The First Modern Jew

by Daniel B. Schwartz

  This was Singer’s “Spinoza moment,” and for all the singularity of its description in his memoirs, it shares the features of many a similar first encounter with the Amsterdam philosopher in the modern Jewish experience: the sense of wondrous discovery, the feeling of having serendipitously stumbled upon the long elusive truth, the intuition of the oneness of all being. The notion that even his “tangled thoughts were divine” seemed to untangle everything, to invest his turbulent, wandering thoughts with necessity and thus stability. “I was exalted,” he concludes; “everything seemed good.”

  If the Stupnicki book was what lit the flame and converted the teenage Singer for a time into a young Spinozist and devotee of the Ethics, it was not his first exposure to the philosophy of Spinoza. One of the arguments, apparently, that raged in the Singer household between Israel Joshua and his parents concerned Spinoza’s heresy. As he describes elsewhere in his autobiographical writings, Isaac first learned of Spinoza from his elder brother.11 His father, meanwhile, countered that “Spinoza’s name should be blotted out,” though he curiously mitigated his heresy by adding “Spinoza had contributed nothing” that was not already recognized by the Hasidic masters.12 “There was an interpretation by the famous Baal Shem,” Singer writes, paraphrasing his father, “who also identified the world with the Godhead. True, the Baal Shem had lived after Spinoza, but my father argued that Spinoza had drawn from ancient sources, which no Spinoza disciple could deny.”13

  Pinhos Menahem’s “ancient sources” were the teachings of Jewish mysticism, and from Singer’s closing comment it is clear he thought this nexus between Spinozism and Kabbalah was irrefutable. Much of A Little Boy in Search of God, one of his later memoirs, is devoted to his youthful discovery of—and enthrallment with—the “cabala books in my father’s bookcase.” His father cautioned that “you couldn’t take to the cabala before you reached thirty” or “[o]ne could drift into heresy.” Isaac Bashevis ignored these warnings and read these works furtively—his first experience of literature as forbidden fruit. Their crux, as Singer perceived it, was pantheism: the “concept that everything is God and God is everything; that the stone in the street, the mouse in its hole, the fly on the wall, and the shoes on my feet were all fashioned from the Divinity.”14 In one volume in particular, The Pillar of Service by the eighteenth-century Hasidic kabbalist Reb Baruch Kossover (d. 1779), Isaac claimed to find proofs for the existence of God akin to the “arguments I found later in Spinoza’s Ethics.” “My later interest in Spinoza,” the older I. B. Singer reminisced, “stemmed from studying the cabala.”15

  With this admission, Singer stands in a chain of tradition stretching back to Salomon Maimon, the eighteenth-century thinker who was, arguably, the first Jewish Spinozist. In his classic Autobiography, Maimon had similarly transposed the Lurianic myth of creation to a Spinozist key: “[T]he Cabbalah is nothing but an expanded Spinozism,” he famously explained, “in which not only is the origin of the world explained by the limitation of the divine being, but also the origin of every kind of being, and its relation to the rest, are derived from a separate attribute of God.”16 Moreover, when Maimon finally came to read Spinoza for the first time after fleeing Poland for Berlin, he claimed that “his system had already been suggested to me by the Cabbalistic writings.”17 Singer never alludes to Maimon as a precursor. Perhaps he was genuinely unaware of the echoes of the earlier Autobiography in his own self-fashioning, but they are striking. Like Maimon, Singer not only highlights the similarities between Spinozism and the Kabbalah. He also implies that his early study of the Kabbalah gave him a grasp of Spinozism even before he read Spinoza.

  What is clear is that, for Singer, the allure of Spinozism lay in its demonstration of a total immanence of God that could be found, in more cryptic form, in the Kabbalah. The Spinoza whom Singer would come to adore was clearly the “God-intoxicated man” of Novalis and the German Romantics. Indeed, though his father would undoubtedly have seen red if he knew his son Isaac was reading secular literature of any kind, not to mention the “horrible heresies” of the Amsterdam philosopher, the Spinoza admired by Singer was, in a way, also a testament to the strength of this paternal legacy—with its heightened spirituality and Hasidic ecstasy—even in its defiance.

  Yet Singer could not entirely commit to this religious Spinoza. The other Spinoza—the atheist and materialist par excellence hated by orthodox theologians and heralded by radical secularists—hovered close by. It was as if Spinoza stood at a crossroads, where one path led homeward, back toward the secret pantheism of Kabbalah, while the other drifted in the direction of the modern evolutionary philosophies of Malthus and Darwin. Recalling his discovery of Malthus—again, through a pamphlet supplied by Israel Joshua—Singer writes that he “proved in a way that couldn’t be clearer that countless creatures were born to die, for otherwise the world would fill with so many creatures that everyone would starve to death or simply be crushed.”18 Darwin, he added, “went even further and maintained the continuous struggle for food or sex is the origin of all species.” In these thinkers, Singer found a fundamentally pessimistic outlook. The notion of a “natural selection” governed by no higher metaphysical plan or purpose appeared to render both individual strivings and suffering meaningless. And the young Isaac, trying to digest such ideas while still in his early teens, was gripped by the thought that the seeds of this godless philosophy lay in the God of Spinoza:

  Spinoza attributed to God merely the capacity to extend and to think. The anguish of people and animals did not concern Spinoza’s God even in the slightest. He had no feelings at all concerning justice or freedom. The Baal Shem and the murderer were of equal importance to Him. Everything was preordained, and no change whatsoever could affect Spinoza’s God or the things that were part of Him. . . . This philosophy exuded a chill, though still I felt that it might contain more truth (bitter truth) than the cabala. If God were indeed full of mercy and benevolence, He wouldn’t have allowed starvation, plagues, and pogroms. Spinoza’s God merely fortified the contentions of Malthus.19

  Interestingly, if, in my reading, his pious father Pinhos Menahem was the invisible (and ironic) inspiration behind Singer’s mystical Spinoza, his freethinking elder brother—who had introduced Isaac to the Spinozan heresy in the first place—became, for a time at least, synonymous with Spinoza the cold rationalist, the Spinoza who seemed only a step from Malthus and Darwin. “All existence is nature, and nature knows of no pity,” Singer quotes Isaac Joshua as having said in response to his moral anguish over the killing of animals for meat.20 Or, as he argued to his mother amid the harsh deprivations of the First World War, “There is no Almighty. Man is an animal like all other animals.”21

  Out of this tug-of-war came Singer’s own stab at a “refined Spinozism.” His starting point was Spinoza’s sixth definition in the first part of the Ethics, “On God,” which states: “By God I understand a being absolutely infinite, that is, a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence.”22 This sentence has long bedeviled Spinoza scholars: Did the seventeenth-century philosopher mean to say that there were other, infinite attributes of God beyond Thought and Extension?23 Whatever the answer to this age-old ambiguity, Singer, in admittedly idiosyncratic fashion, pounced on it:

  Since according to Spinoza substance contained an endless number of attributes, this left some room for fantasy. I even toyed with the notion of changing some of Spinoza’s axioms and definitions and bringing out a new Ethics. You could easily say that time was one of God’s attributes, too, as well as purpose, creativeness, and growth.24 I had read somewhere about Lobachevski’s non-Euclidean geometry, and I wanted to create a non-Spinozan pantheism, or whatever it might be called. I was ready to make will a divine attribute, too. This kind of revisionist Spinozism would come very close to the cabala.25

  That this “revisionist Spinozism” was indeed central to Singer’s thinking in late adolescence is clear from hi
s account of his first stab at becoming a published writer. In 1923, while staying, temporarily, with Israel Joshua and his wife, in-laws, and newborn son in a small flat just outside Warsaw—desperate to find work and avoid having to return to his parents then living in Galicia—Singer wrote his very first manuscript on Spinoza and the Kabbalah. Blithely unaware of any previous scholarship on this topic, Singer composed a little book on the subject in a mere two weeks. His main argument was that “Spinoza had not enriched and expanded the idea of the Kabbalah with his philosophy”; on the contrary, “he had narrowed them, stripped them of their magnificent stature,” such that “Spinozism [was] nothing more than an abridged and shriveled Kabbalah.”26 One is immediately arrested by the inversion of Maimon’s formulation of the relationship between Spinozism and the Kabbalah in his Autobiography, though once again this link goes unacknowledged. Maimon called the Kabbalah “an expanded Spinozism,” suggesting that the pruning of the mythological excesses of Lurianic acosmism as part of its translation into Spinozan rationalism was a positive development in the history of thought. Singer, on the other hand, laments the compression of Jewish mysticism in Spinozism, its yielding of “an abridged and shriveled Kabbalah.”

  Pressed by his brother to travel to Warsaw to do something productive, the younger Singer resolved to see if he could get his work published. Arriving by train, still dressed in his long gaberdine coat and sporting sidelocks, he went first to the Warsaw Synagogue on Tlomackie Street. Its elderly secretary, Hayim Yehiel Bernstein (1845–1928), was a noted authority on the Jewish calendar as well as an expert on Spinoza and Jewish philosophy in general. Singer thought Bernstein might recommend a suitable forum for his study of Spinoza and the Kabbalah. But the meeting with the wizened scholar—echoes of which would find their way into Singer’s later fiction, including The Family Moskat—did not go as hoped. After allowing Singer to expound at length on “Spinoza, the Kabbalah, similarities, influences,” the secretary deflected all his requests for guidance. The help he could offer amounted to “gornisht, absolut gornisht.” And so, after helping the nearly blind Bernstein leave his office and cross the street, Singer—tired and hungry, and suddenly seized by a loathing of his brochure and of philosophizing in a broader sense—walked into the nearest courtyard, opened the garbage can, and threw away his manuscript.27

  Some twenty years later in the mid-1940s, I. B. Singer, now living in New York, would write a few articles explaining Spinoza’s philosophy for the readers of Der Forverts.28 Around the same time, he was also beginning to make use of Spinoza—or the ghost of Spinoza—as a fictional theme in his writing.29 By then, the one-time romance had largely faded.

  III.

  Q: Did you begin to move away from Spinoza before you came to this country or later?

  A: Before.30

  What had begun as a trickle prior to and during the First World War became a flood in its wake. In 1923 the first Yiddish translation of the Treatise appeared in print—nearly four decades before Spinoza’s devastating secular critique of religion (and Judaism in particular) was finally translated into Hebrew.31 That same year, two separate presses—one in Warsaw and one in Chicago—published William Nathanson’s pioneering Yiddish rendition of the Ethics; by 1927 the Warsaw imprint was already in its third edition.32 Stupnicki’s groundbreaking effort to create a Yiddish-language vissenshaft on Spinoza was taken to new heights by the New York–based Yiddish philosopher Jacob Shatzky. His Spinoza un zayn svivoh [Spinoza and His Environment], published in 1927 (along with 1932, one of the two major Spinoza jubilee years of the interwar period)—a work consciously modeled on the magisterial fin-de-siècle Spinoza biographies of Jakob Freudenthal and K. O. Meinsma—was reviewed in practically every Yiddish newspaper and journal of significance.33 To this day, it remains the most significant exemplar of a Yiddish scholarly account of the life and times of the Amsterdam philosopher. Meanwhile, at the same time that Hebraists in Palestine were claiming Spinoza for secular Zionism, Yiddish socialists—from Bundist social democrats to Soviet Trotskyists and even Stalinists—were busy appropriating Spinoza as as a precursor of Marxist liberation and dialectical materialism.34 In 1932 Leo Finkelstein delivered a tribute, in Yiddish, at the international Spinoza congress held in The Hague to commemorate the three-hundredth birthday of the philosopher—the first instance in which Yiddish was ever publicly represented at one of these multilingual symposia.35 Yet the highlight of the Spinoza renaissance in Yiddish between the wars was, without question, the Spinoza bukh of 1932. Edited by Shatzky and published by the Jewish division of the short-lived Spinoza Institute of America, the Spinoza bukh was an anthology of Yiddish essays on topics ranging from Spinoza and Kant to Spinoza and Marx, and from the problem of free will in philosophy from Spinoza to Bergson to the relationship between Spinoza’s thought and Judaism.36 The collection—however uneven in the quality of its articles—was a landmark, proof positive that the competition between Yiddish and Hebrew (which produced no similar Spinoza Festschrift in 1932) now extended to the representation of Spinoza as well. Hebrew clearly had enjoyed a considerable head start, but Yiddish was now catching up, and in some cases even surpassing its rival.37

  The Yiddish Spinoza renaissance spanned countries and even continents. But Warsaw, where the nineteen-year-old Singer arrived in 1923, was certainly one of its main centers. And the poet and editor Melekh Ravitch (1893–1976), who quickly took Singer under his wing, was one of its main champions. Many Yiddish poets—from H. Leyvick to Abraham Sutzkever—would in time write verse about Spinoza.38 Ravitch (né Zekharye Chone Bergner), originally of Galicia, was the first, and arguably the most ardent. In 1919 the first edition of his famed Spinoza cycle of poems appeared.39 Written from 1916 to 1918, while Ravitch was a foot soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army, the four-part poem (much like the Societas Spinozana founded by Carl Gebhardt shortly thereafter) images the rationalist Spinoza as, in essence, the answer to the blood-soaked passions of the Great War. The first section—Der mentsh—portrays Spinoza from birth to death, devoting special attention to his excommunication. The second—Dos verk—muses on Spinoza’s metaphysics and biblical criticism. The third and fourth sections—Di shpin [The Spider] and Ktoyres [Incense], respectively—contain meditations on everything from Spinoza’s stoic example to his role as a kind of eternal flame for the poet throughout his wanderings.40

  Ravitch’s Shpinoza is a fascinating paradox: a lyrical poem, characterized by vivid, even graphic imagery and a striving for emotional effect that is at the same time a paean to the most rationalist element of Spinoza’s system. The geometrical method—the very aspect of Spinoza’s Ethics that nearly all his admirers, since the German Romantics, had scotched—is here the subject of the deepest reverence. In the “Geometrical Form of the Ethics,” one of three poems devoted to the Ethics in the section Dos verk, Ravitch traces his infatuation with the Amsterdam philosopher to the precise definitions and strict deductions of his masterwork:

  It was not your deep loneliness,

  nor the endless sorrow in your face,

  nor even your infinite tranquility

  that built the high airy bridge

  of the silent night watches of my soul

  in your land, Spinoza . . .

  And what my soul plumbed down to bedrock

  was often no more than a simple axiom

  a formula, an adjective or proof

  a parable with a ruler, a parable with a drawn line,

  or your eternal parable about the sum of the angles of the triangle.41

  The notion that the emotions could be pinned down with the exactitude of “the sum of the angles of the triangle” was, for Ravitch, neither a pipe dream nor a type of crude reductionism, but a source of consolation in the face of chaos and immense suffering. In Spinoza, Ravitch—like the “young Spinozist” Moses Hess nearly a century earlier—found a new millennial prophet to succeed Moses (his “tablets turned to dust”) and Jesus (the “crucified one” who was “just a dead imag
e”).42 In the necessitarianism and nonsectarianism of the Ethics, he saw a foundation stone for rebuilding on the ruins left by war.

  Ravitch viewed Spinoza as a figure of total rupture. Contrary to East European Hebraists like Rubin, who aimed to “Judaize” Spinoza by linking him to a subterranean tradition of Jewish pantheism, or like Klausner, who wished to declare an end to the conflict between Spinoza and Judaism with a general “amnesty,” Ravitch—at least the young Ravitch—rejected the path of reconciliation.43 Spinoza’s break from his “own blood,” however painful, had been entirely mutual: Spinoza craved freedom from the “five cells [i.e., books]” of the Torah and the start of a “new life” as Benedictus, not Borukh; the whole of Amsterdam Jewry, meanwhile—as described in two poems devoted to the herem—drove him out with a barrage of insults and curses (“D’Espinoza, fool, meshugener, Borukh, accursed, throw him to the mad dogs / Benedictus, treyf skull, thief, die, gehenm [hell], beat him, skin him, tie him up’).44 The narrowing of this breach, the masking of Spinoza’s innovation as tradition—a tack taken even by radical maskilim like Rubin in the effort to reclaim him—was not for Ravitch. It was the uncompromising Spinoza whom Ravitch adored, for, within Yiddish poetry, Ravitch too hoped to be a groundbreaker, with the Amsterdam philosopher as his lodestar:

  Perhaps I am destined to be a candle

  for my generation,

  a trailblazer, at a crossroads,

  on the endless path to God—

  but you are the light of my light