Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

by Rebecca Goldstein

  But what did the man mean by this inscrutable identification?

  Did he mean that nature had hidden mystical qualities, that it was imbued with nefesh, with spirit, the very spirit of God? Did he think that nature was a great deal more than what we normally think of it as being?

  Or was Spinoza saying that nature is only nature — that it was all those things that the Torah taught were created on the first five days (light and dry land and the heavenly bodies and plants and animals) — and was his assertion that God is nature just a sneaky way of denying the existence of God?

  I rarely posed questions in class, preferring to try to think things out for myself, but I was intrigued and confused enough to ask Mrs. Schoenfeld to explain more about what Spinoza had meant by saying that Ha-Shem was nature. Ironically, given how happy I was that historia was being taught in English, I had used, out of habit, the Hebrew designation for the Unutterable.

  Mrs. Schoenfeld’s response came mainly in the form of rebuking me for saying Ha-Shem. She had deliberately said “God” and not “Ha-Shem” because whatever Spinoza meant by the word, it certainly wasn’t Ha-Shem. Berayshis barah Elokim es ha-shemayim vi’es ha-eretz—In the beginning the Lord created the heavens and the earth. This is the first sentence of the Torah, and if someone doesn’t know this about Ha-Shem, he doesn’t know the first thing about Ha-Shem. Elokim—the Lord. Ha-Shem is the Lord over all He creates. He chose to create nature. He chose that it should be and what it should be. If someone says that God is nature — is the heavens and the earth — then he is not talking about Ha-Shem.

  Then Spinoza was an atheist?

  Yes, she answered me, an atheist. Why do you look so baffled by that? Do you still have a question, Rebecca?

  I did, and since she was pushing me, I asked it: Why did he take such a roundabout way just to say that God doesn’t exist? It sounds like he was trying to say something more by saying that God is nature.

  No, Mrs. Schoenfeld answered me, and so assertively that I thought to ask her if she herself had read the works of the heretic. Of course, I didn’t pose the question that rose to my lips, since it could have been heard as disrespectful of her, a veiled challenge, and derekh eretz—literally, “the way of the land,” a phrase meaning “respect for parents and teachers”— was a virtue drilled into us from an early age.

  Spinoza, my teacher reiterated, was an atheist, even though when the Amsterdam community excommunicated him he hadn’t yet revealed the full extent of his godless immorality. He had left the yeshiva when he was a teenager. We don’t know why exactly, since a student of his caliber would have been expected to go on and get smikha (the ordination for the rabbinate). His teachers, including Rabbi Morteira, an Ashkenazic scholar who had come from Vienna to lead this Sephardic congregation (Ashkenaz means “Germany” in Hebrew), had permitted themselves to indulge the highest expectations for him, a true talmid khokhem (a gifted scholar, literally a “disciple of the wise”), emerging out of this community of first-and second-generation former Marranos. But Spinoza left the yeshiva and instead went into his father’s business, importing dry fruits. Maybe his father’s business was suffering and he had to help him out — his younger brother also went into the family business — or maybe, despite his brilliance in the yeshiva, he had already begun to think like an apikorus and that’s why he didn’t pursue his yeshiva studies.

  He hadn’t yet published any of his blasphemous works when he was put into kherem, but he had spoken to people about some of his ideas. It was a very close community, as you can well imagine, girls, since such hardship as they had suffered, and over generations, make for very strong bonds. They had clung to Yiddishkeit under cover of silence and secrecy, risking their lives, but much had been lost, forgotten, sometimes confused with Christian beliefs. Some of the Sunday prayers of the Christians had gotten mixed up into their own liturgy. They would refer to Queen Esther (the heroine behind the Jewish festival of Purim) as St. Esther, just like the Catholics, who have official saints. Now they were relearning what it means to be good Jews, the centerpiece of their efforts being the yeshiva, the Talmud Torah, where Baruch had studied. Because of his brilliance, people were interested in him, in what he thought.

  But soon rumors of Spinoza’s strange ideas began to emerge, so that his community began to be afraid for him and also afraid of him. Some of his former schoolmates from the yeshiva, knowing how he was straying into alien goyisha ideas, asked him whether he thought, as they had heard he did, that God is made out of matter, and that there are no angels, and that the soul isn’t immortal. Remember, girls, that Maimonides, the greatest Jewish philosopher of all time, had laid it down in his Thirteen Articles of Faith that we must never think of God in bodily terms and that we must believe in tekhiyas ha-maysim, the resurrection of the dead.

  Think about it, girls: Of course the soul must be immortal, must survive bodily death; otherwise, how could there be an olam haba—a world-to-come? And if there is no olam haba, then how can the soul come before the Ultimate Judge and be held accountable for its conduct during its life? How could the good who had suffered during their lives receive their reward, and how could those who were evil and had gotten away with it get their divine punishment? Think of the tzadikim (the righteous) who died in Hitler’s ovens. Think of the innocent children. And think of the Nazis who escaped, who are enjoying life right now in Europe or South America. Without olam haba, we can’t make any moral sense out of the world; without olam haba, there is no moral sense to the world. This is why denying the soul’s immortality is tantamount to denying Ha-Shem.

  Spinoza tried to evade the young men who asked him his views, and when they continued to press him, he used his Torah learning to confuse and mislead, making it seem as if he were still a good Jew, citing the Torah. He said that since the Torah says nothing about noncorporeality we are free to believe that God has a body; and also that the Torah says nothing about the creation of angels, which is why the Sadducees4 were never declared heretics even though they didn’t believe in angels. As for his thoughts on immortality, here Baruch let slip out probably more than he intended. He argued that the Torah uses the Hebrew words for “soul”—ruakh or nefesh or neshama—only to mean life or anything that is living, and that it nowhere commits us to believing that the soul survives the body’s death. On the contrary, he said, there are many places in the Torah where the exact opposite of immortality can be shown, and nothing is easier than to prove this.

  When word of Spinoza’s ideas got back to the rabbis, they were stricken with horror. Here was one of their most brilliant students spouting ideas that not even the non-Jewish apikorsim would dare to contemplate. It was terrible to think that a boy who had shown so much promise and who had received such a fine education from the best rabbis in the community — learned rabbis, who had published books of their own — could reject everything. And the community also had to worry about what the goyim would think if word got out that such a wild heretic was living among them.

  Remember, girls, these were former Marranos who had seen the very worst of what Christian intolerance can mean for the Jews. Amsterdam was a relatively tolerant city, Protestant rather than Catholic. Still, who knew how far their tolerance could be extended? It was true that the seventeenth-century Dutch were a very practical society, concerned at least as much with their economy as with their theology, and this practicality was good for the Jews. At the time of Spinoza’s birth, 1632, the Jews had been living in Amsterdam only a few decades, but they were already contributing to the thriving Dutch economy, using their connections to other Marranos scattered around the world, including those still back in Spain and Portugal, to import and export. Still, there were Protestant theologians even in Amsterdam, particularly the Protestants known as “Calvinists,” who weren’t thrilled about the Jewish newcomers. The Calvinists were not as tolerant as some of the other Protestant sects. And it had been a condition of the Jews being allowed to reside in Amsterdam — because, of course, they had
had to get official permission — that they keep order and decorum among their own, in regard not only to behavior but to beliefs as well. Strangely enough, the Dutch authorities wanted the Amsterdam Jews to abide by the Torah. They wanted Amsterdam’s Jews to be frum (pious).

  So the community leaders approached Spinoza and gently tried to change his mind. When he showed his stubborn arrogance, they begged him at the least to keep his ideas to himself, lest the Christian authorities learn of them and bring sanctions against the whole community. But apparently it did no good. The community met together in the synagogue. It was the parnassim, the community’s lay leaders, who, strictly speaking, had the power of excommunication, rather than the rabbis. The rabbis were also present in the synagogue, except for the chief rabbi, Rabbi Morteira, who had an obligation elsewhere.5 The community met to give Spinoza an opportunity to answer his accusers.

  The two young men who had questioned Spinoza stood before the congregation and told them that they had spoken with Spinoza several times and that his views were full of heresies, and that he didn’t deserve to be held in such high esteem as a brilliant scholar by his former teachers. They said that Spinoza had spoken of the Jews as “a superstitious people born and bred in ignorance, who do not know what God is, and who nevertheless have the audacity to speak of themselves as His people, to the disparagement of other nations.”6 Spinoza had said that so far as the authorship of the Torah was concerned, it had been by someone other than Moses. The Five Books of Moses, he was saying, weren’t written by Moses, but rather by someone who had come many generations later, and someone who had known more about politics than about religion. It would take only some small good sense to discover the imposture, this apikorus said, and whoever continued to believe in it was as naïve as the Jews of Moses’ time.

  This is how it often is, girls — that the vilest accusations against the Jews come from irreligious Jews themselves. It is as if, betraying the special task of holiness that Ha-Shem bestowed on the Jewish people, they must go to the opposite extreme, become leaders of godlessness among men.

  I don’t have to remind you girls that Karl Marx was Jewish.

  Spinoza refused to defend himself against his accusers. He said only that he was sorry for everyone there who had chosen to judge him so hastily and so harshly. Rabbi Morteira, informed of how his former prize student was accounting for himself at the synagogue, now rushed there and confronted the apikorus himself. He asked Spinoza whether this was to be the fruit of all the pains that he, his former teacher, had taken with his education, and whether he wasn’t afraid of falling into the hands of the living God? The scandal was great, but there was still time to repent. But if there was to be no sign of contrition, then the community would have no choice but to excommunicate him.

  And do you know, girls, how this so-called philosopher, whom the world has decided to call great, answered his former rebbe, how he threw off his derekh eretz together with all else that he had been taught? He answered his teacher that he understood very well the seriousness of the charges against him and the nature of the threats that were hanging over his head, and in return for the trouble Rabbi Morteira had taken to teach him the Hebrew language, he, Spinoza, was quite willing to show him the proper method of excommunicating someone.

  When Rabbi Morteira heard the way this young man spoke to him, with so much chutzpa, he dismissed everyone and left the synagogue. He saw that he had been completely mistaken in who this young man was. Before, he had told people that he was as impressed with Spinoza’s character as with his mind,7 that it was rare that one so brilliant would also be so modest. But now he saw that the situation was exactly the reverse. Baruch Spinoza was a monster of arrogance. There was no way of reasoning with this young man, as brilliant as he no doubt was.

  Human intelligence is the greatest gift that Ha-Shem gave to human beings, making us closer to the malakhim—the angels — than to the beasts of the field. But if we forget from Whom we got this divine gift, if we begin to believe that we are somehow the source of our own intelligence and that we are capable of figuring out everything for ourselves without relying on the Torah, then we fall even below the animals. This is why all philosophy is apikorsus. The very word apikorsus, girls, comes from the name of a Greek philosopher, someone who was called Epicurus, who believed that pleasure is all that people have to live for.

  After this confrontation in the synagogue, Spinoza moved away from the community, taking rooms with a non-Jewish friend of his outside of Amsterdam. He had already, for some time now, been mixing with non-Jews, preferring them to his own people. He had been studying Latin with a former priest who had also become a heretic in his own religion, by the name of Franciscus van den Enden.

  In fact, there are some who say that Baruch tried to marry van den Enden’s daughter but that she rejected him for another student of her father’s who wasn’t going to become an impoverished philosopher, like Spinoza, but rather a doctor. Some say that this young man gave the young lady in question a pearl necklace and that is what finally decided her. Whether it’s true or not that he had tried to marry this non-Jewish girl, Spinoza never did marry, and in fact it seems that he never again tried to.

  He lived alone, very simply, supporting himself by grinding lenses for telescopes and other optical instruments, and writing his blasphemous works. He had a small group of friends with whom he discussed his ideas. These were all Christians, although renegades among the Christians. Once he moved away from his old home, he had nothing more to do with Jews, nor with his old yeshiva friends, or even with his family. Because of the kherem, which in his case was permanent, no Jews were allowed to speak with him for the rest of his life, so he really had no choice here.

  He had been studying Latin, girls, because in those days all the goyisha scholars wrote in Latin. If Baruch wanted to reject his rabbayim and study apikorsus, then he would have to learn Latin. He was particularly interested in studying the works of René Descartes, who was a French-Catholic philosopher whom many of the so-called freethinkers in Europe were excited about.

  Descartes believed that there is a God, but he had still made the Catholic Church angry enough to put him onto its list of banned writers, called the Index.8 The reason he was considered dangerous to the Catholics was that he had written that people should not believe in God unless they can prove His existence according to the strictest rules of logic. If there are errors in the proofs for God’s existence, then the believer should no longer believe. In other words, Descartes taught that there is no room for emunah, for faith.

  Spinoza agreed with this heresy of Descartes, only he, the Jew, went much further. Unlike Descartes, Spinoza would go on and argue for atheism, saying that the God that we can prove is nothing over and above nature, which, of course, girls, isn’t God at all, not for the Christians and not for the Jews. For no one. Spinoza wasn’t fooling anyone by playing around with words, saying that he believed in God, only making God be nothing more than nature, which of course everybody believes in. Who doesn’t believe in nature, since it’s what we see all around us? Really, girls, when you think about it, it’s ridiculous.

  It was ridiculous, at least the way that Mrs. Schoenfeld had presented it — which is why I found myself wondering whether she was doing justice to Spinoza’s thoughts. Otherwise, why would the goyim proclaim him a great philosopher? I knew enough to know that the thinkers whom the world called great weren’t stupid.

  But none of these ideas of his were yet known at the time of his excommunication, Mrs. Schoenfeld was explaining. All that the Amsterdam community knew was what the young men had reported about Spinoza’s views and the way that he had conducted himself in the synagogue when the accusations had been brought before him; they had heard for themselves the terrible way in which he had spoken to his former teacher, Rabbi Morteira.

  And so the parnassim voted to put Spinoza into kherem. Others from the Amsterdam community had also been placed in kherem, sometimes for a day or two, sometimes for
longer. It depended, of course, on the khayt (the transgression). This community of returnees, trying to find their way back to Judaism, relied on the kherem as a means of guidance. Sometimes it was a matter of not keeping the law the right way, of buying meat from an unauthorized butcher or cheating in business. Or if someone wrote a letter to a Marrano in Spain or Portugal that put the recipient into danger of being discovered by the Inquisition, then this, too, was grounds for excommunication.

  Then, too, even before the famous Spinoza, there had been other heretical thinkers who had been placed in kherem because of their so-called philosophical ideas. There had been a very famous case, when Spinoza himself was a child, of a man named Uriel da Costa, who had been excommunicated. This da Costa had been born in Portugal into a family of converts from Judaism. His father was a very religious Catholic, and he himself had become a minor church official. However, from reading the Torah he became convinced that Judaism is the true religion and he went to Amsterdam to live as a Jew. But he wanted his Judaism to be based on the Torah alone; he didn’t accept any of the Talmud, any of the laws that derived from the Oral Law and from the rabbinical decisions. The way that he imagined Judaism, as a Christian back in Portugal, that’s the way he wanted it to be. You can see some of the difficulties that the rabbis of these former Marranos had to contend with. They had to be makhmir (strict) in order to impress on these sadly ignorant Jews the nature of halakha.

  (Halakha means “Jewish law.” The term derives from the Hebrew root of the verb “to go,” and so connotes the right way to go. The sources of halakha are basically three. There are the 613 commandments — or mitzvahs — that are contained in the Torah, the work that is traditionally considered the “Written Law,” the author the divinely directed Moses. Then there are the writings in the classical rabbinical sources that are the discussions and debates about the written laws, especially in the Mishnah [referred to as the Oral Law, by tradition taught by Moses and passed down through the ages until it was written down in the third century c.e.] and the Gemorah [which is rabbinical commentary on the Mishnah, the first version authored in Jerusalem in the fifth century; the second, which is the one more commonly studied, authored in Babylonia in the sixth century]. The Mishnah and the Gemorah together comprise the Talmud. And then, third, there is the codified law as it is laid out in the Shulkhan Arukh, a work whose title literally means “The Set Table,” composed in the sixteenth century by the Sephardic kabbalist Joseph Karo. The Shulkhan Arukh culls from all the Talmudic discussions and controversies and sets forth [as in a set table] the redacted halakha. Orthodox Judaism is, for the most part, governed by the Shulkan Arukh, which is interesting since mainstream Judaism rejects the kabbalistic approach that was the [suppressed] inspiration for Karo’s work. To quote the great secular kabbalist scholar Gershom Scholem, “R. Joseph Karo deliberately ignored kabbalism in his great rabbinic code Shulkhan Arukh, yet there is little doubt as to the secret eschatological motives of its composition.”9)