Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

202 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

phy, largely through the lectures he heard David Friedrich Strauss deliver in

winter 1832 – 33.^5 While studying (and attending lectures by Friedrich Schelling)

in Munich in summer 1833 , Auerbach was arrested for his involvement in the

Tübingen Burschenschaft. Due to his arrest he was stripped of the scholarship

he had enjoyed and expelled from Tübingen, whereupon he continued his stud-

ies at Heidelberg. It is unclear to what extent Auerbach retained his earlier de-

sire to become a Reform rabbi, but his criminal record definitively blocked this

career path: Auerbach learned in late 1835 that he would be barred from sitting

for the theology exams required of rabbinical candidates by the 1828 Württem-

berg law. It was while studying in Heidelberg that Auerbach first turned to writ-

ing as a means of generating much-needed income.^6 He landed a good position

as a literary critic for August Lewald’s important journal Europa: Chronik der

gebildeten Welt (Europe: chronicle of the educated world).

Auerbach debuted in 1836 with the essay Das Judenthum und die neueste

Literatur ( Jewry and the most recent literature), and his first significant literary

work appeared in August 1836 , a substantial sketch of the life of the German-

Jewish epigrammatist Ephraim Moses Kuh, a contemporary of Moses Mendels-

sohn and the first Jewish poet to publish verse in German.^7 Auerbach would later

expand this sketch and turn it into his second novel, Dichter und Kaufmann:

Ein Lebensgemälde aus der Zeit Moses Mendelssohns (Poet and merchant: a pic-

ture of life from the times of Moses Mendelssohn; 1840 ). As Auerbach recounts

in at least two places, however, his passionate interest in Spinoza “pushed itself

forward” (drängte sich vor), and fleshing out the Kuh sketch had to wait.^8 Auer-

bach began work on his Spinoza novel in autumn 1836. After the conclusion

of the criminal investigation into his Burschenschaft activity, Auerbach was in-

terned at the Hohenasperg Fortress near Stuttgart from January 8 until March

8 , 1837.^9 After his release he continued to research and write his Spinoza novel

day and night.^10 It was published in November 1837.

Auerbach’s second period of intensive engagement with Spinoza began two

and a half years later, when the peripatetic author moved to Bonn at the end of

May 1840 (where he made the acquaintance of Moses Hess). Believing his liter-

ary activity was over and planning to become a lecturer in philosophy, he began

work on his translation of Spinoza’s complete works, a project that consumed

his energies until the end of August 1841.^11 In the period between his novelistic

debut and his work on the Spinoza edition, Auerbach continued literary proj-

ects he had begun before writing his novel about Spinoza. His novel about Kuh,

expanded from his early biographical sketch, appeared in 1840. He also contin-

ued to write literary reviews for Europa and edited and wrote for a publication

devoted to Jewish biographies, Gallerie der ausgezeichnetsten Israeliten aller