Accompanying this was an increasing conceit about the supposed world-importance of Judaism. It is significant that around the same time that the Spinoza cult was gaining momentum, Heinrich Graetz and Abraham Geiger were claiming that all of Christianity’s accomplishments were due to its supposed links to Judaism.[18] Spinoza was seen increasingly as a genius and a prophet. By the birth of Weimar Germany, as Jews “rose to an unprecedented level of cultural, even political, public prominence,”[19] Spinoza was celebrated for his “assumed merit about the Jewish people and only secondarily about mankind.”[20] Leo Strauss, who was a leading Weimar Spinozist, wrote in the 1930s that contemporary Jews not only “rescinded the excommunication which the Jewish community in Amsterdam had pronounced against Spinoza” but even “canonized him.”[21]
David Wertheim, in his Salvation Through Spinoza: A Study of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, argued that “Spinoza was one of the major heroes of the Jewish cultural Renaissance in Weimar Germany,” and that Weimar Jewry’s “infatuation” with Spinoza “was manifested in scholarship, the popular press, and novels.”[22] Discussion of Spinoza was now “saturated throughout with religious rhetoric.”[23] In some cases, “Spinoza became nothing less than a substitute for the messiah as a focus for Jewish hopes.”[24] Importantly, while Jews could differ on “the nature and relevance of their religion … they hardly differed in their admiration of Spinoza.”[25]
The shared enthusiasm for Spinoza thus came to be an important conduit for the promotion of Jewish group cohesion. Daniel Schwartz writes that Spinoza became a “surrogate father” for secular Jews.[26] Wertheim has a fascinating section on the level of media saturation devoted to Spinoza in 1930s Germany. The Zionist Judische Rundschau, with a readership of over 20,000, often carried more than four articles on Spinoza per issue.[27] Even the newspaper of Berlin’s largest synagogue, Judische Gemeinde zu Berlin, with a readership of over 90,000, “participated enthusiastically in the Spinoza celebrations.”[28] There were increasing numbers of Spinoza lectures, exhibitions, and study groups.[29]
