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This concluding chapter considers the current vogue in appropriations of Spinoza. Broadly speaking, the chapter finds in the recent literature two basic positions on Spinoza's place in the world of Jewish secularism: the “presentists,” who seek to vouch for Spinoza's anticipation of the modern, secular Jew and drive home his relevance to the contemporary culture wars; and the “contextualists,” who look askance at interpretations of Spinoza as a Jewish precursor, judging such readings guilty of everything from historical anachronism at the very least to a groundless “Judaizing” of the Amsterdam philosopher more problematically. This chapter, as with the rest of this volume, maintains a contextualist stance, and discusses this position in more depth in the larger context of the contemporary revival of Spinoza in modern Jewish culture.

This introductory chapter briefly deals with the question of a dichotomy between Athens and Jerusalem. More specifically, it aims to approach the issue by considering how Athens, with its associations of classical antiquity and Hellenism, might have any impact on modern Jewish culture. Both sides of this dichotomy, as this chapter shows, are quite different and distinct from one another. Indeed, they represent seemingly contradictory worlds. For the Jews, Athens represented Western culture as a whole. It was ‘modern’ and ‘secular’. A cultural value or trait was identified as ‘Greek’ in order to approve of it or, conversely, to attach a stigma to it. Some Jewish writers have also argued that ‘Athens’ and ‘Jerusalem’ signify the two forces of a primal duality (Urzwet) that have been contending with each other in Judaism since its inception, creating within it a tension, as well as a dynamic and enriching multiplicity. However, as this chapter shows, duality also creates a disintegrating tension, or one which in the final analysis causes the totality and the unity to alter their nature.

This chapter highlights A. Litvin's anthology, Jewish Souls (1914). Shmuel Hurvits, whose pseudonym was A. Litvin, was born to a poor family in Minsk in 1862. He educated himself in both Jewish and general subjects, and began to work as a teacher. In 1911-12, Litvin began to publish articles based on his travels throughout eastern Europe beginning in 1905. After returning to the United States in 1914, he published these articles in a six-volume anthology entitled Yidishe neshomes (Jewish Souls). In scores of sketches of badkhonim, purim-shpilers, wandering preachers, and musicians; healers and holy men; beggars, pickpockets, and thieves in towns and cities throughout Poland, Lithuania, and Galicia, Litvin constructs an extraordinary panorama of the life of the Jewish masses at the moment when centuries-old traditions engaged modernity and either changed or vanished. He documents this world in the interests of a new generation of Jews who, he believed, needed such knowledge to build a secular yet authentically Jewish modern culture.