The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Heresy, and Philosophy 9780804767682

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The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon

STANFORD STUDIES IN JEWISH HisTORY AND CuLTURE EDITED BY

Aron Rodrigue and Steven J Zipperstein

The Radical Enlighteninent of Soloinon Mai1non Judaism) Heresy) and Philosophy

Abraham P. Socher

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 2006

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2006 by the Board ofTrustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. This book has been published with the assistance of the Koret Foundation. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Socher, Abraham P. The radical enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, heresy, and philosophy/Abraham P. Socher. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8047-5136-6 (cloth : alk. paper) r. Maimon, Salomon, 1754-rSoo. 2. Philosophy, Jewish. 3· Haskalah. I. Title. B3068.S65 2006 181' .06-dc22 2005028101 Original Printing 2006 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: 15 14 I3 !2 II IO 09 08 07 06 Typeset by G&S Book Services

For Shoshana

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction

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Solomon Maimon

Maimon introduced in midcareer. Themes, methods, and scope of study exemplified and described. Maimon's literary and philosophical style. I.

Maimon's Life and "Life History"

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Maimon's life and the light it sheds on eighteenth-century Judaism, including Lithuanian rabbinic culture, Hasidism, and the Haskala. Encounters with Moses Mendelssohn, the Maggid of Mezeritch, and others. Accounts of Maimon's final years. A heretic's burial. 2.

Maimon's Medieval Desire: The Hesheq Shelomo

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Maim on's first, unpublished collection of Hebrew writings. Revision of standard accounts of the place of medieval philosophy in the Haskala. Medieval and early modern discourse of perfection defined and discussed. Maimon's answer to the question, What is Haskala?

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German Idealism in a Maimonidean Key Maimon's Kantian interpretation of Maimonides and Maimonidean interpretation of Kant. New light on Maimonidean-Averroist doctrine as sources for Maimon's influential Idealism.

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Contents

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From Shelomo ben Yehoshua to Solomon Maimon

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Maim on's autobiography: the discourse of perfection ironized, rabbinic style parodied, and tales of Enlightenment. Solution to puzzling comic parable with which Maimon closes his autobiography. 5·

Literary Afterlife

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Maimon as a homegrown Spinoza in the Ashkenazi Jewish imagination, from Auerbach and Guenzberg to Singer and Potok. Colorful anecdotes, legends, literary depictions, and forgeries. Attempts at philosophical and cultural recuperation. Conclusion

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Maimon's philosophical and literary achievements. A counterinstance to standard narratives of the Jewish transition to modernity. Methodological and substantive value of case studies (intellectual microhistories). Heresy as literary performance.

Notes

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Bibliography

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Preface and Acknowledgments

The preface and acknowledgments to an academic first book often read like a bar mitzvah speech, and one is tempted-or I am at any rateto dispense with predictable thank-yous to family, friends, teachers, and colleagues and proceed as a novelist would. In short, I am tempted to write "For Shoshana" and move on to the introduction. But even a simple dedication exhibits an odd feature of the genre: the way in which the gratitude is rendered in the third person to an anonymous public. When one speaks of more local and specific debts than those owed a spouse, the rhetorical effect is, if anything, less direct, so that what had been, say, a helpful remark made by a friend in conversation (as when Azzan Yadin said that the problem of German Idealism was "are we gods?") becomes memorialized and strangely distant. Am I writing a letter to Shoshana, thanking Azzan, telling a story, or making an archival entry? And why should the reader who opens this book to learn about Solomon Maimon care? In short, a preface is either a bit of autobiography or its evasion. As I say, I am tempted to choose the latter, but it turns out, as it often does, that there are good and sufficient reasons for tradition. I, in particular, have no right to enter into the republic of letters (what the premodern Hebrew writers who Maimon read sometimes called qiryat sefer) without thanking those who have made my citizenship possible. Moreover, autobiographical evasion is an inauspicious way to begin a book on Solomon Maimon, of all people. I first had the idea to write something, perhaps a dissertation, on Maimon in my second year of graduate school at Harvard, in the fall of

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Preface and Acknowledgments

1993. I had read the little English Schocken edition ofMaimon's autobiography in Jerusalem a few years earlier. As anyone who has read the Autobiography knows, it is a brilliant and extraordinarily entertaining book. Its wit and pathos shine through even J. Clark Murray's imprecise and incomplete Victorian translation (although it was one of the books that the publisher Salman Schocken personally treasured, he authorized Moses Hadas to cut it further). I had special reason to like Maimon's story of his transition from Lithuanian Talmudic prodigy to German Enlightenment philosopher, since I had studied in a yeshiva whose intellectual origins were in the Lithuanian tradition and then studied philosophy at UCLA. That is not to say that someone like me, brought up in Berkeley and the San Fernando Valley, really had much in common with Maimon. Still, I had a sense of what it meant to be a talmid hakham, a master of rabbinic texts, in the tradition that Maimon had abandoned, and I understood something of the seductiveness and intractability of philosophical problems. I also had a sense of the characteristic performative style of the modern apiqores, or heretic, who is perpetually rebelling against, or ironically subverting, rabbinic culture without ever quite leaving-an odd "Hello, I must be going" rhetoric. (My late uncle Buddy, Rabbi Bernard Kimmel, zikhrona levrakha, was a little like that. After he died, I ran across a copy of that same little Schocken paperback of Maimon's Autobiography in his study.) So in the fall of1993, I read a footnote in one ofMoshe Idel's fantastically learned articles that mentioned an early unpublished Hebrew manuscript of Maimon's, titled the Hesheq Shelomo, and had an idea. I thought perhaps I could get hold of this manuscript and read it together with Maimon's published philosophical writings and his autobiography. At some point, I went to visit my teacher, the late Isadore Twersky, who was the director of the Jewish Studies Program at Harvard, to talk to him about it. Professor Twersky was, I think it is fair to say, an intimidating man. He had clear, penetrating eyes and a quiet way of holding one's gaze that was unnerving. I gave him my best Maimon pitch, but he was not buying. There were, no doubt, several reasons for this. At least one of them was that he was not really interested in a dissertation about an apiqores. I walked out of his office on the top floor of Widener Library

Preface and Acknowledgments and down three flights of stairs, all the way to the basement. As I was walking toward the rear exit, I passed a row of public telephones. I dialed long-distance information and asked for the home phone number in Berkeley ofAmos Funkenstein. I knew Funkenstein was deeply interested in both Maimonides and German Idealism and had a reputation as something of a heretic himself, but it turned out that he had also been reading Maim on himself for forty years. I gave Amos the same pitch I had just given Professor Twersky. He asked me a few questions and said he thought we could work something out. Seven months later I was in Berkeley. Had I stayed at Harvard, I am not sure that I would have ever produced this or any other book in the field ofJewish intellectual history. On the other hand, I have found myself returning to my notes from Twersky's seminar discussions and the conceptual-bibliographical maps he provided of medieval and early modern Jewish thought again and again. Those who know his work will quickly see the debt that I owe him. My debts to my other teachers at Harvard are less fraught. Jay Harris introduced me to the study of modern Jewish intellectual history. The writing and teaching of Bernard Septimus remain my ideals of philosophically informed textual scholarship. Finally, my conversations over the last thirteen years with Jim Robinson, who entered the program at Harvard with me and stayed to become one of its most erudite graduates, have helped me in more ways than I can specify. When I arrived in Berkeley, Amos Funkenstein offered me three things without which this project would never have gotten off the ground: confidence, patience, and an academic home in the history department of the University of California at Berkeley. No doubt this would have been a different (and better) book if he had lived to direct its initial formulation. He died a little less than two years later. Mter Amos's passing, David Biale and Martin Jay cochaired my dissertation committee and, through conversation and by example, taught me a great deal about the writing of intellectual biography. Daniel Boyarin served as outside reader (a perfect role), true friend, and a model of creative scholarship. Each of them has helped me, and they continue to do so with both wisdom and tact. Witl1out their patience, and, more important, their impatience, I would never have finished. My debt to

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Preface and Acknowledgments

Steven Zipperstein, informal mentor, erstwhile senior colleague, and the coeditor of this series, is less formal but no less deep. Among my fellow students at Berkeley, I owe special debts of gratitude to my friends Peter Gordon, Ben Lazier, Sam Moyn, Ron Reissberg, Jonathan Schorsch, and the ubiquitous Azzan Yadin. Among specialists in Maimon, I thank my good friend Itzik Melamed, who has taught me more about Maimon than anybody else. Bluma Goldstein showed me an insightful, unpublished essay on Maimon's autobiography. Moshe Idel generously shared some of his insights on Maimon and the Hesheq Shelomo with me in 1997-98 in Jerusalem. Gideon Freudenthal organized a terrific international conference on Maimon in 2000 and traded insights and speculation with me over a memorable cup of coffee a few years later in a cafe on Emek Refaim. Florian Ehrensperger, the prematurely erudite editor of the modern critical edition of Maimon's Transcendentalphilosophie, took the time to give me detailed comments on my 2001 dissertation. AllanArkush's comments on the manuscript were perceptive and encouraging at a crucial moment. Norris Pope has been tactful and incisive, as has the entire editorial team at Stanford. I owe all of them debts of gratitude, to which the standard caveat applies. I owe a more material but no less significant debt to Professor Dan and Suzanne Portnoy, who made the writing of the dissertation possible by lending me, at an absolutely crucial moment, a quiet and ample space over Codornices Creek in my last year in Berkeley. My students and colleagues at Oberlin College have provided analmost ideal environment for both writing and its avoidance. Shulamit Magnus, Steven Volle, Paula Richman, A. G. Miller, Joyce McClure Babyak, and James Dobbins have been efficient and solicitous chairs as well as good friends. Rabbi Shimon Brand has been both a teacher and a friend. Isaac Miller, an old friend from Berkeley, has been a comrade m arms. My graduate studies and later research were supported by several institutions, including UC Berkeley's Department of History and Program in Jewish Studies, the University of California's Center for German and European Studies, the Fulbright liE Program, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the National Foundation ofJewish Cul-

Preface and Acknowledgments ture, UCLA's Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Studies, Stanford University's Department of History and IHUM Fellows Program, the Koret Foundation's Jewish Studies Publication Prize, and Oberlin College. Harry Hirsch, dean of the college, graciously paid for the indexing. My debt to the Wexner Foundation and to its president, Larry Moses, is of a different order. Without the foundation's generous financial support and mentorship (in particular, that of Larry, Robert Chazan, and Danny Landes) through my first four years of graduate school, I would never have been able to start out on the path that led to this book. My mother, Tammy Sacher, is a poet, and my father, David Sacher, a philosopher, although neither have had the academic good fortune to pursue these callings full-time. In writing a book that combines philosophical and literary interpretation, I have tried to put their influence to good use. My brother Joe has taken some interest in Maimon and made helpful remarks on the introduction, as did my father. I wish that this was a book that my other siblings and best friends Jesse, Sam, Sarah Davis, Tom Ginsburg, and Demian Steele (who delivered the original dissertation to Sproul Hall) might read and enjoy. Maybe next time. My parents-in-law, David and Leean Knetzer, have always taken an interest in my studies, no matter how obscure, and I thank them for their support and for their daughter. Acharon) Acharon Haviv: I thank my children Naomi, Anna, Coby, Daniel, and Dalia for their gracious love and their patience with the geographic and financial vagaries of an academic career. This book is dedicated, as is everything else in my life, to my wife and their mother, Shoshana. Oberlin, 2005

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Introduction

Solomon Maimon

"He is one of the rawest of Polish Jews." Marcus Herz in a letter to Immanuel Kant

In May 1789 Immanuel Kant wrote to Marcus Herz: But what were you thinking, dearest friend, in sending me a large package of the most subtle investigations not only to read but to think through, when I, in my 66th year, am still burdened with completing 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 witl1 those critical demands) .... I had half decided to send the manuscript 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 main questions so well as Herr Maimon 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 Kant at Konigsberg and had maintained an important philosophical correspondence with him over the previous two decades. Indeed, it was in a letter to Herz, nine years before the publication of The Critique ofPure Reason, that Kant 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 Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, written by an acquaintance who called himself Solomon Maimon.

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Introduction In the letter that accompanied his manuscript, Maimon identified himself as someone who had been "condemned at birth to live out the best years of my life in the woods of Lithuania," and had thereby been "deprived of every assistance in acquiring knowledge." He went on to describe his belated and avowedly partial enlightenment in Germany, with the support 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 malce me neglect to some extent those subordinate studies, language, method and so on. 4 Maimon's self-portrait, which he was to elaborate on three years later in a widely read autobiography, was underscored by Herz's cover letter to Kant, which described the author as having only recently been "one of the rawest of Polish Jews." 5 The manuscript itself was 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 Kant's Critique but also a kind of commentary 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 of sources, including the author's boldly chosen namesake, the twelfth-century Jewish philosopher Moses ben Maimon, known in the European philosophical tradition as Moses Maimonides. Kant'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 Kant 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 Kant a matter for social comment, such praise could be almost public without being published? Maimon's book, titled Versuch iiber die Transcendentalphilosophie, was published in 1790, and his career as a public intellectual was launched. 8 He became the coeditor of a lead-

Solomon Maimon ing German 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 commentary to the first part of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed, which interpreted Maimonides in the light of Kant (and vice versa) and was the first substantial work of modern philosophy written in Hebrew. 9 In 1792, Maimon made Kant's praise fully public by proudly 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 autobiography. As the literary historian Alan Mintz has written, it is "one of those rare books that legitimately deserves to be called seminal." 11 Maimon continued to write and publish for another seven years, until his death in 1800 at the age of 47. Over the last two centuries, Kant's letter has been Maimon's legitimating epitaph, quoted 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, Kant had not been so kind. In March 1794, he wrote to Karl Leonhard Reinhold, the leading exponent and popularizer of the Kantian thought at the time: I feel an inexplicable difficulty when I try to project myself into other people's ideas, so that I seem unable really to grasp any one else's system .... 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. 12 Too much, perhaps, should not be made of such private (and parenthetical) remarks. The letter was written at a time in Kant's life in which he felt that his intellectual faculties were failing him just as he

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was witnessing the defection of his most gifted students and expositors, Reinhold among them. The passage smacks as much of academic gamesmanship as it does of Enlightenment anti-Judaism. Nonetheless, the terms with which Kant dismisses Maimon are revealing. He is an intrusive Jew whose work is unoriginal (perhaps even parasitic) and close to unintelligible.I3 Maimon's German philosophical writing did betray its Polish-Yiddish origins, and his exegetical, self-reflexive manner of presentation was strikingly different from the expository prose of the Aufkldrung philosophers whose ranks he aspired to join. In fact, as Kant knew, Reinhold had already administered a scathing reproof to Maim on in an extraordinarily heated exchange of philosophical letters, in which he suggested more than once that Maimon ought to improve his literary skills before publishing anything further. Maimon not only ignored the suggestion but, in a characteristic breach of literary etiquette, published the exchange without Reinhold's permission in 1793. 14 Herz's description of Maimon as "raw," together with Kant's sneer and Reinhold's suggestion, is, of course, an example of now familiar attempts to exclude an unruly other, no matter how clever, from the public sphere of enlightened European discourse. One way to mark the beginnings of European Jewish modernity, however, is to note that Maimon became an influential German philosopher nonetheless. 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 spectacularly 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 ofwhat a Polish Jew might achieve in moving from the barbarism of Eastern European Jewish culture to Western enlightenment. However, there was always a kind of paradox or mystification involved in this thought, which is epitomized in Maimon's remark to Kant that he had grown up "in the woods of Lithuania." Although it is true that Maimon grew up in the house-

Solomon Maimon 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 more bookish than that of, say, Kant's upbringing as a Lutheran Pietist in Konigsberg. 15 Maimon was the son of a recognized rabbinic scholar and himself 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 adult, he rejected the Talmudism to which he was heir, Maimon turned to alternative conceptions ofJudaism in Kabbala 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 man in the early 1770s, was, enthusiastic practices notwithstanding, a group of spiritual elitists devoted to a complex mystical tradition, as Maimon's valuable autobiographical account of that visit makes clear.I 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 Kant. In doing so, it helped to develop and popularize the Haskala critique of a traditional Jewish society that was somewhat paradoxically represented as both ignorantly barbaric and impossibly scholarly. Such a portrait had some roots in traditions of internal Jewish critiques of Talmudism from the rival perspectives of Maimonidean philosophy and Kabbala, but it also reflected the attitudes of a still Christian Europe toward Jews and, to a lesser extent, ofWestern Europe toward the East. 17 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 remarkable capacity ofJews 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 skepticism, he fell prey to shocking errors. 18

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Introduction Graetz's assumption of an easy opposition between "the thickest cloud of Polish ignorance" into which Maimon was born and the European philosophical knowledge and culture that he later attained almost necessitates that he achieved the latter through 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 of several 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 thought, 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 of the Jewish Enlightenment. The first is to identify the influence of premodern forms of thought with conservatism, or at least a kind of moderation. The second has been to represent the maskilic critique of traditional 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 ofMaimon'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 my thoughts quite franldy. [ ... ] 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 manners, my expressions and my whole outward behavior with the rational in my thoughts excited his imagination more than the subject of our conversation raised his understanding. 21

Solomon Maimon

The passage repays close scrutiny. Maimon would seem to admit the crude animality of his language and manners, as well as the exotic novelty of his performance in his matter-of-fact acceptance ofHerz's reception of him as like "a dog or a starling who 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 elsewhere in the autobiography he understands in the light of both Kantian and Maimonidean 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 immersion in the world of premodern Jewish thought. Maimon may even have been undermining this picture of himself as "a talking animal" (redendes Tier) in the very phrase with which he asserts it. If we literally translate this phrase back into Hebrew (Maimon's language of primary literary and philosophical literacy), it becomes hai ha-medaber, which is the medieval Aristotelian designation of man as the rational or speaking animal. 22 Such bilingual puns and allusions were very much a part of Maimon's distinctive literary style. A cruder 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 Mendelssohn 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 themselves, the conduct ofone's life is really a matter of taste. "We are all," he reports himself as saying, "Epicureans" (Wir sind alle Epikuriier). 23 Although the term "Epicurean" was a term of learned abuse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-and the German reader might 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 much more aggressive, with a real idiomatic punch. In both rabbinic Hebrew and Yiddish, the word Epicurean, or apiqores, is

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Introduction a standard term for heretic. 24 Thus, ifwe translate Maimon's sentence into the only lingua franca that he and Mendelssohn actually shared, it becomes not merely a statement of moral hedonism but a bold (and perhaps pained) admission and accusation, with a much wider range ofliterary and Halakhic associations. The urbane exemplar of the compatibility of German-Jewish Enlightenment with 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 return. Maimon returns again and again to the figure of Epicurus in his writings. In 1790, for instance, he applied Lucretius's poetic praise of Epicurus to Kant 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 allusions and sly assertions of intellectual superiority aside, it is nonetheless true that Maimon made his first appearance in enlightened society as an exotic, a kind of philosopher-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 uneasy heretical hybridity, rather than as an example of more or less complete progress, from premodern Judaism or "Polish ignorance" to Enlightenment philosophy. We may 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 cultural translation (in which something is always lost). Nonetheless, the cultural distance that such translations had to travel should not be overstated. Among the reasons for Maimon's success (insofar as his life was a success) is that the spoken language in which he was raised, Yiddish, was not as distant, exotic, and unintelligible as he, Marcus Herz, and their 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 of the triple cord of Christian, Islamic, and Jewish philosophy that comprised medieval

Solomon Maimon philosophy, and although Maim on was far closer to the concerns of such scholasticism than Kant (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 exponents often liked to think. Kant's letter to Herz about Maimon contained more than the praise quoted at the outset. It also included a fairly detailed response to Maimon's proposed revision of the critical philosophy, which Kant called "Spinozism." This description 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 ultimately unified is Spinozistic, although, as we shall see, it also has philosophical roots extending well before Spinoza in medieval Hebrew philosophy (roots that to some extent Spinoza's doctrines shared). 27 Nonetheless, Maimon's doctrines were also an attempt to resolve genuine philosophical tensions in Kant's system, and they even had systematic and textual bases within Kant's Critique ofPure Reason. Moreover, they would seem to anticipate some of the ideas of the Critique ofJudgment, on which Kant 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 Kant's intellectual context. The socalled "Pantheism Controversy" (Pantheismusstreit) over whether Mendelssohn's great friend Gotthold Ephraim Lessing had been a secret Spinozistwas, along with the reception ofKant's philosophy, at the very center of the German Enlightenment struggle over the authority of reason in the 1780s.29 In this context, Spinozism was never a compliment. It meant that one had taken reason beyond its acceptable limits with dangerous and untenable results. To use Kant's own preferred terminology, such a person had lost his proper bearings, or the correct "orientation in thinking." 3 ° Finally, Maimon was, as both his and Herz's cover letters to Kant made clear, a dissident Jew, who had abandoned the traditional Judaism in which he was raised. In 1789, Spinoza was not yet

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Introduction the "God-intoxicated man" he would shortly become under the auspices of Romanticism, but rather still the "accursed Jew." The awkwardness ofMaimon's German 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, even in his very name. The master concept of Maimon's thought is the idea of a purely active or infinite intellect that is, to use a medieval Aristotelian formulation, both the knower and the known. 31 Knowledge, and thus ultimately human perfection, consists in achieving a temporary and partial unity with this divine intellect or-in a later, pregnant formulation of Maimon's, which prefigured post-Kantian German Idealism-"World Soul" ( Weltseele). Throughout his philosophical work, and even in his autobiography, something like this ideal functions as a regulative idea toward which the finite epistemological subject and Maimon himself, 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 of the Perplexed, with which Maimon was familiar. Ari 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 discuss 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 which the breakdown of the idea of a unitary telos of human perfection was an important feature of Enlightenment discourse more generally. This is not merely a technical 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)

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of the "Enlightenment project." 32 One need not endorse the moral 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 ofVivasvan Soni, who has carefully charted the waning of the classical idea of happiness as the teleological fulfillment of human nature development in the imaginative literature of the Enlightenment, from a completely different theoretical orientation. 34 Indeed, one can see each of the intellectual worlds that Maimon inhabited struggling with the idea of a fixed human telos. In late eighteenth century Germany, this teleological ideal is the changing notion of Bildung, meaning (at least) both education and culture, which shares, in part, an Aristotelian genealogy. 35 In the Jewish world, I argue, taking a cue from the work oflsadore Twersky, that one sees each of the competing parties of early Jewish modernity-the theoreticians of the Mitnaged rabbinic establishment, Hasidism, 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 of the soul), hatzlachat ha-enoshit (human excellence, the summum bonum), and devequt (union with the divine) in new discursive contexts. The importance of such 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 ofhis age. Harry Wolfson once described his classic study of the medieval Jewish sources ofSpinoza's Ethics as finding the Baruch under the Benedictius (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 puzzle-solving approach to philosophical argument and in its unlikely governing assumption that Spinoza had been as literate in classical Hebrew literature as Wolfson. 37 Maim on was, as Kant perhaps implied, comparable to Spinoza both in terms of technical philosophy and in general life pattern. Indeed, he served for several generations of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Eastern European Jewish intellectuals (Wolfson among them) as a kind ofhomegrown Spinoza. And I will similarly try to show, among

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Introduction other things, the premodern Hebrew roots ofMaimon's radical enlightenment and aporetic epistemology. However, the principal reason for this exercise is not to demonstrate the philosophical resources ofJewish intellectual tradition but rather to provide a rich sense of the cluster of intellectual and cultural issues that marked the European Jewish transition to modernity, as they played out in Maimon's life. Maimon came to Kant's philosophy as a polyglot approaches a new language. His work is full of surprising conceptual translations, odd connections, and revealing structural comparisons. Nonetheless, although Maimon'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 German Enlightenment reflect larger issues in the two cultures in which he was a marginal figure. In his second unanswered letter to Kant, written shortly after the publication of his Transcendentalphilosophie, Maim on wrote that he had "vowed some time ago that I would henceforth read nothing but your books." 38 This was more than mere sycophancy (although it was that too). In order to understand Maimon, it is important to get some provisional sense ofKant's epochal importance for the philosophical generation to which Maimon belonged. Mendelssohn, the last great German rationalist and Maimon's erstwhile mentor, famously called Kant the "all-destroyer" who had razed the metaphysical bases for belief in God, the Soul, and Eternity. 39 Karl Reinhold, Maimon's erstwhile rival, described Kant as a Christ-like figure whose thought had inaugurated a newage. 40 Despite its extraordinary theoretical abstraction and forbidding technicality, Kant's philosophical project should be understood, at a certain level of historical abstraction, as an attempt to justify and systematize the ideals of the Enlightenment. This is true not only ofKant's moral and 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, Kant described his project as one of bringing not merely "books and systems" but the faculty of reason itself before the "tribunal of pure reason," and he explicitly tied this to the ideals of the Enlight-

Solomon Maimon enment. "Our age," Kant wrote, "is, in especial degree, the age of criticism [Kritik] and to criticism everything must submit." 42 The result of this criticism, to be preemptively brief(! attend to some of the details later), is Kant's "Copernican Revolution," which was supposed to demonstrate that the world necessarily has the structure that it does because finite minds such as ours could not conceive it otherwise. The epistemological subject is thus not merely the passive recipient of the object of his 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, time, and the categories of understanding) under which an object can be known. The cogency and virtues of Kant's transcendental idealism are not at issue for the moment; rather, what should be noted 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 Kant's famous definition 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 enlightenment .... 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 them so. To accept them as an external, heteronomous authority is not so much an abdication of one's self-legislative abilities (strictly speaking an impossibility) as a deluded, unconscious use of them. Part of the sociohistorical significance of Kant's philosophy, then, is in its rigorous working through of the consequences of radical human autonomy at every level of discourse. Freedom was, as Ernst Cassirer once remarked, "always really Kant's main problem." 44 This is so down

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Introduction to the very microstructures of cognition, in which a sense impression is only "really anything to me" if I take it up as such by accompanying it with the proposition "I think," and, correspondingly, I am 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 argument, and the manuscript that Kant 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 tension, using the conceptual tools of medieval Aristotelianism and, in doing so, laid the groundwork for the later idealist systems ofFichte and Hegel. On a more personal level, Maimon's life enacted Kant's ideal of enlightenment as bringing all the cultural givens before the bar of reason as much as any public figure of his generation. He rejected not only each of the regnant forms ofJudaism but also those of the German and Jewish Enlightenments. His distinctively modern project of autobiography can also be seen through a Kantian lens. An autobiography such as Maimon's is not merely an assertion of an autonomous self. It is one in which that self is constructed precisely through the systematic representation and ordering of the manifold of one's life. The Kantian 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 almost 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 illustrious 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 the Enlightenment late, after having been completely immersed through early adulthood in the various intellectual forms of premodern Jewish culture, including the

Solomon Maimon Talmudism of the rabbinic Mitnaged establishment in which he was raised, the populist mysticism of their Hasidic opponents, and the medieval and early modern traditions ofJewish 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 "conscious pariah," like Maimon. 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 Maimon in the eighteenth century to Franz Kafka in the early t:wentieth. 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 Kafka, both of whom are key members of Arendt's subterranean Jewish literary tradition, that their Jewishness consists largely, although not entirely, in a certain style of conscious otherness.47 But unlike these writers, Maimon 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 selfconsciously chosen than that of Arendt's true "conscious pariahs." In this respect too, Maimon stands on the threshold between (at least) two different worlds. One way to clarify this point is to return 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

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Introduction Mendelssohn and Heine, at the beginning of the Jewish entry into German literature. Unlike Mendelssohn and like Heine, he thematized his cultural otherness, flaunted it, and made it a thing of comedy. Like Mendelssohn (only more so) and unlike Heine, Maimon was in fact a product of the distinctive literary, intellectual, and religious traditions of Jewish culture. He is, in an important sense, one of the last figures to whom the traditional term 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 revival. 48 His 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 unpublished Hebrew writings of his youth 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 attempted to show how these texts fit together and make 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 eclecticism. Accordingly, a study that aims to provide a sense of his life and its exemplary interest must 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 Maimon's life and work in the varied contexts in which he lived, from Jewish Lithuania to Enlightenment

Solomon Maimon

Berlin and elsewhere. Since the chronology of Maimon's life is not well known, Chapter r also provides the reader with the biographical and historical knowledge 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 perfectionism 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 thought 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 perfectionism in his influential revision of Kantian Idealism in the face of his own skeptical challenge. These two chapters can also be read as a kind of micro history of ideas that trace, in the work of a single thinker, the transformation of the 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 cultural 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 intellectual perfection, or shelemut ha-nefesh, to the German Enlightenment ideal of Bildung. Neither of these transitions, however, was free ofirony or, indeed, ever really completed. In Chapter 4, I present my interpretation 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 incomplete 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 Maimon ends his autobiography. This allegory about the history of philosophy, human perfection, and death is, in many ways, the epitome ofMaimon's writing. It is cryptic, comic (even buffoonish), and extraordinarily learned. As I will show, in addition to the overt references to the history of philosophy, it calls on passages from

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Introduction both the Guide of the Perplexed and the Zohar and invites serious comparison to passages from the work of such younger contemporaries as G. W. 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) counterexample to several converging arguments about the nature of the Haskala, the origins of radical enlightenment, and the possibilities ofJewish thought. In each of these chapters, I have often relied for both interpretive and contextual matters on the work of several generations of previous scholars ofwhat 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 languages and several genres fit together as the products of an 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. Kenneth Schmitz has eloquently 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 medium 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

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

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Maimon's Life and "Life History" "Striving for intellectual culture [ Geistesausbildung] in endless struggles, with miseries of every kind." Solomon Maimon, Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte, title of Chapter 13

The first readers of Solomon Maimon's Lebensgeschichte took it as a picaresque transcription of events in the life of an extraordinary Polish Jew. Scholars of the last two centuries have, for the most part, made little critical improvement upon this approach. 1 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+, 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 Maimon's life. In doing so, I have still relied, as one must, largely on his autobiography. It is the sole source for the events of Maimon's childhood and, although it may be corroborated or contextualized at several points, it is the main S@urce 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 of the 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 (Solomon, son of Joshua). Indeed, 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,

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Chapter One Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte. I shall continue to refer to him as Maimon throughout, although I will return to the circumstances, 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 ofland from the infamous aristocratic magnate Prince Karol Stanislaw Radziwill (1734-1790 ), which included a farm, a warehouse, and a toll bridge. In eighteenth-century Poland, such magnates were the virtual sovereigns of large estates (latifundia), which included not only farmland but towns and even 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 of them 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 of the workings ofhis grandfather's business and relations with Prince Radziwill during 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," Maimon gives the reader a vivid account of a 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 improvement of their own condition rather than their landlord's property. They oppressed tl1e farmers ... [and] neglected the orders given for improvements. 5 The bridge in question was in frequent use, and the carriages of traveling 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 family would have time to take refuge in the neighboring woods .... This sort of life lasted for some 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 historians of early modern Polish Jewry to make similar points about the backwardness of the Polish economic system and the mentality of its agents. Indeed, Hillel Levine uses Maimon's grandfather as an exemplar of the Jewish economic middleman in eighteenth-century Poland and frames his own sociological history of Jewish-Polish relations with "views" from Maimon'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 economically 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. 10 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 information.ll Maimon'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 of this 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 10, Maimon was sent to live and study with schoolmasters in Mirz and other cities in the region. Maimon's angrily ironic description of the brutality, squalor, and ignorance that prevailed in the heder echoed his general

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Chapter One criticism of Polish-Jewish society and was itself echoed by later writers of the Haskala: I must now say something about Jewish schools in general. The school is commonly a small smoky hut, and the children are scattered, some on benches, some on the bare earth. The master, in a dirty shirt, sits on the table and holds a bowl between his knees in which he grinds tobacco into snuff with a huge pestle, like the club ofHercules, while he wields his authority.... Every week some verses from the beginning of the biblical portion of the week are explained in school, with every possible grammatical blunder. Nor can it be otherwise. For tl1e Hebrew must be explicated by means of the mother tongue [Muttersprache] but the Jewish-Polish mother tongue is itself full of defects and grammatical 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 Jew 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 sometimes 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 not study under any of the well-known Talmudic scholars of the age.l 5 His most traditional extant Hebrew writings are philosophical or kabbalistic, rather than Halakhic in nature, and although all ofMaimon's work is strewn with Talmudic quotations and allusions, there are no full-fledged discussions that engage in the dialectical give-and-take over a Talmudic passage or topic that is charac-

Maimon's Life and "Life History" teristic of traditional Talmudic scholarship. However, as a young boy Maimon was apparently tested several times by Rabbi Raphael Kohen, a prominent Lithuanian Talmudist who would later become both a leading opponent of the Haskala and a personal adversary. Given Maim on's demonstrable precocity, his later brilliance in other areas, and the impression he apparently left on Kohen, it seems reasonable to grant that he really was an excellent young Talmudist. 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 sometimes philologically spurious, comparisons 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-I785), author of the Sha)aget Aryeh, which is still read in yeshiva circles, and the teacher of Raphael Kohen. Among direct contemporaries of Maim on, 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 workY 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 disputation, 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. 18 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 instance, languages, art, astronomy, and history). His fascinating and literally in-

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Chapter One

credible account of his covert studies of non-Halakhic books hidden in his father's cupboard will be discussed in Chapter 4. However, it was as a Talmudic prodigy that Maimon achieved a special social status and, as such, became a prize, even an object of desire, in Lithuanian rabbinic culture. Mter Maimon's family 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 wedding 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 upon the fact-Maimon takes it for granted-that all these impassioned maneuverings were centered not on his bride, Sarah, but on the illui bridegroom, whose status as a future rabbi and Talmudic scholar (talmid hakham) made him, literally, a valuable commodity and an object of desire. Although such a scholar was not likely to become wealthy, his status within the culture had a monetary value. Maimon was thus married off at the young (and Halalelat Yavetz (Altona, I759 ), no. I+, p. I8; and Rabbi Ezekiel Landau, Noda be-Yehuda (Prague, I8n), no. S+, p. 63. For a provocative historical discussion of the phenomenon, see David Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (New York, I992), pp. I27-30. For a demographic discussion, see Andrejs Plakans and Joel M. Halpern, "An Historical Perspective on Eighteenth Century Jewish Family Households in Eastern Europe: A Preliminary Case Study," in Modern Jewish Fertility, Paul Ritterband, ed. (Leiden, I98I), pp. I-29. Plakans and Halpern note four instances of such marriages in their Latvian data and remark that "they would appear to require cultural rather than demographic explanation" (p. 27). This is precisely right. Note that the husbands of these marriages are listed without official occupation. They may very well have been young scholars like Maimon. 20. See the discussion ofMaimon and later maskilic memoirs in Biale, Eros and the Jews, pp. I4-8-52. 21. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. 62. The coincidence of the chapter number with Maimon's marriage age is likely a deliberate bit of Maimonian literary play. 22. Thus, for instance, Solomon Dubno (I738-I8I3) tutored Moses Mendelssohn's son Joseph (see Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study [Tuscaloosa, Ala., I973], p. 355); Isaac Satanow (I732-I8o+) tutored for several Berlin families (see Joseph Klausner, Historiya she! haSifrut haivrit haHadasha [Jerusalem, I952], v. I, p. I65); and Manasseh ofilya (I767-I83I), a more conservative Maskil, also worked as a family tutor (see Yitzhak Barzilay, Manasseh of Ilya: Precursor ofModernity Among the Jews ofEastern Europe [Jerusalem, I999], p. 24-). 23. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. 71. This incident plays a part in Sander Gilman's speculative psychoanalytic reading of Maim on's Lebensgeschichte, in Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore, I986), pp. I25-32· 24-. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. 24-, and see Zwi Batscha's editorial note 8. 25. For another example ofMaimon's misogyny, see Lebensgeschichte, pp. I798r. I am indebted here to a perceptive essay by Bluma Goldstein, which I hope she will publish. 26. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. 97. 27. See Plakans and Halpern, "Historical Perspective on Eighteenth Century Jewish Family Households." 28. For the Talmudic origins of this tension, see Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley, I993); esp. pp. 13+-66. Boyarin has also explored later, nineteenth-century cultural manifestations of the male ideal of

Notes to Pages 28-29 the Talmid Hakham, rabbinic homosociality, and their eventual repudiation, in Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley, 1997). 29. An unreliable tradition has Maimon meeting the Gaon and being placed in stocks before the Vilna synagogue for his impudence. See the discussion of the source for this story in my account of Maimon's literary afterlife in Chapter 5. Maimon was, however, familiar with the Gaon's reputation; see Lebensgeschichte, p. 121. 30. For the account of the Gaon's sons, see their introduction to his commentary to Shulchan Arukh, Orah Hayyim, Biur haGra (standard ed.), in which the Gaon forgets his family entirely while in an exalted spiritual state until a bowel movement returns his thought to mundane matters. The first full hagiography is Yehoshua Hesche! Levin, Aliyot Eliyahu (Warsaw, 1859 ), which contains several less dramatic examples of a similar scale of values. 31. Elijah ben Solomon of Vilna, Biur haGra leMishlei, Moshe Philip, ed. (Petah-Tikva, 1985), p. 263, on Proverbs 23:30, cited in Emannuel Etkes' valuable essay, "Marriage and Torah Study Among Lomdim in Lithuania in the Nineteenth Century," in The Jewish Family, David Kraemer, ed. (Oxford, 1990 ), pp. 153-75. Etkes concentrates on the nineteenth century. I hope to return to the rhetoric and eighteenth-century Lithuanian Jewish context of this and other related passages on another occasion. 32. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, pp. 78 and 86. 33. See the essays in Jacob Katz, Halacha veKabbala (Jerusalem, 1985), and my discussion in Chapter 2. 34. The classic study that argues for the pairing of the Haskala and Hasidism as revolts against rabbinic authority is Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis, 2nd ed. (New York, 1993), although as Bernard Dov Cooperman notes in his afterword, this aspect of Katz's account has had several recent challenges. M. J. Rosman has made the most extensive counterargument in his Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba'al Shem Tov (Berkeley, 1996), but see the vociferous dissent of Allan Nadler, The Faith of Mithnagdim: Rabbinic Responses to Hasidic Rapture (Baltimore, 1996 ), p. 3 and passim. 35. For the attractions of both Hasidism and Haskala to eighteenth-century adolescents like Maimon, see Biale, Eros and the Jews, pp. 150-61; and Gershon Hundert, "Approaches to the History of the Jewish Family in Early Modern Poland- Lithuania," in The Jewish Family: Myths and Reality, Steven M. Cohen and Paula E. Hyman, eds. (New York, 1986), pp. 17-28. 36. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. 104. Compare the classic description of this period by Simon Dub now, "The Maggid and His Associates and the Center in Volhynia (1760-72)," in Essential Papers in Hasidism: Origins to Present, Gershon Hundert, ed. (New York, 1991), pp. 62-63.

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37. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. uo. Maimon actually uses initials, saying that he traveled to "M--, where the leader B--lived," but the identity of the place and leader have never been in doubt. 38. Although Maim on does not indicate exactly where he was living at the time, we can assume that he was still in Polish Lithuania, in the general vicinity of Nieswicz, Slonim, and Mohilna, so a trip to Mezeritch in Volhynia was a major undertaking. 39. Interestingly, Maimon does not appear to be aware of Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov (1700-1760) as a unique founder of the movement. He does, however, mention another "BeShT," Joel Baal Shem, a well-known folk healer (it is not clear whether Maimon is referring to the late seventeenth-century author of Mifalot Elohim, published posthumously in 1727, or his grandson and editor of the same name); see Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. ro8. On the meaning of the honorific title, see Gershom Scholem's discussion in Encyclopedia Judaica, s.v. "Ba'al Shem." Incidentally, Maimon's indistinct knowledge about the origins of the movement may support Moshe Rosman's argument, in Founder of Hasidism, that Israel Baal Shem Tov was only recognized retrospectively as the founder of a distinct movement. 40. Maim on represents both "the founder of the Christian religion" and "the notorious Shabatai Zevi" as similar critics of rabbinic hegemony. Of the former he writes with dry irony that he succeeded in reforming "at least part of the Nation." See Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. ro6. 41. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, pp. ro2-3. 42. See Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer, Hasidism as Mysticism: Quietistic Elements in Eighteenth Century Hasidic Thought, Jonathan Chipman, trans. (Princeton, 1993). 43. The nineteenth-century historian Joseph Fiinn identified the proto-

maskilic Rabbi of Slonim in question as Rabbi Shimon ben Moredechai, who later provided an introductory approbation for Rabbi Baruch Schick's wellknown translation of Euclid's Elements into Hebrew. See Joseph Fiinn, Safah leNe'emanim (Vilna, r88r), p. 94. One of the medical textbooks appears to have been Johann Adam Kulmus,Anatomische Tabellen (Leipzig, 174r); I have been unable to conclusively identifY the others. See Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment, Chaya Naor, trans. (Philadelphia, 2002 ), esp. ch. 2. 44. Moses Shulvass, From East to West: The Westward Migration ofJews from Eastern Europe During the 17th and 18th Centuries (Detroit, 1971 ), esp. pp. 79-125; and William Hagen, Germans, Poles, and Jews: The Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, I772-I9I4 (Chicago, 1980 ). 45. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. 122. 46. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. 123. 47. Marcus Herz had actually been among the enlightened Jewish students of Konigsberg, where he studied with Kant, but by this time (1777 or 1778) he had already moved to Berlin.

Notes to Pages 31-33 4-8. By the time Maimon arrived in Konigsberg, it had gone through nine editions. See Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn, p. 14-8. 4-9. See Alexander Altmann, "Moses Mendelssohn: The Archetypal GermanJew," in The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg, eds. (Hanover, 1985), p. 3. so. Mendelssohn himself apparently considered rendering his Phadon in Hebrew but decided it was too hard. Naftali Herz Wessely also considered translating the work but gave it up. In 1765, Mendelssohn did compose a long epistolary essay in Hebrew on the immortality of the soul that drew on Hebrew classical sources to make similar arguments; see Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn, pp. 179-93. This work was published posthumously as Sefer ha-Nefesh (Berlin, 1787) by David Friedlander. It is to be distinguished from the Hebrew translation of the Phad on that was finally published in the same year by Isaiah Beer-Bing, Fadon: Hu Sefer ha-Nefesh (Berlin, 1787). The contemporary demand for Hebrew translations of Mendelssohn is attested to by Isaac Satanov in an appendix to his Sefer ha-Middot (Berlin, 1784-), p. 138. 51. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. 125. 52. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. 129. On the term Betteljude and the large number of Eastern European Jewish wanderers who fit the category at this time, sec Shulvass, From East to West, esp. pp. 13-17 and pp. 70-74- and notes. 53. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. 133. 54-. The manuscript is now held by the Institute for Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts at the Jewish National and Hebrew University Library, Jerusalem, catalogued as MS 8064-26. Abraham Geiger's conspectus, "Salomon Maimons Entwicldung," is the first scholarly discussion, although it is brief and marred by animus against the genre. The manuscript was held by the Judische Hochschule from sometime in the mid -nineteenth century until World War II, when it was apparently taken to the United States by Alexander Guttman. With the exception of the pages copied by Scholem, the manuscript was lost to view. It was rediscovered by Moshe Ide! at a Sotheby's auction of Guttman's collection in New York in 1981. On the subsequent controversy over its rightful ownership and the eventual disposition of the Hesheq Shelomo and other manuscripts, see H. C. Zafrcn, "From Hochschule to Judaica Conservancy Foundation: The Guttman Affair," Jewish Book Annual 4-7 (1989), pp. 6-26. I discuss parts of this manuscript in some detail in Chapter 2. One other Hebrew manuscript from Maimon is known to be extant, Ta)alumot Holchma, an account of Newtonian mathematical physics, written in the late 1780s while Maimon was in Breslau. It is briefly quoted and discussed in Samuel Hugo Bergman, haFilosojia shel Shelomo Maimon, 2nd ed. (Jerusalem, 1968), app. B, pp. 201-4-. 55. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. 134-. The anecdote is actually more plausible than it might sound. Fish arc commonly associated with the souls of the righteous in Jewish folldore. For an entertaining account of a twenty-first-century reprise of this incident in a traditional Ashkenazi community, sec Corey Kilgannon, "Miracle? Dream? Prank? Fish Talks, Town Buzzes," New York Times, p. AI.

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Pages 33-36

56. Maimon's actual description is slightly more coy. He halfheartedly blames his acquaintances for taking him to "lustigen Gesselschaften, in Wirtshauser, auf Spaziergange und zuletzt auch in--und dieses alles aufihre eigne Kosten" (Maimon, Lebemgeschichte, p. 170 ). Maimon's dissolute ways are also described by Berlin contemporaries, such as Sabbattia Wolff and Lazarus Ben david, whose memoirs are discussed later. 57. Maimon entered the Altona Gymnasium Christianeum the following year in 1784-. 58. On the Jerusalem affair, see Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn, pp. 514--52, especially as supplemented and corrected by the same author in his introduction and notes to Moses Mendelssohn, jerusalem: Or on Religious Power and Judaism, Allan Arkush, trans., with introduction and commentary by Alexander Altmann (Hanover, 1983). 59. For interesting speculation along similar lines, see Allan Arkush, "Solomon Maimon and His Jewish Philosophical Predecessors: The Evidence of His Autobiography," in Renewing the Past, Reconjiguring jewish Culture: From al-Andalus to the Haskalah, Ross Brann and Adam Sutcliffe, eds. (Philadelphia, 2004-), pp. 14-966. In his rather ambivalent chapter-long eulogy of Mendelssohn, Maimon makes their substantive philosophical and political disagreements a little more explicit; see Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, pp. 158-67, esp. p. 166 (on Spinoza). I hope to return to a detailed exegesis of these passages and the related question of their approaches to Kabbala as a form of]ewish allegorical myth on another occasion. 60. Lowenthal's piece was adapted from a series of newspaper articles he wrote in the mid 1920s on "German Jewish Intellectual Culture" for the short-lived ]udisches Wochenblatt, translated and republished in Critical Theory and Frankfurt Theorists: Lectures, Correspondence, Conversations (New Brunswick, 1989 ), pp. 5-14-. See also Leo Lowenthal, "Cedars of Lebanon," Commentary, May 194-6, p. 73. 6I. Todd Kontje, Private Lives in the Public Sphere: The German Bildungsroman as Metajiction (University Park, Penn., 1993), p. 37. The quotation of Anton Reiser is also taken from Kontje. 62. See the commentaries of R. Moses Isserles to Shulkhan Arukh, Orakh Hayyim, p. 695 ff., and, for example, the daring eighteenth-century joke reported in the name ofR. Jonathan Eybeschutz in Menachem haCohen, "Parparot lePurim," Mahanayim 79 (1963), p. 4-0. For a general discussion, see Jeffrey L. Rubinstein, "Purim, Liminality, and Communitas," A]S Review 17 (1992), pp. 24-7-77. 63. An undated twentieth-century brochure published by the Gymnasium Christianeum commemorates the attendance of Maimon and the nineteenthcentury German philosopherS. L. Steinhem and contains the text of two educational certificates, the first of which is dated November 1783 and refers to Maimon as merely "ein junger Mann, jiidischer Nation, namens Solomon aus Lithauen." The second certificate, dated February 1785, refers to him as "Salomon Maimon,

Notes to Pages 36-38 aus Littauen gebi.irtig." See Samuel Hugo Bergman, The Philosophy of Salomon Maimon, Noah J. Jacobs, trans. (Jerusalem, 1967), p. 2, fn. 2. (The footnote does not appear in the Hebrew edition). For the Gymnasium Christianeum's place in the Aufkliirung, see Franklin Kopitzsch, Grundziige einer Sozia!geschichte der Aufkliirung in Hamburg und Altona (Hamburg, 1982 ), pp. 713-38. 64. Every proposed liberalization of Jewish rights in Prussia from 1780 until 1812 included a provision requiring Jews to take a fixed surname in place of their patronymic. Other provisions included conducting business in German rather than Yiddish and shaving off one's beard. See Dietz Bering, The Stigma of Names: Antisemitism in German Daily Life, I8I2-I933, N. Plaice, trans. (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1992), pp. 27-4365. Maimon could conceivably have known of the fourteenth-century philosopher Shelomo ben Menahem Prat Maimon, who was the last influential teacher of philosophy in Provence. His work and that of his students did circulate in manuscript form in eighteenth-century Eastern and Central Europe. On this Maimon, see Colette Sirat, A History ofjewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, England, 1985), pp. 397-98; and Ernst Renan, Les ecrivans juifs du XIV siecle (Paris, 1843), pp. 407-13. 66. For a discussion of Kohen's perhaps apocryphal mission in which he determined that the Maggid was not a Talmid Ha!tham at the behest of the Vilna Gaon, see Simon Dubnow, Toldot haHasidut (Tel Aviv, 1932), pp. 463-65; and WolfZeev Rabinowitsch, Lithuanian Hasidism from Its Beginnings to the Present Day, M. B. Dagut, trans. (London, 1970 ), p. 13. On his opposition to Mendelssohn, see Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn, pp. 383-88. 67. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, pp. 188-89. 68. The refusal to grant one's wife a divorce is not among the original rabbinic list of the twenty-four actionable causes for excommunication (see T B. Berakhot, 19a), but it is mooted in the later Ashkenazi responsa literature. See the sources cited by Katz, Tradition and Crisis, p. ns and notes. 69. Heinrich Heine, Religion and Philosophy in Germany, John Snodgrass, trans. (Albany, 1986), p. 70. Heine's remarks on Mendelssohn, whom he famously compares to Luther, are also perceptive. 70. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. 191. Perhaps because of the ensuing controversy, Maimon mentions them only by their initials. I follow the plausible identifications of Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn, p. 363 and note. 71. Jacques Chretien de Beauval Basnage, Histoire des ]uifs: depuis Jesus-Christ jusqu'a present, pour servir de continuation l'histoire de Joseph (Rotterdam, 1706n). It was widely read, reprinted, and translated throughout the eighteenth century. Indeed, Maimon may have had help from the Yiddish paraphrase by Menahem Amilander, Sheyris Yisroel (Amsterdam, 1743), or the English translation, The History of the jews from Jesus Christ to the Present Time (London, 1708), which is

a

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prefaced with a denunciation of Deism, which Basnage's "amazing chain of Providence refutes," by the translator, Thomas Taylor. In any event, Maimon nowhere else, to my knowledge, demonstrates knowledge of French, nor, unlike Mendelssohn, does he discuss or allude to French writers other than Rousseau, who was already translated into German. 72. Naftali Herz Wessely, Divrei Shalom ve-Emet (Berlin, 17S2), p. 45, cf. pp. 55-56. 73. Sec Basnage, Histoire des Juift, bk. 3, ch. ro -2S, on Kabbala; bk. 4, ch. 6 on Maimonides' account of creation; and bk. 4, ch. 7, and bk. 7, ch. 32 on Spinoza. 74. Basnagc's book offended eighteenth-century Christian sensibilities for opposite reasons. See, for example, Anonymous, Remarks on Some Books Lately Published, viz Basnage's History of the Jews, Whiston's Eight Sermons, Lock's Paraphrase and Notes on St. Paul's Epistles, and LeClerc's Bibliotheque Choise (London, 1709 ), p. 2: "I think I find myself obliged to say that it is not to be read without Caution .... Basnagc ... too commonly insults the Fathers and other Christians in favour of the Jews, and of the Mahomctans; and with a very unnecessary diligence has weeded the Talmud and other Rabbinical Books." 75. Barukh Schiele, Qyneh leMiddah (Prague, 17S3). On Schick, see later discussion. 76. Presumably the work bears some relation to the section of Hesheq Shelomo titled "Maaseh Hoshev," folios 153-266, although that would appear to have been written earlier. Maimon's shi~trim there extend through higher algebra. 77. Barukh Schick, Uqlides (The Hague, 17S0 ), which is famous because in the (unpaginatcd) introduction he claims that R. Eliyahu ofVilna, the Vilna Gaon, encouraged its publication and told him that "for every deficiency a man has in the sciences, he has ten ... in the science of Torah." 7S. Sec the excellent study of David Fishman, Russia's First Modern Jews: The Jews of Shklov (New York, 1995 ), csp. ch. 2. Fishman argues, in fact, that Wessely's remark, quoted earlier, was in direct reference to Schick's visit to Berlin (p. 36). 79. See, for example, Mendel Lefin, Modah le-Binah (Berlin, 17S9 ), a work of health education, subsidized and published by the Berlin Maskilim. On Lefin, see Nancy Sinkoff, "Benjamin Franldin in Jewish Eastern Europe: Cultural Appropriation in the Age of Enlightenment," Journal of the History of Ideas 61 (2000 ), pp. 133-52, and Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands (Providence, R.I., 2004), especially chs. 1-3. So. See Introduction, p. 2. Sr. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. 197. S2. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, pp. 196-97. S3. It is possible to interpret Rabbi Manoth as a kind of digressive doppelganger who exemplifies the missed possibilities ofMaimon's life: a traditional Polish rabbi who teaches Torah and supports his family. Indeed, his name can be read as a Hebrew pun (manoth is the plural form of the Hebrew word for portion or payment).

Notes to Pages 41-45 84. For Kiih's biography, see Meyer Kayserling, Der Dichter Ephraim Kiih: Bin Beitrag zur Gcschichtc der deutschen Literatur (Berlin, r864), and the critical discussion of Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, pp. II5-2I. 85. Ephraim Moses Ki.ih, Hinterlassene Gedichte (Zurich, 1792), e.g., v. r, p. 157. 86. For a fictional portrait of their friendship, see Berthold Auerbach, Dichter und Kaufman: ein Lebensgemiilde aus der Zeit Moses Mendelssohn (Stuttgart, r86o ). 87. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, pp. 198-99. 88. See, for example, the use of the term in Alexander Baumgarten, Aesthetica (Berlin, 1750 ), and in Mendelssohn's famous prize essay of 1763, reprinted in Moses Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften Jubiliiumsausgabe, Alexander Altmann et al., eds. (Berlin, 1929 ), v. 2. 89. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. 199. 90. For an insightful study that focuses on just this episode with an eye toward the literary representation of the Aguna, see Bluma Goldstein, "Deserted Wives: Agun as on German Soil in Glikl 's Memoirs and Solomon Maim on's Autobiography" (forthcoming). 91. Wolff, Maimonia, p. 177. 92. See the discussion of Frederick Beiser, Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, 1987), esp. pp. 105-7. Part of Maimon's translation is preserved in Giva)at ha-Moreh; the rest is lost. 93. Beiser, Fate of Reason, pp. 172-77. The two versions of the infamous "Feder-Garve Review" have been translated and annotated in Brigitte Sassen, trans. and ed., Kant)s Early Critics: The Empiricist Critique of the Critical Philosophy (Cambridge, England, 2000). 94. Gnothi Sauton oder Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde appeared from 1783 to 1793. On Maimon's involvement with the journal, see Liliane Weissberg, "Erfahrungsseelenkunde als akkulturation: Philosophic, und Lebensgeschichte bei Salomon Maim on," in Der Ganze Mensch: Anthropologie und Literatur: wissenschaft in achtzehnten Jahrhundert, H. J. Schings, ed. (Stuttgart, 1994), pp. 298-328. On Moritz, see Mark Boulby, Karl Philipp Moritz: At the Fringe of Genius (Toronto, 1979 ); and Martin L. Davies, "Karl Philipp Moritz's Erfahrungsseelenkunde: Its Social and Intellectual Origins," Oxford German Studies 16 (1985), pp. 13-35. 95. Solomon Maimon, Philosophisches Worterbuch oder Beleuchtung der wichtigsten Gegenstiinde der Philosophic in alphabetischer Ordnung (Berlin, 1791). 96. Solomon Maimon, Giva)at ha-Moreh, Isaac Euchel, ed. (Berlin, 1791). 97. Solomon Maimon, Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte, Karl Philipp Moritz, ed. (Berlin, 1792-93). 98. As noted in the introduction, note rr, Alan Mintz and Marcus Moseley have both concurred in this judgment. See also my discussion in Chapter 4. Perhaps it should be noted that a case could also be made for the seventeenth-century work ofLeon de Modena, Hayyei Yehuda (Warsaw, 19II). Modena's work is informed by the rhetorical traditions of the Renaissance and is often interior in focus, but it also

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Notes to Pages 45-47 includes two ethical wills. See Mark R. Cohen, trans. and ed., The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modena)s Life of Judah (Princeton, 1988).

99. M. Vishnitzer, ed. and trans., The Memoirs of Ber of Belechow (London, 1922), which provides several interesting sketches of mid-eighteenth-century Jew-

ish life. The genre distinction between autobiography and memoir is put crisply by Roy Pascal: "In the autobiography proper, attention is focused on the self, in the memoir or reminiscence on others" (Design and Truth in Autobiography [Cambridge, Mass., 1960], p. 5). 100. The Memoirs were not published until 1896, under the editorship of David Kaufmann, as Die Memoiren der Gluckel von Hameln (Frankfurt, 1896). The only complete translation was rendered by her descendant (and among other things Freud's "Anna 0."), Bertha Pappenheim, in German in a private edition (Vienna, 1910 ). The English edition, edited by Marvin Lowenthal, The Memoirs ofGluckel of Hameln (New York, 1932), omits a good deal. 101. D. Kahana, ed., Megillat Sefer (Warsaw, 1896). 102. Kahana, Megillat Sefer, p. 3. 103. Cf. George Misch on the high medieval autobiography: "The son writes for the benefit of his family what he heard from his father. ... He adds his own life history and that of his children and grandchildren and binds it all together with worldly advice and ethical exhortation," in Geschichte der Autobiographic (Frankfurt, 1969 ), p. 585. And with regard to Gliickel's familial autobiography, compare Dipesh Chakrabarty's remarks on women's autobiographies in India between 1850 and 1910, which tend to be about extended family rather than individuals ("PostColoniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for the Indian Past," Representations 37 [winter 1992], pp. 8-9). 104. This genre is, along with letters, prefaces to books, and other authorial asides, one of the key sources for premodern Jewish self-narrative. See the invaluable collection oflsrael Abrahams, Hebrew Ethical Wills (Philadelphia, 1938). Leo Schwarz, Memoirs of My People (Philadelphia, 1960 ), also includes English translations of several different forms of early Jewish self-narrative. 105. Solomon Maimon, Uber die Progressen der Philosophic (Berlin, 1793); Solomon Maimon, Versuch einer neuen Logik oder Theorie des Denkens (Berlin, 1794; reprinted Berlin, 1912); Solomon Maimon, Die Kathegorien des Aristoteles (Berlin, 1794); Solomon Maimon, Barons von Verulam neues Organon (Berlin, 1793); and Solomon Maimon, Anfangsgrunde der Newtonischen Philosophic von Dr. Pemberton, F. Bartholdy, trans. (Berlin, 1793), a translation of Henry Pemberton's popular exposition of the Principia, titled A View of Sir Isaac Newton)s Philosophy (London, 1728). 106. Solomon Maimon, Salomon Maimons Streifereien im Gebiete der Philosophic (Berlin, 1793).

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107. Immanuel Kant, Kant: Philosophical Correspondence, I759-99, Arnulf Zweig, trans. and ed. (Chicago, I967), pp. zn-12, and discussion in the introduction. 108. Boulby, Karl Philipp Moritz, p. 28. 109. Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, ed., Briefivechsel Zwischen Rahel tmd David Veit (Leipzig, I86r), v. I, p. 254-; and Karl August Varnhagen von Ensc, cd., Briefivechsel Zwischen Schiller und Goethe (Leipzig, 1912 ), v. I, letters dated September 12 and October I794-- Sec also the discussion of Simon Bernfeld, Dor Tahapuchot (Warsaw, 1897). no. Solomon Maimon, Kritische Unterschungen iiber menschlichen Geist oder das hohere Erkentnis und Willensvermagen (Leipzig, I797). III. The letter, signed "S. Maimon. Siegerdorf near Freistadt in Silesia 7. February. 18oo," was recently discovered, along with another letter, by Florian Ehrensperger in an archive ofBendavid's papers. I thank him and Yitzhak Melamed for bringing it to my attention. II2. P. Tscheggey, "Uber Salomon Maimon und seine letzten Stunden," Kronos einem Archiv der Zeit (1801), reprinted in Wolff, Maimonia, pp. 257-59. u3. "I asked him if it was not possible that there might be a future state. He answered that it was possible that piece of coal put on the fire would not burn; and he added that it was a most unreasonable fancy that we should exist forever. Well, said I, Mr. Humc, I hope to triumph over you when I meet you in a future state; and remember you are not to pretend that you are joking with all this infidelity. No, No, said he, but I shall have been so long there before you come that it will be nothing new," in James Boswell, An Account of My Last Interview with David Httme, Esq, in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Norman Kemp Smith, ed. (New York, 1935), pp. 98-99. Cf. The Correspondence of James Boswell, Charles Fifer, ed. (London, I976), v. 3, pp. 73-74-. For the appearance of this account in Germany, see Reinhardt Brandt and Heiner Klemme, David Hume in Deutschland: Literatur zur Hume-Rezeption in Marburger Bibliotheken (Marburg, 1989), p. 6o. II4-. In his Transcendentalphilosophie, Maimon wrote that "the morally good is only good because it is true" and that anything less than metaphysical truth was mere obedience to norms (p. 4-08). This claim is echoed in his last published work, "Dcr moralische Skeptiker," Berlinisches Archiv der Zeit und ihres Geschmackes (18oo ), pp. 24-6-4-7. us. On the distinction between knowledge of"good and bad" and metaphysical knowledge, see, for example, Giva'at ha-Moreh to Guide I:2. For Maimon's philosophical struggles over questions of cognition and immortality, see my discussions in Chapters 2 and 3. u6. Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Mere Limits of Reason, Allan Wood and George di Giovanni, trans. (Cambridge, England, I998), p. 93, note. II7. Quoted in Heidi Thomann Tewarson, Rahel Levin Varnhagen: The Life and Work of a German Jewish Intellectual (Lincoln, I998), p. Sr.

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n8. Lazarus Bendavid, "Uber Salomon Maimon," NationalZeitschriftfiir Wissenschaft (Berlin, 1801). II9. Simon Bernfeld, Michael Sacks (Berlin, 1900 ), p. 3 (in Hebrew); cf. Simon Bernfeld, Kampfende Geister im Judentum (Berlin, 1907), esp. pp. 105-19. A century later, the editor of a new edition of Maimon's autobiography sent a letter to the rabbi of Glogau for information on Maimon's burial and was told that "we know nothing ofMaimon's grave," in Jakob Fromer, ed., Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte (Berlin, 19n), p. 486. 120. Fromer, Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte, pp. 35-40. 121. Yitzhak Melamed and Florian Ehrensperger visited Siegersdorf and tell me that the stone is still referred to as the Denkmal of "Kalkreuth's Jew." 122. Wolff, Maimonia.

Chapter Two I. Solomon Maimon, Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte, Zwi Batscha, ed. (Frankfurt, 1984), p. 128. 2. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. 150. Mendelssohn's edition of Maimonides' Millot ha-Higgayon was first published in Hamburg in 1761. 3. The press was established in 1784 as the publishing arm of the Free School of Berlin. See the classic study of Moritz Stcinschncider, "Hebraische Drucke in Deutschland," Zeitschrift fiir die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 5 (1892), pp. 154-86. On Buche!, sec Shmuel Feiner, "Isaac Buche!, Entrepreneur of the Haskala in Germany," Zion 52 (1987), pp. 427-69 (in Hebrew). 4. Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions ofJewish History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), pp. 234-35 ff. In the following paragraphs, I use different examples of the scholastic pursuits of these Maskilim than Funkenstein chose, for the sake of the present exposition. 5· For a recent argument that the generational distinction is crucial to an understanding of the radicalization of the Haskala, see David Sorkin, The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought: Orphans of Knowledge (London, 2000 ). For distinctions between writers ofHebrew/Yiddish and German, see Isaac Eisenstein-Barzilay's classic articles "The Treatment of the Jewish Religion in the Literature of the Berlin Haskalah," Proceedings of the American Academy ofJewish Research 24 ( 1955 ), pp. 39-68, and "The Ideology of the Berlin Haskalah," PAAJR 25 (1956 ), pp. 1-38. Moshe Pelli concurs in mapping the linguistic distinction more or less directly onto that between moderates and radicals in The Age ofthe Haskalah (Lei den, 1979 ). For an early insistence on the difference between Maskilim of Eastern and Western Europe, see Jacob Raisin, The Haskalah Movement in Russia (Philadelphia, 1913). 6. See James H. Lehman, "Maimonides, Mendelssohn, and the Me'asfim: Philosophy and the Biographical Imagination in the Early Haskalah," Leo Baeck Insti-

Notes to Pages 54-56 tute Year Book 20 (r975), pp. 87-roS, esp. pp. ror-3. The motto was long-lived and widespread enough to have been picked up and quoted by James Joyce in Ulysses (New York, I96r), p. 687. 7. I know of no definitive history of this phrase. It was perhaps suggested by Maimonides' daring Deuteronomical choice of titles for his great code, Mishneh Torah (literally, "second Torah"), which he underlined with the introductory claim that "one could read the Written Torah and this book and learn all Torah without having read any book between them." For an explicit use of the equation in later rabbinic literature, see, for example, Rabbi Hayyim Bachrach, Teshuvot Havot Yair, p. I92. 8. Aaron Wolfson-Halle, "Siha be-Eretz ha-Hayyim," ha-Meassef7 (r794-7), briefly discussed by Lehman, "Maimonides, Mendelssohn, and the Me'asfim," and in some depth by Moshe Pelli, "On the Genre of 'A Dialogue in the Hereafter' in Hebrew Haskala Literature," Proceedings of the Eighth World Congress of Jewish Studies (1982), pp. 209-r5. 9. Isaac Euchel, ed., Moreh ha-Nevuchim im Shnei Perushim (Berlin, I796). Satanov is a fascinating figure who has yet to receive extended, perceptive treatment. Incidentally, Altmann conjectures that Satanov may have been the fellow "Polish Jew residing in Berlin for the sake of study" who saved Maimon from being expelled from Berlin a second time for his possession of Millot ha-Higgayon (Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study [London, I973], p. 354). ro. Mendel Lefin, trans., Moreh haNevuchim (Zolkiew, r828), published posthumously and in direct competition with the third edition of the Maimon-Satanov Giva)at ha-Moreh. However, it may actually have been published five years later, in r833, despite the date on the title page; see Moreh naNevuchim le-Rabbenu Moshe ben Maimon, Michael Schwarz, trans. and ed. (Tel Aviv, 2002), v. 2, app. 3, p. 748, fn. IS. n. The previous publication had been the Renaissance edition of Sabbioneta (Venice, rm). See Jacob I. Dienstag, "Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed: A Bibliography of Editions and Translations," in Occident and Orient: A Tribute to the Memory of Alexander Scheiber, Robert Dan, ed. (Leiden, I988), pp. 98-roo. On this and other publications of the Wulffian Press in Jessnitz, see Alexander Altmann, "Moses Mendelssohn's Kindheit in Dessau," Bulletin des Leo Baecks Instituts ro (r967), pp. 237-75, and Azriel Shohat, Im Hilufei Tekufot (Jerusalem, r960 ), p. 207-8. For Mendelssohn's Maimonidean scoliosis, see the maskilic hagiography oflsaac Euchel, To/dot Rabbenu haHakham Moshe Ben Menahem (Lemberg, r86o ), p. 23. r2. Cf. the opening characterization of eighteenth-century Maskilim in Harry Austryn Wolfson, "Solomon Pappenheim on Time and Space and His Relation to Locke and Kant," in Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion, Isadore Twersky and George Williams, eds. (Cambridge, Mass., I977), pp. 606-7. An analogous desire to find connections between Hebrew literary traditions and contemporary

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Notes to Pages 56 -57 Enlightenment discourse also helps to explain the centrality of biblical literature to the Haskala. 13. David Sorkin first set out his case in "From Context to Comparison: The German Haskala and Reform Catholicism," Tel Aviv Jahrbuch fiir deutsche Geschichte 22 (1991), pp. 23-58. He makes the case most extensively in his Berlin Haslzalah and Germatt Religious Thought, which builds on his earlier book on Mendelssohn, Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996). For explicit confrontations with Funkenstein's question, see David Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (Berkeley, 1997), p. 169, n. 36, and "Emancipation, Haskalah, and Reform: The Contribution of Amos Funkenstein," jewish Social Studies 6 (1999 ), esp. pp. 105-6. 14-. Compare, for instance, Sorkin's mild characterization oflsaac Euchel in The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought, pp. n2-13, with that of the widely quoted impression of the (rather moderate) rabbi of Berlin, Tzvi Hirsch Levin: "Truly it is a world turned upside down. Once pigs ate acorns (Eichel), and now Euchel eats pig," in Israel Zinberg, A History ofJewish Literature, Bernard Martin, trans. (Cincinnati, 1976), p. 135, fn. 34-. 15. In his Moses Mendelssohn, Sorkin ignores some of Mendelssohn's subtler uses of radical philosophical texts, especially those of Maimonides, and does not forge a tight enough connection between Mendelssohn's texts and that of the "moderate" Hispano-Jewish tradition. See the critical review of Lawrence Kaplan, "Review of David Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment," AJS Review 21 (1998), pp. 300-307, which makes some points on a related score (albeit too harshly). The most recent vigorous case for a radical reading of Mendelssohn is Allan Arkush, Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment (Albany, 1994-), especially chs. 6 and 7. One text that might repay study in this regard is a manuscript of Mendelssohn's teacher Israel Zamosc's commentary to the Kuzari in the hand of his most famous student. The manuscript, which Adam Shear first showed me and is held by the Israel National Libraries Institute of Manuscripts, should be carefully examined for scribal additions, marginalia, signs of emphasis, and so on in comparison with the published text, Sefer haKuzari im Shnei Beurim (Warsaw, 1880 ). 16. See the characterization of Nancy Sinkoff, "Benjamin Franldin in Jewish Eastern Europe: Cultural Appropriation in the Age of Enlightenment," Journal of the History of Ideas 61 (2ooo), pp. 133-52. Sinkoff cites the work of Sorkin on Mendelssohn and others in her characterization ofLefin. (It seems to me, on quite independent grounds, however, that her characterization of Franklin is unduly moderate.) J7. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. 86. 18. Another less likely candidate might be one of the Neoplatonic works of Isaac Israeli, who was an older contemporary of Saadia. The earliest extant work of Jewish Aristotelianism is the Emunah Ramah of Abraham Ibn Daud (ca. mon8o ). For earlier anticipations ofJewish Aristotelianism (to which Maimon would

Notes to Pages 58-59 not have had access), see Shlomo Pines, "A Tenth Century Philosophical Correspondence," Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research 24 (1955), pp. I03-36. 19. Maimon, Hesheq Shelomo, folios 19-20 (MS 806426, Institute tor Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts at the Jewish National and Hebrew University Library, Jerusalem). It remains an open question as to whether the algebra textbook is an original production or (as is perhaps more likely) a translation or paraphrase of a contemporary German textbook. See Chapter 1, note 77, for speculation on its relation to the textbook commissioned in the 1780s and mentioned in Lebensgeschichte, p. 19r. 20. I am indebted to Yitzhak Melamed for insisting on this point in several discussions. 2r. On the self-referential titles of rabbinic books, see the classic essay of Solomon Schecter, Studies in Judaism (First Series) (Philadelphia, 19n ), pp. 270-82. Of course, not all such titles were both eponymous and thematically appropriate. Yohanan Allemano (1435-after 1504), one of the Renaissance scholars who taught Pico della Mirandola Jewish lore, also titled a book Hesheq Shelomo with similar noetic connotations, but I have no evidence that Maimon was aware of Allemano's book. On Allemano's perfectionism, see Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Happiness in Premodern Judaism (Cincinnati, 2003), pp. 412-23. On the other hand, Solomon Cohen (d. 1902 ), a leading Lithuanian Talmudic scholar of the nineteenth century, gave his classic work oflegal novellae the title without an apparent allusion to anything but his name. 22. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. 85. 23. See Steven Harvey, "The Meaning of the Term Designating Love in JudeaArabic Thought and Some Remarks on the Judeo-Arabic Interpretation of Maimonides," in Judea-Arabic Studies, Norman Golb, ed. (Amsterdam, 1998), pp. 175-96. 24. See Jacob Klatzkin's great lexicon of medieval philosophical Hebrew, Otzar Munahim ha-Filosojiya (Berlin, 1927-33), which lists PeJfectio and Vollkommenheit as the Latin and German equivalents of shelemut. All three have the connotation of a thing or act that has been completed. Klatzkin actually drew on Maimon's Giva'at ha-Moreh on occasion for the identification of medieval Hebrew and modern German philosophical terms. See, for example, Klatzkin, Otzar, s.v. "Behina." 25. Maimon, Hesheq Shelomo, folio 3. 26. Albeit not precisely. The Nicomachean Ethics begins with the more complex argument that goods correspond to ends and that Eudaemonia is the highest human good, although Maim on's statement that "knowledge of this purpose is very useful for the conduct of man" closely paraphrases Nicomachean Ethics, 1094a234. Maimonides' Guide, and thus the entire medieval Jewish philosophical tradition, was deeply influenced by the Ethics. However, the earliest Hebrew source tor more or less direct knowledge of Aristotle's text was through the fourteenth-century

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Notes to Pages 60-62 translation of one of Averroes' commentaries to the Ethics, which has now been published in a critical edition by L. V. Berman, ed., Averroes Middle Commentary on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics in the Hebrew Version of Samuel Ben Judah (Jerusalem, 1999 ). Maimon, however, would appear to be using a manuscript of the Sefer haMiddot of Meir ben Solomon Alguadez (fl. I390-I4-IO), which was translated from the Latin translation of Boethius. A selection from this version of the Ethics was later published with a commentary by Maimon's friend Isaac Satanov. 27. Maimon, Hesheq Shelomo, folio 3, quoting Maimonides, "Introduction," to Perush haMishnayot, Zeraim. 28. Mishna Peah I: I and B. T. Shabbat I27a. I quote this rabbinic statement, from literally hundreds of others, because it is part of the daily morning liturgy and hence of the shared religious culture. The originally intended scope of"everything else" was all the other commandments, but it was commonly quoted more broadly as a curricular mandate as well. On the Lithuanian ideology of Talmud Torah in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Norman Lamm, Torah for Torah's Sake in the Works of Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin and His Contemporaries (New York, I989 ). 29. For a perspicacious account of the early Maimonidean controversies over the place of philosophy in the curriculum, see Bernard Septimus, Hispano jewish Culture in Transition (Cambridge, Mass., 1982). 30. Maimon, Hesheq Shelomo, folios 3-4. The passage continues with a quotation of scripture that metaphorically describes the extent of Solomonic scientific wisdom: "He spoke on the purpose of the creation of the trees the grasses and animal species: 'And he spoke about the trees-from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the moss that goes out in the wall-and he spoke about the beast, about the bird, about the reptile and about the fishes' (Kings I, 5: I3 ), which demonstrated that he possessed the divine spirit." (The resonance between Solomon's name Shelomo and the word for perfection, shelemut, was a fortuitous coincidence for the medieval adoption of him as the philosopher-king.) 31. Maimon, Hesheq Shelomo, folio 6. 32. Cf Maimonides, Guide, III:27 and III:5r. 33· Maimon, Hesheq Shelomo, folio I6. 34-. Maimon, Hesheq Shelomo, folio I7. The doctrine that Aggadic lore contains hidden philosophical truth is Maimonidean, see Guide of the Perplexed I:63. The complaint that Talmudists think the road to heresy is paved with biblical grammar is also a medieval topos, going back, at least, to the great eleventh-century philologist Jonah ibn Janah, Sefer haRiqma, Yehuda ibn Tibbon, trans. (Frankfurt, I856 ), and repeated often in maskilic texts. 35. Maimon, Hesheq Shelomo, folio I7. 36. Maimon, Hesheq Shelomo, folio I7. 37· Maimon, Hesheq Shelomo, folio I29. This passage and the one quoted next have been discussed by Moshe Ide!, Hasidism: Between Magic and Mysticism (AI-

Notes to Pages 63-66 bany, 1995), pp. 39-40, although it seems to me that they are more skeptical of kabbalistic doctrine than Idel allows. The book is sealed and the dream uninterpretable because there is nothing in them unless one simply stipulates (for theologicopolitical reasons) that they are metaphorical renditions ofMaimonides. I am indebted to Prof. Idel, here and elsewhere, for several discussions regarding Maimon and the Hesheq Shelomo in particular. 38. Maimon, Hesheq Shelomo, folio 142. 39. Maimon, Hesheq Shelomo, folios 17-18. 40. Maimon, Hesheq Shelomo, folio 18. 41. See the early fifteenth-century discussion of Profiat Duran, Ma)aseh Efod (Vienna, 1865), pp. 1-5, and the discussion oflsadore Twersky, "Religion and Law," in Religion in a Religious Age, S.D. Goiten, ed. (New York, 1974), pp. 69-82. Cf. Dov Rappel, "The Introduction to the Ma'aseh Efod ofProfiat Duran," Sinai wo (1987), pp. 749-95 (in Hebrew). 42. For instance, Abraham Abulafia's distinction between the theosophical Kabbala of Sefirot and his own prophetic Kabbala, collected in Adolph Jellinek, ed., Philosophic und Kabbalah (Leipzig, 1854), pp. 33-38. Maimon actually distinguishes between two sorts of Talmudists (see the Hebrew text of Hesheq Shelomo, folio 16 ), but they quicldy coalesce into one anti theoretical party. 43. Isadore Twersky, "Talmudists, Philosophers, Kabbalists: The Quest for Spirituality in the Sixteenth Century," in Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century, Bernard Dov Cooperman, ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), p. 440. And see Twersky's other studies on the theme: "Religion and Law"; "Joseph Ibn Kaspi, Portrait of a Medieval Jewish Intellectual," in Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, Isadore Twersky, ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), pp. 231-57; and "Law and Spirituality in the Seventeenth Century: A Case Study of Rabbi Yair Hayyim Bacharach," in Jewish Thought in the Seventeenth Century, Isadore Twersky and Bernard Septimus, eds. (Cambridge, Mass., 1987). For a substantive philosophical narrative that covers much of the same ground, see Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Happiness in Premodern Judaism, especially chs. 5, 6, 7, and 9. 44. Aristotle, De Anima, 3:5. I quote from D. W. Hamlyn, trans. and commentary, Aristotle's De Anima, Books II and III (Oxford, 1968), with slight revisions in light of the translation contained in J. Barnes, ed., Complete Works ofAristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation (Princeton, 1984), for present expository purposes. 45. Maimon's knowledge of Alexander, whom he refers to in the Hesheq Shelama, folio 297, was mediated by Maimonides, who quotes him several times. For Maimonides' use and knowledge of Alexander, see the "Translator's Introduction" to The Guide ofthe Perplexed, Shlomo Pines, trans. (Chicago, 1963), pp. lxiv-lxxv. 46. Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, VII:7, 1032a32-b2. 47. Needless to say, I am simplifying an extraordinarily complex story for present exegetical purposes. The clearest account of the development of the doctrine

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Notes to Pages 66-68 of the active intellect is Herbert A. Davidson, Avicenna, Alfarabi, and Averroes on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect (Oxford, 1992). 48. Sec, for example, the cosmological description of Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Yesodei ha-Torah, ch. 3. 49. Davidson, Avicenna, Alfarabi, and Averroes, p. 44. so. Nicomachean Ethics, X:7. The question of whether, in fact, this was Aristotle's ultimate conclusion and how it fits with his earlier description of the good life as composed of a balanced diversity of goods has become a renewed issue of philosophical discussion in the last generation; see the essays collected in Arnelie 0. Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle's Ethics (Berkeley, 1980 ), and Richard Kraut, Aristotle on the Human Good (Chicago, 1987). The noetic doctrine famously echoes statements in Metaphysics, bk. 12, and is argued in greater detail in the Eudemian Ethics, on which see Anthony Kenny, Aristotle on the Perfect Life (Oxford, 1992), esp. pp. 86-n2. The Aristotelian tension between practical and intellectual virtues reappears in Maimonides' work. sr. John H. Randall Jr., Aristotle (New York, 1960 ), p. I44· 52. This ambivalence between the religious impulse to make the object of contemplation the divine being itself and the cosmological scruples to restrict it to the active intellect as a kind of epistemological demiurge stand at the very beginning of the tradition and run through Jcwish discussions of the subject. Alexander held the active intellect to be identical to the unmoved mover of the Metaphysics, but Plotinus already restricted it to a lower intellect; see H. J. Blumenthal, Aristotle and Neoplatonism in Late Antiquity (Ithaca, 1996 ), pp. 17-19. For the effect of this on the Jewish philosophical tradition, see the careful equivocations and qualifications of Maimonides, Guide I:1 and I:68, as well as the exegetical argument of his Commentary to the Mishna Pereq Heleq. 53. Jonathan Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge, England, 1988), ends up arguing for this roughly Alexandrian position on textual and systematic grounds without reference to the traditional commentaries; see pp. 135-51 and 293-320. 54. TB. Berakhot, r7a, which Maimonides apparently rephrased to emphasize the contrast between the senses and the intellect. The precise theoretical background ofRav's saying is unclear. It is an exegesis of the biblical description of the nobles oflsrael at Sinai, "And they beheld God and ate and drank" (Exodus 24: n ), which is paradoxically taken to mean that the vision replaced food and drink; sec the commentary ofR. Isaac Alfasi, ad loc. 55. Maimon, Hesheq Shelomo, folio 7, quoting Maimonides, Commentary to the Mishna Pereq Heleq. Cf. the parallel text and discussion in Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuva, 8:2 ff., together with the literalist strictures of Rabad, ad loc., who objects to the disembodied abstraction of the Maimonidean afterlife.

Notes to Pages 69-70 56. Maimon, Hesheq Shelomo, folio 8. Hatzlachat ha-adam is another Hebrew Aristotelian term of art for the ultimate human good, which corresponds to the more familiar Latin summum bonum. 57. Maim on, Hesheq Shelomo, folio 8. The image of the active intellect lighting the candle of the human intellect is overdetermined. In De Anima 3.5, Aristotle compares the action of the intellect to the way in which light activates colors, a suggestion that both recalls a whole set of Platonic images and gives rise to descriptions such as Maimon's throughout the medieval and early modern period. In the specific intellectual context oflate eighteenth-century Hebrew thought, Maimon's words evoke a more determinate cluster of allusions. A well-known Aggadic digression in the Talmud describes the righteous in the divine presence: "To what are tzaddikim likened when they arc next to the Shekhina? To a candle in the presence of a torch." When Maimon wrote this passage, he had only recently left the circle of the Maggid of Mczeritch, where this was a frequently quoted Talmudic passage, because (like the image of the drop ofwater in the sea) it suggested the possibility of losing one's ego in a union with the divine. 58. Shlomo Pines has famously taken Alfarabi's skepticism to be more radical and far-reaching than this in "The Limitations of Human Knowledge According to Alfarabi, Ibn Bajja, and Maimonides," in Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, Isadore Twersky, ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), pp. 82-104. But I follow the reconstruction of Davidson, Avicenna, Alfarabi, and Averroes, pp. 70-73. 59. Pines, "Limitations of Human Knowledge," pp. 109-10. 6o. Maimonides, Guide I:74, p. 221. 6r. One way to motivate this extraordinary idea philosophically is to pursue the question of the identity conditions for a given essence. There can be only one essence of wood, because part of what it means to be an essence is to be stripped of all particularity. If a thought just is the essence itself, then not only is my thought identical to that essence, but so is yours. So my activated material intellect cannot be distinct from yours. We arc of the same mind, literally. For an illuminating textual explication of related arguments, see Alfred Ivry, "Averrocs on Intellection and Conjunction," Journal of the American Oriental Society 86 (1966 ), pp. 76-85. 62. It was precisely this Avcrroist doctrine of "Monopsychism" that Aquinas strove to avoid in his explication of Aristotle's doctrine of the intellect. See Thomas Aquinas, On the Unicity of the Intellect Against the Averroists, Beatrice Zedler, trans. (Milwaukee, 1968). For a concise secondary account, see Fernand Van Steenberghen, Thomas Aquinas and Radical Aristotelian ism (Washington, D. C., 1980), csp. pp. 29-75. For a comparison of Maimonides and Aquinas with Aviccnna on this issue, see Harry Blumberg, "The Problem of Immortality in Avicenna, Maimonidcs, and St. Thomas Aquinas," in Harry Austryn WoijSon Jubilee Volume, Saul Lieberman, ed. (New York, 1965), pp. 165-85 (English section). For an interesting modern defense of Aquinas's position against that of the Arabic commentators, see

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Franz Brentano, The Psychology ofAristotle, in Particular His Doctrine of the Active Intellect, Rolfe George, trans. (Berkeley, 1977). 63. Maimon, Hesheq Shelomo, folio 8. 64-. The case with regard to Maimonides' position on the state of the sciences is vexed, for he (along with others) regarded Aristotelian astronomy as flawed. In an important and controversial article, Shlomo Pines has argued that this implied a deep skepticism about the possibility of real conjunction with the active intellect, in "The Limitations of Human Knowledge." For arguments to the contrary, see Alexander Altmann, "Maimonides on the Scope of the Intellect," in Alexander Altmann, Von der mittelalterlichen zur modernen Aufkliirung: Studien zur judischen Geistegeschichte (Tubingen, 1983), pp. 60-129, and Herbert Davidson, "Maimonides on Metaphysical Knowledge," in Maimonidean Studies, Arthur Hyman, ed. (New York, 1995), v. 3, pp. 4-9-ro5. 65. See Maimonides' introduction to The Guide of the Perplexed, in which the rhetoric strives to convey precisely this image. 66. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. 14-5. 67. Cf. the remark of Mendelssohn's early teacher, Israel Zamosc, Netzach Yisrael (Frankfurt, 174-1): "The ancients knew nothing of this science, so why should I mention every point at which they erred, as there are so many?" (p. 20a), although it is not made in this metaphysical context. 68. A similar set of puzzles about whether the referential function of names and natural kinds can be explicated in terms of definite descriptions led to the so-called Direct Theory of Reference, in the Anglo-American philosophy of the 1960s and 1970s. For an influential argument that the contents of one's mind cannot determine one's reference to a natural kind (like gold), see Hillary Putnam, "The Meaning of' Meaning,"' in his Mind, Language, and Reality: Philosophical Papers (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), v. 2. 69. See the discussions of Gad Freudenthal, "Human Felicity and Astronomy: Gersonides' War against Ptolemy," Da'at 22 (1989), pp. 55-72 (in Hebrew); and Menahem Kellner, "Maimonides and Gersonides on Astronomy and Metaphysics," in Moses Maimonides: Physician, Scientist, and Philosopher, Fred Rosner and Samuel Kottek, eds. (Northvale, N.J., 1993), pp. 91-96. Gersonides gives the position a Whiggish turn in his commentary to the Song of Songs: "While each of us will apprehend either nothing or very little, when all that is apprehended is gathered together, a worthy amount will have been gathered," in Levi ben Gershom, Commentary on Song of Songs, M. Kellner, trans. (New Haven, 1998), p. 23. 70. See Levi ben Gershom, The Wars of the Lord, Seymour Feldman, trans. (Philadelphia, 1984-), v. 1, especially chs. rr and 13. 71. Maimon, Hesheq Shelomo, folios 8-9. 72. Maimon's objection that such a doctrine gives every ignoramus at least a measure of immortality is the opposite of Maimonides' great fifteenth-century opponent, Hasdai Crescas, who objected that any doctrine of immortality as acquired

Notes to Pages 72-76 intellect did nothing for the pious nonphilosophers, in his fifteenth-century antiphilosophical classic, Or ha-Shem. For discussion of Crescas's critique of Aristotelianism on this point, see the unpublished dissertation of Warren Z. Harvey, "Hasdai Crescas' Critique of the Theory of the Acquired Intellect" (Columbia University, 1973). 73- Maimon, Hesheq Shelomo, folio 974- Sec the classic discussion in the title essay of Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago, 1952). 75- For a systematic application ofthis schema to the first medieval Jewish philosopher, see the monograph of Alexander Altmann and S. M. Stern, Isaac Israeli, a Neoplatonic Philosopher of the Early Tenth Century: His Works Translated with Comments and an Outline ofHis Philosophy (Oxford, 1958), esp. p. 149 and pp. 18591, who follow the discussion of H. R. Schwyzer, "Die zweifache Sicht in der Philosophic Plotins," Museum Helveticum (1944), csp. pp. 89-90. For Maimonides' brief discussion of the active intellect as the giver of forms, see Guide, Il:4 and II:n, passim, and the discussion of Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, pp. 78-79. 76. Derashot ha-Ran was published several times in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and I have not located the precise edition that Maim on used. For a modern critical edition, see Leon Feldman, ed., Derashot haRan (Jerusalem, 1973). The passage that Maimon comments on here is found in the first version of Sermon 5, p. 68. 77- Maimon, Hesheq Shelomo, folio 40. The rabbinic saying is quoted from Genesis Rabba, 68; cf. Leviticus Rabba 8. 78. The attentive reader may note that the Shekhina, which had appeared to play the role of the active intellect in the Maimonidean text Maim on quoted, has now become passive and explicitly feminine when Maimon renders the scheme in the sefirotic terms of the Zohar. The "Holy One Blessed Be He" is the ninth Scfira, Yesod, which is generally gendered male. For a discussion of related issues of gender symbolism in scfirotic Kabbala, see Moshe Ide!, "Sexual Metaphors and Praxis in the Kabbala," in The Jewish Family: Metaphor and Memory, David Kraemer, ed. (Oxford, 1989). 79. Cf. Shlomo Pines's suggestion that if God cognizes the system offorms of the universe, then he would be "identical with ... the scientific system ofthe universe ... this would make him something coming perilously close to Spinoza's attribute of thought" ("Translator's Introduction," Guide, p. xcviii). Maimon's interpretation, I suggest, takes him perilously close to the attribute of extension as welL So. Pines, trans., Guide I:69, p. 167. 81. Maimon, Hesheq Shelomo, folio 285. 82. Isaac Melamed, in "Salomon Maimon and the Spectres of Spinozism," paper presented at the Maimon Conference, Van Leer Institute (Jerusalem, 2000 ),

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Notes to Pages 76-78 has also noted this passage and suggests that Maimon's monist elaboration is missing or even conceivably censored. It is true that this passage appears on folio 285 and that the extant manuscript resumes on folio 297. However, it is not clear whether Maimon himself numbered the manuscript and whether whoever did might not have simply slipped a digit (only the odd pages are numbered, so the next number should be 287). In any event the passage does not take up the whole page and does not break off fragmentarily. 83. See the discussion of Gershom Scholem, "Devekut, or Communion with God," in his Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on ]eJVish Spirituality (New York, 1971), esp. 208-10. 84-. Dov Baer of Mezeritch, Maggid le-Devarav le-Ya/aqov (Koretz, 1781), p. 26b. 85. On the Maggid's pantheism, see Rivka Schatz Uffenheimer, Hasidism as Mysticism: Qptietistic Elements in Eighteenth Century Hasidic Thought, Jonathan Chipman, trans. (Princeton, 1993), esp. ch. 8. This aspect of his thought was especially developed by his student and Maimon's contemporary Schneur Zalman of Liadi, on whom sec Rachel Elior, The Paradoxical Ascent to God: The Kabbalistic Theosophy ofHabad Hasidism, Jeffrey Green, trans. (Albany, 1993). 86. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. n+. 87. Joseph Weiss, "Via Passiva in Early Hasidism," collected in Joseph Weiss, Studies in Eastern European ]eJVish Mysticism and Hasidism (London, 1985), pp. 69-94-, esp. n. 10, where he locates the same homily in the work of a student of the Maggid, Rabbi Uzziel Meisels, Tiferet Uzziel (Warsaw, r862), p. 39b. For a related use to which the Maggid put this verse, see Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer, ed., Maggid Deparal' le-Ya)aqol' le-Maggid Dov Ber mi-Mezeritsh (Jerusalem, 1990 ), sec. 196, p. 315. Cf. Ide!, Hasidism, pp. 195-98. 88. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, pp. 102-3. 89. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, pp. 102-3. 90. With regard to Vital's work, Maimon wrote that "leaving out what was enthusiastic [SchJVarmerische] and exaggerated, it contained the principle doctrines of psychology" (Lebensgeschichte, p. 78). Cf. the Maggid's remark with regard to Vital's most important work: "I teach everyone that all of the [scfirotic] teachings described in the book Etz Hayyim also apply to this world and the human being" (Rabbi Dov Baer of Mezeritch, Or ha-Emet, Levi Isaac of Bcrdichev, ed. [Bnei Braq, 1967 ], p. 36d). 91. Maimon, Lebmsgeschichte, pp. 77-80, and compare the testimony of Schneur Zalman of Liadi in a recently discovered contemporary document, published in the Lubavitch journal Kerem Habad (1990 ), app. 2, in which he describes his curriculum of studies under the Maggi d. 92. See, for example, Rabbi Eliyahu ben Shelomo of Vilna, Biur ha-Gra leMishlei, on Prov. 8:19, and his commentary to Song of Songs, passim.

Notes to Pages 78-81 93. Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin, Nefesh ha-Hayyim, Y. Rubin, ed. (Bnei Brak, 1989 ), p. 221. The work was published posthumously in 1814 but reflects currents

in the late eighteenth-century mitnagdic response to Hasidism. 94. Rabbi Hayyim ofVolozhin, Ruah Hayyim (Jerusalem, 1976), p. IO. 95. For a sample ofEuchel's translation of Avicenna, see "Sefer ha-Refuot," haMeassef(1794), pp. 93-95. The rest of the translation remained unpublished. 96. Isaac Satanov, Sefer ha-Middot (Berlin, 1790 ). 97. Sec, for instance, Moshe Pelli, Be-Maavqei Temurah: Iyyunim be-Haskala ha-Ivrit be-Germaniah (Tel Aviv, 1988), pp. 13-14 and notes. Pelli relies, especially, on Paul Hazard's account, European Thought in the Eighteenth Century ( Gloucester, Mass., 1973). 98. See Klatzkin, Otzar, s.v. "Osher." Maimon uses the term in this sense in the Hesheq Shelomo several times, for example, folio 16. 99. The article appeared in ha-Meassef 4 (I788), p. 237. 100. In Naftali Herz Wessely, Divrei Shalom ve-Emet (Berlin, 1782), we find perhaps the earliest instance of this ambivalence. Wessely's call for enlightenment in terms of"the Torah of man" (i.e., Bildung), which is the necessary supplement to the "Torah of God," is also couched in the traditional discourse of perfection and exhibits this ambivalence between an intellectual telos and something more cultural. IOI. Solomon Maimon (Anon.) and Isaac Euchel, "Panim haMoreh," haMeassef5 (1789), pp. 243-63. 102. Maimon and Euchel, "Panim haMoreh," pp. 261-63. A list of more than two dozen prominent subscribers in 19 cities followed. 103. In Abraham Geiger, ed., Melo Hofnayim (Berlin, 1840 ), p. 18 (Hebrew section). Earlier versions ofDelmedigo's letter were published in Yehuda Leib Meises, Qjnat haEmet (Vienna, 1828), pp. 228-32, and, originally, in Delmedigo, Scfer Elim, where Maimon and Euchel might have encountered it. On the complicated and uncertain provenance of these differing versions, see the discussion of David Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (New Haven, 1995), pp. 146-52. 104. Shem Tov ben Joseph ben Shem Tov was the last great figure of the Shem Tov family whose representatives were found among both the great defenders and opponents of philosophical rationalism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Many of Shem Tov's key comments can be read as responding to and moderating Narboni's Aristotelian radicalism. For discussion of one such instance, see Bernard Septimus, "Shem Tov and Narboni on Martyrdom," in Studies in Medieval Jewish Thought, Isadore Twersky and B. Septimus, eds. (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), pp. 447-55 (on Guide III:34). 105. Narboni, known in the Latin tradition as Maestro Vidal, has been the subject of several important studies over the last few decades. For recent overviews, see Colette Sirat, A History of Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge, England, 1985 ), pp. 332-41, and the introductory essays in Alfred Ivry, ed., Ma)amar al Shelemut

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ha-Nefesh (Jerusalem, 1977), and Kalman Bland, trans. and ed., Epistle on Conjunction with the Active Intellect (New York, 1987 ), which is a Hebrew translation of and supercommentary to Averroes's middle commentary on Aristotle's De Anima. 106. For a conspectus of Delmedigo's works, see Isaac Eisenstein-Barzilay, Yoseph Shlomo Delmedigo (Yashar of Candia) (Leiden, 1974), but the material ought to be revisited in light of criticism such as that of Ruderman ,Jewish Thought and Sciemijic Discovery. Sirat places Delmedigo at the very end of her survey of medieval Jewish philosophy (Medieval Jewish Philosophy, p. 4n), although one might also place him among the first of the figures of early Jewish modernity (he was familiar with Galileo ). He is not to be confused with his more famous ancestor, Elijah Delmedigo (1460-1493), author of Behinat haDat, and translator of Averroes and others for Pica della Mirandola. 107. It should be noted that, unlike some of the so-called Latin Averroists at the University of Paris in the thirteenth century, the Averroism of these Jewish writers was much more straightforward: They translated, commented on, and applied the works of Ibn Rushd, some of which only survive now in the Hebrew translation. This is not to say that they possessed all of Avcrrocs' commentaries or that they did not depart from his interpretations in important ways. For the classic nineteenth-century studies of these figures, see Moritz Steinschneider, Die hebraischen Ubersetzungen des Mittelalters tmd die Juden als Dolmetscher (Berlin, 1893), and Ernst Renan, Les Ecrivains Juifs Franfais du XIVe siecle (Paris, 1893). 108. I adopt here the language of Jiirgen Habermas, The Structural Tramformation ofthe Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category ofBourgeois Society, Thomas Burger, trans. (Cambridge, Mass., 1989 ). See also Jacob Katz's classic discussion of the "semi-neutral society," in Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background ofJewish Emancipation, 1770 -1870 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973). 109. Indeed, late medieval Jewish critics of philosophy repeatedly blamed the apostasy of much of Spanish Jewry on the religious disloyalty bred by such a philosophy. An early instance of this is Joseph ben Shem Tov's unfavorable comparison of Spanish conversos with the Ashkenazi martyrs at the time of the Crusades, in Kevod Elohim (Ferrara, 1556), p. 27a-b. The accusation and accompanying unfavorable comparison with unphilosophical Ashkenazi Jewry became a topos. It was revived as a partial historical explanation by Yitzhak Baer, who was also implicitly comparing Spanish Jewry of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to the modern enlightened German Jewry of which he was a product, in his History of the Jews in Christian Spain (Philadelphia, 1966 ). no. Maimon, Giva'at ha-Moreh, p. r. rn. I have translated hatzlachat ha-enoshit literally here as "human excellence." It is another Hebrew Aristotelian term of art and plays the same role as the summum bonum does in parallel Latin discussions. n2. Pinhas Eliyahu Hurwitz, Sefer Ha-Brit (Jerusalem, 1990 ), p. 189, and cf. pp. 362-63. The book was originally published anonymously in Briinn in 1797 and

Notes to Pages 84--89 remains popular in the Haredi world. Remarkably, it combines a defense of the religion in post-Lurianic terms with a pre-Copernican account of natural science. For an account of Hurwitz's career, see Zinberg, A History ofJewish Literature, v. 6, pp. 260-72. II3. In this passage, Hurwitz actually goes on to invoke Kant, in rather naive counter-Enlightenment fashion, as having shown the impossibility of establishing metaphysical proofs on the basis of reason, thus making room for kabbalistic faith. II4. Maimon, Giva'at ha-Moreh, p. 5. II5. The more common meaning of shevi is imprisonment, but I don't think it is the intended meaning here. For the theme of exile in Maim on's self-presentation, see also Chapter 4.

Chapter Three r. Solomon Maimon, Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte, Zwi Batscha, ed. (Frankfurt, 1984), pp. 201-2. 2. For characteristic quotations, see, for example, Samuel H. Bergman, The Philosophy of Solomon Maimon, Noah J. Jacobs, trans. (Jerusalem, 1967), p. 217; Samuel Atlas, From Critical to Speculative Idealism: The Philosophy of Solomon Maimon (The Hague, 1964), p. ro. 3. See, for example, Natan Rotenstreich, "On the Position of Maimon's Philosophy," Review of Metaphysics 21 (1968), pp. 534-45, who explicates the sources of Maimon's philosophy in terms of this coalition. For the latter list of philosophical systems, see Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, p. 210. 4. Immanuel Kant, Kant: Philosophical Correspondence, I759-99, ArnulfZweig, trans. and ed. (Chicago, 1967), pp. 70-76. The letter, dated February 21,1772, contains Kant's earliest critical musings. One wonders whether Herz showed it to Maimon while he was drafting his Transcendentalphilosophie in 1789. 5. See the useful account ofiZant's understanding ofLeibniz in Henry Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (New Haven, 1983), esp. pp. 19-21 on the "theoccntric model." 6. Immanuel IZant, Critique ofPure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith, trans. (New York, 1929), A5o/B74-A51/B75. 7. Kant, Critique, B139. 8. IZant, Critique, A141jB18o-r. 9. Maimon, Versuch iiber die Transcendentalphilosophie (Berlin, 1790 ), p. 62, and sec his commentary on p. 362. Cf. also Maimon, Giva'at ha-Moreh (Berlin, 1791), p. IOI. ro. Solomon Maimon, Streifereien im Gebiete der Philosophic (Berlin, 1793 ), p. 38. II. I say "prescient" because it seems to me that in important respects this form of rule skepticism anticipates that with which Wittgenstein grappled. See the classic and controversial account of Saul A. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private

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Notes to Pages 89-97 Language (Oxford, r982). This similarity has also recently been noted by Paul Franks, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), p. I53. I hope to return to this point on another occasion. r2. Maimon, Gesammelte Werke, V. Verra, ed. (Hildesheim, r965), v. 4-, p. 4-65. I3. Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, Mass., r987), p. 292. r4-. Maimon, Transcendmtalphilosophie, p. 64-. r5. Maimon, Uber die Progressen der Philosophic, in Maim on, Gesammelte Werke, v. IV, p. 20. r6. Maimon, Gesammelte Werke, v. III, pp. I74--75, quoted in Lachterman, "Mathematical Construction, Symbolic Cognition, and the Infinite Intellect," pp. 5!0-II. I7. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, I:r, p. 23. r8. Maimon, Giva'at ha-Moreh, p. 33. I9. Maimon, Giva'at ha-Moreh, p. 29. 20. My interpretation of these passages is closest to David Lachterman, "Mathematical Construction, Symbolic Cognition, and the Infinite Intellect: Reflections on Maimon and Maimonides," Journal of the History of Philosophy 30 (r992), pp. 4-95-5!92!. Maimon, Giva'at ha-Moreh, p. ro3. 22. Maimon, Giva'at ha-Moreh, p. !07 (this may be the only work ofKantian philosophy in which some version of the intellectus archetypus is continually, if perhaps ironically, "blessed"). 23. I am being deliberately imprecise in my statement of the principle, because there has been no end to nuances and redefinitions on this matter. For an important collection of philosophical and exegetical essays, see William L. Harper and Ralf Meerbore, eds., Kant on Causalit)j Freedom, and Objectivity (Minneapolis, I984-). 24-. Maimon, Transcendentalphilosophie, pp. r87-88 and 370-73, and cf. Maimon, Versuch einer neuen Logik oder Theorie des Denkens (Berlin, I794-), GW V, pp. 4-89-90. 25. Maimon, Giva'at ha-Moreh, p. ro9. 26. Maimon, Giva'at ha-Moreh, p. no. 27. See Maimon's essay, "Auszug aus Jordan Bruno von Nola, von der Ursache," in Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde ro (r793). The description "knight errant of philosophy" is from Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections, Richard Popkin, ed. and trans. (New York, I965), s.v. "Bruno." 28. Beiser, Fate of Reason, ch. ro, passim. 29. Maimon, Giva'at ha-Moreh, p. 8r, and cf. p. 53. 30. Bergman, The Philosophy of Solomon Maimon, p. 2r7; Atlas, From Critical to Speculative Idealism, p. ro. Friedrich Kuntze, Die Philosophic Salomon Maimons

Notes to Pages 97-101 (Heidelberg, 1912) is probably still the most thorough study of Maimon's mature philosophy. 31. Ernst Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophic und Wissenschaft der neuren Zeit (Darmstadt, 1917), v. 3, pp. 97-104. Jan Bransen, The Antinomy of Thought: Maimonian Skepticism and the Relation Between Thought and Objects (Dordrecht, 1991), and cf. Achim Engstler, Unterschungen zum Idealismus Salomon Maimons (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1990). 32. Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, pp. 154-55. 33. Kalman Bland, trans. and ed., The Epistle on the Possibility of Conjunction with the Active Intellect by Ibn Rushd with the Commentary of Moses Narboni (New York, 1982), p. 22 (Hebrew section, p. 2), and see p. II3, note 5, on the possible source of this "quote." 34. Spinoza's use of Averroes and, of course, Maimonides is well known. For his use of Narboni, see Harry A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza (Cambridge, Mass., 1934), v. 1, pp. 134-35 (on privative judgments). 35. Michael Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). 36. Apparently it is now possible and considered logically preferable to conceive of calculus on the "Cauchy-Bolzano-Weierstrauss" conception of convergence, which does not involve the idea of continuous (temporal) motion toward a limit but rather a formal, static counterpart based on "quantifier dependence and order relations" (roughly speaking, lists), but this was not the case for Maimon. For the state of calculus in the second half of the eighteenth century, see Carl Boyer, The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development (New York, 1949 ). On Kant's understanding and use of the calculus, see Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences, esp. pp. 72-80. 37. Kant, Critique, A166/B207-rr. Extensive magnitudes are the result of the projection of the given, a posteriori intensive magnitudes (resulting from a caress or hammer blow) into time and space, which are a priori. 38. See Maimon, Transcendentalphilosophie, esp. pp. 32-35, and Beiser, Fate of Reason, p. 297, whose explanation I follow here. 39. The most thorough discussion is in Kuntze, Die Philosophic Salomon Maimons, esp. pp. 331 ff. See also the positive appraisal of Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem, v. 3, pp. 97-104. 40. Maimon, Giva)at ha-Moreh, p. 82, and cf. his Transcendentalphilosophie, p. 37741. Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics, G. H. R. Parkinson, trans. (Oxford, 2000 ), I, prop. 8, schol. 2. 42. Cf. Maimon's Die Kathegorien des Aristoteles (Berlin, 1794), in which he presents Aristotle in decidedly Maimonidean and Spinozistic fashion. 43. The best discussion of this doctrine is now Oded Schechter, "The Logic of Speculative Philosophy and Skepticism in Maimon's Philosophy: Satz der Bes-

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Notes to Pages IOI-I05 timmbarkeit and the Role of Synthesis," in Salomon Maimon: Rational Dogmatist, Empirical Skeptic, Gideon Freudenthal, ed. (Dordrecht, 2003), pp. I8-53· 44. Leo Strauss, "Der Ort ver Vorsehungslehre nach der Ansicht Maimunis," Monatsschrift fur Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 8I (I937), p. 104, notes that he takes the application of the phrase from Maim on's remark in the Lebensgeschichte that the Guide is "theological-political in plan, purpose and method." For his characterization ofLeibniz (which influenced Fichte), see Maimon, Uber die Progressen der Philosophic, v. IV, pp. 58-6o. 45. Maimon, Uber die Progressen der Philosophic, p. 6o, cf. Lebensgeschichte, p. I66. 46. Maimon, Uber die Progressen der Philosophic, p. s8. 47. The interpretation of the useful conspectus of David Baumgardt, "The Ethics of Salomon Maimon," Journal ofthe History ofPhilosophy I (I963), pp. I992IO, is compromised by a failure to realize this and an impossible attempt to keep Maimon within the Kantian categories of contemporary German moral discourse. 48. Maimon, Kritische Untersuchungen uber den menschlichen Geist (Berlin, I797), p. 265. 49. Maim on, Kritische Untersuchungen uber den menschlichen Geist, pp. 255-57. so. Maimon, Giva'at ha-Moreh, p. 35. Note that Maimon explicitly crossreferences his Transcendentalphilosophie, pp. wo ff., thus compromising his anonymity. 51. Maimon, Gesammelte Werke, v. VII, pp. 249-50, and cf. 277-79. 52. Maimon, "Der Moriilischer Skeptiker," Berlininsches Archiv und ihres Geschmackes ( I8oo ), p. 292. 53. Thus Friedrich Holderlin, in a letter to his brother, dated January I, I799, wrote, "Kant ist der Moses unserer Natur, der sie aus der iigyptischen Erschlaffung in die freie einsame Wiiste seiner Spekulation fuhrt, und der energische Gesetz vom Heilegen Berge bringt." 54. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Werner Pluhar, trans. (Indianapolis, I987), p. 402, and see sees. 76 and 77,passim. 55. F. W. J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, Peter Heath, trans. (Charlottesville, I978), p. 27. For a recent claim of Schelling's priority, sec Rolf Peter Horstmann, Die Grenzen der Vernunft: Eine Unterschung zu Zieten des Deutschen Idealismus (Frankfurt, I99I); Horstmann identifies Schelling as the only one who not only pressed the familiar arguments against tl1e Transcendental Idealism of Kant's first Critique but also claimed to see me solution in the notion of intellectual intuition in the third Critique. 56. For Schelling's recognition of Maimon's important contributions on a related matter, sec F. W. J. Schelling, Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophic (Leipzig, I9II), p. 7357- In several works, Robert Pippin has argued that the later developments of Idealism were true to Kant's most basic insight. See, for example, Robert Pippin,

Notes to Pages ros-ro7 "Avoiding German Idealism: Kant, Hegel, and the Reflective Judgement Problem," in Pippin, Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge, England, 1997 ), pp. 129-55. With regard to Maimon, see the remark ofTheodor Adorno: "I must add that you should not run away with the idea that Kant's critical achievement was simply forgotten by the post-Kantian philosophers, starting with Solomon Maimon," in Adorno, Kant's Critique ofPure Reason (Stanford, 2000 ), p. 4-9. 58. Daniel Brezeale, trans. and ed., Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings (Ithaca, 1988), pp. 383-84-. For discussions ofMaimon's influence on Fichte and further references to Maimon in Fichte's work, see Atlas, From Critical to Speculative Idealism, pp. 316-24-, and Bergman, Philosophy of Solomon Maimon, pp. 169-81. 59. For Hegel's explicit rejection of mathematics as the kind of paradigm that Maimon held it to be, see his Preface to the Phenomenology of Mind, Walter Kauffman, trans. and notes (Garden City, N.J., 1965), pp. 62-69. 6o. I am indebted in this brief comparison to conversations with Frederick Beiser as well as his article, "Maimon and Fichte," in Salomon Maimon: Rational Dogmatist, Empirical Skeptic, Gideon Freudenthal, ed. (Dordrecht, 2003), pp. 133-4-8. 61. G. W. F. Hegel, The Logic of Hegel from the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences with Prolegomena, William Wallace, trans. (Oxford, 1874-), pp. 89-90, and see Bergman, Philosophy of Solomon Maimon, pp. 182-86. 62. See the introduction to Giva'at ha-Moreh; Uber die Progressen der Philosophic, and the "kleine Allegoric" of the final chapter of the Lebensgeschichte, discussed later. 63. Nathan Rotenstreich, "Position ofMaimon's Philosophy," p. 54-4-. 64-. Maimon, Sefer Moreh Nevuchim im Shenei Perushim: Moshe Narboni u-Perush Giva'at ha-Moreh (Berlin, 1795; Sulzberg, 1828; Warsaw, 1871). 65. Johann Erdmann, Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Darstellung der Geschichte der neuren Philosophic (Leipzig, 184-8). 66. Wilhelm Dilthey, "Die Rostocker Kanthandschriften," Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophic 2 ( 1889 ), p. 613, quoted in Bergman, The Philosophy of Solomon Maimon, pp. 238-39. 67. Hans Vaihinger, Commentar zu Kants Kritik (Stuttgart, 1881), 2 vols., draws on Maimon on several occasions. Vaihinger's own philosophical work, Philosophy