The First Modern Jew by Daniel B. Schwartz

Author:Daniel B. Schwartz [Schwartz, Daniel B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 860532
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

V.

In 1919, after the Bolshevik Revolution had brought Odessa’s “Golden Age” of Hebrew literature to an abrupt end, Klausner and his family moved to Jerusalem. With the opening of the Hebrew University in 1925, Klausner hoped to be appointed to the chair of Jewish history, in light of his growing body of work on Second Temple Judaism in particular. But his training was not held in high regard by the German Jewish scholars who dominated the early faculty of the university. They viewed Klausner as essentially a publicist and popularizer, whose increasing sympathy for Vladimir Jabotinsky’s right-wing Revisionist party made him even more suspect.111 Klausner was thus given the less sought-after position of chair of Hebrew literature.

Certainly, the international to-do about Spinoza in the postwar period was, by itself, a strong enticement for a nationalist like Klausner to reclaim him. As one Jewish scholar wrote with regard to the three-hundredth anniversary of Spinoza’s birth in 1932—an occasion even more widely celebrated than the previous jubilee five years earlier—“the national feeling does not permit them [i.e., the Zionists] to surrender one of the greats of philosophy, to whom all of humanity shows respect.”112 Yet Klausner, in the 1920s, was also beginning to devote more attention to Jewish philosophy, in particular to the stream influenced more by Platonic than Aristotelian ideas. In 1926 he composed the introduction to the first translation of Solomon ibn Gabirol’s Fons Vitae into Hebrew.113 There, he argued for the origins in Ibn Gabirol’s thought of a uniquely “Jewish pantheism,” which combined a transcendent God possessing free will with an emanationist view of nature. Some eighty years earlier, the discovery of Ibn Gabirol’s immanentist metaphysics had served the Hebrew maskil Senior (Shneuer) Sachs as a stepping-stone toward Spinoza. Klausner had less need of this intermediary, yet, as we will see, his interest in Spinoza and Ibn Gabirol had a common motivation.

Klausner called his lecture “The Spirit of Judaism and the Philosophy of Spinoza,” a title that was changed in its published form to “The Jewish Character of the Philosophy of Spinoza.”114 “I will not speak about Spinoza’s personal or philosophical relationship to Judaism and the Jews,” he begins, only to expound on this question for five pages, and with a great deal of ambivalence. He starts with the issue of the herem, the primal scene in the Spinoza myth dating back to the first biographies of the philosopher. Thanks to the historiography of “the Jew Freudenthal” and “the Christian Dunin-Borkowski,” Klausner claims, the stereotypes surrounding this event have been dismantled. “The herem of the Amsterdam rabbis and oligarchs was, to be sure, not a desirable act from our point of view today; yet it was not a dreadful act.”115 Excommunication was not a tool peculiar to the Jewish community; it had a place even among Protestant dissident sects as progressive as the “Collegiants,” with whom Spinoza was on good terms. Moreover, Spinoza showed no great courage in not deferring to the Mahamad, for in truth he had left the community before it expelled him.

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