However over-the-top in its symbolism, this public reprieve belonged to a century-old campaign on the part of Jews to reclaim Spinoza. Klausner hinted at this in later protesting that his “pardoning” of Spinoza had been misunderstood. The excommunication had “expired of its own accord,” he would insist, as demonstrated by the packed house on hand at the Hebrew University to recall the legacy of the seventeenth-century heretic. The ban imposed by the Amsterdam Sephardim on Spinoza had sought total extirpation of his memory, including among its list of forbidden things the reading of “anything composed or written by him.” It went without saying that a jubilee commemoration wasn’t kosher either. In his own eyes, all Klausner had done was acknowledge a decline in the authority of the herem that had already taken place de facto.13
Yet there was more to this pardon of Spinoza than perhaps Klausner realized. By conjuring the classical rabbinic formula for lifting the herem, Klausner implied that his was not a mere personal rapprochement with Spinoza, but one that bore the imprimatur of Judaism and the Jewish people as a whole. Even if Klausner lacked the passionate attachment to Spinoza that Auerbach and Rubin (for whom the encounter with the philosopher was truly formative) had experienced, the implication of his rhetoric was that he could offer something that they could not: the embrace of a broad national movement that presumed to represent all Jews, including the most distant and alienated. “From the heights of Mount Scopus”—and not from Germany or Galicia, or from Amsterdam for that matter—would come an end to the estrangement between Spinoza and Judaism, with all accounts settled and all sins forgiven. Zionism, with its belief in “the centripetal force of Jewish peoplehood,” a collective and essentialist Jewishness overlying individual and regional differences, seemed to provide one basis for reclaiming Spinoza.14 It also presented a set of obstacles. For how could a commitment to national unity and solidarity be squared with the domestication of a renegade like Spinoza? Could Spinoza—the same Spinoza whom Berthold Auerbach had depicted as the herald of a Diaspora-oriented cosmopolitanism the Spinoza who appeared to have turned his back not only on his religion but on his people—seriously be deemed an asset to a separatist movement that ascribed pivotal meaning to ethnic ties?15
Klausner, who throughout his career clamored for a national culture that would fuse “Judaism” (yahadut) and “humanism” (’enoshiyut), believed that under the right conditions, national cohesion and individual liberty—the “freedom to philosophize”—could complement each other. He conveyed this confidence through his attempt to repair the breach between Spinoza and his native people. Other nationalist intellectuals, both for and against Spinoza, were less sanguine about the possibility of such reconciliation.
In what follows, before circling back to the 1927 commemoration on Mount Scopus, I will examine three contexts for Klausner’s appropriation of Spinoza. I will begin by tracing the origins and early development of the Zionist recovery of Spinoza, with a focus on the major trends and ideological frames in this reception to which Klausner was heir.16 I will then turn to Klausner’s own intellectual biography, focusing in particular on his conflicted feelings over the course a secularization of Hebrew culture should take. Finally, I will study the shadow cast on Klausner’s lifting of the herem by concomitant developments in the reception of Spinoza outside the realm of Jewish nationalism. Ultimately, I contend that the issue of Spinoza’s Jewish or even proto-Zionist credentials was only the surface of the debate over the appropriation of him for Jewish nationalism. At a more fundamental level, this was a debate over the meaning of Zionist secularism—its parameters, its pantheon of heroes, and its relationship to Jewish religion and the Jewish past.
II.
The Zionist objection to the liberal integrationist approach to the “Jewish Question” was divided between two main ideological currents. One, which became known as political Zionism, took its point of departure from the demonstrated failure of liberal enlightenment to eliminate anti-Semitism and “normalize” the condition of the Jews. In this view, assimilation into the Diaspora might have been a worthy goal, but it had been rendered impossible by recalcitrant Gentile hostility. This animosity, moreover, was increasingly based not on religious but on racial and biological differences, implying that total integration was in principle unattainable. The upshot was that the Jewish Question would be remedied only if Jews stopped waiting in vain for their situation to ameliorate through general progress and instead actively sought to transform their circumstances, pursuing what the early Russian Zionist Leo Pinsker famously called autoemancipation. Those who shared this reasoning took as their chief aim the acquisition of a state or at least homeland for the Jews that would be capable of accommodating the vast and disenfranchised Jewish population of the Russian Empire in particular. Though there were others prior to him who espoused a Jewish nationalism with territorial ambitions, this position eventually became synonymous with the charismatic Austro-Hungarian journalist and founder of the Zionist movement Theodor Herzl (1860–1904).
“Cultural” or “spiritual” Zionism offered a separate critique. The founder of this variety of Jewish nationalism was the Russian Zionist Asher Ginzberg (1856–1927), who went by the pseudonym Ahad Ha‘am. Here, the issue with the Diaspora-oriented response to the Jewish problem was not so much its feasibility as the threat it allegedly posed to the survival of Judaism. While rejecting traditional Judaism and conceding that Western emancipation had brought many benefits, this camp saw the privatization of Jewish identity as a religious confession, a kind of false consciousness.17 Judaism was not a matter of personal choice, nor was it a label determined by others; it was an inherited, organic identity of descent. Cultural Zionists thus concerned themselves primarily with a reshaping of Judaism from a covenantal religion of laws and commandments into a rich, vibrant, and life-affirming secular culture.
The division between political and cultural Zionism roughly corresponds to the two primary frames that shaped the Zionist recovery of Spinoza from its nineteenth-century beginnings. The first and more “politically” focused of the two was the tradition of mevasre ha-tsiyonut, or the “forerunners of Zionism.” The second, more “culturally” oriented of the two was the principle of “national pantheism,” a vitalist ideal that attributed all manifestations of Jewish life, however ostensibly unrelated, to an immanent national spirit, or Volksgeist. In what follows, before turning to Klausner, I will discuss these paradigms in turn, tracing the role of each in the Zionist reception of Spinoza.
The “Forerunners of Zionism”
The search for precursors of Zionism has ranged from a serious historiographic enterprise to an exercise in nationalist mythmaking and the creation of a “usable past.”18 Some have restricted the label of forerunner to those who sought to translate words and ideas into action; others have opted for a maximalist definition capable of reeling in makers of even the most oblique references to Jewish national revival and territorial independence. Spinoza, not surprisingly, entered the ranks of the “forerunners of Zionism” through the second door.
The case for including Spinoza in the prehistory of political Zionism rested ultimately on an enigmatic passage at the end of the third chapter of the Treatise, “Of the Election of the Hebrews.” There, Spinoza provides his famous treatment of the biblical concept of the divine election of the Jews. Without flatly repudiating the fact of “God’s choosing,” he secularizes this doctrine in accordance with his pantheism, reasoning that “since no one acts except by the predetermined order of Nature—that is, from God’s eternal direction and decree—it follows that no one chooses a way of life for himself or accomplishes anything except by the special vocation of God.” In other words, the “chosenness” of Israel denoted post facto the natural merit that the Hebrews had achieved in ancient times. What was this mark of distinction? Spinoza held that nations could be differentiated only “in respect of the kind of society and laws under which they live and are governed,” that is, on political grounds.19 Starting from this p
remise, and supporting his case through biblical citations, he argued that the chosenness of the Hebrews was a reflection of their having established a secure and prosperous state (the tribal federation of Joshua and Judges more so than the later monarchy) on the basis of Mosaic Law. But this was only a fleeting accomplishment; eventually the state was overrun, the people were exiled, and the Hebrews lost their sovereignty—which was the same as saying that they ceased to be “chosen.” The election of the Hebrews was thus a temporal and political, not an eternal and spiritual phenomenon, and no longer applied to a scattered and dispossessed Diaspora Jewry who “at the present time,” had “nothing whatsoever” that they could “arrogate to themselves above other nations.”20
Why, then, had the Jewish nation endured in the Diaspora? In medieval Jewish apologetics, this seeming miracle was commonly cited as evidence that the Jews remained “chosen” by God and would ultimately regain their political independence with the coming of messianic redemption. And while Christianity purported to have inherited the mantle of the “true Israel,” it too understood the survival of the Jews to be a supernatural phenomenon, a result of God’s having set apart the “people of the Book” for a special purpose. Spinoza rejected this reasoning. “As to their continued existence for so many years when scattered and stateless,” he wrote, “this is in no way surprising, since they have separated themselves from other nations to such a degree as to incur the hatred of all, and this not only through external rites alien to the rites of other nations but also through the mark of circumcision, which they most religiously observe.”21 What had cemented and preserved the national identity of the Jews, in spite of their dispersion, was a purely natural cause: namely, the interaction between their self-isolation via peculiar rituals (in particular that of circumcision) and the hatred this insularity bred in others. Spinoza then turns to the experience of forced Jewish converts to Catholicism in Spain and Portugal to bear out this argument. In Spain, where New Christians were offered “full civic rights,” they were rapidly integrated and their former Jewishness stamped out; in Portugal, on the other hand, where they were denied the same liberties, they continued to practice Judaism in secret. This contrast has been shown to be wrong and inverted, and particularly odd coming from one, like Spinoza, who would have known better.22 Yet historicity is not our concern here. Spinoza’s point is that ostracism is the only thing holding the Jews together. Once measures discriminating against Jews are lifted, they follow their individual self-interest and blend in completely with the rest of the population.
It is this argument that proponents of Jewish assimilation would often cite in appropriating Spinoza as a prophet of their own favored solution to the “Jewish Question.”23 The segment that immediately follows, however, complicates Spinoza’s position on the survival of the Jews:
The mark of circumcision, too, I consider to be such an important factor in this matter that I am convinced that this by itself will preserve their nation forever. Indeed, were it not that the fundamental principles of their religion discourage manliness, I would not hesitate to believe that they will one day, given the opportunity—such is the mutability of human affairs—establish once more their independent state, and that God will again choose them.24
Spinoza appears to reverse himself in this passage, by suggesting that there is something about the intensity with which Jews observe circumcision that would be sufficient to safeguard Jewish identity “by itself,” regardless of the attitudes of other nations. And this leads him to speculate about an alternative future for the Jews, one that would involve not their disappearance but their reclamation of sovereignty.
Viewed in context, it is clear that Spinoza is not endorsing or even predicting the revival of Jewish statehood. At most, he is vouching for its possibility. Yet the “proto-Zionist” potential (if not intent) of this passage was not exhausted by the reference to the re-creation of a Jewish state. Of equal import was the condition attached: that the Jews first overcome the emasculating effects of their religion. As the Jewish cultural historian Jay Geller has written, “this passage’s combination of Jewish body, gender, statelessness, and survival insinuated the specter of Jewish persistence and—particularly with its assertion that ‘the principles of their religion make them effeminate’—the equally uncanny ascription of embodied Jewish gender identity: the feminized male Jew.”25 From its inception, Zionism was rhetorically linked with the recovery not only of land and language, but also of virility.26 And the Zionist axiom of “Negation of the Exile” (shelilat ha-golah) meant rejection not only of continued Jewish existence in the Diaspora, but of a “Ghetto Jew” long stigmatized as timid, sickly, effeminate, even homosexual in antisemitic discourse.27 This preoccupation with masculinity was perhaps most pronounced in the early Zionist leader Max Nordau’s (1849–1923) call for the creation of a “Jewry of muscle” (Muskeljudentum), who would be distinguished by brawn as much as bookishness and brainpower.28 “Let us take up our oldest traditions,” Nordau beseeched, harking back in a 1903 article to the ancient legacy of Jewish gymnasts in Hellenistic times; “let us once more become deep-chested, sturdy, sharp-eyed men.”29 Yet the “muscle-Jew” fantasy of Nordau and other Western Zionists was only one instance of an ideal type—the “New Hebrew Man”—whose incarnations ranged from the haluts (pioneer) to the sabra (native-born member of the Yishuv or the State of Israel) to the Jewish paramilitary or soldier, and whose cultivation was a goal of practically every stream and stage within the movement.30 With his famously soft and pale features and, in the words of his early biographer Colerus, “very weak constitution,” Spinoza would seem a very unlikely poster child for the “New Hebrew Man.” Moreover, his criticism of Jewish effeminacy in this passage appears more an indictment of the political quietism of rabbinic Judaism (“did not the principles of their religion make them effeminate”) than of the “Diaspora Jew” or the Jewish body per se. Yet this emphasis on Jewish passivity would, as we will see, resonate with those who advocated self-emancipation as the solution to the so-called Jewish Question. Whatever he meant by the use of the Latin effeminare, Spinoza may be said to have anticipated with this choice of words the gendered dimension of the future quest for Jewish national revival.31
The first to use this passage to support the view that Spinoza was a Jewish nationalist avant la lettre was the pioneering German socialist turned pioneering Jewish nationalist Moses Hess.32 In 1862 Hess published Rome and Jerusalem, a short book justly considered the first sustained argument for a modern, secular Jewish nationalism. Prior to this manifesto, the left-wing German Jew—a self-proclaimed “Young Spinozist” in his youth—had been estranged from Judaism for decades.33 In his early works from the late 1830s and early 1840s, he had espoused a messianic socialism that seemed to render outdated even a weakened form of Jewish separation. He foresaw the replacement of both Judaism and Christianity with a global and pantheist religion of reason, in which the alienation between spirit and matter, and the social hierarchy and inequality that was the necessary counterpart of this divide, would be permanently overcome. In Rome and Jerusalem, he switched course dramatically, beginning the work by declaring himself “back with my people.” He passionately affirmed the Jewishness he had once repudiated, yet advanced a revolutionary interpretation of this identity as, at root, a nationality as opposed to a religion. The solution to the Jewish Question, he averred, was neither the radical cosmopolitanism he had formerly advocated nor the confessionalization of Jewish identity promoted by Reform Judaism, but rather the embrace of a humanitarian Jewish nationalism in the spirit of Herder and Mazzini.
And, one might add, Spinoza; for if earlier in his career he had identified Spinoza as the prototype of a universal human brotherhood, in Rome and Jerusalem he transposed the monistic philosophy of his favorite philosopher to an emphatically Jewish key. In the third letter of Rome and Jerusalem, while criticizing the Jewish “Reformers” for renouncing the national character of Judaism, Hess writes, “Spinoza conceived Juda
ism as a nationality (see the end of the third chapter of his theological tractate) and held that the restoration of the Jewish kingdom depends entirely on the courage of the Jewish people.”34 To be sure, Hess makes note of this in a somewhat offhand manner; his interest in Spinoza lies more in the metaphysical unity doctrine of the Ethics than in the critique of religion of the Treatise. Still, it would be fair to say that the appropriation of this passage for a Jewish national ideology began with a German Jew himself later canonized in the pantheon of Zionist forerunners.35
The First Modern Jew Page 17