The First Modern Jew

by Schwartz, Daniel B. ;

  Having encouraged Philopon, by virtue of his previous comment, to boast of a forte in philosophy native to a specific people, Neophil immediately qualifies himself, unsettling the association between “Germanness” and metaphysics he just established. With this reply to Philopon, Mendelssohn synthesizes the different threads of his rehabilitation of Spinoza into a new narrative. Against the blanket condemnation of Spinoza for having grown entangled in metaphysical speculation to the point of saying things that were completely absurd, Mendelssohn insists on placing Spinoza’s errors in context. Yes, Spinoza had become lost in the “labyrinth of his meditations” and as a result said “much that agrees very little with his innocent way of his life.” But his missteps were both necessary and in hindsight fecund. The intellectual difficulties raised by Cartesian dualism for the interaction of mind and body were so profound that someone had first to unite them as attributes of a single substance before Leibniz’s preestablished harmony could recommend itself as an alternative. However offensive to notions of divine and human freedom, the monism of Spinoza had opened up a path in the void, serving as a bridge between Descartes and Leibniz. Viewed in context, his was not a philosophy that bespoke the arrogance of reason or diabolical inspiration, but rather self-effacing mediation to the point of martyrdom.

  Mendelssohn thus took a theme already adduced in the first dialogue—Spinoza’s innovation of crucial elements of the Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy—and endowed it with the dimensions of a tragic heroic myth, constructing a fresh tale about Spinoza. Yet the revisionist force of this new story line cuts much deeper than the image of Spinoza as a “sacrifice for the intellect.” Mendelssohn could have vouched for Spinoza’s import to the history of philosophy while turning a blind eye to his Jewishness. For a first-time Jewish author in German, like Mendelssohn, this would arguably have been the safer path. Instead, he deliberately inserted a reference to this identity, and in a way that tried to spin it deftly to his own advantage. “Let us always acknowledge that even someone other than a German, I add further, someone other than a Christian, namely, Spinoza, has participated immensely in the work of bettering philosophy.” With this, he countered, even if unintentionally, the two paradigms for making sense of Spinoza’s origins discussed earlier. For both the “ex judaeo” and the “cryptokabbalist” frames, the issue was essentially the same: namely, how Jewish was Spinoza’s thought? Either Jewishness was synonymous with a past repudiated in the course of becoming a philosopher, or it was an inescapable heritage of mystical nonsense hardly concealed by the foreign idiom of the geometrical method. Mendelssohn sidestepped these terms entirely.10 By identifying the Amsterdam thinker as “other than a Christian” rather than as a Jew outright, he shifted the problem from the nature of Spinoza’s Jewish identity—which simply from the point of view of his own status in the Jewish community he had no interest in plumbing—to the image of metaphysical thought as essentially Christian, or at least non-Jewish in character. It is this restrictive definition that creates the preoccupation with Spinoza’s heredity in the first place.

  Spinoza’s Jewishness serves to illustrate, then, the speciousness of demarcating philosophy on the basis of confessional (“other than Christian”) and national (“other than German”) differences. And yet, what cultural distinctiveness Spinoza’s philosophy possesses in this account is largely a product of Mendelssohn’s earlier contrast between two styles of philosophizing. With his metaphysical focus, Spinoza is evidently closer to the German intellectual tradition than to the French. At a time when Spinoza had become a principal inspiration for French materialists like D’Holbach and La Mettrie, Mendelssohn sought to wrest him away from the Freygeister and remake him in the image of the German religious Enlightenment, with its characteristic moderation and harmonistic approach to reason and religion.11 Still, he would not erase his difference, the fact that Spinoza was both “other than a German” and “other than a Christian.”

  II.

  In the Philosophical Dialogues, Mendelssohn expressed his displeasure with the cold shoulder that Spinoza had received in philosophy, arguing that he deserved not scorn and exclusion but to have been “decorated with flowers.” What, though, about the rejection he had endured at the hands of the Jews themselves? From his own adherence to Jewish law and lifelong affiliation with the Jewish community, it was clear that Mendelssohn eschewed the model of Spinoza. He avoided, however, any acknowledgment of whether in his critique of Judaism—as in his metaphysics—Spinoza had made productive errors and merited better treatment. It was only in the last five years of his life that Mendelssohn would really address this question, and in an oblique fashion that shied, at least at first, from mentioning the arch-heretic by name.

  In 1782 Mendelssohn reissued Menasseh ben Israel’s Vindiciae Judaeorum [Vindication of the Jews (1656)] in German translation complete with his own preface. His decision to publish a new edition of this work came on the heels of several hopeful developments concerning Jewish political and cultural status in Central Europe. Three years earlier, the now-deceased Gotthold Ephraim Lessing had stirred German audiences with his portrait of a Jew as Enlightenment hero in Nathan the Wise. Subsequent to this, in 1781, the Prussian civil servant Christian Dohm wrote Ueber die buergerliche Verbesserung der Juden [On the Civil Improvement of the Jews], a treatise advocating that the Jews of Alsace be granted rights almost entirely on a par with those of other subjects. This was followed in January, 1782, by Joseph II’s Edict of Toleration, the first of a series of measures by the Habsburg emperor designed to lift traditional restrictions on the Jews of his dominion and so to make of them “useful subjects.” Mendelssohn believed that a reedition of the seventeenth-century Dutch rabbi and humanist’s rebuttal of clerical arguments against the readmission of Jews to British soil might benefit the proponents of Jewish civil equality in his own day.

  In particular, he hoped that it would bolster the effect of Dohm’s treatise, which he had urged the German scholar and bureaucrat to write in the first place. But his gesture of support was far from a blank check. Mendelssohn differed with Dohm on several points, one of them involving what powers would remain at the disposal of the Jewish community after the state had granted individual Jews civil rights. Dohm, in his essay, allowed for the continuation of Jewish juridical autonomy to a fairly substantial degree. Arguing that Jews should be permitted to “live and be judged” by their own traditional laws, if they so desired, he also underscored the right of the community to its chief weapon of enforcement. “The Jewish community, just as any other organized religious society,” he wrote, “should have the right to excommunicate for a period of time or permanently, and in case of resistance the judgment of the rabbis should be supported by the authorities.”12 This would have no impact on the political status of the excommunicate, who could live without a church affiliation and prove “a very useful and respected citizen” notwithstanding. If confronted with the case of Spinoza, Dohm would in all likelihood have conceded the prerogative of the Sephardic community to expel him, especially since the Amsterdam philosopher was under no compulsion to join another religious denomination.

  Mendelssohn, famously, demurred. He opposed church and synagogue discipline in all its incarnations, excommunication most of all. Firstly, coercion was radically antithetical to the spirit of religion, whose true mission was to educate, not to exclude. For Mendelssohn the main issue was not, as for Dohm, whether ecclesiastical power—Jewish self-government included—could be retained in a polity based on the civil rights of individuals, but its illegitimacy in any circumstance, since “expelling must be called irreligious.” Implicit in this reaction to Dohm was the notion that the rabbinic ban on Spinoza was unjustified. Even if Spinoza had no interest in being a “tranquil spectator” in the synagogue, even if he was happy to be free of “meetings for worship” and “external religion,” the Sephardic community, by expelling him, had employed a coercive measure incommensurate with religion and Judaism rightly understood.

 
; Mendelssohn’s political theory thus clearly militated against the herem on Spinoza. Did it go further than that in reclaiming him? This question would arise as a result of the controversy created by Mendelssohn’s preface. A few months after the publication of this work, there appeared an anonymous letter to Mendelssohn, which attempted to drive a wedge between the German Jew’s noncoercive understanding of religion and his Judaism. Entitled “The Search for Light and Right,” the missive—believed today to have been written by August Friedrich Cranz (1732–1801), a German satirist—asserted that religious power was the “master-spring of the whole machinery” of Judaism and that a church founded on the ideals of openness, rationality, and respect for conscience propounded by Mendelssohn could be found only in Christianity. For the sake of intellectual honesty, Mendelssohn had to choose: either Judaism—that is, “the proper Jewish ecclesiastical system, together with all scriptural appointments, rabbinical interpretations thereof, and statutory laws thereon”—or his rousing vision of a religion of reason and freedom. To opt for the latter would mean that “[y]ou, good Mr. Mendelssohn, have renounced the religion of your forefathers. One step more, and you will become one of us.”13 In a postscript to this letter, David Ernst Mörschel, a military chaplain from Berlin, went a step further, suggesting that Mendelssohn’s endorsement of a purely “rational devotion” was a betrayal not only of Judaism but “of revealed religion in general.” Like the author of the anonymous pamphlet, he challenged Mendelssohn to come clean about his true sentiments.

  Jerusalem was Mendelssohn’s rejoinder. Released in April 1783 the book was both an expansion on earlier arguments concerning church-state relations and an apologia for Judaism before the court of the Enlightenment critique of religion. While debate continues over the radicalism and coherence of the philosophy of Judaism expressed in Jerusalem, what is clear is that Mendelssohn wished to show that the choice demanded of him by Mörschel and the unnamed “Searcher” was unnecessary.14 Loyalty to Judaism was fully compatible with freedom of thought and voluntarism in religion, something that could not be said to the same degree about Christianity. Underlying this conviction was Mendelssohn’s claim that what had been vouchsafed by God to the ancient Hebrews as part of the covenant between them was essentially a body of commandments—a “revealed legislation,” as Mendelssohn put it, and not a “revealed religion.” Ostensibly, by emphasizing the legalistic nature of Mosaic Torah, Mendelssohn had played right into the hands of Judaism’s deistic detractors; in fact he aimed to show that it was precisely this characteristic that made Judaism consonant with natural religion. For Judaism did not espouse any irrational mysteries of faith; nor did it promulgate any religious verities that were exclusive to revelation. As for the “eternal truths about God and his government and providence” required for human felicity, these could certainly be found in Hebrew scripture yet were never alleged to be anything more than the universal axioms of natural religion, over which Judaism claimed no monopoly. What was peculiar to the Sinaitic epiphany was simply the “laws, precepts, commandments and rules of life” which had been ordained by God as the constitution of Judaism, along with the particular historical narratives that accounted for the basis of biblical legislation.

  The view of the revelation to Moses as fundamentally legislative has long struck readers as a significant affinity between Mendelssohn and Spinoza.15 In the Treatise, Spinoza claimed that what the Jewish people had received in revelation was not a special metaphysical knowledge—a bequest that would have been inconsistent with the noncognitive nature of prophecy—but a “ceremonial law” meant to serve as the foundation for the ancient Israelite polity. Similarly, Mendelssohn asserted in the second part of Jerusalem that “Judaism boasts of no exclusive revelation of eternal truths that are indispensable to salvation” and is best understood as a “revealed legislation” rather than “revealed religion.” He resorted to the same phrase used by Spinoza to denote this unique dispensation—the “ceremonial law”—and, like Spinoza, he also underscored its originally (at least partly) political inflection. According to Mendelssohn, the Mosaic Law was initially the charter for a biblical commonwealth wherein state and religion were one and the same, and God alone was king. On this ground, Mendelssohn sought to counter those, like the anonymous “Searcher,” who insisted that Hebrew scripture was the font of “ecclesiastical law” and Judaism the quintessential church. In fact the Bible recognized no separate sphere of religious authority. The notion that the power to excommunicate derived from a fundamentally Hebraic ethos was without merit. An argument that Spinoza had made to sever the links between the Dutch Reformed Church and the “Old Testament” prophets in his own day was converted by Mendelssohn into a vehicle for saving the Hebrew Bible from deistic assault.

  Thus far did Mendelssohn allegedly follow Spinoza and no farther. Having taken two famous contentions of the Treatise as his point of departure, Mendelssohn finished in a radically different place. In contrast to Spinoza, Mendelssohn held that the “ceremonial law” was not exclusively political. From the outset, the regulations of the Torah also possessed religious depth and significance: “All laws refer to, or are based upon, eternal truths of reason, or remind us of them, and rouse us to ponder them. Hence, our rabbis rightly say: the laws and doctrines are related to each other, like body and soul.”16 The Mosaic commandments were designed to serve as mnemonics of the cardinal verities of natural religion, as performances of universal precepts about God and providence, and not merely as temporal measures of the ancient commonwealth. Mendelssohn’s break with Spinoza over the nature of the revealed law corresponded to his divergence on the question of its authority. For Spinoza, the raison d’être of biblical legislation disappeared with the downfall of the Hebrew theocracy; for Mendelssohn, this collapse brought an end to the political character of the law, while leaving its spiritual dimension untouched. The Halakhah consequently retained its binding claim on the conduct of the individual Jew. It was for Mendelssohn—as it was emphatically not for Spinoza—a “divine law.” Yet with the demise of territorial sovereignty went the loss of any constitutional right of coercion on the part of the law. Henceforth, whether or not to obey would be a matter of individual choice, with the religious leadership of Judaism in position only to persuade and not to punish its recalcitrants. This was to be the pièce de résistance in Mendelssohn’s response to his critics, the most immediate explanation for why present-day Judaism was neither a symbol nor an executor of religious power. It was also the weakest link in his argument, ignoring how the ban had functioned as the cornerstone of Jewish communal autonomy in the Diaspora. Mendelssohn knew of this history, and even acknowledged it at the end of his preface to Menasseh ben Israel’s Vindiciae Judaeorum. Yet he considered it aberrant, a deviation from what should have been, and presented postbiblical Judaism in Jerusalem in the light of his normative ideal.

  Recently, some scholars have questioned whether Mendelssohn indeed wrote Jerusalem with Spinoza’s Treatise in mind. Among other things, they have pointed to the fact that Mendelssohn mentions Spinoza only once in Jerusalem, and there with reference to his metaphysics only.17 They have also harped on the unsubstantiated nature of the standard assumption that Mendelssohn had direct knowledge of the Treatise, while suggesting that any proximity in theme was at most a reflection of the broad dissemination of Spinozistic ideas (as opposed to Spinoza’s own ideas) in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, or even a mere accident.18 These revisionists are right about one thing: The view that Mendelssohn was targeting Spinoza in Jerusalem has relied on proof of philosophical and literary resemblance as opposed to hard evidence of historical influence. Therefore, it has perhaps been averred with too much certainty in the past. Be that as it may, the similarity in Mendelssohn’s tack vis-à-vis Spinoza’s metaphysics in the Philosophical Dialogues and, in effect if not, incontrovertibly, in intent, with his critique of revelation in Jerusalem is striking. In both cases, Mendelssohn operated by selective appropriation. Whether in his the
ory of substance or his understanding of the Sinaitic revelation, there were sparks buried in Spinoza’s otherwise scandalous philosophy worth rescuing. If carefully isolated from the errors that surrounded and sometimes followed from them in their original setting, these ideas could serve as take-off points for alternative solutions to the problems that nagged at Spinoza—answers that successfully avoided the dead-end road followed by the Amsterdam heretic. Spinoza could be reclaimed, because he had already been defused. Mendelssohn had begun his philosophical career as an advocate for this approach, and implicitly it remained his credo twenty-eight years later.

  Jerusalem, as mentioned earlier, appeared in April 1783; Mendelssohn died less than three years later in early January 1786. In between, he became embroiled in a controversy with F. H. Jacobi, a German antirationalist thinker, over the philosophy of Spinoza and its place in the weltanschauung of Lessing. This Pantheismusstreit, or “pantheism controversy,” as it became known, would demonstrate that Mendelssohn had been prescient in rehabilitating Spinoza years before, but not in the assumptions that had governed this gesture. If Mendelssohn thought that Spinoza’s challenge had been resolved by thinkers like Leibniz, Wolff, and himself, and could thus be shown its rightful due in retrospect, the extraordinary statement attributed by Jacobi to Lessing—“[t]here is no other philosophy but the philosophy of Spinoza”—was proof that the radical pantheist remained explosive.

  III.

  The pantheism controversy began in the late summer of 1783 with Jacobi’s assertion in a letter to Mendelssohn that Lessing, during a visit Jacobi had paid him at his home in Wolffenbüttel in June 1780, less than a year before his sudden death, had declared himself a Spinozist. For the next two years Jacobi and Mendelssohn carried on a private correspondence over the meaning of this revelation, with their mutual friend Elise Reimarus serving as a go-between for their missives. Then, in the fall of 1785, the debate suddenly went public. Earlier that July Mendelssohn had written Jacobi that he was about to publish a work that would hopefully “establish the status controversiae and thereby give the debate its proper introduction.”19 Not wanting to be preempted by Mendelssohn, especially as he feared being tarred as a Spinozist in the process, Jacobi rapidly collated the entirety of their epistolary exchange into a book surrounded by his own narrative about the controversy. As a result, Mendelssohn’s Morgenstuden [Morning Hours] and Jacobi’s Über die Lehre des Spinoza, in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn [Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn] appeared at roughly the same time. The first, without alluding to the debate with Jacobi, sought to cushion the impact of any impending report of Lessing’s Spinozism, though only in three chapters of a book otherwise devoted to a broad range of metaphysical problems. The second laid bare the background to this project in juicy detail, printing Mendelssohn’s letters despite never having received permission to do so. Quickly, Mendelssohn fired back in a work entitled An die Freunde Lessings [To Lessing’s Friends]. He finished the manuscript in late December and rushed to deliver it to the printer before the New Year. It is said that in his haste he left his home to walk to the publisher without a coat. Not in good health to begin with, he died on January 4, 1786. His polemic against Jacobi thus appeared posthumously. The death of his adversary notwithstanding, Jacobi answered the pamphlet with an angry rejoinder of his own, Wider Mendelssohns Beschuldigen [Against Mendelssohn’s Accusations]. While this was the end of the conversation between Mendelssohn and Jacobi, the controversy expanded to include other leading voices in German thought, from Kant to Herder. Next to the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, the Spinozastreit was the most important event in German philosophy of the 1780s, and the sweeping revision in the attitude toward Spinoza and his pantheism that it spawned would take its place alongside Kantianism as one of the chief pillars of the emerging movement of German Idealism.20 And it had all begun with a note from Jacobi to Mendelssohn in September 1783.