The First Modern Jew

by Daniel B. Schwartz

  Unlike Lucas, Bayle and Colerus were at most grudging admirers of Spinoza. They concurred entirely with the general view of his philosophy as absurd and depraved, Bayle calling his doctrine of the unity of substance “the most monstrous hypothesis that could be imagined,”38 Colerus referring to his strict determinism as “the most pernicious atheism that was ever seen in the world.”39 For Bayle the motives for opposing Spinoza were first and foremost philosophical. As a skeptic he objected to the presumption of the infallibility of reason that lay at the core of Spinoza’s system. Reason alone could not serve as the final word on what to believe, for the claims of the heart—“the proofs of feeling, the instincts of conscience, the weight of education, and the like”—held equal, if not stronger right to authority.40 This starting point, Bayle believed, would neutralize Spinoza’s geometric demonstrations even if their logic were impeccable, though, in fact, they were so full of “perplexities” and “impenetrable demonstrations” that “no balanced mind”—a mind, that is, not given over entirely to metaphysical speculation—“could ever be unaware of them.”41 Colerus’s antagonism to Spinoza had a more theological provenance. He was, after all, an orthodox Lutheran, who could not be anything but outraged by Spinoza’s assault on the fundamental mysteries of Christian faith. Indeed, the early editions of his biography were bound together with a sermon he had given from the pulpit in 1704, defending, contra Spinoza and Spinozists, the literal truth of Jesus’s resurrection.

  Yet for all their hostility to Spinoza the philosopher, neither Bayle nor Colerus could find much fault with how he comported himself. The acquaintances of the philosopher whom they interviewed all had generally nice things to say. Spinoza was “sociable, affable, honest, obliging, and of a well-ordered morality.”42 While thrifty and abstemious, he took breaks from his meditations and lens grinding on occasion to smoke a pipe or to chat amiably with his landlords.43 Despite belonging to no confession, he would urge the children of his proprietors to “go often to Church and . . . be obedient and dutiful to their Parents,” and inquire of the family when they returned about the pastor’s sermon. To the question posed to him one day by his landlady of whether she could be saved through her religion, he answered that “[y]our religion is a good one, you need not look for another, nor doubt that you may be saved in it, provided, whilst you apply your self to Piety, you live at the same time a peaceable and quiet Life.” He was a man who mostly kept to himself without being antisocial, a master of his passions without being severe. Simply put, he was a mensch.

  Bayle and Colerus, then, while certainly less kind to Spinoza than the philosophe Lucas, were similarly taken by many of his personal qualities. Their biographies contributed greatly to enshrining such attributes as mildness, objectivity, prudence, self-sufficiency, and gravitas in his public image. And while less thematically integral to the story they told than it was to Lucas’s narrative, the Jewish origin of the philosopher still figured prominently in their depictions. The gist of the portrayal of this origin was more or less the same in Bayle and Colerus as it was in their predecessor; the accent in all three fell on rupture. “A Jew by birth, and afterwards a deserter from Judaism, and lastly an atheist”: Thus Bayle opened his article on Spinoza in the Dictionaire. Colerus echoed this notion of a neat break, pioneering what we might call the “Baruch/Benedict distinction” in the Spinoza literature. “Spinosa,” he began, “that Philosopher, whose name makes so great noise in the World, was originally a Jew. His parents, a little while after his birth, named him Baruch. But having afterwards forsaken Judaism, he changed his Name, and call’d himself Benedict in his Writings.”44 Here, for the first time, the passage from “Jew” to “ex-Jew” in Spinoza’s case was equated with his renaming. Like a convert, “Baruch” was reborn as “Benedict.”

  Neither Bayle nor Colerus detected any source within Jewish thought or society for the system of Spinoza; in the chain of causes each put forward, the stimulus came solely from without. Bayle presented Spinoza as “the first to reduce atheism to a system” by marrying Cartesian method to ancient Far Eastern monism.45 Colerus traced his intellectual development back to the Flemish nonbeliever Franciscus van den Enden, who tutored Spinoza in Latin and laid the ground for his discovery of Descartes.46 This omission was not per se a slap at Judaism. Bayle and Colerus, after all, had deep contempt for Spinoza’s philosophy. It was not that they severed the mature thinker from his Jewish education, but how they did it that conveyed a pejorative image of Judaism. Whatever stigma they imputed to Spinozan “rationalism,” their words betrayed no less an aversion to Jewish “irrationalism.” Bayle stated flatly that “since he [Spinoza] had a mathematical mind and wanted to find a reason for everything he soon realized that rabbinical doctrine was not for him.”47 His Lutheran counterpart made this repulsion even stronger: Embracing the rationalism of Descartes, Spinoza ipso facto turned his back on rabbinic Judaism, a religion “without the least appearance of Reason.”48

  The construction of Judaism as the counterpoint to reason, order, and good sense found its ultimate symbol in the excommunication. We have already seen how Lucas seized on this episode, constructing an account that centered on a dramatic face-off between Spinoza and Morteira, the young prodigy’s greatest champion turned his most vehement foe. Lucas wrote omnisciently, never revealing his sources for this version of events, and the pathos so evidently striven for in his crafting of the story raises serious doubts about its veracity. In contrast Bayle and Colerus both presented themselves as sleuths in search of testimony. Bayle devoted little space to the excommunication in his Dictionaire, stating simply that he had “looked into the circumstances of it without having been able to dig them out.” We can safely assume that he looked hard, not only because he thrilled to such detective work, but because of his general preoccupation with the theme of religious coercion and the autonomy of individual conscience, even to the point of gross error.

  This fascination was evident in his Dictionaire entry on Uriel da Costa (1585–1640), who, next to Spinoza, was the other legendary heretic in seventeenth-century Sephardic Amsterdam. In his autobiography, Exemplar humanae vitae [A Specimen of Human Life], written shortly before his suicide in 1640, Da Costa, a Portuguese “New Christian” who had fled to Amsterdam in his late twenties with the aim of returning to the faith of his fathers, recounted his peripatetic journey from Christianity to Judaism, to openly expressed doubts regarding rabbinic Judaism and in particular the Oral Torah, to total skepticism of revealed religion.49 The Sephardic community of Amsterdam twice placed Da Costa under herem for his heterodoxy, yet both times the heretic grew despondent after living like a recluse for several years and, though his views had not changed, sought reinstatement. On the second occasion, the Mahamad made readmission contingent on his acquiescence to a public humiliation. The only source for this episode is Da Costa, and there are some today who hold that his account of it in the Exemplar is a fabrication written and inserted into the text by a later Christian editor.50 What his autobiography describes, nevertheless, is a ceremony in which Uriel, after recanting his heresy before the entire congregation, was stripped to his waist, bound to one of the columns of the synagogue, whipped thirty-nine times, forced to lie prostrate by the threshold to the sanctuary, and finally trampled on by all the members of the community as they exited. Utterly mortified, Da Costa—after writing a personal history about his trials—ended up shooting himself to death in 1640, not long after the revocation of his herem. Bayle included in his Dictionaire a slightly cropped version of Da Costa’s autobiography annotated by his own commentary, and the abridged account found there of a Jewish anathematization (“this small specimen of Jewish ceremonies”) was undoubtedly in the mold of what the French skeptic had hoped to find in the case of Spinoza as well.

  Colerus, who was familiar with Bayle’s writings on Spinoza, was even more persistent in his quest for evidence about the excommunication. Pumping the Van der Spycks of The Hague for gossip about their most notorious tenan
t bore many dividends, but they had little to offer about this episode in Spinoza’s life. From acquaintances of Spinoza, the clergyman learned that he had spoken of the Jews’ having formally expelled him in his absence and of his having severed “all Friendship and Correspondence with them” from that moment on.51 But what exactly had been the nature of this ceremony? Who had officiated over the ban, and what was the formulary that had been used against Spinoza? Colerus thought that he had struck gold in the testimony of some Jews from Amsterdam, who claimed that the “Chacham Abuab,” “a Rabbin of great Reputation amongst ’em,” had been the one to pronounce the sentence. The reference was to Hakham Isaac Aboab da Fonseca (1605–1693), who in 1656 had been one of the chief rabbis of the Sephardic Talmud Torah congregation of Amsterdam. Colerus tracked down the rabbi’s sons in the hope they might furnish him with a copy of the writ of excommunication, but they dodged his request.

  The Lutheran preacher would not let the matter lie. Stymied in his attempt to obtain a traditional writ of excommunication from the Jews, Colerus had better luck with a Christian Hebraist named Surrenhusius, who was a professor of Hebrew at the Athenaeum Illustre, the prototype of the University of Amsterdam. Surrenhusius provided the author with a Latin translation of a generic formula, taken from a medieval work of Jewish ritual and civil law. Colerus translated the document into Dutch and printed it in full. Compared to the actual text of the herem, it was close to four times as long and more fulminating by far.52 At no point did Colerus categorically assert that this was the anathema used in Spinoza’s case. But that appears to be how it was read. “His long conjectural description of Spinoza’s excommunication,” writes Richard Popkin, “was accepted as fact in the popular literature.”53

  To sum up, though Spinoza’s early biographers were unable to obtain reliable information about the excommunication, they were nonetheless instrumental in making this episode both a pivotal moment in his personal history and a prime example of the backwardness of Judaism and religious power. Particularly in eighteenth-century France, in large measure because of Bayle’s influence, Spinoza and Da Costa came to loom over the discourse surrounding the legitimacy of Jewish communal authority. When the revolutionary Abbé Henri Grégoire (1750–1831) wrote his prize-winning essay in support of Jewish “regeneration” in 1787, he advocated Jewish individual rights while calling for the abolition of the organized Jewish community. “If this right, however, be left them, confined to objects merely of a religious nature,” Grégoire added, “it must have no relation with those of a political society, and must never brand a citizen with infamy, as the synagogue of Amsterdam branded Uriel Acosta.”54

  Yet however prominently the excommunication came to figure in the image of Spinoza and his “precursor,” it was not inevitable that this emphasis would emerge. Jarig Jelles (c. 1619/20–1683), a Dutch Mennonite who was the editor of Spinoza’s posthumous works and one of his oldest and closest friends, glossed over it completely in his preface to the Opera posthuma. Meanwhile, around the time that Bayle and Colerus were polishing off their profiles of the Amsterdam heretic, another story line about Spinoza was taking shape. This one made little fuss about the excommunication, focusing instead on what this much-hyped rupture was allegedly concealing—an underground channel between Spinozism and Judaism.

  III.

  In 1699 Johann Georg Wachter (1673–1757), a German deist and philologist, published Der Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb [Spinozism in Judaism].55 Writing in German instead of Latin, the better to ensure a wide readership in his native language, Wachter ventured a brash new theory for the intellectual origins of Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura. To this point, still only twenty-two years after the original publication of the Ethics, efforts to construct a pedigree for what appeared to contemporary readers a baffling mix of God-talk and atheism had largely centered on Cartesianism. In 1697 Bayle added to this matrix the influence of Eastern religion (in particular Confucian theology), suggesting that the renegade Jew had translated an ancient and exotic conception of unified substance—a conception traditionally concealed from the masses—into the “systematic” idiom and “totally new method” of Cartesian rationalism. Now Wachter, in a tome of over three hundred pages, argued that the search for Spinoza’s sources should return to the world from which he came. The identification of God with the world was of kabbalistic, hence Jewish origin. Spinozism was not a break from Judaism, but its truest expression.

  Wachter claimed to have made this discovery through conversations with Moses Germanus, a late seventeenth-century German proselyte to Judaism who had settled in Amsterdam. Germanus, né Johann Peter Spaeth, had flitted between various Christian denominations before finally undergoing circumcision and joining the Portuguese community of Amsterdam, whereupon he became a noted polemicist against Christianity and heresy. While in Amsterdam between 1698 and 1699, Wachter entered into a debate with his fellow German over Judaism and the Kabbalah; Der Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb was his account of the controversy. Wachter blamed Germanus’s embrace of Judaism on his encounter with Kabbalah years earlier while assisting Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, a Christian Hebraist and theosophist steeped in Jewish mysticism, in the editing of the Kabbalah denudata [Kabbalah Unmasked, 1677–84].56 This multivolume anthology—a work of great import in the history of Christian Kabbalah—consisted of translations into Latin of a variety of Hebrew and Aramaic kabbalistic texts. Whatever knowledge of Kabbalah Wachter owned came primarily from this compendium. The thirteenth-century Zohar was the most significant mystical opus excerpted therein, yet it was the abridgement of a work by the Sephardic Jew Abraham Cohen Herrera that absorbed—and alarmed—Wachter the most.

  A son of former Marranos, Herrera had grown up in Florence and Venice, before moving to Amsterdam shortly after a Portuguese community emerged there in the early seventeenth century. Through his teacher Israel Sarug, an eminent kabbalist, Herrera had imbibed a modified form of Lurianism, the stream of Jewish mystical thought attributed to the Safed spiritualist Isaac Luria, which was then crystallizing in the Ottoman East. In accord with the philosophically inflected tradition of Italian Kabbalah, Herrera proceeded to give the Lurianic myth a strongly Neoplatonic flavor in his magnum opus, the Spanish Puerta del Cielo.57 Translated into Hebrew by Amsterdam rabbi Isaac Aboab de Fonseca in 1655, just a year prior to Spinoza’s excommunication, Herrera’s book would enter the limelight of European letters through Rosenroth’s condensed Latin version of 1678.

  Wachter’s sensationally titled Der Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb did much to advance Herrera’s (not to mention Spinoza’s) recognition. The Lutheran author based his argument for the pantheistic character of the Kabbalah on Herrera’s presentation of Lurianic cosmogony. Before creation, according to Lurianism, there was only the one and infinite God, or En-Sof (Infinite). To bring the world into being, God had first to limit his own unbounded plenitude, in the face of which no finite creation could prevail. The Lurianists imaged this restriction of the divine nature as a process of contraction, in Hebrew tsimtsum, wherein God essentially made room for that which taken alone was not God. But did this act of self-limitation engender a genuine cleavage between God and the world? Or was the cosmos simply a determination of the universal divine power, so that in fact even after creation there remained but a single all-embracing reality—the one and infinite En-Sof? This was the interpretation favored by Herrera. In proposing that nature existed within God—a doctrine that scholars of religion today call panentheism and distinguish from pantheism proper, the view that God and the world are synonymous—Herrera had several texts within classical Jewish literature on which he could draw.58 The line between strict theism and panentheism was never one the fashioners or transmitters of rabbinic Judaism felt compelled to fix clearly; nor was it ever a spur to sectarian division. Provided one affirmed a transcendent God who was the creator and master of the universe—which Herrera and Lurianism most certainly did—the loose criteria for acceptable monotheistic belief were apparently satisfied.r />
  Wachter, however, seized on Herrera’s words to argue that the Kabbalah obliterated the distinction between God and the universe and thus deified the material world entirely. This divinizing of everything (daß alle Wesen Gott seye), even the basest sort of matter, was the core doctrine of the Kabbalah, which Wachter simply equated with the philosophy of Judaism proper. Why, then, did the Jews not expressly promulgate this doctrine? Because, Wachter alleged, they recoiled from its consequences for religious tradition and decorum.59 But Spinoza had no such hesitancy. While rejecting the entire mythological lexicon of Jewish theosophy, he made the Grundlehre of the Kabbalah—the idea “that outside the intellect in the world (logos) there is nothing but the one divine substance”—into the cornerstone of his own system. “We owe a great debt of gratitude to Spinoza,” Wachter thus concluded, “since he was willing to communicate his error so frankly.”60

  The only explicit reference to the Kabbalah in Spinoza’s writings is found in the ninth chapter of the Treatise. After criticizing those who impute covert divine inspiration to the words and even the letters of scripture, Spinoza finally names his target, claiming: “I have also read, and am acquainted with, a number of Cabbalistic triflers whose madness passes the bounds of my understanding.”61 Clearly, no common ground between Spinoza and the Kabbalah existed on the subject of hermeneutics. His metaphysical system was a different story. Wachter pointed to other passages from Spinoza’s oeuvre that appeared to identify a source within Jewish tradition for his identification of God and Nature. In the seventy-third of Spinoza’s epistles, the philosopher explained that “[a]ll things, I say, are in God and move in God,” adding that “I affirm this together with Paul and perhaps together with all ancient philosophers . . . and I would even venture to say, together with all the ancient Hebrews, as far as may be conjectured from certain traditions, though these have suffered much corruption.”62