Jonathan Israel is probably one of the few historians in our time who is capable of taking a panoramic view of a timespan of two hundred years (1650-1850) and a huge geographical expanse, including all of Europe and the New World. The readers of this impressive and challenging book are invited to join in a journey through intellectual and political history for a close encounter with many extraordinary thinkers, some of whom are familiar and central, while others are peripheral and marginal, upon whom Israel justifiably seeks to shed new light.
The book's subtitle presents its central thesis: these revolutionary Jews fought for exalted universal goals – secularization and liberation of the world from prejudice and clericalism, and comprehensive democratization. As Israel argues: “There is a need to identify, characterize and explain the modern revolutionary consciousness as it first emerged from the late seventeenth century onwards down towards the young Marx, a development noticeably gaining momentum down to the mid-nineteenth century” (5). Pursuing his long-range historiographical trend, Israel finds an enormously significant contribution to Western Civilization in the thinking of these Jews. Thus, he chooses a position external to Jewish history, paying less attention to its inner tendencies and development, including the bitter conflicts aroused by the challenge of modernization.
Israel is an astoundingly prolific historian. His new book can be seen as another volume in his series on radical Enlightenment, which he began in 2001. His basic argument is that the father of radical Enlightenment was the Portuguese Jewish philosopher from Amsterdam, Benedict Spinoza, who was excommunicated by his community and denounced as the ultimate representative of heresy. Revolutionary Jews, which begins with Spinoza, traces a steady historical process continuing from him through other radical Enlightened Jews in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, concluding with Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne, Moses Hess, and Karl Marx. In the concluding chapters of the book, Israel seeks to show that the young Marx's radical ideas were influenced by the extensive tradition of radical Enlightenment. Along the way, Israel seeks to establish his claim that only radical Enlightenment could have brought about the emancipation of the Jews, since the conditions for it were democratic revolutions, social equality, equal political rights, and deep secularization.
Replying to critics who maintain that Spinoza had little influence on Jewish history, Israel states that the attraction of Spinoza among the secular Jews of the nineteenth century might have been based on myth, but there is enough in Spinoza's thought to supply the foundation of secular and democratic Judaism, and, therefore, Spinoza should be seen as the archetype of the revolutionary Jew. Israel finds connections to Spinoza in every one of the heroes of his book: Orobio de Castro, Moses Mendelssohn, Solomon Maimon, David Nassy, Zalkind Hourwitz, and many others.
Israel goes quite far in his effort to forge a chain of Jewish revolutionaries. He takes a leap of decades from Orobio to Mendelssohn, for example, coming to a conclusion that contradicts Mendelssohn's own words: that he concealed the similarity of his thinking to that of Spinoza because he couldn't admit it. The effort to force Mendelssohn into radical Enlightenment, claiming that in fact he wasn't what he seemed because he didn't wish to reject religious authority openly, is problematic. Did Mendelssohn really try to smuggle radical Enlightenment into Haskalah? While the Jewish philosopher from Berlin did take part in the broad phenomenon of early Enlightenment, this was certainly an inner Jewish cultural phenomenon that strove for a Renaissance in the Jewish library, for rationalist philosophy, science, and education—with almost none of the distinctive signs of radical Enlightenment.
One of the characteristics of the gallery of Israel's Jewish revolutionaries is alienation from Jewish society and religion. Of course, that trait does not characterize Mendelssohn at all, so it is no wonder that Israel heaps praise upon a link in the chain that is very important to him and easier to prove: Solomon Maimon. In this case, Maimon does indeed exemplify radical Jewish Enlightenment, connected with Spinoza, and rebellion against the rabbis. On the other hand, deep and sensitive examination of his famous autobiography reveals Maimon's pain in coping with his cultural conversion from Lithuanian Talmudist to German philosopher.
Among the fascinating and innovative chapters of Israel's book is a discussion of the transatlantic Jewish enlightenment with the inclusion of David Nassy, an intellectual whose library in Surinam contained the best works of radical Enlightenment. Nassy is ordinarily known only to scholars of the New World, but Jonathan Israel has placed him in the more extensive narrative of Jewish history. The tenth chapter on Felix Libertate society in Holland, in the context of the establishment of the Batavian Republic and French domination, is noteworthy. Israel correctly identifies this society with the struggle on two fronts: for emancipation, and against the authority of parnasim (lay leaders) and the rabbis. After a detailed and interesting discussion of the Jews, mainly dealing with political history in the Napoleonic age, the book moves on to the nineteenth century: “Ludwig Börne, Heinrich Heine, Moses Hess and Karl Marx were all products of this post-1813 vigorous Jewish response to the anti-Jewish reaction and general reversal of the late Enlightenment's transformation of the Jewish world. Pan-European dismantling of the legacy of the French revolution and Napoleonic reforms soon bred an angry new generation of revolutionary Jews” (334). Just as the Jew Spinoza led radical Enlightenment, Israel argues that these Jews combated the reaction against it and rescued it. Although Junius Frey, Börne, and Heine converted to Christianity, and Marx's father took care of his son's conversion, in Israel's opinion they are still part of the chain of Jewish revolutionaries who continued Spinoza's tradition of radical Enlightenment.
Toward the end of the book, Israel concludes that he has succeeded in the task he set himself: “It appears, then, that there did, after all, exist a typical Jewish revolutionary posture that has thus far not been sufficiently profiled, a style integral to Radical Enlightenment closely linked to the fight for Jewish emancipation and, likewise, general emancipation, pushing for Enlightenment based on universal and equal rights, and representative democracy” (431-432). If, indeed, this was a success, it was achieved to no small degree through a problematic and selective reading of Jewish history. For example, since radical Enlightenment is democratic and secular, traditional Judaism, especially that of East Europe, is presented as trapped in a repressive ghetto, submissive, passive, and religious, characterized by what Israel belittles with the ahistorical stereotype of “the shtetl mentality.” Thus, regrettably, he overlooks the turbulent and colorful Jewish world of the early modern period and the first century of Jewish modernization: the eighteenth century. The book ignores the inner drama of the Enlightenment revolution, for example, which was expressed uniquely among the Jews with a pedagogical curriculum that was not solely based on Torah, but on rehabilitation of the Hebrew language, on Hebrew prose and poetry, on a renaissance in philosophy, on the struggle for an alternative leadership, and on creation of a new public sphere. Likewise, the selective choice of a gallery of revolutionaries, which ostensibly proves the truth of the narrative about Jews who fought for democracy and secularization, ignores many other Jewish revolutionaries, including those who led movements of religious renewal (Sabbateanism and Hasidism), those who established new educational institutions, and those who invented the new secular Jewish public sphere, the secular leader, and the gender revolution within Jewish society and culture. Jewish modernization was and still is painful and bleeding.
In conclusion, Revolutionary Jews is a fascinating, rich, and erudite book, offering a superb experience of reading and study. People with an interest in intellectual history will be impressed by the redrawing of the intellectual map of the Age of Enlightenment (which, in Israel's opinion, continued into the nineteenth century) and by the great story of the formation of the modern, secular, and democratic Western world. From the point of view of Jewish history, it is important for this story to be complemented by a description of the gigantic revolution not only of emancipation and liberation from the outside, but also of deep inner changes and culture wars.
