B. d. Spinoza, Heker ’Elohah ‘im torat ha-’adam [An Investigation of God with the Science of Man], translated by S. Rubin (Vienna: G. Brag, 1885).

The Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Jewish origin Baruch (or Benedictus) Spinoza (1632-1677) has undergone something of a renaissance in the last decades. The current revival is as striking for the variety of fields and genres represented as for its essentially similar bottom line: the idea of the rationalist thinker, pioneering biblical critic, and legendary conflater of God and Nature, as an originator of philosophical modernity, or perhaps we should say modernities, given the diverse and often contradictory intellectual legacies from the seventeenth century onward laid at his doorstep. One such legacy, Jonathan Israel has famously argued, was the so-called "Radical Enlightenment," which was distinguished from the moderate mainstream within the larger Enlightenment movement by its revolutionary esprit, its refusal to accommodate itself to religion, tradition, and the past, and its open commitment to the modern and secular as such. "Spinoza and Spinozism," Israel argues, were the " intellectual backbone of the European Radical Enlightenment everywhere, not only in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, and Scandinavia but also Britain and Ireland."

And, we might add, in Jewish East Central Europe. Excommunicated by the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam in 1656 for his "horrible heresies" and "monstrous deeds," Spinoza would remain a persona non grata in Judaism for nearly two centuries thereafter. Yet in the 1840s and 1850s, the Haskalah—which had migrated from Berlin to Austrian Galicia and the Russian Empire earlier in the nineteenth century—became increasingly polarized between moderates committed to keeping the Jewish Enlightenment moored in rabbinic law and culture and militants intent on a no-holds-barred critique of tradition. These radical maskilim—like the European radical enlighteners of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—turned to Spinoza and his ideas for inspiration and guidance. It was in this moment and milieu that the Amsterdam philosopher emerged, in the words of Y.H. Yerushalmi, as "the first great culture-hero of modern, secular Jews."

By far, the most zealous champion of Spinoza in the campaign to reclaim him for Hebrew literature and culture was Salomon Rubin (1823-1910), a Hebraist maskil from Galicia. In 1856, Rubin wrote Moreh nevukhim he-hadash, or The New Guide to the Perplexed, his first of what would be many works over the next fifty years of his life dedicated to Spinoza. This was a two-volume apologia for an audacious venture—a proposal to translate Spinoza's two most notable works, the Ethics (1677) and the Theological-Political Treatise (1677), into Hebrew. Yet the justification for this scheme was in fact already inherent in Rubin's title, which framed Spinoza as the second coming of Maimonides.

Nearly thirty years later, in 1885, Rubin finally came out with his long awaited translation of the Ethics. (He never finished translating the Theological-Political Treatise, which would have to wait until 1961 for a complete Hebrew rendering.) The Hebrew name he gave his translation, however, was not the literal Hebrew equivalent for the Ethics of Sefer ha-middot (as Jacob Klatzkin would later title his 1924 translation) but rather Heker ’Elohah ‘im torat ha-’adam, or An Investigation of God with the Science of Man. The change was significant. Rubin's Spinoza was no atheist. His system—for all its trailblazing character in philosophy and science and its rejection of religious orthodoxy—was thoroughly "God-intoxicated." Its concept of divinity, moreover, had ample precedent within medieval Jewish philosophical and mystical literature; what Spinoza had done, in essence, was to transpose a hidden history of Jewish pantheism into the clear and distinct idiom of rationalism. All this led Rubin to conclude that "Spinozism was Jewish from beginning to end."

Rubin's translation of the Ethics is today reduced to a footnote of Jewish history and Hebrew literature. Though it played an important role in introducing many fin-de-siC(cle Hebrew rebels to Spinoza—including David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973) and Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky (1865-1921)—it has long since been surpassed by Klatzkin's version, which even with subsequent translations remains the standard-bearer. Yet Rubin's Investigation of Godstill has much to tell us about the resonance of Spinoza in Jewish formations of the secular. The Radical Enlightenment celebrated Spinoza as a nonbeliever, revolutionary, and cosmopolitan. The maskilim in the Jewish version of Radical Enlightenment also heralded the Amsterdam heretic as a symbol of modernity. Yet they appropriated him somewhat differently: as a pantheist and even panentheist rather than atheist, as a revealer of the secrets of the Jewish past rather than a proponent of total rupture from tradition, and as a "Jewish" rather than strictly universal thinker and hero.