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
In the pages that follow, Maimon quotes his master's brief exposition of man's unique purpose as just such knowledge, and the purpose of both the natural and social world (includi11g its innumerable fools) as enabling the existence of such a "perfect man, who possesses all wisdom and [good] deeds." 31 According to the interpretation of Main10nides favored by Maimon, bodily health, political well-being, and even ethical virtue are all merely instrun1ental goods that create the conditions for the intellectual perfection of the philosopher. 32 Such extraordinary intellectual elitism had, for Maimon, the great advantage of counterbalancing the Mitnaged ideology of Talmudism while fulfilling an analogOllS need. The i11tellectual virtuoso was still the most important person

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Chapter Two in society under this scheme, but that person was a philosopher, not a Talmid Hakham. Toward the end of this introductory essay, Maimon makes this contrast explicit. He argues that all the parties of Jewish intellectual life agree that the telos ofman is some sort ofintellectual or spiritual perfection. However, they differ radically as to w11at that perfection consists in. The disputants can be divided into three principal camps. The first and largest party is that of the Talmudists, or lomdim, who hold that the sole end of an Israelite man is to toil constantly in God's Written and Oral Torah, to be careful about its words to the best of his ability and carefully fulfill all of its comn1andments in order to acquire [life] in this world and the world to come. 33 Maimon quickly adds that most Tahnudists actually disdain the Stlldy of the Bible, or written Torah, as well as the Hebrew gran1111ar necessary to understand it properly and reserve all of their intellectual energy for the study of oral Torah. Even within the pages of the Talmlld, such lomdim focus only on the exoteric legal discussions, ignoring the scattered Midrashim, which contain hidden p11ilosophical truths. 34 Indeed, those who especially pride themselves on their Talmudic sharpness (Mainl0n uses the untranslatable Hebrew adjective harif, which literally means hot or pungent) hold that such ability and biblical or Aggadic study are mutually exclusive. Moreover, they accuse those who enlploy philological or philosophical tools in their Stlldy with rank heresy (apiqorsut). 35 The second party consists of the IZabbalists, who recognize that the Bible and rabbinic lore contain hidden metaphysical truths and that their attainment is the ultimate object of human life. However, as Maimon goes on to argue in detail in Livnat ha-Sapir, they lose themselves in a dream world of strange symbols, whose meaning has become opaque even to them. 36 In Livnat ha-Sapir, Maimol1 writes: Their words are sealed and are like the words within sealed books, to which a literate person must respond "I cannot since it is sealed" they are like a dream without interpretation. 37 Insofar as one can assign any meaning at all to silch discussions of Creation (.LMaJaseh Bereshit) and the Godhead (MaJaseh Merkavah),

Maimon's Medieval Desire: The Hesheq Shelomo they should be understood as corresponding to the scientific and metaphysical doctrines of Main10nidean philosophy. Whoever has not philosophized through the books of the religious philosophers, in particular Maimonides' Guide, in order to understand the negation of attributes, changes and passions with regard to God, may He be blessed, has no entrance, in any way, into the chambers of IZabbala. This gate will be closed and not open. 38 This returns Maimon to the third and smallest party to the debate, the Aristotelian philosophers: They recognize the value of the intellect and the great value of the sciences, as the greatest sage of humanity [Aristotle] has written. And I saw that the advantage of wisdom over foolishness was like that of light over darkness. They [the philosophers] realize that wisdom and Torah are a single subject, for the Torah is nothing but a representation of the world, its universals and particulars. 39 Maimon, with apparent sincerity, praises the piety of such an approach btlt recognizes the contempt and suspicion with which it is viewed by the Talmudists and the lZabbalists, who erroneously regard Torah and philosophy as opposites, hate philosophers, and mistakenly regard them as "impure" scoffers and heretics. 40 Such spiritual typologies were a n10tif of high medieval and early modern rabbinic literature. In these typologies, religious practice is accepted as a given, and the question is what brand of theoretical study ought to both justify and supplement that practice. The teleological and curricular schema in which this question is generally framed is Aristotelian, btlt the answer need not be. The question arises as much from the centrality ofTalmudic study to the rabbinic religious system and its apparent inability to systematically address certain n1etaphysical or spiritual questions, as it does from the need to frame Judaism in Aristotelian terms. lZabbala, which claims to provide an indigenous, distinctively Jewish set oftheoretical answers to such questions, is the inevitable third option in these typologies, although occasionally a fourth option (for instance, biblicism)41 is added or a sharp distinction is made within, say, the kabbalistic party.42

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Although such discussions contain stereotypical elements, there is no reason to suspect that they did not also reflect real intellectual optionsfacts on the ground, as it were. (Olle cOllld say the same ofcharacterizations of twentieth-century U.S. political factions in terms of right, center, and left.) A better approach would be to say that such discussions lay bare some of the intellectual presuppositions and tensions of premodern Judaism. Isadore Twersky, who identified and mapped these discussions in a series of extraordinary bibliographical essays, characterized them in the following way: The issue in the heated dialogue or trialogue between Talnludists, philosophers and kabbalists is attainnlent of spirituality.... The key term in the vocabulary of [this] spirituality ... is perfection (shelemut or hashlamat ha-nefesh).43

This ideal of intellectual perfection and the ternls, tropes, and arguments associated with it persisted in Maimon's later work, just as, one is tempted to say, he carried the physical manuscript of the Hesheq Shelomo manuscript with him for the rest of his life. But this is not quite right, because one of the features ofMaimon's later writillgs that makes them so interesting is the way in which these tropes of medieval Hebrew thought are transfornled. They are fought with, ironized, translated, and secularized in his autobiography, his maskilic commentary to the Guide, and his post-IZantian philosophical writings. However, before tllrning to these developments, we lnust understand the medieval Aristotelian picture of perfection as Maimon received it. The Aristotelian mechanism of perfect knowledge was a kind of activation of the potential of the passive human intellect (sekhel ha-koach) through the divine active intellect (sekhel ha-poal), which is in a continual and perfect state of thought. This dark doctrine was central to the medieval Aristotelian tradition, and although I have alluded to it more than once, it is important to llnderstand it-and Maimon's struggles with its implications-in some detail. In raising the question ofthe active intellect, Maimon was heir to a long and complicated philosophical tradition by way of the writings of Maimonides and his philosophically informed medieval commentators and

Maimon's Medieval Desire: The Hesheq Shelomo successors. The doctrine's ultimate source is a pregnant passage ofAristotle's De Anima and the miasn1a of cOlnlnentary and elaboration it elicited from pagan, Christian, Muslin1, a11d Jewish writers from late antiquity through the n1edieval period. The crucial passage in question is: Since in every class of things, as in nature as a whole, we find two factors involved, a Inatter which is potentially all the particulars included in the class, and a cause which is productive in the sense that it n1akes them all (the latter standing to the forn1er as an artist to its Inaterial), these distinct elelnents must likewise be found in the soul. And there is an intellect which is of this kind by becolning all things, and there is another which is so by making all things: this is a sort of positive state like light; for in a sense light Inakes potential colors into actual colors. And this [latter] intellect is distinct, unaffected and unlnixed, being in essence activity. For that which acts is always superior to that which is affected, the originating force to the Inatter. Actuallu10wledge is identical with its object; but potential knowledge is prior in time in the individual, but absolutely it is not prior even in time. It does not sometin1es think and sOlnetimes not think. In separation it is just what it is, and this alone is ilnmortal and eternal (we do not relnember because while this is unaffected, passive mind is perishable); and without this nothing thinks. 44 Although the meaning-indeed the gramlnar-of this passage has never been clear, it was take11 by an inflllentialline of commentators beginning with the second-century philosopher Alexander ofAphrodisias (whom Maimon mentions) to suggest that there were two distinct intellects: a potential or passive intellect (nous pathetikos) , which provides the matter of thought, al1d an active intellect (nous poietikos) , which gives it form. 45 The passive intellect is, then, the stuff of thought that has the potential to become anything thinkable, just as prime n1atter has the potential to become anything physical. The active intellect takes up this material and gives it form in the shape of thoughts. In doing so, it realizes the potential of the passive intellect in something like the way that a sculptor realizes the potential of l1is material. 46 It should be noted that the thoughts in question are to be distinguished from mere sensory perceptiol1S. True Aristotelian thoughts are not of particular things but universal essences. The object of my

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perception may be a particlliar ephemeral bit of wood, but the object of any consequent knolvledge I might have on the slLbject must be the eternal essence of wood, stripped (as Maimonides vvould later phrase it) of all matter. This makes it easier to understand Aristotle's statement that "actual knowledge," that is to say, the passive intellect actualized in the forln ofSOlne essence, "is identical to its object." There are many particular bits of vvood and none of them are in my mind, but there is only one essence of wood, which is universal, not particular. If I have truly grasped that universal, then my knowledge of the essence ofwood just is: the essence wood. In such an act of cognition, not only is the knowledge idel1tical to its object bllt both are also identical to the IU10wer, which is the active intellect giving form to the passive intellect in the shape, as it were, of this eternal essence. Aristotle describes the passive intellect as perishable and the active intellect as immortal, which raises the question of whether they are both faculties of the hllman soul or whether the active intellect is entirely transcendent. An influel1tialline of interpretation, to which Maimon was heir, generally took the transcendent view of Alexander and held the active intellect to be singular and distinct from the individual thinker. At the n10ment of cognition, the active intellect conjoins with the passive intellect of the thinker. Having grasped (or, perhaps, been grasped by) a universal truth, the thinker's passive intellect is transformed into an acquired intellect (a term completely unattested in Aristotle) and receives at least a taste of immortality.47 Here, two other Aristotelian doctrines were of special importance: the first was cosmological; the second, ethical. Medieval philosophers of this tradition held that our sublunar world is contained within nine concentric celestial spheres whose motions (visible in the motions of the stars) govern our world and which, as "separate il1telligences," are intermediate between the intelligence of man and that of God. 48 The first of these intelligences emanates from the activity of the thought of the unmoved mover himself, whereas the next intelligence elnanates from the activity of its predecessor and so on until the ninth and final intelligence, the active intellect, beneath which lies our sublunar world. This doctrine was suggested by passages in On the Heavens and the Metaphysics, but it was perhaps first clearly articulated by Alfarabi, who,

MailTIon's Medieval Desire: The Hesheq Shelomo

as Herbert Davidson writes, fashiol1ed his system out of "Aristotelian bricks and mortar borrowed from Neoplatonic philosop11y."49 The second doctrine was Aristotle's statement in the Nicomachean Ethics that a life of study is the ultimate human telos and constitutes an "almost god-like" life. 50 Such a life wOILld consist as much as possible in the theoretical contemplation of essences rather than the cultivation ofpractical virtues and is godlike because God's life is itselfone ofceaseless self-contemplation, or as another distinguished historian of philosophy has put it, "Nous, 110using nous." 51 This conten1plation of eterl1al truths constitutes the true l1appiness, or Eudaemonia, which transcends all others. The cOlnbination of these two doctrines led to the idea that the object of this "godlike" theoretical contemplation was God Himself, whose existence both grounds and comprises the set of all eternal truths, or at least close. More precisely, it was held by Maimonides and others to be I-lis n10st proxin1ate agent, the active intellect. 52 The essence of this intellect is, as stated in the De Anima passage, activity, and in this it both thinks and produces the eternal essences. Combining these doctrines, we get the picture of man's telos as kl10wledge of the eternal essences through the activity of the active intellect, whose essence is just the activity of eternally thinking these essences. Man's truest desire, ultimate purpose, and literal end consist in a conjunction or unification with the divine n1ind of the active intellect, which results in a knowledge of the llniversal trl1ths of metaphysics, free from the transience of human existence. This pictllre provided the metaphysical underpinning for the religious l011ging for a union with God (devequt), the perfection (shelemut ha-nefesh) that follows such a union, and the consequent immortality, although not, as I have already hinted, without technical difficulties. This medieval line of interpretation of Aristotle is as textually plausible as any other, at least in its general outline, and I will, for the most part, leave aside the question of what the philosophical impetus for such a view might be beyond its basis in Aristotle's texts. 53 However, it should be noted that the doctrine of the active intellect may be the first theoretical attempt to do justice to the way in which human thought seems to be both an act of passively finding something and an act of

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Chapter Two making it. To anticipate IZantian terllli110logy, it can be seen as an atten1pt to describe the interplay between the receptivity and the spontaneity of human cognition. In the Hesheq Shelomo, Maimon sums up this world picture by quoting Mailllonides' famous discussion of another TahTIudic statement: In the world to con1e there will be no eating, drinking, bathing, anointing or sex, but only the righteous sitting with crowns on their heads enjoying the splendor of the divine presence (Shekhina). 54 MailTI011ides takes this statement to mean that the afterlife is a purely incorporeal and intellectual affair, in which the soul has left the bodily se11ses behind. However, in his allegorical i11terpretation, he also gives it a more detern1inate Aristotelian sense than its author, Rav, or his rabbinic interlocutors were likely to have envisioned. "Crowns upon their heads" means the ilTIlTIortality of the soul in the attainn1ent of the known, which is God, blessed be He, in which ... the known and the [knower] are one thing, as is explained by the great philosophers.... "Enjoying the splendor of the divine presence," means that the souls are pleased by what they apprehend froni the being of the Creator, just as the hayyot ha-qodesh and the other angels [or intelligences] are pleased by what they grasp of His Existence. Happiness and the final end are to achieve this status. 55 This noetic afterlife, which, according to Maimonides, is equivalent to Aristotle's Eudaemonia, is a perpetual act of cog11ition of the universal truths that are also the object of the divine mind. At least, in the limited case of a con1plete and perfect knowledge, this would amou11t to a cognition of, and union with, God, who is perpetually self-occupied. But at least in this passage, Maimonides seen1S to suggest a final state that is more partial and mediated and that falls well short of a perfect and total lmowledge (which is not even given to the higher intelligences). Indeed, MailTIonides' remark about the pleasure that the angels, or separate intelligences, take in their thou.ght points toward an interpretation in which the radiance of the Shekhina is to be understood as an allegory for the ceaseless activity of the last of these intelligences' the active intellect. Thus, trlle human happiness and the final

Main1on's Medieval Desire: The Hesheq Shelomo end of man is the knowledge of eter11al truths through perpetual conjunction with the active intellect, an endless seminar in natural philosophy with the divine mind. Maimon sums up his account of Maimo11ides' position by emphasizing that it is, in fact, the consensual picture of the entire philosophical tradition with which he is familiar. Echoing Maimonides, he writes: This is the opinion of all philosophers, that the summum bonum of man is to bring his intellect froin the potential to the actual and thereby cleave to the active intellect, and become immortal in its imn10rtality, as is well known from their writings. 56 Within a few years of writing this, Maimon would encounter a world ofphilosophical discourse in which this was no longer trlle, and, indeed had not been trlle for at least two centuries. Nonetheless, Maimon had doubts about the medieval Aristotelian system, although at this point they were still doubts expressed largely from within that system. In his first objection, Main10n writes: When I philosophized about these matters, I saw that there was lTIuch to doubt. Namely, if the soul or intellect, whose essence is the active intellect, returns [to the active intellect], then there is no eternity of the [individual] soul at all. For it adds nothing to the active intellect, which for reasons [i.e., of its perfection and unity] discussed above cannot be added to or subtracted from. Rather, the ennoblelnent of the acquired intellect in lnan fro111 the active intellect is like the lighting of one candle from another, in which nothing is gained [or lost] .... It is clear from this that there is no place for imn10rtality [of the individual soul] at all. 57 Maimon argues that if the active intellect, which is eternal, is necessary for hun1an thOllght ("without this," Aristotle wrote, "nothing thinks") and the passive intellect is perishable, then even if we have a share, as it were, in its eternal activity when we think, this share cannot survive our bodies. We may call this qllickened phase of hllman thought the "acquired intellect" (sekhel ha-niqneh), but it is still a phase in the life ofthe passive and perishable intellect. So there is no way, even for the righteous, to continue to enjoy the splendor of cognition after their bodies have perished. At best, their individual shares of the active intellect will

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Chapter Two return to their source, like the Neoplatonic sOld that is reabsorbed in the One from which it emanated. Some version of this skepticism over i11dividual immortality was a persistent worry of the medieval tradition of thought that Maimon inherited. Alfarabi seems to have suggested that the idea of individual imn10rtality was "an old wives tale" in his lost commentary to the Nicomachean Ethics. 58 Avicen11a, whom Maimon's friend and editor Euchel studied, strllggled against any such conclusion. 59 In his Guide, Maim011ides cited the position of Ibn Bajjah (Aven1pace) that individual immortality is conceptllally impossible, because where there are no bodies, "t11ere can be no thought of multiplicity." Maimonides does not demur, suggesting that this was in fact his true esoteric position, despite statements from his Commentary to the Mishna, quoted earlier. 60 Averroes, who deeply influenced the Maimonidean commentators that Maimon prized most, infamously l1eld the almost Hegelian position that, strictly speaking, individual human cognition was in1possible even in this life. 61 His reason was, apparently that the passive intellect could be construed only as transpersonal and shared by all humanity' thus making an individual noetic afterlife doubly impossible. 62 Maimon's second objection to the idea of a noetic afterlife is more original and perhaps distinctively modern in its insistence on an idea of open-ended progress in knowledge. Moreover, the philosophers have not delimited or defined for us whether immortality and the passing from passive to active [intellect] is consequent upon the comprehension of all sciences or merely some of all of them, or a single one completely ... but this is impossible, for who inforn1ed thein [the natural philosophers] of all of the sciences? It is possible that a new science will be invented that had not been IU10wn up till now, of which they knew nothing at all. Similarly, who has defined anyone of the sciences so that it is this much and no more? An example of this would be alchemists who can transforn1 iron into silver or copper into gold. Who told them that no one will be found in a future generation who can turn sulfur into gold? And, indeed, we see that the sciences progress and multiply in each generation. In which case even the ancients, according to their own doctrines, did not attain immortality and the eternity which they desired. 63

Maimon's Medieval Desire: The Hesheq Shelomo

This is an interesting criticism. Maimon notes that the vvhole 11ledieval Aristotelian schema that he has just patiently quoted and explicated from Maimonides turns 011 the assertion that we live i11 a kind of epistemically closed lU1iverse, in which it is at least ideally possible to have a complete knowledge, which approximates that of the active intellect. 64 Indeed, J\1aimonides' replltation and his effect on centuries of readers such as Maimon, who had mastered both religious tradition and Aristotelian science, was to have been an exemplar of just such intellectual perfection. 65 As Maimon later described his own attitude toward Maimonides in his autobiography, "He was, in my eyes, the ideal and perfect man, and I regarded his teaching as if it had been spoken as the trlle word of God." 66 Such an image becomes increasingly implausible once the epistemological universe is opeI1ed up a11d a sense of historicity enters. How cOll1d Maimonides or any other "ancient" achieve complete knowledge in a given discipline, let alone all ofthem, when they did not even all exist in his time? The ideal of intellectual perfection (and hence the ideas. of immortality and the fulfillment of the human telos) begins to look more like a notional possibility, ifthat. 67 Maimon's second point, about the sig11ificance of new scientific discoveries, strengthens the argument considerably. Although his naive example of alchemy may reveal something of his conception of science in the 1770S, it is also a philosophically clever choice. If immortality is the knowledge of eternal essences, theI1 what if future alchen1ical research shows that the esse11ce of, for instance, gold is not what it had always been thought to be and that ullder certain conditions it is equivalent to sulfur? It would change the jewelry business, among other things, but it would also show that all previolls contemplators of gold had failed to completely grasp that eternal essence and had, at least to that degree, failed to achieve intellectual immortality. It might turn out that Maimonides, for instance, had never thought abollt the essence of gold at all. 68 This line of argument was, I think, only partly anticipated in the n1edieval literature. The great fourteenth-centllry Aristotelian Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides), whom Maimon cites elsewhere, argued that there were a finite number of sciences, some of which had been perfected by the tin1e of Aristotle (e.g., physics), some later (e.g., Galen's

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Chapter Two anatomy), and some of which, like astronomy (Gersonides was a distingllished astronolner), had yet to be perfected. 69 This doctrine, together with an ingenious argument for the preservation of the individllality of human acquired intellects in the afterlife, seems to have allowed Gersonides to envision an afterlife in which the righteous (or at least the intelligent) basked in the light of the active intellect for eternity, in rank order of intellectual achievement. 7o Bllt Gersonides did not envision either the possibility of entirely new sciences or radical revisions of such basic and perfected sciences as physics. Maimon suggests one way out of this dilemma, which may consciously echo Gersonides' position but quickly rejects it as undermining the very idea ofil1tellectual perfection. He writes: And ifyou say that even one who comprehends merely a bit of son1ething attains this immortality, then-by Iny life-I do not know if this distinguishes anybody, for each man among men, even the stupidest among them, knows some intellectible or another, like the prima intelligibilia [principles that are available to all men]. Moreover, what of those who exert their souls without quiet or rest froin the pursuit of the sciences, and delve into them and are not satisfied even after they know some theological or philosophical proofs, and the like?-Since they have already merited the aforementioned level [ofilnmortality ].71 The sllggestion Main10n envisions here is one that turns on the doctrine that any cognition at all necessarily involves the active intellect and hence, perhaps, that any lmowledge at all guarantees immortality. But, as Maimon immediately points out, such a doctrine is unsatisfying for the opposite reason: It trivializes immortality as the telosof a life of theoretical contemplation. 72 At this point Maimon seems to fall back on a familiar kind of skeptical fideism. The end of the matter is that their words are not at all adequate to explain immortality, if they are not strengthened from the side of faith in Torah which informs us of matters that are higher than the comprehension of the intellect. Nonetheless, we ought not cease from approaching the subject of the intellect?3 It is not clear to what extent Maimon was satisfied by such a soilltion to the problem at this stage of his intellectual developn1ent, or indeed

Maimon's Medieval Desire: The Hesheq Shelomo

whether he was satisfied at all, even at this point in his career. A weak but pious rejoinder to a vigorollsly stated philosophical argument is, of course, one of the telltale marks of an esoteric text alTIOng the radical followers of Mainl0nides and Averroes. 74 The philosophical world picture to \vllich MailTIOn was heir was Aristotelian, bllt, as I have already noted, it was a Platonized Aristotle. In particular, the doctrine of llnion with the active intellect can also be described as one in which the human soul rellnites with its heavenly SOllrce. Along these lines, it call be helpful, at least as a heuristic device, to frame the scheme in the explicitly Neoplatonic terms ofthe "Upward Way" and the "Downward Way." In these terills, the Upward Way of the passive human intellect's Llnion with the active intellect, in cognition (or prophecy), is precisely the reverse of the process of the Downward Way, in which tIle active intellect gives form to the world through a conjunction with its ITIatter.7 5 One ofthe underlying problems ofthis pictllre, which is behind some of Maimon's worries over the possibility of conjunction, is the dualist problem ofhow intellectual form and physical nlatter can be conjoined. Thus, one ofthe most basic problems with individual immortality in this picture is just that what is immortal cannot be physically individuated and what is physically i11dividuated (this body) cannot be immortal. These dualist difficulties also attend to the Downward Way, namely, how matter is prepared to take on form, or even more starkly, how matter can exist at all if it must emerge from a purely spiritual (or intellectual) source. One answer to SllCh difficulties is to opt for some version of metaphysical monism that denies, or internalizes, the dualism of form and matter, God and world. Main10n raises this monist possibility several times in the Hesheq Shelomo in connection with such problems. For instance, in his commentary to a sermon of Derashot ha-Ran, which discusses "the great union (devequt ha-gadol) between man and his creator, the Shekhina," 76 Maimon writes: I have seen fit to explain this phrase which is so COmiTIonly on the lips of authors, and in particular among kabbalists who use it a great deal. It is

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Chapter Two already known, as the philosophers have explained, and MaiInoI1ides also Inentions in the Guide, how nature prepares the material objects to receive the forins. These forins are given by the Separate Form which is the active intellect, according to Main10nides and all philosophers. However, we, in the naine of God, will say that we have already explained how He, may His naine be blessed, activates everything in two aspects. Namely, trOIn the beginning He prepares the Inatter and afterwards gives the forin. Note that the true activity is the preparation of the Inatter [to receive the form] and this happens in ti111e, but the giving of the form cannot be called an action, for the form is nothing but He, n1ay He be blessed, Hiinself resting upon the matter, in accordance with its status. And this is like a Inan who builds a house for hiinself, and afterwards dwells (shokhen ) there, and this is clear. Note that even though everything comes from Him, Inay He be blessed, nonetheless this is froin two separate perspectives. That is to say, there is the aspect ofpreparing the 111atter and we call this the Shekhina and the giving of the form we call The Holy One Blessed Be He. There are distinct levels here, for some Inatter is more sublime than others. Accordingly it receives a more sublin1e form. This is the secret in the saying "The Holy One Blessed Be He sits and arranges n1arriages [literally "pairs pairs"]," for in truth He is always doing this. Understand this,?7 Although the passage is not as clear as one wOllld like, several important points do en1erge. First, Maimon makes explicit the conceptual C011nection between the Upward Way of devequt with the active intellect a11d the Downward Way of the active intellect's giving form to matter. Second, he seems to suggest that forn1 and matter are really two aspects of a single thing or process. Third, he associates these two aspects with two different aspects, or sefirot, of the Godhead, the "Holy One Blessed Be He" and the Shekhina, which are understood to be male and female, respectively.78 God is always already, as it were, arranging the marriage between form (or intellect) and matter. Fourth, one n1ay wonder where these marriages are taking place. Could part of the "secret" be that the marriage is always actually between the Holy One Blessed Be He and the Shekhina, within God? If so, then there is another level to Maimon's talk of two aspects, in which the material world itself would only be an aspect of God. Finally, it should be noted that

MailTIon's Medieval Desire: The Hesheq Shelomo t11is comment is i11 keeping with Main10n's claiIn, discussed earlier, that the IZabbala is merely philosophy clothed in vivid symbols. In his introduction to the Hesheq Shelomo, Maimon had hinted that the "wonderful thing" that Maimonides found i11 the rabbinic saying that God "has no part in the world, except for the four cubits of halacha alone" was that God's only relationship to the world is through the material, forinal, efficient, and final callses of Aristotelian science. This interpretive suggestion does have a certain textual plausibility, but its implicit pantheisn1 also radically controverts official Maimonidean doctrine.7 9 As Maimonides makes explicitly clear in the Guide, he endorses the "opinion of the philosophers," that God is only the efficient, forinal, and final cause of the universe: God is the efficient cause, that He is the forIn, and that he is the end. Thus, it is for this reason that they say that He, Inay He be exalted, is a cause and a ground, in order to comprise these three causes-that is, the fact that God is the efficient cause of the world, its form and its end. 80 God is not, however, the material cause of the world (as, say, the marble is of the statue), or so it would seem. Nonetheless, in the brief" Digest of Topics in the Guide in the Order of its Chapters," which closes the Hesheq Shelomo, Maimon reiterates his pantheistic suggestion in his con1n1ent to precisely the sequence of chapters in which the above statement is made: IZnow that the universal intellect is the best and first reality. And it is the cause of the least and last reality external to the intellect, just as the intellectual forln in the artisan is the best and first reality, and the cause of the least and the last reality external to the intellect. And since He is an active intellect, therefore the intellect, the intellecting subject and the intellected object will be one. And He will include the four causes of [all] existents which are: the material, the formal, the efficient, and the final [causes ].81 Maimon goes on to illustrate in the standard, classical vvays how God is the architect, maker, and telos of the universe, but he does not elaborate on his radically pantheistic suggestion that God is also the material cause

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Chapter Two (i.e., simply the material) of the universe, although it was an idea he would return to in his later philosophy.82 Whatever the details of Mailnon's early monism, he was not alone an10ng eighteenth-century Jewish thinkers in suggesting that God and the universe were somehow one, and that this makes union, or devequt, between the human and divine possible. 83 In fact, MaiITIOn'S remarks echo the Hasidic theosophy of Rabbi Dov Baer, the Maggid ofMezeritch, whom he had visited a few years earlier. In a saying that dates to precisely the period in which Maimon visited the Maggid and that was published only three years after 11aimon compiled the Hesheq Shelomo, Dov Baer asserted that In truth, whatever one thinks about, that is the place where one is. And, in truth, the whole earth is full of His glory, and there is no place devoid of Hin1. So wherever one is he may find devotion to the creator, n1ay He be praised, because there is no place devoid of Him. 84 The Maggid's ilnplicit argument here would also seem to turn on the classical doctrine that to truly think abollt or know something entails becoming one with that thing. "Whatever one thinks about," the Maggid says, is "where one is." But since God is literally everywhere and "no place is devoid of him," cognition of anything in the universe, high or low, entails a cognition ofGod. 85 The picture of Hasidism that Maimon painted in his autobiography emphasized the Maggid's cynical manipulation of his followers, but the lnost interesting part of his account focused on the way in which the pantheistic doctrine and ideal of devequt played out in religious life. Thlls, Maimon describes an emissary fron1 the court of the Maggid as "clapping his hand to his brow as if he were waiting for il1spiration from the Holy Spirit," when repeating the following homily: When the musician played the spirit of God came upon him (2 I(ings 3: 15). This is explained in the following way. As long as a man is selfactive, he is incapable of receiving the effects of the Holy Spirit; for this purpose he must hold hin1self like an instrument in a purely passive state. The meaning of the verse is this: When the musician (ha-menagen), or servant of God, becomes like his instrulnent (ke-nagen), then the spirit of God comes upon him. 86

Maimon's Medieval Desire: The Hesheq Shelomo

The clever wordplay expresses the central point: One must realize that he is not the active musician but the passive instrument upon whonl the spirit of God plays. Joseph Weiss has made a persuasive argument .for this homily as an authentic teaching from the Maggid's circle. 87 Maimon explains the metaphysical sources for this doctrine of devequt through "self-annihilation": They maintain that Ilian, in accordance with his destiny, can reach the highest perfection [hiichste Vollkomenheit] only vvhen he regards himself not as a being that exists and works for hilTIself but as an organ of the godhead. 88 This is, of course, true, Maimon adds from the later vantage point of Maimonidean and Spinozistic post-I(antian idealism, "but only to the degree to which that person has achieved perfection." 89 Maimon's pantheisn1, or "acosmism" as he would later insist on calling it (because the doctrine is that everything in the cosmos is God), was probably influenced by his encounter with the thought ofthe Maggid, as well as with an early inclination to read Maimo11ides against the grain. Indeed, when Maimon mentions the kabbalistic works that especially influenced him in his autobiography, they are not only texts that tend toward theological monism and elnphasize devequt as the ultimate end of religious experie11ce, such as Pardes Rimonim of Moses Cordovero and the Sha)arei Qsdusha 90 of Hayyim Vital, but also precisely the texts that were most popular i11 the Maggid's court. 91 Maimon's insistent focus on the ideal and mechanism for intellectual perfection through devequt in his Hesheq Shelomo was indebted to contemporary developlnents in Hasidism. Indeed, he was very likely including the Maggid's "New Hasidin1" under the rubric of "kabbalists" when he depicted the three main parties ofJewish intellectual life. However, it is important to see that it was not only Hasidism that employed this teleological rubric to express the curricular a11d spiritual ideals in the late eighteenth century. The party of the rabbinic establishment, the Mitnagdim, who Maimon refers to as "Talmudists" or simply "scholars" (lomdim), also used these terms and invoked some of the same classical texts to justify their position that the lLltimate telos of man (at least of a

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Chapter Two Jewish man) was to become just the kind of Talmid Hakham that MaiIllon had been groon1ed to be. In scattered exegetical remarks, Rabbi Eliyahu ben Shelomo of ViIna, the patron saint of Lithuanian rabbinic culture, gestured at a theory of Torah study as both the means and end of devequt in a way that perhaps unconsciously echoed medieval accounts of Aristotelian theoria as intellectual perfection (shelemut hanefesh ).92 This line of thought was given full theoretical articulation by the Gaon's leading student and Maimon's historical contemporary, Rabbi Hayyim ofVolozhin (174-9-1820). Rabbi Hayyim's theory made the study of Torah for its own sake (Torah Lishma), paradigIllatically study of the Talmud, the crucial spiritual and intellectual act. In his magnum opus, Nefesh ha-Hayyim, Rabbi Hayyim wrote: When one is truly studying Torah, it is certain that one need not concentrate on union with the Divine at all, for this study alone is true union with His Will and His Word. Moreover He and His Will and His Word are one. 93 In a110ther work, Rabbi HayyiIll llnderlined the point in the explicit terms of traditional Taln1l1dic study as human union, or devequt, with the divine as a union of the knower and the known in the act of knowledge. Through studying the Talmud and commentaries and all the pilpulim, everything is Inade to cling to the Holy One, Blessed Be He ... and by cleaving to his Torah it is as if one is cleaving to Him. 94 At such moments, which profoundly express the ideals of the Lithuanian Jewish intellectllal culture in which Maimon was raised in a theoretical register, the talmid hakham and the Divine are virtually identified with the text. IZnower and known merge in the reading of the text. It might be imagined that this was simply an argument between Hasidism and Mitnagdut and that when Maimon wrote, in the Hesheq Shelomo, of a third party of "philosophers," he was merely retllrning to the terms of the medieval topos, or wishing that he was more than a party of one in Posen. But this is only partly true, for, as I have already indicated, many of Maimon's peers in the Haskala were profoundly engaged not only with the work of Maimonides but with the Aristotelian philosophical tradition more generally. To take just two examples that

Maimon's Medieval Desire: The Hesheq Shelomo

invoke precisely the medieval Aristotelian theme of the human telos as conjunction with the active intellect, Mailllon's eventual editor, Isaac Euchel, translated part of Ibn Sinna's eleventh-century philosophical n1agnum opus, The Book of the Healing of the Soul, into Hebrew and published it in the flagship journal of the Haskala, ha-Meassef;95 and Isaac Satanov, who succeeded Euchel as the director of the Freischule's maskilic press, published precisely the medieval Hebrew translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which Maimon had quoted in the Hesheq Shelomo a decade earlier. 96 In fact, n1edieval philosophical language and topoi were common in the works ofthe Berlin Haskala as well as those mid-eighteenth-century writers sometimes represented as "forerunners of the Haskala," who proceeded then1. The significance and extent of this usage has yet to be carefully or systematically studied, and it has often been misrepresented. Thus, Moshe Pelli, a leading literary historian of the Haskala, identifies terms such as hatzlachat ha-adam or hatzlachat ha-enoshit a11d osher (happiness) as principal terms of maskilic moral discourse and sees this as simply mirroring contemporary discussions ofthis-worldly happiness in the European Enlightenment. 97 As I have already ShOW11, however, the first term is a precise translation ofthe Aristotelian summum bonum. Osher has the closely related meaning in n1edieval philosophical Hebrew ofhappiness in the Aristotelian sense of Eudaemonia. 98 Both terms are, of course, just as characteristic of much of medieval Jewish philosophy as the Haskala. Indeed, the leading primary source that Pelli qllotes in this connection is an article ofIsaac Euchel's, the translator ofAvicenna and editor of Maimon's edition of the Guide, on the thoroughly medieval topic of "Hatzlachat ha-Adam ve-Osher Bichlal." 99 This is not to say that the Maskilim simply revived or continued medieval philosophical traditions any more than the Hasidim simply continued certain kabbalistic traditions ofthe Middle Ages. But both movements' along with their Mit11aged opposition, inherited and employed the tropes, arguments, a11d terms of art of their medieval predecessors. One ofthe main functions ofa literary tradition is to allow historically remote texts to serve as proximate stimuli for a thinker or movement. The Haskala was, at least at its outset, such a moven1ent, bllt its later transformations and success have served to obscure its intellectual roots.

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To understand what is new about these moven1ents, one must set their texts against this historical backdrop. Maimon was not an ordinary member ofthe Haskala (or anything else ), but l1is i11tense preoccupation with the question of man's telos, the ultin1ate object of human knowledge, and the possibility ofunity with the divine Inind points to a larger discourse ofperfection that had both a history and a social context. One of the interesting features of Inaskilic discussio11s of perfection vvas the extent to which it was ambiguous between the classical cognitive ideal, which obsessed Maimon, and a less precise cultural ideal of urbane sociability, aesthetic good taste, and social tolerance, which approximated that of Bildung in the Gerlnan Enlightenn1ent. 10o I will retllrn to this crucial ambiguity and its effect on Maimon's writings in Chapter 4. Scarcely more than a decade after he had written the Hesheq Shelomo, Maimon was an active literary participant in both the Aufklarung and the Haskala. He published his llersuch uber die Transcendentalphilosophie and contributed to ha-Meassef It was at this point in his career that Maimon realized his Maimonidean an1bition of producing a new edition of the first part of The Guide of the Perplexed, together with his o\vn n10dern commentary, Giva)at ha-Moreh, in which, among other things, Maimon finally made his argument for metaphysical monism explicit. I will discuss some of the systematic philosophical positions that Maimon stakes out in the Giva)at ha-Moreh and other writings in Chapter 3. In the present context it is important to note how much this project is still fran1ed in terms of the "Jewish peripatetic philosophy," with which Maimon struggled in the Hesheq Shelomo, and how he connected this to the concerns of the Haskala. One of the most interesting things about this project is the genuine enthusiasm that Euchel, who was arg-uably the n10st influential literary Maskil of the period, showed for the republication and interpretive renovation of the most canonical work of medieval Jewish philosophy. Needless to say, no lapsed Catholic Aufkliirer, or even proponent of Catholic Reform, ever performed such services for Aquinas's Summa. Euchel and an anonymous Maimon published a prospectus for the work in ha-Meassefthat promised to elucidate, correct, and supplement Maimonides' "peripatetic philosophy ... which follows Aristotle and those

Maimon's Medieval Desire: The Hesheq Shelomo

who followed hin1" in light of the author's deep and sustained study of modern philosophy.101 They published his commelltary together with the fourteenth-century Averroist conlmentary of Moses of Narbonlle (Narboni). Narboni had completed his Beur to the Guide in 1362, and, although it had been known by Maimollidean cognoscenti for centllries, the comlnentary had never been published. In exhorting the readers of ha-Meassefto support the publication of Giva)at ha-Moreh, . Euchel placed it squarely in the tradition of radical Maimonidean commentary, emphasizing that it elucidated not only the Guide bllt Narboni's comnlentary as well. Maskilim! You see the great value of these commentaries, the depth of the thought of the sage Narboni, and the lucid way in which he is explicated by the author of Giva)at ha-Moreh, who establishes each idea and enlightens with the lamp of his conlmentary ... both the Guide and Narboni clearly. There is no need to speak further in their praise for you will judge their excellence and utility for us in this time.l°2 In sllort, Maimon's comnlentary promised to help renl0tivate not merely a canonical work of Jewish philosophy but also the world and vocabulary of medieval Jewish philosophical discourse. It is worth noting, in this connection, the particular place that Narboni occupied in that world. In 1625, Joseph Solomon Delmedigo, a Jewish philosopher from Crete, wrote to a student that the tOl-lr leading COlnmentators 011 the Guide of the Perplexed-he was fanliliar with eighteen-were like the "four sons" of the Passover Haggadah. One was wise, one wicked, one simple, and one did not know how to ask. 103 The three "good" sons were, respectively, Shem Tov ben Joseph bell Shem Tov,104 Asher ben Abraham Crescas, and Profiat Dllran, whose commentaries had been included in the Renaissance edition of the Guide alld its 1741 reprint. The wicked son was, of COllrse, Narboni, whose comnlents often u11packed or radicalized (depending on one's perspective) the esoteric philosophical doctrine of Maimonides' text in an Averroist key. lOS The remark was probably meant as a compliment by Delmedigo, who was himself a radical Aristotelian and who is sometimes listed among the last figures of medieval Jewish philosophy.l06

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Narboni's wickedness, and that of other Jewish Averroists, had been to find within Maimonides' Guide a set of radical Aristotelian theses regarding topics such as creation, God's knowledge of particulars, andof special interest in the present context-the linked topics of human knowledge and the possibility of immortality.l07 In each case, such interpreters understood Maimonides' project to be one in which the received doctrines ofbiblical and rabbinic tradition were brought before the tribunal of n1edieval Aristotelian reason and reinterpreted, if necessary, to conform with it. Perhaps most radically, was the general understanding that, according to MailTIonides, Jewish religious doctrine and practice were not so much c011stitutive of the good life as a means toward it. Thus, the beliefs and commandments of the Torah were understood to have been promulgated because they lead the adherent to human perfection, which, strictly speaking, lies beyond then1, for that perfection consists not in devout religious practice or beliefbut rather in Aristotelian theoria: the contemplation ofthe universal truths ofscience and metaphysics and theology, through union with the active intellect. On such a reading, Maimonides' Guide genllinely demonstrates the social utility ofthe apparent irrationalities and superfluities ofJewish religious doctrine and practice, but it also points beyond them to a knowledge whose universality is unmarked by the particularities of religion, or, indeed, any particulars at all. The appeal of this philosophical vision to Mask_ilim such as Maimon and Euchel was that it provided a traditional (although always contested) basis for the sovereignty of universal reason over religion. Such a vision mirrored the social promise of the Enlightenment that Jews might meet with their Christian counterparts as equals within the public sphere ofdiscourse. 108 Moreover, it did so using the biblical and rabbinic proof texts and Hebrew theological idion1 in which Maimon, Euchel, and their readers were schooled. The danger of such a philosophy was in the antinomian possibilities of its instrumentalization of religion. If the commandn1ents of the Torah were prescribed only as a first approximation of the philosophical life to which they ultimately point, why not dispense with them altogether?109 The special resonance of Delmedigo's witticism about Narboni, and his attraction to Maimon, should now be clear. The wicked son asks, "What is this service to

Maimon's Medieval Desire: The Hesheq Shelomo you?" from some standpoint outside the culture, and in doing so, re-

lTIOVeS himself from the community of believers. Maimon opens the Giva)at ha-Moreh with the following programmatic statement: The telos [takhlit] of Inan's activities, in his aspect as a possessor of freewill and choice, is human excellence [hatzlachat ha-enoshit] , and this human excellence necessarily follows upon the attainment of perfection [shelemut]. Here, then, isa topic worthy of research: what is the nature of this attainment of perfection, which we have n1entioned? And what are the means through which it is possible to reach it? And we shall say: the perfection of any being consists in the passing over from the potential to the actual, as with the perfection of a tree, for example, which produces fruit. And the perfection of man is intellection [Haskala] .110 AJthough Maimon eventually goes on to develop this line of thought in ways that can no longer be called peripatetic, each of the key terms as well as the overall argument of this passage are thoroughly Aristotelian, and his conclusion that the telos of man, and the nature of human excellence, is simply a true cognition of the world is in keeping with the radical Maimonidean tradition. 111 But Maimon's precise choice of words to describe this cognition is telling. He refers to it as Haskala. Here too, Maimon is employing medieval philosophical terminology with care, because the word is just the abstract ,noun form of the Hebrew word for intellect, sekhel, but it is also, of course, the selfchosen name of the Jewish Enlightenment. Thus, Maimon can also be taken to be making the polemical claim that the ultimate purpose of man is conforming to the ideal of the Berlin Jewish Enlightenment, or, perhaps more plausibly, for staking out a version of the Haskala that was closer to the shelemut ofMaimonides and Narboni than the Bildung of Mendelssohn and Herz. Maimon's pllnning polemic, and its theoretical background, did not go entirely unnoticed. A few years later, Pinhas Eliyahu Hurwitz, an Eastern European traditionalist who had also lived for a while in Berlin, objected: And I saw the philosopher and author of the Giva)at ha-Moreh, in the Introduction to his con1mentary to the Guide ofthe Perplexed, boast

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Chapter Two that philosophy brings us to the final perfection in our times. And his "vords are not surprising, for in all of the previous generations, philosophers have spoken like this, in particular since Aristotle. 1 12 Hurwitz was familiar with the terms of Maimon's argument and even agreed with him that the Haskala was silnply another version of medieval Jewish philosophy. But he also held that the results of this phi10sophy could never be conclusively established and ultimately betrayed the particular terms of the Jewish covenant with GOd. 113 Main10n himself more or less en1braced this conclusion (n1uch of the pain, charm, and interest of his work lie in this ambivalence) and was, consequently, rather infamous. Because the work itself was intended as part of a program to educate traditional Hebrew readers toward some form of enlightenment, GivaJat ha-Moreh was published anonymously, carrying only Euchel's name. However, Maimon hinted at both his given Hebrew name and the painful distance from his origins, which his inability to use it implied, with this rather poignant bit ofriddling verse: My beloved Maskil Reader You 'will know my name and the name of IllY father In considering the word "exile" 114 The Hebrew word for exile (Shevi), above which asterisks had been placed, is the abbreviation of Maimon's Hebrew name and that of his father, Shelomo ben Yehoshua. 11s III the next chapter, I will examine some of the philosophical uses to which Main10n put his medieval Jewish Aristotelianism in his years of exile as the wicked son of modern Maimonidean scholarship in his GivaJat ha-Moreh.

Three

German Idealism in a Maimonidean I(ey "We are in this respect similar to God." Solomon MailTIOn, Uber die Progressen der Philosophie

Maimon described his approach to IZant's Critique of Pure Reason as one of independent and eclectic exegesis: The method by which I studied this work was altogether peculiar. On the first read-through I obtained an obscure idea of each section. Mterwards, I endeavored to make this distinct by my own reflection and so to penetrate the author's meaning. This is the proper process for what I call thinking oneselfinto a system. But as I had already ll1astered the systems of Spinoza, Hume and Leibniz, I was naturally led to think of a coalition-system. This, in fact, I found and gradually put into writing in the form of explanatory observations to the Critique ofPure Reason. This was the origin of my Transcendentalphilosophie. 1 The description, which is quoted in almost every discussion of Maimon's work, is itselfin need ofexegesis. 2 It should first be noted, as I will show, that the very movement from "obscure ideas" to distinct understanding, with which Main10n describes his study ofKant, is itselfa substantive feature of his proposed revision of Transcendental Idealism, which drew on the ideas with which he wrestled in his Hesheq Shelomo. Moreover, Maimon's method of commentary in the Transcendentalphilosophie was not so much peculiar or idiosyncratic as it was culturally foreign. His work on Kant was, like his Giva)at ha-Moreh, in the style of a medieval Hebrew philosophical commentary. Finally, there is the interesting omission of Maimonides in his list of sources, which has encouraged some commentators to omit him as a principal melnber of the "coalition," although, later in the chapter, Maimon enumerates his intellectual debts more fully as "Peripatetic, Spinozist, Leibnizian, Kantian and lastly Sceptic." 3 In fact, like Spinoza, Main10n's philosophical

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Chapter Three work presents a double aspect. It can be best understood as having been written in two contexts: that ofmedieval Aristotelian Jewish philosophy and that of modern Ellropean philosophy. Each of these issues of doctrine, genre, and influence will playa role in my account of Maimon's mature post-IZantian philosophy. One way to frame the project ofIZant's first Critique is as an attempt to adjudicate between the competing claims of empiricism and rationalism. In an early formulation ofhis critical project of "mapping the Limits ofSense and Reason," IZant wrote to his student and Maimon's eventual patron, Marcus Herz, that the "key to the whole heretofore obscur~ metaphysics" is in the realization that the human mind is neither purely passive (an intellectus ectypus) nor purely active (an intellectus archetypUS).4 The empiricist assumes the former, taking the passive representations of our senses as a paradigm of knowledge. The rationalist, on the other hand, assumes that our knowledge is adequate just to the extent that it corresponds to the eternal propositions contained within a productive divine mind. 5 According to IZa11t, neither ofthese does justice to the a priori knowledge we genuinely have of concepts such as causality, because we cannot abstract them from any number ofsensible representations, as Hllme's skeptical arguments had shown. Nor are we gods, whose knowledge is prodllced, not given by an external world of things in themselves. In the Critique ofPure Reason, IZant went on to argue that ordinary empirical knowledge and experience was inconceivable except as structured by a priori concepts, such as cause and effect. In the famous formlLlation that opens the chapter on Transcendental Logic, IZant wrote: Our knowledge springs from two fundamental sources of the mind; the first is the capacity of receiving representations ... the second is the power of knowing an object through these representations.... Our nature is so constituted that our intuition can never be other than sensible; that is, it contains only the mode in which we are affected by objects. The faculty, on the other hand, which enables us to think the object of sensible intuition is the understanding. Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding

Gerlnan Idealism in a MailTIonidean I(ey no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. 6 The human n1ind is, in short, discursive. We sense, or intuit, objects that are given to us from without but can think about them only insofar as we actively take up these objects with the a priori concepts of understanding. In order to put the divided, discursive nature of intellects such as ours into sharp relief, IZant returned to the contrast with a conceivable divine mind at several key mon1ents in his work. For instance, in the Transcendental Deduction, IZant writes: An understanding which through its self-consciousness could supply to itself the Inanifold of intuition-an understanding that is to say through whose representation the objects of the representation should at the saIne time exist-would not require, for the unity of consciousness, a special act of synthesis of the Inanifold. For the human understanding, however, which thinks only, and does not intuit, that act is necessary. It is indeed the first principle of human understanding, and is so indispensable that we cannot form the least conception of any other possible understanding. 7

The mind of such an intelleetus arehetypus, or intuitive intellect, would be, as it were, undivided. Its knowledge would spring from only one source, since an intuition ofan object would be equivalent to its presentation in consciousness. For SllCh a mind, thinking would already be creating, a pure and llnconstrained activity. Its thoughts would not be empty and its intuitions would not be blind, because they would be one and the same. But we know, according to IZant, nothing of such an intellect; it is a kind of limit-concept that highlights the fact that we are precisely not the sort ofcognitive beings who produce t11e objects of0llr knowledge. Despite all the differences between the Aristotelian picture of cognition, discussed in C11apter 2, and IZant's, and the role each plays in a complex and ramified philosophical system, it should also be clear that both pictures attempt to do justice to the interplay between passivity and activity that seems to underlie the activity of human knowing. Main10n came to IZant after a deep immersion in medieval Aristotelian thought and was well positioned to see the parallels between IZant's new

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critical philosophy and earlier theories, to play one set of ideas off the other, and to see the unresolved tensions in both. Maimon granted that Kant had demonstrated that empirical knowledge must be the product ofthe matter ofsensible intuitions given form by the conceptual categories, but this, as I(ant llnderstood, was not enough. In the section ofthe Critique ofPure Reason called the Schematism, I(ant attempted to show how universal cOl1cepts actually applied to particular intuitions through the medium of time. Later, in the Second Analogy, I(ant worked this out in detail for the key concept of causality. In doing so, he made good, or tried to, on his transcendental defense of a chastened empirical realism against Humean skepticism, although he also admitted that this schematism of our understanding, in its application to appearances and their mere form, is an art concealed in the idepths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover and to have open to our gaze. 8 This is precisely where Maimon attacked. He denied that Kant had, or could possibly have, a coherent account of how the categories applied to the particulars of intuition; how the forn1 of thought made contact with its matter. Kant had made such a gldf between concepts and intuitions that there was no way for the concepts to do their undeniably necessary work of giving shape to sensible intuitions. In a striking analogy that underlines the historical depth which Maimon brought to Kant's philosophy, Maimon puts the point this way in the Yersuch iiber die Transcendentalphilosophie, upon whose subtlety I(ant had remarked. The question quid juris of the legitimacy of applying the forms of understanding to what is sensibly given, addressed in IZant's transcendental deduction is one and the same as the important question that has been treated by all previous philosophers, namely the explanation of the community between soul and body, or as the explanation of the origination of the world (with respect to its matter) from an intelligenceY It was clever to note that Kant's problem of intuition and understanding is an epistemic version ofthe Cartesian problen1 ofgetting body and

German Idealism in a Maimonidean Key

mind together (with I(ant's Schen1a serving as a kind ofmethodological pineal gland that only defers the difficulties), although I(ant and others saw this similarity as well. But it was a genuine and altogether more original insight to see that the problem also resembled the almost forgotten medieval problem ofwhat, in Chapter 2, I refer to as the Downward Way between the active intellect and sublunar matter. Maimon suggests that I(ant's faculty ofunderstanding ful1ctions as a kind ofinternalized active intellect (or Platonic demiurge), but the faculty of understanding has just as much trouble giving forin to the given provided by sensible intuition as the active intellect did in producing (or giving form to) prime n1atter. In short, Kant does not have, according to Maimon, any more adequate notion of the workings of a discursive hllman understanding than he does ofthe notional intuitive intellect of God. On the contrary, his account of human discursivity seemed to make it impossible. As Maimon later wrote to I(arl Leonhard Reinhold: "Philosophy has not been able to build a bridge which makes possible the transition from the transcendental to the particular." 10 Reinhold thought he had solved this problen1 in his own version of the Critical Philosophy, but Maimon was not convinced that he, al1d perhaps even IZant, had even fully understood it. In pressing his skeptical claims, Maimon did not ignore Kant's innovative account of concepts as rules. Indeed, in a prescient line of attack, Maimon argued that no amount ofspecificity in the formulation ofuniversal rules could guarantee that, say, the category ofcausality would apply to all and only the instances to which it ought to.!1 So I(ant might have shown that coherent experience presupposed the application of conceptual categories, but he had 110t shown that we, in fact, have any such experience or knowledge. If concepts without intuition are empty and if intuitions without concepts are blind, then perhaps our thought is never better than empty and blind. At best, Kant will have only shown that we must proceed as if we were entitled to employ such concepts, not that we are in fact entitled to do so. Elsewhere, Maimon wrote "in the sense that Kant gives to experience, I have no experience." 12 In the apt formulation of Frederick Beiser, Maimon "renews the skeptical challenge within the critical philosophy itself." 13

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Maimon's reintroduction of Humean skepticism i11tO the heart of IZant's transcendental idealislTI was a signal achievement, but he also sketched the outlines of a possible solution that both anticipated those of later German Idealists and returned to the ideas of medieval radical Aristotelianism. I say "possible solution" because Main10n seen1S to have remained ambivalent about its viability, just as he had earlier been an1bivalent about the compromises that n1edieval philosophers had struck on the nature of individual immortality and the consolatory promises of religion. His skeptical problem, as well as his proposed solution, consciously echoed themes withi11 the medieval Aristotelian tradition that he first encollntered in Maimonides' Guide ofthe Perplexed, and its comn1entators. Main10n accepted that IZant's account of human cognition as divided and discursive was a perspicuous description of the conditio11 in which man seems to find himself, bllt he argued that the condition was not one of.knowledge. Ifwe are to have knowledge, then the pure concepts of understanding must be truly con1bined with the data of the sensory manifold in a way that IZant did not and could not explain. The crllX of his proposed solution was to argue that human thought is precisely a striving to overcome this condition through an act of knowledge in which the subject, the object, and the act ofknowing are all one and the same. This ideal is, of course, a version of the medieval doctri11e of perfection through union with the active intellect, whose attainn1ent he had both doubted and desired in his Hesheq Shelomo. In explaining this doctrine, Maimon returned to IZant's contrast between a passive and an intuitive intellect, but he argued that the difference between the two was one of degree, not ofkind. Indeed, the human intellect is characterized not merely by its finitude but by its atten1pt to overcome that finitude, or at least to approximate the activity of an infinite divine intellect. In a crucial passage of his VCrsuch iiber die Transcendentalphilosophie, Maimon wrote: We assume (at least as an idea) an infinite understanding for whon1 the forms are also the objects of thought ... our own understanding is this very same understanding but in a limited degree. 14

German Idealism in a Maimonidean I(ey A few lines later, he vvrites with g110mic forcefulness, "Our understanding is exactly the same as God's infinite understanding, though only of a limited kind." Maimon's paradigm case of the way in which the finite human intellect call be seen as, somehow, a restriction or limited expression of the infinite intellect is mathematical construction. God, as an infinite power of representation from all eternity thinks hilnself as all possible essences, that is he thinks himself as restricted in every possible way. He does not think as we do, that is discursively; rather his thoughts are at one and the saIne tilne presentations [of their objects]. If someone objects that we have no conception of such a style of thinking, my answer is: We do in fact have a concept of it, since we partly have this style in our possession. All mathematical objects are at the same time thought by us and exhibited as real objects through a priori construction. Thus we are in this respect similar to God. 15

For such a God, knowledge and creation are the same thing, and both tllrn on a Spinozistic restriction ofthe infinite being in a particular way. We intuit mathematical objects (say, a triangle) by constructing them in somethi11g like the way this God both knows and constructs real objects. In both cases, to construct such an object is to lG10W it and vice versa, or, at any rate, this is almost true, since we do not achieve a complete determination, or llnified knowledge, ofeven mathematical objects. Maimon illustrates this point colorfully in another text: The understanding prescribes a rule to the productive imagination, namely to produce a space enclosed by three lines. The imagination obeys and constructs the trilateral figure; but look, three angles suddenly obtrude themselves, which the understanding had not asked for. ... The understanding then puts on an imperious face and says "a trilateral figure must have three angles," as if it were the legislator in the affair, although in fact it must obey a legislator completely unknown to it.l 6 Unlike us, the infinite intellect has no legislator other than itself and is completely self-transparent. We approach the activity of such a God in positing a geometric figure or a number, but we don't quite get there. Empirical knowledge must be understood on this constructive model.

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Chapter Three The thing-in-itself is not an unattainable exterl1al object that somehow impinges on our senses, but rather the ideal limit to which human knowledge aspires. It is possible to see the source of Maimon's proposed doctrine as responding to internal hints within I(ant about the intuitive intellect, or as a revival of Leibnizian rationalism in a new philosophical context. Kal1t hilTIself called it a peculiar form of Spinozism in his letter to Herz acknowledging Maimon's manuscript. Maimon was indebted to each of these sources, but, in light of the discussion of the previous chapters, I suggest that the leading member of Main10n's coalition system was, in fact, Maimonides-or, more precisely, Maimonides as understood by his more radical interpreters (within whose ranks Maimon probably would have placed Spinoza). One can, perhaps, also hear the echoes of what Maimon called Dov Baer of Mezeritch's pantheistic "system of perfection" in a more intellectualist and sober register. This comes Ollt most clearly in Maimon's Giva)at ha-Moreh, which, as I have discussed earlier, is prefaced with a long discussion of intellectual perfection as man's telos, in Aristotelian terms. In the first chapter ofthe Guide ofthe Perplexed, Maimonides glossed the biblical verse "Let us make Inan after our image and in our likeness" (Genesis I : 26), as being an allegorical represe11tation ofthe relatiol1ship between the passive and active intellects, rather than an anthropomorphic doctrine, with the following remark: Man possesses as his proprium something in hin1 that is very strange, as it is not found in anything else that exists under the sphere of the moon, namely intellectual apprehension. In the exercise of this, no sense, no part of the body ... [is] used; and therefore this apprehension was likened unto the apprehension of the deity ... although in reality it is not like the latter apprehension.... It was because of this something, I mean because of this divine intellect conjoined with man that it is said of the latter that he was "in the image of God and after his likeness." 17 In Giva)at ha-Moreh, Maimon explicates this Aristotelian schema in terms of his own post-IZantian doctrine of the continuum between the finite and infinite intellects. He writes that "the finite intellect and infinite intellect are thus of the same kind, they differ only in degree." 18

Gerlnan Idealisn1 in a Maimonidean I(ey Elsewhere, in unpacking a cryptic hint of Maimonides about Jacob's ladder, Main10n remarks that the phrase "the Lord stood above it" (Genesis 28: 13) means that the necessary end of finite reason is to shed its finitude and form a concept of universal, infinite reason.l 9 The issue ofnoetic perfection is the principal unifying theme of Maimon's comments on the Guide, but his most extel1sive discussion is in his commentary to Maimonides' discussion of the triple identity of the knower, knowledge, and the lG10wn in Guide 1:68. The importance of these passages has been noted in most discussions of Giva)at ha-Moreh, although the extent to which they are both the culmination of more than twenty years of close study of the Guide and its commentators and the true source of Maimon's idiosyncratic idealism is less often registered. 20 In these passages Main10n reads the noetic doctrine of the Guide through IZantian lenses and vice versa. Thus, in the midst ofa long commentary on "the dictum of the philosophers ... that He is the intellect as well as the intellectually cognizing subject and the intellectually cognized object," MaiiTIOn describes the faculty of understanding and its concepts: These forms of similarity [and difference] define the understanding and distinguish it from everything else. It follows from this that the intelligibles, that is the forn1s just mentioned, are the understanding itself. Similarly, the intellect, that is the cause which produces these forins is the understanding, for the entire force of its operation is the understanding itself. 21 Maimon underlines this point repeatedly. A few pages later he writes: The infinite understanding, praised be He, produces with the help of the forms of understanding the objects [of its knowledge] themselves, which are the intelligibles. 22 This reframing of the medieval "dictum of the philosophers" in terms of IZantian faculty psychology comes in the midst of a reiterated challenge to IZant's application of the concepts of understanding, in particular, that of causality. Maimon argues that even if IZant can prove that the causal principle (i.e., "every event has a cause which precedes it")23 is a necessary rule of the understanding, which all coherent experience must presuppose, he cannot provide a criterion that will apply

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it to just the right cases. 24 In short, our concepts will remain empty and our intuitions blind so long as IZant maintains that they are entirely heterogeneous. Maimon's proposed answer is, ofcourse, that concepts and intuitions actually are homogeneous, although they may not appear so to us. He posits a continuum between sensible intuition and pure concepts that mirrors the continuum between the finite and infinite minds. Space and time are not the nonconceptual forms through which we intuit the world, but rather the basic conceptual conditions for distinguishing objects. Thus IZant's distinctions between the faculties of sense and understanding are brought in house, as it were. In his comments to the following chapter of the Guide, MailTIOn explicitly develops the monist implications of this line of thought. In response to Maimonides' assertion that "God is the efficient, final and forn1al cause" of the world, Maimon adds: One ought wonder why the philosophers did not say that God, may He be exalted, is also the material cause. I mean to say, the ultimate subject of everything which is not a predicate of anything else. And in this He, may He be exalted, He will be the ultimate cause of all the causes mentioned. For if we assume that God is the efficient, formal and final cause but not the material cause as well, we would have to assume the existence of prilTIordial matter which has no cause. However this would contradict the notion of God, may He be exalted, that is, the universal cause of everything that is. But the truth is that God is indeed the ultimate cause in every respect. 25

This comn1ent appears to be a direct descendant of the more reticent pantheistic comment on this subject in the Hesheq Shelomo, discussed in Chapter 2 (although as Maimon remarked with regard to Spinoza's philosophy, it might be better to call such a position "acosmic," because the doctrine is that the world is God). It also develops a radical suggestion in Moses Narboni's commentary to this chapter of the Guide, thus justifying Euchel's faith in Maimon's ability to draw out the full implications of the radical Maimonidean position. Narboni remarks that if God is the form of the world as well as its efficient cause, He must be "with" the world in an especially intimate way.

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A decade earlier, Maimon had seemed to hint (echoing Dov Baer, perhaps) that the Upward Way of devequt with the divine intellect was conceivable precisely because God was the immanent material of the world as well as its transcendent maker. Similarly, in his revision ofIZant, Maimon now suggests that the gap between the finite and infinite intellects can be closed by seeing that they form a continuum that is all imn1anent within a si11gle universal substance. This allows the further realization that sensible intuition need not be seen as a distinct and passive mental matter given from without that awaits formation by the internal concepts ofunderstanding. Rather, it lies on a continuum with the pure concepts ofunderstanding. In the discussion that follows his radical revision of Maimonides' description of God, Maimon develops the implications of his Idealist acosmisn1. Strikingly, he does not do so in terms of the philosophy of Spinoza, whose discussion of the way in which we understand God (or Nature) through singular things and the way i11 which the infinite substance of the deity understands itself through this limited understanding, in Book V of The Ethics, seems particularly apposite. Nor does he do so in reference to anyone ofthe other named "coalition" partners ofhis philosophy but rather in terms of the work of Giordano Bruno. In doing so, Maimon applies Bruno's tern1 for the immanent intellect of the universe, the "World Soul" (ruah ha-olam; Weltseele), as an equivalent of his own infinite intellect, a term that he often returned to in later writings. 26 The reasons for this choice of philosophers, however, would appear to be more tactical than substantive. In the Giva)at ha-Moreh, Maimon had ren1ained anonymous, in part so as not to offend traditionalist readers who might be brought from obscure ideas to philosophically exact notions more easily if they did not know who was bringing them there. A positive discussion of Spinoza would undermine this aim at least as much as Maimon plltting his less infamous name to the work. Bruno was, in this regard, a witty substitute: an early modern Christian heretic of whom Jewish readers could be presumed to be entirely ignorant. Moreover, Bruno's profile as the flamboyant "knight errant" of philosophy, who was condemned by a dazzling array of religious authorities

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before being finally burned at the stake, Inade hin1 a figure whose philosophical and social accolnplishlnents Mailnon cOll1d adlnire. 27 Maimon's work on I(ant was remarkable in at least three ways. He was an10ng the first to understand I(ant's Transcendental Idealisn1 as a genuine answer to Hume's skepticism, which showed that en1pirical experience was incoherent without the organizing capacity ofconcepts such as causality. But he was also the first to show that the Humean skeptical challenge could be replicated within Transcendental Idealism, through close attention to the tensions within I(ant's discursive picture ofhuman reason. To return to I(ant's forn1ula, thoughts and sensible intuitions Inight need each other to keep froll1 being empty and blil1d, but that does not guarantee that concepts such as causality legitimately and actually do apply to our manifold ofintuition. Like the intellect and matter of medieval Aristotelians, they are too heterogeneous. This leads us to the third way in which Maimon's work was remarkable: His solution was a return to the philosophical framework ofMaimonides and some of his more radical Hebrew commentators. Maimon's proposed answer was a version of their medieval cosmology, which sllggested that there is no "homogeneity problem," because intuitions and concepts are of a piece. The sensible matter of intuitions can be brought into the conceptual realm because, although it is far removed from concepts, it is not different in kind. It is, no doubt, difficult for us to see this, but it is clear to the infinite intellect in which intllitions are ideas and ideas are intuitions. Our desire to know is a striving toward this state of clarity. I have repeatedly referred to this picture as Maimon's "proposed solution" and can 110 longer avoid the question OfjllSt how seriously he intended the proposal. IfMaimon's infinite intellect is, like I(ant's, merely a regulative idea, as he seemed to sllggest when he spoke ofits assumption "at least as an idea," then its reality is at best problematic. But then how is his proposal an improvement on I(ant's regulative use of the intuitive intellect, or intellectus archetypus? It would seem that only the real existence of an infinite intellect or World Soul could guarantee that cognition is actually a striving toward something and that the confused ideas ofsensation are on a continuum with the distinct ideas ofthe pure concepts. Maimon would seem to need a real metaphysical entity to play

German Idealism in a Main10nidean IZey

son1ething like the cognitive role that the active intellect played in the attainment ofintellectual perfection in the medieval Aristotelian system with which Mainlon began his philosophical career. But it is no more clear whether he believed in the "infinite intellect," or "World Soul," in the 1790S than it is that he believed in the active intellect in the 1770S. What, in short, was MailTIOn doing in proposing this solution to the antinomy he had uncovered in I(ant's systemr This is a crux ofMaimon scholarship, and the son1etimes indistinct or fraglTIentary and exegetical nature ofhis writings does not seem to allow for a clear, defillitive answer. Beiser, for instance, suggests that Maimon moved froIn an early constitutive view of the infinite intellect to a later regulative one, but the chronology is, llnfortunately, not so clear. The regulative remark quoted earlier ("at least as an idea") is from Mainl0n's first German work, the Transcendentalphilosophie, and the more constitlltive qllotes from the Giva)at ha-Moreh are, apparently, later. 28 On the other hand, in another comment in Giva)at ha-Moreh, Maimon specifically indicates that the idea of God is regulative and its reality problematic (mesupaq).29 Friedrich I(untze tll0ught that Maimon's final position was skeptical, whereas Samuel Atlas, as is clear from his title, argues that Maimon progressed from skepticism to full-fledged "Speculative Idealism," as does Bergman. 30 Ernst Cassirer seems to have thought that Maimon had anticipated the insights of neo- I(antiallism in arriving at a position that avoided the pitfalls of both, by internalizing the given and eliminating the thing-in-itself as anything but all endless cognitive task. Most recently, Jan Bransen has argued that Maimon uncovered the fundamental antinomy ofhuman knowledge, which is always both a passive finding alld an active making. 31 My own position is closest to Bransen's, but before turnillg to my reasons for this (still tentative) interpretation, it will be useful to examine Maimon's descriptions of the finite and active intellects and their relations more closely. One of the keys to Maimon's thought seems to be his repeated insistence that the finite human intellect is, somehow, a restriction or limited expression of the infinite intellect. As I suggested earlier, one way to ITIotivate this extraordinary thought might have been through a close reading of Book V of The Ethics, in particular Spinoza's doctrine of the "third kind" of knowledge. Unfortunately, Maimon never did

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this; however, in his autobiography he does describe a striking conversation he had with Marcus Herz on the topic. The scene is MailTIon's .attempt to explain Spinoza's philosophy to Marcus Herz when he was still a "raw" Polish Jew and the great controversy over Lessing's alleged PantheislTI was just over the horizon. A few examples will give an idea of the way in which I conducted a discussion at the tin1e, of the ellipses in my diction arising from Iny deficiency of expression, and of the way in which I illustrated everything by examples. I tried once to make Spinoza's system intelligible-to show that all things are merely accidents of a single substance. My friend interrupted Ine and said, "but n1Y God! Aren't you and I different men and do we not each possess an existence of our own?" "Close the shutters! " I called in reply to his objection. This strange expression astonished him. He did not know what I meant. Finally, I explained Inyself. "See," I said, "the sun shines through the windows. The square window gives you a square reflection and the round window gives you a round reflection. Are they on that account different things and not one and the same sunshine?" 32

The passage both provides a vivid metaphor for Maimon's interpretation of the idea that finite hllman beings and their thoughts are at the same time limitations of the infinite divine thought, which both produces them and thinks through them. It also shows the way in which he both hinted at and deliberately obscured his medieval intellectual inheritance. As with other autobiographical accounts of Maimon's encounters with the Berlin Jewish elite, we are plainly meant to marvel at the native wit and philosophical acun1en that underlie the linguistic and social awkwardness ofthis philosophical bumpkin from the "woods ofLithllania." However, it is worth noting that here, as elsewhere, Maimon may actually be alluding to a n1edieval Jewish philosophical text in the radical Averroist tradition. In Moses Narboni's Hebrew translation and con1mentary to Averroes's Epistle on the Possibility of Conjunction with the Active Intellect, Narboni quotes a pseudo-Platonic source that is very close to Maimon's example: "as Plato said 'the soul resembles the sunlight which passes through a variety of windows.'" 33 Maimon almost inevitably "thought his way into a system" by thinking it back into the categories of the medieval tradition of radical Aristotelianism, which

German Idealism in a Maimonidean I(ey

included Mainl0nides, Averroes, and Narboni, an inheritance that to sonle extent Spinoza, in fact, shared. 34 As we have already seen, mathematics provided another rich set of metaphors for the picture that MaimOl1 attempted to draw. The influence on IZant of the exact sciences, al1d the mathematically determinate picture that they gave of the physical world, is well known. 35 What was perhaps more influential for Maimon was precisely the imprecision of calculus, or rather its infinitely determinable precision. Our noetic striving toward the perfect knowledge of the infinite il1tellect is like the endless aSYlTIptotic progression ofa curve toward its limit. 36 We can, to take another favorite mathematical example of Maimon's, represent an infinite series only imaginatively as a complete object, or add to it item by item, but the infinite intellect presents it whole. The finite hunlan intellect seems to oscillate between this llnjustifiable imaginative leap and the endless task of adding a further itelTI to an infinite series. Such descriptions and metaphors make Mairnon's doctrine more vivid, but it is still llnclear whether he is positing a metaphysical entity, like Spinoza's "God or Nature," or a methodological notion, like the neoIZantian idea of the thing-ill-itself as an infinite task. Two further doctrines round out Maimon's picture, although they do not necessarily clarify it. The first is his doctrine of differentials, which was also suggested by advances in mathematics, and the second is his "Principle of Determinability" (Grundsatz der Bestimmbarkeit). Both of these doctrines are extraordinarily obscure, and I know of no interpretation that fully clarifies them. In discussing tllem here, I will nlerely try to sketch their function in Maimon's proposed system and their connection to the medieval noetic philosophy that was Maimon's tOllchstone. The differentials are Maimoll's attempt to spell out what it would mean to say that the data of the senses and the ideas of the understanding are on a continuum. The notion arises from IZant's discussion ofthe intensive magnitudes of sensation. 37 The intensive magnitude is simply the degree to which our senses are affected by their stimrLli, measllred on a scale from zero to infinity. Zero is fornl without matter, and infinity is matter without form. Maimon's innovation is to suggest that a given magnitude of sensation is infinitely complex alld, as such, subject to an

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analysis in which the faculty ofunderstanding expresses the abstract rule by which the sensation was generated. ThlIs the boundary between sensation and concept, the form and n1atter of the mind, is expressed by a differential equation of the form dx: dy == a: b, meaning that a differs with respect to b as x does to y. 38 Sensibility is inescapable for our finite minds, so we can, so to speak, only run the eqlIations one way; we can approach the pure concepts only through sensation, but an infinite intellect for whom all such equations are resolved would be able to produce the experience through the plIre rules of understanding without recourse to the given. The details ofthis doctrine are dark, but the philosophical n10tivation should be clear. 39 The differentials are a mechanism to build a kind ofpsychological bridge between the llniversais ofunderstanding and the particulars ofsensation, or to pave a road toward intellectual perfection. Nonetheless, a defender ofI(ant might point out that Maimon's theory seems to posit a process jllSt as "concealed in the depths ofthe hun1an soul" as that which I(ant proposed iI1 order to solve the problem. Maimon's Principle of Determinability attempts to COI1struct the saIne bridge at the level of speculative logic. This logic is not purely forInal but transcendental, or content sensitive. To use an example of Maimon's, the principle wOlIld distinguish between the descriptions "straight line," in which the predicate n10difies the subject and is dependeI1t on it, and "sweet line," in which the predicate can find no ground in its subject. 4o On Maimon's account, a properly constructed judgn1ent always resolves into components and expresses this kind of one-way dependence: A line is conceivable whether it is straight or not, but we cannot have the predicate of straightness without the line. Anything else is simply arbitrary, such as "sweet line," or ultimately analytic, SllCh as a == a. One of the sources for this doctrine is obviously Spinoza's distinction between a substance, which is "that whose knowledge does not require the knowledge of any other thing," and a mode that is conceived through a substance. 41 As in Spinoza, ,ve seem to have a genusspecies classificatory scheme in wl1ich every particll1ar is subsumed under a hierarchy of universals at the top ofwhich is God, or substance or Maimon's infinite intellect. 42 This scheme is both the scaffolding that

German Idealisn1 in a Main10nidean I(ey

llnderlies correct hun1an judgments and the nature of the knowledge that an infinite intellect would have. 43 Main10n's doctrines try to show a way out ofIZant's dualisn1 ofsensibility and understanding by positing a U11ity within mind and nature. In doing so, they were also part of Maimon's long-standing attempts to puzzle out the connection between the 11ulnan and divine intellects. Nonetheless, this still does not a11swer our question ofwhether Maimon held the intuitive intellect to be a metaphysical reality (in which case he would seem required to prove it) or a regulative concept (in which case, if a true synthesis and knowledge are never achieved, how does it help?). To use the Neoplatonic terms of the previous c11apter, is it n1eaningful to have an Upward Way of differentials if the Principle of Detern1inability does not map a true Downward Way? Further skeptical and dogmatic quotations could be easily adduced, but this would not solve the metaphysical alnbivalence that runs throughout Maimon's published work. Although I would not claim that Maimon is thoroughly consistent, it seems to n1e that there is, in general, a point to his apparent self-contradiction. It is tempting to suggest that Maimon might be engaging in a latter-day version of the philosophical esotericism that he learned from Maimonides here. It is certainly true that he was acutely aware of t11e possibilities of multiple levels of meaning in philosophical writing. He seems to have been the first to recognize that Spinoza's phrase "Theologia Politica" ought to be retroactively applied to Maimonides' Guide, and he regarded Leibniz as 11aving prodllced a brilliant but finally superfluous version ofSpinoza's system. 44 Finally, as I noted earlier, his own anonymity as the author of GivaJat ha-Moreh and his mobilization of Giordano Bruno to propound his metaphysical acosmism are esoteric tactics. However, even in GivaJatha-Moreh, this seems to be more in the nature of literary gamesmanship than a carefully crafted esoteric policy. Indeed, his own choice ofclassical commentaries to accompany his own was precisely that of the frankly "wicked" Averroist son of Guide scholarship who publicly unpacked its secrets. Moreover, he criticized both Leibniz and Mendelssohn for refusing to confront Spinoza's philosophy directly. In fact, I know ofonly two instances in which Maimon thanked God in print, and both times it was for the same thing: "that in these

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times we have no need for esotericism (thank God)." 45 He seems to have considered nl0dern philosophy as an advance on medieval philosophy chiefly in the fact that it had no need for esotericism. What, then, was the purpose ofMaimon's ambivalent presentation? I would suggest that it was precisely to display the ilnpasse at which IZant's critical philosophy leaves off. A kind of triple movement can be discerned amid the welter of Maimon's philosopllical argllments, inlages, and glosses. First, there is his skeptical attack on IZant's Transcendental Idealism. Mailnon dramatizes this conflict with a playful bit of biblical exegesis: Critical philosophy and skeptical philosophy, stand in the same relationship to each other as the first man and the serpent: He will bruise you upon the head (which 11leans that the critical philosopher will always disturb the skeptic with the demand for the necessary and universally valid principles required for scientific knowledge), but you the serpent 1vill bite the heel ofthe man (that is to say the skeptic will always annoy the critical philosopher with the assertion that his necessary and universally valid principles have no reality, quid facti).46 In the next stage ofMaimon's philosophy, he moves beyolld this ilnpasse to sketch an alternative idealism that draws, especially, on Maimonides, Narboni, Spinoza, and others and anticipates that ofsuch later figures as Fichte and Hegel in mapping an escape fronl the finitude of the IZantian subject. Finally, there is the recognition that such an escape is at best "problelnatic," although no less problematic than the impossible finitude in which the IZantian subject is trapped, unable to penetrate the thing-in-itself or even match its sensible intuitions to its concepts. Maimon llnderstood that his own proposed solution would work but only at the price of making Adam into a god, or, alternatively, of positing a striving toward that state, which would be a successful solution only to the extent that it was fulfilled, per impossible. One way to see the extent to which Maimon remained in the debt of nl_edieval Aristotelianism for this theory, even as he anticipated the Absolute Idealism ofFichte, Schelling, and Hegel, is to focus on the implications of his epistemological and metaphysical views for his ethical

Gennan IdealislTI in a Mailnonidean I(ey

theory. Despite the overwheln1ing contelnporary influence of IZant, Maimon's ethics was thoroughly Aristotelian in the intellectualist tradition of Maimonides and Averroistic commentators such as Narboni throughout his career. 47 Thus, in his last 111ajor philosophical work, I(ritische Untersuchungen iiber den menschlichen Geist (1797), Maimon argues that, at best, IZant's categorical in1perative is only the formal cause of morality, but its final cause lnust be that state of eudaen10nic bliss that attends theoretical knowledge, and its efficient one is the desire to attain that state. 48 Maimon explicitly distinguishes this state from mere creaturely happiness and emphasizes that it is characterized by perfection (Vollkomenheit) in lG10wledge and fulfills the human telos. 49 Morality is not a distinct sphere ofpractical knovvledge, for the only truths are philosophical or sciel1tific, and ethical action is just action in conformity with truth. To the extent that morality does not follow from such knowledge, it is just obedience to rules. Thus, where IZant and n1any of his Sllccessors saw in practical knowledge a key area in which n1an might transcend his finitude, Maimon saw only convention. This is a doctrine that Maimon also explained in his commentary to Maimol1ides' discussion of moral knowledge of good and evil as expressing social or conventional rules (mefursamot) as opposed to theoretical truths: I(now that the true good is the attainlnent of perfection [qinyan hashelemut], that is to say the passing from the potential to the actual. And [true] evil is just the opposite ... and that is good and evil with regard to itself [as opposed to with regard to society]. 50 Finally, when Maimon discusses the possibility of actually attaining the perfect knowledge that we desire, he acknowledges that it would entail losing one's individual identity in the knowledge of, and participation in, the greater whole. 51 This picture should be familiar, because it is, in fact, an aln10st direct translation of the medieval Aristotelian scheme of conjunction with the active intellect that he described as the doctrine of "all philosophers" in his Hesheq Shelomo. Nonetheless, Maimon again seems to adopt this Aristotelian system only on a problematic basis. In his last published essay, "Der Mor~'ilis­ cher Skeptiker," he describes the possibility of a fully articulated posi-

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tive ethical system as a so far unrealized and perhaps in1possible goal. The IZantian moral philosopher and the moral skeptic are, in the end, both like Moses as he gazed at the pron1ised land that he could not enter: "I have caused you to see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there" (Deuteronomy 34:4).52 The comparison of IZant to Moses, as another stern lawgiver, was not original to Main10n, although biblical verses came to his lips with particular ease. 53 The cOlnparison was apt at the level of metaphysics and epistemology as well. IZant had led philosophy out of its doglnatic bondage, but only so far. It was unclear to his readers, and perhaps to IZant at times as well, whether the critical systen1 was all the Inetaphysics it was possible to have or whether it was really a prolegomenon to some future system, which would answer questions it could not without violating its strictures. Moreover, although Maimon was early among those who had both entered into the spirit of the system and wanted to improve on it, he was not alone. A whole generation of philosophical work, culminating in that of Hegel, was ain1ed at fulfilling the task of Joshua and bringing philosophy to the promised land ofa post-IZantian idealism. Each ofthe key figures in this history- Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and perhaps even the late IZant of the third Critique as well-followed Maimon in identifying the stumbling block of the critical philosophy as its irremediable dualism and sought to solve it through a development of the idea of an intuitive intellect. IZant hin1self, who was impressed with Maimon's Transcendentalphilosophie at precisely the n10ment he was finishing his Critique ofJudgment, suggested in that work that in our cognition of the "unconditioned necessity" and purposiveness of nature, we approach the activity ofintellectual intuition. 54 Schelling is often taken to be the first German Idealist to have argued that, as he wrote in r800, "intellectual intuition is the organ of all transcendental thinking." 55 Although it is clear that Schelling read Maimon, his emphasis on the role of intellectual intuition stemmed from his reading of IZant's third Critique. Maimon's direct influence on Schelling seems to have been minimal; nonetheless, it is important to note that Maimon had both diagnosed IZant's dualist problem and

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offered (albeit ambivalently) a prescription tl~at crucially involved some sort ofhun~an connection to intellectual intuition before IZant had even finished vvriting his Critique ofJudgment. 56 Of course, it remains unclear whether this was a good idea, regardless of who thought of it first, or whether it betrayed the fundan1ental tenets of Transcendental Idealism-killing the patient, as it were, in an attempt to save him. 57 Maimon's iI1fluence on Johann Gottlob Fichte, who along with Schelling, was the great historical intermediary between IZant and Hegel, is much more clear. Fic11te acknowledged Maimon's influence on more than one occasion. In a perhaps deliberately provocative letter to Maimon's bitter philosophical rival, IZarl Leonhard Reinhold, he wrote: My respect for Main10n's talents knows no bounds. I firmly believe that he has completely overturned the entire IZantian philosophy as it has been understood by everyone until now, including you. No one noticed what he had done; they looked down at him froin their heights. I believe that future centuries will mock us bitterly. 58 Academic politics aside, it is clear that Fichte was influenced both by Main~on's skeptical attack on 1Zant's philosophy and by the key elements of his proposed solution, the idea of an infinite or intuitive intellect and the necessity or task of the finite human intellect to strive toward that infinite condition. The principal difference between Maimon and Fichte, indeed the entire later tradition ofAbsolute Idealism, is that Maimon sees mathematics as the paradigm of human knowledge that is closest to the unconstrained spontaneity of an active intellect, whereas Fichte sees it in precisely the moral realm that Maimon deprecated. 59 What is as unclear in Fichte, as it is in Maimon, is whether Maimon is really propounding the extravagant doctrine that the thingin-itself, what is given, is somehow the unconscious product of the spontaneous activity of the finite, human self. 60 The relation between Hegel and Maimon is less direct. I know of no overt references to Maimon in Hegel's corpus. S. H. Bergman has pointed to a passage in Hegel's Logic, in which he defends Spinoza's philosophy as acosmism rather than pantheism, and claims that Maimon was the first to make this distinction. 61 This Inay be, but even so, it is not clear that Hegel took the distinctio11 directly from Maimon. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

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More significant is the extent to which Maimon's diagnosis and rejection of IZant's dualisln, his recuperation of Spinoza to revise IZant, the substantive logic of his Principle of Determinability, and his talk of the infinite intellect as a World Soul, all foreshadow important t11emes in Hegel's philosophy. More speculatively, I think that the centrality of the drive for intellectual perfection, Vollkolnenheit or shelemut hanefesh, in Maimon's philosop11Y is suggestive of Hegel's later use of Bildung. One notices, in particular, the way in which in several texts Maimon pairs the intellectual perfection of t11e i11dividual with a sketch of the history ofphilosophy. 62 Here, I an1 Sllre there was no il1flllence, but there n1ay have been an interesting prelnonition on Maimon's part of a radically different way for the finite and infinite intellects to make cOl1tact, via the medium of history. A Inajor difference between MaimOl1 and Hegel is the diffidence, or ambivalence, with which Maimon proposed his form(s) of Absolute Idealisn1. Nathan Rotenstreich made this POil1t vividly: Maimon forn1ulated the progralTI of nineteenth century idealism fully aware that the program could not be carried out. Nineteenth century idealism ll1ay be described as a philosophical ll10vement which endeavors, or dares, to undertake the execution of Maimon's program. Idealism tries to abolish the sceptical boundary set by MailTIOn; it attelTIpts to abolish the difference between finite consciousness and infinite-divine consciousness. 63 It is possible, even likely, that Hegel read Maimon, even ifhe was not deeply influenced by his writings as Fichte had been. It is clear, however, that for the next halfcentury Maimon's German philosophical work was rarely read or discussed and had little impact. Indeed, significantly, the only philosophical work of Maimon's to be .reprinted in the century after his death (insofar as the Lebensgeschichte cannot be considered a philosophical book) was his Hebrew commentary to the Guide of the Perplexed, GivaJat ha-Moreh, which served as an introduction to the theories and terms of modern philosophy for several generations of Hebrew readers and which was reprinted three times. 64 This neglect of Maimon's German philosophical writings continued until the middle of the nineteenth century, when he was "rediscovered" as one of the

German Idealism in a Main10nidean I(ey founders of German Idealism by the historian of philosophy, Johann Erdmann. 65 Wilhelm Diltheywas one ofthe first to state clearlyw11at has become close to the standard account of Main10n's importance in the early developlnent of German Idealisln: Solomon Maimon deserves to be accorded the great distinction of having introduced in justification of the IZantian interpretation, the following principle that was later adopted by Fichte. The reason that sensation arises in us as a given is that it is not produced in us as a completely conscious process. Thus the "given" is only that whose cause and origin are unknown to us. The given for the conscious activities of the faculty of cognition COlnes as it were from without; they simply find it as having arisen outside of them, as something that cannot be resolved in them.... A thing-in-itself outside of consciousness would be a non-entity, nonsense, a no-thing. 66 This, together with the neo-IZantian movement's call to go "back to IZant" initiated a small revival ofinterest in Maimon, who, after all, read IZant very closely if not, perhaps, loyally.67 His idea of the finite human intellect as striving toward the infinite intellect as a kind of endless task was congenial to the neo-IZantian version of Idealism, as was his emphasis on mathematics as the paradign1 of knowledge. Maimon's thought has clear affinities to that ofthe Marburg School and Hermann Cohen, who even propounded a silnilar theory of differentials. 68 Bllt Maimon's influence on Cohen is a vexed issue, because Cohen himself vigorously denied any such i11fluence. My own hypothesis is that this denial had more to do with Maimon's disreputable nature as a heretic together wit11 his very un-Germanic character, which were likely to have offended the great champion of Deutschtum und judentum, than it had to do with the actual question of philosophical influence. 69 Certainly close students of both Cohen and Maimon have found a great deal of similarity.70 In any event, there has been a more or less small but steady stream of philosophical work on Maimon ever since the neo-IZantian revival, and that work has succeeded in making Maimon's texts available and in clarifying many of their darker aspects. However, even those studies that have acknowledged the u11deniable in1portance of Maimonidean

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philosophy for Maimon have often failed to take the full n1easure of this influence. More important, they have not taken account of the way in which, like Spinoza only more so, MailTIOn was not simply a n10dern European philosopher whose cllrriculluTI was enhanced by certain classical Hebrew works of medieval philosophy. He has to be understood, instead, as a philosopher who worked in two intellectual contexts: that of medieval Jewish philosophy and that of modern German philosophy. This allowed for a unique set of argun1ents and insights, as well as a rather foreign style and genre of philosophical expression. This double aspect of Maimon's thought also allows one to trace the history of a philosophical idea within a single consciousness. In Maimon's writings we can see how the medieval active intellect became the World Soul of German Idealisnl, although the fit, as always with Maimon, was not quite perfect. In th.e next chapter I explore the cultural and psychological effects of the parallel process by which the ideal ofintellectllal perfection, or shelemut ha-nefesh, became (albeit imperfectly) the ideal of Bildung, in Maimon's autobiography. In fact, the tension between these ideals llnderlies much of the humor, pain, and blasphemy that make Maimon's Lebensgeschichte such a fascinating book.

F0 u r

From Shelomo ben Yehoshua to Solomon Maimon "I have left my nation, the land of Iny birth and Iny family in search of the truth." Solon10n MailnOI1, Salo1non Maimons Lebensgeschichte

In 1792, Karl Philipp Moritz introduced Maimon's autobiography as a book that would attract all readers interested in the "way in which the force of thought (Denkraft) can develop itself in a h·uman mind even under the most oppressive ofcirCllmstances" and suggested further that what gives this book particular worth in yet another respect is its nonpartisan and unprejudiced presentation of Judaism, of which one can justifiably lllaintain that it is the first of its kind. It is, then especially at present, when the education [Bildung] and en.lightenment [AufkliirungJ of the Jewish nation has become an object of reflection in its own right, that it deserves attention of the first order. ... One is transported by the author's narrative into the area alllong the people where chance let him be born and reason let his spirit ripen to a level of education that found no nourishment on this soil, and therefore had to seek under foreign skies what had now become a necessity for that education. 1 Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte was, indeed, both a book in which Maimon described his own struggle for enlightenment a11d one that presented a striking picture of Jewish religion and culture at a crucial moment in the political process of Jewish emancipation. Although it was hardly a "nonpartisan and unprejlldiced" (unparteiische und vorurteilsfreie) presentation ofJudaism, or ofanything else, it was an autobiography that, like Rousseau's Confessions, clainled above all else to be candid. Moritz was perceptive in recognizing that the unifying theme of Maimon's Lebensgeschichte was "the desire for knowledge," although he does not tell the reader (and perhaps did not himself understand) that

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this was a central concept for Maimon, with a long and complicated philosophical genealogy, as well as a socially resonant personal an1bition. The Jewish desire for secular knowledge, and the growing possibility ofits satisfaction, was peculiarly relevant at this mon1ent in the German Enlightenment when the question of the "education and enlightenment of the Jewish nation" as a whole was indeed "an object of reflection." The word that I have translated as "education" is Bildung, which also has the sense of cultivation or self-formation. In late eighteenthcentury Gerlnan discussions, the term Bildung came to express a constellation of cultural ideals that underlay the forn1ation of both modern German and German-Jewish identity. Although the exact contours of the concept varied, depending on the writer, a certain set of attributes to which the educated Burgher ought to aspire did emerge. These included a clear command ofnascent modern German and its literature, a modicum ofclassical learning, and adherence to a certain set ofaesthetic and moral judgments, together with a kind of enlightened sociability and a respectable profession. 2 A "raw" Polish Jew such as Maimon, to use Herz's description, was, in language, manners, and dress, among those who were often counted as paradigms of Unbildung-a prejudice that Maimon's autobiography tended to confirm as well as belie. 3 As I argued in Chapter I, Maimon's autobiography takes on two tasks that were not previously attempted in Jewish literary history and that were rare in European literary history before the eighteenth century.4 The first task is the attempt, to use George Gusdorf's formulation, to "reconstruct the unity of a life across time." 5 Maimon approaches his life with the autobiographical conviction that there is a thematic and not merely chronological unity to be found in his experiences. This is, to cite another influential theorist of the genre, "the secret project of all auto,.. biography, the discovery of the order of a life." 6 This idea that a life can be grasped (despite the author's being in the midst of it) in something approximating its essential wholeness turns on the idea of the subject possessing a unique and private individuality. In discovering this individuality' the alltobiographer justifies his, or her, life? The second task Maimon undertakes in his Lebensgeschichte is to present that individllality to an anonymous reading public. The two tasks are not unrelated. One justifies one's self to someone, and notions of privacy and publicity

From Shelomo ben Yehoshua to SOlOlTIOn MailTIOn

necessarily come into being together. 111 the case of the modern European sense ofprivacy, Jiirgen Habermas has persuasively argued that the Enlightenn1ent cultivation ofa private and unique individuality was "always already oriented towards a public." 8 The presentation of a private selfwould seem to have reqllired a public reception. Maimon was, of course, inspired by Rousseau's Confessions, which had been published more than a decade earlier. The Lebensgeschichte includes several allusions to Rousseau and the Confessions. A youthful crime is referred to as "a theft a la Rousseau," Main10n is deliberately unapologetic in his depiction of his abandonment of his young wife and family, and an aCCOllnt ofMain10nides' allegorical reading of the expulsion from Eden is described as "al1tirousseauische" in its failure to depict Adam as a noble savage. Nonetheless, such allusions are very much at the surface of the work, and Maimon, who was above all cerebral, is, in many ways, a poor match for the author who wrote that the cause of all his misfortunes was his "sensitive heart." He was more directly influenced by 1(arl Philipp Moritz's autobiographical novel Anton Reiser, which described Moritz's rise from ascetic pietism to enlightenment. Neither the Confessions nor Anton Reiser, however, exhibits the key feature of Maimon's autobiography, which is that it is a presentation of both himself and the culture from which he had become alienated. Indeed, it is precisely in this alienation from "my nation, the land of my birth and my fan1ily in search of the truth" that Maimon finds his identity. The first chapters ofMaimon's autobiography were published in 1792 in Moritz's journal, the Gnothi Sauton oder Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde. The "Fragmente aus Ben Josuas Lebensgeschichte," which began with a sociological sketch of the place ofJews in Poland al1d continued with episodes from Maimon's childhood, provided an account of the life and struggle for enlightenment of a Polish Jew, at a moment of intense public debate over the question of Jewish emancipation and at a time, moreover, when Poland (and hence its Jewish population) was undergoing partition by the German states and Russia. In the late 1780s and early 1790S, the terms in which Jewish emancipation was discussed in the German states had chal1ged. The enlightened brief for Jewish rights, which had begun with Christian Wilhelm

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von Dohm's famous argument that the sin1ple removal ofthe disabilities under which the Jews suffered wOll1d ilnprove their adlnittedly degraded n10ral and social character, had evolved into an argllment in wl1ich the terms of the excha11ge had been reversed. 9 Jewish advocates of enlighten111ent and emancipation, such as David Friedlander and Lazarus Ben.. david, argued that Jews ought first relinquish the "Jewish characteristics" and invidious dogma that divided what Friedlander called (in a term borrowed from Mendelssohn) the "Jewish colonies" from the rest of society, before civil elnancipation could take place. lo In such argu111ents, the unenlightened Polish Jew began to figure as the epitome of that which German Jewry had to overcome in order to enter modern society.11 In short, they had to be worthy ofentrance into tl1e enlightened ranks of the Bildungsbiirgertum. Maimon's "fragn1ents" of "Ben Josua's life history" entered into this debate by placing an engaging hun1an narrative of such a Jew and his strivings for enlightenment next to the polemics and abstract analyses of what would later be called the "Jewish question." This portrait was, however, crucially ambivalent. Maimon both observed himself through the eyes of Germans and sophisticated Berlin Jews, such as Friedlander and Bendavid (both of whom had been patrons), and subverted this perception through the repeated demonstration of his i11tellectual superiority and even the depths of the tradition that he rejected (and of which they were comparatively ignorant). This ambivalence can even be seen in the formal characteristics of the narrative in the initial fragments, which were published anonymously and written in the third person. Although it was hinted that the author and subject were identical, the "life history of Ben Josua" was not yet framed as the remarkable childhood of a prominent Aufkliirer, but rather of an obscure Jew who, in the somewhat comical darkness of Poland, had struggled for enlightenment. 12 The form in which these first chapters were first published is worth dwelling on for a moment. Although I have characterized them as anonymous, this is not quite true. "Ben Josua" was, after all, Maimon's patronymic, the name with which he was born and the name that he used throughout his life in Hebrew contexts. Nonetheless, "Maimon" was more than the German pseudonym of a Polish Jew; it was an achieved

Froin Sheloino ben Yehoshua to Solomon Main10n (or ahnost achieved) identity within the pllblic sphere of the German Enlightenn1ent. The distance, by turns ironic, ethnographic, and defensive' between the narrator and the subject in these "FragInents," persists even after Main10n has become the first-person voice of his Lebensgeschichte. Maimon's narrative stance continues to oscillate between confession and that ofa kind of beInused participant-observer. There is, perhaps inevitably, a narrative distance that lies between the first-person narrative voice ofthe autobiographer and the subject whose life is described. 13 However, in Maimon's case, this distance also seen1S to be an expression ofwhat W. E. B. DuBois fan10usly diagnosed as the divided psyche of the minority thinker: this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of Ineasuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in an amused contempt and pity.14 In Maimon's case, and perhaps that of other Jews of his time and place, we might also speak of a double alienation, both from the cultllre in which he was raised and the one to which he aspired. It is Maimon's account of these alienations, the ways in which he did and did not achieve Moritz's Aufklarung and Bildung, to which I now turn. Moritz's introduction gave no notice of this crucial an1bigllity. Indeed, it prepares the reader for neither the striking oddness nor the subtleties of the Lebensgeschichte. Both features are on display in Maimon's own preface to the second part of his autobiography, in which he wrote: I am not, indeed, a great man; neither a world philosopher, nor a comedian. I have never in IUy life suffocated a dozen mice with an air pump, nor tortured frogs, nor n1ade anin1als dance with electricity. But what of this? I love the truth and when a matter touches upon the truth, I am not worried about a demon or its Grandmother. That being the case, I have left my nation, the land of my birth and my family in search of the truth.l 5 This passage, with its con1bination ofthe high a11d the low, is characteristic of Maimon. Having previously cited Tere11ce's well-known dictum that "I am a man, nothing human is alien to me" 16 in the original Latin, he now ridicules the worldly philosophy of Enlightenment scientists,

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men such as fellow autobiographer Benjan1in Franldin, who are obsessed with the mastery of n1erely empirical phenomena, and finally asserts his own impartiality before enduring philosophical truth with a crude proverb: "I aln not worried about a demon or its Grandmother" 17-all in a Gerlnan prose style in which Yiddish is never very far from the surface. Main10n's rejection of scientific experin1ents and technological control for a more classical and contemplative ideal ofmetaphysical truth is, as I have shown, central to his philosophy. It is also central to his autobiography. However, what is important for the moment is the hybrid style in which this preference is declared. The allusiveness ofthat style is especially importal1t in the final sentence of the passage. In speaking of leaving his nation, homeland, and family, Maimon deliberately invokes God's call to the patriarch Abraham: "Get you out ofyour land, and your birth place and the house ofyour father" (Genesis 12 : I). Here, Maimon is both translating (as he often is) and secularizing: from the biblical me-artzekha u-me-moladatekha u-mi-beit avikha to the German meine Nation) mein Vaterland) und meine Familie. 18 The allusion, however, is not merely biblical, for it implicitly invokes the Main10nidean figuring of Abraham as the first philosopher, whose alienation from his native culture was a prerequisite for the philosophical attainment ofmonotheism. 19 The irony is that Maimon's story is one ofmovement in the other direction, away from the faith of his forefathers, although, of COllrse, it is not really that simple. Maimon's Lebensgeschichte is alternately confessional, picaresque, ethnographic, and philosophical, but what makes it a distinctively modern autobiography is-to return to our earlier discussion-Maimon'sinsistence on finding the order in his life. Maimon found this unifying narrative of his life, as I have suggested, in his exile from "n1Y nation, the land of my birth and my family" in pursuit of a philosophical ideal. In order to understand Maimon's text, then, we have to understand the nature of that ideal (which was not quite the same as Moritz's Bildung und Aufklarung) , the culture that he left (or at least his representation of that culture), and the relationship between the two. That is to say, Maimon's autobiography is an answer, through hi~~~~~~s~~!"!~t_~l~JY

FrOITI ShelolTIO ben Yehoshua to SOlOITIOn Main10n

of the question of Jewish fitness for Enlighteninent and civil emancipation but also to the more general bllt not unrelated question, What is Enlightenment? Maimon begins his autobiography with a socioeconoinic sketch of his nation and his homeland. "The inhabitants of Poland," he begins, "may be reasonably divided into six classes: the sllperior nobility, the inferior nobility, the half-noble, burgl1ers, peasants and Jews." According to Main10n, only the last two of these classes are eco110Inically useful, namely, the peasants and the Jews, who attend to agriculture and the professions and small business, respectively.20 The Jews of Poland are, Maimon says, afforded free exercise of their religion, but this does not exempt them froin the 1110St barbarous forms ofl1atred (he will later describe a supposed blood libel, directed against his grandfather). The paradoxical nature of this situation is to be explained by the fundamental backwardl1ess of Poland. Maimon writes: The religious and civil liberty [of the Jews in Poland] ... does not have its source in any respect for the universal rights of mankind; while on the other hand the religious hatred and persecution are by no means the result of a wise policy designed to remove what is injurious to morality and the welfare of the state. Both phenomena result from the political ignorance and laziness prevalent in the country. With all their defects the Jews are almost the only useful inhabitants in the country.21 Maimon's insistence on the l111ique "usefulness" of Polish Jewry reflects the tern1S of the debate over Jewish emancipation in both Germany and Poland as well as the economic rivalry that existed between Polish Burghers and Jews. Despite this advocacy, one notes that Maimon implies that a state policy that reformed Jewish religion and character in some unspecified ways would be both "wise" and socially justified. This implication is underlined by his schematic description of the internal Jewish social order, which is, in its way, as irrational as that ofthe greater Polish society in which it is to be foul1d. The Jews, in turn, may be divided into three classes: the unlearned working people, those who make learning their profession, and those who completely devote themselves to learning without any

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Chapter Four remunerative profession, being supported by the working people. To the second class belong the chief rabbis, preachers, judges, schoolteachers and others of silnilar profession. The third class consists of those who, by their pre-eminent abilities and learning attract the regard of the unlearned, are taken by them into their families, married to their daughters and supported for some years with wife and children. Mterwards, however, the wife is obliged to take upon herself the support of the holy idler and the children (who are usually very numerous); and for this, as is natural, she thillks a good deal of herself. 22 This sudden, vivid digression from sociological generalization to embittered autobiography with which this passage ends is not a stylistic aberration. Rather, it prefigures the story Maimon is about to tell, for he was precisely one of those whose intellectual abilities entitled him to the status of"holy idler." 23 Indeed, the casual reference to the wives of such men is an implicit reference to his own wife and their troubled relations, and the parenthetical reference to "numerous" children is as close as Maimon gets to describing the size of his own abandoned fan1ily. Moreover, despite his retrospective class analysis, Maimon never seems to have given up the idea that someone else ought to support his studies, although the identity of the patron and the nature of those studies changed. In his autobiography, Maimon sketches a picture of a brutally irrational socioeconon1ic system enforced by tradition, privilege, and sloth. His real ire, however, is reserved for the textual culture that thrived within this system. This textual culture is also an expression of a kind of despotic irrationality, although a note of pride and even longing is often sounded in Maimon's descriptions. This despotism of the learned and those who have some pretension to it is central, in Maimon's account, to the place of Talmud in traditional Jewish society. Thus the Talmud scholar is not only the matrimonial prize but also the most honored member of the community. Maimon writes: If he enters an assenlbly-be he of any age or rank-everyone rises before him most respectfully and the most honorable place is assigned to him. He is director of conscience, lawgiver and judge of the common man. 24

Fron1 Shelomo ben Yehoshua to Solomon Maimon

It is against the background of such descriptions that Maimon's tales of his enlightenment must be read. Maimon begins his account of his education in the third chapter of his autobiography with a dialogue between himself and his father, over the opening lines of Genesis. In my sixth year my father began to read the Bible with me. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Here I interrupted my father, and asked, "But Papa, who created God?" F: I: F: I: F: I: F:

God was not created by anyone, He existed from all eternity. Did he also exist ten years ago? Oh yes, He even existed one hundred years ago. Then maybe God is already a thousand years old? Silence! God is eternal. But he must have been born some time? No little fool! He was forever and ever and ever.

I was not satisfied with this answer, but I thought, "Papa must know better than I, so I must leave it at that." 25

Maimon immediately follows this little scene ofinstruction with a dense philosophical digression, which quickly leads from a discussion of the relationship between the faculties of llnderstanding and imagination (Einbildungskraft) in childhood to the IZantian critique ofthe category ofa cause, and finally to Maimon's own idealist revision ofIZant in which such notions figure as "fictional" regulative ideas. The discussion is substantively and stylistically characteristic of Maimon in the way it moves both from a biblical verse to epistemological theory and from broad comedy to scholastic precision in a few lines. For the moment what is important is the plausibility of the anecdote,which itself bears a certain air of the fictional, as the Israeli literary critic Pinchas Lahover once noted. 26 Although the problem ofinfinity is often among a child's first philosophical puzzlements, there is a staged sense to this dialogue between the dogmatic father and his inqllisitive S011, which is only increased by the fact that the issue of infinite series was central to Maimon's mature

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philosophical thought. More telli11g is the fact (with which Main10n's German audience would have been unlikely to be fan1iliar) that Jewish boys were traditionally initiated into biblical studies with the divine instruction on ritllal sacrifice, which begins the book of Leviticus, rather than with the act of creation with which Genesis begins. 27 Maimon's narration of his progressive alienation from tradition begins with this dubious dialogue and unfolds in several discrete episodes. In the same chapter, titled "Private Edllcation and Independent Study," Maimon writes of his discovery of both art and science, and the way in which his desire for each was frustrated. From childhood on I had the inclination and skill for drawing. In my father's house, to be sure, I never had the opportunity to see a product of the drafts111an's art, but I did find woodcuts of foliage, birds, and the like on the title pages of Hebrew books. These afforded me great pleasure and I sought to copy them with a bit of chalk or charcoal. What however strengthened this inclination in Ine still more was a Hebrew book of fables, in which the characters-the animals,vere represented in sin1ilar woodcuts. I copied all the figures with the greatest exactness. My father ad111ired my skill but rebuked me at the same time, saying: "Do you wish to become a painter? You 111USt study the Talmud and become a rabbi. Whoever understands the Talmud understands all." 28 We ought to note that Maimon's father's question is presented as rhetorical: There were, perhaps, a few Jewish painters in eighteenth-century Poland who specialized in synagogue interiors, but it was not a profession for the brilliant son of a talmid hakham. 29 This was in accordance with the same set of Halakhic strictures on image making that Inade it obvious that there would be no representative art in his father's house. 30 Moreover, the opposition between the textual world of the Talmud, which contains everything-or at least everything worth knowingand aesthetic enjoyment is a classical rabbinic theme, epitomized by the well-known statement in PirqeiAvot: One who walks on the road while studying and interrupts his studies to remark "how beautiful is this tree," or "how beautiful is this field," is considered by Scripture as one who has forfeited his life. 31

FraIn Shelomo ben Yehoshua to Solomon Mailnon

Such rabbinic interests are, here as elsewhere, crucial to understanding Maimon's Lebensgeschichte. More important here, however, is the way in which Maimon represents himself as having discovered representational art. It is, in the first place, from just the sort of rabbinic books that his father prescribed, but only their most incidental and almost nontextual features, namely the title pages. 32 The "book offables" that Maimon mentions as his second source of inspiration was very likely Mashal ha-Qadmoni, which was a leading instance of a genre of adaptations of midrashim and folktales for children. 33 Such books were held in contelnpt by Talmudic scholars, such as Maimon's father, as trivial diversions from true textual learning. Maimon learns of art, then, from books, but only from their most incidental features, or from books that are themselves at the n1argin of his textual world. Moreover, Maimon does not suggest that he went on from t11is to attempt sketches of the Lithuanian countryside. Indeed, whether Maimon realizes it or not, there is the added irony that he too does not think to move beyond the margins of the text to attempt to represent the world at large. Maimon's description of his discovery of astronomy (if not of stars) continues the epistemological theme. In his study my father had a cupboard filled with books, but he forbade me to read any but the Talmud. But prohibitions were of no avail. ... There was a Hebrew chronicle entitled Zemah David by a sensible chief rabbi in Prague named David Gans, as well as an astronon1ical work by the same author ... who had enjoyed the distinction of acquaintance with Tycho Brahe.... Think of a small child of about seven, situated as I was, with an astronomical work thrown in his way and exciting his interest. I had no notion of the first elements of Inathematics ... nor even if he would have been willing to do so could my father have enlightened me. How must the spirit of a child, thirsting for lmowledge, have been inflamed by such a discovery! 34 The astronomical treatise by R. David Gans was titled Nehmad veNaim. Gans was a sixteenth-century Prague scholar, a student of the famous Maharal of Prague, who had indeed enjoyed a relationship with lycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler and consequently had served as a model of early modern Ashkenazi enlightenment for Maimon and others of his generation. 35

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Chapter Four Maimon goes on to describe, how after a day of studying Taln1ud he would sneak off at night to study Gans's book in secret. Mter several evenings he comes upon a diagralTI of the celestial spheres, about which the author made the sensible advice, that, since the manifold circles could not be represented in a plane figure except by straight lines, he should ... nlake for himself either an ordinary globe or an armillary sphere. 36 Maimon follows this advice, making a rudimentary lTIodel of the solar systen1 from twisted rods and hiding it behind the cupboard. When Maimon's father discovers this model, his n1ain reaction is astonishment that "the figure on the page could possibly represent the sphere he held in his hand." 37 That is to say, Maimon's father, who had apparently acquired this book and hid it becallse of a certain interest with the natural world, still cannot imagine that a book could point to something outside the flat world oftexts. Maimon's discovery ofboth art and scie11cethe empirical world outside the text-were, then, discovered precisely in books. But the relationship to these books would seen1 to be a profoundly ambivalent one. This ambivalence is intensified in the episodes of enlightenment that follow, his first encounters with the German language and with n10dern philosophy. Here, then, is Maimon's well-know11 account of his first adolescent steps toward learning German, his language of Enlightenment: At last a fortunate accident came to my help. I observed in some stout Hebrew volumes that they contained several alphabets, and that the number of their signatures was indicated not Inerely by Hebrew letters, but that for this purpose the characters of a second and third alphabet had also been enlployed, these, being commonly in Latin and German. Now I had not the slightest idea of printing.... I presumed, however, that the characters which stood in corresponding places must represent one and the same letter, and as I had already heard something of the order of the alphabet in these languages, I supposed that, for example, a, standing in the same place as aleph, must likewise be an aleph in sound. In this way I gradually learned the Latin and German characters. By a kind of deciphering German letters into words; but as the characters corresponding to the Hebrew letters

From Shelomo ben Yehoshua to Solomon Maimon might be son1ething quite different I was always in doubt whether the whole of my labor in this operation might be in vain, till fortunately a few pages of an old German book fell into my hand. I began to read. 38 Here, as in the case of his youthful encounter with art, Maimon learns from an encounter with the rabbinic books, but only from their most contingent, nontextual features. In this case the objects of scrutiny are not even intended for the reader; rather, they are printer's marks, placed inconspicuously in the bottom margin, for the assembly of the leaves in the proper order before binding. Indeed, Maimon's reasoning here does not turn on textual interpretation ofany sort but rather on a kind ofempirical hypothesis about the correlation between alphabets. Note, moreover, the way in which his hypotheses are confirmed by "a few pages of an old German book [which] fell into my hand," that is, by a few scraps torn from a book whose actual topic is irrelevant. Finally, let us examine Maimon's account of his first encounter with modern philosophy. This incident takes place after Maimon has finally made his successful entry into Berlin, on his second attempt. By chance I went into a butter shop one day, and found the dealer in the act of anatomizing [anatomieren] a somewhat old book for the use of his trade. I looked and found to Iny astonishment, that it was Wolff's Metaphysics) or the Doctrine of God) of the World) and ofMan)s Soul. I could not understand how in a city as enlightened as Berlin such important works could be treated in so barbarous a fashion. I turned to the dealer and asked if he would not sell the book. He was ready to part from it for two groschen. Without thinking long about it I paid the price at once, and went home delighted with my treasure. 39 Maimon immediately reads the text, feverishly composes a Hebrew commentary in refutation of the book, which contested Wolff's use of the Principle ofSufficient Reason to establish God's existence, and compared the system to the Aristotelian metaphysics of Main10nides. He then sends the manuscript to Mendelssohn, who invites him to visit. Maimon's appearance in Mendelssohn's circle was his first great secular success, his first moment in the sphere of German Enlightenment.

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Maimon's learning of both German and German philosophy continues the ambivalence about texts and textual study that I noted in Maimon's account ofhis discovery ofart and natural science. These are moments ofviolence against a text-moments when the particularity, the physicality, of the text are revealed and instrumentalized. That is, in the case oflearning to read German, knowledge is gotten not froll1 the body of the text but at its margil1s, and not from the words of the author but fron1 the marks of the printer. The linguistic knowledge extrapolated froiTI this is then confirmed by torn scraps ofGerman prose. The second case is, if anything, even more striking. This brutal blItcher of a butter ITIaker is actually "anatomizing" Wolff's philosophical text, dismembering its parts, to lIse them in their grossest material aspect, as wrapping paper. This is an act that, Maimon, will, in a certain sense, repeat in his point-by-point refutation. These events are historically unverifiable, and their veracity is not really the point. Rather, they should be connected to Maimon's account of unenlightened Talmudic culture on the one hand, and the ineradicably exegetical character of his own writing on the other, a characteristic that both Maimon and his contemporaries recognized. When these passages of, and to, Enlightenment are strung together, they amount to a narrative of how Maimon learned science and the liberal arts by persistently removing himself from the body of the text. But not so very far. He n10ves to the margins, title pages, to scraps and remains of books, but he never removes himself from them entirely. He does not, as I noted earlier, sketc11 the countryside, nor does he gaze at the stars themselves or learn German by speaking to traveling merchants. Main1on's account of these merest of "chances" and most "fortunate" of curricular accidents have often been repeated. Thus, to take just one example, Moses Hadas, the editor of the popular abridged English edition of the Autobiography, echoes Maimon himself when he writes: Think of a child learning astronomy by means of an arn1illary sphere that he had himself secretly contrived! Think of learning foreign languages from the printers alphabet on successive signatures of bound Hebrew books! 40

FrOIn Shelomo ben Yehoshua to Solon1on Maimon Such remarks help celebrate Maimon's undollbtable, if, perhaps, exaggerated genius, while ignoring the cll1tural and rhetorical significance of these accounts. It should be noted that in each of these pivotal episodes ofenlightenment a profound an1bivalence about texts and textual knowledge is expressed. Maimon's autobiograp11ical descriptions of enlightenment suggest both a parricidal rage against the textual culture of his fatherland, and, as, perhaps, with all such conflicts, a11 inability to escape them. Here is Maimon's rage at full force: And what can I say regarding the monstrous number of books that concern laws that are no longer practiced.... The pen falls from IllY hand as I recall tll-at I, and many like me, spent our best years, when the faculties are the strongest in this intellectually spirit-deadening business [geistestotenden GeschaftJ, staying up at nights attempting to bring meaning where there was no Illeaning; exercise our wit to discover contradictions were there were none; use our acumen to remove them were they were obviously to be met; grasp at shadows through a long chain of inferences, build castles in the air.41 Main10n's lament that "the pen falls from his hand" should be n1arked. It would seem to be precisely the memory of the spirit-deadening business of Talmudic study that threatens Maimo11's ability to write. In another description of his early life Maimon wrote: My life in Poland, from the tiIlle of my marriage and emigration, a period in which I possessed my fullest strength, was a series of diverse miseries, lack of all that could support my development, and a waste of energy that necessarily followed from it. The quill falls from my hand at its description and I seek to squelch my painful recollection. 42 Jean Starobinski, one of the great critics of the genre, has called attention to phrases such as "the hand that holds the pen" as tokens of the problematic but crucial identification between author and protagonist in autobiography.43 In Maimon's case the men10ry of his cultllral and geographic origins would appear to threaten precisely this identificati011. That is to say, the memory of Poland, his studies, and his young family-the "nation, birthplace and fan1ily" that Maimon had aban-

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doned "in search ofthe truth"-ahnost literally deprive hin1 ofhis identity as an author of Germa11 prose, a participa11t in the public sphere of Enlightenment reason. What, then, was Main10n doing in repeatedly removi11g hilTIselffron1 the text, as it were, in his tales of Enlightenment? And how is this to be connected with the dissociative way in which Maimon describes his earlier self and his hOlTIe culture? What is crucial to understand is that, in a certain, very real sense, the homeland from which Main10n exiled himself was as mllch, or more, a set of texts together with an interpretive commllnity, as it was a geographic location. In this textual culture, a rabbinic scholar was inevitably kl10wn not by his given name but by the title of his first or most influential book. One can hear the effects ofthis practice in the passage cited earlier, when MailTIOn is unable to name the author of the astronomical treatise, Nehmad ve-Naim, which he had read as a child without mentioning the title of Gans's other, more influential book, Zemah David, for which, and by which, he was known. 44 But this identification ofthe man with the book was not just a matter of rabbinic authorial conceit. As Maimon himself relTIarks, "I11deed, every rabbi ifhe possesses sufficient acuteness, is to be used as a living COlTImentary."45 There is an old Yiddish idiolTI in which a good Jewish boy, in particular, a Talmlldic prodigy sllch as MailTIOn, is called a Sefer Torah, that is, a scroll ofthe law, a Bible. Ifsuch a child fulfills his promise in adulthood, then he "wears the crown of Torah" and one is obligated to rise before him wl1en he walks into a room just as one would for a Sefer Torah. 46 Main10n was such a child and, briefly before his heretical turn, such a man. There was, in fact, a dense web ofrabbinic, and in particular Ashkenazi, cultural practices, idioms, a11d expectations that all tend to identify the Jewish man with the Torah at key ritual moments. 47 In the insightful forn1ulation of Harvey Goldberg, such ritllals identify the propagators of Jewish biological and cultural reproduction. 48 Claude LeviStrauss famously spoke of "things which are good to think with" in a given cultllre. 49 I would suggest that in the Ashkenazi culture from which Maimon came, among those things were books, even in nonelite culture and even in their material aspects.

From ShelolTIO ben Yehoshua to SOlOlTIOn Mainl0n In an iI1teresting essay, the critic Michael Warner has argued that participation in the eI1lightened discourse of the public sphere required of its participants a peculiarly Inodern kind of self-abstraction. He writes: The Public Sphere calls for a rhetoric of disincorporation in two senses: renl0ving one's selffrOln a particular corporation and renl0ving one's selffroln one's own corporeal body.50 For a Jew like Maimon, the assall1t on textlIality constituted the requisite disincorporation in both senses: both froln his Jewish body, which he identified with the body of the text (the Torah), and from the corporate entity of the Jewish people wllo were constituted precisely by their relationship to this text. And yet one of the interesting features of Mainl0n's writing is the extent to which he is incapable of effecting this disincorporation, of shedding his origins and the exegetical consciollSness that accompanies them. One can also see Maimon's anxiety over his origins operating in the Lebensgeschichte, even when he is not studying mlltilated texts and the peI1 is not falling from his hand. Thus, Mainlon often makes reflexive and spurious allllsions to classical literature at lTIOments when he is describing his previolls life, especially the texts and learning that were at the center of that life. Thus when he describes the brutality of his Heder teacher, Maimon underlines his own cll1tlIral distance froln the scene. The master, sits at the table in a dirty blouse and holds between his knees a bowl in which he grinds tobacco into snuff with a huge pestle like the club ofHercules, while at the saIne tinle he ,;yields his authority. 51 Elsewhere in the text, Main10n ironically describes the figure of a young talmid hakham SllCh as himself as "a kind of a Phoenix" and his mother-in-law as "Xanthippe-like." 52 In each case the allusion functions to ironically distance the narrator from his earlier self. Such awkward and literarily uninteresting classical allusions should be cOlnpared to MailTIOn'S genuinely original and entirely natural use of biblical verses, such as Abrahan1's call in Genesis 12: I, in which he manages to be both parodic and serious, while activating a whole set of exegetical intertexts. 53

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If, in leaving "the land of his birth," Main1011 was leaving a textual culture as much as the geographic area of Lithuania, what was his destination? Here his answer was the same as it was in the cover letter he had sent to I(ant along with his Transcendentalphilosophie, and just as unequivocal: "the truth." Maimon's idea of the trut11 was, as I have shown in the previous two chapters, some version of the Aristotelian notion of the eternal propositions held in the n1ind of God, or at least the active intellect. This, needless to say, is not quite the same as the Bildung and Aufklarung that Moritz described as Maimon's ultimate goal. This leads to an interesting set of tensions, for Moritz was at one with both Maimon's patrons and readers in presuming that Bildung, conventionally understood, was, or ought to be, his ultimate goal. Few, ifany, commentators have noted the extent to which the narrative of Maimon's autobiography is oriel1ted toward a more excillsively intellectual and philosophically austere goal. Maimon's Solomonic desire for intellectual perfection is as important to the emplotment of his Lebensgeschichte as Augustine's Neoplatonic desire for God is for the Confessions. The common failure to note the intellectual perfectionism that is at the heart of Maimon's text is not becallse it is hidden. On the contrary, Maimon places ten chapters that limn Maimonides' entire system in the form of a classic medieval epiton1e at the very cel1ter of his autobiography. He tells the reader that he does so because Maimonides' philosophy exercised "the most decisive influence" on his life. 54 This assertion has been effectively ignored by Maimon's modern editors, who have relegated the chapters to appendixes or excised them altogether, together with most other theoretical excurses. Maimon's English translator, J. Clark Murray, notes that these chapters are not "biographical" and "excite just the faintest suspicion of 'padding,'" so he does not include them at all. 55 This attitude is somewhat reminiscent of that displayed by the English editor of Gliickel of Hameln's Memoirs, who writes that his edition is "complete save for an abridgement ofGluckel's theologizing, the omission ofa few ofher borrowed tales.... Nothing has been omitted of her own experience." 56 The presumption here, that Gluckel's Judisch- Deutsch rendition of Ellropean tales and her "theologizing" were not aspects of her experience, presupposes, first, that experience is

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what the reader is after and, second, that we would know what experience consisted in before engaging with the full autobiographical text. Maimon's modern editors, it seems to me, have made a similar mistake. A proper understanding of MailTIOn and l1is autobiography must come to grips with the fact that he placed a ten-chapter epitome of Main10nidean philosophy at its very center. However, in arguing my case for intellectual perfection as the governing ideal of the Lebensgeschichte, I focus on the vvay in which this ideal is crucial to understanding three important narrative episodes. The first is Maimon's description of his interaction with Mendelssohn and his other enlightened Jewish patrons. The second is an odd encounter with a Lutheran minister in which he makes a rather preSllll1ptuous proposal to convert. The third is ostensibly not about Maimon at all but rather the odd and comic allegory of the history of philosophy as a masked ball with which Maimon ends his autobiography. These three episodes should be placed with Main10n's description of early Hasidism as a genuine VOllkomenheitssystem as well as his repeated descriptions of both his work and his life as striving toward intellectllal perfection. What they show is that Main10nides' philosophy lies at the center of Maimon's autobiography because it is its interpretive key.57 Since I have discussed aspects of the first two episodes earlier, in Chapters I and 2, I will discuss them more briefly here. When Maimon describes his first expulsion from Berlin at the Rosenthaler Gate, he remarks that the attitude of the German rabbinic establishment toward Jews such as himself who were seeking rational enlightenment was, in a certain sense, justified. 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 ofreason and set themselves free from their chains. And this beliefis to some extent well-founded. Persons in such a position may be con1pared to a man 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. 58 Maimon's choice of a sumptuary simile is, perhaps, revealing. Such "raw" Polish Jews (to return to Herz's de~~il?~i~El!£e_~s_gl~~t9!191.1~

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Chapter Four and uncouth in their desire for knowledge as they were at the table, or at least Maimon was. MailTIon records several conversations with Mendelssohn that raised precisely these issues of moderation and the desire for knowledge during his second, and somewhat n10re successful, visit to Berlin. In some of these conversations he C011trasts his own allegiance to the Maimonidean ideal of intellectual perfection to Mendelssohn's position: The inlnl0rtality of the soul for lne (following MailTIonides) consisted in union with the universal World Soul [dem allgemeinen WeltgeisteJ of that part of the faculty of knowledge which has been brought into actuality, in proportion to its degree of actuality; in accordance with this doctrine I held that only those who occupy themselves with eternal truths participate in this ilTIlTIOrtality, and only to the degree which they do so. The soul with its attainment of this high immortality lnust lose its individuality. That Mendelssohn, following lnodern [WolffianJ philosophy thought otherwise, everyone will readily believe. 59 Maimon n1ay be suggesting that, although "everyone will readily believe" that Mendelssohn subscribed to the doctrille of the immortality of the individual soul-he had, after all, written his most successful book in its defense-Mendelssohn privately concurred with Maimon's radical Mainlonideanism. In any case, MaimOl1's exclusive interest in the theoretical truths that afforded the only immortality he thought available gave Maimon little appetite for the belles lettres and artistic interests pursued by Mendelssohn and his circle. In another conversation he records Mendelssohn's gentle attempts to civilize him through aesthetic edllcation: Once when I was going on a stroll with Mendelssohn, the topic arose of when I would read the poets he recoffilnended. I replied: "No, I will read no poets; what is a poet but a liar?" Mendelssohn smiled at this and said: "You agree with Plato who banished the poets from his Republic. But I hope that with time you will think entirely otherwise on the subject. And so it happened soon." 60

Maimon writes that he went on to read Longinus's On the Sublime and writes with special fervor about his enjoym~f!:!_cif_GgJ1l~n_tr~n~atiQl1s_-

FrOln 5he101110 bel1 Yehoshua to 5010111011 Mai111011 of the great eighteenth-centllry forgery, the poetry of Ossian. 61 However he did not pursue this aesthetic education systematically, or with much fervor. Mendelssohn and my other friends were uncomlnonly pleased at this change. They wished me to devote n1yself regularly to the hUlnanities [humanoriaJ as without these a lnan can hardly n1ake his intellectual products [Geistesprodukten ] of use to the world. But it was very hard to convince lne of this. 62 Instead of pursuing the refined pleasures of the humanoria, Maimon recounts his turn to an enthllsiastic enjoyment of less literary forms of "the good and the beautiful," 'Nith, l1e says, "an enthusiasil1 which overstepped all boundaries." 63 Main10n's exuberant discovery of the less refined pleasures ofBerlin was not what Mendelssohn, Herz, and his other patrons had in Inind, but it was not their only disappointlnent. Although he read prodigiollsly, Maimon also failed to take up any other regular, systematic form ofStlldy, which might have led to him being ofsome use to society. Then someone proposed that I should learn pharmacy, and since I had already some acquaintance with physics and chemistry, I consented. My object in this was not to make any practical use of n1Y attainments, but ll1erely to acquire theoretical k11owledge. Accordingly, instead of setting to with my own hands, and thereby acquiring expertise in the art, I merely observed important chemical processes. In this way I learned pharn1acy without ever becon1ing a pharmacist. Mter three years, Madame Rosen, in whose shop I was apprenticed, was duly paid the fee of sixty thalers by Herr J. D. I received a certificate that I had perfectly mastered the art of pharmacy and this ended the matter. This too, however, served to alienate my friends. 64 It should be noted that in disdai11ing the practical application of his scientific studies, Maimon was remai11i11g entirely true to his repeatedly restated aspiration to attain the contemplative ideal of theoria. The passage records the imperfect match between Maim011's version of the Hebrew philosophical ideal ofperfection and the social ideal of Bildung that prevailed in enlightened Berlin. This discrepancy was, in part, a difference between the elite individualism implied by the radical

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Mailnonidean ideal of shelemut ha-nefesh and the more practical and social ideal of Bildung, which emphasized finding one's place in the social whole. Maimon's ultilnate goal was not, and never would be, to become a Iniddle-class pharlnacist with an interest in philosophy, as, say Marcus Herz was a philosophical physician and Mendelssohn himselfwas a businessman-philosopher. It was also a result ofMain10n's inability to accept the consequences ofhis self-imposed exile from Lithuanian rabbinic culture. He seen1S to have acted as if he cOll1d discard the socioreligious structure that Inade possible the institution ofthe talmid hakham without relinquishing the status of the "holy idler" to which he had once been entitled. Maimon's spectacular failure to achieve the Bildung that his patrons prescribed for him was too much. Mendelssohn himself felt con1pelled to ask Maimon to leave Berlin, as recounted in Chapter I, and yet, whatever his regrets, Maimon's autobiography betrays no regrets about this failllre, which, in addition to personal idiosy11crasy, was the result of his adherence to the ideal of shelemut ha-nefesh and his disdain for the strictures ofeither Halakha or enlightened society, which ll1ight have curbed his gluttonous tendencies. He was, in short, immoderate in both realms, like a starving man who "suddenly comes llpon a well-spread table, and attacks the food with violent greed, a11d overfills himself." Maimon's banishment from Berlin initiated another series of travels in which Maimon managed to impress, insll1t, and alienate a series of patrons in Holland and Hamburg. After his comical suicide attelnpt on Purim, he c011sidered his predicament and options and decided that the best course n1ight be conversion to Christianity. His account of this predicament and his subsequent proposal is revealing and worth quoting at something close to its full length: I had grown too enlightened [aufgeklart] to return to Poland ... on the other hand I could not count on success in Gerillany owing to my ignorance of the n1anners and customs of the people, to which I had never been able to adapt myself to properly. . . . I was not even master of any particular language. It occurred to me therefore that there was no alternative but to embrace the Christian religion Accordingly I resolved to go to the first clergyn1an I came upon and inform him of IllY resolution. But as I could not express Illyself well orally, I put

From ShelolTIO ben Yehoshua to Solomon Maimon lny thoughts into writing in German with Hebrew characters, \vent to a schooln1aster and got him to copy it into German characters... : I aln a native of Poland, belonging to the Jewish nation, destined by lny education and studies to be a rabbi; but in the thickest darkness I have perceived SOlne light. This induced lne to search further after light and truth, and to free lnyself completely fron1 the darkness of superstition and ignorance. To this end, which could not be attained in my native place, I came to Berlin, \vhere by support of SOlne enlightened men of our nation I studied for SOlne years, not indeed after any plan, but lnerely to satisfy lny search for IU10wledge. But as our nation is unable to use not only such planless studies but even those conducted on the lnost perfect plan, it cannot be blalned for ... pronouncing them useless. I have therefore resolved, in order to secure temporal as well as eternal happiness [e1vige GliickseligkeitJ, which depends on the attainment ofperfection [Erlangung der VollkommenheitJ; and in order to become useful to myself as well as others, to elnbrace the Christian religion. The Jewish religion, it is true, cOlnes nearer to reason over the forlner, ... but in practical use [praktischen GebrauchsJ the latter has an advantage over the former.... Moreover I hold the mysteries of the Christian religion for that which they are, that is allegorical representations of the truths that are most ilnportant for man.... I therefore lTIOSt respectfully beg an answer whether after this confession I am worthy of the Christian religion or not. 65 Needless to say, Maimol1's request is denied, although we ought to note the historical context in which he n1ade it, or at least represented himself to have n1ade it. Rumors that Mendelssohn himself might accept some such Soci11ian version of Christianity had swirled about En1ightenment circles for almost two decades. Moreover, Maimon sets the time of his letter at the very moment dllring which Mendelssohn was composing his reply to the anonylTIOUS challenge to convert by the "Searcher after Light and truth," which was published as Jerusalem in April 1783. Nor was Maimon's offer to convert to a den1ystified Christianity to be the last of its kind. In 1799, David Friedlander (a disciple of Mendelssohn and patron of Maimon) made a similar offer to the liberal Probst Teller of Berlin in 1799. Finally, I(ant envisio11ed a similar answer to the Jewish question, which he understood his student Lazarus Bendavid (a prominent n1ember of the same circle) to have also

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proposed. So Maimon's apparently farcical request has a specific and recognizable social and historical context, which he nlay have even slyly gestured at with his talk of "light and truth."66 But for Maimon the context of philosophical theory was always the nl0st important. When Maimon proposed conversion to achieve "temporal as well as eternal happiness," he was offering a precise translation of a central MailTIonidean doctrine. The doctrine was what Maimon called the "attainment ofperfection" (Erlangung der Vollkommenheit), or qinyan hashelemut, and was possible only under COllditions ofmaterial well- being. MailTIOn took this argument to its radical extreme in proposing that only conversion to Christianity could seCllre the former and hence the latter, but his argument had precedent. As noted in Chapter 2, Ashkenazi critics of the Maimonidean tradition claimed that it was precisely such reasoning that weakened the resolve of the conversos under the Inqllisition. Only a year before he wrote his autobiography (and eight years after the actual letter, if we take it at face value), in his conlmentary to the Guide of the Perplexed, Maimon discussed this doctrine: I<now that the true Good is the attainment of perfection, I mean to say the bringing of [one's] intellectual potential to actuality ... and whatever is a means to this attainment is good in relation to it [i.e., the true Good]. 67 This is fully in line with Maimonides' doctrine. Indeed, in Guide 111:27, which MailTIOn briefly summarized in his ten-chapter epitolTIe, Maimonides not only makes the distinction between material and intellectual or spiritual perfection, just adduced, but also discusses the former precisely in terms of membership in a well-ordered polis, which is of course what Maimon was seeking in his application for conversion, a MailTIonidean entry ticket to Ellropean civilization, one might say.68 The attempt to bring closure to an autobiography-to rOllnd offa lifealmost inevitably stands as a kind of narrative surrogate for the death of its subject, which the author cannot possibly describe. The desire for noetic perfection, which, as I have shown, animates Maimon's Lebensgeschichte and almost all his work, was also understood to be a drive toward death in the Inedieval Hebrew philosophical and mystical tradi-

From Shelomo ben Yehoshua to SOlOlTIOn Maimon

tions that he drew upon. Conjullction or cleaving (devequt) with either the active intellect ofAristotelian philosophy or the Shekhina ofIZabbala was represented as a kind of prophetic rapture and was tied to tIle exegetical tradition of the "kiss of God," by which Moses, the greatest prophet, and his siblings were said to have died. 69 As vve have seen, in his earliest extant writings Maimon worries over their reconciliation and the relationship betweell the Shekhina of the IZabbalists and the active intellect of the philosophers. His later radical Main10nidean perfectionism underlies and structures both his autobiographical self-understanding and his technical revision of IZant's philosophy. However, in both cases, this philosophical doctrine is employed and undercut in the same gesture: MaimOll understood his life to be a search for noetic perfection but represented it as comical and ullfulfilled; the desire for knowledge was to be understood as a necessary striving toward the infinite intellect, but it is not clear that there actually is such an entity. The final chapter of Maimon's Lebensgeschichte brings these philosop11ical themes together with MailTIOn'S ambivalent relationship toward the Bildungsbiirgertum and a prescient sense of the direction of German philosophical Idealism. It appears after his epitome of MailTIonides and is written in the forn1 of a comic allegory of the history of philosophy, which he prefaces with the following ironic dedication: For those of nlY readers who were cast into boredom by my earnest portrayal of More Newochim [Guide ofthe Perplexed], I present, in the name of both cOlupensation and conclusion, the following small allegory. 70

This chapter has often been excised by editors and has been almost altogether ig110red by critics,?l The inattention is, perhaps, abetted by the apparent heavy-handed didacticism ofMaimon's allegory, together with its crude good humor. In fact, however, the chapter draws subtly on medieval Hebrew traditions of allegory, and, when read with care, can be understood as having indeed been written "toward a conclusion" ofthe Lebensgeschichte, his life history. The allegory brings together Maimon's deep engagement with Maimonidean philosophy, IZabbala, IZant's "Copernican revolution," and his own ambivalent relationship with the

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integrative ideal of Bildung prescribed by enlightened German society. It is, in short, about the frustration of a philosophical eros and the impossibility of noetic, or even social, perfectio11. Because the Schluss-I(apitel, or concluding c11apter of the Lebensgeschichte, has never been translated into English before and has been placed out of sequence or excised entirely from modern German editions, I will quote froIll it extensively in the discussion that follows. The chapter is titled "The Merry Ball [Der Lustige Ball]: A Tale from the Diary of a Friend," a description that Main10n immediately glosses with the following footnote: It is impossible for me not to think that my friend's story must be an allegorical representation of the history of philosophy. Therefore, to spare the reader the trouble of guessing, I will add a few notes, which will provide the means for the interpretation of this allegory,72 This is, in fact, the first of twenty-eight such notes in which Maimon gleefully provides what in the Hebrew literary tradition would be called the nimshal (solution or internal meaning) of the mashal (allegory or parable).73 Indeed, here as elsewhere in Maimon's work, it is important to see the extent to which this chapter was conceived within the classical Hebrew genre of mashal and then transposed into German. Maimon's long, schematic allegory has little in common with, say, the parables of Lessing. Moreover, the chapter is placed immediately after Maimon's presentation of Maimonides' famolls parable of intellectual perfection at the end of the Guide ofthe Perplexed. This may also suggest to the attentive reader that Maimon's description of the chapter as a respite for those incapable of the rigors of even a11 epitome of Maimonidean philosophy is not quite in earnest. In fact, it is not only an allegory of the history of philosophy but also a parable of perfection, or, to be more precise, the two ultimately coincide, because the end of both is real metaphysical knowledge. "The Merry Ball" begins as follows (Maimon's notes appear in italics within the body of the text): In --.-- a masked ball was held in honor of a celebrated woman. It was said that she was exceedingly beautiful, even though no n1an had ever seen her, for she was so devilishly obstinate. She could be

From Shelomo ben Yehoshua to Solomon MaitllOn compared to a flickering light, just as one approached her she would recede, and just at the moment in which one thought he possessed her, she would disappear entirely. Her nan1e, I an1 honored to inform you, is Madame M. [Metaphysics], or the mistress of her chan1bern1aid Ph. [Physics], which is the same thing. For this woman was, as I have said, concealed from sight, and all those who spoke of her beauty, knew of her only through the chattering of her chambermaid.... All of the Gentlemen who were gathered there competed against each other for the honor of dancing with this alluring lady.... As they did not yet know her tastes, they were forced to dance all sorts of dances in order to find favor in her eyes, such as the aimable vainquer) charmant vainquer) passepied) dance dJamour) princesse buree) courante) rigadoun) gavotte) sarabande, and so on.74

The allegory is, at the most obvious level, about the pursuit of metaphysical reality behind mere appearances, the in1penetrable thing-initself, personified as the noble but elusive Madame Metaphysik, who is invisible or virtually so except for the traces she leaves in natural phe110mena, which is only "the chattering of her chambermaid." The dancers and their dances, as will shortly become clear, each represent a figure or school of philosophy and its characteristic doctrines. As I have shown, the idea that knowledge is driven by a kind of eros was of central importance to Maimon, whose first work was, after all, titled Hesheq Shelomo, or "The Desire of Solomon." Similarly, the personification of metaphysics, or philosophy more generally, as a desirable woman for whom gentlemen (I(avaliere) mllst engage in chivalric competition is a topos of European literature. Mendelssohn, for instance, was invoking just such traditions in a fairly stereotypical manner when, in a moment of philosophical fatigue at the olltset of the "Pantheism Controversy," he wrote that having seen his opponent "remove his visor" and demonstrate his worthiness, he would "retrieve the gauntlet," which he had mistakenly thrown down, and retire from the contest for the fair lady.7 5 Hegel employed a more striking and original metaphor, which is closer in spirit to Maimon's allegory. In a famous passage from the preface to his Phenomenology ofMind, written fifteen years after Maimon's Lebensgeschichte, Hegel enigmatically described the history of philosophy as made up of frenzied dancers.

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The true is thus the bacchanalian vvhirl in which no n1elnber is not drunken; and because each, as soon as it detaches itself, dissolves immediately-the whirl is just as much transparent and simple repose.7 6 The progression of such dancers, each of whon1, in his "drunkenness," apprehends (or sin1ply is) a part of "the true," can be seen in retrospect as the lTIOVen1ent of Spirit toward a complete and self-conscious Bildung. MailTIon was, along with many of his philosophical conten1poraries, convinced that the history ofphilosophy had to be rethought in light of IZant's critical turn. Maimon's Giva)at ha-Moreh is prefaced with a historical primer on the history ofphilosophy, in which the crucial turning points were Socrates and IZant, and which el1ded vvith MailTIOn'S revision of the latter?7 His allegory, as we shall see, echoes this narrative, while also, perhaps, toying with an identification between the ideals ofsociety and philosophical truth. Nonetheless, it does not truly anticipate the historiosophy that is compressed into Hegel's aphorism. However, as I have suggested, Maimon's placement of the chapter directly after his "boring lecture" on Maimonides' parable ofperfection and his description of the "allllring" (reizenden) Madame Metaphysik, whose elusiveness is like the flickering ofa light from a concealed place, suggest a more specific set of Hebrew intertextual references. In the falTIous parable at the end of the Guide ofthe Perplexed, which Maimon translates extensively in the final chapter of his epitome, Maimonides ranks types of individllals in terms of their relationship to a Icing, hidden in his palace. These ral1ge from those who are not even within the city and have no knowledge ofthe king to those who know of the Icing and desire to see him but have not yet even seen the walls ofthe palace, and so on, up to those who have reached the inl1er chamber of the palace and are on the verge ofseeing or hearing the kil1g. 78 This parable has been the subject of centuries of interpretation al1d debate, but the general nature ofits import is not in doubt, for Maimonides provides lIS with it quite explicitly?9 The ruler, as in all classic mashalim, is God and his subjects form humanity, which can be ranked on a scale of perfection in accordance with an individual's knowledge of God. The perfect nlan stands within the inner chamber ofthe palace, prepared for the

From ShelolTIO ben Yehoshua to Soloillon Main10n possibility ofintercourse with the divine, which is both "the end ofman" and a foretaste of the eternal life that awaits him. 80 The most perfect specimen of this type was, as mentioned, Moses, whose life ended at precisely the n10ment in which he had fulfilled the ends of life. This is, according to Main10nides, the deep exegetical meaning of the scriptural staten1eIlt that Moses died "by the mouth of the Lord" (Numbers 33: 38), or, in the words of the Talnlud, by the "kiss of God." 81 It is this sort of death into eternal life that Maimonides identified as the sllblin1e object of the Song ofSongs, thereby initiating a whole genre of Hebrew interpretations. 82 In explicating both the rabbinic traditions regarding Moses's death and his own final parable in the Guide, Maimonides vvrote that the apprehension that is achieved in a state of intense and passionate love for Him is called a leiss, in accordance with the verse "Let hilTI leiss n1e with the leisses of his mouth" (Song of Songs I : 2).83 Maimon's deliberate juxtaposition of the final allegorical chapter of his autobiography with Maimonides' final allegorical discussion of perfection as the proper "end oflife" in both senses ofthe term begins to Sllggest, theIl, that there may be more to this chapter than even his own gleeful footnotes on the history ofphilosophy sllggest. However, this kleine allegorie differs importantly from MaiITIonides' mashal of the palace. Both allegories describe a search for a personified yet unapproachable, or virtually unapproachable, trllth. However, the image of an enticing woman for whom the lover nlust strive is very different from that of a hidden king. Indeed, although Maimonides explicitly thematizes the erotic nature of the desired union, there is a significant and obvious difference. Not only are the genders switched, but it is the king who is the active lover, just as in the Aristotelian nimshal it is the active intellectfhat draws up the passive hun1an intellect into its timeless thOllght. In Maimon's mashal the enticing Madame Metaphysik would appear to playa more passive role. However, Maimon was heir not only to the tradition ofMaimonidean philosophy but, as we have seen, to that ofmedieval IZabbala as well. The Shekhina of Zoharic IZabbala, the tenth and lowest of the Sefirot, corresponds to the active intellect, which according to MaiITIonides and

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Chapter Four others was the tenth and lowest ofthe Separate Intelligences. 84 This was a relationship that, as we have seen in detail in Chapter 3, Maimon knew and struggled with while coming to the position that the IZabbala was a symbolic expression of natural truths. The erotic nature of devequt is, needless to say, stronger and less sublimated in the kabbalistic tradition in which the Shekhina is understood to be a feminine aspect ofGod, whose relationship to the mystic is often that of an elusive beloved. 85 It is precisely such a passage in the Zohar that Maimon drew upon in the construction of his allegory. In a deep and puzzling parable of the Zohar, the Shekhina is personified as "the beautiful maidel1 upon whom"-like Maimon's Madame Metaphysik"no one has set eyes." 86 In this passage, a mysterious figure sets out a parable that would seem to be about both the Shekhina a11d the Torah to two of the Tannaim of the Zohar, Rabbi Hiyya and Rabbi Yose. Who is the beautiful maiden on whom no one has set eyes? A body concealed, yet revealed? She COlnes out in the lnorning and is hidden all day. She adorns herselfwith Jewels which are not. . . . What a multitude of humans there are who dwell in confusion, failing to perceive the ,;yay of truth that abides in the Torah, and the Torah, in love, summons them day after day to her, but woe, they do not as much as turn their heads. It is just as I have stated, the Torah releases one word and comes forth fron1 her sheath ever so little and then retreats to conceahnent again.... A parable. To what may she be compared? To a beautiful and stately maiden, who is secluded in an isolated chamber of the palace, and has a lover of whose existence she alone knows. For love of her he passes by her gate unceasingly, and turns his eyes in all directions to discover her.... She thrusts open a small door in her secret chamber, for a moment reveals her face to her lover, then quicldy withdraws it.... And when he arrives, she begins to speak with him, at first from behind a veil which she has hung before her words, so that they il1ay suit his manner of understanding.... Then behind a thinner veil of finer mesh, she speaks to him in riddles and allegories, Aggada. When finally he is on close terms with her, she stands disclosed face to face with him and has intercourse with him on all her secret mysteries....

From ShelolTIO ben Yehoshua to Solomon MailTIOn Now he is a perfect human being, a true husband of Torah, for to hin1 she has uncovered all her mysteries, holding back nothing. 87 This parable, like that of Maimonides', is far too rich and has been the recipient of too much commentary to receive anything like full treatment in the present context; however, it is important to note several of its features for our purposes. In it, not only is a beautiful, mysterious, and perhaps invisible noblewoman the object of desire, but she appears and disappears in the same tantalizing way as Maimon's Madame Metaphysik. Moreover, her attainlnent is explicitly understood to be an erotic union that confers intellectual perfection. It seems, then, overwhelmingly likely that Maimon, who knew the Zohar well, was drawing on this passage in writing his final chapter. 88 Moreover, this passage itself may contai11 allusions to the Guide in its representation of the perfect individual as one who has gained the inner charrlber of the palace. Its description of the divine teaching as bei11g quicldy revealed a11d then hidden agai11 has also been tied by interpreters to Maimonides' description of glimpses of divine truth as flashes of lightning elsewhere in the Guide. 89 In any event itis easy to see how Maimon could draw elements from both medieval sources in constructing his allegory. Finally, it is instructive to note that one of the main implications of the Zohar parable is precisely the multiple meanings of texts, a lesson we would do well to keep in Inind in reading Main10n's chapter. Although I believe it demonstrable that Maimon drew on the deep and polysemous allegories of the Guide and Zohar just discussed, it is important not to lose sight of the less sublime literary effects of his own allegory. Let us return, then, to Maimon's allegory at its most obvious and even farcical level as a history of philosophy. Thus, in describing the Pre-Socratics, he writes (again, Maimon's notes appear in italics within the body of the text): Monsieur Ph. [Pythagoras) whose metaphysics was based upon number theory and mathematical forms] maintained that it was necessary to dance with a ruler, protractor and compass in hand and to deduce all the steps mathematically. Monsieur X. [Xenophanes claimed that the sole and infinite essence was an encompassed circle] was satisfied with less than this. He stood and made a circle around the dance floor, and

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then clailned that it was possible to dance beautifully without even moving from one's place [He denied all movement] . ... Monsieur H. [Heraclitus] wept with sorrow and foresaw the con1ing conflagration. [He taught that the rvorld will end in fire]. Monsieur L. [Leucippus) lvho denied all the tenets of metaphysics and based his philosophy solely on bare matter] sent the celebrated \tVOlnan to the devil and, since he was

an intelligent man, took the chalnbern1aid as his partner. Monsieur D. [Democritus] di d the saIne. Then caIne the dandies who were called S. [Sophists] and fluttered about like butterflies fron1lady to lady.90 Such passages have a whiff of the schoolroolTI in the obviousness of their hun10r. Indeed, MaiITIOn'S con1pll1sive need to gloss them would seem to be not only a mark of the exegetical consciousness that we have discussed but also his need to both delTIOl1strate and deprecate his European scholarly learning and its in1portance. It is important in this C011text to remember that the narrative setting of this allegory is a formal dance, which is precisely the sort of European setting in which Main1011 could never have been comfortable and-whatever his intellectual attainments in the public sphere of enlighte11ment discoursewould never have been welcome. This is not to say that Maimon's depiction of philosophy here is entirely devoid of subtlety. His description of"Monsiellr PI." (helpfully identified as Plato in the notes) and ofthe moderns shows a shrewd sense of the nature ofpl1ilosophical progress: He claimed that it was in1possible to woo the falnous woman through dance, unless one directed one's eyes, throughout the dance to certain pictures, which were floating in the Hall (which no other man had seen) and arranged his steps according to these pictures. And it suddenly seen1ed to all those gathered that they could, in truth, see these remarkable pictures, and they rejoiced over this revelation. Ho\vever, after the first intoxication, they began to be embarrassed by their faith, which they had adopted so light-headedly.91 Mter proceeding through Aristotle and the philosophers of late antiqllity in similar fashion, Maimon-perhaps from fatigue, or perhaps because it is in a real sense too close to home-skips the entire medieval period, including Maimonides (the philosopher upon whom he has

FrOln Shelon1o ben Yehoshua to Soioinon Maimon just lavished ten chapters of his autobiography), and proceeds with the n10derns. Then can1e the line of young gentlen1en. Even though they danced with more skill and grace than those who preceded them, their success was no greater. The old disputes returned and were renewed among then1, and everything ren1ained as it was, only slightly revised. [The new philosophers) it rnust be admitted., madegreat progress in methods of thought) but when it came to metaphysics not a single neJV step Jvas forthcoming. ] Finally one of the clever alnong then1 was no longer able to tolerate this "Don Quixotism." He recognized that the famous lady was nothing but a creature of the ilnagination whose appearance inspired wandering knights to great deeds, but ... also led to all sorts of paradoxes. And not only this, but he also showed how these illusions were created and how to guard against them. [Presumably ](ant is meant here. ] 92 MailTIOn'S description ofIZant's position is in line with his heterodox interpretation of the Critique ofPure Reason, discussed in Chapter 3, in which the imagination (Einbildungskraft) may be the hidden source of sensible intuition, rather than some external given. With this in mind, we can now identify Madan1e M. more precisely not only as "Metaphysics" but as the impenetrable thing-in-itself, which dissolves once one realizes that it is, like the floating Platonic dance instrllctions, at best a goad to the pursuit of an ever more complete knowledge. It is impossible to dance with her precisely because she does 110t exist except as an illusion born of the dogmatic il1terpretation of experience. Main10n n1ay also have had in mind a strilG11g passage fron1 the Critique ofPure Judgment (1790) in which IZant himself personifies the thing-in-itself as a kind of l1l1approachable goddess, although his treatment of it is less skeptical (one might even call it pious) than Maimon's. Perhaps nothing more sublilne has ever been said or a thought ever been expressed more sublimely, than in that inscription above the Telnple of Isis (mother nature): ] am all that is that was and that Jvill be and no mortal has lifted my veil.9 3 Maimon's skeptical reading of IZant implies that the veil may not be lifted because there is nothing behind it, or to use his metaphor, there

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is nobody in the chamber but only tIle chattering of the chambermaid outside. He closes the allegory with this point being pressed by a not very mysterious interpreter ofI(ant (Maimon's note is in italic): [IZant's criticis1l1] Inade a great impression, debates arose. There were those who stubbornly insisted upon the existence of the lady, for everybody had believed in her up until now, others despaired at this turn of events. My friend [Who this friend is and what the content ofhis words are) every reader) who understands these matters) will be able to find for himself. It is not necessary that he be an Oedipus to unmask this maskedfell01v.] , who was among them, entered into this dispute. He

did not merely agree completely upon the nonexistence of the lady, but went further and argued that it was possible to be a worthy gentle1l1an without devoting oneself to this product of the imagination' and demanded the two sides defend their positions against proofs to the contrary.94 In Maimon's kleine allegorie, the figure who one needn't "be an Oedipus to identify" radicalizes I(ant by arguing that there is no Madame Metaphysik. All there is the dance, which one dances alone (or with chambermaids). The placement of this allegory at the climactic end of Maimon's long reconstruction of his identity is not incidental. It is an allegory of the ultimately unfulfillable search for perfection that characterizes both the history of philosophy and the individual philosopher. Moreover, an elaborate costume ball given at an intellectual salon is precisely a social expression of the public sphere in which Mainl0n desperately wanted to participate and was illcapable of participating in gracefully. In the end, a perfect cleaving with the public sphere of Enlightellment was just as impossible as one with the active intellect, the Shekhina, or the divine Madame Metaphysik. The history of his life, then, ends not with a vision of perfection but, apparently, with its impossibility. However, the final lines decline even this much definitive closure: "Thus ends the journal ofmy friend, and I long to know what the elld was of this peculiar ball." 95

Five

Literary Mterlife A writer who has a good style is read. One who has expository power is studied. One who has neither one nor the other, supposing him however, to be in possession of weighty and new truths, is used. His mind not his natTIe, is imperishable. SOlOlTIOn Maimon, Philosophisches Worterbuch

When Maimon wrote the sentences quoted in the epigraph, he was implicitly comparing his accon1plishn1ents as a philosopher and as a writer to those of Mendelssohn al1d IZant. He had ul1derstood and come to grips with IZant's Copernican Revolution in a way that Mendelssol1n (and perhaps even IZant) had not, and yet he knew that his quirky cOlnmentaries possessed neither the grace of Mel1delssohn's n1elliflllous Gerlnan prose nor the architectonic grandeur of IZant's Critiques. He was also, perhaps, positing yet another al1d even more attenuated version of philosophical imn1ortality, ill which the mind merges not with the eternal active intellect but with the future community of scholars. His works wOll1d not be read, but the trllths that he had made his own would survive and be llsed in the work of others. And yet, a century after Maimon had written these words, his work was, in fact, read and discussed, although not (and with good reason) in the same reverential tones as that of Mendelssohn and IZant. In 1878, a British philosopher named Shadworth Hodgson glossed Maimon's oblique prediction with this bathetic note: "Thy name, too [would be immortal], Maimon, ifany words ofmine cOll1d celebrate it. But he who now writes has a pen as little potent as thine own." 1 Hodgson thought, as Ernst Cassirer would a few years later, that Maimon had somehow solved the problem ofthe given. As it turns out, Hodgson's pen was considerably less potent than Maimon's, but Maimon's works as well as his ideas have survived, il1 particular, his sparkling autobiography. I briefly discussed Maimon's afterlife in European philosophy at the end of Chapter 3. This was what Maimon, quite clearly, cared most about, but his literary afterlife is largely the story of his Lebensgeschichte.

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Maimon's autobiography was popular for more than a centuryvvith both Gerlnan and Jewish readers. It becan1e one of the key texts in both the self-construction ofJewish identity and in the representation ofthe Jew by non-Jewish writers. It was also translated into English, Yiddish, and Hebrew. Maimon is known, then, through his autobiography, and yet it is the fact that he was a significant philosopher-that 11e did make the transition from Lithuanian prodigy to Aufklarer-that justified both the writing and the reading of that autobiography. Midway throllgh George Eliot's last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), the title character, a Jewish orphan raised as an English aristocrat, wanders into a secondhand bookshop in East London and finds something that he wanted-nalnely that wonderful piece of autobiography, the life of the Polish Jew Solomon Mailnon; which as he could easily slip it into his pocket, he took from its place, and entered the shop.2

The passage recounts in some detail Deronda's negotiations over the book, as well as the presun1ed religiolls identity of any buyer interested in such an iteln: "'You are perhaps of Ollr race?' ... Deronda colored deeply.... 'No.'" Eliot, who had translated both Spinoza and Heine, may well have looked for the book herself llnder sin1ilar circumstances. In any event, she read Maimon's Lebensgeschichte closely in her research for Deronda, paying special attention to t110se passages and chapters on Jewish culture and religion that have often been excised by later editors. She left a carefully annotated copy of the same pocket-sized first editio11, purchased by her character, in her library.3 Other close readers of the Lebensgeschichte in the nineteenth century used the work in more personal ways. The nineteenth-century German novelist Berthold Auerbach, whose estrangement from Judaism was confirmed by his study ofSpinoza, presented a deeply sympathetic portrait of Maimon and his friend Ep11raim I(iih in his novel Dichter und ](aufman, published in 1839. Nineteenth-century Eastern European Maskilim often saw themselves as attempting to make a similar transition to that of Maimon, and some used his autobiography as a literary paradigm for their own.

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The transition that they were atten1pting was actually in fundamental respects rather different, for what these Maskilim were attempting was an internal reform of traditional Jewish society, rather than an escapeescape being, if nothing else, far less likely a prospect in the nineteenthcentury pale of settlement than it had been in the enlightened Celltral Europe of the late eighteenth ce11tury. The fact that such autobiographies were writte11 in Hebrew or Yiddish and therefore addressed to an exclusively Jewish audience is a lillguistic n1arker of this difference. 4 Nonetheless, autobiographical writers such as Mordechai Aaron Guenzberg and Moshe Leib Lillienblum viewed MailTI011 as their great predecessor, the archetype of the modern heretic, or apiqores, who has described the pathologies of traditional Jewish society and made a successful-or almost successful-break with it. 5 For these Maskilim, Maimon served as a kind of homegrown Spill0za, alld one, moreover, who had left a deeply persuasive aCCOllllt and indictment of a life alld society that could be appropriated as something close to their own. Both Gllellzberg, in his autobiography Aviezer, and Lillienblum, in his Hattot Neurim, describe themselves as Talmudic child prodigies, married at absurdly young ages, and traumatized, sexually and otherwise, by their adolescent unpreparedness for adult life. 6 Not only is this a topic first broached by Maimon, but, as Alan Mintz has shown, there would seem to be a strong sense in which Lillienbillm simply cedes the description of this period of his life to Gllenzberg, who, in turn, can be seen to be responding to and radicalizing the account of Main10n. Indeed, the number ofcoincidences between Guenzberg's autobiography and MailTIOn'S strains credulity.7 Such suspicions ofa kind oftransferential identification are, perhaps, confirlTIed by an essay that Gllenzberg wrote later in his career, in which he describes having made a pilgrimage to Maimon's hometown ofNieswicz, where he inquired after the abandoned son whom Maimon had mentioned in his autobiography.8 The implicit comparison with Maimon was recognized by readers of these biographies well into the twelltieth century. Thus, ill a description of Lillienblum's autobiographical travails, a Yiddish critic writes: Fear for the end of this unfortunate overtakes the reader. For he was no Solomon Maimon, whose cynicism helped him survive his hardships. He was basically honest and sound. But he could not

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Chapter Five live without sOInething affirn1ative. Would he go tOInorrow to the nearest body of water and drown hiInself? Would he, like that other one, knock at SOIne Lutheran pastor's door? 9

The description of Maimon here as "that other one" is not incidental but a deliberate allusion to the archetypal rabbinic heretic Elisha ben Abuya, whon1 the Taln1ud refers to as Acher, the other. Of COllrse, what made Maimon, ultimately, a figure of pride was that he had insulted that Lutheran pastor and remained a Jew. In a perceptive little essay Micha Joseph Berdichevsky wrote of Maimon that he was a "simple Jew [yehudi pashut hu] even when he stood beyond the borders [of Judaism]," and he compared him in this respect to the leftist Hegelian and early Zionist Moses Hess. 1o The characterization itselfis one Maimon would have appreciated. The Hebrew word tehumim, translated here as "borders," alllldes to the Halakhic borders beyond which al1 observant Jew must not walk on the Sabbath and to a famous story about "the Other,',' Elisha ben Abuya, walking beyond them while his student Rabbi Meir remained behindJI But, of course, it also describes the borders of Jewish society, which Maimon was resolutely willing to leave behind withollt ever denying the fact of his Jewishness. Berdichevsky, who held a doctorate in philosophy and would become the great Nietszchean rival to Abad ha-Atn, the theorist of Cultural Zionisln, read Maimon's autobiography as soon as he left Volozhin, the leading Mitnaged yeshiva. 12 One might almost call Maimon the "strong poet" of Eastern European apiqorsut, through wholn later rebels against rabbinic tradition lnust define themselves. 13 Maimon was apparently not entirely forgotten within the borders of the traditionalist world that he had replldiated in the nineteenth century. In one of the great footnotes of nineteenth-century Hebrew literature, an early hagiographer ofRabbi Eliyahu ben Shelomo ofViIna purports to prodllce the text ofa long letter from the philosopher Solomon MaimOl1 to his illustrious sometime mentor Moses Mendelssohn, in which he describes a confrontation with the famous Vilna Gaon. The footnote is attached to the ineffably terse statement that he [the GaonJ lU1ew the discipline of philosophy to its end, and said that he derived two good things from it: the seventy powers which are within man, and one other thing. 14

Literary Mterlife The remarkable story about Maimon and the Vilna Gaon that is contained in this letter appears to be intended, at least in its extant version, to demonstrate that the Gaon, and l1ence the culture that he represented, had nothing to fear fiom either the "Socrates of Berlin" or the falTIous Lithuanian apiqores who had correspol1ded with IZant. It also illustrates the way in which MailTIon's life was situated at the intersection of the worlds of traditional Lithuanian rabbinic scholarship and the Haskala (among others). In the letter, Maimon tells Mendelssohn how he ilTIpersonated an Italian rabbi, thus explaining his shorn beard and short coat-Italians, then, as now, were known for their fashion-a biblical grammarian from Padua, in order to visit the Gaon. 15 He further claimed to be the author of a book on Hebrew syl10nyn1s. 16 Maimon describes forging letters of introduction, which describe hilTI as an emissary sent to learn the Gaon's response to questions posed by contemporary heretics. The Gaon responds masterfully, although, perhaps u11fortunately, the letter details 11either the exact questions posed nor their al1swers. Afterward, the Gaon graciously asks his visitor about the subject of his book. [He said] explain the difference for me between: sason) simcha) gila) rina) ditza) hedva [six biblical words for happiness]. And I answered him according to lTIy opinion. He responded haven't you forgotten to explain ditza? I said ditza isn't [a synonYlTI of] happiness in the holy language. He responded ... doesn't our great Rabbi, Rashi, explain ditza as meaning happiness? ... I answered hilTI that Rashi did not know how to explain the peshuto shel Miqra . . . he responded in a loud voice didn't our holy Rabbis, the lTIasters of midrash, explain it as happiness, when they said "there are ten words for happiness," including ditza? I responded that the masters of midrash also did not know, because they were not alTIOng the n1asters of correct peshat. 17 When Main10n returns to his lodgings, he is detained by officials and tried before seven leading members of the community, who find him gllilty of shalTIing Torah scholars and administer lashes. Afterward, "their spirit not yet quieted," Maimon is placed in stocks at the entrance to the synagogue during mincha with a sign tl1at reads "This is the guilty man who n10cked the words of our holy rabbis," cursed and spit upon "llntil it was like the River Jordan before me." This ordeal

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was prolonged, Main10n tells Mendelssohn, because "Vilna is not like Berlin. In Vilna the masses from young to old do come [to the synagogueJ at prayer tin1e." Nonetheless, he writes, he does not regret the experience because he was able to meet a scholar "greater than all of the scholars of the nations." Of course, the meeting between MailTIOn and the Gaon never took place and the letter is a forgery, as several nineteenth-century maskilic historians illlmediately pointed Ollt after the publication of Aliyot Eliyahu. 18 I can find no independent evidence that Mailllon was ever in Vilna, and if he had been, it is extremely unlikely that he could have resisted describing the encounter i11 his autobiography, wl1erein, incidentally, the Vilna Gaon is n1entioned in passing, as an opponent of Hasidism. Maimon's autobiographical descriptions ofhis arguillents with Rabbi Raphael IZohen and others may have served as inspiration for this tale, or at least for its attribution. 19 The principal motivation underlying the fictional encounter is probably the desire to fabricate an encounter in which the towering intellectual saint ofLithuanian rabbinic culture bests and punishes its most famous intellectual sinl1er, and to place both in literary proximity to the distressingly ambiguous Mendelssohn. Nonetheless, there is a kind of historical insight behind this nineteenth-century fiction, for Solomon Main10n was amo11g those whose lives linked the Berlin Haskala with Lithllanian rabbinic culture, and he was almost the only one who played a significant role in European EnlightenlTIent thought. I have emphasized that one of the most striking things about Maimon, and one that nineteenth-century Maskilim were well positioned to appreciate, is the extent to which, in language, mannerisn1, and habit of thought, Maimon was unable to break with tradition. Berdichevskywas, of course, reacti11g to Maimon's autobiography (and perhaps thinking also of himself) in his witty description of Maimon, but in tl1is respect Maimon would appear to have presented himself with some accuracy. Moreover, this aspect ofhis persona became central to Main10n's image in tl1e nineteenth century. The most important memoir of Maimon, outside his autobiography, is a curious work by MaiITIOn'S friend and fellow Maskil Sabbattia Wolff titled Maimoniana oder Rhapsodien zur

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Charakteristik Salomon Maimons (1813), which is a kind of anecdotal biography somewhat like Boswell's Johnson. The dominant theme of Wolff's anecdotes is the ineradicable Jewish nature of Maimon's character and his inability to speak German without a strong Yiddish accent. ThiIS, to cite merely one incident here, Wolff describes Main10n as becon1ing so excited vvhile reading a treatise by the great lTIathematician Leonhard Euler that he began swaying like a yeshiva student and lapsed into a Talmudic singsong chant. 20 This question of the compatibility of "Jewish characteristics" with European Enlightenment and Bildung and Maimon's struggle with that ideal is another way of framing one of the key features of MailTIOn'S life and work (including his ovvn representation of that life). As I have noted in earlier chapters, not only is Maimon's German redolent of Yiddish (the literary equivalent, perhaps, of readi11g modern mathen1atics in Talmudic singsong), but also the generic form of his written work-even his autobiograpl1y-is consta11tly veering toward that of rabbinic commentary. In Maimon's descriptions ofhin1self and the impression he made on his GerlTIan-Jewish peers, one sees the begi11nings of the phe110menon of the Eastern European Jew, or Ostjude, who is represented as everything thegebildeten Jews of Germany have OVerCOlTIe. Thus, when Maimon describes himself as a Polish Jew arriving in IZonigsberg "with a heavy, dirty beard, in torn filthy clotl1es, my language a jargon COlTIposed of fragments of Hebrew, Jildisch-Deutsch and Polish, together with gran1matical errors," an attentive reader can hear the ecl10es of such descriptio11s in works throughout the next century. A generation later, Heinrich Heine described SllCh a Jew in a sente11ce that simultaneously sums up the stereotype of the Ostjude and anticipates its romantic reversal: The Polish Jew with his barbarous fur cap, vermin infested beard, and his jabber is certainly preferable to many other Jews I know who shine with the magnificence of gilt-edged gover111nent bonds. 21 This stereotyping of the other as all that "gilt-edged" German Jewry had ostensibly overcome has been characterized by Steven Aschhein1 as the "underside" of Jewish Enlightenment, for it was as much the

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construction of Jews intent 011 modernization and acceptance as of Gentiles. 22 The construction of the Ostjude has generally been described as a phenomenon of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but we can already limn all the essential characteristics of this counter-ide11tity in Maimon's self-descriptions, alld the descriptions of hilTI by Wolff and others. The related question of MailTIOn'S literary style, or lack thereof, is connected to a peculiar feature of Maimon's reception, namely, the frequency with which Maimon canle to be contrasted with Moses Mendelssohn as a kind of antithesis. If Mendelssohn, who was one of the founders of modern literary German, was the archetypal figure of the German-Jewish subculture, Maimon came to be represented as his unruly, unassimilable other. 23 The historian Heinrich Graetz's invidious comparison of Maimon and Mendelssohn in the middle of the nineteenth century, which I quoted in the introduction, is typical: Whereas Mendelssohn reached the right way through Maimonides, Solomon Maimon was led into error, doubt and unbelief and to the end of his life lived an ain1less existence. 24 The unbalanced nature of Graetz's historical judgment was already marked by his colleague Simon Bernfeld, who protested against the distinctively German-Jewish animus that he discerned behind it. 25 Nonetheless, this contrast with Mendelssohn is a persistent feature of the literature and has been restated as recently as 1992, in a popular history of German Jewry that describes Maimon as Mendelssohn's doppelganger, his "dark twin." 26 Occasionally, the valences have been reversed. Thus Israel Zangwill wrote a rather contrived bit ofhistorical fiction titled "Nathan the Wise and Solomon the Fool." The title was ironic, and Maimon, the unassimilable Jew, was given to see what the urbane Mendelssohn (the model for the sterling, ecumenical "Nathan the Wise" of his friend Lessing's play) could not: that the Jewish Enlightenment project was doomed and that Mendelssohn's own children would convert. 27 A subtler slight of Mendelssohn comes from the pen of the great historian of Jewish philosophy Harry A. Wolfson, who in describing the generation to which both men belonged wrote:

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Some of them, like Solomon Maimon and Moses Mendelssohn, achieved fame and distinction either through the profundity of their thought or the elegance of their table talk. 28 Wolfson, who had been a student at the Slobodka Yeshiva before coming to the United States and, despite a lifetime at Harvard, never lost his Yiddish accent, may have identified with Maimon. However, the largely self-created image of Maimon as the improbably gifted, yet barbarous, philosopher has predominated. In 1911, Jakob FrOil1er published a new edition of the Lebensgeschichte. In his introductory description of Maimon's origins, he imitated MailTIOn'S laboriously achieved cultural detachment: Whoever desires to experience an ethnological sensation need not venture to the far corners of the earth. For that a day's journey from Berlin will suffice. One need only cross the border to find an ahnost unknown human type full of mystery and wonder . . . to look with astonishment at these people with their dirty caftans, their exotic faces which, like ghostly apparitions frOITI times long lost, still haunt the modern present. 29 Of course, Fromer's sensation was no lTIOre "ethnological" than Maimon's or many of their Jewish readers. It was something closer to the embarrassment oforigins, for Fromer, like Maimon, was himselfan Ostjude. 30 Interestingly, the Yiddish translator ofMaimon's autobiography makes a similar set of assumptions in his introduction to the Lebensgeschichte. J. Goldschmidt writes that Maimon was a phenomenal event as a person, as a Jew and as a philosopher. Like a young tree in a wasteland, without dew and without rain he appeared unexpectedly and astonishingly in a dark and miserable land without any means and rose extremely high-to the loftiest heavens of thought ... but not a single event in his life aided the normal development of his intellectual powers. 31 Of course, both authors are merely echoing Maimon's own assiduously cultivated self-image as having come, as he wrote to !Zant, fron1 "the woods of Lithuania" and appeared to his contemporaries in Berlin "like a comet" and so on. 32

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It was just this exoticization of Main10n as "an almost unknown human type" who had nonetheless managed to cross the border to civilization that irked Franz Rosenzweig when he read Fromer's edition of Main10n's autobiography while serving in World War I. In a letter home to his parents, Rosenzweig wrote: It is nonsense to describe the condition of the Jews at that tin1e as 'barbaric' ('decline' etc.). We are talking about a self-sufficient culture [eine geschlossene I(ulturJ. Only the individual (Maiinon) who abandons it, beco1l1es a barbarian. Seen froin the outside, without linguistic or factual knowledge, such a culture can only be understood as barbaris1l1. 33 The ecumenical idea behind this ren1ark about cultural "others" is, in a certain sense, obvious (it was ancient by the time Montaigne expressed it), but it was rarely so to Maimon's Gern1an and Jewish readers in the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and even twentieth centuries. The questions of Gern1an-Jewish cultural identity were sin1ply too close to the bone for most of Rosenzweig's peers to share his insight. Nonetheless, it has been part of my argument throughout this book that such romanticism also needs to be ten1pered. It was, in part, Maimon's inability to abandon the characteristic tropes and forins of the rich literary culture in which he was raised that made him appear barbarous to his conteinporaries and later readers. Nonetheless, no culture is homogeneous or "self-sufficient," certainly not that of premodern European Jewry. In biographical fact, Main10n could not have succeeded had he not been able to draw on the tradition of Jewish philosophical thought, which was one tributary of his literary heritage. Maimon's autobiography had another effect on Rosenzweig. It introduced him, as well as several previous generations of German-Jewish readers, to a serious account of Maimo11ides' thougl1t, through Maimon's ten-chapter epitome and innuinerable philosophical asides. In fact, it was just this form of Jewish thollght against which Rosenzweig was beginning to rebel when he wrote his letter. In a brief enigmatic note to himself written a little while afterward, Rosenzweig notes that Maiinon could be seen as the key figure betwee~ _I~a~~ ~I~~ :~-Ie~~1~3~ _

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Later, in his Star of Redemption, which, r011ghly speaking, marks the end of the period of German-Jewish Enlightentnent thought that Maimon helped to inaugurate, Rosenzweig decisively rebels against precisely Mailnon's sort of philosophical idealisln. 511Ch philosophy, he fatuously wrote, vveaves the blue n1ist of its idea of the All about the earthly. For indeed an All would not die and nothing ,vould die in the All. Only the singular can die ... philosophy has to rid the world of what is singular. 35 Mailnon's project of reading Maimonides through IZantian lenses and vice versa, which he had followed explicitly in Giva)at ha-Moreh and ilnplicitly elsewhere, including the Lebensgeschichte, had initiated al1 interesting and important subtradition in modern Jewish thought, which was Rosenzweig's main target whether he was explicitly thinking of Maimon or not. In Chapter 3, I lnentioned Hermann Cohen's rejection of the suggestion that he was influenced by MaitTIon, and lny speculations as to why. For Cohen the project was as much culturala twinning of the heroes of Deutschtum and ]udentum-as it was philosophical, and Maimon, a disreputable Ostjude, did not fit the cultural profile. But the approach had appeal also to those who had no stake in the ideal of German-Jewish symbiosis. Thus, the lTIodern editor of the standard Hebrew edition of the Guide of the Perplexed) Yehuda Even-Shmuel (IZa11fn1.an), a staunch Zionist, wrote an extensive threevol1une cOlnlnentary that was characterized by a generally IZantian approach. 36 Likewise, two historians of Jewish philosophy, Jakob Guttman and David Neun1.ark, interpret Main10nidean doctrine as quasi-IZantian. 37 One can also see Maimon's influence in the work of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the preeminent Orthodox Jewish theologian of the twentieth century, a neo-IZantian and Mailnonidean. 50loveitchik cites Maimon's comn1entary to Maimonides' Guide) Giva)at ha-Moreh, in his most important work, Halakhic Man, which is, in part, an attempt to keep his IZantian and Maimonidean comlnitlnents without (like Maimon) devaluing the realm of Jevvish lavv. 38 Most recently (and perhaps crudely) the Israeli popular philosopher ~l~d_ g~dily Y~s!l-~y~4u

_

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Leibowitz has also read Maimonides through IZantian lenses, although he has done so unaided by Maimon. 39 Franz Rosenzweig was not the only prominent German-Jewish thinker to have read Maimon's autobiography. Walter Benjainin, Gershorn Scholem, and Leo StralIss all read Jakob Fromer's 1911 edition of the Lebensgeschichte as yOllng men. 40 Rosenzweig's philosophy was, as I have noted, a decisive rejection of the modern neo-IZantian rationalism that Maimon helped initiate, as, in a different way was Scholem's philological resuscitation of IZabbala. Scholen1 was more interested in Maimon's early kabbalistic work, parts of which he copied at the Hochschule fur Wissenschaft des JudentulTIS on a trip to Berlin in the 1930S. In an early draft of the "Epistemo-Critical Prologue" in his brilliant but failed Habilitationsschrift: The Origins of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin quoted a passage froin Main10n's discussiol1 of The Guide of the Perplexed in his autobiography. In his account of Main10nides' discussion of in what sense the two tablets of Sinai had been written with "the finger of God," Maimon had repeated a striking comlnent from Narboni's con1mentary. With regard to Maimonides' claim that the tablets were not artificial but merely "the work of God," in the same sense that, for instance, the cedars of Lebanon had been "planted" by God, Narboni tells us of a medieval marvel with radically naturalist intent. 41 Local Jewish dignitaries had shown him stones ostensibly brougl1t from Mount Sinai, each ofwhich had the impression ofa bush, in Hebrew sneh, like the burning bush encountered by Moses in his initial revelation, hence the name of the mountail1, Sinai. 42 Remarkably, Narboni says, when he broke the rocks, each of the resulting pieces retained the image ofthe bush, and he takes this as empirical confirmation ofMaimonides' philosophical claim. That is, the initial tablets ofthe law, which were written with tl1e very "finger of God," were sin1ply interesting but el1tirely natural rocks. Maimon was struck by this comment and expanded upon it in Giva)at ha-Moreh, as well as reproducing Narboni's remark in his autobiography. Benjamin was also struck by this image of the mark on the stones of Sinai, whose "peculiar nature consists in the fact that it reproduces itself immediately on ever single piece that has broken off ... and this in

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infinity."43 But he had little interest in why Mailllon had taken it from Narboni, let alone Narboni's original philological or metaphysical point (or indeed who Narboni was). In Benjamin's fertile mythological imagination, the shards of the stones upon which the original revelation had been engraved became something like signatures of the divine in1pressed on the physical world. 44 Leo Strallss, on the other hand, read Maimon in the radically naturalist spirit in which he wrote. Strauss would appear to have first encoulltered the (for him) crucial esotericist idea ofapplying the Spinozist description "theological-political" to Maimonides from Maimon's autobiography, which he cited in an early essay.45 Nonetheless, Maimon apparently played, even in the case of Strauss, a relatively minor role. Strauss would doubtless have found his way to esoteric rationalism with or without Maimon, just as Scholen1 and Rosenzweig would have rejected any such rationalism whether they had read Maimon or not. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those scholars who have made a thorough study of Maimon's philosophy have, for the most part, also been Jewish. The leading twentieth-century interpreters of Maimon-Friedrich IZuntze, Samuel Atlas, Samuel Hugo Bergman, and Nathan Rotenstreich-have all obviously viewed him as a figure of Jewish inspiration even when dealing with the most technical aspects of his idealistic doctrine. Of these, Atlas, who was (like Harry Wolfson) a graduate of the European yeshiva system and a formidable rabbinic scholar who bore an ambivalent relationship toward the world of traditional Talmlldic scholarship, had the most similar backgrollnd. Nonetheless, despite his obvious, biographical ide11tification with Maimon, his work does not engage with Maimon's style or personality in any serious way.46 I11terestingly, a fictional double of San1uel Atlas makes an appearance in Isaac Bashevis Singer's Shadows on the Hudson, which was originally serialized in the Yiddish Forverts in the 1950S. A Jewish intellectual named Zadok Halperin is described as having written works on "IZant, Solomon Maimon and Hermann Cohen. . . . His Hebrew monographs were studied at the University of Jerusalen1. His proficiency in Talmud and other sacred studies knew no limits." At almost the same time as Singer was writing his novel, a group of essays on

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Chapter Five Maitllon's philosophy was published in a Yiddish journal fron1 Buenos Aires. 47 IZuntze, Bergman (who was an adolescent conlpanion of IZaf1(a's), and Rotenstreich all gre\v 11p in an assilllilated Central European Jewish milieu. If there is a weakness to the extraordinary vvorks that each of thenl produced on Main10n, it is a tendency to view him exclusively within the discursive context of IZantian pllilosophy, even when discussing his debts to Maimorlides. One of the nlore sllrprising scholars of Maillloniana in the twentieth ce11tury has been Chaim Potok, who wrote a good philosophical dissertation on Mainl0n's philosophy 11ndel" Rotenstreich and Bergman that was never published. 48 With the exception of the first three pages, the work is entirely devoted to technical matters of epistenl0logy, but Oilly four years later Potok became famous by writing a best-seller that brought the issues of apiqorsut to popular Atnerican fiction in his novel The Chosen. In the following telltale scene, Patok's years of studying Maimon's rugged Idealist philosophy come to commercial fr11ition: All right, nlY father said I see you want me to continue my story. Now I an1 going to tell you another story, also a true story, about a Jewish boy who lived in Poland in the second half of the eighteenth century. As I tell you the story, think of Reb Saunder's son and you will have your answer. This boy, Reuven, was brilliant, literally a genius. His name was Solomon and later in life he changed his nanle . . . to Maimono When he was young, he found that the Talnlud could not satisfy his hunger for knowledge. His mind would not let him rest.... He had a great mind but it never left him in peace. He wandered from city to city, never finding roots anywhere, never satisfied, and finally died at forty-seven on the estate of a kind-hearted Christian who had befriended hinl.... Reuven, Reb Saunder's son has a mind like 5010n10n Main10n. 49 In Patok's novel, Mailllon becomes the historical emblem for the tragic conflict between religion and secular lGl0wledge, the first tragic archetype for his hero "DanllY Saunders." Historians within the Orthodox world did not forget Maimon after his appearance in the notes of the Vihla Gaoll's hagiography, and he has continued to be an occasional source of polemics again~~!!I~~Jll~uitQ(_

Literary Afterlife

philosophy or secular knowledge. As recently as 1992, an article appeared that promised to answer the question, "How has the Enlightennlent been disproved by history?" through reCOllrse to Mailnon's life history.5o This trend goes back to the 11ineteenth century. Thus, the generally nl0derate neo-Orthodox historian Zev Ya'avetz grollped Mailnon together with Lazarus Bendavid and Marcus Herz as men who sold their birthright for a right to participate in tIle Enlightennlent, although to relnain for a monlent with the biblical allegory, Maimon never really renounced the birthright of rabbinic culture, and Herz and Bendavid never quite possessed it. 51 Mainl0n's Sllccess as a German philosopher legitinlated his value as a vvorthy autobiographical subject, in his own eyes as well as those of his original readers. However, his historical reception alrnost reversed the process. Had he merely written his philosophical works withollt his autobiography, it is llnlikely that even they wOllld have received as much scholarly attention as they have. I-lis Lebensgeschichte has been read for its style, even studied on occasion for its subtleties, and used for purposes ranging from philosophical instruction to historical polelnics. What would seem to be imperishable is, literally, the name that Maimon gave hinlself in writing his autobiography. Bllt perhaps it is still too early for such a judgment. Maimon's philosophical work has, along with Gernlan Idealisnl nlore generally, enjoyed an intellectual renaissallce recently. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Maimon's philosophical work is being read in spite or perhaps even because ofits difficult literary style, and studied for its exegetical genius ifnot, perhaps, its expository power. As Manfred Frank declared ofMaimon in the pages of Die Zeit in 2004, "A great philosopher is waiting to be discovered, and the research on him still stands at the beginning." 52

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Conclusion Everywhere in scholarly work n10re is promised than achieved. SOlOlTIOn MailTIOn, "Der moralischer Skeptiker"

158

Solomon Maimon is famous (to the extent that he is famous) for two extraordinary accomplishments within the German and Jewish Enlightenments of the late eighteenth century. He was among the very first philosophical critics to truly engage the central problems of Immanuel IZant's great epistemological project in the Critique ofPure Reason and to sketch the contours of a post-IZantian German Idealism in response. He was certainly the first writer to vividly depict the wrenching move of an Eastern European Jew from traditional rabbinic culture to the Western European Enlightenment, in his autobiography. We might call the first of these accomplishments philosophical and the second literary. On the face of it, they have little to do with one another, except for the contingent fact that Main1on's achievements as a philosopher legitimated his worthi11ess as an autobiographical subject (as Maimon himself well llnderstood). This, in fact, has been the approach of writers on Maimon over the past two centuries. Philosophers have treated his autobiography as a colorful footnote and have proceeded quicldy to the technical argumentation; historians have taken Maimon's philosophical accomplishment as merely one of the earliest and most dramatic illustrations of the Jewish e11try into European high culture, and literary critics have generally ig110red the role ofphilosophical ideas, tropes, and argume11ts in Maimon's autobiography, let alone their historical origins. Such approaches are justifiable within their disciplinary borders, but sometimes it is necessary to cross borders in order to nlap important territory. As I have shown, Maimon's philosophical and autobiographical works are n10re than merely contingently related, and understanding the way in which they inforn1 each other helps to

Conclusion

illuminate the particular intellectllal and cultural n10n1ent in which Maimon's comet burst across the German sky. (The meteorological metaphor is, of course, Main10n's.) I have argued that a single, central philosophical theme animates almost all of Maimon's work fron1 his earliest unpublished Hebrew writings through his mature German and Hebrew philosophical work to his self-invention in the Lebensgeschichte. Each ofthese works is written under the philosophical sign ofnoetic, or intellectual, perfection, in which the subject strives for a perfect knowledge that would be equivalent to union with the divine mind, which he serially refers to as the active intellect, the Shekhina, the infinite intellect, and the World Soul. In his Hebrew writil1gs, Maimon uses the Hebrew Aristotelian term of art for such perfection, shelemut ha-nefesh (perfection of the soul), along with an associated cluster of Hebrew terms. In German, the word Maimon often uses to express this ideal of perfection is Vollkomenheit. In recognizing this continuity between Maimon's early unpublished Hebrew work, his matllre Hebrew and German philosophical writings, and his autobiography, I have also traced a kind ofmicrohistory ofideas withil1 a single consciousness. In little more than a decade, Maimon moved from being an exponent of what he called the "Jewish peripatetic philosophy" of the Middle Ages to being a forerunner, if not a founder, of German Idealism, one of the n10st distinctively modern philosophical systen1s. In 1778, when he wrote the Hesheq Shelomo, Maimon still wrote from within the tradition of medieval Aristotelian philosophy, especially as it was il1terpreted and radicalized by later philosophers such as Moses Narboni. Twelve years later, when Maimon published his Versuch iiber die Transcendentalphilosophie, in which he criticized and revised IZant's philosophy, he was already anticipating many of the characteristic arguments of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, as well as the perhaps insoluble contradictions they faced. Maimon's philosophical development is interesting on several levels. In the first place it complicates the standard picture of the history of Jewish philosophy. Thus, a distinguished historian of Judeo-Arabic philosophy has recently written: Jewish philosophy remained in varying degrees, indebted to Jewish AverroislTI for its continued vitality into the sixteenth century. When

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Conclusion Jews began to philosophize again in the late eighteenth century, Averroes and Aristotle were no longer their guides to the truth. l The author was, no doubt, thinkillg ofMendelssohn, who was the foremost exponent of the so-called Wolff- Leibniz school of philosophy. Maimon, who was the only other distingllished Jewish philosopher of the late eighteenth century, is a clear counterinstance ofthis description. In addition to MailTIonides, Mainl0n read Gersonides, Delmedigo, Falaquera, and perhaps even Averroes hilTIself, in Hebrew translation. He is the first l1l0dern editor ofNarboni, who was among the most radical and thorough of lnedieval Averroists. Nor will it do to silnply chalk this up as another of Maimon's brilliallt idiosyncrasies. Isaac Euchelwho studied with IZallt and who, as the editor of ha-Meassefand its associated publishing firm, had as Inllch responsibility for the propagation of maskilic ideals as anybody else, translated Avicenna, wrote about intellectllal perfection, and vvas Maimon's enthusiastic publisher-also philosophized employing the terms of radical Aristoteliallism. Isaac Satanov, who succeeded Euchel at the Hinuch NeJarim publishing hOllse, published a fourteenth-century Hebrew translation ofAristotle's Ethics with a comlnentary that struggled with qllestions of intellectual perfection. Neither l1lan was a true philosopher, but their cases do tend to show that when Jews began to philosophize again, they tllrned, unsurprisingly, to the medieval Jewish tradition, which inevitably read Aristotle through Maimonides alld sometimes read Mailnonides through Averroes. More work needs to be done on these and other figllres to determine the extent to which what I have called a medieval discourse of perfection was still all important underlying structure ofJewish thought in the late eighteenth centllry. IfMaimon is a counterillstance to standard accounts ofthe end ofthe Aristotelian period ill Jewish philosophy, he is also difficult to integrate into the common distinction in the modern period between Jewish philosophers and philosophers of Jewish origin. Thus, in a magisterial survey of Jewish philosophy, tIle great intellectual historian Shlomo Pines wrote: Although lnedieval philosophers of Jewish origin for whom Judais111 does not constitute a primary philosophical theme are thought of as

Conclusion belonging to the history of Jewish philosophy, a classification of this kind applied to such modern philosophers of Jewish origin as Salomon Maimon, Henri Bergson, Edmund Husser! and L. 1. Shestov might lead to some significant conclusions but would nevertheless seem inappropriate. It would certainly not be in keeping with the intentions of the philosophers themselves, and their views would be taken out of their natural contexts. 2 This echoes Hannah Arendt's remark about Maimon as a paradigm of the modern European Jewish intellectual, as a "conscious pariah," which I quoted in the introduction to this study. And, like Arendt's comment, it too is mistaken, or at least misleading. Maimon can certainly be placed at or near the beginning of historical lines that include Heine and Kafka on the one hand and Bergson and Husser! on the other. However, unlike them, Jewish literary and philosophical tradition is, pace Pines, not merely a theme or interest of Maimon's; it is the primary context out of which he always wrote, even when addressing the most delicate questions of Kamian epistemology. Maimon's progression from Maimonides to German Idealism is also, of course, one of secularization, in which ideas such as God, the soul, and immortality lose the last vestiges of traditional religion. In this respect as well as others, the movements of Maimon's life reflect larger trends. The point is methodologically interesting as well, for intellectual histories of secularization have often seemed to presuppose either an unlikely continuity of ideas expressed in texts of different historical periods or some stable metasubject (say, European thought), which is difficult to defend but seemingly hard to do without. In Maimon, we have a thinker in whose work one can actually see the process in which the radical potential of classical and medieval ideals are released in the Enlightenment. The point of this study has been, however, to understand Maimon as the man thinking and not only the thought. In tracing thematic continuities between Maimon's Hebrew and German works and by showing how they make sense as parts ofan individual life, at a crucial moment of transition in Jewish and German history, I have tried to show, at the level of the individual, how secularization and cultural conflict are expressed in pain and dislocation, as well as the comedy of hard-won blasphemy.

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Notes

Introduction 1. Arnulf Zweig, trans. and ed., Immanuel I(ant: Correspondence (Catnbridge, England, 1999), pp. 3II - 2. 2. Zweig, I(ant: Correspondence, pp. 132-8. 3. For a biographical study, see Martin L. Davies, Identity or History: Marcus Herz and the End ofthe Enlightenment (Detroit, 1995). 4. Zweig, I(ant: Correspondence, p. 293. 5. Zweig, I(ant: Correspondence, p. 292. 6. Zweig, I(ant: Correspondence, p. 312. 7. For a historical portrait of the salon, see Deborah Hertz, jeJvish High Society in Old Regime Berlin (New Haven, 1988). The classic study of the significance of such institutions as spaces for early Inodern public discourse is Jiirgen Habern1as, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thon1as Biirger, trans. (Calnbridge, Mass., 1989). For an application of a generally Habermasian Inodel to this period in Jewish history, see the influential study of David Sorkin, The Transformation ofGerman jewry) 1780-1840 (Oxford, 1987). 8. Sololnon Maimon, Versuch iiber die TranJcendentalphilosophie) mit einem Anhang iiber die symbolische Erkenntnis und Amerkungen (Berlin, 1790). 9. Solomon Maimon, GivaJat ha-Moreh (Berlin, 1791). 10. Solomon Maimon, Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte) Von ihm selbst erziihlt und herausgegeben von I(arl Philipp Moritz (Berlin, 1792-3). II. Alan Mintz, Banished from Their FatherJs Table: Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography (Bloomington, Ind., 1989), p. 10. This judgn1ent has been recently confirmed in extensive detail in the con1prehensive study by Marcus Moseley, Being for M.,vselfAlone: Origins ofjewish Autobiography (Stanford, 2005). 12. Zweig, I(ant: Correspondence, p. 476. 13. Cf. Yinniyahu Yovel, Dark Riddle: I(ant) Nietzsche) and the jelvs (University Park, Penn., 1999), pp. 18-9. Yovel suggests that this passage was actually in some sense directed at Mendelssohn. This is simply n1istaken. Mendelssohn had been dead for eight years, did not know Reinhold, and had a fairly cordial relationship

Notes to Pages 4- - 6 with IZant. Main10n, on the other hand, vvas both Reinhold's bitter rival and alTIOng the lTIOst formidable of those who both understood "the critical philosophy" and thought it could be improved. 14. SOlOlTIOn Main10n, Streifereien im Gebiete der Philosophie (Berlin, 1793). 15. For an anecdotal account of IZant's childhood that discusses his Lutheran upbringing, see J. H. W. Stuckenberg, The Life ofImmanuel I(ant (London, 1882), ch. 1. See also Ernst Cassirer, I(a'nt: Life and H10rk (New Haven, 1980), pp. 12-39; and Manfred IZuehn, I(a·nt: A Life (Calnbridge, Mass., 2001), pp. 24-60. 16. The name ofthe town in which Dov Baer held court is transcribed variously. 'The spelling I adopt here is ll1eant to reflect Yiddish pronunciation rather than the Polish orthography, in conformity with the usage of~ for exalTIple, Allan Nadler, The Faith ofthe Mithnagdim: Rabbinic Responses to Hasidic Rapture (Baltimore, 1997). 17. These ambivalently related characterizations n1ay, in part, be traceable to the lnedieval Christian question of vvhether to regard Jews as atavistic Old Testament biblicists or as adherents of a new Taln1udic heresy (nova lex). See Frank Manuel, The Broken Staff: Judaism Through Christian Eyes (Calnbridge, Mass., 1992), and Amos Funkenstein, Perception of Jewish History (Berkeley, 1993), pp. 172-200. For Enlightenment attitudes toward Eastern Europe, see Larry Wolff, The Invention of Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization in the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, 1994), especially ch. 7, on Poland. 18. Heinrich Graetz, History ofthe Jews (Philadelphia, 195 6 ), v. 5, p. 407. 19. For a recent, and ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to relate Maimon's early kabbalistic interests to his later philosophy, see the otherwise excellent study of Meir Buzaglo, Solomon Maimon: Monism) Skepticism) and Mathematics (Pittsburgh, 2002), pp. 130-5. 20. I think, for instance, that David Sorkin, who is the leading American historian of the Haskala, sometimes falls into this trap. For an early instance, see his "Jews, the Enlightenlnent, and Religious Toleration: Some Reflections," Leo Baeck International Year Book (1992), p. 10. Sorkin's most important recent studiesMoses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (Berkeley, 1997) and The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought: Orphans of [(nowledge (London, 2000 )-display similar tendencies on occasion. I discuss these issues a little further in Chapter 2. 21. I quote from the most accessible recent edition, Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte, Zwi Batscha, ed. (Frankfurt, 1984), p. 154. Here and throughout, I have dravvn on the incomplete nineteenth-century English translation of J. Clark Murray, which has been recently reprinted, The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon (Urbana-Chalnpaign, 2001). (A modern German scholarly edition that respects the integrity of the original remains a desideratum, as does a complete and accurate English translation.) The patron is actually identified, in the literary fashion of the day, only as "H--." Davies, in Identity or History? identifies this figure as Herz (p. 10 and fn. 28), as have others. Maimon's slighting of "H's" philosophical

Notes to Pages 7-10 talents might be taken to undern1ine this identification, but it is Inore probably to be understood as a deliberate insult of his former patron. 22. See, for instance, Maimonides' philosophical dictionary, Millot ha-Higayon s.v. dibur: "The word dibur is an amphibolous tern1 which can mean 3 things. First, that which distinguishes Inan who may intellect the intelligibles, learn the arts, and distinguish evil from good, is called the faculty of dibur." Maimon had brought a copy of this dictionary with hin1 to Berlin in an edition with commentary by Mendelssohn; see Main10n, Lebensgeschichte, p. ISO. For Maimon's own explicit use of this definition, see his remark that "the essence [of Inan] is as a Hai haMedaber," in his commentary to the Guide ofthe Perplexed (Mailnon, Giva)at ha-Moreh, S. H. Berglnan and N. Rotenstreich, eds. [Jerusalem, 19 65], p. 35). 23. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. 172. 24-. For the classical source of the tenn, see Mishna Sanhedrin 10: I, which excludes the apiqores fron1 the world to come, and the comn1ents of the Talmud, BT Sanhedrin 99b, which describes such a person as one who disparages the Torah and rabbinical authority. 25. "0 thou who first from so great a darkness were able to raise aloft a light so clear, illumining the blessings of life, thee I follow, 0 glory of the Grecian race," in Lucretius, De Raerum Natura, W. H. D. Rouse, trans. (Cambridge, Mass., 1924-), bk. III, p. 171. Con1pare, for instance, Maimon's remark that the Hasidim are ranked beneath the "grossest Epicurean" in their failure to understand the nature of perfection (Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. 98), discussed in Chapter 2. 26. See the discussion ofSander Gilman,jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the jews (Baltimore, 1986), pp. 124--32; and Ritchie Robertson, "From the Ghetto to Modern Culture: The Autobiographies of Salomon Maimon and Jakob Fromer," Polin: A journal of Polish-jewish Studies 7 (1992), pp. 12-30. 27. The classic discussion of the Hebrew sources of Spinoza's philosophy is Harry A. Wolfson, The Philosophy ofSpinoza (Cambridge, Mass., 1934-), 2 vols. 28. For a discussion of what might be called the "crypto-Spinozisln" of I(ant's third Critique, see John H. Zammito, The Genesis of I(ant)s Critique ofjudgment (Chicago, 1992), pp. 24-8-62. 29. See Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate ofReason: German Philosophy from [(ant to Fichte (Cambridge, 1987), esp. pp. 4-4--126; and, more generally, David Bell, Spinoza in Germany from 1670 to the Age of Goethe (London, 1984-). 30. The title of I(ant's oblique contribution to the controversy was "What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?" (1786), recently retranslated in Allan Wood and George di Giovanni, eds., Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason) and Other Writings (Cambridge, England, 1998), pp. I-IS. 31. Actually, in the Maimonidean form with which Maimon was familiar, it was the triple identification of knower, known, and the act of knowing. See the extensive discussion in Chapter 3.

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32. Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dan1e, 1984), p. 52, and esp. ch. 5,passim. 33. In particular, MacIntyre works vvith a rather unnuanced and rOlnantic idea

of the theoretical stability of the n1edieval religious Aristotelianisln of Aquinas and others (e.g., Main10nides). Part ofvvhat I will sho\v about Main10n is that he selfconsciously releases the radical and even anti-ethical potential of this philosophical tradition. MacIntyre's ongoing refonnulations and the cOlnlnentary and criticisn1 that these works have elicited is beyond the scope of this study. 34. Vivasvan Soni, "Affecting Happiness: The Emergence of the Modern Political Subject in the Eighteenth Century," Ph.D. dissertation (Duke University, 2000 ). 35. For a con1prehensive discussion of the centrality of Bildung for modern Ger-

n1an Jewry, see Sorkin, Transformation ofGermanIervry. On the Aristotelian sources for the developlnent of early ideas of Bildung, see Robert E. Norton, The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth Century (Cornell, 1995), esp. ch. 3. 36. Wolfson, The Philosophy ofSpinoza, v. I, pp. vii-viii. Wolfson discusses Main10n's cOlnparison of Spinoza's account of the relationship between finite n10des and an infinite God to the Lurianic doctrine of Tzimtzum, or divine contraction, on pp. 394-5. 37. On the vexed question of Spinoza's Jewish education, see, now, Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (Can1bridge, England, 1999), ch. 4. For a critique ofWolfson's general approach, see Edwin Curley, Behind the Geometrical Method: A Reading ofSpinozaJs Ethics (Princeton, 1988), pp. x-xii. 38. Zweig, I(ant: Correspondence, p. 175. 39. Moses Mendelssohn, "Morgenstunden," In Gesammelte Schriften Iubiliiumsausgabe, Alexander Altn1ann, ed. (Stuttgart, 1971), v. 3, pt. 2, p. 3. 40. I(arl Reinhold, "Briefe tiber die kantische Philosophie," Der Teutsche Merkur, January 1787, third letter, p. 12. 41. Robert Pippin has produced an interesting and important body ofwork devoted to arguing for this characterization and working through its consequences. For his most succinct statements, and references to his other work, see his Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions ofEuropean High Culture (Oxford, 1991), esp. ch. 3, and his Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge, England, 1997), esp. ch. I. 42. In1n1anuel I(ant, Critique of Pure Reason, Nonnan I(elnp Smith, trans. (New York, 1963), Axi-xii. 43. In1manuel I(ant, "An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenlnent?" in What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century AnS1vers and TIventieth-Century Questions, Jalnes Schn1idt, ed. (Berkeley, 1996), p. 58. 44. This is from the famous Davos disputation with Heidegger over the nature of I(ant's philosophy, reproduced in Martin Heidegger, I(ant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Richard Taft, trans. (Bloomington, 1990), app. 2, p. 172.

Notes to Pages 14-21 45. I(ant, Critique ofPure Reason, B135. 46. Hannah Arendt, "The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition," Jewish Social Studies 6 (1944), p. 100. 47. Interestingly, Arendt, succun1bing to a popular misilTIpression, included Charlie Chaplin among her Jewish pariahs. 48. One place to n1ark the beginning of this revival of interest is in Beiser's influential book, The Fate ofReason, ch. 10. More recent studies include those collected in the excellent anthology edited by Gideon Freudenthal, Salomon Maimon: Rational Dogmatist) Empirical Skeptic (Dordrecht, 2004). Manf1 ed Frank has recently proclaimed Mailnon the great undiscovered philosopher of his generation (a clain1 that was also heard in the nineteenth century), in Die Zeit, "Der Scharfsinn des Herrn Main10n," June 3, 2004. 49. Sabbattia Wolff, Maimoniana oder Rhapsodien zur Charakteristik Salomon Maimons (Berlin, 1813). 50. I(enneth L. Schlnitz, "The History of Philosophy as Actual Philosophy," Journal ofPhilosophy 85 (1988 ), p. 674. 4

Chapter One 1. A cOlTIplete list of such works would be tedious. However, in addition to the treatment ofHeinrich Graetz, A History ofthe ]e'ws (Philadelphia, 1956), p. 6, and the work of Hillel Levine, The Economic Origins ofAntisemitism: Poland and Its Jews in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, 1991), p. 4and fn. 7, see, for example, Bernard Dov Weinryb, The Jews ofPoland: A Social and Economic History ofthe Jewish Community of Poland) 1100 -1800 (Philadelphia, 1973). For a partial exception, see the brief but nuanced discussion of MailTIOn'S proposed conversion in Jacob I(atz, Out ofthe Ghetto: The Social Background ofJe1vish Emancipation) 1770 -1870 (Can1bridge, Mass., 1973), pp. 114-15, and compare with n1Y discussion in Chapter 4. 2. Or thereabouts. The question of the exact date of Maimon's birth has been the subject of son1e dispute. The date is generally put at 1754; see, for instance, Encyclopedia Judaica S.v. "Maimon, Solomon." This date follows Sabbattia Wolff's early men10ir, Maimoniana oder Rhapsodien zur Charakteristik Salomon Maimons (Berlin, 1813), p. 10, which was echoed by the first in1portant scholarly work on MailTIon, Abrahan1 Geiger's "Salomon MailTIOnS Entwicklung," Jiidische Zeitschrift 4 (1866), pp. 198-99. However, the date does not quite tally with various ren1arks of Maimon, as was recognized by Friedrich I(untze, Die Philosophie Salomon Maimons (Heidelberg, 1912), p. 502, who noted that in September 1794 Maimon wrote to Goethe, "Ich trete zwar erst in n1einem 42 Jahr." In his in1portant introduction to the Hebrew translation of Main10n's autobiography, Pinchas Lahover strengthened the case for n10ving the date backward to 1753, based on a relTIark in Maimon's unpublished Hebrew manuscript Hesheq Shelomo, folio 19. As Lahover also insists, Main10n's birthplace was certainly Sukoviborg rather than the

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nearby Nieswicz (to which he later moved). See Solomon Main10n, Hayyei Shlomo Maimon, Pinchas Lahover, cd., and Y. L. Baruch, trans. (Tel Aviv, 1941), p. 9. 3. For an overview of this economic arrangement, see M. J. Roslnan, The LordJs Jews: Jelvish-Magnate Relations in Eighteenth-Century Poland (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), esp. pp. 1-22. For an illulninating socioeconomic case study, see Gershon Hundert, The Jews in a Polish Private T01vn: The Place of Opat01v in the Eighteenth Century (BaltilTIore, 1992). The work of Hundert, Roslnan, and others has substantially revised the Inonochromatic portrait of Polish-Jewish relations painted by previous historians. For a discussion of the Halakhic details of Jewish leaseholding in Poland, see Edward Fram, Ideals Face Reality: Jelvish LalV and Life in Poland) I550 -I655 (Cincinnati, 1997), ch. 6. 4. The bulk of Ashkenazi Jewry lived in the Polish Lithuanian COInmonwealth throughout Inost of the eighteenth century. The population figure of 750,000 was arrived at by Raphael Mahler, The Jelvs ofOld Poland in Light ofNumbers (Warsaw, 1958) (in Yiddish), on the basis of a 1764 census. For more recent discussions that accept Mahler's reasoning, see Rosman, The LordJsJelvs, and Shaul Stalnpfer, "The 1764 Census of Polish Jewry," Bar IUan 24-25 (1989), pp. 41-147. 5. Solomon Main10n, Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte, Zwi Batscha, ed. (Frankfurt, 1984), p. 15. 6. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. 16. 7. Levine, Economic Origins ofAntisemitism, pp. 1-19,232-40. Levine refers to Main10n's grandfather and his broken bridge at several key points throughout the book and draws on Maimon's autobiography rather uncritically for his account of eighteenth-century Polish blood libels as well. For trenchant criticism on this and other scores, see the brief review of Gershon D. Hundert, American Historical Revielv, 98 (October 1992), p. 1246, and cf. Hundert's similar criticisms of the work of Majer Balaban and Wladyslaw Smolenski in the introduction to his Jelvs in a Private Polish Town, p. xv. See also Levine's discussion in "'Should Napoleon Be Victorious . . . ': Politics and Spirituality in Early Modern Jewish Messianism," Jerusalem Studies in Jelvish Thought 16-17 (1997), pp. 65-84. 8. Adam Teller argues for the specific historical plausibility of Mailnon's account, even if it should not be taken as typical, in "The Reliability of SoloInon Maimon's Autobiography as an Historical Source," Gal-Ed: On the History of the Jews in Poland 14 (1995), pp. 13-23 (in Hebrew). 9. For a brief statement of this position, see M. J. Rosman, "Jewish Perceptions of Insecurity and Powerlessness in 16th-18th Century Poland," Polin I (1986), pp.19- 27· 10. Such two-generation households were exceedingly common, as Jacob I(atz showed in his classic study "Family, I(inship, and Marriage in the 16th to 18th Centuries," Jewish Journal ofSociology I (1959), pp. 4 -22. II. Main10n n1entions his older brother Joseph in Lebensgeschichte, p. 32.

Notes to Pages 24 -25 12. Main10n, Lebensgeschichte, p. 3+. The rhetoric of this passage is interesting and will be further discussed in Chapter 4. 13. A social history of this phenolnenon in eighteenth-century Ashkenaz is a desideratuln, as is an analytical account of the logic and rhetoric used by such prodigies and their teachers. For studies of the latter in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see H. Z. Dinlitrovsky, "Leqet YosefveSugyot haTalInud (leToldot I
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Notes to Pages 25 -28 18. See, for exan1ple, the characterization ofAchim Engstler in his Untersuchungen zum Idealismus Salomon Maimons (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt, 1990), p. 26. 19. For the eighteenth-century Ashkenazic, especially Polish, practice of n1arrying boys off at this age, see the responsa of Mailllon's older rabbinic contemporaries: R. Jacob Emden, She)elat Yavetz (Altona, 1759), no. 14-, p. 18; and Rabbi Ezekiel Landau, Noda be-Yehuda (Prague, 1811), no. 54-, p. 63. For a provocative historical discussion of the phenoillenon, see David Biale, Eros and the Jelvs: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (New York, 1992), pp. 127-30. For a demographic discussion, see Andrejs Plakans and Joel M. Halpern, "An Historical Perspective on Eighteenth Century Jewish Fan1ily Households in Eastern Europe: A Prelin1inary Case Study," in Modern Jewish Fertility, Paul Ritterband, ed. (Leiden, 1981), pp. 1-29. Plakans and Halpern note four instances of such n1arriages in their Latvian data and reillark that "they would appear to require cultural rather than den10graphic explanation" (p. 27). This is precisely right. Note that the husbands of these n1arriages are listed without official occupation. They lllay very well have been young scholars like Maimon. 20. See the discussion of Mai1110n and later Inaskilic memoirs in Biale, Eros and the Jelvs, pp. 14-8 -52. 21. Mai1110n, Lebensgeschichte, p. 62. The coincidence of the chapter nUlllber \vith Main10n's marriage age is likely a deliberate bit of Maimonian literary play. 22. Thus, for instance, Soloillon Dubno (1738 - 1813) tutored Moses Mendelssohn's son Joseph (see Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study [Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1973], p. 355); Isaac Satanow (1732-1804-) tutored for several Berlin families (see Joseph I