The First Modern Jew

by Daniel B. Schwartz

  In Nahum Sokolow’s Baruch Shpinozah u-zemano: midrash be–filosofyah u-be-korot ha-‘itim [Baruch Spinoza and His Time: A Study of Philosophy and History] from 1929, the reappropriation of Spinoza for modern Jewish culture reveals “national pantheist” thinking at its most inclusive. Sokolow was one of the most versatile figures in the history of Zionism. Before becoming a leader and envoy for the World Zionist Congress, who played no small role in successfully advocating for England’s Balfour Declaration in 1917, Sokolow had been a renowned Hebrew author, journalist, and translator, and he continued to juggle writing and diplomacy right up to his death in 1936.62 His first contribution to Spinoza’s Jewish reception occurred in 1885, in a hostile review of Rubin’s preface to Rubin’s translation of the Ethics. Sokolow, like both Zeitlin and Klatzkin, rejected the analogy of Spinozism and Judaism. But whereas in 1885 this appeared to represent his final word on the conundrum of Spinoza’s Jewishness, over forty years later, amid the general hoopla surrounding the bisesquentennial of the death of the Amsterdam philosopher, Sokolow sounded a very different tune. While rebuking Spinoza for his acerbic treatment of Judaism in the Treatise and even sympathizing with the Amsterdam Mahamad for imposing the ban, Sokolow insisted that no judgment on its part could decide the issue of Spinoza’s identity. “Whether or not he was excommunicated or considered himself Jewish” was immaterial, Sokolow wrote; for “[o]ne does not become a Jew via the shofar, nor does one cease to be a Jew via the shofar. Jewish existence is a fact of nature, of birth. Spinoza only withdrew or was withdrawn from the religious community; he could never have abandoned or been excommunicated from his people.”63 The more specific unconscious legacies singled out by Zeitlin and Klatzkin give way here to a veritable torrent of inherited characteristics: “his blood, his brain, every capillary of his heart, his temperament, his spiritual being—none of these could cease to be what they were.”64 Spinoza, in short, bore the permanent imprint of a particular Jewish national type, with all its biological, ethnic, and cultural determinants. He was a single manifestation, albeit a highly distinctive and influential one, of “the power of the Hebrew spirit and the glory of the Israelite genius” over time. Sokolow—perhaps the “national pantheist” par excellence—made clear that his interest in historical recuperation did not stop with Spinoza. “Spinoza is ours and the excommunicators are ours,” he concluded. “All is tied and connected together.”65

  The perspectives of Zeitlin, Klatzkin, and Sokolow offer three examples of a paradigm shift from the nineteenth-century Haskalah to secular Zionism. Their interpretations of Spinoza’s Jewishness as a kind of cultural, linguistic, even racial inheritance—a birthright unbeknownst to the philosopher himself—illustrate the immanentist impulse characteristic of “national pantheism.” What still remains to be more fully considered is the overarching framework in which these appropriations of Spinoza occurred—the project to create a national Jewish culture. A belief widely shared among the writers who contributed to media such as Ahad Ha‘am’s cultural Zionist journal Ha-Shiloah or the German monthly Ost und West (whose original guiding light was the young Zionist Martin Buber) was that there had to be a “Jewish renaissance.”66 There was broad disagreement, however, over what this would entail. Indeed, the questions that preoccupied the Zionist intelligentsia at the turn of the century were the same ones, mutadis mutandis, that we have encountered in the previous chapters on German liberal Judaism and the East European Haskalah—namely, what should be the relationship between the old and the new? What events, personalities, places, or movements from the Jewish past should be viewed as exemplary for the present? What balance, if any, was to be struck between the “Jewish” and the “universal” in this cultural renaissance? How were these categories to be understood in the first place? What was Jewish art, music, literature? Could Jewishness be ascribed only to something with allegedly Jewish content? Or did writing in Hebrew automatically confer Jewishness on its subject matter?

  Above all, there was the problem of how the architects of a secular national revival should relate to Jewish religion, particularly as this remained a vital part of the Jewish identity of most East European Jews, the raw materials for the cultural Zionists’ vision of the future. Ahad Ha‘am represented one side of the spectrum of opinion on this issue. Ha‘am, on the one hand, was an adamant freethinker who rejected literal belief in a personal and transcendent God, special providence, and the giving of the Torah at Sinai. In his famous short essay excoriating emancipated French Jewry for their “Slavery within Freedom” (1891)—a “slavery” implicit in their need to hold fast to outmoded religious beliefs, lest the basis for their continued existence as Jews under the terms of their “freedom,” namely by “Mosaic faith” alone, crumble—Ha‘am boasted, “I at least can speak my mind concerning the beliefs and the opinions which I have inherited from my ancestors, without fearing to snap the branch that unites me to my people, I can even adopt that ‘scientific heresy which bears the name of Darwin,’ without any danger to my Judaism.”67 Nevertheless, for all his religious agnosticism and even atheism, Ha‘am sought to instill secular Jewish nationalism with a loving appreciation for the cornerstones of traditional religion, now regarded as “spiritual assets” of the Jewish people as opposed to revealed articles of faith.68 Writing about the meaning of the Sabbath in 1898, the originator of cultural Zionism famously quipped that, “more than Israel has kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept Israel,” and he, moreover, insisted that “[w]hoever feels in his heart a true connection with the life of the nation in each of its generations, will be utterly unable—even if he does not believe in the World to Come or in a Jewish state—to imagine a reality of a Jewish people without the ‘Sabbath Queen.’”69 What was needed, Ahad Ha‘am stressed, was “rebirth—not creation,” a cultural renaissance that would remain moored in the deep wellsprings of Jewish collective memory.70

  If Ahad Ha‘am represented one pole, the other was occupied by the iconoclasts known as the “young Hebrews,” whose chief inspiration was the enfant terrible of fin-de-siècle Hebrew literature, Micah Yosef Berdichevsky. Echoing Nietzsche, the philosopher who most spoke to their desire for a radical break from the past, this band of Zionist intellectuals called for a “transvaluation of values” (shinui ‘arakhin). Ahad Ha‘am’s attempt to construct a secular Jewish culture that would hold on to the “spiritual assets” of Judaism met largely with scorn from figures like Berdichevsky, for whom not just rabbinic Judaism but also prophetic religion, indeed the very symbols of Torah and covenant at times appeared to be one great error. “Our hearts, ardent for life,” Berdichevsky wrote at the turn of the century, “sense that the resurrection of Israel depends on a revolution—the Jews must come first, before Judaism—the living man, before the legacy of his ancestors.”71 Secular Jewish nationalism had to be a true liberation of the individual from the constraints of religion, including from the vague “ethical culture” promulgated by Ahad Ha‘am. The times demanded a stark choice: “to be the last Jews or the first Hebrews.”72

  Berdichevsky’s defiance of “Ahad Ha‘amism” was, in fact, a refutation of the very idea of “national pantheism,” with its concept of a secular yet eternal Jewish national essence that endured amid the flux of history and permeated even those renegades who refused to bow to the will of the collective. From chapter 4, we know that Berdichevsky’s discovery of Spinoza via Salomon Rubin’s translation was a revelatory experience, one this icon of Jewish revolutionary secularism recounted in the language of prophecy and a “road to Damascus”-style conversion. Yet Berdichevsky would have nothing to do with the posthumous efforts to bring Spinoza home by way of cultural nationalism. Hillel Zeitlin’s Hebrew biography of Spinoza from 1900 thus met with a scorching review from Berdichevsky’s pen. Berdichevsky found especially irksome the suggestion of a rapprochement between Spinoza and the community that drove him out. For “we cannot forgive the persecutors, these men, who rejected this hero of the spirit among us completely,” he protested.7
3 Commenting on the passage in which Zeitlin had linked Spinoza with “the ultimate tendency of Judaism,” Berdichevsky sneered, “And they utterly rejected this very man, who had inherited the ultimate tendency of Judaism!” The rupture between Spinoza and Jewry could not be whitewashed: The Jews expelled him, and he in turn made his mark in Western thought and literature—and not in Judaism.

  For Berdichevsky, then, there was to be no gloating about Spinoza being “one of us,” no attempt to domesticate his heresy by spiriting him back into the fold through the back door. Above all, there was to be no appeal to a unifying element in Jewish life that linked all Jews past and present and overcame the entropic forces of history. While he died six years before Klausner’s speech on Mount Scopus, he undoubtedly would have disapproved.

  The running feud between these two forms of Jewish secularism—the basically conservative model of Ahad Ha‘am and the acutely critical brand of Berdichevsky—came to a head in a controversy over Christianity that erupted in 1910, involving the already mentioned Hebrew author Yosef Haim Brenner. Brenner had moved from Eastern Europe to Palestine in 1909 as part of the wave of Jewish immigration from 1903 to the end of World War I known as the Second Aliyah. The settlers of the Second Aliyah were famous for their religious irreverence, and Brenner, a great admirer of Berdichevsky, was one of the most freethinking among them.74 In essays first published in the Palestinian socialist journal Ha-Poel ha-Tsa‘ir, Brenner called for a complete emancipation of Jewish nationality from Judaism. To show the lengths to which he was willing to go in severing the two, he argued in one of his pieces that it was possible “to be a good Jew and, at the same time, to be thrilled by the Christian legend of the son-of-God who was sent to mankind, and who atoned with his life for the sins of all the ages.”75 This inflammatory comment, with its implication that one could be nationally Jewish and religiously, for all it mattered, Christian, scandalized the Hebrew-reading public and elicited a number of polemical responses.

  One such rejoinder appeared in the 1911 volume of Ha-Shiloah under the title “Freedom and Heresy” [Herut ve-Apikorsut]. The author of the piece, identifying himself by the pen name “Hebrew Man,” which he commonly used, sought to discriminate between true “freethinking” and “heresy.” While admitting that personal liberty and creativity were prerequisites for a Hebrew cultural renaissance, he contended that these had to be balanced with “a feeling of awe for the venerable and sacred possessions of the nation, on which Jewish existence relied for several thousand of years.” Appreciation of this religious heritage, “which is dear and beloved to the greater part [of the nation] still,” would ensure that the builders of the new national culture remained connected to the Jewish masses and would also imbue their work with the “spirit of holiness and celebration that always accompanies anything on which generations of lives have depended.” Brenner, with his callous dismissal of the problem of apostasy and, by extension, the cause for which countless Jews had martyred themselves throughout history, had demonstrated not genuine “freethinking” but an “ugly” and gratuitous disrespect worthy of the description “heresy”: “No! One who is truly free and enlightened, who has a place in his heart for holiness and is capable of appreciating the value of holiness in the eyes of others, would never speak with such levity on things sacred to millions of people, and all the more so on things that the life of his nation depends on!”76 The author of this plea for sensitivity to tradition and respect for the martyrs was the same person who would formally reclaim the prototype of the modern Jewish secular heretic in a public ceremony sixteen years later—Yosef Klausner.

  III.

  All his life, Klausner maneuvered between the moderate and militant visions of renaissance outlined above, at times tilting toward one, at times toward the other.77 Born near Vilna in 1874, at the age of eleven he moved with his family to the southern metropolis of Odessa, which, at the time, contained the second largest Jewish community in the Russian Empire. In these years Odessa—long at the vanguard of modern Jewish ideologies in Eastern Europe—was becoming a center of the proto-Zionist Lovers of Zion movement and of an efflorescence of Hebrew literature.78 Among the residents of Odessa in the 1880s were Moses I. Lilienblum and Leo Pinsker, early leaders of the drive for Jewish settlement in Palestine, as well as Ahad Ha‘am, who would emerge by the end of the decade as one of the sharpest critics of the Lovers of Zion. Once in Odessa, Klausner enrolled in one of the modern Hebrew day schools that had recently opened and tended to be staffed by Hebraist sympathizers with the Lovers of Zion. By his teens he was already a part of the Hebrew nationalist intelligentsia of the city, becoming the youngest member of a pioneering society devoted to the revival of Hebrew as a spoken tongue. In the late 1890s, while studying Semitic and modern languages, history, and philosophy at Heidelberg, he began contributing to various Hebrew periodicals—including Ahad Ha’am’s newly founded Ha-Shiloah. He also became active in Herzl’s world Zionist movement from the outset, attending the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1896 and each one thereafter until 1913.

  In 1903 Klausner replaced Ahad Ha‘am as editor of Ha-Shiloah, in which capacity he would endure, in spite of several disruptions in its publication, through the final issue in 1926. Under Ahad Ha‘am, Ha-Shiloah had become the most distinguished periodical in Hebrew journalism, renowned for its literary quality as well as its strong opposition to political Zionism and to the militant secularism of Berdichevsky. The assumption of its editorship thus gave Klausner a platform to become an opinion molder. From the tenor of his aforementioned criticism during the “Brenner controversy” of 1910, it should be clear that Klausner was in several respects a loyal Ahad Ha‘amist, convinced, like his mentor, that secular Jewish culture had to maintain an organic link to its religious past and avoid the temptation of what he called “de-historicization.”79 To the end of his life he rejected the path of a total “normalization” of Jewry, the oft-expressed Zionist aspiration to become “a nation like all the others.” True to the credo of Ahad Ha‘am, he would always maintain that Judaism was a “national Weltanschauung built on religio-ethical foundations.”80 The Jewish national impulse, he insisted, exhibited “two fundamental aims” rooted in the prophetic legacy—the demand for “the unity of God and the reign of absolute justice.” His exaltation of the biblical prophets was most emphatically conveyed in his essays on the Jewish messianic idea. In the “original” form of this belief, which he identified with the prophetic works of First Isaiah and Micah, he found the perfect synthesis of national and universal ideals—and one of the main “gifts which the people Israel have left as an inheritance to the entire world.”81

  Over his first decade as editor of Ha-Shiloah, Klausner issued frequent criticism of the rebel camp in Hebrew literature, whom he branded “sophists” (with Berdichevsky the “greatest” among them) for their extreme relativism and consequent rejection of the idea of a “unique ‘essence’ of Judaism.”82 A “national pantheist,” Klausner contended that however different the Judaism of the Bible was from that of the Talmud, the Judaism of the Talmud from that of Maimonides, the Judaism of Maimonides from that of the Ba’al Shem Tov, or the Judaism of the Ba’al Shem Tov from that of Ahad Ha’am, each was a stage in the development of one historical organism. As for the present, he viewed with alarm the increasingly “areligious” character of the typical “young Hebrew” in Palestine, for whom Judaism was only “the Hebrew language and the Land of Israel.”83 Arguing against an association of the tradition with the Shulhan Arukh alone—the sixteenth-century code of Jewish law that had become the detested symbol of talmudic Judaism among modern reformers—Klausner urged upon the “young Hebrews” a different approach to religion:

  Renaissance is a return to the good in the old. And in our old religion there are many lovely customs. I don’t know, if I can see anyone reviving the practical commandments like tefillin (phylacteries), tsisit (ritual fringes), or mezuzah. But it is possible and desirable to revive the Sabbath banquet with its glori
ous serenity, the Passover “seder” with its pleasant air of festivity, the etrog and lulav and the Hoshana prayer of Sukkot, the greenery of Shavuot, the blasting of the Shofar on Rosh Hashanah, the sublime and sacred Neilah (concluding) prayer of Yom Kippur.84

  Klausner went on to add that only if Zionism maintained a connection to religion and faith would it be able to become a truly mass movement. “The young Hebrew,” he concluded, “must become a creator not only with regard to the language of Israel and the land of Israel, but also with regard to the faith of Israel!”85

  This was one side of Klausner—the moderate reformer, the champion of historical continuity, the advocate for the nation as a whole. Yet there was another dimension to his personality as well—the part that was impatient for a razing of the walls between Hebrew literature and universal culture, that admired the greatness he believed came only from far-reaching innovation, and that celebrated those who went against the grain. Whereas the one feared revolution and warned against “heresy,” the other was strongly drawn to them. From the first issue of Ha-Shiloah he edited, Klausner signaled that he would depart from his predecessor’s practice of printing material only on Jewish subjects. He promised “to remove completely the boundaries separating ‘Hebraism’ from ‘universalism’” and thereby broaden the scope of Hebrew literature to include “all that is true, good, and beautiful in all the national literature.”86 This, in turn, would guarantee that modern Hebrew literature would eventually take its rightful place in general humanistic culture. “We do not consider ourselves to be beneath the Norwegians,” Klausner concluded, no doubt alluding to the contemporary popularity of Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun. Thus, on one of the major issues that had divided Ahad Ha‘am and Berdichevsky, Klausner sided with the latter.