“Reading Spinoza in the Ghetto” and the Metaphysical Overview Effect

• In Event: Sephardic & European Jewry & Their Legacies

Abstract

Oskar Rosenfeld (1884 to 1944) writes from the Łódź Ghetto within Polish school notebooks in 1943, the year before he will be murdered at Auschwitz:
 
I am seeking to broaden the confines of life with my thoughts. I place myself into the cosmos, such a thought process heals me for a short time, lifts my despair. Sun, moon, stars, God, and I are one. Nothing can happen to me. I feel the millennium rushing past me—I am reading Spinoza in the ghetto, what good fortune, and I am discovering a beautiful Zionist matter, see elsewhere...
 
In this paper, I clarify how Rosenfeld seems to find profound relief in the serene metaphysics that Spinoza offers. In contemplating it, he achieves a kind of ‘overview effect’ (a notion I shall clarify) whereby one steps away from human existence in conceiving of it from a great distance. Instead of looking at planet Earth as a mere blue marble from outer space, however—which was of course not yet technologically feasible—Rosenfeld undergoes his own kind of cognitive shift in study, and thereby sees things, as Spinoza might put it, “from the perspective of eternity” (sub specie aeternitatis; see E5p29 etc.).

In the first section of the paper, I introduce Rosenfeld, since his ghetto journals and other writings are not well known. Then, I quickly review key relevant aspects of Spinoza’s metaphysics in a second section of the paper. With these resources, I offer in a third section a close reading of the above passage. I conclude by anticipating concerns that other thinkers in the German-language Jewish tradition would have had about achieving such serenity, arguing that Rosenfeld has the resources at hand for a response to e.g. Horkheimer and Adorno’s worries about Spinoza's philosophy and about what might seem to them an unwarranted kind of reconciliation.

Author

• Jason Maurice Yonover, Yale University