I Return to Hamburg. A Lutheran Pastor Calls Me a Mangy Sheep and Claims That I Am Unworthy of Being Taken into the Christian Flock. I Become a Gymnasium Student and Make the Chief Rabbi as Mad as a Ram
I ARRIVED SAFELY BACK in Hamburg but wound up in the most straightened circumstances. My lodgings were a ramshackle inn. In addition, I had nothing to eat, and I simply didn’t know what to do. But I couldn’t go back to Poland. There I would spend my life languishing in misery and privation, cut off from the pursuit of science and systematic knowledge, far away from enlightened interlocutors, and sinking back into the darkness of superstition and ignorance that, through the greatest effort, I had barely managed to escape. I had come too far, intellectually and morally, for that. [216] But with my insufficient mastery of the local language, customs, and way of life, which I still hadn’t been able to adapt myself to, I certainly couldn’t count on being able to make my way in Germany. I hadn’t acquired a profession. Nor had I distinguished myself in any one field of knowledge. In fact, I didn’t really speak a single one of the languages in which I might have made myself comprehensible to others. I came to the conclusion that my only option was to take on the Christian faith. I would undergo baptism in Hamburg.
And so I resolved to head straight for the closest pastor, whom I would tell about both my decision and my motives in an open way perfectly in keeping with my candor. Because I couldn’t express myself well in spoken German, I wrote down my thoughts in German using Hebrew characters; I then went to a schoolmaster and had my statement rewritten in German letters. The upshot of the letter was as follows:
I was born in Poland, into the Jewish nation. Brought up and trained [217] to be a rabbi, I saw some light in the blackest darkness, which moved me to pursue light and truth and to try to free myself from superstition and ignorance. Because it was impossible to work toward my goal in the land where I was born, I moved to Berlin. Supported by some enlightened men of my nation, I studied there—not systematically, but rather simply to satisfy my desire for knowledge. But because our nation has no use for such desultory study, these men naturally grew weary of supporting me, and they declared their support pointless. Thus, for the sake of both earthly and eternal happiness, which depends on the achievement of perfection, and also as a way of becoming useful to both myself and others, I have decided to accept the Christian religion. Admittedly, the articles of faith [218] in Judaism come closer to reason than those in Christianity. But with respect to its practical application, the latter has the advantage over the former. And since morality, which is the chief aim of all religions, consists of actions rather than beliefs, Christianity is closer to the aim of religion than Judaism. Furthermore, I hold the mysteries of Christianity to be what they are, mysteries: allegorical representations of the truths that matter most to humanity. In this way, I can reconcile my belief in the mysteries with reason, although I cannot believe in them as they are commonly construed. I ask, then, with all due deference: After giving such a confessional statement, am I worthy or unworthy of the Christian religion? If the former is the case, I am ready to put my resolution into practice. If the latter, then I must give up all claim to having religion, for it would force me to lie, i.e., confess my faith in words that contradict my reason.1 [219]
The schoolmaster to whom I dictated these words was astonished and marveled at my boldness. He had never heard anyone offer such a confession of faith. Shaking his head anxiously, he paused several times while writing to ask himself whether merely transcribing such a document was a sin. Getting him to complete the task wasn’t easy. But in the end, he just wanted to be done with it.
I went to a very fine pastor, gave him the text, and asked him for a response. Reading attentively, he, too, marveled over my words. After he had finished, we spoke.
PASTOR: As I see it, you want to adopt Christianity simply to improve your material circumstances?
I: Pardon me, Pastor, but I believe that I explain well enough in my statement that my goal is to achieve perfection. [220] Clearing away external obstacles and bettering my circumstances are prerequisites for that. They are not, however, my ultimate aim.
PASTOR: External motivations aside, do you feel any inner attraction to Christianity?
I: I would be lying if I said I did.
PASTOR: You are too much of a philosopher to become a Christian. Reason has the upper hand in you, and faith must conform to reason. You treat the mysteries of Christian religion as mere fables, and the commandments of this religion as mere laws of reason. At this point, I cannot find your confession of faith satisfying. Pray to God. Ask Him to illuminate you with His Grace and to fill you with the spirit of true Christianity. Once you have done that, come back here.
I: If that is how things are, Pastor, then I must admit I am not qualified to be a Christian. I will always shine the light of reason [221] on whatever light I receive. I will never accept new truths until I can see how they relate to the truths I know already. So it seems I must remain what I am: a stubborn Jew. My religion compels me to believe nothing and instead to pursue the truth and perform good deeds. If external circumstances currently keep me from doing so, that isn’t my fault. I am doing all I can.
With that, I bid the pastor good-bye.
The hardships of my journey, together with a lack of nourishing food, weakened me, and I came down with a fever. I lay in an attic on a pile of straw, painfully deprived of sustenance and of course comforts, too. Out of genuine pity, the innkeeper called for a Jewish doctor, who prescribed an emetic. Having discovered that I was an unusual person, he engaged me in conversation. We spoke for several hours, and he said that I should visit him after I had recovered. The cure he prescribed worked and my fever soon broke. [222]
In the meantime, a young man who knew me from Berlin had heard about my arrival. He came to tell me that Herr W., whom I had met in Berlin, was now living in Hamburg, and that I should visit him right away. I did so. W. was a capable and upstanding man, inclined by nature to do good works. He asked me what I was planning to do next; I laid out my situation and asked for advice. His opinion was that my precarious position had the following cause. Having devoted myself so enthusiastically to pure knowledge and scholarship, I had neglected the study of languages, which left me unable to communicate and use my knowledge and expertise. But it wasn’t too late to change that. If I wanted to, I could reach my goal by enrolling in the gymnasium in Altona, where his son was a student. He, Herr W., would act as my patron.2
I gratefully accepted his offer and went home feeling elated. [223] Meanwhile, Herr W. spoke with the gymnasium’s teachers and its director. In particular, he sought out a man whose gifted mind and heart cannot be praised enough: a lawyer named G. Herr W. described me as a man of uncommon talents who would certainly make a name for himself in the world. All I needed to do was improve my language skills, something I hoped to achieve through a short course of study at the gymnasium. This plan was approved. I registered as a student and was given a room at the gymnasium.
I lived there for several years, peacefully and happily. Of course, because students at such places tend to progress quite slowly, and I had already gone quite far in acquiring knowledge in various fields, I found some of the lectures boring. So I didn’t attend them all, only the ones that appealed to me. I greatly admired the gymnasium’s director, Herr Dusch, for both his comprehensive erudition and his excellent character, and I heard many of his lectures. [224] To be sure, the philosophy of Ernesti, which he lectured on, left me rather cold, as did his lectures on Segner’s mathematical compendium.3 But I learned a great deal from his English language classes.
Rector H.—a cheerful old man, but rather pedantic—was not particularly pleased with me, because I didn’t want to do his Latin exercises or learn Greek.
The history professor, Vice Rector . . . , began his lectures ab ovo with Adam. Only with great effort was he able to reach—two years later—the construction of the Tower of Babel.
The French teacher, Assistant Vice Rector . . . , used Fenelon’s Sur l’existence de Dieu for the purpose of explication, a work I came to dislike in the extreme. While the author pretended to be against Spinozism, he was, I realized, actually arguing for it.
My professors were never able form an accurate sense of who I was during my time at the gymnasium, [225] because they never really had the chance to get to know me.
Believing I had gained a solid foundation in the languages I wanted to learn, and now weary of this idle way of life, I decided to leave the gymnasium at the end of my first year there. However, Director Dusch, who gradually had begun to get to know me after all, begged me to stay for at least one more year. Since I otherwise wanted for nothing there, I acceded to his wishes.
Around this time, the following event took place. A Polish Jew—whom my wife had sent to look for me—learned that I was there. He came to Hamburg and visited me at the gymnasium. My wife was demanding that I either return home immediately or give the man a letter of divorce to take back to her. Neither option appealed to me. I didn’t want to divorce my wife without due cause. Nor was simply packing up and going back to Poland, [226] where I wouldn’t have the slightest prospect of advancement or chance to lead a life of reason, a palatable course of action. I explained this predicament to the messenger, adding that I planned to leave the gymnasium soon. My aim was to travel to Berlin, in the hopes that my Berlin friends would give me moral and material support and help me carry out my scholarly plans.
This answer failed to satisfy him. Indeed, he saw it as an evasion. Because he had no authority, and couldn’t do anything to me on his own, he went to the chief rabbi and lodged a complaint. The rabbi, in turn, sent someone from his court to summon me to appear before his tribunal of justice. I replied that the chief rabbi’s jurisdiction didn’t extend to me, since the gymnasium had its own jurisdiction, which my case should be decided under. The rabbi did all he could to make me bend to his will: His strategy was to go through the local government. However, it was all in vain. Seeing that he couldn’t sway me with such tactics, [227] he sent his messenger again. But this time he merely requested that I come see him. All he wanted to do was talk. I happily accepted the invitation and set off at once.4
He received me with a great show of respect. When I told him about my childhood and family in Poland, he began to wail out lamentations, wringing his hands: “Oh! Can it be that you are the famous Rabbi Joshua’s son? I know your father very well. He is a pious and learned man. And I know you, too. I tested you on a number of occasions when you were a boy, and I found you so full of promise. Oh! How is it possible that you have changed so much!” (Here he pointed to my shaved beard.)
I replied that I felt honored to know him: Indeed, I remembered his examination well. My actions, I maintained, ran no more counter to religion (properly understood) than to reason.
He interrupted me: “But you have no beard and you don’t go to synagogue—doesn’t that run counter to religion?” [228]
“No!” I answered, and demonstrated that according to the Talmud all of this was permissible given the circumstances I found myself in. Thereupon we entered into a wide-ranging debate over the issue, a debate in which we were both right. Because this method wasn’t getting him anywhere, the rabbi turned to sermonizing. When that, too, failed to produce results, he worked himself up into a holy fervor, and he began to shout: “Shofar! Shofar!” (This is the name of the horn that is blown in synagogues at New Year as a call to come and repent; Satan is supposed to be terribly afraid of it.)5 While shouting, he pointed to a Shofar that happened to be lying on a table. He asked me: “Do you know what that is?”
I answered brazenly: “Of course, it’s a ram’s horn.” These words made the rabbi tumble back into his chair. He began to bewail my lost soul. And as he did, I walked out, leaving him to bewail my soul for as long as he pleased.
At the end of my second year, I determined that letting the professors get to know me better would [229] be fair to the gymnasium, and good for my own prospects as well. I went to Director Dusch and told him that I would be leaving soon. I also said that I wanted a certificate attesting to my progress. And, in addition, I asked him to give me an examination. That way, the certificate could come as close as possible to expressing the truth.
He had me translate a series of passages, both prose and poetry, from Latin and English, and he was very satisfied with my renderings. Then we discussed several philosophical topics. Here he found me to be so well versed in the material that he soon broke off. Finally, he asked, “How about mathematics?” I requested that he test me in this, too.
“We are more or less up to the theory of mathematical bodies in our math class,” he said. “Why don’t you solve a problem that hasn’t yet come up in the lectures, such as how the cylinder, [230] sphere, and cone relate to each other? You can have a few days.” I replied that that wouldn’t be necessary. I could complete the assignment on the spot. Not only did I prove the proposition that had been given to me, but I also demonstrated quite a few additional ones from Segner’s geometry. The rector was very surprised. He summoned all the students in the gymnasium and, to their embarrassment, impressed upon them how much I had managed to achieve. Most of the students didn’t know what to say, but some offered this response: “Director, you mustn’t think that Maimon has made so much progress at school. He almost never came to the mathematics lectures, and when he did, he didn’t pay attention.” They wanted to say more, but the director silenced them and gave me a glowing certificate. I can’t help but quote several lines here, as, after a while, they had the effect of spurring me on to accomplish more. Only for this reason am I relating part of the esteemed rector’s evaluation. My doing so should not be seen as self-aggrandizement. [231]
He wrote: “His talent for understanding all that is good, beautiful, and useful, and, above all, everything in the sciences that requires a strong intellectual effort as well as deep and abstract thinking, is, I would almost say, extraordinary. Knowledge that most people acquire only through the greatest effort is his favorite kind. The use of his mental powers seems to be his main, if not only, source of enjoyment. Up to now, philosophy and mathematics have been his preferred subjects; the progress he has made in these subjects has astonished me . . .”
I took my leave of the gymnasium’s teachers and administrators, all of whom paid me the compliment that it had been an honor to have me at their school. I then set off once more for Berlin. [232]
1 On the sources of Maimon’s philosophical-theological argument regarding means and ends in the attainment of perfection, see the editors’ introduction.
2 This was the Gymnasium Christianeum in nearby Altona. An undated twentieth-century brochure published by the gymnasium contains the text of two educational certificates for Maimon, the first of which is dated November 1783, and describes Maimon as “a young man of the Jewish nation, named Solomon from Lithuania.” The second, dated February 1785, refers to him as “Salomon Maimon, born in Lithuania,” cited in Samuel Hugo Bergman, The Philosophy of Salomon Maimon, trans. Noah Jacobs (Jerusalem, 1967), p. 2, thus giving us the rough date of his adoption of Maimon as a surname.
3 Johann Heinrich Ernesti was a Lutheran theologian-philosopher, who translated Cicero and feuded with his academic colleague Johann Sebastian Bach, who later composed the motet for Ernesti’s funeral. Johann Andreas Segner (1704–77) was a professor at the University of Halle and one of the leading scientists of the age.
4 Rabbi Raphael Kohen (1722–1803) was the chief rabbi of the Jewish “triple community” of Hamburg, Altona, and Wandsbeck (which were under three distinct secular governments), and a leading opponent of the Haskala, who had once threatened to excommunicate Moses Mendelssohn, and did ban his Bible translation. In 1789 a halachic work of his was anonymously and brutally attacked by Maimon’s odd and brilliant peer Saul Berlin (1740–94) in one of the major episodes of late eighteenth-century Jewish intellectual life. Although he did not name him, Maimon would have expected his Jewish readers to recognize his portrait of Kohen and to have this background in mind.
5 The Shofar is also blown on the occasion of an excommunication, as Maimon was well aware.