In addition to stressing his own bond with Acosta, Rubin identified each of the play’s characters with a distinctive social type “in the congregation of Israel in our days.” Uriel, not surprisingly, he called the “standard-bearer of the young, honest, and enlightened faction of our people, sifting and sounding out the certainties of faith, bringing the meditations of scholars of other nations to bear upon the Torah and Talmud, slow to believe and quick to put into question . . . a painful thorn and stinging barb in the eyes of the rabbis.”40 He was, in other words, a “Young Hebrew” along the lines of Schorr and the other radical maskilim, waving the flag for unfettered freedom of thought. The total integrity of Acosta is put into relief by Rubin’s profile of another of the dramatis personae, the figure of Da Silva. Da Silva, it will be recalled from the previous chapter, was the author of the Portuguese Treatise on the Immortality of the Soul, the main treatise defending the rabbinic doctrine of immortality of the soul against Acosta. Though this former Marrano physician from Portugal in fact settled in Hamburg, Gutzkow—like Auerbach in his Spinoza—took the license of placing him in Amsterdam.41 Da Silva, Rubin wrote, bore the mark of
the moderates among our people: an expert in Torah and Talmud as well as an investigator into the wisdom of the nations, a student of the ancient philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, and their peers—a product of the bet midrash of the Arabs in Spain. Such a man is similar to the enlightened Talmudists in our times, proficient in the Talmud and its commentaries in addition to the Book of Doctrines and Beliefs,42 the Guide to the Perplexed, the Akedah,43 the Principles44 and other scholarly and scientific works composed from the period of the Geonim to the fourth century of this millennium.45 Such a man has a hand everywhere—he is with both the rabbis and the maskilim, abandoning neither camp. He knows how to compromise in everything; in his heart he is a scholar and on the outside a rabbi. He flatters the beliefs and customs of the masses, currying favor among them for the sake of his present welfare and livelihood, even though he is supposed to be a healer. Such a man is like “a lodge in a garden of cucumbers,”46 tossed about by every wind, never standing firm.47
According to the translator, Da Silva and Acosta were in fact prototypes of the current clash of generations between the old and new guards of the Galician Haskalah. In Da Silva’s equivocation, in his stale philosophical knowledge, in his unwillingness to risk anything for the sake of freedom of thought, Rubin saw the quintessence of the maskilic middle. In the skeptical, searching, instinctively sincere Acosta—whom in a later article Rubin would compare to the medieval Jewish martyrs of cherished memory—he saw the epitome of the Jewish Enlightenment ideal of hakirah, or critical inquiry.48
Soon after translating Uriel Acosta, Rubin came out with the first volume of his book on Spinoza. Possibly, it was his reading of Gutzkow that motivated this progression from one Amsterdam heretic to another. Near the end of Gutzkow’s play, a young Baruch strolls with Acosta (portrayed here as his uncle) in a garden, working out the rudiments of his future philosophy while his despondent predecessor contemplates suicide. The torch is thus figuratively passed from the herald of modernity to its secular messiah. Rubin’s title for his translation, however, suggested a different trajectory for his road to Spinoza, one originating not in another radical dissenter, but in the veritable dean of Haskalah cultural heroes—Maimonides.
IV.
The title alone of Rubin’s The New Guide of the Perplexed was, to use Erich Auerbach’s phrase, “fraught with background.” First, there was the obvious reference to Maimonides, and to the role both his image and his philosophical tour de force had played in the history of the Jewish Enlightenment. The title also carried echoes of Moreh nevukhe ha-zeman [The Guide to the Perplexed of the Time (1851)], the unfinished opus of Jewish philosophy authored by one of the luminaries of the Galician Haskalah, Nahman Krochmal.49 Finally, there was the adjective “new,” with all the weight this term carried in a movement where innovation was often presented as tradition rightly understood.
One of the hallmarks of the Haskalah was its attempt to revive the legacy of medieval Sephardic rationalism.50 This inheritance functioned as a “usable past,” providing an internally derived license for the effort to extend the scope of Jewish education beyond its largely talmudic focus in “baroque” Ashkenazic culture. In addition to the study of the Bible and of Hebrew grammar, the maskilim encouraged a renewal of the medieval philosophic tradition that had flourished in the Sephardic milieu. They recovered and reprinted philosophical and literary texts that had been marginalized for centuries, drew heroic portraits of exemplars of premodern rationalism in the new Hebrew press, and frequently used the language and genres characteristic of earlier Jewish philosophy (to wit, the commentary) for the dissemination of their own thought.
The prime beneficiary of this reclamation of medieval philosophy was, not surprisingly, the individual most synonymous with this heritage, a figure whose preeminence was reflected in his common designation in Jewish sources as the “great eagle”—Maimonides. Within the Haskalah, only Moses Mendelssohn himself could match the Rambam (the acronym for Rabbi Moses ben Maimon by which Maimonides was conventionally known) in symbolic clout. In the pages of Ha-me’asef [The Gatherer], the groundbreaking Haskalah periodical of the 1780s, a Maimonides myth took shape that enlisted the philosopher as a prototype of the values most dear to the Jewish Enlightenment, celebrating such features as his rationalism, his distinction beyond the limits of Jewish society, his achievement of a fruitful synthesis of Jewish and secular knowledge, and (most problematically) his commitment to universalism and tolerance. This iconic image of Maimonides (the Rambam) was entwined with that of Mendelssohn (the Rambaman, or Rabbi Moses ben Menahem-Mendel) to form a composite ideal of the rational and cultivated Jew, encapsulated in the familiar adage “from Moses to Moses, there was no one like Moses.”51
The cult of Maimonides within the Haskalah extended to his masterwork of medieval rationalist exegesis, The Guide of the Perplexed. Mendelssohn, it will be recalled, was said by his maskilic biographer to have attributed his famous humpback to days and nights spent hunched over the Guide in his youthful zeal to understand it.52 The more radical Jewish thinker Salomon Maimon (1754–1800) paid even greater tribute to Maimonides, adopting the surname Maimon to express his indebtedness to the Guide for its direction on the road to enlightenment. In addition to devoting most of the second part of his Autobiography to an exposition of the Guide for a largely non-Jewish readership, Maimon composed an anonymous Hebrew commentary to the first part of the work for the benefit of the Berlin Haskalah.53
The passion for Maimonides and the Guide was arguably even more earnest in the Haskalah of Eastern Europe to which Rubin was heir. This popularity had much to do with demographics. The struggle against Hasidism that occupied center stage in this outpost of the Jewish Enlightenment, coupled with the marginality and alienation of the maskilim in East European Jewish society, made their rationalism all the more militant.54 This was one factor in the intensity of the attachment to Maimonides among these modernists. The Galician Haskalah yielded both a new Hebrew translation of Maimonides’ Guide and numerous appropriations of the twelfth-century philosopher as a symbol of reason and enlightenment against Hasidic folly.55 A glimpse of the stature enjoyed by the Guide is afforded by a letter published in the first edition of Kerem Hemed, the leading journal of the Galician Haskalah in the 1830s. Presumably written by Rapoport, the missive prescribes a strict regimen of readings of Maimonides for a friend wavering in his commitment to Haskalah, beginning with the legal works and culminating in the Guide: “Give this [i.e., the Moreh] your complete attention, and do not stop until you have finished. Do not let a difficult chapter keep you from moving onward, for sometimes a later [section] will shed light on an earlier [one]. Besides, even the little you grasp on first reading will delight you like one who discovers a great bounty, and soon, as your eyes are further opened, you will come to understand everything therein.”56
Well into the nineteenth century, then, grounding in the Guide continued to be seen by many as a crucial part of the education of the would-be maskil. This was so notwithstanding the considerable friction between the medieval Aristotelian framework of Maimonides and the methods and parameters of modern science and philosophy. From both the biographical sketch of the Rambam printed in Ha-me’asef and the diverse commentaries written on the Guide, it is clear that even those Hebrew authors most committed to revitalizing the Maimonidean legacy were often aware of this gap. Their response was generally to seek to reinterpret Maimonides to accommodate him to contemporary intellectual trends.57 At its most extreme, this led to the omission or outright deletion of those aspects of Maimonides’ life and thought that clashed with the zeitgeist. We find this approach in the Galician maskil Mendel Lefin’s commentary on the Guide. Writing in the wake of Kant, Lefin emphasized the epistemologically modest strands in Maimonides (for instance, his “negative theology”) while ignoring the more boldly speculative ones.58 Others, even in appropriating Maimonides, more openly acknowledged their rejection of various elements of his philosophy. Salomon Maimon exhibited this tack in his Givat Ha-moreh [Hill of the Guide].59 Unlike most traditional commentators, Maimon acknowledged his intent to evaluate Maimonides’ Guide from the vantage point of current knowledge.60 At times he tried to save Maimonides by indicating how his arguments, read selectively and between the lines, could be reconciled with modern science; at other times he frankly dismissed Maimonides’ proofs as outmoded. Still, the mere fact that he expressed his reservations as part of a chapter-by-chapter exegesis indicates a desire to bridge the gap between Maimonides and recent philosophy, wherever possible. By working within the framework of the Guide he implied that it was still relevant, particularly for the didactic aims of the Jewish Enlightenment.
The maskilim, then, not only celebrated Maimonides as a model of intellectual harmonization, but often put this ideal into practice in their interpretations of his life and work. They did so in part to anchor their innovations in an august figure whose Guide, at least in the Haskalah if not necessarily in traditional society, was widely regarded as on the safe side of heresy. Rubin balked at this deference, yet he was not the first to see the need for a Guide to the Perplexed better suited to the age; Nahman Krochmal had already composed a work in this vein, The Guide to the Perplexed of the Time. What relevance did this exemplar of nineteenth-century Jewish religious thought have to Rubin’s project of reclaiming Spinoza? Was there a deliberate echo in Rubin’s choice of title—not only of Maimonides’ Guide, but also of Krochmal’s updated version of this classic?
Born in 1785 Krochmal spent all fifty-five years of his life in Galicia, mostly in the cities of Brody and Zolkiew.61 Despite publishing very little, he influenced successive generations of the Galician Haskalah through his private mentoring and correspondence and had many who considered themselves his disciples. He died in 1840 before completing his Guide to the Perplexed of the Time. First published in 1851, eleven years after his death, Krochmal’s seventeen-chapter opus was a dense mélange of metaphysical speculation, idealistic philosophy of Jewish history, and historical criticism of Jewish religious literature. Through his Guide, Krochmal, an instinctive moderate, sought to help the contemporary maskil confront the challenges of the modern age without losing his balance and seeking refuge in either secular heresy or religious fanactisim. His strategy was to initiate the reader into a deeper understanding of Jewish sources, “in the manner of Maimonides in his book Moreh nevukhim . . . yet with deviations large and small in both subject and syntax, in line with the demands of the perplexities of the time in which we are living.”62
Briefly, I want to identify some key aspects of Krochmal’s Guide that would reverberate in Rubin’s later project:
The ambivalent use of Maimonides. As is evident from the excerpt cited above, Krochmal felt that a Guide to the Perplexed modeled after that of Maimonides could speak to the crisis within nineteenth-century Judaism. At the same time, the original was no longer sufficient to the task. That Krochmal opted to bridge the divide between Maimonides’ Guide and the current state of affairs by writing what amounted to a “new guide” and not through a commentary—the genre that earlier maskilim as opposite in temperament and ideology as the cautious Lefin and the radical Maimon had employed in their own efforts to modernize Maimonides—is a mark of the boldness of his design. Most important, Krochmal took from Maimonides the general aim of seeking to extrapolate a philosophy from Jewish sources that could resolve the ostensible contradiction between Judaism and contemporary thought.63 What he explicitly eschewed was the Aristotelian metaphysics of Maimonides and his school.64 While appropriate to its time, the stark dualism of the Maimonidean concept of the relationship between God and the universe, as derived from Aristotelianism, was incompatible with the emphasis on the immanence of God within nature and history in nineteenth-century German Idealism.65 To find a pedigree for this development within the gamut of Jewish religious thought, Krochmal had to look elsewhere.
The appropriation of Jewish Neoplatonism and Kabbalah. Krochmal discovered a “usable past” in the speculative mysticism known in Hebrew as torat ha-nistar, or recondite knowledge.66 In the Hebrew Enlightenment, this was a break from the norm. The East European rationalists of the 1820s and 1830s, locked in battle with Hasidism, generally viewed the Kabbalah as a bizarre and treacherous deformation of “normative” Judaism; some went so far as to equate it with pagan idolatry.67 The idea that one might affirm the legacy of both Maimonides and the Zohar [Book of Splendor] would have struck the typical maskil as outlandish. Yet, to Krochmal, Jewish Neoplatonism and the early Kabbalah contained the seeds of a metaphysics that could answer the challenge of German Idealism. Particularly in Ibn Ezra, of all the medieval Jewish thinkers the one with whom the nineteenth-century philosopher most identified, Krochmal found insinuations of an immanentist doctrine of God’s creation and providence. In line with the “great chain of being” in Neoplatonism, Ibn Ezra (per Krochmal) understood all of reality (the Many, or ha-kol) to be the manifestation of a continuous flow of divine emanations ultimately originating in the hidden God (the One, or ’ehad).68 Though the hidden God remained beyond comprehension, this One constituted the absolute unity prior to all form and matter. In this scheme, there was no abyss between God and the world, no concept of a creation “from nothing,” as existed in Maimonides. Rather, for Ibn Ezra and his spiritual heirs, the world inheres within God, as one possible limitation of His infinite intellect. From this, Krochmal derived a distinctively Jewish lineage for panentheism, the view that all being exists within God, but—unlike in strict pantheism—God is still transcendent to being. “This,” Krochmal wrote, “is the true meaning (or sod) of the verse, ‘I am first, I am last, and other than myself, there is no God.’”69
The task of the modern Jewish philosopher as that of revealing the metaphysical truth concealed in Jewish sources. Krochmal’s method for firming up “the perplexed of the time”—namely, to study the history of Jewish religious philosophy in sweeping and contextualized fashion and then tease solutions to the current crisis out of the resources of Judaism—rested on two main assumptions. First, there was a conviction that this textual heritage contained a deeper import than was apparent on the surface. Against Luzzatto, Krochmal defended a modified version of the allegorical approach to interpretation central to medieval Jewish thought.70 The foundation of this hermeneutic, present in both philosophy and the Kabbalah, was the belief that texts contained both an exoteric sense (nigleh) and an esoteric truth (nistar); the mark of enlightenment was the ability to penetrate through the literal, exterior meaning to the inner core.71 This outlook had to be adapted to square with nineteenth-century German philosophy, as the notion that there was a static truth embedded in texts like “apples of gold in settings of silver”72 was incompatible with the historicist character of Hegelian metaphysics. Krochmal’s solution was to treat this polarity between th
e exoteric and the esoteric as a dynamic unfolding both in the individual and in history—a teleological progression in which the concealed truth of God’s absolute oneness is gradually made manifest.73 Whence the second of the two assumptions: that the proper objective of the modern Jewish thinker was to accelerate this process, by bringing to light the “purified faith” (emunah tserufah) already anticipated in potentia within classical Jewish sources.
Spinoza is mentioned only once in Krochmal’s work, in chapter 12, in the remarks that preface his discussion of Alexandrian Jewish thought of the Second Temple period. To justify his historical method in general, and possibly his treatment of this particular legacy marginalized by rabbinic Judaism, Krochmal writes:
And know, it is a fundamental and honored principle that it is proper, indeed, obligatory, for us to investigate the ideas, mores, and characteristics that have emerged from within our nation over the course of time, throughout our history. [We must study] the bonds and associations we have developed with others to a greater extent than any other people, albeit with limitations. [We must study] the way we have related to—and been transformed by—these ideas, mores, and characteristics, and how, on their basis, we have interacted with others—those who were distant from us and have come closer to some extent, borrowing from our ways, such as the Greeks at the time of Plotinus and Proclus, and, in a different way, Mohammed, as well as those who were close to us and distanced themselves such as the early Christians, or the philosopher Baruch and his followers.74
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