In late 1929, in one of his last opinion pieces, “Transposed Fronts,” Franz Rosenzweig made a shrewd observation according to some, a tragic one in the eyes of others, regarding the posthumous heritage of Hermann Cohen.Footnote 1 Reflecting on what would later be known as the Davos disputation between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger that had taken place a few weeks before, Rosenzweig identified Heidegger as an ally in carrying on the true legacy of Cohen, rather than Cassirer, who was commonly perceived as the non-contested heir of Cohen's Marburg neo-Kantianism.Footnote 2 According to Rosenzweig, Cohen's last book, Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism, contained a breakthrough beyond Cohen's own critical system of philosophy, toward a new way of thinking which takes into account individual human existence as it stands in a real relationship with God and the world.Footnote 3 Thus, for Rosenzweig, in their common turn from the Marburg school's focus on epistemology to a renewed interest in ontology and metaphysics, he and Heidegger were the bearers of Cohen's post-Marburgian legacy. As Rosenzweig aphoristically put it, “The school with its schoolmaster dies; the master lives.”Footnote 4
Leaving aside the veracity of a breakthrough made by Cohen in his last book, Rosenzweig's claim regarding Cohen's philosophical afterlife may nevertheless be applicable to twentieth-century Jewish thought.Footnote 5 In this field of inquiry, thinkers such as Martin Buber, Joseph B. Soloveitchik, and others have engaged with Cohen's philosophy, whereas outside this field, Cohen and neo-Kantianism had lost currency in the interwar and, even more so, postwar eras.Footnote 6 However, these Jewish thinkers were certainly not Cohenians themselves, and, to go back to Marburg, even Cassirer advanced beyond Cohen's philosophy in ways that Cohen would not have recognized or authorized.Footnote 7 Were there, then, any inheritors of Cohen and the Marburg school?
One answer to this question was arguably suggested by Cohen himself. Reporting on a lecturing tour in the Russian Empire in May 1914 Cohen wrote, “I am better known there … than even in my own country, I daresay in Christian scholarly circles as well, not only in regard to my religious writings, but also my philosophical works.”Footnote 8 Indeed, in late imperial Russia, among those who travelled to attend prestigious universities in Central and Western Europe, there were Jewish students whose access to higher education in Russia was limited by government regulations.Footnote 9 Many of these students traveled to Marburg to study with Cohen, and brought Cohen's form of neo-Kantianism back to Russia, adding to the broader reception of neo-Kantianism there.Footnote 10 Nobel Prize winner Boris Pasternak is the most famous among such students.Footnote 11 Others include Sergei Rubinstein, a leading psychologist in Soviet Russia, and Matvei Kagan, a central figure in the philosophical circle of Mikhail Bakhtin.Footnote 12 Similarly, as this article demonstrates, it was through a Russian émigré that a key element in Cohen's thought was transmitted from Germany via Russia to France. This element was Cohen's fierce anti-Spinozism, articulated in lectures and writings during Cohen's later years (1910–18).
While tracing Cohen's legacy from Berlin to Paris, and from the early twentieth century to the postwar era, this article follows Jacob Gordin (1896–1947) and the pivotal role he played in the French reception of Cohen's anti-Spinozism.Footnote 13 Gordin grew up in St Petersburg, where he trained in Semitics and neo-Kantianism and discovered Cohen's works. During the early post-revolution years, he was a leading member of Vol′fila, the Free Philosophical Association (1919–23), a central platform of intellectual activity in St Petersburg turned Petrograd.Footnote 14 With the expulsion of liberal intelligentsia from Russia, Gordin moved to Berlin in 1923. During his decade in Berlin, he published, under the aegis of the Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Academy for the Science of Judaism), a thesis treating the topic of infinite judgment from Kant to Cohen.Footnote 15 With the Nazi rise to power in 1933, Gordin and his family moved to Paris, where he worked as librarian, lectured, and published on Jewish thought. During the Second World War and until his death in 1947, Gordin taught philosophy and kabbalah to Jewish resistance fighters in southern France and then to Parisian students, and in this last capacity is considered the founder of the Paris school of Jewish thought.Footnote 16
As shown in this article, Gordin introduced Cohen's anti-Spinozism to interwar France, through an article responding to a critique of Cohen by Leo Strauss. Gordin's impact was then felt most strongly in the postwar years, when his piece was redeployed by Levinas and the historian of anti-Semitism Léon Poliakov against David Ben-Gurion's public Spinozism. Following Cohen and Gordin, this article analyzes the twists and turns of an anti-Spinozist strand in twentieth-century European thought, and the stakes involved in its transmissions.
Cohen contra Spinoza
With the benefit of hindsight, Hermann Cohen could not but be the enemy of Spinoza. As a leader in the movement back to Kant, Cohen was in a milieu that opposed previous romantic thinkers who were associated with an admiration for Spinoza. Cohen's conception of ethics, in particular, seems incommensurable with that of Spinoza: Cohen was committed to the Kantian distinction between the natural and given “is,” and the prescriptive moral “ought.” This is in contradiction with Spinoza's ethics, which, certainly in a Kantian reading, takes moral virtue as related to degrees of understanding of what “is,” and denies any external source of moral duty. Relatedly, Cohen's neo-Kantian notion of God as a transcendental and regulative idea stands in opposition with the Spinozist immanent God identical with Nature.Footnote 17 Philosophical disagreements aside, however, in the German Jewish context of Cohen's time, a disliking of Spinoza was rather surprising. By the late nineteenth century, Spinoza, whose excommunication by the Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1656 included a ban on reading his works, was practically readmitted into Judaism by liberal Jewish intellectuals, particularly in German-speaking countries.Footnote 18 These members of the Jewish Enlightenment movement found in Spinoza an inspiring model, and a fitting program, for their own projects of advancing reason and accommodating Judaism to modern culture.Footnote 19 On this background, no one would have expected Cohen, a living symbol of German Jewish intellectual achievements and cultural integration, to begin a public campaign against Spinoza. Yet, during the last decade of his life, while teaching Jewish audiences in Berlin, Cohen gave lectures on the Theological-Political Treatise where he offered a scathing critique of that work and its author.Footnote 20
Cohen's most detailed attack appeared in 1915 under the title “Spinoza on State and Religion, Judaism and Christianity.”Footnote 21 Structured as a chapter-by-chapter reading of the Treatise, Cohen took Spinoza to task for his pantheism, for divesting religion from knowledge, Judaism from ethics, and ethics from the state—all moves which were incompatible with central tenets of Cohen's philosophy. Together with the philosophical dispute, Cohen sought to expose and refute what he viewed as Spinoza's treacherous misrepresentation of Judaism. His main historical assertion was that aside from promoting the views of his patron, Jan de Witt, the central motivation of the Treatise was Spinoza's desire to avenge his excommunication by defaming Judaism. Throughout his essay Cohen discussed multiple occasions where this motivation compromised Spinoza's integrity, leading to contradictions within the Treatise itself and between it and Spinoza's Ethics, and legitimating a preference for Christianity over Judaism. Regarding the excommunication itself, Cohen suggested it was a preventive act by the Jewish authorities that was legitimate also in the eyes of Spinoza's Christian friends:
Spinoza's repudiation of Judaism … was preceded, long before his excommunication, by alienation … “the most precious possession of the church is the right of excommunication.” That was the motto of the sect with which Spinoza kept intimate company before the Jews, who had so often suffered a bitter fate at the hands of informers in their own midst, took the step of excommunicating one of their own, in whose lineage, intellect, and erudition they had placed their greatest hopes.Footnote 22
For Cohen, then, the excommunication was an acceptable political move, provoked by the suspicious status of Spinoza's loyalty to the Jewish community. This interpretation made Spinoza's alleged retributive act by means of the Treatise, whose central aspect Cohen viewed as the denial of Judaism's universal message, even more infuriating. This denial, Cohen argued, was rooted in Spinoza's biblical misreading and subsequent failure to recognize the foundational biblical ideal as professed by the prophets: “to found and elaborate a religion, a religion in which national political particularism must be transformed into a universalism of humanity.”Footnote 23
In Cohen's view, Spinoza's most striking rejection of this Jewish-cum-biblical universalism occurred at the end of the fifth chapter of the Treatise. There, Spinoza cited a ruling by Maimonides as evidence that Judaism neither recognizes an independent human ethics nor grants blessedness to followers of such ethics. In his ruling, Maimonides discussed the case of a “Noachide” (a rabbinical term referring to a non-Jew who follows a set of biblically derived ethical precepts) whose decision to lead a moral life is nevertheless based on their reason rather than the authority of revelation. On Spinoza's reading, Maimonides ruled that in such a case, the Noachide will not be granted a share in the world to come.Footnote 24 In his rebuttal to Spinoza, Cohen first pointed out that Maimonides cannot be taken as the sole representative of all Jewish thought, and he then went into a lengthy discussion of the concept of the Noachide in rabbinical thought and in Maimonides. At the end of his discussion, Cohen asserted that Maimonides's ruling cited by Spinoza referred only to a non-Jew living within a Jewish polity, and, moreover, that elsewhere in his great code Maimonides explicitly affirmed the unconditional share of Noachides in future blessedness.Footnote 25 Having undermined this Spinozistic move, Cohen declared, “Spinoza's entire historical, political, and religious theory of the Jewish state and Judaism disintegrates in self-contradiction.”Footnote 26
Philosophically speaking, Cohen's fixation on the issue of the Noachide was related to his approach to the relationship between ethics and state law, as applied to the Jewish case. Cohen saw the Jewish tradition as an early contributor to natural-law theory, through the development of a principle according to which all of humanity, seen as descendants of biblical Noah, may lead an ethical life based on reason.Footnote 27 On a biographical level, Cohen's investment in the concept of the Noachide can be traced to the 1880s, when he was asked by the Marburg Jewish community to serve as an expert witness in a court case in defense of the Talmud (and, by derivation, of Judaism) from anti-Semitic charges. During and in the aftermath of the case, Cohen developed an account of the Noachide, as a concept which manifested Judaism's sanctioning of care for the non-Jewish other as central to its legal system.Footnote 28
Consequently, Cohen's efforts to reject Spinoza's treatment of the Noachide included an additional attempt to deflect what Cohen viewed as the implications of Spinoza's literary defamation of Judaism, which Cohen felt he experienced firsthand.Footnote 29 Indeed, not only did Cohen explain the eager reception of Spinoza among European thinkers as a Christian celebration of a Jew who finally “conceded his own stubbornness,”Footnote 30 he also recognized Spinoza in anti-Jewish propaganda of his time:
That it is possible for anti-Semitism to celebrate its orgies in our age, at the same time as academic Protestant theology has produced illuminating studies that have led to a new understanding of Israelite prophecy—this would be inexplicable if not for the demonic spirit of Spinoza, still poisoning the atmosphere from within and without. The pithy sayings Spinoza employed to vent his vengeful hatred of the Jews can be found even now, almost verbatim, in the newspapers of those political camps.Footnote 31
This last accusation was situated in the later part of Cohen's study, where the treatment of the content of the Treatise was replaced by ad hominem attacks questioning Spinoza's psychological makeup and general mental state. Here Cohen's personalized rebuke of Spinoza reached its most extreme form in memorable phrases that would be echoed by subsequent anti-Spinozists, down to Levinas: Spinoza, the “great enemy who emerged from our midst,”Footnote 32 has committed “a humanly incomprehensible treason”Footnote 33 against his people.
Cohen's iconoclastic attack thus pitted Spinoza against Cohen's philosophically and religiously cherished values of universality and reason and charged him with being an ally of contemporary anti-Semitism. It seems that the timely motivation for this attack was an increase in Jewish admiration of Spinoza that Cohen aimed to counter.Footnote 34 Yet Cohen was unable to stem the popular Spinozist tide. To Cohen's posthumous chagrin, Spinoza became a cultural hero of Weimar Jews, symbolizing the variety of positions available in a liberal republic where confessional and ethnic identity should not, in principle, limit one's access to civil and political life.Footnote 35 Even among Jewish intellectuals Cohen's position was by and large ignored, with one notable exception: a young scholar named Leo Strauss, who conducted a close reading and subsequent dismantling of Cohen's arguments regarding Spinoza and the Treatise.Footnote 36
Strauss on Spinoza's impartiality
In 1924, upon the republication of Spinoza on State and Religion in an anthology of Cohen's Jewish writings, Martin Buber's journal Der Jude published a review article by Strauss titled “Cohen's Analysis of Spinoza's Bible Science.”Footnote 37 In that piece, Strauss set out to show that an analysis of the Treatise focusing on the inner logic of Spinoza's project has superior explanatory power to Cohen's psychologically laden emphasis on Spinoza's vengefulness: “It is doubtful that Spinoza's critique of the Bible begins with the ban; assuming, however, that it begins with the ban, it need not therefore arise from it alone. The essential thing, that is, the contents, would have arisen from Spinoza's own context of thought, while the sense impression of the ban merely provided the occasion.”Footnote 38 Spinoza's motivation for the critique of religion in the Treatise, Strauss argued, is sufficiently explained by his declared concern with guaranteeing the freedom of philosophy. And since in Spinoza's time and place religion and politics were intertwined, and religious leaders appealed to biblical authority in their political claims, the alternative reading of the Bible offered by Spinoza was a philosophical necessity. Consequently, any seeming contradiction between the Treatise and the Ethics either belongs with Spinoza's need to accommodate himself to his readers or was in accord with Spinoza's “principle of hierarchy,” which differentiated the moral capacity of the multitudes from those of the elites, for whom Spinoza reserved the ideal of intellectual love of God.Footnote 39 As for Spinoza's penchant for Christianity, Strauss argued, it was due to his view of law as religiously irrelevant. Since Amsterdam Jewry saw Judaism and its law as identical, it was philosophically more feasible for Spinoza to appreciate the antidogmatic and anti-ceremonial stance, as well as focus on Gospel teachings by Protestant sects around him. If Protestantism ultimately did not become as purely philosophical as Spinoza expected, Strauss stated, his was not anti-Jewish but an honest mistake.
Turning to Spinoza's alleged neglect of Jewish universalism, Strauss pointed out that the Bible itself contained expressions of Jewish particularism, which Spinoza highlighted, and Cohen ignored. Relatedly, Strauss explained Spinoza's discussion of Jewish separatism and subsequent hatred of Jews (Treatise, Chapter 3), in that these were the only causes Spinoza could deduce for Jewish survival, since he viewed religion as a “means for political ends,” and Judaism without a state as “politically meaningless.”Footnote 40 On this topic, Strauss conceded that in a few cases Cohen managed to fend off “some of Spinoza's [anti-Jewish] exaggerations.”Footnote 41 However, these exaggerations were “not the result of his [Spinoza's] method, and, therefore, concerning which it is irrelevant whether they were due to objective errors or evil intentions.”Footnote 42 Furthermore, “even if it were true that only a mind sharpened by a ‘humanly incomprehensible’ alienation could have arrived at them; even so, the truth of these results is independent of such personal presuppositions.”Footnote 43
Having cleared Spinoza from most of Cohen's charges, Strauss ended his review, in good neo-Kantian fashion, by focusing on method. Taking the impartiality of Spinoza's biblical hermeneutics as a given, Strauss contrasted it with Cohen's reading of the Treatise, suggesting that the latter was inflected by a pro-Jewish bias. It was Cohen's desire to defend Judaism, Strauss suggested, an “interest for life,” which led Cohen to misrepresent the Bible and fail to recognize Spinoza's methodical neutrality, the same neutrality that became the basis of a pan-European biblical scholarship.Footnote 44 “Blame it on human frailty,” Strauss wrote, “the objectivity of the investigation of Bible science may no more be endangered by the skeptical coldness of the apostate than by the apologetic love of the faithful.”Footnote 45 In order to truly carry out Cohen's inquiry regarding Judaism and Spinoza, Strauss finally asked, wouldn't it be better to search for the “Jewish impulses” which animated Spinoza's biblical method?Footnote 46
That last question, however, as the review implied, did not interest Strauss. Nor did Strauss seriously address Cohen's philosophical arguments with Spinoza.Footnote 47 Rather, through his turning the table on Cohen and acquittal of Spinoza by means of the principle of sufficient reason, Strauss introduced his own approach to Spinoza's thought. The rhetorical force of the review lay in disrupting the fundamental assumptions of Cohen's philosophy of religion (and, by extension, philosophy of Judaism) as basis for justifying Spinoza's excommunication. This was carried out through instituting binary oppositions that located Spinoza on the side of Europe, philosophy, and unbelief, in contrast with Judaism, religion, and faith. Where Cohen attempted to reinstitute the ban on Spinoza, Strauss dismissed the historical ban as irrelevant, but not due to Spinoza's Jewish significance—which Strauss also contested—but rather due to his philosophical impartiality.Footnote 48
That Strauss's review impressed the readership of Der Jude can be gathered from his subsequent hiring as a researcher at the Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, an important center of Jewish studies during the interwar years, inspired by Cohen and committed to his legacy.Footnote 49 There, Strauss pursued the lines of inquiry suggested in his review, leading to the publication in 1930 of Spinoza's Critique of Religion as the Foundation of His Bible Science.Footnote 50 In the book, Strauss fully developed his basic contentions in the review. He rehabilitated Spinoza within an Epicurean tradition of philosophical resistance to religion and cast him as an exemplar of Enlightenment anti-religious thought.Footnote 51 Yet despite the turn away from Cohen's approach, Strauss's analysis also found a fundamental fault in Spinoza's Treatise. According to Strauss, Spinoza failed to confront the basic assumptions of his orthodox opponents regarding the primacy of revelation over reason, thereby making his arguments philosophically insufficient.Footnote 52 Indeed, Strauss seems to have viewed his Spinoza book as a qualified continuation of Cohen's path, albeit under Strauss's own, improved conditions of freedom from pro-Jewish bias.Footnote 53 In Germany, Strauss's modification of Cohen's anti-Spinozism remained unchallenged. In France, however, the anti-Spinozist legacy of Cohen was recovered by Strauss's colleague, Jacob Gordin.
Gordin: the Spinoza case
Gordin arrived in Berlin in 1923. He joined the Akademie one year before Strauss, in 1924, and left Berlin in 1933, a year after Strauss moved to England.Footnote 54 During that decade, together with their geographical and institutional proximity, the research interests of these thinkers also converged: upon completing his dissertation on Cohen's logic in the late 1920s, Gordin began work on medieval Jewish philosophy, a shift that was manifested in entries he contributed to the German Encyclopedia Judaica and his commencement of a comprehensive study on Maimonides.Footnote 55 With the publication of his Spinoza book, Strauss too expanded his study to medieval figures like Maimonides and Averroes.Footnote 56 One can only wonder whether Strauss and Gordin ever discussed Cohen and Spinoza while in Berlin.Footnote 57 What is certain, however, is that in 1935, with both thinkers outside Germany, Gordin published an article wherein he unabashedly reproduced and developed Cohen's original anti-Spinozist arguments, in spite of Strauss's critique.
Gordin's piece appeared in the Cahiers juifs, a review established by Sephardi francophone intellectuals, under the provocative title “Benedictus or Maledictus (The Spinoza Case).”Footnote 58 As the title indicates, Gordin sought to reevaluate Spinoza's excommunication in 1656 by the Amsterdam Jewish community and to pronounce Spinoza a blessing or curse to his people. Beginning with a lengthy quote from the original text of the ban, Gordin stated that Spinoza's centrality within contemporary European thought makes it unfeasible to uphold the ban as regards to reading Spinoza's works. Nevertheless, Gordin argued, there is a “moral duty toward Jewish history, ourselves, and the titanic thought of Spinoza” to revisit the question of the excommunication.Footnote 59 This imperative to reexperience the ban of 1656, Gordin added, was as binding as the ancient Jewish call, recorded in the Passover Haggadah, for every generation to relive the Exodus story. Moreover, the need to revisit Spinoza's ban was even more pressing due to the “spiritual malady” suffered by Jewish intellectuals in modern times, a major symptom of which involved their being “poisoned by Spinoza.”Footnote 60
In this reenacted trial, Gordin proposed two reasons why evidence regarding Spinoza should be sought in the Theological-Political Treatise rather than in the Ethics. First, it would be easier to detect Spinoza's foundational philosophical orientation in the Treatise, whereas the Ethics as a mature work is (a) far more complex, and (b) already a topic of many and conflicting interpretations.Footnote 61 Second, since the Ethics, published posthumously, could not have been familiar (historically) or intelligible (philosophically) to the community leaders who pronounced the excommunication, reasons for the ban must be found in the Treatise, published in 1670 during Spinoza's lifetime. Relying on various sources postulating the existence of an apologia, a written disputation with Judaism composed by Spinoza prior to his excommunication, Gordin took this apologia as proof that “at the moment of the herem [the ban] Spinoza had already amassed in broad outlines his critique of the Jewish religion,” which he later deployed in the Treatise.Footnote 62
Yet, before a historical analysis, Gordin saw fit first to characterize Spinoza's philosophy and expel Spinoza from the canon of Jewish thought. The idea of Spinoza as a “well of rabbinic science,” namely a reliable source of traditional knowledge, Gordin asserted, “is completely wrong and belongs … to the ‘pious legend’ woven around the master by his first Christian biographers.”Footnote 63 In an attached footnote, Gordin cited primary sources as evidence that young Spinoza was never sent for rabbinic training and did not attend the high-level Talmudic classes offered in the Amsterdam seminary. Spinoza's familiarity with Jewish thought was therefore strictly an outcome of individual study, with severe consequences: “In a certain way, [Spinoza] was deprived of spiritual discipline and of tradition, of the very possibility to speak ‘in the name of the master’ which alone confers the specifically Jewish understanding of texts.”Footnote 64 Spinoza's Jewish knowledge was therefore marked by an absence which, according to Gordin, also inflected Spinoza's comprehension of Jewish philosophers whose ideas he utilized, like Maimonides and Crescas. Lacking access to the inner sense of his predecessors’ works, Spinoza relied “on the external, already emptied of its meaning, outline of Jewish religious philosophy” and “profoundly deformed its living spirit.”Footnote 65
Moving from the arguably external to the internal aspects of Spinoza's mode of philosophizing, Gordin brought in Bergson to define Spinoza's foundational philosophical drive. In “philosophical intuition,” Bergson argued that philosophers begin from a simple and identifiable preconceptual rejection of other positions, which pre-dates the positive construction of their own systems and is later frequently revisited as a source of self-affirmation.Footnote 66 Using this Bergsonian scheme, Gordin introduced Spinoza's “first intuition” through another comparison with his predecessors.Footnote 67 Unlike Spinoza, he argued, medieval and early modern Jewish philosophers composed their books in response to “a concrete, existential religious need of their contemporaries (and not merely sub specie aeternitatis).”Footnote 68 Relatedly, their works aimed at “the reaffirmation and elevation of the doctrine of the God of Israel and his Book, read and interpreted in light of the living tradition,”Footnote 69 and their philosophical “Eros” lay in a “return to the Bible ‘after’ the temptation of reason.”Footnote 70 In contrast, Spinoza's “‘religious’ enthusiasm emerged in his denigration of the Bible, which he tore into pieces [déchiquète] … in a caricaturized manner, as was recognized by every Jew and every Christian.” Accordingly, Spinoza's preconceptual act of rejection, his “philosophical Eros,” came to the fore in “the distance he established between him and Judaism.”Footnote 71
Having secured Spinoza's status as Judaism's ultimate philosophical other, Gordin concluded this part of the essay by commenting on Spinoza's role within the history of philosophy.Footnote 72 He summarized an earlier article where he presented Maimonides's central contribution to medieval philosophy as the development of an “anthropocentric” account of individuals as fully endowed moral agents, that superseded a contrasting Aristotelian “cosmological” moral determinism.Footnote 73 Maimonides's achievement, Gordin argued, represented a broader transformation of classical philosophy into a “monotheistic” philosophy effected by medieval thinkers in Muslim and Christian lands, an achievement whose eventual collapse was heralded by Spinoza:Footnote 74
Spinoza's system represents a reaction, celebrating the resurrection of the “Great Pan,” who—at least as his contemporary Pascal envisioned—seemed definitively dead (Pensées, Frg. 695) … The triumph of ancient Pan led to the triumph of the principle of absolute necessity, that weighs heavily on the Spinozist man (which is nothing but an animated thinking mechanism) and on his God … But history, as a free creation of a free humanity guided by Providence, the ascending messianic history … this history has no place in his system.Footnote 75
The view of Spinoza's philosophy as ahistorical (lacking individual subjectivity) and in kinship with ancient philosophy, which here Gordin retrieved from Pascal, was a familiar Hegelian tenet shared by others in German philosophy.Footnote 76 However, while Gordin drew on this accepted view, his critique of Spinoza was primarily Cohenian. On the ethical level, Gordin's emphasis on Spinoza's necessitarianism built upon Cohen's charge that Spinoza's pantheism cannot provide a coherent ethical account, since it lacks a transcendental “ought” as ground for ethical demands.Footnote 77 Similarly, for the philosophy of history, Gordin's assertion that Spinoza lacks a concept of an “ascending messianic history” followed a distinctly Cohenian, and Jewish-inspired, idealist progressivism. It was Cohen who, already in his early work on ethics and especially in his later Religion of Reason, presented Jewish messianism as constitutive of an ethical philosophy of history. The notion of the messiah, Cohen argued, was a regulative concept affirming a vision of universal human equality, and inspiring constant action towards realizing this social goal. Moreover, Cohen claimed, this universalist messianic idea, first introduced by the biblical prophets, was the basis from which the Western concept of world history emerged. Finally, Cohen saw Judaism as guardian and propagator of this messianic, progressive, historical vision.Footnote 78
In this way, by invoking Pascal as a contrast to Spinoza and describing Spinoza's philosophy in Cohen's terms, Gordin welded his Cohenian approach to a recognized French philosophical tradition. Tying Pascal's reference to Pan the deity (mythical figure) with the German view of Spinoza as pan-theist (philosophical concept), Gordin offered his francophone Jewish audience a negative view of Spinoza, legitimated by dominant figures in French spiritualism, Pascal and Bergson.Footnote 79 In this way, although he declared that he was not interested in Spinoza's philosophy per se, Gordin marked Spinoza, with Cohen and against accepted views at the time, as a philosopher who was not only anti-Jewish, but also, via his non-monotheistic ahistoricism, ultimately an antiliberal thinker.
Moving from philosophy to historical consideration of the Treatise, Gordin related the anti-Jewish polemic embedded in this text to Spinoza's Marrano background and his Christian social circle. Building upon the works of Spinoza scholar Carl Gebhardt, Gordin grouped Spinoza with his probable older Marrano acquaintances, Uriel da Costa and Juan de Prado, both of whom were also excommunicated by the Amsterdam Jewish community. In Gordin's depiction, these three thinkers shared an unresolvable spiritual clash between their theoretical understandings of Judaism informed by a Catholic orientation, and a Judaism of “uninterrupted discipline … with a preference for the Ashkenazi style” practiced by Amsterdam Jewry.Footnote 80 Yet whereas da Costa and Prado sought Jewish reacceptance until the tragic ends of their lives, Spinoza had already “established a beachhead on the other side” prior to his excommunication,Footnote 81 finding friends and supporters among radical Christians whose political disagreement with the mainline Church matched their theological hostility to Judaism. Accordingly, Gordin suggested, while the leaders of Amsterdam Jewry did not have the intellectual and spiritual acumen to recognize the long-term dangers in Spinoza's writings, they nevertheless sensed the political danger he held for their community. Echoing Cohen's earlier designation of Spinoza as informer, Gordin explicated the historical ban as an act of communal self-defence rooted in collective memory, a “millenarian experience which still retained the burning memory of the inquisition,” and therefore “recognized the fatal and tragic role played in Jewish history by the Malshin [informer].”Footnote 82
While this collective instinct sufficed for the fateful decision in 1656, Gordin wanted his readers to make their own judgment regarding the ban, fully cognizant of the theological commitments of Spinoza and his Christian milieu.Footnote 83 He characterized the intellectual approach that Spinoza's friends and disciples shared with other Reformation sects as emphasizing “religious subjectivity, non-dogmatism, and most of all … an attitude to Judaism heavily indebted to Socinianism.”Footnote 84 Like earlier Marcionism, Gordin explained, Socinianism was an expression of the recurring gnostic rejection of the fragile equilibrium between the Old and New Testaments which mainline Christianity attempted to maintain, a rejection which assigned the role of evil creator to the God of the Jews and the Old Testament.Footnote 85 Quoting from Wolzogen, a theologian associated with Socinianism whose writings were published in Amsterdam during Spinoza's lifetime, Gordin highlighted the former's multiple anti-Jewish assertions and focused on Wolzogen's reading of the biblical commandment to love a resident stranger (Leviticus 19:34).Footnote 86 According to Gordin, Wolzogen explicated that verse as pertaining to a current Jewish convert, who was formerly a non-Jewish resident, and thereby transformed a positive biblical commandment to love the stranger into an implied imperative to hate all non-Jews.
Turning back to the Treatise, Gordin enumerated Spinoza's discussions of key Biblical and Jewish themes and presented them as variations on foundational Socinian views. Last on a long list, Gordin called attention to Spinoza's reproduction of Wolzogen's reading of Judaism as commanding hate of one's neighbor. Spinoza's assertion that Jewish law pertained exclusively to the state, Gordin argued, implied a view of Judaism as an “archi-egoist particularism,” wherein pious love for the state parallels hatred toward everybody else.Footnote 87 For Gordin, this theory of Jewish hate espoused in the Treatise was the most revealing of Spinoza's views:
We are thus standing in front of a striking fact: A Jew who is saturated with the Socinian–Marcionist interpretation of biblical teachings regarding love of the neighbor (rea), who therefore reaches a conclusion which is logically irrefutable: To this deep hatred of anything and everything only one response is possible: “the other nations couldn't but hate them bitterly in return” (chapter 17). Judaism owes its existence to this hate it encounters: “experience proves that what conserved them [the Jews] most is the hate of other nations” (chapter 3). This is then the messianic philosophy of history as understood by Spinoza. This is his interpretation of the God of the Bible and his people.Footnote 88
Spinoza's chief failure was therefore the inversion of a positive Cohenian messianism wherein Judaism's survival is tied to its guardianship of a universal utopian future, setting instead hate as the exclusive cause for a continued Jewish existence deprived of moral and metaphysical significance. With this conclusive evidence against Spinoza, Gordin reached his verdict. First, he declared, in light of these findings, “we do not have the moral right” to oppose the harsh curses included in the original ban, “before becoming aware of the monstrosity that a Jew—certainly genuine—has attributed to his martyred people, the eternal pilgrim on whom it was said ‘you shall be a blessing for all the people of the earth.’”Footnote 89 Second, he added, “we must also take into account … the way in which civilized humanity, ‘the salt’ of the earth, responded to this testimony of a Jew regarding the Jews. It had accepted it!”Footnote 90 To demonstrate this last claim, Gordin listed notable European thinkers who were attentive to Spinoza's anti-Jewish views, beginning with the English deist Thomas Morgan and ending with the German theologian Adolph von Harnack. With this Spinozist reception as background, Gordin continued:
Today we know more than in 1656. Truly, this man who “rejected his own religion, who made his own people contemptible” (Hermann Cohen), has committed “a humanly incomprehensible betrayal.” The venom of his “demonic irony” did not only poison European civilization, but also … our moral being. Our own experience, our painfully acquired wisdom, how can they not influence our judgement of the condemnation of 1656, in its profound historical significance?Footnote 91
As Gordin made clear, his verdict on Spinoza followed and fully agreed with that of Cohen twenty years earlier. Like Cohen, Gordin condemned Spinoza for his negative treatment of Judaism as well as for the long-term impact of his views on European thought. Nevertheless, the framework within which Gordin reproduced Cohen's thesis effected a significant modification of its original context. Simply put, Gordin rearticulated Cohen's thesis within an existentialist framework.Footnote 92
This existentialist modification was suggested in Gordin's presentation of Jewish thinkers as concerned with the “concrete” needs of their brethren, in contrast with Spinoza's interest only in the abstract and universal.Footnote 93 It was most explicit in Gordin's insistence that the historical ban be experienced anew, and in the broader emphasis on its contemporary moral as well as metaphysical significance. Accordingly, in Gordin's reproduction of Cohen's concerns and arguments, their relevance was presented as less abstract and more immediate: where Cohen was concerned with the epistemological issue of Spinoza's treatment of Jewish teaching about the neighbor, through a falsification of the concept of the Noachide, Gordin additionally attended to Jewish spiritual and intellectual experience, shaped by the moral and ideational implications of Spinoza's theory of hate. Where Cohen cared about the universalist elements within Jewish thought, Gordin was more appalled by Spinoza's view of the historical mission of the Jewish people.
Did Gordin's existentialist modification of Cohen, then, fulfill Rosenzweig's condition for continuing Cohen by leaving Cohen behind? I think not. For side by side with his metahistorical claims and existential emphasis, Gordin's historical and philological analysis of the Treatise, in the wake of Cohen, stands for itself. Moreover, considering Strauss's critical review of Cohen in 1924, Gordin's article should be read as a defense of Cohen's thesis, which accepted elements of Strauss's argument but rejected his conclusions: Gordin concurred with Strauss that Spinoza's distance from Judaism should be related to his philosophy more than to his relationship with the Jewish community, that the ban cannot explain Spinoza's attack on Judaism, and that as a consequence, any vengeful motivation for Spinoza's writings should be discarded and Spinoza be granted inner consistency and philosophical sincerity. Yet here the mutual agreement ends. For whereas Strauss took the previous points as proof of Spinoza's impartiality both in his method of biblical criticism and in his general critique of religion, Gordin used them to reinforce Cohen's claims regarding Spinoza's misinformed biblical interpretation and special targeting of Judaism. For Strauss, Spinoza was a thinker free from religious superstitions and partisan interest and committed to a political project of advancing freedom; for Gordin, with Cohen, Spinoza was an anti-liberal and anti-Jewish thinker with a strong theological bias—a bias which inflected his philosophy, his conception of history, and his biblical hermeneutics.
In its first publication, the fate of Gordin's reactivation of the ban on Spinoza seems to have been similar to Cohen's earlier attempt. There appears to be no evidence that Gordin made an impact on the readership of the Cahiers juifs, who were little familiar either with Cohen's or with Strauss's views on Spinoza. This situation changed two decades later, when Gordin's “Spinoza Case” was published again, this time to counter the Zionist appropriation of Spinoza.
Gordin and Poliakov versus Ben-Gurion
Admittedly, the association of Spinoza with Zionism did not explicitly figure within Cohen's or Gordin's readings of Spinoza. Yet both were opposed to Zionism, the political program of which was antithetical to their diasporic commitments and the secular orientation of which was the opposite of their theistic views.Footnote 94 These themes also undergirded a common Zionist image of Spinoza as a proto-Zionist thinker, an image which built on a section in the Treatise (Chapter 3) that stipulated the reestablishment of a Jewish state as a realistic possibility, provided that Jews overcome their religion.Footnote 95 Even if Zionism and the ban on Spinoza were not linked in Cohen's mind when he penned his anti-Spinoza piece, in 1927 this association was given public expression in a speech at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem where a Zionist scholar theatrically revoked the ban.Footnote 96 Writing several years after that event, Gordin surely counted Zionists among the Jewish intellectuals “poisoned” by Spinoza, and his assertive reinstitution of the ban might also be read as an implicit response to its Zionist annulment.Footnote 97 Nevertheless, it was only after Gordin's death, and in response to the avid Spinozist and first prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, that Gordin's piece was brought into an open clash with Zionism. What occasioned that clash was Ben-Gurion's dedication to Spinoza, in 1953, of the first opinion piece he published after leaving the premiership.
Ben-Gurion's piece, “Let Us Amend the Wrong,” was a plea to nullify the ban on Spinoza, “one among the greatest sons of our people and the most profound and original thinker that arose among us from the post-Biblical era until Einstein.”Footnote 98 His aim, Ben-Gurion specified, was not to invalidate Spinoza's historical excommunication, which was irrelevant in today's Jewish state. What needed lifting was “not religious, but [a] literary–cultural” prohibition on reading Spinoza's works, which would allow for the translation and publication of all of Spinoza's writings into Hebrew.Footnote 99 Ben-Gurion admitted that Spinoza did relate negatively to “Jewish sages,” and sometimes did not contain his anger towards the Jewish community.Footnote 100 However, these elements paled beside Spinoza's many virtues, in which he was second only to Socrates and the Buddha. For Ben-Gurion, Spinoza was distinctly Jewish in the unity of his theory and practice and practical search for happiness. He was also a great biblical scholar and father of modern biblical criticism. Finally, Spinoza was “the first Zionist of the last three hundred years,” who was and remained a proud Jew.Footnote 101 In light of these virtues, Ben-Gurion called for a remedy to this exilic condition which deprived the Jewish people of Spinoza, and he urged the Hebrew University to hasten and prepare a Hebrew version of Spinoza's oeuvre by the ban's third centennial in 1956.
Ben-Gurion's provocative call elicited responses in Israel and abroad.Footnote 102 One of them manifested as the republication of Gordin's “Spinoza Case” in late 1954, in a journal of the French Jewish intelligentsia, Evidences.Footnote 103 With an explicit anti-Ben-Gurionist tone, Léon Poliakov, St Petersburg expat and prominent historian of anti-Semitism, introduced the piece by assuring readers that only Gordin offered a “clear view on the very foundation of the problem” of Spinoza's excommunication.Footnote 104 For Poliakov, the stakes in republishing “The Spinoza Case” were interrelated with his project of locating Spinoza within the history of anti-Semitism, a project in which, as I will presently show, Poliakov was under Gordin's decisive influence.
Poliakov met Gordin during the war years, and both were involved, following the liberation of France, with the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation (CDJC).Footnote 105 Poliakov's first book, A Harvest of Hate, based on his work at the CDJC and focused on the Nazi's “final solution,” was dedicated to the memory of “my friend and teacher, Jacob Gordin.”Footnote 106 In that book's concluding chapter, Poliakov described an anti-Semitism inherent in certain Christian doctrines, the propagation of which had brought about, in Nazi Germany, the pathological attack on morality and on Christianity itself.Footnote 107 Later in that chapter, in what could be read as a rejection of the Spinozist claim that troubled Gordin, Poliakov asserted that historical Jewish ghettos were a response to external hostility rather than a cause of it, and the Jewish idea of election served only positively to sustain Jewish solidarity.Footnote 108
Poliakov's concern with Spinoza became explicit in the introduction to the first volume of his magnum opus, The History of Anti-Semitism, where he followed to the utmost the conclusions of Gordin's “Spinoza Case.”Footnote 109 Armed with a contemporary “evolutionary hypothesis” informed by the Annales school, it was Spinoza's “rigid hypothesis”—on the interconnectedness of Jewish survival and hate—that Poliakov proposed to reject and overcome in his macro-historical study.Footnote 110 The importance of this task emerged out of the essential role into which Poliakov cast Spinoza within the modern history of anti-Semitism:
a historian of ideas could readily reconstruct the thread that leads from Spinoza to Herder, Fichte and Hegel, and also to Schleiermacher and Harnack. It is in this context that the “divine” interpretation was replaced by the “racial” one: the prerogative of an elite in the eighteenth century, the property of the masses in the nineteenth, and in the twentieth affording an ideological justification for the crematory ovens.Footnote 111
Poliakov was careful enough a historian not to put all the blame for setting up the intellectual preconditions for the Holocaust (Shoah) on Spinoza, and he conceded that there were several Enlightenment authors of a “rationalist spirit” who shifted anti-Semitic discourse from theology to racism.Footnote 112 Nevertheless, for Poliakov, Spinoza “stands out” as the central figure in this anti-Jewish tradition.Footnote 113 Accordingly, Spinoza's reflections on Jewish hate and survival in the third chapter of the Treatise—prophetic from a Zionist perspective, and fundamentally anti-Semitic for Poliakov and Gordin—appeared as a chosen motto in the second volume of the series, which covered anti-Semitism experienced by Sephardic Jewry.Footnote 114 The volume itself concluded with a discussion of Spinoza, his thesis of Jewish hate, and its anti-Jewish consequences.Footnote 115 These harmful consequences, Poliakov wrote, “justified a Hermann Cohen” in pointing out the tragic “demonic irony” of Spinoza's conflicted life.Footnote 116
The first volume of The History of Anti-Semitism was published in 1955. The emphasis on Spinoza in the introduction, assuming it was authored just prior to submitting the manuscript, might have been affected by the polemics with Ben-Gurion. Either way, under the obvious influence of Gordin, Poliakov adopted into his historiography of anti-Semitism a central anti-Spinozist tenet that originated with Hermann Cohen and applied it in the most extreme way. No wonder Ben-Gurion's embrace of Spinoza was nothing short of sacrilegious for Poliakov, in whose eyes Spinoza was directly linked with the most horrific event in modern Jewish history.Footnote 117
Levinas's Spinoza case
In the small Jewish francophone republic of letters, Gordin's intervention in the Spinoza debate, courtesy of Poliakov and Evidences, offered an authoritative anti-Spinozist voice, and an aid for affirming a religious or cultural rather than national Jewish identity.Footnote 118 In December 1955, Emmanuel Levinas also intervened in this debate, taking Gordin as point of departure in a piece similarly titled “The Spinoza Case.”Footnote 119
Beginning with an ironic questioning of Ben-Gurion's desire to affirm Spinoza's obvious historical triumph, Levinas argued that Spinoza is not in need of being accepted by the Jewish people, nor is Judaism so vulnerable as to need to avoid a conflict with Spinoza. He then framed the Jewish Spinoza issue in terms of two related problems, which pertained to “Israelites and Israelis” alike: that of Judaism and the West, and that of Judaism and its rabbinic heritage.Footnote 120 For Levinas, for better and for worse, rationalism was the gist of what Judaism received from the West, and indeed “Judaism in its entirety … has perhaps sought only to bring an end to mythologies and the violence they exert on reason and perpetuate in custom.”Footnote 121 Yet while Spinoza was certainly associated with this intellectual disposition, Levinas noted that for rationality one can turn directly to Plato and Aristotle without a stop at Spinoza on the way. As regards the biblical criticism Spinoza inspired, it was not a problem for a faith fully aware of the “miracle” of the unity which “rabbinism” established in its engagements with the plurality of biblical texts, engagements which rather “nurture a fidelity to Judaism.”Footnote 122 For Levinas, this fidelity entailed “the conviction that the Old Testament contains the definitive terms of civilisation,” and that “its truths no longer call up new revelations.”Footnote 123
With this insistence on the self-sufficiency, at least from a Jewish perspective, of the Hebrew Bible, Levinas moved to his incrimination of Spinoza:
We completely agree with the opinion of our late lamented and admirable friend Jacob Gordin: Spinoza was guilty of betrayal. Within the history of ideas, he subordinated the truth of Judaism to the revelation of the New Testament … we cannot ignore the harmful role Spinoza played in the decomposition of the Jewish intelligentsia, even if for its representatives, as for Spinoza himself, Christianity is only a penultimate truth, and the adoration of God in spirit and in truth must still surmount Christianity … It was by prefiguring Jesus with Judaism that Spinozism managed to introduce a movement into irreligious Judaism which, when it was religious, it opposed for seventeen centuries …Footnote 124
Unnecessary for rationality, non-persuasive for the study of the Bible, Spinoza's fault, for Levinas, lay in his effectively secularizing Christian replacement theology. On Levinas's reading, Spinoza's presentation of Jesus as a higher and necessary stage of intellectual development than the one exemplified by Moses (Treatise I, IV), reproduced Christianity's claim to superseding an obsolete Judaism.Footnote 125 Under the mantle of secular rationality, Levinas suggested, Christianity, still the “religion of the strong” in Europe, was secretly triumphing over Judaism through Jewish intellectuals’ uncritical subscription to Spinoza's ideas.Footnote 126 To counter this Spinozism, Levinas first berated Jewish intellectuals for their traditional illiteracy. “Do they still know,” he rhetorically asked, “that our great books … reveal a Synagogue that in no way tries to act as a blindfold? That Spinoza, in his Jewish studies, perhaps only had teachers of little calibre?”Footnote 127 Then, affirming Judaism's religious independence, Levinas stated that “Israel is not defined by opposition to Christianity,” but by its universal promotion of morality based on a “Mossaism prolonged and interpreted by rabbinism.”Footnote 128 Consequently, he concluded, despite positive feelings towards Christianity, “We cannot recognize a child that is not ours. We protest against its claim on the inheritance, and on its impatience to take over, since we are alive and kicking.”Footnote 129 With the same plural first person, Levinas finally returned to Ben-Gurion: “The difficult trial has lasted for two thousand years. In proposing that Spinoza's trial be reopened, perhaps Ben-Gurion is seeking to question … the great certainty of our history; which ultimately, for Ben-Gurion himself, preserved a nation to love and the opportunity to build a state.”Footnote 130
Levinas's “The Spinoza Case” clearly followed Gordin in situating Spinoza on the wrong side of a historical Jewish–Christian conflict. Yet Levinas shifted the center of discussion away from Spinoza's association with anti-Semitism to his harmful influence on Judaism and Jewish thinkers. In this Levinas expressed his own postwar agenda, which included a presentation of Judaism as intellectually rigorous and politically relevant, and a renewed engagement with Christianity from a non-apologetic position. Relatedly, his (re)appropriation of the term “Israel” to serve as a designation for the Jewish people tout court rather than the Jewish state marked the broader move Levinas made vis-à-vis Ben-Gurion. By restoring the religious dimension to the Spinoza issue, and insisting that Judaism be defined by its rabbinic heritage and not by its nationalist politics, Levinas made Zionism into an ignorant child of an ethical tradition, and demanded that its representative, Ben-Gurion, become aware of and answerable for its predominantly religious heritage.Footnote 131 For Levinas, it was the rabbinic tradition and its reading practices on which the future of Judaism lay, and not the anti-Judaism rooted in rabbinic ignorance which was the backbone of Spinoza's Treatise.
Conclusion
In his Gifford lectures, Alasdair MacIntyre characterized each thinker's work within a tradition as rearticulating the tradition's view, in a way that “may provide some answers to the questions” treated by previous thinkers, and “in that form transcend the limitation of their earlier version.”Footnote 132 This description captures the elements of continuity and change in the anti-Spinozist strand treated in this article, which was inaugurated by Cohen, taken up critically to the point of rejection by Strauss, recuperated by Gordin, and carried over to Poliakov and Levinas. All the figures in this strand were concerned with the historical reasons for and contemporary meaning of the ban on Spinoza, and its symbolic reactivation by means of intellectual boundary making. At stake were the very conditions for a mutual engagement of Judaism and the West, an issue for which Spinoza was simultaneously a historical exemplar, a symptom, and a placeholder.
From the perspectives of Cohen, Gordin, and Levinas, the political theory that Spinoza grounded in his biblical hermeneutics amounted to an eviction of biblically rooted Jewish thought from Western philosophy and, by extension, of Judaism from European life. Consequently, to criticize Spinoza meant not only to defend Judaism, but also to defend a vision of Western culture where a religious Judaism that is not subsumed by Christianity can be an insider. Mutatis mutandis, at a time of intensifying Jewish persecution in Europe and in the aftermath of its tragic culmination, an anti-Spinozist position had to also respond to a Zionist Spinoza, perceived as wedded to a positive program of extracting religion from Judaism and Jews from Europe.
Consequently, while Cohen, Gordin, and Levinas held serious misgivings regarding Spinoza's philosophy, in their consecutive reflections on Spinoza treated in this article the philosophical issue was increasingly bracketed while the political question and critique of Zionism became more explicit.Footnote 133 Similarly, the attention to Spinoza's harmful effect on Jewish intellectuals, as well as the insistence on the significance of his lack of proper rabbinical training, were latent in Cohen, explicitly introduced by Gordin, and greatly expanded on by Levinas.Footnote 134 From this perspective, Levinas's “The Spinoza Case” should be read not only as an early moment in his treatment of Spinoza, but also as another link in Cohenian anti-Spinozism.Footnote 135 Here Levinas expressed his own views, interpreted those of Gordin, and carried Cohen's heritage into postwar France.Footnote 136
Beyond the postwar era, an indication of the persistence of Cohenian anti-Spinozism may be found in Slaovj Žižek's study of Gilles Deleuze, a central figure in the “Spinoza renaissance” in 1960s France.Footnote 137 In Organs without Bodies, Žižek criticized an “injunction to love Spinoza” pervading the academic world “from France to America,” which he sought to counter with the equally popular “ethicotheological ‘Judaic’ turn of deconstruction exemplified by the couple Levinas/Derrida,” a turn that corresponds with a “Jewish universe … of God as radical otherness” and of “negative prohibitions,” to which Spinoza is the “most foreign” of philosophers.Footnote 138 Žižek's Lacanian–Hegelian aims for staging this contrast notwithstanding, his desire to check a perceived excessive Spinozism resembles Cohen's earlier motivation to attack Spinoza, and his loose identification of deconstruction with anti-Spinozism may open up further directions of inquiry, particularly regarding Derrida's relationship with this Cohenian strand.Footnote 139 Yet, as suggested in this article, it is imprecise to pose theology as Levinas's chief concern with Spinoza, nor was it the central issue for Cohen, Strauss, or Gordin.Footnote 140 Rather, their engagement with Spinoza revolved around the fundamental question of the possibility to define and determine the relationship between a thinker's philosophy on the one hand, and other, possibly non-philosophical, elements of their identity, politics, and thought on the other hand. Like the question of Rosenzweig and Heidegger's alliance, so also with Spinoza, this problem remains productively unresolved to this day.Footnote 141
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Julie Cooper, Daniel Herskowitz, George Kohler, Françoise Meltzer, and Paul Mendes-Flohr for critical comments on earlier drafts. I am also grateful to the editors of Modern Intellectual History, especially Tracie Matysik, as well as four anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and feedback.
