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PARTISAN REVIEW
disregarding canon and ritual, rode beyond the boundaries. When I
was thirteen or perhaps fourteen I began to write a drama on Akher
and Rabbi Meir and tried to find out more about Akher's character.
What made him transcend Judaism? Was he a Gnostic? Was he the
adherent of some other school of Greek or Roman philosophy? I
could not find the answers, and I did not manage to go beyond the
first act of my drama.
The Jewish heretic who transcends Jewry belongs to a Jewish
tradition. You may, if you like, view Akher as a prototype of those
great revolutionaries of modern thought-you may do so, if you
necessarily wish to place them within any Jewish tradition. They
all
went beyond the boundaries of Jewry. They all-Spinoza, Heine,
Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, and Freud- found Jewry too nar–
row, too archaic, and too conStricting. They all looked for ideals and
fulfillment beyond it, and they represent the sum and substance of
much that is greatest in modern thought, the sum and substance of
the most profound upheavals that have taken place in philosophy,
sociology, economics, and politics in the last three centuries.
Have they anything in common with one another? Have they
perhaps impressed mankind's thought so greatly because of their spe–
cial "Jewish genius"? I do not believe in the exclusive genius of any
race. Yet I think that in some ways they were very Jewish indeed.
They had in themselves something of the quintessence of Jewish life
and of the Jewish intellect. They were
a priori
exceptional in that
as Jews they dwelt on the borderlines of various civilizations, religions,
and national cultures. They were born and brought up on the border–
lines of various epochs. Their minds matured where the most
di–
verse cultural influences crossed and fertilized each other. They lived
on the margins or in the nooks and crannies of their respective na–
tions. They were each in society and yet not in it, of it and yet not
of it. It was this that enabled them to rise in thought above their
societies, above their nations, above their times and generations, and
to strike out mentally into wide new horizons and far into the
future.
It was, I think, an English Protestant biographer of Spinoza who
said that only a Jew could carry out that upheaval in the philosophy
of his age that Spinoza carried out-a Jew who was not bound by
the dogmas of the Christian Churches, Catholic and Protestant, nor
