The First Modern Jew

by Schwartz, Daniel B. ;

  Though little read today, Auerbach was one of the most popular and critically acclaimed German authors of the nineteenth century. A prolific writer of novels, essays, criticism, and short fiction, he was best known for the work that marked his breakthrough—his fabulously successful Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten [Black Forest Village Stories], a series of novellas, begun in 1843, that intimately recreated the disappearing peasant culture of his native Swabian region in the style of the emerging European realism. Blending nostalgia for the local peculiarities of provincial life with liberal optimism and commitment to progress, Auerbach’s sentimental stories struck a chord with middle-class German readers, providing them with an idealized image of their national character. For a time, he enjoyed a degree of acceptance by non-Jewish Germans as “one of us” exceeding that of virtually any of his German Jewish forerunners and successors in the arts. Since he had “made it” without ever renouncing his Jewish identity, his German Jewish contemporaries celebrated him as one of their own as well.

  Auerbach also earned notice during his lifetime as a great partisan of Spinoza. In 1841 he became the first to translate Spinoza’s entire oeuvre (at least what was known of it at the time) into German, complete with an introductory biography.7 But this was not the first fruit of his literary engagement with the Amsterdam philosopher. Four years earlier, in 1837, he made his fictional debut with Spinoza, ein historischer Roman [Spinoza, a Historical Novel].8 This was the first attempt ever made to portray Spinoza as a fictional protagonist—a landmark in his cultural, if not philosophical reception. It was also a landmark in his Jewish reception. The early biographies by Lucas and Colerus had made the Jewish beginnings of Spinoza a prominent part of his myth, but they had depicted primarily the mature thinker after his break with Judaism.9 Auerbach focused on the previous years, devoting unprecedented attention to evoking, however fancifully, the Sephardic Amsterdam that had shaped and yielded the budding philosopher, and which he had eventually left behind. In Spinoza’s rupture from Amsterdam Jewry, coupled with his refusal to convert to Christianity, Auerbach saw the dawn of a new age in the history of the Jews and humanity at large, an era that would end with the emancipation of all individuals from given identities and sectarian hatreds and the realization of the Enlightenment vision of a religion of reason. The latter hope is made explicit in an epilogue to the novel, in which the figure of Ahasverus, the Wandering Jew—the personification of Jewish exile in an old Christian legend—appears to the recently excommunicated Spinoza in a dream and declares him to be both his redeemer and the redeemer of all mankind, conferring upon him the status of secular messiah.10

  The image of Spinoza as a pioneer on the road leading “out of the ghetto”—indeed, as what Leo Strauss would later call a “symbol of that emancipation which was to be more than emancipation but secular redemption”—might thus be said to have had its genesis in a work of historical fiction from 1837.11 At a time when within German Jewish enlightened circles, it was Mendelssohn who was generally held up as the progenitor of the “modern Jew,” Auerbach was one of the first to give priority in this pedigree to Spinoza. Yet despite the obviously foundational significance attributed to Spinoza in the novel, the form of the Jewish identity he is meant to exemplify is not entirely evident. In his earlier writings, Auerbach had allied himself with the nascent Reform movement within German Jewry.12 There, he expressed confidence that a modernized Judaism, understood solely as a religious identity and not as an ethnic or national one, could continue to thrive and maintain its “mission” even under conditions of emancipation. This distinguished him from his fellow Spinoza enthusiasts Heine and Hess, both of whom, at least at this stage in their careers, were more zealous in their rejection of revealed religion and indeed enlisted Spinoza in support of this vision. Did Auerbach’s invocation of Spinoza in his 1837 novel—an invocation that contained definite elements of personal identification—signify a deviation from his prior stance on the so-called Jewish Question, or were these positions, at least in his own mind, consistent? Could the seventeenth-century heretic be claimed as a forerunner of a liberal Judaism? Or did he exemplify a more “ruthless cosmopolitanism” at odds with the persistence of any degree of Jewish particularism?13

  Questions of this nature were at the core of Auerbach’s reception of Spinoza. I contend that his historical novel, when studied against the backdrop of his previous Jewish writings, evinces a very personal—but also very contemporary—tug-of-war between two different visions of Jewish modernity: one more reformist and accommodating of a religious framework for change, the other more uncompromisingly radical. In essence, Auerbach was the first not only to present Spinoza as the first modern Jew. He was also the first to project dilemmas of Jewish identity of a much later generation back onto him. Perhaps in this respect, more than any other, his use of the Amsterdam heretic would prove prophetic.

  II.

  “The subject interests me greatly,” David Fränkel (1799–1865), the editor of Sulamith, wrote to his former pupil Philippson in the summer of 1832, responding warmly to the idea of including a short biographical sketch of Spinoza in the next edition of his periodical. “Fundamentally, Spinoza lived such that today he would be considered a good Jew, since, in spite of everything, he remained what he was. The opposite, it seems to me, is not proven; thus he can be counted among the Jews.” Fränkel concluded by noting that “the controversy between Mendelssohn and Jacobi must certainly be known to you and what the former—Mendelssohn—expressed regarding the Jew Spinoza.”14

  The allusion was to Mendelssohn’s final work, To Lessing’s Friends (1786), where the German Jewish philosopher had issued his most personal apology for Spinoza yet. To show how far he was willing to go in identifying with Spinoza—a gesture he hoped would sap Jacobi’s revelation of Lessing’s Spinozism of its ability to scandalize—Mendelssohn highlighted (one might even say magnified) the Jewishness they bore in common. He referred bluntly to “the Jew, Baruch Spinoza,” and added that the Amsterdam heretic “could have remained an orthodox Jew were it not that in his other writings he had called genuine Judaism into question and in so doing stepped outside the Law.”15 Nearly five decades later, Fränkel, while linking himself to Mendelssohn’s “coattails,” went much further. Spinoza the Jew, even Spinoza the “fellow Jew,” had become—perhaps for the first time—Spinoza the “good Jew.” What made such a label thinkable (which is not to say accurate, or, for that matter, widespread) by 1832? In what follows, before turning to Auerbach, I focus on three fundamental developments in both German Jewish intellectual and cultural history and the German reception of Spinoza that facilitated the formation of this new framing in the years following Mendelssohn. These include the growing challenge to the authority of the Law within Judaism; the embrace of Spinoza as a religious thinker within German Romanticism; and the spate of German Jewish conversions to Christianity in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Together, these trends appeared to open the door to a dismissal, or at the very least a reduction, of the main charges against Spinoza from the perspective of Judaism: namely, that he was an antinomian, an atheist, and an apostate.

  The rethinking of the place of the Law in Judaism opened one door—the main door, really—to a Jewish reclamation of Spinoza. For premodern Judaism, Spinoza’s utter rejection of the continued authority and religious value of the commandments (the “ceremonial law”) constituted, arguably, his greatest heresy. Historically, to be a “good Jew” involved, at a minimum, submission to the yoke of the Written and Oral Torah, predicated on the belief that the Law was divine at its source, absolute in its scope, and—at least in theory—complete, eternal, and unchanging. Even Mendelssohn, for all his tinkering with Spinoza’s metaphysics to show how it might be kept on the safe side of heresy, conceded that by “step[ping] outside the Law” Spinoza had “called genuine Judaism into question.” Yet Mendelssohn’s line in the sand was quickly washed over. Continuing a trend that had begun prior to the Haskalah, Jews throu
ghout most of Western and parts of Central Europe in the nineteenth century steadily ceased to feel bound by the Halakhah, and abandoned whole areas of it, as they moved out of the ghetto and adopted a more secular lifestyle.16 Especially in major cities, there existed sizable constituencies of Jews who were alienated from the Law, yet who nevertheless remained members of the official Jewish community. One can safely assume that most of the celebrants at the Mendelssohn festivities of 1829 were not strictly observant. Traditionalist rabbis and the emerging representatives of Jewish “orthodoxy” held these Jews to be as much sinners, heretics, renegades—in short, “bad Jews”—as the deliberate lawbreakers of earlier eras. By the 1830s, however, they faced a growing internal challenge from advocates of Jewish religious reform who argued that the process, and project, of emancipation—and the reality of mass Jewish defections—demanded new standards of virtue.

  One way of interpreting the rising Reform movement is to see it as a bold attempt to alter the definition of the “good Jew” such that observance of the traditional Law was no longer a prerequisite. Or, to modify Mendelssohn’s claim, Reform held that one could, conceivably, “step outside the Law” without “calling genuine Judaism into question.” Indeed, the more extreme Reform thinkers would eventually go a step further: One actually had to “step outside the Law” to practice “genuine Judaism.”17 Yet in its radical as well as moderate incarnations, German Jewish Reform would close ranks around the conviction that the “essence of Judaism” lay elsewhere than in the “four cubits” of the Law.

  The rise over the first half of the nineteenth century of a Reform theology in Germany centered on antinomianism (or, at the very least, non-nomianism) made a reappropriation of Spinoza for liberal Judaism conceivable in two respects. At a minimum, it effectively lifted what previously had been an insurmountable barrier to rapprochement. It also introduced the possibility of perceiving Spinoza as a table-setter for the critique of the Law, even if not a “reforming” Jew himself. This is how he appears in what many consider the first work of Reform philosophy, Saul Ascher’s Leviathan (1792).18 One of the young Jewish Kantians to emerge in the 1780s and 1790s, Ascher sought, in Leviathan, to counter his mentor’s critique of Judaism as a heteronomous system of externally legislated law that failed to pass the Enlightenment test of a religion of reason. He did so by repudiating the strategy behind Mendelssohn’s defense of Judaism before this same bar. Mendelssohn, in Jerusalem, had argued that Judaism was essentially a “revealed legislation” that commanded only actions, not beliefs, and thus contained no dogmas or mysteries of faith that contradicted the “natural religion” of the Enlightenment. Nine years later, Ascher reversed the hierarchy of law and belief in Judaism. What was elemental was faith, more specifically certain principles (Ascher listed fourteen) that lay at the core of Judaism; the role of the Halakhah throughout history was only to provide a set of performative rituals that could anchor these principles in lived experience. “We fail to understand, however,” he wrote, “that if our faith is strong we do not need symbols and if we make a genuine effort to achieve earthly happiness we can liberate ourselves from the law.”19 In this respect, Spinoza also went astray by reducing Judaism to the “ceremonial law,” mistaking the merely temporal for the essential.20 Yet his basic innovation—the historicizing and thus relativizing of Jewish law—could be seen as an anticipation of Ascher’s own project. Moreover, Ascher had no sympathy for the conventional view of Spinoza as a heretic in philosophy and an enemy of religion. “Would that I should be worthy in my life,” he wrote, “to see critical theology absolve Spinoza of heresy in the same manner that philosophy has succeeded in purifying the name of this remarkable man from the epithet of ‘atheist.’”21

  Here was an allusion to the second sweeping change that underlay the Jewish reclamation of Spinoza. The very desire to repossess Spinoza evident in Fränkel’s letter (“thus he can be counted among the Jews”) has to be understood as a response to his astonishing rehabilitation within German philosophy in the wake of the pantheism controversy. Through no intention of Mendelssohn and Jacobi, their open quarrel over Lessing’s Spinozism only encouraged other admirers of the seventeenth-century thinker to step forth. “Apparently overnight,” writes Frederick Beiser, a leading scholar of German Idealism, “Spinoza’s reputation changed from a devil into a saint. The scapegoat of the intellectual establishment in the first three quarters of the eighteenth century became its hero in the last quarter.”22 Goethe and Herder were among the first and most famous to confess their Spinozism; other leading lights of the era, including Schleiermacher, Schlegel, Novalis, Schelling, Hölderlin, and the young Hegel, would eventually follow. The result was a Spinoza revival so epic in scale that it became a cornerstone of German Idealism and Romanticism and a watershed in the reception of the philosopher in general.

  Of the many facets of this volte-face in Spinoza’s image, two are most relevant here. To begin with, the perception of Spinoza as a prototypical modern thinker gained in authority. His one-substance doctrine was increasingly regarded as a defining juncture in the history of thought, a challenge to be confronted by friend and foe alike. “There is no other philosophy than the philosophy of Spinoza,” Jacobi quoted Lessing as having confessed to him privately.23 Hegel would ultimately take a dimmer view of Spinoza’s metaphysics, yet he also identified the monism of the seventeenth-century Jew as a necessary starting point for philosophical speculation, stating, “You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all.”24

  The other notable development was a new understanding of Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura, his identification of God with infinite nature. Throughout the Enlightenment, this was generally held to be tantamount to atheism and materialism. Radical enlighteners, as Jonathan Israel has shown, often celebrated Spinoza for this very reason, heralding him as both a source and symbol of an uncompromising critique of religion rooted in a rejection of supernaturalism; the vast majority of moderates and conservatives opposed him vigorously on this same basis. The Romantics, on the other hand, appropriated Spinoza as an out-and-out religious thinker—a “God-intoxicated man,” in the well-known words of the poet and fragmentist Novalis. They took his “God-or-Nature” concept to be an admission of pantheism (where God and the world are one) or even panentheism (where God fully permeates the world but is not exhausted by it), not atheism. Spinoza, in this reading, had sought not to dismantle a religious view of the universe but to divinize the latter down to its smallest particle. Freed of its dated “geometrical” mode of demonstration and transposed from a mechanistic to a vitalistic paradigm, Spinoza’s monism appeared to the Romantics to unite a consistent naturalism with a belief in a cosmic and immanent God—and thus to bridge the widening chasm between religion and science. With its pinnacle in the intellectual love of God (amor dei intellectualis) described in the final book of the Ethics, the system of Spinoza seemed to offer a “viable middle path” between the equally unpalatable alternatives of orthodoxy and radical secularism.25 Here was a rational, scientific, modern outlook that still had its moorings in a religious sensibility.

  This interpretation of Spinoza’s thought in a spiritual key was paralleled by a construction of his character as a model of perfect equilibrium. Indeed, even stern critics of his philosophy had often credited Spinoza for his temperance and probity. Now, however, Spinoza’s life and thought began to appear more closely aligned. Goethe’s attribution of an “all-composing calmness” to Spinoza bespoke the dominant early Romantic picture of the philosopher as a sublime figure, lifted above the “storm and stress” of the passions.26 No longer was Spinoza enlisted mainly as an exemplar of radical revolt against scriptural and ecclesiastical authority. He was invoked instead as an emblem of Ruhe (calmness) and resignation, an exponent of a philosophy that resolved all dissonance in the “One and All” (Hen kai pan) of its pancosmic vision. The Romantic Spinoza, in short, was the very epitome of the German ideal of Bildung, the synthesis of reason and feeling into a whole, integrate
d self. He exemplified unity, from the individual personality to humanity to nature and the cosmos. He was, in short, so evidently good.

  At no point, however, did this change of attitudes to Spinoza redound to the benefit of the image of Judaism in German letters. For those who were most fervent in their appreciation of the thinker, Spinoza was a “good Jew” to the extent that his philosophy bore traces of conversion to a Christian outlook, however unorthodox. “And so whereas others vituperate him as an atheist, I prefer to call him and cherish him as the greatest of theists [theissimum], indeed the greatest of Christians [christianissimum]”: thus wrote Goethe in 1785, defending Spinoza in a letter to his chief prosecutor in the pantheism controversy, F. H. Jacobi.27 Herder, in his Gott: einige Gespräche [God: Some Conversations] (1787) argued that embracing Spinoza’s immanentist theology did not mean rejecting Christianity but rather recognizing that the doctrine of love (agape) in the Gospel of John pervaded everything from the works-based morality of the Treatise to the amor dei intellectualis of the Ethics.28 And indeed, the Treatise at least exoterically does make a concerted effort to accommodate its universal religion to the teachings of Jesus and the apostles while reserving its harshest criticism for the particularist law and unwarranted superiority complex of the “Pharisees” past and present. Thus, it became possible to view Spinoza as a philosopher who would belong to a Christian genealogy of modernity.