Baruch Spinoza was eight years old at the time of da Costa’s ritual abasement. He may have been among “the young” who witnessed it. There is no doubt that da Costa’s life and opinions had a bruising impact on the Amsterdam community. Spinoza’s education was strict in its orthodoxy. His teacher Saul Levi Mortera was an authority on halacha, the interpretation of the law. Something of a rationalist, in the Maimonidean tradition, he sanctioned pictorial images when they were not objects of worship, but he considered that “Jews who are not circumcised and who do not observe the law in lands where they are not permitted to do so [for instance, in Iberia] risked eternal punishment.” Mortera too was pitched between uncompromising orthodoxy and the wider intellectual and scientific world of northern Europe.
One of the important influences on the young Spinoza was his Latin teacher, Franciscus van den Enden, an unfrocked Jesuit who, when Baruch was his pupil, confessed to being no more than a “vague deist.” Amsterdam Jews were, in some regards, bound by the same rules which Nachmanides had had to observe in thirteenth-century Catalonia; they were forbidden, above all, to engage in theological discussion. To question the divine origin of the Torah entailed the severest cherem: total severance from the community. The right of the parnassim,ee the elders, to excommunicate “the unruly and the rebellious” was a function both of orthodoxy and of apprehension, lest their Gentile hosts turn against them (Amsterdam Jews, like others in Europe, had no right of tenure or citizenship). The double bind of esoteric presumption and public deference to alien authority prefigures the tragic fix in which so many of Europe’s Jews found themselves under the Nazis. The self-policing of the Amsterdam community was at least somewhat echoed, during the Shoah, by Jewish “leaders” as corrupt as Chaim Rumkowski (the self-styled “king” of the Lodz ghetto under the Nazis) and as well-intentioned as Leo Baeck, the Berlin rabbi who concealed the truth about the camps in order to lessen the dread of those he failed to warn of their imminent fate and who was vilified, after the event, for his reticence, by moralists who were never forked by his dilemma.
Spinoza, like so many precocious Jews before and since, was at first a brilliant student and then a flagrant apostate. His heretical ideas had traces of da Costa’s: “Nature is a unity, a whole outside of which there is nothing.… but if Nature is just the substance composed of infinite attributes, the underlying productive unity of all things, then Nature is God.” The mental agility learned with Mortera enabled Spinoza to hurdle the limits of orthodoxy. Latin and mathematical models became the alien means by which he revised his reading of the moral world, as the use of Greek had emancipated Josephus, perhaps despite himself, from the blinkered perspective of the Jerusalem Jew he had once been. Once evicted from the Amsterdam community, Baruch Spinoza was free to turn his calm indignation on a target at which he might fire as incautiously as he chose: Judaism itself.
Bertrand Russell called Spinoza the “noblest” of all philosophers; his logical elegance was the ornament of his genius. In solitary and austere dignity, he had recourse to a system that approximated to mathematics in its abstract apparatus. By composing his ideas in Latin, he attached them to the Erasmic enlightenment, of which, in time, he became the most radical exponent. Encoding his urgent convictions in the seemingly dispassionate guise of syllogistic rationalism, Spinoza contrived to be heterodox without descending to rhetorical bombast. His conversion to the European philosophical manner enabled him to efface the prints that marked him as a Jew. Like Joseph ben Mattathias, he signaled his change of track by adopting a Romanized version of his name: Baruch became Benedict. Writing in Latin, and advocating the contemplation of life “sub specie aeternitatis” (in long shot, as it were), he eschewed ephemeral disputes.ff He inaugurated what Jonathan Israel designates as “the Radical Enlightenment” by hiding his personal light under a bushel of verbiage.gg
Since the public philosophy of the time (and the laws of the Dutch Republic) left him free to attack Judaism without fear of Christian reprisal, it has been supposed that Spinoza’s greatest quarrel was with his own “superstition.” Certainly he directed his scholarship to the demolition of its pretensions, not least that the ancient Hebrews “surpassed other nations in their wisdom or in their proximity to God.” As a precocious philologist, he claimed (as few now doubt) that the books of the prophets were “heaped together” long after the events they affect to describe. Their miracles might impress the simple but are impossible: everything, he came to say, has a natural cause and explanation. It requires no great elasticity to see that everything Spinoza remarks about Judaism and its God can be applied, mutatis mutandis, to Christianity, against which he says nothing. He never refers directly to the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but he could hardly fail to be conscious that it was (and is) the pivotal miracle on which all Christian hope turned. Its veracity had supposedly been established by the fall of Jerusalem as recorded by Flavius Josephus. The humiliation and eviction of the Jews was the price, decreed by God, that they paid for failing to recognize His son. Belief that Jerusalem might be redeemed by the return of the Jews to their ancestral home bolstered the mania that spread through the Diaspora as a result of the messianic pretenses of Shabbetai Zevi in 1666.hh
Believing that the moment of return to Zion was at hand, many Jews, including sane citizens in comfortable circumstances, sold up and prepared to emigrate to Palestine. Spinoza was not among them. He argued only in favor of free choice and the love of justice, of which democracy is the best guarantee. It is, he said, in his Ethics “a disaster for a state to grant religious functionaries the right to issue decrees or to concern themselves with state business.” He adds that it is “clearer than the noonday sun that the real schismatics are those who condemn the writings of others.” Nevertheless, the Huguenot diplomat Jean-Baptiste Stouppe said that Spinoza was “a very bad Jew and no better Christian.…. His [theologico-political treatise] undermines the foundations of all religion.” The charge was not meant kindly, but it shows conspicuous understanding of the thrust of Spinoza’s arguments. Baruch/Benedict Spinoza’s genius is as marked as his inability, like that of so many Jews, to pull away definitively from his roots. It is said that Spinoza drew excellent portraits, including a number of himself, though none has survived; it was the nearest he came, apart from his letters, to a first-person statement. His only equivalent to Josephus’s in the literary self-portrait Vita was a wordless profile.
Spinoza led a deliberately reclusive life. He was always courteous to his landlords and neighbors, but never sociable. Although he corresponded with the great minds of his time, he lived—somewhat as Josephus did in Rome—in a ghetto of one. Unlike Josephus, he remained celibate.ii Advocating radicalism, he felt no call to detach himself from his roots by any ostentatious apostasy. Spinoza was always identified disparagingly as a Jew even by those, such as Leibniz, who did not deny his innovating genius.jj Without public ambitions, Spinoza was not tempted to the kind of pragmatic “belief” that disposed later men of genius, such as Heinrich Heine, to embrace baptism as the price of emancipation from the hobble of Jewish origins.
In the nineteenth century, Benjamin Disraeli matched his contemporary Heinrich Heine by accepting baptism as the formal price of entry into a Christian society.kk Disraeli’s conversion did not dispose his enemies to think of him as anything but an alien adventurer in fraudulent (and too flamboyant) Christianized costume. He met the anti-Semitism of men such as Thomas Carlyle and Anthony Trollope by the exquisitely ostentatious deployment of the language they took to be their own.ll Disraeli became an ornament of English society and of English literature on what he liked to parade as his own terms: “When I want to read a novel,” he said, “I write one.” Once baptized and eligible for political life, Benjamin Disraeli adopted the tactics of flaunting his difference. When prime minister of Great Britain, he teased aristocratic colleagues such as Lord Derby by reminding them that his ancestors had been men of literate resource and social refinement in ancient Israel, while the ancient
Britons were prancing about in woad. He also trumped English conceit by going further in pandering to it than any of his predecessors: he put a new jewel in the imperial crown. When he made his annunciation to Queen Victoria that she was henceforth to be empress of India, he at least somewhat mimicked Joseph ben Mattathias when he declared his imminent elevation to Titus Flavius Vespasianus.
Disraeli’s premiership was flamboyant and theatrical. His insolence was calculated to be disarming. “A conservative government,” he declared, “is an organized hypocrisy.” Taking care always to be as amusing as he was outrageous, he was a political actor-manager whose fictions dignified the myth of Jewish superiority with a shamelessness that amused some of the ranks of Tuscany while enraging others. When James McNeill Whistler, at the height of his fame as a fashionable painter, saw Disraeli sitting on a bench in St. James’s Park, he had the confidence to approach the prime minister and ask if he might paint his portrait. Disraeli waved a weary hand, saying, “Go away, little man, go away.” His fictional self-portraits—another mutation of the Josephan Vita—were the only ones he cared to license.
Disraeli’s ascent of what he called “the greasy pole” of English politics was achieved with little more than a perfunctory show of renunciation. Unlike Josephus, he was not obliged to grateful servility or literary tact. His youthful role as a dandy, somewhat in the Byronic style,mm made isolation into a form of elegance. Deliberately outlandish in dress, Disraeli made a one-man parade of his genius; while he solicited the ballots of the British at large, he had small illusions concerning his acceptance by the ruling class. He depended, at least somewhat, on the idleness of the conservatives who left the brilliant outsider, as Pharaoh had with Joseph, to order things more competently than the natives. Disraeli’s coat of many colors set the style for British Jews, though few of them were ever as stylish, or as colorful, again. The only prime minister until Winston Churchill to be graced with an affectionate diminutive, “Dizzy” infuriated the bigots but installed himself in British folklore as no Jew ever contrived to do among the other nations of Europe.nn
a An expression used, with some irony, in the title of a 1908 novel by Arthur Schnitzler.
b After the suppression by Hadrian of the revolt of Bar Kochba in 125 C.E., no circumcised person was admitted into “Aelia Capitolina,” as Jerusalem was officially renamed.
c Richard Seaford argues, in Reciprocity and Ritual, that the shapeliness of the Iliad was fashioned only at the end of its protracted evolution to the “authorized” version of the sixth century B.C.E. Prosaic history took on the lineaments of epic and, in its formal structure, mimicked the idea of “justice,” which moralized both epic and tragedy (comedy found small place in it). The Holy Grail of historians is to discover the pattern that runs through the past and present, into the future.
d Who does not? André Malraux put it succinctly: “One does not become an artist by looking at life, but by looking at art.”
e With deconstructive effort, a master of the subtle arts might read even T. S. Eliot’s somewhat regretted line “The jew is underneath the lot” as an involuntary recognition of the outcast’s fundamental role. The Khazar king in Yehuda Halevi’s Kuzari (see p. 228) is more gracious in recognizing that both Christianity and Islam gained their presumed validity from their dependence on Jewish Scriptures.
f Nazi artists devised images of an “Aryan” Jesus, blond and blue-eyed. The Mexicans pay homage to a black Madonna. Icons are rarely a good likeness.
g King Louis IX of France (1214–1270).
h In Arabic “the well-watered place.” After the Reconquista, Andalucia lapsed into aridity due to the Christian neglect of the irrigation system installed by the Semites.
i Raphael Loewe, Ibn Gabirol (New York: Grove, 1991), passim.
j In The Invention of the Jewish People (London: Verso, 2009), the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand excited an outcry by claiming that Spanish Jews in the happy years of the convivencia can by no means all have been descended from those dispersed from Palestine. Against Zionists who insist that all Jews derive from the original Judaeans, Sand maintains that North Africans, of various tribes, were likely to have been converted to Judaism before or soon after immigrating into Iberia.
k Twelfth-century Toledo even produced a historian somewhat in the Josephan style. The rabbi and physician Abraham ibn Daud is said, in Yosef Yerushalmi’s Zakhor, to have “understood history by viewing it schematically.” Making symmetry a priority, he tampered with chronology in order to procure what he took to be the key to future events. Pattern was prescriptive, as the Marxist dialectic would be. Events in themselves were noteworthy only if they conformed with a destined place in the historical plan. Hegel repeated this facile scheme when he found significance in the repetition of a key event: Napoleon’s defeat at Leipzig became ominous as the prelude to Waterloo. Hegel’s conclusion that history operated on the rule “two strikes and you’re out” was echoed by Marx’s famous “history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce.”
l Joseph Süss Oppenheimer (1698–1738), commonly known as “Jew Süss,” was only the most emblematic of the Jews who served as advisers and tax-gatherers to any number of princes in the three hundred or so petty states of central Europe. Süss was in effect a scapegoat whose execution served to appease the mutual detestation of two sets of Christians, Catholic and Lutheran. Susan Tegel’s Jew Süss provides a useful epitome of the affair and its malicious uses.
m The delegated didaskalos was a monk called Nicholas.
n There was, however, a Jewish duke of the island of Naxos in the Cyclades, in the early sixteenth century. Joseph Nasi, a Sephardic refugee, was appointed by the Turkish Sultan Selim II.
o The role and sentiments of the Muslim Brotherhood in modern Egypt are not dissimilar in its rejection of “civilized” syncretism and alien supervisors.
p Many of New York’s twentieth-century literary intellectuals were opinionated arrivistes, quick to be fluently in command of their assumed culture. Outsiders, whether Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin or George and Ira Gershwin, can commend themselves to the established order by the ostentation of their ingenuity; they excite, they instruct and, if they are part of what was known in the 1920s as “the show business,” they had better entertain. Theater and the movies were powerful incentives for assimilation. Golden age Hollywood stars were often allotted Gentile-sounding names: Kirk Douglas, John Garfield and Edward G. Robinson among them.
q In The Thirteenth Tribe, Koestler proposed, however fancifully, that many Ashkenazim must stem from Khazari proselytes, rather than, as Zionist legend insisted, from dispersed Judaeans. Koestler even drew profiles to show that the “Jewish” nose was in fact a legacy from the Eurasian genetic pool.
r The twentieth-century Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin remarked that he had never met any “determinist” who actually lived as though he were not free to do one thing rather than another. Marxism compromised with a notion of necessity in history that could be accelerated by those on the side of the inevitable.
s In his Levantine exile, Maimonides became one of Saladin’s team of doctors. Medicine was a tempting road to privileged status for non-Muslims in the Islamic world but not without dangers. In 1715, a famous Greek physician, Andreas Likinios, who had previously cured Sultan Ahmed of smallpox, went—after the Ottoman capture of Monemvasia—to claim his promised exemption from being enslaved. He was hanged instead. (See Monemvasia, by Haris A. Kalligas, p. 87.) The Jewish doctors accused of plotting to kill Stalin narrowly escaped a similar fate.
t According to legend, the Jew Helinus, the Greek Pontus, the Arab Adela and the Latin Salernus were the cofounders of a school unequaled in fame for three centuries. It possessed a unique library of Greek and Arabic texts, taken from the adjacent monastery of Monte Cassino. Medicine promoted a therapeutic universality beyond the scope of any revealed religion.
u Wittgenstein’s famous concluding words in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (with its parodic
allusion to Spinoza), which were translated, gnomically, as “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should keep silent,” can be read, in a Straussian light, as implying that unspoken things lie behind its apparent terminus. No wonder that, as will be seen, Wittgenstein later described his thought as “100% Hebraic.”
v In Northern Ireland, the “sectarianism” of Catholics and Protestants was superficially “ideological” but was also the expression of Catholic resentment at the empowerment of an alien ascendancy that defined (and justified, not to say sanctified) its rule by flagging its allegiance to the Church of England and its titular head, the queen.
w Holocaust deniers have made the Shoah itself into a Jewish fabrication, designed to extract blood money from those who were accused by the Jews of killing millions more than actually died. Fantastic versions of the same syndrome have proposed that Hitler himself had some Jewish blood. In this way, anti-Semitism itself can be represented as a function of Jewishness.
x The same monastic order would save a good many Jews when they were being rounded up in Nazi-occupied Italy. It also assisted the flight of Nazis such as Adolf Eichmann.
y Formal Judaism had no place for spells and amulets and inscribed skulls and all the paraphernalia of witchcraft and sympathetic magic, but they recur in the folklore. Their common use in ancient Judaea has been established by archaeologists. Jesus of Nazareth and his followers clearly believed in evil spirits—why else did the Gadarene swine run over that steep place into the sea? In Jewish Antiquities, Josephus describes, without apparent skepticism, how a plant with a flamelike color, which emitted a brilliant light, was fatal to touch. It could be plucked only by having a dog tied to it and then sacrificed. As with the magic Greek “moly,” the root could then be used to expel demons, simply by being “applied to the patient.” Medicine still has a hint of magic, if not the diabolical, about it. The willful illegibility and esoteric terminology of medical prescriptions have continued to carry a vestige of medieval abracadabra. More naughty than malicious, Vladimir Nabokov, a philo-Semite with a formidable Jewish wife, referred to Sigmund Freud as “the Viennese witch-doctor.”
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