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Commentary Footnotes
March 2008

The Last Prophet:
Spinoza And The Political Theology Of Moses Hess

By Jerome E. Copulsky
Goucher College

^* An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the Nineteenth-Century Theology Group, Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion (November 2007).

¹ Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 66 (hereafter cited in the text as TPT).

² Compare to Spinoza’s statement that women (who are considered to be naturally weak) are to be excluded from the right of voting and office holding in a democracy in the last paragraph of the Political Treatise.

³ This can be seen in what many consider the first modern Jewish treatise, Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism. Though his name is only uttered once in the text, Spinoza’s critique of Judaism haunts Mendelssohn’s work. It has been pointed out, in the eighteenth century by Saul Ascher in his Leviathan, oder über Religion in Rücksicht des Judenthums (1792), and in the twentieth by Julius Guttmann (1981), that Mendelssohn’s depiction of Judaism as a “revealed legislation,” bears significant structural similarities to Spinoza’s discussion of the Mosaic law in the Theological-Political Treatise.

The motivations of the two political theories were strikingly different, however. While both Spinoza and Mendelssohn desired to secure freedom of thought, Mendelssohn wished to secure the freedom of religion as well. Spinoza subordinated all religious actions to the state; Mendelssohn, by contrast, attempted a defense of Judaism. In this defense, Mendelssohn applied Spinoza’s reduction of Judaism to law and turned it into a virtue. But in order to do so, Mendelssohn had to restrict the contemporary jurisdiction of the law. The Mosaic legislation was not equivalent to the moral law (which does not require supernatural revelation to be known). It was no longer political (the law of the Hebrew state). Now, it is merely “ceremonial” (though it did serve, indirectly, political ends.) Judaism therefore posed no conflict with the law of the modern state.

If the struggle with Spinoza was implicit in Mendelssohn’s treatment of Judaism, for the neo-Kantian philosopher and Liberal Jewish theologian Hermann Cohen, the struggle was explicit and direct (on Cohen’s attitude towards Spinoza, see Franz Nauen “Hermann Cohen’s Perceptions of Spinoza: A Reappraisal,” and Hans Liebschütz, “Hermann Cohen und Spinoza”). For Cohen, Spinoza was a dangerous foe. Cohen found him guilty on two charges: first, of grave philosophical error—his pantheist metaphysics, which in subsuming all being into nature, destroyed the metaphysical ground of human ethical striving. Second, Spinoza had shown himself to be a true enemy of Judaism. Motivated by resentment against his former co-religionists, Spinoza was a slanderer of Judaism, a traitor to his own people, a provider of aid and comfort to her enemies.

What was Spinoza’s treachery? Spinoza had stated that “the religion of Judaism, founded by Moses, set … as its sole end the establishment and preservation of the Jewish state,” a “polarization” intended to “destroy the Jewish concept of religion” (Hermann Cohen, “Spinoza über Staat und Religion,” 293, quoted in “Cohen’s Analysis of Spinoza’s Bible Science” in Leo Strauss: The Early Writings, 144).

By portraying Judaism in this way, Spinoza, Cohen believed, had provided the philosophical basis for modern anti-Semitism. Spinoza was therefore not a hero to be celebrated, the archetype of the modern Jew, who, despite his estrangement from the Jewish community nevertheless maintained a degree of national loyalty by not converting to Christianity. On the contrary, Cohen insisted that Spinoza’s hatred of Judaism ran so deep that he was utterly oblivious to its fundamental and enduring idea: Judaism’s prophetic ethos and messianic hope.

Yet, Cohen could not acknowledge his own debt to Spinoza. It was this debt that Strauss was trying to illuminate when he criticized Cohen for not realizing that his own Judaism was in fact a synthesis of traditional Judaism and Spinoza. In this sense, Cohen was, like the Jewish reformers of the nineteenth century, endorsing a vision of Judaism that was indebted to Spinoza.

⁴ Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem: The Last Nationalist Question, trans. Meyer Waxman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 39 (hereafter cited in the text as RJ). The German-language edition consulted is Rom und Jerusalem, die lezte Nationalitätsfrage, in Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. Horst Lademacher (Köhn: Joseph Melzer Verlag, 1962). On Hess’ intellectual development, see Isaiah Berlin, “The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess”; Shlomo Avineri, Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism; Edmund Silberner, Moses Hess: Geschichte seines Lebens.

⁵ The Holy History of Mankind and Other Writings, ed. Shlomo Avineri (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 37 ff (hereafter cited in the text as HH).

⁶ I have modified the translation somewhat. This comment is followed by the qualification: “I myself, if I had a family, would, in spite of my dogmatic heterodoxy, not only join an orthodox synagogue, but would also observe in my house all feast and fast days, so as to keep alive in my heart and in the heart of my children, the traditions of my people. If I had influence in the synagogue, I would endeavor to beautify the religious worship.”

⁷ However, later in the text, Hess maintained that “the divine teaching of Judaism was never, at any time, completed and finished. It has always kept on developing, its development being based upon the harmonizing of the Jewish genius with than of life and humanity” (RJ, 97).

⁸ On the contemporary reaction to Rom und Jerusalem, see Israel Cohen, “Moses Hess: Rebel and Prophet,” 51f.

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