Betraying Spinoza (14 page)

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 Maltranilla
³
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.