“This is a spectacular book, deeply researched and brilliantly written, on a riveting subject–the historical reception of Spinoza from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Schwartz demonstrates his command of European philosophy, modern European Jewish history, Hebrew and Yiddish literature, and Zionist culture. A tour de force.”–David Biale, University of California, Davis

“In this daring and outstanding book, Schwartz does a superb job of bringing Spinoza back to life in a number of diverse and intriguing historical contexts. A full-bodied cultural history, attentive to the various settings in which Spinoza was rediscovered and revivified, this is the most wide-ranging, historically grounded, and illuminating book that has been written on the subject.”–David N. Myers, University of California, Los Angeles

“This is a spectacular book, deeply researched and brilliantly written, on a riveting subject–the historical reception of Spinoza from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Schwartz demonstrates his command of European philosophy, modern European Jewish history, Hebrew and Yiddish literature, and Zionist culture. A tour de force.”–David Biale, University of California, Davis

“In this daring and outstanding book, Schwartz does a superb job of bringing Spinoza back to life in a number of diverse and intriguing historical contexts. A full-bodied cultural history, attentive to the various settings in which Spinoza was rediscovered and revivified, this is the most wide-ranging, historically grounded, and illuminating book that has been written on the subject.”–David N. Myers, University of California, Los Angeles

Daniel B. Schwartz is assistant professor of history at George Washington University.

The First Modern Jew

Spinoza and the History of an ImageBy Daniel B. Schwartz

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-14291-3

Contents

List of Illustrations………………………………………………………………………………………………….ixPreface and Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………………………….xiNote on Translations and Romanization……………………………………………………………………………………xviiIntroduction Spinoza’s Jewish Modernities………………………………………………………………………………..1Chapter 1: Ex- Jew, eternal Jew: Early Representations of the Jewish Spinoza…………………………………………………15Chapter 2: refining Spinoza: Moses Mendelssohn’s Response to the Amsterdam Heretic……………………………………………35Chapter 3: The First Modern Jew: Berthold Auerbach’s Spinoza and the Beginnings of an Image……………………………………55Chapter 4: A Rebel against the Past, A Revealer of Secrets: Salomon Rubin and the East European Maskilic Spinoza…………………81Chapter 5: From the Heights of Mount Scopus: Yosef Klausner and the Zionist Rehabilitation of Spinoza…………………………..113Chapter 6: Farewell, Spinoza: I.B. Singer and the Tragicomedy of the Jewish Spinozist…………………………………………155Epilogue: Spinoza Redivivus in the Twenty-First Century……………………………………………………………………189Notes………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..203Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………………….247Index………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..265

Chapter One

Ex-Jew, Eternal Jew

Early Representations of the Jewish Spinoza

I.

The year 1670 had hardly begun before the first Latin edition of the Theological-Political Treatise appeared anonymously and under false imprint in the Dutch republic. And this brief for the “freedom to philosophize” had hardly begun to circulate before word spread of what one objector memorably dubbed the “liber pestilentissimus” (or most pestilent book). Here was a book that denied biblical prophecy was a source of truth, rejected miracles, read scripture as a human document, limited the role of religion to guaranteeing social obedience while relegating the pursuit of truth to philosophy, and argued for stripping religious communities of the right to coercive authority separate from the sovereign power. In short, here was a book that sought to displace once and for all organized religion as a bedrock of state and society.

It took all of four months for the first published reaction to appear—a tractlet by the Leipzig philosopher Jakob Thomasius, best known as Leibniz’s teacher—blasting the “author afraid of the light” for purporting to support greater liberty in philosophy alone when in fact he sought anarchy in religion as well. Thomasius was genuinely ignorant of the man behind the Treatise; in this he seems to have been more the exception than the rule. “It is said that the author is a Jew by the name of Spinosa, who long ago was expelled from the synagogue on account of his monstrous opinions”: so wrote the German professor of rhetoric J. G. Graevius to the twenty-five-year-old Leibniz in the spring of 1671. Leibniz made sure to echo these sentiments in a letter to the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld later that fall, even while simultaneously dashing off his first missive to the man he fawningly addressed as “Mr. Spinosa, celebrated doctor and profound philosopher.”

This was only the beginning of a raucous reaction against Spinoza throughout the West. Amazingly, Western Europe continued to be beset by war, the early modern Dutch republic grew ever more religiously fragmented, yet in regard to the philosophy of Spinoza a remarkable ecumenism prevailed: He was vituperatively attacked on all sides. The barrage only intensified with the appearance in late 1677 of Spinoza’s Opera posthuma [Posthumous Works], which contained the Ethics. Here the “hidden teaching” on which the “theological-political” critique of organized religion rested—the conflation of God and Nature—was made utterly manifest. Calvinist theologians of the Dutch Reformed Church instantly tried to have his work suppressed, branding the Treatise and later the Opera posthuma “as horrible and blasphemous as anything the world has ever seen.” The states of Holland banned both works; the papacy added them to the Index of Forbidden Books. All told, by the end of the seventeenth century, state governments and churches throughout Europe had proscribed Spinoza’s philosophy either officially or de facto. Meanwhile, Cartesians largely disowned him, fearful lest their efforts to wall off the new rationalist and mechanical science from fundamental dogmas of Christian faith be damaged by association with the unfettered “freedom to philosophize” sought by Spinoza. Protestant sects that on balance were more liberal than reformed Calvinism or Catholicism, including the Remonstrants, Mennonites, and Quakers, even the staunchly nonconformist Dutch Collegiants with whom Spinoza is believed to have affiliated, at least for a time—all these groups were in the main repelled by Spinoza’s monism and determinism and were well-represented in the torrent of anti-Spinoza literature. No one could safely acknowledge any sympathy for Spinoza’s ideas and maintain a reputation as a “respectable” thinker.

The criticism of Spinoza’s thought went along with gibes against his name and character. Most famously, the Kiel theologian Christian Kortholt substituted “Maledictus” (the accursed one) for “Benedictus,” a swap that became a favorite of Spinoza’s many adversaries for the first century of his reception. The more common target of puns was the philosopher’s surname Espinosa, which means “thorn” in Spanish. Spinoza was also labeled an “exotic animal,” a “frivolous bird,” even a sodomizer—the latter by a Dutch Collegiant no less. The worst came in 1702 in an anonymous thrashing of Spinoza that ended on this vivid note: “These are the horrid teachings, the repulsive errors, that this impudent Jewish philosopher (to put it nicely) has shit into the world.” But the two words that were probably used to describe him most frequently could be found in the caption to a popular engraving of Spinoza from around 1700: Benedictus de Spinoza, Judaeus et Atheista. Benedictus de Spinoza, Jew and atheist.

Amid this spate of polemics and vulgarities, the Jews of Holland and Western Europe largely kept to the sidelines. They held their fire despite the singling out of Judaism for especially withering treatment in the Treatise. Spinoza’s charges cut right to the heart of postbiblical Judaism. By interpreting the biblical concept of election as a doctrine referring solely to political and material prosperity, Spinoza dismissed one of the cornerstones of Judaism—the idea that even in exile, the Jews remained the “chosen people” of God. On similar grounds, he denied the identification of the Halakhah as a “divine law” and insisted that the practices instituted by Moses (the so-called ceremonial law) had a mere political significance and retained validity only so long as the ancient Jewish commonwealth stood. Spinoza also portrayed Moses in a less flattering light than Jesus, used the Hebrew Bible rather than the New Testament as the basis for his biblical criticism, and on several occasions referred to the Jews as Pharisees in a manner that seemed designed to capitalize on the negative Christian connotations of the label. Yet none of this elicited a reaction. For the period between 1656 and 1755, the year that Mendelssohn’s Philosophical Dialogues appeared, there is but a single work by a Jewish author that is a rejoinder to Spinoza’s philosophy, the Certamen philosophicum (1684) of the Portuguese converso turned Sephardic apologist isaac (Balthazar) orobio de castro (1617–1687). And even this treatise was written solely at the behest of a Dutch Collegiant troubled by Spinoza’s geometrical proofs in the Ethics for a metaphysical monism and determinism. It dealt only obliquely with Spinoza and not at all with the devastating criticism of Judaism in the Treatise.

The standard explanation of this general silence vis-à-vis Spinoza is that the Jews had years before issued their definitive statement on the matter. on July 27, 1656, the Sephardic community of Amsterdam, known as the Kahal Kados Talmud Torah, issued this writ of excommunication against the twenty-three-year-old Spinoza:

The Senhores of the Mahamad make it known that they have long since been cognizant of the wrong opinions and behavior of Baruch d’Espinoza, and tried various means and promises to dissuade him from his evil ways. But as they effected no improvement, obtaining on the contrary more information every day of the horrible heresies which he practised and taught, and of the monstrous actions which he performed, and as they had many trustworthy witnesses who in the presence of the same Espinoza reported and testified against him and convicted him; and after all this had been investigated in the presence of the rabbis, they decided with the consent of these that the same Espinoza should be excommunicated and separated from the people of Israel, as they now excommunicate him with the following ban:

After the judgment of the angels, and with that of the Saints, we excommunicate, expel and curse and damn Baruch d’Espinoza with the consent of God, Blessed be He, and with the consent of this holy congregation [Kahal Kados] in front of the holy Scrolls with the 613 precepts which are written therein, with the anathema with which Joshua banned Jericho, with the curse with which Elisha cursed the youths, and with all the curses which are written in the Law. Cursed be he by day, and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up; cursed be he when he goes out, and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not pardon him; the anger and wrath of the Lord will rage against this man, and bring him all the curses which are written in the Book of the Law, and the Lord will destroy his name from under the Heavens, and the Lord will separate him to injury from all the tribes of Israel with all the curses of the firmament, which are written in the Book of the Law. But you who cleave to the Lord your God are blessed.

We order that nobody should communicate with him orally or in writing, or show him any favor, or stay with him under the same roof, or come within four ells of him, or read anything composed or written by him.

Six weeks after its proclamation, a Portuguese copy of the ban, or herem, was officially entered into the community’s Book of Ordinances, whence it did not resurface for two hundred years. What were the “horrible heresies” and “monstrous actions” referred to in the preamble to the writ of expulsion? What were, for that matter, the “various means and promises to dissuade him from his evil ways” that the community had tried? The Mahamad—that is, the lay leaders of the Sephardic congregation—were not forthcoming with such details. Nothing is said about which taboos in particular he had violated. Nor do we have any detailed testimony about the causes and circumstances of the ban from a Jew who was witness to the events firsthand. It is certainly plausible that Spinoza was propagating ideas in the mid-1650s similar to what he published in the Treatise and Ethics years later (in which case his excommunication would be no mystery whatsoever), but there is no unimpeachable proof to support this presumption. Scholars have thus been forced to rely on hints and allusions, circumstantial evidence and collateral sources in venturing hypotheses about why Spinoza was excommunicated. From the new theories that continue to be added to the myriad already suggested, it seems fair to wonder whether a measure of consensus will ever be reached on this question.

One thing is clear: The community evidently viewed Spinoza as a very wicked and dangerous heretic, since they slapped him with a ban of exceptional harshness. In sound and fury as well as in scope, his writ of expulsion exceeds all but one of the more than one hundred listed in the community’s Book of ordinances. Clearly, this was no ordinary herem. Beyond forbidding all personal contact with the heretic, the board of governors also outlawed reading “anything composed or written by him.” This meant that even a rebuttal of the Treatise or the Opera posthuma would presume some form of reading of the texts themselves and thus constitute a violation of the terms of the herem, putting the polemicist himself at risk of communal censure. The lack of extant published responses to Spinoza by Jews for the first hundred years of his reception (barring the one indirect polemic by Orobio) would thus seem to testify to the success of the 1656 prohibition in squelching any and all engagement with the Amsterdam heretic.

The more we learn about early modern Amsterdam and the Western Sephardic Diaspora, the more problematic this picture of scrupulous obedience of the herem becomes. We know that as early as 1658, only two years after the ban, Spinoza, along with another recently excommunicated heretic—the former converso Dr. Juan de Prado—dined on several occasions at the Amsterdam residence of a convalescing Spanish caballero, where they were regularly joined by two seemingly untroubled members of the Sephardic community, “good” Jews who refused the pork offered them. We also know, from both external sources and internal Jewish polemics, that by the first half of the eighteenth century, freethinking, antirabbinic, and deistic tendencies were increasingly rife among a rarefied clique of upper-crust and cosmopolitan Western Sephardim and a smaller number of Ashkenazim living in port cities like Amsterdam, Hamburg, and London. It stands to reason that many of these irreligious Jews would have read Spinoza or at least absorbed his ideas secondhand. No less likely is it that their opponents within the Jewish community—defenders, like Orobio, of miracles, divine providence, and the binding authority of both Written and oral Torah—were compelled to develop working knowledge of the deistic and pantheistic heresies they were countering. The notion that “[t]he Jews, even the ones who did know Latin, would not read the TTP [the Tractatus theologico-politicus], since it was written by an outcast” overrates the deterrance of the herem and, in a broader sense, the ability of Jewish communal authorities throughout the eighteenth-century Western Sephardic world to enforce their decrees.

These qualifications aside, it remains a fact that Jewish voices were almost entirely absent in the discourse about Spinoza until the middle of the eighteenth century. They may have read him, but they did not—at least to our knowledge—write about him. This is true of both the majority who detested Spinoza (and would be expected to submit more readily to the terms of the ban) and the radical fringe receptive to his biblical criticism and one-substance doctrine. Of the various freethinking tracts affirming Spinoza and his philosophy that were written in this period and that have trickled down to us, we are aware of not one from the hand of a Jew.

The fashioning of Spinoza into a symbol was thus initially left to non-Jews. In what follows, I discuss the relevance of Spinoza’s Jewishness to this early mythmaking. The shapers of Spinoza’s early image typically assigned his Jewishness a significant role, albeit not a positive one. Two basic plotlines à propos this particularity developed in the late seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century. One emphasized contrast, the other continuity. The first of the two frames—we might call it the “ex-Jew” (ex judaeo) frame—originated in the pioneering biographies of Spinoza and made Spinoza’s excommunication and estrangement from Judaism seminal aspects of his image. The second—we might, for lack of a better phrase, call it the “eternal Jew” frame—vouched for the ineffaceable nature of Spinoza’s religious past, claiming his philosophy to be no more than a dressed-up version of Jewish esoteric lore. The imaging of Spinoza’s Jewishness tended to oscillate between these poles. When, later on, Jews began to take a new look at the seventeenth-century heretic, they joined this already existing discourse. In rethinking Spinoza’s Jewishness, they were also rethinking representations of this identity they had inherited.

(Continues…)

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