Salomon maimon autobiography of benjamin
The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2018 Princeton University PressAll 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: Contin
The following is an excerpt from spring 2018 fellow Paul Reitter’s translation ofThe Autobiography of Solomon Maimon, to be published by Princeton University Press in September 2018.
Introduction by Yitzhak Y. Melamed and Abraham P. Socher
Introduction
Midway through George Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), the title character, a Jewish orphan raised as an English aristocrat, wanders into a secondhand bookshop in East London and finds “something that he wanted—namely that wonderful piece of autobiography, the life of the Polish Jew Solomon Maimon.” Eliot, who had translated those more famous Jewish heretics, Benedict Spinoza (who Maimon had read closely) and Heinrich Heine (who had read Maimon closely), left an annotated copy of Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte in her library.
Contemporary readers of Maimon’s autobiography included Goethe and Schiller, but it made the greatest impression on nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewish readers who had suffered a similar crisis of faith and were struggling to modernize Jewish culture or find their feet outside of it. Mordechai Aaron Guenzberg (1795-1846) and Moshe Leib Lillienblum (1843-1910) both saw Maimon as their great predecessor, the archetype of the modern Jewish heretic who had described the pathologies of traditional Jewish society and made a successful—or almost successful—break with it. Both of them patterned their own influential Hebrew autobiographies after Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, as did the Yiddish philologist Alexander Harkavi (1863-1939), a generation later.
When the soon-to-be radical Nietzschean Zionist Micha Yosef Berdichevsky (1865-1921) left the great Yeshivah of Volozhin, in the 1880s, one of the first books he turned to was Maimon’s autobiography. Prominent German-Jewish readers included the novelist Berthold Auerbach, who based a character upon him, the pioneering historian of Hasidism Aharon Marcus (Verus), and the twentieth-century thinkers Hannah Arendt, Walter "The collaborative product of four scholars, this impressive new edition makes available Maimon’s autobiography as he intended it be read."—David Sorkin, Intellectual History Review "This superb new edition—edited by Yitzhak Y. Melamed and Abraham Socher, and skilfully translated by Paul Reitter—is the fullest yet available in English: Melamed and Socher have restored text cut in J. Clark Murray’s abridged translation of 1888."—Audrey Borowski, Times Literary Supplement “Solomon Maimon was, quite simply, one of the most important philosophers of the Jewish Enlightenment. Both brilliant and eccentric, he set out in 1792 to write the first autobiography ever written in German by a Jew. It is a work of great literary and philosophical significance that is now finally available in a splendid and unabridged English translation.”—Liliane Weissberg, University of Pennsylvania “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 The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon: The Complete Translation