Letteris and Rubin belonged to the first and second generations, respectively, of the Galician Haskalah.20 The Haskalah emerged in the once Polish territory of Galicia in the first decades of the nineteenth century, at exactly the same time as the movement was petering out in its original Prussian context. Its migration to Galicia came on the heels of the ceding of the province to the Central European Habsburgs in the first Polish partition of 1772, as a result of which Galician Jewry would ultimately be included within the Enlightenment reforms of the Emperor Joseph II.21 From Austrian Galicia, the Haskalah eventually spread into the Jewish communities of the Russian Empire in the 1830s and 1840s. In both these locations, which together housed the vast majority of what once had been Polish Jewry, the Jewish Enlightenment remained an active cultural current through most of the nineteenth century. Its chief language of expression was Hebrew, with the result that the East European Haskalah is sometimes called the Hebrew Enlightenment. This Hebraic character was critical in distinguishing the reception of Spinoza by the maskilim from that within German Jewry. In part, the use of Hebrew was a tactical move, a way of broadening the cultural horizons of young Jewish males (and a smaller number of females) in a language that would be familiar to them, while avoiding a Yiddish vernacular seen as irremediably corrupt. Yet it was also supported by a genuine, if rudimentary ideology of Hebraism, which drew on the traditional sanctity of the language and imagined Hebrew as a formative and organic factor in Jewish peoplehood.
We find this reasoning in Rubin’s defense of his plan to render Spinoza in Hebrew:
It is incumbent upon every language, new or old, Western or Eastern, living or dead, to gather into her store of rhetoric the choicest, most noble and useful works of all her sister tongues . . . and to nestle them in her bosom like the fruit of her womb, so that they become to her like her own favorite children.
Surely, then, every language enjoys an added birthright [mishpat ha-bekhorah] in repossessing her lost children, who were taken from her breasts and given over to the embrace of a foreign bosom. . . .
Who, then, will deny to our holy language the right to restore to her bosom the words of Spinoza, her Hebrew son, in whom she enjoyed no pleasure all the days of his life, so that she should at least after his death rejoice in his philosophy that was founded on the sacred mountain of Scripture, in the Torah of her prophets and teachers, whose banner she has waved over centuries . . . ?22
Thirty years later Rubin would reiterate this rationale for translating Spinoza’s Ethics into Hebrew with the blunt assertion that “ours is the birthright” (lanu mishpat ha-bekhorah).23 There is a Hebraic origin to the philosophy of Spinoza—an origin that in the Romantic logic employed here is the mark of true essence. Hebrew serves here as the ultimate mark of Jewishness, though this secularizing impulse is checked by Rubin’s suggestion of a bond between “our holy language” and a specific religious content: the “sacred mountain of Scripture,” the “Torah of her prophets and teachers.”
This was a rather different tack toward reclaiming Spinoza than had been taken by the German Jewish intellectuals of the previous chapter. Berthold Auerbach, for instance, approached Spinoza through the eyes of one who saw himself as Jewish by confession and German by nationality.24 He viewed the German high culture in which the seventeenth-century philosopher had been absorbed—his embrace by Lessing, Herder, and Goethe—as his own patrimony, and he both wrote about and translated Spinoza with the aim of introducing him to German readers of any religious background. In line with the evolutionary model of Abraham Geiger’s Reform philosophy, Auerbach sought to highlight the role played by usable precedents in the Jewish past in Spinoza’s self-formation; he also finished his novel with an image of Spinoza as a prototype of the modern Jew’s break with the constraints of rabbinic law and assimilation into the surrounding culture sans conversion. Yet he certainly did not write to assert a uniquely Jewish hold on Spinoza; on the contrary, he viewed efforts to “Judaize” the Amsterdam philosopher with suspicion, equating them with a betrayal of the Enlightenment ideals of universal reason and common humanity. Rubin was not bothered by this concern. Like most other Hebrew maskilim who lived in the multinational empires of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, even those who were most critical of tradition, he saw no contradiction between a continued affirmation of Jewish linguistic and cultural particularism and the entry of Jews into European culture and society. Rubin could claim Spinoza—the “Hebrew son”—specifically for Jewish culture, without, in his mind, violating the integrationist spirit of the maskilic project.
One key aspect of the Hebraizing of Spinoza in the East European Jewish Enlightenment, then, was the ethnic self-assertion this appropriation revealed. Another element that must be considered is the rhetorical nature of Haskalah Hebrew. The maskilim tended toward a highly florid and allusive Hebrew known as melitsah. This form favored the use of biblical and, to a lesser extent, rabbinic phrases, so as to create a virtual echo chamber of canonical references within the text.25 There was a double-edged thrust to this maskilic strategy. On one hand, the heavy dose of citations might serve as a bridge between traditional Jewish literature (itself laden with intertextuality) and Haskalah writing, obscuring the novelty that characterized the latter. Yet this essentially classicizing impulse could easily be adapted for seditious ends, since it abetted the transposing of deviant subject matter into a familiar register. Moreover, it did this often in a veiled and indirect manner, without clearly delineating for the reader the passage being quoted or parallel being drawn. Haskalah Hebrew thus facilitated a recovery of Spinoza for Judaism at the level of style alone, over and beyond any explicit rationale detailed on the surface of the text. The splicing of sacred, or at least venerable texts into the Hebrew appropriations of Spinoza lent them a fundamentally different inflection than anything written in a non-Jewish language. For those opposed to Spinoza, like Luzzatto, the assimilation of his image and thought to Judaism via Hebrew melitsah could not be anything but heretical. Still, the question of intent—whether an individual maskil, in enveloping his reclamation of Spinoza with biblical and medieval allusions, did so sincerely or subversively—cannot be answered in the abstract. In the same work, the invocation of classical phrases or exemplars might be meant to anchor Spinoza in Jewish sources in one place, and to rattle the tradition in another. In using the vocabulary of medieval Jewish thought to depict Spinoza, Rubin was being sincere. There are other instances, however, where his use of melitsah is clearly ironic. In one of his many flourishes, he writes that “everyone, young and old, cleric and layman, rabbi and philosopher now supplicate before the dust of Baruch, and to his name and memory all say: ‘Glory.’”26 The final snippet comes from the ninth verse of Psalm 29, where it denotes the universal acknowledgment of the glory of God in his temple. To write Spinoza into the tradition of Jewish philosophical speculation was one thing, to surreptitiously equate him with the God of the Bible quite another. The familiarity of this psalm to any Hebrew reader, moreover, given its regular recitation in the Sabbath liturgy, would have made this example of melitsah all the more mischievous.
A blurring of the boundaries between the old and new was thus one of the by-products of maskilic Hebrew. It was also characteristic of the incipient critical study of the past in the Hebrew Enlightenment. In the 1820s and 1830s, soon after Wissenschaft des Judentums originated in the German Jewish milieu, a modern Jewish scholarship in Hebrew emerged in the periodical literature of the Galician Haskalah. In time, this Hebrew discourse became known as Hokhmat Yisrael, literally the “wisdom of Israel.” Its leading early practitioners included the Galician thinkers Shlomo J. L. Rapoport (1790–1867) and Nahman Krochmal (1785–1840), along with the aforementioned Italians Luzzatto and Reggio. Despite appearing at roughly the same historical moment as Jewish research in German, and ultimately coming to serve as the term most commonly used to render Wissenschaft des Judentums in Hebrew, Hokhmat Yisrael differed from its German Jewish equivalent in ways that have
become the subject of growing attention.27 Generally speaking, Hokhmat Yisrael was marked by a much closer tie to traditional methods and sources than was Jewish Wissenschaft. Whereas the founders of Wissenschaft, including Leopold Zunz, Eduard Gans, and Immanuel Wolf, were fresh from a university education that had exposed them to cutting-edge methods of historical and philological criticism as well as to an overall ethos of freedom of inquiry, the pioneers of Hokhmat Yisrael were autodidacts whose models for research stemmed, to a much greater extent, from within their Jewish intellectual heritage. Rapoport, for instance, whose bibliographic essays on the Gaonim (or heads of the medieval Babylonian Talmudic academies) are generally considered the starting point for the critical study of this subject, derived methodological inspiration from lexicons and biographical indices within rabbinic literature.28 Luzzatto, meanwhile, identified his willingness to interpret the Bible contextually, even when this yielded a reading contrary to rabbinic tradition, with medieval practitioners of literal exegesis such as Rashi and his grandson Samuel ben Meir.29 And if the early Wissenschaft figures were typically reformers who sought to historicize Jewish writing and praxis as part of an agenda of far-reaching religious change, scholars such as Rapoport, Krochmal, and Luzzatto, for all their forays into textual and even historical criticism, remained fundamentally dedicated to the authority of Jewish law.
The difference between these two discourses shines through in the phrases that were adopted to designate them. The term Wissenschaft implied a basic watershed in the view of Jewish tradition—the ideal of evaluating its entirety from a standpoint of pure objectivity. The Hebrew expression of Hokhmat Yisrael had a much different resonance. First mentioned in a rabbinic midrash, the phrase eludes precise definition.30 What is clear, however, is that throughout the nineteenth century, Hokhmat Yisrael signified not merely the new critical inquiry that was taking shape in the Hebrew Haskalah, but a much more expansive sense of an intellectual tradition immanent to Judaism. The question of how to demarcate this tradition provoked fierce controversy in the Galician Haskalah. If the originators of modern scholarship in Hebrew—Luzzatto, Krochmal, and Rapoport—were, as I mentioned before, united in their commitment to Halakhah, they clashed bitterly over which legacies from the spectrum of Jewish literature should be considered legitimate and normative. Was Hokhmat Yisrael synonymous with the elitist rationalism of Maimonides and the medieval philosophers? Did the Jewish Neoplatonism found in Ibn Ezra and the later Kabbalah have a place in this orbit? Or, as Luzzatto argued against Rapoport and Krochmal, did these speculative and allegorizing currents represent a Greek, or “Atticist,” perversion of the historical Judaism upheld by such thinkers as Yehudah Halevi? Here, I wish only to underscore that however Hokhmat Yisrael was circumscribed, the underlying assumption was of a continuum linking the medieval to the modern. When Letteris, then, labeled Spinoza “one of the hakhme yisrael” in his groundbreaking article of 1845, this had reverberations that went well beyond the literal sense of “sages of Israel.” In the jargon of the Hebrew Enlightenment, he was situating Spinoza in an authentic tradition of Jewish thought even before spelling out any concrete linkage.
To sum up, the Hebrew Enlightenment of Central and Eastern Europe formed a distinct paradigm of reception for a figure like Spinoza. The perception of tension between the old and the new was less acute within the Haskalah than in nineteenth-century German Jewish culture, or at least there was a penchant toward disguising innovation as tradition. In that case, what are we to make of Rubin’s presentation of Spinoza in 1856 as the New Guide to the Perplexed?
III.
Rubin was born in 1823 in the small town of Dolina in eastern Galicia. The story told by his biographers—the doyen of Hebrew literary history, Yosef Klausner, and the German rabbi turned social democrat, Jakob Stern—deviates little from what might be considered the template of Haskalah narratives about the making of a maskil.31 The typical stages of development are all there: his schooling in the traditional heder and yeshiva of Eastern Europe; his arranged marriage while still in adolescence; his resistance to following the rabbinic path urged upon him by his elders; his discovery of critical perspectives in Hebrew texts (the commentary of Ibn Ezra, the medieval treatises on Hebrew grammar, and so forth) that had been marginalized in his Talmudic education; his subsequent acquisition of German, French, and Latin and perusal of foreign works; his wandering from place to place to eke out a modest living.
It was not until the 1850s that Rubin became an active contributor to the Hebrew Haskalah. His entry into the public sphere came at a time of growing radicalization in the Galician branch of the Jewish Enlightenment. Under the banner of Joshua Heschel Schorr (1818–1895), there rose around midcentury a young and iconoclastic generation of maskilim imbued with the revolutionary spirit of 1848 and impatient with the cautious approach to historical criticism of tradition exhibited by the elders of the movement, such as Reggio and Rapoport. The periodical He-Haluts [The Pioneer], founded by Schorr in 1852, became the principal organ of these religious radicals. In a mix of scholarly and satirical essays, Schorr subjected rabbinic interpretations of the Torah and the legislation to which they gave rise to withering critique.32 Moreover, inspired by the example of Abraham Geiger, he fixed his arrows not just on the Oral Law but, increasingly, on the Written Law itself, becoming the first Hebrew writer to embrace a historical-critical approach to the Pentateuch and, without repudiating the idea of Revelation, to treat at least the text of the Torah as an essentially human document. In place of the Halakhah, whose authority for the present he plainly rejected, Schorr maintained that the essence of Judaism was monotheism, the “pure belief” in God’s oneness and unity. Here, then, was an ideological break with Jewish law in Hebrew literature that, like the Reform movement in Germany, declared itself neither heresy nor apostasy, but authentic Judaism.
Rubin never published in Schorr’s journal; nor did he make the campaign for religious reform a centerpiece of his writing. Yet his sympathy with the openly defiant ethos of He-Haluts was made clear beginning with his 1856 Hebrew translation of Karl Gutzkow’s decade-old German play Uriel Acosta.33 Gutzkow was one of the original members of Young Germany, the left-wing movement that had roiled German letters in the 1830s with its scathing attacks on revealed religion. In Uriel Acosta, a political drama cum romantic tragedy that was an adaptation of a novella he had written over ten years earlier, Gutzkow cast the excommunicated Jewish freethinker of seventeenth-century Amsterdam as a martyr in the struggle for religious liberty.34 Debuting not long before the revolutions of 1848, the play proved far more successful than Gutzkow’s earlier novella, becoming almost overnight a symbol of the cause of liberal nationalists throughout Europe. Interest surged in the life and writings of the ill-fated Acosta.35 Meanwhile, the Hebrew version of Uriel Acosta produced by Rubin was one of several translations of Gutzkow’s work in the second half of the nineteenth century.36
Merely the decision to render this play in Hebrew, and thereby reclaim a notorious critic of biblical infallibility and talmudic law for modern Jewish culture, could have sufficed to cement a reputation for Rubin as one of the newly emergent maskilic rebels.37 If there were any doubts about his alliance with this camp, he erased them in a long foreword “to the enlightened and critical reader,” where he sought to make the contemporary relevance of Acosta’s plight perfectly transparent.
Part of this resonance, we learn here, was quite personal. At the time Rubin published his translation, he was living alone in the Romanian city of Galatz (Galati), working as a bookkeeper for a large firm while his wife and children remained over the border in his native Galicia. Four years earlier, he had left the Galician townlet of Zhuravne (Zurawno), where he had been employed as a tutor in foreign languages, after running afoul of the Hasidic majority. After word circulated of a manuscript Rubin had written harshly critical of Hasidism, the communal authorities placed him in herem. In a small town heavily populated by Hasidim, where job opportunities for a maskilic tut
or were already limited, this was enough to drive Rubin to leave and find work elsewhere.
That this excommunication shaped Rubin’s identification with Gutzkow’s Acosta is clear from his preface. In a segment denouncing Jewish priests and rabbis throughout the ages for their autocratic behavior, Rubin, in typical maskilic fashion, provides a genealogy of their alleged victims. Beginning with Moses and the biblical prophets, he mentions the two classic heroes of the Haskalah, Maimonides and Mendelssohn, before proceeding to lament the recent demise of the Galician reformer Abraham Kohn, a liberal rabbi in Lemberg (Lviv) who had been poisoned to death by his Hasidic opponents back in 1848.38 His list of casualties concludes as follows:
My heart burns like a raging fire when I recall how in my destitute, rebellious days in the land of my birth Galicia, in that smallest of towns Zhuravne, the rabbis, judges, and Hasidim, like a colony of locusts, gathered against me to destroy me. They sounded the shofar and humiliated me, shouting Herem!—all on account of my book Spider’s Web, in which I admonished their crooked ways, and explained a mere trifle of their obscure doctrines, and roused my brothers to open their eyes and hearken to what the new times demand of them!
Uriel too, this Uriel Acosta, is not a fresh creation of this poet, but in fact lived some two hundred years ago in the city of Amsterdam.39
The juxtaposition of his ban with that of Acosta suggests that, whatever the differences in their practical ramifications, for Rubin they were one and the same, an expression of the despotic nature of rabbinic authority from time immemorial. Indeed, we find here a biographical dimension to the East European attraction to heretics like Acosta and Spinoza—a common experience of excommunication, however distinct in form and context—that was absent in the case of the German Jewish intellectuals of chapter 3.
The First Modern Jew Page 13