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This chapter discusses anti-hasidic criticism in the last years of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Opposition to hasidism is almost as old as the hasidic movement itself. However, it was not the supporters of the Jewish Enlightenment ideology, the maskilim, but representatives of the rabbinical elite who were the first to begin an organized wave of opposition. Their hasidic opponents therefore called them ‘mitnagedim’ (opponents). The first maskilic voices to criticize the hasidic movement were heard at almost the same time as those of the mitnagedim, or perhaps, as some historians suggest, slightly earlier. The chapter then explores the anti-hasidic criticism of Salomon Maimon, Mendel Lefin, and Jacques Calmanson. Calmanson was the first advocate of the Haskalah associated with central Poland and Warsaw to speak out on the hasidic question. The history of subsequent maskilic polemics on the subject of hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland is, broadly, the history of the reception of the works by these three authors.

This chapter examines the works of some of the most notable Jewish philosophers during the Enlightenment Period. It traces themes that unite and divide the projects of Baruch Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, and Salomon Maimon in the context of the Enlightenment trajectories in modern philosophy beginning with Michel de Montaigne and Etienne de La Boëtie. It analyzes Spinoza's controversial place in the history of Jewish philosophy and the legacy of the Jewish Enlightenment philosophers. This chapter suggests the Jewish philosophers saw themselves as developing projects that would embrace Jewish tradition as an emancipatory and progressive force and contribute to the project of critically rethinking the problem of the universal claim of philosophy in the face of the particularity that defines the universal terms of the project of modernity.

A number of non-idealist thinkers are important in the transition from Kantian idealism to post-Kantian German idealism. The second chapter, “On the transition from Kant to Fichte,” considers three such philosophers: Reinhold, Maimon and Schulze (pseud. Aenesidemus). I argue Reinhold’s foundationalist restatement of the critical philosophy is incompatible with Kant’s critical philosophy, hence incompatible with German idealism. Maimon, whose reading of the critical philosophy was accepted by Kant, criticizes Reinhold’s foundationalism, and influences Fichte and Hegel. Under the pseudonym Aenesidemus, Schulze is important for Fichte’s transcendental philosophy.

This chapter begins with a well-known account of the visit by Salomon Maimon to the court of the Magid Dov Ber of Mezritsh. It notes that Maimon visited Mezritsh at the end of the 1760s, when he was himself a young married man of 16 or 17 years of age. It also discusses how Maimon, despite his disappointment with Hasidism, eventually became a maskil and a philosopher, which suggested an appreciation for those first Hasidim he met. The chapter looks at independent testimonies that confirm the reliability of Maimon’s memoirs and his encounter with Hasidism, which includes his account of three homilies delivered by the Magid. It reviews Maimon’s explanation as to why he became disillusioned with Hasidism and how he attributed his change of mind to an event he witnessed at the court of the Magid, when a man was punished for having a daughter.

In the second chapter I explain the nature of immanent cause in Spinoza. I discuss and criticize the German Idealists’ acosmist interpretation of Spinoza according to which Spinoza revived the radical monism of the Eleatics and assigned no genuine reality to modes. Finally, I draw a crucial distinction, implicit in Spinoza's text, between modes of particular attributes, and modes under all attributes.

This chapter takes us into the fundamental elements of Baumgarten’s metaphysical system, the concepts of “determination” and “determinability,” and shows how his specific formulation of these concepts was fateful for the development of later German philosophy. Nuzzo notes in particular that Baumgarten’s formulation of these ideas fundamentally structured three key moments in German thought: the public debate on the “Destiny of Mankind” (“Bestimmung des Menschen”—lit. “Determination of Mankind”), Salomon Maimon’s development of the “Principle of Determination,” and finally Georg Wilhelm Hegel’s discussion of being in his Science of Logic.