The Spinoza Problem (25 page)

The second plaque read:

Drivel, thought Alfred. Spinoza was surrounded by idiots. Walking around the building Alfred discovered that half the house was the museum and half was inhabited by a village family who used a separate entrance on the side. An old plow in the driveway suggested that they were probably farmers. The museum door was so low that Alfred had to bow his head to enter. He then had to pay an entrance fee to a shabbily dressed Jewish guard who seemed to have just awakened from a nap. The guard was a sight to behold! He obviously hadn’t shaved for days, and sagging bags hung under his bleary eyes.

Alfred was the sole visitor and looked about in disappointment. The entire museum consisted of two small, eight-foot-by-ten-foot rooms, both with a small-paned window that looked out on an apple orchard in the back. One room was of little interest, containing generic seventeenth-century lens-grinding equipment, but the other, the one that excited Alfred, held Spinoza’s personal library in a six-foot-long bookcase extending along the side wall and covered by glass panels badly in need of washing. A thick red tasseled cord supported by four upright stands prevented close access to the bookcase. The shelves were crammed with heavy volumes, most upright but the larger ones lying horizontal, all bound with sturdy covers dating from the seventeenth century and earlier. Here was a treasure, indeed. Alfred strained to count the titles—well over a hundred volumes. The guard, sitting on a chair in the corner, peered over his newspaper and called out, “
Honderd een en vijftig
.”

“No Dutch. I speak only German and Russian,” replied Alfred, whereupon the guard instantly switched to excellent German—“
Ein hundert ein und funfzig
”—and returned to his reading.

On the adjacent wall a small glass case displayed five first editions (1670) of the
Theological-Political Treatise
—the very book Alfred carried in his small bag. Each edition was opened to the title page, and as the legend explained in Dutch, French, English, and German, the publishers adjudged this book so incendiary that neither the author nor the publishing company was identified. Moreover, each of the five editions claimed to be published in a different city.

The guard beckoned Alfred to come to the desk and sign the guest register. After signing, Alfred flipped through the pages scanning the names of other guests. The guard reached over, turned back a few pages, pointed to the signature of Albert Einstein (dated November 2, 1920), and, tapping the page, proudly said, “Nobel laureate for physics. A famous scientist. He spent almost a whole day reading in this library and writing a poem to Spinoza. Look there,” he pointed to a small framed page of paper hanging on the wall behind him. “It’s his handwriting—he made us a copy. It’s the first stanza of his poem.”

Alfred stepped over and read:

Alfred felt like throwing up.
More drivel. A Jewish pseudo-scientist giving a Jewish halo to a man who rejected all things Jewish.
“Who runs this museum?” Alfred asked. “The Dutch government?”

“No, it’s a private museum.”

“Sponsored by? Who pays for it.”

“The Spinoza Association. Freemasons. Private Jewish donors. This man here paid for the house and most of the library”—the guard flipped the pages of the huge guest register all the way to the beginning and pointed to the first signature dated 1899: George Rosenthal.

“But Spinoza was not a Jew. He was excommunicated by the Jews.”

“Once a Jew, always a Jew. Why so many questions?”

“I’m a writer and the editor of a newspaper in Germany.”

The guard bent over to look closely at his signature. “Aha, Rosenberg?
Bist an undzericker
?”

“What are you speaking? I don’t understand.”

“Yiddish. I asked if you were Jewish.”

Alfred drew himself up. “Take a good look. Do I look Jewish?”

The guard looked him up and down. “Not distinguished enough,” he said, and sauntered back to his chair.

Cursing under his breath, Alfred turned back to the bookcase and leaned over the guardian cord as far as he could in order to read the titles of Spinoza’s books. A bit too far. He lost his balance and fell heavily against the bookcase. The guard, sitting in his corner chair, threw down his newspaper and rushed over to assure himself no damage had been done to the books. He said, “What are you doing? Are you crazy? These books are priceless.”

“Trying to see the names of the books.”

“Why do you have to know?”

“I’m a philosopher. I want to see where he got his ideas.”

“Aha, first you’re a newspaper man, and now you’re a philosopher?”

“Both. I’m both a philosopher and a newspaper editor. Get it?”

The guard glared at him.

Alfred glared back at his drooping lips, the fat misshapen nose, the hair sprouting from unclean fleshy ears. “That too hard to understand?”

“I understand a lot.”

“Do you understand Spinoza is an important philosopher? Why keep his books so distant? Why is there no catalogue of the books displayed? Real museums are meant to display things, not conceal them.”

“You’re not here to learn more about Spinoza. You’re here to destroy him. To prove he stole his ideas.”

“If you knew anything at all about the world at large, you’d know that every philosopher is influenced and inspired by other preceding philosophers. Kant influenced Hegel; Schopenhauer influenced Nietzsche; Plato influenced everyone. It’s common knowledge that—”

“Influenced, inspired. That’s the point, the very point: you didn’t say ‘influenced.’ And you didn’t say ‘inspired.’ Your exact words were ‘where he got his ideas from.’ That’s different.”

“Aha, Talmudic disputation is it? That’s what you people like to do. You know damned well what I meant—”

“I know exactly what you meant.”

“Some museum. You let Einstein, one of yours, spend the whole day studying the library and keep others three feet away.”

“I promise you Herr philosopher-editor Rosenberg—you win a Nobel Prize, and you can hug every book in this library. The museum is now closing. Get out.”

 

 

 

A
lfred had seen the face of hell: A Jewish guard with authority over an Aryan, Jews blocking access to non-Jews, Jews imprisoning a great philosopher who despised Jews. He would never forget this day.

T
wo blocks from the Talmud Torah Synagogue, Bento, with help from Dirk, his fellow student at Van den Enden Academy, packed his library of fourteen volumes into a large, wooden case and then dismantled the Spinoza family four-poster bed. The pair then loaded bed and books onto a barge on the Nieuwe Herengracht Canal for shipping to the van den Enden house, where Bento would live temporarily. Dirk accompanied Bento’s goods on the barge, while Bento stayed behind to pack his remaining possessions—two pairs of trousers, brass-buckled shoes, three shirts, two white collars, underclothes, a pipe, and tobacco—into a bag that he would carry to van den Enden’s house. The bag weighed little, and Bento congratulated himself on having so few possessions. If not for his bed and books, he would be able to live entirely unfettered, like a nomad.

Taking a final look around the room, Bento collected his straight razor, soap, and towel, and then he spotted, on a high shelf, his tefillin. He had not touched his tefillin since the day his father died. He reached for the two small leather boxes with their straps, and he held them gently—perhaps, he thought, for the last time. What strange objects! And strange, too, he considered, how they both repelled and beckoned him. Holding up the leather boxes, he examined each of them. Affixed to the box marked “
rosh
”—for the head—were two leather straps. To the “
yad
” box—for the arm—was attached one long strap. The hollow boxes contained verses of holy scripture written upon parchment. And, of course, everything—the leather from which the boxes had been made, the sinews used as ties, the parchment, the straps—came from kosher animals.

A memory from fifteen years earlier drifted into his mind. Often, as a child, he had watched with insatiable curiosity as his father had put on his tallit and began laying tefillin before breakfast—something his father had done every workday morning of his life. (Tefillin were never used on the Sabbath.) One day, his father had turned to him and said, “You want to know what I’m doing, don’t you?”

“Yes!” Bento had replied.

“In this as in all things,” his father had replied, “I follow the Torah. The words of Deuteronomy instruct us, ‘And you should bind them as a sign on your hand, and they should be as frontlets between your eyes.’”

A few days later, his father came home with a gift—the very set of tefillin Bento now held in his hand.

“This is for you, Baruch, but not for today. We’ll keep it until you are twelve, and then, a few weeks before your bar mitzvah, you and I will start to lay tefillin together.” So excited was Bento about the prospect of laying tefillin with his father, and so often did he ply his father with questions about the precise procedure, that, in only a few days, his father acquiesced. “Today, just this one time, we’ll have a rehearsal, and then, after that, we’ll put away the tefillin until your time comes. Agreed?” Bento nodded eagerly.

His father continued. “We’ll practice together. You do exactly what I do. You place the
yad
box on the upper part of your left arm, facing your heart, and then you wrap the leather straps seven times around your arm, ending at your wrist. See—watch me. Remember, Baruch, exactly seven times—not six times, not eight—for so the rabbis have taught us.”

Next, his father chanted the prescribed blessing:

His father opened his prayer book and handed it to Bento and said, “Here,
you
read the prayer.” But Bento did not take the book. Instead, he raised his head so that his father could see that his eyes were closed; then he repeated the prayers precisely as his father had spoken it. Once Bento heard a prayer—or any other text—he never forgot it. Beaming, his father
kissed him tenderly on each cheek. “Ah what a mitzvah, what a mind. In my heart, I know that you shall be one of the greatest of all Jews.”

Bento broke the reverie to taste the words “the greatest of all Jews
.
” Tears flowed down his cheeks as he returned to his memory.

“Now, let’s continue with the
tefillin shel rosh
box,” his father said. “Put it on your forehead just like I’m doing—high, just above your hairline, and exactly between your eyes. Then you place the tight knot right at the nape of the neck, like I’m doing. Now, say the next prayer.”

Once more, to his father’s delight, Bento repeated the prayer word for word.

“Next, you put the two hanging
rosh
straps in front of your shoulders and make sure the blackened side faces outward and the left strap must reach right here”—his father put his finger on Bento’s belly button and tickled him. “And you be sure to make the right strap end a few inches lower—right by your little watering spout.”

“Now we go back to the
tefillin shel yad
strap and tie it around your middle finger, three times. See how I’m doing? Then wrap it around your hand. Do you see how it forms the shape of the letter
shin
around my middle finger? I know it’s hard to see. What does
shin
stand for?”

Bento shook his head.

“
Shin
is the first letter of
Shaddai
(Almighty).”

Bento recalled an unusual state of calmness brought about by winding the leather straps around his head and arms. The sense of confinement, the binding, pleased him greatly, and he felt almost merged with his father, who was bound by the leather straps in the same manner.

His father ended the lesson: “Bento, I know you won’t forget any step of this, but you must resist laying tefillin until formal rehearsals just before your bar mitzvah. And after your bar mitzvah, then you’ll lay tefillin every morning for the rest of your life except for? . . .”

“For the holidays and the Sabbath.”

“Yes.” His father kissed his cheeks. “Just like me, just like every Jew.”

Bento allowed his father’s image to dissolve, returned to the present, stared at the bizarre little boxes, and, for a moment, felt an ache that he would never lay tefillin again, never again feel that pleasant sense of confinement and merger. Was he acting dishonorably by failing to obey his father’s wish? He shook his head. His father, blessed be his name, had come from an age hobbled by superstition. Looking again at the inscrutably tangled
rosh
and
yad
straps, Bento knew that he had made the decision that was right for him. But what to do with his father’s gift, his tefillin
?
He couldn’t simply abandon them for Gabriel to find. That would greatly wound his brother. He would have to take them with him and dispose of them later. For now, he placed the little boxes into his bag beside the razor and soap and then sat down to write a long and loving letter to Gabriel.