Abstract

When the translator and editor of the German edition of Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary, Johann Christoph Gottsched, sug gested to Johann Georg Wachter that he supply an explanation of his views on Spinoza for inclusion in the eponymous article, he gladly obliged. Wachter, a failed university professor in Duisburg who had since managed to find employment in the council library in Gottsched’s adopted home town of Leipzig, had good reasons for doing this. Not only had his Elucidarius cabalisticus been fiercely attacked in the Respublica litteraria as being the work of a new cabbalist evidently out to defend atheism and other purported evils of Spinoza’s philosophy, but also he appeared in that book to have adopted a philosophical position diametrically opposed to the one he had held just a few years earlier. His Der Spinozismus Im Jüdenthumb, which he had published in 1699 after a year-long stay in Amsterdam and which had been directed against a certain Moses Germanus, had after all sought to defend natural religion against Spinoza’s phi losophy by attacking those elements in it which were seen to represent the greatest threat to an understanding of God and the duties of man based solely on rational knowledge, in particular, its fundamental pantheism. In effect, while Wachter had there used the demonstration of the cabbalistic roots and the detrimental ethical consequences of Spinoza’s philosophy to show that Christianity and Judaism are fundamentally irreconcilable, he now used the first part of that demonstration as the basis for presenting the theory contained in the Ethics as a tenable philosophical theology.