The First Modern Jew

by Schwartz, Daniel B. ;

  Like battles over national identity in the modern state, which tend to be fiercest along the frontier, clashes over the nature and limits of Jewishness have frequently taken the shape of controversies over the status—and stature—of marginal Jews past and present. There is, by now, a virtual cottage industry of academic and popular literature asserting the Jewishness of “cosmopolitan” intellectuals of Jewish origin, in particular those who innovated in dramatic, even revolutionary ways. These allegations are often sophisticated arguments, grounded in thorough empirical research and sensitive to the complexities of identity. Yet their discursive origins stand at a long distance from the ivory tower of scholarship. They start, typically, as efforts to lodge a uniquely Jewish claim to a Heine, Einstein, or Freud, motivated in part by a desire for standard-bearers of an agnostic and even atheistic Jewish identity. And even in their more sober, scholarly form these arguments often betray, wittingly or unwittingly, their authors’ deep spiritual kinship with their subject.

  The Jewish rehabilitation of historical heretics and apostates with a vexed relationship to Judaism has become so much a part of contemporary discourse that it is difficult to imagine secular Jewish culture without it. Yet this tendency has a beginning as well as a template in modern Jewish history. The Ur-reclamation in the litany of such Jewish reclamations is that of the Amsterdam philosopher, arch-heretic, biblical critic, and legendary conflater of God and Nature, Baruch (or Benedictus) Spinoza (1632–1677)—“the first great culture-hero of modern secular Jews,” and still the most oft-mentioned candidate for the title of first modern secular Jew.1

  II.

  Spinoza, famously, was a lifelong bachelor who left no offspring. Yet, if not a biological father, he has few equals when it comes to claims of intellectual fatherhood. A bird’s-eye-view of his reception in Western thought reveals a running perception of Spinoza as a “founding father” of modernity, or perhaps we should say modernities, given the diverse and often contradictory schools of thought from the seventeenth century onward laid at his doorstep. Liberals and communitarians, absolute idealists and historical materialists, humanists and antihumanists, atheists, pantheists, and even panentheists have claimed Spinoza as a precursor. In the past two decades alone, Spinoza has been credited with fathering, or at least foreshadowing liberal democracy, radical Enlightenment, the turn toward immanence in contemporary thought and culture, neo-Marxist theory and politics, even recent trends in brain science.2 A recurring hero in master narratives of secularization, he has also figured prominently in movements, from Romanticism to “deep ecology,” that have sought to resacralize the natural world.3 One would be hard-pressed to identify more than a handful of developments in modern thought that have not been traced, at one point or another, to the seventeenth-century freethinker.

  The Jewish reception of Spinoza presents a similar panoply of paternity claims. Excommunicated by the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam in 1656 for his “horrible heresies” and “monstrous deeds,” Spinoza defected from Judaism, rejecting its traditional beliefs, practices, and teachings—but without ever converting to another religion. For this reason he is often seen as an originator in yet another sense—namely, as the first modern, secular Jew.

  Yet Spinoza’s Jewish modernity has been construed no less diversely than his philosophical modernity tout court, or, for that matter, than the label “modern, secular Jew” itself. Over time, partisans of Jewish liberalism, nationalism, socialism, and various cross-pollinations of these and other isms have held up Baruch or Benedictus as a harbinger. He has figured as the quintessential “non-Jewish Jew” and as Judaism’s best ambassador for the monotheistic idea, as a prototype of assimilation and a prophet of political Zionism, as a consummate rationalist and a closet Kabbalist, as a “reforming Jew” and a radical secularist. The mutability of his image has been such that in the course of his reception he has been linked to personalities who span the gamut of modern Jewish cultural icons—from other exemplars of secular heresy like Heine, Marx, and Freud; to such medieval luminaries as Maimonides and Ibn Ezra; to the other famous seventeenth-century Amsterdam heretic Uriel Acosta (or da Costa); to the towering figure of both the German and Jewish Enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn; and to messiahs like Jesus and Shabbetai Zvi. To quote one leading Jewish cultural historian, Spinoza has served as a “palimpsest for a variety of constructions of modern Jewish identity.”4

  This book is a study of the rehabilitation of Spinoza in Jewish culture. More specifically, it is about the appropriation of Spinoza by a range of modern Jewish thinkers in order to validate—and in some cases critically interrogate—their own identities and ideologies. Spanning from Spinoza’s excommunication in 1656 to the effort of certain Zionists three centuries later to reverse the ban, and from the beginnings of the cult of the Amsterdam outcast among nineteenth-century Jewish intellectuals to the emergence of this very cult as a literary and cultural topos in its own right, it explains how and why a notorious insurgent came to be seen as a turning point between the medieval and the modern in Jewish history and a patron saint of secular Jewishness. In short, this is a history of the heretic turned hero. Yet it is more than merely a postmortem for Spinoza in modern Judaism. More generally, it is about how Jews from the Enlightenment to the present, by remembering and reclaiming Spinoza, have wrestled, in the absence of compulsory models, with what it means to be a modern, secular Jew. Indeed, the Jewish reception of Spinoza is nothing less than a prism for viewing the intellectual history of European Jews from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.

  But would Spinoza, in fact, accept responsibility for fathering any of the multiple Jewish modernities ascribed to him? Would he acknowledge paternity?

  III.

  Here we must make a crucial if often neglected distinction between the original intent of a particular thinker and how he or she is received. One path to understanding Spinoza’s Jewish legacy—indeed, the road most taken to date—is trying to ascertain, on the basis of his own texts and whatever are deemed the most pertinent biographical, historical, and philosophical contexts, his own views on the nature and future of Jewishness. Since this is a matter heavily reliant on interpretation, opinions—not surprisingly—differ: over whether he should be considered the first secular Jew or an originator of Jewish secularism, over what construction of secular Jewishness, if any, he would be most likely to underwrite—indeed, over whether he should be considered a Jewish thinker in an affirmative sense at all. This dissension notwithstanding, those who proceed on this path seek Spinoza’s meaning for Jewish modernity in what they hold Spinoza himself—the Spinoza of history—actually meant.5

  This book approaches the topic of Spinoza’s meaning for Jewish modernity from the vantage of his reception.6 It is a study, in other words, of the Spinoza of memory, not of history. In method it bears similarity to a form of historical inquiry dubbed by Egyptologist Jan Assmann “mnemohistory,” which “unlike history proper is concerned not with the past as such, but only with the past as it is remembered.”7 I do not argue in this book that Spinoza was the first modern Jew, nor do I go so far as to claim that his rupture with Amsterdam Jewry marked the inception of the modern period in Jewish history or of modernity in toto. In fact, I am rather skeptical of such arguments, both as a general rule—periodizations that focus on a single individual tend to lie in a nebulous no-man’s-land between history and mythology—but also because in the case of Spinoza, this is a purely anachronistic construction, one that did not have, because it could not have had, any meaning for Spinoza himself.

  Yet, whatever the truth or falsity of the view of Spinoza as “founding father” of the modern Jew, it is incontestable that he came to be regarded as such: by generations of freethinking Jews of various stripes, but also by a host of Jewish thinkers deeply wary of secularism and modernity, who despite recoiling from much of what they found in Spinoza—his far-reaching assault on the raison d’etre of Judaism in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus [Theological-Political Treatise
], his uncompromising rejection of the reality of the supernatural—could not shake the feeling of trailing in his wake. The enduring effects of this image suggest that any effort to cleanse Spinoza of his Jewish appropriations—necessary though this may be in the quest for the historical Spinoza—cannot serve as the final word on Spinoza’s Jewish legacy. If our aim is to chart the concrete reverberations of Spinoza’s heresy in Jewish culture—to discover Spinoza’s meaning for Jewish modernity in the history of his meanings—a preconceived notion of the “real” Spinoza may be more a hindrance than a help to understanding, since it risks preventing us from appreciating the impact of the appropriation of Spinoza by modern thinkers, whatever the justification.8 As Moshe Idel has written with regard to the study of Judaism, “the history of misunderstandings is as important as theories of understanding.”9 Just as no scholar of religion would argue that a certain religion is only what its sacred works mean in context, so no student of a certain secularism—here Jewish secularism—should make such a claim vis-à-vis its classic figures and texts. One could write a magisterial study of the French Revolution, isolating its numerous causes both short- and long-term, adducing all the relevant contexts, giving as accurate a picture of the Revolution in its historical moment as would appear feasible—and still a surplus would remain. For the “history” of the Revolution includes how it has been remembered, even misremembered. It includes how the Revolution came to figure as the ultimate myth of modernity, a model for later revolutionaries to reenact and for their opponents to resist.10 On a different scale, the same holds for the appropriation of Spinoza by Jews. However wide of the mark, such usage is a valuable window into the afterlife of Spinoza in modern Jewish consciousness, an afterlife that must be distinguished from the historical Spinoza, but which nevertheless forms part of the “history” of this arch-heretic and philosopher in the broadest sense.

  Such appropriations of Spinoza are also, just as crucially, a window into how Jews have constituted a sense of their own modernity and the place of “the secular” therein. For all the ink that has been spilled over the years—and especially, it seems, in recent years—on the concept of the secular, the process of secularization, and the ideology of secularism, the literature on the subject still remains essentially divided between two “master narratives” with remarkable staying power. To one side lie those who portray the rise of a secular, this-worldly orientation as a repudiation of a religious past, a rupture in the course of historical time between a “premodern” age grounded in divine authority, belief in the supernatural, and a general reliance on the tried and true and an authentically “modern” era committed to human autonomy, natural reason, and innovation.11 To the other side lie those who stress the theological origins and dimensions of modernity and the premodern roots of secularism.12 Yet for all the seeming incompatibility of these secularization stories—one of conscious rebellion against religion, the other of development from within it—they intersect in fascinating ways in Jewish appropriations of Spinoza.

  On one hand, the modernity-as-rupture story has figured prominently in perceptions of Jewish history—and Spinoza has been arguably its preeminent symbol. His excommunication from Sephardic Amsterdam has served as a kind of primal scene of Jewish modernity, act one in the advent of the emancipated Jew. Unlike the eighteenth-century German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, the other most oft-mentioned candidate for the title of “first modern Jew,” who became a model of Jewish-liberal symbiosis and of the reconciliation of Judaism and Enlightenment, his seventeenth-century predecessor would appear to epitomize not symbiosis, but separation; not reconciliation, but refusal. Spinoza rejected whatever concessions would have been necessary to remain in the Jewish community, opting instead for an uncompromising commitment to secular, cosmopolitan reason and the “freedom to philosophize.” He rejected the premise that the Bible, in its entirety, was the word of God, a move that led him famously to spurn the Maimonidean tack of reading scripture allegorically, all so as to shore up its authority and to maintain fidelity to revelation. He rejected faith in a personal, providential, and above all transcendent God, endorsing instead a theology of pure immanence that denied the reality of the supernatural. All told, his name and legacy seem synonymous with a flat no to tradition, without equivocation.

  Whether this equation of Spinoza’s modernity with rupture holds up historically is debatable. Scholars from Manuel Joël in the nineteenth century to Harry Wolfson in the twentieth to Steven Nadler today have pointed to a medieval Jewish template for much of Spinoza’s thought, arguing that his articulation of the new emerged out of a deep and critical engagement with earlier traditions of biblical interpretation and religious philosophy.13 Others, like Jonathan Israel, have questioned the degree of this indebtedness.14 Whatever the proper interpretation of Spinoza, the history of his rehabilitation in modern Jewish culture—of his conversion into an icon for iconoclasts—reveals a thoroughly entangled relationship between the old and the new, the traditional and the modern, indeed the sacred and the secular in the evolution of Jewish secularism. It may have been a perception of rupture from tradition, of a radical break with the past and embrace of the new, that conditioned and fueled the modern Jewish reappropriation of Spinoza; but Spinoza—even as a figure of rupture—came to provide many aspiring secular Jewish intellectuals with a touchstone and origin, with a feeling of being part of an immanent tradition of Jewish heresy, at times even with a surrogate father to replace the biological fathers and biblical Father of fathers they had rejected. On one hand, reclaiming Spinoza was a way of both secularizing Jewishness—by redrawing the boundaries of Jewish culture not only to accommodate but to venerate an implacable opponent of rabbinic Judaism—and of “Judaizing” secularity—by defining values such as “the freedom to philosophize,” the questioning of authority, the embrace of reason, science, and even universalism itself as distinctively “Jewish.” Yet in this very secularization of Jewishness and Judaizing of secularity via Spinoza we find, time and again, a striking persistence of sacral metaphors and motifs. The appropriators of Spinoza have invariably drawn on frames, scripts, and schemas with a long pedigree in the Jewish religious imagination, be it by depicting the Amsterdam heretic as a messiah of modernity or a “new guide to the perplexed,” recounting the first brush with his philosophical writings in the language of biblical prophecy, or even invoking the rabbinic formula to declare the ban null and void. The conferring on Spinoza of the label “first modern Jew” based in part on his rejection of the contemporizing biblical interpretation characteristic of rabbinic midrash has, from the beginning, been entwined with his own contemporization to speak to later dilemmas of Jewish identity; while the very construction of Spinoza as the “first secular Jew” has been saturated throughout with religious rhetoric.

  Yet for all these paradoxes, if there is one aspiration that comes through repeatedly in the Jewish recovery of Spinoza, it is the hope of finding intellectual lineages of modernity and our “secular age” that are, to some degree, Jewish, or at least not solely Christian. The notion of a new secular outlook gestating while an insular Jewish minority, still subservient to rabbinic law and communal coercion, remained obstinately indifferent to the winds of change about it, stuck in its “self-imposed immaturity,” would become a pillar of Enlightenment antisemitism. As we will see in chapter 1, the excommunication of Spinoza would be seized on as fodder by many philosophes persuaded of a chasm between Judaism and Enlightenment.15 (Of course, his having emerged from the Jewish community would be seized on by critics of his philosophy as proof of the religiously subversive ideas indigenous to Judaism.) Even today, though usually free of the malign intent of the radical enlighteners, many accounts of the origins of secularism—including ones written by scholars of Jewish history and thought—skip over the Jewish experience. As Ben Halpern wrote more than two decades ago, in an entry on “Secularism” for an anthology of essays on Jewish thought, “the history of Jewish secularism (unlike secularism in
Occidental Christendom, which is a native growth maturing over the whole extent of European history) is the application to Jewish matters of standards carried over from the outside.”16 The history of the Jewish reclamation of Spinoza is, to a considerable extent, a rejoinder to this statement. From Berthold Auerbach, the nineteenth-century German Jewish author whose pioneering reception of Spinoza is the subject of chapter 3, to the American Jewish writer Rebecca Goldstein today, laying claim to Spinoza has been tantamount to laying claim to a Jewish role in the shaping of the modern and the formation of the secular.