7. From his introduction to Ha-mishtadel (Vienna, 1847), qtd. in “Neged Shpinozah,” Mehkere ha-yahadut, vol. 2, 200.
8. See Ha-tehiyah 1 (1850): 33–35, 59–61. Sachs would expound further on the proximity between Spinozism and the immanentist character of Jewish Neoplatonism in Kerem Hemed 8 (1854): 22–34.
9. This appeared in the periodical Otsar Nehmad 2 (1856), qtd. in Mehkere ha-yahadut, 203–205.
10. Rubin, Moreh nevukhim he-hadash, vol. 1, 17.
11. See, in order of appearance, Luzzatto, Otsar Nehmad 2 (1856), qtd. in Mehkere ha-yahadut, 205–209; Rubin, Moreh nevukhim he-hadash, vol. 2; Luzzatto, Ha-magid 3 (1858–59), qtd. in Mehkerei, 209–212; Rubin, Teshuvah nitsahat (Lvov, 1859); Luzzatto, Ha-magid 3 (1859), qtd. in Mehkere, 212–17.
12. Though Rubin had intended to provide translations of the Treatise and the Ethics as part of his New Guide to the Perplexed, he later claimed to have been thrown off course by his controversy with Luzzatto. His translation of the Ethics would appear nearly thirty years after the project had been initially launched. See Baruch Spinoza, Heker ’Elohah ‘im torat ha-adam [Ethics], trans. S. Rubin (Vienna, 1885). As for the Treatise, Rubin only published a translation of the first two chapters on prophecy. He incorporated them into the beginning of a work on prophecy titled Ma‘aseh merkavah (Vienna, 1884). The Treatise would not be translated into Hebrew in its entirety until 1961. See Ma’amar te’ologi-medini, trans. Chaim Wirszubski (Jerusalem, 1961).
13. Spinoza, Dikduk sefat ‘ever [Compendium of Hebrew Grammar], trans. S. Rubin (Krakow, 1905).
14. Rubin, Spinoza und Maimonides: Ein psychologisch-philosophisches Antitheton (Vienna, 1868).
15. Rubin, “Shitat Shpinozah be-filosofyah,” Ha-Shahar 12 (1884); idem., Hegyone Shpinozah (Krakow, 1897); idem., Barukh Shpinozah be-regesh ’ahavat ’Elohim (Podgorze, 1910).
16. Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 11. Israel has further developed his case for the crucial importance of Spinoza and the Radical Enlightenment he spawned in the “making of modernity” in Enlightenment Contested (New York, 2006); and A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton, 2009).
17. Israel, Radical Enlightenment, vi. The importance of the reception of Spinoza in Enlightenment constructions of Jewishness is clearly borne out by Israel’s student, Adam Sutcliffe, in his Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2003).
18. Previous studies of the image of Spinoza in nineteenth-century Hebrew literature include Pinhas Lachower, “Shpinozah be-sifrut ha-haskalah ha-‘ivrit,” ‘Al gevul ha-yashan veha-hadash (Jerusalem, 1951), 109–22; Yosef Klausner, Historyah shel ha-sifrut ha-‘Ivrit ha-hadashah, vol. 2 (Jerusalem, 1952), 102–107; Eliezer Schweid, Toledot he-hagut ha-yehudit be-‘et ha-hadashah: He-me’ah ha-tesha-‘esreh (Jerusalem, 1977), 338–55; Menahem Dorman, Vikuhe Shpinozah be-aspaklaryah Yehudit (Tel Aviv, 1990), 96-153; Shmuel Feiner, Haskalah and History: The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness, trans. Chaya Naor and Sondra Silverston (Oxford, 2002), 146–50.
19. Feiner, Haskalah and History, 148.
20. The first generation comprised individuals born in the final decades of the eighteenth century or the first decade of the nineteenth who began contributing to Haskalah literature in the 1820s and 1830s. The second generation consisted of those who became active in the 1840s and 1850s.
21. On the origins of the Galician Haskalah, see Israel Bartal, “‘The Heavenly City of Germany’ and Absolutism à la Mode d’Autriche: The Rise of the Haskalah in Galicia,” Toward Modernity: The European Jewish Model, ed. Jacob Katz (New Brunswick, NJ, 1987), 33–42; Nancy Sinkoff, Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands (Providence, 2004).
22. Moreh nevukhim he-hadash, vol. 1, 10–11. Emphasis mine.
23. Heker Elohah, vii.
24. Though there was no united Germany until the last decade of Auerbach’s life, his commitment to liberal German nationalism had originated long before.
25. On melitsah, see Moshe Pelli, “On the Role of Melitzah in the Literature of the Hebrew Enlightenment,” Hebrew in Ashkenaz, ed. Lewis Glinert, 99–110; Jeremy Dauber, Antonio’s Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (Palo Alto, CA, 2004).
26. Rubin, Moreh nevukhim he-hadash, vol. 1, 3. Emphasis mine.
27. For examples of the use of the phrase Hokhmat Yisrael to denote German Jewish Wissenschaft, see Gershom Scholem, “Mi-tokh hirhurim ‘al Hokhmat Yisrael,” Devarim be-go (Tel Aviv, 1975), 385–404; Paul Mendes-Flohr, Hokhmat Yisrael: Hebetim historiyim u-filosofiyim (Jerusalem, 1979). For a more nuanced distinction between Wissenschaft and Hokhmat Yisrael, see David N. Myers, Re-inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (New York, 1995), 25–29.
28. His models included the prototype of all medieval rabbinic dictionaries, the Arukh of the Italian rabbi Nathan ben Yehiel (ca. 1025–1106), as well as the Sephardic astronomer Abraham Zacuto’s (ca. 1450–1510) chronicle Sefer Yuhasin, a work arranged in the form of a register. Rapoport’s studies of the Gaonim and other early rabbinic sages, which began to appear in the Hebrew periodical Bikkure ha-‘itim in the late 1820s, can be found in the collection Toledot gedole yisrael (Warsaw, 1913). See Gerson D. Cohen, “The Reconstruction of Gaonic History,” Studies in the Variety of Rabbinic Cultures (Philadelphia, 1991), 99–103.
29. See Luzzatto, Ha-mishtadel (Vienna, 1847), introduction.
30. The original source is chapter 34 of Sifre to Deuteronomy, where the phrase appears in the midst of an exegesis of the command “and you shall recite them” (6:7). Hokhmat Yisrael is used here to signify specifically Jewish learning and is contrasted with Hokhmat ha-’Umot, i.e., the “wisdom of the nations” or “external knowledge.” An etymological history of this term, which would trace its eventual application to modern Jewish scholarship, remains a desideratum.
31. Yosef Klausner, Historyah shel ha-sifrut ha-‘Ivrit ha-hadashah, vol. 5 (Jerusalem, 1949), 305–18; Jakob Stern, Dr. Salomon Rubin, sein Leben und seine Schriften (Krakow, 1908). Rubin never wrote an autobiography, and neither of the two biographies reveals its sources, making it difficult to gauge their reliability.
32. On Schorr, see Ezra Spicehandler’s introduction to Schorr, Ma’amarim (Jerusalem, 1972), 7–38; Schweid, Toledot he-hagut ha-yehudit be-‘et ha-hadashah, 339–42.
33. Gutzkow, Uriel Acosta, trans. Shlomo Rubin (Vienna, 1856). The play Uriel Acosta debuted in December of 1846 and was published the following year in Karl Gutzkow’s dramatische Werke, vol. 5 (Leipzig, 1847), 113–238.
34. The novella was entitled Der Sadducaer von Amsterdam and was first published in 1834.
35. Three German books appeared in 1847 that contained partial or complete translations of Acosta’s Latin autobiography and identified the heretic with the spirit of revolution. One was by the Viennese left-wing journalist Hermann Jellinek, the brother of the scholar and liberal rabbi Adolph Jellinek. He penned an introduction to his translation of Acosta’s autobiography lambasting Gutzkow for muting Acosta’s radicalism in his play. Hermann Jellinek would ultimately be executed for his part in the 1848 revolution in Vienna. See Uriel Acostas Leben und Lehre. Ein Beitrag zur Kenntnis seiner Moral wie zur Berichtigung der Gutzkowschen Fictionen über Acosta, und zur Characteristik der damaligen Juden (Vienna, 1847).
36. In addition to English, Dutch, Swedish, Polish, and Hungarian (among other languages), the play was eventually translated into Yiddish, and it became a staple of the Yiddish stage.
37. Witness the angry reaction to the play of the Russian maskil Judah Leib Gordon (1830–92), who went on to become one of the most famous poets of the Hebrew Enlightenment. Writing under the pseudonym Dan Gavriel, Gordon blasted Rubin for bringing “this Ammonite and Moabite into the congregation of Israel.” See “Ha-tsofeh me-’erets Rusiyah,” Ha-magid 2 (1858): 138. Ironically, it would be Gordon who, some two decades later, would compose arguab
ly the most heretical poem in nineteenth-century Hebrew literature, “Tsidkiyahu be-bet ha-pekudot” [Zedekiah in Prison].
38. For a recent microhistorical study of the 1848 assassination of Rabbi Abraham Kohn by another Jew, see Michael Stanislawski, A Murder in Lemberg: Politics, Religion, and Violence in Modern Jewish History (Princeton, 2007).
39. Rubin, Uriel Acosta, 10. This appears to be the only source that sheds any light on Rubin’s excommunication.url>
40. Ibid., 4–5.
41. Interestingly, Gutzkow did not include the character of Da Silva in his earlier novella about Acosta. Since his function in the play is similar to that of Auerbach’s Da Silva, it might be that Gutzkow was motivated by the 1837 Spinoza novel to write this figure into his Uriel Acosta.
42. The renowned work of Jewish Kalam by Saadia (890–940), the prominent Babylonian Gaon, philosopher, and commentator.
43. The Akedat Yitshak was a philosophical and homiletical commentary on the Bible by Isaac Arama (1420–94), a Sephardic rabbi who went into exile in 1492 and died in Naples two years later.
44. The Principles, or Ikkarim, was a work of medieval rationalist dogmatics written by the Spanish theologican Joseph Albo (ca. 1380–1444).
45. By the Hebrew calendar, and equivalent to the year 1640 in the Gregorian calendar.
46. Isaiah 1:8, where this phrase connotes a flimsy structure susceptible to the elements.
47. Uriel Acosta, 5.
48. See Rubin, “Mikhtav,” Kokhave Yitshak 25 (1858): 105–106, where the author protests Gordon’s attack on Acosta by equating him to “one of the martyrs killed in sanctification of the faith in their hearts.”
49. The work was edited by the German Jewish Wissenschaft scholar Leopold Zunz after Krochmal’s death and first published in Lemberg (now Lviv) in 1851.
50. See David Sorkin, “The Early Haskalah,” New Perspectives on the Haskalah, ed. Shmuel Feiner and Sorkin (London, 2001), 9–26.
51. On the image of Maimonides and its conflation with that of Mendelssohn in Ha-me’asef, see James H. Lehmann, “Maimonides, Mendelssohn and the Me’asfim: Philosophy and the Biographical Imagination in the Early Haskalah,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 20 (1975): 87–108.
52. Isaac Euchel, Toledot Rabenu Mosheh ben Menahem (Berlin, 1788).
53. Salomon Maimon, Salomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte [1792], ed. K. P. Moritz and Zwi Batscha (Frankfurt a. M., 1984); Givat ha-moreh [The Hill of the Guide (1791)], ed. S. H. Bergmann and Nathan Rotenstreich (Jerusalem, 1965). Maimon’s commentary was originally published as part of a 1791 Berlin reprint of the Hebrew translation of the Guide to the Perplexed. Two subsequent 1828 reprints of this edition, in Zolkiew and Vienna, also carried Maimon’s Givat ha-moreh.
54. Feiner, Haskalah and History, 78.
55. The translator was Mendel Lefin (1749–1826), one of the oldest of the Galician maskilim. He rendered the Guide into the simple rabbinic Hebrew of the Mishnah. On Lefin, see Sinkoff, Out of the Shtetl. On the image of Maimonides in the work of early Galician maskilim such as Lefin, Rapoport, and Judah Leib Mieses, see Feiner, 96–115.
56. Kerem Hemed 1 (1833): 77.
57. See Amos Funkenstein, “Haskala, History, and the Medieval Tradition,” Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley, 1993), 234–47.
58. Sinkoff, 128.
59. See Funkenstein, 241–43.
60. “I intend to explain this sacred book anew,” Maimon writes in his introduction, “to expand on points that he, may his name be for a blessing, abbreviates, to provide proof for any law lacking thereof in this treatise, and to compare for the reader in all places the ideas of Aristotle and his followers with those of the best philosophers of our times.” Givat ha-moreh, 4.
61. On Krochmal’s biography, see Simon Rawidowicz’s introduction to his now standard edition of Krochmal’s writings: Kitve Rabbi Nahman Krochmal, ed. Rawidowicz, 2nd edition (Waltham: Ararat Press, 1961), 15–227; cf. Jay Harris, Nachman Krochmal: Guiding the Perplexed of the Modern Age (New York, 1995), 3–14.
62. From an 1836 letter sent by Krochmal to Luzzatto, qtd. in Kitve Ranak, 425.
63. Whether the goal of The Guide to the Perplexed was, in fact, to resolve the seeming friction between reason and revelation has long been a moot issue in Maimonidean studies. If most have understood Maimonides’ motives as essentially harmonistic, others, most famously Leo Strauss and his disciples, have argued that he viewed the gap between religion and philosophy as ineradicable and believed the latter could be safeguarded only if shrouded in esotericism and thus concealed from the masses. Krochmal, however, clearly held the Guide to be a prototype of the reconciliation of philosophical and religious truth. As he wrote in 1839, “[t]he apparent contradiction, from a superficial point of view, between scriptural images and rational ideas in the philosophy of religion is the perplexity which the Rav, may his memory be for a blessing (i.e., Maimonides) was the first to grasp clearly in all its parts and extension.” See Kitve Ranak, 436. On this controversy, see Eliezer Schweid, “Religion and Philosophy: The Scholarly-Theological Debate between Julius Guttmann and Leo Strauss,” in Maimonidean Studies 1 (1990): 163–95.
64. See chapter (or “gate”) 5 of Krochmal’s Guide, in Kitve Ranak, 18–28.
65. Some question whether Maimonides’s idea of God is in fact so radically transcendent to nature. See Moshe Idel, “Deus sive Natura—The Metamorphosis of a Dictum from Maimonides to Spinoza,” Maimonides and the Sciences, ed. R. S. Cohen and H. Levine (Boston: Kluwer, 2000), 87–110.
66. See Pinhas Lahower, “Nigleh ve-nistar be-kitve Ranak,” Knesset le-zekher Bialik 3 (1941).
67. See the discussion of the first-generation Galician maskil Judah Leib Mieses’s Kinat ha-emet in Feiner, 96–104.
68. For more detail see Harris, 61–70.
69. Qtd. in Harris, 71.
70. See Kitve Rank, 433.
71. On the centrality of this dichotomy in medieval Jewish exegesis, see Frank Talmage, “Apples of Gold: The Inner Meaning of Sacred Texts in Medieval Judaism,” in Apples of Gold in Settings of Silver: Studies in Medieval Jewish Exegesis and Polemics, ed. Barry D. Walfish (Toronto, 1999), 108–150.
72. The phrase comes from Maimonides’ introduction to the Guide.
73. “And this is in truth the glory of the Absolute Spirit that lives and dwells in our midst . . . namely, that He is always ascending from the sensual to the conceptual, from the image to the idea, and from what is in some generations given to the soul from without . . . to what is an inner reality united with its essence for eternity.” See Kitve Ranak, 433. Emphasis mine. While some have argued for the existence of a notion of historical development in Maimonides’ philosophy of religion, this is not subscribed to by most experts. See Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, 131–55; David Hartman, “Maimonides’ Approach to Messianism and Its Contemporary Implications,” Da‘at 2–3 (1978–79): 5–33.
74. Kitve Ranak, 187. Emphasis mine. Translation based on Harris, 153, with some deviations.
75. See Simon Rawidowicz, “On Interpretation,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research 26 (1957): 83–126. Rawidowicz distinguishes between two modes of commentary in this essay—”explicatio,” which aims to understand through formal and contextual analysis what a document means on its own terms, and “interpretatio,” which seeks to penetrate to the “hidden layer” of the text and disclose “that which the document ought to have said” but “did not say,” thus ensuring its continued vitality and relevance. Spinoza is a paradigm of “explicatio,” Rawidowicz argues, whereas Maimonides is an exemplar of the opposing principle of “interpretatio.” Krochmal perpetuates the latter tradition. For another interpretation of the Guide to the Perplexed of the Time that emphasizes its implicit criticism of Spinoza, see Harris, 18, 27–28, 44–45, 53, 79, 81–84.
76. Letteris, “Toledot ha-Rav he-hakham ha-hoker ha-mehulal Nahman ha-Kohen Krochmal,” in More neboche ha-seman (Lemberg: Michael Wolf, 1863), 11–29. On Krochmal’
s desk, Letteris wrote, one could find
the Ethics of Baruch de Spinoza lying on top of the Yalkut Reuveni, the Me’or ‘Enayim of R’ Azariah de Rossi and the Sefer ha-Kanah alongside the Critique of Pure Reason of the philosopher Kant, the commentary of Rabbi Moshe Alshikh, the Zohar, and the poems of Horace next to some tractates from the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmud, and works of Lucian on top of them, and other books as ostensibly far from one another as east from west joined together in peace and tranquility, love and friendship (26).
77. Yosef Klausner, “Sheneur Sachs,” Historyah shel ha-sifrut ha-‘ivrit ha-hadashah, vol. 2 (Jerusalem, 1952), 128–47.
78. On A. Krochmal, see Klausner, Historyah shel ha-sifrut ha-‘ivrit ha-hadashah, vol. 4 (Jerusalem, 1953), 78–104.
79. A. Krochmal, Even ha-roshah [Foundation Stone], introduced by Peretz Smolenskin (Vienna: Holzwarth, 1871); Iyun tefilah [A Study of Prayer] (Lvov, 1875).
80. The extent to which the views on Spinoza ascribed to the elder Krochmal in this work are indicative of his true feelings is unclear. Schweid claims that this dialogue “testifies” to the “close relationship between R’ Nahman Krochmal (Ranak) and Spinoza,” but this may be an overly naïve reading of the evidence. It is hard to imagine that Abraham Krochmal would have credited his father with sympathy for Spinoza if he knew this to be untrue. It is also hard to imagine that the younger Krochmal did not project some arguments onto Rabbi Nahman that were in fact his own. See Schweid, Toledot he-hagut ha-yehudit be-‘et ha-hadashah, 428f16.
81. Émile Saisset (1814–1863) was a French philosopher associated with the Eclectic school of Victor Cousin. In 1842 he published a French translation of Spinoza’s complete works in two volumes, the first of which he prefaced with a critical introduction to his philosophy. See Oeuvres de Spinoza (Paris: Charpentier, 1842).
82. Rubin, Moreh nevukhim he-hadash, vol. 1, 13.
83. See chapter 7 of the Treatise in Spinoza: Collected Works, 456–71.
84. Rubin, Moreh, vol. 1, 14.
The First Modern Jew Page 32