Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

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about the prospects for a German-Jewish synthesis.^122 In a study of Spinoza as a

secular Jewish icon, Daniel Schwartz reads the relationship between Auerbach’s

debut essay and debut novel as ambivalent and helpfully identifies the status of

the modern Jewish individual as the central vexing question posed by the rela-

tionship between these two texts. Schwartz points to an exchange in Spinoza be-

tween the philosopher and another character, da Silva, who (anachronistically)

articulates the project of Reform Judaism. Spinoza rejects this project and opts

for what Schwartz characterizes as “categorical individualism.”^123

Yet even as Schwartz nicely draws attention to an unresolved conflict in Spi-

noza between Auerbach’s support for a Reform institutional religious framework

for modern Jewish collective existence and a radical individualism that breaks

with Jewish collectivity, he leaves underexplored how Auerbach’s project was to

envision and forge a German community in which Jews would have a place.^124

Auerbach’s central preoccupation was less the tension between Jewish collec-

tive commitments and radical individualism than the place Jews could inhabit,

whether as individuals or as a collective, within the German Volk. Auerbach’s

argument in “Das Judentum und die neueste Literatur” that a reformed Judaism

is capable of sustaining a modern Jewish community cannot be isolated from his

insistence, with which it is entwined, that Jews are Germans, and that German-

ness and Jewishness in no way conflict. Auerbach’s creative use of Spinoza to

imagine inclusive versions of the German Volk and Vaterland go well beyond his

explicit depictions and discussions of the philosopher. Indeed, even as Spinoza

recedes from view as an icon in Auerbach’s work, he continues to inform Auer-

bach’s conception of Germany.

For exploring Auerbach’s anxious self-image as a budding Jewish author in

Germany, there is no richer text than the preface he attached to Spinoza. Since

each of Auerbach’s two Jewish novels in a sense precedes the other, it is fitting

that this preface, titled “Das Ghetto,” announced a “series of historical portraits

of periods and customs from the life of the Jews.. ., of which the present work

makes up the first part.”^125 Here Auerbach has relatively little to say about Spi-

noza per se, but the way Auerbach imagines speaking to a literary community

and the vexed way he stages the reception that awaits his work illuminate the

ambiguities and anxieties that accompanied his appearance on the German lit-

erary scene with a novel about the Jewish sage from Amsterdam.

Auerbach writes that he would have liked to have placed Spinoza at the end of

his envisioned cycle of Jewish historical novels, since the Jewish ghetto “in the

higher sense ends with Spinoza,” but was unable to resist the “force of the idea

after it had taken hold of me.”^126 Despite numerous abortive plans in his later

years, Auerbach never wrote another Jewish-themed work after Spinoza and