The second novelty has to do with a change in the vector of Jewish reclamations of Spinoza. For virtually all the thinkers profiled in this study, the attraction to Spinoza was part of a basic biographical arc from a traditional upbringing toward a modern, secular Jewish identity. Over the course of the nineteenth century, an encounter with Spinoza became a rite of passage in the maturation of the secular Jewish intellectual. The “conversion” story of the radical maskil came to include a de rigueur brush with the biblical criticism and repudiation of the Law of the Treatise, the Deus sive Natura of the Ethics, and the myth of a martyr for intellectual independence and integrity above all else. The degree to which this “narrative” became a stereotype of the culture is reflected and ironized in I. B. Singer’s fiction, which takes for granted an understanding of Spinoza as a code for secular heresy and rejection of halakhic authority. This is how the terse observation that Asa Heshel arrives in Warsaw from the shtetl with a worn Hebrew translation of the Ethics is able to convey so much about his character, even before we gain any substantial knowledge of him.
Certainly, Spinoza has not ceased to appeal to rebels in the mold of the classical Jewish heretic who rejects the very tradition in which he or she has learned; this is confirmed by Goldstein’s own autobiographical account of her path to secular Jewish identity via Spinoza. And the popularity of recent books like Shalom Auslander’s Foreskin’s Lament: A Memoir (2007) suggests that one of the most archetypal plotlines in the literature of Jewish secularism—the story of the Orthodox Jewish boy turned enfant terrible who angrily and dramatically breaks with his religious past, struggling to free himself of an ancestral God and law that for all his efforts, he is unable entirely to shake—continues to resonate. As stated, however, the threat to secular Jewishness today comes not only from the religious Right but from the swelling ranks of nominally “secular” Jews for whom estrangement from Judaism is an inheritance rather than a lived experience and who have little need to struggle against a tradition they are too far removed from to fight. More and more, it seems, the nontraditional Jew as apikores, even as self-consciously “wicked son,” has given way to the “one who does not even know how to ask.” Could it be that for this “lost” soul, the turn to the prototype of the secular Jewish intellectual allegedly “lost” to Jewish culture might also be understood as a return to identity? For the perplexed of our own day, it would seem that Spinoza has moved beyond his customary role in the modern Jewish imagination as a guide beyond Judaism. Perhaps, paradoxically, through his very marginality, he has also come to represent the hope of a way back.
Notes
Preface
1. Philip Weiss, “Baruch Spinoza Goes into Rehab at Yivo Institute,” Mondoweiss, November 1, 2006, http://mondoweiss.net/2006/11/baruch_spinoza_.html.
2. Steven Nadler, “The Jewish Spinoza,” in Journal of the History of Ideas 70, no. 3 (2009): 506.
3. Roger-Pol Droit, “Spinoza: L’homme qui a révolutionné la philosophie,” in Le Point, July 12, 2007. The issue contained a few other short articles on Spinoza in addition to the cover story.
4. “New Jerusalem Press Round Up to Date,” The Theater J Blog, July 6, 2010, http://theaterjblogs.wordpress.com/2010/07/06/new-jerusalem-press-round-up-to-date/. The play proved such a hit at the box office that Theater J has already scheduled a return engagement for its 2011–2012 season.
Introduction: Spinoza’s Jewish Modernities
1. Yosef H. Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven, 1993), 10.
2. See Steven B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (New Haven, 1997); Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001); Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics, vol. 2, The Adventures of Immanence (Princeton, 1992); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2000); Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York, 2003).
3. See Frederick C. Beiser, The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 171–88; Eccy de Jonge, Spinoza and Deep Ecology: Challenging Traditional Approaches to Environmentalism (Farnham, UK, 2004).
4. David Biale, “Historical Heresies and Modern Jewish Identity,” in Jewish Social Studies 8 (2002): 115. The “non-Jewish Jew” label was coined by the British Marxist historian of Polish Jewish origin Isaac Deutscher. See The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (London, 1968).
5. Yirmiyahu Yovel’s Spinoza and Other Heretics, vol. 1: The Marrano of Reason and Steven B. Smith’s Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity are two of the most important “master narratives” of Jewish secularization of recent vintage to begin with Spinoza. On the other side of the fence are scholars such as Steven Nadler and the late Richard Popkin, who while acknowledging that Spinoza drew on Jewish sources in the development of his philosophy, deny that he either envisioned, or would conceivably have endorsed, a specifically and self-consciously Jewish secularism. See Popkin, “Notes from Underground,” The New Republic 202, no. 21 (May 21, 1990): 41; Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge, UK, 1999), and more recently “Spinoza and the Origins of Jewish Secularism,” in Religion and Ethnicity? Jewish Identities in Evolution (New Brunswick, NJ, 2009), 59–68. I discuss these authors and the ongoing debate over whether Spinoza was the first “secular Jew” at greater length in my Epilogue.
6. There is still no book-length study, in English, expressly devoted to the Jewish reception of Spinoza. The Israeli philosophers Eliezer Schweid and Ze’ev Levy have written voluminously in Hebrew (and, in Levy’s case, occasionally in German, his native tongue) about Jewish responses to Spinoza. Schweid, the 1994 Israel Prize laureate, is particularly well known for interpreting virtually the entirety of modern Jewish thought as a response to the Spinozan challenge. Yet both Schweid and Levy approach this topic as philosophers, not historians. Their chief concern is what place, if any, to assign Spinoza in Jewish thought—the question of whether he was a Jewish philosopher. I come at this subject from a very different angle, as I explain below. See Eliezer Schweid, Ha-yehudi ha-boded veha-Yahadut (Tel Aviv, 1974); idem, Toledot ha-filosofyah ha-yehudit: Ha-me’ah ha-tesha ‘esreh (Jerusalem, 1977); Ze’ev Levy, Shpinozah u-musag ha-yahadut: Tefisah ve-gilguleha (Tel Aviv, 1972) and Baruch Spinoza—seine Aufnahme durch die jüdischen Denker in Deutschland (2001).
7. Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA, 1997), 8–9.
8. My comments here are in line with those of Steven Aschheim in his examination of the reception and reworking of Nietzsche’s thought in twentieth-century Germany. See The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (Berkeley, 1994), 4–5.
9. Moshe Idel, Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism: Pillars, Lines, Ladders (Budapest, 2005), 11.
10. For an analysis of how one of the quintessential symbols of the Revolution—the storming of the Bastille—became a cultural paradigm with shifting meanings over time, see Hans-Joseph Lüsebrink and Rolf Reichardt, The Bastille: A History of a Symbol of Despotism and Freedom, trans. Norbert Schürer (Durham, NC, 1997).
11. For the now classic account of secularization as a “rupture,” see Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA, 1985). Jonathan I. Israel’s multivolume revision of the historiography of the Enlightenment, beginning with his Radical Enlightenment, is one of the most emphatic recent arguments for modernity as a rupture with the past.
12. This perspective has traditionally been associated with critics of modernity determined to expose the theological atavisms within discourse deemed “secular” and thereby puncture the Enlightenment “grand narrative” of modernity as a progressive break from a religious past. See, for example, Carl Schmidt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago, 2006 [1923]); Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago, 1957). Yet studies in t
his vein are not ipso facto hostile to modernity. For recent works that stress religious lineages for modernity and the Enlightenment, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, 2007); Michael A. Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago, 2008); and David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton, 2008).
13. Manuel Joël, Spinoza’s Theologisch-politischer Traktat auf seine Quellen geprüft (Breslau, 1870); Harry A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza: Unfolding the Latent Processes of His Reasoning (Cambridge, MA, 1983 [1934]); Steven Nadler, Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind (Oxford, 2001).
14. Israel’s Spinoza was the “intellectual backbone” of the Radical Enlightenment, which—according to Israel—”rejected all compromise with the past and sought to sweep away existing structures entirely.” See Radical Enlightenment, 11.
15. On this, see also Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge, UK, 2003).
16. Ben Halpern, “Secularism,” in Arthur A. Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr (eds.), Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought (New York, 1987), 863. For a new history of Jewish secular thought that stresses its inflection by rabbinic and medieval Jewish philosophical concepts of God, Torah, and Israel, see David Biale, Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought (Princeton, 2010).
17. See Israel, Radical Enlightenment; Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford, 2006); and A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton, 2009).
18. See Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Middletown, CT, 2005).
19. Steven Nadler, “The Jewish Spinoza”: 491–510.
20. Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, 9.
Chapter 1: Ex-Jew, Eternal Jew
1. On the early publication history of the Theological-Political Treatise, see Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 275–85. For brevity’s sake I will mostly refer to the Theological-Political Treatise as simply the Treatise throughout the rest of this book.
2. The phrase appeared in an April 1671 letter from J. G. Graevius to the philosopher Leibniz and is discussed below. See Jakob Freudenthal, ed., Die Lebensgeschichte Spinoza’s in Quellenschriften, Urkunden, und nichtamtlichen Nachrichten (Leipzig, 1899), 193; Ernst Altkirch, ed., Maledictus und Benedictus: Spinoza im Urteil des Volkes und der Geistigen bis auf Constantin Brunner (Leipzig, 1924), 29.
3. Freudenthal, 192; Altkirch, 26.
4. Freudenthal, 193; Altkirch, 29.
5. Spinoza, “Letter 45,” in Completed Works, trans. Samuel Shirley, ed. Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis, 2002), 884.
6. Freudenthal, 174; Altkirch, 51.
7. The Catholic Church placed the Treatise on the index of forbidden books in 1679 and added the Opera posthuma in 1691. See Altkirch, 54.
8. A leading early spokesperson for the moderate Cartesian attack on Spinoza was Regner à Mansvelt, a professor of theology at the University of Utrecht. See Altkirch, 34.
9. This gibe appeared in Kortholt’s De tribus impostoribus (1680), a rejoinder to the radical deist branding of Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed as “impostors” that applied this same moniker to Hobbes, Herbert of Cherbury, and Spinoza. See Altkirch, 61.
10. See Kortholt: “Benedictus Spinoza, who should more rightly be named Maledictus; for the earth, full of thorns [spinosa terra] as a result of the divine curse [Gen. 3:17–18], has never borne a more accursed man, nor one whose writings are strewn with so many thorns.” In Altkirch, 61.
11. This came in a poem by Joachim Oudann, which appeared in Adriaen Verwer’s Mom-aensicht der atheistery afgerukt (Amsterdam, 1683). See Altkirch, 64–65.
12. Fuerstellung vier neuer Welt-Weisen, nahmentlich I. Renati Des Cartes, II. Thomae Hobbes, III. Benedicti Spinosa, IV. Balthasar Beckers, nach ihrem Leben und fuernehmsten Irrthuemern (Koethen, 1702), 2. Qtd. in Altkirch, 77.
13. For a copy of this image, see E. Altkirch, Spinoza im Porträt (Jena, 1913), 90.
14. On Orobio, see Yosef Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism: The Story of Isaac Orobio de Castro, trans. Rafael Loewe (Oxford, 1989), 1. Though originally published in 1684, the first extant edition of Orobio’s polemic is from 1703. See Fritz Bamberger, Spinoza and Anti-Spinoza Literature (Cincinnati, 2003), 88. The significance of this tract both at the time and well into the eighteenth century has often led scholars to exaggerate the Jewish contribution to the emerging anti-Spinoza movement. Following the ban of all editions of the Opera posthuma by the states of Holland in June 1678, Jonathan Israel writes, “[t]he barrage of refutations from Voetian, Cocceian, Anabaptist, and Jewish quarters continued unabated,” though the only Jewish contribution to this barrage was that of Orobio. See Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford, 1995), 922.
15. The Dutch Collegiant in question was Johannes Bredenburg, a merchant from Rotterdam who had written a rejoinder to Spinoza’s Treatise in 1675 that tried and failed to demolish Spinoza’s proofs for an inexorable determinism. On his Enervatio tractatus theologico-politici (Rotterdam, 1675), see Bamberger, Spinoza and Anti-Spinoza Literature, 46. For an analysis of Orobio’s Certamen philosophicum, see Seymour Feldman, “Ha-bikoret ha-yehudit ha-rishonah neged Shpinozah,” in Iyyun 37 (1988): 222–37.
16. Qtd. in Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, 3rd edition (New York, 2010), 57. The writ of excommunication found here is translated from the Portuguese by Rita Mendes-Flohr and is reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.
17. The text was unearthed by the Dutch researcher Johannes van Vloten (1818–83), an important figure in nineteenth-century Spinoza scholarship. See B. de Spinoza, Benedicti de Spinoza opera quae supersunt omnia. Supplementum, ed. J. van Vloten (Amsterdam, 1862), 290–93.
18. From the late seventeenth century onward it has been widely presumed that around the time of his herem, Spinoza wrote an apologia in Spanish vindicating his rupture with the Jewish community on ideological grounds. Though never published, this work, it is said, contained in nuce the arguments of the Treatise. There is certainly plausibility to this rumor, yet proof remains elusive. The person who first asserted the existence of this precursor to the Treatise—a Dutch Cartesian at the University of Leiden named Salomon van Til (1643–1713)—is still the only one ever to claim to have actually seen it. See Van Til, Het Voorhof der heydnen (Dordrecht, 1694–96).
19. For two radically different hypotheses of recent years—one emphasizing Spinoza’s refutation of the immortality of the soul, the other a financial conflict between the Mahamad and Spinoza concerning his late father’s estate—see Steven Nadler, Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind (Cambridge, UK, 2001); Odette Vlessing, “The Excommunication of Spinoza: A Conflict Between Jewish and Dutch Law,” Studia Spinozana 13 (2003): 15–47. For a somewhat dated overview of various theories for Spinoza’s expulsion, see Asa Kasher and Shlomo Biderman, “Why Was Baruch de Spinoza Excommunicated?” in Skeptics, Millenarians, and Jews, eds. David Katz and Jonathan Israel (Leiden, 1990), 98–141.
20. The exception occurred in 1712, when the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam excommunicated three heretics for “following the sect of the Karaites, acting as they do, and entirely denying the Oral Law, which is the foundation and underpinning of our Holy Law.” In expelling these three “Karaites” (an epithet in rabbinic apologetics of the era for anyone who renounced the legitimacy of the Oral Law), the communal syndics resorted to an excommunication formula that had been used on only one other occasion in the history of the congregation—namely, with Spinoza. On this episode, see Yosef Kaplan, “‘Karaites’ in the Early Eighteenth Century,” in An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe (Leiden, 2000).
21. Israel S. Révah, a French Jewish historian of the conversos and the Western S
ephardic Diaspora, unearthed this datum. While doing research in the archives of the Inquisition in Madrid in the mid-1950s, he came upon two affidavits from August 1659 that yielded startling information. Two men, an Augustinian monk originally of Columbia and a Spanish sea captain, had presented themselves before the Inquisition for questioning after returning to Madrid from time spent abroad, including in Amsterdam, where their paths had crossed. While in Amsterdam, they became acquainted with Spinoza and Dr. Juan de Prado, and heard then “that they had previously been Jews and had observed their law, but . . . had distanced themselves from it because it was not good, but a fabrication, and for that reason they had been excommunicated.” See Révah, Spinoza et le Dr. Juan de Prado (Paris, 1959), 66–68; Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism, 134.
22. On this subculture of libertinism and skepticism, see Jonathan Israel, “Philosophy, Deism, and the Early Sephardic Enlightenment,” in The Dutch Intersection: The Jews and the Netherlands in Modern History, ed. Yosef Kaplan (Leiden, 2008), 173–201. For a recent study that argues for a substantial degree of secularization and religious laxity among Sephardim and Ashkenazim alike in the early eighteenth century, especially in the major cities of Western and Central Europe, see Shmuel Feiner, The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe, trans. Chaya Naor (Philadelphia, 2010).
The First Modern Jew Page 29