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An Icon for Iconoclasts: Spinoza and the Faith of Daniel B. Schwartz

n late 1953, David Ben-Gurion, then in and Portuguese in Amsterdam as between stints as Israel’s prime minister, to whether, from a halakhic perspective, the Ipublished an article in the main labor herem could in fact be annulled. For a time, union daily Davar, entitled “Let Us Amend admirers of Spinoza, his detractors, and the the Injustice.” The specific “injustice” that ambivalent Jewish majority were abuzz over moved the “Old Man” of Israeli politics to the rescinding of a judgment the heretic him- speak out from his Negev retreat involved self had never recognized as authoritative to none of the most obvious controversies of the begin with. day besetting the five-year-old Jewish state: the Ben-Gurion had a preoccupation with fallout from Israel’s bloody raid two months the author of the Ethics and the Theological- earlier on the West Bank village of Qibya, Political Treatise dating back to his east Euro- the continued housing of tens of thousands pean youth. He was far from alone. In seeking of Jewish immigrants from the Middle East to reclaim Spinoza in 1953, Ben-Gurion was in shantytowns, nor the Palestinian refugee heir to a long and remarkably diverse history crisis. Rather, Ben-Gurion entered the fray to of vindications, canonizations, and repudia- plead for a philosopher who had been dead tions of Spinoza in . This had for close to three hundred years: Benedict, or led, by 1953, to a view of the Dutch Jewish (for Ben-Gurion certainly) . freethinker as a pioneer of secular Jewish iden- The seventeenth-century Spinoza was tity and as primus inter pares in the camp of one of the pioneers of modern philosophy and Jewish historical heretics turned hero. Portrait of Baruch Spinoza. Herzog August biblical criticism. He was also arguably the Spinoza’s heresy was revolutionary and Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel: B 117. most notorious heretic in . In far-reaching. It was founded on his conflation 1656, the Sephardic community of Amsterdam of God and Nature and resulting rejection had excommunicated Spinoza, then twenty- of the reality of the supernatural, which did in a decidedly ambiguous light, both heroic three, for his “horrible heresies” and “mon- away with belief in a personal and transcen- and troubling at once. Those who heralded the strous deeds,” explicitly barring the faithful dent deity, free will, miracles, the revealed Amsterdam philosopher as a prototype of the “read[ing] anything composed or written by character of the Bible, the eternal “chosenness” modern, secular disagreed over the proper him.” Now, just three years shy of the tercen- of any people or religion by God, and—most interpretation of this identity. Some saw Spi- tenary of the rabbinic ban, Ben-Gurion called problematically from a traditional Jewish per- noza as a founding father of the Jewish cosmo- for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem—the spective—the notion of a divine ceremonial politan committed to and freedom over crown jewel of Israel’s higher education—to law distinct from the universal laws of nature. any ethnic loyalties, a type famously labeled publish a Hebrew translation of the collected The scandal of his ideas met its match in the the “non-Jewish Jew” by the Marxist historian works of “the deepest, most original thinker radicalness of his personal example. After his Isaac Deutscher. Others—like Ben-Gurion— to emerge from [our people] from the end of excommunication, Spinoza made no effort to regarded Spinoza as “the first Zionist of the last the Bible to the birth of Einstein.” Moreover, reconcile with Amsterdam Jewry; nor did he three hundred years.” A precursor of Jewish though he never explicitly petitioned for the embrace some form of Christianity. He simply liberalism, , , and various excommunication to be formally lifted, it went without membership in a religious com- cross-pollinations of these and others isms, was (and, to a striking degree, still is) widely munity in an age when confessional status Spinoza became, to a degree matched only by believed that he had done just that, conjuring remained a primary criterion of identity. the eighteenth-century German and Jewish echoes of the scholar Yosef Swept under the rug by in his own time Enlightenment thinker Klausner’s use of the phrase traditionally used and for decades thereafter, the Spinozan rup- (the other most oft-mentioned candidate for to repeal the rabbinic ban (“Our brother are ture re-emerged in Jewish historical conscious- “first modern Jew”), a perennial landmark and you!”) at a Hebrew University commemora- ness as a milestone—a perceived turning point of reference for constructions of modern tion of the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary point between the medieval and the modern Jewish identity. of Spinoza’s death in 1927. In the wake of and breakthrough of the secular—in the Whether Spinoza should be viewed as the Ben-Gurion’s article, debate raged from the nineteenth century. For a growing number of first modern or secular Jew is questionable. halls of the Knesset to the pages of the inter- Jews and particularly , the fiercely Certainly, as a descriptive label for the phi- national Jewish press over the prospect of a independent Spinoza became a model to be losopher of history it is anachronistic, a claim full pardon for the philosopher. Opinions were emulated; for others, he remained a corrosive Spinoza himself would have probably found sought from both the Ashkenazi chief threat to Jewish continuity that now had to unintelligible. Steven Nadler, the author of of Israel and the head rabbi of the Spanish be met head-on; for still others, he appeared the definitive biography of Spinoza in English,

SPRING 2011 13 argues that while Spinoza never converted both the secularizing of Jewishness—by interpretation with a traditional pedigree. to Christianity in the wake of his break with redrawing the boundaries of Jewishness to not This is especially glaring in descriptions of the he did not continue to identify as only accommodate but venerate a notorious first formative engagement with the life and Jewish either; at most, then, he should be con- enemy of rabbinic religion—and the Judaizing thought of the Amsterdam heretic, which fre- sidered the first secular person but not the first of secularity—by defining values such as “the quently echo narratives of conversion or calls secular Jew. freedom to philosophize,” the questioning of to prophecy. No less a religious insurgent than Regardless of whether Spinoza would authority, the embrace of reason, , and Micah J. Berdichevsky, the militantly secular have recognized himself in titles such as the even universalism itself as quintessentially fin-de-siècle Hebrew writer who sought a radi- first modern Jew or the founder of Jewish “Jewish.” All told, Spinoza’s posthumous cal break with Jewish tradition, recalls in a secularism, the connection between his Jewish course from heretic to celebrated, if still con- diary entry from 1900 rich with theological reception and the secularization of Jewish troversial, hero in Jewish consciousness is a imagery his discovery of Spinoza ten years ear- thought, culture, and identity is irrefutable. case study par excellence of both the process lier. He refers to the Ethics as “the Tablets of the From Berthold Auerbach in the nineteenth and project of secularization in Covenant,” and recounts how, having picked century to Rebecca Goldstein today, countless modern Jewish history. up a copy of the first Hebrew translation of seminary students turned secular intellectu- Yet secularization, as sociologists and Spinoza’s magnum opus, the earth trembled, als have testified to the seminal impact that historians have increasingly come to realize, the philosopher appeared before him in a reading Spinoza (or simply reading about is not a one-way street from the religious to vision, and a voice cried out, “The book in Spinoza) had in stripping them of belief in the profane, and the rehabilitation of Spinoza your hands is the answer to the mystery of the min ha-Shamayim (“Torah from Heaven”), in Jewish culture is perceived in only partial universe!” There is, no doubt, embellishment the divine authority of Jewish law, and the light if seen as a history of desacralization in this account, but not a whit of irony. Berdi- existence of an immortal soul separate from exclusively. When we turn to the actual chevsky’s professed experience of ecstasy on the body. Spinoza became “the first great rhetoric of this recuperation we find a strik- encountering Spinoza has several equivalents culture-hero of modern secular Jews,” in the ing persistence of sacral metaphors and in modern , including in the words of the late Yosef Yerushalmi, through motifs, of frames, languages, even modes of writing of I. B. Singer. All this suggests that a process of sacral- ization, as well as secularization, has taken place in the course of the transformation of Spinoza into an icon for iconoclasts. And this, The Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns in turn, may offer insight into why at least Program some devout Jewish secularists would find the idea of rescinding the ban on Spinoza attrac- Indiana University tive in principle. An amnesty, even if only figurative, was a gesture that contained hints • NEW: Master’s Degree in Jewish Studies of both secularization and sacralization, the • Doctoral Minor former by implying a total “ingathering” of the prototype of the modern secular heretic

• Undergraduate Major, Certificate & Hebrew Minor in Jewish culture, the latter by investing this • Graduate Fellowships and ingathering with an authority drawn from the

www.indiana.edu/~jsp www.indiana.edu/~jsp appropriation of a religious idiom and symbol. • Undergraduate Scholarships Available This constant oscillation between the secular and the sacred is at the very heart of the his- tory of the Jewish reclamation of Spinoza, and indeed, of the history of the secularization of Jewish culture more broadly. [email protected] [email protected] •

-4314 -4314 Daniel B. Schwartz is assistant professor of modern Jewish history at George Washington University. He is the author of From Heretic to Hero: Spinoza in the Modern Jewish Imagina- tion (Princeton University Press, forthcoming). Goodbody Hall 326 • 1011 E. Third Street • Bloomington, IN 47405 IN • Bloomington, Street Third E. • 1011 326 Hall Goodbody 0453 • Fax: (812) 855 (812) • Fax: 0453 Tel: (812) 855- (812) Tel:

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