The First Modern Jew

by Schwartz, Daniel B. ;

  The disclosure that Lessing was a crypto-Spinozist was a blow to Mendelssohn on several levels. First, there was the simple fact that the news had come from Jacobi and not from his late friend himself. In his notorious tell-all, Jacobi let it be known that Lessing, even while confiding in him, had deliberately kept Mendelssohn in the dark about his conversion. Mendelssohn put his best face on this revelation at least as far as Lessing was concerned. In To Lessing’s Friends, he opined that his friend had wished to spare him the pain of realizing how far apart in outlook the two had grown—a gesture of kindness that contrasted sharply with Jacobi’s treachery.21 Yet one wonders if Mendelssohn, in some corner of his mind, did not hold himself partly accountable for Lessing’s Spinozist turn. It has long been thought that the Philosophical Dialogues of 1755 reflect actual conversations between Mendelssohn and Lessing on the former’s “own plan to rehabilitate the much abused Spinoza.”22 The book—whose original publication Lessing, apparently, had seen to—came to light not long after the two thinkers had become fast friends in 1754. “To what extent Lessing had known Spinoza’s thought prior to his friendship with Mendelssohn cannot be established with any degree of likelihood,” Altmann concedes. “But it was undoubtedly Mendelssohn who introduced Lessing to a deeper understanding of philosophy in general and of Spinoza in particular.”23 Their early discussions made a strong mark on Lessing, evident in his writing soon after their acquaintance that “[h]is [Mendelssohn’s] honesty and philosophical mind make me anticipate in him a second Spinoza, equal to the first in everything but his errors.”24 A quarter century later, Lessing had gone well beyond the qualified appreciation of Spinoza that Mendelssohn had proposed. From his allusion to Mendelssohn’s likely surpassing of Spinoza in 1754, he had journeyed to the point of reportedly claiming that “[t]here is no other philosophy but the philosophy of Spinoza.” Still, it was quite possibly Mendelssohn who had planted the seed of this enthusiasm.

  Beyond the personal slight, and the fear of what association with the atheist par excellence of the Enlightenment might do to his friend’s posthumous standing, Mendelssohn was discomfited by Jacobi’s deeper agenda in divulging Lessing’s Spinozism. Jacobi’s attitude toward Spinoza was paradoxical: He opposed him strenuously, and yet agreed in essence with Lessing that he was the zenith of philosophy, at least of speculative reason. Years of wrestling with the Ethics had led Jacobi to conclude that Spinoza could not be overcome with his own rationalist weapons. For all its pretense to detachment and remaining above the fray, philosophy was ultimately consumed by an “uncontrolled addiction to explaining,” a “need to reconcile things by means of clear conceptualizations, to the total disregard of all else.”25 This affect propelled philosophy toward greater and greater abstraction until it culminated in a system that was all-encompassing and self-sufficient, able to account for all particulars with a general, immanent, and inexorable causality—a system, in short, much like that of Spinoza. Thus the phrase that became Jacobi’s rallying cry: “Consistent philosophy is Spinozist, hence pantheist, fatalist and atheist.” Reason, in stretching itself to embrace everything, lost its moorings from what was most real according to Jacobi: the sheer givenness of my existence, the individual texture of my experience, the undeniable feeling of my freedom to choose. The more one traveled down the path of ratiocination, the closer one came to Spinoza’s God—“the principle of being in all that exists, entirely without individuality, simply and plainly infinite”—and the farther one wandered from being itself. For the mind adrift on this path, the way back to being was not to try to match Spinoza proof for proof, but to suspend dogmatic reason and take what Jacobi called a salto mortale, a head-over-heels somersault into faith in a personal God. This is what he had urged Lessing to perform during his sojourn at Wolffenbüttel. Lessing had wryly demurred—“Even to do that would entail a leap I may no longer ask of my old legs and my muddled head”—but his willingness to stick with Spinoza was useful to Jacobi. Bringing this tidbit to Mendelssohn’s attention was, for Jacobi, the first step in fatally crippling the compromise position of the religious Enlightenment. In a pattern by now familiar to Mendelssohn, a Christian scholar once again sought to confront him with a stark choice, this time between Spinozism and the salto mortale.

  In both the final chapters of Morning Hours and his front-on riposte to Jacobi in To Lessing’s Friends, Mendelssohn focused on framing the issue of Lessing’s Spinozism in a way that would limit the damage to the reputation of his deceased comrade and vindicate his own resolute adherence to a middle-of-the-road path in metaphysics. His apologia for Lessing drew on an argument he had initially advanced in the Philosophical Dialogues. There, in addition to claiming that Spinoza was the founder of Leibniz’s preestablished harmony, Mendelssohn had ventured that the philosophy of the Ethics could be interpreted so as to “exist with reason and religion”:

  NEOPHIL . . . You know, the Leibnizians attribute to the world a twofold existence, as it were. It existed, to use their language, among possible worlds in the divine intellect prior to the divine decree. Because it is the best, God preferred it over all possible worlds and allowed it actually to exist outside him. Now Spinoza remained at that first stage of existence. He believed that a world never became actual outside God and all visible things were not subsisting for themselves, up to this hour, outside God, but instead were still and always to be found in the divine intellect alone. What, then, the Leibnizians maintained about the plan of the world as that plan existed in the divine mind antecedenter ad decretum (“before the decree”) is what Spinoza believed it possible to maintain about the visible world.26

  Here, then, was another way in which Spinoza’s one-substance doctrine could be seen as only a single step removed from Leibniz’s metaphysical pluralism. Spinoza and Leibniz, in this reading, were at one in asserting the existence of the world in the mind of God, only for Spinoza this was the actual, visible world, whereas for Leibniz it was only the best of all possible worlds prior to the divine decree of creation, which permitted the universe to exist outside God. Without endorsing this ideal monism, which he continued to regard as erroneous on several crucial points, Mendelssohn nevertheless saw in this reinterpretation a means of reconciling Spinoza’s system with a broadly theistic outlook.

  Thirty years later, in Morning Hours, Mendelssohn essentially dusted off this argument from his youth and recast it to fit the views of his late friend. After once again underscoring—emphatically—his rejection of any speculative metaphysics that did not maintain an irreducible gap between God and the universe, Mendelssohn struck a more apologetic tone in the last two chapters of the work. Basing himself in part on ostensibly pantheistic fragments strewn throughout Lessing’s oeuvre, Mendelssohn portrayed their author as a specific kind of pantheist, one who rejected not so much an “extra-mundane God” as an “extra-divine world.” In other words, Lessing went no further than Leibniz’s antecedenter ad decretum, holding that the world exists necessarily and eternally within the mind of God. Mendelssohn labeled this viewpoint not panentheism or acosmism, but a “refined pantheism” or “refined Spinozism.” Having formulated Lessing’s theology thus, Mendelssohn concluded that “[i]f my friend [Lessing], that champion of a refined Spinozism, concedes all this . . . then morality and religion are in no danger; for, after all, this position is distinguished from our system only by a degree of subtlety which has no practical consequence.”27 Mendelssohn went so far as to suggest that Lessing had been “on his way to link pantheistic concepts even with positive religion,” much as had been done by theistic writers “with the Ancients’ system of emanation . . . throughout the centuries.” Like Neoplatonism, Spinozism could eventually be accommodated to “orthodox doctrine.”28

  IV.

  The religious divide between Mendelssohn and Jacobi shadowed their correspondence from the outset. In one of his letters to Jacobi, Mendelssohn described the salto mortale as an “honourable retreat to the shelter of faith” that was “entirely in keeping with
the spirit of your religion which imposed an obligation to suppress doubt by means of faith.”29 Jacobi happily assented to this equation of faith-based religion and Christianity, replying to Mendelssohn that “[i]t is a different faith that is taught—and not demanded—by the religion of the Christians. A faith which deals not with eternal truths but with the finite contingent nature of the human being.”30

  References to the confessional background of the two contestants were mostly held in check over the course of their private communication, but with the publication of Jacobi’s exposé, they moved to the center. Furious at Jacobi’s attempt to humiliate both him and Lessing, Mendelssohn wrote, in To Lessing’s Friends, what was perhaps his most personal and embittered work in German. He cast Jacobi as but the latest Christian pietist to try to “guide me to the bosom of faith” by converting him and, in the mold of the second part of Jerusalem, struck an emphatically Jewish note throughout.

  The amplifying of this element was evident in a new wrinkle in his defense, not only of Lessing, but of Spinoza himself:

  Lessing, a follower of Spinoza? Good Lord! What have a person’s speculative views to do with the person himself? Who would not be delighted to have had Spinoza as a friend, no matter how great his Spinozism? And who would refuse to give Spinoza’s genius and excellent character their due?

  As long as my friend still was not accused of being a secret blasphemer and a hypocrite to boot, the news of his being a Spinozist was a matter of complete indifference to me. I knew that there is also a refined Spinozism which rhymes very well with all that is practical in religion and morality. . . . I knew that, in the main, this refined Spinozism can be easily reconciled with Judaism, and that Spinoza, irrespective of his speculative doctrine, could have remained an orthodox Jew [italics mine] were it not that in other writings he had called genuine Judaism into question and in so doing stepped outside the Law. Obviously Spinoza’s doctrine would come much closer to Judaism than does the orthodox doctrine of the Christians. If I was able indeed to love Lessing and be loved in return where he was still a strict follower of Athanasius (or was at least considered so by me), then why not all the more when he approximated Judaism, and where I saw in him an adherent of the Jew, Baruch Spinoza?31

  What is new about this passage is less the substance itself, hints of which we have found in Mendelssohn’s earlier work, than the provocative highlighting, even flaunting of Spinoza’s Jewishness. In Jerusalem Mendelssohn had established Judaism as a “revealed legislation” as opposed to “revealed religion,” with membership determined by observance of the Law and not by adherence to a particular creed. Now he applied this interpretation to Spinoza, portraying his pantheism as a matter of indifference from the point of view of Jewish self-definition, indeed going so far as to assert that the seventeenth-century arch-heretic “could have remained an orthodox Jew were it not that in other writings [i.e., the Treatise] he had called genuine Judaism into question and in so doing stepped outside the Law.”32 Furthermore, in Morning Hours, Mendelssohn had shown that “there is also a refined Spinozism which rhymes very well with all that is practical in religion and morality.” Clearly, this meant for Mendelssohn any variety of natural religion, of which he had already claimed elsewhere in his work Judaism to be the most perfect, but now, in To Lessing’s Friends, he spelled this out, noting that “in the main, this refined Spinozism can be easily reconciled with Judaism.” Not only this, it was “much closer to Judaism” than to the “orthodox doctrine of the Christians.” Lessing had therefore “approximated Judaism” by embracing a “refined pantheism” and becoming a disciple of the Amsterdam philosopher. Perhaps most strikingly, the latter appears no longer under the coy disguise of “someone other than a German” or “other than a Christian”; he is simply “the Jew, Baruch Spinoza.”

  This was as close as Mendelssohn ever came to an expressly Jewish reclamation of Spinoza. Yet his comments were distinguished by their pathos, not by their prescription of a fundamentally new tack toward Spinoza. From the start of his career to its finish, Mendelssohn maintained a consistent ambivalence vis-à-vis Spinoza; he wanted to salvage what was best in Spinoza’s philosophy and to inoculate religion and morality from what was worst. He believed he had achieved this goal in the idea of a “refined Spinozism.” He could not have expected, let alone have wanted, that later generations of Jews would take his statement that Spinoza “could have remained an orthodox Jew were it not that in other writings he had called genuine Judaism into question” as an endorsement of his further rehabilitation—a development that only intensified as the number continued to escalate of those who, like Spinoza, had “stepped outside the Law.” But this, as we will see, is exactly what happened.

  *FIGURE. 3.1. Julius Hubner, Portrait of Berthold Auerbach, 1846. Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach.

  CHAPTER 3

  The First Modern Jew

  Berthold Auerbach’s Spinoza (1837) and the Beginnings of an Image

  I.

  In September 1829, German Jews celebrated the hundredth birthday of Moses Mendelssohn.1 The Enlightenment luminary known in his day as the “Socrates of Berlin” had long been eclipsed in German philosophy, yet he was still very much alive in the cultural memory of the German Jewish Bürgertum. In Berlin, Dessau, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Dresden, and Breslau, Jewish communities observed the jubilee with secular commemorations that included speeches, toasts, poems, and even chorales composed in honor of Mendelssohn. At the Berlin gathering, in the “tastefully furnished hall” where Mendelssohn’s marble bust stood on display, illuminated and decked with flowers, the keynote address was delivered by Leopold Zunz (1794–1886), one of the founders of the recently inaugurated Wissenschaft des Judentums, the modern critical study of Judaism. Zunz referred to himself and all those assembled as “Mendelssohn’s spiritual legacy,” adding “we belong to him like the student to the teacher who shows him the correct path.”2 In celebrating “the eternal Moses Mendelssohn,” Zunz and his comrades were in effect paying homage to the first modern Jew.3

  Three years later was the anniversary of another historic Jew and philosopher. November 24, 1832, was the bicentenary of the birth of Baruch Spinoza. Not surprisingly, those Jewish communities that had paid homage to Mendelssohn in 1829 remained mute with respect to the seventeenth-century excommunicate. Yet the occasion did not pass entirely unnoticed. That fall, a sympathetic biographical sketch of Spinoza appeared in the reform-oriented German Jewish journal Sulamith.4 Though modest compared to the Mendelssohn festivities of 1829, this eulogy was itself a milestone, being the first article, laudatory or otherwise, ever to be devoted to Spinoza in an identifiably Jewish publication. Its author was a Jewish university student named Ludwig Philippson (1811–1889)—the same Philippson who later would become perhaps the prime molder of nineteenth-century German Jewish public opinion as editor of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, the most influential and widely circulating Jewish newspaper of its era.5

  Philippson was the sole Jew to pay written tribute to Spinoza in 1832. The rest of the 1830s and 1840s, however, witnessed continued signs of a reentry of Spinoza into Jewish consciousness. For some left-wing German Jews at this time—most of them members, like Philippson, of a rising generation of Jewish intellectuals born in the first two decades of the century, who had received (if not always completed) a university education that exposed them to the latest currents in German thought—Spinoza became the subject of growing interest and even identification. This attraction stemmed not only from his then fashionable pantheism, but from what was seen as his relevance to the origins of modern Jewish identity. Two individuals within this early group of Spinoza admirers remain familiar names today: the poet Heinrich Heine (1799–1856) and the pioneering German socialist later turned pioneering Jewish nationalist Moses Hess (1812–1875).6 Yet the most concerted effort to convert Spinoza into a prototype of the modern Jew in this period was made by the author Berthold Auerbach.