The following is a slightly revised version of an
article that appeared in the Autumn 2005/Winter
2006 issue of Humanistic Judaism. It is
reprinted with permission.

Soon after the establishment of the State of
Israel, Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, a
secular Jew, urged the Chief Rabbi of the new
Jewish state to lift the excommunication or herem
on Spinoza. The answer was negative. Instead of
being lifted, the ban imposed in 1654 was
reaffirmed. Nothing has changed since then.
Spinoza remains the ultimate Jewish heretic.

Baruch Spinoza was born in Amsterdam, Holland in
1632. His parents were Portuguese Jewish
marranos, forced converts to Catholicism who
practiced their Judaism in secret. They fled to
Holland, a Protestant nation, because it allowed
Jews religious freedom. Spinoza's father, a
merchant, was active in the Amsterdam Jewish
community.

Spinoza received a traditional Jewish education.
His first language was Portuguese, but he also
spoke Spanish, an imperfect Dutch and read
Hebrew. He left school in his teens to go into
his father's business, but continued his Jewish
education as a young adult. Well versed in Jewish
religious texts, he also studied with liberal
non-Jewish scholars and learned Latin.

Influenced by Christian humanists and
freethinkers, he gradually became disenchanted
with rabbinic Judaism. Descartes (1596-1650), the
French rationalist philosopher, had the most
impact on his thinking, but he also owed an
intellectual debt to the French Jewish
philosopher Gersonides, a.k.a. Levi Ben Gerson
(1288-1344), who valued reason over revelation
and posited a God who was remote from human
affairs.

Although young Spinoza took no steps to formally
break with the Jewish community, his heretical
ideas came to the attention of the Jewish
authorities. He apparently was overheard denying
God's authorship of the Torah, the immortality of
the soul, the existence of the afterlife and
divine rewards and punishments. After he refused
to disavow these views, he was summoned before a
Jewish court. Failing to appear, he was
excommunicated on July 27, 1656. (The Hebrew term
is herem.) At nearly the same time, his friend,
Juan de Prado, a Jewish refugee from Spain,
suffered the same fate. Other excommunications
took place during this period as well, attesting
to both the prevalence of dissenting currents
among Amsterdam's Jews and the dogged intolerance
of the Jewish communal leadership.

Excommunication was not merely a religious
disenfranchisement. It meant that Spinoza was
officially declared a heretic and cut off from
all dealings and relationships with other Jews.
He may still have maintained low-level contacts
with a handful of Jews, including some dissidents
like de Prado, but for the most part, he lived
the rest of his life in the company of
progressive Christian intellectuals. He never
converted, but did assume the Latin name Benedict
in place of the Hebrew Baruch. In 1677, he died
at age 45 from tuberculosis, an occupational
hazard of his later work as a lens grinder.
Since his ties with the Jewish community were
irrevocably severed, he was buried in a church
cemetery.

Spinoza developed a political philosophy that
laid the foundation for representative
government, democracy and the separation of
religion and the state. His advocacy of freedom
of thought and conscience had enormous influence
on Western intellectual history. But can he be
properly described as the founder of Jewish
secularism?

If we relied only on the testimony of leaders of
the secular Jewish movement, as it emerged in
Eastern Europe in the second half of the 19th
century, the answer would be a resounding "yes."
They praised Spinoza for freeing Judaism from the
shackles of religion and proving that the Bible
was a human creation, full of contradictions and
prejudices. They also honoured Spinoza as a
victim of rabbinic persecution. Indeed, today's
secular Jewish movement can also profit from his
critique of the Jewish doctrine of the "Chosen
People," his analysis of the origins of the
Bible, and his conclusion as to its ultimate
purpose.

On the doctrine of the Chosen People:
"A man's true happiness ? lies simply in his
wisdom and knowledge of the truth and not in the
belief that he is wiser than others or that
others lack true knowledge ?. Accordingly, when
Scripture tries to encourage Jews to obey the
law by saying that God has chosen them as his
own before all other peoples (Deuteronomy 10:15)
?, that he is close to them and not to others ?,
and finally, that he has revealed himself to them
alone, preferring them to the rest (Deuteronomy
4:32), the words are merely a concession to the
understanding of the Jews who knew nothing of
true blessedness. For would they have been less
blessed themselves had God called all men equally
to salvation? ?. Would their laws have been less
just and they themselves less wise had such laws
been given to all? ?. And, finally, would the
Jews have been less bound to worship God if he
had provided these gifts to all alike?"

On the origins of the Bible:
"He who accepts everything in Scripture
indiscriminately as the universal and ultimate
teaching about God ? will inevitably ? hail the
arbitrary inventions of men as the precepts of
God ? The fact is that the sacred books were not
written by one man only, or for the common people
of a single age, but by many men of different
temperaments and periods?. "

And its ultimate purpose:
"?The chief object of Scripture as a whole ? was
simply to inculcate obedience ?. Moses, for
instance, did not seek to convince the children
of Israel by reason, but to bind them by a
covenant, by oaths and by gratitude for services.
Besides, he threatened the people with penalties
for disobeying his laws, and held out rewards to
encourage them to observe them. All these devices
are means of inculcating obedience only, and not
knowledge ?. "

What, then, does Judaism have to offer? Spinoza
argued that it was not only excessively
irrational and ethnocentric, but also utterly
obsolete. When Jews were sovereign in ancient
Israel, ruled by a theocracy, the Bible served as
their constitution. Once Jews became a people in
the Diaspora, Judaism ceased to serve any useful
purpose. On the contrary, Judaism was harmful,
because it encouraged Jews to segregate
themselves, which naturally engendered Gentile
hostility. The best thing Jews could do was to
abandon their antiquated religion and assimilate.

Although Spinoza studied Maimonides, he rejected
the Spanish Jewish philosopher's attempt to
reconcile revelation with reason. The two are
incompatible, claimed Spinoza, and Maimonides, by
claiming to find deeper meaning in the Bible that
ordinary Jews could not comprehend, was proposing
to introduce "a new form of ecclesiastical
authority ? which the multitude would mock rather
than venerate."

Spinoza came perilously close to blaming Jews for
provoking anti-Semitism, but from his knowledge
of the marrano experience, he knew that
anti-Semitism could also be rooted in race
hatred. In Spain and Portugal, Jews who converted
to Catholicism faced persecution nevertheless,
merely because of their Jewish origins. It was
Spinoza's hope that tolerant nations like Holland
and secular democratic republics of the future
would allow Jews to assimilate in peace.

Spinoza had a more favourable view of
Christianity. Although he found the New Testament
as flawed as the Old, he accepted Christian
claims of universality and expressed admiration
of Jesus as a prophetic figure.

If we apply the standards of contemporary secular
Judaism, Spinoza cannot be viewed as the first
secular Jew. The essence of secular Judaism, in
all its varieties, is that Jews are a people with
a shared history and cultures that can sustain a
viable Jewish identity independent of religion.
For Spinoza, Judaism was purely a religion that
he rejected.

After his excommunication, Spinoza no longer
considered himself a Jew. Neither Jewish nor
Christian, he became a pantheist. God does not
exist apart from the natural world, he
maintained. Rather God and the world are one
substance, governed by immutable scientific laws.
The function of religion is to inspire moral
conduct. Man's highest calling is to treat
others with justice and charity, as they would
wish to be treated themselves. Within this
framework, people should be free to profess their
beliefs and to practice any religion or no
religion.

In fairness, it must be said that Spinoza lived
in an era when religion was the exclusive form of
identification. Nationalism as a secular
ideology, either in its political or cultural
form, was unknown. It is entirely legitimate to
celebrate Spinoza as the first modern secularist
and an exemplary humanist, but it would not be
for at least another century after his death that
the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, ushered in
the age of secular and humanistic Judaism.