Instead, Spinoza was to offer something rather new under the seventeenth century’s European skies: a religion of reason. His religion asks us to do something that is far more difficult for us than the most severe practices of asceticism. It asks us to be reasonable. It asks us to look at ourselves with unblinking objectivity. It asks us to subdue our natural inclinations toward self-aggrandizement, our attempts to shore up our dreadful fragility by fictions of a God who favors us because we were born — thank God! — into the right group, or have gone through the nuisance of converting to it. And it asks us, as well, to face squarely the terror of our own mortality.
It is the self-deceptive fabrications that emanate out of these two weaknesses in our human nature — self-aggrandizement and death terror, both of them aspects of our own frightening and incurable finitude — that account for the fearsome force of the superstitious forms of religion. “It is fear, then, that engenders, preserves and fosters superstition,” observes Spinoza in the preface of his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Spinoza distinguishes between religion, which he endorses, and superstitions, which he condemns. Superstitions, as opposed to religion, offer us false cures for our finitude. They make us believe that we are more cosmically important than we are, that we have had bestowed on us — whether Jew, or Christian, or Moslem — a privileged position in the narrative of the world’s unfolding. And they make us believe that we can, if we have jumped through the right hoops, live on after our bodily deaths.
There is no privileged access to the truth: this follows from the nature of truth itself. Any viewpoint that denies that we are all, by reason of our very own faculties of reason, in precisely the same position to attain the truth, as well as any of the rewards of consolation that knowing the truth brings, is and must be false.
All things being equal, it is better to believe truly than falsely. But the variety of superstitious false beliefs, denying the universal accessibility of truth — the same truth — to all who exercise their faculty of reason, is particularly pernicious. It has delivered unspeakable harm to our species. Superstitions increase rather than diminish the awful suffering to which we are prone by reason of our incurable finitude. These misguided attempts to expand ourselves in the world only succeed in the most violent and painful contractions.
So it was in Spinoza’s day, and so it continues into ours. Spinoza could have predicted it. In fact, he did, deducing the weaknesses of our minds from our sorely tried finitude with mathematical rigor.
Yet, even though he deduced our weaknesses, he also tried to save us from them. There is no contradiction. It is the deduction itself that reveals the weaknesses as weaknesses. If we follow his reasoning, we will outgrow our tendencies toward skewed points of view.
Strict determinist that he was, Spinoza was no fatalist.
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IV
Identity Crisis
Personal identity: What is it that makes a person the very person that she is, herself alone and not another, an integrity of identity that persists over time, undergoing changes and yet still continuing to be — until she does not continue any longer, at least not unproblematically?
I stare at the picture of a small child at a summer’s picnic, clutching her big sister’s hand with one tiny hand while in the other she has a precarious hold on a big slice of watermelon that she appears to be struggling to have intersect with the small o of her mouth. That child is me. But why is she me? I have no memory at all of that summer’s day, no privileged knowledge of whether that child succeeded in getting the watermelon into her mouth. It’s true that a smooth series of contiguous physical events can be traced from her body to mine, so that we would want to say that her body is mine; and perhaps bodily identity is all that our personal identity consists in. But bodily persistence over time, too, presents philosophical dilemmas. The series of contiguous physical events has rendered the child’s body so different from the one I glance down on at this moment; the very atoms that composed her body no longer compose mine. And if our bodies are dissimilar, our points of view are even more so. Mine would be as inaccessible to her — just let her try to figure out The Ethics—as hers is now to me. Her thought processes, prelinguistic, would largely elude me.
Yet she is me, that tiny determined thing in the frilly white pinafore. She has continued to exist, survived her childhood illnesses, the near-drowning in a rip current on Rockaway Beach at the age of twelve, other dramas. There are presumably adventures that she — that is that I — can’t undergo and still continue to be herself. Would I then be someone else, or would I just no longer be? Were I to lose all sense of myself — were schizophrenia or demonic possession, a coma or progressive dementia to remove me from myself— would it be I who would be undergoing those trials, or would I have quit the premises? Would there then be someone else, or would there be no one?
Is death one of those adventures from which I can’t emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists. A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does exist, then what is she, and what makes that thing that she now is identical with the beautiful girl laughing at her little sister on that forgotten day? Can she remember that summer’s day while I cannot?
Personal identity poses a host of questions that are, in addition to being philosophical and abstract, deeply personal. It is, after all, one’s very own person that is revealed as problematic. How much more personal can it get?
The continued inquisitorial persecution of conversos had added yet a new dimension to the mystery of personal identity, merging it with the mystery of Jewish identity. What is it to be Jewish? Is it a matter of creed, of culture, of family or blood — or, as we would now put it, of genes? Having once been Jewish, can one then cease to be Jewish? Or is a Jew essentially a Jew, no matter what religion he might practice or even think himself to be a member of? Was the rejection of Jesus as Christ fated to be repeated, a reversion to type that was embedded in the inherited point of view? Just what sort of an attribute is being Jewish, and how significant is it in constituting the personal identity of those who are Jews?
Jews were not allowed on the Iberian Peninsula. Those who had remained had converted. Were they nevertheless still Jews? Were those who practiced their ever more deformed and Christianized secret Judaism — who spoke of their matzahs as “holy bread,” similar to the sacramental host of Mass, and of “St. Esther” as their patron saint — still Jews?1
Were those who genuinely gave up their ancestral religion, those who no longer even really knew of it, perhaps weren’t even aware of their family history, even so still Jews? Were such ardent believers as St. Teresa of Ávila, who not only gave themselves wholeheartedly to Christianity, but were accepted, even canonized, still incorrigibly Jewish?
Implicit in the constancy of inquisitorial attention is an assumption of ineradicable Jewish essentialism. No matter how sincere the conversion, no matter how devoutly Christian the life, Jewish ancestry branded one as forever suspect. It was as if certain propositional attitudes — most notably the rejection of Jesus of Galilee as the Messiah — were transmitted in the blood, making true Christian sincerity all but impossible, and for all the generations to come. Recidivism was biologically determined, and the formidable office of the Inquisition was necessary to pry open the outer Christian carapace to reveal the Jewish substance within. A Jew is a Jew is a Jew.
The Marranos were enmeshed in some of the same identity-metaphysics as were their persecutors. For them, too, there was an inviolable fact of the matter concerning true Jewish identity that remained untouched by all outer performance. They may have gone through formal Christian conversions, taken the sacrament, and gone every week to confession, but within the confessional of their inner being they, too,
continued to insist on their essential Jewishness.
A Sephardic friend tells me his grandfather used to tell him a joke that perhaps goes back to Marrano times. A Jew has undergone a conversion process, in the course of which the priest has put his hands on the Jew’s head and repeated several times, “You were a Jew, now you’re Christian, you were a Jew, now you’re Christian.” A few weeks pass and the priest comes on a Friday to see how his converso is getting on. The priest finds, to his shock and dismay, that the New Christian is not eating fish for his Friday night dinner, as he ought to as a good Catholic, but rather a roasted chicken. The Jew, ordered to account for himself, explains that he had simply put his hand on the chicken’s head and repeated several times, “You were a chicken, now you’re fish, you were a chicken, now you’re fish.”
Despite the joke, one should not equate the Marrano’s notion of private Jewish identity with the Inquisition’s essentialist — essentially racist — presupposition. The Marrano’s Jewish identity was not so much passively received but actively acquired, even if the activity dare not show itself, requiring precisely the same unobservable inwardness as the fact of Jewishness itself. For the Marrano, the inner avowal of a secret covenant with the nation of Israel, enacted in the inviolable interiority of their own minds, was the very act that made them Jewish. Being Jewish consisted in the private performative act — one was Jewish because one avowed oneself to be.
And, too, the performative act of acknowledging oneself as Jewish also, for the Marrano, effected salvation. Accepting a historical concept of “the chosen people,” interpreted in terms of the reception of the Mosaic Code of Law, to acknowledge oneself as Jewish, and thus the recipient of these laws — even if they could not be followed — entailed salvation. Thus their redemption, too, was enacted within the silence of their Judeo-actualizing avowals.
Ironically, the emphasis that they placed on this dichotomous concept of personal “salvation”—one is either saved or one is not — is itself Christian, and an indication of how far from historical Judaism their understanding had strayed. Jews do not traditionally possess such an all-or-nothing concept of personal salvation as is prominent in Christianity. The dichotomous concept of personal salvation is connected, too, with a certain view of personal identity. The very person who one is is changed with the passing from being unsaved to saved. There is a radical discontinuity between the person one was and the person one has become (the born-again). Applying the Christian concept of salvation to their Jewish predicament, the Marranos located their salvation in the acceptance of the Laws of Moses. As the Christian is saved by accepting Jesus as his Savior, so the Marrano was saved by accepting the hegemony over him of the Laws of Moses, as transmitted to his ancestors.
But of course those Laws could not be outwardly followed, though many went to dangerous lengths to perform some small ritual of Jewish significance. So there was, for example, the Marrano “trick” of hanging a statue of the Madonna on the doorpost of one’s house and placing within her foot the prayer of the Shema — Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One! — so that the Marrano could transform the Madonna into a mezuzah, to be kissed upon entering and leaving their homes, as religious Jews will kiss the mezuzah.
But the freedom to fulfill the Mosaic Laws was, to say the least, subject to severe limitations — male circumcision, for example, was obviously out of the question — and over the years the content of the Laws dimmed. Salvation consisted, more and more, in the inner acknowledgment of these outwardly unperformable Laws. What was performed was one’s acknowledgment of “them,” whatever they were. It was the line of historical causal continuity between the event at Sinai and the personal acknowledgment now that meant that the Laws one acknowledged — even if they could not be performed, even if one did not retain the knowledge of how they ought to be performed — were still the Laws of Moses holding sway over one’s will.
The Marrano insisted on an essential Jewish adherence preserved within a Christian life, and this created a dilemma for the rabbis of the time. The rabbinical responsa of the time from outside Iberia are filled with painful discussions of particular Marrano cases. Does the inward avowal of distorted “Mosaic Law” make a converso, who goes to church and prays outwardly to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, a Jew? The Trinity seem to be, on the face of it, a negation of the holy words of the Shema: the Lord is One! Insofar as it is a deviation from monotheism, it is avodah zorah, idol worship. The Talmud teaches that in general, life being holy, halakha can be sacrificed in order to save one’s life. However, there are three sins so serious that a Jew must die rather than transgress them. These are forbidden sex, murder, and idol worship. Many rabbis deemed the Trinity a form of idolatry and therefore saw Marranism as an unjustifiable alternative to martyrdom. And if, as many rabbis believed, it is the practice of the Law that make a Jew a Jew, then in what sense could the Marranos be Jews? Their predicament was tragic, but compassion could not, at least for some of the rabbis in the debate, override halakha.
The Inquisition gave prominence to the question of Jewish identity. In its cruelest interpretation, the Inquisition insisted that Jewishness is part of the personal identity of the Jew, and one that is passed on through the blood. There was no outward act that would transform the substantive essence. Wafers and wine could be transformed into the flesh and the blood of Christ, but no rite or ritual could turn a Jew into a Christian.
In the 1630s there were again a rash of accusations in Portugal that the conversos were crypto-Judaizers, and that they were trying to convert Old Christians, particularly their Christian servants. The inquisitor of Llerena wrote in 1628 or soon thereafter, “From the moment of its conception, every fetus permanently carries with it the moral attributes — in the case of the Marranos, the moral depravity — of its parents.”2 This was not a new idea in Portugal. The sermons preached on the occasion of autos-da-fé throughout the fifteenth century often stressed the immutability of the Jews, a moral trait passed on from generation to generation.
The former conversos who came to Amsterdam brought with them the interwoven preoccupations with Jewish identity and personal identity that the Inquisition had forced on them. While the rash of accusations were going on in Portugal, conversos kept arriving, leaving relatives and friends behind.
In the relative freedom of Protestant Amsterdam, the former Marranos set about organizing themselves into the kind of community required for the full performance of the halakha from which they had been severed. At first, rabbis had to be imported to instruct them, though they soon started producing their own; a model school was organized; an elaborate hierarchical system was erected for guidance as well as for chastisement.
But the old painful dilemmas would not so easily be laid to rest; how could they possibly be when the trauma had gone so deep and those who walked the streets of the Vlooienburg and the Breestraat had New Christian friends and relatives in Portugal still kept under the ever watchful eye of the Inquisition? The Jews of Amsterdam — especially those whose unorthodoxy brought them into conflict with the rabbis— were themselves still objects of pointed interest to the Church, and inquisitorial spies walked among the Dutch Sephardim.
In fact, we owe what scant knowledge we have of Spinoza himself during the period that had been known as his “lost years”—the four years between his excommunication and his known fraternization with various dissenting Christians, known collectively as the Collegiants — to investigative diggings in the records of the Inquisition by the historian Israel Révah. Révah discovered reports on the young Spinoza from two different sources. One was a Latin-American Augustinian monk, Friar Tomás Solanao y Robles, who had visited Amsterdam in late 1658 and voluntarily reported to the Madrid Inquisition upon his return. He volunteered the information to clear himself of any suspicion he may have attracted by traveling in non-Catholic lands. And then on the following day, a report was filed, this time upon request, by a Spanish soldier, Captain Miguel Pérez de Maltranil
la3 Spinoza’s surfacing to light from out of the medieval murk of the inquisitorial files of the Church — which still, apparently, considered his soul of their concern, since he was the offspring of conversos, and so, in its eyes, still Christian— underscores the anachronistic audacity of Spinoza’s choice: to define his life on his terms, not as a heterodox Jew or Christian. But it underscores, as well, how vividly present the powerful and hidden forces of the Inquisition remained in the lives of the community — even in the life of the banished of the community, in a heretic Jew like Spinoza.
The obsession with the questions of who is a Jew, what is a Jew, can a person be un-Judaized, re-Judaized — all of these questions intertwined with the Marrano preoccupation with redemptive possibilities — would have been, one imagines, like an incessant nervous murmur registering just below audibility, a constant discordant accompaniment to conversations in homes and streets and synagogues, as well as in the inner recesses of unquiet minds. Sometimes the murmur would break out into painfully articulated communal conflicts and contretemps, ripping apart whatever façade of placid Dutch burghers they might have been trying to assume.
The case of Uriel da Costa, in the 1620s when Spinoza was a child, had been one such crisis that had lain uneasily on the collective conscience. His is a tragic, if also controversial, example of the confusions and disillusions that accompanied the attempt to be reintegrated into historical Judaism. The internal aspects of Spinoza’s story, so to speak — a sense of the experiences and reflections that led up to his break with his close-knit community and of how he felt about the treatment he received — are hard to come by, Spinoza himself maintaining the perfect high-minded disregard for the merely personal that is consistent with the impersonal point of view that he champions. In contrast, da Costa left behind an achingly personal testament, which he entitled Exemplar humanae vitae, documenting — though in a biased and not altogether reliable manner — his troubled relationship with the Amsterdam community, which would twice excommunicate him. The Examplar was, in a sense, his suicide note.
Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity Page 11