The catastrophe of the Spanish expulsion changed the nature of kabbalah. The kabbalists of pre-1492 had not been particularly messianic. They had conceived of spiritual salvation as compatible with life in galut, in exile. Their spiritual efforts were bent on uncovering the esoteric meaning of the universe in order to effect a personal union with the Godhead, individual salvation. It was in the wake of the Sephardic disaster that kabbalah would become increasingly apocalyptic and messianic.11
In the sixteenth century, the kabbalistic giant Isaac Luria, known as Ha-Ari, or the Lion, would come to Safed, and Lurianic kabbalah, still the essence of modern kabbalah, would emanate from out of the narrow medieval alleyways and synagogues of that golden-lit city to sweep across the lands of the Diaspora, infiltrating all levels of Jewish life. It transformed not only practice, with new rituals of meditation and purification, but the very way Jews constructed and understood the narrative of their own religion.
Originally a recluse who would see his wife and children only on the Sabbath, Luria believed himself to see visions of the prophet Elijah, who initiated him into the esoteric system. Luria’s mother was Sephardic, though his father was Ashkenazic, and among his small circle of disciples, many of whom believed him to be the Messiah, were Sephardic refugees from the Inquisition. Among the inner circle were Joseph Karo, whom you will recall was the author of the Shulkhan Arukh (The Set Table), which Orthodox Jews, Ashkenazic and Sephardic, regard as the official compendium of Jewish Law. Karo, who was born in Toledo, had messianic motivations for his codification of halakha, since the right observance of the Law would hasten the coming of the Messiah. Also in Luria’s inner circle was Hayyim Vital, originally of Calabria, who was responsible for writing down the lectures of Luria in the form in which they were disseminated throughout Jewry.
Lurianic kabbalah, transmitted from his visions of Elijah, offered a new narrative to explain the moral history of the suffering world, and the role that the Jews were chosen to play in that moral history. It is a tale of a shattering— a shevirah—at the very beginning of the creation of the world, when the Ein Sof, or That Without End, contracted itself so that the world could be created. The divine light entered into the ten vessels that were waiting to receive it, and some were shattered, the shards falling into the abyss from which the world arose, carrying sparks of the light that were trapped within. From the moment of its first being, then, the world was not as it ought to have been. The exile of the Jews is the historical symbol for the disruption and displacement brought about by the shevirah. As Gershom Scholem writes: “This situation of not being where one ought to be, viz. of being removed from one’s rightful place, is what is meant by the term ‘exile.’ In fact, since the breaking of the vessels, exile is the fundamental and exclusive— albeit hidden — mode of all existence. In Lurianism the historical notion of exile had become a cosmic symbol.”12 So, too, spiritual advance must be seen on a cosmic scale. It is tikkun ha-olam—healing the world — which in mystical terms is described as the gathering up of the shards of the broken vessels, the divine light caught within them. The rituals and prayers of purification that Ha-Ari devised — what is often called “practical kabbalah”—were means of effecting the tikkun. When all is restored to its rightful place, the Messiah will come; his arrival will not deliver our redemption to us, but rather signal that redemption has, through man’s spiritual efforts, been achieved.
The majority of the Sephardic exiles were not kabbalists, and they headed not toward Galilee but to the far closer land of Portugal, where history would not wait long to deliver them another of its cruel twists. For though the Inquisition had not yet arrived in this part of the Iberian Peninsula, it soon would, and with equal if not greater ferocity. Manuel I declared, in 1497, a mere five years after the Spanish expulsion, that all his Jewish subjects must be forcibly converted. Not wishing to make the same economically ruinous mistake as the Spanish rulers (whose daughter, Isabella, was his fiancée), Manuel had not given his Jews the opportunity for emigrating. He wanted to extirpate Judaism while retaining the highly lucrative skills and resources of the formerly Jewish. He also decreed, after entreaties from the Sephardim, that he would give the New Christians a period of grace in which to adjust to their new faith; backsliding into Judaism would not be punished until 1527, a period which was then extended to 1534. Practically, this meant that Portuguese crypto-Judaism had some time to evolve its secret practices, and it proved far more tenacious there than in Spain. Also the Portuguese conversos were, by definition annusim, choosing the traumas of exile from the beloved Sepharad over conversion. Such stalwarts were predisposed toward Marranism.
In fact, a highly complicated culture of fraught subterfuge evolved in Spain and even more intricately in Portugal, an elaborate congeries of masked identities and coded phrases, to be understood only by those who shared the mortal secret. Outward Christian behavior was not what it appeared to be — there are still Spanish Catholics who, before entering a church, mumble a meaningless “incantation” that they were taught to recite by their equally uncomprehending elders, and which linguists have unraveled into a degenerated Hebrew, disavowing the rituals in which the worshipper is about to engage.
The externalities may sometimes have been bogus, but the veiled internality was tenuous as well, its precise content blurring with the years. The crypto-Jews may have disassociated themselves from their assumed identity, but, inevitably, the outward forms seeped inward. The Jewishness they were guarding became unconsciously Christianized, absorbing the symbolism and themes of the Church. As the philosopher Yirmiyahu Yovel describes it: “Religious duality penetrated the consciousness and the subconsciousness of the most ardent Judaizers. Even the Marrano martyrs and heroes were rarely Jews in the conventional sense. The clandestine character of worship, the Catholic education, the lack of Jewish instruction, the mental mixture of faiths, and the isolation from Jewish communities outside Iberia created a special phenomenon in the history and sociology of religion: a form of faith that is neither Christian nor Jewish.”13
Of course, not all of the conversos were stricken by religious duality, at least not consciously. Many, perhaps the majority, were genuine in their conversion, indoctrinating their children in the new faith. Even if the original conversos were not motivated by Christian zeal, their offspring, brought up as Catholics, often were. Some became important figures in the history of Christianity itself, important in both conventional and, perhaps even more interestingly, unconventional ways, their torn identity playing a role in the development of Christianity.
St. Teresa of Ávila, for example, the brilliant mystical writer and Carmelite reformer, belonged to a New Christian family, even though many of the Catholic Web sites I’ve visited list her simply as deriving of Spanish noble stock. It’s true that her grandfather, a Toledan merchant named Juan Sánchez de Toledo, transferred his business to Ávila, where he succeeded in having his children marry into families of the nobility, which was a path to which many conversos aspired as a way of securing some degree (by no means absolute) of security against the charges of secret Judaizing. The future Catholic saint was born in 1515, twenty-three years after the Great Expulsion. She became one of the alumbrados, or illuminated ones, as the Spanish Christian mystics were known. (She was also the teacher of St. John of the Cross, another alumbrado and author of Dark Night of the Soul.) Her extraordinary personality, as well as the Christian sincerity of her upbringing, can be inferred from this tale of the saint I got from a Catholic Web site: “Her courage and enthusiasm were readily kindled, an early example of which trait occurred when at the age of 7 she left home with her brother Rodrigo with the intention of going to Moorish territory to be beheaded for Christ, but they were frustrated by their uncle, who met the children as they were leaving the city and brought them home (Ephrem de la Madre de Dios, Tiempo y Vida de Sta. Teresa).”
St. Teresa’s Interior Castle, written reluctantly as a guide for her Carmelite Sisters, is one of the classic Christian texts, a maste
rpiece of mystical literature. The castle, or mansion, as its known in Spanish, is the soul, which has, in her metaphorical vision, seven rooms. Spiritual advance, made through the medium of prayer, is a progressive movement through these rooms, drawing ever nearer to the center of the mansion, which is where one finds unity with God. Teresa makes of spiritual activity an entirely inward private process, the self ’s communing with itself alone, with all external influences, other than God Himself, rendered irrelevant; and the case can be made that her approach to spirituality has much to do with her converso background.14
Spinoza, too, will emphasize the entirely inward and self-reliant process of spiritual advancement — though in his case the medium is not prayer but mathematically rigorous reason. It is intriguing to speculate how the Marrano psyche, necessarily oriented inward, found such different expressions in these two spiritual geniuses.
By the 1550s the full force of the Inquisition fell on all conversos suspected of Judaizing; and they were all suspected. Life was so unendurable, even for those who were faithfully Christian, that some in Portugal returned to Spain, where at least less attention was paid to each and every New Christian. In 1580 the two kingdoms were united, making travel between them easier. And although emigration had been outlawed for them, many conversos, whether secret Judaizers or not, tried to escape the Iberian Peninsula. Some left clandestinely, others secured permission to go on business trips from which they never returned, though there was always the fear as to what repercussions would befall relatives left behind. There are even reported cases of conversos obtaining permission to make a pilgrimage to the Vatican, and in this way effecting their escape.
By the sixteenth century the term “Portuguese” was simply understood through much of Europe, Asia, and Latin America as meaning Jewish, as more and more New Christians tried to circumvent the laws against immigration. A chosen destination was the city of Amsterdam, whose burghers may not have welcomed the refugees with open arms, but were not inclined to pry into personal religious beliefs, as long as they were praticed with decorum and discretion.
Sephardim began arriving in Amsterdam as early as 1590, some eleven years after the Union of Utrecht (1579) and the birth of the United Provinces of the Netherlands as a Protestant state now independent from Catholic Spain. They didn’t openly reveal themselves as Jews for several years. One of the legends is that foreign chanting was heard one night, coming from a darkened house. The Calvinists suspected papists and brought the authorities to investigate. The chanting, however, turned out to be Hebrew, which, though curious, wasn’t as threatening to the Protestants as a cadre of Catholics would have been.
In 1614 the Jews were able to purchase some land right outside Amsterdam, in Ouderkerk, as a burial ground. They had to wait until 1615 before Jewish settlement was officially recognized, though outward worship was still forbidden, and the conservative Calvinist clergy were always a hostile force with which to contend. The esteemed legal scholar Hugo Grotius, who had been one of those consulted when the legal status of the newly arrived Jews was being considered, opined that “plainly, God desires them to live somewhere. Why then not here rather than elsewhere? … Besides, the scholars among them may be of some service to us by teaching us the Hebrew language.” But knowing that the Jews had their share of “atheists and impious people,” he demanded the condition that all Jews over the age of fourteen state their faith in God, Moses, the prophets, and the afterlife.
In 1619 the Amsterdam city council officially granted its resident Jews the right to practice their religion, though imposing some restrictions on their economic and political rights and enacting various laws concerning intermarriage and social activities with Christians. They also demanded that the Amsterdam Jews observe Orthodoxy, not deviating from the Mosaic Code, nor from the belief that there is “an omnipotent God the creator, [and] that Moses and the prophets revealed the truth under divine inspiration, and that there is another life after death in which good people will receive their recompense and wicked people their punishment.” In other words, the Amsterdam authorities were demanding that their Jews believe at least three of the Thirteen Articles of Faith that Maimonides had articulated. Unlike under the Catholic rulers of the lands they were fleeing, the Dutch Jews now had neighbors who would tolerate their presence just so long as they remained good believing Jews. It had to have been a welcome change, all things considered. Still, such conditions for tolerance aren’t entirely reassuring, prodding wounds that hadn’t begun to close, reminding people who hardly needed reminding that security is a rare and fragile thing. The Jews of the Netherlands remained a “foreign group” until 1657 (the year following Spinoza’s excommunication), when they were finally recognized as subjects of the republic.
But even before recognition of citizenship, they had set about organizing themselves — intensely organizing themselves — into a Jewish community. The Amsterdam Portuguese-Jewish community was the only community of former Marranos that didn’t continue for years to hide their religion but practiced openly as soon as they felt they safely could, a testament to the relative tolerance of their Dutch neighbors. Still, as my old teacher Mrs. Schoenfeld had put it in her inimitable way: “Amsterdam was the most tolerant city in all of Europe. But don’t think that it was as free as what you girls have come to take for granted here. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that it was as tolerant as New York City in 1967.”
By 1614, a year before they had any official legal status, the Sephardic community already had two congregations, Beth Jacob (The House of Jacob) and Neve Shalom (Dwelling of Peace). Beth Jacob was meeting in an old warehouse and Neve Shalom, which had raised money to build a synagogue but had been denied its use through the influence of the city’s Calvinist clergy, was meeting in a private home. Before long, a controversy within Beth Jacob split the synagogue into two, and a breakaway synagogue, Beth Israel, was the result. The controversy might have revolved around the hiring of a shokhet, or ritual slaughterer. The three Amsterdam synagogues would eventually recoalesce into one congregation and build a magnificent edifice, still a showplace today.
It was to be a highly structured community, with head rabbis and rabbinical assistants, khakhamim—literally, “wise men”—themselves arranged in hierarchical ordering. Each congregation had its own board of lay governors, the parnassim, who had jurisdiction over a great number of issues— business, social, political, judicial, and, trumping the rabbis, even religious. The parnassim, for example, set the standards for charitable donations and the koshering of meat. They also made the decisions concerning bans and — their ultimate means of control — writs of excommunication. Kherem, which most often was temporary, entailed isolation from the community, and it was employed surprisingly often by Amsterdam’s Sephardim, certainly surprising to our contemporary antiauthoritarian sensibilities.
In 1622 a more centralized communal board of governors, the Senhores Deputados, was established, consisting of two parnassim from each of the three synagogues, though for the most important decisions all fifteen parnassim—the Senhores Quinze — would convene. This highly organized, hierarchical structure might strike one as aspiring toward an approximation of the Catholic Church itself, a Vatican wanna be. That is, I think, how it struck Spinoza, who was to write in the preface of his Tractatus:
I have often wondered that men who make a boast of professing the Christian religion, which is a religion of love, joy, peace, temperance, and honest dealing with all men, should quarrel so fiercely and display the bitterest hatred towards one another day by day, so that these latter characteristics make known a man’s creed more readily than the former. Matters have long reached such a pass that a Christian, Turk, or Jew or heathen can generally be recognized as such only by his physical appearance or dress, or by his attendance at a particular place of worship, or by his profession of a particular belief and his allegiance to some leader. But as for their way of life, it is the same for all. In seeking the causes of this unhappy state of affair
s, I am quite certain that it stems from a wide-spread popular attitude of mind which looks on the ministries of the Church as dignities, its offices as posts of emolument and its pastors as eminent personages.
But however grandiose their ecclesiastical arrangement, the returning Marranos of Amsterdam felt the need to turn to older Sephardic communities, particularly Venice, for guidance. They sought the opinions of the Venetian rabbis when there were interpretations of Law to be decided, controversies to be resolved.
There were to be many controversies. The psychological atmosphere of the community was fraught, to put it mildly. The dark history that the returning Jews brought with them saw to that. The perilous hopes for the religion that had been clung to in secrecy turned, in some, to fierce religiosity, messianic and mystical. In others, it turned to disappointment, disillusion, attempts to argue with the rabbis as to what true Judaism ought to be, sometimes ultimate rejection and a return to Christianity.
Mrs. Schoenfeld had mentioned the sad case of Uriel da Costa, a returning New Jew whose dramatically played-out difficulties in assimilating himself to halakhic Judaism sparked a crisis for the community. Though he was, by all accounts, a particularly unstable man — as Mrs. Schoenfeld had put it, meshugga—there was something in his constitutional marginality, fated always to be an outside no matter where he turned, that captures the inner turmoil of the community, struggling so hard to lay down a system of double roots, in the soil of the Low Lands and, even deeper, in the body of historical Judaism.
And then of course there was to be the case of Baruch Spinoza, who turned neither to the Christianity his Portuguese ancestors had outwardly practiced, nor to the rabbinical Judaism of halakha. Nor was he interested in trying to reform the existing religions, as da Costa had dreamed of doing first with Christianity and then with Judaism, or as St. Teresa of Ávila, yet another converso, had managed to accomplish with the Carmelite order of nuns, reforming it so that it answered better to Jesus’ vow of poverty and humility.
Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity Page 10