Betraying Spinoza (24 page)

“I am aware that these terms are employed in senses somewhat different from those usually assigned,” he writes. “But my purpose is to explain, not the meaning of words, but the nature of things. I therefore make use of such terms, as may convey my meaning without any violent departure from their ordinary signification.”
²⁸

For nature is nothing like what we experience. Nature consists in the whole infinite system of necessary connections that exist between things, which necessary connections are revealed only to pure reason.
The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things
.
²⁹
The order and connection of ideas is provided by logic, which displays how one idea logically entails another. And the order and connection between things, too, is displayed by logic. When one thing causes another thing the conception of the thing logically entails the conception of the other. We don’t even have the conception of a thing unless we have the conception of the cause that logically entails it.
The knowledge of an effect depends on and involves the knowledge of a cause
.
³⁰

Once he was thrown out of his community, his business venture with his brother had, of course, to end. Gabriel is no longer even allowed to speak with his elder brother and business partner. Spinoza has therefore replaced the entrepreneurship characteristic of one of the Portuguese Nation with lens-grinding. It is an occupation that suits him splendidly, not only bringing him into contact with the latest developments in the new mathematical sciences, but also allowing him the solitude he now requires in order to pursue the progress of his understanding. Now even his means of support separates him from the Jews, severs him from his past.

He and his lathe move first to Rijnsburg, a little village well known for its tolerance, not far from Leiden, which has a university where he has attended some lectures on Cartesianism. Then he moves even farther away from Amsterdam, to Voorburg, a place slightly more cosmopolitan than the bucolic Rijnsburg, but still offering the peace and quiet he finds so essential, especially after the turmoil of La Nação, the human bondage of Amsterdam’s Jewry.

Voorburg is just outside of The Hague, where the astronomer Christiaan Huygens lives. Christiaan’s father, who was Descartes’ friend, had called The Hague “a village that knows no equal.”

Heinrich Oldenburg, originally from Germany but now residing in London, has assumed the office of the secretary of the Royal Society of London, and as such it is his happy obligation to become acquainted with the creative minds of Europe. On one of his trips to The Hague he is persuaded to pay a visit to the banished Jew who lives not far away. Oldenburg forms a favorable impression, initiating an epistolary exchange which will connect Spinoza, via Oldenburg, to important thinkers and scientists throughout Europe.

Spinoza’s house in Rijnsburg

Oldenburg is certain, from his observations of the temperate man with whom he conversed in Voorburg, that the man cannot possibly be, as he is rumored to be, an atheist. For he lives a sober life, free from any trace of corruption or licentiousness, which could not be the case of one who was truly irreligious. Therefore, he is certain that there can be nothing dangerous to the spirit of Christianity in Spinoza’s philosophy, and urges him to publish his work for the benefit of all:

I would by all means advise you not to begrudge to the learned those works in philosophy and theology, which you have composed with the talent that distinguishes you. Publish them, I beg you, whatever be the verdict of petty theologians. Your country is free; the course of philosophy should there be free also. Your own prudence will, doubtless, suggest to you, that your ideas and opinions should be put forth as quietly as possible. For the rest, commit the issue to fortune. Come then, good sir, cast away all fear of exciting against you the pigmies of our time. Long enough have we sacrificed to ignorance and pedantry. Let us spread the sails of true knowledge, and explore the recesses of nature more thoroughly than heretofore. Your meditations can, I take it, be printed in your country with impunity; nor need any scandal among the learned be dreaded because of them. If these be your patrons and supporters (and I warrant me you will find them so), why should you dread the carpings of ignorance? I will not let you go, my honoured friend, till I have gained my request; nor will I ever, so far as in me lies, allow thoughts of such importance as yours to rest in eternal silence.
³¹

As it turns out, though, Oldenburg will be deeply scandalized when Spinoza at last “commit[s] the issue to fortune” and publishes his
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
. Spinoza’s views are less compatible with Christianity than Oldenburg had suspected. Their epistolary exchange—of such interest to Spinoza scholars—will suffer from the estrangement.

One of Oldenburg’s letters to Spinoza makes reference to the fever of messianism that is sweeping through the body of Jewry (to use something of the language of old Aboab, who has now been made the chief rabbi of Amsterdam since the death of Morteira), in the person of Sabbatai Zevi, the self-proclaimed Messiah from Smyrna, Turkey.

Spinoza’s workroom at Rijnsburg

Having gone through the traditional training in Talmud, Sabbatai Zevi had turned at an early age to the study of the
Zohar
. His interpretation of the distinction between the
Ein Sof
, the core of Infinity that has removed Itself from the world and so lies beyond our knowledge, and the
Sefirot
, God’s manifestations in the world, differs somewhat from Ha-Ari’s, so that he is said by some to have carried Lurianic insight to its next stage. He is also reputed to be so serious an ascetic that none of his several marriages has ever been consummated. He is reported to go through long periods of sustained sorrow and racking anguish, when he cannot cease his weeping, to then emerge into an ecstasy of inspired religious frenzy, beholding visions and prophecies, going for days without the mortal need for sleep or any form of physical sustenance.
³²
Men can see that he is either madman or Messiah. Exigency and yearning dispose Jewish community after Jewish community toward the latter, and least likely, alternative.

Oldenburg writes to ask Spinoza what he has heard of the phenomenon:

Here there is a wide-spread rumor that the Israelites, who have been dispersed for more than two thousand years, are to return to their homeland. Few hereabout believe it, but many wish it. Do let your friend know what you hear about this matter, and what you think. … I am anxious to know what the Jews of Amsterdam have heard about it, and how they are affected by so momentous an announcement, which, if true, is likely to bring about a world crisis.
³³

Jews across the Diaspora are convinced, Ashkenazic as well as Sephardic (though the latter count more heavily among the followers), that they are at last delivered. It is the conclusion that they had long been awaiting, the expectation of it passed along the generations, drawn from the suffering that also was passed along the generations. The Jewish massacres of the Chmielniki uprising—a Ukrainian peasant revolt that had unleashed a wave of atrocities that had decimated Ashkenazic Jewry—in addition to the relentless torments of the Inquisition to which Sephardic Jewry has been subjected, are seen now as signs that the messianic era is at last upon them.

The Jews of Amsterdam have fallen under the spell of the self-proclaimed Messiah with special furor,
³⁴
so that normal life has been for them suspended, and they are reportedly forsaking their businesses to spend all day in the synagogue, praying and purifying, as if every day is Yom Kippur, their personal fates hanging in the balance as the God on High makes up His mind as to who shall be saved and who not.

Shrewd Portuguese businessmen though they may be, they are selling off their properties at great losses. Abraham Pereira, one of the richest of Amsterdam’s Portuguese Jews, a merchant prince, has offered his entire fortune of several million to the Messiah, a fact of which he makes certain that the Messiah knows. Still the shrewd businessman, he wants to ensure a supernatural return for his outlay.
³⁵

The Jews are even preparing to dig up the corpses in the cemetery in Ouderkerk so that they can transport them to Jerusalem, there to be resurrected. One of the rabbis of Venice, to whom the Amsterdam community had been wont to turn for
halakhic
guidance in their earlier days when they were less certain of themselves, writes to express his astonished disapproval that “the graves of them that sleep in the dust have been disturbed [contrary to Jewish Law] so as to remove the bones of the dead from their graves.”

But the messianic enthusiasm of Rabbi Aboab is not to be dampened by any cool, rational Venetian doubt. His fervor for the approaching Messiah inspires him to write a new prayer to replace the prayer Jews recite each Sabbath and festival for the ruler of the land. Now the Jews of Amsterdam no longer offer their prayer for the Grand Pensionary of Holland but rather for “Our Lord the Great King Sabbatai Zevi, the Anointed of the Lord, the Messiah son of David, the Messiah King, the Messiah Redeemer, the Messiah Savior, our Messiah of Righteousness, the Anointed of the God of Jacob.”

The news that the Messiah had been imprisoned in a fortress in Gallipoli by the Turkish sultan, who had become alarmed by the commotion among the Jews but still does not wish to make a martyr, does not diminish the flames of delusion but only feeds them. Letters arrive from Constantinople bringing the most fantastical news, quickly disseminated by word of mouth and printed pamphlets, and believed with
kavana
by Rabbi Aboab and his followers. Sabbatai had resurrected the dead and passed through the locked and barred doors of his prison, which opened of themselves. The iron chains with which his hands and feet were fettered had broken of themselves.

Yes, of course, Spinoza has heard of how the Jews of Amsterdam are affected by, in Oldenburg’s words, “so momentous an announcement.” There is nothing in their reaction to surprise him:
Partly from piety, partly for the sake of opposing those who cultivate the natural science, they prefer to remain in ignorance of natural causes, and are eager to hear only of what is least comprehensible to them and consequently evokes their greatest wonder. … This idea seems to have originated with the early Jews, in order to refute the beliefs of the Gentiles of their time who worshipped visible gods—the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, Water, Sky and so on—and to prove to them that these gods were weak and inconstant, or changeable and under the command of an invisible God, they boasted of their miracles, from which they further sought to prove
that the whole of Nature was directed for their sole benefit by command of God whom they worshipped. This idea has found such favour with mankind that they have not ceased to this day to invent miracles with a view to convincing people that they are more beloved of God than others, and are the final causes of God’s creation and continuous directions of the world
.
³⁶

In the summer of 1666, it became known in Amsterdam that many communities had sent emissaries, or at the very least letters of homage, to the new Messiah. One of the believers, Rabbi Isaac Nahar, who had been a fellow student of Spinoza’s in the Talmud Torah, has already set off to greet the Messiah, and a letter is sent to him to present to Sabbatai Zevi, signed by Chief Rabbi Aboab.
³⁷

And how badly it all ends for them, this delirium of false salvation, when the news arrives that the Jews’ Messiah has not been walking through the doors of his prison but, quite the contrary, is at the mercy of his captors. Given the choice of martyrdom or conversion, he has donned the turban and become Azziz Mehemed Effendi. Some are so committed to their self-deception that they continue to believe in the face of their false Messiah’s apostasy. Indeed, they believe with even deeper faith, because with even more desperation.