Spinoza's heresy

Alan Saunders: Hello, and welcome to The Philosopher's Zone. I'm Alan Saunders.

This week, a curious anniversary. Just 350 years ago last month, on July 27th, 1656, a proclamation in Hebrew was read in front of the ark at the Talmud Torah synagogue in Amsterdam. The congregation was Iberian: Jews who came, or whose parents had come, from Spain or Portugal. Their governing body, not the rabbis but the lay people who administered the synagogue, were known as the senhores of the ma'amad, and this is what they had to say.

Reading: The Senhores of the ma'amad having long known of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Spinoza, they have endeavoured by various means and promises to turn him from his evil ways. But having failed to make him mend his wicked ways, and, on the contrary, daily receiving more and more serious information about the abominable heresies which he practiced and taught and about his monstrous deeds, they have decided that the said Spinoza should be excommunicated and expelled from the people of Israel. By decree of the angels and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Spinoza, with the consent of God, Blessed be He, and with the consent of the entire holy congregation and in front of these holy scrolls; cursing him with the excommunication with which Joshua banned Jericho and with the curse which Elisha cursed the boys and with all the castigations which are written in the Book of the Law. Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him, but then the anger of the Lord and his jealousy shall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are written in this book shall lie upon him, and the Lord shall blot out his name from under heaven. And the Lord shall separate him unto evil out of all the tribes of Israel, according to all the curses of the covenant that are written in this book of the law.

Alan Saunders: The object of all this fury was a 23-year-old man Baruch - or Bento or Benedictus - Spinoza was not yet what he was later to become: one of the most significant and, in his own time, one of the most notorious of philosophers ever. So what had he done to merit this sort of treatment?

Steven Nadler, Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is Spinoza's biographer and more recently, the author of an account of this event. But before we talked about that, I wanted to know from him why it matters. Why do we care what happened to Spinoza?

Steven Nadler: His importance for us today is merely as the most outspoken and radical proponent of democratic, secular tolerant society. Spinoza was extremely frightened by what he was seeing happening around him at the time, as the secular Dutch Republic was more and more becoming taken over by extreme ecclesiastic authorities, especially in the early 1670s. And the theological political treatise and the political treatise are pleas for freeing political authority from the reins of religious figures. And so you have this really deep cry that the most secure state, the most healthy state, will be one in which political authority is vested in the will of the people and it's free from interference by the church. And I think that there's no more important lesson today than that particular one; that society can achieve its most perfect form, its most secure condition when it's run in a tolerant, democratic and secular manner.

Alan Saunders: Well let's turn then to the cherem. This is a ban; it's normally referred to, not entirely accurately, as a ban of excommunication from the Jewish community. So what sort of Jewish community was there in Amsterdam at the time?

Steven Nadler: It was a very mutli-faceted one, with a very interesting history. Most of the Jews in Amsterdam in the 1610 to '20s and '30s, were Jews of Portuguese and Spanish background. They were families, or descendents of families that had been forced to convert to Catholicism in Spain and Portugal some generations earlier, and finally emigrated to Amsterdam, either directly from Spain and Portugal, or more proximately, from Antwerp. And when they arrived in Amsterdam, they found they were able, with a bit of a wink from the authorities around 1604, 1605, they were able to actually worship openly, return to Judaism. Of course, having been separated from Judaism for so long, they also had to re-educate themselves in the norms of Judaism. And over the next 10 or 20 years, there were almost 600 to 800 of these Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam, many of them quite well off because they were able to carry on the same mercantile businesses that they had established back in Iberia. So these were fairly well off Jews, a bit unorthodox in their Jewish practice because of the generations of Catholic influence. So for example, on the Purim holiday, they celebrated what they called the Feast of St Esther.

Spinoza was born in 1632 into this community. He himself was not one of these conversos, that is somebody who had actually been forced to convert. His parents were, but Spinoza was born a Jew and by the time he was born in Amsterdam, the Jewish community had three good-sized congregations that had finally merged into one fairly large congregation, and there were learned and active rabbis running a very well functioning community. You're absolutely right to say that we shouldn't think of what happened to Spinoza as an excommunication, because Judaism doesn't have communion. I mean, the cherem is not exactly a religious act, in fact in Amsterdam it was not pronounced by the rabbis, it was pronounced by the lay governors of the community. And these Jews in Amsterdam used the cherem quite frequently as a way of imposing a kind of order and discipline upon the community. So for example, you could be put under cherem for showing disrespect to a rabbi or taking books out of the library without permission; women could be banned for cutting the hair of gentile women. You could be put under the ban for engaging in theological discussions with gentiles, and my favourite instance is one man who was put under the ban because he - according to the document, he circumcised a Polish man without permission. Well, we can only hope that it wasn't without the Polish man's permission.

But Spinoza's ban is on the one hand not extraordinary, because the ban was used quite frequently as a way of disciplining a community that was still kind of educating itself in Jewish ways. But when you compare the vitriol and the text and the curses in Spinoza's cherem with all the other cherems from the period, you're just immediately struck by the length and the depth of the anger directed at Spinoza.

I have actually another example here of a cherem from the period. This is a man named Isaac de Peralta and he was put under a cherem because he had become angry at some of the leaders of the community and found them in the street, insulted them and assaulted them, and as a result of this violent act, here's the cherem that he was given. It says:

'Taking into consideration that Isaac de Peralta disobeyed the aforesaid governing board and that he responded with negative words concerning this issue, and not content with this, Peralta dared to go out and look for members of the board on the street and insult them, the aforesaid governing board, considering these things, and the importance of the case, decided the following:

It is agreed upon unanimously that the aforesaid Peralta be excommunicated because of what he has done. Because he has been declared under punishment of cherem, no-one shall talk or deal with him, only family and other members of his household may talk with him.'

Now this was for assaulting members of the governing board, and the anger here doesn't even begin to compare with what Spinoza received. I should say most of the cherems were easily removed by making an apology or paying a fine, but in Spinoza's case there is not even that hope of redemption offered.

Alan Saunders: And in Spinoza's case, and I should stress that this is a very, very young man we're talking about, it does seem to be 'his evil deeds and abominable opinions' that they're talking about. But this is before he's published any philosophical works, so what is going on here? What can we suppose might have happened? Because they say that he had abominable opinions, but they don't say what they were.

Steven Nadler: Yes, it's very clever of them, isn't it. On the one hand there's a mystery here; these words are ambiguous and we're not told exactly what he was saying or doing, we can be sure it was something more than simply going to a non-Kosher restaurant and eating. There's a view that used to be offered that it was ironic that Spinoza would be the victim of an inquisition in Amsterdam by men who had themselves escaped the Inquisition. But I don't think it was an inquisition. Some recent scholars have suggested that it was a purely legal matter. At this time Spinoza was seeking some protection from his creditors for debts he'd inherited from his father. And rather than going to the governing board of the Jewish community to resolve those debts, he went to the Dutch authorities, which was forbidden by the laws of the community. He was supposed to resolve it within the community.

I find it very hard to believe the depth of the anger in the cherem goes way beyond a mere legality. So on the one hand you have this mystery: what are the 'abominable heresies and monstrous deeds'? On the other hand, there's really no mystery if we read his later works and take a sampling of the opinions that are found there.

These are works that he began composing in the late 1650s and early 1660s, so it's not that far distant from the date of the cherem. And we also have some testimony of witnesses from around 1658, two years after the cherem, who say that they were in Amsterdam, they met this man named Spinoza and here's the kinds of things he was saying.

I would suggest there are four or five elements from Spinoza's mature philosophy that we have good reasons for thinking that he was uttering, even around the time of the cherem. At this time he was already educating himself in secular philosophy, of Aristotle, Descartes and others, and I find it perfectly plausible that the views, the theological and philosophical and political views that Spinoza lays out in his mature treatises, were already, at least in embryonic or not fuller form, in his mind around 1656. So for example, I think at this time, as he does in his work The Ethics', Spinoza denies the providential God of Judaism. Spinoza's God, (this appears in Part 1 of The Ethics) is a God who has no moral characteristics. God is neither good, nor perfect, nor just, nor wise, so God doesn't form plans; God doesn't judge things on the basis of how well they conform to his plans. Spinoza's God also has no psychological characteristics. His is not a God with a will and with desires or emotions. And by eliminating all these features, these anthromorphic features from God, Spinoza effectively eliminates the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob: not something that would be looked upon lightly by a 17th century rabbi.

He also denies that there's any metaphysically or morally interesting sense in which the Jews are a chosen people. The only sense in which the Jews are chosen is that for a long time they enjoyed political good fortune with a well-established kingdom, but that's gone now and so there's nothing whatsoever that distinguishes the Jews from other people.

He also - and this is the kind of thing that drew the greatest wrath in the period - in the theological-political treatise, which is regarded as the most blasphemous and heretical work of the time, something that some contemporary critic claimed was forged in hell; in that treatise Spinoza denies the divine origin of Scripture. He says that the Bible is not at all the work of God, it's certainly not all written by Moses either, but what it is is a collection of writings by human beings that were compiled over time and finally put together by an editor after the first exile, and therefore we should regard this as nothing more than a work of human literature. This is an astounding opinion for somebody to hold at the time.

Fourthly, Spinoza denies that Jewish halacha, Jewish law, has any continued validity for contemporary Jews, that the law was basically created around the ceremonies of the temple, and with the destruction of the temple Jewish law has lost its whole raison d'etre, and therefore contemporary Jews are no longer bound to observe halacha or Jewish regulations.

Finally, and this is what I think really pushed the rabbis over the edge, in The Ethics, Spinoza basically denies the immortality of the soul. He says that there are certain eternal elements of a human being, basically the kind of knowledge we can acquire of eternal truths. That's something that will outlive us because these are eternal truths, and to the extent that we grasp them in this lifetime, they become a part of us and when we die, they will persist, but we don't persist. When we die, we're dead. This is a very metaphysical or speculative position and ordinarily wouldn't have brought one into trouble. There's a lot of latitude in Jewish intellectual tradition for your views on the afterlife, and even on immortality. But for a variety of historical and social reasons, Amsterdam was simply the wrong place at the wrong time, in the 1650s, to be denying the immortality of a soul.

Alan Saunders: Well, you say that this was what pushed the rabbis over the edge. Now as you've said, the cherem was the work of the secular governing board of the synagogue, but you're suggesting now that the rabbis were behind it. So perhaps we should talk about them, because the rabbis in Amsterdam at the time were a fairly impressive bunch of guys, weren't they. I mean, they weren't obscurantists.

Steven Nadler: Absolutely not, that's right. They were a learned group of men. If you look at the four major rabbis of the period in Amsterdam, there was Saul Levy Mortera, who was well-schooled not just in Jewish philosophy but also in Latin philosophy. He was a well-educated man who came to Amsterdam originally from Venice. He certainly did not have a ghetto mentality. Then there was Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel, perhaps the most famous Jew in all of Europe, and somebody who more than any other Rabbi, made an effort to communicate Judaism to a Gentile public. He was regarded in Europe at the time as, in a way, the kind of Jewish public face. Then there was Rabbi Isaac Aboab da Fonseca. He was given more to mysticism, but still not somebody who sought obscure doctrines, but rather who was engaged as a Kabbalist, nonetheless engaged in the welfare of the community. So I think you're absolutely right, that this is not an act of blind anger by an inquisitional committee. But I think that Spinoza's ideas here represented to these Rabbis, not the threat of modernity, because this was a very modern community. The Jews of Amsterdam in the 17th century, especially the Portuguese Jews, were in many says assimilated to Dutch mores. They dressed like the Dutch, they wore their beards like the Dutch, and they ran their businesses very often like the Dutch.

Alan Saunders: Yes, and we should say of course that if we want to look at names of the Jewish community in Amsterdam at the time, we can look at pictures by Rembrandt, for example.

Steven Nadler: That's right. This is not a ghetto, the Jews could live anywhere they wanted in Amsterdam, and they all tended to live in this neighbourhood because it was a newly built neighbourhood in a very crowded city, but this is not a closed, insular community. And so the cherem of Spinoza was not an attempt to keep out new ideas in general, because some of these Rabbis were very well read in new philosophy. But I do think that the Rabbis saw that these four or five opinions of Spinoza were possibly threatening to their efforts to maintain a normative Jewish community among people who were still coming in from Iberia and thus tempted by a kind of Catholicised Judaism, or a Judaism with rather unorthodox flavour. And I think that in one sense Spinoza's cherem was like the others, in that it was the attempt of the community to keep things under control, keep their house in order. But I don't think it should be read as an attempt to close off the minds of the members of the community. This was a highly educated cosmopolitan group of Jews.

Alan Saunders: And the Cherem, the expulsion, as far as we know doesn't seem to have meant a lot to Spinoza himself, does it?

Steven Nadler: Yes, I think his reaction was so much, you know, 'See you later'. One of his earliest biographers says that what Spinoza said was: So much the better, they don't do anything that I wasn't going to do myself anyway. It did make life a little bit more difficult for him from a business point of view, because with the ostracism in place he could no longer run his father's importing business within the community. But the evidence points to the fact that he wasn't a very good businessman to begin with and was probably happy to be done with that part of his life. So on the one hand, I think he saw this as a bit of a relief, potentially economically difficult, but probably spiritually he no longer had to keep up appearances - if he was even doing that at this time, I doubt that he was. And in a way it liberated him to become an independent philosopher.

Alan Saunders: Well, to what extent ultimately should we see Spinoza as a Jewish philosopher? I've heard it said that if you look at his book, '
The Ethics, the definition of God there, remote though it ultimately gets from the providential, judgmental God of Judaism, nonetheless the basic definition derives ultimately from the great mediaeval Jewish philosopher, Moshe Ben Maimon, also known as Moses Maimonides. So should we see Spinoza as a Jewish philosopher?

Steven Nadler: I think those two questions need to be distinguished. Is Spinoza a good Jew, and is Spinoza a good Jewish philosopher. The answer to the first question I think is clearly no, he was not a good Jew, and didn't see himself as a Jew at all. But does that not give us the right to say that he was nonetheless a good Jewish philosopher? And it all depends upon what your criteria are for deciding whether somebody belongs to the history of Jewish philosophy. Moreover, using the case of Spinoza's conception of God might be a bit misleading, because by denying the providential God of Judaism, maybe Spinoza isn't a good Jew, but the difference between religion and philosophy is that, unlike religion, philosophy never prescribes what the answers have to be, it only prescribes what the questions have to be. The minute philosophy starts prescribing the answers, you know, Jewish philosophy can't say, 'Here's what you must believe about X', because then it's no longer being philosophical, it's simply being dogmatic. I think to be a Jewish philosopher means two things:

First of all you're raising certain questions that are peculiar to the Jewish tradition. For example, the question of what is the status of Jewish law, and where does it derive its normative force? Why ought one or ought one not to obey Jewish law? Or another example: what is the status of the Jewish people? In what sense might they be described as 'chosen by God'? What are the origins of Scripture? And so on.

So, in this sense, Spinoza's certainly asking questions that are internal to the Jewish intellectual tradition. But here's an even more important sense in which I think Spinoza clearly belongs to the history of Jewish philosophy. Look at who he's in dialogue with: certainly contemporary thinkers like Descartes when Spinoza's talking about substance and nature, and the human being and the mind's relationship to the body. And he's in dialogue with another contemporary, Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher, when Spinoza's discussing the origins of the State instead of nature in the social contract.

But Spinoza's also in dialogue with the tradition that very few other major philosophers of the time can tap into, and that is the Jewish philosophical tradition. And when Spinoza starts talking about nature and its relationship to God and the connection between virtue and happiness, and the role that reason plays in contributing to our well-being, and his discussion of the eternity of the mind as opposed to the immortality of the soul, all of these issues in his moral philosophy from the later parts of The Ethics, are I think very clearly a dialogue with mediaeval Jewish rationalist thinkers, and especially Maimonides and Gersonides, but also people like Ibn Ezra and Sa'adia Ben Joseph. Spinoza knew these thinkers but because he's in this conversation with these Jewish philosophers on the same questions, I think that that makes him a Jewish philosopher; that he is philosophizing in a certain tradition, taking in a certain philosophical conversation over questions that are essential to these earlier Jewish thinkers.

So I would answer yes, we should think of him as not a good Jew but as a very good Jewish philosopher, and in fact why not think of Spinoza not as representing a break with all of the Jewish philosophy that's come before him, but on the contrary, as its ultimate culmination: that if you take Maimonidean rationalism, this notion that the key to human happiness is an understanding of the universe, and to understand and love God, is to know nature. If you take all of this to its ultimate logical conclusion, and push it as far as perhaps Maimonides was not willing to push it, I think we could get a Spinoza.

Alan Saunders: Steven Nadler, it's an endlessly fascinating topic, the subject of Spinoza and indeed the subject of intellectual life in The Netherlands in the 17th century. Thank you very much indeed for sharing it with us.

Steven Nadler: It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.