The First Modern Jew

by Daniel B. Schwartz

  The standard explanation of this general silence vis-à-vis Spinoza is that the Jews had years before issued their definitive statement on the matter. On July 27, 1656, the Sephardic community of Amsterdam, known as the Kahal Kados Talmud Torah, issued this writ of excommunication against the twenty-three-year-old Spinoza:

  The Senhores of the Mahamad make it known that they have long since been cognizant of the wrong opinions and behavior of Baruch d’Espinoza, and tried various means and promises to dissuade him from his evil ways. But as they effected no improvement, obtaining on the contrary more information every day of the horrible heresies which he practised and taught, and of the monstrous actions which he performed, and as they had many trustworthy witnesses who in the presence of the same Espinoza reported and testified against him and convicted him; and after all this had been investigated in the presence of the rabbis, they decided with the consent of these that the same Espinoza should be excommunicated and separated from the people of Israel, as they now excommunicate him with the following ban:

  After the judgment of the Angels, and with that of the Saints, we excommunicate, expel and curse and damn Baruch d’Espinoza with the consent of God, Blessed be He, and with the consent of this holy congregation [Kahal Kados] in front of the holy Scrolls with the 613 precepts which are written therein, with the anathema with which Joshua banned Jericho, with the curse with which Elisha cursed the youths, and with all the curses which are written in the Law. Cursed be he by day, and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up; cursed be he when he goes out, and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not pardon him; the anger and wrath of the Lord will rage against this man, and bring him all the curses which are written in the Book of the Law, and the Lord will destroy his name from under the Heavens, and the Lord will separate him to injury from all the tribes of Israel with all the curses of the firmament, which are written in the Book of the Law. But you who cleave to the Lord your God are blessed.

  We order that nobody should communicate with him orally or in writing, or show him any favor, or stay with him under the same roof, or come within four ells of him, or read anything composed or written by him.16

  Six weeks after its proclamation, a Portuguese copy of the ban, or herem, was officially entered into the community’s Book of Ordinances, whence it did not resurface for two hundred years.17 What were the “horrible heresies” and “monstrous actions” referred to in the preamble to the writ of expulsion? What were, for that matter, the “various means and promises to dissuade him from his evil ways” that the community had tried? The Mahamad—that is, the lay leaders of the Sephardic congregation—were not forthcoming with such details. Nothing is said about which taboos in particular he had violated. Nor do we have any detailed testimony about the causes and circumstances of the ban from a Jew who was witness to the events firsthand. It is certainly plausible that Spinoza was propagating ideas in the mid-1650s similar to what he published in the Treatise and Ethics years later (in which case his excommunication would be no mystery whatsoever), but there is no unimpeachable proof to support this presumption.18 Scholars have thus been forced to rely on hints and allusions, circumstantial evidence and collateral sources in venturing hypotheses about why Spinoza was excommunicated. From the new theories that continue to be added to the myriad already suggested, it seems fair to wonder whether a measure of consensus will ever be reached on this question.19

  One thing is clear: The community evidently viewed Spinoza as a very wicked and dangerous heretic, since they slapped him with a ban of exceptional harshness. In sound and fury as well as in scope, his writ of expulsion exceeds all but one of the more than one hundred listed in the community’s Book of Ordinances.20 Clearly, this was no ordinary herem. Beyond forbidding all personal contact with the heretic, the board of governors also outlawed reading “anything composed or written by him.” This meant that even a rebuttal of the Treatise or the Opera posthuma would presume some form of reading of the texts themselves and thus constitute a violation of the terms of the herem, putting the polemicist himself at risk of communal censure. The lack of extant published responses to Spinoza by Jews for the first hundred years of his reception (barring the one indirect polemic by Orobio) would thus seem to testify to the success of the 1656 prohibition in squelching any and all engagement with the Amsterdam heretic.

  The more we learn about early modern Amsterdam and the Western Sephardic Diaspora, the more problematic this picture of scrupulous obedience of the herem becomes. We know that as early as 1658, only two years after the ban, Spinoza, along with another recently excommunicated heretic—the former converso Dr. Juan de Prado—dined on several occasions at the Amsterdam residence of a convalescing Spanish caballero, where they were regularly joined by two seemingly untroubled members of the Sephardic community, “good” Jews who refused the pork offered them.21 We also know, from both external sources and internal Jewish polemics, that by the first half of the eighteenth century, freethinking, antirabbinic, and deistic tendencies were increasingly rife among a rarefied clique of upper-crust and cosmopolitan Western Sephardim and a smaller number of Ashkenazim living in port cities like Amsterdam, Hamburg, and London.22 It stands to reason that many of these irreligious Jews would have read Spinoza or at least absorbed his ideas secondhand. No less likely is it that their opponents within the Jewish community—defenders, like Orobio, of miracles, divine providence, and the binding authority of both Written and Oral Torah—were compelled to develop working knowledge of the deistic and pantheistic heresies they were countering. The notion that “[t]he Jews, even the ones who did know Latin, would not read the TTP [the Tractatus theologico-politicus], since it was written by an outcast” overrates the deterrance of the herem and, in a broader sense, the ability of Jewish communal authorities throughout the eighteenth-century Western Sephardic world to enforce their decrees.23

  These qualifications aside, it remains a fact that Jewish voices were almost entirely absent in the discourse about Spinoza until the middle of the eighteenth century. They may have read him, but they did not—at least to our knowledge—write about him. This is true of both the majority who detested Spinoza (and would be expected to submit more readily to the terms of the ban) and the radical fringe receptive to his biblical criticism and one-substance doctrine. Of the various freethinking tracts affirming Spinoza and his philosophy that were written in this period and that have trickled down to us, we are aware of not one from the hand of a Jew.

  The fashioning of Spinoza into a symbol was thus initially left to non-Jews. In what follows, I discuss the relevance of Spinoza’s Jewishness to this early mythmaking. The shapers of Spinoza’s early image typically assigned his Jewishness a significant role, albeit not a positive one. Two basic plotlines à propos this particularity developed in the late seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century. One emphasized contrast, the other continuity. The first of the two frames—we might call it the “ex-Jew” (ex judaeo) frame—originated in the pioneering biographies of Spinoza and made Spinoza’s excommunication and estrangement from Judaism seminal aspects of his image. The second—we might, for lack of a better phrase, call it the “eternal Jew” frame—vouched for the ineffaceable nature of Spinoza’s religious past, claiming his philosophy to be no more than a dressed-up versi.on of Jewish esoteric lore. The imaging of Spinoza’s Jewishness tended to oscillate between these poles. When, later on, Jews began to take a new look at the seventeenth-century heretic, they joined this already existing discourse. In rethinking Spinoza’s Jewishness, they were also rethinking representations of this identity they had inherited.

  II.

  Data about the life of the philosopher are strewn across the spectrum of early Spinoza and anti-Spinoza literature, yet three figures were especially important in the formation of his myth: Jean-Maximilien Lucas (1647–1697), Pierre Bayle (1647–1707), and Johannes Colerus (1647–1707). Lucas was the author of what is considered to be
the “oldest biography of Spinoza,” written not long after his death in 1677. He was also the only one of the three who was unequivocal in his admiration of the philosopher. As both a Huguenot and a freethinker, Lucas had two marks against him in the France of Louis XIV, so, like many in his situation, he had immigrated to Holland in the early 1670s, where it seems he became a member of Spinoza’s circle. He wrote La vie de M. Benoit de Spinosa as a tribute to an “illustrious friend” and “Great Man” he considered a beacon to lovers of reason everywhere. “This is what I counsel to steadfast souls,” Lucas concluded, “to follow [Spinoza’s] maxims and his lights in such a way as to have them always before their eyes to serve as a rule for their actions.”24 In the words of Paul Vernière, the author of a classic study of the French reception of Spinoza through the Revolution, “[w]ith the devoted biographer Lucas, a legend is born.”25 Spinoza’s beginnings were pivotal to this legend. Though his Jewish pedigree had drawn notice since the moment he gained a public reputation, little was actually known about his upbringing and eventual falling-out with the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam. What stood out was simply that Spinoza had left the Jewish community; the road to this break was foggy.

  Lucas was the first to expand on this skeletal frame. He transformed the ex judaeo status of the philosopher from a biographical eccentricity into a watershed of mythic proportions. His narrative divides roughly into two halves, with the excommunication right in the middle. “BARUCH DE SPINOSA,” it begins, was born to a poor Portuguese Jewish family—a family so poor that they could not afford to stake him to a career in business and thus had him study “Hebrew literature” instead.26 This field, “the whole of Jewish science,” per Lucas, was unable to satisfy a mind as brilliant as his for long. Through Spinoza’s own critical reading of the Bible followed by the Talmud he realized the futility of searching for “Truth” in either. Nevertheless, he kept quiet, not wanting to cause a scandal. Great things were expected of him: The original chief rabbi of the Talmud Torah congregation of Amsterdam, Hakham Saul Morteira (or Mortera) (1596–1660), “a celebrity among the Jews, and the least ignorant of all the Rabbis of his time,” saw Spinoza as his prize student. He took Spinoza’s reserve as a mark of humility, marveling that “a young man of such penetration could be so modest.” By walling himself off, Spinoza was able for a while to avoid rousing too much suspicion.

  Then, one day, two of Spinoza’s contemporaries approached him “professing to be his most intimate friends” and mentioned to him their own skepticism of rabbinic teachings. In this way they managed to coax out of him his true thoughts. Spinoza claimed that the Bible describes God in corporeal terms, that it makes no mention of immortality of the soul, and that it characterizes angels as subjective visions rather than real beings. Almost immediately, he regretted saying anything. He broke off the conversation, avoided their attempts to renew it, and eventually cut them off entirely. Once they realized he meant to snub them for good, the two friends determined to take revenge. They started by whispering against him in the community that “the people deceived themselves in believing that this young man might become one of the pillars of the Synagogue; that it seemed more likely that he would be its destroyer, as he had nothing but hatred and contempt for the Law of Moses.”27 When the two presented this charge before the “Judges of the Synagogue,” the latter were at first so irate that “they thought of condemning him [Spinoza] without hearing him first.” Spinoza, calm as always, “went cheerfully to the Synagogue” after receiving their summons.

  Morteira, “having heard of the peril in which his disciple was placed,” dashed toward the synagogue and joined the judges. He pled with Spinoza to repent of the views ascribed him; the latter held firm. He threatened, as chief of the synagogue, to expel the accused instantly if he did not show remorse; Spinoza replied cheekily “that he knew the gravity of his threats, and that, in return for the trouble which he had taken to teach him the Hebrew language, he was quite willing to show him how to excommunicate.”28 The rabbi predictably exploded with rage at this retort. He adjourned the trial and “vowed not to come there again except with the thunderbolt in his hand.” Still, he allowed some time to pass, believing Spinoza would flinch once he realized the severity of the punishment he faced. But Spinoza didn’t waver. On the contrary, hearing that a date had been appointed for his expulsion, he responded: “All the better; they do not force me to do anything that I would not have done of my own accord if I did not dread scandal.”29

  Unwilling to settle for merely banning from the synagogue someone who seemed altogether unmoved by such a punishment, the Jews, led by Morteira, pressed the Amsterdam magistrates to evict Spinoza from the city. The magistrates, though unconvinced by the evidence against the defendant, reluctantly acceded to the Jewish community’s petition and condemned Spinoza to temporary exile. Spinoza thus left his native city for the Dutch village of Rijnsburg. Once there, he dedicated himself entirely to the search for truth, setting out on the path that would lead to the Treatise and the Ethics. He never had anything to do with Jews or Judaism again.

  Here and there in the narrative, one can make out echoes of events that probably have a basis in fact. Some kind of confrontation between Spinoza and Morteira is hinted at in an internal history of the Talmud Torah congregation written by Daniel Levi (né Miguel) de Barrios, a onetime Andalusian Marrano who became the most celebrated poet and chronicler of the Portuguese community of Amsterdam.30 We know that the relapse of De Prado, a former converso and deist in the Amsterdam community who appears to have been connected with Spinoza around the time the latter was excommunicated, and may even have been the cause of his heretical turn, was detected in part by using his students as spies.31 Finally, there is no reason to suppose that the divorce between Spinoza and Sephardic Amsterdam was anything but entirely mutual. Still, the flat-out falsehoods in this account are many. From the alleged poverty of Spinoza’s youth to the notion that Morteira, as “chief of the synagogue,” had the power to impose the “thunderbolt,” from the claim that the Jews convinced the city magistrates to expel Spinoza from Amsterdam, to the depiction of the Jewish excommunicators as foaming at the mouth, this is a highly slanted version of Spinoza’s origins, written to show Jews and Judaism in the ugliest light possible. “But what I esteem most in him,” Lucas wrote, “is that, although he was born and bred in the midst of a gross people who are the source of superstition,” he had emancipated himself entirely “of those silly and ridiculous opinions which the Jews have of God.”32 Lucas’s biography of Spinoza plays up the Jewish past of the philosopher, but only as a benighted foil to the rationality, cosmopolitanism, and tolerance that Spinoza, by his heroic repudiation of Judaism, is meant to embody. It is an early illustration of a stream within the radical Enlightenment that opposed Judaism not, like earlier Christian theological anti-Judaism, for rejecting the messiahship and divinity of Jesus, but as the ultimate “source of superstition.”

  Lucas’s iconization of Spinoza went unprinted for four decades after its composition, circulating only in various manuscripts that belonged to the burgeoning corpus of “clandestine literature” associated with the radical Enlightenment. In 1719 two editions of the biography were published in Amsterdam—one in tandem with the Traité des trois imposteurs [Treatise of the Three Impostors], a work that became perhaps the most notorious antireligious tract of the eighteenth century.33 But these imprints were rapidly suppressed, so few copies are extant. The only other edition that appeared over the rest of the century shared the same fate.34 Outside, then, of a small number of texts whose existence was known to a select few, Lucas’s account survived only piecemeal—through interpolations made to other biographies of Spinoza, which would not be traced back to their originator until much later.35 Familiarity with his profile of the philosopher in its entirety was undoubtedly slight.

  The framing of the life of Spinoza in the early Enlightenment thus largely fell to two other foreign-born residents of the Netherlands, Bayle and Colerus. From
1681 until his death in 1706, Bayle lived as an exile in Rotterdam, teaching philosophy and history to fellow Huguenot refugees at the École Illustre while writing the works that made him the leading skeptical philosopher of the late seventeenth century. Of the many persons he assayed in his landmark of Enlightenment literature, the Dictionaire historique et critique, the one who merited the longest treatment was Spinoza, the focus of an entry that combined biographical précis with philosophical censure. Because of the popularity of the book of which it was a part, this article did more to influence the eighteenth-century image of Spinoza than any other work.36 Colerus, or Johann Köhler, hailed from Düsseldorf. In 1693, after serving as the pastor to the Lutheran community of Amsterdam for fourteen years, he moved to The Hague to accept a parallel position. There, he happened to take lodgings in the house where Spinoza had boarded initially after settling in the city—his final place of residence—some twenty-three years earlier. Just behind this house stood that of the painter Henryk van der Spyck and his family. Members of the Lutheran congregation, they had rented to Spinoza the room in which he lived until his death in 1677. Exactly what role these coincidences played in encouraging Colerus to write a biography of Spinoza is unclear. In any event, he made extensive use of the reminiscences of Spinoza’s former landlord and his parishioner Van der Spyck in putting together his narrative. In 1705 his Korte, dog waarachtige Levens-Beschryving van Benedictus de Spinosa [Short, but True Biography of Benedictus de Spinosa] appeared in print, followed a year later by English and French translations of the Dutch original.37 This was by far the longest and most informative of the early accounts of Spinoza, and in the end also the most authoritative.