History of the Jews (52 page)

For all these reasons, then, Jews made a contribution to the creation of modern capitalism quite disproportionate to their numbers. It would have occurred without them. In some areas they were weak or absent. They played very little direct part, for instance, in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. In some fields—raising large-scale capital—they were notably strong. In general, they brought to the eighteenth-century economic system a powerful spirit of rationalization, a belief that existing ways of doing things were never good enough, and that better, easier, cheaper and quicker ways could and must be found. There was nothing mysterious about Jewish commerce; nothing dishonest either; simply reason.

The rationalizing process was at work within Jewish society too, though at first more diffidently and fearfully. There is a paradox that, at one and the same time, the ghetto bred mercantile innovation and religious conservatism. The Jews in the early modern period were curiously dualistic. They often saw the world outside with clearer eyes than it saw itself; but when the Jews turned inward, on themselves, their eyes misted over, their vision became opaque. In the twelfth century Maimonides had tried hard to align Judaism with natural reason. That effort faltered and went underground in the fourteenth century. The ghetto helped to keep it there. It strengthened traditional authority. It discouraged speculation. It made the penalities of communal disapproval much more severe, since a Jew could not leave the ghetto without sacrificing his faith entirely. But of course it could not kill the rationalizing spirit altogether because that was inherent in Judaism and in the halakhic method. Even in the ghetto, Judaism remained a cathedocracy, a society ruled by learned men. Where scholars exist, controversies will erupt and ideas circulate.

The ghettos were depositories of books too. The Jews set up presses everywhere. Despite frequent raids by hostile religious authorities, they accumulated impressive libraries. One member of the Oppenheimer family, David, who was Chief Rabbi of Prague 1702-36, set out to acquire all the Hebrew books ever printed. Having inherited a fortune from his uncle Samuel, he was a very rich man; certainly no radical. Christians accused him of using his powers of excommunication to get choice treasures. In fact he had to keep his library in Hamburg to escape the Inquisition in Catholic Bohemia. His collection, which now forms the basis of the Bodleian
hebraica
in Oxford, once encompassed over 7,000 volumes and 1,000 manuscripts. Rabbi Oppenheimer got a ruling from the Emperor Charles
VI
in 1722 giving
him sole control over Jewish studies in Prague. But the library he spent his life assembling was itself an inevitable breeding-ground for intellectual subversion.
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All the same, the spirit of rationalism within the Judaic world was slow to develop, partly because Jews with new ideas hesitated to challenge tradition, partly because such challenges were liable to meet crushing disapproval. Experience suggests that the most effective way to change conservative religious modes is to adopt the historical approach. Maimonides, while adumbrating modern techniques of Biblical criticism, never used historical criteria as such. It was one of his few intellectual weaknesses that he regarded non-messianic history as ‘of no practical benefit but purely a waste of time’.
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His disapproval was no doubt a collateral reason why the Jews were so slow to return to historical writing. But they did come to it again in the end, in the second half of the sixteenth century. After Ibn Verga’s pioneer if naïve book, Azariah dei Rossi (
c
. 1511-78), a Mantuan, at last produced a genuine book of Jewish history, the
Me’or Eynayim
(Light of the Eyes) in 1573. Using gentile sources and critical techniques developed by Christians during the Renaissance, he subjected the writings of the sages to rational analysis. His manner was apologetic and diffident and he clearly took no pleasure in pointing out where the wise old men had erred. But his work on the Hebrew calendar none the less destroyed the traditional basis of messianic calculations and cast doubt on much else.
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Rossi’s work aroused intense resentment among Orthodox learned Jews. The great codifier Joseph Caro, the most influential scholar of his time, died just before he could sign a decree ordering the book to be burned. The Rabbi Judah Loew, the famous Maharal of Prague, the dominant figure in the next generation, was just as critical of Rossi’s book. He thought that Rossi’s sceptical investigations into talmudic legends and Jewish history would undermine authority and destroy belief. Rossi, in his view, had failed to distinguish between two totally different forms of intellectual process, the divine and the natural. It was absurd to use methods suitable for investigation of the natural world to try to understand the workings of divine providence. Now this was to repudiate Maimonides completely, in one sense. Yet the Maharal was not really an obscurantist and irrationalist; he straddled many trends in Judaism.
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His opposition to Rossi, whose book was banned to Jewish students without special rabbinical permission, indicates the strength of the opposition any intellectual innovator had to face.

This power of orthodoxy was dramatically demonstrated in the
tragic case of Baruch (or Benedict) de Spinoza (1632-77) of Amsterdam. Spinoza is usually approached as a central figure in the history of philosophy, as indeed he was. But his importance in Jewish (and Christian) history is still more crucial, and in some ways baneful: he set in motion chains of events which still influence us today. By birth he was the son of a Sephardi refugee who became a successful Dutch merchant. By trade he was a scholar (he probably studied under Manasseh ben Israel) and a grinder of optical lenses. By temperament he was a melancholic and ascetic. He was slender, swarthy, with long, curling hair and large, dark, lustrous eyes. He ate practically nothing except porridge with a little butter and gruel mixed with raisins: ‘It is incredible’, wrote his early biographer, the Lutheran pastor Colerus who lodged in the same house, ‘with how little in the shape of meat or drink he appears to have been satisfied.’
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By intellectual descent, Spinoza was a follower of Maimonides. But some of his views on the origins of the Pentateuch seem to have derived from veiled hints in the writings of the older rationalist Abraham ibn Ezra (1089-1164). He was a precocious youth in what was then (the 1650s) perhaps the most intellectually radical city in the world, and at an early age he became part of a circle of free thinkers from various religions: the ex-Jesuit Franciscus van den Enden, a former
marrano
, Juan de Prado, a notorious schoolteacher, Daniel de Ribera, and various Socinians, anti-Trinitarians and anti-clericals. A generation earlier, the Jew Uriel da Costa had been expelled from the Amsterdam community not once but twice for denying the immortality of the soul. In 1655, when Spinoza was twenty-three,
Praedamnitiae
, a sensational book by an ex-Calvinist, Isaac La Peyrère, which had been banned everywhere, was published in Amsterdam, and Spinoza undoubtedly read it. La Peyrère was certainly not an atheist; he was, rather, a
marrano
messianist, an enthusiastic kabbalist, part of the wave that was to carry Shabbetai Zevi to fame a decade later. But his work had the tendency to treat the Bible not as revelation but as a secular history to be critically examined. It seems to have reinforced in Spinoza’s mind doubts already aroused by Ibn Ezra and Maimonides. At all events, the year after it appeared Spinoza and De Prado were hauled before the Jewish authorities. De Prado apologized; Spinoza was excommunicated publicly.

The actual rabbinical pronouncement, dated 27 July 1656 and signed by Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira and others, has survived. It reads:

 

The chiefs of the council make known to you that, having long known of evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Spinoza, they have endeavoured by
various means and promises to turn him from evil ways. Not being able to find any remedy, but on the contrary receiving every day more information about the abominable heresies practised and taught by him and about the monstrous acts committed by him, having this from many trustworthy witnesses who have deposed and borne witness on all this in the presence of the said Spinoza, who has been convicted; all this having been examined in the presence of the rabbis, the council decided, with the advice of the rabbis, that the said Spinoza should be excommunicated and cut off from the Nation of Israel.

 

Then followed the anathema and cursing:

 

With the judgment of the angels, and the sentence of the saints, we anathematize, execrate, curse and cast out Baruch de Spinoza…pronouncing against him the anathema wherewith Joshua anathematized Jericho, the malediction wherewith Elisha cursed the children, and all the maledictions written in the book of the Law. Let him be accursed by day and accursed by night; accursed in his lying down and his rising up, in going out and in coming in. May the Lord never more pardon or acknowledge him! May the wrath and displeasure of the Lord burn against this man henceforth, load him with all the curses written in the book of the Law, and raze out his name from under the sky…. Hereby, then, are all admonished that none hold converse with him by word of mouth, or communication by writing, that no one do him any service, abide under the same roof with him, approach within four cubits’ length of him, or read any document dictated by him or written by his hand.
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During the reading of this curse, ‘the wailing and protracted note of a great horn was heard to fall in from time to time; the lights, seen burning brightly at the beginning of the ceremony, were extinguished one by one as it proceeded, till at the end the last went out, symbolizing the extinction of the spiritual life of the excommunicated man, and the congregation was left in total darkness’.
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Spinoza, aged twenty-four, was then expelled from his father’s house, and shortly after from Amsterdam too. He claimed that an attempt to kill him had been made one night when he was returning from the theatre: he used to show the coat with the dagger-hole. When his father died, his rapacious sisters tried to deprive him of his inheritance. He went to law to establish his rights but, having done so, withdrew all claims except to one bed with its hangings. He finally settled in The Hague, where he lived by his lens-work. He had a small pension from the state, and an annuity left by a friend. He turned down other offers of help and refused a professorship at Heidelberg. He lived the austere life of a poor scholar, as he probably would have done had he remained orthodox; but he did not marry. He was the
reverse of a Bohemian, dressing with great sobriety, and insisting: ‘It is not a disorderly and slovenly carriage which makes us sages; rather, affected indifference to personal appearance is evidence of a poor spirit in which true wisdom could find no fit dwelling place and science only meet with disorder and disarray.’
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He died, aged forty-four, of a form of tuberculosis, and his estate was so small that his sister Rebecca refused to administer it.

The origin and substance of Spinoza’s quarrel with the Jewish authorities is not entirely clear. He was accused of denying the existence of angels, the immortality of the soul and the divine inspiration of the Torah. But an
apologia
for his views, which he wrote in Spanish soon after the
herem
, has not survived. However, in 1670 he published, unsigned, his
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
, in which he set out his principles of Biblical criticism. Therein lay his essential heterodoxy. He argued that the Bible should be approached in a scientific spirit and investigated like any natural phenomenon. In the case of the Bible, the approach had to be historical. One began by analysing the Hebrew language. Then one proceeded to analyse and classify the expression in each of the books of the Bible. The next stage was to examine the historical context:

 

the life, the conduct, and the pursuits of the author of each book, who he was, what was the occasion and the epoch of his writing, whom did he write for and in what language…[then] the history of each book: how it was first received, into whose hands it fell, how many different versions there were of it, by whose advice was it received into the Canon, and lastly how all the books now universally accepted as sacred were united into a single whole.

 

Spinoza proceeded to apply his analysis, discussing which parts of the Pentateuch were actually written by Moses, the roll of Ezra, the compilation of the canon, the provenance of such books as Job and Daniel, and the dating of the works as a whole and its individual parts. In effect, he rejected the traditional view of the origin and authenticity of the Bible almost completely, providing alternative explanations from its internal evidence. He thus began the process of Biblical criticism which, over the next 250 years, was to demolish educated belief in the literal truth of the Bible and to reduce it to the status of an imperfect historical record.
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His work and influence were to inflict grievous and irreparable damage on the self-confidence and internal cohesion of Christianity. They also, as we shall shortly see, raised new, long-term and deadly problems for the Jewish community.

Spinoza was the first major example of the sheer destructive power of Jewish rationalism once it escaped the restraints of the traditional
community. During his lifetime and for long after, he was treated as an atheist by all the main religious bodies. His works were banned everywhere—though everywhere they survived and were constantly reprinted. In 1671 he sent a letter to the Jewish leader Orobio de Castro denying that he was an atheist and refuting the charge that the
Tractatus
was an anti-religious book. But his
Ethics
, published after his death, showed that he was a pantheist of a peculiarly thoroughgoing type. Strange as it may seem to us, some forms of pantheism were evidently regarded as compatible with Judaism in the seventeenth century. Kabbalah, then regarded as acceptable by many Jews, was pantheistic in tendency; the
Zohar
has many passages which suggest that God is everything and everything is God. Twenty years after Spinoza died, the London Sephardi rabbi David Nieto (1654-1728) got into serious trouble for producing a work in Spanish,
On Divine Providence
, which identified nature with God. The dispute was referred to the great Talmudic scholar Zevi Ashkenazi of Amsterdam, who ruled that Nieto’s argument was not merely acceptably Judaic but almost commonplace among some Jewish thinkers.
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