BETRAYING SPINOZA
Reviewed by Steven G. Kellman (July / August 2006)

BETRAYING SPINOZA: THE RENEGADE JEW WHO GAVE US MODERNITY. Rebecca Goldstein. Schocken, New York, 2006, 290 pages.

When Michael Shapiro compiled a cheeky book he called The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (New York, Carol Publications, 1994), Baruch Spinoza placed tenth, just ahead of King David, Anne Frank, and the Prophets. Three of the top nine-Jesus at #2 (#1 is Moses), Saint Paul at #6, and Mary at #9-were not exactly frum, but Spinoza represents the most notorious case of a Jew repudiated by his own people. Seventeenth-century Amsterdam contained three synagogues, but all united in denouncing Spinoza. Though he is, according to Rebecca Goldstein, "the greatest philosopher that the Jews ever produced," [p. 3] the Jews of Spinoza's own time, like many later, refused to recognize either the philosopher or his philosophy as Jewish.

On July 27, 1656, in a proclamation of excommunication, the Jewish community of Amsterdam announced: "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 [with] which Elisha cursed the boys and with all the castigations that are written in the Book of the Law. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in." [pp. 17-18]

Twenty-three-year-old Spinoza did not go out of his way to defend himself against charges of heresy, and the kherem (ban or excommunication) that was imposed on him was unconditional and permanent. No Jew was henceforth permitted to have any contact with him, under penalty of his or her own excommunication.

However, Spinoza considered tribal loyalties an impediment to his quest for universal truth. He was a child when a Jewish refugee from Portugal named Uriel da Costa was formally ostracized for heretical beliefs and practices. Da Costa recanted but, though his excommunication was rescinded in 1640 in a ceremony of public humiliation, committed suicide shortly afterward. Yet banishment by the same Jewish community did not unhinge Spinoza. Discarding his Hebrew name, Baruch (Blessed), for its Latin equivalent, Benedictus, the blessed thinker branded with a communal curse pursued his work-grinding lenses and wooing reason-in splendid isolation, until his death in 1677 at forty-four.
"In all of Western philosophy," states Goldstein, "he is the most singular and solitary."
[p. 143]

Following Robert Pinsky's The Life of David, Sherwin B. Nuland's Maimonides, and Douglas Century's Barney Ross, Goldstein's Betraying Spinoza is the fourth book in the "Jewish Encounters" series that Jonathan Rosen is editing for Schocken. The title of her book is an admission that its purposes are in many ways at odds with Spinoza's austere principles.

A champion of absolute reason, he spurned sectarian personal identities. So the first way that Goldstein "betrays" her subject is by situating him within this series, by presuming that a meditation on Spinoza is indeed a Jewish encounter. In her elegant formulation, though, Spinoza is never more Jewish than when he is challenging the religious identity imposed on him in the Europe of the Inquisition and the Reformation. "For what can be more characteristic of a Jewish thinker," she asks, "than to use the Jewish experience as a conduit to universality?" [p. 178] A pioneer of secularism in an era that did not yet comprehend the term, Spinoza, "The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernism," anticipated such other renegade Jews as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Albert Einstein.

However, Goldstein commits her most fundamental "betrayal" by making her book into a personal encounter. She tells the story of an American adolescent who fell in love with the philosopher who aspired to a state of radical objectivity, in which the temporal self has been transcended. To attempt to know Spinoza biographically is to betray his insistence on impersonality.

As both a novelist and a philosopher, Goldstein (who took the title of her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem, from an ontological conundrum that tested Spinoza and his contemporaries) is ideally equipped to take on this assignment. She does so by blending memoir, history, philosophy, and biography. Goldstein begins by recalling her introduction to Spinoza, in 1967, in the all-girls' Orthodox yeshiva that she attended on the Lower East Side. For her pious teacher, Spinoza offered a cautionary illustration of the seductive dangers of modernity. His claim that God is neither more nor less than nature was, insisted Mrs. Schoenfeld, tantamount to atheism. In her view, Spinoza, a brilliant student of Torah and the Talmud, succumbed to the temptations of assimilation and ended up an apikorus, a pathetic, lonely heretic who believed in nothing but his own genius. Young Goldstein found herself perversely attracted to this renegade, this image of the betraying Spinoza, perhaps because he embodied some of her own ambivalent feelings about Jewish identity in a Gentile society.

Later, trained in analytic philosophy, Goldstein was taught to scorn Spinoza's extravagant presumption about the role of a priori reason, his construction of a metaphysics and an ethics based entirely on deduction. However, she came to admire the magnificence and rigor of Spinoza's thought when, as an instructor at Barnard College, she was assigned to teach a course called "Seventeenth-Century Rationalism: Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz." The effect on her students of following Spinoza's mind as he attempted to grasp the universal logic that admits neither chance nor contingency Goldstein found "moving beyond measure."[p. 63] And she discovered an ecstatic quality to Spinoza's thought that was lacking in the rationalism of Descartes and Leibnitz and that she attributed to the historical circumstances of being a Sephardic Jew in Amsterdam.

The son of refugees from Portugal, Spinoza grew up, speaking Portuguese, within a community traumatized by the eradication of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, where Jewish culture had flourished for centuries. Forcing its victims to choose between conversion or emigration, the Inquisition ruthlessly pursued conversos whom it deemed insufficiently or insincerely Christian. Protestant Holland welcomed fugitive Jews, as long as they conformed to the religious category of Jew. However, for people who had been deprived for a century of Jewish education and institutions, questions of Jewish identity were perplexing-they were uncertain about exactly what being Jewish entailed. After a generation or two of observing Christian rituals in Portugal and Spain, these ambiguous Jews were as disturbing to Dutch authorities as they were to Jewish leaders. Goldstein explains how the rabbis of Amsterdam were particularly anxious to establish structures and norms for their traumatized community. Excommunication was a tool for ensuring orthodoxy.

Describing the competing strains within the Jewish community of Amsterdam, Goldstein notes the powerful appeal of Kabbalah as an alternative to a legalistic adherence to halakhah (Jewish religious law). Mysticism in general and messianism in particular offered consolation and hope to victims of the Christian terror in Iberia. The rationalist Spinoza might seem to have had very little in common with his charismatic contemporary the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi, though each aspired to transcendent ecstasy. In Spinoza's rational universe, nothing occurs by chance, and it is surely more than historical happenstance that Sabbatai Zevi was being hailed as Messiah at the same time that Spinoza was struggling toward the ecstatic state of Amor dei intellectualis, the intellectual love of God in which petty matters such as individual and group identity are dissolved. According to Goldstein, Spinoza sought a solution to the problem of Jewish history in a synoptic vision that transcends both Jewishness and history. Yet the peril of his enterprise, for our time as much as his, is evident in the fate not only of Sabbatai Zevi but also of another contemporary, Jan de Witt. The former was forced by Turkish authorities to renounce his prophetic claims and convert to Islam. And de Witt, the Dutch champion of liberty and toleration, was torn to pieces by a savage mob.

Goldstein evokes the poignant image of the pariah Spinoza near the end of his short life returning from the Hague to visit Amsterdam. He gazes wistfully from a distance at the Jewish community, but his mind is closing in on cosmic truths. Until his death, in a modest rented room, he continues aiming at "an objectivity so radical that even our own demise can be contemplated with equanimity." [p. 189] Though Goldstein presumes to represent Spinoza's thoughts, she respects his goal of objectivity enough not to betray the philosopher with voyeuristic inventions about his life.

Nor does she do more than suggest Spinoza's continuing relevance, during a violent time of religious sectarianism and fanatical irrationality. Both The Ethics and Tractactus Theologico-Politicus have more beneficiaries than readers, in the legacy of freedom to think. Though the question of who is a Jew remains contested, Spinoza must be considered the greatest philosopher produced by the Jews, if not the greatest Jewish philosopher. During the past century, when Ashkenazic Jews abandoned Orthodoxy for secular universalism, this Portuguese-speaking renegade became the intellectual saint of Yiddishkeit. In "The Spinoza of Market Street," Isaac Bashevis Singer depicts a scholar who, after thirty years spent studying The Ethics, still considers himself unworthy of the master. In Montreal in the 1950s, Melekh Ravitch composed twenty Yiddish poems about Spinoza, and in "Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens," A. M. Klein marvels: "Reducing providence to theorems, the horrible atheist compiled such love that proved, like two and two makes four, that in the crown of God we all are gems." Spinoza even moved Albert Einstein, who called himself his disciple, to poetry: "Wie liebe ich diesen edlen Mann, mehr als ich mit Worten sagen kann " (How much I love this noble man is more than I can say with words). The words that Goldstein musters explain and sustain such love, even as they acknowledge that biography is an impediment to cosmic understanding.

Steven G. Kellman teaches comparative literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio and is the author of Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth (Norton) and The Translingual Imagination (Nebraska).