Theologico-Politicus, and as Isreal has emphsized, “no one else
rivalled his notoriety as chief challenger of revealed religion”)
(Isreal, 2001, p. 259). Only toward the end of the eighteenth
century did Spinoza begin to arouse enthusiasm among men
of letters. In 1778, Johan Gottfried Herder equated Spinoza
with John himself as the apostle of love, and in 1780 Got-
thold Ephraim Lessing declared to Friedrich Jacobi that
“there is no other philosophy than that of Spinoza” (Vallée,
Spinoza Conversations, 1988, p. 86). Although a follower of
Christian Wolff, who directed a formidable critique against
Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn hailed Spinoza as early as 1775
as a martyr for the furthering of human knowledge. As a re-
sult of the publication of Mendelssohn’s Morgenstunden in
1785, in which he sought to attribute to Lessing a purified
form of pantheism, Jacobi countered with a work called Über
die Lehre des Spinoza (“On the teaching of Spinoza,” 1785),
in which he branded Spinozism as atheism and the Jewish
Qabbalah as a confused Spinozism. Goethe, on the other
hand, eagerly devoured Spinoza’s Ethics, noting that it
“agreed most with his own conception of nature,” and that
“he always carried it with him.” Goethe shared two of Spino-
za’s most fundamental principles, his monism and his theory
of necessity (Bell, 1984, pp. 153, 168). Salomon Maimon,
the first to call Spinoza’s system acosmic, spoke admiringly
in his autobiography of the profundity of Spinoza’s philoso-
phy, and his first book, Versuch über die Transendentalphilo-
sophie (An essay on Transcendental philosophy, 1790), was an
attempt to unite Kantian philosophy with Spinozism. Ac-
cording to G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), there was “either
Spinozism or no philosophy,” and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph
von Schelling (1775–1854) wrote that “no one can hope to
progress to the true and complete in philosophy without hav-
ing at least once in his life sunk himself in the abyss of Spino-
zism” (McFarland, 1969, p. 103).
Appreciation for Spinoza in England was due especially
to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who wrote in about 1810 that
only two systems of philosophy were possible, that of Spino-
za and that of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). In a letter of
1881, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) expressed his aston-
ishment at the kinship between Spinoza’s position on moral-
ity and his own, although elsewhere he is severely critical of
Spinoza. Martin Buber (1878–1965) found much inspira-
tion in Spinoza, seeing in him the highest philosophical ex-
emplification of Judaism’s unique quest for unity, but he
criticized the Spinozistic attempt to depersonalize God.
In the 1850s, Shemu’el David Luzzatto stirred up a lit-
erary polemic concerning Spinoza after having been aroused
by the first laudatory biography of Spinoza in Hebrew
(1846), written by the poet Me’ir Letteris; by the essays of
Schelling’s student Senior Sachs from 1850 to 1854, in
which he links together Shelomoh Ibn Gabirol, Avraham ibn
Ezra, the qabbalists, and Spinoza; and by Shelomoh Rubin’s
Moreh nevukhim he-hadash (1857), which contains a positive
account of Spinoza’s thought. Luzzatto attacked Spinoza’s
emphasis on the primacy of the intellect over the feelings of
the heart and his denial of free will and final causes, and
called unjustified his attack on the Pharisees and on the Mo-
saic authorship of all of the Pentateuch. Nahman Krochmal’s
son, Avraham, wrote an apologetic work, Eben ha-ro’shah
(1871), in which he defended Spinoza, whom he reverently
called Rabbenu (Our Master) Baruch (an epithet already ap-
plied to Spinoza by Moses Hess (1812–1875) in 1837, and
later also adopted by Einstein). Hermann Cohen later
mounted a virulent attack against Spinoza, as impassioned
as that by Luzzatto, in Cohen’s “Spinoza über Staat und
Religion, Judentum und Christentum” (1905; 1924,
pp. 290–372).Shortly after arriving at Sedeh Boker on December 13,
1953, in order to settle at a kibbutz in the Negev, first prime
minister of Israel, Ben Gurion, published an article in the
newspaper Davar titled “Let Us Make Amends,” in which
he expressed the wish “to restore to our Hebrew language
and culture, the writings of the most original and profound
thinker that appeared amongst the Hebrew people in the last
two thousand years.” The injustice that required mending
was thus not the excommunication of Spinoza, since in Ben
Gurion’s eyes that was nothing but a historic curiosity, which
in the course of time had been automatically nullified. What
still needed mending was the literary cultural fact that He-
brew literature remains incomplete as long as it does not in-
clude the entire corpus of Spinoza’s writings as one of the
greatest spiritual assets of the Jewish nation. Ben Gurion’s
wish has now finally been fulfilled with the appearance of all
of Spinoza’s major works in Hebrew translation, and with
the establishment of a Spinoza Institute in Jerusalem which
holds biannual conferences devoted to Spinoza’s thought.
This piece of historical irony by which Spinoza’s philosophi-
cal legacy has now been emphatically included in the intel-
lectual life of Israel would undoubtedly have afforded Spino-
za a measure of supreme delight. (See Dorman, 1990,
pp. 154–163).
Spinoza has been regarded as the founder of scientific
psychology, and his influence has been seen in the James–
Lange theory of the emotions and in some of the central con-
cepts of Freud (see Bidney, 1962). A more recent version of
this kind of influence is found in the work of the noted neu-
rologist Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow,
and the Feeling Brain (New York, 2003). Spinoza has also re-
ceived an enormous amount of attention in the former Soviet
Union. Spinoza’s concept of nature as self-caused, infinite,
and eternal was first singled out for comment by Friedrich
Engels in his Dialectics of Nature. From the Soviet viewpoint,
Spinoza’s materialism is unfortunately wrapped in a theolog-
ical garb, but his consistent application of the scientific
method is seen as overshadowing “the historically transient
and class-bounded in his philosophy” (see Kline, 1952,
p. 33)
In America, the transcendentalists of the eighteenth cen-
tury held Spinoza in very high regard. Oliver Wendell
Holmes (1841–1935) read and reread Spinoza’s Ethics, andSPINOZA, BARUCH 8685