Amsterdam

by Russell Shorto

  While trying to conduct business in and around Amsterdam’s harbor and between the columns of the stock exchange building, Spinoza picked up currents of what was happening in the city. He had a world-class mind and was used to soaking up information in many languages (Portuguese at home, Spanish at school, Hebrew for reading the Torah, and Dutch on the streets), and in his late teens he began to reach beyond the boundaries of the Jewish community in seeking to understand the world.

  There was a lot to understand. In 1648, momentous news reached Amsterdam. Marathon negotiations, conducted jointly in the cities of Münster and Osnabrück, had resulted in twin peace treaties. The warfare that had engulfed most of Europe for decades was over. The Thirty Years’ War, which had started out as a Catholic-Protestant conflict but evolved in many directions, and the Eighty Years’ War, between the Spanish empire and the Dutch Republic, were at an end. For the first time in living memory, Europe was at peace. Some said it was the final peace: that the treaties were so momentous they would make war itself a thing of the past. For the Dutch, it meant the conclusion of the struggle that had begun in their grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ time, when Philip II, the ardently Catholic Spanish king, brought his armies and the Inquisition raining down on the Dutch provinces. Although the Dutch nation was long since a de facto truth, now it was proclaimed by official decree.

  Amsterdam had played an instrumental role in the treaties, with Adriaen Pauw, the son of one of the original founders of the VOC, acting as a chief negotiator. The city reacted to the news by throwing parties. The mayors held a celebration on Dam Square featuring tableaux vivants: live human beings posing in scenes from the long struggle. The civic guards hosted sprawling banquets that everyone got staggeringly drunk at and that naturally had to be captured in group portraits. The city struck a commemorative coin declaiming in Latin that “one peace is worth more than countless victories.” The wars to end all wars were over.

  Less than two years later, the city was plunged headlong into a new crisis. The end of the war with Spain brought to the fore tensions between two Dutch parties that were vying for control. One thought the government should be centralized around the figure of Willem II, Prince of Orange, whose grandfather of the same name and title had led the Dutch charge against Spain. The other party supported a republican form of government in which power was held by the individual provinces. With the Spanish conflict at an end the republicans immediately called for troops to return to their homes. Holland—the biggest and most powerful of the provinces—led the way, largely out of self-interest: because it had the most money, it had to contribute the most to maintain an army. Amsterdam, the province’s richest city, became the center of republicanism.

  Willem, who was twenty-two years old and pumped up with monarchic ideas, took the call to disband the army as a direct attack on his power, since he was in effect the general of the Dutch troops. He had tried to block the peace treaty, which he believed (rightly) would embolden republican forces among the Dutch. He had also maneuvered with the English to try to preserve their monarchy (Charles I, who was Willem’s father-in-law, had recently been deposed by Oliver Cromwell and was about to be beheaded), and with the French. Willem responded to the obstinance of the Hollanders with a rush of brute force that took the whole country by surprise: he had soldiers arrest six members of the provincial assembly and sent his cousin at the head of an army of ten thousand troops to invade Amsterdam. The House of Orange, which had once represented Dutch freedom and resistance to monarchy, now for many embodied something like the opposite.

  In a flash, a civil war seemed imminent. At dawn, Amsterdammers swarmed onto the city fortifications to gaze at the sight of phalanxes of soldiers marching toward them. It had happened so suddenly that many people didn’t even know who was threatening them. Rumors flew about marauding intentions. “The women mixed their laments with screeches,” ran a news account. “The weakest of them feared for their bodies and their property and bewailed their misfortune that in the middle of the peace and in a city that was in the middle of the country they were unprotected from the will of soldiers.”

  As it happened, the prince’s army had arrived late, due to bad weather, giving the city’s leaders time to muster every able man. Instead of an assault came negotiations. The attack fizzled, and shortly thereafter Willem died from what was apparently smallpox.

  Spinoza was eighteen; he may well have stood on the fortifications with his fellow townspeople to watch the business of choosing a form of government take this dramatic turn. Around this time he was doing a lot of reading and thinking about such matters: about politics, society, human nature. Was there such a thing as a right form of government? What was a government’s responsibility to its people? What constituted moral behavior?

  A seeming breakthrough in answering such questions had been achieved by René Descartes, the Frenchman who had spent most of his career in the Dutch Republic. Despite the revolutionary character of his philosophy, Descartes cowered in the face of authority and had tried to sidestep awkward issues such as the fact that his work seemed to undercut both biblical and monarchic authority. But the political implications of his philosophy were impossible to ignore for long. Spinoza never met Descartes, who had recently left the Dutch Republic for Sweden, where he was to die an untimely death, but Descartes had left behind a swirling controversy that had engulfed the country’s intellectual circles. Descartes had absorbed all the new thinking and scientific study going on in Europe—from Harvey’s discovery of the circulatory system to Galileo’s astronomical observations—and provided what he and his followers heralded as a new framework for understanding these findings: a theory of knowledge based not on the received wisdom of the Bible and ancient authorities but on the human mind and its “good sense,” as he put it. It was a system, in other words, based on reason. Not only that, but Descartes offered a “method for rightly conducting the reason.” He proposed that Europeans scrap their whole educational system and start over, letting reason be the sole tool for determining truth in every human endeavor. Descartes’s method opened the door to empirical scientific thinking, and it had implications for virtually every other field. If the human mind was the true basis for understanding, did it not follow that the central point of all endeavors should be the individual human being? Was not each person, no matter his or her status, of equal value and importance to every other? And did that not compel one to favor a form of government based not on theological power or hereditary ascendancy but on the say of every citizen?

  Descartes’s ideas—the first stirrings of what would be called the Enlightenment—would soon sweep across Europe. But the first place they made an impact was in the Dutch provinces, where the Frenchman had lived and published. Preachers and orthodox university professors accused him of being a radical, a revolutionary, and, most damning of all, an atheist. Meanwhile, the very things that incited such fury also attracted many intellectuals to his work.

  In order to appreciate what the fuss was about, Spinoza needed to be able to read Latin. He signed up as a student in a Latin school on the Singel, the innermost of the city’s concentric canals. The school’s head, Franciscus van den Enden, turned out to be a Cartesian radical who promoted something called “democracy” and had as his dream to found a colony in North America that would be based on the principles that flowed from what Descartes had started.

  In Van den Enden’s utopia, every inhabitant would be equal to all others in every respect.

  From Van den Enden Spinoza got more than language training. The older man was a true mentor in radical ideas, and Spinoza became a disciple. Van den Enden had emigrated from Antwerp, perhaps seeing Amsterdam as a freer place in which to peddle his beliefs. His school became a meeting place for young men—some of them, like Spinoza, the sons of merchants—who had been raised in a city that was the epicenter of trade and ideas. Many in this younger generation were not content simply to build on the fortunes their fathers had made. They had a bi
t of comfort in their lives; they were used to freedom, and they wanted to use it to push for answers. Van den Enden would later move on to Paris, where he would found a similar salon, mastermind a plot to overthrow Louis XIV, and be hanged for his efforts. His importance to history, however, would be via one of his Amsterdam students. His fame comes from the fact that he is the man who introduced Spinoza to the new world of philosophy that Descartes had launched.

  Spinoza’s time line is sketchy. We know he entered Van den Enden’s academy in the mid-1650s. And we also know that around the same time he became interested in the ideas of one of the many sects that had sprung up in this newly dawning age of discontent. Put together the names of the more obscure sects and it sounds like a lineup at a folk festival: the Tremblers, the Enthusiasts, the Seekers, the Levellers. More well known today are the Quakers. What united all of these groups was a quest for truth and justice outside the established religious institutions and the existing economic system. A Dutch offshoot of the Mennonites was the Collegiants, and it was to this group in particular that Spinoza was drawn. The Collegiants were pacificists who believed in retreating from society; they formed communes and shared property. Many of their ideas would make their way into Spinoza’s works.

  Spinoza may have gotten his introduction to the Collegiants through a man named Jan Rieuwertszoon, who ran a bookstore and publishing company out of his house in one of the narrow streets near the harbor. Rieuwertszoon was entranced by the new thinking that was pulsing through Europe, and he managed to make his little house into an important center for it. He published the works of Descartes in Dutch and sold them in his shop. He held salons where like-minded seekers and thinkers could gather and exchange ideas. In time he would publish all of Spinoza’s works.

  Somewhere in this period Spinoza made a conscious turn: he chose philosophy as his life’s work. He formally relinquished his role in the family business and decided to take up Descartes’s challenge to orient one’s life around reason. Many young people make dramatic pronouncements about their life’s path; few follow through. Spinoza did indeed spend the rest of his life working out a philosophy that tied together everything from God to politics to the nature of matter and thought, and he based it on a cold, scientific calculus. The irony is that while his philosophy appears so chilly on the page—broken down as it is into postulates, propositions, proofs, and corollaries—its ultimate concern is the warmest of things: the individual human being and his or her possibilities.

  As he consorted at Van den Enden’s academy amid the swirl of national politics, the young Amsterdam Jew found he had reasoned opinions about the circumstances that were in front of him. High-handed monarchs, he saw, were an abhorrence and an anachronism. He was proud of his city, both in its readiness to confront Willem of Orange and in its overall character, which he reduced to a single concept: its promotion of individual freedom. It was a city, he declared proudly and loudly, in which “religion and sect is considered of no importance.”

  The leaders of Spinoza’s religion and sect, though, considered these things to be of great importance. There is certainty about one date in his life. On July 27, 1656, in the synagogue just steps from his family home, before a packed gathering of friends and neighbors, people among whom he had grown up, the rabbis of the Jewish community in Amsterdam took the drastic step of excommunicating him. Referring to the “evil opinions and acts” of the twenty-three-year-old, the rabbi who read aloud the proclamation declared that

  by decree of the angels and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, with the consent of God, Blessed be He, and with the consent of the entire holy congregation, and in front of these holy scrolls with their 613 precepts which are written therein; cursing him with the excommunication with which Joshua banned Jericho and with the curse which Elisha cursed the boys and with all the castigations that are written in the Book of the Law. Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in.

  Since we know none of the exact circumstances leading up to this event, it has long been a pastime among Spinoza scholars to try to figure out the “real” reason for his excommunication (or herem, the Hebrew term for banishment from the Jewish community). Maybe the point most worth noting is that there were so many reasons to choose from. In the small, tightly controlled world of Amsterdam Jewry, which had seen itself all but snuffed out in Sepharad and in which everyone was thus vividly aware of how precarious their existence was, obedience was expected, and stepping far over the line of accepted speech and behavior was unheard of. Spinoza trampled on the line, jumped across it, and mocked it.

  In the main, Spinoza scholars have seen the excommunication as motivated by either theology or economics. Over the course of his life Spinoza provided plenty of material to support the theological argument. He skewered Jewish laws and practices as viciously as a stand-up comic might today—starting with the cherished notion that the Jews were “the chosen people.” “In regard to intellect and true virtue,” he wrote dismissively, “every nation is on a par with the rest, and God has not in these respects chosen one people rather than another.” The idea that angels appeared to holy people in the Bible was, he said, “mere nonsense,” and the elaborate elucidation of such superstitious beliefs in Jewish writing was “the acme of absurdity.” Regarding Kabbalists—followers of Jewish mysticism, who included one of the rabbis who excommunicated him—Spinoza said that their “insanity provokes my unceasing astonishment.” Organized religion overall received his most withering criticism. The paraphernalia of religion—holy books, incense, rules, circumcision, holy days, prescribed prayers—were just man-made trappings that existed only so that institutions could exercise control.

  The brand of faith that Spinoza espoused would also have provided rich cause for excommunication. He believed it was wrong to think of God as the creator and the world as His creation. That sort of conception, Spinoza said, cheapened “God” by forcing the term into anthropomorphic garb. Rather, he held, God is the totality of all that is. Spinoza’s use of the term “God or nature” has led some people to think he associated God with the life force—flowers and bees and such—but Spinoza’s God is, so to speak, bigger than that. Spinoza’s God is the infinity of substance, and substance included all matter and all thought.

  Spinoza held that God exists—for Spinoza, God logically must exist—but Spinoza’s God doesn’t think or have pity or watch or feel compassion or answer prayers. Spinoza characterized the essence of spirituality as follows: “Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can either be or be conceived without God.” Spinoza’s God is without borders, beyond religion. Albert Einstein, on being asked by a rabbi if he believed in God, answered, “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.” That a lot of people might agree with that statement today points to one of the many ways in which Spinoza, at the dawn of the liberal era, set the template. But in the seventeenth century such assertions as Spinoza made about God and religious practice would have meant excommunication from any congregation, Jewish or Christian.

  At the same time, the herem against Spinoza could equally have had an underlying economic basis. While he believed in free trade, and was proud of his city for the economic miracle it had wrought, Spinoza had also witnessed some of the dark side of history’s first experience with capitalism. As power had accumulated in the East India Company and its sister, the West India Company, those great concerns had strangled small businesses. Spinoza’s family business—which fell on hard times—may have been one of the small businesses that were hurt by their practices. The vast trading companies, with their monopolies, routinely manipulated markets to their advantage, forcing ordinary citizens to pay inflated prices for goods. And while society flourished in innumerable ways during the period, th
e ranks of the poor kept growing: proof that capitalism in and of itself was a pitiless machine that needed to be controlled. The republicans whom Spinoza admired called for an end to the great trading companies, which, they said, had become a danger to society and, to boot, violated the principle of free trade.

  The leaders of Amsterdam’s Jewish community were conservative and deeply cautious men. They were aware that their people had only recently arrived in the country and that they lived there at the discretion of the Dutch. Yes, there was a policy of religious toleration, but laws could be changed at a moment’s notice. From their first days in the provinces, the Jewish elders allied themselves with the conservative faction in Dutch politics, which in turn was closely connected to the big trading companies. Prominent Jews were investors in the VOC. The fact that the orthodox Calvinist faction had pushed through a law requiring VOC board members to be loyal subscribers to the Calvinist faith did not bother the Jewish elders; nor did the staunch Calvinists in the VOC mind that Jews were significant shareholders. In this turbulent era, the orthodox had to stick together. So a young Jew who attacked the VOC was a threat to the well-being of the Jewish community.