The most characteristic literary genre of our day is the memoir. Unlike an autobiography, the author of a memoir needn’t have distinguished herself in her life in order to have earned the right to tell her life’s story. Many contemporary memoirs are written by people who are famous for having done nothing but write a memoir, often to much acclaim.
The appeal of the memoir says something about the temperament of our times. What, precisely, it says, I’m not prepared to say, though I suspect it’s nothing good. I suspect that what it says is mixed up with the nondecorous celebration of celebrity that is also such a salient feature of our days.
And who, after all, am I to condemn the memoirist turn in contemporary letters when I myself have seized upon it in approaching this very discussion of Spinoza? I have insisted on speaking in personal terms of the philosopher who insisted most on impersonality. To bring in the personal and the temporal — references to one’s self and one’s times— is to place oneself outside of Spinoza’s reason-sanctioned scheme of things, the view, as one contemporary philosopher has wonderfully put it, “from nowhere.”1 Spinoza himself puts it this way in The Ethics: “It is in the nature of reason to perceive things sub quâdam aeternitatis specie,” that is, under the guise of a certain form of eternity.2
Still, the personal and the temporal is where we all begin. Even Spinoza began by being only himself. The question is whether that is where one ought to end. Spinoza tells us no. He urges one to forsake, in a sense, one’s own temporal identity as it has passively come down to one through the contingencies of what he calls “external causality,” contingencies that have nothing to do with one’s own true essence. He asks one to construct — through the active reflective work of philosophy, seeking the true explanations of all things— a new identity.
To become rational, believing only what we have good grounds for believing, is to transform the self so substantially as to change its very identity. His astounding conclusion: to the extent that we are rational, we, all of us, partake in the same identity. (The rationally reconstructed cannot fail to get along: this provides the key to his political theory. Philosophy is good for the polity.)
To arrive at an identity that is not uniquely one’s own? Isn’t that, in a certain sense, to simply forsake personal identity altogether? Yes, it is, in a certain sense, and in that sense it is what he asks of us. To disinhabit our selves, and thereby save ourselves. It is in that sense that he will even offer us, at the end of The Ethics, a certain form of immortality, the immortality that comes from abandoning one’s own personal identity, giving it up for the infinite web of necessary connections that he identifies as the causa sui, the self-explained, the thing that can be conceived alternatively as God or nature and which he dubs Deus sive natura. It is that vast and infinite scheme of things that pure reason can get us to precisely because it is constituted of the very stuff of reason: logic. It consists of all logical implications spun out in their entirety.
We can survive our death to the extent that we have already let go of being our singular solitary selves. (But do we particularly care about that universalized self surviving? An aperçu of Woody Allen’s seems peculiarly pertinent at this point: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.”)
Immortality, for Spinoza, is impersonal; I survive my necessary death to the extent that I have ceased identifying with that mere thing that I am, and identify with the whole intricate web I have assimilated in the knowing. The first-person point of view that I am is relinquished for the View from Nowhere, which is the same for all of us.
All of this is to say that we, whose distinctive literary voice is the memoir, are perhaps peculiarly ill placed to grasp the vision of Spinoza. Where we are endlessly captivated by the drama of the self in all its distinctive singularity, Spinoza sought only to escape it. The priority of that fascinating singularity, that problematic and precious “I,” is, for Spinoza, a symptom of a passivity, the acceptance of the contingently given, that weakens our capacities, drains and stunts us, impedes our driving force to persist in our own being, to flourish in the world. Paradoxically, the only way to flourish in one’s being is to cease being only that being. That singular self, that localized “I,” that “me” which is “me” and no other, that tantalizingly elusive but inescapably ubiquitous reality that is my substance, my identity, my very being, yes, that thing is, for Spinoza, a thing to be cast off into the mists of unreality, outgrown as one stretches outward into reality. Escape from it in order to save it. (But then, if we truly escape from it, why care about it enough to want to save it? Is the way to his salvation barred by paradox? Are we in Woody Allen Land again?) The distinctive singular self is not what we ought to think about. It is not even what we ought to be.
Spinoza wrote the only story of himself of which he would have approved, and it is called The Ethics.
This is the way his self-approved memoir begins: “Definition 1: By that which is self-caused I mean that of which the essence involves existence, or that of which the nature is only conceivable as existent.”
That is as personal as he wanted his story to get (see the next two pages to see how his story continues). It doesn’t sound, on the face of it, as if it is about Spinoza at all, and it isn’t, on the face of it. It is of the whole world that he is speaking in that definition of the causa sui, the vast system of logical implications that is the necessary expression of necessary existence itself. Spinoza is, as each of us is, but one of the implications in the implicative order that is the world. So, in a sense, Spinoza is implicitly speaking of himself in that first definition. To the extent that he — that any of us— becomes rational, he will cease to identify with that one implication and identify instead with the vast implicative order itself.
So the causa sui is where he begins The Ethics. But the causa sui is not where he begins, Baruch Spinoza, who sought topurge his point of view of the personal, to become one with the radical objectivity that he dubs Deus sive natura. But that passive identity, the one he aimed to discard? That is the one I’m searching for now, the identity come to him by way of the contingencies of external causality. What were those contingencies that passively shaped him, a passivity he sought to wrest back and dissolve in the pure activity of philosophy? How far back must we go to get a sense of the man who did not identify himself with Deus sive natura—the purely personal part that was left over, dangling outside of the rational enterprise, the finite modification, the isolated implication, the son and brother and teacher and friend? The Jew.
THE ETHICS.
PART I. CONCERNING GOD.
DEFINITIONS.
I. BY THAT which is SELF-CAUSED, I mean that of which the essence involves existence, or that of which the nature is only conceivable as existent.
II. A thing-is called FINITE AFTER ITS KIND, when it can be limited by another thing of the same nature; for instance, a body is called finite because we always conceive another greater body. So, also, a thought is limited by another thought, but a body is not limited by thought, nor a thought by body.
III. By SUBSTANCE, I mean that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself; in other words, that of which a conception can be formed independently of any other conception.
IV. By ATTRIBUTE, I mean that which the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of substance.
V. By MODE, I mean the modifications of substance, or that which exists in, and is conceived through, something other than itself.
VI. By GOD, I mean a being absolutely infinite — that is, a substance consisting in infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality.
Explanation. — I say absolutely infinite, not infinite after its kind: for, of a thing infinite only after its kind, infinite attributes may be denied; but that which is absolutely infinite, contains in its essence whatever expresses reality, and involves no negation.
VII. That thing is called free, which exists solely by the necessity of its own nature, and of which the action is determined by itself alone. On the other hand, that thing is necessary, or rather constrained, which is determined by something external to itself to a fixed and definite method of existence or action.
VIII. By ETERNITY, I mean existence itself, in so far as it is conceived necessarily to follow solely from the definition of that which is eternal.
Explanation. — Existence of this kind is conceived as an eternal truth, like the essence of a thing, and, therefore, cannot be explained by means of continuance or time, though continuance may be conceived without a beginning or end.
AXIOMS.
I. Everything which exists, exists either in itself or in something else.
II. That which cannot be conceived through anything else must be conceived through itself.
III. From a given definite cause an effect necessarily follows; and, on the other hand, if no definite cause be granted, it is impossible that an effect can follow.
IV. The knowledge of an effect depends on and involves the knowledge of a cause.
V. Things which have nothing in common cannot be understood, the one by means of the other; the conception of one does not involve the conception of the other.
VI. A true idea must correspond with its ideate or object.
VII. If a thing can be conceived as non-existing, its essence does not involve existence.
PROPOSITIONS.
PROP. I. Substance is by nature prior to its modifications.
Proof. — This is clear from Def. iii. and v.
PROP. II. Two substances, whose attributes are different, have nothing in common.
Proof. — Also evident from Def. iii. For each must exist in itself, and be conceived through itself; in other words, the conception of one does not imply the conception of the other.
Spinoza’s “memoir”: the opening pages of The Ethics, stating definitions, axioms, and the first two propositions.
The community into which he was born was also, as he would be, obsessed with issues of identity. They, too, were in the process of trying to construct a new identity, to save themselves by realigning their identities with what they took to be their essential selves. The confluence of preoccupations with identity and salvation can’t be irrelevant. It can’t be irrelevant to the way that Spinoza would react to his community, to the way that they would react to him, to the ferocity of their mutual disavowal.
For the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam, too, questions of identity were meshed into the project of escape, of bringing out into the open the secret but true identity that they had been forced for a century to conceal, the Jewishness they took to be essential to themselves. The contingencies of external causality had shaped their passive identity as well, and they, too, sought to wrest that passivity back and reshape it, to actively and freely redefine themselves.
They lived in Amsterdam, mainly concentrated into two districts, the Vlooienburg and the Breestraat (later called the “Jodenbreestraat”—“Jews’ Broad Street”), but not because they were required to live in a ghetto, as in the Jewish community of Venice, which was also predominantly Sephardic, but simply because their communal life necessitated it. There were synagogues, kosher butcher shops, and of course the Talmud Torah, that model school that Mrs. Schoenfeld had praised to us, even though it had failed to inculcate its Jewish values into its most famous graduate. A Polish scholar named Shabbethai Bass visited Amsterdam and came away even more impressed with it than Mrs. Schoenfeld had been:
[In the schools] of the Sephardim … I saw “giants [in scholarship]: tender children as small as grasshoppers,” “kids who have become he-goats.” In my eyes they were like prodigies because of their unusual familiarity with the entire Bible and with the science of grammar. They possessed the ability to compose verses and poems in meter and to speak a pure Hebrew. Happy the eye that has seen all these things.3
The area of Amsterdam where the Jews mostly lived was a business and mercantile area, as well as being residential, surrounded by canals on which barges and boats were anchored right beside the streets. Engravings of the time portray tidy, tree-lined streets, lined with tall and narrow wooden houses, the distinctive stepped roofs rising like the prosperity of the merchant owners who inhabited them. Gentiles lived in the Jewish quarter, including for a time Rembrandt, who often chose his Jewish neighbors as subjects, the richer ones sitting for their portraits, while others served the artist as models for his works on biblical themes. One of the rabbis of the community, Manasseh ben Israel, said to have been the most famous Jew of Amsterdam and certainly the most worldly of the Sephardic rabbis, counting many Gentiles as his friends, was painted by Rembrandt.
Etchings and portraits from Rembrandt and other artists show the Portuguese Jews affecting the dress and style of the Amsterdam mercantile class, from the sweeping feathers in their capacious caps down to the silver buckles on their blackened boots. Within a few short decades, a high degree of affluence and a certain degree of acclimation had been achieved, and whatever security can be gained from donning rich brocades and other signs of bourgeois respectability had been gained. The treasures of Dutch art were also of interest to the prospering Sephardim. They were acquiring Rembrandts as well as sitting for him. One family was said to have paintings worth “a ton in gold.”
Insofar as the Portuguese Jews’ outward presentation, little marked them as being foreigners rather than just swarthier-complexioned Dutch. They appeared to be adapting to the lifestyle of the prospering city with flair and exuberance, contributing to the economic rise of the middle class. Their successful and rapid acclimation was in contrast to their Ashkenazic brethren. The latter were arriving in ever bigger numbers, especially as the Thirty Years’ War and pogroms created catastrophic conditions in Germany and Poland. The Ashkenazim of Amsterdam did not catch on as dexterously as did the Sephardim to life in Amsterdam.
They remained impoverished and presented something of a burden for, and an embarrassment to, the Portuguese Jews. In 1632, the very year of Spinoza’s birth, a bylaw was passed by the Sephardic community setting up two charity boxes meant for the Ashkenazim, “to prevent the nuisance and uproar caused by the Ashkenazim who put their hands out to beg at the gates.”
But though the look of the Portuguese Jews was, at least to the extent that they could affect it, Dutch, the language in the streets and in the homes, in the shops and in the synagogues (including the magnificent one that they would build at the end of Jews’ Broad Street, still standing today), was Portuguese. Since they were primarily merchants (even the rabbis often engaged in some trade), and dealt with Dutch Gentiles, they knew Dutch as well, but Portuguese remained the native language.
For Spinoza, too, Portuguese was his native tongue. He might write, as Mrs. Schoenfeld had put it, in the goyisha language of Latin, but he thought in the language of his community, Portuguese, as emerges at times in his letters, when he apologizes for the clumsiness of his Dutch:
I do indeed wish that I might write in the language in which I was brought up. I might possibly express my thoughts better. But please take it in good part, and yourself correct the mistakes, and consider me
Your devoted Friend and Servant
B. de Spinoza
The Long Orchard
5 January 1665
Another language, too, speaks of the community’s long history and the way it continued to live on inside the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam: Spanish. This was the language reserved for high literature and scholarly works, just as it had been for them in Portugal, preserving in the linguistic practice memories of the culture the Jews brought with them to Portugal after they had been exiled from Spain in the Great Expulsion of 1492.
When they arrived in Amsterdam, they often replaced their Portuguese names with Hebrew ones, though also often retaining the Portuguese name for business purposes outside the community. They also often took on Dutch names, in order to hide their Portuguese, and therefore Jewish, identities, so that they could do business with Iberian New Christians — as the converts from Judaism were known, even generations after the family’s conversion — without placing these New Christians in danger. Josef de los Rios became “Michael van der Riviere,” and Luis de Mercado became “Louis van der Markt.”4 Collectively, they referred to themselves, even, in Amsterdam, as the “Portuguese Nation,” or La Nação, clearly setting down invisible borders between themselves and their neighbors. As they were assiduously assimilating the outward style of the Dutch burghers, participating in the burgeoning mercantile economy, within them there was a very different reality, carrying traces of times long preceding their arrival on the banks of the Amstel River.
The weight of many centuries of history bore down on the collective memory of La Nação. How far back do we have to go to gather a sense of that collective memory and understand how it presented itself in the ongoing life of the community? That life, animated by long memory, must have made itself felt in Baruch Spinoza. He was, after all, a child of that community, born to parents who were first-generation immigrants to Amsterdam. His father, Michael, had fled as a child, most likely sometime in the 1590s, together with his extended family, perhaps because someone in the clan had been denounced to the Inquisition. Once that happened, entire families would decamp in haste, since the Inquisition was never content with investigating just a single individual. Once a person fell under suspicion, so did everyone intimately connected with him.
But the collective memory of the Jewish community of Amsterdam reached further back than the immediate history that had brought each of the Sephardic families there. A memory stretching back over the centuries, even the millennia, is a vital part of the Jewish sensibility. The Jews are a people who are enjoined to recite the Passover narrative each year as if they themselves had personally experienced the exodus from Egypt. Amsterdam Jews had special reasons for recalling centuries of Jewish history as if they had personally experienced the events for themselves.
How far back must we go to get a sense of the communal inner life that had informed the passive identity of Baruch Spinoza, shaping that singular self that his ethics demanded he resist, and that I am seeking?
Long before the official European “Renaissance,” the Jews of Spain had experienced, under the relatively tolerant rule of the conquering Moslems, an extraordinary cultural renaissance, still referred to as the Golden Age of Spanish Jewry.
In the eighth century, the Moslem Moors, expanding from Morocco, had captured large chunks of Spain from the Christian Visigoths, and the Jews, who had largely been forced into conversion under the Visigoths, welcomed the Arabs as liberators and allies. Victorious Islam was then barely one hundred years old. Under the new Moslem rule, many former converts, who had secretly clung to their faith, not only returned to Judaism but entered into concourse with Moslem high culture to produce their own heady concoction of science and poetry, mathematics and art, rationalistic philosophy and the esoteric mysticism known as kaballah.
The intellectual Sephardic tradition as it emerged out of those golden days of inspired intermingling of cultures was more slanted toward philosophical reflection and mystical speculation than was the mainstream Ashkenazic intellectual tradition, which to this day remains focused almost exclusively on Talmudic legalistic disputations. This last comparison should not be understood as a slight to Talmudic study, despite the fact that “legalistic disputations” might seem to have a pejorative tone to it. But the legalistic logic of Talmudic analysis encloses a unique form of spiritual activity. Here, too, we encounter, as we do in Spinoza, the sacramentalizing of logic, reason as the means of unifying with God.
Isaac Bashevis Singer has a lovely, if gently mocking, description of Talmudic scholarship in the opening paragraphs of his novel Shosha:
I was brought up on three dead languages — Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish — and in a culture that developed in Babylon: the Talmud. The cheder where I studied was a room in which the teacher ate and slept, and his wife cooked. There I studied not arithmetic, geography, physics, chemistry, or history, but the laws governing an egg laid on a holiday and sacrifices in a temple destroyed two thousand years ago.
The applications of the Law to quotidian life is of some concern, of course — what is one to do with the egg laid on a holiday? — but the analytic reasoning itself is the real focus. Talmudic logic is understood as a spiritual activity, a meshing with the Divine Presence. The Law is the way God is seen as interacting with His people, and to study it is to approach Him in the most direct way that we can. What might seem from the outside to be dry anachronistic hairsplitting is, from the inside, experienced as shot through with the radiance of Divine Intentionality. In this tradition, the dialectics of pilpul—Talmudic argumentation — is spiritual activity at its very highest, and it became mainstream Jewish scholarship. Philosophical ruminations about the nature of God are decidedly not part of this mainstream.
But the Sephardic thinkers of the Golden Age were much more drawn to such philosophical ruminations. The towering figure of Sephardic rationalistic philosophy was the philosopher Maimonides (1138–1204), also known as the Rambam, derived from the initials of his name, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon. “Maimonides” is actually his Greek appellation, meaning “son of Maimon.” He was born in Córdoba, Spain, though when the city fell to Muslim Berbers, the Almohades, the family fled to Morocco. After spending some time in Jerusalem he settled in Fustat, Egypt, where he was doctor of the Grand Vizier Alfadhil and to the Sultan Saladin of Egypt.
Maimonides is generally acknowledged as the greatest of Jewish philosophers (excluding Spinoza, of course, who belongs to the Western canon rather than to the Jewish one). He was controversial in his day, and in my high school we weren’t altogether certain of him still. He was a bit too modern for us (pronounced with a long o, a rolling r, accent on the second syllable). His main project was to reconcile Judaism with what he considered the best scientific thinking of his day, which was the Aristotelian system. Aristotle’s was an impressively inclusive system that set forth the proper place of each and every thing in the universe, working outward from us, the inhabitants of the earth, around whom the entire universe, laid out in concentric spheres, literally revolved. Aristotle also offered a rich strategy for explaining events by explaining the end that would be accomplished by means of the event. In other words, his model for explaining the physical world was the way that we explain intentional actions, namely by citing the intention. This is what is meant by saying his explanations were teleological (telos means “end” or “goal” in ancient Greek). Alternatively, one says his explanations relied heavily on final causes; a final cause is the end for which the event or process took place. So, for example, Tom’s going to the all-night convenience store at 11 p.m. could be explained by his having just discovered that there is no beer in his fridge and his wanting a beer. The final cause is Tom’s procurement of his bevarage of choice. So, too, in the Aristotelian system a dropped stone’s falling to the earth is explained by the stone’s being composed primarily out of earth and therefore belonging on the earth, from which it had been displaced and to which it is now returning. In other words, the stone is moving toward the earth, as Tom is moving toward the convenience store, because those are the places toward which each wants to go, each wanting to correct a condition which is a privation given their particular natures. Aristotle’s was a system in which physical space was not the same in all directions; rather, different parts of space were the province of the four different elements: earth, water, air, and fire. These spatial differences provided the orientations that explained motions, the end of the motion identical with its final cause.
Aristotle’s system was the best scientific thinking of Maimonides’ day, though the great thinkers of the seventeenth century — Galileo, Descartes, Newton — would have to declare themselves its enemy and dismantle its teleological explanatory apparatus in order to lay the foundations of modern science. Spinoza, as we will see, could not have been more irreconcilably opposed to all teleological thinking. He was thoroughly conversant with, and hostile to, the general thrust of Maimonides’ thinking, not only in its Aristotelianism, but in its reconciliatory theism. Maimonides’ method in interpreting Scripture derived from his reconciliatory theism, which could be simplified into a principle something like this: Since scientific truths are true and the Torah, too, is true, there is always a way to interpret the Torah so that it is consistent with science. The method of biblical interpretation Spinoza pursued in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus avoided any such external principles. Railing against traditional rabbinical interpreters of Scripture, clearly having Maimonides very much in mind, he wrote in his Tractatus:
It is not enough for them to share the delusions of the Greeks: they have sought to represent the prophets as sharing in these same delusions. … And this is further evident from the fact that most of these assume as a basic principle for the understanding of Scripture and for extracting its true meaning that it is throughout truthful and divine — a conclusion which ought to be the end result of study and strict examination, and which they lay down at the outset as a principle of interpretation. …
Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) would do some years later for Christianity what Maimonides had done for Judaism, namely “Aristotelize” it. The Dominican friar, author of Summa Theologica and one of the most important of Catholic theologians, was highly influenced by “Rabbi Moyses,” though Christian apologists would often try to conceal the Jewish influence. Scholasticism was the enterprise of translating Christian theology into Aristotelian terms, and it dominated post-Thomistic Catholic thinking. In the early years of the Middle Ages, when Maimonides was alive, Plato rather than Aristotle had been the more influential ancient thinker among those Christian thinkers who tried to reconcile Christian thought with ancient philosophy. St. Augustine, one of the early Church fathers, had been a Platonist, and his influence dominated. Maimonides, a religious thinker with a distaste for the mystical, was far more drawn to Aristotle than to Plato’s brand of rationalism. Aquinas’s influence would mean that Christian thinking of the later Middle Ages was dominated by Aristotelian rather than Platonic thinking, which is why the seventeenth century’s great scientific innovators would have to defeat the hegemonic grip that Aristotle had come to have on Church dogma.
Maimonides’ Aristotelianism was perhaps quite intellectually compatible with his profession as a physician. The body, after all, would appear to be a teleological system, its various processes acting in order to accomplish some end. So, for example, if the body becomes too hot, it perspires in order to cool itself down. If it becomes too cold, it shivers, the muscular contractions causing it to warm up.
Though Maimonidean philosophy, just because it is philosophy, has been controversial ever since the Rambam’s own day, raising generations of Jewish eyebrows (the position in my high school was to keep a respectful distance), there was one aspect of his work that became ensconced firmly in the mainstream, perhaps precisely because it eschews philosophical grounding for straightforward faith. This is the Thirteen Articles of Faith, which have become such an accepted aspect of Judaism that they are recited on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year. It is as if Maimonides vindicated his dalliance with the dangerous seductions of Hellenistic rationalism with his straightforward assertion of belief:
I believe with perfect faith in the existence of God which is perfect and sufficient unto himself and which is the cause of the existence of all other beings.
I believe with perfect faith in God’s unity, which is unlike all other kinds of unity.
I believe with perfect faith that God must not be perceived in bodily terms, and the anthropomorphic expressions applied to God in Scripture have to be understood in a metaphorical sense.
I believe with perfect faith that God is eternal.
I believe with perfect faith that God alone is to be worshiped and obeyed. There are no mediating powers able freely to grant man’s petitions, and intermediaries must not be invoked.
I believe with perfect faith in prophecy.
I believe with perfect faith that Moses is unsurpassed by any prophet.
I believe with perfect faith that the entire Torah was given to Moses.
I believe with perfect faith that Moses’ Torah will not be abrogated or superceded by another divine law nor will anything be added to or taken away from it.
I believe with perfect faith that God knows the actions of man.
I believe with perfect faith that God rewards those who fulfill the commandments of the Torah, and punishes those who transgress them.
I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah.
I believe with perfect faith in the resurrection of the dead.
Of these Thirteen Articles, Spinoza will aver 1, 2, 4, 5, and 10, though their meanings shift radically in alignment with his system. One might say that the second principle, in particular, is adamantly assented to in his system; the unity of Deus sive natura is certainly unlike all other unity. Spinoza denies — though again according to the special meaning he gives the relevant terms — principles 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, and 13. But far more ardent and fundamental than the rejection of some eight of the requisite articles of faith is the philosopher’s rejection of the Maimonidean ethics of belief. For Spinoza, far more thoroughgoing in his rationalism than Maimonides, there is no virtue whatsoever in believing with perfect faith. The virtue is in believing because you know, which requires proof.
Another strain of Jewish thinking also emerged from the Iberian soil, though later in the Sephardic experience than Maimonidean rationalism: the mystical tradition known as kabbalah. Here, too, the soil was seeded by ancient Greek thinking — not Aristotelianism this time, but rather Platonism, or rather Neoplatonism, particularly Plotinus and Proclus. It was the Arab scholars who transmitted knowledge of the Greeks, translating their works, and this is how Spanish-Jewish scholars came to know them.
The Zohar, which is traditionally translated into English as The Book of Splendor, is considered the most important of the kabbalistic writings. It is written as if it were an ancient text, with commentary added to it by the Spanish kabbalists, but modern scholarship has revealed it to be almost incontrovertibly composed in Spain, in the southern city of Gerona, in the late thirteenth century. The author of the Zohar was most probably Moses de Leon, though he claims it to be the work of a scholar named Simeon bar Yohai, a second-century sage, who was himself a student of the legendary Rabbi Akiva.
I had heard tales of Rabbi Akiva from youngest childhood. One of the greatest of Jewish scholars, he had not even learned to read until he was a grown and married man. He had married above himself, a rich man’s daughter, and she had agreed to marry him only if he became a scholar. He and his son learned to read at the same time. (I remember learning this in kindergarten, when it had a special enchantment.) He died as a martyr at the hands of the Romans, by legend being flayed to death at the age of ninety. The traditional tale is that Simeon bar Yohai hid from the Romans in a cave near the Dead Sea, fed for years on a spring of freshwater and the fruit of a carob tree that sprang up in his hiding place, and it was there, in the miraculous hiding place, that the mystical form of Midrash, or Torah interpretation, is said to have been inspired, though Rabbi Akiva, too, had possessed esoteric knowledge.
The Spanish kabbalists traced their ideas back to this ancient tradition, but some new spring was flowing into their thoughts as well, and this new spring, too, was very ancient, only it wasn’t Jewish. It was Greek. It was the thinking of Plato, most especially as it had found expression in the Neoplatonists.
The Jewish poet and philosopher Ibn Gabirol (c. 1020–c. 1057) was a Neoplatonist living in Gerona. He presented his metaphysics in his major work Mekor Hayyim (The Source of Life), which was written in Arabic. (The Arabic version is no longer extant, but a medieval Latin translation, Fons vitae, exists.) It is written in dialogue form, as Plato had written, and the only authority who is ever mentioned by him is Plato. Although Ibn Gabirol was an undeniably Jewish thinker whose religious poetry found its way into the liturgy, Mekor Hayyim is rigorously nonsectarian. As the Encyclopedia Judaica puts it succinctly, “Mekor Hayyim is unique in the body of Jewish philosophical-religious literature of the Middle Ages, because it expounds a complete philosophical-religious system wholly lacking in specifically Jewish content and terminology. The author does not mention biblical persons or events and does not quote the Bible, Talmud, or Midrash. To some extent this feature of the work determined its unusual destiny.”5 Part of its unusual destiny is that its ideas and even its terminology found their way into Spanish kabbalah.
Kabbalah, in contrast to mainstream Jewish thinking, which concentrates almost exclusively on Talmudic legalistic disputation, speculates heavily on metaphysical questions, especially those concerning the beginning of all things. Why, as philosophers are wont to put it, is there something rather than nothing? Why did God — referred to in kabbalistic terminology as the Ein Sof, That Without End — have to create the world? What is the relationship between the Ein Sof, existing outside of time, and the created temporal world? How does, how can, eternality interact with temporality?
According to kabbalistic thinking, the Ein Sof is beyond our understanding, beyond all our words and concepts. But there are what the kabbalists referred to as the Sefirot, the emanations of His infinite power, in which the divine attributes are turned into acts of creation, and Sefirot can be grasped by the human understanding; they can be gleaned from the structure of being. The Ein Sof is unrevealed, non-manifest, and unknowable. Only the emanations of his power (the Sefirot) transform the Ein Sof into the Creator-God and a personal God.
As the kabbalistic tradition meditates on the beginning of all things, so, too, it ponders the awful mystery of suffering, most poignantly, most bafflingly, represented by the example of children who suffer, children who die. The Zohar says of children “who still as sucklings are taken from their mother’s breast” that “the whole world weeps; the tears that come from these babes have no equal, their tears issue from the innermost and farthest places of the hearts, and the entire world is perplexed: … [I]s it needful that these unhappy infants should die, who are without sin and without blame?” Clearly, an answer has to be offered, and here is the one that the Zohar offers: “But … the tears shed by these ‘oppressed ones’ act as a petition and protection for the living … and by dint of their innocence, in time a place is prepared for them … for the Holy One, blessed be He, does in reality love these little ones with a unique and outstanding love. He unites them with himself and gets ready for them a place on high close to him.”6
There is a path to be traced from Athens to Gerona, and then from Gerona to Amsterdam, for kabbalism was a distinct aspect of the inner life of the Portuguese Nation. The Sephardic community of Amsterdam, for a host of reasons, was deeply susceptible to the mystical tradition that was part of their Sephardic heritage, especially as that tradition was transformed by the pain of the Spanish exodus and its aftermath, as we shall see, so that it transformed itself into a historical narrative obsessed with the theme of national— and cosmic — redemption. One of the most influential rabbis in the community, Isaac Aboab, was a kabbalist. Manasseh ben Israel, another Amsterdam rabbi who has been briefly mentioned (as having posed for Rembrandt), was also deeply influenced by its redemptive narrative. Spinoza gives ample evidence of being conversant with the esoteric Jewish texts — both Aboab and Manasseh were most likely his teachers in the yeshiva — though he was plainly irked by the kabbalist habit of seeing each word of Torah surrounded by an aura of mystical secret meanings:
[T]hey say that the various readings are the symbols of profoundest mysteries and that mighty secrets lay hid in the twenty-eight hiatus which occur, nay, even in the very form of the letters. Whether they are actuated by folly and infantile devotion, or whether by arrogance and malice so that they alone may be held to possess the secrets of God, I know not; this much I do know, that I find in their writings nothing which has the air of a Divine secret, but only childish lucubration. I have read and known kabbalistic triflers, whose insanity provokes my unceasing astonishment.7
Nonetheless, despite Spinoza’s impatience with the kabbalistic methodology, despite his emphatic rejection of the specific answers that kabbalah offers for the profound questions it poses; still many have claimed that the spirit of kabbalah was not altogether foreign to Spinoza. I have long thought that the distinctly Platonic tone of Spinoza’s philosophy, which consists not so much in his actual picture of reality but in the ecstatic impulse that irradiates it, and that sharply distinguishes his rationalism from both Descartes’ and Leibniz’s, came to him by way of the kabbalistic influences which were vividly alive in his Portuguese community. And Spinoza’s system will offer us, as we shall see, its own solutions to the two mysteries that are most central to kabbalistic speculations: the ontological mystery of why the world exists at all, and the ethical mystery of suffering: why does suffering — and of such mind-numbing magnitude— exist in this world, if God is both all-good and all-powerful?
As the fortunes of Spanish Jewry declined, the kabbalists’ meditations on suffering deepened and darkened. The meaning of Jewish suffering, in particular, occupied more and more of their mystical speculations, and the theme of national redemption made its appearance. As the travails of Spanish Jewry increased, so increased the redemptive preoccupations of the Spanish kabbalists. In the time of exile, they speculated, the truth, too, had been exiled. The redemption of the world is intimately intertwined with the destiny of the Jews, and they believed themselves to be living in the messianic era. There were esoteric signs that the Messiah’s arrival was imminent, that he would reveal himself in the Jewish year 5250, or, in the world’s way of reckoning time, the year 1490.
The Amsterdam Jewish community would be heavily influenced by these kabbalistic preoccupations, and the influence fell, though in subtle ways, on Spinoza, too. It is not that Spinoza has any sympathy at all for Jewish mysticism, or for mysticism of any sort for that matter. Spinoza’s rationalism is not mysticism. It is, rather, Cartesianism, though with some major tinkering. But the ultimate mysteries he seeks to solve with his revamped Cartesianism are nowhere to be found in Descartes — nor in Galileo, nor in any of the “scientist rationalists” who precede him. Instead, Spinoza turns the Cartesian methodology, meant to focus in the “natural light of reason,” to illuminate the mysteries of the kabbalists, no matter their dubious methods of enlightenment: the beginning of all things, the Ein Sof ’s relationship to creation and to our knowledge, the mysteries of evil and of suffering.
These three strains in Jewish scholarship — the legalistic analysis of the Talmud; the rationalist semiphilosophical approach represented by Maimonides (semiphilosophical in the sense that not all questions are open to philosophy: religion has the final say); the mystical confabulations of the kabbalah — are, quite obviously, in tension with one another. The Talmud famously warns against the other two approaches, but the kabbalistic one in particular: “Whoever ponders on four things, it were better for him if he had not come into the world: what is above, what is below, what was before time, and what will be hereafter.”
The story is told of four who went into the garden or orchard (it is the Persian word pardes) of mystical study. One went mad, one became an apostate, and one took his life. Only one came out whole, and this was Rabbi Akiva. Again the Talmud cautions that no one should study kabbalah who has not yet attained the age of forty, marriage, and a full belly — a degree of mundane ballast to safeguard against being “blasted by ecstasy” (as in Ophelia’s speech).
Though the influence of ancient Greece made itself felt in both the Maimonidean philosophical and kabbalist ecstatic strains in Sephardic culture, still some of the most prominent participants in the Golden Age voiced wariness of the Hellenist legacy. For example, Judah Halevy (before 1075–1141), who was perhaps the greatest of all the Hebraic-Spanish poets, and whose religious poetry found its way into the liturgy, acknowledges the heavy influence of Greek philosophy on his Judeo-Spanish culture in his poetic admonition:
Turn aside from mines and pitfalls.
Let not Greek wisdom tempt you,
For it bears the flowers only and not the fruits.
To balance the impression of stern rectitude on the part of Judah Halevy, it is only fair to share other stanzas that show him in a softer, more sensual mood. (Iberian sensuality also contributed its flushed warmth to the heady concoction of the Golden Age of Spanish Jewry):
Pity me, you of the hard heart and soft hips,
Pity me, let me bend the knee before you!
My heart is pure, but my eyes are not!
There were other exoticisms, in addition to philosophy, mysticism, and poetry, that bloomed in the garden of Sephardic Judaism. Science, too, and particularly medicine, attracted many Spanish Jews. Rulers often had their own Jewish physicians, and often these physicians were themselves philosophers or poets or both. Both Maimonides and Judah Halevy had been doctors. And Jews contributed to Spanish science in other ways as well. For example, King Alphonso X commissioned Isaac ibn Said, the cantor of Toledo, to compile correct astronomical tables. The Alphonsine Tables were completed in 1256, the most complete heavenly topography ever assembled.
It had not only been in intellectual, spiritual, and cultural inroads that the Spanish Jews had broken new ground, but also in more worldly-minded ways as well. They were not only poets and philosophers, scholars and mystics, but treasurers and advisers and landowners. Court Jews, who helped rulers in administrative and financial capacities, came to have real political clout. They were sent on diplomatic missions. They established family dynasties, so that they constituted their own “nobility.” According to some estimates, the Jews of the eleventh and twelfth centuries owned more than a third of all the estates in the county of Barcelona. A culture at once distinctively Jewish was yet contributing to the culture at large, and both cultures were incalculably the better for it.
While the Spanish Jews were reaping the benefits of relative Moslem tolerance, rising to lustrous preeminence in the arts and sciences, the Jews of Christian northern Europe, the Ashkenazim, were pressed into squalid marginality or worse. The worse was truly terrible. Jews had been accused of causing the Black Plague by poisoning the wells, and mobs burned masses of them alive.
In the towns of northern Europe — in Rouen, and Cologne, and Prague, and Mainz, and Worms — the Jews were on the brink of a wild terror that came down on them in the form of the Holy Crusades. “The Unholy Crusades” is what the Jews called them. In 1095, Pope Urban II had called for a Crusade to liberate the Holy Land from Moslem rule, and the knights and feudal lords, with the masses that they mobilized, wreaked their fury on the Jews they encountered on their way east, reasoning, “Why wait until we get to the Holy Land to punish the nonbelievers?” The French exegestist Rashi, whose commentaries on all the sacred Jewish works are still the first commentaries that an Orthodox child studies and will continue to consult throughout his life of scholarship, had witnessed the ravaging of the communities of the Rhine, the destruction of the centers of learning in which he himself had studied and taught. He composed a heart-wrenching prayer addressed not to God but to the Torah, beseeching that it intercede on High, so that its words, and not the Crusaders’ swords, would prove victorious in Jerusalem. “Explain thy lovely words for men to understand,” Rashi wrote, a poignant plea from a scholar devoted to explaining each and every word of all of Holy Scripture, sometimes spinning out an elaborate interpretation from nothing more than an extra squiggle over a Hebrew letter.
In England the accession of the Crusader Richard had spelled disaster for the Jews, who were set upon by mobs in many towns. The most dramatic atrocity had taken place in York, during the Third Crusade. Jews had sought refuge in a castle. Surrounded by their enemies, with no hope of escape, they committed mass suicide. The first of the blood libels, accusing Jews of murder for ritualistic purposes, took place at Norwich in the twelfth century. And even when English rulers had offered protection to their Jewish communities, they had levied such exorbitant taxes on them, enriching the royal coffers, that finally the Jews were too impoverished tobe of any use. The culmination came in 1290. Edward I banished the now useless Jews from England, decreeing that every one of them must leave by All Saints’ Day.
One of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, “The Prioress’s Tale,” tells of a widow’s child murdered by the Jews because he was singing the hymn to the Virgin “Alma redemptoris mater” while walking on the “Jewes Street” in some unspecified Asian city. The Jews cut his throat and then threw him into a pit, in Chaucer’s telling, where he miraculously continued to sing, so that the ritual murder was discovered and the Jews of the town were triumphantly tortured and massacred. Chaucer himself refers to the twelfth-century story of Hugh of Lincoln, one of the early blood libels. The poet could not himself have known any English Jews, since they had been banished from England a century before, but the tales of the libels lived on as poetic inspiration.
France, too, had banished its Jews in the thirteenth century, King Louis IX (canonized in 1297 by Pope Boniface VIII) canceling all Christian debts to them and confiscating their property. They were eventually invited back, again for the economic advantages they could offer, but their position always teetered precariously toward disaster, and they were subject to ongoing systematic attempts to get them to see the “Jewish error” of their ways and convert.
It was under the expansive tolerance of sophisticated Moslem life that the perfumed essence of Sephardic culture had been distilled, a culture poetic, philosophical, scientific, mystical, and also worldly. At certain times, among certain more fundamentalist Moslem groups, the tolerance abated. Maimonides, for example, had been forced to flee, as a boy, with his family, from his birthplace in Cordoba when it was conquered by the Almohades, a Moslem sect that demanded the conversion of all Jews. But, for the most part, Moslem rule proved conducive to Sephardic flourishing.
The Christian attempt to regain control over Spain had begun almost coterminously with the Moslem conquest in 711; the mountainous northwest region had always remained Christian. Over the centuries there was a steady erosion of Moslem dominion, especially as Moslem rule had been destabilized by invasions from the Moslem Berbers, whose outlook was far less enlightened than the Moors. By the end of the fifteenth century, the Moslems ruled over only Granada. But Sephardic culture continued on, and the Moslem and Jewish blend was at times and places enhanced, too, by Christian intermingling, achieving a state that was called convivencia, literally “living together.”
As the Christians unified their hold on Spain, the sorts of intolerance that had dominated in other European lands began to creep into Sephardic existence as well. The first blood libel came to Spain in 1250. Soon after, the most famous Sephardic rabbi of the day, Nachmanides, provoked by an apostate Jew, engaged in a formal disputation on the relative merits of Christianity and Judaism. Nachmanides also known as the Ramban, came from the city of Gerona, the center of mystical Judaism, and he himself was an important kabbalistic thinker. The famous disputation, however, was held in Barcelona in 1263 over a span of four days, before the king and gathered bishops. Nachmanides had secured permission to speak frankly, and so he did, arguing that the evidence that Jesus had ushered in messianic times was scant, for had not the prophet Isaiah foretold of the perfect peace that would follow upon the Messiah’s coming?
Yet from the days of Jesus until now that whole world has been filled with violence and pillage. The Christians, moreover, shed more blood than other nations; and how hard it would be for you, your Majesty … and for these knights of yours if they were not to learn war any more?
There were to be many more such formal disputations, not only in Spain but throughout Christian Europe, often with the set purpose of determining the fate of the Jewish communities in which they were held. Riots, torture, forced conversions, and murder increasingly concluded these staged debates. Nachmanides would be the last Jewish representative who would speak with what he had thought was impunity; in fact, he was brought to trial for publishing his own account of the debate and, though acquitted, was forced to leave Spain, resettling in Jerusalem.
Now once again, with the turning of the tide against the Jews, the ranks of the New Christians swelled in Spain. The upper Jewish classes, in particular, converted to Christianity in increasing numbers. And Nachmanides’ uncensored words, charging Christianity with shedding more blood than other nations, took on prophetic tones.
The practice of burning heretics at the stake was introduced in the last years of the twelfth century. The Holy Inquisition was a procedure devised and named by Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) for exposing Christian heretics, though it was another pope, Gregory IX, who established it as an institution. It was to last for 350 years. Its stated targets were Christian heretics; the Church claimed no official authority over non-Christians. But since the mere presence of Jews was seen as conducive of heresy, they were to suffer severely at the hands of the Inquisition, most especially when the Inquisition took on a new ferocity as it entered Spain and then Portugal. And of course all New Christians were ipso facto Christians, and thus fell under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition.
The first mass burning of Jews at the stake took place in 1288, following a blood libel. This was in Troyes, France (where Rashi himself had lived a century before). But the Inquisition had already infiltrated Spanish life by this time, quietly at first. Right around the time of Nachmanides’ public disputation, Pope Clement IV granted the Inquisition freedom to interfere in Jewish affairs by allowing the inquisitors to pursue converted Jews who had relapsed into their former faith.Conversos,some of whose families had become Christians centuries before, at the time of the Visigoths, were considered true Christians by the Church, and the lapse of any Christian back into Judaism was punishable by death. Therefore, the Inquisition had jurisdiction over their souls and went after them in elaborate ceremonies of intrigue and torture.
The attitude toward Jews had changed in Spain well before the Inquisition took on its full formidable power. By the mid-1300s, the mobs, incited by the anti-Semitic tirades of priests, were attacking Jews, the authorities intervening only when Christian lives and property were threatened. In 1391, a year which is a blood-soaked marker for the changing fortunes of the Jews of Spain, marauders went from town to town throughout Castile and Aragon, massacring men, women, and children. Sometimes women and children were sold as slaves to the Moslems. All the synagogues of Barcelona were destroyed, and the community that had existed for eight hundred years came to an end. The mounting numbers of conversos after 1391 reflected the markedly different situation that now confronted the Jews.
The new century brought new violence against the Sephardim. The notorious friar Vicente Ferrer preached in the towns of Castile, his Sunday-morning sermons often followed by long nights of violence against Jews. He instigated new anti-Jewish regulations in Castile, proclaimed on January 2, 1412. Jews now had to wear their hair and beards long so that they could be recognized by all. They could no longer be addressed with the honorific “Don.” They could no longer be tax collectors, nor perform any other public services, nor collect interest, nor engage in commerce. Almost all professions were to be closed to them, and Jewish physicians could no longer treat Christian patients. These edicts, however, were difficult to enforce and were largely ignored. Still, they tolled doom.
In June of that same year Ferdinand I became king of Aragon, through the assistance of the very same rabble-rousing friar. Now Ferrer could extend his anti-Jewish edicts in Aragon as well. At this same moment Pope Benedict XII ordered a new staged disputation to be held in Aragon, the designated topics to include the veracity of the Talmud. The rabbis who had been sent to represent the Aragonese community were given no opportunity to express themselves, and a new wave of forced conversions followed their preordained defeat, with Ferdinand ordering that all copies of the Talmud be submitted for inspection so that remarks deemed anti-Christian could be excised.
The final end of Spanish Jewry was determined by a marriage. In 1469, Ferdinand II of Aragon, son of John II of Aragon and grandson of Ferdinand I, married Isabella of Castile, the unification of their kingdoms effected by 1479. The royal couple were not only in the debt of various zealot churchmen whom they repaid by imposing restrictions against Jews and conversos; they were also sincerely committed to a religious and ethnic solidification of their country. Their statesmanship was, in many ways, so admirable and enlightened that the question of their acquiescence to the formidable beast that the Inquisition would become forcefully presents itself. Interestingly, there is evidence that both monarchs had converso ancestors, Ferdinand several generations back and Isabel even further back. The Jews of the time secretly believed that Ferdinand had Sephardic ancestry, which might explain why court Jews — the highly influential Abraham Seneor and Isaac Abrabanel in particular — pushed so hard for the match, even providing the betrothal gifts that Ferdinand required to seal the deal, according to contemporary Hebrew sources.8
The first problem, at least as it was explicitly stated, was not with the Jews but with the New Christians. The very designation “New Christian” was itself an indication of the suspicion with which “Old Christians” regarded the conversos. “New Christian” simply meant that the family had once been Jewish, even though the conversion might have taken place generations, even centuries, before.
Some conversos had ardently embraced the new faith. In fact, many who had stirred up anti-Jewish sentiments had been enthusiastic apostates bent on demonstrating the Jewish fallacy. There were important Christian thinkers and reformers who were New Christians. Other conversos did not take their new religion as seriously. There were many, especially among the upper classes, who had pragmatically converted in order to further their social, political, and economic advance. But others had only converted under duress; the Jews called such converts annusim, or “forced ones” (as opposed to meshumadim, voluntary converts), and Christianity perhaps had reason to doubt the forced ones’ sincerity, though not as much reason as the diabolical machinery of the Inquisition could warrant. The historian Benzion Netanyahu argued in The Marranos of Spain, partly on the basis of the response of rabbis outside of Spain and Portugal, that the great majority of New Christians, even when their original conversions were forced, were not secret Judaizers and that this was well known in the Church. Netanyahu’s conclusion leads him to search for covert motives of a political nature behind the relentless persecution of New Christians under the Inquisition.
Still, there is the sinister presence of racist ideology that lurks in the notion of a New Christian, the suggestion that Christian conversion, both in faith and in practice, no matter how sincere, cannot succeed in removing the stain of Jewishness. In fact, this suggestion is more than borne out by the statutes that were enacted as early as 1449 demanding limpieza de sangre, or purity of blood, for those who would perform all but the lowliest tasks in churches, for admittance to guilds, colleges, religious and military orders, and even for residence in certain towns. There were those in the Church who protested that the conversion of the Jews to Christianity had been taking place over so long a period of time, stretching back to the time of the Visigoths, that it was impossible for any Spaniard to establish limpieza de sangre. Perhaps this very impossibility fed the racist anxiety. (In varying degrees the Spanish obsession with blood purity would last into the nineteenth century. Blood purity was finally abolished as a requirement for admission to the military academy in 1860.) The persecution of the New Christians, a designation that neither religious belief nor practice could eradicate, was the first European experiment with racist ideology. It was, more specifically, the Marranos who were the designated target of Old Christian wrath, those who had converted to Christianity and whose souls therefore belonged to the Church, but who continued to practice Judaism secretly. But racist animus tended to blur the line between New Christian and Marrano.
The two communities of Jews and New Christians were still deeply intertwined, living side by side with each other, related, at the very least, by blood and history. The royal couple took steps to segregate the Jews, so that they could not exert any pernicious influence on the New Christians. Though previous rulers had been wary of allowing the formidable power of the Inquisition to compete with their own rule, in 1478 Ferdinand and Isabella invited the Inquisition into their land. It was in Spain that the full fury of the Inquisition would develop, becoming a powerful political institution that answered to no one, not even the pope. It would terrorize Jews for hundreds of years to come, pursuing its prey all the way to the New World. Late in the twentieth century, Catholic Mexican-Americans in Arizona and other western states would reveal secrets to university researchers, telling of their families’ practice of not eating bread during Holy Week, and of closing all the shutters and lighting candles in secret cupboards on Saturday nights. The tone in which they imparted these family secrets was still one of hushed nervousness, yielding us, over five centuries later, some small sense of what the terror must have been like in its most hellishly active period.
The Dominicans were chosen to manage the Inquisition in Spain, and Tomás de Torquemada, the head of a Dominican monastery in Segovia and confessor to the queen, was appointed inquisitor-general in the autumn of 1483. Torquemada, too, is said to have had converso ancestors, perhaps stoking his hatred. With his ascension, inquisitional reach was extended across the whole of the kingdom. Torquemada was insatiable. There are recorded instances of people being cleared of all charges and Torquemada demanding retrial after retrial, until either the verdict he wanted was reached or he burned the victims anyway. It was he who set up the formidable machinery of the Inquisition, its secret mechanism so perfectly calibrated to do what it was designed to do that it would keep running well after his death (though the greatest concentration of activity was during his lifetime).
Over the course of the next twelve years, the inquisitors, with their irresistible methods of forcing confessions, claimed to have found over thirteen thousand secretly Judaizing New Christians, men and women, many of whom were burned at the stake.9 Everything — accusations, imprisonment, torture, forced confessions, sentencing — took place in the greatest secrecy, contributing to the terror. The verdicts were announced at great public spectacles, the infamous autos-da-fé, where masses of the condemned heard their sentences announced, one by one, the proceedings often stretching into the night, and sometimes protracted over two or three days. The last to hear their sentence pronounced were those condemned to death, the method of execution specified as being “without an effusion of blood,” which meant, of course, being burned alive. This seeming mercy, a bloodless murder, amounted to a death of maximum cruelty and was based on an old legal fiction of the Church dating back to the eleventh or twelfth century and justified by a passage in John 15:6: “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.” Penitent heretics were granted the mercy of being strangled before their bodies were burned. Those who had died under torture were burned as well, and condemned heretics who had escaped were burned in effigy, their goods confiscated, as were all goods confiscated, by the increasingly wealthy Inquisition, though those who had originally brought the accusation of crypto-Judaism — a neighbor, a business partner, even a family member — were entitled to some of the goods, a diabolical plan if ever there was one.
The flimsiest grounds could serve as an accusation. For example, extreme personal hygiene could be interpreted as crypto-Judaism. An old habit from the days before conversion, absentmindedly reverted to, could cost a person his or her life and bring catastrophic attention to his or her extended clan as well. The guidelines the Church issued for detecting a crypto-Jew included such behavior as wearing clean clothes on Saturdays and draining away the blood of meat and cutting away its fat and gristle. An accused person never got the opportunity to face his accusers, so personal vendettas, as well as envy, malice, and greed, could serve as motives.
In 1492, Granada, the last Moslem holdout, fell to the Christians. Now it was only the Jews and the backsliding conversos who spoiled the royal vision of a unified Christian Spain. The autos-da-fé ceased, as plans for the final solution were being put into place. There was one more effort at mass conversion, and then came the announcement. Judaism was to be officially terminated in Spain. There were attempts to bribe the monarchs. Various Jews were members of the royal court or in other ways close to the two rulers, including most prominently Abraham Seneor and Isaac Abrabanel, and a large sum was handed over by way of these intermediaries. Legend has it that Ferdinand and Isabella wavered at the eleventh hour and Torquemada came rushing in to them, with a crucifix held aloft, fulminating, “Judas Iscariot sold his master for thirty pieces of silver. Your Highnesses would sell him anew for thirty thousand. Here he is. Take him and barter him away.” Spain’s Jews had two choices: convert or emigrate. The official justification again was put in terms not of punishing Jews for being Jews, but for corrupting Christians:
We have been informed that within our kingdom there are evil Christians who have converted to Judaism and who have thereby betrayed our holy Catholic faith. This most unfortunate development has been brought about as a result of the contact between Jews and Christians. … We have decided that no further opportunities should be given for additional damage to our holy faith. … Thus, we hereby order the expulsion of all Jews, both male and female, and of all ages, who live in our kingdom and in all the areas in our possession, whether such Jews have been born here or not. … These Jews are to depart from our kingdom and from all the areas in our possession by the end of July, together with their Jewish sons and daughters, their Jewish servants and their Jewish relatives.
Those who converted would of course be allowed to remain in Spain, where the inquisitional torments continued with mounting fury. Considerable numbers of Spain’s Jews, including the chief rabbi, Abraham Seneor (who had been appointed to his post by the royal pair following his help with their nuptials), and most of the members of the most influential families, chose baptism over exile, adding their numbers to the conversos. But between 100,000 and 150,000 Jews packed up their belongings and left, the exodus beginning in May. By the end of the summer there were officially no Jews left in Spain. As the rabbis remarked, the final expulsion occurred just about the time of the Jewish fast day of Tisha Ba-Av, the ninth of Av, which marks the two destructions of Jerusalem, the first by the Babylonians and the second by the Romans in 70 c.e.
An eyewitness to the exodus, an observer generally unsympathetic to the Jews, Andrés Bernáldez, who had enthusiastically endorsed the work of the Inquisition, gives a glimpse of the pathos as the Jews left Castile and Aragon that hot summer:
Confiding in their vain blind hopes, [they] left the lands of their birth, children and adults, old and young, on foot and in wagons, and the caballeros on asses and other beasts, and each journeyed to a port of embarkation. They went through roads and fields with many travails and [mixed] fortunes, some falling, others rising, others dying, others being born, others falling sick, so that there was no Christian who did not feel sorry for them and always invite them to be baptized. And some sorrowfully converted and stayed, but very few. And on the way the rabbis heartened them, and had the women and youths sing and play tambourines to cheer the people, and so they went through Castile and arrived at the ports. … When those who went to embark through Puerto de Santa María and Cádiz saw the sea, they shouted loudly and cried out, men and women, great and small, in their prayers demanding mercy of God, and they expected to see some marvel of God and that he would open a path through the sea for them.
Among the masses leaving the land of Sepharad in those anguished summer months were the kabbalists, the visionaries who had seen signs of the Messiah’s imminent arrival, and in this way explained how it was given to them to have so many divine secrets revealed, and how it was that the people with whom God had made his covenant were being subjected to such unholy torment. They had predicted that the year of 5250, or 1490, would bring the final redemption. What kind of effect did the expulsion and the other horrors that had both preceded and would follow this calamity have on these mystical visionaries? They would take the kabbalist tradition with them, many of them eventually finding their way to the ancient city of Safed, in the northern hills of Galilee. According to tradition, the Messiah, from the House of David, would arise in the Galilee and make his way from there to Jerusalem. Presumably, this is why the Spanish kabbalists, forced from their homes in Gerona, chose this destination, making it the new center of kabbalistic mysticism.
Kabbalah would undergo, in the wake of the Sephardic tragedy, a profound transformation. How could it not have affected their mystical apprehension of the universe? How could men who read the world — its natural laws and its history — as a divine code not have interpreted the great calamity in symbolic terms? “I think that the afflictions visited on the Jews in all the Christian kingdoms between the years 5250–55 (1490–95) … are the messianic birth pangs,” wrote Joseph She’altiel b. Moses ha-Kohen on the island of Rhodes in 1495, in the margin of a manuscript he was composing.10
The catastrophe of the Spanish expulsion changed the nature of kabbalah. The kabbalists of pre-1492 had not been particularly messianic. They had conceived of spiritual salvation as compatible with life in galut, in exile. Their spiritual efforts were bent on uncovering the esoteric meaning of the universe in order to effect a personal union with the Godhead, individual salvation. It was in the wake of the Sephardic disaster that kabbalah would become increasingly apocalyptic and messianic.11
In the sixteenth century, the kabbalistic giant Isaac Luria, known as Ha-Ari, or the Lion, would come to Safed, and Lurianic kabbalah, still the essence of modern kabbalah, would emanate from out of the narrow medieval alleyways and synagogues of that golden-lit city to sweep across the lands of the Diaspora, infiltrating all levels of Jewish life. It transformed not only practice, with new rituals of meditation and purification, but the very way Jews constructed and understood the narrative of their own religion.
Originally a recluse who would see his wife and children only on the Sabbath, Luria believed himself to see visions of the prophet Elijah, who initiated him into the esoteric system. Luria’s mother was Sephardic, though his father was Ashkenazic, and among his small circle of disciples, many of whom believed him to be the Messiah, were Sephardic refugees from the Inquisition. Among the inner circle were Joseph Karo, whom you will recall was the author of the Shulkhan Arukh (The Set Table), which Orthodox Jews, Ashkenazic and Sephardic, regard as the official compendium of Jewish Law. Karo, who was born in Toledo, had messianic motivations for his codification of halakha, since the right observance of the Law would hasten the coming of the Messiah. Also in Luria’s inner circle was Hayyim Vital, originally of Calabria, who was responsible for writing down the lectures of Luria in the form in which they were disseminated throughout Jewry.
Lurianic kabbalah, transmitted from his visions of Elijah, offered a new narrative to explain the moral history of the suffering world, and the role that the Jews were chosen to play in that moral history. It is a tale of a shattering— a shevirah—at the very beginning of the creation of the world, when the Ein Sof, or That Without End, contracted itself so that the world could be created. The divine light entered into the ten vessels that were waiting to receive it, and some were shattered, the shards falling into the abyss from which the world arose, carrying sparks of the light that were trapped within. From the moment of its first being, then, the world was not as it ought to have been. The exile of the Jews is the historical symbol for the disruption and displacement brought about by the shevirah. As Gershom Scholem writes: “This situation of not being where one ought to be, viz. of being removed from one’s rightful place, is what is meant by the term ‘exile.’ In fact, since the breaking of the vessels, exile is the fundamental and exclusive— albeit hidden — mode of all existence. In Lurianism the historical notion of exile had become a cosmic symbol.”12 So, too, spiritual advance must be seen on a cosmic scale. It is tikkun ha-olam—healing the world — which in mystical terms is described as the gathering up of the shards of the broken vessels, the divine light caught within them. The rituals and prayers of purification that Ha-Ari devised — what is often called “practical kabbalah”—were means of effecting the tikkun. When all is restored to its rightful place, the Messiah will come; his arrival will not deliver our redemption to us, but rather signal that redemption has, through man’s spiritual efforts, been achieved.
The majority of the Sephardic exiles were not kabbalists, and they headed not toward Galilee but to the far closer land of Portugal, where history would not wait long to deliver them another of its cruel twists. For though the Inquisition had not yet arrived in this part of the Iberian Peninsula, it soon would, and with equal if not greater ferocity. Manuel I declared, in 1497, a mere five years after the Spanish expulsion, that all his Jewish subjects must be forcibly converted. Not wishing to make the same economically ruinous mistake as the Spanish rulers (whose daughter, Isabella, was his fiancée), Manuel had not given his Jews the opportunity for emigrating. He wanted to extirpate Judaism while retaining the highly lucrative skills and resources of the formerly Jewish. He also decreed, after entreaties from the Sephardim, that he would give the New Christians a period of grace in which to adjust to their new faith; backsliding into Judaism would not be punished until 1527, a period which was then extended to 1534. Practically, this meant that Portuguese crypto-Judaism had some time to evolve its secret practices, and it proved far more tenacious there than in Spain. Also the Portuguese conversos were, by definition annusim, choosing the traumas of exile from the beloved Sepharad over conversion. Such stalwarts were predisposed toward Marranism.
In fact, a highly complicated culture of fraught subterfuge evolved in Spain and even more intricately in Portugal, an elaborate congeries of masked identities and coded phrases, to be understood only by those who shared the mortal secret. Outward Christian behavior was not what it appeared to be — there are still Spanish Catholics who, before entering a church, mumble a meaningless “incantation” that they were taught to recite by their equally uncomprehending elders, and which linguists have unraveled into a degenerated Hebrew, disavowing the rituals in which the worshipper is about to engage.
The externalities may sometimes have been bogus, but the veiled internality was tenuous as well, its precise content blurring with the years. The crypto-Jews may have disassociated themselves from their assumed identity, but, inevitably, the outward forms seeped inward. The Jewishness they were guarding became unconsciously Christianized, absorbing the symbolism and themes of the Church. As the philosopher Yirmiyahu Yovel describes it: “Religious duality penetrated the consciousness and the subconsciousness of the most ardent Judaizers. Even the Marrano martyrs and heroes were rarely Jews in the conventional sense. The clandestine character of worship, the Catholic education, the lack of Jewish instruction, the mental mixture of faiths, and the isolation from Jewish communities outside Iberia created a special phenomenon in the history and sociology of religion: a form of faith that is neither Christian nor Jewish.”13
Of course, not all of the conversos were stricken by religious duality, at least not consciously. Many, perhaps the majority, were genuine in their conversion, indoctrinating their children in the new faith. Even if the original conversos were not motivated by Christian zeal, their offspring, brought up as Catholics, often were. Some became important figures in the history of Christianity itself, important in both conventional and, perhaps even more interestingly, unconventional ways, their torn identity playing a role in the development of Christianity.
St. Teresa of Ávila, for example, the brilliant mystical writer and Carmelite reformer, belonged to a New Christian family, even though many of the Catholic Web sites I’ve visited list her simply as deriving of Spanish noble stock. It’s true that her grandfather, a Toledan merchant named Juan Sánchez de Toledo, transferred his business to Ávila, where he succeeded in having his children marry into families of the nobility, which was a path to which many conversos aspired as a way of securing some degree (by no means absolute) of security against the charges of secret Judaizing. The future Catholic saint was born in 1515, twenty-three years after the Great Expulsion. She became one of the alumbrados, or illuminated ones, as the Spanish Christian mystics were known. (She was also the teacher of St. John of the Cross, another alumbrado and author of Dark Night of the Soul.) Her extraordinary personality, as well as the Christian sincerity of her upbringing, can be inferred from this tale of the saint I got from a Catholic Web site: “Her courage and enthusiasm were readily kindled, an early example of which trait occurred when at the age of 7 she left home with her brother Rodrigo with the intention of going to Moorish territory to be beheaded for Christ, but they were frustrated by their uncle, who met the children as they were leaving the city and brought them home (Ephrem de la Madre de Dios, Tiempo y Vida de Sta. Teresa).”
St. Teresa’s Interior Castle, written reluctantly as a guide for her Carmelite Sisters, is one of the classic Christian texts, a masterpiece of mystical literature. The castle, or mansion, as its known in Spanish, is the soul, which has, in her metaphorical vision, seven rooms. Spiritual advance, made through the medium of prayer, is a progressive movement through these rooms, drawing ever nearer to the center of the mansion, which is where one finds unity with God. Teresa makes of spiritual activity an entirely inward private process, the self ’s communing with itself alone, with all external influences, other than God Himself, rendered irrelevant; and the case can be made that her approach to spirituality has much to do with her converso background.14
Spinoza, too, will emphasize the entirely inward and self-reliant process of spiritual advancement — though in his case the medium is not prayer but mathematically rigorous reason. It is intriguing to speculate how the Marrano psyche, necessarily oriented inward, found such different expressions in these two spiritual geniuses.
By the 1550s the full force of the Inquisition fell on all conversos suspected of Judaizing; and they were all suspected. Life was so unendurable, even for those who were faithfully Christian, that some in Portugal returned to Spain, where at least less attention was paid to each and every New Christian. In 1580 the two kingdoms were united, making travel between them easier. And although emigration had been outlawed for them, many conversos, whether secret Judaizers or not, tried to escape the Iberian Peninsula. Some left clandestinely, others secured permission to go on business trips from which they never returned, though there was always the fear as to what repercussions would befall relatives left behind. There are even reported cases of conversos obtaining permission to make a pilgrimage to the Vatican, and in this way effecting their escape.
By the sixteenth century the term “Portuguese” was simply understood through much of Europe, Asia, and Latin America as meaning Jewish, as more and more New Christians tried to circumvent the laws against immigration. A chosen destination was the city of Amsterdam, whose burghers may not have welcomed the refugees with open arms, but were not inclined to pry into personal religious beliefs, as long as they were praticed with decorum and discretion.
Sephardim began arriving in Amsterdam as early as 1590, some eleven years after the Union of Utrecht (1579) and the birth of the United Provinces of the Netherlands as a Protestant state now independent from Catholic Spain. They didn’t openly reveal themselves as Jews for several years. One of the legends is that foreign chanting was heard one night, coming from a darkened house. The Calvinists suspected papists and brought the authorities to investigate. The chanting, however, turned out to be Hebrew, which, though curious, wasn’t as threatening to the Protestants as a cadre of Catholics would have been.
In 1614 the Jews were able to purchase some land right outside Amsterdam, in Ouderkerk, as a burial ground. They had to wait until 1615 before Jewish settlement was officially recognized, though outward worship was still forbidden, and the conservative Calvinist clergy were always a hostile force with which to contend. The esteemed legal scholar Hugo Grotius, who had been one of those consulted when the legal status of the newly arrived Jews was being considered, opined that “plainly, God desires them to live somewhere. Why then not here rather than elsewhere? … Besides, the scholars among them may be of some service to us by teaching us the Hebrew language.” But knowing that the Jews had their share of “atheists and impious people,” he demanded the condition that all Jews over the age of fourteen state their faith in God, Moses, the prophets, and the afterlife.
In 1619 the Amsterdam city council officially granted its resident Jews the right to practice their religion, though imposing some restrictions on their economic and political rights and enacting various laws concerning intermarriage and social activities with Christians. They also demanded that the Amsterdam Jews observe Orthodoxy, not deviating from the Mosaic Code, nor from the belief that there is “an omnipotent God the creator, [and] that Moses and the prophets revealed the truth under divine inspiration, and that there is another life after death in which good people will receive their recompense and wicked people their punishment.” In other words, the Amsterdam authorities were demanding that their Jews believe at least three of the Thirteen Articles of Faith that Maimonides had articulated. Unlike under the Catholic rulers of the lands they were fleeing, the Dutch Jews now had neighbors who would tolerate their presence just so long as they remained good believing Jews. It had to have been a welcome change, all things considered. Still, such conditions for tolerance aren’t entirely reassuring, prodding wounds that hadn’t begun to close, reminding people who hardly needed reminding that security is a rare and fragile thing. The Jews of the Netherlands remained a “foreign group” until 1657 (the year following Spinoza’s excommunication), when they were finally recognized as subjects of the republic.
But even before recognition of citizenship, they had set about organizing themselves — intensely organizing themselves — into a Jewish community. The Amsterdam Portuguese-Jewish community was the only community of former Marranos that didn’t continue for years to hide their religion but practiced openly as soon as they felt they safely could, a testament to the relative tolerance of their Dutch neighbors. Still, as my old teacher Mrs. Schoenfeld had put it in her inimitable way: “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.”
By 1614, a year before they had any official legal status, the Sephardic community already had two congregations, Beth Jacob (The House of Jacob) and Neve Shalom (Dwelling of Peace). Beth Jacob was meeting in an old warehouse and Neve Shalom, which had raised money to build a synagogue but had been denied its use through the influence of the city’s Calvinist clergy, was meeting in a private home. Before long, a controversy within Beth Jacob split the synagogue into two, and a breakaway synagogue, Beth Israel, was the result. The controversy might have revolved around the hiring of a shokhet, or ritual slaughterer. The three Amsterdam synagogues would eventually recoalesce into one congregation and build a magnificent edifice, still a showplace today.
It was to be a highly structured community, with head rabbis and rabbinical assistants, khakhamim—literally, “wise men”—themselves arranged in hierarchical ordering. Each congregation had its own board of lay governors, the parnassim, who had jurisdiction over a great number of issues— business, social, political, judicial, and, trumping the rabbis, even religious. The parnassim, for example, set the standards for charitable donations and the koshering of meat. They also made the decisions concerning bans and — their ultimate means of control — writs of excommunication. Kherem, which most often was temporary, entailed isolation from the community, and it was employed surprisingly often by Amsterdam’s Sephardim, certainly surprising to our contemporary antiauthoritarian sensibilities.
In 1622 a more centralized communal board of governors, the Senhores Deputados, was established, consisting of two parnassim from each of the three synagogues, though for the most important decisions all fifteen parnassim—the Senhores Quinze — would convene. This highly organized, hierarchical structure might strike one as aspiring toward an approximation of the Catholic Church itself, a Vatican wanna be. That is, I think, how it struck Spinoza, who was to write in the preface of his Tractatus:
I have often wondered that men who make a boast of professing the Christian religion, which is a religion of love, joy, peace, temperance, and honest dealing with all men, should quarrel so fiercely and display the bitterest hatred towards one another day by day, so that these latter characteristics make known a man’s creed more readily than the former. Matters have long reached such a pass that a Christian, Turk, or Jew or heathen can generally be recognized as such only by his physical appearance or dress, or by his attendance at a particular place of worship, or by his profession of a particular belief and his allegiance to some leader. But as for their way of life, it is the same for all. In seeking the causes of this unhappy state of affairs, I am quite certain that it stems from a wide-spread popular attitude of mind which looks on the ministries of the Church as dignities, its offices as posts of emolument and its pastors as eminent personages.
But however grandiose their ecclesiastical arrangement, the returning Marranos of Amsterdam felt the need to turn to older Sephardic communities, particularly Venice, for guidance. They sought the opinions of the Venetian rabbis when there were interpretations of Law to be decided, controversies to be resolved.
There were to be many controversies. The psychological atmosphere of the community was fraught, to put it mildly. The dark history that the returning Jews brought with them saw to that. The perilous hopes for the religion that had been clung to in secrecy turned, in some, to fierce religiosity, messianic and mystical. In others, it turned to disappointment, disillusion, attempts to argue with the rabbis as to what true Judaism ought to be, sometimes ultimate rejection and a return to Christianity.
Mrs. Schoenfeld had mentioned the sad case of Uriel da Costa, a returning New Jew whose dramatically played-out difficulties in assimilating himself to halakhic Judaism sparked a crisis for the community. Though he was, by all accounts, a particularly unstable man — as Mrs. Schoenfeld had put it, meshugga—there was something in his constitutional marginality, fated always to be an outside no matter where he turned, that captures the inner turmoil of the community, struggling so hard to lay down a system of double roots, in the soil of the Low Lands and, even deeper, in the body of historical Judaism.
And then of course there was to be the case of Baruch Spinoza, who turned neither to the Christianity his Portuguese ancestors had outwardly practiced, nor to the rabbinical Judaism of halakha. Nor was he interested in trying to reform the existing religions, as da Costa had dreamed of doing first with Christianity and then with Judaism, or as St. Teresa of Ávila, yet another converso, had managed to accomplish with the Carmelite order of nuns, reforming it so that it answered better to Jesus’ vow of poverty and humility.
Instead, Spinoza was to offer something rather new under the seventeenth century’s European skies: a religion of reason. His religion asks us to do something that is far more difficult for us than the most severe practices of asceticism. It asks us to be reasonable. It asks us to look at ourselves with unblinking objectivity. It asks us to subdue our natural inclinations toward self-aggrandizement, our attempts to shore up our dreadful fragility by fictions of a God who favors us because we were born — thank God! — into the right group, or have gone through the nuisance of converting to it. And it asks us, as well, to face squarely the terror of our own mortality.
It is the self-deceptive fabrications that emanate out of these two weaknesses in our human nature — self-aggrandizement and death terror, both of them aspects of our own frightening and incurable finitude — that account for the fearsome force of the superstitious forms of religion. “It is fear, then, that engenders, preserves and fosters superstition,” observes Spinoza in the preface of his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Spinoza distinguishes between religion, which he endorses, and superstitions, which he condemns. Superstitions, as opposed to religion, offer us false cures for our finitude. They make us believe that we are more cosmically important than we are, that we have had bestowed on us — whether Jew, or Christian, or Moslem — a privileged position in the narrative of the world’s unfolding. And they make us believe that we can, if we have jumped through the right hoops, live on after our bodily deaths.
There is no privileged access to the truth: this follows from the nature of truth itself. Any viewpoint that denies that we are all, by reason of our very own faculties of reason, in precisely the same position to attain the truth, as well as any of the rewards of consolation that knowing the truth brings, is and must be false.
All things being equal, it is better to believe truly than falsely. But the variety of superstitious false beliefs, denying the universal accessibility of truth — the same truth — to all who exercise their faculty of reason, is particularly pernicious. It has delivered unspeakable harm to our species. Superstitions increase rather than diminish the awful suffering to which we are prone by reason of our incurable finitude. These misguided attempts to expand ourselves in the world only succeed in the most violent and painful contractions.
So it was in Spinoza’s day, and so it continues into ours. Spinoza could have predicted it. In fact, he did, deducing the weaknesses of our minds from our sorely tried finitude with mathematical rigor.
Yet, even though he deduced our weaknesses, he also tried to save us from them. There is no contradiction. It is the deduction itself that reveals the weaknesses as weaknesses. If we follow his reasoning, we will outgrow our tendencies toward skewed points of view.
Strict determinist that he was, Spinoza was no fatalist.
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