Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

by Rebecca Goldstein

  Manasseh ben Israel (1604–57), who has already been mentioned several times, was born in Madeira, a Portuguese colony off the coast of Africa, where he had been baptized Manuel Diaz Soeiro. His father, Gaspar Rodrigues Nuñez, had been a penitent at an auto-da-fé, and the family had fled Lisbon when they got word that he was about to be re-arrested as a Judaizer. Upon arriving in Amsterdam, Gaspar renamed himself Joseph ben Israel. He renamed his two sons Ephraim and Manasseh. Ephraim and Manasseh were the sons of the biblical Joseph, and a traditional blessing for parents and teachers to bestow on their children is “May God make you like Ephraim and Manasseh.”

  Manassah ben Israel’s Judaism was strongly messianic. When he became convinced that the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel had been discovered among the natives in South America, he saw this supposed event in terms of the narrative of redemption. According to kabbalistic tradition, the Jews had to be dispersed to the four corners of the world before the Messiah could come. Now that the lost tribes had been located in the Americas, there remained only one country that was devoid of the Jewish presence: England, since the exile of Jews was still in effect there. (Apparently, he considered the New Christians who resided in the inquisitorial lands to be Jews.) It was on this messianic theory that he entered into negotiations with Oliver Cromwell to allow Jews back into England, so that the dispersal could be completed, the path paved for the Messiah. He made a trip to England in 1655, submitting his petition to Cromwell, who was impressed with the rabbi, although formal permission for a return wasn’t granted. (As a consequence of this trip, Manasseh ben Israel was not present when Spinoza was excommunicated.)

  Manasseh ben Israel was the most worldly among the three rabbis, though his place in the rabbinical hierarchy of Amsterdam was not the highest. His sphere of interests brought him into contact with many Christians. He was well-published, and one work in particular, El Conciliador, which attempts to reconcile seeming contradictions within the Bible, gained him a substantial reputation among Christian scholars.

  Another rabbi of the community was Isaac Aboab da Fonseca (1605–93), and it was he who had been most directly and deeply imbued with the spirit of Lurianic kabbalah, which he transmitted to the young men who studied with him, so that a significant number of them also claimed themselves as disciples of the esoteric tradition. The rabbi had been baptized Simão da Fonseca in Castro Daire, Portugal, and the family had fled when he was a child, first to France and then to Amsterdam. He was a disciple of the only kabbalist to have written in Spanish, Abraham Herrera (c. 1570–1635), who was also of a Marrano family and born in Portugal. Herrera’s studies of Neoplatonism, as it was taught in the Florentine Academy, together with his studies of Lurianic kabbalah (which also, as was pointed out above, has a strong Neoplatonic cast, inherited from the original kabbalists of Gerona), resulted in his own synthesis. Aboab translated into Hebrew such works of Herrera’s as his Puerta del cielo (Gates of Heaven), and these translations were in Spinoza’s library at his death, presenting once again the tantalizing suggestion that Spinoza’s own strongly Platonic orientation, most especially the focus on salvation, which sets him apart from his rationalist confreres Descartes and Leibniz, might have been transmitted to him by way of the kabbalist influence. Interestingly, Herrera also wrote a treatise on logic, Epítome y compendio de la lógica o dialéctica, which was his only published work.

  Aboab’s absorption of Lurianic kabbalah, as refiltered through Herrera, left him with a conception of Judaism sharply in contrast with Morteira’s, for where Morteira cites the traditional rabbinical authorities as the final word on all matters halakhic and theological, Aboab maintains the hegemony of the esoteric tradition. Kabbalah, he asserted, yields the only definitive authority for interpretation of rabbinical dicta. The philosophical approach of Maimonides, whom Morteira cites as the final word on the more philosophical aspects of Judaism, did not impress Aboab: “We have no dealings with Maimonides as far as this subject is concerned, for he discussed it from the aspect of philosophical inquiry, and not from the aspect of Kabbalah.” Furthermore, he claimed that no one was in a position to interpret kabbalah unless he had been initiated into the esoteric tradition by a qualified teacher who was himself a link in that tradition. Aboab claimed his place here since his teacher Abraham Herrera had received Luria’s teachings from Israel Sarug, who was a disciple of Luria’s disciple Hayyim Vital.

  Rabbi Isaac Aboab (Courtesy of The Jewish Museum, London)

  The rabbinical controversy that broke out in Spinoza’s boyhood involved the two rabbis Morteira and Aboab. It was a controversy that had wide implications, pitting the mystical approach to Judaism against the rationalistic, and also revealing the painfully deep and divergent responses to the situation in Iberia, the Jewish tragedy of the New Christians that constantly plagued the mind of the Portuguese Nation of Amsterdam.

  In its narrow specifics the argument revolved around the interpretation of a saying in the Mishnah (Sanhedrin 2:1): “All Israelites have a share in the world-to-come.” Rabbi Morteira had become distressed by a new doctrine that had caught fire among some of the impressionable young. Citing this statement in the Talmud as their slogan, and claiming the kabbalah as their source of its interpretation, they proclaimed that all Jews, no matter how grave their sins, would partake in the bliss of the afterlife. They dismissed or altogether ignored the Mishnah’s own qualifications to the statement, as well as those of classical rabbinic sources, insisting instead that the kabbalah superceded all other interpretations, and the kabbalah proclaims the thesis of universal Jewish salvation.

  This cavalier attitude toward rabbinical authority — an attitude that had no doubt often tried Rabbi Morteira’s Orthodox patience — proved too much this time. After all, if all Jews, no matter their behavior, were ipso facto guaranteed eternal bliss, what would be the motivation for becoming better Jews? The chief rabbi of Beth Jacob regarded the revisionist eschatology as “a rock of offense and stone of stumbling dressed up as Kabbalah.” He took his stand, preaching a sermon in which he quoted a passage from the Talmud (Rosh Ha-Shana 17a) that affirms the eternality of punishment in hell for such grave offenders as minim, or informers, and apikorsim, or heretics. He embellished with copious quotations from other sources supporting the damnation of Israel’s sinners. The Mishnah did not mean by “Israelite” anyone who had been born into the nation of Israel; rather, it had meant righteous person. It is not the case that someone born of Jewish origins is saved no matter how his life is lived.

  Rabbi Morteira’s sermon on the eternality of punishment provoked “cries of indignation” from a contingent of Aboab’s students who were in the synagogue and whom Rabbi Morteira described, in his complaints to the Venetian rabbis from whom he was seeking advice in dealing with the incendiary situation, as “young rebels,” and “immature disciples,” who had been “corrupted by Kabbalists.” Their “cries of indignation,” in Morteira’s words, were such that he had been forced “in my anguish … to admit as controversial a perfect doctrine of our faith which we received from our Fathers, the Prophets, the Tanna’im [those who wrote the Mishnah] and the Amora’im [those who wrote the Gemarah, the commentary on the Mishnah] and which, permitting no doubt, was upheld by the more recent authorities.”

  For their part, the “young rebels” professed themselves scandalized by a doctrine that, they claimed, was reminiscent of Christianity. “By believing in the eternality of sin and punishment we support the religion of the Christians who say that Adam’s sin was eternal and that, on this account, only God, who is eternal, could make atonement for it by incarnation and death.” They requested from the community’s lay authorities, the parnassim, that an injunction be placed against the rabbi’s preaching of eternal punishment.

  The subtext of this debate was, unsurprisingly, the Marrano situation. The young kabbalists’ interpretation of “Israelite” was sufficiently wide to extend to the Marranos still living on the Iberian Peninsula, whose identity as Jews consisted in no
thing more than the internal performative act of declaring themselves Jews. The opponents of eternal punishment clearly had the New Christians in mind, arguing that God’s compassion must extend to them, and also arguing that the New Christians would have no reason for becoming observant Jews if Judaism, too, offered no remedy for Catholicism’s harsh eschatology. And Rabbi Morteira also had the Marranos in mind in making his case for the opposite thesis. What reason would the Marranos have for leaving behind all their goods and their often comfortable positions in society, to seek out circumstances in which they could become fully integrated halakhic observers, if they were guaranteed eternal bliss in any case? In addition, Morteira contended that one should teach in public only what the classical rabbinic sources had pronounced. It was a “criminal offence” to contradict their “splendid traditionally received words.” The mishnaic statement “All Israelites have a share in the world to come” could not be regarded as an unconditional “absolute verdict.”

  Then, too, the unfortunate Uriel da Costa, still clinging pitifully to the margins of the community, presented a vivid exhibit for both sides of the debate. He had stressed that it was precisely the terror provoked by Catholicism’s vision of eternal damnation that had turned him away from Christianity, so that those who argued for Judaism’s promise of salvation might point to him as support. But, too, da Costa had demonstrated the tendency of the returning Marrano to bend the complicated structure of redacted Judaism to his own personal desiderata.

  It was after the “immature disciples” had appealed to the parnassim, and apparently staged a few more protests in Rabbi Morteira’s synagogue, that the tried rabbi wrote to the older community of Venice, seeking their counsel.

  So far, Rabbi Aboab had kept a low profile, but it soon became clear on behalf of whom the young rebels were protesting, and to whom Rabbi Morteira had been referring when he described them as corrupted by “Kabbalists.” Rabbi Aboab was himself a young man then, barely thirty, and his rapport with his young students, as well as the always intriguing promise of initiation into esoteric secrets, no doubt made for a heady experience. One young disciple declared that he himself wished to have the soul of Jeroboam, son of Nebat, having perhaps heard from Aboab the kabbalistic belief that Jeroboam was to be reincarnated as the Messiah. Jeroboam, the first king of the ten tribes of Israel, after the split from the kingdom of Judah, became the prototype of the wicked king, having introduced golden calf idols into his kingdom, so that the expression “evil like Jeroboam” was not uncommon. The traditional version of this chapter in ancient Jewish history is that Jeroboam’s sins were realized in the utter desolation of the kingdom of Israel, with the result that the ten tribes that had composed it were carried away as slaves and disappeared from the world as Israelites. The restoration of Jerobaom — as the Messiah no less! — was an ardent symbol of the ingathering toward salvation that was at the heart of Lurianic kabbalism, and one which one might expect reverberated for the newly Judaized former conversos, who had been in danger, too, of entirely disappearing from the world as Jews. Then, too, the moral transfiguration involved in iconic evil becoming iconic goodness reinforced the redemptive promise held out in the kabbalah’s reading of history.

  The Beth Din (Rabbinical Court) of Venice did not want to get involved in this particular controversy, preferring that the Amsterdam community work things out for itself both as a sign of its growing independence and because they did not want to confuse the congregants by making it appear that a Beth Din needed to issue a ruling on an issue that they, too, along with Rabbi Morteira, considered to be part of the codified theology of Judaism. And so, instead of taking on the issue, they wrote to Rabbi Aboab with finessed diplomacy. They launched their appeal by first extolling him for the impressive scholarship of which they’d heard tell, which had long prompted them to desire his friendship. God had willed that he now be presented with the opportunity to demonstrate his leadership by suppressing the revisionist views that had been disseminating among the impressionable youth. “We were hoping for the day that would bring the message of peace … but our expectation has been frustrated. For we were again informed that the conflict persists and that the spokesman of those denying the belief in the eternality of punishment is none other than you.” They took solace, they continued, pursuing the vein of ecclesiastical tact, in the fact that the person who led the recalcitrant group was a God-fearing Jew, and thus could be counted on to heed the wisdom of Proverbs 12:15: “He that is wise hearkeneth unto counsel.” They advised him to convene a public forum in which he could announce his change of mind, saying that he would best know how to phrase his recantation and how to warn the group against venturing rash opinions on subjects of this kind. And they made explicit reference to the Marrano situation that lurked, for all of them, behind the Talmudic altercation, stating that the warning was particularly appropriate to “those of our people who came from those places,” that is, Marranos, who “should seek only one thing, namely the way how to serve God in sincerity and how to fulfill the mitzvoth according to Halakha in all their minutiae.”

  The young rabbi’s response to the delicately worded appeal of the Venetian rabbis was his defiantly fiery tract Nishmat Hayyim (literally, “Souls of Life”). (Rabbi Manasseh ben Israel would in 1651 publish a book of that name as well, having brought out, in 1631, a tripartite treatise on the Resurrection of the Dead in both Latin and Spanish.) That he had written such an unpublished Hebrew manuscript had long been known, but it is only recently that it has been brought to light, and published, together with commentary, by Alexander Altmann, from whose fascinating article “Eternality of Punishment: A Theological Controversy Within the Amsterdam Rabbinate in the Thirties of the Seventeenth Century” I have largely been drawing.

  Aboab’s manuscript opens on a note of brazen defiance, before those rabbinical authorities who had pulled rank on him in an effort to muzzle him: “Truly speaking, matters of this kind have been entrusted only to the Kabbalists, illumined as they are by the light of truth.” The tone of defiance continues throughout. There follows an ardent attack on the sterilities of rationalistic philosophy, of the Maimonidean sort, those who “lean upon a broken reed” and are unqualified to interpret the profound utterances of the rabbis. Aboab asserts that though he was young in years (thirty in 1636, which was when, Altmann argues, the manuscript must have been written), the true “elder” was the one who had acquired wisdom, and in this respect he was older than his opponents, who became more foolish as they advanced in years. Most importantly, as a kabbalist, he claimed to know certain truths of an esoteric nature that put an entirely new and different complexion on things. If those truths had been withheld from the uninitiated in the past, the time had now come to disabuse people’s minds of a notion of God that is contrary to His known attributes of justice and mercy. The kabbalah, of course, never contradicts the laws of the Torah, since all sacred texts derive from the same divine source, but it is kabbalah that reveals their secret significance. In particular, the Lurianic message of restoration, the righting of the cosmic unbalance of the shevirah, the shattering of the vessels, is seen as running throughout the Torah’s commandments and prohibitions. All the laws of restitution and return bespeak the great mystery of the final tikkun ha-olam: such laws as those regarding the return of lost property; the laws of the Jubilee year, when the crops are left unharvested in the fields; of the healing of the leper and the cleansing of the house upon which a plague had been pronounced — all these and other commandments serve as the practical symbols for the ultimate salvation that is promised. Lurianic truth provides the illumination for the laws, and all the light points to the return to God. “God forbid that they [the rabbis] should have assigned to the soul a punishment whereby she will not ‘return to her Father’s house as in her youth.’ ”

  To counter the rabbis’ fear that the doctrine of salvation for all of Israel, even those who partake in the evil of a Jeroboam, will remove all motivation to live righteously, Aboab re
sorts to the Lurianic belief in the gilgul, the transmigration of souls. Those who have sinned will have to enter the wheel of rebirth, so that their souls can be purified. Aboab takes great pains to trace this idea back to one of the great kabbalists of Gerona, Nachmanides.

  Aboab’s treatise ends: “This is what our rabbis, of blessed memory, meant when coining the phrase, ‘Though he sinned, he is still an Israelite.’ They intended to convey the idea that though he sinned he was not cut off thereby forever from the tree but remained a Jew; and even if he apostasized from the Lord and chose new gods, he will again be called a Jew as a result of transmigrations and punishments.”

  The reference to those who chose new gods once again focuses attention on the subtext. It is not one’s choice of God that makes one a Jew, but something independent of one’s choices, something constitutive of one’s very essence. In the words of Isaac Luria’s own teacher, David ibn Abi Zimra, which Aboab quotes, “All Israelites are a single body and their soul is hewn from the place of Unity.”

  Shortly after the controversy, in 1639, the three Sephardic synagogues of Amsterdam — Beth Jacob, Neve Shalom, and Beth Israel — all of them crowded next to each other in the Jewish quarter, would merge into one, Beth Israel, and Rabbi Aboab would be demoted to an assistant rabbi and Rabbi Morteira promoted to chief rabbi. Shortly thereafter, Aboab left Amsterdam, accepting the invitation to become the rabbi of the prosperous community of Recife, Brazil, which was then under the rule of the Dutch, making him the first American rabbi. His departure might very well have been a result of the fracas regarding the afterlife. He remained in Brazil from 1642 until the reconquest of Recife by the Portuguese in 1654, when all the Jews were forced to leave.

  Twenty-three of the refugees — men, women, and children — ended up in Dutch New Amsterdam after their ship was attacked by a Spanish privateer who deprived them of their possessions. Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch colonial governor, was ill-disposed toward Jews and disinclined to allow these particular Jews — now indigent — to stay. Their former Jewish neighbors back in Holland interceded on their behalf with the Dutch West India Company, which directed Stuyvesant to tolerate their presence, so long as they proved no burden to the community. In this way these twenty-three from Recife became the first Jewish New Yorkers — even before there was a New York.