Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

Salomon Maimon's Lebensgeschichte (1792) presents a strange and troubled man, a solitary wanderer between the darkness of Polish-Jewish superstition and the light of German-Jewish reason. When he arrived in Berlin in 1777, the 25 year-old Maimon had left behind his life in the shtetl with its great material and intellectual poverty and premature responsiblities. A rabbi and husband at age eleven, he had experienced the near total lack of interest in a larger world, of teachers and books that taught anything, the unquestioning authority of texts that were impenetrable to reason, the absence of thoughtful social—not to mention political—organization and conduct. In Berlin, he was to develop into an intellectual with remarkably broad interests, insights and erudition. But his early struggle to gain access to such learning had impressed on him a sense of authenticity, a "true" self that, given his difficult temperament and the social and political conditions of German- Jewish Enlightenment culture, inexorably separated him from what he most desired: an intellectual community that would accept him as he was. Maimon the intellectual had attracted the interest and support of a number of distinguished Berlin Enlightenment figures, Moses Mendelssohn, Ephraim Veitel, Samuel Levy, David Friedlaender among them. Marcus Herz had sent Maimon's Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie (1790) to Kant, who thought it one of the best critiques of his work. Yet by the time his Lebensgeschichte was published, Maimon had managed to alienate all of them because of his lack of "civility." He could not adapt to their grossbürgerlich sociability and they, the posterchildren of the Enlightenment ideology of tolerance, were too insecure in their minority status to tolerate Maimon's chaotic person and subversive, "heretical" ideas. This conflict points to larger issues of tolerance which are discussed in the context of a general German-Jewish tension around 1800 between assimilation to German society and culture and an enduring Jewish identity.