Uriel da Costa had been baptized Gabriel, born in Oporto, Portugal. His father was a devout Catholic, but his mother came from a converso family and, as the work of recent historians has unearthed, most likely observed some of the secret rites of Marranism. Gabriel studied canon law at the University of Coimbra and was a church treasurer. Da Costa described himself as having become disillusioned with Christianity. In studying and comparing the New Testament with the Five Books of Moses, he found contradictions and reached the conclusion that Judaism, from which Christianity had sprung, presented the authentic experience, with Christianity a corruption of it. He also confessed that Christianity’s emphasis on hell’s damnation terrified him. Soon both he and his five brothers were inwardly identifying themselves as Jewish. After the death of their Catholic father, the six boys, together with their mother, Banca, determined to leave Portugal.
He presents himself as having voluntarily left Portugal for the freedom to practice Judaism openly, but the historian Israel Révah, researching the records of the Oporto Inquisition, found that, unsurprisingly, the converso had attracted the attention of the office of the Inquisition, which was preparing a devastating case against him, so his emigration was most likely not simply a spiritual journey but an attempt to escape with his life.
Once in Amsterdam, da Costa found that the Judaism being practiced there did not live up to his expectations. The departures from the pristine ancient religion of Moses were, in his eyes, unjustifiable extensions of God’s direct revelations. The accretions of rabbinical ordinances and Talmudic rulings, the codification of the so-called Oral Law, offended da Costa’s construction of what Judaism ought to be. The organized hierarchical religion of the rabbis was as much a corruption of the original Mosaic Code as was Catholicism, and da Costa set about single-handedly to reform it, to purify it of all its post-Mosaic content. As the historian Yirmiyahu Yovel points out, we must read Examplar with several grains of salt. It is highly dubious that da Costa believed that “the religion of Moses had been petrified for over two millennia, waiting for Uriel da Costa to perform an unhistorical leap into it. However vaguely and unwillingly, da Costa was aware that post-biblical Judaism was different from the original model. But he hoped and believed that the fluid New Jewish situation offered a historical opportunity to remedy this. … Da Costa expected that (unlike the Catholicism of which he had despaired) Judaism could lend itself to a purifying reform in the original direction of the Bible, especially within the New Jewish communities where, out of a minimal and shattered basis, former Marranos were trying to reconstruct a Jewish life for themselves. Since these New Jews were already engaged in an effort to recapture their lost essence, they may as well have regressed further back to their origins and restored the purer biblical Judaism that elsewhere had been obliterated.”4
Needless to say, his efforts did not find favor with the rabbis of Amsterdam, who were charged with the task of transporting the former Marranos back to the halakhic Judaism from which history had separated them.
Da Costa reacted with fury to the intransigence of the religious authorities of the community, and in search of a more authentic Judaism left Amsterdam for the Sephardic community of Hamburg, which did not respond any more favorably to his reforming ideas than Amsterdam had. In 1616 he composed a set of eleven theses attacking what he called “the vanity and invalidity of the traditions and ordinances of the Pharisees.” He claimed that the rabbis, in equating Talmudic interpretations with the Torah, “make the word of man equal to that of God.”
On August 14, 1618, da Costa was put in kherem by the chief rabbi of Venice, Rabbi Leon de Medina, who was the teacher of the chief rabbi of Amsterdam, Rabbi Morteira. He was also put under a ban in Hamburg, and returned to Amsterdam, still fighting. He committed his protest to writing, publishing in 1624 his feisty Exame das tradições phariseas (Examination of the Pharisaic Traditions), which objects to such laws as male circumcision, the laying on of tefillin, or phylacteries, and also vehemently protests the extrabiblical inclusion of the doctrine of immortality and divine retribution. This doctrine, he confesses, was precisely what had driven him from Catholicism. “In truth, the most distressful and wretched time in my life was when I believed that eternal bliss or misery awaited man and that according to his works he would earn that bliss or that misery.” He was terrified by the eschatological metaphysics and found peace only when he realized the absurdity of the claim that the soul might survive the death of the body, since the soul is only an aspect of the body, the vital source that animates it and also accounts for rationality. It thus has as little possibility of surviving the death of the body as has any other corporeal part, da Costa argued, and any religion that claims otherwise is founded on error. Biblical Judaism makes no such claim: “The first proof is an argumentum ex silentio: the Law nowhere indicates that the human soul is immortal or that another life, whether of punishment or glory, awaits it.” In fact, he claims that the whole thrust of the Bible’s message points to the mortality of the soul: “Once he is dead, nothing remains of a man, neither does he ever return to life.” Those who pursue virtue with an eye to the afterlife delude themselves with superstition. “It is in this life that the righteous and the wicked receive their just deserts. … Let no one be so stupid and mad as to believe otherwise.”
The rabbis of Amsterdam responded by placing the would-be reformer under their own ban of excommunication: “Seeing that through pure obduracy and arrogance he persists in his wickedness and wrong opinions, the delegates from the three boards of elders, together with the boards of warders and the consent of the khakhamim, ordained he be excluded as a person already excommunicated [i.e., in Venice and Hamburg] and accursed of God, and that … no communication with him is henceforth permitted to anyone except his brothers, who are granted eight days to wind up their affairs with him.” Nor was this all. Da Costa reports that the “senators and rulers of the Jews” lodged a complaint against him with the public magistrate, charging him with the heresy of publishing a book purporting to disprove the mortality of the soul, and he was arrested and thrown in prison for ten days, until his brothers bailed him out. His book was publicly burned. Once he was excommunicated, no Jews were allowed to have anything more to do with him, even his brothers, on pain of being placed in kherem themselves. Only his old mother, who had changed her name to Sarah upon arriving in Amsterdam, stood by him, so that she, too, was placed in kherem. In fact, the Amsterdam rabbis wrote for halakhic advice to the Venetian rabbis as to whether she should be allowed to be buried in the Jewish cemetery. “Therefore we desire from you in case she dies in this time of resistance if we could let her lay on the soil without burying her at all or should we bury her in consideration of her honorable sons [Uriel’s brothers].” On October 4, 1628, a “Sara de Costa” was buried in the Beth-Chaim cemetery at Ouderkerk, indicating what the Venetian pasak, or ruling, had been.
But the community was under rabbinical orders to regard the religious renegade as a pariah. Da Costa writes in the Examplar that even children mocked him on the streets and threw stones at his windows. Nevertheless, da Costa did not absent himself from the community. Of course, he was already under kherem in Venice and Hamburg, and he must have reasoned that wherever he went Jewish communities would find him intolerable. But interestingly, even though he had reached the intellectual conclusion that Judaism, like Christianity, was but a man-made system arising out of man’s needs, and that the true religion was deism — the belief, based solely on reason and not revelation, in a God who created the universe and then left it to its own devices, assuming no control over life and never intervening in the course of history or of natural phenomena — still, on an emotional level, da Costa seemed incapable of taking leave of Judaism, or at least of the Jewish community. He lived among the Amsterdam Sephardim as a despised individual, clinging to the margins of a world that had become for him an open narcissistic wound. Yet he did not simply pick himself up and quit Jewish life decisively. Though the Jews
had excommunicated him he was not prepared to excommunicate the Jews. His disinclination to think of himself as outside the religious community is telling and casts a dramatic contrast with Spinoza.
In 1633, da Costa sought reconciliation with the Jewish rabbis, using a cousin as an intermediary, and succeeded in having his kherem lifted by outwardly recanting his views. Since his inward beliefs remained at variance with the community’s, his recantation amounted to a reenactment of the Marrano experience, only now within the community of former Marranos. He writes in the Examplar that he resolved to live “like an ape among apes.” But sometimes, apparently, his mimicry fell short. A nephew who lived with him found his preparation of meat to be not in accord with Jewish ritual and told other family members, including the formerly helpful cousin, who, feeling betrayed, became, at least according to da Costa’s account, da Costa’s sworn enemy, interceding wherever he could, in business and personal affairs, to ruin Uriel’s life, including stepping in to prevent a marriage.
A short time later, still under suspicion, Uriel was asked for advice by two Christians who claimed that they were interested in converting to Judaism. One of the conditions on which the Sephardim had been granted permission to live in Amsterdam was that they not proselytize among the Christians in an attempt to convert them. Da Costa, as we can well imagine, certainly had little reason to encourage outsiders to enter the community in which he himself felt like an outsider, and apparently he dissuaded the Christians, but perhaps in terms that were too vehement. He made them promise not to report his words to the rabbis, but they did, and once again he was excommunicated; this time his ostracism lasted for seven years.
In 1640, unable to endure the situation any longer, he reap-proached the rabbis for readmittance. The rabbis wanted to make sure that this time he really meant it and tested his resolve by putting him through a ceremony of public humiliation. Within the synagogue, before the whole assembled congregation, his stripped back was given thirty-nine lashes, and then he was made to lie down across the threshold so that every member of the congregation could tread on his prone figure as they exited the synagogue. The ceremony seemed to have taken a terrible toll, depriving this proud man (his extreme pride echoes throughout his last testament) of his remaining dignity: the dignity before himself. He writes that it was no longer possible to live with himself, a phrase that has particular resonance for the Marrano— which da Costa still essentially was, even though he lived in Jewish Amsterdam — whose only refuge was the inner sanctum of his own self. He wrote his autobiography, from which I have largely been quoting, and then set out to kill both his cousin and himself. The pistol he aimed at his cousin in the street misfired, so that he didn’t succeed in becoming a murderer, but the gun worked when he fired it into his own skull. Onlookers report that his death was terrible.
Uriel da Costa, not surprisingly, has inspired several works of fiction, including a play by the German writer Karl Gutzkow, penned in 1846, in the midst of the liberal upsurge that led to the revolutions of 1848. He is presented there in the terms in which he wrote about his own life, a casualty of religious intolerance. The play Uriel Acosta (Acosta was the family name in Portugal) was, significantly, the first classic play translated into Yiddish, first produced in Odessa in 1881, shortly after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, and it became a standard in the Yiddish theater’s repertoire, both in Europe and on New York’s Second Avenue.
In 1640, when the da Costa scandal reached its violent climax, Baruch Spinoza was a child of eight, already exposed to personal loss; his mother had died of tuberculosis when he was six. Obviously, the children of the community were well aware of the opprobrium in which the unorthodox man was held, the authorized disapprobation licensing their own childish games of cruelty. An eight-year-old boy, studious and quiet, given to reflecting on things for himself, to pondering the words of the grown-ups, not taking them on authority necessarily; a solemn child, I would imagine, always trying to puzzle out the truth for himself, caring ardently about the truth — and not only the truth about God and the Torah, and the Jewish people, but about people as well. Spinoza’s Ethics reveals a mind that is not only an abstract systematizer on the grandest of scales, but also one that is fascinated by human nature in all its variety, directing its unblinking gaze into the subtleties of motivations. Yes, he was only eight, but habits of mind, orientations of attention, start early. What, one wonders, did Spinoza make of the excommunicated da Costa? Did his memory of the man’s ruin, the crazed rage and loathing that ended his life, guide him toward his very different reaction when, some mere fifteen years later, the rabbis would turn their disapproval on him?
Da Costa’s public drama of torn identity helps one to draw a little closer to the private Spinoza. The memory of this man’s torment of marginality must have made an impression on the boy. Still, there was another communal crisis that might take us even further toward understanding Spinoza. This one involved a theological controversy that grew into a major rabbinical dispute, once again requiring the intercession of the rabbis of Venice. Two of the rabbis of the community, Rabbi Morteira and Rabbi Aboab, clashed with each other over an issue that reached down into the community’s distinctive preoccupations with issues of identity and salvation.
Spinoza was only four years old when the theological controversy reached its denouement, so it is not so much a matter of his having taken in, and remembering, the specifics of that situation. Rather, it is that the rabbinical controversy yields a glimpse into the soul of the community in which Spinoza was raised, a sort of rich group portrait, as revealing as one of the celebrated psychological canvases painted by Rembrandt. Perhaps the group portrait will afford a glimpse of the elusive figure, who stands off to the side, barely visible in the shadows.
Somehow he managed to break away from the intense life of that community, to stand aloof, rendering himself utterly indifferent to its judgment of him, an attitude that the unfortunate da Costa could never achieve. But his aloofness extended much further than toward his own community. Spinoza’s aloofness is absolute. In all of Western philosophy, he is the most singular and solitary.
In 1635–36 there were three different synagogues in Amsterdam’s Sephardic community, the triangulation the result of disputes and factionalizing familiar to anyone who has ever been involved in Jewish communal life. Rabbi Morteira was the chief rabbi of Beth Jacob. He had been brought to Amsterdam from Venice when he was only twenty to serve the community and educate them in halakhic Judaism. Though Rabbi Morteira had become fluent in Portuguese, he was not of the same background as his congregants. He was Ashkenazic; contemporary sources speak of his Germanic origin. Though he must, of necessity, have attained some insight into the complex inner world of the former Marrano, he was emotionally not of that world. He saw his obligation as that of educating these former Marranos, often applying a somewhat stern hand in ridding them of the Christianized customs and concepts that had become encrusted onto their understanding of Judaism. Some might call him authoritarian. He was a learned man, a Talmudic scholar, who founded the yeshiva Keter Torah and taught the advanced course in Talmud there. His orientation was rationalistic and philosophical, in the Maimonidean mode. In fact, he refers to Maimonides as “the leading spokesman.”5
Morteira’s rationalistic approach to Judaism is noteworthy. There were certainly other currents in Amsterdam. In particular, the messianic mysticism of Lurianic kabbalah had stirred up some of the deepest yearnings across the lands of the Diaspora, and Amsterdam was no exception. The Marrano experience had perhaps disposed these returning Jews toward a particular susceptibility to the Lurianic narrative of redemptive history. One can understand how the kabbalistic message, especially as transformed through Lurianism into a tale woven around the theme of exile, of the light that had been lost in the great shattering and was slowly being returned to its rightful place, would resonate for the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam. They had a terrifyingly intimate experience of exile’s cruelty and were
now in the process of restoring what had been smashed in their national and family histories. Their gathering together, to reidentify as Jews among the tolerant Dutch, must have seemed like a sort of pale reflection of the final tikkun ha-olam to which they seemed to be drawing nearer. It was true that the Inquisition’s horrors still continued in the lands they had fled, and that family members and friends that they had left there were still caught within the maws of the exile’s violence. Still, the narrative of Lurianism provided the means for a hopeful interpretation of even these dark circumstances. Then, too, the mystical tradition was entwined in their history. It had flowered in Gerona and then been exiled, to take root again in the hills of Safed. Luria himself was of both Ashkenazic and Sephardic lineage, and most of those in his inner circle were Spanish Jews. The kabbalah’s evolution had been shaped by the history of Spain’s Jews.
Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira
Rabbi Morteira, by both inculcation (his teacher in Venice was the antimystical Leon de Medina) and inclination, was of a nonmystical cast. Though he was not oblivious, of course, to the mystical leanings of many in the community, including some of his rabbinical colleagues, in his opinion the classical rabbinic sources were “the only trustworthy Kabbala.” The other two prominent rabbis in the Amsterdam community were far more touched by the spirit that had emanated out from Safed. Perhaps not coincidentally, both these rabbis were Sephardic, and had in fact been born in the lands of the Inquisition.
Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity Page 12