Igor Kaufman

My general objective in this paper is to provide the outlines of the reception of Baruch Spinoza and Moses Mendelssohn in the Russian Enlightenment of the late 18th century as well as in the Russian-Jewish Haskalah. In part of the paper I consider Gavrila Derzhavin’s mention of Mendelssohn in his “Opinion,” the translation of Mendelssohn’s Phaedon in Nikolay Novikov’s Masonic-inspired journal Utrennyi Svet, and the readings of Spinoza’s view on God and then-shared interpretation of his views as an “atheism” in Feofan Propovich, Vasily Trediakovskiy, and Alexander Sumarokov. In the part on the late Russian-Jewish Haskalah of 1860s I examine two intellectual biographies appeared in the period—Saveliy Kovner on Spinoza and Yakov Gurliand on Mendelssohn, which aim to interpret positions of Spinoza and Mendelssohn as exemplary strategies of the Jewish emancipation within the framework of claims and prospects of the modern European culture. I also rediscover and reinterpret Spinoza’s approach to religion as the late Russian Haskalah’s authors strongly object to label Spinoza’s philosophy of religion as “atheistic” and consider it as close to the “pure, or true Judaism.”

The review demonstrates that there are four main historiographical approaches to explanation of the role of Mendelssohn’s philosophy in the emergence of the Haskalah project: (1) traditional approach (created by the Jewish historiography in the second half of the 19th century; it stressed secular and culture-centered character of Haskalah, making it closer to German intellectual tradition); (2) social historiography (it treated Haskalah as a consequence of and reaction to the processes of global social and political modernization); (3) the approach practiced by researchers of early Jewish proponents of Enlightenment’s (determination of the intellectual foundations of Haskalah in the early Maskilim projects); (4) the researches of Mendelssohn's Jewish texts, the concept of “Political Theology”, and the interpretation of Mendelssohn’s ideas in the works of Leo Strauss (new interpretation of the role of Mendelssohn in the creation of Haskalah).