3. For all its prevalence, the image of Spinoza in Singer’s work has received surprisingly little attention. Nearly all the scholarship on this topic pertains to “The Spinoza of Market Street.” See Morris Golden, “Dr. Fischelson’s Miracle: Duality and Vision in Singer’s Fiction,” The Achievement of Isaac Bashevis Singer, ed. Marcia Allentuck (Carbondale, IL, 1969), 26–43; Samuel I. Mintz, “Spinoza and Spinozism in Singer’s Short Fiction,” Critical Views of Isaac Bashevis Singer, ed. Irving Malin (New York, 1969), 207–17; Steven B. Smith, “A Fool for Love: Thoughts on I. B. Singer’s Spinoza,” in Iyyun 51 (2002): 41–50.
4. The questionable reliability of autobiography as a historical source is compounded in the case of I. B. Singer. The biographer not only has to contend with the sheer number of autobiographical texts produced by Singer over the course of his life, with their conflicting details and emphases. He or she is also confronted with the author’s rather open transgression of the boundaries between fiction and autobiography. What is arguably Singer’s most famous autobiographical work—In My Father’s Court—is described by the writer as “an attempt to combine two styles—that of memoirs and that of belles-lettres”; at the same time, much of Singer’s fiction is of an unmistakably autobiographical character. On this duality, see Chone Shmeruk, “Isaac Bashevis Singer—In Search of His Autobiography,” in Jewish Quarterly 29 (Winter 1981/1982): 28–36. I have attempted to hedge against the reliability of any single autobiographical text by drawing on several, but this is by no means foolproof. There is simply no getting around the fact that the account given by Singer of his youthful wrestling with Spinoza may be a more accurate reflection of how the mature author remembered and chose to present this encounter than of the encounter itself.
5. I. B. Singer, “Isaac Bashevis Singer: An Interview,” by Cyrena Pondrom, Contemporary Literature 10 (1969): 1–38. Reprinted in Grace Farrell (ed.), Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations (Jackson, MS, 1992), 92.
6. I. B. Singer, In My Father’s Court (New York, 1966), 304. “Old Jewishness” and “The New Winds” are two of the chapter titles in this memoir. In My Father’s Court was originally serialized in Der Forverts from February 18 to September 16, 1955 as In mayn foters bezdn-shtub. When first published in book form in 1956, it was titled Mayn tatns bezdn-shtub.
7. According to Ringelblum, Stupnicki poisoned himself at the Umschlagplatz of the Warsaw ghetto before being deported. See Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum, ed. and trans. Jacob Sloan (New York, 1974).
8. Nahum Fiedel, “Borukh Shpinoza. A kurtse lebensbeshraybung [ferfertigt tsu zayn geburtstag. 12./24. November], in Yudishes folks-blat 43 (1886): 683–87; 44 (1886): 699–703; Berthold Auerbach, Borukh Shpinoza: Dos leben un di ferfolgungen fun dem gresten idishen filozof, fervikelt in an antsienden roman, trans. B. Gorin (New York, 1899); Phillip Krantz, Borukh Spinoza, zayn leben un zayn filozofye (New York, 1905). For bibliographies of Yiddish “Spinozana,” see Y. Anilovitsh, “Spinoza bibliografye,” in Spinoza bukh, tsum drayhundertstn geboyrn-yor fun Benediktus Spinoza, ed. Jacob Shatzky (New York, 1932), 175–83; Kay Schweigmann-Greve, “Spinoza in Jiddischer Sprache,” in Studia Spinozana 13 (1997): 261–95; Brad Sabin Hill, Spinoza in the Yiddish Mind: An Exhibition on the 350th Anniversary of the Excommunication of Benedictus de Spinoza, 1656–2006 (New York, 2006).
9. Shaul Stupnicki, Borukh Shpinoza: zayn filozofye, bibel-kritik, shtatslere un zayn badaytung in der antviklung fun mentshlikhen denken (Warsaw, 1917). From introduction, unpaginated.
10. In My Father’s Court, 305.
11. I. B. Singer, Love and Exile (London, 1984), xix–xx.
12. In My Father’s Court, 305. Isaac Bashevis does not present his father’s condemnation of Spinoza in In My Father’s Court as a rejoinder to Israel Joshua. He notes merely that after discovering Stupnicki’s Spinoza, “I remembered how Father used to say that Spinoza’s name should be blotted out.” His brother’s role in first exposing him to the Spinozan heresy is only mentioned in the preface to the English edition of Love and Exile, a compilation of three other memoirs by Bashevis Singer originally serialized in Der Forverts. Yet it makes sense that his pious father would only have castigated Spinoza by name in response to a specific provocation and not of his own initiative.
13. Ibid. The “Baal Shem” refers to Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer (1699–1760), often called the Baal Shem Tov or Besht, conventionally regarded as the spiritual founder of Hasidism. On the history of comparisons between Spinoza and the Baal Shem Tov in the Jewish reception of Spinoza, see Allan Nadler, “The Besht as Spinozist: Abraham Krochmal’s Preface to Ha-Ketav ve-ha-Mikhtav,” in Rabbinic Culture and Its Critics: Jewish Authority, Dissent, and Heresy in Medieval and Early Modern Times, eds. Daniel Frank and Matt Goldish (Detroit, 2008), 359–89.
14. A Little Boy in Search of God (New York, 1976)—a translation of the first part of the serialized autobioraphy Gloybn un tsveyfl (Der Forverts, 1974–78)—was later incorporated in Love and Exile. See Love and Exile, 16.
15. Love and Exile, 15. The Pillar of Service was a popularization of the cosmology of the sixteenth-century kabbalist R. Isaac Luria.
16. Salomon Maimon, An Autobiography, trans. J. Clark Murray (Champaign, IL, 2001 [1888]), 105.
17. Ibid., 219.
18. Love and Exile, 18.
19. Ibid., 32, emphasis mine.
20. Ibid., xxii.
21. Ibid., 23.
22. Spinoza, The Collected Works, 409.
23. For an overview of the different positions on this issue, see Steven Nadler, Spinoza’s Ethics: An Introduction (Cambridge, UK, 2006), 68–69, 141–43.
24. Spinoza, of course, describes time as only a mode of thought existing within the imagination while ruling out of hand a God who plans and acts purposively. See Ethics I, D8, Appendix; II, D5.
25. Love and Exile, 34–35.
26. I. B. Singer, “Shpinoza un di Kabbalah,” reprinted in Mayn tatns bezdn-shtub [hemshekhim-zamlung], ed. Chone Shmeruk (Jerusalem, 1996), 298.
27. I. B. Singer, “Ikh fantazir vegn mayn manuskript—in ‘Mizrahi,’” in Mayn tatns bezdn-shtub [hemshekhim-zamlung], 301–306.
28. Singer published these pieces using the pseudonym Yitshok Varshavsky that he commonly used for newspaper articles. See Y. Varshavsky, “Di filozofye fun Borukh Shpinoza,” Forverts, April 26, 1947, 2, 9; idem., “Shpinozas lere vegn der mentshlekher moral,” Forverts, May 3, 1947, 2, 8.
29. Singer would eventually create a close fictional analogue to his autobiographical account of the “Spinoza and the Kabbalah” episode in his novel The Certificate (New York, 1992), originally serialized as Der sertifikat in Forverts, 1967.
30. I. B. Singer, “Isaac Bashevis Singer: An Interview,” by Cyrena Pondrom, in Grace Farrell (ed.), Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations (Jackson, MS, 1992), 93. “Q” (“Question”) signifies Pondrom, “A” (“Answer”) Singer.
31. Borukh (Benedikt) Shpinoza, Der teologish-politisher traktat, trans. N. Perelman (New York, 1923). The first complete Hebrew translation of the Treatise by Chaim Wirszubski was first published in 1961.
32. Borukh Shpinoza, Di etik [dervayzen oyf a geometrishen ufen], trans. W. Nathanson (Warsaw, 1923); idem., Di etik [dervayzen, etc.], trans. W. Nathanson (Chicago, 1923). On Nathanson and other Yiddish Spinozists, see Shlomo Berger, “‘Undzer Bruder Spinoza’: Yiddish Authors and the Free Thinker,” Studia Rosenthaliana 30 (1996): 255–68.
33. J. Shatzky, Spinoza un zayn svivoh (New York, 1927). For a list of reviews of Shatzky’s book, see Schweigmann-Greve, “Spinoza in Jiddischer Sprache,” 272–74.
34. See A. M. Deborin, Shpinoza, der fargeyer [in likht fun Marxism] (Warsaw, 1930); Jacob Milch, “Spinoza un Marx—a paralel,” Spinoza bukh (New York, 1932), 54–93; Z. Rudi, “Spinoza un der materializm,” Spinoza bukh, 137–57; Z. Neln, “Borukh Shpinoza un der dialektisher materializm,” Literarishe bleter, September, 1932, 1–4.
35. Leo Finkelstein, “Di Spinoza-fa
yerungen in Hag,” Globus 3 (1932): 74–83.
36. Spinoza bukh, ed. Jacob Shatzky (New York, 1932).
37. The sudden increase of Yiddish literature on Spinoza between the wars was a single, if notable illustration of the growth of Yiddish culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuies. On this efflorescence, see, most recently, David E. Fishman, The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture (Pittsburgh, 2005); Barry Trachtenberg, The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903–1917 (Syracuse, NY, 2008); Kenneth Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2009).
38. H. Leyvick, “Shpinoza,” Ale verk, vol. 1 (New York, 1940 [1934]), 483–91; A. Sutzkever, “Shpinoze,” Poetishe verk, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv, 1963 [1947]), 593–97.
39. M. Ravitch, Poetisher priv in fir tsiklen. Der mentsh, dos verk, di shpin, ktoyres (Vienna, 1919). Ravitch amended his Spinoza cycle for each printing. The excerpts cited in the text come from its final form, in Ravitch’s anthology Di lider fun mayne lider. A kinus—oyfgekliben fun draytsen zamlungen, 1909–1954 (Montreal, 1954), 51–74.
40. Ravitch led a famously peripatetic life. After leaving Warsaw in 1934 he lived in Melbourne, Buenos Aires, New York, Mexico City, and Montreal. He told his life story through 1934 in the three volumes of his autobiography, Dos mayse-bukh fun mayn leben (Buenos Aires, 1964). The account of his discovery of Spinoza can be found in volume 2, 335–39.
41. Di lider fun mayne lider, 63–64. The English translation is taken from Berger, “‘Undzer Bruder Shpinoza,” 259.
42. Di lider fun mayne lider, 72.
43. In 1956—while Ravitch was temporarily living in Israel with his son, the painter Yosl Bergner—he represented the Haifa-based Bet Shpinozah (“Spinoza House” or Spinozaeum) at a commemoration of the three-hundredth anniverary of Spinoza’s excommunication held at the burial site of the philosopher in the churchyard of the Niewe Kerk in The Hague. To mark the occasion, the Spinozaeum donated a monument of black volcanic rock, hewn from the mountains of the Galilee, on which was inscribed a single Hebrew word: AMKHA (your people). At its unveiling in the Niewe Kerk that September, Ravitch stated, “It is true that the Jewish community was among the first to distance itself from this genius and his Torah—but on behalf of the Bet Shpinozah of Israel I hereby proclaim our reconciliation with him and admiration for him. The word AMKHA engraved on the stone cut from the mountains of Israel is a token of this.” See Bet Shpinozah, ‘Eser shanot Bet Shpinozah (Haifa, 1961).
44. Di lider fun mayne lider, 52–53.
45. Ibid., 73.
46. On this journal and Yiddish modernism of 1920s Warsaw more broadly, see Seth Wolitz, “‘Di Khalyastre,’ the Yiddish Modernist Movement in Poland [after WWI]: An Overview,” Yiddish 4, no. 3 (1981): 5–19.
47. The three founders of Di Khalyastre were divided by latent and later explicit ideological differences. The communist Markish returned to the Soviet Union in 1926 and was ultimately one of the fifteen Yiddish artists, writers, and poets murdered by Stalin in August 1952 in the “Night of the Murdered Poets.” Greenberg immigrated to Palestine in 1923 and, after the 1929 riots, joined the radical Revisionist Right. Ravitch would reject both nationalism and communism in favor of a Spinoza-inflected secular humanism.
48. Love and Exile, 49.
49. Like Hillel and Aaron Zeitlin, whose hostility to the Yiddish Left he would come to share, I. B. Singer harbored a particular loathing for Peretz Markish, “who sang odes to Stalin until Stalin had him liquidated.” Love and Exile, 50. In Singer’s autobiographical novel The Certificate, the character Susskind Eikhl is an obvious (and withering) surrogate for Markish.
50. Ibid., 55.
51. For an extremely thorough description of the different cliques in Jewish literary Warsaw from the end of World War I through the great deportation from the Warsaw ghetto in the summer of 1942, see Natan Cohen, Sefer, sofer, ve-‘iton: Mercaz ha-tarbut ha-yehudit be-Varshah, 1918–1942 (Jerusalem, 2003).
52. I. B. Singer, “Concerning Yiddish Literature in Poland” (1943), Prooftexts 15, no. 2 (1995), 124.
53. On the surge of interest in parapsychology in the interwar period—an interest with roots in the fin-de-siècle—see Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, UK, 1995), ch. 3.
54. Love and Exile, 57.
55. Singer would skewer this subordination of art to politics in an essay, published in an early issue of Globus, that has been called his “literary credo.” See Yitshok Bashevis, “Tsu der frage fun dikhtung un politik,” Globus 1, no. 3 (September 1932); Moshe Yungman, “Singer’s Polish Period: 1924 to 1935,” Yiddish 6, nos. 2–3 (Summer–Fall 1985): 34.
56. Der sotn in Goray would first be published as a stand-alone work in Warsaw 1935; then, after I. B. Singer had already immigrated to America, it will be published in New York as Der sotn in Goray: A mayse fun fartsaytns un andere derstseylungen [Satan in Goray: A Tale of Bygone Days, and Other Stories]. In 1955 it was translated into English as Satan in Goray by Jacob Sloan.
57. Aaron Zeitlin, “Perushim oyf toyres-Spinoza,” Globus 8, no. 14 (September, 1933): 76–86; Globus 8, no. 15 (September 1933): 39–45.
58. “Perushim,” Globus 8, no. 14, 86.
59. “Perushim,” Globus 8, no. 15, 45. Zeitlin lost his whole family (including his father, wife, and children) in the Holocaust. He survived through a twist of fate: He happened to be in New York for the premiere of one of his plays when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, and he never returned. His animus toward Spinoza would surface again in his most famous post-Holocaust poem, which vindicates faith “in my living God of cataclysm / God of naked revenge and secret consolation” even while thundering against Him: “And who would rage / against a Spinozan god, / a nonbeing being?” See the excerpt of “I Believe” (1948), translated by Robert Friend, in Milton Teichman and Sharon Leder, eds., Truth and Lamentation: Stories and Poems on the Holocaust (Champaign, IL, 1994), 441.
60. “Perushim,” Globus 8, no. 14, 82.
61. Ibid., 84.
62. Love and Exile, 87.
63. See Der yid fun Bovl [The Jew From Babylon], Globus 1, no. 2 (1932): 17–27; Der sindikher Meshiekh [The Sinning Messiah], serialized in Forverts in 1935–36; “Der hurbn fun Kreshev” [The Destruction of Kreshev], included along with other “demon” stories in the 1943 Yiddish reprinting of Der Sotn in Goray: A mayse fun fartsaytns un andere dertseylungen [Satan in Goray: A Tale of Bygone Days, and other Stories] (New York, 1943). All of these works with the exception of Der sindlikher Meshiekh would eventually be translated into English.
64. See, among others, Ruth Wisse, “Singer’s Paradoxical Progress,” in Commentary 67, no. 2 (1979): 33–38; Edward Alexander, Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Study of the Short Fiction (Boston, 1990). Singer himself would indict the Yiddish literature inspired by the secular messianism of the 1920s and 1930s as an expression of “literary Sabbatianism.” See I. B. Singer, “Concerning Yiddish Literature in Poland (1943), Prooftexts 15, no. 2 (1995).
65. Gershom Scholem, “Redemption through Sin,” reprinted in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York, 1971 [1937, Heb.]), 78–141.
66. I. B. Singer, “The Destruction of Kreshev,” trans. Elaine Gottlieb and June Ruth Flaum, in The Collected Stories (New York, 1983), 94. On Singer’s “demon” stories, see David Roskies, “The Demon as Storyteller,” A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 266–306.
67. See Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, 10:169–258 (Leipzig,1866). For later examples of this rhetorical linkage in the Jewish literary and theological imagination, see Israel Zangwill, Dreamers of the Ghetto (Philadelphia, 1898), 115–220; Felix Theilhaber, Dein Reich komme! Ein chiliastischer Roman aus der Zeit Rembrandts und Spinozas (Berlin, 1924); Jakob Wasserman, Fränkische Erzälungen. Sabbatai Zewi, ein Vorspiel (Frankfurt, 1925); Martin Buber, “Spinoza, Sabbatai Zvi, and the Baal-Shem” [1927], in idem., The Origin and Me
aning of Hasidism, ed. and trans. Maurice Friedman (New York, 1961); and Josef Kastein, Sabbatai Zewi, der Messias von Ismir (Berlin, 1932). For more recent scholarly analysis of this pairing, see Michael Brennre, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven, 1996), 148–50; David Biale, “Shabbtai Zvi and the Seductions of Jewish Orientalism,” in The Sabbatean Movement and Its Aftermath, vol. II, ed. Rachel Elior (Jerusalem, 2001), 85–110; and Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars (Princeton, 2009).
68. Max Scheler, Person and Self-Value: Three Essays, trans. Manfred Frings (Hingham, MA, 1987), 129–30.
69. This observation is made by Samuel I. Mintz in his “Spinoza and Spinozism in Singer’s Shorter Fiction,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 1 (1981): 207–208.
70. While Spinoza was certainly a bachelor, the image of him as a secular monk cloistered in his attic apartment has been convincingly shown to be more myth than fact. See Nadler, Spinoza: A Life, 289–90.
71. I. B. Singer, “The Spinoza of Market Street,” trans. Martha Glicklich and Cecil Hemley, The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer (New York, 1983), 79–80.
72. The saying comes from the Mishnah Avot (5:22).
73. The Collected Stories, 81.
74. Ibid., 79.
75. Colerus, The Life of Benedict de Spinosa, reprinted in Frederick Pollock, Spinoza: His Life and Philosophy (London: C. K. Paul, 1880), 421.
76. Love and Exile, xxi–xxii.
77. The Collected Stories, 82–83.
78. Indeed, if Fischelson had a true understanding of Spinoza’s third and highest kind of knowledge, or intuition—which “proceeds from an adequate idea of certain attributes of God to an adequate knowledge of things,” and is the stepping stone to the “intellectual love of God”—then he would realize that his instinctual recoiling from the multitude represents yet another failure to live up to his Spinozan ideal. The right path would be to grasp how both the orderly “celestial bodies” and the apparent chaos of the “rabble” derive from the same rational necessity, which is equivalent to understanding them sub specie aeternitatis (under the aspect of eternity).
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