Betraying Spinoza (15 page)

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 Fon-seca (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.