“The Seal of the Guide”: Hermann Cohen on Salomon Munk’s Translation of Maimonides’ Guide of...

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Chiara Adorisio

“The Seal of the Guide”: Hermann Cohenon Salomon Munk’s Translationof Maimonides’ Guide of The Perplexed.

Chiara Adorisio: Università di Roma-La Sapienza, Dipartimento di Filosofia,Via Carlo Fea 2, I-00161 Roma. E-mail: [email protected]

I Introduction

The fundamental contribution that the Wissenschaft des Judentums made to thestudy of Judaism, the Hebrew language, and Jewish thought during the 19th cen-tury in Europe seems to be particularly relevant also in the field of philosophy.If we refer to the reception of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed in the Wis-senschaft des Judentums, we will see how 19th century Jewish scholarship usedMaimonides in order to demonstrate the possibility of creating a modern Juda-ism based on rational ethics1 and universal laws. Maimonides gave to the 19th

century Jewish scholars the possibility of a rational, universalist, and ethicalrethinking of the world of rabbinic sources. While this endeavour was not un-problematic, it nevertheless gave a great impulse to the rediscovering of Maimo-

1 For a detailed discussion of the reception of Maimonides in 19th century German Jewry andits relationship to the Jewish Reform movement see George Y. Kohler, Reading Maimonides’Philosophy in 19th Century Germany: The Guide to Religious Reform, (Dordrecht-New York-Lon-don: Springer, 2011). Kohler also stresses in his book that “the dynamic reception process ofthe Guide begins early in the nineteenth century with two basic demands on contemporaryJudaism, demands that could clearly be learned from the Guide, as the thinkers involved be-lieved: first, to accept the idea that the study of worldly science and philosophy is not foreignto Judaism and second, the demand of halachic flexibility on rational grounds”, Furthermorehe writes: “No other concept is as important for the religious philosophy of the Wissenschaftdes Judentums as ethical monotheism. The task of preserving pure monotheism was developedby nineteenth-century Jewish thinkers into a specific mission of the Jews to the rest of the cul-tured world, often formulated as a self-confident answer to Christian confessional patronizing.In spite of the constant theological onslaught on their religious traditions, the Jews insisted ona partial distinctiveness of Judaism, on an autonomous right of Judaism to an existence inde-pendent of Christianity, because they saw themselves as the bearers and guardians of puremonotheism”. see Ibid., p. 343.

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nides’ philosophical thought which continued later in 20th Jewish Philosophyand gave birth to different reinterpretations of the medieval philosopher2.

The first translation of the Guide of the Perplexed from the original text inJudeo-Arabic, made between 1840 and 1856 by Salomon Munk, a German-Jew-ish orientalist, who emigrated to Paris in 1828, was the beginning of this newreception of Maimonides’ philosophy. Munk’s translation into French with acommentary became a classic and a model for all the later translations of thiswork up to this day, into English, Hebrew, or Italian.

Recent research has begun to draw a line between the Wissenschaft des Ju-dentums, the 19th century Jewish scholarship influenced by the Jewish reformmovement, and Hermann Cohen’s philosophy, where Maimonides plays a cen-tral rôle, together with Kant and Plato. This research generally neglects the rôleand the influence of Salomon Munk’s works. Both Munk and Hermann Cohenwere, each in his own way, original interpreters of the philosophy of Maimo-nides, and influenced in a seminal way the discussion about the possibility andnature of a Jewish philosophy of religion3.

The present article intends to emphasise the fact that Salomon Munk’stranslation also had an influence on the philosophy of Hermann Cohen4, the

2 The return to Maimonides’ philosohical work has had a deep impact on modern Jewish thin-kers. The first was Hermann Cohen, followed by Franz Rosenzweig, Leo Strauss, Julius Gutt-mann, Steven Schwarzschild, and Emmanuel Lévinas.3 See Leopold Löw, “Salomon Munk”, in: L. Löw, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 (Szegedin:A. Bába, 1890), pp. 454, 457. The essay was originally published in: Ben Chananja 10 (1867).After Salomon Munk’s death, Leopold Löw, a Hungarian rabbi, scholar of theology and aes-thetics, and editor of the periodical “Ben Chananja”, published from 1858 to 1867, wrote in hispassionate essay how important Munk’s work should have been considered for the history ofJewish philosophy. He also claims in his article that “Munk was one of the first Jews adept inArabic language and literature, whose study had been totally neglected by the Jewish scholars,although since the 17th century there had been quite some stimulus for this.“ Furthermore:“Like the knowledge of mediaeval philosophy, the knowledge of Hebrew grammar and exegesisin this historical period was furthered by Munk in a highly successful manner. His treatise onAbu’l-Walid Merwan Ibn Ganach and several Hebrew grammarians of the 11th century, trans-lated by Fürst into German and published in 1830 in the Journal Asiatique, is a veritable treas-ure trove of rich and diverse instruction. Here it is shown for the first time that the Karaitescultivated the field of Hebrew grammar earlier than the Rabbanites, and that the impulse for asounder exegesis sprang from the former. And they were also the ones to lay the groundworkfor a systematic and rational Jewish theology, guided and nurtured by philosophical specula-tion, under the influence of the Moslem Motekallemin, whose name they even adopted”. SeeIbid., p. 460.4 See Hermann Cohen, Charakteristik der Ethik Maimunis (1908), English translation and com-mentary by Almut Sh. Bruckstein, in: Hermann Cohen, Ethics of Maimonides (Madison: TheUniversity of Wisconsin Press, 2004), p. 259, and Hermann Cohen, Religion der Vernunft aus

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founder of the neo-Kantian school of Marburg, who carried out what has beencalled the philosophical turn in Jewish thought by opposing his philosophicalreading of Jewish sources to the prevailing historical and philological methodof 19th century Jewish scholars. To do this we shall describe Cohen as a readerof Salomon Munk’s work while also claiming that Munk was an important inter-preter of Maimonides’s philosophical thought, whose genesis and context hewas able to reconstruct with a clarity and precision which are still today a mod-el for other scholars5.

II Cohen Between Idealism and 19th CenturyJewish Scholarship

To further analyse Hermann Cohen’s relationship to the Wissenschaft des Juden-tums in general is beyond the scope of this article. It is nevertheless necessaryto mention how he was familiar with the world of 19th Jewish scholarship andhow his discussion and confrontation with the ideas of the Wissenschaft desJudentums accompanied him during his entire life. He had contacts with theauthors of the Wissenschaft both in his formative years at the Seminary of Bres-lau and later, when he left Marburg in 1912 and went to teach at the Lehranstaltfür die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. From October 1857 until 1861 theyoung Cohen was a student of the Rabbinical Seminary of Breslau (“Jüdisch-theologische Seminar Fraenckelscher Stiftung”) founded in 1854 by ZachariasFrankel. He met here teachers like Heinrich Graetz, Manoel Joel, and AbrahamGeiger. Notwithstanding this, he was always very far from subscribing to thephilological method of “value-free” and historicist type of research into Jewishtradition and sources that was characteristic of the Seminary.

Cohen criticised, for example, Graetz’ incapacity to understand philosophyas lively and constructive thinking, and wrote later in his essay “Ein Gruß derPietät an das breslauer Seminar”: “Der tiefe Mangel seines Wesens lag in sei-nem persönlichen Verhältnis zur Philosophie. Er kannte sie, aber eben nur als

den Quellen des Judentums (1919), English translation in: Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reasonout of the Sources of Judaism, Translated, with an Introduction by Simon Kaplan, Introductoryessays by Leo Strauss, (New York: F. Ungar Pub. Co., 1972).5 A new “mise à jour” of Salomon Munk’s translation appeared in 2012, which again testifiesto the importance and actuality of his work. See Moïse Maïmonide, Le Guide des égarés, trad.de l’arabe par Salomon Munk (1856–1866), nouvelle édition revue et mise à jour sous la dir. deRené Lévy, avec la coll. de Maroun Aouad, (Lagrasse: éd. Verdier, 2012).

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ein Philologe und Historiker; und da es nicht gab, was er nicht verstandenhätte, so darf man wohl auch sagen, wie ein Polyhistor”6.

In contrast to this, Manoel Joel and Abraham Geiger, who also taught at theSeminary for a certain period of time, had according to Cohen the merit of as-signing to philosophy and science an important rôle beside faith, that of excer-cising control on religion. This was the spirit, according to him, that the institu-tion of the Breslauer Seminary should have had: “Dieser Respekt vor derWissenschaft als vor der letzten Instanz aller menschlichen Frömmigkeit, gingvon diesen grossen Lehrern auf uns alle über”. […] Möge der freie Geist der Wis-senschaft immerdar in diesen hohen Schule walten”7. This very idea of scienceas an instance of purification of thought and scholarship, and, also, of Judaismand religion, could be considered, as Dieter Adelmann’s work stresses8, one ofthe threads that connected 19th century Jewish philology to the entire philoso-phical work of Hermann Cohen.

Salomon Munk was also inspired by a similar idea. Unlike Abraham Geiger,who met Cohen personally in Breslau, Salomon Munk, who lived in Paris andwas at that time much older then Geiger, did not teach in Breslau. He neverwent back to Germany but wrote all his works in Paris and completed his scho-larly career at the Collège de France. His translation of the Guide of the Per-plexed, published between 1856 and 1861, when Munk was already almost com-pletely blind, was intended to be completed by a treatise on the philosophy ofMaimonides, which Munk in the end did not write.

If we consider the way in which they study Judaism and Jewish texts, Munkand Cohen are representatives of two different epochs. They were influenced bysome of the greatest German philologists of the 19th century. Salomon Munk wasin fact a disciple of August Boeck in Berlin, before emigrating to Paris. HermannCohen later on assimilated Boeck’s philological theories through ChaijmSteinthal, his Jewish teacher and very close friend, who was a philosopher of lan-guage9. Already during his early studies, Steinthal, who was one of the major fig-

6 Hermann Cohen, “Ein Gruß der Pietät an das breslauer Seminar”, in: Das breslauer Seminar1854–1938, Gedächtnisschrift hrsg. von Guido Kisch, (Stuttgart: Mohr, 1963), p. 305. Originallyin: “Ost und West. Illustrierte Monatschrift für modernes Judentum”, IV (1904): 748–755.7 Ibid., p. 755.8 See Dieter Adelmann, “‘Reinige dein Denken’: Über den jüdischen Hintergrund der Philosophievon Hermann Cohen.” Aus dem Nachlass herausgegeben, ergänzt und mit einem einleitendenVorwort versehen von Görge K. Hasselhoff (Würzburg: Koenighausen & Neuman, 2010).9 Steinthal, who was a linguist and a philosopher, studied philology and “Sprachwissen-schaft” at the University of Berlin from 1843 onwards. He studied in a comparative sense a widerange of languages: Hebrew, Latin and Greek, Sanscrit and Persian, Turkish, and other Euro-pean and Oriental languages. He wrote and published in Berlin: Die Sprachwissenschaft Wil-

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ures of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, embraced August Boeck’s idea of philol-ogy, which implies the reconstruction and the “recovery” of the knowledge ofwhat was known in the past10. Steinthal, the founder, with Moritz Lazarus, of“Völkerpsychologie” (psychology of nations), was fascinated by Boeck’s idea ofphilology as a science of reconstruction. According to what Dieter Adelmannwrites in his article11 on the relationship between Steinthal and Cohen, the idea ofa philological science, which was very close to history and to speculation, too,and had the function of reconstructing something that was known in the past,must have stimulated great fascination in both Steinthal and Cohen. It is wellknown that the latter published his first essays in Steinthal’s “Zeitschrift für Völ-kerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft”12. The young Cohen did not embrace thepositivistic attitude of Völkerpsychologie completely, however, for he was alreadyunder the influence of German Idealism, which made him attribute a central rôleto the creativity of human consciousness. Cohen was probably able to discussKant’s philosophy already as a student with some of his teachers at the BreslauSeminary. Manoel Joel, for example, probably played a preeminent role in the ela-boration of Cohen’s concept of philosophy in opposition to mere philology.

helm von Humboldts und die Hegel’sche Philosophie (Berlin: Dümmler 1848). In Berlin Steinthaltook part in the new movement for the introduction of the scientific study of Judaism into theuniversity, the so-called Wissenschaft des Judentums, together with Leopold Zunz and AbrahamGeiger. He founded the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in 1872, where he taughtbiblical sciences and philosophy of religion until his death. Toghether with Moritz Lazarus healso edited, between 1860 and 1890, the journal Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwis-senschaft.10 The German expression used by Boeck is “das Erkennen des Erkannten”. Philology is aglobal science of human spirit, according to Boeck. He conceives the goal of philology as theknowledge of “what has been produced by the human spirit”, that is “the knowledge of theknown” and writes: “Hiernach scheint die eigentliche Aufgabe der Philologie das Erkennen desvom menschlichen Geist Producierten, d.h. des Erkannten zu sein”, see August Boeck, Enzyklo-pädie und Methodenlehre der philologischen Wissenschaft, ed. by Ernst Bratuscheck, 2. Ed.,Leipzig: Teubner 1886 [1877], p. 10–11. Reprint. Leipzig: Teubner 1966, p. 10.11 See Dieter Adelmann, H. Steinthal und Hermann Cohen, in: Hermann Cohen’s philosophy ofreligion, International Conference in Jerusalem 1996, ed. by Stéphane Moses and Hartwig Wie-debach, (Hildesheim-Zürich-New York: Olms, 1997), p. 11.12 Among the articles published by Hermann Cohen in the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie undSprachwissenschaft, one finds: “Die platonische Ideenlehre psychologisch entwickelt” (1866),“Mythologische Vorstellungen von Gott und Seele, psychologisch entwickelt” (1868–9), “Diedichterische Phantasie und der Mechanismus des Bewußtseins” (1869). In the same period,Cohen also gave two lectures “Der Sabbath in seiner Kulturgeschichtlichen Bedeutung” (1869)and “Heinrich Heine und das Judentum” (1867) that he published respectively in “Der Zeitgeist”and in “Die Gegenwart. Berliner Wochenschrift für Jüdische Angelegenheiten” and show how hewas at that time still, but only at some extent, near to the “Völkerpsychologie”.




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III Cohen’s “Ethics of Maimonides”

Cohen’s interest in Kant’s philosophy finds later on in his work a connection tohis interpretation of Maimonides’s ethics as the culmination of his philosophy.Such a connection is well sketched for the first time in one of Cohen’s Jewishwritings, i.e. in the essay entitled: “Charakteristik der Ethik Maimunis”, whichappeared in 1908 in a volume that was the product of a project on Maimonides’life, work, and fortune. This project tried to see in Maimonides a philosopherwho interacted simultaneously with Christian scholasticism, Muslim culture,the work of kalam, Jewish tradition, rabbinical literature, and last but not least,Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy and science. This reflects the interests ofJewish scholarship at the turn of the 20th century and was possible thanks tothe pioneering work of the Jewish scholars of the first half of the 19th century,such as Salomon Munk13.

In fact, Cohen’s reading of Maimonides in this essay offers a Platonic andKantian construal of his thought, which is opposed to former Aristotelian inter-pretations. The essay discusses the problem of the connections between Cohen’scritical idealism and Maimonides’ thought, as it would be developed and dee-pened in Cohen’s last work Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism. Themost interesting parallel between Kant and Maimonides is found by Cohen intheir common concept of God, although this apparent similarity is conditionedby a radical reading of Maimonides’ theory of the divine attributes. In Cohen’sreading, Maimonides’ theology culminates in ethics because he posits that theethical “attributes of action” are the only knowledge of God available to us.Cohen also develops in this essay the concept of correlation between Greek andJewish sources, between Plato’s idea of the Good (which is prior to being) andMaimonides’s concept of “loving kindness, righteousness, and justice”.

The name of Salomon Munk appears just once in Cohen’s essay, but it doesso at a very important juncture. Here, Cohen grounds his ethical and, in thissense, Platonic interpretation of Maimonides, discussing how knowledge of Godis inextricably linked to the cognition of the Good. In this note Cohen criticisesManoel Joel’s interpretation of the concluding chapters of the Guide of the Per-plexed14 in favor of the interpretation given by Salomon Munk. Joel, in fact, in-

13 To this volume collaborated among others Jacob Guttmann, who wrote important works onSalomon Ibn Gabirol quoting Munk’s edition of Gabirol’s Meqor Hajim. Munk’s edition openedthe path for the study of the reciprocal influences of Islamic, Jewish, and Christian Thought inthe Middle Ages, influencing the idea of a philosophy of religion written in three languages:Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin.14 See Guide 3:51, 618.

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terpreted the words of Maimonides himself, saying that he intended these chap-ters as a mere appendix to the themes exposed in the Guide. Salomon Munk, onthe other hand, understood correctly that the Arabic term khatma or the Jewishatimà do not mean in any way “appendix” but “conclusion” and they corre-spond to the greek sfragis, meaning seal, or mark, or signature. Salomon Munktranslates, in fact, Maimonides’ introduction to these chapters as follows: “Lechapitre que nous allons produire maintenant n’ajoute aucun sujet nouveau…Iln’est en quelque sorte qu’une conclusion”15. According to Cohen, and thanks toMunk’s reading, the seal of the Guide is constituted by the love of God andethics16, a conclusion in the light of which all other chapters of the Guideshould be read. The very nature of Maimonides’ conception of ethics was dis-cussed by Cohen in this essay, and it is interesting to note how Cohen whodespite quoting Munk only once, seems to know Munk’s translation of theGuide very well.

Cohen certainly read Munk’s translation of the Guide already around 1870.Like Munk, he was persuaded that Maimonides was the classic of Jewish med-iaeval rationalism. Munk thought, in fact, that, with the exception of Maimo-nides, there were not really Jewish philosophers in the Middle Ages who madean original contribution to philosophy, as the Islamic philosophers did. He alsothought that philosophy, as a rationalistic current, is certainly irreconcilablewith Judaism or Mosaism, as he himself writes. Maimonides constituted an ex-ception because he was the only one, according to Munk, who succeeded inharmonising Jewish faith and reason.

Apart from the “Ethics of Maimunis” there are several essays in which Co-hen quotes Munk’s works. An important one is “Ethik und Religionsphilosophiein ihren Zusammenhängen”, published in 1904 and followed by a plea for theestablishment of Chairs for Ethics at the ‘Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft desJudentums’. He affirms in this essay that ethics and the Idea of God are deeplybound up in Judaism and that the cultural confrontation between Judaism andthe Western Tradition already began in late antiquity,and its wake, amongothers, under the influence of Kala’am, in the Middle Ages, continuing until thepresent day. He mentions in his discussion a polemic against Leopold Zunz andother founders of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, who had tried to treat allmatters by way of the historical method, thus also treating philosophy of reli-

15 Salomon Munk, Le Guide des Égarés. Traduit pour la première fois de l’original arabe etaccompagné de notes critiques, littéraires et explicatives par Salomon Munk, 3 volumes (Paris:A. Franck, 1856–1870), 3:51, p. 618.16 See Hermann Cohen, Ethics of Maimonides, translated by Almut Sh. Bruckstein, forward byRobert Gibbs, (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2004), p. 25.




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gion as such. What was lost through this was the insight into practical, cultural,problems. He claims that there is also a necessity for a systematic study of theJewish philosophy of religion whose basis is not history. Although there is nooriginal thinking that does not at the same time bear a strong relation to his-tory, the study of such thought cannot be assigned to philologists, according toCohen. In this context, he speaks of Munk as an important author who contrib-uted to the historical study of Judaism according to the ideals of the Wis-senschaft des Judentums, thanks to his knowledge of Arabic, in which many im-portant sources for the history of Jewish philosophy were written.

Cohen recognises in this very passage that not only Munk’s historical orphilological discoveries were pioneering, but also that his commentary on Mai-monides’s Guide was objectively written and illuminating. He writes:

So war die Notwendigkeit gegeben, den Lehrvortrag in diesem Gebiete Arabisten alleinanzuvertrauen, welche sich von den hebraischen Übersetzungen dieser Werke unabhän-gig zu machen vermögen. […] die Notlage hat sich als eine Quelle von Einsichten erwie-sen, welche den allgemeinen Geschichte der Philosophie nicht minder förderlich gewor-den sind, wie der speziellen jüdischen. Munk hat nachweisen können, dass Avicebron,den man für einen mohamedanischen Araber gehalten hat, kein anderer ist als unserSalomon Ibn Gabirol. Und er hat das Grundwerk der jüdischen Philosophie, den More,aus seinem arabischen Text ins französischen übersetzt und mit einem lichtvollen, sach-lichen Kommentar versehen.17

Hermann Cohen shows in this passage his gratitude to Munk’s pioneering work in en-lightening and rendering available some important Jewish sources: Salomon Ibn Gabir-ol’s Meqor Chajim and Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed, which are fundamental forthe development of Jewish Philosophy because they are classics of Jewish medieval ra-tionalism. Not only Cohen’s ethical reinterpretation of Maimonides but also Cohen’s rein-terpretation of philosophy as a “religion of reason out of the sources of Judaism” in hisopus postumum bear a debt to Salomon Munk’s studies.

IV Cohen and Munk on Pantheismand Universalism.

Around 1904 Cohen has already developed his aversion to pantheism, in thelight of ethics, an aversion he shared with Munk, who in all his works struggledagainst all sorts of pantheistic currents of thought. Their similar aversion to-ward pantheism is in fact determined by different reasons. Cohen rejects

17 Cohen, Hermann, Ethik und Religionsphilosophie in Ihrem Zusammenhänge, in: Schriften zurFörderung der Wissenschaft des Judentums, (Pressburg: Adolf Alkalay & Son, 1904), p. 2.

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pantheism, or better philosophical monism, in the name of ethics, which isbased on the difference between “Sein” and “Sollen” . Munk, on the contrary,rejects pantheism, in the name of traditional religion and recognises, like alsoCohen does, a profound conflict between Jewish monotheism and pantheism,which is, in his words, “nothing else but atheism”18.

Cohen’s evaluation of pantheism, however, seems to have changed duringhis lifetime. While in his early essays and in particular in the essay entitled“Heinrich Heine und das Judentum”, published in 1867, Cohen presents Spino-za’s pantheistic philosophy as a sort of “monotheistic pantheism” and gives it avery positive evaluation as the origin of what he calls a “monotheistic feeling”,in his last work: Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism he strongly con-demns pantheism as a main danger for ethics, and as Julius Guttmann reports inhis essay on Cohen, he claims that the God of ethics cannot be the God of panthe-ism as in Spinoza. According to Cohen’s interpretation of Kantianism, “natureand ethics are not identical, but correlated” and therefore “God, as principle ofthis correlation, must stand outside both spheres.” Cohen’s first evaluation ofthe problem of pantheism dates back to his first essays influenced by Lazarus’and Steinthal’s “Völkerpsychologie”. Here the problem of pantheism emergedonly as one of the representations of the relationship between God and nature,within a reflection on the fundamental concepts of culture that are generatedfrom simple mechanisms of consciousness deriving from the senses. Through therepresentation of the “unity” of nature it was also possible to represent the“unity” of God. In his later essays pantheism became for Cohen the characteristicof monistic philosophy, which is a danger for ethics insofar as it cancels the dif-ference between Sein and Sollen. Furthermore, he found pantheistic tendencesalso in Philo of Alexandria’s philosophical synthesis and in Christianism. Juda-ism is nevertheless not completely extraneous to these tendencies as Cohennotes in speaking of Salomon Ibn Gabirol and his philosophical work. Gabirol,says Cohen, has been forgotten as a Jewish philosopher not only because he doesnot quote from the Bible but also “weil er die universelle Einheit der Materie unddie der Form für das ganze Bereich des Seienden zu lehren wagte,” and also:

weil jener Anlage seiner Methaphysik gemäß die Ethik nicht genügend ausgiebig und auf-saugend den Gegenstand seiner Spekulation bildet. Das ist das charakteristische Merkmaldes wahrhaften Lebes im Monotheismus: dass alle Spekulation wie atemlos auf die Ethikhinzielt. Alle Ketzerei wird vergeben und übersehen sogar, wenn nur die echte Teleologie,der ethische Zusammenschluss von Natur und Geist angestrebt und erreicht wird. Die philo-sophische Spekulation im Judentum dürfte sich auf dieser Linie entwickeln lassen. (p. 231).

18 Munk, Salomon, Cours de langues Hebraique, Chaldaique et Syriaque au Collège de France,Leçon d’ouverture, 1re Fevrier 1865 (Paris: Michel Lèvy Fréres, 1865), p. 19.




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The illuminating works by Myriam Bienenstock19, have shown how this changefrom a positive, enthusiastic evaluation of Spinoza’s pantheism, in Heine’s read-ing, to a virulent polemic against pantheistic, monistic philosophies, does notrepresent a change in Cohen’s attitude toward pantheism or toward Spinoza’sthought, but much more Cohen’s reference to different meanings of the term“pantheism”. Bienenstock, in particular, shows how the uses of the term “panthe-ism” in the German philosophical context at the end of the 19th and at the begin-ning of the 20th centuries were very different from the use of the term which wasfamiliar to the authors of the first half of the 19th century and in the period ofCohen’s early career. Between 1867 and 1915 the historical and political context,but much more then this, the situation of philosophical discourse changed andwith them also the use and the sense of the term “pantheism”. The continuitybetween Cohen’s different positions on Spinoza has to be found in the emphasishe gave to the notion of “universal humanity” and “ethics” in all his essays, firstin Heine’s interpretation of Spinoza’s monotheistic pantheism, and then in thedefense against Spinoza of a Judaism able to construct a “universal humanity”.

For Munk, like Cohen, Jewish monotheism maintains a profound oppositionto pantheism. Munk’s critique of pantheistic tendencies within philosophy is tobe found first of all in his survey of Jewish philosophy. Philosophy is for Munka rationalistic current of thought, born in ancient Greece and mediated in Eur-opean thought thanks to Jewish and Islamic philosophers of the Middle ages.As a consequence, it seems that there is no such thing as Jewish philosophy, aswe already explained above. Munk prefers to speak of philosophy among theJews, stressing that the mediaeval Jewish philosophers had acted as the media-tors of Greek philosophy to the West, through Arabic and Islamic thought. Inaddition, he attributed to them a major influence on Christian theology, anddemonstrated this by attributing the work Fons Vitae, which had a strong influ-ence on Christian thought, to Salomon Ibn Gabirol, a Jewish poet. Jews, accord-ing to Munk, were not attracted to philosophy, because the ultimate conse-quence of such a way of thinking was pantheism, that is, in the sense he gaveto this term: atheism. In pantheism God is not free and does not create theworld according to his will but is reduced to mere fate. This is how Munk ex-plains his positon in his inaugural lecture at the College de France in 1864:

Les Hebreux n’ont pas non plus brillé dans la philosophie, car la philosophie, c’est leculte de la pensée humaine, qui, abandonée a elle-meme, ne peut arriver tout au plusqu’au panthéisme, c’est a dire à un Dieu qui n’est pas libre dans ses mouvements, qui

19 See Myriam Bienenstock, “Hermann Cohen sur le panthéisme. Sens et usages du terme danssa réception de Spinoza”, in: Hermann Cohen. L’idéalisme critique aux prises avec le matéria-lisme, in: Revue de métaphysique et de morale, edited by Myriam Bienenstock, 1(2011): 29–45.

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n’a pas créé le monde par sa volonté, et qui n’est qu’une fatalité, organisatrice dumonde divinisé. Ne vous méprenez pas sur le sens de mes paroles, et n’y voyez pas unesortie contre la philosophie. A Dieu ne plaise! Je ne suis adversaire que du panthéisme,qui, dans ma conviction, est identique avec l’atheisme.20

In this passage, Munk, who, in contrast to many of the other German-Jewishemigrés in France, never abandoned his traditional faith and his orthodoxy,21

does not reject philosophy as the attempt to cultivate human thought, but hedoes negate pantheism, both that of of Spinoza and that of the “pantheistic ten-dencies” he found also in Judaism, in particular in mystic sources or in the phi-losophy of Philo of Alexandria22.

Munk’s position is that of a scholar who, because of his remaining orthodoxin his faith and loyal to the beliefs and traditions of the fathers, considers thepossibility of a science conceived as “value free” which can function as an in-stance of examination of the tradition and of control, but that does not trans-form or affect tradition in a fundamental way. His thought, according to hisassistant Moise Schwab, was certainly most influenced by Maimonides, whomhe saw as the real founder of the method of “rational exegesis”, which Spinozalater taught in his Theological-political Treatise23. Maimonides’ style and method

20 Salomon Munk, Cours de langues Hebraique, Chaldaique et Syriaque au Collège de France,Leçon d’ouverture, cit., p. 19.21 See Perrine Simon-Nahum, La cité investie. La science du judaïsme français et la République(Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1992).22 Much more then this, his critique to pantheism is also the expression of a polemical stanceagainst the Hegelian interpretation of Spinoza’s philosophy that was dominant at his timeamong the Jewish members of the Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden, founded in1819 by his Hegelian teacher, Eduard Gans, and by Munk’s lifelong friends Leopold Zunz andHeinrich Heine. Spinoza’s philosophy, in particular his political philosophy, was read by mostof the members of the Verein in the light of Hegel’s notions of the State. It is, in fact, implicit inHegel’s strong notion of the State that this can overcome the problem of religious differencesand the wars of religion. Spinoza’s philosophy became for many of the members of the Vereinthe ground on which all the differences between Judaism and Christianism could be overcome.Munk did not think that this was true. In contrast to his friends, he was very soon disappointedby Hegel’s philosophy, ceasing to attend Hegel’s lectures in Berlin in order to dedicate himselfexclusively to the study of oriental languages. While attending Hegel’s class on the philosophyof history during the years 1825–26, Munk became conscious of the latter’s complete disregardfor the rôle and importance of Jewish and Islamic traditions in Western philosophy. Hegel,according to Munk, saw Judaism as an antiquated religion destined to be superseded, as op-posed to “true philosophy” which was confined to the “West” – that is, to Greek and Germancivilisation. The tendency in Hegel’s philosophy to cancel every difference was the object of adifferent evaluation by Munk, on the one hand, and his friends in the Verein, on the other,most of whom later converted to Christianity.23 See Moise Schwab, Salomon Munk. Professor aux College de France. Sa vie et ses Ouvres,(Paris: Leroux, 1900), p. 192.




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is what Munk imitates in his work as is evident in the way he uses, in his firstintroductory lesson at the Collège de France, a metaphor borrowed from Maimo-nides in order to describe the immeasurable relationship between the humanspirit, i.e. philosophy, and the absolute. This relationship, according to him, re-calls the hyperbolic curve and its asymptote: human spirit and the absolute aretwo lines that approach one another indefinitely, with the distance betweenthem never equalling zero. He continues as follows:

Eh bien, la philosophie et l’absolu me paraissent offrir quelque resemblance avec cesdeux lignes; la philosophie est sans terme, mais non pas sans but. Le travail grandiosede l’esprit humaine que nous admirons dans l’histoire de la philosophie a pour but de lerapprocher de l’absolu, qu’il n’atteindra jamais complètement.24

The distance that remains between the two lines, or between the human spiritand the absolute, is to be reduced through a “hypothesis”. According to Munk,this hypothesis can be identified with religious faith, and in particular with faithin the Mosaic Law, which neither refutes the absolute spirit, as atheism does,nor impedes those who wish to dedicate themselves to philosophical specula-tion (for example Philo, Avicebron, Maimonides, or the philosophers of Chris-tian scholasticism). In Munk’s view, there is a tension between the belief thatphilosophy and Judaism cannot be harmonised, and the idea that their harmo-nisation is a necessity in order to reach that concept of universal humanity thatis well represented in Hebrew poetry. Maimonides remains, according to Munk,an exception. To try to attain human perfection is, according to Maimonides,the aim of philosophy. Religion and the divine Law have the same aim. ForMunk, however, philosophy and religion remain two separate ways of reachingthis perfection, for Cohen they can coincide if ethics is put into the center, as inMaimonides’ philosophy. Cohen’s ethics as the center of the system of philoso-phy and his interpretation of the Jewish sources as rational sources, does allowhim to overcome Salomon Munk’s 19th century sceptical and positivistic point ofview on the relationship between Judaism and philosophical rationalism.

V Conclusion

Such an interpretation of Maimonides is certainly different from Munk’s readingof Maimonides as an Aristotelian, scholastic philosopher. Cohen’s critique ofMunk and of mere philology has as its presupposition the idea of a new rela-

24 Salomon Munk, Cours de langues, hébraïque, chaldaïque et syriaque, (Paris: Michel LèvyFrères, 1865), p. 19.

206 Chiara Adorisio



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tionship between religion and philosophy, the idea of a religion of reason out ofthe sources of Judaism. While Munk’s idea of Judaism renders it impossible tosynthethise Judaism and philosophy, Cohen explores a new concept of philoso-phy and a new concept of religion, which permits him to reconcile philosophi-cal rationalism and Judaism, rediscovering reason in the metaphorical, religiouslanguage of Jewish Sources.

There is no doubt, however, that Munk’s work, and in particular his transla-tion of the Guide – notwithstanding all the fundamental differences betweenthe two authors – did influence Cohen’s interpretation. Even if Munk remains amere philologist and a historian, according to Cohen, his discoveries on judeo-arabic literature opened the path to the ethical interpretation of Maimonides’philosophy. Therefore, if we speak of the relationship between Cohen and 19th

Jewish scholarship we should not forget Salomon Munk’s influence. To considerthis relationship can shed light both on Munk’s ideas of Judaism and philoso-phy and on Cohen’s philosophical project, contributing also to a re-evaluation,now taking place in the academic world, of the often highly criticised results ofthe Wissenschaft des Judentums.


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