Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

by Rebecca Goldstein

  1666 Newton discovers universal gravitation, differential calculus, lunar orbit

  Leibniz finishes dissertation Nova methodus docendi discendique juris, as well as De arte combinatoria

  Sabbatai Zevi converts to Islam; many of his followers become apostates 1667 Louis XIV invades the Spanish Netherlands

  1668 Leeuwenhoeck first describes red blood corpuscles

  Newton constructs reflecting telescope

  The French conquest of the Spanish Netherlands halted by the Triple Alliance (England, United Provinces, Sweden)

  1669 Death of Rembrandt (born 1606) in Amsterdam Spinoza moves to The Hague

  1670 Spinoza publishes his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which is denounced by the (Calvinist) Council of Amsterdam as a “work forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil and issued with the knowledge of Mynheer Jan de Witt”

  1671 Leibniz sends Spinoza his Notita opticae promotea; Spinoza sends Leibniz his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus

  1672 Louis XIV invades the United Provinces; the Dutch open the dikes and succeed in holding the French back; Jan de Witt and his brother are massacred by a mob on August 20; Spinoza prevented by his landlord from denouncing the assassins as the “ultimate barbarians”

  1673 Spinoza is offered professorship of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg but declines

  1674 An edict banning the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus is issued by the States of Holland

  1675 Spinoza completes The Ethics

  Leibniz visits Spinoza in The Hague

  The Jews of Amsterdam complete the building of the Esnoga, the largest synagogue in Europe

  1677 February 21, Spinoza dies

  Publication, by Spinoza’s friends in Amsterdam, of Opera Posthuma (Ethics, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Tractatus de intellectus emendatione, Epistolae, Compendium grammatices linguae Hebralae)

  1678 Dutch translation of Spinoza’s works published

  1683 John Locke moves to Amsterdam

  1686 Gottfried Leibniz publishes his Discourse on Metaphysics

  1689 Locke publishes the “Letter on Tolerance,” a defense of religious liberty

  NOTES

  I. Prologue: Baruch, Bento, Benedictus

  1. Huygens, Oeuvres complètes, 6:181.

  2. Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe I. i. 148. This is from a letter to Leibniz of Johan Georg Graevius, professor of rhetoric, and from Leibniz’s reply to him.

  3. “In a series of open letters to Mendelssohn, Jacobi claimed that the late Lessing’s conversations proved him to be a Spinozist, and, therefore, in Jacobi’s eyes, a fatalist. Such an allegation posed a severe challenge to Enlightenment thought, for by pigeonholing Spinoza as the fatal example of rationalism’s dire consequences, Jacobi forged Lessing’s alleged admission of his Spinozoism into an indictment of the Enlightenment as a whole.” Willi Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), p. 12.

  4. The Correspondence of Spinoza, Letter VI, to Oldenburg, 1662.

  II. In Search of Baruch

  1. This was the congregation’s lay governing board, which oversaw excommunications, rather than the community’s rabbis.

  2. These were official wise men, the rabbis and rabbinical assistants of the community.

  3. In fact, Mendelssohn studied Spinoza intensely. His first philosophical publication, Philosophical Dialogues (Philosophische Gespräche), published anonymously in 1755, begins with an attempt to rescue Spinoza by arguing that Leibniz’s thought would not have been possible without Spinoza. Since Spinoza’s name was still then reviled, and sympathy with him was seen as sympathy for atheism and immorality, the young Mendelssohn’s opening gambit was daring.

  4. The division between the Sadducees — more urbane and upper-class, representative of the more conservative views of the priestly class — and the Pharisees (who were the scribes and the teachers of religious law, and included both the more rigid teachings of the school of Shammai and the more lenient and flexible interpretations of Hillel) occurred in the first century, during the time preceding the eventual sack of Jerusalem by the Romans. This, of course, was also the time of Jesus. The party of the Sadducees held more political power in Jerusalem but were, for the most part, rejected by the Jewish masses. They were far more Hellenized, many of them following the teaching of the Greek philosopher Epicurus, who taught that the soul dies with the body. The Hebrew word for heretic, apikorus, is derived from the name of Epicurus, for it was the Pharisees who prevailed in rabbinical Judaism. But then the Pharisees’ name became synonomous, especially in the Christian denunciations of Judaism, with rabbinical inflexibility and deicide.

  5. A third rabbi, Mannaseh ben Israel, was also absent, away on a fruitless mission to try to get Oliver Cromwell to allow Jews to return to England. They had been exiled from the country in 1290. See pp. 146.

  6. Mrs. Schoenfeld’s account generally follows the narrative of one Jean Maximilien Lucas, a French freethinker who claimed to have known, and certainly greatly admired, Spinoza. Lucas wrote one of the few contemporary accounts of Spinoza’s life, The Oldest Biography of Spinoza. A much less approving, indeed choleric, seventeenth-century account of Spinoza’s life, Vies de Spinoza, was written by Johannes Colerus, a Lutheran clergyman who lived in Spinoza’s rooms after the philosopher’s death and had access to Spinoza’s landlord, the sympathetic Hendrik van der Spyck, to whom Spinoza had told some details of his life.

  7. According to Lucas, Morteira had particularly liked that Baruch “was not vain. … He did not understand how a young man of such penetration could be so modest.” 8. The Index was finally abolished in 1966.

  9. Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676, trans. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, Bollingen Series (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 19.

  10. Mrs. Schoenfeld chose not to complete the quote attributed to him. It continues: “with the consolation that my departure will be more innocent than was the exodus of the early Hebrews from Egypt.” 11. Actually, Heinrich [Henricus] Künraht, “at Hamburg,” was the name of the fictitious printer, not author, that Spinoza put on the title page, in order to protect the real publisher. The treatise listed no author.

  12. Interestingly, Bertrand Russell — whose background could not have been more divergent from both Spinoza’s and mine — uses the same surprising adjective when describing Spinoza, making for perhaps the most personal moment in his History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1945). “Spinoza (1634–77) is the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers. Intellectually, some others have surpassed him, but ethically he is supreme. As a natural consequence, he was condemned during his lifetime and for a century after his death, as a man of appalling wickedness. He was born a Jew, but the Jews excommunicated him. Christians abhorred him equally; although his whole philosophy is dominated by the idea of God, the orthodox accused him of atheism. Leibniz, who owed much to him, concealed his debt, and carefully abstained from saying a word in his praise; he even went so far as to lie about the extent of his personal acquaintance with the heretic Jew” (p. 569).

  13. And quite rightly so. In fact, we get into trouble if we try to treat the laws of logic as axioms, the moral of Lewis Carroll’s ingenious logic-fable “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles.” The slow methodical tortoise here outruns, so to speak, the facile Achilles by requiring him to write down, as an additional axiom, the rule of modus ponens. This rule tells you that if you have a conditional statement of the form if p, then q (where p and q stand for propositions) and you also have the proposition p, then you can deduce q. But Achilles can’t actually apply this axiom unless he has another axiom, which he can’t apply unless he has another axiom, ad infinitum.

  14. See pp. 166–174 below.

  15. Banesh Hoffmann and Helen Dukas, Albert Einstein: The Human Side (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 70.

  III. The Project of E
scape

  1. Thomas Nagel, in his book by that title. (He is not using the phrase in reference to Spinoza’s philosophy but rather to his own grasp of things; in fact, his claim is that the View from Nowhere is necessarily incomplete, a distinctly non-Spinozist conclusion.) But here is his way of describing the View from Nowhere: “It is a conception of the world as simply existing, seen from no particular perspective, no privileged point of view — as simply there, and hence apprehensible from various points of view. … In fact, it is the world, conceived from nowhere within it.” The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 56.

  2. The Ethics, Part I. XLIV, Corollary ii.

  3. Jacob Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World (Cincinnati: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1938), p. 378.

  4. Daniel M. Swetschinski, The Portuguese-Jewish Merchants of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam: A Social Profile, Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Microfilms, 1977).

  5. “Gabirol Solomon Ben Judah Ibn,” in Encyclopedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing, 1971), 7:242–43.

  6. Gershom Scholem, Zohar: The Book of Splendor(New York: Schocken, 1995), pp. 68–69.

  7. Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, chapter 9.

  8. Jane S. Gerber, The Jews of Spain (New York: Free Press, 1992), p. 128.

  9. Numbers are difficult to establish with accuracy for the Spanish Inquisition, and there is an ongoing debate between recent historical research supported by the Catholic Church, which holds that the previously accepted death toll of the Inquisition is greatly exaggerated, and other historians, who claim that up to hundreds of thousands might have been killed. Some of the statistics of large death tolls are given by historians such as Will Durant, who, in The Reformation (1957), cites Juan Antonio Llorente, general secretary of the Inquisition from 1789 to 1801, as estimating that 31,912 people were executed from 1480 to 1808. He also cites Hernando del Pulgar, a secretary to Queen Isabella, as estimating 2,000 people were burned before 1490. Philip Schaff in his History of the Christian Church, 3rd ed. (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 1996), gave a number of 8,800 people burned in the eighteen years of Torquemada.

  10. Manuscript, Vatican 187. Quoted in Scholem, p. 18n.

  11. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi. See especially pp. 18–22.

  12. Ibid., p. 34.

  13. Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics, vol. 1, The Marrano of Reason (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 22.

  14. Yovel argues that the spirit of Marranism was instrumental in the whole movement of the alumbrados: “The esoteric nature of Judaizing Marranos, the rejection of external acts as meaningless, interiorization and concentration on the inner self as a way to reach God and attain salvation — these are patterns of life and experience that, by force of necessity, took shape among the Judaizing Marranos and were transformed into basic features of the Spanish schools of the alumbrados.” Ibid., p. 26.

  IV. Identity Crisis

  1. Queen Esther (there are no official saints in Judaism, no official procedure of canonization) is the heroine of the story behind the Jewish festival of Purim, a holiday that celebrates the aborted attempt by a trusted royal adviser, Haman, to destroy the Jews of Persia. Esther, who had hidden her faith — herself then a crypto-Jew! — had married the king, Ahasuerus. She learns of Haman’s evil plot through her cousin Mordecai, who chastises her that she herself will not escape the fate of her people. Gathering her courage, she reveals her secret heritage to the king, with the result that the Jews of Persia are redeemed, the evil Haman and his progeny themselves destroyed. It is poignantly obvious why the Marranos considered Esther their patron saint.

  2. Quoted in Raphael Patai and Jennifer Patai, The Myth of the Jewish Race (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1989), p. 76.

  3. The monk was more interested than the soldier in the theological views of the two excommunicants, whose views are discussed as if there were unanimity between them. This is from the Inquisition’s records of the friar’s account: “He also made the acquaintance of Dr. Prado, a physician, who has been called Juan and whose Jewish name he did not know … and also one Espinosa, whom he believes was born in one of the cities of Holland, for he studied in Leiden and was a good philosopher. … Both of these had formerly professed the Mosaic Law, but the synagogue expelled and chased them because they became atheists. They themselves told the witnesses that they were circumcised and [in the past] had observed the law of the Jews, but they changed their minds because it seemed to them that the law was not true, and that the souls die along with the bodies, and that there is no God except philosophically. For this reason they were driven out of the synagogue; and felt the lack of the alms which the synagogue had given them [this would be true only of Prado, who, despite being a physician, was indigent; Spinoza, on the contrary, kept up with his contributions to the community’s assessed charitable demands right up until his excommunication] and of the communication with the other Jews, they were content with maintaining the error of atheism.” Yovel, The Marrano of Reason, p. 74, taken from Révah, Spinoza et Prado, (Paris: Mouton & Co., 1959), Documents, p. 64.

  4. Yovel, ibid., p. 78.

  5. He thus refers to Maimonides in his letter to the Venetian rabbinical court, in relation to the controversy with Aboab.

  6. The Ethics, Part III. VII.

  7. Yovel argues that Spinoza’s slip betrays how “deeply ingrained the Hebrew language was in his mind.” Yovel continues: “That Spinoza calls him ‘the faithful’ and not ‘the believer’ demonstrates, in my view, that Spinoza’s thinking here operates through the mediation of the Hebrew language and its associations. For the words creyente and fidus have no common root, neither in Spanish nor in Latin. In Hebrew, however, the two words (ma’amin, ne’eman) have the same root (amn).” Yovel, The Marrano of Reason, p. 187.

  8. In this regard Spinoza did not have the typical mathematician’s personality, which is often exclusively interested in abstract systems rather than in people. (The autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen argues that the “autistic continuum,” going from Asperger syndrome to full-fledged autism, represents the systematizing — or male! — mind run amuck, leading him to predict that autism increases when both parents are systemetizer types. He has a longitudinal study set up at MIT to test his hypothesis. See his The Essential Difference: The Truth About the Male and Female Brain [Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2003]. One of the gorgeous treats of Spinoza’s sweeping system is how he manages to enfold within it, often in his “Notes” to the proofs, little nuggets of psychological insight. His trenchant observations of specific types of characters are so sharply drawn that one can well imagine the people who must have served him as models. My own copy of The Ethics is crowded with marginalia, often including names of personal acquaintances called to mind by such offhand remarks as these: “However, these emotions, humility and self-abasement, are extremely rare. For human nature, considered in itself, strives against them as much as it can; hence those who are believed to be most self-abased and humble are generally in reality the most ambitious and envious.” Or: “[N]one are so prone to envy as the dejected; they are specially keen in observing men’s actions, with a view to fault-finding rather than correction, in order to reserve their praises for dejection, and to glory therein, though all the time with a dejected air” (Part I V. IVII, Note). Or: “Again, as it may happen that the pleasure wherewith a man conceives that he affects others may exist solely in his imagination, and as everyone endeavors to conceive concerning himself that which he conceives will affect him with pleasure, it may easily come to pass that a vain man may be proud and may imagine that he is pleasing to all, when in reality he may be an annoyance to all.” Besides being on target, Spinoza is really quite funny, no? Why, I always wonder when I read Part III of The Ethics, the part that includes both his grand psychological theory of the emotions and his “derivations” of the various psychological types, does no one ever comment on Spinoza’s s
ense of humor?

  V. For the Eyes of the Mind

  1. The Ethics, Part III. Preface.

  2. Ibid., Part III. LIX, Note.

  3. Ibid., Part I V. XXXVII.

  4. Ibid., Part V. XXIII, Note.

  5. Tractatus, chapter 6.

  6. Ibid., chapter 3.

  7. Ibid., chapter 2.

  8. So he wrote to Oldenburg: “I am now writing a Treatise about my interpretation of Scripture. This I am driven to do by the following reasons: 1. The Prejudices of the Theologians; for I know that these are among the chief obstacles which prevent men from directing their mind to philosophy; and therefore I do all I can to expose them, and to remove them from the minds of the more prudent. 2. The opinion which the common people have of me, who do not cease to accuse me falsely of atheism; I am also obliged to avert this accusation as far as it is possible to do so. 3. The freedom of philosophizing, and of saying what we think; this I desire to vindicate in every way, for here it is always suppressed through the excessive authority and impudence of the preachers.” Correspondence, Letter XXX, Voorburg, September or October 1665, p. 206.

  9. This bed is mentioned in Lucas’s biography. Spinoza kept it throughout his life, moving it with him from Amsterdam to Rijnsburg, and from Rijnsburg to Voorburg.

  10. Isaac Spinoza died in 1649, at the age of eighteen or nineteen. Baruch was seventeen.

  11. This is, as I’m sure the reader has surmised, pure speculation on my part. I am actually having Spinoza think thoughts here that echo Plato in the Euthyphro. But we know that Spinoza considered this train of reasoning from the evidence of The Ethics: “I confess that the theory which subjects all things to the will of an indifferent deity, and asserts that they are all dependent on his fiat, is less far from the truth than the theory of those, who maintain that God acts in all things with a view of promoting what is good. For these latter persons seem to set up something beyond God, which does not depend on God, but which God in acting looks to as an exemplar. Or which he aims at as a definite goal. This is only another name for subjecting God to the dominion of destiny, an utter absurdity in respect to God, whom we have shown to be the first and only free cause of the essence of all things and also of their existence. I need, therefore, spend no time in refuting such wild theories.” Part I. XXXIII, Note II.