Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

by Rebecca Goldstein

  The Zohar, which is traditionally translated into English as The Book of Splendor, is considered the most important of the kabbalistic writings. It is written as if it were an ancient text, with commentary added to it by the Spanish kabbalists, but modern scholarship has revealed it to be almost incontrovertibly composed in Spain, in the southern city of Gerona, in the late thirteenth century. The author of the Zohar was most probably Moses de Leon, though he claims it to be the work of a scholar named Simeon bar Yohai, a second-century sage, who was himself a student of the legendary Rabbi Akiva.

  I had heard tales of Rabbi Akiva from youngest childhood. One of the greatest of Jewish scholars, he had not even learned to read until he was a grown and married man. He had married above himself, a rich man’s daughter, and she had agreed to marry him only if he became a scholar. He and his son learned to read at the same time. (I remember learning this in kindergarten, when it had a special enchantment.) He died as a martyr at the hands of the Romans, by legend being flayed to death at the age of ninety. The traditional tale is that Simeon bar Yohai hid from the Romans in a cave near the Dead Sea, fed for years on a spring of freshwater and the fruit of a carob tree that sprang up in his hiding place, and it was there, in the miraculous hiding place, that the mystical form of Midrash, or Torah interpretation, is said to have been inspired, though Rabbi Akiva, too, had possessed esoteric knowledge.

  The Spanish kabbalists traced their ideas back to this ancient tradition, but some new spring was flowing into their thoughts as well, and this new spring, too, was very ancient, only it wasn’t Jewish. It was Greek. It was the thinking of Plato, most especially as it had found expression in the Neoplatonists.

  The Jewish poet and philosopher Ibn Gabirol (c. 1020–c. 1057) was a Neoplatonist living in Gerona. He presented his metaphysics in his major work Mekor Hayyim (The Source of Life), which was written in Arabic. (The Arabic version is no longer extant, but a medieval Latin translation, Fons vitae, exists.) It is written in dialogue form, as Plato had written, and the only authority who is ever mentioned by him is Plato. Although Ibn Gabirol was an undeniably Jewish thinker whose religious poetry found its way into the liturgy, Mekor Hayyim is rigorously nonsectarian. As the Encyclopedia Judaica puts it succinctly, “Mekor Hayyim is unique in the body of Jewish philosophical-religious literature of the Middle Ages, because it expounds a complete philosophical-religious system wholly lacking in specifically Jewish content and terminology. The author does not mention biblical persons or events and does not quote the Bible, Talmud, or Midrash. To some extent this feature of the work determined its unusual destiny.”5 Part of its unusual destiny is that its ideas and even its terminology found their way into Spanish kabbalah.

  Kabbalah, in contrast to mainstream Jewish thinking, which concentrates almost exclusively on Talmudic legalistic disputation, speculates heavily on metaphysical questions, especially those concerning the beginning of all things. Why, as philosophers are wont to put it, is there something rather than nothing? Why did God — referred to in kabbalistic terminology as the Ein Sof, That Without End — have to create the world? What is the relationship between the Ein Sof, existing outside of time, and the created temporal world? How does, how can, eternality interact with temporality?

  According to kabbalistic thinking, the Ein Sof is beyond our understanding, beyond all our words and concepts. But there are what the kabbalists referred to as the Sefirot, the emanations of His infinite power, in which the divine attributes are turned into acts of creation, and Sefirot can be grasped by the human understanding; they can be gleaned from the structure of being. The Ein Sof is unrevealed, non-manifest, and unknowable. Only the emanations of his power (the Sefirot) transform the Ein Sof into the Creator-God and a personal God.

  As the kabbalistic tradition meditates on the beginning of all things, so, too, it ponders the awful mystery of suffering, most poignantly, most bafflingly, represented by the example of children who suffer, children who die. The Zohar says of children “who still as sucklings are taken from their mother’s breast” that “the whole world weeps; the tears that come from these babes have no equal, their tears issue from the innermost and farthest places of the hearts, and the entire world is perplexed: … [I]s it needful that these unhappy infants should die, who are without sin and without blame?” Clearly, an answer has to be offered, and here is the one that the Zohar offers: “But … the tears shed by these ‘oppressed ones’ act as a petition and protection for the living … and by dint of their innocence, in time a place is prepared for them … for the Holy One, blessed be He, does in reality love these little ones with a unique and outstanding love. He unites them with himself and gets ready for them a place on high close to him.”6

  There is a path to be traced from Athens to Gerona, and then from Gerona to Amsterdam, for kabbalism was a distinct aspect of the inner life of the Portuguese Nation. The Sephardic community of Amsterdam, for a host of reasons, was deeply susceptible to the mystical tradition that was part of their Sephardic heritage, especially as that tradition was transformed by the pain of the Spanish exodus and its aftermath, as we shall see, so that it transformed itself into a historical narrative obsessed with the theme of national— and cosmic — redemption. One of the most influential rabbis in the community, Isaac Aboab, was a kabbalist. Manasseh ben Israel, another Amsterdam rabbi who has been briefly mentioned (as having posed for Rembrandt), was also deeply influenced by its redemptive narrative. Spinoza gives ample evidence of being conversant with the esoteric Jewish texts — both Aboab and Manasseh were most likely his teachers in the yeshiva — though he was plainly irked by the kabbalist habit of seeing each word of Torah surrounded by an aura of mystical secret meanings:

  [T]hey say that the various readings are the symbols of profoundest mysteries and that mighty secrets lay hid in the twenty-eight hiatus which occur, nay, even in the very form of the letters. Whether they are actuated by folly and infantile devotion, or whether by arrogance and malice so that they alone may be held to possess the secrets of God, I know not; this much I do know, that I find in their writings nothing which has the air of a Divine secret, but only childish lucubration. I have read and known kabbalistic triflers, whose insanity provokes my unceasing astonishment.7

  Nonetheless, despite Spinoza’s impatience with the kabbalistic methodology, despite his emphatic rejection of the specific answers that kabbalah offers for the profound questions it poses; still many have claimed that the spirit of kabbalah was not altogether foreign to Spinoza. I have long thought that the distinctly Platonic tone of Spinoza’s philosophy, which consists not so much in his actual picture of reality but in the ecstatic impulse that irradiates it, and that sharply distinguishes his rationalism from both Descartes’ and Leibniz’s, came to him by way of the kabbalistic influences which were vividly alive in his Portuguese community. And Spinoza’s system will offer us, as we shall see, its own solutions to the two mysteries that are most central to kabbalistic speculations: the ontological mystery of why the world exists at all, and the ethical mystery of suffering: why does suffering — and of such mind-numbing magnitude— exist in this world, if God is both all-good and all-powerful?

  As the fortunes of Spanish Jewry declined, the kabbalists’ meditations on suffering deepened and darkened. The meaning of Jewish suffering, in particular, occupied more and more of their mystical speculations, and the theme of national redemption made its appearance. As the travails of Spanish Jewry increased, so increased the redemptive preoccupations of the Spanish kabbalists. In the time of exile, they speculated, the truth, too, had been exiled. The redemption of the world is intimately intertwined with the destiny of the Jews, and they believed themselves to be living in the messianic era. There were esoteric signs that the Messiah’s arrival was imminent, that he would reveal himself in the Jewish year 5250, or, in the world’s way of reckoning time, the year 1490.

  The Amsterdam Jewish community would be heavily influenced by these kabbalistic preoccupations, and th
e influence fell, though in subtle ways, on Spinoza, too. It is not that Spinoza has any sympathy at all for Jewish mysticism, or for mysticism of any sort for that matter. Spinoza’s rationalism is not mysticism. It is, rather, Cartesianism, though with some major tinkering. But the ultimate mysteries he seeks to solve with his revamped Cartesianism are nowhere to be found in Descartes — nor in Galileo, nor in any of the “scientist rationalists” who precede him. Instead, Spinoza turns the Cartesian methodology, meant to focus in the “natural light of reason,” to illuminate the mysteries of the kabbalists, no matter their dubious methods of enlightenment: the beginning of all things, the Ein Sof ’s relationship to creation and to our knowledge, the mysteries of evil and of suffering.

  These three strains in Jewish scholarship — the legalistic analysis of the Talmud; the rationalist semiphilosophical approach represented by Maimonides (semiphilosophical in the sense that not all questions are open to philosophy: religion has the final say); the mystical confabulations of the kabbalah — are, quite obviously, in tension with one another. The Talmud famously warns against the other two approaches, but the kabbalistic one in particular: “Whoever ponders on four things, it were better for him if he had not come into the world: what is above, what is below, what was before time, and what will be hereafter.”

  The story is told of four who went into the garden or orchard (it is the Persian word pardes) of mystical study. One went mad, one became an apostate, and one took his life. Only one came out whole, and this was Rabbi Akiva. Again the Talmud cautions that no one should study kabbalah who has not yet attained the age of forty, marriage, and a full belly — a degree of mundane ballast to safeguard against being “blasted by ecstasy” (as in Ophelia’s speech).

  Though the influence of ancient Greece made itself felt in both the Maimonidean philosophical and kabbalist ecstatic strains in Sephardic culture, still some of the most prominent participants in the Golden Age voiced wariness of the Hellenist legacy. For example, Judah Halevy (before 1075–1141), who was perhaps the greatest of all the Hebraic-Spanish poets, and whose religious poetry found its way into the liturgy, acknowledges the heavy influence of Greek philosophy on his Judeo-Spanish culture in his poetic admonition:

  Turn aside from mines and pitfalls.

  Let not Greek wisdom tempt you,

  For it bears the flowers only and not the fruits.

  To balance the impression of stern rectitude on the part of Judah Halevy, it is only fair to share other stanzas that show him in a softer, more sensual mood. (Iberian sensuality also contributed its flushed warmth to the heady concoction of the Golden Age of Spanish Jewry):

  Pity me, you of the hard heart and soft hips,

  Pity me, let me bend the knee before you!

  My heart is pure, but my eyes are not!

  There were other exoticisms, in addition to philosophy, mysticism, and poetry, that bloomed in the garden of Sephardic Judaism. Science, too, and particularly medicine, attracted many Spanish Jews. Rulers often had their own Jewish physicians, and often these physicians were themselves philosophers or poets or both. Both Maimonides and Judah Halevy had been doctors. And Jews contributed to Spanish science in other ways as well. For example, King Alphonso X commissioned Isaac ibn Said, the cantor of Toledo, to compile correct astronomical tables. The Alphonsine Tables were completed in 1256, the most complete heavenly topography ever assembled.

  It had not only been in intellectual, spiritual, and cultural inroads that the Spanish Jews had broken new ground, but also in more worldly-minded ways as well. They were not only poets and philosophers, scholars and mystics, but treasurers and advisers and landowners. Court Jews, who helped rulers in administrative and financial capacities, came to have real political clout. They were sent on diplomatic missions. They established family dynasties, so that they constituted their own “nobility.” According to some estimates, the Jews of the eleventh and twelfth centuries owned more than a third of all the estates in the county of Barcelona. A culture at once distinctively Jewish was yet contributing to the culture at large, and both cultures were incalculably the better for it.

  While the Spanish Jews were reaping the benefits of relative Moslem tolerance, rising to lustrous preeminence in the arts and sciences, the Jews of Christian northern Europe, the Ashkenazim, were pressed into squalid marginality or worse. The worse was truly terrible. Jews had been accused of causing the Black Plague by poisoning the wells, and mobs burned masses of them alive.

  In the towns of northern Europe — in Rouen, and Cologne, and Prague, and Mainz, and Worms — the Jews were on the brink of a wild terror that came down on them in the form of the Holy Crusades. “The Unholy Crusades” is what the Jews called them. In 1095, Pope Urban II had called for a Crusade to liberate the Holy Land from Moslem rule, and the knights and feudal lords, with the masses that they mobilized, wreaked their fury on the Jews they encountered on their way east, reasoning, “Why wait until we get to the Holy Land to punish the nonbelievers?” The French exegestist Rashi, whose commentaries on all the sacred Jewish works are still the first commentaries that an Orthodox child studies and will continue to consult throughout his life of scholarship, had witnessed the ravaging of the communities of the Rhine, the destruction of the centers of learning in which he himself had studied and taught. He composed a heart-wrenching prayer addressed not to God but to the Torah, beseeching that it intercede on High, so that its words, and not the Crusaders’ swords, would prove victorious in Jerusalem. “Explain thy lovely words for men to understand,” Rashi wrote, a poignant plea from a scholar devoted to explaining each and every word of all of Holy Scripture, sometimes spinning out an elaborate interpretation from nothing more than an extra squiggle over a Hebrew letter.

  In England the accession of the Crusader Richard had spelled disaster for the Jews, who were set upon by mobs in many towns. The most dramatic atrocity had taken place in York, during the Third Crusade. Jews had sought refuge in a castle. Surrounded by their enemies, with no hope of escape, they committed mass suicide. The first of the blood libels, accusing Jews of murder for ritualistic purposes, took place at Norwich in the twelfth century. And even when English rulers had offered protection to their Jewish communities, they had levied such exorbitant taxes on them, enriching the royal coffers, that finally the Jews were too impoverished tobe of any use. The culmination came in 1290. Edward I banished the now useless Jews from England, decreeing that every one of them must leave by All Saints’ Day.

  One of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, “The Prioress’s Tale,” tells of a widow’s child murdered by the Jews because he was singing the hymn to the Virgin “Alma redemptoris mater” while walking on the “Jewes Street” in some unspecified Asian city. The Jews cut his throat and then threw him into a pit, in Chaucer’s telling, where he miraculously continued to sing, so that the ritual murder was discovered and the Jews of the town were triumphantly tortured and massacred. Chaucer himself refers to the twelfth-century story of Hugh of Lincoln, one of the early blood libels. The poet could not himself have known any English Jews, since they had been banished from England a century before, but the tales of the libels lived on as poetic inspiration.

  France, too, had banished its Jews in the thirteenth century, King Louis IX (canonized in 1297 by Pope Boniface VIII) canceling all Christian debts to them and confiscating their property. They were eventually invited back, again for the economic advantages they could offer, but their position always teetered precariously toward disaster, and they were subject to ongoing systematic attempts to get them to see the “Jewish error” of their ways and convert.

  It was under the expansive tolerance of sophisticated Moslem life that the perfumed essence of Sephardic culture had been distilled, a culture poetic, philosophical, scientific, mystical, and also worldly. At certain times, among certain more fundamentalist Moslem groups, the tolerance abated. Maimonides, for example, had been forced to flee, as a boy, with his family, from his birthplace in Cordoba when it was conque
red by the Almohades, a Moslem sect that demanded the conversion of all Jews. But, for the most part, Moslem rule proved conducive to Sephardic flourishing.

  The Christian attempt to regain control over Spain had begun almost coterminously with the Moslem conquest in 711; the mountainous northwest region had always remained Christian. Over the centuries there was a steady erosion of Moslem dominion, especially as Moslem rule had been destabilized by invasions from the Moslem Berbers, whose outlook was far less enlightened than the Moors. By the end of the fifteenth century, the Moslems ruled over only Granada. But Sephardic culture continued on, and the Moslem and Jewish blend was at times and places enhanced, too, by Christian intermingling, achieving a state that was called convivencia, literally “living together.”

  As the Christians unified their hold on Spain, the sorts of intolerance that had dominated in other European lands began to creep into Sephardic existence as well. The first blood libel came to Spain in 1250. Soon after, the most famous Sephardic rabbi of the day, Nachmanides, provoked by an apostate Jew, engaged in a formal disputation on the relative merits of Christianity and Judaism. Nachmanides also known as the Ramban, came from the city of Gerona, the center of mystical Judaism, and he himself was an important kabbalistic thinker. The famous disputation, however, was held in Barcelona in 1263 over a span of four days, before the king and gathered bishops. Nachmanides had secured permission to speak frankly, and so he did, arguing that the evidence that Jesus had ushered in messianic times was scant, for had not the prophet Isaiah foretold of the perfect peace that would follow upon the Messiah’s coming?

  Yet from the days of Jesus until now that whole world has been filled with violence and pillage. The Christians, moreover, shed more blood than other nations; and how hard it would be for you, your Majesty … and for these knights of yours if they were not to learn war any more?