The First Modern Jew

by Daniel B. Schwartz

  V.

  What I have tried to argue in this chapter is that Auerbach’s pioneering portrayal of Spinoza as a progenitor of the modern, emancipated Jew, when examined up close and in the context of his earlier intellectual biography, contains a fundamental ambivalence over what it means to be a modern, emancipated Jew. For all the temporal and thematic proximity between Das Judenthum and Spinoza, they are in many ways difficult to reconcile in their vision of Jewish modernity. One possibility for resolving this tension might be to suggest different target audiences for the two works. Jacob Katz, for instance, maintains that whereas the earlier Das Judentum defends the notion of a “modernized Judaism against external objectors,” in Spinoza Auerbach writes “in the face of internal resistance.”81 Yet this contention is consistently vitiated in the course of the novel, starting with the preface, where Auerbach presents his book as a corrective to the silly and stereotypical image of Jews in German literature. The pronounced intertextuality of the 1837 novel vis-à-vis other works of German literature—something that is most strongly felt in the finale, which develops Goethe’s never-realized literary ambition of staging an encounter between Spinoza and the Wandering Jew—speaks further to the implausibility of this suggested divide between an “internal” and “external” addressee.82

  Alternatively, we might reason that Auerbach changed his mind with respect to the future of Judaism, and that he conveyed this reversal through his appropriation of Spinoza. These were years of decision for Auerbach. His former aspiration to become a liberal reformer working within the community appeared to have been dashed. A letter written by Auerbach to his cousin in the fall of 1836, between the publication of Das Judenthum and Spinoza, suggests that he was indeed grappling with the idea of a drastic aboutface: “Practically every morning I negate all my ideas and all my external attachments, in order to construct them afresh. I must do this if I am ever to achieve autonomy and independence from all and everything.”83 Over the course of his life, though Auerbach never repudiated his Judaism, it became more an expression of loyalty to personal origins—a matter of honor—than a strongly held religious identity. After writing one more “Jewish novel” about Haskalah poet Ephraim Kuh, Auerbach abandoned Jewish subject matter to focus primarily on Christian peasants, and presented in his wildly successful Black Forest Village Stories and later novels a more sanguine view of the tension between the individual and the community.84

  Yet I would argue for another reading, one that does not try to remove the ambiguity in Auerbach’s position by retrojecting later commitments onto the twenty-five-year-old author, but instead regards the clash between Da Silva and Spinoza as illustrative of a conflict found in many liberal Jewish thinkers during that decade. Indeed, the same Geiger who rejected the path of a “violent and ruthless break with tradition” in both his sermons and scholarship—and so deeply influenced the young Auerbach in this respect—sounded a very different tune in many of his personal letters to his friend Joseph Dernburg in the 1830s. “There is hardly any time left for a reformation; the only course possible now is revolution—and God grant that something new may then come forth.”85 These were Geiger’s own words in June 1836, and their impatience and despair about the possibility of any reform of Judaism are echoed in other letters to Dernburg from this period. By appreciating this tension within Geiger, and seeing the 1830s as a decade when the course Jewish modernization would take—whether that of “reformation” or “revolution”—was still very much in question, we can better understand how Spinoza might be reclaimed in 1837 not in clear-cut support of one possibility against the other, but in a vacillation between both.

  The friction between these two paths of modernization—reform and revolution—gains added resonance in the second, revised edition of the novel from 1854, where the standoff between Spinoza and Da Silva is expanded. Here, Auerbach drops a hint as to who the model for Da Silva might be. The issue at stake is Spinoza’s pursuit of a single, absolute truth. Da Silva criticizes this quest, arguing, “God himself vouchsafes the multiplicity of truth.”86 Might there be an echo here of the conclusion of Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem, with its rejection of a union of faiths on the grounds that “diversity is evidently the plan and purpose of Providence”?87 Could it be that through this fictional quarrel, in addition to playing out his own identity crisis, Auerbach was in effect staging a debate between Spinoza and Mendelssohn, both candidates for the title of first modern Jew, rivals over what this entailed?

  VI.

  Auerbach’s 1837 novel attracted relatively little notice. It received positive mention in Philippson’s Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums by a reviewer who lauded “Herr Berthold Auerbach” for “giving us the first Jewish novel.”88 It received considerably less applause from David F. Strauss, Auerbach’s mentor from his Tübingen days. Strauss may have been one of the inspirations for Auerbach’s engagement with the Amsterdam philosopher, and from his later correspondence with his cousin, it is clear that Auerbach admired Strauss (with whom he remained lifelong friends) as something of a modern-day Spinoza, possessed with the same unyielding devotion to the “naked truth” as his seventeenth-century prototype.89 His review of the Spinoza novel must therefore have come as a disappointment to Auerbach. While offering modest praise for Auerbach’s evocation of the “local color” of Jewish life and even the external events of Spinoza’s youthful experience, Strauss criticized the novel for failing to provide an aesthetically persuasive account of the inner life of Spinoza and its connection to his philosophical genius. Comparing the portrait of the hero to a sculpture hewn from marble, Strauss concluded that the author “had diligently chiseled the body of Spinoza with appropriate bearing and handsome attire; but in place of the head he had placed an edition of the complete works of the philosopher.”90 In any event, the book appears to have found few readers, and as such enjoyed no reprint, accounting for its extreme rareness today.

  The fortunes of the second, revised edition of the Spinoza novel, of 1854, proved quite different.91 By then, Auerbach was a celebrated author renowned for his “village stories” and for his German translation of Spinoza’s collected works. The higher profile of the author, coupled with the continued mainstreaming of the philosopher in nineteenth-century liberal bourgeois culture, made for a much larger audience. Retitled Spinoza: Ein Denkersleben [Spinoza: A Thinker’s Life], shorn of the elaborate footnotes of the original and of the general frame as a “Ghettoroman,” this new version “proved to be one of Auerbach’s most enduring works,” undergoing some thirty editions by 1907.92 Several translations followed, including into Dutch (1856), French (1858–59), English (1882), Hebrew (1898), and Yiddish (1917). Evidence of the impact of the novel on nineteenth- and even early-twentieth-century popular perceptions of the philosopher leads to more trails than can be followed. One finds Auerbach’s portrait supplying the basis for the first biographical tribute to Spinoza in the Yiddish press in 1886.93 In a very different setting, the distinguished English jurist and Spinoza aficionado Sir Frederick Pollock (1845–1937), in his Spinoza: His Life and Philosophy (1882), gave a glowing endorsement of Auerbach’s historical novel, going so far as to assert that for those who “fear to attack technical works on philosophy, there can be no better introduction to Spinoza.”94

  More immediately, the ripples of Auerbach’s novel were felt in the midcentury Hebrew Enlightenment of Central and Eastern Europe. In 1856, some four decades before the “official” translation of Spinoza: Ein Denkersleben into Hebrew, lengthy excerpts of the novel (no doubt, without subsidiary rights) were incorporated in the first work to call for the translation of Spinoza’s oeuvre into the sacred tongue. Its publication would cause a ruckus without parallel in Spinoza’s Jewish reception in nineteenth-century Europe. Let us turn, now, from Germany to Galicia, and more specifically to Salomon Rubin’s New Guide to the Perplexed.

  *FIGURE. 4.1. Title page, S. Rubin’s Hebrew translation of Spinoza’s Ethics (Vienna, 1885). Courtesy of the Library at the Herbe
rt E. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania.

  CHAPTER 4

  A Rebel against the Past, A Revealer of Secrets

  Salomon Rubin and the East European Maskilic Spinoza

  I.

  In 1856, exactly two hundred years after his excommunication by the Sephardic community of Amsterdam, Spinoza was reappropriated in Hebrew literature as the second coming of Maimonides. That fall, there appeared the first volume of a work named Moreh nevukhim he-hadash [The New Guide to the Perplexed].1 Its author was Salomon Rubin, a native of Habsburg Galicia and relative newcomer to the Hebrew Enlightenment. Fresh from translating Karl Gutzkow’s well-known drama Uriel Acosta into Hebrew, Rubin turned his attention in The New Guide to the other legendary Jewish heretic of seventeenth-century Amsterdam. In two volumes of roughly thirty pages each, Rubin provided a rambling apologia for an audacious venture—a proposal to translate Spinoza’s two most famous works, the Ethics and the Treatise, into Hebrew. Yet the justification for this scheme was in fact already inherent in Rubin’s title, which conferred on Spinoza’s philosophical system the arresting label of a “new guide to the perplexed.”

  With this work, Rubin made a brash entrance into a controversy over Spinoza that had been simmering for just over a decade in Central and Eastern European Jewish culture. The opening salvo in this dispute had come back in 1845, with the publication by the Galician maskil Meir Halevi Letteris (1800–1871) of a flattering portrait of the Amsterdam philosopher in a Hebrew periodical.2 Titled “The Life of the Wise Scholar Baruch de Spinoza,” replete with the eulogistic phrase “may his memory be for a blessing” (zikhrono li-berakhah, or z’l) traditionally appended to the names of the departed, the article was the first ever to be devoted to Spinoza in Hebrew literature.3 The hagiographic nature of this short profile, which went so far as to assert that the Treatise contained “not a whit of heresy” and that Spinoza’s pantheism “rested on the foundations of our Sages” drew an angry response from two scholars from Northern Italy (then part of the Habsburg Empire) who, like Letteris, were veteran affiliates of the Hebrew Enlightenment: Isaac Samuel Reggio (1784–1855) of Gorizia and Samuel David Luzzatto (1800–1865) of Padua.4 Reggio and Luzzatto disagreed about much: The former was a committed rationalist and the latter an avowed antirationalist with regard to biblical exegesis, yet they shared an aversion to the effort to recover Spinoza for Judaism. Reggio, the editor of the journal in which Letteris’s article had appeared, expressed his dismay in a footnote to the piece, asserting a “total contradiction” between the Treatise and the “fundamentals of the Torah.”5 Luzzatto was even more scathing in his criticism. As one who considered philosophic speculation to be utterly foreign to authentic Judaism, Luzzatto had previously protested the maskilic hero-worship of Maimonides and Ibn Ezra.6 With Spinoza now ostensibly on the verge of being added to this canon, he once again entered the fray. In 1847 he opened a work of biblical commentary with a sharp attack on Spinoza, branding him an atheist undeserving of rehabilitation in any language, not to mention in the “holy vestments” of Hebrew. He implied that Spinoza’s thought was responsible for all the ills of modern society and, without mentioning Letteris by name, accused him of misrepresenting the facts by “Judaizing” a traitor who “distanced himself from [his people], and neither lived with them nor died in their midst.”7

  If Luzzatto hoped his polemic might stem the growing attraction to Spinoza within the Haskalah, he was to be disappointed. In 1850 the Lithuanian-born Hebrew scholar Senior (Sheneur) Sachs (1816–1892) lent support to Letteris’s blanket claim of a Jewish lineage for Spinoza’s philosophy. In a collection of dense essays based for the most part on his research on the eleventh-century Andalusian poet and philosopher Solomon ibn Gabirol (Avicebron) and Ibn Ezra, Sachs situated Spinoza’s pantheism within a line of development immanent to medieval Jewish Neoplatonism and the later Kabbalah.8 Though Sachs did not shower the Amsterdam heretic with accolades, Luzzatto saw his writings as yet another sign of the creeping domestication of Spinoza’s heresy, and once again he issued a livid rejoinder.9

  Then came Rubin’s New Guide to the Perplexed of 1856. If not the first attempt to reclaim Spinoza within the nineteenth-century Haskalah, this was easily the most far-reaching. By casting him as the heir to a now outdated Maimonides, Rubin was in effect vaulting Spinoza to the top of the Haskalah pantheon. Criticizing the continued veneration of antiquated models of philosophizing within the Haskalah, Rubin reserved his praise for those who “believed in the Lord and in His servant Baruch, and not in Aristotle and in Moses [i.e., Maimonides] his pupil.”10 With this wry twist on the biblical verse from Exodus 14 regarding the crossing of the sea—“and they believed in the Lord and in His servant Moses”—Rubin seemed to be suggesting that even the original Moses was not immune to being supplanted by the philosopher Baruch.

  Rubin’s plan to translate Spinoza into Hebrew left the already agitated Luzzatto apoplectic. That same year, he published a broadside against Spinoza and his youthful partisans in a Hebrew periodical; Rubin fired back with a stinging rebuke of Luzzatto; and so it went, back and forth, in both letters and articles, until Luzzatto’s death in 1865.11 At this point, Rubin’s study of Spinoza had only begun to bear fruit. Before his death in 1910 at the age of eighty-seven, he would complete pioneering Hebrew translations of both the Ethics12 and the Compendium of Hebrew Grammar,13 a German dissertation contrasting Spinoza to Maimonides14, and a few general introductions to Spinoza’s thought in Hebrew.15 These constituted only a portion of a vast scholarly and journalistic oeuvre, spanning six decades, whose main concerns included mysticism, folklore, and superstition, among both Jews and other peoples from the ancient Near East to present-day Eastern Europe.

  The historian Jonathan Israel has become well known for arguing that the reception of Spinoza played a major part in the emergence and evolution of the so-called Radical Enlightenment of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. What distinguished this militant fringe from the “mainstream moderate Enlightenment,” according to Israel, was its attitude toward tradition. Whereas the latter sought to “preserve and safeguard what were judged essential elements of the older structures, effecting a viable synthesis of old and new,” the Radical Enlightenment “rejected all compromise with the past and sought to sweep away existing structures entirely.”16 Spinoza and Spinozism, moreover, were “the intellectual backbone of the European Radical Enlightenment everywhere,” the symbol par excellence of this wing of the movement to sympathizers and opponents alike.17

  This chapter probes the relationship between Spinoza and the radicalizing of Enlightenment in nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewish culture.18 My focus is on the image of Spinoza in the work of Rubin, the greatest advocate of the dissident thinker within the Haskalah. One of the main dilemmas confronted by maskilim in their attempt to articulate a self-consciously modern Jewish identity concerned the perception of change. The questions that hovered over their polemical and pedagogical writings included: What kind of bond should the Haskalah maintain toward venerable Jewish texts and methods of study? How far should the movement go in accommodating novel ideas to classical exemplars so as to avoid the suggestion of a rupture with the past? What were the limits of innovation? These issues were at the core of Rubin’s engagement with Spinoza. The Israeli historian Shmuel Feiner, in his book Haskalah and History, writes that Rubin’s Spinoza “was not a legitimate bearer of Jewish tradition but a religious revolutionary relying solely on his intelligence . . . an example of Kantian man, proclaiming his own full freedom.”19 Feiner sees this appropriation as symptomatic of a growing militancy in the East European Haskalah at midcentury—the emergence of a rebellious orientation no longer obsessed with presenting itself as “the authentic heir of the Jewish past,” but openly committed to the modern and secular as such.

  That Rubin intended to radicalize the Haskalah by hailing Spinoza over Maimonides is clear. Yet the relationship between Spinoza and the Jewish pa
st, as represented by Rubin, is in fact more complicated than Feiner concedes. For all his emphasis on the trailblazing nature of Spinoza—the “new guide to the perplexed”—in contrast to Maimonides, Rubin also portrays the heretic as the offspring of an esoteric legacy of speculation embedded within Jewish thought. A rebel against Jewish tradition, and a revealer of its secrets: An appreciation of this tension within Rubin’s Spinoza is vital, as it not only provides a key to the nineteenth-century East European Jewish reception of the philosopher in a broader sense, but also suggests ambivalence to the modernizing thrust of the Jewish version of radical Enlightenment.

  II.

  The attraction to Spinoza on the part of East European Hebraists such as Rubin and Letteris was similar to that of the German Jewish thinkers of the 1830s and 1840s. Both groups saw Spinoza as a champion of such liberal values as rationality, individuality, freedom of thought, and intellectual daring. Both drew inspiration for celebrating the Amsterdam heretic by the fact of his reclamation within German philosophy starting in the late eighteenth century. And both, finally, felt a special kinship with Spinoza as a Jew who had asserted his independence from tradition without converting to another religion. Nevertheless, nineteenth-century German Jewish culture and the Eastern European Haskalah diverged in both context and sensibility—and the recovery of Spinoza in these two settings, notwithstanding the proximity in time and common motivations in each, differed accordingly.