The First Modern Jew

by Daniel B. Schwartz

  the torch of my own night.45

  Ravitch moved to Warsaw in 1921 and rapidly became one of the leading members of the Yiddish Warsaw avant-garde. With Spinoza as his guiding light, Ravitch was determined to bury the old and usher in the new, only in poetry—Yiddish poetry—and not in philosophy. In 1922 he, along with fellow twentysomething radicals Peretz Markish and Uri Zvi Greenberg, founded a journal, Di Khalyastre [The Gang], expressly devoted to the promotion of a revolutionary poetics in Yiddish.46 Not the religious and regional particulars of Jewish Eastern Europe, but the dominant European aesthetic movements of the day, from proletarianism to futurism to expressionism, would take center stage. For a time, it included among its contributors Israel Joshua Singer. The periodical was defunct after only two years, but the label Khalyastre endured as a byword for a defiantly modernist and antireligious impulse in twentieth-century Yiddish writing.47 In its wake, Ravitch went on to found and edit Literarishe bleter [Literary Pages], one of the most prominent Yiddish literary journals in interwar Poland. He also became secretary of the famed Yiddish Writers’ Union on Tlomackie 13, before leaving Warsaw for good in 1934 for a decade of worldwide travel.

  If I have gone on about Ravitch at more length than seems warranted, it is not only because he, more than anyone else in the world of Yiddish literature, furnished Singer with the ideal type of the Jewish Spinozist. It is also because of his personal influence on the late adolescent who arrived in Jewish Warsaw as a would-be Yiddish writer. Early on, Ravitch took on the role of Singer’s guide and guardian, greeting him with free temporary accommodations, providing him with some much needed polish, and, in general, introducing him to the world of Yiddish literary Warsaw. In A Little Boy in Search of God, Singer writes of the discussions they had in Ravitch’s garret apartment, in which his host would proclaim his “absolute faith” in a “world of justice that could come today or tomorrow” and would contain neither Jew nor Gentile, but “only a single united mankind.”48 One can safely assume that these discussions at some point touched on the philosopher from Amsterdam. And Singer’s first low-paying job in Warsaw would be as a proofreader for the Literarishe bleter of which Ravitch (as well as, for a time, Israel Joshua) was editor. Yet Bashevis would ultimately reject the Spinoza worship of Ravitch, just as he turned his back on the utopian radicalism and socialism of Di Khalyastre and its successor, the Literarishe bleter.49 While it is impossible to pinpoint the precise moment of this reversal—Singer himself in one of his later interviews mentioned only that it came “before” he left Warsaw for New York in 1935—it would appear that a crucial role in this change of heart was played by another Warsaw Yiddish and Hebrew writer: the poet and essayist Aaron Zeitlin (1898–1973).

  Zeitlin was a son of Hillel Zeitlin, whom we first encountered in chapter 5 as the author of a turn-of-the-century Hebrew critical study of Spinoza written from the perspective of a Jewish secularist and Zionist. By the 1920s the elder Zeitlin was no longer either. He had “returned” to a pious, if still idiosyncratic version of the Hasidic spirituality and halakhic observance of his youth. As Singer described him, “[t]he father, Hillel Zeitlin, who was learned in philosophy and a cabalist, had come to the early conclusion that a modern Jewishness (whether in nationalistic or socialistic form) that lacked religion was a paradox and absurdity.”50 Not only did he castigate the “radical, atheistic atmosphere” of Yiddish literature between the wars (it was actually Zeitlin who coined the label “di Khalyastre,” originally as an epithet); he also opposed the more appreciative stance vis-à-vis traditional religion of writers and poets like I. L. Peretz and H. N. Bialik, whose work—even if often saturated with nostalgia for the shtetl—hinged, nevertheless, on a cultural nationalist understanding of Jewishness. Within interwar Warsaw, a circle formed around Zeitlin that in many ways functioned as a counterpoint to the Yiddish PEN Club.51 “He rarely entered the Writers’ Union,” Singer would later write, “but his home was itself a kind of writers’ union. . . . His house was always filled with writers, some just starting out, as well as with other remarkable personages. Every young man who lifted a pen sooner or later called on Hillel Zeitlin.” Moreover, despite his newfound orthodoxy, he “had patience for all: for kabbalists seeking clues about the Messiah and the End of Days and for scoffers who came to debate the existence of God.”52

  Isaac’s introduction to the open house of Hillel Zeitlin came as a result of an acquaintance struck with his son Aaron. Only six years Singer’s senior, the younger Zeitlin was already an accomplished poet when the two first met by chance in the Writers’ Union on 13 Tlomackie in 1924. Aaron shared his father’s mystical sensibility as well as contempt for the revolutionary politics and infatuation with various isms of the Yiddish avant-garde. Like many postwar intellectuals, he was also fascinated with spiritualism and occultism.53 “Both Zeitlin and I were deeply interested in psychic research,” Singer later recalled. “We often sat for hours then—and years later too—conversing. We both believed in God, in demons, evil spirits, in all kinds of ghosts and phantoms.”54

  The acquaintance between the younger Singer and the younger Zeitlin quickly turned into a deep friendship that eventually culminated in a literary collaboration. In 1932 they cofounded Globus, a Yiddish journal that was determined to shun the leftism of Yiddish literature and its politicization in a broader sense.55 The periodical survived for only three years, and its significance in the history of Yiddish literature is largely a product of its serialization of Bashevis’s debut novel, Der sotn in Goray [Satan in Goray].56 A dark portrait of a seventeenth-century Polish shtetl decimated first by the 1648–49 Chmielnitski massacres, then plunged into even greater devastation by the false hopes raised by the seventeenth-century messianic movement of Shabbetai Zevi, the novel—blending “history” with frank description of supernatural phenomena and personae—was an implicit condemnation of what Bashevis would later brand the “literary Sabbateanism” of the interwar period, with its determination to cast aside the yoke of the past and its dreams of a utopian future. We will have to consider the relevance of Singer’s early literary fascination with the Sabbatean heresy to his later introduction of the Spinoza theme in his writing. But for our purposes here, what is most important about Globus is that it became a forum for Zeitlin to profile—and attack—the Spinoza craze that crested in the tercentenary year of 1932.

  Zeitlin’s “Perushim oyf toyres-Spinoza” [Comments on the Teachings of Spinoza] was, loosely speaking, a review of the Spinoza bukh of 1932, but as the author himself admitted, it was “a review of ideas, not simply a book review.”57 After initially offering mild praise for the inclusion of such a volume in the still slight library of Yiddish literature, Zeitlin issued a critique as blistering of appropriations of Spinoza, whether for Judaism or Marxism, as of the ideas of Spinoza himself. While Zeitlin’s bill of indictment was long, his main charge was that Spinoza’s philosophy was utterly inadequate to the problem of human suffering—“the Job-experience of modern man.” This inadequacy stemmed from its very character as philosophy, at least as a philosophizing about the nature of God. For such philosophy, especially when driven to the extremes of Spinozism, ultimately reduced God to the affectless causa sui of the natural order and all human suffering to the infinite chain of causes of deductive reasoning. The contrast with Ravitch could not be starker. Ravitch viewed the more geometrico as the most suitable response to the chaos and carnage of war. Zeitlin saw this same method as the ultimate tragedy of Spinoza—that he had no answer to human tragedy save necessity. “Who knows?,” Zeitlin asked. “Perhaps it is sheer madness that so many minds have sought and continue to seek consolation precisely from the lonely man from Amsterdam?”58 In place of Spinoza’s God, Zeitlin called for a return to the living, personal, suffering, responsive, choosing, indeed highly anthropomorphized God of the Bible and the Kabbalah—the God who answered Job out of the whirlwind, and even in chiding consoled him. And in place of the philosophical pursuit of intellectual perfection (shlemus)
—reflected in the Spinozan ideal of the amor dei intellectualis—he envisioned a human encounter with God that would be intimate, at times angry and argumentative, but always impassioned. For it was through feeling and suffering, not through contemplative reason, that man came closest to God. With a closing flourish that deliberately mimicked the trinitarian formula, Zeitlin wrote: “Let us overthrow the God of the philosophers in the name of the three: in the name of suffering, in the name of will, and in the name of faith.”59

  To what degree his relationship with Zeitlin spurred Singer to spurn the Spinoza enthusiasm of his youth is impossible to determine with any certainty. No doubt, his own attraction to mystical, supernatural forces played a part in this break. Nevertheless, the similarity between the views expressed by Zeitlin regarding Spinoza, and Singer’s later reflections on the philosopher in his memoirs, is striking. Zeitlin stresses, as Singer later would, free will as the crux of Judaism and the key issue dividing it from Spinozism.60 He also explicitly distinguishes between the “mystical” and the “rationalist” Spinoza, arguing that while the first ascribes to God infinite attributes, the latter limits human apprehension to two, thought and extension.61 Given that Zeitlin was already a forceful voice and a recognized poet by the time Singer met him, it is certainly plausible that he exercised great influence on Singer’s developing opinions of the Amsterdam heretic. Indeed, it is even possible that Singer, in his memoirs, retrojected ideas about Spinoza formed at a later period—and perhaps under Zeitlin’s guidance—onto his adolescent musings.

  But Singer would become best known not for his essayistic reflections on Spinoza and Judaism but for his fashioning of the Spinoza-obsessed secular Jewish intellectual into a recurring type in his fiction. In this respect he would prove a true original.

  IV.

  I recalled Spinoza’s words to the effect that everything could become a passion. I had resolved beforehand to become a narrator of human passion rather than of a placid lifestyle.62

  Spinozism was the first heresy to intrigue and, for a time, win over the young Bashevis. A little over two decades after tossing his “Spinoza and the Kabbalah” essay into a garbage bin on Tlomackie Street in Warsaw, Singer would revisit this early enthusiasm in his famous short story “The Spinoza of Market Street,” published in Yiddish in 1944 under the title “Der Shpinozist.” Yet it was a different Jewish heresy that first ignited his literary imagination. From 1932 to 1944—a period interrupted by his wrenching, albeit in retrospect lifesaving move to New York in 1935—Singer wrote, in addition to his acclaimed novel Satan in Goray, several stories and another serialized novel dedicated to the messianic movements of Shabbetai Zvi and his “successor” Jacob Frank.63 Critics have commonly explained these works—Satan in Goray especially—as thinly veiled warnings about the secular messianisms of the 1920s and 1930s, from fascism to communism, and an added jab at the Jewish attraction to the latter.64 Yet there was more to Singer’s fascination with this heresy than mere contemporary critique. Singer was drawn to the very same aspect of Sabbatean theology that Gershom Scholem would immortalize in the title of his groundbreaking 1937 essay “Redemption through Sin.”65 This was the idea that the road to redemption lay not in the time-honored posture of patiently waiting for God to act, in submission to the yoke of the Law as interpreted and enforced by the rabbinic and lay leadership of the community, in the careful control and sublimation of the passions, but in just the opposite—in giving vent to desire, in sinning with full intent. Where Singer differed markedly from Scholem was in his willingness to ascribe ultimate agency to Satan and his entourage in luring Jews to succumb to this heresy. Several of his early stories are actually narrated by “the Primeval Snake, the Evil One, Satan,” who, through his chosen human agents, manipulates the God-fearing into believing “that there was no such thing as a sin” and that “it is preferable for a man to commit a sin with fervor, than a good deed without enthusiasm.”66

  Dating back to Heinrich Graetz’s history, the rationalist Spinoza and irrationalist Shabbetai Zvi had often been bracketed together in Jewish consciousness as contemporary, though so strikingly different precursors of the modern revolt against rabbinic authority and the Judaism of the “ghetto.”67 Of both the Spinozan and Sabbatean heresies, it could be said, at the very least, “that there was no such thing as a sin.” Yet, for Singer, it would appear that the difference between them far exceeded any superficial resemblance. In his writings Spinozism is in fact far more evocative of rabbinic Judaism than Sabbateanism. Each in its own way seeks a bridling of the passions: rabbinic Judaism on the basis of the revealed Law and communal coercion, Spinozism through reliance on pure and autonomous reason. It is the very ideal (or illusion) that rational enlightenment, as symbolized by Spinoza’s Ethics, might inoculate us against the storm and stress of the passions that Singer would question in his fiction. This questioning begins with “The Spinoza of Market Street.”

  V.

  Above everyone there hovers an image of what he should be. As long as he is not that, he will not be in full peace with himself.68

  At least with regard to the title, “The Spinoza of Market Street” is one of the rare cases where the translation is an improvement on the original.69 The Yiddish version, as already mentioned, is called simply “Der Shpinozist” [The Spinozist]. But the hero of the short story—Dr. Nahum Fischelson—is not simply a student and follower of the Amsterdam philosopher. He is a copyist, who has striven to emulate his exemplar in every way possible. Like Spinoza, Fischelson—“a short, hunched man with a grayish beard”—is a lifelong bachelor and recluse.70 Like Spinoza—at least in his years in The Hague at the home of the Van den Spycks—Fischelson lives in a garret apartment on Market Street in Warsaw. After earning a doctorate in philosophy in Zurich and returning to Warsaw, he had been made the head librarian at the Warsaw synagogue. To say that he was “excommunicated” would be too strong; nevertheless, he “had wanted to be as independent as Spinoza himself” and was thus forced to step down because of his “heretical ideas.” Ever since, he has subsisted on a small subsidy provided by the Berlin Jewish community thanks to the intervention of a sympathetic member—just like Spinoza, who was supported for a time by a pension from one of his patrons and close friends, the Dutch republican Jan de Witt. His main task, still unconsummated after years of work, is to compose a commentary on the Ethics. More fundamentally, his ambition is to live a life based on sober reason alone.

  What Singer does with brilliant effect in this story is invert the conventional Spinoza topos in Jewish culture. Traditionally, Spinoza had served as a symbol of the radical maskilic break with the Written and Oral Law, as part of an embrace of secularism. Yet here the focus in not on the betrayal of Torah, but on Spinoza’s Ethics, which is, in effect, Fischelson’s surrogate holy writ. Having studied it for the last thirty years, “[h]e knew every proof, every corollary, every note by heart.” Yet the more he studied, “the more puzzling sentences, unclear passages, and cryptic remarks he found. Each sentence contained hints unfathomed by any of the students of Spinoza.”71 Like the first-century sage Ben Bag-Bag, who said of the Torah, “Turn it, turn it, for everything is in it,” Fischelson finds in the Ethics a bottomless pit of meaning and interpretation.72 On the rare occasions he leaves his apartment, he brings the Ethics with him and devotes any spare time to reading it. He displays a constant, almost fanatical recourse to passages from the Ethics to justify his stated positions (his refusal to fear death) and make sense of his experience (the joy caused by a cool evening breeze through his attic window)—as if justification can come only within the four cubits of Spinoza’s system. His greatest pleasure comes in looking out his window at night and observing the planets and constellations through his telescope, which provides him with the reassurance that “although he was only a weak, puny man . . . he was nevertheless a part of the cosmos, made of the same matter as the celestial bodies.” “In such moments,” the narrator continues, “Dr. Fischelson experienced the Amor
dei intellectualis which is, according to the philosopher from Amsterdam, the highest perfection of the mind.” The Book of Nature—“the earth, the sun, the stars of the Milky Way, and the infinite host of galaxies known only to infinite thought”—appears to stand as open to the ecstatic Fischelson as the Book of Revelation: Spinoza’s Ethics.73

  Yet, in ways both marked and subtle, even mischievous on the author’s part, Fischelson invariably falls well short of his lodestar. Singer hints at this incongruity between the hero and his intellectual hero even before mentioning the name Spinoza, starting with his very first sentence: “Dr. Nahum Fischelson paced back and forth in his garret room in Market Street.” The cause of his distress is the stifling summer heat, but already we know that Fischelson suffers from a very un-Spinozan restlessness and agitation. Further intimations of Fischelson’s deviation from his exemplar come toward the end of the first paragraph, once more before any reference to Spinoza:

  A candle in a brass holder was burning on the table and a variety of insects buzzed around the flame. Now and again one of the creatures would fly too close to the fire and sear its wings, or one would ignite and glow on the wick for an instant. At such moments Dr. Fischelson grimaced. His wrinkled face would twitch and beneath his disheveled mustache he would bite his lips. Finally he took a handkerchief from his pocket and waved it at the insects.

  “Away from there, fools and imbeciles,” he scolded. “You won’t get warm here; you’ll only burn yourself.”74

  To the reader directly or indirectly familiar with the early biography of Spinoza by Johannes Colerus, this little episode is an unmistakable wink. According to the Lutheran preacher, on the rare occasion Spinoza took a break from lens grinding or writing, one of his hobbies was to look for spiders and make them fight together, or throw flies into a cobweb, “and [he] was so well pleased with that Batttle, that he would sometimes break into laughter.”75 Fischelson, on the other hand, observes flies about to burn themselves and impulsively swats at them. His curmudgeonly tone notwithstanding, he seems to care that these insects might suffer pain and even death. On this point, Singer makes a revealing confession in the introduction to his collection of memoirs Love and Exile: