The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Heresy, and Philosophy

The Radical EnlightenIllent of SoloIllon MaiInon Judaism) Heresy) and Philosophy

Abraham P. Sacher

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 2006

Introduction

Solomon Maimon

"He is one of the ra\vest of Polish Jews." Marcus Herz in a letter to Immanuel lunt

111 May 1789 1m1nanuel 1Zant wrote to Marcus Herz: But what were you thinking, dearest friend, in sending me a large package of the Inost subtle investigations not only to read but to think through, when I, in Iny 66th year, aln still burdened with con1pleting my plan (partly in producing the last Critique, namely that of judgment, which should appear soon, and partly in working out a system of metaphysics, of nature as well as of morals, in conformity with those critical demands) .... I had half decided to send the Inanuscript back with this completely adequate apology. But one glance at the work made me realize its excellence and that not only had none of my critics understood me and the Inain questions so well as Herr Maiinon does but also very few men possess so much acumen for very deep investigations as he. 1 Herz was a doctor and man of letters who had studied with IZant at 1Zonigsberg and had maintained an important philosophical correspondence with hin1 over the previous two decades. Indeed, it was in a letter to Herz, nine years before the publication of The Critique ofPure Reason, that 1Zant first sketched the outlines of his great critical project of mapping "the Limits of Sense and Reason." 2 Herz had also been a close friend and collaborator of Moses Mendelssohn, the leader of the Berlin Jewish Enlightenment (the Haskala), and along with his wife, Henriette Herz, presided over the most glittering intellectual salon in Berlin. 3 The manuscript in question was a commentary to 1Zant's Critique of Pure Reason, written by an acquaintance who called hin1self Solon10n Maimon.

I

2

Introduction

In the letter that accon1panied his manuscript, Maimon identified himself as son1eone who had been "condemned at birth to live out the best years ofn1Y life in the woods of Lithuania," al1d had thereby been "deprived of every assistance in acquiring knowledge." He went on to describe his belated and avowedly partial enlightenlnent in Gerlnany, with the sllpport of such patrons as Mendelssohn and Herz. I finally had the good fortune to get to Berlin, late though it was. Here the support of certain noble-minded persons has put me in a position to study the sciences. It was natural, I think, that my eagerness to arrive at my main goal-the truth-should 111ake 111e lleglect to some extent those subordinate studies, language, 111ethod and so 011. 4

Maimon's self-portrait, which he was to elaborate 011 three years later in a widely read autobiography, was underscored by Herz's cover letter to IZant, which described the allthor as having only recently been "one of the rawest of Polish Jews." 5 The manuscript itselfwas written in a difficult and ungainly German, but even more striking was the literary form that it took. The book included not only a close reading and criticism of the central doctrines of IZant's Critique but also a IUl1d ofcommel1.tary upon itself, which refined and extended the criticism and sketched a possible solution to the philosophical and exegetical problems posed. Throughout, Maimon drew implicitly and explicitly on an eclectic array ofsources, including the author's boldly chosen namesake, the twelfth-centlIry Jewish philosopher Moses ben Main10n, known in the European philosophical tradition as Moses Maimonides. IZant's letter to Herz was the turning point of Maimon's career. Although it was a private communication, addressed to a third party, in which IZant had specifically written "I assume it is taken for granted that this is not for publication," it served much the same function as a positive blurb from a preeminent academic would now. 6 At this particular historical moment, in which the salon was a forum for peer review and any letter from IZant a matter for social comment, such praise could be almost public without being published. 7 Maimon's book, titled VCrsuch uber die Transcendentalphilosophie, was published in 1790, and his career as a public intellectual was launched. 8 He became the coeditor ofa lead-

SolOlllon Maimon

ing Gern1an journal of philosophical and speculative psychology, published work in leading Enlightenment journals in both German and Hebrew, and engaged vigorously in scholarly controversies throughout the following decade. In 1791, Maimon published an extraordinary Hebrew comn1entary to the first part of Main10nides' Guide ofthe Perplexed, which interpreted Maimonides in the light of IZant (and vice versa) and was the first substaI1tial work of moderI1 philosophy written in Hebrew. 9 In 1792, Maimon made IZant's praise fully public by prolldly quoting it in his odd and brilliant autobiography, simply titled Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte. 10 Maimon's "life history" was widely read and remarked upon by both his Jewish and Gentile contemporaries. It was discussed in the salons, Goethe and Schiller corresponded about it, and it virtually invented the subsequent genre ofHaskala alltobiography. As the literary historian Alan Mintz has written, it is "olle of those rare books that legitimately deserves to be called senlinal." 11 Maimon contiI1ued to write and publish for anot11er seven years, until his death in 1800 at the age of 47. Over the last two centuries, IZant's letter has been Maimon's legitimating epitaph, qlloted or paraphrased (and often exaggerated) in both histories of German philosophy and histories of the Haskala since the mid-nineteenth century. In a later letter, written to a Gentile philosophical rival of Maimon's rather than a Jewish sponsor, IZant had not been so kind. In March 1794, he wrote to 1Zarl Leonhard Reinhold, the leading exponent and popularizer of the 1ZantiaI1 thought at the time: I feel an inexplicable difficulty when I try to project lllyself into other people's ideas, so that I seem unable really to grasp anyone else's systelll.... This is the reason why I can turn out essays of my own, but, for example, as regards the "improvement" of the critical philosophy by Maimon (Jews always like to do that sort of thing, to gain an air of importance for themselves at someone's else's expense), I have never really understood what he is after and must leave the reproof to others.!2 Too much, perhaps, should not be made of such private (and parenthetical) remarks. The letter was written at a time in 1Zant's life in which he felt that his intellectual faculties were failing him just as he

3

4

Introduction

was witnessing the defection ofhis nl0st gifted students and expositors, Reinhold among them. The passage smacks as nluch of academic gamesmanship as it does of Enlightenlnent anti-Judaism. Nonetheless, the terms with which I(ant dismisses Maimon are revealing. He is an intrusive Jew whose work is unoriginal (perhaps even parasitic) and close to unintelligible. 13 Maimon's German philosophical writing did betray its Polish-Yiddish origins, and his exegetical, self-reflexive nlanner of presentation was strikingly different from the expository prose of the Aufklarung philosophers vvhose ranks he aspired to jOil1. In fact, as I(ant lUlew, Reinhold had already adnlinistered a scathing reproof to Main10n in an extraordinarily heated exchange of philosophical letters, in which he suggested more than once that Mainl0n ought to improve his literary skills before publishing anything furt11er. Mainl0n not only ignored the suggestion bllt, in a characteristic breach of literary etiqllette, published the exc11ange without Reinhold's perlnission in I793. 14 Herz's description of Maimon as "raw," together with IZant's sneer and Reinhold's suggestion, is, of course, an example of now familiar attempts to exclude an llnruly other, no nlatter how clever, from the public sphere of enlightened European discourse. One way to n1ark the beginnings of Ellropean Jewish modernity, however, is to note that Main10n became an influential Gerlnan philosopher 110netheless. Another is that Maimon concurred, however ambivalently, with Herz in his estimation of his own uncultivated "rawness" and the barbarity of his origins in Lithuanian rabbinic culture. Maimon was both spectaclllarly successful at entering the highest reaches of European discourse and self-consciously unsuccessful at doing so as anything but an odd and exotic Jew. Maimon, his patrons, and his readers viewed his life and accomplishments as both an inspiring and a cautionary tale of what a Polish Jew nlight achieve in moving from the barbarism of Eastern European Jewish culture to Western enlightenment. However, there was always a kind of paradox or nlystification involved in this thought, which is epitomized in Maimon's remark to IZant that he had grown IIp "in the woods of Lithuania." Although it is true that Maimon grew up in the house-

SOlOlTIOn MailTIOn

hold of a Jewish leaseholder on the outskirts of a forest, he hardly led a rural life. Indeed, his Lithuanian Jewish childhood was almost certainly nlore bookish than that of, say, IZant's upbringing as a Lutheran Pietist in IZonigsberg. Is Maimon was the son of a recognized rabbinic scholar and hinlself a Talmudic prodigy, in a time and place in which such learning held both cultural prestige and tangible rewards. Moreover, when, as an adolescent and young ad1dt, he rejected the Talmudisn1 to which he was heir, Maimon turned to alternative conceptions of J1ldaism in IZabbala and Maimonidean philosophy, which were no less bookish traditions. Even the Hasidic court of the Maggid of Mezeritch, which he had visited as a young nlan in the early 1770S, was, enthusiastic practices notwithstanding, a group of spiritual elitists devoted to a cOlnplex Inystical tradition, as Maimon's valuable autobiographical account of that visit makes clear.l 6 Nonetheless, Maimon's autobiography expanded on his portrait of his barbarous origins and his travels to the West to pursue "the truth," as he had underlined it in his first letter to IZant. In doing so, it helped to develop and popularize the Haskala critiq1le of a traditional Jewish society that was somewhat paradoxically represented as both ignorantly barbaric and i111possibly scholarly. SllCh a portrait had SOl1le roots in traditions of internal Jewish critiq1les ofTall1ludisnl from the rival perspectives ofMaimonidean philosophy and IZabbala, b1lt it also reflected the attitudes of a still Christian Europe toward Jews and, to a lesser extent, of Western Europe toward the East.l 7 It was this picture of both Maimon and premodern Ashkenazi rabbinic culture that was largely accepted by nineteenth-century scholars of Jewish history, who were the more or less direct intellectual heirs of the Haskala. The characterization of the great nineteenth-century historian Heinrich Graetz is typical: Of the relnarkable capacity of Jews for culture, Solomon Maimon was a striking example.... He rose from the thickest cloud of Polish ignorance to pure philosophical knowledge, attaining this height by his unaided efforts, but owing to his skepticisnl, he fell prey to shocking errors. I8

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6

Introduction Graetz's assumption of an easy opposition between "the thickest cloud of Polish ignorance" into which Maimon was borl1 and the European philosophical knowledge and culture that he later attained almost necessitates that he achieved the latter throllgh his "unaided efforts," since nothing in his background could possibly have prepared him for it. Thus, Maimon's ambivalent self-invention became history. Although Maimon has been the subject ofseveral excellent philosophical, literary, and (to a lesser extent) historical studies, few have questioned the basic validity of such a biographical approach and none have worked out the complex and ironic ways in which his thollght, even at its most philosophically radical, grows out of medieval and early modern Hebrew intellectual traditions. 19 This has been abetted, in part, by two more general historiographic tendencies in the study ofthe Jewish Enlightenment. The first is to identify the influel1ce ofpren10dern forn1s of thollght with conservatism, or at least a kind of moderation. The second has been to represent the maskilic critique oftraditional culture on more or less its own terms as a moderate, internal attempt to rationalize Judaism and free it from obscurantism. This can make it difficult to see the, as it were, indigenous, premodern origins ofMaimon's radical enlightenment, in which he was not alone, and its significance for understanding the period. 20 A striking feature ofMaimol1's autobiography is the way in which it both endorses and undercuts the dissociative condescension bordering on contempt with which cultivated Western Jews such as Marcus Herz held "raw" Polish Jews such as himself. In a revealing passage, Maimon describes his early relationship with Herz as marked by just such attitudes. He took great pleasure in my conversation, and we often discussed the most important subjects in Natural Theology and Morals on which I expressed illy thoughts quite frankly. [... ] At first, this friend regarded me as a speaking animal and entertained himself as one might with a dog or a starling that has been taught to speak a few words. The odd mixture of the animal in my Inanners, my expressions and my whole outward behavior with the rational in my thoughts excited his ilnagination Inore than the subject of our conversation raised his understanding. 21

I

Solomon Maimon

Ehe passage repays close scrutiny. Maimon would seem to admit the crude animality of his language and manners, as well as the exotic novlelty ofhis performance in his matter-of-fact acceptance ofHerz's reception of him as like "a dog or a starling ,vho has been taught to speak a few words." Nonetheless, he slyly underlines his intellectual superiority over Herz by contrasting his own rational thoughts with the merely imaginative ones of his interlocutor. In doing so, Maimon employs the technical terms of contemporary faculty psychology, imagination, and understanding, which he makes clear elsew11ere in the autobiography he understands in the light of both IZantian and MailTIonidean doctrine. Indeed, in the narrative that precedes this incident, Maimon has already shown that his easy conceptual mastery of Enlightenment topics was due not only to his native genius (something he never underestimated) but also to his imlTIersion in the world of premodern Jewish thought. Maimon may even have been undermining this picture ofhimself as "a talking anin1al" (redendes Tier) in the very phrase with which he asserts it. If we literally translate this phrase back into Hebrew (Maimon's la11guage of primary literary and philosophical literacy), it becomes hai ha-medaber, which is the medieval Aristotelian designation of man as the rational or speaking anima1. 22 Such bilingllal pllns and allusions were very much a part of Maimon's distinctive literary style. A crllder example of both Maimon's sly allusiveness and the aggression with which he confronted enlightened German Jews can be found in his account of his break with the great exemplar of GermanJewish Enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn, in the early 1780s. When Me11delssohn remonstrated with him for his dissolute and scattered life, Maimon replied that since morality can prescribe only means to given ends but not the ends then1selves, the conduct ofone's life is really a matter oftaste. "We are all," he reports himselfas saying, "Epicureans" (lfTir sind aIle Epikuraer).23 Althollgh the term "Epicurean" was a term of learned abuse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-and the German reader migl1t have registered it as such-it could also have been read as a casual classicism between philosophers. But Maimon, who italicized the phrase, meant something mllch more aggressive, with a real idiomatic punch. In both rabbinic Hebrew and Yiddish, the word Epicurean, or apiqores, is

8

Introduction

a standard terln for heretic. 24 Thus, if we translate Maimon's sentence into the only lingua franca that he and Mendelssohn actually shared, it becomes not merely a statement ofmoral hedonisn1 but a bold (and perhaps pained) adlnission and accusation, with a milch wider range of literary and Halakhic associations. The urbane exemplar of the compatibility of Gerlnan-Jewish Enlightenment vvith religious orthodoxy has no principled basis for either his synthesis or his reproach beyond conventional propriety: "We are all apiqorsim." Mendelssohn and Maimon's Jewish readers would certainly have registered the force of this remark, to which I will have occasion to retilrn. Maimon returns again and again to the figure of Epicurils in his writings. In 1790, for instance, he applied Lucretius's poetic praise of Epicurus to I(ant in the epigram for his versuch iiber die Transcendentalphilosophie. 25 The choice of a Latin epigraph helped establish the author's worthiness in the European public sphere, but the particular text still had a sharp, ironic sting for Maimon, if not for many of his readers. Learned allilsions and sly assertions of intellectual superi0rity aside, it is nonetheless true that Maimon made his first appearance in enlightened society as an exotic, a kind of pl1ilosopher-dog, and he both accepted and resisted such characterizations in his own selfpresentation. 26 I take Maimon's life, and his presentation of that life, to be of exemplary interest, in part, as a site of ilneasy heretical hybridity, rather than as an example of more or less complete progress, from premodern Judaism or "Polish ig110rance" to Enlightenment philosophy. We Inay think, then, of the transitions in Maimon's life as consisting not only of geographic moves from East to West, or as stages of intellectual development, but in terms of cilltural translation (in which something is always lost). Nonetheless, the cultilral distance that such translations had to travel should not be overstated. Among the reasons for Maimon's success (insofar as his life lvas a success) is that the spoken language in which he was raised, Yiddish, was not as distant, exotic, and uni11telligible as he, Marcus Herz, and tl1eir contemporaries were wont to characterize it. It was, after all, a Germanic language. Moreover, the Hebrew philosophical tradition that served him so well was one braid ofthe triple cord of Christian, Islamic, and Jewish philosophy that comprised Inedieval

SolOlllon Maimol1

philosophy, and although Maimon was far closer to the concerns ofsuch scholasticism than IZant (or even the "German Aquinas," Christian Wolff), they were not as alien to either the technical philosophical concerns or the radical anticlerical spirit of the Enlightenment as its expo11ents often liked to think. IZant's letter to Herz about Maimon contained more than the praise quoted at the outset. It also incillded a fairly detailed response to Maimon's proposed revision of the critical philosophy, which IZant called "Spinozism." This descriptio!1 of Maimon's philosophy has, at least, a triple significance. In the first place, as a technical matter, Maimon's representation of human understanding as a limited reflection ofa divine intellect in which sensibility and understanding are ultin1ately unified is Spinozistic, although, as we shall see, it also has philosophical roots extending well before Spinoza in Inedieval Hebrew philosophy (roots that to some extent Spinoza's doctrines shared).27 1'Jonetheless, Maimon's doctrines were also an attempt to resolve genuine philosophical tensions in IZant's systen1, and they even had systen1atic and textual bases within IZant's Critique ofPure Reason. Moreover, they would seem to anticipate some of the ideas of the Critique ofJudgment, on which IZant was working when he received Maimon's manuscript, as well as those oflater German Idealism. 28 However, the attribution ofSpinozism was never, or even primarily, a simple philosophical description in IZant's intellectual context. The socalled "Pantheism Controversy" (Pantheismusstreit) over whether Mendelssohn's great friend Gotthold Ephraim Lessing had been a secret Spinozist was, along with the reception ofIZant's philosophy, at the very center ofthe German Enlightenment struggle over the authority ofreason in the 1780s. 29 In this context, Spi110zism was never a compliment. It meant that one had taken reason beyond its acceptable lin1its with dangerous and untenable resllits. To use IZant's own preferred terminology, such a person had lost his proper bearings, or the correct "orientation in thinking." 30 Finally, Maimon was, as both his and Herz's cover letters to I(ant made clear, a disside11t Jew, who had abandoned the traditional Judaism in which he was raised. In 1789, Spinoza was n0J:JT~~ __

10

Introduction

the "God-intoxicated man" he wOll1d shortly become under the auspices ofRon1anticism, but rather still the "accursed Jew." The awkward11ess of Maimon's Gern1an prose and even the exegetical character of his philosophy were easily marked as Jewish. However, the complex, self-consciously ironic but genuinely substantive relationship between Maimon's thought and Jewish intellectual tradition (including Spinoza) was less apparent to his peers and even many later scholars. This was the case despite the fact that, as I have already suggested, he thematized this relationship in his autobiography and, indeed, eve11 in his very name. The Inaster concept of lVlaimon's thollght is the idea of a purely active or infinite intellect that is, to use a Inedieval Aristotelian formulation, both the knower and the know11. 31 IZnowledge, and thus ultimately human perfection, consists in achieving a telnporary and partial unity with this divine intellect or-in a later, pregnant forlnulation of Maimon's, which prefigllred post-IZantian German Idealism-"World SOld" (Weltseele). Throughollthis philosophical work, and even in his autobiography, something like this ideal functions as a reglliative idea toward which the finite epistemological sllbject and Maimon hilnself, respectively, strive. The picture of perfection that emerges from Maimon's texts is complex and tension ridden. It has its roots in the premodern Hebrew philosophical tradition, especially in certain radical interpretations of Maimonides' Guide ofthe Perplexed, with which Maimon was familiar. An early Hebrew manuscript of Maimon's, written before his arrival in Berlin, contains his attempts at working through the philosophical and theological implications of this ideal. I will discllss this manuscript, the development of this theme in Maimon's corpus, and its significance in Chapters 2 and 3. However, in this context it is important to note the way in whicl1 the breakdown of the idea of a llnitary telos of human perfection was an important feature of Enlightenment discourse more generally. This is not merely a tech11ical philosophical point. Alisdair MacIntyre has famously argued that the modern abandonment of the Aristotelian scheme of "man-as-he-happens-to-be and man-as-he-couldbe-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature" is the central feature (and flaw)

Solotllon MaitllOn

of the "Enlightenment project." 32 Olle need not elldorse the Inoral or all of the details of MacIntyre's historical narrative to see that he has identified something important. 33 This can be seen most recently in the subtle work of Vivasvall Soni, who llas carefully charted the waning of the classical idea of happiness as the teleological fulfillment of human nature deveiopinent in the imaginative literature of the Enlightenn1ent, froin a completely different theoretical orielltation. 34 Indeed, one can see each of the intellectual worlds that Maiinon inhabited struggling with the idea of a fixed hllman telos. In late eighteenth century Germany, this teleological ideal is the changing notion of Bildung, mealling (at least) both education and culture, which shares, in part, an Aristoteliall genealogy.35 In the Jewish world, I argue, taking a cue from the work of Isadore Twersky, that one sees each of the competing parties ofearly Jewish modernity-the theoreticians of the Mitnaged rabbinic establishment, Hasidisn1, and the Haskala-vying to create a new unitary cultural ideal, often employing theoretical terms of medieval philosophical and mystical traditions such as shelemut hanefesh (perfection ofthe soul), hatzlachat ha-enoshit (human excellence, the summum bonum), and devequt (ul1ion with the divine) in new discllrsive contexts. The importance ofsuch terms and concepts for understanding the internal debates oflate eighteenth-century Judaism has yet to be sufficiently appreciated. They are also precisely the terms in which Maimon attempted to understand both his life and the philosophical problems of his age. Harry Wolfson once described his classic study of t11e medieval Jewish SOllrces ofSpill0za's Ethics as finding the Baruch under the Be11edictius (a method of Spinoza interpretation that Maimon himself pioneered).36 Wolfson's project, although an extraordinary work of scholarship, is famously problematic, both in its philological pllzzle-solving approach to philosophical argun1el1t and in its unlikely governing assumption that Spinoza had been as literate in classical Hebrew literature as Wolfson. 37 Maimon was, as I(ant perhaps in1plied, comparable to Spinoza both in terms oftechnical philosophy and in general life pattern. Indeed, he served for several generations ofnineteenth- and twentiethcentury Eastern European Jewish intellectuals (Wolfson among them) as a kind ofhomegrown Spinoza. And I will similarly try to show, among

II

12

Introduction

other things, the premodern Hebrew roots ofMaimon's radical enlightenn1ent and aporetic epistemology. However, the principal reason for this exercise is not to demonstrate the philosophical resources of Jewish intellectual tradition but rather to provide a rich sense of the cluster of intellectual and cultural issues that marked the European Jewish transition to lTIodernity, as they played out in Maimon's life. MailTIOn can1e to IZant's philosophy as a polyglot approaches a new language. His work is full of surprising conceptual translations, odd connections, and revealing structural comparisons. N011etheless, although MailTIOn'S career was brilliant and idiosyncratic, his struggles with the concepts and ideals of medieval and early modern Jewish thought, the Berlin Haskala, and the GerlTIan Enlightenn1ent reflect larger issues in the two cultures in which he was a marginal figure. In his second unanswered letter to IZant, written shortly after the publication ofhis Transcendentalphilosophie, Maimon wrote that he had "vowed some time ago that I wOl11d henceforth read nothing but your books." 38 This was n10re than mere sycophancy (although it was that too). In order to understand Maimon, it is important to get son1e provisional sense ofIZant's epochal importance for the philosophical generation to which Main10n belonged. Mendelssohn, the last great German rationalist and Maimon's erstwhile mentor, famollsly called IZant the "all-destroyer" who had razed the metaphysical bases for beliefin God, the SOl11, and Eternity.39 IZarl Reinhold, Maimon's erstwhile rival, described IZant as a Christ-like figure whose thought had inallgurated a newage. 40 Despite its extraordi11ary theoretical abstraction and forbidding technicality' IZant's philosophical project should be understood, at a certain level of historical abstraction, as an attempt to justify and systematize the ideals of the Enlig11tenlTIe11t. This is true not only of IZant's moral a11d political philosophy, but even, or perhaps especially, of the transcendental idealism of the Critique ofPure Reason, which laid the basis for them. 41 Thus, in the programmatic "Preface to the First Edition" of that work, IZant described his project as one of bringing not n1erely "books and systems" but the faculty ofreason itselfbefore the "tribllnal of pure reason," and he explicitly tied this to the ideals of the Enlight-

Soloillon Maimon enment. "Our age," IZant wrote, "is, in especial degree, the age ofcriticisn1 [I(ritik ] and to criticism everything must sllbmit." 42 The result ofthis criticism, to be preemptively brief(I attend to S01l1e of the details later), is IZant's "Copernican Revolution," which was supposed to demonstrate that the world l1ecessarily has the structure that it does because finite Ininds such as ours could not conceive it otherwise. The epistemological slLbject is thus not merely the passive recipient of the object ofhis knowledge but rather "spontaneously" and freely takes up that which is "given" to him in empirical experience and makes it into an object of knowledge. Such a spontaneous subject necessarily legislates for itself the conditions (space, tin1e, and the categories of understanding) under which an object can be known. The cogency and virtues ofIZant's transcendental idealism are not at issue for the moment; rather, what should be 110ted is their resonance with Enlightenment ideals, not only of criticism but also of radical autonomy. Indeed, precisely these twin ideals are echoed at the cultural level in IZant's famous defil1ition of Enlightenment as "mankind's exit from its self-incurred immaturity." The consequent challenge to "dare to know" should be understood precisely as a call to bring cultural and historical "givens" before the bar of reason, in a way analogous to that in which the contents of perception must submit to the concepts of understanding: Sapere aude! 'Have the courage to use your own understanding!' is thus the motto of the enlightenn1ent.... If I have a book that has understanding for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a doctor who judges my diet ... I have no need to think. 43

The dicta given by books, pastors, doctors, and tradition generally are only authoritative insofar as one makes then1 so. To accept them as an external, heteronomous authority is not so much an abdication ofone's self-legislative abilities (strictly speaking an impossibility) as a deluded, unconscious use of them. Part of the sociohistorical significance of IZant's philosophy, then, is in its rigorolls working through of the consequences of radical human autonomy at every level of discourse. Freedom was, as Ernst Cassirer once remarked, "always really IZant's n1ain problem." 44 This is so down

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14

Introduction

to the very microstructllres of cognition, in which a sense impression is only "really anything to me" if I take it up as sllch by accoinpanying it with the proposition "I think," and, correspondingly, I an1 only a subject, an "I," to the extent which I do SO.45 Maimon was perhaps the first to appreciate the full epistemological implications of this argun1ent, and the 111anuscript that IZant praised turned precisely this line of thinking against the first Critique to expose one of its central tensions. One of the most interesting and extraordinary features of this accomplishment is that Maimon went on to attempt to resolve this te11sion, using the conceptual tools of medieval Aristotelianisin and, in doing so, laid the grollndwork for the later idealist systems of Fichte and Hegel. On a more personal level, Maimon's life enacted IZant's ideal of enlightenment as bringing all the cultural givens before the bar of reason as much as any public figure ofhis generation. He rejected not only each of the regnant forins ofJudaism but also those of the German and Jewish Enlightenments. His distinctively modern project ofalltobiography can also be seen through a IZantian lens. An autobiography such as Maiman's is not Inerely an assertion ofan autonomous self. It is one in which that self is constructed precisely through the systematic representation and ordering ofthe manifold ofone's life. The IZantian subject discovers itself through the active representation of that which it has been given in the sensory manifold. We might say that a modern autobiographer such as Maimon does something similar; in organizing the materials of his life, he both discovers and creates his subject. Maimon's historical interest rests not only on his literary or philosophical achievements (although they were considerable) but on his aln10st unique position at the intersection of several of the most important social and intellectual trends of European and Jewish modernity just evoked. Thus, he is virtually alone, along with the more illustriolls Mendelssohn, in being an active and original participant in both the German and Jewish Enlightenments. Moreover, unlike Mendelssohn (and lesser lights such as Herz), he came to tl1e E11lightenment late, after having been completely imn1ersed through early adulthood in the various intellectual forms of premode121J~~i~h_,=-u~t1..lr~,_i?,:l~d_i~g_t~e

Solon10n Maimon Taln1udisn1 of the rabbinic Mitnaged establishme11t in which he was raised, the populist mysticism of their Hasidic opponents, and the medieval and early modern traditions of Jewish philosophy and mysticism. In a famous essay, Hannah Arendt suggested that during the modern period in which "Jews [have] truly lived amidst and not just in the neighborhood of Western European peoples," there have been only two choices for the aspiring Jewish intellectual. One could be a parvenu, as she would have classified Herz, or a "consciollS pariah," like Main10n. Indeed, although she never discussed Maimon at length, she seems to have regarded him as perhaps the first modern Jewish intellectual to adopt the role. In the same essay, Arendt writes: However slender the basis out of which the concept [of the pariah as a human type] was created and out of which it was developed, it has nevertheless loomed larger in the thinking of assimilated Jews than might be inferred from standard Jewish histories. It has endured from Salomon Mainl0n in the eighteenth century to Franz IZafka in the early twentieth. 46 If this were truly so, then Maimon would have been the first to transmute the existential fact of his Jewishness into a kind of abstract otherness or comic homelessness, but it isn't quite right. It is true of Heine and eventually of I(afka, both of whom are key members of Arendt's subterranean Jewish literary tradition, that their Jewishness consists largely, althollgh not entirely, in a certain style of conscious otherness. 47 Bllt unlike these writers, Main10n was, or at least had been, literally at home in-even a master of-Jewish culture, and his literary and philosophical accomplishments are inexplicable in the absence of this fact. His homelessness was, then, both less complete and more selfconsciollsly chosen than that of Arendt's true "conscious pariahs." In this respect too, Maimon stands on the threshold between (at least) two different worlds. Olle way to clarify this point is to retllrn to the comparison with Mendelssohn, whose unique achievement as the great exemplar of "German-Jewish symbiosis" might be described as having been to avoid capture in Arendt's retrospective categories of pariah and parvenu. Maimon stands in a both chronological and substantive sense between

15

16

Introduction

Mendelssohn and Heine, at the beginning of the Jewish entry into German literature. Unlike Mendelssohn and like Heine, he thematized his cilltural otherness, flaunted it, and made it a thing of comedy. Like Mendelssohn (only n10re so) and unlike Hei11e, Maimon was in fact a product ofthe distinctive literary, intellectual, and religious traditions of Jewish culture. He is, in an in1portant sense, one of the last figures to whon1 the traditional tern1 heretic, or apiqores, literally applies. Maimon's philosophical work had significant influence on later thinkers, has been the subject of several excellent studies, and is now enjoying, along with German Idealism more generally, something of a reviva1. 48 I-lis autobiography was even more influential and set the pattern and standard for Jewish autobiography for the next century. It has been quoted and referred to often in historical studies of the period but rarely interpreted with care. The llnpublished Hebrew writings of his yOllth have been noted by scholars, from Abraham Geiger to Gershom Scholem and Moshe Idel, but have never been integrated with his later work. Certainly, no one has attelnpted to show how these texts fit together and n1ake sense as constituent parts of a single, albeit divided and hybrid, life or how, taken as a corpus, they shed light on the different intellectual and cultural worlds in which Maimon lived. Maimon was an eclectic thinker and writer who gloried in his eclecticisn1. Accordingly, a Stlldy that aims to provide a sense of his life and its exemplary interest mllst be similarly eclectic. In the following chapters I try to provide something that is both more and less than the traditional intellectual biography of a philosopher. In each chapter, I address one of the central thematic features of Maimon's life and work, which I have tried to evoke in the preceding pages. In doing so, I emphasize the extent to which Maimon must be understood in the vertical context of the Jewish intellectual traditions in which he was educated and against which he rebelled, as well as the horizontal context of his late eighteenth-century contemporaries. Each chapter bears a quote by or about Maimon as its epigraph and can be taken as a kind of extended commentary on it. In Chapter I, I provide a historical overview of Main1011's life and work in the varied contexts in which he lived, fron1 Jewish Lithuania to Enlightenment

Solomon Maimon

Berlin and elsewhere. Since the chronology of MailTIOn'S life is not ,vell known, Chapter I also provides the reader with the biographical and historicallu10wledge necessary for the detailed interpretive readings of the following chapters. In Chapter 2, I locate the center of Maimon's philosophical thought in the philosophical and theological perfectionislTI first articulated in his unpublished Hebrew manuscript, Hesheq Shelomo. Along the lines indicated already, I discuss the significance of this perfectionism for an understanding of the thollght of the early Haskala and its dialogue, or debate, with Hasidism and the Mitnaged party of rabbinic traditionalism. In Chapter 3, I show how Maimon employed the tools and terms of this medieval philosophical perfectio11ism in his i11flllential revision of I(antian Idealism in the face of his own skeptical challenge. These two chapters can also be read as a kind of microhistory ofideas that trace, in the work ofa single thinker, the transforn1ation ofthe medieval religious and philosophical ideal of union (devequt) with the divine mind into the German Romantic ideal of a World Soul. As I argue throughout, however, these technical arguments have a wider cultllral and literary resonance as well as an internal philosophical logic. The transition from active intellect to World Soul is paralleled by the transition from the Maimonidean ideal of intellectllal perfection, or shelemut ha-nefesh, to. the German Enlightenment ideal of Bildung. Neither of these transitions, however, was free of irony or, indeed, ever really completed. In Chapter 4, I present my i11terpretation of Maimon's autobiographical self-invention as underwritten by Maimonidean perfectionism. In effect, Maimon wrote a Bildungsroman (or Bildungsgeschichte to be precise) in which German Bildung is not really the reigning ideal. In this chapter, I also show the extent to which Maimon's incon1plete revolt against the rabbinic textual practices of commentary and supercommentary was central to his literary style and persona. I close this chapter with a thorough exegesis of the puzzling and hitherto untranslated allegory with which MailTIOn ends his autobiography. This allegory about the history of philosopl1Y, human perfection, and death is, in many ways, the epitome of Maimon's writing. It is cryptic, comic (even buffoonish), and extraordinarily learned. As I will show, in addition to the overt references to the history ofphilosophy, it calls on passages from

17

18

Introduction both the Guide ofthe Perplexed and the Zohar and illvites serious comparison to passages from the work of such younger contemporaries as G. V\l. F. Hegel, on the one hand, and Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav on the other. In Chapter 5, I sketch the story of Maimon's literary afterlife as a figure in and an influence on novels, philosophical works, historical narratives, and the Jewish popular imagination. Finally, in a brief concluding chapter, I discuss ways in which Maimon's career serves as an instructive (if not, perhaps, decisive) coullterexample to several converging arguments about the llature of the Haskala, the origins of radical enlightenment, and the possibilities of Jewish thought. In each of these chapters, I have often relied for both interpretive and cOlltextual matters on the work of several generations of previous scholars of what the first such writer, Maimon's friend and memoirist Sabbattia Wolff, called "Maimoniana."49 What is especially new is the picture I try to provide of how Maimon's works in two langllages and several genres fit together as the products of all individual life, with a set of central concerns and tensions. I further argue that these concerns also reflect neglected, or incompletely understood, aspects of the historical transformations through which Maimon lived. I(enneth Schmitz has eloqllently argued for the importance of historical studies of philosophers that respect the individuality, even idiosyncrasy, of their arguments and ideas. He writes: The history of philosophy starts from a more concrete base [than the history of ideas], and its integers are neither facts nor ideas but persons. Ideas do not live a free life of their own, but are taken up rather into the personal thought of a philosopher and suffused with the energy of his own mind and personality.... More needs to be said about how the hidden possibilities within ideas and new interrelationships among them are disclosed in the mediunl of actual philosophical discourse. 50 To this, I would only add that philosophers do not lead "free lives of their own" either; they live in particular cultures with distinctive patterns of life and vocabularies. They are, ethereal occupation notwithstanding, "natives" of somewhere. In tracing the connections

Solomon Main10n

between Maimon's different texts and their contexts, I aim to reconstruct a key mon1el1t ofintellectual and cll1tural transition in Jewish and European history. Among other things, I hope this study will serve as a reminder that large processes of secularization, intellectllal and cultural transition, often take the form of hard-won blasphen1Y at the level of the individual.

19

One

Maimon's Life and "Life History" "Striving for intellectual culture [Geistesausbildung] in endless struggles, with tniseries of every kind." Solomon Main10n, Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte, title of Chapter I3

The first readers ofSolomon Maimon's Lebensgeschichte took it as a picaresque transcription of events in the life ofan extraordinary Polish Jew. Scholars ofthe last two centuries have, for the most part, made little critical improven1ent upon this approach. l Maimon's autobiography has been culled for colorful anecdotes, on the one hand, and treated as an almost unmediated primary historical source on the other. In later chapters, especially Chapter 4, I try to show how a more nuanced reading can yield richer results. In this chapter, my aim is more modest: I simply reconstruct the chronology and principal social contexts of Main10n's life. In doing so, I have still relied, as one n1ust, largely on his autobiography. It is the sole source for the events of Maimon's childhood and, although it n1ay be corroborated or contextualized at several points, it is the main source for detailed knowledge of most of the events of his life, through its publication in 1792. Nonetheless, even here, I will try to show some ofthe ways in which Maimon's representation ofhis life holds both biographical and historical interest. It would be a mistake on severallevels to attempt to understand this life and its significance by simply rendering in third-person narrative those events that Maimon narrated incomparably well in the first. Solomon Maimon was born in 1753 in Sukoviborg, a small town on a tributary of the Niemen River, near the city ofMirz, in what was then Polish Lithuania. 2 His given Hebrew name was simply Shelomo ben Yehoshua (Solon10n, son of Joshua). I11deed, he did not take the surname Maimon until he was close to 30 years old, and then only in more or less formal German contexts, although one such context was the autobiography in which he introduced himself to the literary world,

21

Chapter One Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte. I shall continue to refer to him as Maimon throughout, although I will return to the circun1stances, significance, and irony of his choice of names later. Maimon's family was, by the standards of the time and place, relatively prosperous. His grandfather held a lease on a large parcel of land from the infamous aristocratic magnate Prince I(arol Stanislaw Radziwill (1734-1790), which included a farm, a ,\\rarehouse, and a toll bridge. In eighteenth-centllry Poland, such n1agnates were the virtual sovereigns of large estates (latifundia), which included not only farn1land but towns and eve11 small cities. 3 During Maimon's childhood, more than half of Polish Jewry (which comprised a total population of about 750,000 people) lived on such estates, and many ofthem formed part of a nascent middle class of tradesmen and small-business proprietors in Poland. 4 Thus, Maimon was born in sociologically typical, if somewhat privileged, circumstances. Maimon's depiction ofthe workings ofhis grandfather's business and relations with Prince Radziwill dllring his childhood was both jaundiced and influential for later accounts of Jewish life in eighteenth-century Poland. In the very first chapter of his Lebensgeschichte, titled "Des Grossvaters Okonomie," Main10n gives the reader a vivid account ofa decrepit bridge near his grandfather's farm. He writes:

In accordance with the terms of the lease the landlord was to repair everything, and put it in a condition fit for use. But like all Polish magnates, he lived in Warsaw and paid no attention to the improvement of his estates. His stewards were interested in the ilnprovement of their own condition rather than their landlord's property. They oppressed the farmers ... [and] neglected the orders given for improvements. s The bridge i11 question was in frequent use, and the carriages of travel.., ing Polish gentry were sometimes damaged. When this happened, "The poor farmer was then dragged to the bridge and flogged until it was thought sufficient revenge had been exacted." In order to avoid this punishment, Maimon's grandfather took extraordinary precautions, which Maimon dryly describes: He stationed one of his people to keep watch at the bridge, so that . . . if any accident were to happen, the sentinel might bring word to

Maimon's Life and "Life History"

the house as quickly as possible, and the whole fan1ily would have tilue to take refuge in the neighboring woods.... This sort of life lasted for son1e generations. 6

Here and elsewhere in his autobiography, Maimon emphasized the irrationality of each of the economic actors in his story, in particular his grandfather who could, presumably, have repaired the bridge. Such anecdotes have been adduced by 11istorians of early modern Polish Jewry to n1ake similar points about the backwardness of the Polish economic system and the mentality of its agents. Indeed, Hillel Levine uses Mai1110n's grandfather as an exemplar of the Jewish economic middlelnan in eighteenth-century Poland and fran1es his own sociological history of Jewish-Polish relations with "views" from Main10n's grandfather's metonymic and perhaps mythical "broken bridge." 7 It has recently been argued that Maimon may have been telling something close to the truth in this and related anecdotes, but his polemical intent should still be underlined. 8 Polish-Jewish relations during his childhood seem to have been neither as econon1ically irrational nor as inevitably brutal as his account would suggest. 9 In Maimon's early life, both of his parents, as well as their extended family and Christian servants, worked with his grandfather in running the family business.l° His father, Joshua, was also a scholar and later worked in various minor rabbinic capacities after the family fell on hard times. Maimon does not mention his mother's name or the exact number of his siblings in his autobiography, which is the sole source for such inforn1ation. 11 Main10n's education, which, in a real sense, is the main topic of his autobiography and even, in a certain sense, his philosophical work, will be discussed in the later chapters ofthis book. For the present purposes, it suffices to note that Maimon was taught to read the Hebrew Bible along with classical rabbinic commentaries at an early age by his father, and the Talmud not very much later. From the ages of about 7 to la, Maimon was sent to live and study with schoolmasters in Mirz and other cities in the region. Maimon's angrily ironic description ofthe brutality, squalor, and ignorance that prevailed in the heder echoed his general

23

Chapter One criticism of Polish-Jewish society and was itself echoed by later writers of the Haskala: I n1ust now say something about Jewish schools in general. The school is comlnonly a small smoky hut, and the children are scattered, some on benches, SaIne on the bare earth. The master, in a dirty shirt, sits on the table and holds a bowl between his IG1ees in which he grinds tobacco into snuff with a huge pestle, like the club of Hercules, while he wields his authority.... Every week some verses froln the beginning of the biblical portion of the week are explained in school, with every possible grammatical blunder. Nor can it be otherwise. For the Hebrew must be explicated by means of the mother tongue [MutterspracheJ but the Jewish-Polish n10ther tongue is itself full of defects and gran11natical inadequacies, so naturally the Hebrew language which is learned from it must be of the same stamp.12

Nonetheless, Maimon was quicldy recognized by his father and others as a Talmudic prodigy, or Illui, which is to say-given his time and place-not much more than that he was extraordinarily precocious and a boy. As with other Talmudic prodigies, who formed a recognizable social category, Maimon was encouraged by his father to concentrate on Talmud to the exclusion of virtually everything else, and he was tested and marveled over by local and visiting rabbinic dignitaries. 13 As Maimon remarks, with bitter hyperbole, in another context, "Every Polish Je,v is destined from birth to be a rabbi, and only the greatest incapacity can exclude him from the office." 14 Maimon was, needless to say, far from incapable, and he did not avoid an early semikha. Although Maimon, even in later life, would son1etimes judge others by their Talmudic attainments (he admired Mendelssohn in part because he thought him a good Talmudist), the extent of his own technical mastery of rabbinic literature is difficult to gauge. Unlike some of his maskilic contemporaries, he did 110t study under any of the well-known Taln1udic scholars of the age. IS His most traditional extant Hebrew writings are philosophical or kabbalistic, rather than Halakhic in nature, and although all ofMain1on's work is strewn with Taln1udic quotations and allusions, there are no full-fledged discussions that engage in the dialectical give-and-take over a Talmudic passa~_~J=~2J-~!~!is_cb~r~£-_

Maimon's Life and "Life History"

teristic of traditional Talmudic scholarship. However, as a young boy Main10n was apparently tested several times by Rabbi Raphael IZohe11, a prominent Lithuanian Talmlldist who would later become both a leading opponent of the Haskala and a personal adversary. Given Maimon's demonstrable precocity, his later brilliance in other areas, and the impression he apparently left on IZohen, it seems reasonable to grant that he really was an excellent yOllng Taln1udist. Although early modern Eastern European Talmudic study has been the subject of a great deal of polemical invective and homogenizing description, beginning (although by no means ending) with the Haskala, it is probably fair to say that in such study a premium was often put on conceptual ingenuity and interpretive daring at the expense of modest interpretive scholarship. Thus, imaginative, if sometin1es philologically spllrious, con1parisons between widely separated Talmudic passages (sugyot) were used to arrive at novel interpretations (hiddushim). 16 If one were to look for a classic exemplar of the Talmudic method in which Maimon was schooled, a plausible candidate might be the great Lithuanian Talmudist Rabbi Aryeh Leib Gunzberg (1695-1785), author of the Sha)aget Aryeh, which is still read in yeshiva circles, and the teacher of Raphael Kohen. Among direct contemporaries of Maimon, Rabbi Aryeh Leib Heller from Galicia was a Talmudist with a gift for the sort of sharp conceptual analysis that would become popular in nineteenth-century Talmudic scholarship and that is comparable to that which Maimon displayed in his philosophical work. 17 In his autobiography, Maimon excoriated such Talmudic study in the strongest terms, as "endless disputation without end or aim," in which "subtlety, loquacity and impertinence carry the day." Nonetheless, he never relinquished his proud claim to have mastered such displltation, and it is not unfair to say, as many have, that his later philosophical work sometimes exemplified techniques ofTalmudic analysis and the general exegetical mind-set they presuppose.1 8 Certainly "subtlety, loquacity and impertinence" remained his calling cards in later life. As an intellectually inquisitive child and adolescent, Maimon also studied, or at least wondered about, other subjects (for iI1stance, languages, art, astronomy, and history). His fascinating a11d literally in-

25

26

Chapter One

credible account of his covert studies of non-Halakhic books hidden in his father's cupboard will be discussed in Chapter +. However, it was as a Taln1udic prodigy that Mailuon achieved a special social status and, as such, became a prize, even an object of desire, in Lithuanian rabbinic culture. Mter Maimon's faluily lost their lease and fell on hard times, his father tried to capitalize on this desirability by offering him in marriage in exchange for a large vvedding contract. In one of the more culturally revealing episodes of his autobiography, Maimon recounts the bitter rivalry of his prospective parents-in-law, the clever stratagems, and even attempted kidnapping that preceded his betrothal. It is worth remarking Llpon the fact-Maimon takes it for granted-that all these impassioned maneuveril1gs were centered not on his bride, Sarah, but on the illui bridegroom, whose status as a future rabbi al1d Talmudic scholar (talmid hakham) made him, literally, a valuable con1modity and an object of desire. Although such a scholar was not likely to become wealthy, his status within the culture had a n10netary value. Maimon was thus married off at the young (and Halakhically dubi0us' although not uncommon) age of II to a girl only barely older, in 176+. Such marriages and familial living arrangements were somewhat common and are attested to in memoirs, responsa, and the archives. 19 Maimon's aCCOl1l1t ofhis years as a married adolescent are bitterly comic. He candidly admits his illitial preadolescent ignorance and inability regarding the erotic "secrets of marriage" in the earliest instance of the persistent maskilic complaint against debilitating effects of arranged marriages. 2o He offers little praise for his wife and none for his n10therin-law, with whom he engaged il1 an all-out war. The descriptive subtitle ofChapter II ofhis autobiography gives something ofthe flavor ofhis account: "My marriage in n1Y eleventh year makes me a slave ofmy wife, and procllres thrashings for me from my Mother-in-Law." 21 One notes the iro11y in Maimon's description ofwhat was procured (verschafft) for him through his father's marital wheelings and dealings. As a married adolescent, Maimon was soon forced out ofhis mot11erin-Iaw's house to work as a private tutor, returning home to the Lithuanian town of Mohilna only on holidays. This was a common occupation for adolescents and young men in Maimon's position. Indeed, if one

Maimon's Life and "Life History"

were to write a prosopography of those Eastern European Jews who, along with Maituon, were among the first generations of Maskilin1, a period as a family tutor, often poorly paid, would be on the itinerary.22 Although Maimon mentions the birth of his first son, David, when he was I4 years old, his description ofhis adolescent years is almost entirely devoted to his private studies and the miseries of his employn1ent. His wife and fatuily life sin1ply drop out of the narrative, as they would literally, when he deserted them, a decade later, at the age of 25. Indeed, Mainl0n's only unreservedly positive description of his wife comes when he describes her attractiveness to the wolfish Prince Radziwill from whom she is forced to flee. 23 The incident itselfis not unlikely, given Radziwill's reputation for debauchery, but it echoes another odd and perhaps unintentionally reveali11g anecdote. Earlier in the autobiography, Maimon tells his readers that his mother was attractive and that the minor Polish nobility and merchants who frequented their house nicknamed her I(uza, a Polish word that, in apparent euphemism, he translates as "yollng filly." Maimon recounts the story, which he claims is his earliest memory, ostensibly to demonstrate his precocious cleverness in outwitting both the Polish customer who bribed him to call her this and his parents who forbade it: "Herr Pilezki wants me to say 'Mama IZuza', but I will not say 'Mama IZuza', because God pU11ishes anyone who says 'Man1a IZuza'. Thereupon, I got three pieces of sugar." 24 Maimon's precocious disquotational device aside, the anecdote is disturbing. Regardless of the historical veracity of either incident, it remains the case that Maimon's only praise for either his mother or his wife (or indeed any woman) comes in the context of their being viewed as physically desirable by a Polish nobleman. Whether this is a window onto another aspect of the Polish-Jewish social dynamic or merely onto Maimon's problematic representation ofwomen is impossible to tell. There certainly is a misogynist theme running through Maimon's autobiography, which reflects elements of both German Enlightenment and Eastern European Jewish discourse. 25 The only relationship from his adolescent years that Maimon recalls wit11 warmth is that with his study partner, fellow skeptic, and "bosom friend" Moses Lapidoth. The passages in which he recounts their adolescent friendship and covert rebellion against the strictures of religious

27

28

Chapter One practice come closer than anything else in the book to a description, at times almost idyllic, of love. The chapter ends on a melancholy note: This enthusiastic companionship [Schwarmerische UmgangJ had, like everything else in the world, to CaIne to an end. As both of us were ll1arried and our marriages were suitably fruitful [zieni/lich fruchtbar ] we had to accept positions as family tutors. We were often separated and later able to spend only a few months in the year together. 26 This passage is as close as MailTIOn comes to mentioning the size of his own family, although together witl1 a few other cryptic ren1arks (as well as demographic probability),27 it would seem that he and his wife had several other children. Despite the incipient heresy that evidently formed the bond between Maimon and Lapidoth, their relationship reflects a tension between the homosocial bond of male intellectual companionship and that of marital responsibility, which appears to be something close to a structural feature of rabbinic cultures, dating back to the Talmud. 28 If anything, this tension intensified in eighteenth-century Lithuania, which might be described as the last time and place of rabbinic hegemony in Ashkenazi culture. A more pious but related version of the te11sion between i11tellectual study and familial duty ca11 be seen in the life of Rabbi Eliyahu ben She101TIO, the "Vilna Gaon" (1720 - 1797), Maimon's older contemporary and the most acclaimed exemplar of Lithuanian rabbinic culture. 29 The Gaon was repeatedly described in hagiographies (including one written by his sons) as having been able to completely dismiss his wife and family from his mind in order to concentrate on his studies. 30 Indeed, in his commentary to the book of Proverbs, the Gaon described the "man of valor" as one who could ignore his fan1ily's material needs in order to concentrate on the performance ofthe commandments and the study of Torah "day and night." 31 Although Maimon gave up on both the performance ofthe commandments and the study ofTorah as a young man (at least in any sense that tl1e Gaon would have allowed), he retained and acted on the associated ideal of the talmid hakham, whose intellectual quest trumped all other responsibilities throughout his life. *

Main10n's Life and "Life History"

During these years of adolescence and young adulthood, Maimon describes himself as obsessed with books. He disrupts the connubial bliss of a young mystic and his bride through late-night kabbalistic reading at the table of their one-room house and travels great distances by foot in order to obtain Hebrew philosophical works and eventually German scientific textbooks. 32 It is ilnportant to note that throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period, the disciplines of Talmlld, philosophy, and IZabbala were in competition with one another and projected alternative intellectual ideals. 33 In moving from Talmudism to IZabbala and on to philosophy-as well as their eighteenth-century ideological descendants, Hasidisn1 and Haskala, respectively-Main1on passed through the main spiritual and intellectual options open to an Eastern European Jewish intellectllal at the ClISP of modernity. The ranks of the Haskala and early Hasidism, both of which challenged Ashkenazi rabbinic authority,34 were to a large extent drawn from disaffected adolescents and young men such as Maimon and Lapidoth. 35 In describing the phenomenon of early Hasidisn1, Maimon writes that "young men forsook parents, wives and children, and went en masse to visit its leaders and hear the new doctrine from their lips." 36 MailTIOn depicts himself as a briefly curious outside observer of the movement, but his experience as a disaffected young man on a selfdescribed "pilgrimage" to the court of Rabbi Dov Baer, the Maggid of Mezeritch, at the age Of18 or 19, may have been longer and more typical than he later wished to acknowledge. 37 Maimon describes his visit as taking place after he had completed a term as a private tutor. Rather than returning home with his wages to his young wife and family, who lived nearby, he walked for several weeks to the center of the new movement, in Mezeritch. 38 The Maggid was a student of the Baal Shem Tov's and the true founder of institutional Hasidism. 39 Maimon's chapter is one of the few and most valuable firsthand accounts of early Hasidism. Its level of theological and sociological detail also suggests that he may have spent more time there and was more deeply influenced than his explicit account suggests. Maimon presents the new movement as a reaction to the arid legalism of the Mitnaged rabbinic establishment as well as the

29

30

Chapter One

asceticism of its more saintly figures. 4o The central doctrine of this "secret society," according to Maimon, was that true piety does not consist in chastisement of the body, which disturbs the spiritual quiet and cheerfulness necessary for the knowledge and love of God. On the contrary, they maintained that Inan must satisfy all his bodily needs and enjoy the pleasures of the senses . . . since God has created all for his glory. The true service of God, according to theIn, consists in exercises of devotion with exertion of all our powers and annihilation of self before God; for they Inaintain that Inan, in accordance with his destiny, can reach the highest perfection [hijchste VollkomenheitJ only when he regards hin1self not as a being that exists and works for himself but as an organ of the godhead. 41

This is a perceptive and historically valuable description ofwhat has been called the "spiritual quietism" ofearly Hasidism. 42 It also begins to show the way in which Maimon took HasidislTI to be related to his own central philosophical concern, the natlIre ofhuman perfection and the possibility of union with the divine n1ind. Indeed, although Main10n ridicules Hasidic adherents for their groundless "enthusiasm" and charges the Maggid with manipulating his credulous followers, he also describes Hasidic thought as a genuine "system ofperfection" (Vollkomenheitssystem). The ideas of the Maggid were, Maimon writes, "closer to correct ideas of religion and morals" than those of his rabbinic opponents, although they relied more on obscure feelings than distinct ideas and were undermined by the crude sensualisn1 of his followers. It is unclear how long Maim011 actually spent in the Maggid's cOlIrt, although it cannot have been very long, since Dov Baer died in 1772. I will return to the question ofthe Maggid's possible influence on Maimon's mature philosophical work later. Maimon also continued to plIrsue studies outside Judaism. Mter having taught himself to read German, he obtained a few old German textbooks on n1edicine and physics from a rabbi in Slonim who had studied in GerlTIany and was a representative ofwhat Shmuel Feiner has called the "Early Haskala."43 Such studies only whetted his desire for modern scientific knowledge, and at about the age of 25, Maimon left his young family and set off for the east Prussian city of IZonigsberg on the ship of a Jewish merchant.

Maimon's Life and "Life History"

This move might be compared to the period of wandering, or selfimposed "exile," undertaken by several of Maimon's pious intellectual contemporaries, among them the Vilna Gaon himself. In any event, although Maimon's reasons for leaving Lithuania may have been intellectual a11d personal, his move was part of a larger westerly migration of indigent Jews from Poland to Central and Western Europe (a reversal of the migratory patterns of the previous two centuries), which had broad social and demographic ramifications. 44 His trip to Germany was taken, he wrote in his autobiography, to learn true "human knowledge," a locution to which we will have occasion to return. 45 Maimon arrived in IZonigsberg, he recalled, "with a heavy, dirty beard, in torn filthy clothes, my language a jargon composed of fragments of Hebrew, JiidischDeutsch and Polish, together with grammatical errors." 46 Nonetheless, he managed to impress some Jewish students whom he describes as treating him with the same amused condescension as Marcus Herz would years later, in Berlin. 47 This encounter is Maimon's first with members of enlightened Western European Jewry, and it sets the pattern for his accounts oflater such n1eetings. Upon hearing of Maimon's intellectual aspirations, the students challenge him to translate Moses Mendelssohn's Phiidon (1767), "which by chance lay on the table," into Hebrew. The book was an adaptation of the Platonic dialogue Phaedo, in which Socrates' arguments that the soul is perfect and immortal and hence that philosophy is properly "a training for death" were updated and presented in the language of contemporary Wolffian metaphysics. Mendelssohn's book was extraordinarily popular, especially with young German Jews for whon1 he represented all the promises of enlightenment. 48 Nonetheless, the fortuitousness of just this book being the subject of Maimon's challenge has the slightly too-perfect ring to it that we will encounter again, when we begin to subject Maimon's Lebensgeschichte to closer scrutiny. Thus, Maimon's first intellectual encou11ter on German soil is, as it were, with Moses Mendelssohn himself, "the Socrates ofBerlin," 49 and his success consists precisely in rendering Mendelssohn's mellifluous German philosophical prose into scholastic Hebrew. 50 This performance, Maimon tells us, astounded his sophisticated Jewish interlocutors, who responded by clothing him, arranging for his board in IZonigsberg, and

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advising him, he recalled, "to go to Berlin, where I could best achieve my purpose." 51 In what is, perhaps, the most well-kno\vn il1cident ofthe alltobiography, Maimon's first attempt to enter Berlin was rebuffed by a functionary of the Jewish community at the Rosenthaler Gate. Main10n's disreputable appearance aroused suspicion, which, he writes, was only confirmed by his remark that he aspired to publish a commentary to Mail11onides' Guide ofthe Perplexed, an occupation-or lack of onethat was both religiously dangerous and economically useless. The study ofMain10nides' Guide, as opposed to his great legal code Mishneh Torah and other writings, had a long history of being considered hazardous to one's piety and by this tin1e had becol11e a kind of emblen1 of Jewish Enlightenlnent, a perception to which I return in Chapter 2. Upon failing to gain entry into Berlin 011 his first atten1pt, Maimon fell into a vagrancy comn10n to many Eastern European Jews of the time and wandered together with a "professional Jewish beggar" (Bettlejude ex professo) for several months. 52 Dllring this period, he writes, he taught his companion the rudiments of rational religion while his companion taught him to curse. Whel1 they arrived in the large Jewish comillunity of Posen, Maimon attempted to return to something like his former life (or at least a fantasy of what that life might have been like without his wife and children). He remembered that Rabbi Raphael IZohen, who had tested him as a child, had taken the post of chief rabbi in Posen and 11ad even brollght a friend of Maimon's as an assistant. When Main10n went to the Beit Midrash to find them, he discovered that IZohen had already left to take an even more prestigious post, bringing his assistant with him. However, IZohen had left some of his family in Posen. His son-i11-law had replaced him as chief rabbi, and his adolescent son had stayed to live with his sister and brother-in-law. The boy remembered Maimon, and the new chief rabbi, recognizing Main10n's erudition, arranged for his lodging and employment as a teacher. Maimon lived there for two years and wrote of this period that it was "the happiest and most honorable of my life." 53 During this time, he reread several medieval theoretical and exegetical works and struggled to reconcile kabbalistic doctrine with Maimonidean philosophy. He collected his writings of this period under

Maimon's Life and "Life History"

the title Hesheq Shelomo, "The Desire of Solomon." 54 Although it was never published, the original manuscript- or at least the blllk of itis still extant and will be discussed in Chapter 2. This is the period in which Maimon - or perhaps here we really should call him Shelomo ben Yehoshua-came closest to inhabiting the traditional role of a talmid hakham, which had been expected of him since childhood, and it is not surprising that he speaks of it as the happiest of his life. None~ theless, his Maimonidean convictions, growing impiety, and irrepressible wit (not to speak of his unmentioned family) n1ade it impossible for hilll to settle forever in Posen. He stopped attending the synagogue regularly and went fiAom being a brilliant, idiosyncratic talmid hakham to something more like the village atheist. Thus when a local cook thought that she had heard a carp lItter a word as she was cutting it up for the Sabbath, Maimon could not resist the temptation to mockery. Thinking the fish possessed, the chief rabbi, Maimon's friend, colleague, and patron, ordered it buried with full rites. Maimon remarked that he would have liked to find out what an inspired carp tasted like. 55 Within two years he had worn out his welcome. In 1781 or 1782, Maimon set out, once again, for Berlin. I have sketched Maimon's place in enlightened Berlin Jewish society in the introduction. Maimon describes his introduction to Mendelssohn as having taken place after he sent him a refutation of Christian Wolff's lIse of the Principle of Sufficient Reason to establish God's existence. The essay was written in Hebrew and compared the system ofWolff and Leibniz, to which Mendelssohn adhered, unfavorably with the Aristotelian n1etaphysics of Maimonides. Maimon's brilliance and idiosyncrasy n1ade a spectacular impressiol1 on Mendelssohn and his circle. Nonetheless, within two or three years, Maimon had mal1aged to scandalize and disappoint his patrons by his seemingly unfocused and certainly unremunerative intellectual pursuits, his forthright defenses of Spinoza, and his fondness for "spirited society ... pubs, pleasure trips" and brothels. 56 Philanthropists in Mendelssohn's circle attempted to make Maimon into a pharmacist, but although he willingly studied medicine and chemistry, he ren1ained stubbornly "unproductivized." Moses Mendelssohn himself, who had recognized Maim011's talent and had

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taken an interest in his developn1ent, eventually suggested that MailTIOn leave the city. Maimon complied, although not without (at least in autobiographical retrospect) having the last Epicurean word in the exchange quoted in the introduction. There was probably more to this exchange, or at least Maimon's account of it, than previous scholars have noted. Main10n and Mendelssohn's exchange would have taken place sometime in 1783. 57 This was at the height of the controversy in which Mendelssohn had been challenged by the anonymous author of a polen1ical essay titled "The Searching for Light and Bjght in a Letter to Mr. Moses Mendelssohn." In it, the author challenged Mendelssohn to reconcile his public rejection of the rabbinic power of excomlTIunication with his adherence to Judaism. Mendelssohn replied in his brilliant apologia Jerusalem: Or on Religious Power and Judaism, which n1aintained his rejection of the power of excolTImunication while vindicating Judaism as a religion that required belief only in the tenets of natural religion. 58 It is likely that Maimon's debauchery, religious skepticism, and philosophical radicalism (he described Mendelssohn's adherence to the Wolffian system as "a political dodge and a piece of hypocrisy") would have been especially embarrassing to Mendelssohn at the time. In these circumstances it is not surprising that Mendelssohn would have asked his wild young protege to leave, but Maimon has, at least in retrospect, the last laugh. He shows Mendelssohn, the great defender of religious freedom, in the act of a de facto excommunication while insisting that, although he is less politically prudent than Mendelssohn, "We are all Epicureans." 59 Maimon's subsequent stays in An1sterdam and Hamburg were even less successful than his time in Berlin. In Amsterdam he contemplated throwing himself off a bridge on the Jewish holiday of Purim, only to find that his feet refused to follow his head. In Hamburg, with frank opportunism, he proposed his conversion to a Lutheran pastor in a letter, which stipulated that Judaism was closer to the truth ofnatural religion and that he would accept the Christian mysteries only allegorically. This generous offer, which I will analyze in detail in Chapter 4-, also failed. One critic has interpreted Maimon's comic description of his failed suicide attempt as "symbolic of his wretched predicament-that of the enlightened Jew from the East who wanted to live among unenlightened

MailTIOn'S Life and "Life History"

Jews of the West-or rather i11 the regional territory of bourgeois enlightenment."6o It is an inge11ious suggestion, and there is little doubt that here, as elsewhere, Maimon is doing more than merely reporting an incident in his life, but it seelns to me that the symbolism and allusions ofthis passage lie elsewhere. In writing his autobiography, Main10n was influenced by his friend and editor I(arl Philipp Moritz's autobiographical novel about his liberatioI1 from German Pietism, Anton Reiser. At a crucial moment in that account, the protagonist is described as being brought to the point of suicide by a crisis of identity: The fact that he always had to be himself and could never be anyone else . . . gradually brought him to a degree of despair that led hilTI to the banks of the river that flowed through part of the city, to a place where there was no protective railing. An acute critic has pointed out that this incident was a version of the Pietist self-annihilation through union with God. 61 Maimon, who, as I will show in Chapter 4, evokes related themes of human perfection through divine union in his comical attempt at conversion, may well have had this passage in mi11d. But Maimon's description of his failed suicide should probably also be taken as another one of his sly in-group jokes: Purim is precisely the one Jewish holiday whose carnivalesqlle celebration turns on sllrprising reversals. In early modern Ashkenazi communities, the biblical phrase "the opposite happened" (Esther 9: I) was taken as a kind ofritual imperative for drunkenness, cross-dressing, role reversals, and other acts ofsymbolic transgression on Purim. 62 Mainlon's story ofhis feet refusing to follow the directions ofhis head wOll1d seen1 to be in the same spirit. Moreover, his easy allusion to this set oftexts and cultural practices underlines the extent to which his subsequent failed conversion (in which, one might say, his l1ead refused to follow his feet) was also an attempted suicide. In Hamburg, Maimon's fortunes were saved by yet another patron, who offered to pay his tuition as an irregular adult student (he was abollt 31) at the liberal Gymnasium Christianeum in nearby Altona. Maimon's description of his two years in the gymnasium is closest in tone and language to that of his two years as a philosophical talmid hakham in Posen. Here, too, he was far froin any family obligations,

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supported financially, and given close to free intellectual rein. It was in the gymnasiun1 th.at he picked up his (actually rather limited) knowledge of English, French (perhaps), Latil1, and classical literature, which he later liked to flaunt in his writing. More in1portant, he learned (although imperfectly) German con1position and excelled in mathelnatics, vvhich would later playa significant role in his philosophical work. He also apparently took "Maimon" as his last nanle during these years (1784 or 1785), in tribute to his philosophical hero, the great twelfthcentury Jewish thinker Moses Maimonides, or Moshe ben Main1on. 63 Although the Jewish adoption of a surname was one of the great symbolic and adlninistrative den1ands of European emancipation, the audacity and prima facie oddness of this choice ought to be remarked upon. 64 Rather than formalizing his patronymic (as in Jewish names such as Mendelssohn or Bendavid) or place of origin (e.g., Satanow, Dubno), Shelomo ben Joshua chose to nan1e himself after the outstanding intellectual figure of the Jewish Middle Ages. 65 SOlnething of the boldness of this choice, as well as the peculiar role of medieval Hebrew scholasticism in early Jewish versions of European Enlightenment, can be seen ifone simply imagines a contemporary lapsed Catholic philosophe or Aufklarer renan1ing himself Aquinas. The reasonscultural, historical, and personal-that made it possible for Maimon to do somethil1g analogolls to this, indeed to make Maimonides the basis ofhis self-invention, are at the center ofthis study, although it should be remembered that he never used the name in his Hebrew writings. Main10n was not, in fact, quite as far from the life he had left behind in Lithuania as he had hoped when he changed his name in Altona. A message from his wife, who had heard of his whereabouts, spurred Raphael IZohen, now chief rabbi of the triple community of Hamburg, Altona, and Wandsbeck, to request al1 interview with Maimon. Although Maimon coyly omits the n1ention of IZohen's name here and throughout the alltobiography, he expected his contemporary Jewish readers to recognize the rabbi of the prestigious community, if not, perhaps, the extent of his lifelong association with him. IZohen was a well-known scourge of heretics who rlded his community with a heavy hand. He was a famously frequent user of the rabbinic ban of herem, or

Main10n's Life and "Life History"

excon11TIunication, who had opposed Mendelssohn's Bible translation project, publicly feuded with Maimon's friend, the gifted rabbinic forger Saul Berlin, and staunchly opposed the Hasidisn1 of the Maggid ofMezeritch. 66 IZohen demanded that Maimon either return to Poland or grant his abandoned wife a divorce, thus releasing her from her status as an Aguna (a grass widow, "chained" to a defunct n1arriage). Main10n declined to do either and recounts his skeptical provocations and the fruitless rebukes of IZohen with apparent glee: My conduct, I told hiIn, was as little opposed to religion (properly understood) as it was to reason.... We entered into a lengthy dispute in which each Inaintained his right. As he could not influence ll1e by such disputation, he began to serlTIonize, but when this was also to no avail he cried aloud "Shofar! Shofar" (This is the naiTIe of the horn which is blown on the holiday of the New Year as a SUmiTIOnS to repentance, and of which it is supposed Satan is horribly afraid). As the chief rabbi called out the word, he pointed to a Shofar that lay before him on a table and asked n1e "Do you lU10w what that is?" I replied quite boldly "Oh yes! It's a raIn's horn." At these words the chief rabbi fell back into his chair and began to lament over ll1y lost sou1. 67 The insouciance ofMaimon's narrative tone and his insistence upon describing a central religious symbol ofthe world in which he was raised as if he were an unsympathetic anthropologist are belied by his eagerness to engage in rabbinic dispute with the Talmudist who had tested him as a child, as well as his refusal to grant his wife a divorce (an action that would actually sever his last formal connection with that world). In this passage one sees Maimon glorying, at least retrospectively, in IZohen's clerical impotence while simultaIleously claiming that 11e got the best of the rabbinic argument. Moreover, Main10n deliberately misleads the general reader in explaining IZohen's reference to the shofar as merely a call to repentance. He knew very well that the shofar was also blown during the ceremony of excommunication, which could be invoked by a rabbinical court for heresy and, on occasion, for refusing to grant one's wife a divorce. 68 Heinrich Heine, who enjoyed MailTIOn'S deadpan description of the shofar as a n1ere ram's horn and compared his position to Spinoza, understood the implication in his witty essay on Religion and Philosophy in Germany.69

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In fact, IZohen was an early theorist of the Mitnaged ideology of the absolute primacy of Talmudic knowledge and Stlldy, who once wrote that anyone who studied secular literature violated the biblical admonition to look at one's ritual fringes (tzitzit) so as not to "follow your heart and eyes in your lustful urge" (Numbers I5: 39). One could hardly imagine a less receptive audience for the argument of the author of the Hesheq Shelomo that religion, properly understood in the light ofrationalsist philosophy, actually required his attendance at the Altona Gymnasium Christianeum. In I785, Maimon left the gyn1nasillm and returned to Berlin with the intention of llsing his nevvly won lingllistic skills. Maimon is not entirely forthcoming about the reasons for his departure from the gymnasium, but they may well have included a feeling that he was not free fron1 his wife's inqlliries or Rabbi IZohen's ecclesiastic powers so long as he remained there. In Berlin, Maimon turned to Mendelssohn and some of the leading maskilic patrons of his circle, among them his physician, Dr. Marcus Bloch; Daniel Itzig, a prominent Jewish businessman with an outstanding library; a11d David Friedlander, who was Itzig's s011-in-law, a student of IZant's, and Mendelssohn's leading disciple?O These Maskilim suggested that "in order to enlighten the Polish Jews still living in darkness," Maimon should translate some scholarly work into Hebrew, using his newfound understanding of European languages. One suggestion was to translate Jacqlles Basnage's Histoire des fuifs, and Maimon reports producing a specime11 ofwhich Mendelssohn approved?l The discussion over what Maimon should translate echoes a passage from one ofthe founding documents of the Haskala, Naftali Herz \Vessely's Divrei Shalom ve-Emet, written three years earlier. In the course of arguing for sweeping educational reform, Wessely described "our Polish brothers" who had recently come to Berlin seeking enlightenment. Such men might arrive with a fairly good knowledge of geometry and astronomy through the reading of medieval and early modern Hebrew works on the subject, but they did not lmow natural sciences, since nothing is written of them in Hebrew. Nor, it goes without saying, did they know geography and

MailTIOn'S Life and "Life History"

history, even though they are easier than the deep sciences they have studied, since nothing is written about them in Hebrew. 72 It was precisely the lack of "depth" ofsuch subjects that dissuaded Mailuon from continuing with the commission as a translation ofBasnage. He wrote to his patrons that such works would offend orthodox sensibilities too much, on the one hand, ,vithout exciting sufficient intellectual stimulation for sharp Polish Talmudists on the other. One such Taln1udist in question might have been Mailuon hin1self. It is hard to imagine Main10n laboring for very long over Basnage's n1any volumes. In addition to the obligatory pious assumption that the Jevvs would eventually convert, Basnage's history was credulous on various points on which Maimon was already a skeptic, including the early rabbinic composition of the Zohar and Maimonides' actual theological positions. Basnage also repeatedly condemned his conten1porary Spinoza as a damnable heretic in terms that Maimon is not likely to have been interested in reproducing for his Polish brethren. 73 Instead, Main10n proposed to write a Hebrew algebra textbook. The book would begin with self-evident propositions and lead the reader into higher mathematics, thus making it both more "suitable for the development of the mind" and less offensive to religiolls sensibilities than the other works. 74 Apparently, neither Maimon nor his patrons knew that another contemporary Lithuania11 Jew had already published such a work, a translation of an English textbook of algebra and trigonometry in 1783.75 In any event, Maimon's proposal was approved, and he wrote the textbook "using the Latin work by Wolff as its basis." However, when the book was finished and Maimon requested payment, his erstwhile patrons complained that it was too long, typograpl1ically complicated, and impractical to pri11t. Eventually Mendelssohn resolved the dispute by suggesting that Maimon take up a subscription for the work, including but not liluited to his principal patrons. Maimon reports that "Mendelssohn and the other enlightened Jews of Berlin subscribed," but the work was never published, leaving both Maimon and his patrons bitter. 76 The dispute may have had as much to do with Maimon and his patrons' differing views of his intellectual role as it did with the specific

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details of paylnent and publication. Mendelssohn and his circle appear to have thought that the best use of Maimon's talents was to serve as a publicist for Enlightenment to other Polish Jews. This was in keeping with the educational goals of the Haskala in general, but it n1ay also have reflected a certain condescension to\vard Maimon as a quirky, Yiddish-speaking autodidact fron1 Poland who could, perhaps, do some useful work writing for other such Jews. This had certainly been their attitude toward Rabbi Barukh Schick, the pious rabbi fron1 Shklov who had preempted Maimon by publishing an algebra textbook in Hebrew in 1783 and, Inore famously, a translation of the first six chapters of Euclid's Elements in 1780.77 In 1777, Schick had visited Berlin and received encouragement, generous subvention, and lavish praise, along ,with a certain measure of condescension. 78 Another contemporary figllre whose career was even closer to what the Maskilim appear to have envisioned for Mailnon was the great Eastern European maskilic publicist Mendel Lefin, an almost exact contemporary of Maimon's fron1 Satanow who had lived in Berlin in the early 1780s and had gone on to a prolific career of translation, adaptation' and popularization of edifying ethical, homiletic, and n1edical works of a predominantly moderate Enlightenlnent cast. 79 But Maiman was neither pious nor moderate. More to the point, he had a genuine belief in himself as a thinker whose intellectual goals ("the truth" as he would italicize it in his first letter to IZant) 80 trumped all else. Shortly after the dispute, Maimon decided yet again that his positio11 in Berlin was untenable, and he moved to Breslau in 1786. In Breslau, Maimon was able to enter into the life of enlightened intellectual exchange (as well as mild debauchery) more confidently than he ever had before, although his German was still imperfect. He tutored the children of the wealthy Maskil Aaron Zadig in Hebrew, n1athematics, and physics, attended medical lectures, befriended some of the more enlightened teachers at the Jesuits College, and frequented the coffeehOllses and taverns with "a short, round man of enlightened mind and cheerful disposition," named Hien1a11n Lisse. 81 In tutoring for Zadig, Maimon reports himselfas declining to replace the traditional Polish-Jewish tutor whom they l1ad already engaged.

Maimon's Life and "Life History" I thought it would be unfair to displace this poor man, who had a

family of his own to support.... Accordingly Rabbi Manoth continued his lessons, and I gave mine. 82 Such throwaway anecdotes have the ring of historical trllth, but Maimon's reasons for refusing to displace Manoth were, at least, likely to have been more complicated than he admitted. In working side by side with such a man, Maimon would have been able to retain some connection with the Yiddish-speaking rabbinic culture he had abandoned. Indeed, Main10n's own identity as an apiqores made sense only in juxtaposition to that which he had left, and he seen1S to have sought out cOllfrontations with representatives of Jewish orthodoxy throughout his later life, just as his literary practice turned on the conjuring up of such juxtapositions through satirical description, ironic quotation, and allusions. Finally, it should be noted that it was precisely in Breslau that his own fan1ily responsibilities returned to haunt him in the palpable form of his wife and eldest son, whom he had deserted some eight years earlier. 83 Maimon's most important intellectual interlocutors in Breslau were the distinguished philosopher Christian Garve (1742-1798) and the eccentric German-Jewish poet Ephraim I(iih (1731-1790). Garve was, along with Mendelssohn, one of the leading "popular philosophers" (popularphilosophen) of the period, and upon his arrival in the city, Maimon almost immediately presented him with a set of philosophical "aphorisms" on the impossibility of establishing a First Cause from Leibniz's Principle of Sufficie11t Reason. These aphorisms may well have been a revised German version of the Hebrew essay he had sent to Mendelssohn in refutation of Wolff. Garve was apparently impressed enough to introduce Maimon to his intellectual circle, as well as to a wealthy Jewish patron, Lipmann Meier. I(iih was an odd and fascinating man who had been raised in a wellto-do Breslau home. 84 Unlike Maimon, he had been taught literary German at a relatively early age. As a young man, he too had gone to Berlin and had become a minor poet in the German Neo-Classicist style ofthe time. In 1768, he left Berlin for a tour ofthe great cities ofEurope. Upon his returl1, in 1771, he suffered a nervous breakdown when he was

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identified as a Jew subject to special taxes by a Saxon customs official. In the last two decades of his life in Breslau, IZiih bitterly attacked the local Jewish establishment, flirted (like MailTIOn) with the possibility of conversion to Lutheran Christianity, and compulsively wrote hundreds of epigran1matic pOelTIS, lTIany of which tl1elTIatize the dilemma of the cultured Jew mocked with "bitter laughter" by his Christian peers. 85 MailTIOn, whose philosophical ambitio11s lTIatched IZiih's poetic ones, describes IZiih as delighting in his company and chan1pionil1g his cause to possible patrons, in the face of the reports of intellectual radicalism and personal vices that had followed him from Berlin (although this may not have helped). 86 In Breslau, then, one can see Maimon reconstrllcti11g his life along the lines it had taken dllring his stays in Berlin, with Garve serving as a philosophical mentor in place ofMendelssohn, and IZiih, Lisse, Manoth, and Maimon's students and patrons each making possible a kind of expatriate life. This was all put in jeopardy by the arrival ofhis wife and their eldest son (by then a young adult), who demanded that he return with them to Poland. Maimon's description ofthis visit will repay close study: A won1an of rude education and manners [rauher Erziehung und Lebensart], but of good sense and the courage of an Atnazon [bon sens und Amazonenmut] , she demanded that I ilnmediately return home with her, not seeing the ilnpossibility of what she asked. I had now lived some years in Germany, had happily emancipated myself from the fetters of superstition [Fesseln des Aberglaubens] and religious prejudice' had abandoned the rude manner of life in which I had been brought up, and extended n1Y knowledge in many directions. I could not return to my barbarous and miserable condition, deprive myself of all the advantages I had gained and expose myself to rabbinical rage at the slightest deviation of ceremonial law, or the utterance of a free thought. 87

Maimon's description of 11is wife repeats the precise adjective (rauhe) and general tone with which his own patron Marcus Herz described him in his letter to IZant. Even Maimon's praise of his wife's "good sense," which balances her uncultivated "raWl1ess" and "Amazonian" foreignness, seems calculated to distance himself from her, byemploying a current philosophical term of art for the subrational faculty of the

MailTIOn'S Life and "Life History"

conscience (in French, no less).88 Maimon's description of Jewish life in Lithuallia as barbarous and subject to rabbinic tyranny, and thus 11nthinkable for an enliglltened person such as hilTIself, sin1ilarly mimics the characterizations of enlightened German Jews such as Herz. Maimon also recounts an attempt to convince his son, David, "by several passages in [Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed] that enlightenment of the understanding and refinement of manners are much more favorable to religion than the alternative." 89 This argument for the primacy ofwhat he elsewhere termed "hun1an knowledge" would seem to be a version of the same argument l1e mentions having posed to Rabbi Rap11ael IZohen in Hamburg. In Chapter 4, I will argue that it is, in fact, a version of the same radical Mainl0nidean argument that he presented to the Lutheran pastor in explanation of his abortive request for conversion. Maimon did 110t give his wife a divorce imn1ediately and appears to have seriously considered the possibility ofretl1rning with her ifhe could raise "two or three hundred Thalers" in order to live independently of the Jewish authorities in Poland. Presumably, this was another attempt to get himself supported as a representative of "enlightened understanding" and "refined manners" within Polish Lithuania. His patrons seem to have largely resisted the opportunity, and, eventually, Maimon gave his wife a divorce, after another satisfying dispute with the local Beit Din (rabbinical court). Maimon's account of these episodes ofrabbinical jousting over his wife and family's future are among his least selfaware and certainly most obnoxious autobiographical moments. 90 It is, perhaps, worth noting here that his friend and contemporary Sabbattia Wolffwrote in his memoir of Main10n that "when the subject of his divorce came up in conversation it was easy to read in his face the deep sorrow he felt, and his liveliness faded away." 91 The episode cannot have done much for Maimon's reputation in Breslau. Once again within less than two years, he had again run out of patrons and protectors and resolved to return to Berlin. On his fourth and final trip to Berlin, in 1789, Maimon decided to tackle IZant's Critique ofPure Reason, which had been published in 178r and, in an important revised edition, in 1787. In his autobiography and elsewhere, Maimon claimed not to have read IZant's Critique until he

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Chapter One

had returned to Berlin. This may well have been true, for Maimon writes with the genuine enthusiasm of someone to whom a new intellectual world has been revealed, and his interest and excitement reflect the renewed attention that IZant's difficult work began to receive at the end of the decade. Nonetheless, Maimon may also have been exaggerating his lack of familiarity with the Critique. In the first place, his sometime patron Marcus Herz had been I(ant's student, his philosophical correspondent, a11d among his first readers. Second, although Mendelssohn wrote that he no longer had the i11tellectual stamina to read the first Critique, his Morgenstunden (1785), which Maimon had already translated into Hebrew, carried on a covert argument with IZa11t's transcendental idealism, which an astllte philosophical reader such as Maimon cannot have failed to miss.9 2 Finally, as noted, Maimon had sought out the company and patronage of the philosopher Christian Garve and his circle in Breslau. Garve had been the at-first anonymous allthor of the first and most controversial review of the Critique, in 1782, which provoked an extended controversy and a massive response from IZant in the form of his Prologomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783).93 It is hard to inlagine, then, that Maimon was quite as innocent of the details of the Critical Philosophy before arriving in Berli11, and his association with Garve, whom IZant regarded as an empiricist enen1Y, n1ay have given him added reason to profess such innocence. The dramatic reception of Maimon's subsequent commentary, VCrsuch iiber die Transcendentalphilosophie (1790), by IZant himself and others has already been discllssed in the introduction. However, we are now in a position to see both the long process tl1at led up to the pllblic discovery of this "rawest of Polish Jews" and the way in which it conformed to the earlier patterns of his life. The publication of his Transcendentalphilosophie opened doors for Maimon. He became a coeditor with the brilliant IZarl Philipp Moritz of a curious journal of empirical psychology, parapsychological investigations, and anthropological case studies, titled Gnothi Sauton oder Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde. 94 He also published philosophical articles in the leading journals of the German Enlightenment, the Berlinische Monatschrift and the Journal fur Aufklarung.

Maimon's Life and "Life History"

In 1791, Maimon published two books, one in German and one in Hebrew. The first was a philosophical dictionary titled Philosophisches Wiirterbuch, which, in keeping with the identity Maimon was constructing for himself, began with an entry on superstition (Aberglaube) and ended with one on skepticism (ZweiJel).95 If his Transcendentalphilosophie can be described as a kind of Maimonidean cOlnmentary on Kant, then the second book Maimon published in this year, Giva)at haMoreh, is even more straightforwardly a post-IZantian reading of Maimonides. 96 As such it is a locus, as is Maimon's life, for the intersection of several different intellectual and cultural trends. Here, the philosophical ideals of the Enlightenment in their most radical form are worked through medieval Aristotelian philosophy and rendered in maskilic Hebrew. It is, in fact, the first work of modern philosophy composed in Hebrew, and yet it is written, as to some extent were almost all Maimon's writings, in the most traditional form of Jewish writing, a cOlnmentary. It was in the wake of both his cultural alienation and his philosophical success that Maimon published his autobiography, which was simply titled Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte. 97 The first chapters were published anonyn10usly in the Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde, as a third-person ethnography of the life of a Polish Jew named "Solomon ben Josua." This reflects a deep ambivalence that runs through the Lebensgeschichte and Maimon's corpus as a whole. In the published book version, however, Maimon assumes the first person, which was crucial to its success, for what made the Lebensgeschichte so interesting to German readers of the time was the literary voice of this Polish Jew who had become a German philosopher. Indeed, the autobiography was in an important sense predicated on Maimon's public philosophical success. It describes the arc from Lithuanian Talmudic prodigy to German IZantian philosopher. Maimon's Lebensgeschichte is, arguably, the first modern Jewish autobiography.98 It is not merely a collection of memoirs, such as those of Maimon's older contemporary, Ber ofBelechov. 99 Nor is it an exemplary account written for one's heirs, such as the now-famous work ofGliickel ofHameln. 1oo Main10n's work is, rather, like Rousseau's Confessions, an attempt to grasp one's life whole an9_l2!~~Q~!!=_~efQr~_a_Qr9~ci ?l1d

4-5

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Chapter One

anonymous reading public. In this it also differs from the only other prominent example of eighteenth-century Ashkenazi self-narrative, Rabbi Jacob Elnden's Megillat Sefer. 101 Elnden's work is far too selfabsorbed to truly count as either an ethical will or a set of memoirs, but it was never n1eant for publication. 11oreover, it begins vvith a recitation ofthe names ofEmden's forefathers, whose purpose seems to be to embed Emden within a larger fan1ily narrative. "They were a holy seed," he writes, "men ofdiscernn1ent and purity amidst times ofdecrees and destruction.... [They] were among the great leaders ofAshkenaz in earlier times." 102 The book then turns to a long biographical account of Emden's father, whose life, he claims, set the pattern for his own. The contrast with Mendelssohn's determination to distance himselffrom his father and grandfather's traditional irrationality could not be clearer. Another point to make about each of these works is that they were vvritten in a Jewish language: in Gluckel and Ber's case, Yiddish; in En1den's, Hebrew. Neither book was published, or even prepared for publication, during their authors' lifetimes. Indeed, each of these books is addressed, at least ostensibly, to the author's heirs and was preserved within the family until published by scholars at the turn of this century.103 As such, they belong in many respects to the medieval Hebrew genre of the ethical will, which was left for the writer's heirs as an act of religious and moral instruction. 104 Despite the fact that these works and others like thein are often discussed together with Maimon's autobiography, it is not irrelevant to point out that Maimon himself could not have read them, or even known of their existence. Although such docun1ents afford the reader precious access to the lives ofearly modern Jews, they were still written in a context in which the primary ful1ction ofsuch writing was still cultural transmission within a family, rather than a presentation of self. For Maimon, 1793 and 1794 were years of prodigious activity. He published a major essay, Uber die Progressen der Philosophie (1793); a book proposing a new transcendental logic, versuch einer neuen Logik oder Theorie des Denkens (1794); and three commentaries on the works of other philosophers: Die JCathegorien des Aristoteles (1794), a critical commentary on Aristotle's Categories that further elaborated Maimon's

Maimon's Life and "Life History"

transcendental logic and epistemological theory; a brief comn1entary to a German translation of Bacon's New Organon; and Anfangsgriinde der NeJvtonischen Philosophie von Dr. Pemberton, an annotated translation of an English exposition of Newtonian physics and natural philosophy, which pushed his skeptical challenge to IZant into the realm of the philosophy of science. lOS He also, rather scandalously, published his polemical correspondence with IZarl Reinhold, without Reinhold's permission. lo6 Three things should be noted about this explosion of philosophical creativity. First is the extent to which Maimon's thought was almost inevitablyexegetical. One recalls IZant's jibe about Jews liking to do that sort of thing "to gain an air of importance for themselves at someone's expense," and, n10re in1portant, the Jewish intellectual traditio11s of commentary in which Maimon was schooled. lo7 Second, it should be noted that, despite the variety ofpublications, Maimon knew (or at least propounded) one thing in all of his writings: a post-IZa11tian epistemological monism, which attempted to meet his own skeptical challenge to the IZantian dualism ofconcepts and intllitio11s. According to Maimon, IZant's unbridgeable dualism could be overcome through recourse to the ultimate identity of the knower and the known in an infinite mind, or, as he later termed it, a "World Soul." Finally, although the nature of this early version of what later came to be called Absolute Idealism a11d Maimon's ambivalent advocacy of t11e theory will occupy us later, it should be repeated that the notion of human cognition as ultimately explicable through recourse to a divine n1ind was, in Maimon's case, a direct application of Maimonidea11 ideas. Maimon's best editor and patron, IZarl Philipp Moritz, also died in 1793- Maimon wrote a final essay for the journal that he had helped Moritz to edit, summing up the studies of the past ten years, and cast about for another patron. Johann Wolfgang Goethe had once written that he considered Moritz to be exactly like himself, only less fortunate, and Maimon seems to have had a similar thought. lo8 In 1794, he wrote to Goethe to inquire about visiting Weimar. Goethe had been an enthusiastic reader of Main10n's Lebensgeschichte as well as his philosophical essays, which he discussed with Friedrich Schiller and others, a fact

4-7

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Chapter One

that Maimon Inight have known from David Veit or Rahel Varnhagen. lo9 There seen1S to have been a briefflurry ofinterest on Goethe's part, but nothii1g n10re, and Maimon never visited Weimar. In 1795, Maimon found his final, and perhaps lnost generous patron, a free-thinking young count named Adolf Kalkrellth, who invited him to live with him in his Berlin residence and, later, to n10ve to his estate in Niegersdorf, Silesia, where Maimon stayed for the rest ofhis life. In 1797, Main10n published his final major work, J(ritische Unterschungen iiber menschlichen Geist oder das hijhere Erkenntnis und Willensvermijgen, which was an atten1pt to synthesize his earlier work and give systen1atic forln to his idiosyncratic Idealism, which we could call a Maimonidean revision ofIZant. l1o The five years spent in Count IZalkreuth's residence in Silesia was probably the longest period in Maimon's adult life in which he stayed in one place, and at least one writer depicts him as having lived his last years in triumph over his petty detractors in Berlin. Other accounts have hin11iving his final years in a drunken stupor, his intellectual creativity spent. Neither would seem to be the case. In fact, he had articles in press at the time ofhis death and was plotting a return to Berlin, which he had always regarded as the polestar ofhis intellectual life. Only a few months before his death, in a letter to his fellow Kantian and sometime patron, Lazarus Bendavid, MailTIOn wrote: Do SaInething that I might come back to Berlin; what this depends on you can figure out by yourself. Maybe we can undertake sOITlething together. Speak about it with Mr. Levi, or even better with Madame Levi.!ll This letter and another he wrote to Bendavid in the same year show Maimon in full intellectual form, discussing the nature of philosophy, defending Fichte against the attacks of Kant, and tweaking Bendavid for a mistake in a published mathematical proof. In an irritated letter to a publisher, written at about the same time, he complained about the failure to publish his article and promised further work that would, among other things, explain "das Absolut" once and for all. Solomon Maimon died in Siegersdorf on Noven1ber 22, 1800. The date of Main10n's death is known because a local Protestant clergyman,

Main10n's Life and "Life History"

49

J.

C. Tscheggey, visited hin1 during the last weeks of his life to discuss n1atters of philosophy and religion and published a memoir of their c011versations shortly after Maimon died. It is impossible to say how accurately Tscheggey depicted his interchanges with Maimon. Certainly, they do not read as the fluid record of actual conversation. On the other hand, the conversations do accurately reflect MaitTIon's philosophical preoccupations. This, according to Tscheggey, is Maimon's deathbed conversation: I an1 sorry to find you so ill today. M: There will perhaps be some improvement yet. T: You look so ill that I am doubtful of your recovery. M: What does it matter after all? When I aill dead, I aill gone. T: How can you say that, dear friend? Your n1ind, which aillong the most unfavorable of circumstances soared to ever higher attainments' which bore such fair flowers and fruits-shall it be trodden in the dust along with the poor covering in which it has been clothed? Do you not at this moment feel that there is something in you which is not body, not matter, not subject to the conditions of space and time? M: Ach, these are beautiful dreams and hopes [sehijne Traume und HoffnungenJ . T: Which will surely be fulfilled .... You maintained not long ago that here we cannot reach above mere legality. Let this be admitted. Now, perhaps, you are about to pass over soon into a condition in which you will rise to the state of true morality, since you and all ofus have a natural capacity for it. Wouldn't you wish to come into the society of one WhOlll you honored as much as Mendelssohn? M: Oy me! I have been a foolish man, the most foolish among the foolish-and how earnestly I wished otherwise! T: This is proof that you are not yet in complete accord with your unbelief. No you will not all die. Your spirit will surely live on. M: SO far as mere faith and hope are concerned, I can go a good way. But what does that help us? T: It helps us at least to peace. M: I am at peace. [feh bin ruh~.J 112 T:

The account invites historical doubt. Its dialogue is stilted to the point of bathos, and the scenario of the unrepe~t~~t_s}c~p_t~c_~n_ hi~

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Chapter One

deathbed is both a literary topos and a bit reminiscent of Boswell's famous last conversation with David HUlne, in 1776. 113 On the other hand, Tscheggey's brief allusion to Maimon's distinction between "mere legality" and true knowledge is a gen-uine description of Maimon's idiosyncratic Maimonidea11 idealism, which he consistently maintai11ed llntil the end of his life. 114 Moreover, Maimon's reply that ilnmortality is a "beautiful dream," while hardly original, does echo his eventual position that union with the divine mind or World Soul is a kind of limit-concept. lls IZant once wrote "that the aim of those who have a clergyma11 summoned to them at the end oflife is normally to find a comforter" against a bad conscience and compared this llnfavorably to the administering of opium. 116 The well-meaning Tscheggey seems to have been offering a similar narcotic, bllt Maimon, apparently, would have none of it. I will not speculate on the nature of his regrets or on the source of his peace, ifhe had either. In any event, none of Maimon's great friends or interlocutors were with him when he died, and Maimon's passing went largely unrell1arked in Berlin, as Rahel Varnhagen lamented, in passing, in a letter to David Veit. 117 Lazarus Bendavid, who had been Maimon's student, patron, and rival, wrote a brief memoir.l 18 Maimon's body was delivered by Count IZalkreuth to the nearby Jewish commllnity of Glogau. He was apparently given the derisory funeral of an excoll1municated apiqores (though I have no evidence that he was ever formally placed in herem) and buried in an unmarked grave olltside the cemetery proper, in keeping with the traditional practice for the bllrial of heretics. T11e nineteenth-century Jewish historian Simon Bernfeld paints an even grimmer picture: Soloillon Mainlon was brought [to Glogau] for burial and put in a grave covered with scorn and shame. Moreover, the members of the Burial Society [Hevra Qadisha] abused the body of this great man before burying it. This was reported to me personally by Dr. Brann of Breslau who had read it in a letter at the time. The details of this incident are very ugly.119

Jakob Fromer, who edited a popular early twentieth-century edition of Maimon's autobiography, adds that children threw stones at the coffin

Mailllon's Life and "Life History"

and shouted, presumably at the prompting of discerning adults, "Apiqores!" 120 When Count IZalkreuth inquired about Maimon's funeral, he was, by one account, told that Mainl0n had been buried in a special area reserved only for philosophers, which would, in a sense, have been true. IZalkreuth was apparently not satisfied and had a lnemorial stone erected in Maimon's honor, which still stands. I21 A decade later, Sabbattia Wolff published a longer, entertaining, if llnreliable, lnemoir of his friend, but Mainl0n was remembered largely because of his own remarkable autobiography.I22

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T1VO

Maimon's Medieval Desire: The Hesheq Shelomo "I keep it [the Hesheq ShelomoJ with lue even now as a nlenl0rial to the striving of the hunlan spirit for perfection, despite all the hindrances which stand in its way." Solomon Mainl0n, Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte

In his autobiography, Maimon describes having been turned away at the Rosenthaler Gate in his first attempt to enter Berlin, sometin1e in the mid 1770S, after a conversation with a local rabbi. This rabbi told the elders of the comlnunity that I was going to issue a new edition of the Guide ofthe Perplexed with a commentary, and that my intention was not so much to study medicine, as to devote myself to the sciences in general, and to extend my knowledge. This the orthodox Jews look upon as sOlnething dangerous to religion and good morals. They believe this to be especially true of the Polish Rabbis, who, having by some lucky accident been delivered from the bondage of superstition, suddenly catch a gleam of the light of reason and set themselves free from their chains. And this belief is to some extent wellfounded. Persons in such a position may be compared to a n1an who after being famished for a long time suddenly comes upon a well-spread table, and attacks the food with violent greed, and overfills himself. 1

52

A few years later, when Maimon attempted to return from Posen, he was ahnost thrown out again for merely owning a copy of Moses Mendelssohn's popular edition of Maimonides' Millot ha-Higgayon, a brief treatise on philosophical terms and methods. "That's just the sort of book!" Maimon reports an incensed community officer exclaiming upon spying it. 2 The Jewish officer's objection had not been to the Aristotelian syllogism any luore than the pious rabbi's had been to Maimon's understanding of the nature of the active intellect. In both cases it was understood that the study of medieval Jewish philosophy, which was epitomized in the philosophical work of Mailnonides, indicated a heretical mode of thought and that its renewal was somehow part of a

Maimon's Medieval Desire: The Hesheq Shelomo

dangerous new progralTI of reform. Indeed, when MailTIon finally did realize his Maimonidean an1bition in 1791 and republished the first part of the Guide together with his commentary, it was issued by the same Berlin publishing house that produced the flagship journal of the Berlin Haskala,ha-Meassef, and edited by ha-Meassef)s editor, Isaac Euchel, the great literary entrepreneur of the movement. 3 This is not to say that Maimon's particular brand of philosophical radicalism was not also viewed as dangerous within the Haskala. When Mendelssohn himself finally suggested that Maimon quit the city, Maimon interpreted it as an indictment of his philosophical ambitions and forthrightness as much as ofhis disreputable life. Although he acknowledged (even reveled in) his debauchery, Maimon also aspired to an austere Maimonidean ideal of intellectual perfection, cared as little for philosophical tact as he did for conventional propriety, and certainly had no interest in being the enlightenedgebildet pharmacist or middlebrow translator that his patrons had hoped he would becon1e. Here and elsewhere, as I have already suggested, incidents in Maimon's Lebensgeschichte may have the slightly too polished feel of the perfect anecdote. One lTIay wonder whether an autobiography in which the protago11ist attempts to enter the capital of philosophical enlightenment but is repeatedly rejected for being too much of a philosopher might not have a tighter thematic structure than its picaresque sllrface suggests. I shall return to such literary questions in Chapter 4. In any event, Maimon was, at the minimllm, n1aking a live polemical point in SllCh anecdotes. The philosophical works of Maimonides and other medieval Jewish thinkers were championed by the forces of Jewish Enlig11tenment and opposed by the rabbinic establishment. This is, in fact, a central feature of the debates over the Haskala in the eighteenth century, and the reasons for this centrality remain historically puzzling. Amos Funkenstein made the point sharply, by contrasting the characteristic Enlightenment disdain for all things medieval with the centrality of medieval Jewish philosophy to the Haskala. The Haskala saw itself as part of the Enlightenment. Many of its basic tenets corresponded indeed to those of the "Aufklarer,"

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Chapter Two

"philosophes," and "illuluinisti." Yet its attitude towards the medieval tradition of Jewish philosophy was throughout different and positive: so luuch so that one can, without exaggeration, tie the beginning of the Haskala to the renewed interest in medieval religious philosophy. The contrast with the European Enlightenment is blatant and calls for an explanation. 4 Funkenstein mentions five leading Maskilim who were deeply engaged with the medieval Jewish philosophical tradition: Maimon; his contemporary Aaron Wolfson-Halle (1754-1835); fellow Maskilim from Poland, Isaac Satanov (1732-1804) and Mendel Lefin (1749-1826); and, of course, his erstwhile mentor, Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786). Funkenstein's list is brief but well chosen. It includes two generations of Maskilim, from both Germany and Poland, and cuts across many of the standard distinctions made between different types of Maskilim in the historiography of the Haskala. Some of these Maskilim composed work primarily in Jewish languages (Satanov and Lefin, who also wrote in Yiddish), some in both Hebrevv and German (Mendelssohn, Maimon, and Wolfson-Halle), and they include among their number socalled moderates like Lefin and, perhaps, Mendelssohn, as well as "radicals" like Maimon, Wolfson-Halle, and, at times, Satanov. 5 Yet each of these men had a deep intellectual engagement with medieval Jewish philosophy and that of Maimonides in particular. This self-conscious identification of the Haskala with medieval Jewish philosophy was summed up in the fan10us slogan that paired the great exemplars of each movement: "from Moses [Maimonides] to Moses [Mendelssohn], no one arose like Moses,"6 a saying that had been first applied to Maimonides and his biblical namesake in the high Middle Ages? Wolfson-Halle later dramatized this identification in a satirical play in which Maimonides and Mendelssohn meet in heaven and find themselves to be intellectual soulmates who both reject the hairsplitting Halakhic discourse of a Polish rabbi. 8 When Maimon's Giva)at ha-Moreh was reissued in a second edition, in 1795, Isaac Satanov's commentaries to the second and third parts were added to produce a completely enlightened, if somewhat inconsistent, Guide. 9 Mendel Lefin later produced a rival edition ofthe Guide, which replaced

Mailllon's Medieval Desire: The Hesheq Shelomo

the difficult medieval Hebrew translation of Samuel Ibn Tibbon with a Hebrew text in the flowery (and philosophically imprecise) style favored by the Haskala. lo The medieval absorption of these figures of the late eighteenth-centllry Jewish Enlightenment really is striking. Characteristically, however, Maimon embodies Funkenstein's paradox of a backward-looking modernism at its most blatant. He was by far the n10st thorough Maimonidean of this grollp, from 11is philosophical doctrines down to his self-chosen name, bllt he was also a genuine Aufkla'rer who fully endorsed the radical Enlightenment critique of religion and traditional authority. As Funkenstein recognized, one of the main reasons for this eighteenth-century anomaly was biographical. Maimon, Mendelssohn, Wolfson-Halle, Satanov, Lefin, and many of their intellectual contemporaries' first encounter with any version ofsystematic philosophical rationalism had been through the work of Maimonides and his commentators and opponents, which they read as young students of rabbinic literature. Such a reader could gain access to this tradition most readily through the philosophical sections of Maimonides' canonical Halakhic works, the Commentary on the Mishna and his comprehensive code of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah, which were a part of any complete rabbinic library. Further study sometimes led to Maimonides' Guide ofthe Perplexed (Mendelssohn attributed his hll11chback to an adolescence bent over the Guide), which had been republished together with the comn1entary of three late medieval commentators, for the first time in aln10st two centuries in 1742 by the enterprising Wulffian Press, which published several other non-Halakhic books. II Finally, the independent works of other medieval and early modern Jewish philosophers and scientists, and even ofAristotle and his great twelfth-century Arabic commentator Ibn Rushd (Averroes), still circulated in Hebrew manuscripts and a few rare early modern editions. Such works had introduced the Maskilim to the possibilities of a philosophical rationalism and science, which was, ifnot quite commensurate with current European thought, at least intelligibly related to it in a way that other genres of Hebrew literature, such as Halakhic responsa and codes, Talmlldic commentaries and novellae, biblical commentaries

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and sermons, were not. 12 In republishing and commenting on Main10nides and others in the Jewish philosophical tradition, these early Maskilim sought to influence others in an intellectual culture whose epistemic ideal was still the well-glossed text, rather than empirical observation or mathematical demonstration. However, the question remains as to what the relatio11ship was between such texts and the philosophical discourse of the Enlightenment in the eyes of the Maskilim. In a formidable series ofbooks and essays, David Sorkin has addressed Funkenstein's question by reframing the Haskala in the context of the contemporary movelnents of the Protestant theological Enlightenment and Reform Catholicism as a third moderate, harmonizing attempt at internal religiolls reform in eighteenth-century Germany.13 Although this is suggestive and although, no doubt, certain ideas were in the air, it is important to note the minimal extent to which Sorkin traces den10nstrable lines of horizontal influence. More critically, his attelnpt fails to grapple with either the antirabbinic animus of many of the Maskilim who drew on the medieval tradition or some of the specific philosophical taproots of their ideas.l 4 His ge11eral claim that the Haskala drew upon the moderate fideistic "Hispano-Jewish" tradition of thought, epitomized by a medieval figure like Judah Halevi, is suggestive but underestimates the importance of more radical voices in that same tradition (including Maimonides and his followers). More crucially, it underestimates the extent to which the radical and moderate voices were part ofa single discourse that the Maskilim were attempting to renew in radically changed social circumstances. In fact, the Maskilim, including those on Fllnkenstein's list, engaged Main10nides and the medieval philosophical tradition in different ways and at varying levels of intensity. Mendelssohn, for instance, may have been the moderate fideist he often appeared to be, closer to the spirit of Halevi's I(uzari than that of Main10nides' Guide, although the question remains open (perhaps permanently so). 15 Mendel Lefin almost certainly was. 16 Satanov was a virtually unclassifiable eclectic who published everything from pseudepigraphic works of biblical poetry and IZabbala to the commentaries on Maimonides' Guide, mentioned earlier. Maimon, as I will show in this chapter, was a radical Maimonidean and the self-conscious heir to a medieval and early modern tradition of

Main1on's Medieval Desire: The Hesheq Shelomo

Aristotelian naturalism. Nonetheless, each of these Maskilim, and much of their intellectual cohort, shared a set of distinctive texts, argun1ents, and concepts-in short, a world of discourse-at the center of which stood Main10nides' medieval Aristotelianism. In the rest of this chapter, I trace the outlines of Maimon's early philosophical thought through a close reading of key passages from his unpublished Hebrew manuscript, Hesheq Shelomo. In doing so, I do not claim that Maimon's intellectual development was typical of Jewish E11lightenment figures. Main10n was an idiosyncratic thinker, if anyone ever was, and a genuine, if minor, philosophical genius. Nonetheless, he shared a particular set of intellectllal contexts and traditions with Mendelssohn, Satanov, Euchel, and others. In explicating his texts, I show at least one way in which the medieval philosophy of Maimonides and his successors entered the eightee11th-century Jewish Enlightenn1ent, and from there the idiosyncratic but influential post-Kantian Idealism of Maimon. At the end of the chapter and in the chapters that follow, I return to the question of how Maimon's use of medieval phi10sophy echoed that of other Maskilim, and how this discourse is connected to contemporary argllments over Hasidism on the one hand and enlightened discussions of Bildung on the other. In his autobiography, Maimon recalled having traveled "thirty n1iles on foot to look at a Hebrew book of peripatetic philosophy [hebraischperipathetisch-philosophisches BuchJ from the Tenth Century," as an adolescent. 17 The greatest tenth-century work of Jewish rationalism, and Maimon's probable object, was Saadia Gaon's Sefer Emunot ve-Deot ("Book of Beliefs and Opinions"). Maimon knew that neither Emunot ve-Deot nor any other tenth-century Jewish philosophical work was truly Aristotelian, but he was unable to resist the pun. 18 In any event, by the time of his first extant writings, collected in the Hesheq Shelomo manuscript, Maimon himself was a critical exponent of "Jewish peripatetic philosophy." He used its tools and vocabulary, struggled with its religious and philosophical implications, and felt compelled to resolve its apparent contradictions with rabbinic legal tradition, IZabbala (by now the regnant Jewish theology ofAshkenazic Jewry), and his own inchoate sense of modern scientific progress.

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Chapter T\vo

As discussed in Chapter I, Main10n wrote, or at least compiled, the Hesheq Shelomo after having been tllrned away from Berlin, during his stay in Posen in the late 1770S. Toward the end of a long, rich introductory essay, Maimon lists the manuscript's contents: an incomplete comn1entary on the fourteenth -century philosophical sern10ns of Rabbenu Nissim of Gerona, Derashot haRan, vvhich had, according to Mailllon, "appeared to the ll1e11 of our gelleration as a sealed book"; a supercoll1mentary to parts of Abraham Ibn Ezra's classic eleventhcentllry commentary to the Torah, which Maimon valued for both its graillmatical erudition a11d its scattered bits ofNeoplatonic doctrine; a dense essay on the relationsflip between IZabbala and philosophy titled Livnat ha-Sapir; fragments of another supercolume11tary to the popu1ar fourteenth-centllry mystical Torah comme11tary of Rabbe11u Bahya; and, finally-and with typical i11congruousness-a Hebrew textbook of "higher algebra." 19 The n1anuscript also included a brief and fascinating section that Maimon did not mention in the introduction, titled "Digest of Topics in the Guide in the Order of Its Chapters," which is appended to the e11d of the luanuscript. This section is probably a version of the "commentary on Maimonides" that Maimon had incautiously shown to that officious rabbi upon his first arrival in Berlin. 20 Throughout, Maimon quotes or alludes to a wide array of medieval and early lllodern Hebrew writi11gs and simply assumes (as did they) a wide rabbinic erudition. The manuscript is best understood as a discon11ected set of philosophical and exegetical notebooks, w11ich Maimon initially attempted to revise and weld together in Posen, perhaps at the urging of his students and patrons, to whom he gives the customary fulsome praise in the introduction. Nonetheless, the concern with knowledge as the human telos toward which man is, or ought to be, irresistibly drawn does give the manuscript a loose thematic unity, as well as its title. The title alludes, in accepted rabbinic fashion, both to the first name of the author and to a biblical phrase, in which his name appeared, in this case "and that which Solomon desired" (I IZings 9: 19, 2 Chronicles 8: 6) .21 The scriptural object of desire had been merely architectural (what Solomon wanted to build), but the p11rase had come to refer to Solomon's

Maimon's Medieval Desire: The Hesheq Shelomo 11lore fa11lous desires, both illtellectual and erotic. In his autobiography, MaimOll wrote of this early work that I keep it with nle even now as a merTIorial to the striving of the hunlan spirit for perfection [Vollkomenheit], despite all the hindrances which stand in its way. 22 Both the title of Maimon's first book and llis alltobiographical description evoke its central concern, the nature of human cognition and the .human telos, with n10re precision than nl0st of his readers were likely to notice. l-'he use of the Hebrew term hesheq in this sense derives from the cognate Arabic terln for desire, ishk, which was used by Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Maimonides, and others to describe philosophical eros, the desire for IG10wledge. 23 Such a desire is consllmmated in intellectllal perfection, a complete IG10wledge, wllich can be had only through llnion, or devequt, with the divine mind, or active intellect. In the technical terminology ofmedieval Hebrew philosophy, to which the Hesheq Shelomo was a belated addition, this perfection is terlned shelemut, for which the German Vollkomenheit is Maimon's consistent translation. 24 Indeed, Mainl0n begins the Hesheq Shelomo on just tllis·Aristotelian note. He writes: When we investigate the true purpose of the species man, that purpose being one of the four causes which account for all existents, [we will find that] lmowledge of this purpose is very beneficial for the conduct of nlan. For when the purpose is lUlown we can define and represent the actions which will necessarily bring one to that purpose, as is explained in The Book of Virtues [i.e., Aristotle's Ethics].25 Thus, in the late 1770S, we find Maimon framing the questions ofethics and politics in pllrely medieval Aristotelian terms as the question of what the final cause, or telos (for which Maimon's takhlit is, again, the precise translation in scholastic Hebrew), of man is. Indeed, it is worth noting that Aristotle's Ethics is the first authority that MaimOll cites. 26 Although Aristotle had long been supplanted as the leading philosophical authority in the rest of Europe, he still stood at the head of the only philosophical tradition available to an eighteenth-century Hebrew reader.

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Chapter Two The Aristotelian question ofman's telos, with which Maimon opened his investigations, retained the religious danger it had possessed in the Middle Ages to challenge the sovereignty ofHalakha and tradition. The answer to this question might not merely be "very useful" for human conduct but might threaten to supplant any law not constructed solely on its basis. MailTIOn both jllstifies alld answers his question about man's purpose through a selective quotation ofan extraordinarily long passage from Maimonides' Commentary to the Mishna. In it, Maimonides outlines an allegorical method for understanding rabbi11ic dicta as philosophical remarks. Maimon then interprets one sucl1 remark (albeit in an abbreviated and somewhat esoteric fashion) to show that the divine governance of the world is entirely through the laws of nature and that the cognition of God through these natural, universal laws (rather than those ofHalakha) is luan's ll1timate purpose. The passage begins: They [the rabbis] said "the Holy One Blessed Be He has no part in the world, except for the four cubits of halacha alone" [T.B. Berakhot 8a]. Now concentrate on this statement, for if you look at its plain meaning, you will find yourself very far from the truth, as if the 4 cubits of halacha were the only true end to be sought, and all the other sciences and true beliefs were worthless, and in the time of Shem and Ever [i.e., before the revelation of the Torah], when there was no Halacha, it would be possible to say that the Holy One Blessed Be He had no part in the world at all. But if you inquire into this matter philosophically, you will see that they said a wonderful thing. 27 In this passage, Maimonides interpreted the Talmudic statement in precise contradiction to its manifest intent-that Halakha is the 10CllS of divine concern in the universe-to be somehow hiding the wonderful but dangerous truth that God's relationship to the universe was in fact not exhausted by the prescriptions of Jewish law. Maimon, who sets this quote directly after mentioning the Aristotelian four causes, was intent on unpacking MailTIonides' allegorical reading of the statement somewhat more forthrightly, and perhaps more radically, than Main10nides himself. On this interpretation, God's only relationship to the world is through physical laws, in particular the four causes (material, formal, efficient, and final) of Aristotelian science. In retrieving such an argument from Maimonides' undeniably canonical text, Maimon

Maimon's Medieval Desire: The Hesheq Shelomo

justified a thoroughgoing naturalism regarding the universe and man's purpose within it. I return to the radically pantheistic way in which Maimon was to take this thought later in this chapter. Just as important, a Maimonidean passage such as this also helped Maimon to oppose the regnant Lithuanian rabbinic ideology in which he had been educated. This ideology took the sentiment expressed by another famous rabbinic dictum, "the study of Toral1 is equal to everything else," as radically as possible, more or less equated Torah with Talil1l1d, and excluded virtually everything else from the curriculum. 28 One of the polemical functions ofMaimo11idean texts such as this one, since the Middle Ages, had been to legitimate intellectual pursuits other than Torah study and beyond the "four cubits of halacha." 29 If the allthor of the Mishneh Torah, the most comprehe11sive code of Jewish law, could mandate the study of philosophy and the natural world, Maimon and other early Maskilim argued, then it could not possibly be forbidden. A few lines later in the Hesheq Shelomo, Maimon quotes Maimonides' statement that the scientific knowledge of the created world is, insofar as it is possible, the highest human achievement and the fulfillment of the ultimate purpose of man. Maimonides exemplifies the possibility of such intellectual perfection with a description ofI