A Best-Selling Hebrew Book of the Modern Era

The Book of the Covenant of Pinhas Hurwitz and Its Remarkable Legacy

David B. Ruderman

• Éditeur: University of Washington Press
• Année: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780295805597
• Sujet: Théologie et religion
• Sous-sujet: Théologie juive

In 1797, in what is now the Czech Republic, Pin?as Hurwitz published Book of the Covenant. Nominally an extended commentary on a sixteenth-century kabbalist text, Pin?as's publication was in fact a compendium of scientific knowledge and a manual of moral behavior. Its popularity stemmed from its ability to present the scientific advances and moral cosmopolitanism of its day in the context of Jewish legal and mystical tradition. Describing the latest developments in science and philosophy in the sacred language of Hebrew, Hurwitz argued that an intellectual understanding of the cosmos was not at odds with but actually key to achieving spiritual attainment. In A Best-Selling Hebrew Book of the Modern Era, David Ruderman offers a literary and intellectual history of Hurwitz's book and its legacy. Hurwitz not only wrote the book, but also was instrumental in selling it, and his success ultimately led to the publication of more than forty editions in Hebrew, Ladino, and Yiddish. Ruderman provides a multidimensional picture of the book and the intellectual tradition it helped to inaugurate. Complicating accounts that consider modern Jewish thought to be the product of a radical break from a religious, mystical past, Ruderman shows how, instead, a complex continuity shaped Jewish society's confrontation with modernity.

CHAPTER 1

The Hague Dialogues

IMAGINE the following scenario: A young scholar, apparently from Vilna, having wandered through several cities in eastern Europe and Germany, arrived in the city of The Hague toward the close of the 1780s. Once there, he most likely enjoyed the material support of the richest family of Jewish merchants in the city, the Boas family, and sought and gained the religious approval of the rabbi of the city, Judah Leib Mezerich. The young man’s name was Pinḥas Elijah ben Meir Hurwitz (1765–1821), and he was about to complete the first draft of his soon-to-be published book, an encyclopedia of the sciences entitled Sefer ha-Brit (Book of the Covenant).¹ Hurwitz soon learned of the presence of an aging sage who lived in the city, a rigorous philosopher and émigré from Mainz, Naphtali Herz Ulman (1731–87). Ulman had completed a multivolume philosophic opus of which only the first volume, Ḥokhmat ha-Shorashim (The Science of Roots or First Principles), had been published, in 1781.² Hurwitz himself was hardly a philosopher; rather, he was a student of religious texts, drawn especially to the kabbalah. But he did share something in common with Ulman: an appreciation of the life of the mind and particularly a fascination for the natural world and the new sciences. They were also both ashkenazic Jews with knowledge of the German language.³ It seems natural that Hurwitz would seek out Ulman, the major intellectual figure of Hague Jewry.

While this scenario may have been possible, it was probably never realized. Ulman, who had lived in Holland for more than fifteen years, died in 1787 at the age of fifty-six.⁴ Hurwitz, according to the testimony of Mezerich, was living in The Hague in 1790 and had been residing there for at least a full year.⁵ If indeed he arrived in 1789, he had missed his opportunity to engage with the formidable philosopher. If only they had had a chance to meet, one might have imagined an animated, even contentious conversation. Ulman was thirty years older than Hurwitz, and that generational difference in age revealed an enormous gap in their intellectual styles and in the values and aspirations they held for themselves and their communities. Sefer ha-Brit was first published in 1797 in Brünn, only sixteen years after Ulman’s single Hebrew publication, but the contrast between the two works—not to mention the numerous volumes Ulman left in manuscript but never published—is astounding. If one were to chart the transformation of Jewish thought from one generation to another, these two thinkers would provide meaningful markers of some continuity but more of radical change. Ulman’s cultural world was that of Leibniz, Wolff, and Mendelssohn, the ambiance of the German enlightenment, with which he identified even from his self-imposed exile in Holland. Hurwitz was of a different makeup. While he knew of Mendelssohn and his philosophical contemporaries, he had chosen a different intellectual trajectory, merging his passion for Lurianic kabbalah with an appreciation and commitment to the study of the natural world. Not Wolff nor Leibniz but Kant inspired him. Even Maimonides, the quintessential medieval Jewish philosopher, excited him far less than his self-proclaimed spiritual mentors Isaac Luria and Ḥayyim Vital of Safed. Judging from the intellectual products of these two Hebraic scholars who nearly encountered each other in the Jewish neighborhood of The Hague, the interval of a mere sixteen years had utterly altered the intellectual landscape of the Jewish cultural world.

Historians should not engage in hypotheticals regarding what might have happened had two historical figures encountered each other. But in the case of Ulman and Hurwitz, two scholars who happened to reside in the same place at nearly the same time, their literary legacies offer ample information to reconstruct what a conversation between them might have sounded like. Far removed from the cultural centers of Berlin, Cracow, and Vilna, The Hague might seem an unlikely cultural setting for monitoring a critical transition in modern Jewish thought, an evolution from Wolffian metaphysics to kabbalistic natural science. Neither Ulman nor Hurwitz ever attained a status as primary intellectual figures in the history of modern Jewish thought, a designation that would certainly include the likes of Mendelssohn, Maimon, and other luminaries of the German Haskalah. But they remain fascinating secondary figures of Jewish self-reflection, and they help to illuminate major shifts in the cultural world of European Jewry at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries—a transitional period usually charted through Mendelssohn, his children and disciples and adversaries, primarily in Germany. It also might properly set the stage to consider the content and impact of Hurwitz’s best-selling book on several generations of Jewish readers to follow. This opening chapter, therefore, which I call “The Hague Dialogues,” depicts a conversation that, although it most likely never took place, seems quite plausible in the light of the extensive literary remains of these two thinkers. It will set the scene for the book that follows.

THE NEED FOR RABBINIC APPROBATIONS

We might begin our comparison of Ulman and his younger contemporary, Hurwitz, by perusing the openings of their published volumes. The title page of Ḥokhmat ha-Shorashim, published by two local printers, Loeb ben Moses Soesmans and J. H. Munnikhuisen, with the financial support of four local Jewish patrons,⁶ indicates immediately that wisdom of the roots of knowledge represents the first science of metaphysics and serves as an introduction to the volumes that follow: wisdom of the world, the soul, and finally the divine. Having prepared volumes on each of these topics as well as other works, Ulman obviously imagined that this initial publication of 1781 would be followed by more. Perhaps one reason for the book’s lack of financial success and his failure to publish any subsequent volumes can be found in this statement of the author:

I apologize in publishing this book for having abandoned the custom of most writers of our times in approaching the famous, brilliant, and wise rabbis who sit in learned counsel, teachers of the Torah in the land of Holland where I presently reside, to seek their permission and approval of this publication. I justify this on two grounds. First, something that is made clear by decisive proof, which is the case for all the studies discussed in this book, is complete and self-evident truth and requires no formal approval. Would it not be ridiculous, for example, to declare that the three angles of a triangle represent more than two sides of a perpendicular just because a famous person gave his approval of this statement? Second, these rabbis, who are famed throughout the land as our teachers and sages, are so burdened with Torah and divine commandments and with their profound and expert investigations of heavenly law and religious observance that they have no spare time to contemplate the wonders of nature and the secrets of the divine through self-reflection. The only demonstrative proof for them is revealed tradition, as it is for the majority of loyal and faithful Jews.⁷

Ulman’s sarcastic and belligerent stance toward the rabbis of his generation in justifying his decision to ignore any rabbinic haskamah (approbation) for his book could not have endeared him to them and their loyal constituencies, the potential purchasers of his Hebrew tome. On the contrary, he was both rejecting their authority in understanding the truth and also claiming that the study of nature and metaphysics had no place in their own curriculum of sacred study. In this he openly declared that the only authentic expositors of the truth were philosophers like himself (note his own self-designation on the title page: “Torah scholar, naturalist [mehandes], and exalted philosopher”),⁸ who alone were capable of leading the Jewish community in these confused and troubling times.

How different was Hurwitz’s strategy in Sefer ha-Brit! It appears that Hurwitz went to great lengths to solicit haskamot from seven rabbis during the early 1790s: Saul Loewenstamm, rabbi of the ashkenazic community of Amsterdam; David Azevado, rabbi of Amsterdam’s sephardic community; Aryeh Leib Breslau, rabbi of Rotterdam; the aforementioned Rabbi Judah Leib Mezerich of The Hague; Isaac ha-Levi of Lemberg, rabbi of Cracow; Moses Münz of Brod, rabbi of Oven (Ofen = Buda); and Rabbi Isaac Abraham of Pintshov (Pinczow). Hurwitz apparently lobbied hard for these rabbinic approbations. When approaching Rabbi Loewenstamm of Amsterdam, for example, he brought with him a letter of introduction from the latter’s own brother, Rabbi Ẓevi Hirsch of Berlin. Rabbi Azevado surely knew of Rabbi Loewenstamm’s support for Hurwitz’s book, as he mentioned that he was writing his own approbation during the mourning period for this recently deceased colleague, who had just died on June 19, 1790. Rabbi Mezerech had been ordained by Rabbi Loewenstamm and was surely inclined to follow in his footsteps in writing his own approbation. Rabbi Isaac ha-Levi of Cracow was the son-in-law of Rabbi Aryeh Leib Breslau of Rotterdam and was surely in contact with him. In short, Hurwitz chose his seven rabbis carefully. Despite the distances from eastern Europe to Holland, these rabbis were connected to each other and, at least in some cases, simply followed the lead of their associates in granting rabbinic approval of Hurwitz’s book.⁹

Hurwitz’s motivation in enlisting the support of these rabbinic authorities was surely related to their privileged place within traditional Jewish society. In contrast to Ulman, who consciously maligned these figures by making fun of their authority and knowledge, Hurwitz knew full well that he needed haskamot to sell his book among traditional Jews. Furthermore, he assumed that if these rabbis would issue a warning prohibiting anyone from republishing the book for fifteen years without the permission of the author, he would be relatively protected to pursue his own publishing interests and would reap any profits exclusively for himself. To his utter surprise, this expectation was not realized. Despite the rabbinic threats mentioned in the approbations, a pirated edition of Sefer ha-Brit appeared in 1800–1801, and the publisher ignored the rabbis altogether, going so far as to remove their approbations from his edition. They were restored in Hurwitz’s new and expanded edition of 1806–7, which included a new introduction in which Hurwitz expressed his disgust over the sheer disregard by the rogue publisher in ignoring these rabbis who had supported his publishing endeavor.¹⁰ In short, in the mind of Hurwitz rabbinic approbations were still important, both in providing religious approval of his message and in protecting him from illicit publishing practices that would harm his authorial rights. When this proved not to be the case, Hurwitz not only excoriated the man who had stolen his book; he also singled out this practice at the end of Sefer ha-Brit in a broader social critique of the Jewish community of his day.¹¹

ON METAPHYSICS

In the same year that Ulman published his introduction to Jewish metaphysics, or what he called “The Wisdom of That Which Is Beyond Nature,”¹² Immanuel Kant published his Critique of Pure Reason.¹³ Ironically, at the very moment that Ulman was conceiving his major project of a Jewish philosophy based on the principles of Leibniz and Wolff, Kant had initiated a direct assault on those same thinkers’ core assumptions. Although Ulman deviated from his mentors in some of his specific formulations, he was clearly indebted to their core ideas and the overall structures of their works, viewing his enterprise as a specific Jewish adaptation of their vital contributions to philosophical thinking. Even a superficial perusal of his ambitious composition reveals employment of their working hypotheses such as the principles of contradiction, sufficient reason, and the best and most perfect worlds, as well as a description and defense of the existence of monads.¹⁴

Leaving aside the intricacies of Ulman’s specific interpretations of Leibniz and Wolff, I wish to stress in this context Ulman’s unwavering commitment to the enterprise of metaphysical thinking in general. Right from the beginning of Ḥokhmat ha-Shorashim, he underscored the need for philosophical reflection in determining first principles and in organizing human knowledge. He was certainly aware of those detractors of philosophical metaphysics from within both the traditionalist and the rational camps and aggressively sought to deflect their criticisms. For Ulman, metaphysics was fundamental to human understanding; faulty principles yield bad knowledge and ultimately harm society. Ulman readily conceded that Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy had made invalid assumptions; nevertheless, the search for meaning beyond and behind nature was still valid. Metaphysical thinking was neither impractical nor dry. Without a systematic undergirding of philosophical principles, human society was cast into doubt and heresy, and for Jews, the meaning of the Torah was put in jeopardy. What the Jewish community required, Ulman believed, was a new paradigm of philosophical metaphysics based on Leibniz and Wolff and a moral commitment to fathom the ontological basis of reality rigorously and sincerely. Sensory knowledge alone could not sufficiently make sense of the infinite variety of things in nature; fundamental rational assumptions were necessary as well.¹⁵

Hurwitz would have strongly objected to this line of thinking. He would have particularly found offensive Ulman’s declaration at the beginning of Ḥokhmat ha-Shorashim that anyone who assumes it is impossible to know truth except through prophecy and kabbalah is completely mistaken.¹⁶ The proofs of “science” undermine such claims. For this indeed was the exact position that Hurwitz came to champion. He saw the kabbalah as the ultimate source of all truth and the foundation of the Jewish faith, and he viewed his primary intellectual role as an expositor of the kabbalistic tradition. In Sefer ha-Brit, therefore, he undertook to interpret kabbalistic sapience for a wide Jewish readership. For Hurwitz, philosophy, both in the past and in his own time, generally led to skepticism and heresy, denying the foundations of Jewish faith. He believed, rather, that it was only through faith, and not rational investigation, that a Jew could know God: “It is not God’s desire . . . that we will know the Lord our God through human investigation and acquired proof . . . for God wants from his people that they believe in him based on our tradition from our forefathers, generation after generation back to those who stood on Mount Sinai.”¹⁷

In radical opposition to the stance of Ulman, Hurwitz declared that the entire philosophical enterprise was antithetical to Judaism. Philosophy was the creation of the Greeks, beginning with Solon, Socrates, and Aristotle. The Arabs then took this tradition and transmitted it to Christian Europe. Building on the Moslems and the Christians, certain Jews mastered philosophy and wrapped themselves in “a stolen tallit.”¹⁸ Despite the attraction of philosophy for some Jewish thinkers, most notably Maimonides, philosophical study was never incumbent upon Jews and did not, Hurwitz believed, lead to knowledge of God. The latter could only be reached, following the formulation of Judah ha-Levi, by the observance of the divine commandments and by experiencing the world to its fullest. Wisdom was not a function of rational investigation but rather of faith and understanding and appreciating the natural world, the wondrous creations of the Divine: “A thing is more certain acquired through achievement and experience than one acquired through human investigation as the elder sages declare: ‘There is no wiser person than one of experience.’”¹⁹

In almost revelatory terms, Hurwitz dramatically announced the publication of Kant’s devastating critique of metaphysics in 1781. In Hurwitz’s words, the book appeared to undermine not only ancient philosophy but also “the most recent philosophers of this generation . . . and their theoretical proofs regarding the reality beyond nature called metaphysics.” Hurwitz explicitly pointed to “the books of the great philosopher Wolff and the famous philosopher Leibniz who are the most publicized recent philosophers,” describing their intellectual systems as children’s toys made of paper and carton easily blown away in the wind.²⁰ For Hurwitz, Kant’s challenge was devastating to metaphysics, showing that all philosophical proofs are mere figments of thought and imagination unconnected to reality. Kant demonstrated unequivocally that human beings lack the means to know, based on either the senses or rational investigation, what is beyond nature.

Hurwitz added that the attempt of the contemporary Jewish philosopher Solomon Maimon to defend the foundations of philosophy was unsuccessful. Hurwitz associated Maimon’s defense with a justification of Leibniz’s theory of monads, which, he said, have no basis in reality and were invented in Leibniz’s mind. Hurwitz acknowledged the many followers of Leibniz but considered Kant’s disbelief as the ultimate vindication that such metaphysical assumptions were nothing but deceptive vanities. With the shattering of the truth claims of the school of Leibniz and Wolff, the door was open to embrace a metaphysics based on kabbalistic assumptions constituting the true faith of Judaism, one philosophically informed by Kant’s latest critique and aligned with an empiricist appreciation of the physical world known through human experience.²¹

The explicit reference by Hurwitz to Kant’s challenge to Leibniz and Wolff underscores the gulf that existed between Ulman and Hurwitz. While Ulman suffered the fate of defending an epistemological system already under siege by the time he had completed most of his writing, Hurwitz greatly benefited from the timeliness of Kant’s challenge to metaphysics and his attempt to limit human investigation to the natural world. Through Kant, Hurwitz discovered a convincing strategy of combining natural philosophy with kabbalistic metaphysics. In this vital conflict over the place of philosophy in Judaism, Hurwitz had found a remarkably effective ally from within the very cohorts of recent philosophy from which he intended to distance himself.

ON INTERPRETING THE WONDERS OF NATURE

In one of his many compositions left in manuscript, Naphtali Ulman described an incredible invention that he had seen in the home of an affluent Jew from Amsterdam named Jacob Heimfeld. The invention was an elaborate clock, which he called a horologe; from it a sculpted figure would emerge every half hour, accompanied by music. The music, Ulman said, was s...