The First Modern Jew

by Daniel B. Schwartz

  31. On the possibility that Spinoza was influenced by Machiavelli’s use of the identical term, effeminare, in the Discourses, to criticize Christianity for its valorization of the monastic life over the this-worldly political orientation of the ancient Greeks, see Steven Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (New Haven, 1997), 101–102.

  32. On Hess, see Ken Koltun-Fromm, Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity (Bloomington, IN, 2001).

  33. His initial work, considered a pioneering text in the history of German socialist thought, was entitled Die Heilige Geschichte der Menschheit, von einem Jünger Spinozas (Stuttgart, 1837). It has recently been translated into English by Shlomo Avineri as The Holy History of Mankind (Cambridge, 2004).

  34. Moses Hess, Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. Horst Lademacher (Cologne, 1962), 237.

  35. See Katz, “The Forerunners of Zionism.” Hess figured prominently in one of the first histories of Zionism, Adolf Boehm’s Die Zionistische Bewegung (1920; Berlin reprint, 1934), where his Rome and Jerusalem is called “the first classic work of modern Zionism.” Qtd. in Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology, 65.

  36. For a list of reviews, see Edmund Silberner, Moses Hess: Geschichte seines Lebens (Leiden, 1966), 427–44.

  37. The German Jewish author Ludwig Wihl, in a letter to Hess, wrote, “I cannot bring Spinoza into harmony with Judaism, though this does not keep me from considering him an important philosopher and great character”—a view that by 1862 probably represented the norm among most German Jews. See Hess, Briefwechsel, ed. E. Silberner (The Hague, 1959), 411. In the Orthodox-leaning L’univers israélite, after quoting an impassioned excerpt from Rome and Jerusalem in which Hess claims that, were he a paterfamilias, he would ensure that his family celebrated all the Jewish holidays, the editor S. Bloch noted that “[w]e will return to this curious expression of a man who calls himself a spinozist.” It does not appear that he ever did so. See S. Bloch, L’Univers israélite 18 (October 1862), 53.

  38. Pinsker, “Autoemanzipation!”: Mahnruf an seine Stammesgenossen von einem russischen Juden (Berlin, 1932). For excerpts from Pinsker’s Autoemancipation and other Zionist writings, see Arthur Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader (Philadelphia, 1997).

  39. Lovers of Zion (Hovevei Tsion) was a group founded in the wake of the 1881–82 pogroms. It consisted primarily of Russian Jewish nationalists committed to furthering Jewish settlement in Palestine.

  40. Bilu, an acronym for the biblical verse from Isaiah 2:5 “Beit Yaakov lekhu ve-nelkhah” (House of Jacob, let us go up!), was another, smaller and younger group of settlers founded in response to the 1881–82 pogroms and comprising primarily Russian Jewish university students. They placed greater emphasis on the political goal of achieving some kind of Jewish homeland.

  41. Klausner, Filosofim ve-hoge de‘ot, vol. 1, 217–18.

  42. David Neumark, “Shpinozah ‘al devar ‘atidot Yisra’el,” in Ha-Shiloah 2 (1897): 287–88.

  43. Z., “Spinoza über den Zionismus,” Die Welt (June 16, 1899): 5.

  44. On other such “anthology projects,” see Israel Bartal, The Ingathering of Traditions: Zionism’s Anthology Projects, in Prooftexts 17 (1997): 77–93.

  45. Dinur, “Mevasre ha-Tsiyonut,” 89.

  46. Ibid., 90.

  47. Ibid., 169–71. On Dinur and his “inclusivist . . . view of Jewish culture in the diaspora”—as seen in his formation of a concept of a Zionist forerunner so capacious that it could embrace (among others) Spinoza, “[a] figure who just as easily could be remembered for his negative definition of Jewish identity”—see David Myers, Re-inventing the Jewish Past (Oxford, 1995), 148.

  48. For a list of instances in which Ben-Gurion and others cast Spinoza as a herald of Zionism, see Simon Rawidowicz, Bavel vi-Yerushalayim (Waltham, MA, 1957), 521f14.

  49. David Ben-Gurion, “Netaken ha-me‘uvat,” Davar, December 25, 1953. Reprinted in Yehoshua Manoah, Be-vikuah ‘im David Ben-Gurion, vol. 2, 5–14. 13.

  50. Saadia Gaon, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, trans. from Arabic by Samuel Rosenblatt (New Haven, 1948), 158.

  51. Qtd. in Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology, 53.

  52. See Ahad Ha’am, “Yalkut katan—Tehiyah u-beri’ah” (1898), reprinted in ‘Al parashat derakhim: Kovets ma’amarim, vol. 3 (Berlin, 1921), 91–94. For a discussion of the Ahad Ha’amian notion of a “national pantheism,” see Shmuel Almog, Zionism and History: The Rise of a New Jewish National Consciousness, trans. Ina Friedman (New York, 1987), 165–72.

  53. Quoted in Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology, 122. Glickson was considered the leading theorist of “General Zionism,” the stream within the movement that wished to avoid identifying Zionism with class-based ideologies on the Left and Right, less out of clear opposition than out of a fear that this would detract from the nationalist claim to representing all Jews.

  54. Territorialism emerged as a result of the “Uganda controversy” of 1903, which brought a tension that had attended the national movement from the beginning—namely, did the proposed Jewish home have to be located in Palestine?—to the surface. Territorialists argued that this was not a prerequisite and that the possible British offer of a homeland in Uganda should be accepted. For Zeitlin, the demand that the Jewish homeland be in Palestine amounted to putting land above the needs of the Volk.

  55. On Zeitlin, see the biography by Shraga Bar-Sela, Ben sa‘ar le-demamah (Tel Aviv, 1999).

  56. Hillel Zeitlin, Baruch Shpinozah: Hayav, sefarav, ve-shitato ha-filosofit (Warsaw, 1900), 152.

  57. This outlook is further discussed below.

  58. Jakob Klatzkin, Baruch Shpinozah: Hayav, sefarav, shitato (Leipzig, 1923); Spinoza, Torat ha-midot, trans. J. Klatzkin (Leipzig, 1923).

  59. In the 1910s Klatzkin had studied philosophy at the University of Marburg under Hermann Cohen, the German Jewish Neo-Kantian philosopher and fiery critic of Spinoza. While Klatzkin would publicly break with Cohen’s idealistic and integrationist view of Judaism, the sharp distinction he drew between monotheism and pantheism attested to the imprint made on him by his former teacher. See Klatzkin, Hermann Cohen (Berlin, 1919).

  60. For instance, Klatzkin argued that the proposition that a true “idea” must agree with its object (or “ideatum”) was more accurately translated into Hebrew than other languages. He based this on the fact that both Latin (idea, ideatum) and medieval philosophical Hebrew (muskal, davar muskelet) convey a relationship between these two entities, whereas other languages lack such a terminology. See the introduction to Torat ha-midot, xvii–xix.

  61. Klatzkin, “Der Missverstandene” (1932), Spinoza: Dreihundert Jahre Ewigkeit (Spinoza-Festschrift 1632–1932), ed. S. Hessing (The Hague, 1962), 101–108, 108.

  62. For a recent scholarly biography of Sokolow that focuses on his early intellectual development before he embraced Zionism, see Ella Bauer, Between Poles and Jews: The Development of Nahum Sokolow’s Political Thought (Jerusalem, 2005). There is, as yet, no satisfying account of his later period.

  63. Sokolow, Baruch Shpinozah u-zemano, 6.

  64. Ibid.

  65. Ibid., 367.

  66. The “Jewish Renaissance” and its implicit idea of a “new Jewish culture”—in its German Jewish and Russian Jewish incarnations, respectively—is the subject of two recent works of scholarship. See Asher Biemann, Inventing New Beginnings: On the Concept of Renaissance in Modern Judaism (Palo Alto, 2009); Kenneth B. Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2009).

  67. Ahad Ha’am, “Slavery in Freedom,” in Ahad Ha’am, Selected Essays, ed. and intro. Leon Simon (Cleveland, 1946), 146.

  68. Ibid., “Yalkut katan—Tehiya u-veri’ah,” 93.

  69. Ibid., “Yalkut katan—Shabbat ve-tsiyonut” [1898], in ‘Al parashat derakhim, 78–81, 79.

  70. For a biography of Ahad Ha’am that places such discrepancies in his outlook at the center of its analysis, see Steven J. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of
of Zionism (Berkeley, 1993).

  71. Qtd. in Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea, 294.

  72. Ibid., 293. The most penetrating analysis of the conflict between Ahad Ha’am and Berdichevsky remains Arnold J. Band’s classic essay, “The Ahad Ha-Am and Berdyczewski Polarity,” in Jacques Kornberg, At the Crossroads: Essays on Ahad Ha-Am (Albany, NY, 1983), 49–59.

  73. Berdichevsky, Kol ma’amare Michah Yosef Berdichevsky (Tel Aviv, 1952), 48.

  74. See Shmuel Almog, “The Role of Religious Values in the Second Aliyah,” Zionism and Religion, ed. S. Almog, Jehuda Reinharz, and Anita Shapira (Hanover, NH, 1998), 237–50.

  75. Qtd. in Stanley Nash, In Search of Hebraism: Shai Hurwitz and His Polemics in the Hebrew Press (Leiden, 1980), 300.

  76. Ish Ivri [Klausner], “Herut ve-Apikorsut,” Ha-Shiloah 20 (1911): 88–91, 91.

  77. An intellectual biography of Klausner remains a desideratum. The only study of Klausner in English is Simcha Kling’s Joseph Klausner (New York, 1970), and its merits are few. Discussions of various aspects of Klausner’s life and work can be found in Iris Parush, Kanon sifruti ve-ideologyah le’umit (Jerusalem, 1992); Myers, Re-inventing the Jewish Past; and Kenneth Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution. For Klausner’s autobiography, see Darki li-krat ha-tehiyah veha-ge’ulah (Tel Aviv, 1946).

  78. Steven J. Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794–1881 (Palo Alto, 1983).

  79. Klausner coined this term in 1905 in reference to both the Territorialists and Yiddishists, whom he castigated for trying to form a modern Jewish culture that would be totally secular and cut off from the resources of the past. See “Ha-sakanah ha-kerovah,” Ha-Shiloah 15 (1905): 419–31.

  80. Klausner, Filosofim ve-hoge de‘ot, vol. 1, 227.

  81. Klausner, The Messianic Idea in Israel, trans. W. F. Stinespring (New York, 1955), 13.

  82. Klausner, “Ha-sofistim ha-‘atikim veha-hadashim” (1908), reprinted in Filosofim ve-hoge de‘ot, vol. 1, 12–32.

  83. On Klausner’s reservations about the “New Yishuv” in Ottoman Palestine, see most recently Arieh Bruce Saposnik, Becoming Hebrew: The Creation of a National Culture in Ottoman Palestine (Oxford, 2009), 196–203.

  84. “Ha-‘ivri ha-tsa‘ir,” Ha-Shiloah 20 (1909): 405.

  85. Ibid., 406.

  86. Klausner, “Megamatenu (davar me’et ha-‘orekh ha-hadash),” Ha-Shiloah 11 (1903): 1–10.

  87. Klausner, Yotsrim u-vonim, vol. 3/2 (Jerusalem, 1930), 152–53.

  88. Klausner, Ha-Zeramim ha-hadashim shel ha-sifrut ha-‘ivrit ha-tse‘irah (New York, 1907), 37.

  89. Ibid., 40.

  90. See Iris Parush, Kanon sifruti ve-ideologyah le’umit, 221.

  91. Hermann Cohen, “Spinoza über Staat und Religion, Judentum und Christentum,” in Jahrbuch für die jüdische Geschichte und Literatur 18 (1915): 56–150. Later reprinted in Cohen, Jüdische Schriften, vol. 3, ed. Bruno Strauss (Berlin, 1924), 290–372.

  92. In fact, before his Kantian turn in the 1870s, Cohen had sounded a very different tune on the subject of pantheism. In an early essay, “Heinrich Heine und das Judentum” (1867), Cohen had argued for the compatibility of Jewish monotheism and pantheism in attempting to reclaim the German poet for Judaism. How Cohen came not only to repudiate this view, but to regard Spinoza with such deep contempt is a moot point among scholars. For two different approaches, one that emphasizes “extraphilosophical” factors and the other that sees Cohen’s late-in-life polemic as fully consistent with his philosophical development, see, respectively, Ernst Simon, “Zu Hermann Cohens Spinoza-Auffassung” [1935], in Brücken: Gesammelte Aufsätze (Heidelberg, 1965), 205–14, and Franz Nauen, “Hermann Cohen’s Perceptions of Spinoza: A Reappraisal,” in Association for Jewish Studies Review 4 (1979): 111–24.

  93. Cohen, “Spinoza über Staat und Religion, etc.,” in Jahrbuch für die jüdische Geschichte und Literatur 18 (1915): 127.

  94. Ibid., 124.

  95. Qtd. in Carl Gebhardt, “Spinoza/Judentum und Barock. Rede bei der Feier des jüdischen Akademischen Philosophenvereins im kleinen Festsaal der Universität zu Wien am 12. März 1927,” in Spinoza; Vier Reden (Heidelberg, 1927), 34.

  96. Ibid.

  97. For a list of the various commemorative works published in 1927, see Jean Préposiet, Bibliographie Spinoziste (Paris, 1973), 140–43.

  98. Qtd. in Gebhardt, op. cit., 33.

  99. Societas Spinozana, 1932, Oko-Gebhardt Collection, Box 8, Columbia University.

  100. Among the participants in this conference were Jakob Klatzkin, who was then engrossed in the project of editing the original German Encyclopedia Judaica, and Leon Roth, a British Jew who had written about Spinoza and Maimonides and would soon be appointed the first chair in philosophy at the Hebrew University.

  101. Oko to William Leonard Benedict, 9 December 1926, Oko-Gebhardt Collection, Box 1.

  102. Ibid.

  103. Ibid., “Spinoza und der Platonismus,” Chronicon Spinozanum 1 (1921): 181.

  104. Gebhardt, “Spinoza und der Platonismus,” 182.

  105. Gebhardt, “Spinoza. Rede bei der Feier der Societas Spinozana,” 12.

  106. Gebhardt, “Spinoza/Judentum,” 35.

  107. Ibid., 36.

  108. Ibid.

  109. The Collected Works of Spinoza, ed. Curley, 462.

  110. Gebhardt, “Spinoza. Rede bei der Feier der Societas Spinozana,” 13.

  111. On the politics surrounding the hiring of Klausner, see Myers, Re-inventing the Jewish Past, 53–54.

  112. Isaiah Sonne, “‘Yahaduto’ shel Shpinozah,” Ha-Do’ar 13 (1934): 7–8, 22–23, 56, 60, 70–71.

  113. Klausner, “Rabbi Shlomo ibn Gabirol: Ha-adam, ha-meshorer, ha-filosof ” (1926), reprinted in Filosofim ve-hogei de‘ot, vol. 1, 92–171.

  114. For the original title, see “Memorial for Spinoza at the Hebrew University” [Heb], Davar 2 (22 February 1927): 1.

  115. Klausner, Filosofim, vol. 1, 219.

  116. Ibid.

  117. Cohen, “Spinoza über Staat und Religion, Judentum und Christentum.”

  118. Klausner, Filosofim, 220–21.

  119. Leo Strauss, “Cohens Analyse der Bibelwissenschaft Spinozas,” in Der Jude 8 (1924): 295–314. Klausner does not cite Strauss here.

  120. Klausner, Filosofim, 220.

  121. Ibid., 225.

  122. Ibid., 227.

  123. Ibid., 227–28.

  124. Ibid., 230.

  125. Ibid.

  126. Ibid., 240.

  127. Klausner would include a “biography” of Judah Maccabee in his collection of essays Ke-she-’umah nilhemet ‘al herutah [When a Nation Fights for its Freedom], vol. 1 (Tel Aviv, 1935–36), 43–90.

  128. Klausner, Filosofim, 241.

  129. Immanuel of Rome (c. 1261–c. 1328) was a Hebrew poet who wrote poetry on love, friendship, wine, and other topics.

  130. Klausner, “Tradition and Innovation in Hebrew Literature,” Filosofim ve-hoge de‘ot, vol. 1, 10.

  131. Ibid.

  132. Klausner, Filosofim ve-hoge de‘ot, vol. 1 (Jerusalem, 1934), 242.

  133. Klausner, “Shpinozah ve-torato,” Filosofim ve-hoge de‘ot, vol. 1, 209–18.

  134. David Ben-Gurion, Ben-Gurion Looks at the Bible, trans. Jonathan Kolatch (New York: Jonathan David Publishers, 1972), 48.

  135. Ibid., 52–54.

  136. On Ben-Gurion’s speech, see Aaron Zeitlin, “Shpinozah un a ‘nevuah,’” Der Tog, September 7, 1951. For the “proto-Zionist” passage of the Treatise in Ben-Gurion’s handwriting, see David Ben-Gurion diary, August 7, 1951, The Ben-Gurion Archives, Ben-Gurion University (Be’er Sheva, Israel).

  137. Ben-Gurion, letter to G. H. Shikmoni, July 19, 1951, The Ben-Gurion Archives.

  138. In what appears to be a memo about the Spinozaeum prepared for Ben-Gurion, dated September 26, 1951, Herz-Shikmoni is presented as someone “pleasant, a bit odd, unrealistic yet modest . . . an upstanding man but an ‘amateur’ and not of great caliber.” The mi
ssion of the society is said to be “the cultivation of the ‘Jewish-communist’ idea, that is, a Judaism that transcends a national and religious Judaism.”

  139. The same memo of September 26, 1951, also lists some of the most prominent members of the Spinozaeum.

  140. Leon Roth, the brother of Cecil Roth, taught at Hebrew University from 1928 to 1951, when, weary of what he saw as a growing parochialism in Zionism and Israeli culture, he returned to England. On Leon Roth, see Neve Gordon and Gabriel Motzkin, “Between Universalism and Particularism: The Origins of the Philosophy Department at Hebrew University and the Zionist Project,” Jewish Social Studies 9, no. 2 (2003): 99–122.

  141. Letter from Ben-Gurion to G. H. Shikmoni, July 19, 1951.

  142. David Ben-Gurion diary, March 1, 1952, and November 30, 1952, The Ben-Gurion Archives.

  143. In the November 30, 1952, diary entry, Ben-Gurion expresses a preference that the translator have a “Hebrew name” as well.

  144. David Ben-Gurion, “Netaken ha-me‘uvat,” reprinted in Be-vihuah ‘im David Ben-Gurion, vol. 2, ed. Yehoshua Manoah (Tel Aviv, 1956), 7.

  145. Ibid., 14.

  146. On the conversion of “countermemory” into “official” memory in the context of Zionism, see Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago, 1994).

  147. Letter from Rabbi Isaac Halevi Herzog to G. Herz-Shikmoni, 6 Tishre 5714 (September 15, 1953), G. Herz-Shikmoni Papers, A2/32:2, Abba Hushi Archive, University of Haifa (Israel).

  148. Qtd. in “Spinoza Project Stirs Amsterdam,” New York Times, July 25, 1954.

  149. These responses are culled from a two-page document titled “Baruch Shpinozah bi-shenat 5714” [Baruch Spinoza in the Year(s) 1953–54], The Ben-Gurion Archives.

  150. Yehoshua Manoah, “Le-yeter hitbonenut,” Be-vikuah ‘im Ben-Gurion, 52.

  Chapter 6: Farewell, Spinoza

  1. David Biale, “Historical Heresies and Modern Jewish Identity,” in Jewish Social Studies 8 (2002): 115.

  2. In fairness, this is true only of I. B. Singer’s published body of work. His private papers contain a few undated, handwritten Yiddish fragments of planned stories about Spinoza, including one entitled “The Last Years of Spinoza.” See Isaac Bashevis Singer Papers, Box 38/4, 100/11, Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin.