The First Modern Jew

by Daniel B. Schwartz

  4. Ludwig Philippson, “Baruch Spinoza (Eine Skizze),” Sulamit, eine Zeitschrift zur Beförderung der Kultur und Humanität der Israeliten 7 (1832), 327–36. Sulamith, founded in 1806, was the first modern Jewish periodical in the German language.

  5. Philippson, by then a rabbi in Magdeburg, founded the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in 1837 and edited it until his death in 1889. The newspaper, which despite its moderate liberal orientation was conceived as the organ of the German Jewish community as a whole and not of any religious denomination in particular, lasted until 1922. See Johanna Philippson, “Ludwig Philippson und die Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums,” in Das Judentum in der deutschen Umwelt, ed. Hans Liebeschütz and Arnold Paucker (Tübingen, 1977).

  6. Heinrich Heine, Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland (Frankfurt a.M., 1966); Moses Hess, Die heilige Geschichte der Menschheit, von einem Jünger Spinozas (Stuttgart, 1837); Rom und Jerusalem, die letzte Nationalitätsfrage (Leipzig, 1862).

  7. Benedictus de Spinoza, B. v. Spinoza’s sämmtliche Werke; aus dem lateinischen mit dem Leben Spinoza’s, von Berthold Auerbach, trans. Auerbach, 5 vols. (Stuttgart, 1841). The biography (“Das Leben Spinozas”) served as the preface to the first of the five volumes, ix–cxxv. Auerbach’s translation did not include works by Spinoza that were discovered only later in the nineteenth century, including the Short Treatise and a host of letters.

  8. Auerbach, Spinoza, ein historischer Roman (Stuttgart, 1837). After he had already grown famous for his Dorfgeschichten, Auerbach came out with a revised edition of his Spinoza novel. See Spinoza, ein Denkerleben (Mannheim, 1854). The analysis in this chapter is for the most part limited to the first edition of the novel.

  9. For excerpts of these biographies, see Jakob Freudenthal, Die Lebensgeschichte Spinoza’s in Quellenschriften, Urkunden und nichtamtlichen Nachrichten (Leipzig, 1899). For my analysis of them, see chapter 1, above.

  10. On the evolution of this legend, see George K. Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew (Providence, RI, 1965).

  11. Leo Strauss, “Preface to the English Translation” of his Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (New York, 1982), 17.

  12. Berthold Auerbach, Das Judenthum und die neueste Literatur; kritischer Versuch (Stuttgart, 1836).

  13. The phrase “ruthless cosmopolitanism” comes from K. Anthony Appiah’s The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, 2005), 220–23. Appiah’s contrast between “rooted” and “ruthless” forms of cosmopolitanism bears a similarity to the tension in Auerbach’s reception of Spinoza explored in this chapter.

  14. Qtd. in Meyer Kayserling, Ludwig Philippson: Eine Biographie (Leipzig, 1898), 35–36. Italics mine.

  15. Qtd. in Vallée, The Spinoza Conversations, 130.

  16. On the pre-Haskalah roots of this drift away from Jewish tradition, see, most recently, Feiner, The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe.

  17. This was the view of the Pittsburgh Platform (1885), the crucial programmatic statement of nineteenth-century “classical Reform” theology that was largely authored by the Reform rabbi Kaufmann Kohler. Its fourth principle read: “We hold that all such Mosaic and Rabbinical laws as regulate diet, priestly purity and dress originated in ages and under the influence of ideas altogether foreign to our present mental and spiritual state. They fail to impress the modern Jew with a spirit of priestly holiness; their observance in our days is apt rather to obstruct than to further modern spiritual elevation.” Qtd. in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World, 521.

  18. Saul Ascher (1767–1822) was a Berlin-based bookseller and a prolific writer and public intellectual. Throughout the Romantic turn in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Germany, he remained an Enlightenment stalwart.

  19. Ascher, Leviathan, oder über Religion in Rücksicht des Judenthums (Berlin, 1792), 231. Trans. in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, 109.

  20. “If we describe Judaism in this orthodox manner,” Ascher writes on p. 157 of Leviathan, “it is only natural that we should come to the most severe conclusions.”

  21. Ascher, 149.

  22. Beiser, The Fate of Reason, 44–45. The most complete study of German neo-Spinozism in the age of Goethe remains Hermann Timm, Gott und die Freiheit: Studien zur Religionsphilosophie der Goethezeit. Band 1: Die Spinozarenaissance (Frankfurt a.M., 1974).

  23. Vallée, The Spinoza Conversations, 86.

  24. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures in the History of Philosophy, vol. 3, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (London, 1896), 283.

  25. Beiser, The Fate of Reason, 60.

  26. J. W. von Goethe, The Autobiography of J. W. von Goethe, vol. 2, trans. John Oxenford (Chicago, 1974), 261.

  27. Qtd. in Max Grunwald, Spinoza in Deutschland (Berlin, 1897), 119.

  28. See Beiser, The Fate of Reason, 159.

  29. Witness how Fränkel describes the Amsterdam philosopher as early as 1807, in the second volume of Sulamith: “Benedikt Spinoza was of the Jewish religion. Hounded by numerous zealots of his confession, he lived a very noble, virtuous life in Holland. . . . If his metaphysical principles are not all to be commended, as a person and philosopher he certainly deserves at the very least to become better known to, and more properly appreciated by, our fellow believers.” See “Briefe an den Herausgeber der Sulamith. Fünfte Brief,” in Sulamith 2 (1807): 118.

  30. See Immanuel Wolf, “Ueber den Begriff einer Wissenschaft des Judentums,” in Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums 1 (1823): 1–24. Translated in Michael Meyer, Ideas of Jewish History (New York, 1974), 150.

  31. Historians in recent decades have used archival data to quantify and qualify this tide of defections. Steven Lowenstein, who has studied these defections in more detail than anyone else, concludes that conversion was a significant problem that touched the lives of “a substantial proportion of Jewish families in early nineteenth century Berlin,” even while falling short of epidemic proportions. See Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community: Enlightenment, Family, and Crisis, 1770–1830 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), 120.

  32. Ibid., 125.

  33. Ibid., 247.

  34. Berthold Auerbach, Briefe an seinen Freund Jakob Auerbach: Ein biographisches Denkmal, vol. 1, ed. Jakob Auerbach (Frankfurt a. M, 1884), 5. Jakob Auerbach was himself a well-known Jewish reform theologian and educator.

  35. Most of this overview of Auerbach’s early years here is based on Anton Bettelheim’s Berthold Auerbach: Der Mann, sein Werk—sein Nachlaß (Stuttgart, 1907), still the only full-length biography of the German Jewish author to date. Bettelheim makes ample use of Auerbach’s extensive archive at the Deutschesliteraturarchiv in Marbach, Germany.

  36. See Jacob Katz, “Berthold Auerbach’s Anticipation of the German-Jewish Tragedy,” in Hebrew Union College Annual 53 (1982): 217.

  37. On the nineteenth-century transformation of the rabbinate, especially in Germany, see Ismar Schorsch, “Emancipation and the Crisis of Religious Authority: The Emergence of the Modern Rabbinate,” in Schorsch, From Text to Context (Hanover, NH, 1994), 9–50.

  38. Bettelheim, 55.

  39. Briefe, vol. 1, 9.

  40. Bettelheim, 56–57.

  41. On Strauss’s years at Tübingen prior to the publication of his Life of Jesus in 1835, see Horton Harris, David Friedrich Strauss and His Theology (Cambridge, UK, 1973).

  42. Briefe, vol. 1, 16.

  43. Auerbach’s involvement in one of the student fraternities was exceedingly rare for a Jew in this period. The fraternities had played a prominent role in the völkisch reaction against Jewish emancipation in the wake of the defeat of Napoleon. See Keith Pincus, Constructing Modern Identities: Jewish University Students in Germany, 1815–1914 (Detroit, 1999).

  44. Gutzkow, Wally, die Zweiflerin (Mannheim, 1835).

  45. Menzel (1798–1873) was the nationalistic editor of the journal Literaturblatt. He turned against the Young Germans after the publication of Gutzkow’s Wally.

  46. Das
Judenthum, 5.

  47. Ironically, one of the main intellectual sources for Heine’s “rehabilitation of the flesh” was the pantheism of Spinoza, though this goes completely unmentioned by Auerbach here.

  48. Das Judenthum, 15.

  49. Nancy A. Keiser, “The Dilemma of the Jewish Humanist from ‘Vormärz’ to Empire,” German Studies Review 6 (1983), 399–419. The Vormärz (Pre-March) refers to the period between the 1815 Congress of Vienna and the March Revolution of 1848 in Germany.

  50. Das Judenthum, 8.

  51. There is a great deal of classic and contemporary scholarship on the largely negative image of Judaism in nineteenth-century German thought and on German Jewish rejoinders to this discourse. See Hans Liebeschütz, Das Judentum im deutschen Geschichtsbild von Hegel bis Max Weber (Tübingen, 1967), along with more recently Michael Mack, German Idealism and the Jew: On the Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses (Chicago, 2003).

  52. The main anthology of Geiger’s writings translated into English remains Abraham Geiger and Liberal Judaism: The Challenge of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Max Wiener (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 1981). More recent biographies include Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago, 1998); and Ken Koltun-Fromm, Abraham Geiger’s Liberal Judaism: Personal Meaning and Religious Authority (Bloomington, IN, 2006).

  53. On the Idealist tradition of German historiography, see George G. Iggers, The German Idea of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, CT, 1968).

  54. Qtd. in Wiener, 266.

  55. Das Judenthum, 52.

  56. Ibid., 38.

  57. Ibid., 50.

  58. Ibid.

  59. Briefe, vol. 1, 31.

  60. This is true only of the first edition of the novel from 1837 and not of the revised version of 1854. The attempt to marginalize the Jewish historical backdrop in the second edition is evident in the change in titles, from Spinoza, a Historical Novel to Spinoza, a Thinker’s Novel.

  61. Auerbach, “Das Ghetto,” Spinoza, ein historischer Roman, vol. 1, iii.

  62. Ibid.

  63. It should be noted that the image of Spinoza as a prototype of the road “out of the ghetto” is a symbolic as opposed to historical construction, as there was no ghetto to which Jews were confined in seventeenth-century Amsterdam.

  64. “Das Ghetto,” Spinoza, ein historischer Roman, vol. 1, vii.

  65. Relying on Johann Christoph Wolf’s Bibliotheca hebraea (Hamburg, 1715–1733), Auerbach wrongly cites 1647 as the year of Da Costa’s suicide, when in fact he is believed to have killed himself in 1640.

  66. Auerbach’s inclusion of bibliographic endnotes indicates his desire to link his novel to the historiographic project of Wissenschaft des Judentums. These endnotes were omitted in all subsequent editions.

  67. Qtd. in Rudolf Vierhaus, “Bildung,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexicon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. 1., ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart, 1972), 517.

  68. Spinoza, vol. 2, 179. Ludwig (or Lodewijk) Meyer was a Dutch philosopher, rationalist biblical critic, and member of Spinoza’s circle.

  69. Ibid., 18.

  70. Jacob Katz, “Spinoza und die Utopie einer Totalen Assimilation der Juden,” in Zur Assimilation und Emanzipation der Juden (Darmstadt, 1982), 199–209.

  71. Jonathan Skolnik, “Writing Jewish History between Gutzkow and Goethe: Auerbach’s Spinoza and the Birth of Modern Jewish Historical Fiction,” Prooftexts 19 (1999): 118.

  72. Da Silva’s Tratado da immortalide da alma [Treatise on the Immortality of the Soul] is printed in English translation in Acosta, Examination of Pharisaic Traditions, ed. and trans. H. P. Salomon & I.S.D. Sassoon (Leiden, 1993).

  73. Spinoza, vol. 2, 242–43.

  74. Ibid., 244.

  75. Das Judenthum, 8.

  76. On the probability that Spinoza “simply quit the community” and did not lodge any formal protest of the herem, see Nadler, Spinoza: A Life, 154.

  77. Spinoza, vol. 2, 262.

  78. This is how Skolnik interprets the claim that “[i]n our reason . . . here is Sinai.” He cites this passage as evidence of how Auerbach connects Spinoza with the “revealed deism” attributed to Mendelssohn in Das Judenthum. For Skolnik, this serves as yet another indication of the continuity between the two works. Once again, I would contend that he overstates this continuity.

  79. Holdheim became the principal advocate of radical reform starting in the 1840s. He demanded a total conformity of religion and modern rationalism and was less concerned than Geiger with organic continuity and historical consciousness in general. According to Michael Meyer, “Holdheim displays an interpretation of Judaism that has reached the furthest point of subjectivization: what is Jewish is what has passed into the religious consciousness of the individual Jew.” This resonates with the outlook expressed by Auerbach’s Spinoza in the excommunication scene. See Meyer, Response to Modernity (Detroit, 1988), 82.

  80. Spinoza, vol. 2, 299–300.

  81. Idem., “Berthold Auerbach’s Anticipation of the German-Jewish Tragedy,” 219.

  82. Goethe conveyed this plan in the fourteenth book of his autobiography. The intertextual allusions of Auerbach’s narrative are analyzed with great insight in Skolnik, “Writing Jewish History between Gutzkow and Goethe: Auerbach’s Spinoza and the Birth of Modern Jewish Historical Fiction.”

  83. Briefe, vol. 1, 25.

  84. His second novel was entitled Dichter und Kaufmann: Ein Lebensgemälde aus der Zeit Moses Mendelssohn’s (Stuttgart, 1839). David Sorkin argues that Auerbach turned to German Volksliteratur deliberately after being unable to resolve the alienation of the individual from the community in his “Jewish novels.” See “The Invisible Community: Emancipation, Secular Culture, and Jewish Identity in the Writings of Berthold Auerbach,” The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War (Hanover, NH, 1985).

  85. Qtd. in Geiger, Abraham Geiger and Liberal Judaism, 85.

  86. Auerbach, Spinoza. Ein Denkersleben. Neu durchgearb., stereotypirte Aufl. (Mannheim, 1854), 250.

  87. Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, trans. Arkush, 138.

  88. Louis Seligman, Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 2 (1838), No. 33 = (Literarisches und homiletisches Beiblatt, No. 7, 27–28).

  89. Such thoughts were prompted by the immense controversy generated by Strauss’s final work, Die alte und die neue Glaube [The Old Faith and the New], published in 1872 two years prior to his death. In it, Strauss called for a clean break from Christianity and theism in general in favor of a “new faith” grounded entirely in the secular values of universal reason and science, including the belief in Darwinian evolution. In Auerbach’s letters to his cousin concerning this free-thinking confession, which he claimed had shaken him like no other work since his reading of Spinoza’s Treatise as a student, we find the same ambivalence as in his Jewish writings of the 1830s: on the one hand, a powerful attraction to Strauss’s undiluted embrace of the “naked truth” even at the expense of total rupture from the “old faith”; on the other hand, a recoiling from this example of “simple negation” and continued affirmation of the organic development of the historical religions. Of Strauss, he wrote in a letter of October 1872: “He has that same reclusiveness as Spinoza.” See Briefe, vol. 2, 123–31.

  90. David F. Strauss, Charakteristiken und Kritiken. Eine sammlung zerstreuter Aufsätze aus den Gebieten der Theologie, Anthropologie, und Aesthetik (Leipzig, 1844), 453. Strauss’s review originally appeared in the Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik 59 (1838), 470–72.

  91. Berthold Auerbach, Spinoza. Ein Denkersleben (Mannheim, 1854).

  92. See Jeffrey Sammons, “Observations on Berthold Auerbach’s Jewish Novels,” in Orim: A Jewish Journal at Yale 1 (1985): 61–74.

  93. N. Fidel, “Borukh Shpinoza: A kurtse lebenshraybung,” in Yudishes Folksblat 6 (October 18
86), 683–87.

  94. Sir Frederick Pollock, Spinoza: His Life and Philosophy (London, 1882), 372.

  Chapter 4: A Rebel against the Past, A Revealer of Secrets

  1. S. Rubin, Moreh nevukhim he-hadash, 2 vols. (Vienna, 1856–57).

  2. A Hebrew poet, writer, translator, and editor, Letteris was one of the leading figures in the Galician Haskalah. For his biography, see Yosef Klausner, Historyah shel ha-sifrut ha-‘Ivrit ha-hadashah, vol. 2 (Jerusalem, 1952), 360–400.

  3. Letteris, “Toledot he-hakham ha-hoker Barukh di Shpinozah z’l,” in Bikure ha-‘itim ha-hadashim [The New First Fruits of the Times] 1 (1845): 27a–33b.

  4. Reggio, known in Hebrew literature by the acronym YaShaR, was a biblical translator and commentator and a frequent contributor to the literary correspondence of the Hebrew Enlightenment. He was one of the founders of the Collegio Rabbinico in Padua, the first modern European rabbinical seminary. Luzzatto, or ShaDaL, an impassioned Hebraist and prolific scholar of biblical and medieval Jewish literature, was a key contributor to the nineteenth-century Hebrew Enlightenment—and at the same time one of the movement’s strongest critics. See Morris B. Margolies, Samuel David Luzzatto: Traditionalist Scholar (New York, 1979).

  5. Letteris, “Toledot,” 31. Reggio specifically criticized Spinoza’s claim in the opening chapters of the Treatise that biblical prophecy concerns the imagination alone and not the intellect—perhaps, not coincidentally, the point on which the gap between Spinoza and Maimonides is at its widest. Notably, Reggio restricted his censure of Spinoza to the Treatise and made no mention of the pantheism of the Ethics. And even his objection to Letteris’s whitewashing of the Treatise did not keep him from publishing the biographical précis in his journal.

  6. See the essays and letters reprinted in Luzzatto, Mehkere ha-yahadut, vol. 2 (Warsaw, 1912–13), 153–97.