Personal identity: What is it that makes a person the very person that she is, herself alone and not another, an integrity of identity that persists over time, undergoing changes and yet still continuing to be — until she does not continue any longer, at least not unproblematically?
I stare at the picture of a small child at a summer’s picnic, clutching her big sister’s hand with one tiny hand while in the other she has a precarious hold on a big slice of watermelon that she appears to be struggling to have intersect with the small o of her mouth. That child is me. But why is she me? I have no memory at all of that summer’s day, no privileged knowledge of whether that child succeeded in getting the watermelon into her mouth. It’s true that a smooth series of contiguous physical events can be traced from her body to mine, so that we would want to say that her body is mine; and perhaps bodily identity is all that our personal identity consists in. But bodily persistence over time, too, presents philosophical dilemmas. The series of contiguous physical events has rendered the child’s body so different from the one I glance down on at this moment; the very atoms that composed her body no longer compose mine. And if our bodies are dissimilar, our points of view are even more so. Mine would be as inaccessible to her — just let her try to figure out The Ethics—as hers is now to me. Her thought processes, prelinguistic, would largely elude me.
Yet she is me, that tiny determined thing in the frilly white pinafore. She has continued to exist, survived her childhood illnesses, the near-drowning in a rip current on Rockaway Beach at the age of twelve, other dramas. There are presumably adventures that she — that is that I — can’t undergo and still continue to be herself. Would I then be someone else, or would I just no longer be? Were I to lose all sense of myself — were schizophrenia or demonic possession, a coma or progressive dementia to remove me from myself— would it be I who would be undergoing those trials, or would I have quit the premises? Would there then be someone else, or would there be no one?
Is death one of those adventures from which I can’t emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists. A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does exist, then what is she, and what makes that thing that she now is identical with the beautiful girl laughing at her little sister on that forgotten day? Can she remember that summer’s day while I cannot?
Personal identity poses a host of questions that are, in addition to being philosophical and abstract, deeply personal. It is, after all, one’s very own person that is revealed as problematic. How much more personal can it get?
The continued inquisitorial persecution of conversos had added yet a new dimension to the mystery of personal identity, merging it with the mystery of Jewish identity. What is it to be Jewish? Is it a matter of creed, of culture, of family or blood — or, as we would now put it, of genes? Having once been Jewish, can one then cease to be Jewish? Or is a Jew essentially a Jew, no matter what religion he might practice or even think himself to be a member of? Was the rejection of Jesus as Christ fated to be repeated, a reversion to type that was embedded in the inherited point of view? Just what sort of an attribute is being Jewish, and how significant is it in constituting the personal identity of those who are Jews?
Jews were not allowed on the Iberian Peninsula. Those who had remained had converted. Were they nevertheless still Jews? Were those who practiced their ever more deformed and Christianized secret Judaism — who spoke of their matzahs as “holy bread,” similar to the sacramental host of Mass, and of “St. Esther” as their patron saint — still Jews?1
Were those who genuinely gave up their ancestral religion, those who no longer even really knew of it, perhaps weren’t even aware of their family history, even so still Jews? Were such ardent believers as St. Teresa of Ávila, who not only gave themselves wholeheartedly to Christianity, but were accepted, even canonized, still incorrigibly Jewish?
Implicit in the constancy of inquisitorial attention is an assumption of ineradicable Jewish essentialism. No matter how sincere the conversion, no matter how devoutly Christian the life, Jewish ancestry branded one as forever suspect. It was as if certain propositional attitudes — most notably the rejection of Jesus of Galilee as the Messiah — were transmitted in the blood, making true Christian sincerity all but impossible, and for all the generations to come. Recidivism was biologically determined, and the formidable office of the Inquisition was necessary to pry open the outer Christian carapace to reveal the Jewish substance within. A Jew is a Jew is a Jew.
The Marranos were enmeshed in some of the same identity-metaphysics as were their persecutors. For them, too, there was an inviolable fact of the matter concerning true Jewish identity that remained untouched by all outer performance. They may have gone through formal Christian conversions, taken the sacrament, and gone every week to confession, but within the confessional of their inner being they, too, continued to insist on their essential Jewishness.
A Sephardic friend tells me his grandfather used to tell him a joke that perhaps goes back to Marrano times. A Jew has undergone a conversion process, in the course of which the priest has put his hands on the Jew’s head and repeated several times, “You were a Jew, now you’re Christian, you were a Jew, now you’re Christian.” A few weeks pass and the priest comes on a Friday to see how his converso is getting on. The priest finds, to his shock and dismay, that the New Christian is not eating fish for his Friday night dinner, as he ought to as a good Catholic, but rather a roasted chicken. The Jew, ordered to account for himself, explains that he had simply put his hand on the chicken’s head and repeated several times, “You were a chicken, now you’re fish, you were a chicken, now you’re fish.”
Despite the joke, one should not equate the Marrano’s notion of private Jewish identity with the Inquisition’s essentialist — essentially racist — presupposition. The Marrano’s Jewish identity was not so much passively received but actively acquired, even if the activity dare not show itself, requiring precisely the same unobservable inwardness as the fact of Jewishness itself. For the Marrano, the inner avowal of a secret covenant with the nation of Israel, enacted in the inviolable interiority of their own minds, was the very act that made them Jewish. Being Jewish consisted in the private performative act — one was Jewish because one avowed oneself to be.
And, too, the performative act of acknowledging oneself as Jewish also, for the Marrano, effected salvation. Accepting a historical concept of “the chosen people,” interpreted in terms of the reception of the Mosaic Code of Law, to acknowledge oneself as Jewish, and thus the recipient of these laws — even if they could not be followed — entailed salvation. Thus their redemption, too, was enacted within the silence of their Judeo-actualizing avowals.
Ironically, the emphasis that they placed on this dichotomous concept of personal “salvation”—one is either saved or one is not — is itself Christian, and an indication of how far from historical Judaism their understanding had strayed. Jews do not traditionally possess such an all-or-nothing concept of personal salvation as is prominent in Christianity. The dichotomous concept of personal salvation is connected, too, with a certain view of personal identity. The very person who one is is changed with the passing from being unsaved to saved. There is a radical discontinuity between the person one was and the person one has become (the born-again). Applying the Christian concept of salvation to their Jewish predicament, the Marranos located their salvation in the acceptance of the Laws of Moses. As the Christian is saved by accepting Jesus as his Savior, so the Marrano was saved by accepting the hegemony over him of the Laws of Moses, as transmitted to his ancestors.
But of course those Laws could not be outwardly followed, though many went to dangerous lengths to perform some small ritual of Jewish significance. So there was, for example, the Marrano “trick” of hanging a statue of the Madonna on the doorpost of one’s house and placing within her foot the prayer of the Shema — Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One! — so that the Marrano could transform the Madonna into a mezuzah, to be kissed upon entering and leaving their homes, as religious Jews will kiss the mezuzah.
But the freedom to fulfill the Mosaic Laws was, to say the least, subject to severe limitations — male circumcision, for example, was obviously out of the question — and over the years the content of the Laws dimmed. Salvation consisted, more and more, in the inner acknowledgment of these outwardly unperformable Laws. What was performed was one’s acknowledgment of “them,” whatever they were. It was the line of historical causal continuity between the event at Sinai and the personal acknowledgment now that meant that the Laws one acknowledged — even if they could not be performed, even if one did not retain the knowledge of how they ought to be performed — were still the Laws of Moses holding sway over one’s will.
The Marrano insisted on an essential Jewish adherence preserved within a Christian life, and this created a dilemma for the rabbis of the time. The rabbinical responsa of the time from outside Iberia are filled with painful discussions of particular Marrano cases. Does the inward avowal of distorted “Mosaic Law” make a converso, who goes to church and prays outwardly to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, a Jew? The Trinity seem to be, on the face of it, a negation of the holy words of the Shema: the Lord is One! Insofar as it is a deviation from monotheism, it is avodah zorah, idol worship. The Talmud teaches that in general, life being holy, halakha can be sacrificed in order to save one’s life. However, there are three sins so serious that a Jew must die rather than transgress them. These are forbidden sex, murder, and idol worship. Many rabbis deemed the Trinity a form of idolatry and therefore saw Marranism as an unjustifiable alternative to martyrdom. And if, as many rabbis believed, it is the practice of the Law that make a Jew a Jew, then in what sense could the Marranos be Jews? Their predicament was tragic, but compassion could not, at least for some of the rabbis in the debate, override halakha.
The Inquisition gave prominence to the question of Jewish identity. In its cruelest interpretation, the Inquisition insisted that Jewishness is part of the personal identity of the Jew, and one that is passed on through the blood. There was no outward act that would transform the substantive essence. Wafers and wine could be transformed into the flesh and the blood of Christ, but no rite or ritual could turn a Jew into a Christian.
In the 1630s there were again a rash of accusations in Portugal that the conversos were crypto-Judaizers, and that they were trying to convert Old Christians, particularly their Christian servants. The inquisitor of Llerena wrote in 1628 or soon thereafter, “From the moment of its conception, every fetus permanently carries with it the moral attributes — in the case of the Marranos, the moral depravity — of its parents.”2 This was not a new idea in Portugal. The sermons preached on the occasion of autos-da-fé throughout the fifteenth century often stressed the immutability of the Jews, a moral trait passed on from generation to generation.
The former conversos who came to Amsterdam brought with them the interwoven preoccupations with Jewish identity and personal identity that the Inquisition had forced on them. While the rash of accusations were going on in Portugal, conversos kept arriving, leaving relatives and friends behind.
In the relative freedom of Protestant Amsterdam, the former Marranos set about organizing themselves into the kind of community required for the full performance of the halakha from which they had been severed. At first, rabbis had to be imported to instruct them, though they soon started producing their own; a model school was organized; an elaborate hierarchical system was erected for guidance as well as for chastisement.
But the old painful dilemmas would not so easily be laid to rest; how could they possibly be when the trauma had gone so deep and those who walked the streets of the Vlooienburg and the Breestraat had New Christian friends and relatives in Portugal still kept under the ever watchful eye of the Inquisition? The Jews of Amsterdam — especially those whose unorthodoxy brought them into conflict with the rabbis— were themselves still objects of pointed interest to the Church, and inquisitorial spies walked among the Dutch Sephardim.
In fact, we owe what scant knowledge we have of Spinoza himself during the period that had been known as his “lost years”—the four years between his excommunication and his known fraternization with various dissenting Christians, known collectively as the Collegiants — to investigative diggings in the records of the Inquisition by the historian Israel Révah. Révah discovered reports on the young Spinoza from two different sources. One was a Latin-American Augustinian monk, Friar Tomás Solanao y Robles, who had visited Amsterdam in late 1658 and voluntarily reported to the Madrid Inquisition upon his return. He volunteered the information to clear himself of any suspicion he may have attracted by traveling in non-Catholic lands. And then on the following day, a report was filed, this time upon request, by a Spanish soldier, Captain Miguel Pérez de Maltranilla3 Spinoza’s surfacing to light from out of the medieval murk of the inquisitorial files of the Church — which still, apparently, considered his soul of their concern, since he was the offspring of conversos, and so, in its eyes, still Christian— underscores the anachronistic audacity of Spinoza’s choice: to define his life on his terms, not as a heterodox Jew or Christian. But it underscores, as well, how vividly present the powerful and hidden forces of the Inquisition remained in the lives of the community — even in the life of the banished of the community, in a heretic Jew like Spinoza.
The obsession with the questions of who is a Jew, what is a Jew, can a person be un-Judaized, re-Judaized — all of these questions intertwined with the Marrano preoccupation with redemptive possibilities — would have been, one imagines, like an incessant nervous murmur registering just below audibility, a constant discordant accompaniment to conversations in homes and streets and synagogues, as well as in the inner recesses of unquiet minds. Sometimes the murmur would break out into painfully articulated communal conflicts and contretemps, ripping apart whatever façade of placid Dutch burghers they might have been trying to assume.
The case of Uriel da Costa, in the 1620s when Spinoza was a child, had been one such crisis that had lain uneasily on the collective conscience. His is a tragic, if also controversial, example of the confusions and disillusions that accompanied the attempt to be reintegrated into historical Judaism. The internal aspects of Spinoza’s story, so to speak — a sense of the experiences and reflections that led up to his break with his close-knit community and of how he felt about the treatment he received — are hard to come by, Spinoza himself maintaining the perfect high-minded disregard for the merely personal that is consistent with the impersonal point of view that he champions. In contrast, da Costa left behind an achingly personal testament, which he entitled Exemplar humanae vitae, documenting — though in a biased and not altogether reliable manner — his troubled relationship with the Amsterdam community, which would twice excommunicate him. The Examplar was, in a sense, his suicide note.
Uriel da Costa had been baptized Gabriel, born in Oporto, Portugal. His father was a devout Catholic, but his mother came from a converso family and, as the work of recent historians has unearthed, most likely observed some of the secret rites of Marranism. Gabriel studied canon law at the University of Coimbra and was a church treasurer. Da Costa described himself as having become disillusioned with Christianity. In studying and comparing the New Testament with the Five Books of Moses, he found contradictions and reached the conclusion that Judaism, from which Christianity had sprung, presented the authentic experience, with Christianity a corruption of it. He also confessed that Christianity’s emphasis on hell’s damnation terrified him. Soon both he and his five brothers were inwardly identifying themselves as Jewish. After the death of their Catholic father, the six boys, together with their mother, Banca, determined to leave Portugal.
He presents himself as having voluntarily left Portugal for the freedom to practice Judaism openly, but the historian Israel Révah, researching the records of the Oporto Inquisition, found that, unsurprisingly, the converso had attracted the attention of the office of the Inquisition, which was preparing a devastating case against him, so his emigration was most likely not simply a spiritual journey but an attempt to escape with his life.
Once in Amsterdam, da Costa found that the Judaism being practiced there did not live up to his expectations. The departures from the pristine ancient religion of Moses were, in his eyes, unjustifiable extensions of God’s direct revelations. The accretions of rabbinical ordinances and Talmudic rulings, the codification of the so-called Oral Law, offended da Costa’s construction of what Judaism ought to be. The organized hierarchical religion of the rabbis was as much a corruption of the original Mosaic Code as was Catholicism, and da Costa set about single-handedly to reform it, to purify it of all its post-Mosaic content. As the historian Yirmiyahu Yovel points out, we must read Examplar with several grains of salt. It is highly dubious that da Costa believed that “the religion of Moses had been petrified for over two millennia, waiting for Uriel da Costa to perform an unhistorical leap into it. However vaguely and unwillingly, da Costa was aware that post-biblical Judaism was different from the original model. But he hoped and believed that the fluid New Jewish situation offered a historical opportunity to remedy this. … Da Costa expected that (unlike the Catholicism of which he had despaired) Judaism could lend itself to a purifying reform in the original direction of the Bible, especially within the New Jewish communities where, out of a minimal and shattered basis, former Marranos were trying to reconstruct a Jewish life for themselves. Since these New Jews were already engaged in an effort to recapture their lost essence, they may as well have regressed further back to their origins and restored the purer biblical Judaism that elsewhere had been obliterated.”4
Needless to say, his efforts did not find favor with the rabbis of Amsterdam, who were charged with the task of transporting the former Marranos back to the halakhic Judaism from which history had separated them.
Da Costa reacted with fury to the intransigence of the religious authorities of the community, and in search of a more authentic Judaism left Amsterdam for the Sephardic community of Hamburg, which did not respond any more favorably to his reforming ideas than Amsterdam had. In 1616 he composed a set of eleven theses attacking what he called “the vanity and invalidity of the traditions and ordinances of the Pharisees.” He claimed that the rabbis, in equating Talmudic interpretations with the Torah, “make the word of man equal to that of God.”
On August 14, 1618, da Costa was put in kherem by the chief rabbi of Venice, Rabbi Leon de Medina, who was the teacher of the chief rabbi of Amsterdam, Rabbi Morteira. He was also put under a ban in Hamburg, and returned to Amsterdam, still fighting. He committed his protest to writing, publishing in 1624 his feisty Exame das tradições phariseas (Examination of the Pharisaic Traditions), which objects to such laws as male circumcision, the laying on of tefillin, or phylacteries, and also vehemently protests the extrabiblical inclusion of the doctrine of immortality and divine retribution. This doctrine, he confesses, was precisely what had driven him from Catholicism. “In truth, the most distressful and wretched time in my life was when I believed that eternal bliss or misery awaited man and that according to his works he would earn that bliss or that misery.” He was terrified by the eschatological metaphysics and found peace only when he realized the absurdity of the claim that the soul might survive the death of the body, since the soul is only an aspect of the body, the vital source that animates it and also accounts for rationality. It thus has as little possibility of surviving the death of the body as has any other corporeal part, da Costa argued, and any religion that claims otherwise is founded on error. Biblical Judaism makes no such claim: “The first proof is an argumentum ex silentio: the Law nowhere indicates that the human soul is immortal or that another life, whether of punishment or glory, awaits it.” In fact, he claims that the whole thrust of the Bible’s message points to the mortality of the soul: “Once he is dead, nothing remains of a man, neither does he ever return to life.” Those who pursue virtue with an eye to the afterlife delude themselves with superstition. “It is in this life that the righteous and the wicked receive their just deserts. … Let no one be so stupid and mad as to believe otherwise.”
The rabbis of Amsterdam responded by placing the would-be reformer under their own ban of excommunication: “Seeing that through pure obduracy and arrogance he persists in his wickedness and wrong opinions, the delegates from the three boards of elders, together with the boards of warders and the consent of the khakhamim, ordained he be excluded as a person already excommunicated [i.e., in Venice and Hamburg] and accursed of God, and that … no communication with him is henceforth permitted to anyone except his brothers, who are granted eight days to wind up their affairs with him.” Nor was this all. Da Costa reports that the “senators and rulers of the Jews” lodged a complaint against him with the public magistrate, charging him with the heresy of publishing a book purporting to disprove the mortality of the soul, and he was arrested and thrown in prison for ten days, until his brothers bailed him out. His book was publicly burned. Once he was excommunicated, no Jews were allowed to have anything more to do with him, even his brothers, on pain of being placed in kherem themselves. Only his old mother, who had changed her name to Sarah upon arriving in Amsterdam, stood by him, so that she, too, was placed in kherem. In fact, the Amsterdam rabbis wrote for halakhic advice to the Venetian rabbis as to whether she should be allowed to be buried in the Jewish cemetery. “Therefore we desire from you in case she dies in this time of resistance if we could let her lay on the soil without burying her at all or should we bury her in consideration of her honorable sons [Uriel’s brothers].” On October 4, 1628, a “Sara de Costa” was buried in the Beth-Chaim cemetery at Ouderkerk, indicating what the Venetian pasak, or ruling, had been.
But the community was under rabbinical orders to regard the religious renegade as a pariah. Da Costa writes in the Examplar that even children mocked him on the streets and threw stones at his windows. Nevertheless, da Costa did not absent himself from the community. Of course, he was already under kherem in Venice and Hamburg, and he must have reasoned that wherever he went Jewish communities would find him intolerable. But interestingly, even though he had reached the intellectual conclusion that Judaism, like Christianity, was but a man-made system arising out of man’s needs, and that the true religion was deism — the belief, based solely on reason and not revelation, in a God who created the universe and then left it to its own devices, assuming no control over life and never intervening in the course of history or of natural phenomena — still, on an emotional level, da Costa seemed incapable of taking leave of Judaism, or at least of the Jewish community. He lived among the Amsterdam Sephardim as a despised individual, clinging to the margins of a world that had become for him an open narcissistic wound. Yet he did not simply pick himself up and quit Jewish life decisively. Though the Jews had excommunicated him he was not prepared to excommunicate the Jews. His disinclination to think of himself as outside the religious community is telling and casts a dramatic contrast with Spinoza.
In 1633, da Costa sought reconciliation with the Jewish rabbis, using a cousin as an intermediary, and succeeded in having his kherem lifted by outwardly recanting his views. Since his inward beliefs remained at variance with the community’s, his recantation amounted to a reenactment of the Marrano experience, only now within the community of former Marranos. He writes in the Examplar that he resolved to live “like an ape among apes.” But sometimes, apparently, his mimicry fell short. A nephew who lived with him found his preparation of meat to be not in accord with Jewish ritual and told other family members, including the formerly helpful cousin, who, feeling betrayed, became, at least according to da Costa’s account, da Costa’s sworn enemy, interceding wherever he could, in business and personal affairs, to ruin Uriel’s life, including stepping in to prevent a marriage.
A short time later, still under suspicion, Uriel was asked for advice by two Christians who claimed that they were interested in converting to Judaism. One of the conditions on which the Sephardim had been granted permission to live in Amsterdam was that they not proselytize among the Christians in an attempt to convert them. Da Costa, as we can well imagine, certainly had little reason to encourage outsiders to enter the community in which he himself felt like an outsider, and apparently he dissuaded the Christians, but perhaps in terms that were too vehement. He made them promise not to report his words to the rabbis, but they did, and once again he was excommunicated; this time his ostracism lasted for seven years.
In 1640, unable to endure the situation any longer, he reap-proached the rabbis for readmittance. The rabbis wanted to make sure that this time he really meant it and tested his resolve by putting him through a ceremony of public humiliation. Within the synagogue, before the whole assembled congregation, his stripped back was given thirty-nine lashes, and then he was made to lie down across the threshold so that every member of the congregation could tread on his prone figure as they exited the synagogue. The ceremony seemed to have taken a terrible toll, depriving this proud man (his extreme pride echoes throughout his last testament) of his remaining dignity: the dignity before himself. He writes that it was no longer possible to live with himself, a phrase that has particular resonance for the Marrano— which da Costa still essentially was, even though he lived in Jewish Amsterdam — whose only refuge was the inner sanctum of his own self. He wrote his autobiography, from which I have largely been quoting, and then set out to kill both his cousin and himself. The pistol he aimed at his cousin in the street misfired, so that he didn’t succeed in becoming a murderer, but the gun worked when he fired it into his own skull. Onlookers report that his death was terrible.
Uriel da Costa, not surprisingly, has inspired several works of fiction, including a play by the German writer Karl Gutzkow, penned in 1846, in the midst of the liberal upsurge that led to the revolutions of 1848. He is presented there in the terms in which he wrote about his own life, a casualty of religious intolerance. The play Uriel Acosta (Acosta was the family name in Portugal) was, significantly, the first classic play translated into Yiddish, first produced in Odessa in 1881, shortly after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, and it became a standard in the Yiddish theater’s repertoire, both in Europe and on New York’s Second Avenue.
In 1640, when the da Costa scandal reached its violent climax, Baruch Spinoza was a child of eight, already exposed to personal loss; his mother had died of tuberculosis when he was six. Obviously, the children of the community were well aware of the opprobrium in which the unorthodox man was held, the authorized disapprobation licensing their own childish games of cruelty. An eight-year-old boy, studious and quiet, given to reflecting on things for himself, to pondering the words of the grown-ups, not taking them on authority necessarily; a solemn child, I would imagine, always trying to puzzle out the truth for himself, caring ardently about the truth — and not only the truth about God and the Torah, and the Jewish people, but about people as well. Spinoza’s Ethics reveals a mind that is not only an abstract systematizer on the grandest of scales, but also one that is fascinated by human nature in all its variety, directing its unblinking gaze into the subtleties of motivations. Yes, he was only eight, but habits of mind, orientations of attention, start early. What, one wonders, did Spinoza make of the excommunicated da Costa? Did his memory of the man’s ruin, the crazed rage and loathing that ended his life, guide him toward his very different reaction when, some mere fifteen years later, the rabbis would turn their disapproval on him?
Da Costa’s public drama of torn identity helps one to draw a little closer to the private Spinoza. The memory of this man’s torment of marginality must have made an impression on the boy. Still, there was another communal crisis that might take us even further toward understanding Spinoza. This one involved a theological controversy that grew into a major rabbinical dispute, once again requiring the intercession of the rabbis of Venice. Two of the rabbis of the community, Rabbi Morteira and Rabbi Aboab, clashed with each other over an issue that reached down into the community’s distinctive preoccupations with issues of identity and salvation.
Spinoza was only four years old when the theological controversy reached its denouement, so it is not so much a matter of his having taken in, and remembering, the specifics of that situation. Rather, it is that the rabbinical controversy yields a glimpse into the soul of the community in which Spinoza was raised, a sort of rich group portrait, as revealing as one of the celebrated psychological canvases painted by Rembrandt. Perhaps the group portrait will afford a glimpse of the elusive figure, who stands off to the side, barely visible in the shadows.
Somehow he managed to break away from the intense life of that community, to stand aloof, rendering himself utterly indifferent to its judgment of him, an attitude that the unfortunate da Costa could never achieve. But his aloofness extended much further than toward his own community. Spinoza’s aloofness is absolute. In all of Western philosophy, he is the most singular and solitary.
In 1635–36 there were three different synagogues in Amsterdam’s Sephardic community, the triangulation the result of disputes and factionalizing familiar to anyone who has ever been involved in Jewish communal life. Rabbi Morteira was the chief rabbi of Beth Jacob. He had been brought to Amsterdam from Venice when he was only twenty to serve the community and educate them in halakhic Judaism. Though Rabbi Morteira had become fluent in Portuguese, he was not of the same background as his congregants. He was Ashkenazic; contemporary sources speak of his Germanic origin. Though he must, of necessity, have attained some insight into the complex inner world of the former Marrano, he was emotionally not of that world. He saw his obligation as that of educating these former Marranos, often applying a somewhat stern hand in ridding them of the Christianized customs and concepts that had become encrusted onto their understanding of Judaism. Some might call him authoritarian. He was a learned man, a Talmudic scholar, who founded the yeshiva Keter Torah and taught the advanced course in Talmud there. His orientation was rationalistic and philosophical, in the Maimonidean mode. In fact, he refers to Maimonides as “the leading spokesman.”5
Morteira’s rationalistic approach to Judaism is noteworthy. There were certainly other currents in Amsterdam. In particular, the messianic mysticism of Lurianic kabbalah had stirred up some of the deepest yearnings across the lands of the Diaspora, and Amsterdam was no exception. The Marrano experience had perhaps disposed these returning Jews toward a particular susceptibility to the Lurianic narrative of redemptive history. One can understand how the kabbalistic message, especially as transformed through Lurianism into a tale woven around the theme of exile, of the light that had been lost in the great shattering and was slowly being returned to its rightful place, would resonate for the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam. They had a terrifyingly intimate experience of exile’s cruelty and were now in the process of restoring what had been smashed in their national and family histories. Their gathering together, to reidentify as Jews among the tolerant Dutch, must have seemed like a sort of pale reflection of the final tikkun ha-olam to which they seemed to be drawing nearer. It was true that the Inquisition’s horrors still continued in the lands they had fled, and that family members and friends that they had left there were still caught within the maws of the exile’s violence. Still, the narrative of Lurianism provided the means for a hopeful interpretation of even these dark circumstances. Then, too, the mystical tradition was entwined in their history. It had flowered in Gerona and then been exiled, to take root again in the hills of Safed. Luria himself was of both Ashkenazic and Sephardic lineage, and most of those in his inner circle were Spanish Jews. The kabbalah’s evolution had been shaped by the history of Spain’s Jews.
Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira
Rabbi Morteira, by both inculcation (his teacher in Venice was the antimystical Leon de Medina) and inclination, was of a nonmystical cast. Though he was not oblivious, of course, to the mystical leanings of many in the community, including some of his rabbinical colleagues, in his opinion the classical rabbinic sources were “the only trustworthy Kabbala.” The other two prominent rabbis in the Amsterdam community were far more touched by the spirit that had emanated out from Safed. Perhaps not coincidentally, both these rabbis were Sephardic, and had in fact been born in the lands of the Inquisition.
Manasseh ben Israel (1604–57), who has already been mentioned several times, was born in Madeira, a Portuguese colony off the coast of Africa, where he had been baptized Manuel Diaz Soeiro. His father, Gaspar Rodrigues Nuñez, had been a penitent at an auto-da-fé, and the family had fled Lisbon when they got word that he was about to be re-arrested as a Judaizer. Upon arriving in Amsterdam, Gaspar renamed himself Joseph ben Israel. He renamed his two sons Ephraim and Manasseh. Ephraim and Manasseh were the sons of the biblical Joseph, and a traditional blessing for parents and teachers to bestow on their children is “May God make you like Ephraim and Manasseh.”
Manassah ben Israel’s Judaism was strongly messianic. When he became convinced that the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel had been discovered among the natives in South America, he saw this supposed event in terms of the narrative of redemption. According to kabbalistic tradition, the Jews had to be dispersed to the four corners of the world before the Messiah could come. Now that the lost tribes had been located in the Americas, there remained only one country that was devoid of the Jewish presence: England, since the exile of Jews was still in effect there. (Apparently, he considered the New Christians who resided in the inquisitorial lands to be Jews.) It was on this messianic theory that he entered into negotiations with Oliver Cromwell to allow Jews back into England, so that the dispersal could be completed, the path paved for the Messiah. He made a trip to England in 1655, submitting his petition to Cromwell, who was impressed with the rabbi, although formal permission for a return wasn’t granted. (As a consequence of this trip, Manasseh ben Israel was not present when Spinoza was excommunicated.)
Manasseh ben Israel was the most worldly among the three rabbis, though his place in the rabbinical hierarchy of Amsterdam was not the highest. His sphere of interests brought him into contact with many Christians. He was well-published, and one work in particular, El Conciliador, which attempts to reconcile seeming contradictions within the Bible, gained him a substantial reputation among Christian scholars.
Another rabbi of the community was Isaac Aboab da Fonseca (1605–93), and it was he who had been most directly and deeply imbued with the spirit of Lurianic kabbalah, which he transmitted to the young men who studied with him, so that a significant number of them also claimed themselves as disciples of the esoteric tradition. The rabbi had been baptized Simão da Fonseca in Castro Daire, Portugal, and the family had fled when he was a child, first to France and then to Amsterdam. He was a disciple of the only kabbalist to have written in Spanish, Abraham Herrera (c. 1570–1635), who was also of a Marrano family and born in Portugal. Herrera’s studies of Neoplatonism, as it was taught in the Florentine Academy, together with his studies of Lurianic kabbalah (which also, as was pointed out above, has a strong Neoplatonic cast, inherited from the original kabbalists of Gerona), resulted in his own synthesis. Aboab translated into Hebrew such works of Herrera’s as his Puerta del cielo (Gates of Heaven), and these translations were in Spinoza’s library at his death, presenting once again the tantalizing suggestion that Spinoza’s own strongly Platonic orientation, most especially the focus on salvation, which sets him apart from his rationalist confreres Descartes and Leibniz, might have been transmitted to him by way of the kabbalist influence. Interestingly, Herrera also wrote a treatise on logic, Epítome y compendio de la lógica o dialéctica, which was his only published work.
Aboab’s absorption of Lurianic kabbalah, as refiltered through Herrera, left him with a conception of Judaism sharply in contrast with Morteira’s, for where Morteira cites the traditional rabbinical authorities as the final word on all matters halakhic and theological, Aboab maintains the hegemony of the esoteric tradition. Kabbalah, he asserted, yields the only definitive authority for interpretation of rabbinical dicta. The philosophical approach of Maimonides, whom Morteira cites as the final word on the more philosophical aspects of Judaism, did not impress Aboab: “We have no dealings with Maimonides as far as this subject is concerned, for he discussed it from the aspect of philosophical inquiry, and not from the aspect of Kabbalah.” Furthermore, he claimed that no one was in a position to interpret kabbalah unless he had been initiated into the esoteric tradition by a qualified teacher who was himself a link in that tradition. Aboab claimed his place here since his teacher Abraham Herrera had received Luria’s teachings from Israel Sarug, who was a disciple of Luria’s disciple Hayyim Vital.
Rabbi Isaac Aboab (Courtesy of The Jewish Museum, London)
The rabbinical controversy that broke out in Spinoza’s boyhood involved the two rabbis Morteira and Aboab. It was a controversy that had wide implications, pitting the mystical approach to Judaism against the rationalistic, and also revealing the painfully deep and divergent responses to the situation in Iberia, the Jewish tragedy of the New Christians that constantly plagued the mind of the Portuguese Nation of Amsterdam.
In its narrow specifics the argument revolved around the interpretation of a saying in the Mishnah (Sanhedrin 2:1): “All Israelites have a share in the world-to-come.” Rabbi Morteira had become distressed by a new doctrine that had caught fire among some of the impressionable young. Citing this statement in the Talmud as their slogan, and claiming the kabbalah as their source of its interpretation, they proclaimed that all Jews, no matter how grave their sins, would partake in the bliss of the afterlife. They dismissed or altogether ignored the Mishnah’s own qualifications to the statement, as well as those of classical rabbinic sources, insisting instead that the kabbalah superceded all other interpretations, and the kabbalah proclaims the thesis of universal Jewish salvation.
This cavalier attitude toward rabbinical authority — an attitude that had no doubt often tried Rabbi Morteira’s Orthodox patience — proved too much this time. After all, if all Jews, no matter their behavior, were ipso facto guaranteed eternal bliss, what would be the motivation for becoming better Jews? The chief rabbi of Beth Jacob regarded the revisionist eschatology as “a rock of offense and stone of stumbling dressed up as Kabbalah.” He took his stand, preaching a sermon in which he quoted a passage from the Talmud (Rosh Ha-Shana 17a) that affirms the eternality of punishment in hell for such grave offenders as minim, or informers, and apikorsim, or heretics. He embellished with copious quotations from other sources supporting the damnation of Israel’s sinners. The Mishnah did not mean by “Israelite” anyone who had been born into the nation of Israel; rather, it had meant righteous person. It is not the case that someone born of Jewish origins is saved no matter how his life is lived.
Rabbi Morteira’s sermon on the eternality of punishment provoked “cries of indignation” from a contingent of Aboab’s students who were in the synagogue and whom Rabbi Morteira described, in his complaints to the Venetian rabbis from whom he was seeking advice in dealing with the incendiary situation, as “young rebels,” and “immature disciples,” who had been “corrupted by Kabbalists.” Their “cries of indignation,” in Morteira’s words, were such that he had been forced “in my anguish … to admit as controversial a perfect doctrine of our faith which we received from our Fathers, the Prophets, the Tanna’im [those who wrote the Mishnah] and the Amora’im [those who wrote the Gemarah, the commentary on the Mishnah] and which, permitting no doubt, was upheld by the more recent authorities.”
For their part, the “young rebels” professed themselves scandalized by a doctrine that, they claimed, was reminiscent of Christianity. “By believing in the eternality of sin and punishment we support the religion of the Christians who say that Adam’s sin was eternal and that, on this account, only God, who is eternal, could make atonement for it by incarnation and death.” They requested from the community’s lay authorities, the parnassim, that an injunction be placed against the rabbi’s preaching of eternal punishment.
The subtext of this debate was, unsurprisingly, the Marrano situation. The young kabbalists’ interpretation of “Israelite” was sufficiently wide to extend to the Marranos still living on the Iberian Peninsula, whose identity as Jews consisted in nothing more than the internal performative act of declaring themselves Jews. The opponents of eternal punishment clearly had the New Christians in mind, arguing that God’s compassion must extend to them, and also arguing that the New Christians would have no reason for becoming observant Jews if Judaism, too, offered no remedy for Catholicism’s harsh eschatology. And Rabbi Morteira also had the Marranos in mind in making his case for the opposite thesis. What reason would the Marranos have for leaving behind all their goods and their often comfortable positions in society, to seek out circumstances in which they could become fully integrated halakhic observers, if they were guaranteed eternal bliss in any case? In addition, Morteira contended that one should teach in public only what the classical rabbinic sources had pronounced. It was a “criminal offence” to contradict their “splendid traditionally received words.” The mishnaic statement “All Israelites have a share in the world to come” could not be regarded as an unconditional “absolute verdict.”
Then, too, the unfortunate Uriel da Costa, still clinging pitifully to the margins of the community, presented a vivid exhibit for both sides of the debate. He had stressed that it was precisely the terror provoked by Catholicism’s vision of eternal damnation that had turned him away from Christianity, so that those who argued for Judaism’s promise of salvation might point to him as support. But, too, da Costa had demonstrated the tendency of the returning Marrano to bend the complicated structure of redacted Judaism to his own personal desiderata.
It was after the “immature disciples” had appealed to the parnassim, and apparently staged a few more protests in Rabbi Morteira’s synagogue, that the tried rabbi wrote to the older community of Venice, seeking their counsel.
So far, Rabbi Aboab had kept a low profile, but it soon became clear on behalf of whom the young rebels were protesting, and to whom Rabbi Morteira had been referring when he described them as corrupted by “Kabbalists.” Rabbi Aboab was himself a young man then, barely thirty, and his rapport with his young students, as well as the always intriguing promise of initiation into esoteric secrets, no doubt made for a heady experience. One young disciple declared that he himself wished to have the soul of Jeroboam, son of Nebat, having perhaps heard from Aboab the kabbalistic belief that Jeroboam was to be reincarnated as the Messiah. Jeroboam, the first king of the ten tribes of Israel, after the split from the kingdom of Judah, became the prototype of the wicked king, having introduced golden calf idols into his kingdom, so that the expression “evil like Jeroboam” was not uncommon. The traditional version of this chapter in ancient Jewish history is that Jeroboam’s sins were realized in the utter desolation of the kingdom of Israel, with the result that the ten tribes that had composed it were carried away as slaves and disappeared from the world as Israelites. The restoration of Jerobaom — as the Messiah no less! — was an ardent symbol of the ingathering toward salvation that was at the heart of Lurianic kabbalism, and one which one might expect reverberated for the newly Judaized former conversos, who had been in danger, too, of entirely disappearing from the world as Jews. Then, too, the moral transfiguration involved in iconic evil becoming iconic goodness reinforced the redemptive promise held out in the kabbalah’s reading of history.
The Beth Din (Rabbinical Court) of Venice did not want to get involved in this particular controversy, preferring that the Amsterdam community work things out for itself both as a sign of its growing independence and because they did not want to confuse the congregants by making it appear that a Beth Din needed to issue a ruling on an issue that they, too, along with Rabbi Morteira, considered to be part of the codified theology of Judaism. And so, instead of taking on the issue, they wrote to Rabbi Aboab with finessed diplomacy. They launched their appeal by first extolling him for the impressive scholarship of which they’d heard tell, which had long prompted them to desire his friendship. God had willed that he now be presented with the opportunity to demonstrate his leadership by suppressing the revisionist views that had been disseminating among the impressionable youth. “We were hoping for the day that would bring the message of peace … but our expectation has been frustrated. For we were again informed that the conflict persists and that the spokesman of those denying the belief in the eternality of punishment is none other than you.” They took solace, they continued, pursuing the vein of ecclesiastical tact, in the fact that the person who led the recalcitrant group was a God-fearing Jew, and thus could be counted on to heed the wisdom of Proverbs 12:15: “He that is wise hearkeneth unto counsel.” They advised him to convene a public forum in which he could announce his change of mind, saying that he would best know how to phrase his recantation and how to warn the group against venturing rash opinions on subjects of this kind. And they made explicit reference to the Marrano situation that lurked, for all of them, behind the Talmudic altercation, stating that the warning was particularly appropriate to “those of our people who came from those places,” that is, Marranos, who “should seek only one thing, namely the way how to serve God in sincerity and how to fulfill the mitzvoth according to Halakha in all their minutiae.”
The young rabbi’s response to the delicately worded appeal of the Venetian rabbis was his defiantly fiery tract Nishmat Hayyim (literally, “Souls of Life”). (Rabbi Manasseh ben Israel would in 1651 publish a book of that name as well, having brought out, in 1631, a tripartite treatise on the Resurrection of the Dead in both Latin and Spanish.) That he had written such an unpublished Hebrew manuscript had long been known, but it is only recently that it has been brought to light, and published, together with commentary, by Alexander Altmann, from whose fascinating article “Eternality of Punishment: A Theological Controversy Within the Amsterdam Rabbinate in the Thirties of the Seventeenth Century” I have largely been drawing.
Aboab’s manuscript opens on a note of brazen defiance, before those rabbinical authorities who had pulled rank on him in an effort to muzzle him: “Truly speaking, matters of this kind have been entrusted only to the Kabbalists, illumined as they are by the light of truth.” The tone of defiance continues throughout. There follows an ardent attack on the sterilities of rationalistic philosophy, of the Maimonidean sort, those who “lean upon a broken reed” and are unqualified to interpret the profound utterances of the rabbis. Aboab asserts that though he was young in years (thirty in 1636, which was when, Altmann argues, the manuscript must have been written), the true “elder” was the one who had acquired wisdom, and in this respect he was older than his opponents, who became more foolish as they advanced in years. Most importantly, as a kabbalist, he claimed to know certain truths of an esoteric nature that put an entirely new and different complexion on things. If those truths had been withheld from the uninitiated in the past, the time had now come to disabuse people’s minds of a notion of God that is contrary to His known attributes of justice and mercy. The kabbalah, of course, never contradicts the laws of the Torah, since all sacred texts derive from the same divine source, but it is kabbalah that reveals their secret significance. In particular, the Lurianic message of restoration, the righting of the cosmic unbalance of the shevirah, the shattering of the vessels, is seen as running throughout the Torah’s commandments and prohibitions. All the laws of restitution and return bespeak the great mystery of the final tikkun ha-olam: such laws as those regarding the return of lost property; the laws of the Jubilee year, when the crops are left unharvested in the fields; of the healing of the leper and the cleansing of the house upon which a plague had been pronounced — all these and other commandments serve as the practical symbols for the ultimate salvation that is promised. Lurianic truth provides the illumination for the laws, and all the light points to the return to God. “God forbid that they [the rabbis] should have assigned to the soul a punishment whereby she will not ‘return to her Father’s house as in her youth.’ ”
To counter the rabbis’ fear that the doctrine of salvation for all of Israel, even those who partake in the evil of a Jeroboam, will remove all motivation to live righteously, Aboab resorts to the Lurianic belief in the gilgul, the transmigration of souls. Those who have sinned will have to enter the wheel of rebirth, so that their souls can be purified. Aboab takes great pains to trace this idea back to one of the great kabbalists of Gerona, Nachmanides.
Aboab’s treatise ends: “This is what our rabbis, of blessed memory, meant when coining the phrase, ‘Though he sinned, he is still an Israelite.’ They intended to convey the idea that though he sinned he was not cut off thereby forever from the tree but remained a Jew; and even if he apostasized from the Lord and chose new gods, he will again be called a Jew as a result of transmigrations and punishments.”
The reference to those who chose new gods once again focuses attention on the subtext. It is not one’s choice of God that makes one a Jew, but something independent of one’s choices, something constitutive of one’s very essence. In the words of Isaac Luria’s own teacher, David ibn Abi Zimra, which Aboab quotes, “All Israelites are a single body and their soul is hewn from the place of Unity.”
Shortly after the controversy, in 1639, the three Sephardic synagogues of Amsterdam — Beth Jacob, Neve Shalom, and Beth Israel — all of them crowded next to each other in the Jewish quarter, would merge into one, Beth Israel, and Rabbi Aboab would be demoted to an assistant rabbi and Rabbi Morteira promoted to chief rabbi. Shortly thereafter, Aboab left Amsterdam, accepting the invitation to become the rabbi of the prosperous community of Recife, Brazil, which was then under the rule of the Dutch, making him the first American rabbi. His departure might very well have been a result of the fracas regarding the afterlife. He remained in Brazil from 1642 until the reconquest of Recife by the Portuguese in 1654, when all the Jews were forced to leave.
Twenty-three of the refugees — men, women, and children — ended up in Dutch New Amsterdam after their ship was attacked by a Spanish privateer who deprived them of their possessions. Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch colonial governor, was ill-disposed toward Jews and disinclined to allow these particular Jews — now indigent — to stay. Their former Jewish neighbors back in Holland interceded on their behalf with the Dutch West India Company, which directed Stuyvesant to tolerate their presence, so long as they proved no burden to the community. In this way these twenty-three from Recife became the first Jewish New Yorkers — even before there was a New York.
Aboab, however, made it safely back to Amsterdam, there to resume his post as khakham. He was therefore one of the rabbis who was involved in the harsh decree of excommunication that was imposed on Baruch Spinoza in 1656. In fact, we don’t know which of the two rabbis actually read out the writ of excommunication to the gathered congregants. Most have assumed that it was the chief rabbi, Morteira, though Colerus, the man who rented Spinoza’s rooms in the Hague after he died and then wrote a sanctimoniously indignant biography of the philosopher, tells us that some “Jews of Amsterdam” told him that the “old khakham Aboab”—who happened to have been the presiding head of the Beth Din, the rabbinical court of law, in 1656—provided the voice of official banishment.
Whether a Jewish soul is, by the very fact of its Jewishness, ipso facto saved was a question that deeply divided the two Amsterdam rabbis, with the Sephardic Aboab, himself born in Iberia, not surprisingly inclined to interpret “Jewish soul” in redemptive terms. But even though they were sharply adversarial on the fate of the Jewish soul after death, concerning the fate of Baruch Spinoza, the two rabbis agreed.
Aboab’s position in the rabbinical controversy with Morteira only deepens the mystery surrounding Spinoza’s harsh excommunication. If, according to Aboab’s mystical lights, all Jewish souls are redeemable, what about the soul of the twenty-three-year-old philosopher? Why didn’t it make a claim on Aboab’s inclusiveness? “Though he sinned, he is still an Israelite.” What was the conceived nature of Spinoza’s offense that caused Aboab to unite with Morteira in decreeing Spinoza irredeemable, decreeing him, in effect, no longer an Israelite? Was it an offense that went to the very heart of those coiled questions concerning identity and salvation?
Of course, the mature philosopher, the author of The Ethics, would have even less sympathy for Aboab’s Jewish essentialist position than for Morteira’s. He would have spurned any clemency the kabbalist might have offered him on its grounds (though the words of David ibn Abi Zimra, approvingly quoted by Aboab, in some strange sense shadow Spinoza’s own mature view of the relation between individual finite minds and the Infinite Intellect of God, so long as one removes the reference to “Israelites”).
Still, the question remains as to why the rabbi who was prepared to offer universal inclusion to untold Jewish apostates was irreconcilably opposed to the profound thinker who had emerged from within. Had Spinoza somehow managed to suggest to the community, even at this early stage of his life, the position that would follow from his mature philosophy, namely that the question of personal salvation, which was of true consequence, should be pried apart from the question of Jewish identity, which was of no consequence?
Personal identity poses philosophical questions that are bafflingly abstract, even though our prephilosophical sense of personal identity is as firm as the fear of death and the grief for those we’ve lost. The distinction between one’s own self and all that is not one’s self provides the invisible scaffolding of the emotions. One cares about one’s self simply because one is one’s self. A person is committed, immediately and unthinkingly, to the survival and flourishing of that single thing in the universe that she is. There is no reason, external to one’s own identity with that thing — one’s self — that one should be so single-mindedly, unswayingly committed to it. What explains this commitment is nothing over and above the bare fact that one is who one is. Implicit in being oneself is the commitment to oneself. One pursues one’s life. One doesn’t need a reason to pursue it. One pursues it, quite obsessively, because it’s one’s life. Who else’s life is one supposed to pursue anyway?
There is an absurdity in even asking for a reason as to why we should care about ourselves. Identity itself explains the self-concern. We don’t require any persuasion in taking a special interest in what will befall us. The persuasion we require is to take an interest in others as well. That’s the business of ethics, and the business, too, of The Ethics.
Spinoza tries to capture this fundamental fact — that our commitment to ourselves is unlike the commitment to anything else, since it is tantamount to simply being oneself — in his concept of conatus. Conatus is simply a thing’s special commitment to itself. It is its automatic concern about its own being and its intent to do what it thinks it takes in order to further its well-being. There is nothing that explains this commitment to this one thing that one is other than one’s being that thing, and this is Spinoza’s reason for saying that the very essence of each thing, the thing that makes that thing that thing and not another, is nothing over and above its conatus: “The endeavour, wherewith everything endeavours to persist in its own being, is nothing else but the actual essence of the thing in question.”6
It is important that Spinoza not be understood here as asserting some sort of Nietzschean will-to-power ethics, or precursor to the “objectivism” of Ayn Rand. Spinoza has not yet begun, at this point in The Ethics, to make any ethical claims. What he’s making, at this point in The Ethics, is a metaphysical statement, not an ethical one, trying to explain what makes an individual thing that individual thing that it is. His claim about conatus is meant to capture the mysterious connection a person feels with that one thing in the world that happens to be itself, and it is compatible with a whole spread of different ethical points of view, going all the way from Ayn Rand’s to Mother Teresa’s. A saint will perhaps feel that her life of, say, ministering to the needs of others, ignoring perhaps her own material benefits, is nevertheless, because it is the ethical thing to do, benefiting herself. Even a saint is not indifferent to who performs the acts of saintliness. If I were a saint, I wouldn’t say: Look, I just want someone or other to commit these righteous deeds; it’s all the same to me whether it’s me or someone else. That would make being a saint too easy. A saint, just like each of us, is identical with the thing that she is, and this identity is tantamount to a certain interest in that thing. Spinoza is trying to capture this extraordinarily elusive situation in his concept of conatus.
To be oneself, then, is to be involved, Spinoza is saying, in an ongoing project of pursuing the interests of this one thing in the world (though, again, those interests may involve making enormous ethical sacrifices). But when one stares at this whole situation — one’s ongoing commitment to this one thing in the world — from the outside, as it were, one can seem to lose one’s grip on it. Nothing can explain this ongoing project other than the bare fact that that’s who one is — Spinoza’s very point in making this conatus one’s actual essence. But step out of that ongoing project that constitutes one’s identity and reflect upon it from the outside, as it were, and it can give the appearance of vanishing under one’s gaze.
What sort of a fact is it that one is who one is, that very thing in the world and no other? How can one even isolate this fact when one inhabits, with great mental effort, the View from Nowhere? From out there, the remotest point from which to behold the world, the fact of who one is within the world seems to disappear; one can gain no purchase on it. This is what happens when one assumes the view sub specie aeternitatis, and this is the view that Spinoza recommends to us as the means of attaining salvation. Our very essence, our conatus, will lead us, if only we will think it all through, to a vision of reality that, since it is the truth, is in our interests to attain, and will effect such a difference in our sense of ourselves that we will have trouble even returning to the prephilosophical attachment to ourselves. It will appear almost too contingent to be true that one just happens to be that thing that one is. After all, contingency, for Spinoza, is just a ignis fatuus, a false fire cast by our finitude.
When, in the true light of objectivity, one is overtaken by the sense of near-estrangement from one’s own self, then one is saved. One can then regard even one’s own personal death, the thought we dare not even think since it negates the very process that keeps us together, with a degree of philosophical detachment. Our inability to realistically contemplate our own demise accounts, for Spinoza, for the otherwise incomprehensible power that the superstitious religions exert on us. Only reason, as rigorous as we can muster it up, can truly save us, both give us the truth and also deliver us from our primal fear of the truth. This is the state of blessedness toward which The Ethics will, through its severe formal proofs, try to deliver us.
The fraught altercation between the two rabbis of Amsterdam brings to light the underlying ferment within the community, swirling around the entangled questions of Jewish identity and personal salvation that the Inquisition had made urgent. For this community, such theological questions were painfully close. Spinoza’s philosophy systematically rethinks these questions. His community’s travails might very well have impressed on him the necessity for such systematic rethinking.
What is it to be Jewish? Are those who choose other gods still Jewish, of the same body, hewn from the place of Unity, so that one’s personal identity is supervenient on one’s Jewish identity? Is it true that one might carry in oneself, for no other reason than the conditions of one’s birth, the causal link between that birth and the long causal link of others’ births that has a role to play not only in one’s own salvation but in tikkun ha-olam, cosmic redemption?
How would an exquisitely sensitive soul such as Spinoza’s have reacted to this hum of impassioned obsession, the omnipresence of a seemingly irresolvable dilemma that was charged with centuries of ongoing anxiety and suffering? Like the lover of mathematics that he was, he would try to seek a clear and definitive solution, the deepest sort of solution, the sort that reframes the original question entirely, that in fact makes the original question altogether impossible. His solution would be to dissolve all sectarian frames of reference, to point the way to a concept of personal identity in which the question of who is Jewish and who is not simply could not meaningfully arise. Growing up in an atmosphere in which the question of personal identity throbbed with all the cumulative tragedy of the Sephardic experience, he would be the philosopher who would radically rethink the very notion of personal identity itself.
Spinoza looked toward the new rationalism of Descartes, which had thrust the rigorous necessity of mathematics forward as the model for all knowledge, and found a way of once and for all putting the tortured question of his community to rest. Spinoza’s brave new revisioning of the world was an answer to the centuries of Jewish suffering. In his own way he was tackling the question of Jewish suffering toward which the Lurianic tale was also directed. Only, of course, Lurianic kabbalah told its tale in terms that singled out the special role the Jewish people have to play in the world’s redemption.
For this particular community, seeking its Jewish identity with such passion, Spinoza’s solution was the most damnable betrayal one of their own could commit. It was to deny that he was one of their own. It was to deny meaning to the very phrase “one of their own.”
Spinoza’s response, on being delivered the verdict of his excommunication, was reported to be, as my old teacher had faithfully, if partially, quoted: “All the better; they do not force me to do anything that I would not have done of my own accord if I did not dread scandal; but, since they want it that way, I enter gladly on the path that is opened to me.” The path he was to follow was to reconstruct his identity, shedding as inessential all the passive markers of who he was, the accidents of his identity come to him by way of history, instead identifying himself in terms of what he was in relation to the infinite system that is reality. And of course what he was in relation to that infinite system is precisely the same as that which any of us is in relation to the infinite system. The only significant way we differ from one another is the degree to which we know the infinite system, and this is a difference that can be eradicated through rational thought. It is precisely in these cognitive processes that we reconstruct ourselves; we are what we know, and what we know depends on the active exercise of our rational faculties, seeking after necessary explanations, assimilating the objective necessity of Deus sive natura to the thinking matter of ourselves, becoming more consciously a thing hewn from the place of Unity by comprehending ever more of that inexhaustible Unity.
The path opened up to him by his excommunication was, in a certain sense, the same that those who were excommunicating him had followed: the path of actively and ardently refashioning identity. Only his would be a notion of personal identity that could not be fit into the terms of Jewish identity, nor of Christian identity, nor of any specific religious or ethnic or political identity. He was to define himself by his rational activity itself, and to try, in as cautious a way as possible, to help others seek this same active identity as well.
So for Spinoza, like for the tormented Marranos from whom he derived, personal identity is a purely private affair, enacted within the unobservable regions of our innermost minds, a project that one can undertake for oneself, with no need of external validation or acknowledgment, which of course was out of the question for Marranos. And, too, like them, he saw in the purely inward activities of identity-formation the way to salvation, though for him salvation rests in the dissolution of one’s personal identity, in a merging into the whole. So the solution will come in dissolution.
But the problem for which dissolution is the solution was posed by his community’s anguish. Sanguine Cartesian rationalism, somewhat chill in temperament, becomes, in the system of this son of Marranos, a solution to the horrors of Jewish suffering that some of his surviving letters show us he never ceased to respond to in a way that we might almost call, despite the rationalist’s best attempts, a Jewish sensibility.
One of the last letters he wrote in his short life, in December 1675, only two months before his death, betrays his emotional affinity with the narrative of Jewish history. There it is suddenly: the sympathetic participation in the story of heroic martyrdom that a scion of the Portuguese Nation, no matter how he might philosophically remake himself, instinctively feels. Instinctive feeling is of course part of that passive identity that the philosopher qua philosopher must resist and transcend. But it is there to be resisted.
It is December 1675 and he is reluctantly responding to a former pupil of his, Albert Burgh, whose parents Spinoza knows (the father, Conraad Burgh, is the treasurer of the Republic of the Netherlands) and whom he had privately tutored on the foundations of philosophy. On a trip to Italy, young Burgh had dramatically seen the light and converted to Catholicism. He wrote to Spinoza, exhorting him, in the most impudent of terms, to follow his example:
Even as I formerly admired you for the subtlety and keenness of your natural gifts, so now do I bewail and deplore you; inasmuch as being by nature most talented, and adorned by God with extraordinary gifts; being a lover, nay a coveter of the truth, you yet allow yourself to be ensnared and deceived by that most wretched and most proud of beings, the prince of evil spirits.
Young Burgh’s letter is long and the vehemence keeps mounting:
If you do not believe in Christ, you are more wretched than I can express. Yet the remedy is easy. Turn away from your sins, and consider the deadly arrogance of your wretched and insane reasoning. You do not believe in Christ. Why? You will say: “Because the teaching and the life of Christ are not at all in harmony with my teaching.” But again, I say, then you dare to think yourself greater than all those who have ever risen up in the State or Church of God, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, martyrs, doctors, confessors, holy virgins innumerable, yea, in your blasphemy, than Christ himself. Do you alone surpass all these in doctrine, in manner of life, in every respect? Will you, wretched pigmy, vile worm of the earth, yea, ashes, food of worms, will you in your unspeakable blasphemy, dare to put yourself before the incarnate, infinite wisdom of the Eternal Father? Will you, alone, consider yourself wiser and greater than all those, who from the beginning of the world have been in the Church of God, and have believed, or believe still, that Christ would come or has already come? On what do you base this rash, insane, deplorable, and inexcusable arrogance?
This is a depressing sort of letter to get from a former student in the final months of one’s life. Here is an intelligent former disciple, who has had the benefit of hours of private explanation and discussion, falling victim to the crucifying passions of superstitious religion. It tolls a terrible message, bespeaking the futility of one’s life work, for which one had forsaken so much: excommunication from one’s own people, vilification from far and wide. What hope is there for reason’s ever finding an audience? (Every teacher probably has these moments of despondency. As one of my colleagues once remarked to me, in a black moment of pedagogy, “Just what the hell do we think we’re doing? Having some sort of effect?”)
But Spinoza has his methods of always regaining his equilibrium. The first and foremost rule to remember is that we have no control over anything other than the progress of our own understanding. And the second rule is to care only about that over which we have control. We don’t have control over the progress of others’ understanding, no matter how hard we may try to help their advance. In the end, it had not been in Spinoza’s power to keep Albert Burgh from descending into narrow-minded confusion; that power would have belonged to the young man himself. Spinoza will do what he can do. But he will not allow his own sense of failure and futility to become inflamed by another’s weaknesses.
Burgh’s letter arrived in September. For several months Spinoza didn’t answer. But then in December, in the dead of his final winter, from out of the leaden tiredness and malaise of the final stages of tuberculosis, he writes back. Albert’s distressed Calvinist father had urged the philosopher to try and exert whatever influence he still might have, and so Spinoza summons the strength to respond:
That, which I could scarcely believe when told me by others, I learn at last from your own letter; not only have you been made a member of the Romish Church, but you are become a very keen champion of the same, and have already learned wantonly to insult and rail against your opponents.
At first I resolved to leave your letter unanswered, thinking that time and experience will assuredly be of more avail than reasoning, to restore you to yourself and your friends. … But some of my friends, who like myself had formed great hopes from your superior talents, strenuously urge me not to fail in the offices of a friend, but to consider what you lately were, rather than what you are, with other arguments of the like nature. I have thus been induced to write you this short reply, which I earnestly beg you will think worthy of calm perusal.
Spinoza’s reply is not so short that it does not contain a fair number of fascinating nuggets. A few times Spinoza loses his famous philosophical cool and shows flashes of fire:
And, poor wretch, you bewail me? My philosophy, which you never beheld, you style a chimera? O youth deprived of understanding, who has bewitched you into believing, that the Supreme and Eternal is eaten by you and held in your intestines?
This is followed by a statement that seems to support the oft-repeated charge of arrogance, made by far weightier minds than Albert Burgh’s, and even Mrs. Schoenfeld’s, who had also declared that Spinoza’s rationalism rested on arrogance.
Yet you seem to wish to employ reason, and ask me, “How I know that my philosophy is the best among all that have ever been taught, or ever will be taught?” a question which I might with much greater right ask you; for I do not presume that I have found the best philosophy, I know that I understand the true philosophy. If you ask in what way I know it, I answer: In the same way as you know that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles: that this is sufficient, will be denied by no one whose brain is sound, and who does not go dreaming of evil spirits inspiring us with false ideas like the true. For the truth is the index of itself and of what is false.
Spinoza is claiming here that since he has relied on nothing but a priori reason to deduce his system, just as mathematics relies on nothing but a priori reason, his conclusions (granted that his deductions are valid) enjoy precisely the same degree of certitude as mathematics. His conclusions, just as those of mathematics, must be necessary truths, those which could not possibly have been otherwise. We’ll return to this claim in the next chapter.
But another aspect of Spinoza is revealed in the next stage of his reply to Burgh. Burgh had argued that Catholicism must be true since it has been attested to by a continuous lineage, supposedly reaching back to the witnesses of the miraculous events themselves. Spinoza, in answering Burgh, begins by pointing out that this is just the way “the Pharisees” also argue, meaning by this punitive word to indicate the rabbis. Spinoza is adopting here the terminology common to Christian critics of Judaism. He adopted the same terminology in his Tractatus, probably for a multitude of complicated motives, the most pragmatic of which would be that he was addressing himself to Christian readers (as he is here), and he does not want to have his arguments dismissed as being put forward by a Jew, even an excommunicated one. So it is that in the Tractatus he makes certain to refer to Jesus the Nazarene as “Jesus Christ,” and does him the honor of making him the most important among the prophets, the best example of the virtuous man.
In this paragraph to Burgh, too, he is distancing himself from the Jewish point of view, calling attention to the fact that he speaks of it as an outsider by speaking of the rabbis as the Pharisees.
As to what you add of the common consent of myriads of men and the uninterrupted ecclesiastical succession, this is the very catch-word of the Pharisees. They with no less confidence than the devotees of Rome bring forward their myriad witnesses, who as pertinaciously as the Roman witnesses repeat what they have heard, as though it were their personal experience. Further, they carry back their line to Adam. They boast with equal arrogance, that their Church has continued to this day unmoved and unimpaired in spite of the hatred of Christians and heathens. They more than any other sect are supported by antiquity. They exclaim with one voice, that they have received their traditions from God Himself, and that they alone preserve the Word of God both written and unwritten. That all heresies have issued from them, and that they have remained constant through thousands of years under no constraint of temporal dominion, but by the sole efficacy of their superstition, no one can deny. The miracles they tell of would tire a thousand tongues. But their chief boast is, that they count a far greater number of martyrs than any other nation, a number which is daily increased by those who suffer with singular constancy for the faith they profess; nor is their boasting false. I myself knew among others of a certain Judah called the faithful, who in the midst of the flames, when he was already thought to be dead, lifted his voice to sing the hymn beginning “To Thee, O God, I offer up my soul,” and so singing perished.
Spinoza begins this paragraph by disassociating himself from the Jews; but by the end he has placed himself inside the Jewish narrative — homing in on one of those tales of heartbreaking martyrdom with which his community was constantly being racked. These were the tales of horror and heroism that Baruch Spinoza had been raised on, the communal drama he had participated in as a child.
In May 1655, just fourteen months before Spinoza’s excommunication, news had arrived that a Marrano named Abraham Nuñez Bernal, who had friends and relations in Amsterdam, had fallen victim to the Inquisition in Córdoba and been burned at the stake. Two months before this tragedy, Yithak da Alameida Bernal had been burned at the stake in Galicia. In 1647, when Spinoza was fifteen, the fate of one Isaak de Castra-Tartos had hit the community particularly hard. For he had been one of its own, a member of the Portuguese Nation, La Nação, who had left Amsterdam as a young man, returning to Spain and Portugal to try to convert the Marranos back to Judaism. He was caught, tried, and confessed to his “sins.” As he stood on top of his funeral pyre, he reportedly screamed out the Shema: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.” A funeral service was conducted for him by Rabbi Morteira, with the entire community participating.
Spinoza, addressing the New Catholic bent on saving him, can distance himself sufficiently from the Jews to speak of their habit of “boasting” of suffering. He is the evil son at the Passover seder: what has their story to do with me? But then, on a phrase, he turns himself around: “nor is their boasting false.” Suddenly he pulls out from his extensive knowledge of Jewish suffering, a knowledge that went with the territory in which Spinoza had been raised, a single tale of martyrdom, which he relates in a tone that betrays his own awe and affinity.
The martyr to whom Spinoza refers in his reply to Burgh as “Judah the faithful” was actually known as Judah the Believer.7 He was Don Lope de Vera y Alarcon de San Clemente, a Spanish nobleman who was not a Marrano but an Old Christian, converted to Judaism through the study of Hebrew. He had himself circumcised, was arrested by the Inquisition, refused to recant, and was burned at Valladolid on July 25, 1644. Spinoza was then twelve years old, a boy in Amsterdam, not in Spain. But he was a boy whose participation in this story was so vivid that years later, at the end of his life, he would write of the martyr in a tone so personal that it misled at least one scholar, the eminent German Jewish historian Heinrich Grätz (1817–91), to infer that Spinoza himself must have begun his life in Spain. Of course, he did not. He was born a Jew, not a Marrano, but within a community consisting almost entirely of Marranos.
The meaning of Jewishness was, at least partly for this community, expounded in the historical narrative of suffering — partly, but of course not entirely. They did not try to compress the entire meaning of Jewishness into these tales of persecution and woe, as some contemporary Jewish writers today do, insisting that the Holocaust provides the culminating Jewish experience. Spinoza’s community was actively resisting the reductive definition of the Jewish experience that Christendom had tried to impose, a definition that not only predicted suffering for the nation that had rejected Jesus as savior, but also ensured that the suffering came to pass. The self-realizing logic of Christian persecution is, in its own way, impeccable.
Spinoza’s community did not succumb to that usurpation of the meaning of their history. Judaism is not a religion that exults in suffering, and Spinoza’s community, in actively reconstituting itself as a Jewish community, was actively resisting the claim that the culminating Jewish experience is some form of suffering.
And yet, of course, Jewish history runs thick with martyrs, with, as Spinoza himself says, “a number which is daily increased by those who suffer with singular constancy for the faith they profess.” As misguided as this “singular constancy” in suffering is for Spinoza, it is sublime as well. It is sublime precisely because there is no Jewish virtue per se in suffering. Like Spinoza, Jews are far more focused on the rewards of this life than on those of the afterlife. Martydom is not glorified; it is not a state to be desired. So for a Jew to risk his life for the faith he professes, as the Marranos still on the Iberian Peninsula were doing, for him to give up his life in a terrible blaze of suffering, as Judah the Believer did, is a delusion most sublime. One can hear Spinoza’s paying his respects to the sublimity, in his terse and emotional phrase “and so singing perished.”
Spinoza, almost despite himself, cannot fail to be moved. Faced with Burgh’s claim that Christianity presents the only authentic experience, he speaks of the authenticity, if also deludedness, of Jewish experience. And the authentic Jewish experience he narrates is that of heroic martyrdom at the hands of the Inquisition. He manifests a certain reflexive protectiveness that belies his distancing talk of “the Pharisees” and the Jewish “boast” of suffering. Spinoza the philosopher can’t countenance the source for such acts of self-annihilation, grounded on superstitious beliefs in a people’s election. But, at the same time, Benedictus retains the memories of Baruch, who himself retains the long memory of the Amsterdam Jewish community. And so not even Benedictus can help being stirred by the spectacle of transcendence in the face of crucifying injustice.
He himself, in answering the impertinence of his young would-be savior, who had ended his letter to him beseeching that both he and his “most unfortunate and adulterous followers” be born again through Jesus Christ, had succumbed to the Pharisees’ habit of “repeating what they have heard as though it were their personal experience.” Despite himself, he has assumed the role of the wise son at the Passover seder, who enters so personally into shared Jewish experience that its history becomes his memoir.
It was the community itself that had made the problem of personal identity of such crushing exigency for Spinoza that a way simply had to be found out of it, even though the way out would set him at irreconcilable odds with that community. The history of suffering, a living palpable history with conversos arriving every day and new incidents of the Inquisition’s avenging power taking place throughout Spinoza’s life, together with all the psychological devastation that had been wrought, posed the initial problem for which the impersonal grandeur (some might say frigidity) of Spinoza’s conceptual scheme is the answer.
Though we know few details of Spinoza’s early experiences, we know, from the evidence of his writings, that he was acutely sensitive to the nuances of human nature. The third part of The Ethics bears witness to Spinoza’s close observations of his fellow creatures. His admiration for the mathematical methodology and abstract systems did not preclude his fascination with human types and to psychological depths.8
He is fascinated by what makes people tick, excruciatingly attuned to the ticking. How likely is it that a person of Spinoza’s makeup, both observant and reflective, disposed to take in his environment and to subject it to relentless rethinking, would not have responded to the obsession with Jewish identity that his community’s extraordinary experience had bequeathed to it? How likely was it that he failed to agonize on this question himself?
Sometimes my students, when they have progressed deeply enough into Spinoza’s system to grasp the radical remedy he is offering us to the problem of being human, will muse, in ways that I cannot quite condone, about Spinoza’s love life. There must have been some woman who broke his heart, one or more of them will speculate aloud. Some experience with a woman must have made him believe that love was a thing too heartbreaking to bear. What else could have driven him to such extremes of rationalism? I will share with them, though without much conviction, the rumor of van den Enden’s daughter. Perhaps there’s a story here, but I’m dubious that it’s the story. If there is some missing element of biography that must be summoned in order to explain the philosopher’s vision of radical objectivity, his abjuring any love other than that for objectivity itself, I very much doubt that it lies in disappointed romantic love. If it lies anywhere, it’s in Jewish history. Spinoza has forsworn the Jew’s love of that history. That was the love that was too heartbreaking to bear.
The final vision of reality that he arrives at is so dauntingly universal, so large and impersonal, that it is strange to contemplate that perhaps the original psychological drama that pointed him on the path that was to take him so far away from his community was to try to think of himself as outside of the awful dilemmas of Jewish identity.
And if this is so, then Spinoza is something of a Jewish thinker after all. He is, paradoxically, Jewish at the core, a core that necessitated, for him, the denial of such a thing as a Jewish core.
For what can be more characteristic of a Jewish thinker than to use the Jewish experience as a conduit to universality?