The First Modern Jew

by Daniel B. Schwartz

  Krochmal thus indicates his own knowledge of Spinoza’s writings as well as his belief that such inquiry is appropriate to the study of Jewish history. It is also clear from this passage that “the philosopher Baruch” would have been recognized within his circle as a reference to Spinoza. For all this suggested familiarity, he says nothing to absolve Spinoza of heresy, and by grouping him with the early Christians as “those who were close to us and distanced themselves,” he does little to mitigate Spinoza’s rupture from Judaism. All in all, his Guide reads like an apology for Judaism against Spinoza’s thought and example. Krochmal defends, however unconventionally, the basic principles that Spinoza had undermined, from the metaphysical chosenness of Israel to the spiritual content of Jewish law, from the belief that the Bible contains esoteric truth to the integration of religion and philosophy. He reinterprets the tradition instead of rejecting it, choosing Maimonides over Spinoza as his guide.75

  In spite of this, the individuals most responsible for rehabilitating Spinoza within the Hebrew Enlightenment were largely his disciples. Letteris was one of Krochmal’s earliest devotees; in addition to the first Hebrew article about Spinoza, he also wrote the original biography of Krochmal, which appeared as a foreword to the second, 1863, edition of The Guide of the Perplexed of the Time.76 Sachs, whose essays of the 1850s built on Krochmal’s revitalization of medieval Jewish Neoplatonism, had briefly studied with the Galician philosopher near the end of his life.77 Then there was Abraham Krochmal (c. 1818–1888), the son of the philosopher, who became a leading advocate for religious reform in the Hebrew press and served briefly as Schorr’s coeditor of He-Haluts.78 Starting in the 1870s he published a few works aimed at reconciling aspects of the philosophy and biblical criticism of Spinoza (whom he labeled “Rabbi Baruch”) with Judaism.79 Significantly, all three of these thinkers invoked the authority of the elder Krochmal for their inclusion of the Amsterdam heretic within the canon of Hokhmat Yisrael. His son Abraham went the furthest in this regard. In his Even Ha-Roshah [Foundation Stone] of 1871, a loose translation of Herder’s God; Some Conversations, one of the key texts in the German Spinoza renaissance of the late eighteenth century, he cast his father in the role of Spinoza’s defender (if occasionally also critic), and another Galician rabbi and maskil, Tsvi Hirsch Chajes (1805–1855), as the initially skeptical interlocutor eventually won over.80

  Rubin had not been one of Krochmal’s students; his association with the Haskalah began in the 1840s, after the philosopher had died. Nevertheless, it is clear that he had read Krochmal and, like the thinkers mentioned above, believed that the “Socrates of Galicia” had pointed the way toward a new reception of the Amsterdam heretic. Even by titling his work as he did, Rubin may have hinted at this link to Krochmal and not only to Maimonides, signaling that what had been only gingerly implied in The Guide to the Perplexed of the Time would be taken to its radical conclusions in his own New Guide to the Perplexed.

  V.

  The title of Rubin’s book was The New Guide to the Perplexed, Including Two Books of the Great and Noble Thinker Baruch de Spinoza According to the French Translation of Emile Saisset81 with a Life of the Philosopher. It appeared in two volumes, the first in 1856 and the second in 1857. The first and the beginning of the second volume consist of an introduction to Spinoza. After an opening tribute that embraces Spinoza as an exemplar of freedom of thought and pure reason, Rubin proceeds to explain his reasons for rendering the Ethics and the Treatise into Hebrew and to justify the chosen title of his translation:

  In their endeavor to scale the heights of wisdom, the maskilic youth of our people have traditionally begun their ascent with the learned works of the sages of Spain and Arabia, works that have become wizened with age. . . . The Guide has been to them the cornerstone . . . on which they have established the foundations of their intellect before proceeding onto the wisdom and philosophy of the nations. Yet the philosophy of the Guide, with its reliance on the doctrines of Aristotle, is as remote from the truth as east from west, as the days of yore from the present; it is very distant from the system of modern philosophy. . . .

  Thus from the bottom of my heart I say to the youths of Jeshurun, those who have left the traditional House of Study [bet midrash] as a result of their fervent desire for wisdom, who yearn to delve into philosophy yet still lack the strength to persevere in the study of works in different languages and of different nations: let them first look intently in this new guide. It will speak to them in the language of their parents and teachers, which they have been used to hearing from the time they first thought to consult books. And so it shall lead them to the gates of the temple of the new philosophy that is built on its foundations.82

  If others before Rubin in the Hebrew Enlightenment had acknowledged the obsolescence of Maimonides’ Aristotelianism, few had done so in as cutting a fashion. Against the earlier maskilic strategy of bringing Maimonides’ Guide into step with the present—even, in the case of Krochmal, of renewing the genre, yet doing so with deep reverence for the Moreh of the Rambam—Rubin called for a clean break. By titling Spinoza the New Guide to the Perplexed, he came, in essence, not to praise Maimonides but to bury him. Just as Spinoza, in the Treatise, cast his repudiation of the rationalist interpretation of the Bible as a break with Maimonides in particular, so too Rubin equated his repossession of Spinoza with the liberation of the Haskalah from the shadow of the “great eagle” of medieval Jewish philosophy.83 Rather than starting with Maimonides, the young scholar alienated from the bet midrash should begin his intellectual journey with Spinoza, via the familiar Hebrew of Rubin’s promised translation. As one of the founders of modern philosophy, it was Spinoza, not Maimonides, who was best suited for the role of “guide of the perplexed.”

  The problem with Maimonides, however, was not just the dated quality of his metaphysics. Rubin also finds him wanting as a model for the Haskalah. In a comparison of Spinoza and Maimonides, Rubin begins by duly acknowledging what he sees as their similarities: a rational, nonanthropomorphic understanding of God, a suspicion of the masses, the use of a foreign language for their speculative literature, their excommunication by fanatical rabbis.84 But the differences that Rubin highlights are more telling. Maimonides was a product of diverse travels, experiences, and encounters, Rubin argues, whereas Spinoza was fundamentally a hermit shielded from outside influence. Maimonides was a communal leader and ambassador, a figure close to kings who sought both wisdom and glory—a twelfth-century “court Jew,” Rubin seems to be implying. Maimonides’ concern for his reputation among the common people led him to tailor his message to his audience, as demonstrated by the very different character of his Guide of the Perplexed and his Mishneh Torah. Spinoza, by contrast, was poor and averse to the masses; he cared not a whit for appearances but for truth alone. Maimonides, as a result of his natural caution, was cagey and deliberately obscure in his writing; Spinoza, on the other hand, was completely frank and uninhibited in his writing, difficult for the masses to understand but for the wise of heart utterly lucid. Finally, Maimonides relied on Aristotelian philosophy, which was already somewhat obsolete in his time and was all the more so in Rubin’s time; “not so Baruch: he forged a new path that our forefathers could not have imagined.”85

  No one, I think, would confuse this for a fair and balanced comparison of the two philosophers. Just as he had done with the characters of Gutzkow’s Uriel Acosta, Rubin projects onto Maimonides and Spinoza a contemporary tension within the Hebrew Enlightenment, as seen from the point of view of one of its rival factions. Maimonides, drawn here after Gutzkow’s Da Silva, has all the stereotypical features of the dithering moderate in the eyes of the ideological purist. He is antiquated, derivative, lacking in boldness, desperate to please everyone; above all, he is internally divided, ever the scholar-rabbi, the philosopher-politician. Spinoza, on the other hand, is the ideal fantasy of the radical maskil. He represents a fresh type of Haskalah hero, one beholden to no wealthy patron or religious authorit
y and aspiring only to the “liberty to philosophize.” Marginal and impoverished, like many a Galician maskil, he is for this very reason intellectually free—and thus able to become the founder of “a new path that our forefathers could not have imagined.”

  It would appear that one source for Rubin’s trailblazing view of the Amsterdam heretic was his familiarity with the work of his fellow Spinoza admirer and translator Berthold Auerbach. In 1854 Auerbach, by now a celebrated author within German literature, had come out with a revised edition of his 1837 Spinoza novel.86 Rubin was evidently one of its readers. In the second volume of Rubin’s New Guide to the Perplexed, he supplements his own abbreviated narration of the life of the seventeenth-century thinker with various excerpts from Auerbach’s fictional portrait in footnotes.87 Most notably, Rubin includes a translation (some forty years before the Hebrew version of Auerbach’s Spinoza was published) of the triumphalist epilogue from Auerbach’s novel, which portrays Spinoza as the redeemer of Ahasverus, the Wandering Jew.88 In Rubin’s otherwise close rendition of this segment, the identity of Ahasverus—a familiar symbol of Jewishness within West European and particularly German literature but not within East European Jewish society—is not clearly marked. Auerbach finishes the scene with an image of the Wandering Jew leaning over to kiss Spinoza, writing “[i]t was the kiss of the dying Ahasverus, who bore the fate that Jesus Christ on the cross had laid upon Israel”; Rubin converts this into “[i]t was the kiss of Jeshurun,” employing the poetic name used to designate the Israelites on rare occasion in the Bible, and always in an affectionate manner.89 What drew Rubin to this scene was likely neither the pejorative vision of the Jewish past that Ahasverus connoted in the German context, nor what the historian Jacob Katz has called with reference to this passage “the utopia of a total assimilation of the Jews.”90 He probably found Auerbach’s epilogue appealing because its poetic beatification of Spinoza into a hero of watershed significance—a prototype of the “new Jew”—echoed his own construction of the Amsterdam philosopher as the modern Maimonides.

  The image of Spinoza presented by Rubin is thus, on the one hand, quite revolutionary. In the context of a Hebrew Enlightenment traditionally anxious about embracing innovation too openly, Rubin’s Spinoza—for all his residual ties to Maimonides—appears bluntly novel. Witness how Rubin introduces the Treatise to the reader: “[T]here,” he writes, Spinoza “demonstrates that all the prophecies were only imaginary visions, and all the miracles mere exaggerations hanging by a thin hair on the laws of nature, and Moses only a sage politician who was great in his time.”91 This summary does little to disabuse the pioneering biblical critic of radical heresy. It is passages like this that led Shmuel Feiner to claim that the Spinoza of the New Guide of the Perplexed exemplifies a rejectionist attitude to the Jewish past.92 In this view, rousting Maimonides from his perch in the maskilic pantheon and installment of Spinoza in his place is a challenge to the Haskalah to grow up—to wean itself from the old in favor of the new.

  Yet, on the other hand, alongside the image of Spinoza as a figure of rupture with the past, there exists another view of the seventeenth-century heretic in Rubin’s account, that of an heir to a subterranean legacy of philosophic speculation within Judaism. This perception is most acute in the section “On God” devoted to Spinoza’s metaphysical monism, which begins as follows:

  Like God concealed in his lair, invisible to all flesh and incomprehensible to all life; yet revealed in his brilliant glory by the heavenly bodies, the celestial hosts telling of his feats throughout the earth . . . and like the human soul hidden in the innermost recesses, beyond the reach of all matter and corporeality, but glimpsed fleetingly through the window-lattices before she turns away; and like nature in her holy palace, her face cloaked in mystery and her image concealed from every penetrating eye; yet, from behind the veil, clear and manifest to every noble spirit and precious soul who knows how to embrace her as a whole—so too is the system of Spinoza in its investigation of the secrets of God, the soul, and nature: elusive in a web woven of fixed logic, moving about under the cover of geometrical laws sturdy as a polished mirror yet also hard as barren rock, sealed and implicit.93

  As indicated by the language used in this passage, the path that Rubin charts for his reader into the Spinozan Deus sive natura is thoroughly mystical, pivoting on the tension between the hidden and the revealed. The God of Spinoza, according to Rubin, is both fully manifest in the universe and at the same time “concealed in his lair,” bringing to mind the ultimately ineffable deity of Neoplatonism. By maintaining this concept of divine transcendence, Rubin signals his departure from a strict pantheist interpretation of Spinoza’s metaphysics. In fact, he immediately goes on to define Spinoza’s pantheism as “psychological pantheism,” or panentheism. By identifying Spinoza with the Platonic notion that “[n]ature is the body of the divine spirit,” or conversely, that God is the soul of the world, its eternal and indispensable source of life, Rubin appears to lend support to an idealist reading of the seventeenth-century philosopher that would ascribe priority to spirit over matter in his metaphysical system. This would at least partly restore the mind-body hierarchy ostensibly undermined by Spinoza’s doctrine of the strict identity of thought and extension, encapsulated in the famous seventh proposition of Book II of the Ethics stating that “[t]he order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.”

  After defining Spinozism as a version of panentheism, Rubin proceeds to elaborate on the precedents for this idea of God in the history of religion. “Glimpses of this system,” he writes, “appeared in the light clouds of dawn in antiquity.”94 Rubin casts a wide net, alluding to sources from Greco-Roman thought to Norse mythology, but most of his references are to Jewish literature. Starting with one piece of evidence from the Torah itself—the fact that the “master of the prophets (i.e., Moses) would occasionally call a natural act a divine decree”95—Rubin then scours rabbinic, philosophical, and kabbalistic texts for suggestions of the view that all is in God. Sayings and legends of the Sages [Hazal]96 bump up against mystical numerologies,97 while citations from Maimonides’ Guide98 stand alongside paraphrases from the kabbalistic Zohar99 and Sefer Yetsirah [Book of Creation].100 All these excerpts speak to the notion of a monistic undercurrent pulsing through Judaism. If on a merely exoteric plane Judaism mandates a separation between God and his creation, the implication of the fragments quoted here is that there is a hidden, esoteric interpretation, or sod, attesting to their ultimate unity.

  Having begun, then, by accentuating the radical and innovative nature of Spinoza, Rubin mitigated this picture by excavating precedents for his “heresy” within “tradition.” In doing so, he suggested a bond between his reclamation of Spinoza and the Galician philosopher whose method of assimilating novel ideas to an esoteric dynamic within Judaism had left an imprint on so many nineteenth-century maskilim—namely, Krochmal. That Krochmal lurked in the background of this reception was made clear in Rubin’s subsequent work in defense of Spinoza, Teshuvah Nitsahat [A Victorious Reply], written to rebut the criticism of Luzzatto in particular. In this forty-five-page treatise, Rubin expands on his earlier presentation of the Jewish foundations for Spinoza’s pantheism while simultaneously muting the revolutionary zeal that was so much a part of the New Guide. Krochmal receives honorable mention for having demonstrated the Jewishness of Spinozism as part of his lengthy exposition of the “poor man’s wisdom” of Ibn Ezra.101 After explaining how various statements made by Krochmal can be explicated in a Spinozist light, Rubin writes: “You have shown the discerning reader that our philosopher is blessed [barukh] and his source is blessed—he is our brother, our kith and kin even in his outlook. His words are all words of tradition, the foundations of his thought are in the mountains of Zion, and the axioms of his system rest on the pillars of the wisdom of our people from antiquity to the present.”102 Krochmal, in other words, had laid the groundwork for the restoration of Spinoza to his Hebraic inhe
ritance that Rubin was proposing. In his Guide to the Perplexed of the Time—first by sidestepping the theism of Maimonides, then by revitalizing the panentheism of Ibn Ezra—he had implanted a seed that would blossom in Rubin’s suggestively entitled New Guide to the Perplexed. If Krochmal had shown that an immanentist theology could be developed more convincingly from Jewish sources than from the Christian symbols relied on by the German Idealists Schelling and Hegel, Rubin would prove Spinoza—the figure trumpeted by the German post-Kantians as one of the founders of modern thought—the consummator of this tradition within Hokhmat Yisrael. Spinoza’s modernity, in this view, was a function of his having exposed a heretofore latent metaphysical content within Jewish texts. His novelty lay in translating into the “clear and distinct” language of seventeenth-century rationalism what premodern Jewish thinkers had only intimated in an allusive and figurative manner. But for his having written the Ethics in Latin instead of Hebrew, Spinoza’s position toward his Jewish sources was not far removed from that of Krochmal toward Ibn Ezra. Both were disclosing what had been concealed—the esoteric interpretation of Jewish monotheism as radical monism, or Krochmal’s “purified faith.”103

  This was likewise the stance adopted by Rubin toward Krochmal—the militant to the middle-of-the-road maskil, or the New Guide vis-à-vis the Guide of the Perplexed of the Time. The radical maskil, in this view, would neither cling to tradition, even if only for show, nor unmoor himself entirely from the Jewish past. Rather, modeling himself after Spinoza, the “new guide” for the modern Jew, he would bring light to dark places, guide underground traditions from the periphery to the center of Jewish cultural memory. In short, he would act as a revealer of secrets. Heine, writing in the mid-1830s, had famously called pantheism (in the context of discussing Spinoza) “the secret religion of Germany.”104 For Rubin, as for many of his nineteenth-century East European contemporaries enamored of the heretic from Amsterdam, this secret was equally at home within Judaism.