Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

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tiation of modern subjectivity. Circumstances conspire to unmoor both figures

from the social context of their youth and to leave them isolated individuals. Yet

they handle their fate as orphaned subjects very differently: Kuh tragically fails

in his attempts to inhabit different social roles and milieus. Like Auerbach’s

parents, Kuh’s wished their son to become a rabbi, but Kuh—like Auerbach—

became a German writer instead. Finding no viable social locus or identity, he

finally succumbs to insanity. He experiences modern subjectivity ultimately as

brute isolation.

If Auerbach’s Kuh succumbs to the perils of modern subjectivity, his Spi-

noza transcends them. In a reminiscence written on the occasion of the unveil-

ing of the Spinoza memorial in The Hague in 1880 , Auerbach remembers how

difficult it was to render as a vibrant literary character a “philosopher who is

not moved by affects and passions but rather regards all life sub specie aeterni

[sic], for whom the temporal and the eternal are one.”^119 Yet if Spinoza’s view

from eternity made him an awkward novelistic hero, it also made him attractive

to Auerbach as an archetypical modern individual: “the first and possibly most

perfect homo liber, which he held up as the purest ideal. Spinoza relocated the

ideal human being from the clouds of myth to the daylight of knowledge as homo

liber, the free individual. Spinoza was the first self-made man in the most emi-

nent sense, and that has become the signature of the modern world.”^120 Although

in Auerbach’s novel Spinoza’s progressive estrangement from Jewish tradition

and community leave him socially isolated, the kind of isolated individuality he

embodies is the diametrical opposite of the widely deployed stereotype of the

Jew as an egoistic and nefarious foreign element within German society. Even as

an individual outside the Jewish community, Auerbach’s Spinoza continues to

contest the discourse of Jewish egoism with which Auerbach had contended in

“Das Judentum und die neueste Literatur.” Spinoza’s embodiment of individu-

ality and universality, moreover, points ultimately to the possibility of collective

harmony. At its culmination Auerbach’s novel stages Spinoza in the role of a

rational secular messiah, the harbinger of a secular humanism into which both

Judaism and Christianity are destined to evolve.

Critics have interpreted Auerbach’s portrait of Spinoza differently. Jacob Katz

reads Auerbach’s Spinoza as a “utopia of total assimilation.”^121 In a nuanced re-

construction of the position of Spinoza between works by Gutzkow and Goethe,

Jonathan Skolnik sees Auerbach’s novel within a nineteenth-century tradition

of Jewish-German historical novels that sought to create “usable fictional pasts”

for a secularizing German Jewry. In Skolnik’s reading, Spinoza—though not de-

void of inner ambivalence—remains basically consistent with the universalizing,

denationalizing thrust of the nascent Jewish Reform movement, and optimistic