The First Modern Jew

by Daniel B. Schwartz

  FIGURE. 5.2. David Ben-Gurion’s diary for August 7, 1951, containing, in the prime minister’s handwriting, his transcription, in the original Latin, of the passage from chapter 3 of Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise that begins “were it not that the principles of their religion discourage manliness . . .” The Ben-Gurion Archives, Be’ersheva, Israel.

  In his positive reply to Herz-Shikmoni’s letter of invitation, Ben-Gurion suggested that the “Bet Shpinozah take upon itself the publication of Spinoza’s books and letters in Hebrew,” stating his readiness “to try to find all the assistance necessary for the task.”141 True to his word, the prime minister, when not busy with matters of state, began seeking out translators, publishers, and financial backing for this endeavor, assisted by his minister of education, who happened to be none other than Ben-Zion Dinur.142 It was Ben-Gurion’s hope that the Hebrew University would publish the complete works of Spinoza in Hebrew all at once, and in time to mark the tercentenary of Spinoza’s excommunication in 1956.143

  Such was the backdrop to Ben-Gurion’s appeal to “amend the injustice.” Like many a Zionist thinker before him—Klatzkin, Sokolow, Klausner—Ben-Gurion allowed that the Jewish community of Amsterdam had sufficient reason three centuries earlier to expel Spinoza. “Amsterdam Jewry of that time, however, is not Jewry, nor is the seventeenth century the eternity of the eternal people,” he insisted, adding that “[i]t was not within the authority or the power of the Jews of Amsterdam in the year 1656 . . . to exclude the immortal Spinoza from the community of Israel for all time.”144 The Athenian people condemned Socrates to death in antiquity, yet Socrates was never written out of the history of Greek thought; why, then, should a Jewish court in Amsterdam be able to do to Spinoza what the judgment of the Athenians could not do to Socrates? At the present moment, with Jewish sovereignty restored, the conditions for an “ingathering” of Spinoza and his works were ripe. Lauding Spinoza as “the most original thinker and the most profound philosopher that Jewry has produced in the past two thousand years,” Ben-Gurion concluded that “[t]here is no longer any justification for the spiritual ‘bereavement’ of the Exile in the State of Israel. The publication of a complete and critical edition of Baruch Spinoza’s writings by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is a debt of honor to ourselves from the national and cultural point of view, and it should not be put off.”145 A rehabilitation that, however zealously pursued, had long served as a counterweight to the historical memory of traditional Judaism—as a countermemory, so to speak—seemed well on its way to acquiring official legitimacy in the State of Israel.146

  In his article, Ben-Gurion was careful to note that the injustice demanding redress was cultural, not religious—the fact that “Hebrew literature would not be complete, so long as it did not include all the writings of Baruch Spinoza.” He was not calling for an annulment of the herem. Yet this qualification, to his alleged chagrin, went entirely unnoticed. Ben-Gurion, it was (and, to a striking degree, still is) widely believed, had proposed that the ban on Spinoza be officially lifted. And a controversy that had seemingly ended years before now returned at an even higher pitch. Already in 1953 Herz-Shikmoni had written the chief rabbi of Israel, Isaac Halevi Herzog, to determine whether, from the perspective of Jewish law, the herem on Spinoza still held. That September, shortly after the Jewish New Year of 5714, he received an encouraging letter in response. While denying Herz-Shikmoni the formal invalidation of the ban he no doubt wanted, Rabbi Herzog nevertheless suggested, based on a close exegesis of the writ of excommunication, that the anathema could be read as applying only to Spinoza’s lifetime. “It seems,” he concluded, “that the ban on the reading of Spinoza’s books and essays no longer stands.”147

  On the other hand, the chief rabbi of the Sephardic community of Amsterdam, Salomon Rodrigues Pereira, refused to grant a similar ruling, invoking the well-known dictum from Jewish law that “[n]o rabbinate has the right to review a decision of previous rabbinates, unless it is greater in number and wiser.”148 Meanwhile, from the halls of the Israeli Parliament to the pages of the worldwide Jewish press, debate raged over Ben-Gurion’s article. The nonpartisan Hebrew daily Ma‘ariv opined: “The man was great. He was a spiritual giant, and he was Jewish. Why shouldn’t he belong to us? Why shouldn’t his work be considered a part of Hebrew writing?” Predictably, the orthodox camp was less enthused. On the floor of the Knesset, Eliyahu-Moshe Ganhuvsky, an MK from the religious Zionist Ha-po‘el ha-Mizrahi party, warned that canceling the herem on Spinoza would open the floodgates to naturalizing “countless individuals established by history as traitors.” The Mizrahi (religious Zionist) newspaper Ha-Tsofeh [The Watchman] sarcastically labeled Shikmoni’s group in Haifa Spinoza’s Hasidim, and it castigated them for “introducing into the temple of Jewish thought a new idolatry that was liable to ruin the spiritual and cultural character of the State of Israel.”149

  Yet the most sustained attack on the repatriation of Spinoza came not from a religious Jew but from a secularist. Rising to challenge Ben-Gurion was Yehoshua Manoah, an Eastern European Jew who had been among the founders of Deganyah, the first kibbutz. From 1954 to 1956, Manoah and Ben-Gurion engaged in a dialogue in the Hebrew press over the propriety of celebrating Spinoza from a national Jewish perspective, with occasional contributions to the debate by other Israeli intellectuals. Here I wish to highlight only a central—and indeed familiar—aspect of Manoah’s argument against Spinoza:

  I am not religiously observant, but nevertheless I can say wholeheartedly that I take pride in the belief in one God (monotheism), the most magnificent creation of our people, which conquered a large number of the peoples of this earth and ever since has been an unfailing source of consolation, deliverance, and mercy, for which until today no substitute has been found. But I will admit that in truth, I don’t have the strength to enter into arguments and controversies over this noble and glorious creation. As a national Jew, who sees an ironclad need that the materials for the construction of the present and the future be taken from the tradition of the past and its sacred possessions—there are things for me that, once touched, immediately cause offense. Regarding these things there can be no compromise! They are, to my mind taboo. Even somebody completely secular, but nationalistic, must have something like this (one might call it “holy”). . . . For me (and I don’t care what others think) anybody who belittles the stature of Moses, our teacher (Moshe rabenu), speaks ill of the Prophets of Israel, shows disrespect to the Hebrew Bible, our book of books, which in my eyes has no equal—I want nothing to do with his philosophy.150

  FIGURE. 5.3. Letter from the chief rabbi of Israel, Isaac Halevi Herzog to G. Herz-Shikmoni, 6 Tishre 5714 (September 15, 1953), suggesting that the rabbinic ban on Spinoza’s writings no longer applies. G. Herz-Shikmoni Papers, Abba Khoushy Archive, University of Haifa Library, Haifa, Israel.

  Manoah gives the secular-national rationale for keeping Spinoza out. Like Spinoza, he does not feel bound by the Law, and while he “takes pride” in the monotheistic idea, he has no interest in religious disputations. But in attacking Moses, the prophets, the Bible, Spinoza was not just attacking the Jewish religion; he was undermining the “sacred possessions” of the Jewish people, the building blocks on which any future national Jewish culture had to be constructed. To honor such a traitor—to say to him “Our brother are you!”—would be to show an appalling disrespect to our forebearers. And respect, Manoah concludes, is precisely what is missing in contemporary Israeli secularism.

  Contra Ben-Gurion—but also contra Klausner—Manoah insists that one cannot enter Spinoza into the cultural pantheon and also extol the values of Jewish unity and solidarity. These cannot be brought together as part of a single “imagined community,” as it were. Yet what leaps out most in this protest is how closely it resembles Klausner’s scolding of Brenner and the “Young Hebrews” from 1911. The need for respect for the “great values” of our ancestors urged by an openly nonobservant Jew, the fear of total ru
pture from the religious past, the insistence that there are certain lines that cannot be crossed without committing national treason—all these emphases in Manoah have their counterpart in Klausner. One of the great secular champions of the reappropriation of the Amsterdam philosopher for Hebrew culture shared with one of its vehement secular critics a nearly verbatim concern over unchecked secularization. By going beyond attention-grabbing gestures like Klausner’s lifting of the herem, and appreciating the anxiety over where to draw the line between “freedom” and “heresy” they obscure, we gain more complex insight not only into the Zionist use of Spinoza, but into an essential tension within the Zionist formation of the secular.

  *FIGURE. 6.1. Photo of I. B. Singer as a young man. Isaac Bashevis Singer Papers, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

  CHAPTER 6

  Farewell, Spinoza

  I. B. Singer and the Tragicomedy of the Jewish Spinozist

  I.

  Mention the making of Spinoza into a modern Jewish culture hero and the author most likely to come to mind is Isaac Bashevis Singer. Like dybbuk possessions and love triangles, Spinoza casts a long shadow in Singer’s vast oeuvre. He figures most conspicuously in “The Spinoza of Market Street,” a widely acknowledged masterpiece of Singer’s short fiction that portrays a would-be Spinoza in early twentieth-century Jewish Warsaw. Yet the Amsterdam philosopher is also a mainstay of several of Singer’s novels and of his copious autobiographical writings (the lines between which are often deliberately blurred), where an at least temporary veneration of Spinoza and the Ethics often serves as a rite de passage in the protagonist’s journey from traditionalism to secularism. Reflecting on the emergence of Spinoza as an icon for nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish iconoclasts, historian David Biale writes, “One thinks of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s characters who obsessively read Spinoza, a practice that Singer borrowed from earlier Yiddish and Hebrew writers.”1 Others preceded (and succeeded) him, but it is Singer who, over time, has become the most readily invoked example for Spinoza’s rehabilitation from heretic to hero, as “the first modern Jew.”

  In fact, the twinning of Singer with this rehabilitation is rife with irony. At one level, this is because Singer—unlike Berthold Auerbach, Israel Zangwill, Melech Ravitch, and others—never fictionalized or poeticized Spinoza himself, but Spinoza’s Jewish reception. In Singer’s writing, there is no return to the scene of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, no reconstruction of Spinoza’s Sephardic upbringing and estrangement from Judaism, no reprise of the excommunication.2 The setting for the Spinoza theme in his work is prewar and interwar Eastern Europe—specifically Warsaw and its environs—and, to a lesser extent, Singer’s later American home. The subject is the intimate link between the encounter with Spinoza’s rationalist and pantheist heresy and the peculiarities of East European Jewish enlightenment and secularization. Indeed, as Biale intimates, the whole basis for Singer’s appropriation of Spinoza is the earlier appropriation (and adulation) of him by modern Jewish secularists. With a mixture of wry humor and occasional pathos, Singer dramatizes the overwrought nature of this appropriation, the intensity of the identification with Spinoza among many a talmudic prodigy turned secular intellectual. We might call Singer the great ironist of Jewish Spinozism. And yet, Singer is not only a satirist of the modern Jewish fixation with Spinoza. He is also a critic. The pinnacle of Spinoza’s system—the ideal of the amor dei intellectualis—could not provide satisfactory answers to what were, for Singer, the perennial truths of human existence: the power of the emotions, the problem of evil, the pangs of homelessness. Herein lies an even more fundamental paradox to the association of Singer with the Jewish cultural reclamation of the Amsterdam rebel—the fact that his appropriation is essentially an argument with Spinoza, a critique of the Enlightenment legacy of secular rationalism he embodied. But because of its repetitive character, it is a rebuke, even repudiation that only furthers the cause of rehabilitation, cementing the bond between Spinoza and the oyfgeklerte yid, the “enlightened Jew.”

  This chapter will analyze the Spinoza image in Singer’s work in three stages.3 First, relying primarily on Singer’s autobiographical writings, I will chart Singer’s path from worship to wariness of Spinoza in Warsaw between the wars, the very period that witnessed a broad and ecumenical revival of the Amsterdam philosopher and a veritable explosion of his popularity within Yiddish literature.4 I will then turn to an analysis of the two works in Singer’s canon most pivotal to his use of Spinoza, “The Spinoza of Market Street” and The Family Moskat. Written in close proximity—“The Spinoza of Market Street” was originally titled “Der Shpinozist” and published in Di tsukunft [The Future] in 1944, while The Family Moskat [Di familye mushkat] was serialized in Der forverts [The Forward] from 1945 to 1948—these two works reflect the range of the Spinoza theme in Singer, from the miniature scale of the short story to the multigenerational novel, and from gentle comedy to harsh post-Holocaust tragedy.

  II.

  I used to carry around Spinoza’s Ethics wherever I went.5

  It is perhaps a further irony that Singer came under the spell of Spinoza not in worldly, cosmopolitan Warsaw, his home for nearly ten years of his youth and then for much of his twenties and early thirties, but in the secluded shtetl of Bilgoray (Bilgoraj) in southeastern Poland. In 1917 Isaac and his mother Bathsheba, fleeing the extreme hardships and shortages of wartime Warsaw, returned to her hometown. He spent four years in this traditional Jewish town, separated from both his father Pinhos Menahem, a Hasidic rabbi exacting in his faith and religious discipline, and hostile to anything smacking of secular modernity, and his elder brother Israel Joshua, an artist-novelist who was already an “enlightened” heretic. While Bilgoray was a bastion of “old Jewishness,” it was not immune from “the new winds” of modern Jewish politics and culture, and it was in the context of his compulsive reading of “original works in Yiddish” and “translations of European writers” that Singer discovered “Stupnicki’s book on Spinoza.”6

  One can safely assume that few readers of Singer’s In My Father’s Court in translation today have ever heard of this book or, for that matter, Stupnicki. Shaul Stupnicki (1876–1942) was a well-known Yiddish journalist in Poland and a prominent supporter of the Folkspartei, the movement and political party, inspired by the Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, that sought national-cultural autonomy for Jews in Eastern Europe. His greatest legacy was as one of the leading intellectuals of the Warsaw ghetto, where he contributed to Emmanuel Ringelblum’s Oyneg Shabes archive.7 Yet in the history of Spinoza’s Jewish reception, he also looms large. In 1917—the same year Singer moved to Bilgoray—Stupnicki published Borukh Shpinoza: Zayn filozofye, bibel-kritik, shtatslere un zayn badaytung in der antviklung fun mentshlikhen denken [Baruch Spinoza: His Philosophy, Biblical Criticism, Political Theory, and Import for the Development of Human Thought]. The Yiddish library on Spinoza as of 1917 was still extremely modest. It consisted mostly of a smattering of articles, the first of which had appeared in a St. Petersburg weekly in 1886; a translation of Berthold Auerbach’s Spinoza novel by the Lithuanian-born playwright Bernard Gorin; and a slender primer on Spinoza’s life and philosophy by the American Yiddish journalist and socialist Philip Krantz (Jacob Rombro).8 Stupnicki’s volume was something new, a book of over one hundred sixty pages that was the first attempt at a scholarly and comprehensive introduction to Spinoza in Yiddish. “For the first time,” Stupnicki wrote in his introduction, “the Jewish reader has in hand the complete Spinoza, his philosophy, his biblical criticism, his political theory.”9 Acknowledging that for many, Spinoza’s teachings—in particular his biblical criticism—would be “new and startling,” the author maintained that “the Jewish reader is, by now, sufficiently grown up” to cope with the challenge to his inherited beliefs.

  “The Spinoza book created a turmoil in my brain,” Singer writes. The biblical criticism that Stupnicki felt necessary to caution against seems barely to have attra
cted notice. It was instead the pantheist philosophy of the Ethics and Spinoza’s God that instantly absorbed him:

  His concept that God is a substance with infinite attributes, that divinity itself must be true to its laws, that there is no free will, no absolute morality and purpose—fascinated and bewildered me. As I read this book, I felt intoxicated, inspired as I never had been before. It seemed to me that the truths I had been seeking since childhood had at last become apparent. Everything was God—Warsaw, Bilgoray, the spider in the attic, the water in the well, the clouds in the sky, and the book on my knees. . . . I too was a modus, which explained my indecision, my restlessness, my passionate nature, my doubts and fears.10