The First Modern Jew
Page 21
Klausner proceeds to the various injuries done by Spinoza to Judaism in the Treatise, among them his favoring of Christianity, his treatment of the biblical prophets as inferior to Jesus and the apostles, and his crude dubbing of Jews as “Pharisees.” These features had all figured prominently in Cohen’s caustic critique of Spinoza and vindication of the herem a little over a decade earlier.117 “He [Cohen] clearly showed,” Klausner wrote, “the contradictions in the judgements of Spinoza about the great Jewish thinkers in every generation, his crooked judgement about the image of the God of Israel according to the teaching of Moses and the prophets, and in general his unjust attitude to Judaism.”118 Yet Klausner also faulted Cohen for engaging with Spinoza as a contemporary and failing to appreciate the historical context for the Treatise—a tack similar to that taken by Leo Strauss in his 1924 analysis of Cohen’s attitude toward Spinoza.119 Moreover, he cited an example from Spinoza’s correspondence that would become a favorite prooftext of the Zionists. The letter concerned was epistle 76, in which Spinoza rebutted the attempts of one of his former acquaintances to convert him to Catholicism. Countering the line of reasoning that the spread and prosperity of Christianity attested to its truthfulness, Spinoza ventured that one could argue that the endurance of Judaism through thousands of years of persecution gave it equal claim to this mantle. And if Christianity had its martyrs, so did Judaism, Spinoza maintained, recalling an anecdote he had heard about a certain Judah “the Believer” who in the midst of being burnt to death by the Inquisition in an auto-da-fé, uttered a verse from Psalms that one of the Gospels had attributed to Jesus during his crucifixion. Spinoza thus showed, says Klausner, “that Christianity had no advantage over Judaism from the side of ethics, constancy, and self-sacrifice.”120
After dispensing with the question of Spinoza’s attitude to Jewry and Judasim, Klausner explains that he also does not intend to deal with the relationship between Spinoza and previous Jewish thought. Here too, however, this appears to be mere posturing. The large corpus of research on this topic, Klausner writes, has shown how important thinkers such as Maimonides, Hasdai Crescas, Ibn Ezra, Gersonides, Ibn Gabirol, and Leone Ebreo were to the philosophical oeuvre of Spinoza. In a bizarre calculation, he states that 80 percent of the Treatise deals with “Jewish” matters and only 20 percent with “non-Jewish” ones. Even those works, moreover, less overtly Jewish than the Treatise, still contain substantial evidence of Jewish influence. “Thus Spinoza belongs not just to humanity as a whole,” Klausner deduces, “but to Judaism in particular.”121 Indeed, he speculates that if the Treatise or the Ethics had been written in Hebrew, they would certainly have caused a ruckus similar to those about Maimonides and Gersonides in the history of Jewish thought, yet ultimately they would have come to be considered part of this legacy.
Did the presence of so many Jewish traces in Spinoza’s philosophy support the notion of a basic agreement between Judaism and Spinozism? On this question, which threw the nineteenth-century Hebrew Enlightenment into controversy, Klausner finds in favor of Luzzatto. The pantheist rationalism of Spinoza and the prophetic monotheism of the Jewish people are fundamentally opposed to each other. Rejecting the panentheist interpretation that had originated in German Idealism and been taken up by the maskilim, Klausner maintains that, for Spinoza, God is totally identical with nature, whereas even the most abstract and depersonalized forms of Jewish monotheism in medieval Jewish thought always remained true to the belief that God exceeded the universe. Klausner also endorses another of Luzzatto’s criticisms, namely that the rational and utilitarian ethics of Spinoza, which rest entirely on maximizing the capacity (virtu) of the individual, cannot be squared with Judaism. “Prophetic Judaism,” he concludes, “whose crown is the messianic idea with its communal vision of the kingdom of heaven, can never be harmonized with this perspective. Spinozism is not Judaism in the purest sense of the term.”122
This brings Klausner to the pivot in his argument. Turning to the “national pantheist” rationale of Ahad Ha‘am, Klausner lays the foundation for reappropriating Spinoza for Jewish Geistesgeschichte. “Judaism is not solely a religion just as it is not solely a nation”; it is the product of a natural Volk with an immanent tendency toward a particular religious and ethical outlook that informs its national consciousness.123 Like any historical organism, it is full of internal variety and incongruity. The discrepancies between the “Judaisms” of Spinoza and the prophets, then, need not be resolved for the former to be reclaimed for Jewish identity. The unifying characteristic of Judaism is not any single abstract teaching or idea, such as the “pure faith” (emunah tserufah) sought by the nineteenth-century Reformers; rather it is “[t]he consciousness that all [the multiple Judaisms] are simply part of an uninterrupted chain . . . to our generation and until the end of all generations.”124 In short, the unity of Judaism was its consciousness of historical continuity amid so much diversity.
“From this vantage point,” Klausner reasons, “Spinoza was a complete Jew and his teaching contained an absolutely Jewish character.”125 Not only was his system a product of the Jewish national impulse; it was also, like Judaism, in essence a torat hayim, a philosophy of life, and thus similarly rife with contradictions. On the one hand, Spinoza’s philosophy was atheistic, materialistic, mechanistic, deterministic, utilitarian, and Machiavellian. On the other hand, it was “God-intoxicated,” idealistic, teleological, obsessed with freedom, concerned with community, and committed to the proposition that “man is God to man.” Most important, the Spinoza who deprecated Judaism in the Treatise also claimed the ultimate aim of the Bible to be “righteousness and justice” and predicted the possibility of a future restoration of Jewish sovereignty.
This image of a Spinoza torn between extremes, and in this respect quintessentially Jewish, culminates in an unexpected historical analogy:
Jakob Klatzkin compared the Ethics of Spinoza to the Shulhan-Arukh of Rabbi Yosef Karo: arid laws on the outside and a blazing faith within. I have another comparison that appears to me more fitting: a soldier from the ranks of Judah Maccabee. On the outside—a soldier like any soldier: crude, armed, fighting with cruelty, killing and trampling the enemy, and on the inside—a deeply pious man, fighting to save his people, his God and his Torah. . . . So too is Spinoza like this: cold, dry, geometrical at first glance, yet within—a burning faith, the religion of his people, the religious spirit of his ancestors, who gave their lives in martyrdom—the same burning spirit of that “Believer,” whom Spinoza knew and recalled warmly, the one who sang with the expiration of his soul on the burning stake of the auto-da-fé of the Inquisition: “In your hands, O Lord, I place my spirit.”126
To compare Spinoza to a Maccabee soldier, however absurd on its face, was equivalent to ranking him among the elite of the Zionist pantheon. Along with such events as the mass suicide of the zealots at Masada in 73 C.E . and the failed Bar-Kochba uprising of 132–35 C.E., the Hasmonean revolt of the second century B.C.E. was one of the most central lieux de mémoire in Zionism, and one with which Klausner was well familiar through his studies of Second Temple Judaism.127 In this context it serves as evidence of how far Klausner was willing to go to merge Spinoza with Zionist imagery.
Yet Klausner’s effort to expose “Jewish” characteristics allegedly inherited by Spinoza should not be taken as the main motivation for this appropriation. What drew Klausner to Spinoza in the first place was less any visibly Jewish element to Spinoza’s person or thought than the possibility of naturalizing Spinoza’s perceived “universal-human” significance. In other words, if Klausner invokes a line of reasoning characteristic of Ahad Ha‘am to establish how Spinoza belongs to Judaism, Klausner’s admiration for Spinoza is more closely related to this Russian Zionist critic’s literary infatuation with Tchernichowsky.
Klausner edges toward an acknowledgment of this near the end of his lecture. Spinoza, he writes, was the fourth in a chain of Jewish thinkers—after Philo, Ibn Gabirol, and Don Judah Abarbanel
(Leone Ebreo)—who had a much stronger impact on Western civilization in general than on Jewish philosophy. The first-century Alexandrian Jew Philo would not be clearly mentioned in any Hebrew work until the sixteenth-century Me’or ‘enayim [Light of the Eyes] of Azariah de Rossi. The eleventh-century Ibn Gabirol would be celebrated within Jewish liturgy for his Hebrew poetry, yet would not even be recognized as the author of the Fons vitae until the 1840s. The sixteenth-century Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’amore would have a profound influence on Renaissance thought and would be translated soon after its appearance into several European languages, yet despite being rendered into Hebrew in the seventeenth century the book remained little known in the Jewish world until “our time,” Klausner writes. Spinoza, meanwhile, would be excommunicated. What these thinkers had in common was the fact that they were all influenced by Platonist and Neoplatonist philosophy, with its pantheist leanings. “And so the matter is clear,” Klausner claims: “[A]s long as Judaism was sustained on religion alone, without land, without language, without a national foundation, it is possible that all those who wished to graft onto it a Platonic or Neoplatonic pantheism were in fact a danger.”128
Their pure or quasi pantheism was not the only thing that made them a hazard. In a later essay from 1932 entitled “Tradition and Innovation in Jewish Literature,” with which he prefaced his collection of studies of the aforementioned Jewish Platonists, Klausner highlighted an even greater departure from the norm in medieval Jewish thought on the part of Ibn Gabirol, Leone Ebreo, and Spinoza. None of their three major metaphysical works—the Fons vitae, the Dialoghi d’amore, and the Ethics—were written in the guise of interpretation of sacred scripture; they contained no cited verses, no sayings of the sages, indeed no identifiably Jewish content at all. At a time when Jewish continuity was dependent on masking innovation as tradition, the neglect of these texts was perhaps understandable. But now the continued tendency to regard works as Jewish only if they deal with a specifically Jewish problematic has become an impediment to a much-needed freshness and creativity in Jewish culture. This meant that
We have to devote special attention to those Hebrew poets or thinkers who up to now have been considered a “foreign branch” in the vineyard of our literature: to Immanuel of Rome129 more than to Rabbi Judah ha-Levi, to Tchernichowsky more than to Bialik. This way, perhaps, our children will see that there is innovation in our “House of Study”—in an original Hebrew literature, and thus they will not go to seek nourishment in other literatures or only in Hebrew translations of superficial works in other languages.130
If one step toward “universalizing” a national culture was to shift the scale of attention from authors like Bialik to Tchernichowsky in contemporary Hebrew literature, another, even more basic step was “to restore our banished greats: all the Jewish works that are genuinely novel, which survived for us in foreign languages and until recent times were ‘exceptional’ in the chain of Jewish tradition.”131
And such was the case with Spinoza. If his pantheism and bold innovation had once been a threat to Judaism, now they constituted a national asset, as we hear once again in Klausner’s abrogation of Spinoza’s herem:
Now everything has changed. Judaism has ceased to be solely or even especially a religion—as Moses Mendelssohn and Hermann Cohen, enemies of Spinoza, depicted it—and it is also not—and shall never be!—a nation alone: it shall be a nation-religion in one. It has begun to acquire land and a national language, and at the same time a territorial and political foundation along with them. . . . [A]nd, in the marvelous words of Spinoza, “given the opportunity—such is the mutability of human affairs—they may establish once more their independent state, and God will again choose them.” In this situation the four philosophers estranged from Israel are no longer a threat to her: they will bring not danger, but encouragement and invigoration to her spirit. Judaism will be enhanced and enriched by all her great sons—including the lost and rejected ones. To Spinoza, however, whose Ethics, Treatise on the Improvement of the Intellect, and Hebrew Grammar have been translated into Hebrew, with only the Theological-Political Treatise, his short works, and correspondence still missing—it is declared in recognition of the great sin that his people perpetrated against him, and the likewise not trivial sin that he perpetrated against his people, but also in recognition of his human greatness and the Jewish character of his teaching— 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 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!132
VI.
The international buzz created by Klausner’s lifting of the ban on Spinoza “from the heights of Mount Scopus” quickly dissipated. Though he included his “Our brother are you!” flourish in the published versions of his speech, Klausner—perhaps because of the criticism and even mockery his “amnesty” elicited, perhaps because he was never so wedded to it in the first place—never pressed the issue of a formal pardon for Spinoza any further. In later addresses he gave on Spinoza—including another tribute in the old “People’s House” (Bet ha-‘am) in Tel Aviv to mark the tercentenary year of Spinoza’s birth in 1932—he mostly shied from theatrics, arguing for the Jewishness of Spinoza without resorting to rabbinic formulas.133 There was every reason to think the matter of a public reprieve for Spinoza all but dead, a case of bloated rhetoric now deflated.
Twenty-seven years later, this death proved only to have been a prolonged hibernation. On December 25, 1953, Israel’s labor union newspaper Davar ran a front-page article with the headline, “Let Us Amend the Injustice.” The specific “injustice” involved none of the most obvious controversies of the day besetting the five-year-old Jewish state: the fallout from Israel’s bloody raid two months earlier on the West Bank village of Qibya, the continued housing of tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants from the Middle East in shantytowns, the Palestinian refugee crisis. Rather, this was a brief for Spinoza, an appeal to right the wrong to Jewish culture as long as the herem on the philosopher retained any authority. In essence the author was continuing Klausner’s quest to see the works of great Jewish thinkers like Philo and Spinoza added to the treasury of Hebrew literature. The circumstances, however, were quite different. For the Jewish Yishuv of 1927 was now a Jewish state, the infant university on Mount Scopus an internationally prestigious research institution with its own press. And the author was not just one Zionist intellectual but a man widely regarded as the “founding father” of modern Israel: David Ben-Gurion, then in between stints as prime minister.
The “Old Man” of Yishuv and Israeli politics was an ardent admirer of the Amsterdam philosopher. Spinoza, in the eyes of Ben-Gurion, had inaugurated the breakthrough of the scientific spirit into modern Judaism, all the while rejecting a purely mechanical and materialist view of nature, upholding in its stead the biblical view that mind and body, spirit and matter were “manifestations of a higher unity.”134 He had founded a biblical hermeneutic that rejected spiritual allegory and demanded that all knowledge of Scripture “be sought from Scripture alone,” thereby inadvertantly laying the foundation for the prime minister’s dream of transforming the Hebrew Bible from a work of transcendent revelation into a national epic of Israel’s origins.135 Indeed, for Ben-Gurion, Spinoza had anticipated not only Jewish secularism, but a specifically Zionist secularism. The prime minister’s obsession with Spinoza’s “proto-Zionism” was everywhere in evidence in the early years of statehood, from his address to the 1951 Zionist congress, where he cited Spinoza’s “prophecy” of a restoration of Jewish sovereignty, to his diary from August of that same year, where he recorded, in Latin, the exact wording of that pregnant passage of the Treatise that begins “were it not that the principles of their religion discourage manliness . . .”136
; Ben-Gurion’s transcription of this excerpt in his journal followed his agreement a month earlier to become a friend of the first society devoted to Spinoza in the Jewish state.137 In 1950 Georg Herz-Shikmoni (1885–1976), a German Jewish Zionist—and an even more avid Spinozist—who had immigrated to Palestine twenty-five years earlier, founded the Bet Shpinozah (Spinoza House) in the coastal city of Haifa.138 His Spinozaeum, as it was also known, was a little center on Mount Carmel for which he had large ambitions that are almost laughable in retrospect. In both literature distributed by the center and in letters seeking dues-paying members and donations, Herz-Shikmoni described a campaign to make Spinoza and his thought cornerstones of the new Jewish culture in Israel. He envisioned daily recitations on Israeli state radio of passages from Spinoza’s Ethics; special “Spinoza Days” dedicated to the study of his philosophy that would become part of the official school curriculum; and, ultimately, a center for the “Spinoza House” on Mount Carmel, whose exterior would be modeled after the Spinozahuis in The Hague.139 While the Spinozaeum, from its founding to its closing in 1973, was largely kept alive by Herz-Shikmoni alone, it nevertheless—especially in its early years—managed to attract several distinguished members. In addition to Ben-Gurion, the roster included Klausner and the British-born Leon Roth, the first chair of the philosophy department at the Hebrew University.140 Manfred George, the New York–based editor of the German Jewish newspaper Der Aufbau, was a member, as was the renowned Yiddish poet Melech Ravitch. But the biggest star among the friends of the Spinozaeum was clearly Albert Einstein, a longtime Spinoza enthusiast, who when asked by the New York Times in 1929 if he believed in God had responded, “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”