Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity Read online

  The philosopher is firm in the denial that any true philosophy could offer some special meaning to some particular group of people. The truth makes no such distinctions. From its remote point of view, that is, the point of view of truth itself, the sort of differences around which groups construct their social identities and distinguish between “them” and “us” could not appear more inconsequential. From the point of view of truth itself, the view that Spinoza dubs “the Infinite Intellect of God,” those differences that loom so large in human affairs are not represented at all. These differences emerge only in our limited points of view — finite, all too finite. These insistences on difference are all confused, albeit understandable—all is understandable — attempts to substantiate that peculiar and necessary significance one confers on one’s self by erecting a view of all reality that would do justice to it. So it is that religions distinguish themselves from one another by declaring their own adherents the favored of God. All such confusions are relegated by Spinoza to the status of superstitions, including any and all difference to which Jews may cling.

  The name “Spinoza” derives from the word for “thorn” in Portuguese, which was the language of the Amsterdam Jewish community in which he had been reared and out of which he had been cast. It was the language in which Spinoza remained the most comfortable throughout his life, no doubt the language in which he thought out his incomparable philosophy. The language in which the most universal of systems was excogitated — a system designed to bleach out any reference to personal points of view determined by the contingencies of historical narratives — was itself maculate with the extraordinary history of Spinoza’s community.

  The name Spinoza strangely suits. Spinoza, as a Jew, presents himself to us adorned in a crown of eternally thorny questions.

  II

  In Search of Baruch

  The Senhores of the ma’amad,1 having long known of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Espinoza, have endeavored by various means and promise, to turn him from his evil ways. But having received more and more serious information about the abominable heresies which he practiced and taught and about his monstrous deeds, and having for this numerous trustworthy witnesses who have deposed and borne witness to this effect in the presence of the said Espinoza, they became convinced of the truth of this matter; and after all of this has been investigated in the presence of the honorable hakhamim2 they have decided, with their consent, that the said Espinoza should be excommunicated and expelled from the people of Israel.

  By decree of the angels and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, with the consent of God, Blessed be He, and with the consent of the entire holy congregation, and in front of these holy scrolls with the 613 precepts which are written therein, cursing him with the excommunication with which Joshua banned Jericho and with the curse which Elisha cursed the boys and with all the castigations that are written in the Book of 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 spare him, but then the anger of the Lord and his jealousy shall smote against that man, and all the curses that are written in this book shall lie upon him, and the Lord shall blot out his name from under heaven. And the Lord shall separate him unto evil out of all the tribes of Israel, according to all the curses of the covenant that are written in this book of the Law. But you that cleave unto the Lord your God are alive every one of you this day.

  We warn that none may contact him orally or in writing, nor do him any favor, nor stay under the same roof with him, nor read any paper he made or wrote.

  — Congregation Talmud Torah, July 27, 1656

  Without intelligence there is not rational life, and things are only good in so far as they aid man in his enjoyment of the intellectual life which is defined by intelligence. Contrariwise, whatsoever things hinder man’s perfection of his reason, and capability to enjoy the rational life, are alone called evil.

  — BENEDICTUS SPINOZA

  The Ethics, Part I V, Appendix V

  I first heard the name Baruch Spinoza uttered as an admonition, a cautionary tale of unbridled human intelligence blindly seeking its own doom.

  This is what happens, the voice of my teacher warned, when someone thinks that human reason is sufficient unto itself and that the truth divinely given to us can be ignored. This is what happens when philosophy takes the place of Torah.

  Baruch Spinoza had come from a good family of God-fearing Jews, similar to your families, girls — all too similar in certain ways. Like so many of your parents and grandparents, your aunts and uncles and cousins, Spinoza’s family had suffered al-Kiddush ha-Shem, for the sanctification of the Holy Name. No, not in Germany or Austria or Poland. Not in Hungary, Rumania, or Russia. The persecution had been in Spain and Portugal, starting in the fifteenth century and continuing for hundreds of years.

  The Espinozas, the philosopher’s family, had been Marranos, those who, even though they had been forced by the Church to convert to Christianity, still continued to practice Judaism in secret, hiding their observance of the Torah from the cruel edicts of the Spanish-Portuguese Inquisition. The slightest suspicion that they still obeyed the Torah — that they remembered the Shabbos and kept it holy, that they would not eat pig — and they would have been subjected to brutal torture and horrible death. In Spanish, auto-da-fé means “act of faith.” What it really meant was the mass trial of those accused of being secret Jews, and then the mass burning to death of all those who were condemned.

  And still, as you well know, girls, many of you, from the examples of your own families, not even this terror was able to extinguish the spark of Yiddishkeit from their souls. Look at what your own families went through under Hitler, and yet one of the first things that concerned them when they got to this country was to make sure that the next generation — your generation, girls — would still learn To-rah. They never lost their faith.

  And that was how it was for Spinoza’s family. After generations of their dangerous secret Jewish allegiance, his family, like many others before them and after, managed to make their way to the Dutch city of Amsterdam, where a community of Portuguese-Jewish exiles was thriving as it could in few other European cities of that day.

  Amsterdam was the most tolerant city in all of Europe. But don’t think that it was as free as what you girls have come to take for granted here. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that it was as tolerant as New York City in 1967.

  Baruch Spinoza had reaped the benefits of the long years of danger and suffering that his family had endured. He had been born into blessed circumstances, had been educated at the yeshiva the community of Portuguese refugees had organized almost as soon as they got to their new shores. It was, by all accounts, an excellent school. Rabbis from other parts of Europe who visited the Talmud Torah of Amsterdam marveled at the level of learning attained there. Baruch had studied under worthy rabbis, including the chief rabbi of Amsterdam, Rabbi Morteira, and he had distinguished himself. He was a brilliant student, a boy born with blessings. His very name, of course, means “blessed” in the holy tongue.

  Yet this misguided young man, my teacher continued, ascending toward the climax, who might have used his superior mind to increase our knowledge of the Torah, had died with the pagan name of Benedictus, excommunicated and cursed by his own people, condemned and reviled as a dangerous heretic even by believing Christians. Let the history of the philosopher Spinoza serve as a warning to you, girls, against the dangers of asking the wrong questions.

  In my teacher’s telling, this Baruch Spinoza might have been one of the no-goodnik boys attending one of the several yeshivas in the neighborhood, the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where Mrs. Schoenfeld taught at an all-girls yeshiva high school. There was only one such girls’ school in the neighborhood, but there were several boys’ schools, anachronistic reminders of the once teeming
Jewish immigrant neighborhood that was largely dismantled by then. I had a long commute to it from a suburb out in Westchester, where my father served as the community’s cantor.

  It was an extremely Orthodox school, the sort that had to be single-sex, since its outlook included the dictum that there be no mixing of girls and boys until it was time to think of marriage, and then the necessary encounters would be carefully supervised. And yet, despite the many oughts and ought-nots drilled into us, some among us still managed to achieve waywardness. There were girls who were not as pious as they might have been. There was a certain kosher pizza shop on East Broadway that was favored by certain girls from my school, the kind who rolled their skirts of regulation length (down at least to the calf) up above their knees as soon as they were out of the sight of our teachers. These girls would go to the infamous pizza shop for the purpose of flirting with “bumulkes,” as my father used to call them, bums with yarmulkes, yeshiva boys who were out on the streets or in pizza shops, up to no good, when they ought to have been in the beit midrash, the house of study, bent over their Talmudic tomes from morning until night.

  Mrs. Schoenfeld’s discussion of Baruch Spinoza suggested that she had seen his type before, and so, she feared, had we. A boy who thinks he knows better than his rabbis and the Torah, who flaunts the Law and flirts with girls. Baruch Spinoza, a bumulke.

  Mrs. Schoenfeld was a serious woman of middle age. At least I remember her as middle-aged. I was of an age when middle age might have meant late twenties. She wore matronly suits with calf-length skirts, and her prim head was topped by both an unbecoming wig and an unbecoming felt hat, a double precaution against committing the sin of a married woman’s hair being seen in public. (Actually, the double precaution is taken so that nobody fooled by the verisimilitude of her wig, might mistakenly think a married woman’s hair is uncovered. From what I remember of Mrs. Schoenfeld’s wig, there was little reason for the hat.) Mrs. Schoenfeld’s students were not yet married (though many of us, including me, would become engaged in our senior year of high school), and so our hair, unlike our teacher’s, was still exposed in all its maidenly glory. Otherwise, we were dressed not unlike her, in skirts that modestly hid most of our legs and blouses with cuffs that nestled our wrists, even though the scandalous sixties were raging all around us. The psychedelic swirl of Washington Square Park was no more than a twenty-minute walk from the door of our little school world, and sometimes I walked through this foreign land to watch the blissful braless girls and long-haired boys, forever at play.

  Mrs. Schoenfeld taught various of the limudei kodesh, or sacred subjects, at the school, but this was the first time I’d ever had her as a teacher. The subject she was teaching was historia, or Jewish history. I had high expectations for this class, and for this teacher. I was encouraged not only by the seriously unattractive black glasses perched on her nose, but also by her English accent, so different from the nasal singsongese that prevailed in the school. I liked the cool, crisp tones of her voice, admired the way she used the English language, distinguishing between “who” and “whom,” using the occasional polysyllabic word that sent me to the dictionary.

  And I liked the subject, too, at least that year, which was devoted to the modern European period. This was exciting for me. Not only did I have a teacher who appeared to be smart, but I was finally learning some historia that seemed more like “regular” history, less like the other le-mudai kodesh subjects that I had already come to doubt counted as genuine knowledge at all, which was a dispiriting thought, given the high percentage of my student life that was taken up by them. I felt the doubt as a sensation in my chest, gnawing away like some sharp-toothed rodent.

  I had an urgency in me to become knowledgeable. I had stared into the hideous face of my ignorance and confusion and grown sick at the sight. I wasn’t at all certain that the large portion of each school day that was devoted to holy scholarship was redressing my lack of knowledge in the least. Mrs. Schoenfeld’s class seemed the one exception offered to me that year.

  Ever since I could remember, historia had gotten no further than the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, in 7 °C.E. Jewish history that was so remote had felt to me continuous with khumash and navi, the Five Books of Moses and the books of the prophets. This impression was underscored not only by historia’s being taught in the mornings, together with all the other religious subjects, but also taught in Hebrew, while our secular subjects were taught in English, mostly by moonlighting public school teachers.

  The public school teachers brought, at least for me, the sweet breath of real knowledge into the classroom, even though I knew they had to censor themselves. I had caught the look of discomfort on my tenth-grade biology teacher’s face, listening to our rabbi-principal explain to us that, because of the New York State Regents exam, we were going to have to study an untrue theory fabricated by Charles Darwin, but that we should not forget for a single moment that it was scientifically unproven and, more important, contradicted by Torah.

  Studying the Jews of modern Europe seemed to carry the subject of historia a thrilling distance away from the religious sphere and closer to the domain of credible secular fact. With relief, I felt that I could put aside my spiky doubts in Mrs. Schoenfeld’s class, reassured by her intelligent accent and syntax. And because of the complexity of the material that year, we were being taught historia in English, again reassuring me of its proximity to trustworthy temporality.

  It would be some while into the school year before I would hear tell of the apikorus, or heretic, Spinoza. Spinoza’s introduction into our classroom awaited the discussion of the touchy subject of the Haskalah, or Jewish enlightenment. Only, in our classroom it wasn’t called by the approbatory term Haskalah. We called it “modernity,” pronouncing it with a Hebrew accent.

  The pivotal figure in modernity was the late-eighteenth-century thinker Moses Mendelssohn, grandfather of the famous composer, both of whom were also mentioned as part of the extended cautionary tale. Moses Mendelssohn had urged that Jews not keep themselves intellectually and culturally separate. He had argued that adherence to the Torah, to which he held firm — he was not an apikorus, girls — did not exclude participation in the arts and sciences. He had urged that Jews educate themselves in the accomplishments of Western civilization. So had argued the grandfather. And the grandson, Felix, was a great musician. His compositions are still played by famous orchestras all over the world. But, girls, he was also a convert to Christianity. The descendents of this illustrious family probably don’t even remember that they were once Jewish. They probably don’t know the first thing about the Yiddishkeit of their ancestors.

  Mrs. Schoenfeld’s expressions, both on her face and in her voice, made the articulation of the moral of the Mendelssohn story gratuitous: admiration leads to accommodation, which leads to assimilation, which leads to the worst. The so-called Haskalah had wanted to mix the immiscible: the insular Torah Jew into the modern world, the modern world into the Torah Jew. We were in favor of insularity, and Mrs. Schoenfeld was no exception, despite her fancy way around English syntax. I still unconsciously think of the word “modernity” as being a Hebrew word, hearing it pronounced with its r rolled and with a tone of stern admonition.

  Spinoza predated Moses Mendelssohn by a good century and a half, but Mrs. Schoenfeld spoke of him as a precursor. He was, she very rightly suggested, the first modern Jew. Spinoza headed the long line of yeshiva boys who were not as pious as they might have been. He was one of the so-called enlightened Jews, a so-called maskil, long before the term had been introduced. (I remember a student in the class once mistakenly saying masik—which means “a little devil,” often used affectionately for children — for maskil, an error which propelled sober Mrs. Schoenfeld to the very verge of laughter.) This Benedictus-né-Baruch was an early sign of the sickness to come, and his own community had tried to keep the contagion from spreading. That is why they took the drastic step of putting him into kherem
, girls, excommunicating him when he was only twenty-three years old. Had Moses Mendelssohn studied the case of Spinoza a little better, he might have saved himself, his family, and the Jewish people a lot of tzurris.3

  Mrs. Schoenfeld suggested that a lot could be learned from understanding the case of Spinoza, as opposed to the philosophy of Spinoza. About the latter she said very little; only that he had had two basic beliefs: The first was that the Torah was not a divine revelation but rather written by man — written in fact by several men who came much later than Moshe Rabbenu, Moses Our Teacher. And the second was that God was identical with nature.

  Mrs. Schoenfeld used the English word “God,” which was not a word we normally used. Instead we said Ha-Shem, Hebrew for “The Name,” a designation that at once circumvents and underscores the prohibition against uttering God’s true and awful name. If His true name were transcribed, then the paper on which it was written would be too holy to be thrown away. It would have to be buried like a human corpse. Even the English word radiated sanctity, which is why we were taught to write “G — d.”

  As brief as it was, Mrs. Schoenfeld’s synopsis of Spinoza’s philosophy intrigued me, by reason of its very incomprehensibility, so that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. First of all, if Spinoza thought that God was identical with nature, then of course he didn’t think the Torah was revealed by God. The denial of divine authorship seemed barely worth mentioning, once one had made the astounding claim that God and nature were one.