The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon – The Complete Translation - Hardcover

Maimon, Solomon; Melamed, Yitzhak Y.; Socher, Abraham; Reitter, Paul; Freudenthal, Gideon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691163855 ISBN 13: 9780691163857

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2019

Synopsis

The first complete and annotated English translation of Maimon’s influential and delightfully entertaining memoir

Solomon Maimon's autobiography has delighted readers for more than two hundred years, from Goethe, Schiller, and George Eliot to Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt. The American poet and critic Adam Kirsch has named it one of the most crucial Jewish books of modern times. Here is the first complete and annotated English edition of this enduring and lively work.

Born into a down-on-its-luck provincial Jewish family in 1753, Maimon quickly distinguished himself as a prodigy in learning. Even as a young child, he chafed at the constraints of his Talmudic education and rabbinical training. He recounts how he sought stimulation in the Hasidic community and among students of the Kabbalah―and offers rare and often wickedly funny accounts of both. After a series of picaresque misadventures, Maimon reached Berlin, where he became part of the city's famed Jewish Enlightenment and achieved the philosophical education he so desperately wanted, winning acclaim for being the "sharpest" of Kant's critics, as Kant himself described him.

This new edition restores text cut from the abridged 1888 translation by J. Clark Murray, which has long been the only available English edition. Paul Reitter's translation is brilliantly sensitive to the subtleties of Maimon's prose while providing a fluid rendering that contemporary readers will enjoy, and is accompanied by an introduction and notes by Yitzhak Melamed and Abraham Socher that give invaluable insights into Maimon and his extraordinary life. The book also features an afterword by Gideon Freudenthal that provides an authoritative overview of Maimon's contribution to modern philosophy.

About this title

About the Author

Yitzhak Y. Melamed is the Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. Abraham Socher is associate professor of Jewish studies and religion at Oberlin College. Paul Reitter is professor of Germanic languages and literatures at Ohio State University. Gideon Freudenthal is professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University's Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas.

From the Back Cover

"This new translation of Maimon's pathbreaking autobiography is timely, and the editors and translator are exactly the right team to pull it off. It is a kind of Jewish picaresque, with Maimon playing the role of the rude barbarian who can't help but import his Talmudic sensibility into the philosophical debates of late eighteenth-century Germany."--David Biale, coauthor of Hasidism: A New History

"Reitter's translation captures the drive, energy, humor, and occasional irreverence of the original German, while annotations by Melamed and Socher supply the information readers need to read Maimon's autobiography with pleasure."--Jonathan M. Hess, author of Deborah and Her Sisters: How One Nineteenth-Century Melodrama and a Host of Celebrated Actresses Put Judaism on the World Stage

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon

The Complete Translation

By Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Abraham P. Socher, Paul Reitter

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2018 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-16385-7

Contents

Acknowledgments, ix, 
Translator's Note, xi, 
Maimon's Autobiography: A Guide for the Perplexed, xiii, 
Original Editor's Preface, by Karl Philipp Moritz, xxxvii, 
Introduction, 1, 
Chapter 1: My Grandfather's Household, 4, 
Chapter 2: Earliest Childhood Memories, 11, 
Chapter 3: Private Education and Independent Study, 13, 
Chapter 4: Jewish Schools. The Joy of Being Delivered from Them Results in a Stiff Foot, 19, 
Chapter 5: My Family Is Driven into Poverty, and an Old Servant's Great Loyalty Costs Him a Christian Burial, 22, 
Chapter 6: New Residence, New Misery. The Talmudist, 24, 
Chapter 7: Happiness Turns Out to Be Short-Lived, 28, 
Chapter 8: The Student Knows More Than the Teacher. A Theft à la Rousseau Is Discovered. The Pious Man Wears What the Godless Man Procures, 31, 
Chapter 9: Love Affairs. Marriage Proposals. The Song of Solomon Can Be Used as a Matchmaking Device. Smallpox, 34, 
Chapter 10: People Fight over Me. I Suddenly Go from Having No Wives to Having Two. In the End, I Wind Up Being Kidnapped, 37, 
Chapter 11: Marrying as an Eleven Year Old Makes Me into My Wife's Slave and Results in Beatings at the Hands of My Mother-in-Law. A Spirit of Flesh and Blood, 41, 
Chapter 12: Marital Secrets. Prince R., or the Things One Isn't Allowed to Do in Poland, 44, 
Chapter 13: Striving for Intellectual Growth amidst the Eternal Struggle against All Kinds of Misery, 49, 
Chapter 14: I Study the Kabbalah, and Finally Become a Doctor, 52, 
Chapter 15: Brief Account of the Jewish Religion, from Its Origins to the Present, 62, 
Chapter 16: Jewish Piety and Exercises in Penance, 75, 
Chapter 17: Friendship and Rapture, 78, 
Chapter 18: Life as a Tutor, 82, 
Chapter 19: Another Secret Society and Therefore a Long Chapter, 86, 
Chapter 20: Continuation of the Story, as well as Some Thoughts on Religious Mysteries, 101, 
Chapter 21: Trips to Königsberg, Stettin, and Berlin, to Further My Understanding of Humanity, 108, 
Chapter 22: My Misery Reaches Its Nadir. Rescue, 113, 

CHAPTER 1

My Grandfather's Household

My grandfather Heimann Joseph leased several villages near the city of Mirz, in Prince Radziwil's territory. He chose one of those villages as his base: Sukowiborg, as it was called, on the Niemen River. In addition to a few farmhouses, Sukowiborg had a mill and also a small harbor and cargo depot for ships sailing from Königsberg to Prussia. All this, along with two bridges — one behind the village and a drawbridge on the other side of the Niemen — was included in the lease, which, back then, was worth about a thousand guilders. This was my grandfather's chasaka. Because of the depot and the heavy traffic, the lease should have been very profitable, and with enough energy and economic know-how, my grandfather would have been able (si mens non laeva fuisset) not only to feed his family but also to amass considerable wealth. However, the poor condition of the estate and the unfavorable political circumstances, as well as my grandfather's total lack of knowledge about how to use the land effectively, proved to be fatal liabilities.

My grandfather installed his brothers as subleaseholders in the villages under his lease. Not only did his brothers arrange to live with him (under the pretext of wanting to be on hand to assist him in his various undertakings), but at the end of the year, they also tried to avoid paying him any rent.

The buildings included in my grandfather's lease had become run down from old age, and they needed to be fixed. The harbors and bridges, too, had fallen into disrepair. According to the lease agreement, the estate owner was responsible for making all necessary improvements and keeping everything in working order. But the owner, like all Polish magnates, spent his time in Warsaw and was unable to oversee renovations on his estate. His estate administrators, for their part, were far more concerned with bettering their own condition than with that of the estates. Indeed, they subjected the tenants to all manner of coercion, ignored orders to carry out renovations, and spent the money intended for improvements on themselves. My grandfather tried almost daily to reason with the administrators, impressing upon them that he couldn't possibly pay his rent if they didn't uphold their end of the contract. But it did no good. All sorts of promises were made, not one of them ever fulfilled. The result was not only the deterioration of the property, but many related misfortunes as well.

Because, as I mentioned, quite a bit of traffic passed through the village, and the bridges were in bad shape, it often happened that just as a Polish lord and his wealthy entourage were crossing a bridge, it collapsed, plunging both steed and rider into the bog. In such cases, the poor leaseholder was immediately summoned, made to lie down next to the bridge, and beaten until the lord felt sufficiently avenged.

My grandfather therefore did everything he could to prevent such an evil turn from happening in the future. He ordered one of his house servants to constantly stand watch at the bridge, so that if a lord had an accident of the kind just described, the sentry could dash off and bring word of the incident to my grandfather's house, leaving my grandfather and his whole family enough time to escape into the nearby woods. They would all run out of the house, utterly terrified, and often spend the night under the open sky, until one by one they dared to go home.

This arrangement persisted through several generations. My father used to tell a story about a similar incident that took place when he was about eight. The whole family had fled to its usual place of refuge, but my father remained in the house by himself: He had been playing behind the oven, unaware of what was going on. The irate lord, arriving with his entourage, found no one on whom he could take out his wrath, so he had every corner of the premises searched and discovered my father behind the oven. The lord invited him to have a drink of brandy. When my father declined the offer, the lord bellowed at him: "If you don't want any brandy, you'll drink water!" He immediately ordered a bucket of water to be brought, and, using a whip, forced my father to drink until the bucket was completely empty. This treatment naturally resulted in a bout of quartan fever that lasted almost a whole year and ruined my father's health.

I had a similar experience when I was three years old. Everyone in my family ran out of the house, including the servant carrying me in her arms. With the servants of the approaching lord chasing after her, our servant began to run even faster, and in her great haste she dropped me. I lay in some bushes whimpering until I had the good fortune to be picked up by a passerby — a peasant — who took me home with him. Only after things had quieted down again, and my family had returned home, did the servant remember that she had lost me while fleeing. She started to wail lamentations and wring her hands. They searched for me everywhere, but they couldn't find me, until finally the peasant from the village brought me back to my parents.

Terror and dismay were not all that one experienced during these escapes; there was also the plundering of one's house. The pillagers drank as much beer, brandy, and mead as they pleased, sometimes going so far as to empty whole barrels, make off with grain and chickens, etc.

If my grandfather had simply accepted the injustice and repaired the bridge at his own expense, instead of trying to argue with a more powerful person, he would have avoided all this suffering. But he kept invoking his contract, while the estate administrator only laughed at his misery.

Now a few words about how my grandfather ran his household. His style of living was very simple. The harvest from the fields, along with the yield from the kitchen gardens and the meadows on the land he leased, not only provided his family with ample nourishment, it also sufficed for brewing and distilling spirits. Moreover, my grandfather was able to sell large amounts of hay and grain every year. His beekeeping brought enough honey to brew mead. He also had a lot of cattle.

His family mainly ate an awful-tasting cornbread with bran mixed into it, flour-and-milk gruel, and vegetables grown in the garden. Meat was rare. Their clothes were poor-quality linen and rough cloth. Only the women sometimes made small exceptions, and my father, too, a scholar who craved a different way of life.

The family also had a strong sense of hospitality. Owing to the important trading route running through it, the area had much traffic. Jews with their wagons comprised part of it, and whenever a Jew passed through our village (something that happened quite often), he had to stop at my grandfather's inn, where someone would come outside to greet him with a glass of brandy, making the sign of shalam with one hand, and giving him the glass with the other. After that, the Jew would have to wash his hands and sit down at the table, which was always set.

Offering such hospitality while supporting a large family would not have seriously compromised my grandfather's material situation if only he had run his household better. His failures in this regard were the source of his misfortune.

My grandfather pinched pennies in small things but didn't pay enough attention to matters of greater importance. For example, he thought it was wasteful to use wax or tallow candles at home. Narrow strips of resinous pine had to be inserted into cracks in the wall and lit at one end. The result, not infrequently, was fire damage far exceeding what candles would have cost.

There were no windows in the storage room for the beer, spirits, mead, herring, salt, and other things consumed daily at the inn. Light came in through simple openings in the walls. This easy access tempted the sailors and carriage drivers staying at the inn to climb into the room and get drunk on spirits and mead without paying for any of it. Even worse, these champion inebriates often fled upon hearing the slightest noise, because they were afraid of being caught in the act. Instead of taking a moment to shut off the tap, they would jump out of the holes they had come in through, leaving the drink running. Whole barrels of spirits and mead were emptied out this way.

The barns were secured with wooden beams, not proper locks. As a result, and also because the barns were located quite far from the main living quarters, anyone could come in and make off with whatever he wanted, even a whole wagonload of grain. The sheep stalls were full of holes, and since all this was near the forest, wolves could slip in through the holes and kill as they pleased.

The cows often came back from grazing with their udders empty. In such cases, people would say — expressing a widely accepted superstition — that a magic force had taken the milk from the cows, an evil turn they believed there was no way to prevent.

My grandmother, a good, simple woman, would lie down to sleep on the oven fully dressed, exhausted from her activities around the house. Her pockets were generally full of money, but she never knew just how much she had. The housemaid took advantage of this habit and would empty out her pockets halfway. As long as the housemaid didn't get too greedy, my grandmother tended not to notice that anything was missing.

All these misfortunes could have been avoided by repairing the buildings, windows, shutters, and locks, as well as through proper management of the various sources of revenue that came with the lease, and by closely keeping track of income and expenses. But no one thought of doing any of that. And yet, when my father, a scholar partly raised in the city, wanted especially fine cloth for his rabbinical dress, my grandfather didn't hesitate to give him a long, reproachful lecture on the vanity of the world.

He would intone on those occasions: Our ancestors, they knew nothing of fashionable clothing, and they were certainly pious people. But you, you need a special shirt, leather pants — leather pants with buttons! — and everything else that goes with them. You'll make a beggar out of me. I'll wind up in jail because of you. What a poor, unhappy man I am! What will become of me?

My father, in turn, would invoke the rights and privileges of the scholar class. He would also point out that if the lands and finances were being managed well, it wouldn't matter whether the people in my grandfather's household lived a little better. He would say that my grandfather's misfortunes resulted not from how much his household consumed, but rather from his letting others pillage it through his negligence. None of this swayed my grandfather. He simply couldn't tolerate change, so everything had to remain as it was.

In the village, my grandfather was seen as a wealthy man, which he would have been, had he known how to make use of his opportunities. Everyone envied and hated him for his wealth, even his own family. His estate keepers deserted him, his administrators sabotaged him in every conceivable way, his own domestic workers and also ones he didn't know defrauded and stole from him. He was, in short, the poorest rich man in the world.

In addition to all of that, there were even greater personal calamities, which I cannot pass over in silence. The "pope" (i.e., the Russian priest) in my grandfather's village was an ignorant simpleton who could barely read and write. He was constantly at the inn getting sloshed with his congregants, the peasants, and he always put his drinks on a tab without ever intending to pay it. My grandfather finally grew tired of this, and resolved to stop letting him buy his drinks on credit. The pope was outraged, naturally, and wanted revenge.

He found a means repellent to most people, but which the Catholic Church in Poland had frequent recourse to at the time: accusing my grandfather of murdering a Christian and thereby bringing my grandfather before a hanging court. This happened in the following way. My grandfather had secret dealings with a beaver trapper who was often in the area because of how good the trapping was on the Niemen River (beaver trapping remains an aristocratic privilege, and everything regarding it is supposed to go through the prince's court). One night, the beaver trapper came to my grandfather's house at about midnight, knocked on the door, and asked to speak to him. The trapper presented him with a heavy sack, and said with a strange expression on his face, "I've brought you a good one." My grandfather wanted to light a fire so that he could examine the beaver and negotiate its price. But the peasant told him that such dealings wouldn't be necessary: He should simply take the beaver, and they would come to an agreement later about what it should cost. My grandfather, suspecting nothing, took the sack, put it in a corner, and went back to bed. Having just fallen back asleep, he was woken again by very loud knocking on the door.

It was the scheming priest. He had come with several peasants from the village, who immediately began to search the house. They found the sack; my grandfather trembled at the thought of the consequences, believing that someone had told the court about his secret beaver trading. Now he wouldn't be able to deny it. How horrified he was when the sack was opened, and inside there was no beaver at all, but a human corpse!

The peasants immediately tied my grandfather's hands behind his back, put his feet in blocks, threw him onto a wagon, and took him to the city of Mirz, where they brought him before the criminal judge. He was bound with chains and locked in a dark jail cell.

Under interrogation, my grandfather insisted that he was innocent, told the questioners exactly what had happened, and, of course, demanded that the beaver trapper be questioned as well. But the beaver trapper was already far away, not to be found. They searched everywhere for him, but this took too long for the bloodthirsty judge. He had my grandfather tortured three times in quick succession as the search was still going on. However, my grandfather continued to insist that he was innocent.

Finally, they found the beaver trapper. He was questioned, and because he denied the whole affair he, too, was subjected to a torture test, during which he confessed everything. He admitted that he had discovered the dead body in the water and had brought it to the vicar to be buried. But the vicar had said to him: "There's plenty of time for that. You know how stubborn the Jews are in their beliefs, and that they are damned for all eternity. They crucified our Lord Jesus Christ. And they are still after Christian blood, which they want for their Easter festival. They need the blood for their Easter cakes, part of their celebration of the triumph of crucifixion. So if you can sneak this corpse into the house of the evil Jewish leaseholder, you will have done something very important. You will have to disappear afterward, but you can practice your trade anywhere."

After giving this confession, the fellow was whipped. My grandfather was set free. The pope, though, remained the pope.

As a permanent memorial to my grandfather's escape from death, my father wrote a sort of epic poem in Hebrew, which includes songs, narrates the whole event, and praises the goodness of God. It was established as a rule that the family would acknowledge the day of my grandfather's rescue. The poem would be read aloud, like the Book of Esther during the Festival of Haman.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691163855
• ISBN 13: 9780691163857
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336