Klausner’s attraction to “heretical” figures would be most dramatically exemplified by his Hebrew inquiry into the “historical Jesus.” Yet I would argue that we can gain equal if not greater insight into his attraction to Spinoza via his commentary on the contemporary Hebrew writer he admired most, the poet Saul Tchernichowsky. A friend from their years growing up together in Odessa and attending university in Heidelberg, Tchernichowsky epitomized for Klausner the glorious potential of the “New Hebrew man.” The mix of nostalgia for, and estrangement from the receding world of the shtetl found in the work of the more celebrated Hebrew poet Haim Nahman Bialik was totally absent in Tchernichowsky. Born in a Russian village, to a family that was religious without being overly fastidious, Tchernichowsky was blessedly free of the ambivalence, secretiveness, guilt, and pedantry that Klausner associated with the stereotypical maskil. He wrote not about talmudic prodigies losing their faith, but about universal themes such as nature, love, the body. The knowledge of nature that the poet had gained by training in medicine at Heidelberg, Klausner claimed,
had not killed his love of nature, but just the opposite: it broadened and deepened this love and produced that pantheist philosophic-poetic world-view, which had already budded in his poem Nocturno, which he wrote while still in Odessa, yet which became more profound in Heidelberg from his intense study of science. This perception is: that man, fauna, and flora have one exalted source, they sprout forth from one exalted root.87
The unity and wholeness Tchernikhowsky found in nature also typified his person. “For him, in truth,” Klausner wrote in 1907, “there is no Judaism at all—his humanity is his Judaism, and he Judaizes everything through his language and will.”88 While Klausner would occasionally express reservations about the Nietzschean flavor of much of Tchernichowsky’s poetry and its paucity of Jewish content, his admiration for the vital, original, nature-affirming character of his oeuvre outweighed his misgivings. Tchernichowsky, he concluded, was by nature and outlook “the complete opposite” of Ahad Ha‘am—and at the same time Klausner’s favorite poet.89
Ultimately, the ideal that guided Klausner through all his attempts to construct a national culture was the integration of “Judaism” and “humanism.” He wavered over how to achieve this synthesis: At times, in the spirit of Ahad Ha‘am, he emphasized an adaptation of global values to the Jewish national character; at others, in the spirit of Berdichevsky and Tchernichowsky, he demanded that the partitions between the “Jewish” and the “universal” be overthrown entirely.90 The goal, however, was complete identity—a culture that would be “universal-human and national-Hebraic as one,” without any compartmentalization between the two. In this fantasy, the individual Jew would never have to escape from Jewishness to develop all his or her capacities and become whole. The pursuit of Bildung, which required that Auerbach’s Spinoza depart from his native community, could be carried out at home.
IV.
The tribute at the Hebrew University in February 1927 took place in the near aftermath of the most scathing and sustained attack on Spinoza by a Jewish thinker since the nineteenth-century Luzzatto at least and perhaps dating back to the writ of excommunication itself. Klausner, it will be recalled, later justified his lifting of the ban as the ratification of a posthumous recuperation of the Amsterdam philosopher that had already taken place in practice. If he believed this, his memory was short, or at the very least selective. Twelve years earlier, in 1915, the distinguished neo-Kantian philosopher and German Jewish liberal theologian Hermann Cohen had published a lengthy essay on Spinoza entitled “Spinoza über Staat und Religion, Judentum und Christentum” [Spinoza on Religion and State, Judaism and Christianity].91 The prosaic title gave little indication of the vitriol of the polemic to follow. As a stalwart Kantian, Cohen had long objected to Spinoza’s pantheism, which by collapsing all reality into God-or-Nature rendered the distinction between the “Is” and the “Ought” meaningless and thus left no room for a transcendental and prophetic ethics.92 Yet it was the critique of Judaism in the Treatise more than the philosophical system of the Ethics that drew the heaviest fire in Cohen’s 1915 attack. The bill of indictment drawn up by Cohen was long and diverse, beginning with the charge that Spinoza had prefaced his Treatise with biblical criticism solely out of spite toward the community that had expelled him, and not because it had any logical connection to the work’s primary task of defending the Dutch republican government of Jan de Witt and the “freedom to philosophize.” Motivated by bile alone, his “Bible science” was consequently as unscrupulous as it was tendentious. Spinoza was accused of intentionally misrepresenting the Mosaic revelation as purely political and particularist, knowingly attributing to ancient Israel and their “Pharisaic” descendents a hatred of the rest of humankind belied by countless statements in biblical and rabbinic literature, purposefully exempting the New Testament from the arrows he fixed on the Hebrew Bible, and extolling Jesus over Moses, the latter out of a genuine preference for Christianity over Judaism. For Cohen, Spinoza was more rightly considered the founder of modern antisemitism than of modern Judaism: “The pithy slogans,” Cohen wrote, “in which Spinoza vented his hatred of the Jews can be found today almost verbatim in the newspapers of that [i.e., the anti-Semitic] political orientation.”93 Ultimately, Spinoza’s many offenses derived from a single, unspeakable crime, his “humanly incomprehensible betrayal” of his religion and people.94 Far from deserving to be “decorated with flowers,” as the young Mendelssohn had urged, Spinoza deserved to be remembered as the “enemy” of Judaism and ethical idealism par excellence.
Cohen’s fiery rebuke did little to stem the Jewish cult of Spinoza. In 1927, at any rate, it was largely drowned out by the unprecedented show of affection for the Amsterdam philosopher throughout the West to mark the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of his death. In France there was a celebration at the Sorbonne, presided over by the poet Paul Valéry and featuring a letter written by the most famous French philosopher of the day, Henri Bergson, declaring that “today everyone has in essence two philosophies, his own and that of Spinoza.”95 The Soviet Union honored Spinoza with its greatest of accolades, displacing Kantianism from its accustomed perch in the “prehistory” of dialectical materialism and putting Spinozism in its place.96 Books and articles in French, Russian, English, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew were published to mark the occasion. The Liberal Synagogue of London held a memorial with the English Jewish metaphysician Samuel Alexander as its keynote speaker; the Biblioteca Israelita of Lisbon hosted its own commemoration; and numerous Jewish periodicals ran special editions with cover stories about Spinoza.97
For the most lavish spectacle, however, one had to travel to The Hague. In 1877 the Dutch capital had been the site of the first major public salute to the memory of Spinoza, on the two-hundredth anniversary of his death. At that affair, the French Semiticist Ernest Renan had delivered his legendary paean to the Amsterdam philosopher, pointing to the house on the Paviljoensgracht where Spinoza had died and famously suggesting that “[i]t was here, perhaps, that God was most nearly seen.”98 The two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary was to be the occasion for an even bigger party. Hosting the tribute was the Societas Spinozana (the Spinoza Society), an international consortium that had been established in 1920 to “promote the study of the philosophy of Benedictus de Spinoza, and of its value in relation to human life, among men of all nations and creeds.”99 The founders of the society—a distinguished and cosmopolitan group that included the French Jewish philosopher Léon Brunschvicg, the German art critic and Spinoza scholar and translator Carl Gebhardt, and the English jurist Sir Frederick Pollock—were all noted experts in the life and thought of Spinoza. For seven years, the Societas Spinozana had worked to revive interest in Spinoza and his philosophy among both academics and laypersons. In its brochures as well as in many of the articles that appeared in the elegant Chronicon Spinozanum, the annual journal published by the society, Spinoza
was depicted not simply as a thinker of great historical stature but as a prophet of sorts, carrying a message of peace and universalism to a Europe bloodied by national hatreds. The two-hundred-fiftieth jubilee marked the pinnacle of their efforts to that point. Starting on February 21—the actual date of Spinoza’s death—with a convocation in the venerable Rolzaal, where the States General had decreed the original ban on the Treatise and the Opera posthuma, the festivities spanned four days of speeches and discussions on the legacy and essential problems of Spinozism.100 The highlight came on the second day, with the dedication of the house on the Paviljoensgracht where Spinoza had died, and which the Societas Spinozana had recently purchased to serve, once restored, as its base. In the words of Adolph S. Oko, the American Jewish librarian of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and the secretary of the Societas Spinozana, the site would be a “shrine” like “Shakespeare’s house in Stratford, the grave of Voltaire, the home of Goethe, [and] Dante’s cell,” places where “the reverent soul feels itself somehow standing in genius’ own presence.”101 In acquiring the house, the society was acting in behalf of the “rightful owner, Humanity—consecrated as it is by Spinoza’s philosophy and his death.”102
Of the members of the society, it was Gebhardt who was the driving force behind the campaign to revitalize Spinozism. A resident of Frankfurt am Main, Gebhardt had produced the still definitive critical edition of Spinoza’s Opera posthuma in addition to German translations of each of his works. He had also made a significant contribution to the historical understanding of Spinoza in his writing, one that would be recognized in hindsight as the start of a new line of inquiry. While the Jewish origins of the philosopher had long figured prominently in his mythic image in European culture—and more recently had acquired an important place in historiography as well, in the scholarship of Manuel Joël, Jakob Freudenthal, and Stanislaus von Dunin-Borkowski—Gebhardt was the first to treat the Marrano background of seventeenth-century Sephardic Amsterdam as the most seminal context for Spinoza’s heresy and thought. “Spinoza,” Gebhardt wrote in 1921, “was a Marrano. Whoever calls him a Jew applies an imprecise umbrella concept to him, encouraging false connections of ideas.”103 Indeed, it was Gebhardt who was imprecise with this statement—not Spinoza but his parents had been conversos—yet his point was clear enough: Spinoza’s uniqueness was not a function of his Jewishness tout court but of his having been a descendant of a special kind of Jew, a Marrano.
In support of this thesis, Gebhardt cited seventeenth-century documents from within the Sephardic community of Amsterdam that spoke to the influence of specific channels of converso influence on Spinoza prior to his excommunication. Yet this tangible evidence was only the surface of an argument that at bottom rested on an essentialist concept of the Marrano psyche as a house divided against itself. To be a Marrano, Gebhardt argued, was to be tragically caught between the historical religions at a time when these were the dominant criteria of identity. But this very alienation prepared the way for the discovery of a secular and universal religion beyond the traditional categories, one that, after the abortive efforts of Uriel da Costa, would be introduced by Spinoza. “The world-historical mission of the Marranos,” Gebhardt wrote with a Hegelian flourish, “was to bring forth Spinoza. Out of their split consciousness emerged modern consciousness.”104 Gebhardt thus claimed Spinoza as “the first European . . . our guide, after calamitous strife, to a new and unified world, belonging to every people and reminding each to realize a culture of humanity within national culture.”105
Three weeks after the Spinoza celebration in The Hague, Gebhardt gave the keynote address at a tribute to the philosopher held by the Jewish Academic Union of Philosophers at the University of Vienna. Speaking on the theme of “Spinoza, Judaism, and Baroque,” he identified cosmopolitanism with what he called “Galuth”:
Since the destruction of the Second Temple, Jewry has lived in Galuth. Abandoning the plaintive sense of the word and aiming only at its essence, we may translate Galuth for us as: symbiosis. Judaism, whether national religion or religious nationality, has not lived apart within regional borders, but rather, has lived for two thousand years among other peoples, among other religions. Thus, whereas others may live according to the laws of inner causality, Judaism is primarily determined by the law of interaction. If the Greek were Greek and the Roman Roman, the German German and the English English, the Jew was and is shot through with a double life-stream, first the Jewish and then the life-stream of the people, in whose cultural community he resides.106
Against “Galuth,” Gebhardt introduced a binary opposite he termed “Ghetto,” or “the isolation from the other cultural community, the constriction of the other life-stream.”107 Of these two alleged Tendenzen in exilic Judaism, his sympathies, as expected, were with the former:
The greatest of the Galuth affirmed their fate of symbiosis, by living equally in two worlds. Thus Philo was both Jew and Hellenist, Ibn Gebirol and Jehuda ha Levi lived in both the world of Torah and of Islamic culture, Maimonides, in Spain and in Cairo, belonged also to Gothic scholasticism, and Leone Ebreo, the son of the last great biblical commentator Abarbanel, entered the Renaissance as a Jew. But Spinoza was perhaps the greatest product of a Judaism that was a Judaism of Galuth, yet a Judaism without Ghetto.108
If elsewhere Gebhardt had underscored the proto-Europeanness of Spinoza, before an audience of Viennese Jews, he was an exemplar of the combinatory possibilities of Diaspora Jewish identity. Echoes of Spinoza’s ascription of greater capacity to complex than to simple bodies in the fourteenth proposition of the second book of the Ethics—“[t]he human mind is capable of perceiving a great many things, and is the more capable, the more its body can be disposed in a great many ways”—can be heard in this praise for the symbiosis signified by “Galuth.”109 This symbiosis, Gebhardt went on to note, was not only cultural but racial. “No people of world history are as diversely mixed as the Jews.”
Whether Gebhardt meant deliberately to criticize Zionist constructions of Jewishness with this homage to hybrid identities is unclear. Perhaps he was just playing to the likely resonance of the ideal of “German Jewish symbiosis” amid a group of Austrian Jews. Klausner, moreover, could not have known of this lecture prior to his reclamation of Spinoza because it was delivered three weeks afterward. Nevertheless, Gebhardt’s speech in Vienna offers an example of the competing models of modern Jewish identity for which Spinoza was being appropriated in the very same year. Gebhardt had argued that “Spinoza belongs, like the greats of all religions, to all people equally.”110 Could Klausner show that he belonged doubly to Jewry?
V.
In 1919, after the Bolshevik Revolution had brought Odessa’s “Golden Age” of Hebrew literature to an abrupt end, Klausner and his family moved to Jerusalem. With the opening of the Hebrew University in 1925, Klausner hoped to be appointed to the chair of Jewish history, in light of his growing body of work on Second Temple Judaism in particular. But his training was not held in high regard by the German Jewish scholars who dominated the early faculty of the university. They viewed Klausner as essentially a publicist and popularizer, whose increasing sympathy for Vladimir Jabotinsky’s right-wing Revisionist party made him even more suspect.111 Klausner was thus given the less sought-after position of chair of Hebrew literature.
Certainly, the international to-do about Spinoza in the postwar period was, by itself, a strong enticement for a nationalist like Klausner to reclaim him. As one Jewish scholar wrote with regard to the three-hundredth anniversary of Spinoza’s birth in 1932—an occasion even more widely celebrated than the previous jubilee five years earlier—“the national feeling does not permit them [i.e., the Zionists] to surrender one of the greats of philosophy, to whom all of humanity shows respect.”112 Yet Klausner, in the 1920s, was also beginning to devote more attention to Jewish philosophy, in particular to the stream influenced more by Platonic than Aristotelian ideas. In 1926 he composed the introduction to the first translation
of Solomon ibn Gabirol’s Fons Vitae into Hebrew.113 There, he argued for the origins in Ibn Gabirol’s thought of a uniquely “Jewish pantheism,” which combined a transcendent God possessing free will with an emanationist view of nature. Some eighty years earlier, the discovery of Ibn Gabirol’s immanentist metaphysics had served the Hebrew maskil Senior (Shneuer) Sachs as a stepping-stone toward Spinoza. Klausner had less need of this intermediary, yet, as we will see, his interest in Spinoza and Ibn Gabirol had a common motivation.
Klausner called his lecture “The Spirit of Judaism and the Philosophy of Spinoza,” a title that was changed in its published form to “The Jewish Character of the Philosophy of Spinoza.”114 “I will not speak about Spinoza’s personal or philosophical relationship to Judaism and the Jews,” he begins, only to expound on this question for five pages, and with a great deal of ambivalence. He starts with the issue of the herem, the primal scene in the Spinoza myth dating back to the first biographies of the philosopher. Thanks to the historiography of “the Jew Freudenthal” and “the Christian Dunin-Borkowski,” Klausner claims, the stereotypes surrounding this event have been dismantled. “The herem of the Amsterdam rabbis and oligarchs was, to be sure, not a desirable act from our point of view today; yet it was not a dreadful act.”115 Excommunication was not a tool peculiar to the Jewish community; it had a place even among Protestant dissident sects as progressive as the “Collegiants,” with whom Spinoza was on good terms. Moreover, Spinoza showed no great courage in not deferring to the Mahamad, for in truth he had left the community before it expelled him. The image that Auerbach had drawn in his historical novel, of Spinoza as a seventeenth-century Luther, disputing with his rabbinic prosecutors in a public forum, was sheer fantasy. After the excommunication, moreover, “no injury was done to Spinoza by Judaism,” dispelling the fictions that Spinoza had to escape Amsterdam because of fear for his safety, or that the Jewish community had petitioned the Amsterdam stadtholders to ban him from the city. Remarkably, he footnotes this assertion by crediting Luzzatto—the chief antagonist of Spinoza within the nineteenth-century Haskalah—for having been the first “to assess the life of Spinoza in Hebrew with sobriety and from a Jewish point of view.”116 From an essay beginning with such praise for Luzzatto, one would be hard-pressed to anticipate a concluding embrace of Spinoza as “our brother.”
The First Modern Jew Page 20