Ibid., lxxvii–lxxviii. Auerbach refers to the preface to Spinoza’s Ethics, III, for the
second of his quotations from Spinoza here. The first quote about the error of anthropocen-
trism seems to be a paraphrase of lines in the Appendix to Ethics, I.
Auerbach, “Das Leben Spinoza’s,” lxxix.
Ibid., cxxi.
Ibid.
Ibid., cxxi–cxxii. And see Benedict de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, chap-
ter 6.
Auerbach, “Das Leben Spinoza’s,” cxxv.
See Auerbach, “Ephraim Moses Kuh.” Bettelheim (BA, 97 ) mentions numerous Jew-
ish biographies that Auerbach had in mind when he began coediting the Gallerie, most of
which he never pursued.
Auerbach, SA 2. Auerbach compensated by building the plot around the Sephardic
experience of exile as an important part of the prehistory of Spinoza’s residence in Holland
and by spinning out an infatuation Spinoza may or may not have felt for the daughter of his
teacher, Van den Enden, into a major plot line. In his explanatory notes to Spinoza, Auer-
bach cites Johannes Colerus’s early Spinoza biography as the source of his knowledge of
Spinoza’s love for “Olympia” (the character based on Clara Maria van den Enden), though
he acknowledges that there was no reliable corroboration for this (Spinoza, part 2 , 303 ). Ac-
cording to Steven Nadler (Spinoza, 108 – 9 ), the story is probably apocryphal.
Auerbach, SA 2.
See Jacob Katz, “Spinoza und die Utopie einer totalen Assimilation der Juden.”
Skolnik, “Writing Jewish History between Gutzkow and Goethe,” 104. For Katz’s
bleaker interpretation of Auerbach’s novel, in whose culminating scene the figure of the
Wandering Jew, Ahasuerus, visits Spinoza in a dream but proves unable to survive Spinoza’s
universalist spirit, see “Spinoza und die Utopie einer totalen Assimilation der Juden.” For
reasons given below, I disagree with Skolnik insofar as I see the Jewish past as Auerbach
depicts it in Spinoza as not terribly “usable,” precisely because of the not easily reconciled
uses Auerbach would like to make of it.
Daniel Schwartz, The First Modern Jew, 75. Schwartz’s analysis of the ambivalence
in Auerbach conveyed by this scene hinges on the degree to which Auerbach identified with
his own figure of Spinoza. Schwartz argues very plausibly that “there is good reason to sus-
pect that, in this scene, Auerbach is airing a very personal ambiguity over modern Jewish
identity” (ibid.). In “Spinoza-Arbeiten,” Auerbach addresses the nature and limits of his
identification, as a Jew, with Spinoza at the time he was writing this novel and confirms
what Schwartz suspects: “I felt as a Jew like Spinoza and, like him, could not avow mem-
bership in any positive religion. But I can also say I felt more like a Jew than Spinoza, the
critical scholar [Forscher] and philosopher” (SA 1 ). Auerbach views Spinoza as far more
iconoclastic than he and sees him, despite his purity of soul (Seelenreinheit) and indepen-
dence, as too embittered by his experiences to appreciate the poetry and esthetic beauty
(Kunstschönheit) of the Bible. Moreover, Spinoza’s reclusive nature left him unable to grasp
the “gemüthlichen Zusammenhang der Juden und die tiefe Intimität ihres Empfindungsle-
bens” (ibid.). Auerbach believes that he was sufficiently independent as a writer, despite his
veneration for Spinoza, to portray the justification for the campaign against him on the part
of the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam). In Auerbach’s remark that he felt “as
