12. This story is told in Lucas’s biography.
13. Spinoza’s charitable contributions are well documented. His last pledge came in March 1656. Spinoza was excommunicated in July of that year.
14. The Ethics, I V. Prop. XXVIII. The last line in the paragraph is Prop. XXVIII. The previous line is taken from the proof of that proposition.
15. Vaz Dias and van der Tak, Spinoza, Merchant and Autodidact, pp. 155–56. For an analysis of De Barrios’s account of Morteira’s yeshiva, see Wilhelmina C. Pieterse, Daniel Levi de Barrios als Geschiedschrijver van de Protugees-Israelietische gemeente te Amsterdam in zign “Triumpho del govierno Popular (Amsterdam: Scheltema and Holkema, 1968), pp. 106–8.
16. The Ethics, III. LV, Note.
17. Tractatus, chapter 3.
18. The Ethics, IV. XXXV.
19. Ibid., I V. Appendix VII.
20. It is no accident that the renegade who gave us modernity also first gave us modern biblical criticism.
21. Ibid., I V. Appendix IX.
22. Ibid., III. XIII, Note.
23. Ibid., V. XX, Note.
24. This story is related by Pierre Bayle in his biography of Spinoza. Bayle was by no means a sympathetic admirer of the heretic Jew.
25. The Ethics, IV. LXIII, Note.
26. Ibid., I. Appendix.
27. Ibid., V. XXIII, Note.
28. Ibid., III. Definition of the Emotions. XX, Explanation.
29. Ibid., II. VII.
30. Ibid., I, Axiom I V.
31. Correspondence, VII.
32. Gershom Scholem’s diagnosis of manic-depression seems hardly debatable.
33. Unfortunately, Spinoza’s response has not survived.
34. Scholem, in Sabbatai Sevi: “As regards its role in Sabbatian history, the Jewish community of Amsterdam may well compete with Italy for the first place. … Circumstances in Amsterdam were indeed uniquely propitious for the success of the Sabbatian message. Amsterdam Jewry, which was by far the greater part of the Jewry of the Low Countries, was made up of two elements, each — for its own reason— particularly responsive to the messianic tidings. The Sephardic (Portuguese) community, founded by Marranos from Spain and Portugal, counted many members who had themselves escaped the Inquisition. In the Ashkenazic community the memory of the Cossack massacres of 1648 was still very much alive, particularly as many of the survivors (including Sabbatai’s wife and her brother) had found refuge in Amsterdam. The relative freedom enjoyed by the Jews of Amsterdam further contributed to their responsiveness. They had indeed found a haven of safety in the Dutch republic, but they were still close enough to the tempests and catastrophes of the immediate past to make the messianic call meaningful. Their sense of safety — unique in that age — enabled them to react freely and without the inhibiting fear of ‘What will the gentiles say?’ ” (pp. 518–19).
35. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, p. 5.
36. Tractatus, chapter 6, pp. 71–72.
37. Scholem, pp. 540–41. The letter is lost.
38. This was from 1665 to 1669. Meyer was probably the most important of the group of Spinoza’s personal friends, and the most secular. He was an enthusiastic admirer of Spinoza’s, and, more than anyone else, was responsible for seeing the philosopher’s works published, both during his life and posthumously. Some people believe that he was present at Spinoza’s death, but this is dubious. Unfortunately, he didn’t see fit to publish their letters because of their personal nature.
39. The identity of this fortunate fellow lodger is in dispute. Some believe it to have been Johannes Casear (or Casearius), ten years younger than Spinoza, who went on to become a Reformed preacher. Others are almost certain that it was none other than Albert Burgh, whose religious passions would darken the last months of Spinoza’s life.
40. De Vries to Spinoza. Correspondence, Letter XXVI (VIII).
41. This was Lodewijk Meyer, whose broad humanistic interests included the arts, most particularly literature and drama. He was the director of the Amsterdam Municipal Theater from 1665 to 1669.
42. The Ethics, I. XVI.
43. The Ethics, IV. Appendix. I V.
44. Ibid., V. XXXII, Corollary.
45. Ibid., V. X V.
46. Ibid., V. XVI.
47. Ibid., V. XIX.
48. Ibid., V. XX.
49. Ibid., I V. XXXVII, Note I.
50. Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, chapter 3.
51. The Ethics I. XXXIII, Note I.
52. Ibid., I. XXXIII.
53. Ibid., I V. LXXIII, Note.
54. Ibid., V. XVIII, Note.
55. Correspondence, Letter XXX, to Oldenburg, September or October 1665, pp. 205–6.
56. Freudenthal, Die Lebensgeschichte Spinoza, p. 194.
57. The Ethics, IV. LXIX.
58. Spinoza himself told this story to Leibniz when the latter came to visit him in The Hague in 1676.
59. The Ethics, I. Appendix.
60. The Ethics, V. XXXII.
61. Correspondence XIX (LXVIII).
62. The synagogue still stands, and still serves the Sephardic community. Not far from it is a statue of Spinoza.
63. The Ethics, IV. I V, Proof.
64. Ibid., I V. LXVII.
65. Ibid., V. XXXVIII, Note.
66. Ibid., V. XLII. These are the very last words of Spinoza’s magnum opus.
VI. Epilogue
1. Colerus speaks of a “Dr. L. M.,” which suggests Spinoza’s old and loyal friend Lodewijk Meyer, who was, in addition to other things, a doctor. However, he also reports, on the testimony of an outraged van der Spyck, of the doctor in attendance at Spinoza’s death “who just that evening returned to Amsterdam by the nightboat, not even seeing to the care of the deceased. But he made off with some money that Spinoza had left lying on the table, along with some ducats and a few gold pieces, and a knife with a silver handle.” It is possible, if indeed this was Meyer, that the disappearance of the items was, as Steven Nadler suggests in Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), “more likely explained as a case of memento collecting rather than theft” (p. 350). However, another young physician, Georg Hermann Schuller, a shadier character who had insinuated himself into Spinoza’s circle in the early 1670s, claimed in letters to have been present at Spinoza’s death, and told Leibniz that he had searched through Spinoza’s things “thoroughly, one by one, before and after his death.” On Schuller’s possible presence at the philosopher’s death, see Steenbakker’s, Spinoza’s Ethica from Manuscript to Print, pp. 50–63.
2. Thomas Jefferson, letter to his young nephew Peter Carr, August 10, 1787. From Adrienne Koch, ed., The American Enlightenment: The Shaping of the American Experiment and a Free Society (New York: George Braziller, 1965), pp. 320–21.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not, and could not, have been written without the vision and encouragement of Jonathan Rosen. A more thoughtful editor — in ways both intellectual and moral — cannot be imagined. A brilliant writer himself, Jonathan engages the writer, challenges the writer, trusts the writer. For me, this last gift was all important, allowing me to approach Spinoza in a far more personal way than I would have been able to do under any other circumstances.
Dan Frank read the first draft of Betraying Spinoza, and his insightful comments were important in giving final shape to the book.
Aside from Jonathan and Dan, two people read the entire manuscript while it was still in progress, and their comments and enthusiasm were invaluable. These are Yael Goldstein and Steven Pinker, two of the best readers on the planet.
I would also like to thank the many students who have passed though my course “Seventeenth-Century Rationalism: Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz,” first at Barnard College and, more recently, at Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut. I hope that the intellectual intensity that they brought to those classes has sustained them, as it has me, and that they remember my warning that if they ever write to me in the way that Spinoz
a’s student Albert Burgh wrote to him (“wretched pigmy, vile worm of the earth”), I shall not answer.
Among the books from which I drew, Steven Nadler’s magisterial biography of the philosopher, Spinoza: A Life, was the most important. I also admire his Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind, even though I ultimately disagree with his proposed solution to the mystery behind the unusual vehemence of Spinoza’s excommunication.
In addition to the books that are already cited in the text and footnotes, the following books are recommended to those interested in further reading: Melvin Konner’s Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews (New York: Viking Compass, 2003); Cecil Roth’s A History of the Marranos (New York: Harper and Row, 1966); Benzion Netanyahu’s The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain (New York: Random House, 1995), as well as his The Marranos of Spain: From the Late 14th Century to the Early 16th Century According to Hebrew Sources (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999); Jane S. Gerber’s Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience (New York: Free Press, rep., 1994); Stuart Hampshire’s Spinoza and Spinozism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Harry Anstryn Wolfson’s Philosophy of Spinoza: Unfolding the Latent Process of His Reasoning (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, repr., 1983); Jonathan Francis Bennett’s A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing Company, 1984); Jewish Themes in Spinoza’s Philosophy, edited by Heidi M. Ravven and Lenn E. Goodman (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2002); and Leo Strauss’s Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). This last book is by the University of Chicago scholar and expert on the art of ambiguity whose own ideas have gone on to play an ambiguous role in American politics. Strauss makes Spinoza’s texts central in his argument about the relationship between philosophy and power, the heterodox writer’s art of disguising his thoughts in his writing, and the reader’s interpretive art of uncovering them. This is an aspect of the continuing life of Spinoza that I was unable to address in this book.
Finally, I heartily recommend the short story “The Spinoza of Market Street,” by the Yiddish-American writer and Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. The protagonist of Singer’s story, Dr. Nahum Fischelson, also ends up betraying Spinoza, delivering a last line that I now usurp as my own: “Divine Spinoza, forgive me. I have become a fool.”
FB2 document info
Document ID: 4a827c08-e18c-4c8b-a401-c1683e9ef5e5
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 30.11.2011
Created using: calibre 0.8.28, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6 software
Document authors :
alaskin
About
This file was generated by Lord KiRon's FB2EPUB converter version 1.1.5.0.
(This book might contain copyrighted material, author of the converter bears no responsibility for it's usage)
Этот файл создан при помощи конвертера FB2EPUB версии 1.1.5.0 написанного Lord KiRon.
(Эта книга может содержать материал который защищен авторским правом, автор конвертера не несет ответственности за его использование)
http://www.fb2epub.net
https://code.google.com/p/fb2epub/
Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity Page 24