The First Modern Jew

by Daniel B. Schwartz

  Appearing amid what he called “renewed identity issues in the homeland,” Yovel’s book put forward a resolutely “secular” definition of Jewishness while providing this definition with a precursor.17 “A philosopher of immanence and secularization,” Yovel wrote, in the epilogue to volume one, “was he [Spinoza] also the first secular Jew?”18 While paying lip service to the anachronism of this classification in the context of the seventeenth century, Yovel opined that Spinoza, who “left the Jewish congregation but did not enter the church,” was indeed a harbinger of “what later generations would call ‘Jewish secularism.’”19 He was a forerunner not simply because of what he renounced—namely, commitment to Halakhah and deference to rabbinic authority on the one hand, and conversion to another religion on the other—but because of what he was one of the first, allegedly, to realize could not be so easily renounced: namely, one’s Jewishness as a purely existential identity. According to Yovel, this insight stemmed from Spinoza’s reflections on the experience of his Marrano forebears and contemporaries in Spain and Portugal. The stubbornness of Jewish self-identification within the ranks of the conversos, fueled in part by the emergence of a “new, existential kind of anti-Semitism” on the Iberian Peninsula that impeded the absorption of even the most sincere “New Christians,” made the Amsterdam freethinker aware of a gap “between the religion of the Jews and their actual, more fundamental existence.”20 Jewishness was not exhausted by belief or practice; left over was “a basic and collective dimension of Jewish identity” that linked “Jews, Marranos, and a nonbeliever like himself,” a secular peoplehood that Spinoza intuited without being able fully to articulate.21 For Yovel, Spinoza thus contemplated (without ever endorsing) another remedy to what would become known as the “Jewish Question”—the reclamation of Jewish sovereignty within an independent state. Yovel entertains the possibility that Spinoza was a “closet Zionist.” He “may not have defined Zionism as a goal”—for this was “an anachronistic solution,” one that “[i]n Spinoza’s time, had no social basis and was not even a glimmer on the horizon of consciousness”—but “he pointed out the methodological approach”: namely, “an utterly prosaic, natural, and secular” interpretation of Judaism.22

  Eight years after Yovel’s book appeared, Yale University political theorist Steven B. Smith delivered his own brief for Spinoza’s prophetic relevance for Judaism and liberalism in Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (1997). While acknowledging that Spinoza, “if he was an advocate of a religiously tolerant liberal state as one solution to the Jewish Question . . . was also a founder, perhaps the founder, of political Zionism,” Smith nevertheless put him squarely in the assimilationist camp. “Spinoza’s solution to the theologico-political problem can be summarized in a single word: assimilation.”23 The thrust of the Treatise was a strategy for “dissolving group identities, not accommodating them,” since, for Spinoza, only by suppressing “the politics of group identity” could individual freedom and intellectual independence be safeguarded.24 To the extent that Judaism would survive in Spinoza’s ideal polity, it would be as a privatized confession in harmony with the liberal civil religion of the secular state, not as a separate ethnic minority or subculture. Indeed, Smith’s Spinoza is ultimately a contemporary culture warrior, called on to fight the American postmodernists and communitarians who would elevate diversity, multiculturalism, and identity politics over the “older idea of a common citizenship.” Like Yovel, Smith endorsed the view of Spinoza as a “prototype of the emancipated Jew” and forerunner of Jewish secularism, but what he meant by this is somewhat different. For whereas the Israeli Yovel diagnosed in Spinoza a deep if inchoate sense of Jewish peoplehood, the American Smith construed Spinoza’s secular Jewishness as a commitment to the liberal values of reason, cosmopolitanism, and individual freedom over any corporate ties.

  The years since have seen a proliferation of works that follow in the footsteps of Yovel and Smith by asserting Spinoza’s pertinence to problems of Jewish identity in the present. An inventory of such works would include several academic books, which often make the case for Spinoza’s Jewish modernity in ways quite different from the arguments of Smith and Yovel.25 It would include Rebecca Goldstein’s whimsical Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (2006), a personal memoir-cum-philosophical meditation on Spinoza’s Jewishness, in which the quest for a Jewish impulse buried beneath the geometrical proofs of Spinoza’s rationalism serves quite explicitly as a vehicle for wrestling with dilemmas of Jewish identity at the turn of the twenty-first century.26 It would include, by my count, two plays, in Hebrew and English, that center on the excommunication of Spinoza, as well as an Israeli film that imagines a Spinoza reborn in late-twentieth-century Tel Aviv.27 Finally, it would include further contributions by both Smith and Yovel to this literature, most notably the latter’s translation of the Ethics into Hebrew in 2003, only the second Hebrew translation of Spinoza’s magnum opus since Jacob Klatzkin’s of the mid-1920s.28 In his introduction to the translation, Yovel justifies it on explicitly populist grounds, claiming that the “majority of [Hebrew] readers in our time, students and others, bemoan the difficulty of understanding the Hebrew version of Klatzkin” and require a more familiar idiom.29 And to come full circle, Yovel served earlier in the last decade as editor in chief for the Posen encyclopedia on Jewish secularization, thus clearly emerging as the person in whom the revived interest in Spinoza and the broader campaign to rejuvenate Jewish secularism are most intimately conjoined.

  This new wave of appropriations of Spinoza as a prototype of the modern, secular Jew, however, has not gone unchallenged. One of the first to issue a rebuttal was Richard Popkin, the late historian of early-modern Western European thought. In a lacerating review of the first volume of Yovel’s diptych in The New Republic, Popkin derided his claim that Spinoza was “in some meaningful way, both a secularist and a Jew” as a “cliché . . . based on only a few morsels of evidence.”30 In one of his last published essays, Popkin went so far as to question the historical significance of the excommunication itself, claiming that its fashioning into a milestone in the confrontation between orthodoxy and modernity, and eventually into a “turning point” in Jewish history itself, was a myth propagated by later writers. All in all, he concludes, the herem, at least in context, “was a minor, local event in the Amsterdam community, one that was never discussed later on.”31 More recently, Steven Nadler, the author of Spinoza: A Life (1999), the preeminent biography of Spinoza in English, has issued his own refutation of the view that traces Jewish secularism back to Spinoza. Nadler insists that the adult Spinoza “seems to have had practically no sense of Jewish identity,” in part because being Jewish, for Spinoza, was totally bound up with observance of the Halakhah, which he had famously rejected. Contra Yovel, Nadler maintains that Spinoza had no concept whatsoever, not even a vague premonition, of Jewishness as an existential identity. It might, then, make sense to consider Spinoza as “perhaps the most prominent early modern model of the secular individual,” yet he was “not the first secular Jew, for he was not a secular Jew at all.”32 Finally, in a piqued rejoinder in Commentary to Goldstein’s book, Allan Nadler calls for an end to “two centuries of determined Jewish efforts to restore the wayward heretic to the bosom of his people,” noting “how little Spinoza has to contribute to current debates over Jewish identity and Jewish destiny.”33 At the heart of this backlash is the belief that Spinoza must be set loose from his legion of Jewish invokers, reclaimers, and, yes, betrayers, and returned to his seventeenth-century context, where he can be, simply, Spinoza.

  III.

  Broadly speaking, then, we find in the recent literature two basic positions on Spinoza’s place in the world of Jewish secularism. In one corner stand those—let us, a bit crudely, call them the “presentists”—who seek to draw Spinoza nearer to us, by vouching for his anticipation of the modern, secular Jew and driving home his relevance to the contemporary culture wars. In the other c
orner stand those—let us, a bit less crudely, call them the “contextualists”—who look askance at interpretations of Spinoza as a Jewish precursor, judging such readings guilty of everything from historical anachronism at the very least to a groundless “Judaizing” of the Amsterdam philosopher more problematically.

  In this book, I have argued for a different way of conceiving the relationship between Spinoza and secular Jewish identity. Like the “contextualists,” I am deeply skeptical of the claim that Spinoza was the first secular Jew, and not just because the emphasis on a single progenitor lies suspiciously close to myth. It is, of course, impossible to know what unexpressed and perhaps unconscious thoughts and feelings lurked in the psyche of the Amsterdam philosopher. We cannot rule out the possibility that Jewishness continued to figure in his self-concept, however elusively. The absence of evidence is not necessarily the evidence of absence. But this absence should nevertheless give us pause. All too often, expansive claims for Spinoza’s initiation or even simply anticipation of a secular Jewish outlook are found to rest on table scraps: a fragment from a letter here, a book excerpt ripped out of context there, even passages with no clear allusions to Jewishness at all beyond those read into them. Historicizing the idea of Spinoza’s break with Amsterdam Jewry as a “turning point” between the old and the new, as we have done here, providing this notion of a beginning with its own beginning and charting some of its most salient iterations in Jewish cultural memory reveals how much retrojection has been involved in making Spinoza a forerunner and exemplar of the “secular Jew.” Dilemmas of identity of later vintage are referred back to the Amsterdam heretic, even as he is wrested from his seventeenth-century milieu and forced into the present to serve as a mouthpiece for some version or another of secular Jewishness. Seen in the longue durée of Spinoza’s reception, it becomes clear that the efforts of aforementioned “presentists” to link up with Spinoza has a history that stops well short of the philosopher himself. Their true “precursors,” I would submit, are the nineteenth-century Jewish intellectuals who were the first to resurrect Spinoza as their standard-bearer.

  To claim that Spinoza was not the originator of Jewish secularism, however, is not to say that he was immaterial to its origins. There may be no causal nexus or even strong connection between the seventeenth-century philosopher and the rise of secular Jewish identity, but we would be ill advised to separate them entirely. What this book has shown is that whatever Spinoza, the Spinoza of history, may have intended, the Spinoza of memory has been crucial to constructions of nontraditional Jewishness—assimilationist, cosmopolitan, and national—from the nineteenth century to the present. Between the reception of Spinoza and the formation of secular Jewish identity (or identities), in other words, an intimate link most certainly exists. Obviously, there have been many self-described Jewish secularists who have defined their Jewishness without reference to Spinoza. By no means was the reception of Spinoza a necessary cause of Jewish intellectual secularization. That said, no other cultural icon has figured as prominently, as diversely, and as recurrently in fantasies of the modern, secular Jew as Spinoza.

  We can thus agree with the “contextualists” that the common perception of Spinoza as the first secular Jew is a myth that has more to do with fantasy than reality without rejecting it out of hand. Dispelling myths is one of the principal tasks of historical criticism; understanding their effects, however, is too. As Peter Novick has written, “A central problem for any new cognitive structure is to legitimize its epistemological foundation. This may involve a myth of an individual genius or hero whose personal qualities exemplify the way in which the new knowledge is acquired. . . . Without some such myth, cognitive structures lack grounding and authority.”34 What Novick asserts with regard to the professionalization of history holds equally true of what Yosef Yerushalmi called “the historically problematic and not self-evident” condition of being “a Jew without God.”35 In both cases, the quest for legitimacy for ideas, practices, and ways of being in the world without clear precedent generated new foundation myths, from the myth of “historical objectivity” as embodied in the figure of Leopold von Ranke to the myth of Spinoza, the first “secular Jew.”

  Another advantage of treating as myth Spinoza’s pioneering reputation is that it reveals the complex interplay of the secular and the sacred in the fashioning of Spinoza and, by extension, in modern Jewish self-fashioning. As a window into the effort to transform Jewishness by freeing it from a halakhic framework, the Jewish rehabilitation of Spinoza is rightly considered a barometer of secularization. Yet this process is seen through a glass darkly if perceived only as a one-way street from the holy to the profane. The rhetoric of this recovery—its dominant metaphors, schemata, and tropes—suggests that the “religious” is not so much displaced in the drive to create a new Jewish culture (or “new Hebrew man”) as it is deployed in a new context. Examined up close, each of the appropriations analyzed in this book—from Auerbach’s rendering of Spinoza as the “redeemer of mankind” to efforts of Klausner and other Zionists to redeem Spinoza by rescinding the ban—contains notes of both sacralization and secularization. Indeed, the brilliance of I. B. Singer’s parody derives precisely from its laying bare the rabbinic, exegetical mindset that continues to haunt the Nahum Fischelsons and Asa Heshels for whom the Ethics has simply replaced the Talmud, and who respond to life’s challenges not with the bold Selbstdenken of a Spinoza, but by asking, in essence, “what would Spinoza do?” For all its caricature, Singer’s portrait of the Jewish Spinozist poses a serious question: Namely, if Spinoza has served as a charismatic rebbe and moreh for generations of Jewish freethinkers, how freethinking have the latter been really? If one of the most common techniques for creating a secular Jewish culture has been, historically, the canonization of classic heretics like Spinoza, does the use of the adjective secular to characterize this culture conceal as much as it reveals? Is a label along the lines of “first secular Jew” even truly secular?

  IV.

  On the surface, there is little about the contemporary revival of Spinoza in modern Jewish culture that is original. The perception of Spinoza as the first modern or secular Jew, the tension between assimilationist and ethnic or national interpretations of this identity, the extent to which the rising interest in the Amsterdam philosopher cuts across disciplines and genres to the point that it constitutes a genuine cultural phenomenon: As has been shown, precedents can be found for all these features of the current moment in the prior history of Spinoza’s Jewish reception. Above all, I would argue, the wave of Jewish appropriations of Spinoza in the present is driven by the same all-too-human need that has motivated such appropriations in the past: It is the need to imagine origins, to develop a sense of a beginning, all as part of the struggle over where to draw the boundaries of Jewishness and whether a secular Jewish identity is even possible. To close, however, I would like to offer some thoughts, admittedly quite speculative, about two aspects of the most recent chapter in Spinoza’s Jewish reception that strike me as new, if not in an absolute sense at least in their overall prominence.

  The first involves the nature of the awareness behind appropriation. Throughout this book, I have stressed that the concept of Spinoza as the first modern or secular Jew is a constructed image that tells us more about the appropriators of the seventeenth-century heretic than about the heretic himself. If I may give a playful misreading of that wonderful epigraph from William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”—“The Child Is Father of the Man”—we might say that the intellectual “children” of Spinoza have been, in effect, “father” to their own “founding father.” They have claimed descent from a progenitor they themselves created. This was as true of Auerbach in the nineteenth century as it was of Singer in the twentieth. In each of the case studies, we found that it was problems of identity in the present—the need to provide a secular Jewish existence with both cover and content—that underlay the birth of Spinoza as a modern Jewish prototyp
e and sustained this image throughout its many iterations. Nevertheless, the participants in this formation of a precursor generally did so naively. They transposed Spinoza to their own frames of reference with at most a fleeting idea of the distance being eclipsed.

  In one of the most recent additions to the Jewish cult of Spinoza, Goldstein’s Betraying Spinoza, this lack of irony about his appropriation is the first thing to go. A novelist and philosopher, Goldstein begins her book with an account of her adolescent introduction to Spinoza in a Jewish history class at her strictly Orthodox, all-girls high school on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Her teacher’s deprecating (if surprisingly well-informed) discussion of the life of this apikores notwithstanding, the author, a budding skeptic herself, identified with Spinoza. “There was a moment long ago,” she writes, recounting this discovery, “when I knew next to nothing about the magnificent reconfiguration of reality laid out in the system of Spinoza, and yet when I felt I knew something about what it was like to have been him, the former yeshiva student, Baruch Spinoza.”36 As this book has shown, moments like the one Goldstein describes have a time-honored place in the Jewish reception of Spinoza. Her response echoes that of the eighteen-year-old Auerbach, declaring in 1830 after reading about Spinoza for the first time, “I shall now be called Moses Baruch Berthold Benedict Auerbach.” For both, a certain kinship with Spinoza—a sense of inhabiting a similar if not identical predicament—occurred at a decisive stage in their intellectual maturation, providing them with an exemplar for constructing a new identity. But this teenage infatuation is punctured in Goldstein’s case by the philosophical understanding of Spinoza acquired in later years. A serious engagement with the rationalist metaphysics found in the Ethics causes her to question whether reading its author as a model Jewish thinker, even a heretical one, amounts to “betraying Spinoza,” straying from his utterly impersonal vision of reality through a fixation on identity. From there, much of the rest of Betraying Spinoza consists of a rather derivative explanation of why Jewish concerns in fact were a determining factor in the genesis of Spinoza’s philosophy. Still, one wonders whether Goldstein’s method of drawing attention to the act of appropriation itself, questioning the “Judaizing” of Spinoza even while proceeding to do just that, marks a new, postmodern turn in the Jewish cult of the Amsterdam heretic, wherein lighthearted betrayal is generally fine, so long as it is conscious.