Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

by Rebecca Goldstein

  The area of Amsterdam where the Jews mostly lived was a business and mercantile area, as well as being residential, surrounded by canals on which barges and boats were anchored right beside the streets. Engravings of the time portray tidy, tree-lined streets, lined with tall and narrow wooden houses, the distinctive stepped roofs rising like the prosperity of the merchant owners who inhabited them. Gentiles lived in the Jewish quarter, including for a time Rembrandt, who often chose his Jewish neighbors as subjects, the richer ones sitting for their portraits, while others served the artist as models for his works on biblical themes. One of the rabbis of the community, Manasseh ben Israel, said to have been the most famous Jew of Amsterdam and certainly the most worldly of the Sephardic rabbis, counting many Gentiles as his friends, was painted by Rembrandt.

  Etchings and portraits from Rembrandt and other artists show the Portuguese Jews affecting the dress and style of the Amsterdam mercantile class, from the sweeping feathers in their capacious caps down to the silver buckles on their blackened boots. Within a few short decades, a high degree of affluence and a certain degree of acclimation had been achieved, and whatever security can be gained from donning rich brocades and other signs of bourgeois respectability had been gained. The treasures of Dutch art were also of interest to the prospering Sephardim. They were acquiring Rembrandts as well as sitting for him. One family was said to have paintings worth “a ton in gold.”

  Insofar as the Portuguese Jews’ outward presentation, little marked them as being foreigners rather than just swarthier-complexioned Dutch. They appeared to be adapting to the lifestyle of the prospering city with flair and exuberance, contributing to the economic rise of the middle class. Their successful and rapid acclimation was in contrast to their Ashkenazic brethren. The latter were arriving in ever bigger numbers, especially as the Thirty Years’ War and pogroms created catastrophic conditions in Germany and Poland. The Ashkenazim of Amsterdam did not catch on as dexterously as did the Sephardim to life in Amsterdam.

  They remained impoverished and presented something of a burden for, and an embarrassment to, the Portuguese Jews. In 1632, the very year of Spinoza’s birth, a bylaw was passed by the Sephardic community setting up two charity boxes meant for the Ashkenazim, “to prevent the nuisance and uproar caused by the Ashkenazim who put their hands out to beg at the gates.”

  But though the look of the Portuguese Jews was, at least to the extent that they could affect it, Dutch, the language in the streets and in the homes, in the shops and in the synagogues (including the magnificent one that they would build at the end of Jews’ Broad Street, still standing today), was Portuguese. Since they were primarily merchants (even the rabbis often engaged in some trade), and dealt with Dutch Gentiles, they knew Dutch as well, but Portuguese remained the native language.

  For Spinoza, too, Portuguese was his native tongue. He might write, as Mrs. Schoenfeld had put it, in the goyisha language of Latin, but he thought in the language of his community, Portuguese, as emerges at times in his letters, when he apologizes for the clumsiness of his Dutch:

  I do indeed wish that I might write in the language in which I was brought up. I might possibly express my thoughts better. But please take it in good part, and yourself correct the mistakes, and consider me

  Your devoted Friend and Servant

  B. de Spinoza

  The Long Orchard

  5 January 1665

  Another language, too, speaks of the community’s long history and the way it continued to live on inside the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam: Spanish. This was the language reserved for high literature and scholarly works, just as it had been for them in Portugal, preserving in the linguistic practice memories of the culture the Jews brought with them to Portugal after they had been exiled from Spain in the Great Expulsion of 1492.

  When they arrived in Amsterdam, they often replaced their Portuguese names with Hebrew ones, though also often retaining the Portuguese name for business purposes outside the community. They also often took on Dutch names, in order to hide their Portuguese, and therefore Jewish, identities, so that they could do business with Iberian New Christians — as the converts from Judaism were known, even generations after the family’s conversion — without placing these New Christians in danger. Josef de los Rios became “Michael van der Riviere,” and Luis de Mercado became “Louis van der Markt.”4 Collectively, they referred to themselves, even, in Amsterdam, as the “Portuguese Nation,” or La Nação, clearly setting down invisible borders between themselves and their neighbors. As they were assiduously assimilating the outward style of the Dutch burghers, participating in the burgeoning mercantile economy, within them there was a very different reality, carrying traces of times long preceding their arrival on the banks of the Amstel River.

  The weight of many centuries of history bore down on the collective memory of La Nação. How far back do we have to go to gather a sense of that collective memory and understand how it presented itself in the ongoing life of the community? That life, animated by long memory, must have made itself felt in Baruch Spinoza. He was, after all, a child of that community, born to parents who were first-generation immigrants to Amsterdam. His father, Michael, had fled as a child, most likely sometime in the 1590s, together with his extended family, perhaps because someone in the clan had been denounced to the Inquisition. Once that happened, entire families would decamp in haste, since the Inquisition was never content with investigating just a single individual. Once a person fell under suspicion, so did everyone intimately connected with him.

  But the collective memory of the Jewish community of Amsterdam reached further back than the immediate history that had brought each of the Sephardic families there. A memory stretching back over the centuries, even the millennia, is a vital part of the Jewish sensibility. The Jews are a people who are enjoined to recite the Passover narrative each year as if they themselves had personally experienced the exodus from Egypt. Amsterdam Jews had special reasons for recalling centuries of Jewish history as if they had personally experienced the events for themselves.

  How far back must we go to get a sense of the communal inner life that had informed the passive identity of Baruch Spinoza, shaping that singular self that his ethics demanded he resist, and that I am seeking?

  Long before the official European “Renaissance,” the Jews of Spain had experienced, under the relatively tolerant rule of the conquering Moslems, an extraordinary cultural renaissance, still referred to as the Golden Age of Spanish Jewry.

  In the eighth century, the Moslem Moors, expanding from Morocco, had captured large chunks of Spain from the Christian Visigoths, and the Jews, who had largely been forced into conversion under the Visigoths, welcomed the Arabs as liberators and allies. Victorious Islam was then barely one hundred years old. Under the new Moslem rule, many former converts, who had secretly clung to their faith, not only returned to Judaism but entered into concourse with Moslem high culture to produce their own heady concoction of science and poetry, mathematics and art, rationalistic philosophy and the esoteric mysticism known as kaballah.

  The intellectual Sephardic tradition as it emerged out of those golden days of inspired intermingling of cultures was more slanted toward philosophical reflection and mystical speculation than was the mainstream Ashkenazic intellectual tradition, which to this day remains focused almost exclusively on Talmudic legalistic disputations. This last comparison should not be understood as a slight to Talmudic study, despite the fact that “legalistic disputations” might seem to have a pejorative tone to it. But the legalistic logic of Talmudic analysis encloses a unique form of spiritual activity. Here, too, we encounter, as we do in Spinoza, the sacramentalizing of logic, reason as the means of unifying with God.

  Isaac Bashevis Singer has a lovely, if gently mocking, description of Talmudic scholarship in the opening paragraphs of his novel Shosha:

  I was brought up on three dead languages — Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish — and in a culture that develope
d in Babylon: the Talmud. The cheder where I studied was a room in which the teacher ate and slept, and his wife cooked. There I studied not arithmetic, geography, physics, chemistry, or history, but the laws governing an egg laid on a holiday and sacrifices in a temple destroyed two thousand years ago.

  The applications of the Law to quotidian life is of some concern, of course — what is one to do with the egg laid on a holiday? — but the analytic reasoning itself is the real focus. Talmudic logic is understood as a spiritual activity, a meshing with the Divine Presence. The Law is the way God is seen as interacting with His people, and to study it is to approach Him in the most direct way that we can. What might seem from the outside to be dry anachronistic hairsplitting is, from the inside, experienced as shot through with the radiance of Divine Intentionality. In this tradition, the dialectics of pilpul—Talmudic argumentation — is spiritual activity at its very highest, and it became mainstream Jewish scholarship. Philosophical ruminations about the nature of God are decidedly not part of this mainstream.

  But the Sephardic thinkers of the Golden Age were much more drawn to such philosophical ruminations. The towering figure of Sephardic rationalistic philosophy was the philosopher Maimonides (1138–1204), also known as the Rambam, derived from the initials of his name, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon. “Maimonides” is actually his Greek appellation, meaning “son of Maimon.” He was born in Córdoba, Spain, though when the city fell to Muslim Berbers, the Almohades, the family fled to Morocco. After spending some time in Jerusalem he settled in Fustat, Egypt, where he was doctor of the Grand Vizier Alfadhil and to the Sultan Saladin of Egypt.

  Maimonides is generally acknowledged as the greatest of Jewish philosophers (excluding Spinoza, of course, who belongs to the Western canon rather than to the Jewish one). He was controversial in his day, and in my high school we weren’t altogether certain of him still. He was a bit too modern for us (pronounced with a long o, a rolling r, accent on the second syllable). His main project was to reconcile Judaism with what he considered the best scientific thinking of his day, which was the Aristotelian system. Aristotle’s was an impressively inclusive system that set forth the proper place of each and every thing in the universe, working outward from us, the inhabitants of the earth, around whom the entire universe, laid out in concentric spheres, literally revolved. Aristotle also offered a rich strategy for explaining events by explaining the end that would be accomplished by means of the event. In other words, his model for explaining the physical world was the way that we explain intentional actions, namely by citing the intention. This is what is meant by saying his explanations were teleological (telos means “end” or “goal” in ancient Greek). Alternatively, one says his explanations relied heavily on final causes; a final cause is the end for which the event or process took place. So, for example, Tom’s going to the all-night convenience store at 11 p.m. could be explained by his having just discovered that there is no beer in his fridge and his wanting a beer. The final cause is Tom’s procurement of his bevarage of choice. So, too, in the Aristotelian system a dropped stone’s falling to the earth is explained by the stone’s being composed primarily out of earth and therefore belonging on the earth, from which it had been displaced and to which it is now returning. In other words, the stone is moving toward the earth, as Tom is moving toward the convenience store, because those are the places toward which each wants to go, each wanting to correct a condition which is a privation given their particular natures. Aristotle’s was a system in which physical space was not the same in all directions; rather, different parts of space were the province of the four different elements: earth, water, air, and fire. These spatial differences provided the orientations that explained motions, the end of the motion identical with its final cause.

  Aristotle’s system was the best scientific thinking of Maimonides’ day, though the great thinkers of the seventeenth century — Galileo, Descartes, Newton — would have to declare themselves its enemy and dismantle its teleological explanatory apparatus in order to lay the foundations of modern science. Spinoza, as we will see, could not have been more irreconcilably opposed to all teleological thinking. He was thoroughly conversant with, and hostile to, the general thrust of Maimonides’ thinking, not only in its Aristotelianism, but in its reconciliatory theism. Maimonides’ method in interpreting Scripture derived from his reconciliatory theism, which could be simplified into a principle something like this: Since scientific truths are true and the Torah, too, is true, there is always a way to interpret the Torah so that it is consistent with science. The method of biblical interpretation Spinoza pursued in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus avoided any such external principles. Railing against traditional rabbinical interpreters of Scripture, clearly having Maimonides very much in mind, he wrote in his Tractatus:

  It is not enough for them to share the delusions of the Greeks: they have sought to represent the prophets as sharing in these same delusions. … And this is further evident from the fact that most of these assume as a basic principle for the understanding of Scripture and for extracting its true meaning that it is throughout truthful and divine — a conclusion which ought to be the end result of study and strict examination, and which they lay down at the outset as a principle of interpretation. …

  Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) would do some years later for Christianity what Maimonides had done for Judaism, namely “Aristotelize” it. The Dominican friar, author of Summa Theologica and one of the most important of Catholic theologians, was highly influenced by “Rabbi Moyses,” though Christian apologists would often try to conceal the Jewish influence. Scholasticism was the enterprise of translating Christian theology into Aristotelian terms, and it dominated post-Thomistic Catholic thinking. In the early years of the Middle Ages, when Maimonides was alive, Plato rather than Aristotle had been the more influential ancient thinker among those Christian thinkers who tried to reconcile Christian thought with ancient philosophy. St. Augustine, one of the early Church fathers, had been a Platonist, and his influence dominated. Maimonides, a religious thinker with a distaste for the mystical, was far more drawn to Aristotle than to Plato’s brand of rationalism. Aquinas’s influence would mean that Christian thinking of the later Middle Ages was dominated by Aristotelian rather than Platonic thinking, which is why the seventeenth century’s great scientific innovators would have to defeat the hegemonic grip that Aristotle had come to have on Church dogma.

  Maimonides’ Aristotelianism was perhaps quite intellectually compatible with his profession as a physician. The body, after all, would appear to be a teleological system, its various processes acting in order to accomplish some end. So, for example, if the body becomes too hot, it perspires in order to cool itself down. If it becomes too cold, it shivers, the muscular contractions causing it to warm up.

  Though Maimonidean philosophy, just because it is philosophy, has been controversial ever since the Rambam’s own day, raising generations of Jewish eyebrows (the position in my high school was to keep a respectful distance), there was one aspect of his work that became ensconced firmly in the mainstream, perhaps precisely because it eschews philosophical grounding for straightforward faith. This is the Thirteen Articles of Faith, which have become such an accepted aspect of Judaism that they are recited on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year. It is as if Maimonides vindicated his dalliance with the dangerous seductions of Hellenistic rationalism with his straightforward assertion of belief:

  I believe with perfect faith in the existence of God which is perfect and sufficient unto himself and which is the cause of the existence of all other beings.

  I believe with perfect faith in God’s unity, which is unlike all other kinds of unity.

  I believe with perfect faith that God must not be perceived in bodily terms, and the anthropomorphic expressions applied to God in Scripture have to be understood in a metaphorical sense.

  I believe with perfect faith that God is eternal.

  I believe with perfect faith that God
alone is to be worshiped and obeyed. There are no mediating powers able freely to grant man’s petitions, and intermediaries must not be invoked.

  I believe with perfect faith in prophecy.

  I believe with perfect faith that Moses is unsurpassed by any prophet.

  I believe with perfect faith that the entire Torah was given to Moses.

  I believe with perfect faith that Moses’ Torah will not be abrogated or superceded by another divine law nor will anything be added to or taken away from it.

  I believe with perfect faith that God knows the actions of man.

  I believe with perfect faith that God rewards those who fulfill the commandments of the Torah, and punishes those who transgress them.

  I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah.

  I believe with perfect faith in the resurrection of the dead.

  Of these Thirteen Articles, Spinoza will aver 1, 2, 4, 5, and 10, though their meanings shift radically in alignment with his system. One might say that the second principle, in particular, is adamantly assented to in his system; the unity of Deus sive natura is certainly unlike all other unity. Spinoza denies — though again according to the special meaning he gives the relevant terms — principles 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, and 13. But far more ardent and fundamental than the rejection of some eight of the requisite articles of faith is the philosopher’s rejection of the Maimonidean ethics of belief. For Spinoza, far more thoroughgoing in his rationalism than Maimonides, there is no virtue whatsoever in believing with perfect faith. The virtue is in believing because you know, which requires proof.

  Another strain of Jewish thinking also emerged from the Iberian soil, though later in the Sephardic experience than Maimonidean rationalism: the mystical tradition known as kabbalah. Here, too, the soil was seeded by ancient Greek thinking — not Aristotelianism this time, but rather Platonism, or rather Neoplatonism, particularly Plotinus and Proclus. It was the Arab scholars who transmitted knowledge of the Greeks, translating their works, and this is how Spanish-Jewish scholars came to know them.