Spinoza's Election of the Jews: The Problem of Jewish Persistence

My title plays on that of the third chapter of Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, "Of the Election of the Jews...." In that chapter Spinoza argues that the claim that the Jews are God's chosen people is no longer valid. Further, their former elected status was not a consequence of any qualities or religious beliefs particular to them but was the result of their past political good fortune. The fall of the Jewish state marked the end of their chosenness:

[T]he Hebrew nation was not chosen by God before others by reason of its intellect or of its peace of mind, but by reason of the social order and of the fortune by which it acquired a state and by which it kept [a state] for many years. . . . [S]ince God is equally well disposed to all and chose the Hebrews only with respect to their social order and their state, we conclude that . . . there is no difference between [a Jew] and a gentile.¹

That the Jewish people still existed as a self-identified entity some 1,600 years after the fall of Jerusalem was not, therefore, a sign of divine election. Nor, however, was their continued disempowered existence an index of divine rejection. Such persistence was a curiosity and a consequence of the separation between Jews and gentiles that had been maintained by hatred and the peculiarity of Jewish practices. Spinoza's discussion of divine election and his analysis of the causes of Jewish persistence converge on a passage that Leo Strauss refers to as "Spinoza's Testament":

The mark of circumcision is also, I think, of great importance in this connection [i.e., Jewish persistence]; so much so that in my view it alone will preserve the Jewish people for all time; indeed, did not the principles of their religion make them effeminate [effoeminarent] I should be quite convinced that some day when the opportunity arises [so changeable are human affairs] they will establish their state once more, and that God will chose them afresh.²

According to Strauss, this sentence delivered the coup de grâce to any claims that the continued existence of the Jewish people was a sign of divine chosenness. Moreover, it concisely asserted Spinoza's detachment of Jewry's ethnic identity and practices (such as circumcision) from any religious claims and principles (such as messianic hopes); the passage also reinforces Spinoza's political conception of Judaism in the face of the Jewish people's current apolitical existence. For Strauss, this passage represents Spinoza's final word on his relationship to Judentum, that condensation of ethnos, ethos, and ethic (of Jewry, Judaism, and Jewishness); hence neither apology nor repudiation, Spinoza's assertion is a testament to his neutral stance vis-á-vis the Jews, their beliefs, and their practices.

What else Spinoza may have intended by this combination of denigrating contemporary Jewry and opening the possibility of future statehood has been a frequent topic of speculation in the contemporary literature on the Tractatus. Is this sentence a response to the messianic movement of Sabbatai Sevi, or a final act of ressentiment directed at the community that had put him under the herem (ban), or, simply, a logical conclusion based on his representation of Judaism and his understanding of the rational laws of history?³

My concern, however, is less with Spinoza's intentions than with his line's various receptions. This article plots how this passage from the Tractatus has provided an optic through which leading Jewish and gentile writers and, more broadly, a variety of German (sub)cultures have seen Jewish-gentile relations and Jewish identity since the Enlightenment.⁴ This one sentence may not have shaped these authors' understanding of modernity as much as Spinoza's critique of scripture and revealed religion, his separation of reason and faith, and/or his ontologization of immanence, of this-world. Yet by breaking the connection between persistence and chosenness/election, distinguishing the sociological fact of Jewry's existence from its religious meaning, and opposing a political/legal conception of Judaism to its apolitical...