Solomon Maimon - The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon: The Complete Translation

T HE
A UTOBIOGRAPHY
OF

SOLOMON

MAIMON

THE

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

OF

SOLOMON

MAIMON

THE COMPLETE TRANSLATION

EDITED BY

YITZHAK Y. MELAMED &
ABRAHAM P. SOCHER

TRANSLATED BY
PAUL REITTER

WITH AN AFTERWORD BY
GIDEON FREUDENTHAL

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2018 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press

41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018956052

ISBN 978-0-691-16385-7

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Fred Appel and Thalia Leaf

Production Editorial: Karen Carter

Text Design: Lorraine Betz Doneker

Jacket/Cover Design: Lorraine Betz Doneker

Jacket/Cover Credit: Portrait of Solomon Maimon.

Engraving by Wilhelm Arndt.

Production: Jacquie Poirier

This book has been composed in Sabon and Trajan for display

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

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C ONTENTS

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

W E ARE GRATEFUL to the many friends of ours and of Solomon Maimons who have insisted that a complete annotated translation of his great autobiography should exist and have helped us to bring it into existence. Among them, we should particularly like to acknowledge the members of a wonderful seminar on a draft of this text at the Skeptical Atelier of the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies at the University of Hamburg: Leora Batnitzky, Daniel Dragicevic, Florian Ehrensperger, Warren Zev Harvey, Moshe Idel, who also delivered a remarkable public address on Maimons relationship to Kabbala, Patrick Koch, Ada Rapaport-Albert, Oded Schechter, Shaul Stampfer, Josef Stern, Mate Veres, Dirk Westerkamp, and Professor Stephan Schmid, co-director of the Institute. We are also grateful to Giusepe Veltri for graciously hosting us at the remarkable institution he has done so much to build. Damion Searls, a remarkably skilled translator, read the manuscript and offered many incisive suggestions for improvement. This galaxy of linguistic, philosophical, and historical talent notwithstanding, this book would not exist without the patient support of our editor Fred Appel and the rest of the editorial team at Princeton University Press, especially Karen Carter and Thalia Leaf. The same can be said of our editorial assistant Jason Yonover, who is already a significant scholar of German Idealism in his own right. We are also very grateful to Brittany Micka-Foos, who gave us much good counsel in copyediting the manuscript and was a pleasure to work with. We are delighted to acknowledge the generous support of the Stulman Jewish Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University.

A number of scholars generously responded to our queries and requests for advice, and we want to thank them, too: Frederick Beiser, Moishi Chechik, Jonathan Garb, Matt Goldish, Gershon Hundert, Elhanan Reiner, Moshe Rosman, Abraham Abish Shor, Scott Spector, and Liliane Weissberg. Finally, we are especially grateful to Gideon Freudenthal for contributing a concise, brilliant afterword on Maimons philosophical oeuvre.

Our debts to our spouses, who have had to live with this project for so long, is incalculable. The autobiography of a wayward husband may not be an entirely appropriate gift, nonetheless we dedicate this book to Maria, Neta, and Shoshana.

Paul Reitter
Yitzhak Y. Melamed
Abraham Socher

T RANSLATOR S N OTE

F RIEDRICH S CHLEIERMACHER , a great theorist of translation, once claimed that the experience of reading a translation should be like that of reading in a language in which you are fluent, but of which you are not a native speaker. In other words, a translation should seem a little foreign. How, then, to translate a text that already seems a little foreign in the original language? Should you accentuate its foreignness so that readers of the translation, who might expect some foreignness from a translation, will understand that in this case, there is a foreignness even in the original? But when the foreignness we are talking about isnt, say, some kind of dialect, marked as such by context, are readers likely to keep the originals foreignness in mind from line to line? Might not the translation wind up coming across as ponderous, rather than as purposively non-colloquial? Furthermore, non-dialect foreignness is a broad category. How to produce echoes of the particular foreignness in question?

I thought a lot about these issues as I rendered Maimons autobiography into English. For while Maimons German prose is grammatical, and often elevated in its selection of words and expressions, it isnt quite colloquial. Its proficiency is due in part to the editorial efforts of Maimons friend Karl Phillip Moritz: As has often been noted, the autobiographical fragments that Maimon published in the Magazine of Empirical Psychology (Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde) are much roughermuch more clearly marked by the syntax of his native language: a grammatically deficient mix of Hebrew, Yiddish-German, Polish, and Russian, as he describes it in his autobiography (109). But in the fragments Maimon was going for a different effectthat of an authentic case study as opposed to the perspective of the autobiography, which is that of a man who has overcome the intellectual and material privation of his youth to develop into an accomplished, if erratic, person of letters. Its unclear how much he relied on Moritz in his attempt to create a style consistent with the latter aim.

In truth, Maimon was a linguistic shape-shifter whose level of German proficiency changed according to the occasion and who was very aware of the sort of scrutiny to which his German was subjected, especially from German Jews. Indeed, one of the most famous scenes in the Autobiography involves Maimon recounting how, upon reaching Berlin for the first time, his broken speech, unpolished manners, and wild gesticulations resulted in his cutting a bizarre figure, like a starling that has learned to say a few words. What breathes out of Maimons evocation of the scene isnt so much resentment as an air of superiority and passive-aggressive delight. Having slyly alluded to Aristotles definition of man (i.e., the talking animal), Maimon tells of how he, the underdog, bested Markus Herz, his cultivated and thoroughly stunned Jewish partner in debate. For Maimon himself, though, the outcome should not have been surprising. While his outsider status caused him no small measure of hardship, and while the