Resurrection is not commonly the lot of dead dogs, yet Spinoza—the “dead dog” of the mid-eighteenth century, to use Lessing's expression—has been not only resurrected, but actually turned into a second Christ, perhaps even an improved one. Over the past thirty or forty years, Spinoza has become a cult figure, first in France and elsewhere in Europe, and more recently in North America, among both philosophers and the educated public. There are many engines pushing the swift train of current Spinozism. To name just a few: the ongoing process of the rehabilitation of metaphysics in Anglo-American philosophy; the disappointment of French Marxists with Hegelian teleology and utopianism, and their hope of finding in Spinoza a better candidate for a synthesis with Marx; the publication of a cluster of superb scholarly works on Spinoza circa 1970; and the thirst for a new naturalist religiosity. Jews have not been late to climb on this train, as more and less serious studies of Spinoza and “the Jewish Question” (whatever that expression may mean) abound.

Three important recent studies trace various chapters in the story of the Jewish reception of Spinoza. David J. Wertheim's Salvation through Spinoza (Leiden: Brill, 2011) addresses Spinoza's Jewish reception at the end of the Weimar republic, while Jan-Hendrik Wulf's Spinoza in der jüdischen Aufklärung (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012) concentrates on the German and East-European Haskalah. Both works are substantial and deserve close reading.

Daniel Schwartz's new book is the broadest in scope among these three works. In six chapters and an epilogue, it covers the period from the late seventeenth century to the present day. The primary subject matter of the book is the image of Spinoza as the founding father of Jewish “modernity,” which Schwartz identifies with secularism. Following an introduction in which he attempts to explain and defend his methodology, Schwartz turns in the first chapter to discuss the perception of Spinoza's Jewishness by his contemporaries and immediate successors, both Jewish and Gentile. The second and third chapters address the reception of Spinoza by Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) and Berthold Auerbach (1812–1882), respectively. The fourth is dedicated to Shlomo Rubin (1832–1910), the Galician maskil and Spinoza's first Hebrew translator, and the fifth examines the Zionist appropriation of Spinoza in the early twentieth century. The sixth chapter, which is probably the best in the book, studies the image of the Jewish heretic in twentieth-century Yiddish literature, with a special focus on the works of the Nobel Laureate I. B. Singer (1904–1991).

Schwartz's book has quite a few virtues. It is clear and well written, thoughtful, and occasionally seasoned with healthy irony (as with the signature at the end of the preface, D.B.S., which plays with Spinoza's initials, B.D.S.). The book also displays impressive erudition and an excellent command of languages. Finally, as long as the author does not address Spinoza's philosophy (or Rabbinics), the discussion is fairly nuanced and careful. Particularly impressive in this context is Schwartz's attempt to sift the historical from the imaginary in the fanciful accounts of Spinoza's excommunication (17–28).

In his preface, Schwarz aptly describes the book as “a study of the rehabilitation of Spinoza,” whose aim is to “explain how and why a notorious insurgent came to be seen as a turning point between the medieval and the modern in Jewish history and a patron saint of secular Jewishness” (3–4). The author stresses that the book is a study “of the memory of Spinoza, not of history” (4), and it is interested not in “the history of the Jewish philosophical response to Spinoza, but rather in the place of Spinoza in the Jewish literary and cultural imagination” (10). Whether Schwartz is loyal to his pledge to focus on Jewish literary and cultural, rather than philosophical, attitudes to Spinoza is not clear (much of the book attempts to address genuine philosophical issues), but even the viability of such an attitude is quite questionable, since, when all is said and done, Spinoza was primarily a philosopher. Without a good grasp of his philosophy, it is almost impossible to discern which memory is distortive and which not, which representations are products of gross ideology and which of serious scholarship, which studies are high and which low.

Let me provide a brief example. According to Schwartz, Spinoza “opted for an uncompromising commitment to secular reason… He rejected faith in a personal, providential, and above all, transcendental God, endorsing instead a theology of pure immanence” (6). To what extent “secular reason” (whatever this phrase means) can generate a theology, I will let the readers judge for themselves. More disturbing is the author's categorical and misleading claim about immanence and transcendence. ‘Causa immanens’ and ‘causa transiens’ are Spinoza's terms for two species of the efficient cause. This is the only context in which Spinoza uses the two terms. An immanent cause is a cause whose effect inheres in the cause. Schwartz, however, employs these terms in their much more colloquial, twenty-first century sense. But if we ask ourselves whether Spinoza's God is transcendent in our sense of the term, the answer is not at all clear. Spinoza's God has infinitely many attributes that are beyond the human mind, and beyond what we understand as nature. These attributes of God are as real as our extended nature, yet we cannot know or access them, and will never be able to. Are these attributes of God not transcendent?

In a similar vein, Schwartz makes other questionable announcements. He claims, for instance, that Spinoza “sought to displace once and for all organized religion as a bedrock of state and society” (15). Organized, and even official, state religion has a crucial political role in Spinoza's philosophy. In his Political Treatise (Chap. 8), Spinoza suggests a state religion whose priests and senators are the very same people. Schwartz also states that “sympathetic understanding of sources in their specific contexts [is] a kind of reasoning almost entirely foreign to traditional Judaism” (69). Such regrettable, broad-brush generalizations somewhat spoil the book, which is overall sensitive and perspicuous. Part of the problem, as it seems to me, is that Schwartz frequently adopts the ideological glasses of Jewish secularism, which is the real subject matter of the book; and for this ideology, as for any other, nuances and multi-dimensional facts are primarily obstacles.

The book contains a few factual errors. In the scholium to proposition 7 of part 2 of the Ethics, Spinoza does not mention the “ancient Hebrews,” as the author claims (31), but rather “the Hebrews,” and this reference has little to do with the Kabbalah (in all likelihood, it is a reference to Maimonides' Guide, I 68). God's attributes are thought and extension, not “mind and body” (37). For Spinoza ‘mind’ [mens] connotes finitude and thus cannot be ascribed to God. Let me also note a few surprising omissions: Schwartz makes no reference to the Nieto affair in an otherwise interesting discussion of early-eighteenth-century controversies on pantheism; he also neglects Salomon Maimon's description of his Spinoza disputes with Mendelssohn in a chapter dedicated to Mendelssohn's attitude to Spinoza. Still, I learned a lot from the book and found it a valuable, and frequently insightful, contribution to the field of modern Jewish intellectual history.