23. See Seymour Feldman, “Introduction” to Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise (Gebhardt edition), 2nd edition, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, 1998), xvii. The focus on Latin obscures the fact that several vernacular translations of the Treatise appeared early on in the reception of the work, including in French (1678), English (1689), and Dutch (1693). On early translations of the Treatise, see Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 278–79.
24. Freudenthal, Die Lebensgeschichte, 24. For an English translation of one of the extant manuscripts of Lucas’s biography, see The Oldest Biography of Spinoza, ed. Abraham Wolf (London, 1927), 75.
25. Paul Vernière, Spinoza et la pensée française avant la Revolution, vol. 1 (Paris, 1954), 27.
26. Freudenthal, 3; Wolf, 42. Unlike Spinoza’s later biographers, Lucas never cited the sources of his information, and so the origin of this brazen untruth is not clear. From the rest of his account, it is hard to avoid Freudenthal’s acid conclusion that “[t]he biographer describes Spinoza’s origins as very lowly because they are Jewish.” In fact, Spinoza’s family was one of the most esteemed in the Jewish community, as evidenced by the various honorary offices to which both his father and grandfather were elected.
27. Freudenthal, 7; Wolf, 47.
28. Freudenthal, 8; Wolf, 50.
29. Freudenthal, 8–9; Wolf, 51. David Ives’s recent play about the excommunication of Spinoza, New Jerusalem (2009), is only the latest work to draw heavily on this conceit of a standoff between a resolute Spinoza and a reluctant Mortera prior to the herem.
30. The work in question was Triompho del Govierno Popular y de la antigüedad holandesa (1683), a collection of opuscules on the history of Amsterdam Sephardic society. For the possible allusion to a conflict between Spinoza and Mortera, see Nadler, Spinoza: A Life, 90.
31. Prado, who was nearly two decades Spinoza’s senior, arrived in Amsterdam in the middle of 1655 after escaping from Spain with his family in 1652 and reverting to Judaism during a stopover in Hamburg. The claim that Prado played a decisive part in spurring Spinoza to heresy was first ventured by the German Spinoza scholar Carl Gebhardt and then bolstered by the aforementioned Révah. In 1656 Prado managed to avoid sharing Spinoza’s fate by publicly retracting his “evil beliefs” in a confession entered into the Amsterdam Sephardic community’s Book of Ordinances (one page before Spinoza’s writ of excommunication). Yet just two years later, the Talmud Torah officials found Prado guilty of “having returned to his evil and false beliefs against our Sacred Law and having corrupted through these beliefs young students,” and on these grounds they ousted him for good. See Gebhardt, “Juan de Prado,” in Chronicon Spinozanum III (1923) and Révah, Des Marranes à Spinoza, ed. Henry Méchoulan et al. (Paris, 1995).
32. Freudenthal, 20–21; Wolf, 69.
33. On these editions, see S. von Dunin-Borkowski, Spinoza, vol. 1 (Münster, 1933), 488–89.
34. This edition, which contained the false imprint of Hamburg, was in fact printed in Amsterdam in 1735.
35. Portions of Lucas’s biography were spliced into an edition of Colerus’s life of Spinoza that appeared in Lenglet-Dufresnoy’s notorious compendium of Spinozist and anti-Spinozist literature Réfutation des erreurs de Benoit de Spinosa (1731).
36. Pierre Bayle, Dictionaire historique et critique (Rotterdam, 1697). For this and subsequent editions of Bayle’s Enlightenment classic, see Fritz Bamberger, Spinoza and Anti-Spinoza Literature: The Printed Literature of Spinozism (Cincinnati, 2003), 77, 78, 86, 102, 162, 170, 173. For an English translation of Bayle’s entry on Spinoza, see Historical and Critcal Dictionary: Selections, ed. and trans. Richard H. Popkin (Indianapolis, 1965), 288–338.
37. On the publication history of this book, see Freudenthal, Die Lebensgeschichte, 249–50; Bamberger, Spinoza and Anti-Spinoza Literature, 92–93, 150. Quotations in the text come from the English translation of 1706, The Life of Benedict de Spinosa, which was reprinted in Sir Frederick Pollock, Spinoza: His Life and Philosophy (London, 1899). This translation was based on the previous French translation and not on the original Dutch exemplar.
38. Freudenthal, 32; Popkin, 296.
39. Colerus, The Life of Benedict de Spinosa, 406.
40. Popkin, 299.
41. Ibid., 298. The sincerity of Bayle’s objection to “Spinozism” has been a subject of heated debate from the appearance of the Dictionaire to the present. Most recently, Jonathan Israel has vigorously defended the view of Bayle as a disguised atheist and crypto-Spinozist whose skepticism was far more antitheological than fideistic in spirit. See Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 264–78. Without denying that Bayle left his readers with ample reason to doubt his professions of “orthodoxy,” I nevertheless side with those who argue for the genuineness of Bayle’s objection to Spinoza’s metaphysical monism and, more broadly, to the whole premise of an all-encompassing philosophical system. See Adam Sutcliffe, “Spinoza, Bayle, and the Enlightenment Politics of Philosophical Certainty,” in History of European Ideas 34 (2008): 66–76.
42. Freudenthal, 31; Popkin, 295.
43. Colerus, 395.
44. Ibid., 387.
45. Popkin, 288–93.
46. Colerus, 389–90.
47. Freudenthal, 29; Popkin, 290.
48. Colerus, 389.
49. This along with other works by Da Costa can be found in Carl Gebhardt, ed., Die Schriften des Uriel da Costa (Heidelberg, 1922).
50. Richard Popkin was one such skeptic. See R. H. Popkin, “Spinoza and La Peyrère,” in Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 3 (1977), 177ff. Yosef Kaplan formerly believed this description was a forgery but has since changed his mind. See Kaplan, “The Social Functions of the Herem,” in An Alternative Path to Modernity, 130–32.
51. Colerus, 391.
52. The text, labeled by Colerus “the form of the general excommunication used amongst the Jews,” is omitted in the version of the biography that appears in Pollock. It can be found in The Life of Benedict de Spinosa (The Hague, 1906), 20–31, which is a reprint of the original 1706 copy.
53. Popkin, “Spinoza’s Excommunication,” in Jewish Themes in Spinoza’s Philosophy, ed. Heidi M. Ravven and Lenn E. Goodman (Albany, 2002), 272.
54. Qtd. in Chimen Abramsky, “The Crisis of Authority Within European Jewry in the Eighteenth Century,” in Studies in Jewish Religious and Intellectual History: Presented to Alexander Altmann on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Siegfried Stein and Raphael Loewe (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1979).
55. J. G. Wachter, Der Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb, oder, die von dem heutigen Jüdenthumb und dessen Geheimen Kabbala vergötterte Welt (Amsterdam, 1699). There is now a reprint of Wachter’s book. See Wachter, Der Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb, ed. Winfried Schröeder (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1994).
56. On Rosenroth and his Kabbalah denudata, see Allison P. Coudert, “The Kabbalah Denudata: Converting Jews or Seducing Christians,” in Jewish Christians and Christian Jews: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. Richard H. Popkin and Gordon M. Weiner (Dordrecht, 1994), 73–96.
57. See Alexander Altmann, “Lurianic Kabbalah in a Platonic Key: Abraham Cohen Herrera’s Puerta de cielo,” in Hebrew Union College Annual 80 (1982): 1–38.
58. Perhaps the most noteworthy can be found in Genesis Rabbah 68:9, where it states that God is also known as Makom because “He is the place of the world [mekomo shel ‘olam], the world is not his place.”
59. Wachter, Der Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb, vol. 3, 77/399.
60. Ibid., vol. 3, 77.
61. Spinoza: Complete Works, ed. Michael L. Morgan, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, 2002), 486.
62. Ibid., 942.
63. The Collected Works of Spinoza, 451.
64. Wachter, Der Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb, vol. 3, 60/382.
65. Gershom Scholem, “Die Wachtersche Kontroverse über den Spinozismus und ihre Folgen,” in Spinoza in der Frühzeit seiner religiöse Wirkung, ed. Karlfried Gründer and Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann (Heidelberg, 1984
), 15–25; Richard Popkin, “Spinoza, Neoplatonic Kabbalist?,” in Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought, ed. L. E. Goodman (Albany, 1992), 387–409.
66. Jacques Basnage, L’histoire et la religion des Juifs, depuis Jesus-Christ jusqu’à présent. Pour servir de supplement et de continuation à l’histoire de Joseph, 5 vols. (Rotterdam, 1706–1707). For the second, augmented edition, see Histoire des Juifs, depuis Jesus-Christ jusquà present (La Haye, 1716).
67. This is taken from the English translation of 1708: Basnage, The History of the Jews, from Jesus Christ to the Present Time: Containing Their Antiquities, Their Religion, Their Rites, the Dispersion of the Ten Tribes in the East, and the Persecutions This Nation Has Suffer’d in the West, trans. Thomas Taylor (London, 1708), 294.
68. A. Foucher de Careil, ed., Réfutation inédite de Spinoza par Leibniz (Paris, 1854).
69. Schröder, “Introduction” to Der Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb, 23.
70. Wachter, 218.
71. J. G. Wachter, Elucidarius Cabalisticus, sive reconditae Hebraeorum philosophiae brevis et succincta recensio, ed. Winfried Schröeder (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt, 1995 [1706]).
72. Wachter, Der Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb, 326.
Chapter 2: Refining Spinoza
1. The publisher of the 1742 Guide was Moses Wulff, and the translation was that of the medieval Provençal philosopher Samuel ben Judah Ibn Tibbon.
2. Isaac Euchel, Toledot Rabenu Mosheh ben Menahem (Berlin, 1788).
3. Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (Philadelphia, 1973), 12.
4. For Joachim Lange’s many publications against the rationalistic “Leibniz-Wolff school,” see Bamberger, Spinoza and Anti-Spinoza Literature, 130, 133, 135, 137, 156. In one of his works, Lange claimed that Budde also took Wolff to be an atheistic Spinozist.
5. As part of his effort to situate Mendelssohn squarely in the “religious Enlightenment,” which, unlike its radical and anticlerical counterpart, sought to use reason to revitalize faith and piety, David Sorkin downplays the boldness and significance of his pioneering rehabilitation of Spinoza. Regarding Spinoza, Sorkin writes only that “his position was so extreme that Mendelssohn could attempt to rehabilitate his thought.” It is no doubt true that Mendelssohn’s willingness to “rescue” Spinoza was in part a function of his confidence that the philosophical challenge of his Sephardic predecessor had been answered. But the implication that Mendelssohn did not have to worry about his own position being conflated with Spinoza’s because they were so evidently far apart ignores a whole history of pietist attacks on the Leibniz-Wolff school for alleged Spinozism. Moreover, the way Mendelssohn uses Spinoza in this debut work to “de-Christianize” philosophy testifies, as will be shown later in this chapter, to an at least partial identification with the Amsterdam heretic. See David Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (Berkeley, 1996), xxiv. For studies that ascribe greater weight to his vindication of Spinoza, philosophically and Jewishly, see Willi Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine (Madison, WI, 2003), 92–93; and Dominique Bourel, Moses Mendelssohn: La naissance du judaïsme moderne (Paris, 2004), 98.
6. Moses Mendelssohn, “Dialogues,” in Philosophical Writings, trans. Daniel Dahlstrom (Cambridge, UK, 1997), 104. This quotation is taken from the English translation to Mendelssohn’s Philosophische Schriften of 1761, which contained a revised version of the Philosophische Gespräche of six years earlier. For the original, see Moses Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften. Jubiläumsausgabe [henceforth JubA], vol. 1, ed. Alexander Altmann et al. (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1971), 11–12.
7. On Mendelssohn’s exaggeration of the proximity between Spinoza and Leibniz, see Alexander Altmann, “Moses Mendelssohn on Leibniz and Spinoza,” in Die trostvolle Aufklärung: Studien zur Metaphysik und politischen Theorie Moses Mendelssohns (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt, 1982), 28–49.
8. Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, 105–106; JubA, vol. 1, 13–14.
9. Philosophical Writings, 106; JubA, vol. 1, 14–15.
10. Three decades later Mendelssohn would suggest that Spinoza had in fact derived his monist metaphysics from the Jewish mystical tradition. By then, as we will see below, Mendelssohn’s main concern was to prevent his rival F. H. Jacobi from branding all forms of Enlightenment rationalism—including the rational theism of Leibniz and Wolff, to which Mendelssohn was heir—with the stigma of Spinozism. Linking Spinoza’s pantheism to what Mendelssohn regarded as the irrationalism of Kabbalah was one of, though by no means his only strategy for parrying Jacobi’s attack and distancing his own philosophy from that of the Amsterdam thinker. Still, it is, to my mind, significant that Mendelssohn ignored J. G. Wachter’s well-known thesis with its “Judaizing” insinuations entirely in his early vindication of Spinoza. On Mendelssohn’s later assertion of Spinoza’s dependence on Kabbalah, see, most recently, the discussion in Michah Gottlieb, Faith and Freedom: Moses Mendelssohn’s Theological-Political Thought (New York, 2011), 94–95.
11. “For one must not infer this philosopher’s kind of mind from the intractable hardheadedness of the so-called ‘free spirits.’ He was led astray out of error and not out of the baseness of his heart”: Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, 108; JubA, vol. 1, 16.
12. Qtd. in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World, 34.
13. Qtd. in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, 103.
14. As indicated above, among contemporary scholars, David Sorkin best represents the view of Mendelssohn as a staunch moderate in tune with the conservatism of the German Enlightenment. The opposite perception, of Mendelssohn as a more radical thinker than his rhetoric would indicate, and of Jerusalem as a rather wobbly attempt to reconcile liberalism and traditional Judaism, is associated with Allan Arkush. See Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment; Arkush, Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment (Albany, NY, 1994).
15. The first thinker to juxtapose Spinoza and Mendelssohn on this basis was Saul Ascher in his early work of Reform theology, Leviathan (1792). On Ascher, see chap. 3 below. The twentieth-century historian of Jewish thought Julius Guttmann was the first to argue in detail the indebtedness of Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem to Spinoza’s Treatise. See Guttmann, “Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem and Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise [1931], in Studies in Jewish Thought, ed. and trans. Alfred Jospe (Detroit, 1981), 361–86.
16. Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism, trans. Allan Arkush (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987), 99.
17. The mention of Spinoza comes early in the book in the context of an analogy with Hobbes: “In matters of moral philosophy Hobbes has the same merit as Spinoza has in metaphysics. His ingenious errors have occasioned inquiry” (36).
18. See Friedrich Niewöhner, “‘Es hat nicht jeder das Zeug zu einem Spinoza’: Mendelssohn als Philosoph des Judentums,” in Moses Mendelssohn und die Kreise seiner Wirksamkeit, ed. Michael Albrecht, Eva J. Engel, and Norbert Hinske (Tübingen, 1994), 291–313. Niewöhner dismisses outright the conventional wisdom that Mendelssohn had firsthand knowledge of Spinoza’s Treatise and that Jerusalem was an implicit riposte. Michah Gottlieb takes a more nuanced approach: Though agnostic on the question of whether Mendelssohn had actually read the Treatise, he asserts that “[w]hether or not Mendelssohn knew the TTP directly, in Jerusalem he is clearly engaged with a Spinozistic analysis of Judaism, though he may have found the analysis in other sources.” See Gottlieb, Faith and Freedom, 137f19.
19. Gérard Vallée, ed., The Spinoza Conversations between Lessing and Jacobi: Texts with Excerpts from the Ensuing Controversy, trans. G. Vallée, J. B. Lawson, and C. Chapple (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988), 124. The translated excerpts come from Heinrich Scholz, ed., Die Hauptschriften zum Pantheismusstreit zwischen Jacobi und Mendelssohn (Berlin, 1916).
20. This is the argument of Frederick Beiser, whose chapters on the “pantheism controversy” in The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Ca
mbridge, MA, 1987) remain the best introduction to this affair in English.
21. Vallée, The Spinoza Conversations, 134.
22. Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn, 37.
23. Ibid.
24. G. E. Lessing, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Karl Lachmann and Franz Muncker, vol. 17 (Stuttgart, 1886–1924), 40, cited in Jonathan Skolnik, “Kaddish for Spinoza: Memory and Modernity in Celan and Heine,” New German Critique 77 (1999): 170.
25. Vallée, The Spinoza Conversations, 95–96.
26. Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, 108–109; GS, 10.
27. Vallée, The Spinoza Conversations, 65.
28. Ibid., 77.
29. Ibid., 113.
30. Ibid., 121.
31. Ibid., 130.
32. This is apparently one of the first uses of the term orthodox to denote Jewish observance of Halakhah in modern times. See Christoph Schulte, “Saul Ascher’s Leviathan, or the Invention of Jewish Orthodoxy in 1792,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 45 (2000): 25–34.
Chapter 3: The First Modern Jew
1. See Christhard Hoffmann, “Constructing Jewish Modernity: Mendelssohn Jubilee Celebrations within German Jewry, 1829–1929,” in Towards Normality? Acculturation and Modern German Jewry, ed. Rainer Liedtke and David Rechter (Tübingen, 2003), 27–52.
2. Leopold Zunz, Rede gehalten bei der Feier von Moses Mendelssohns hundertjährigen Geburtstage (Berlin, 1829), 7.
3. For studies on how Mendelssohn was fashioned into the “father of the Haskalah” and, next to Spinoza, the other major candidate for the title of “first modern Jew,” see Shmuel Feiner; “Mendelssohn and Mendelssohn’s Disciples: A Re-examination,” in the Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 40 (1995): 133–67; David Sorkin, “The Mendelssohn Myth and Its Method,” in New German Critique 77 (Spring–Summer 1999): 7–28; and now, most exhaustively, in the first chapter (“Le legende de Mendelssohn”) of Dominique Bourel’s magisterial Moses Mendelssohn: La legende du judaïsme moderne, 21–43.
The First Modern Jew Page 30