The First Modern Jew

by Daniel B. Schwartz

  Though widely reviewed in the Jewish press upon its appearance, Rome and Jerusalem did not spawn a movement and was rather quickly forgotten.36 The responses, moreover, understandably tended to focus on what was most strikingly novel in Hess’s treatise—the argument for a modern Jewish nationality—and to pay little attention to his use of Spinoza, with some exceptions.37 Exactly twenty years later, a Russian-Jewish physician from Odessa named Leo Pinsker (1821–1891) published a German pamphlet entitled Autoemanzipation [Self-Emancipation], in which he urged European Jewry to seek a homeland of its own.38 Like Hess, the highly Russified Pinsker had previously been a staunch advocate of Jewish integration, albeit one more closely affiliated than the German socialist with the organized Jewish community. The 1881 pogroms that spread through the southern areas of the Russian Pale of Settlement, including into Odessa, robbed him of the faith that emancipation alone would solve the Jewish Question. Autoemanzipation marked his volte-face. Regarding this pioneering tract of political Zionism, Klausner would later close a lecture on Spinoza from 1932, commemorating the three-hundredth anniversary of his birth, with the following anecdote:

  And in connection with these marvelous words [i.e., the conclusion to chapter 3 of the Treatise] I have something to relate that has been unknown to anyone but me to date:

  An old Lover of Zion,39 the late physician Dr. Zvi Himmelfarb, who for many years was a member of the committee of the Lovers of Zion in Odessa, told me in 1917, that in 1881, when the idea arose of founding the Love of Zion in order to establish a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, Dr. J. L. Pinsker was hesitant, as in the Sixties and Seventies he had been a complete assimilationist and Russifier. The pogroms of 1881 shocked and terrified him; but, at first, he saw the idea of a Jewish state as a dream of the young and delirious.

  One time, on a winter afternoon, this Himmelfarb, who was still a young student, came to see Dr. Pinsker along with another student, who was close in outlook to the Biluim.40 They showed him this passage in the Theological-Political Treatise. It was close to dusk. Pinsker pondered these marvelous words of Spinoza for a long while—until it grew completely dark. Then he rose from his place and said with evident emotion:

  “Yes, if Spinoza, a man of careful and measured intelligence, Spinoza who treats everything with caution and Judaism—without much love,—if he could believe in the possibility that the Jews ‘will one day establish their own state and God will again choose them,’ it is a sign, that it is not just a dream of the delirious!”

  And thus was sealed the fate of his treatise Autoemancipation, which Pinsker wrote not only under the influence of the pogroms, but also because of the strong impact of these words of Spinoza.

  And in this way Spinoza prompted—to be sure, not intentionally—the movement of Hebrew revival.41

  This secondhand testimony is rather too neat and melodramatic to be entirely credible. But whether history or myth, or something in between, the account suggests that an interest in reading Spinoza into the chain of tradition for political Zionism emerged early on in the history of the movement—among the pioneering Lovers of Zion, who regarded Pinsker as a mentor.

  With the publication of Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State [Der Judenstaat] in 1896 and the convening of the First Zionist Congress in Basel the following year under his leadership, this passage from the Treatise drew increased attention. In 1897 David Neumark, writing in the second volume of Ahad Ha‘am’s cultural Zionist periodical Ha-Shiloah [The Spring], produced the first Hebrew translation of Spinoza’s fragment. Neumark (1866–1924), a Reform rabbi in Bohemia who was also a Zionist—an unusual combination in that era—was not overly enamored of Spinoza; as one committed to a theology of a continued Jewish “mission,” he resented the Treatise’s depiction of the Jews as a people frozen in time. He cast his translation as a response to the frenetic efforts of “our nationalists and Zionists” to find statements by “righteous Gentiles” foretelling the revival of Jewish nationalism, which they prefer to texts from their own people. The excerpt from Spinoza, he noted, represented a third category: “one who is not of them and not of us.”42 Two years later, the German Zionist newspaper Die Welt printed this passage under the heading “Spinoza on Zionism,” concluding with the question: “Will this sublime philosopher prove also to be a prophet?”43

  A major development in the Zionist history of this passage would come in 1938, with the publication of the first volume of Ben-Zion Dinur’s (Dinaburg) compendium of Zionist sources Sefer ha-Tsiyonut [The Book of Zionism]. Dinur (1884–1973), then a lecturer in modern Jewish history at Hebrew University, explained that his purpose in putting together this work—one of the many “anthology projects” undertaken by Zionist intellectuals between 1920 and 1960—was “to gather the best of Zionist literature as well as documents pertaining to the movement and its endeavors . . . in historical chronology.”44 He devoted his first volume to what he called the “mevasre ha-tsiyonut,” or “forerunners of Zionism.” Dinur defined this category broadly, designating as a harbinger any expression of even a loosely secular conception of the Jewish people combined with a belief that the redemption would occur through natural means. Most famously in this respect, he argued that the Jewish Enlightenment, whose integrationist ethos made it ostensibly the antithesis of Zionism, in fact represented an embryonic stage of the movement—particularly in Eastern Europe, where a Hebraist revival coincided with the first hints of a secular national consciousness.

  At the very beginning of this development he located Spinoza. By interpreting “chosenness” as a civic instead of spiritual capacity, Spinoza became the first to secularize the messianic idea and to secure Jewish uniqueness on purely immanent as opposed to transcendent foundations. Spinoza was a Zionist precursor, in other words, because he intuited the intrinsically political character of the Jewish nation that had long lain dormant under the “effeminate” exterior of rabbinic religion. “The Amsterdam philosopher,” Dinur writes, “who was almost completely cut off from his Jewish surroundings and who, at first glance, looks upon the fate of his people with the indifference of a foreigner, nevertheless is wholly permeated with a feeling of the majestic national being of the Jewish people and with a recognition of the forces of renewal latent in this being.”45 Therefore, Dinur concludes, “one must see in Spinoza’s views on the possibility of a fulfillment of the redemption . . . the first revelation of several foundations of modern Zionism, expressed here as a result of patterns of life and of thought close to those of later generations.”46 Accordingly, it was with two excerpts from chapter 3 of the Treatise—one of them being, of course, the passage on the revival of Jewish statehood—that Dinur opened the section devoted to “forerunners of Zionism” from the Jewish Enlightenment.47

  After the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, the proto-Zionist reading of this extract from Spinoza became a good deal more aggressive. Hess had understood the end of the third chapter as saying only that the reclamation of Jewish sovereignty would depend on an assertion of popular will and a manly “courage.” Dinur had identified Spinoza’s reformulation of “chosenness” from a spiritual into a political principle as the start of an attempt to explain the national individuality of the Jews without recourse to religious modes of thought. However, the Amsterdam philosopher’s most renowned advocate in Israel’s first decade of statehood—Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion—never tired of claiming that Spinoza had predicted the reestablishment of a Jewish state.48 “He [Spinoza] was in a certain sense the first Zionist of the last three hundred years,” Ben-Gurion wrote in 1953. “Through keen insight into Jewish and world history he prophesied the rebirth of the State of Israel.”49 With Ben-Gurion, the effort to cast Spinoza as not simply a “forerunner” of Zionism, but as one of its “founding fathers,” reached a level never seen before or since. Yet the Spinoza-as-precursor argument represented only one of the roads taken in reclaiming Spinoza for a Zionist weltanschauung. Another basis for his appropriation was the expansive view of Jewish
ness that grew out of the spiritual Zionist project of restructuring Judaism into a secular national culture—a view that Ahad Ha‘am, the leading spirit of cultural Zionism, called “national pantheism.” Here, the ramifications of Spinoza for Zionism represented only one side of the equation. The other was the ramification of a Zionist perspective on understanding Spinoza. Otherwise put: what was at stake was not simply what Spinoza could do for Zionism, but what Zionism could do for Spinoza.

  “National Pantheism”

  Behind the campaign to reconstruct Jewish culture and identity along secular national lines lay a simple yet revolutionary inversion in Jewish self-understanding. Traditionally, Jewish peoplehood was believed to be a function of a special revelation embodied in the Torah. At Sinai the Jews had become a nation, and their continued existence as such depended on their adherence to the covenantal law. This interrelationship was perhaps most famously expressed by the tenth-century thinker Rav Saadia Ga’on in his classic work The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, where he writes, “Our nation of the children of Israel is a nation only by virtue of its laws.”50 Nearly a millennium later, Rabbi Yehiel Michel Pines (1842–1913), an early exponent of religious Zionism, echoed Saadia, arguing that “Israel is not a natural nation in origin, for its peoplehood from the beginning was not born naturally, that is to say, as a result of a common race and territory, but rather out of the Torah and the covenant of faith.”51 Put simply, Jewish nationality rested on a fundamentally religious base.

  Secular Zionism—or cultural Zionism, to be more specific—reversed this hierarchy. The Jews were and had always been a natural, ethnic nation. Like all peoples, they possessed a unique national spirit. Religion had long been the dominant mode of this Volksgeist, but it did not exhaust its essence. Rather, it was part of a much broader realm of Jewish culture, a complex of values, laws, customs, and traditions ultimately created by the people themselves. The Torah was not a gift of a transcendent God, but an inspired product of the Jewish genius. Moreover, while the Jewish national character was, in a sense, timeless, a constant amid the vicissitudes of history, the religious and ethical outlook that characterized the people was subject to evolution. In short, the Jews were akin to a historical organism with an instinctive will to life, always adapting to changing circumstances in order to persevere in its being.

  Ahad Ha‘am, the theorist of cultural Zionism who would become most synonymous with the inversion of nationality and religion in Jewish identity, coined the phrase national pantheism to describe this belief in an immanent national matrix that underlay all the modi of Jewish expression throughout the centuries. In a published response to an 1898 letter from one of the “Lovers of Zion,” asking whether an atheist who nevertheless loved his people and its cultural heritage and wished for a national revival of the Jews in the land of their forefathers could be considered “one of us,” Ahad Ha‘am answered yes, arguing that such a Jew should be considered a “national pantheist.” Just as a pantheist, Ha‘am argued, finds the “spirit of God” in the deep structure of reality rather than beyond nature, the “national pantheist . . . sees the creative power of the spirit of the people from within.”52 Ha‘am did not cite Spinoza, though in the following excerpt from the Zionist thinker Moshe Glickson (1878–1939), whose work was above all concerned with the relationship between the individual and the community, we see how echoes of Spinoza might attend constructions of a “national pantheism”:

  The nation is not a metaphysical entity, not a mystical ethereal thing that exists outside of the tangible existence of Reuben, Simon, and Levy etc; nor is it merely a logical abstraction. . . . [T]he nation is inside Reuben and Simon etc, it is Reuben and Simon themselves insofar as they are more than only a personality. . . . As Spinoza would put it: these two are not different substances, but rather two “descriptions of substance,” that may be likened to two measures in geometry, length and width.53

  Here, the substance-attribute distinction in Spinozan metaphysics is adduced only for the purpose of analogy (and a rather poor one at that) to the organic relationship between the Jew and his national community. Yet it is not far-fetched to reason that this resemblance struck a chord with other “national pantheists” in the mold of Ahad Ha‘am, one of whom, as we will see, was Yosef Klausner.

  Could Spinoza—clearly a nonbeliever, though one who demonstrated little affection for his people—be considered, on Ahad Ha‘am’s terms, a “national pantheist”? Those, like Dinur, who saw in Spinoza’s secularization of Jewish “chosenness” an acknowledgment of latent “forces of renewal” (read Ha‘am’s “creative power of the spirit of the people from within”), might well have assented to this label. The problem of national solidarity would, as we will see, pose greater, though not insurmountable difficulties for some Zionists. Yet the unifying logic of “national pantheism” facilitated a recouping of Spinoza independent of any “national feeling” of which the Amsterdam heretic might be aware. In chapter 4, we saw how Rubin portrayed Spinoza as heir to an esoteric tradition of Jewish speculation, as part of the effort to reclaim Spinozism as a distinctively Jewish philosophy. While an equation of Spinozism and Judaism was asserted by some Zionist thinkers, most dismissed this parallel while seeking to place the Jewishness of Spinoza on a more cultural, linguistic, and ethnic footing.

  One of the first to take this route was Hillel Zeitlin (1871–1942), in his 1900 monograph Baruch Shpinozah: Hayav, sefarav, u-shitato ha-filosofit [Baruch Spinoza: His Life, Works, and Philosophy]. A fascinating figure in modern Jewish intellectual history, Zeitlin, over the course of his life, went from orthodoxy to the secular ideologies of Zionism and territorialism before ultimately returning to orthodoxy.54 Born in czarist Belorussia and raised as a Habad Hasid, Zeitlin claimed to have lost his faith as a result of his self-education in philosophy.55 When he wrote his book on Spinoza, Zeitlin was living in the Belorussian city of Homel, where he was part of a circle influenced by the ideas of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche that included the Hebrew author Yosef Haim Brenner (1881–1921). He had not yet become an active Zionist—that would occur in 1901, after he attended the Fifth Zionist Congress and was won over by Herzl—yet he was already wrestling with the questions that were being debated both between, and within, political and cultural Zionism.

  As a result of his own estrangement from the piety of his youth, Zeitlin strongly identified with Spinoza. Nevertheless, he presented his biography as an attempt to explain the conflict between Spinoza and the Jewish community of Amsterdam in a more balanced fashion than had previous maskilic treatments of the subject. In the twelfth and final chapter of the book, Zeitlin took up the question of the relationship between Spinoza and Judaism that had preoccupied Hebrew literature in the second half of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, he rejected the argument of thinkers like Rubin, who claimed that Spinozism was an authentic stream within Jewish philosophy. On the other hand, he maintained that it did not follow that Spinoza was “not one of us,” as Luzzatto and his admirers had asserted. Instead, he adopted a third position, which he outlined as follows: “Consciously, Spinoza was opposed to Judaism, but he was a Jew without knowing it. His theory is not the faith of Judaism, nor is it the philosophy of Judaism. What it is, if one can say this, is the ultimate tendency of Judaism. It conforms not to Judaism in itself, but to the eternal ideals of Judaism in the purest sense: absolute justice, absolute peace, absolute love.”56 Zeitlin thus inaugurated an important shift in the rehabilitation of Spinoza, affirming the Jewishness of Spinoza’s thought without trying to harmonize his pantheism with Jewish monotheism. What is particularly noteworthy in this excerpt is the claim that Spinoza “consciously” sought to break with Judaism yet “was a Jew without knowing it.” Whereas Rubin had portrayed Spinoza as a proud Jew convinced that he was part of an elite chain of tradition within Jewish thought, Zeitlin interpreted his Jewishness as something reflexive and involuntary—an inheritance of the prophetic ideals of justice, peace, and love. One finds traces here of the cultural Z
ionist philosophy of Ahad Ha‘am, for whom Jewishness was an organic national identity distinguished by a unique ethical outlook rooted in the prophets.57

  In the early 1920s, the Zionist philosopher Jakob Klatzkin (1882–1948) began to make a more rigorous argument for the impact on Spinoza of Jewish cultural forms. The son of a famous Lithuanian rabbi, Klatzkin abandoned orthodoxy in his twenties and spent most of his life in Central Europe, where he was active in Zionist cultural projects. Within Zionist ideology, he was distinguished by the extremity of his repudiation of Diaspora Judaism. He was particularly critical of Ahad Ha‘am’s attempt to construct a cultural Jewish identity that would be defined by a particular ethical content. What would ensure Jewish continuity, he argued, was not the secularization of the Jewish religious heritage encouraged by Ahad Ha‘am and his “spiritual Zionist” disciples, but the acquisition of the two concrete “forms” necessary for survival in the modern world—namely, land and language.

  Though Klatzkin did not overtly link his Zionist outlook to his research in Jewish philosophy, traces of his “formalist” nationalism can be seen in his novel approach to the question of Spinoza’s Jewishness. In 1923 Klatzkin published a Hebrew biography of Spinoza, which he followed up a year later with a new translation of the Ethics.58 While he, like his maskilic predecessors, argued for the Hebraic foundations of Spinoza’s magnum opus, what he meant by this was something entirely different. Rubin had stressed ideational parallels between Spinozism and the Jewish speculative tradition. Klatzkin disagreed with this line of reasoning, contending that there was an essential difference between Jewish monotheism and Spinozist pantheism that Rubin had misrepresented.59 The influence on Spinoza of medieval Jewish philosophy was not one of ideas, but of language. Klatzkin identified specific Latin terms in the Ethics that posed difficulties when translated into most languages yet were illuminated once rendered into their medieval Hebrew equivalent.60 This led him to argue for a kind of linguistic determinism at work in the composition of the Ethics. Spinoza, having been raised on the canon of medieval Jewish thought, could only go so far in escaping the clutches of its Hebrew idiom. If, for Rubin, the content of medieval Jewish thought constituted the hidden Jewish kernel in the Ethics, for Klatzkin, it was the Hebrew language itself, that is, the form of Spinoza’s philosophy, that lay beneath the surface. “A good Hebrew translation,” Klatzkin thus concluded, “would be, in many a sense, more accurate, indeed more original than the Latin original.”61