The First Modern Jew Schwartz_The-First-Modern-Jew.indb 1 12/9/2011 3:24:41 PM This page intentionally left blank The First Modern Jew Spinoza and the History of an Image Daniel B. Schwartz PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD Schwartz_The-First-Modern-Jew.indb 3 12/9/2011 3:24:41 PM Copyright © 2012 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved ISBN 978- 0- 691-14291-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2011942572 British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available This book has been published with the generous assistance of the Foundation for Jewish Culture and its Sidney and Hadassah Musher Subvention Grant for First Book in Jewish Studies Excerpt from “The Spinoza of Market Street” from THE COLLECTED STORIES by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Copyright © 1982 by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Excerpts from THE FAMILY MOSKAT by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Copyright © 1971 by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Excerpt from “The New Winds” from IN MY FATHER’S COURT by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Copyright © 1966 by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Copyright renewed 1994 by Alma Singer. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Excerpts from LOVE AND EXILE by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Copyright © 1984 by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. This book has been composed in Janson Text Printed on acid- free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Schwartz_The-First-Modern-Jew.indb 4 12/9/2011 3:24:41 PM To Alisa Schwartz_The-First-Modern-Jew.indb 5 12/9/2011 3:24:41 PM This page intentionally left blank Contents List of Illustrations ix Preface and Acknowledgments xi Note on Translations and Romanization xvii Introduction 1 Spinoza’s Jewish Modernities Chapter 1: Ex- Jew, Eternal Jew: 15 Early Representations of the Jewish Spinoza Chapter 2: Refining Spinoza: 35 Moses Mendelssohn’s Response to the Amsterdam Heretic Chapter 3: The First Modern Jew: 55 Berthold Auerbach’s Spinoza and the Beginnings of an Image Chapter 4: A Rebel against the Past, A Revealer of Secrets: 81 Salomon Rubin and the East European Maskilic Spinoza Chapter 5: From the Heights of Mount Scopus: 113 Yosef Klausner and the Zionist Rehabilitation of Spinoza Chapter 6: Farewell, Spinoza: 155 I. B. Singer and the Tragicomedy of the Jewish Spinozist Epilogue: 189 Spinoza Redivivus in the Twenty- First Century Notes 203 Bibliography 247 Index 265 Schwartz_The-First-Modern-Jew.indb 7 12/9/2011 3:24:41 PM This page intentionally left blank Illustrations Figure 1.1. Anonymous, Portrait of Spinoza, ca. 1665. 14 Figure. 2.1. Johann Christoph Frisch, Portrait of Moses Mendelssohn, 1786. 34 Figure. 3.1. Julius Hubner, Portrait of Berthold Auerbach, 1846. 54 Figure. 4.1. Title page, S. Rubin’s Hebrew translation of Spinoza’s Ethics (Vienna, 1885). 80 Figure. 4.2. Samuel Hirszenberg, Uriel Acosta and Spinoza, 1888. Photo from postcard. 109 Figure. 4.3. Samuel Hirszenberg, Spinoza, 1907. 110 Figure. 5.1. Photograph of Yosef Klausner, 1911. 112 Figure. 5.2. David Ben- Gurion’s diary for August 7, 1951, containing, in the prime minister’s handwriting, his transcription, in the original Latin, of the passage from chapter 3 of Spinoza’s Theological- Political Treatise that begins “were it not that the principles of their religion discourage manliness . .” 149 Figure. 5.3. Letter from the chief rabbi of Israel, Isaac Halevi Herzog to G. Herz- Shikmoni, 6 Tishre 5714 (September 15, 1953), suggesting that the rabbinic ban on Spinoza’s writings no longer applies. 152 Figure. 6.1. Photo of I. B. Singer as a young man. 154 Schwartz_The-First-Modern-Jew.indb 9 12/9/2011 3:24:41 PM This page intentionally left blank Preface and Acknowledgments On a blustery October morning five years ago, I went to the YIVO Insti- tute for Jewish Research in lower Manhattan to speak at a most unusual semiseptcentennial. Headlining the YIVO schedule for that day was an event entitled: “From Heretic to Hero: A Symposium on the Impact of Baruch Spinoza on the 350th Anniversary of His Excommunication, 1656– 2006.” The list of speakers read like a “who’s who” of recent Spinoza scholarship, with names like Steven Nadler, author of Spinoza: A Life, the definitive bi- ography of Spinoza in English; Steven B. Smith, a leading authority on Spinoza’s political thought; and above all Jonathan I. Israel, author of two magisterial works on Spinoza and the European Enlightenment. House- hold names for me, but not, I figured, for those outside the academy, even for the stereotypical New York Jewish culture- bearers. I did not know what size audience to expect, but an auditorium that seated 250 filled to three- quarter capacity seemed optimistic. I guessed wrong. By the time I arrived the event had already sold out. This came as a surprise not only to me. One journalist, blogging about the conference in the New York Observer, wrote: “I almost didn’t get in. The conference was sold out, there were scores of people waiting for an extra ticket on 16th St. I of course played the press card, but happily for all of us, Yivo lowered the screen in its main hall, allowing the overflow to watch the event on simulcast.”1 Whether they sat in the auditorium or the hall just outside, well over three hundred New Yorkers chose to spend their Sunday afternoon listening to six hours of lectures on a seventeenth- century phi- losopher whom few in the audience, frankly, were likely to have read. The spillover crowd for this YIVO symposium in 2006 was simply one example of a surge of interest in Spinoza since the turn of the millennium that transcends the academy and cuts across nations, disciplines, and genres. We find evidence of this fascination in the audience for Israel’s Radical En- lightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (2001), which has been called “one of the most important books on Spinoza in the past hundred years” and— notwithstanding its forbidding length— “certainly among the Schwartz_The-First-Modern-Jew.indb 11 12/9/2011 3:24:41 PM xii PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS most popular.”2 We find it in the fact that a weekly news magazine likeLe Point— a kind of French equivalent to Time and Newsweek— would choose to run a cover story on Spinoza in the summer of 2007, labeling the Am- sterdam heretic “the man who revolutionized philosophy.”3 And we find it in the enthusiastic response to David Ives’s 2008 play New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch Spinoza, whose “box- office success” was referred to by one of the most recent repertory theaters to perform it as “one of the more staggering surprises of the summer.”4 I, too, am fascinated by Spinoza. But I am also fascinated by the fascina- tion with him, by the extremity of feeling this early modern philosopher, dead more than three hundred years, continues to evoke. Moreover, the Jewish fascination— because it reverberates through practically every major Jewish ideological response to modernity and is so closely bound up with the struggle to define what it means to be a modern, “secular” Jew— has a fascination all its own, and it is the subject of this book. In the pages that follow, we will come across several testimonies by mod- ern Jewish writers that recount their initial discovery of Spinoza as a tran- scendent, even revelatory experience. My road to Spinoza, I confess, began with much less fanfare, while I was a graduate student in Jewish history at Columbia University. Asked by one of my advisors, Yosef H. Yerushalmi, about my plans for a dissertation topic, I spoke vaguely about my interest in historical consciousness and modern Jewish identity; he recommended a study of the Jewish reception of Spinoza. From his crowded bookshelves he pulled down what would prove my first and most essential reference work: Adolph Oko’s Spinoza Bibliography, with its over six hundred pages of entries of “Spinozana.” Steering me to this subject, while at the same time withdrawing to enable me to write this work as I saw fit, would be reason enough for thanks. I am also grateful to Professor Yerushalmi for his me- ticulous comments on early drafts of individual chapters, for his rich and stimulating pedagogy in Jewish history, and for the confidence he expressed in my work and me at key moments over the years. I am deeply saddened that he died before this book was complete, though also appreciative that I was fortunate enough to be one of the last of a long line of trained scholars in Jewish history to benefit from his vast erudition and thoughtful tutelage. May his memory be for a blessing. I am equally indebted to Michael Stanislawski, a master teacher of mod- ern Jewish intellectual and cultural history and my other mentor throughout graduate school. There are only so many “highlights” in graduate school, yet certainly our independent study of one of his many areas of expertise, the East European Haskalah, where I first encountered various thinkers Schwartz_The-First-Modern-Jew.indb 12 12/9/2011 3:24:41 PM PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii who figure prominently in this book, ranks among them. Moreover, the deftness with which he weaves together literary and historical analysis in his writing has served as a model and inspiration for my own work.