VI.
In 1885 Rubin’s translation of Spinoza’s Ethics into Hebrew finally appeared in print.105 By now, the Galician upstart who had brashly defied the old guard of the Jewish Enlightenment with his iconization of Spinoza and Acosta three decades before was, at age sixty-two, one of the elder statesmen of secular Hebrew literature. Ever since his conflict with Luzzatto over Spinoza, Rubin had kept a distance from literary polemics. In his choice of subjects he remained quite daring, challenging the traditional religious perception of Jewish uniqueness with books on such things as parallel creation myths in the ancient Near East.106 The tenor of his writings, however, was sober and scholarly, often reminding his admirers of the legendary evenness of his favorite thinker.107 And at a time when materialist, positivist, and atheistic ideas were beginning to make inroads among the Eastern European Jewish intelligentsia, the philosophical idealism to which Rubin remained devoted was comparatively moderate and even old-fashioned.
This idealism was immediately evident in the idiosyncratic Hebrew title of Rubin’s translation. On the first of the two title pages, which furnished the Latin and German titles of Spinoza’s Ethics using the Roman alphabet, the given name prevailed: Ethica in the former, Die Ethik (Tugendlehre) in the latter. On the second, Hebrew title page, one encountered an altogether different title: Heker ’Elohah ‘im torat ha-’adam, or The Investigation of God with the Science of Man. By emending the title so, Rubin indicated that, in his reading, the ethics of Spinoza was effectively subordinate to his immanentist theology. Rubin’s Spinoza was, at bottom, a religious thinker, a quasi-mystical “God-intoxicated man” in the Hen kai pan (One and All) mold of his German Romantic appropriators, only with a distinctively Jewish intellectual pedigree.
That Spinoza could still fire Rubin’s Hebraist passion was clear from his long introduction to The Investigation of God, in which he sounded the same determination to reclaim the Amsterdam heretic for Judaism and Hebrew literature and to exculpate him of all wrongdoing that he had demonstrated in his first apology for Spinoza. “Now that all the peoples of the earth have come around to pay homage to the stone of Spinoza . . . now it is our birthright to repatriate him within our Hebrew literature.”108 Had Spinoza not been excommunicated, he might have written in the language of Gersonides and Crescas, exemplars of the medieval Jewish philosophy that had left traces on his thought; “for the Hebrew tongue was very dear and beloved to him and only death came between them”—a reference to Spinoza’s unfinished book on Hebrew grammar.109 Indeed, Rubin argued that it was only the need to write in a foreign language for a non-Jewish audience, and not any grudge toward the community that expelled him, that led Spinoza to refer to earlier Jewish philosophers as “Pharisees” and to feign a preference for the New Testament over the Hebrew Bible.110 The “spirit of Jewish thought [hokhmat yisrael] spoke through him” and enabled him to supply a monistic alternative to Cartesian dualism.111 Spinozism, in short, was “fundamentally Jewish from beginning to end.”112
The appearance, in Hebrew, of Spinoza’s most significant philosophical work reverberated widely. From one of his earliest extant letters, a missive to a friend from July 1904, touching on a lecture about Spinoza he had recently given to a Zionist organization in his hometown of Plonsk, it is clear that David Grin—soon to be known as David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973)—first encountered the Ethics via Rubin’s translation.113 Micah Josef Berdichevsky (1865–1921), in a remarkable diary entry from 1900, describes being transformed by the mere purchase of the translated Ethics ten years earlier, when he was not yet known as the Nietzschean heretic par excellence in fin-de-siècle Hebrew literature. He prefaces his reconstruction of that moment with a striking confession:
There are a select few among the heroes of the spirit whose stature is so lofty and the power of their personality so absolute that even without being familiar with their work . . . you tremble merely upon hearing uttered their Holy Name [shemam ha-meforash, a term that refers to the divine Tetragrammaton].
. . . And I will not err if I say that this was the case with Spinoza. He touched me to the heart, and I set his image before me even prior to looking at his Holy Tablets [luhot-ha-berit, the tablets on which were inscribed the Ten Commandments revealed at Sinai].
Here we are given a glimpse into what a reception theorist might call the “horizon of interpretation” for the budding author’s exposure to Spinoza’s thought.114 Berdichevsky concedes that the name and image of the Amsterdam philosopher had a potent, mystical charge for him before he read a word of the “Holy Tablets” (i.e., the Ethics)—an indication of the near sacred aura that Spinoza already enjoyed in East European secular Jewish culture. After opening with this reflection, Berdichevsky recalls having bought “the Ethics in a beautiful Hebrew edition” ten years earlier while living in Odessa. By then, he writes, “I had rejected the God of my fathers and my heart was filled with anger and sadness.” Yet shortly after buying Rubin’s Hebrew translation of the Ethics, he experiences something resembling a call to prophecy:
I stood for a moment in the middle of the road. Suddenly, everything changed before me; mountains surrounded me and lo and behold! The body of Spinoza touched my own and a voice cried inside me: the book in your hands is the answer to the mystery of the universe! And once again, I had a vision of this majestic figure in all his solitude. A feeling of reverence grabbed me; a hallowed torrent of ideas rained down upon me; thousands upon thousands of words of truth lit up my mind, and it seemed as if everything had become clear. Here I was sitting at the feet of my teacher and rabbi, lonely like him, and like him cut off from Israel. The voice of the Reproof sounded in my ear: cursed shall you be in getting up and cursed shall you be in going out. Yet I was blessed and favored in that moment, and I felt a revelation of the spirit in all the strings of my soul. I had taken on a different form.
Berdichevsky closes with the admission that, following this rapture, “a few years passed until I read Spinoza. But his great benevolence was disclosed to me from the moment I received his book and held it in my hand.”115
To be sure, the text of Rubin’s translation plays only an indirect role in Berdichevsky’s recounting of his discovery of Spinoza. Whatever rhetorical embellishment this episode underwent in the retelling, the point Berdichevsky wishes to convey is that the epiphany preceded the real encounter; Spinoza “touched him to the heart” before any serious engagement with his writings. Still, the echoes, even exaggeration of a major trope in the maskilic reaction to Spinoza—the image of the Amsterdam philosopher as a “new guide to the perplexed,” an initiator into the “mystery of the universe”—are unmistakable. For all his secularism (“I had rejected the God of my fathers”), Berdichevsky drenches his reminiscence in theological language, reconstructing his earliest reception of Spinoza as a great and redemptive ecstasy, a sudden insight into esoteric truths (the nistar) gifted from on high. The Spinoza of this diary entry is, in short, a revealer of secrets. At least in this respect, Berdichevsky proves himself here to be Rubin’s heir.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the East European maskilic Spinoza that Rubin had done so much to fashion was fast becoming a theme of Jewish visual culture as well. At the vanguard of this development was the Lodz-born Polish Jewish artist Samuel Hirszenberg (1865–1908).116 In 1888 Hirszenberg completed the first of his historical works, an oil-on-canvas entitled Uriel Acosta and Spinoza. The painting portrays Spinoza as a young boy of no more than ten, sitting on the lap of his mentor Da Costa. The contrast between the two figures could not be starker. Baruch has long, golden curls and soft, cherubic features; he wears an elegant, perfectly tailored mauve-colored coat over an ivory, wide-collared chemise; and his face, tilted back ever so slightly and turned to the massive tome that sits open on the desk before him, is aglow with a serene rapture. Da Costa, on the other hand, is gaunt, bearded, and brooding; he is dressed all in black, from his large skullcap to his long, shapeless caftan; and his posture is as stiff and tightly coile
d (witness the fingers gripping the armrest) as Spinoza’s is relaxed, even languorous. Hirszenberg based this painting on a scene from the last act of Gutzkow’s Uriel Acosta already described in this chapter, in which a young and happy Baruch walks in a leafy park together with his distracted “uncle” Uriel, who (in the conceit of the play) is devastated by the loss of his betrothed to another man on account of his scandalous heresy. The pink flowers resting on the open book on the table in Hirszenberg’s painting have their roots in this episode: As Spinoza collects flowers, a chastened Da Costa urges that he “sleep, like flowers, content to enjoy their loveliness,” without embarking, like him, on a path of restless inquiry into the true nature of things that will only lead to ruin. Yet before leaving Da Costa, for the last time, Baruch cannot help but use the flowers for a philosophical analogy, by comparing the fresh ones to the eternal, infinite attribute of Thought, and their faded counterparts to finite modes.
Was Hirszenberg familiar with Rubin’s Hebrew adaptation of Gutzkow’s Uriel Acosta? Did his depiction of Spinoza and Da Costa in 1888 have anything to do with Rubin’s translation of the Ethics of three years earlier? At present there is nothing to suggest he was acquainted with either. Still, Uriel Acosta and Spinoza can justly be considered part of a pattern of rehabilitation of Spinoza both inaugurated and exemplified by Rubin. First, nearly everything about the painting suggests an East European Jewish frame of reference. The setting is no longer a verdant city garden but a small, austere room that has the feel of a claustrophobic space; the plainness of the background wall, bare of all ornament, is interrupted only by an unruly stack of books on a nearby shelf. With his long black coat and untrimmed beard, Da Costa looks more like an Ashkenazi rabbi than a seventeenth-century Portuguese Jew. Only the child Spinoza, with his brightly colored clothing and fair expression, is an exception to the general drabness and darkness of his surroundings. Moreover, by picturing Da Costa and Spinoza in what appears to be a master and disciple relationship, Hirszenberg, deliberately or not, echoes the image of the seventeenth-century pantheist fostered by Rubin and other East European maskilim, as heir to a freethinking legacy opposed to talmudic orthodoxy yet seeded in Judaism, and conveyed from rav to talmid via an underground “chain of tradition.” Here too, in other words, there are intimations of a Spinoza who is a recipient, and eventually a revealer of secrets.
FIGURE. 4.2. Samuel Hirszenberg, Uriel Acosta and Spinoza, 1888. Photo from postcard. The Jewish Theological Seminary, New York.
Uriel Acosta and Spinoza was one of Hirszenberg’s first paintings; his Spinoza (1907) of two decades later was one of his last. No longer a boy in the lap of his heterodox tutor, the Spinoza of this mature work is an excommunicated heretic. Hirszenberg portrays Spinoza, dressed like a Dutchman, walking composedly in the foreground of a cobblestone street, rapt in a book he is reading. To all appearances, he is utterly unperturbed by the scowls and menacing glares of the bearded brood all in black behind him. While one of the men kneels down, perhaps to pick up a stone to throw at Spinoza, the rest simply recoil, packing ever closer together in herdlike fashion, and in so doing underscoring the degree to which Spinoza stands abandoned and alone, apart from the crowd. If Hirszenberg’s earlier opus had hinted at a Jewish countertradition of dissent to which Spinoza belonged, here the emphasis was exclusively on rupture. This too, however, was a crucial aspect of the maskilic Spinoza—the “rebel against the past,” the “founder of a new path that our forefathers could not have imagined,” the hero of freedom and solitude.
The response to Rubin’s translation was far from universally positive. One detractor was the Polish Jewish writer Nahum Sokolow (1859–1936), who by the 1880s had become arguably the most wellknown Hebrew journalist in all of Eastern Europe.117 Reviewing Heker ’Elohah shortly after its appearance, the Warsaw-based Sokolow scoffed at Rubin’s attempt in his preface to equate Spinozism with Judaism. “It is true,” he conceded, “that Judaism is not uniform among us . . . and perhaps Spinoza had his own peculiar Judaism, but in the conventional sense, as we are accustomed to understand Judaism, it is as far from Spinoza as east from west.” Spinoza, he pointed out, denies free will and replaces it with an absolute determinism. He denies the immortality of the soul by dissolving it in the immortality of the En-sof, in the general eternity of the universe and its forces. The God of Spinoza is so boundless that ultimately, at least from the vantage of the human intellect, He is everything; there is nothing else.
FIGURE. 4.3. Samuel Hirszenberg, Spinoza, 1907. A. A. Deineka Picture Gallery of Kursk, Russia.
This is philosophy, but why should we deceive ourselves into saying that this is Judaism? By means of rhetoric (melitsah) and casuistry (pilpul) one can prove anything; one can extract some isolated saying from the Guide or from Kabbalistic books, find similar wording between it and a statement of Spinoza, and declare the two kin! . . . But can the foundations of Judaism—the creation of the heavens and the earth, general and special providence, immortality of the soul, reward and punishment, the divinity of the Torah and the [authority of] the non-cognitive commandments—be sustained on the basis of the philosophy of Spinoza?
Put simply, Sokolow concluded—sounding very much like Luzzatto years earlier—“Judaism and Spinozism do not make a good match.”118
This was Sokolow’s position on the “Judaizing” of Spinoza in 1886. Yet some four decades later, without in any way retracting his earlier criticism of Rubin, Sokolow would write Barukh Shpinozah u-zemano: Midrash be-filosofyah uve-korot ha-‘itim [Baruch Spinoza and His Time: A Study in Philosophy and History], a massive Hebrew intellectual biography whose overriding aim was to reclaim Spinoza for modern Jewish culture. In the intervening years, Sokolow had become a Zionist—indeed, not just any Zionist but a major leader and emissary in the annals of political Zionism prior to the creation of the State of Israel. How Zionism, and a secular nationalist conception of Jewishness to be more exact, afforded a new platform for receiving, and rehabilitating, Spinoza is the subject of my next chapter.
*FIGURE. 5.1. Photograph of Yosef Klausner, 1911. The National Library of Israel, Jerusalem.
CHAPTER 5
From the Heights of Mount Scopus
Yosef Klausner and the Zionist Rehabilitation of Spinoza
I.
On February 21, 1927, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, then in only its third year of existence, commemorated Spinoza on the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of his death. Its afternoon assembly was one of several tributes held around the globe to mark the occasion, the grandest of which was clearly a four-day conference in The Hague, the city where Spinoza had died in 1677. Modest in comparison, the Jerusalem event nevertheless packed the main auditorium on Mount Scopus with an audience that, in addition to the expected mix of students, lecturers, professors, and university officials, contained many leading figures in the Jewish community of Palestine (known as the Yishuv). Sitting at the dais next to Rabbi Judah L. Magnes, the American-born chancellor, were the acclaimed Hebrew poets Hayyim Nahman Bialik and Ya‘akov Cahan, as well as the veteran Russian Zionist Menahem Ussishkin, a member of the Executive Committee of the university.1 It was Magnes who opened the event, by reading aloud a missive in both Hebrew and Latin that had been sent by the university to the gathering in The Hague. In the letter, he praised Spinoza as “a son of his people in both his religious enthusiasm and bold knowledge of God” and declared this day of remembrance a university holiday.2
Next to speak was Professor Yosef Klausner, who recently had been hired by the university to serve as the first chair of Hebrew literature. A longtime member of the Zionist intellectual elite, the Russian-born Klausner had three decades of Hebrew writing and editing behind him, and a litany of scholarly and publicistic works to his name—perhaps most germanely, his biography of Jesus of Nazareth, the first of its kind in Hebrew, and a subject of international controversy among both Jews and Christians from its publication in 1922.3 Over his career, he had written profiles of many past an
d present Hebrew authors, among them S. D. Luzzatto and Salomon Rubin, who had butted heads over Spinoza in the middle of the previous century.4 This, however, was to be his first opportunity to treat Spinoza directly. Klausner introduced his speech, later published under the title “The Jewish Character of Spinoza’s Philosophy,” as an attempt to give a strictly objective assessment of a topic long distorted by myth and misrepresentation.5 Throughout, he zigzagged between negative and affirmative opinions of the Jewishness of Spinoza and his system, at one minute criticizing the effort to paper over differences between Judaism and Spinozism, at another appearing to do just that. Yet it was not this ambivalence, but the exuberance of his finale that would be remembered:
To Spinoza the Jew, it is declared two-hundred-fifty years after his death, from the heights of Mount Scopus, from our Temple in miniature (mikdash-ha-me‘at)—the Hebrew University in Jerusalem:
. . . The ban (herem) is nullified! The sin of Judaism against you is removed and your offense against her atoned for! Our brother are you, our brother are you, our brother are you (’ahinu ’atah, ’ahinu ’atah, ’ahinu ’atah)!6
To close, Klausner invoked the phrase traditionally used to rescind a rabbinic ban—“Our brother are you”—and applied it to Spinoza. The secular and right-leaning Zionist ideologue had usurped the role of the bet din (or rabbinical court) in Jewish law, symbolically lifting the stigma of heresy from the seventeenth-century philosopher.
Whatever the seriousness with which this annulment was uttered, it made a fast impression. Gershom Scholem, watching from the audience that day, would later recall that “when we left the hall, some people laughed at his [Klausner’s] emotional performance (Our brother are you! . . .) and said that under Jewish law it was sheer nonsense and proved only that Klausner was ignorant of the Law.”7 Hugo Bergmann, the head of the Jewish National Library and future professor of philosophy at Hebrew University, who spoke after Klausner on more general themes in Spinoza’s thought, penned a brief note to a friend that same evening, writing: “Delivered the Spinoza lecture in the university. Beforehand Klausner’s lecture, which concluded with the words repealing the ban: Our brother are you!”8 The Hebrew press in Mandate Palestine reporting on the event singled out the same line for mention. By the end of the week, Klausner’s statement was sufficiently well-known that a column for the Hebrew daily Haaretz could begin: “At about the same hour as Professor Klausner stood on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem and abrogated the herem on the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza . . . I went to find the street named after Spinoza in Tel-Aviv.”9 News of what had happened eventually reached America, leading one Reform rabbi to complain about the “the incident of the formal removal of the ban, an incident reported to have taken place on the hallowed heights of Mt. Scopus and in which a preeminent scholar figured as master of ceremonies.”10 Even the New York Times reported on the event in Jerusalem in a brief article whose headline read: “Ban Against Spinoza Revoked by Jews.”11 Klausner’s amnesty has since served as a landmark in the story of Spinoza’s Jewish reception, eliciting a range of reactions from approbation to refutation to ridicule.12
The First Modern Jew Page 16