Daniel B. Schwartz
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691142913
- eISBN:
- 9781400842261
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691142913.003.0004
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
This chapter skips ahead fifty years from the previous chapter to find the roots of the heroic and prototypical image of Spinoza in the historical fiction of the young Berthold Auerbach (1812–1882), ...
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This chapter skips ahead fifty years from the previous chapter to find the roots of the heroic and prototypical image of Spinoza in the historical fiction of the young Berthold Auerbach (1812–1882), using his engagement with the Amsterdam heretic in the 1830s as a lens for exploring tensions in early Reform Judaism between organic and revolutionary visions of religious change. It contends that his 1837 historical novel, Spinoza, ein historischer Roman (Spinoza, a Historical Novel), when studied against the backdrop of his previous Jewish writings, evinces a very personal—but also very contemporary—tug-of-war between two different visions of Jewish modernity: one more reformist and accommodating of a religious framework for change, the other more uncompromisingly radical.Less
This chapter skips ahead fifty years from the previous chapter to find the roots of the heroic and prototypical image of Spinoza in the historical fiction of the young Berthold Auerbach (1812–1882), using his engagement with the Amsterdam heretic in the 1830s as a lens for exploring tensions in early Reform Judaism between organic and revolutionary visions of religious change. It contends that his 1837 historical novel, Spinoza, ein historischer Roman (Spinoza, a Historical Novel), when studied against the backdrop of his previous Jewish writings, evinces a very personal—but also very contemporary—tug-of-war between two different visions of Jewish modernity: one more reformist and accommodating of a religious framework for change, the other more uncompromisingly radical.
