Pariah to Messiah: The Engineered Apotheosis of Baruch Spinoza, Part 2 of 3
The Jewish Reclamation of Spinoza
To understand the shift in Jewish attitudes to Spinoza, one must take into account the birth of the concept of the ‘secular Jew,’ and the corresponding development of surrogate intellectual and cultural movements in which ‘Jewishness’ was divorced from Judaism and yet survived and thrived post partum. Prior to and throughout the Enlightenment, Jewry in the West remained separate and distinct in patterns of settlement, custom, language and dress. Judaism remained the only avenue for the expression of ‘Jewishness.’ Only at the end of the eighteenth century, as modernity began to encroach upon them, and “to remedy the inferiority of the Jews,” did Jewish intellectuals in Germany begin to make attempts to represent Judaism as an entirely rational belief system, and to justify the continued existence of Jews as a separate people.[1]
The earliest proponents of this attempt to reframe Judaism were a group of German Jewish intellectuals known as the maskilim, and they first began to rise to prominence, both inside and outside Jewry, in the 1780s. It is noteworthy that some of the earliest works produced by the maskilim, the most famous of whom was Moses Mendelssohn, were built around the reclamation of Spinoza. Mendelssohn was the author of Jerusalem (1783), probably the most important 18th-century text arguing the case for pluralism, and putting forth the contention that Judaism was compatible with the precepts of the Enlightenment.[2] Daniel Schwartz writes that Mendelssohn was also a “watershed figure”[3] in softening Spinoza’s image both for Jews and for non-Jews. He played a major role in overturning the prevailing apathy towards Spinoza’s works in the German Academy, and was pivotal in aiding Spinoza’s “integration into the canon of modern Western philosophy.”[4]
Although outwardly, Jewry appeared to be undergoing great change, at heart the real change it sought was in the non-Jewish world. Rather than adapt to modernity and wider society, Jewry sought a means of justifying its continued isolation. At first, the case that Judaism was inherently rational was argued by the maskilim, but it increasingly failed to convince non-Jewish intellectuals or the non-Jewish society as a whole. At the beginning of the 19th century, Jews were coming under intense scrutiny for their seeming unwillingness to enter the modern age. In the French Republic, Napoleon had halted moves towards the political emancipation of the Jews after hearing about extensive Jewish usury in the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. Napoleon subsequently convened a ‘Grand Sanhedrin’ of notable Jews at Hotel de Ville in Paris in July 1806.[5] All of the twelve questions posed by Napoleon to the notables cut to the heart of Jewish group cohesion as being incompatible with the Enlightenment. They concerned, “Jewish clannishness, divided loyalties, intermarriage, and usury.”[6] Napoleon asked: “Has the law ordered that the Jews should only intermarry among themselves?” and “In the eyes of Jews are Frenchmen considered as brethren or strangers?”[7] Rather than tell the truth and abandon the push for political power for their group, the notables believed they could succeed through crypsis and resorted to evasion and lies, telling Napoleon among other things that “the law does not say that a Jewess cannot marry a Christian, nor a Jew a Christian woman; nor does it state that the Jews can only marry among themselves.”[8]
Napoleon took them at their word, even trusting the notables with the writing of reforms necessary to bring about the political emancipation of the Jews. As Esther Benbassa noted in her The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present, while the notables were willing to tinker slightly with religious organization, they utterly refused to move “on the questions of usury and exogamous marriage.”[9] Emancipation proceeded regardless.
In Germany too, the pressure was increasing. Schwartz writes: “Within German Idealism, it was more or less a consensus that while a reformed Christianity could serve as a basis, or at least a vehicle, for a modern religion of reason, Judaism could not provide such a foundation. As the religion of a single people, it was seen as intractably chauvinist and exclusive, and with its strict legal character, it seemed totally at odds with a modern ethos stressing human autonomy.”[10] For Hegel and others, there was a belief that Jews could be granted civil rights, but there was real doubt about whether Jews could long survive an encounter with modernity. Read more