The Jewish Character of Spinoza’s Teaching

Joseph Klausner was born in a small town near Vilna but moved to Odessa at age eleven. There he later became active in the city’s circle of writers, who were working to revive Hebrew. He studied in Heidelberg briefly and then moved to Warsaw, where in 1903 he took over the editorship of Ha-Shiloaḥ, the most important Hebraist and Zionist literary periodical of the era. Moving back to Odessa in 1907, he continued to edit Ha-Shiloaḥ until the Bolshevik regime suppressed Hebrew cultural life in 1919. He also launched a career as an historian of classical and contemporary Hebrew literature. Throughout, he exerted great influence over the budding Hebrew literary sphere, attempting to connect the new Hebrew culture to the European humanist tradition. He helped to champion a more cosmopolitan Hebrew literature—he was an early champion of the work of Saul Tschernikhovsky and a fervent supporter of literary translation from classical and contemporary Western literature into Hebrew—while also arguing that precisely such a more cosmopolitan and aesthetically worthwhile Hebrew literature, especially poetry, was essential to the Zionist vision of Jewish national revival. Fiercely Hebraist, he was sharply critical of those Hebrew writers who took part in Yiddish literary life. He was also antisocialist, continuing to identity with centrist-liberal forces in the Russian Empire even as many younger Hebrew writers moved toward socialist sympathies in the years before and during the Russian Revolution. In 1919, he left for Jerusalem and was appointed to the chair in Hebrew literature at the newly opened Hebrew University (1925). In Palestine, he embraced right-wing nationalism and identified as a Revisionist Zionist; his scholarship, including some controversial work on Jesus of Nazareth, was imbued with a strongly nationalist flavor.