Earlier, Asa contemplated the leveling thrust of Spinoza’s metaphysical monism, its reduction of the “crying of a child” and “Hitler’s Mein Kampf” to modes of a single substance, with quiet acquiescence. Now, at least momentarily, he recoils from such resignation, recalling “another credo” (emunah): the belief in the personal, transcendent, even anthropomorphic God of the Bible, “[t]he Jewish God . . . who is jealous and vengeful” and “gave free will to choose between good and evil.”
Torn between these alternatives, Asa Heshel abruptly gives up committing to either (“What’s the use of all these speculations?”), yet later in the chapter this same internal tug-of-war between the Spinozan and the biblical God repeats itself. While his sister and her family go off to High Holiday prayers, Asa stays home, adamant that “[i]f you live as an unbeliever (apikores), you should die as an unbeliever.” As if by rote, he begins to browse the pages of Spinoza’s Ethics, yet, like Dr. Fischelson, quickly loses his bearings:
What did he want, that Amsterdam philosopher? Did he know what he was talking about, or was he simply splitting hairs? What is it, this substance and its endless attributes? Whom does he call God? What is thought? What is spirit? What are ideas? What sort of spider’s web has he woven here? Asa Heshel tried to run quickly through all the theorems, but the more he studied, the more confused he became. Some sentences were obvious; others now seemed to him unclear, ambiguous, a game of words. In essence, one could be both a Nazi and a Spinozist. True, the fascists were opposed to Spinoza, but only because he was a Jew. The professors of philosophy in Berlin, Leipzig, Bonn, are no doubt analyzing Spinoza now, just as the poets there are still writing poems, and the essayists are chattering about culture, aesthetics, ethics, personality. They had divided the roles among themselves. You fight and you sing; you philosophize and you rob; you slaughter children and you write history.108
Putting the Ethics aside, Asa Heshel grabs a Bible from the bookcase. Still racked with theological questions and misgivings, he nevertheless finds in the clarity of its commandments, prohibitions, and promises something sturdy to grasp hold of:
Suppose there is no God! Suppose the murderers are right! Suppose God himself is on Hitler’s side! Suppose Moses is a liar! His words are thereby not diminished but more exalted. One Jew, Moses ben Amram, stood up in opposition to nature, to man, to history and let his voice be heard: I am the Lord Thy God who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. . . . Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thous shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. . . . Be holy, for I, the Lord thy God, am holy. . . . Thou must not steal nor deal deceitfully nor fraudulently with thy neighbor. . . . Thou must not oppress nor rob they neighbor. . . . Thou must not be guilty of unjust verdicts. Thou must neither favor the little man nor be awed by the great. . . . Thou must not slander thy people. . . . Thou must not bear hatred for thy brother in thy heart. Thou must openly tell him of his offense, thus not take a sin upon yourself. Thou must not exact vengeance nor bear a grudge against thy people. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. . . . Thou shalt not follow the laws of the nations that I expel to make way for thee, because they have practiced all these things and I have come to detest them. And I say unto thee: thou shalt take possession of their soil. I myself will give it to thee, a land flowing with milk and honey. . . . And I will set thee apart from all these peoples to be mine . . . to be high above the other peoples I have made, in praise, in renown, and in honor, to be a nation consecrated to the Lord, your God. . . .
In the street, bombs kept exploding. Fires flamed. Cannons cracked. But Asa Heshel did not interrupt his reading. These words, indeed, are neither unclear nor ambiguous. The Nazi could not adopt them. These are not words but flames that the eternal Jew has flung at eternal evil.109
VIII.
Up until his death in 1991, I. B. Singer would continue to people his novels and short stories, particularly those of a semiautobiographical and nonsupernatural character, with intellectuals intermittently drawn to and repelled by Spinoza.110 The seventeenth-century philosopher remained code in his work for the illusory assumption of many a secular Jewish intellectual that the Ethics could be a new “tree of life,” a Spinozan Torah of rationalist self-government that might substitute for the Mosaic Torah of divine revelation and imperative. Never again, however, would Singer pen so scorching, indeed Zeiltinesque an indictment of Spinoza as one finds in the original Yiddish ending to The Family Moskat. True, the diatribe is given to an invented character, leaving the notoriously slippery Singer plausible deniability that Asa Heshel is simply a mouthpiece for his own ideas. Yet the fact that nowhere else in Singer’s work do we find so stinging and sustained a rebuke of Spinoza suggests that the author was indeed airing a very personal and sincere animus toward the “beyond good and evil” ethics and toward the leveling pantheism of Spinoza in the aftermath of the Shoah. Still, the exclusion of this coda from the English translation of The Family Moskat meant that most later readers were not privy to this fury. And the much greater readership for “The Spinoza of Market Street” following its translation in 1961 meant that Singer’s Spinoza image in the popular mind would ultimately owe more to the lighthearted caricature of Nahum Fischelson than to the much darker view of the Jewish Spinozist in the case of Asa Heshel. Perhaps this is how Singer—whose criticisms of Spinoza in later writings and interviews contained little in the way of invective—would have wanted it.111
Be that as it may, Singer clearly judged the modern Jewish attachment to Spinoza to be a path wrongly taken, a source not merely of comedy, but of tragedy. Contrary to the images from previous chapters in this book, Singer’s Spinoza was neither a secular messiah come to liberate the Jews from the ghetto and usher in a religion of humanity; nor was he a prototype of, and posthumous returnee to, a revived Jewish political and ethnic nation. Above all, for the emancipated Jew alienated from orthodoxy and the law and in search of a new safe harbor, Spinoza was no “new” guide to the perplexed.
Epilogue
Spinoza Redivivus in the Twenty-First Century
I.
Six weeks before he died, Irving Howe (1920–1993) delivered his last lecture in front of an audience at Hunter College. Fittingly, it was a eulogy, albeit one he had been giving, in one form or another, for nearly two decades, starting with his magisterial history of the East European Jewish immigrant experience, World of Our Fathers (1976). In this talk, entitled “The End of Jewish Secularism,” the renowned critic, editor, and socialist paid final respects to Yiddishkayt, that amalgam of Yiddishism, leftism, and this-worldly messianism that had flourished in the heyday of East European Jewish immigration to America but that, two generations later had largely run its course. “I think,” he lamented, “we are reaching a dead end.” With Yiddish culture, the Jewish labor movement, and socialist politics in terminal decline, secular Jewishness in America had lost its moorings, and what had emerged in the postwar era as substitutes—the memory of the Holocaust and solidarity with Israel—would not be enough to sustain it. The one task left was to “say farewell with love and gratitude” to the “world that made us,” Howe claimed—to give the remains not of Judaism, but of Jewish secularism, a decent burial.1
Howe’s eulogy was focused on North America alone, but late twentieth-century pessimism about the future of cultural Judaism was hardly limited to the Jewish Diaspora. Within the State of Israel as well—the “grandest creation of nineteenth-century Jewish secularism,” in the words of one scholar—its prospects were in doubt.2 By the 1990s the foothold that the Labor party—the founding party of the state—had long held in Israeli politics was a thing of the past, the hegemony of its socialist-Zionist ethos an even more distant memory. The old spiritual Zionist ideal of a Hebrew culture that would be at once universal and yet affirmatively and knowledgably Jewish, expressed through words, concepts, and symbols originating in the Jewish tradition but transposed to a secular key, was falling victim,
in the eyes of many, to a pincer movement. On one flank it was threatened by a resurgent, increasingly politicized orthodoxy, in both its religious-Zionist and haredi (Ultraorthodox) varieties, which rejected the very notion of a secular Judaism and claimed a monopoly on the definition of Jewishness. On the other flank it was confronted by a rising generation of “new Israelis” who were either ideologically opposed, or, more frequently, simply indifferent to a Jewishness they deemed insufferably parochial.3 Indeed, it was this latter “post-Zionist” trend, characterized (and, for the most part, celebrated) by the Israeli journalist Tom Segev in Elvis in Jerusalem (2002), that appeared to have the wind at its back by the turn of the millennium, reflected in the ever-mounting number of Israelis, motivated primarily by the individualist and consumerist values of the modern West, who showed little of the interest of their Ashkenazi Zionist elders in justifying their secularism in Jewish terms.4 Squeezed by these two demographic trends, Jewish secularism, in Israel as in other centers of Jewish life, seemed to many to be in a terminal state, destined for a slow but inexorable decline.
Judged from the perspective of a decade into the new century, the obituaries of Howe and others were, perhaps, premature. No less an authority on American Jewish history than Jonathan Sarna has claimed that, “in our own day, almost like the proverbial phoenix, Jewish secularism has made something of a comeback,” defying Howe’s bleak diagnosis which “at the time, most observers agreed with.”5 As evidence of this “unexpected rebirth,” Sarna points to the amazing success of the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, whose mission of rescuing Yiddish books, which seemed to many quixotic when the organization was founded in 1980, today seems clairvoyant with the recent vogue of klezmer music and Yiddish culture. He points to the group Reboot (also, interestingly enough, based in Amherst), a self-proclaimed vanguard of “thought-leaders and tastemakers” that runs invitation-only annual conferences that are a kind of Davos for well-connected Jewish thirtysomethings to think of creative ways to “reboot” the “culture, rituals, and traditions” of Judaism for Generations X and Y through projects like the recent architectural competition Sukkah City. He points to the overtly heretical and anti-establishment (and now discontinued) magazine Heeb: The New Jew Review, described in its original 2002 mission statement as a “take-no prisoners quarterly for the plugged-in and preached-out,” and to the more mainstream American Jewish World Service, founded in 1985, which stands apart from most American Jewish charitable organizations in its focus on global rather than specifically Jewish causes.
None of the above, however, has made as concerted an effort to reinvigorate secular Jewish culture and identity in the past decade as the last organization Sarna singles out, the Center for Cultural Judaism (CCJ) and its parent institution the Posen Foundation. Established in 2003 with a mission of bringing Jewish secularism to the nearly one-half of American Jews who described themselves as “secular” or “somewhat secular” in a 2001 survey, the CCJ has had an especially noticeable—and controversial—impact on Jewish studies programs on college campuses.6 Since 2003 more than thirty of some of the finest universities in North America, including Harvard and Brown, have received grants from the CCJ on the basis of proposals to expand course offerings related to the study of Jewish secularism and secularization.7
Standing behind this sharp secular turn in Jewish studies is Felix Posen, a British Jewish energy magnate, philanthropist, and self-described “cultural Jew” with a calling. Now in his eighties, Posen has emerged in the past decade as the patron par excellence of secular Jewish education. Before being badly hurt by the Bernard Madoff scandal that broke out in late 2008, the Swiss-based Posen Foundation, run jointly by Posen and his son Daniel, had been donating over four million dollars each year to finance educational projects and curricula related to secular Judaism.8 Moreover, while its affiliate, the CCJ, focuses on North America, the Posen Foundation directs its efforts worldwide, and in fact began its work in 2000 by awarding grant money to universities in Israel, where its influence has been particularly profound. With the exception of Bar-Ilan, Israel’s flagship religious-Zionist university, nearly every major university in Israel contains Posen-seeded courses (in the case of Tel Aviv University, even an academic program) related to secular Jewish culture and identity. The Posen Foundation is also responsible for the recent publication of Zeman yehudi hadash: Tarbut yehudit be-‘idan hiloni [New Jewish Time: Jewish Culture in a Secular Age], a five-volume encyclopedia on the subject of Jewish secularism and secularization with contributions from some of the leading scholars of Jewish studies in both the United States and Israel.9 Meanwhile, the first of ten volumes of the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, an “anthology of important literary works produced primarily by Jews from the biblical period to the end of 2002,” is slated to appear sometime in 2012 under the imprint of Yale University Press.
Are these developments evidence of a genuine revival of Jewish secularism? Or is it merely the perception of crisis that is fueling a flurry of efforts at cultural reconstruction, while the long-term indicators remain decidedly bearish? I will qualify my impressions with the trite but true claim that (to borrow from Star Trek’s Dr. McCoy) “I’m a historian, not a fortune-teller.” The dubious record of mid-twentieth-century secularization theorists in predicting the inevitable decline of religion in the developed world should caution those who make similar predictions regarding secularism. That said, I remain skeptical that a secular Jewish culture of any real coherence, robustness, and depth, especially in the Diaspora, can survive the loss of what was once, in essence, a surrogate religion of Jewish secularism. Reports of the demise of the latter were not, to my mind, premature. I would also submit that if, as Yosef Yerushalmi writes, the “blandly generic term secular Jew gives no indication of the richly nuanced variety of the species,” we can expect this variety to grow exponentially—and the label “secular Jew” to turn even more “blandly generic”—as hybrid identities become increasingly the norm.10
Whatever the future of secular Judaism, the various projects for revitalizing it in the present—as the Posen encyclopedias and myriad course syllabi and book lists make clear—have boosted an interest in retracing its past. And this genealogical imperative has given new life to an old controversy: Spinoza’s Jewishness, and more specifically the issue of whether he was the “first secular Jew.”
II.
Periodizations are notoriously arbitrary and subjective, and in the case of contemporary developments typically premature as well. Nevertheless, a strong argument can be made for opening the latest chapter in Spinoza’s Jewish reception in 1988. In that year there appeared in Israel a thick volume on the sources and reverberations of Spinoza’s philosophical revolution entitled Shpinozah ve-kofrim ’aherim [Spinoza and Other Heretics].11 Its author was Yirmiyahu Yovel, then a professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Yovel was already associated with Spinoza: Four years earlier, in 1984, he had founded the Jerusalem Spinoza Institute, only the second society in the history of Israel devoted to promoting the study and diffusion of Spinoza’s thought.12 Yet it was the publication of Spinoza and Other Heretics that made Yovel, almost overnight, into something of a celebrity intellectual in Israel, while at the same time signaling, if only in hindsight, the renewal of an obsession with Spinoza’s Jewish legacy and identity that, two decades later, shows no signs of abating.
The immediate success enjoyed by Yovel’s Spinoza book in Israel was astounding. By early 1989 this nearly six-hundred-page tome (it would be translated as two volumes in English) had run through four editions with over five thousand copies sold.13 Incredibly, in December 1988 Spinoza and Other Heretics was the top-selling book in Israel. Public discussions of the book at universities—the kind of seminars that typically managed to attract “a few university eggheads and maybe a casual drop-in or two looking for a place to snooze,” wrote one American reporter—proved to be standing-room-only affairs. “Newspapers that usu
ally show more interest in British soccer scores than Dutch liberal ideas,” he added, “devoted columns to the long-dead thinker. A soft-porn magazine coupled a portrait of Spinoza, who was known for living a saintly life, with a cheesecake cover picture. He wore a frock, she a tattoo.”14
The extraordinary interest elicited by Yovel’s book generated extraordinary interest in its own right. Why, critics and pundits debated, would an academic book on Spinoza, however readable, rise to the best-seller list? Spinoza’s great innovation, Yovel argued, was his “philosophy of immanence,” with its emphasis on the fact that “this-worldly existence [is] all there is . . . the only actual being and the sole source of ethical value.”15 Most of Spinoza and Other Heretics was dedicated to tracing this “radically new philosophical principle” backward and forward in time: In the first volume of the English translation, entitled The Marrano of Reason (1989), Yovel underscored the crucial importance of Spinoza’s Marrano lineage in the Amsterdam philosopher’s conflating of God with nature; in the second, The Adventures of Immanence (1992), he charted the peregrinations of this allegedly major strain of modern philosophy in the work of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.
Yet Yovel’s book did not become a cultural phenomenon on account of its theses concerning transcendence and immanence. Nor would an argument for Spinoza’s pioneering modernity alone have been enough to make this book a surprise best seller. Its broad appeal was a symptom of something else, as even the author admitted. The first full year of the first Palestinian intifada in the occupied territories was 1988; it was also a year racked by the “who is a Jew?” question, when Orthodox parties came close to succeeding in their campaign to amend the Law of Return to exclude from automatic citizenship anyone converted to Judaism under non-Orthodox supervision. “People here do not know what they have in common,” claimed one professor of Jewish history. “It is supposed to be their Jewishness, but what is Jewishness?”16
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