Spinoza and Hagiography Part One

One of the latest works that has come out on Spinoza is the work of Rebecca Goldstein. It's a fun and highly engaging book, but I think that it suffers from this problem of hagiography. This tendency is crucial to the larger objective of Goldstein and others who attribute to Spinoza great personal virtues: If one is going to pose an alternative to the wisdom of the rabbis, one must assert not only the alternative's comparable or superior wisdom but also the alternative's comparable or superior ethical conduct. Certainly Spinoza's intelligence, his cerebral power, is undisputed, but the matter that is more disputable is his ethical conduct. A meticulous reading of Betraying Spinoza reveals that Goldstein is not sufficiently objective in considering Spinoza's character, tending toward the hagiographical, which is a tendency that has been around since the beginning of biographical monographs on him. Of course, one should - to be fair - acknowledge that Spinoza was also vilified extensively by many writers in the late 1600 and 1700s. I do not intend to act out similar responses, which I regard as both inaccurate and historically contingent. That is to say that the vilifying responses were often conditioned by the state of affairs in Europe, where the dogmatic dimension of religion still held great sway.

In addition, the hostile responses to Spinoza - his thought and his person - during this period were primarily penned by Christians. The Jewish community had rendered its verdict of cherem and, until Moses Mendelssohn, that verdict defined the discourse on Spinoza, the thinker and the person. As modernity advanced, the majority of Jews appeared to embrace Mendelssohn's view of Spinoza, which was favorable. All of this is to say that what I write here - though it places Spinoza's character in question - is altogether different from what was written in the late 1600 and 1700s, where the accounts of Spinoza were far from hagiographical.

With that said, for this post, I will examine one item in Betraying Spinoza that will set the stage for this meticulous reading that I promise. Referring to the controversy that Spinoza's works generated in the 1700s, Goldstein writes, "The holy furor aroused by the name Spinoza is in contrast to the man's predilection for peace and quiet. He confessed himself [in a letter to an acquaintance] to have a horror of controversy" (9). I find this characterization hard to reconcile with the fact that Spinoza was placed in cherem by the Amsterdam Jewish community, an event overflowing with controversy. Of course, one could consider his excommunication a case where a man was victimized by the authoritarian elements in the community. Although cherem is a practice that we should not wish to restore, one must understand how it operated at this time. This understanding will demonstrate that the narrative of Spinoza as the victim of authoritarian leadership is not the whole story.

Before a person was placed in cherem, the threat of cherem was made. Often that very threat was enough to compel a person to conform. If it wasn't, the person was excommunicated. But even then, the Jewish community almost always gave a person a route for readmission. All this is to show that the person placed in cherem was rarely blind-sided and often, if not always, given the chance to accommodate himself to the demands of the community and thus avoid cherem. To support her implicit contention that Spinoza was a victim of authoritarian leadership, she writes, "The terms of his excommunication were the harshest imposed by his community, uncharacteristically including no possibility for reconciliation or redemption." The first point to be made here, which was the original purpose of initiating this discussion to begin with, is that already this is evidence that Spinoza did not "have a horror of controversy." In fact, it seems that he was party to the most controversial - not in the sense of being disputed but in the more notorious, publicized sense of the word - excommunication of that period.

But leaving this point aside for the moment, the silence of Goldstein's account of the excommunication is what is most striking. I refer to her silence about Spinoza - his reaction to cherem, or, rather, his handling of his impending cherem. My sense is that the harshness of the cherem - rather than demonstrating the authoritarian nature of the Amsterdam leadership - is a reflection of Spinoza's own attitude to the prospect of cherem.

To what can this be compared? A couple is about to break up. One expresses his interest in staying together. The other not only rejects this prospect but vows wholeheartedly to never try to revive the relationship. In turn, the first, who initially offered the terms of reconciliation, responds in kind - and then some! Indeed, the words of the first will appear harsh, excessive. But, in truth, it is the words of the second that altered the tone of the whole exchange and led to the invective-laced outburst of the first. In short, neither party emerges clean.

It is the same with Spinoza. The harshness of the cherem does not prove that the Amsterdam leadership was authoritarian, though it may have been; rather it reflects the attitude of the excommunicated party. What this attitude was is a matter that will be discussed more in future posts, but for the time being, I hope that I have exposed a hint of the problem of hagiography in Betraying Spinoza.

Jewish Political Thought: Promise and Peril

It seems that Jewish political thinking has reached something of an apogee in our times. As far as I can tell, there are currently two intellectual communities, largely distinct and seemingly unaware of one another, that are engaged in thick, sophisticated and highly non-apologetic projects; what they share is a willingness to explain the Jews and Judaism using political language. One emphasizes the continuity of the political in the Jewish experience; the other seems to emphasize a more recent vintage of Jewish politics. One is truly engaged in political thought; the other is made up primarily of historians of the Jews in Central and Eastern Europe. In addition to the work being done itself, what I find tremendously interesting is the question: what is it about our current moment that has brought Jewish political thinking to the fore?

The first community has come together under the sponsorship of the Shalom Hartman Institute of Jerusalem, their collective yield being a projected four-volume series brought out by Yale University Press titled The Jewish Political Tradition; the first two volumes (Volume 1: Authority and Volume 2: Membership) have already appeared. These works bring together texts, selected by leading political philosophers and theorists and their attendant commentaries The titles of the volumes produced thus far demonstrate the highly thematic structure of the project. Among the many varied texts brought together and mined for political wisdom are Talmudic and Midrashic texts, fragments from Jewish communal records, classical Jewish philosophers and Zionist thinkers, among others. Despite the wide array of texts, an introduction by the political philosopher Michael Walzer elucidates the sustained argument that emerges from the first volume. The Jews, despite a long history of statelessness, still produced a political philosophy. It is a long-held bias of western political thinking that equates politics with the state, and the Jews are among those people who break that mold.

The other scholarly community in question is more amorphous and may not constitute a community at all, or at least not as of yet. Inspired in part by "transnationalism", an au currant academic trend, a crop of young scholars, mainly historians, who all received their PhD's within the last 5 to 10 years, has sought out a usable Jewish political past by focusing on the years before state-centered Zionism and American Judaism became the regnant ideologies that they are today. The result has been a resurgence of interest in Diaspora Nationalism, a non-, or even extra-statist variety of modern Jewish politics, most often associated with the Central/East European Jewish experience. A nice analysis of the trend can be found here (AJS Review (2010), 34: 289-308) in an article (particularly the extensive footnotes) by James Loeffler, one of the young scholars I just mentioned. Another name that could be added to the list is Simon Rabinovitch, who, according to his webpage at Boston University, is editing a reader on Diaspora Nationalism, another on Jewish politics, and a monograph on Autonomism (http://blogs.bu.edu/srabinov/works-in-progress/.) Autonomism, like Diaspora Nationalism more broadly, is often associated with Simon Dubnow, the Russian-Jewish historian, intellectual, and political activist. A day-long conference at YIVO in honor of his 150th birthday (http://www.yivoinstitute.org/index.php?tid=165&aid=778 - includes video) and a feature on Jewish Ideas Daily (http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2010/11/8/main-feature/1/the-non-zionist) has brought his name back to the lips of the Jewish cognoscenti in recent months.

Perhaps the most fully thought-out attempt to recapture Diaspora Nationalism as a program in the here and now can be found in a recent book by Noam Pianko titled Zionism and the Roads Not Taken. The book is something of a hybrid combining intellectual biography with theoretical exposition. Three individuals serve as the main protagonists (though Pianko looks at Ahad Ha'am and Dubnow as well others): Simon Rawidowicz, a Brandeis University Professor best known for his studies of modern Jewish thinkers and his work as a Hebraist; Mordecai Kaplan, best known as the founding father of the Reconstructionist movement; and Hans Kohn, best known as the founder of the modern study of nationalism. In Pianko's hands, however, these three seemingly disparate figures, studied today by three disparate scholarly communities, offer us similar theories of Zionism that were in their time somewhat mainstream, although they were ultimately rejected. What these Zionist thinkers offered then, and can still offer us today, is a vision of Jewish nationalism that does not confine it to a state apparatus, what Pianko calls "nation beyond state". Born of the heady internationlism and national-minority rights culture of the interwar period, these three thinkers pictured the Jewish national movement as an opportunity to de-link nation from sovoreignty, and saws the Jews as models of this project.

Pianko's book is essentially two. There are close readings of Rawidowicz, Kaplan and Kohn along the lines of intellectual biography, and intellectual historians will no doubt take issue with some of what is said about these three very different figures. Is the political theory that Pianko susses out really embedded in their work? As the book begins to get reviewed in journals we will have to see. But then there is the programmatic argument in which Pianko attempts to seize upon the theory he sees and offer it as useful in an age of globalization, mass communication, large-scale access to affordable travel, and diasporic identities.

I have to admit that there is much to recommend this book, and I find myself liking it despite some of its flaws and its generally inchoate political theory. But I take a bird's eye view of the moment and how Pianko's book fits in with The Jewish Political Tradition. I can't help but think that works such as these mean Jewish studies or Jewish self-image has truly come of age. In multicultural America, we seem to have outgrown our need for nervous apologetics of the kind that made German Jewry so productive. We demand our particularist claims by right. Classical Liberalism, undergirded by belief in the efficacy of the individual, has come under attack from new understandings of the self: the Communitarian and the post-modern. Though very different from one another, both understand that our moral and philosophical universe is shaded, inflected, or constructed by that which we share with others similar to us, and each embraces differences among groups of people, to varying degrees. The circle is narrower than a posited universal humanity. (Then again, Jews seem to number disproportionately among those whose universalism is the most thoroughgoing. As Cynthia Ozick once put it, "universalism is the parochialism of the Jews").

The Jewish political thinking coming from the Hartman Institute is employed in an attempt to articulate a status quo favorable to both the reality of Jewish sovereignty and the Diaspora. What precedent does Jewish tradition have governing? For embracing the rights of others? For developing law outside the four ells of Halakha? I believe there is a great deal of overlap between this project and those who embrace Diaspora Nationalism, but there will always be those who want to see beyond the here and now. For some, the Messiah has come, however secularized or neutralized. But there will always be those who believe he tarries - Jews who traffic in what-if scenarios. Do we work to maintain the status quo of Jewish sovereignty, count the blessings it has brought and work to make our new state-arrangement as equitable and just as we can? Or do we insist on pushing history forward, regardless of what the abyss in front of us may or may not hold?