Betraying Spinoza
The Renegade Jew Who
Gave Us Modernity
by Rebecca Goldstein
Schocken, 304 pp., $19.95
"Can the seventeenth-century rationalist, who produced one of the most ambitious philosophical systems in the history of Western philosophy, be considered, by any stretch of interpretation, a Jewish thinker?" asks Rebecca Goldstein. "Can he even be considered a Jew?"
It is these questions and others she seeks to answer in this latest installment of Jewish Encounters, a series devoted to Jewish themes and intellectuals. Goldstein, philosopher and author of Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, first heard the name Baruch Spinoza in high school when her yeshiva teacher uttered the name "as an admonition, a cautionary tale of unbridled human intelligence blindly seeking its own doom." Spinoza was an apikorus ("a heretic") who put his faith in the power of logic and reason--the only true tools for salvation and goodness. God was nothing above nature, Spinoza argued; the Torah was not Divine Revelation but text written by very worldly men for political purpose.
It is in this framework that Goldstein begins to unravel the story of Spinoza's trammeled past: his persecuted Marrano origins, his desolate family life, his erudite aptitude for Talmudic study, his daring questions about God, and his eventual excommunication at the age of 23. Though Betraying Spinoza becomes heavily focused on Goldstein's personal memories and scholarly dalliances with the philosopher, the conversational setup takes a near impenetrable subject--a rationalist's philosophy steeped in Cartesian metaphysics and epistemology--and renders it accessible, even enjoyable.
Baruch Spinoza was born in Amsterdam to a family of Marranos--Sephardic Portuguese Jews forced by the Roman Catholic Church to convert to Christianity during the Spanish Inquisition. At the time of his birth, his family lived a relatively peaceful existence practicing Judaism without fear of persecution; yet Goldstein argues that the trauma of the Inquisition, as well as the Marranos' constant struggle for identity, played a pivotal role in Spinoza's thinking. Indeed, the author contends, Spinoza was, in part, responding to Europe's first experiment with anti-Semitism.
Most Marranos switched languages when they moved from Portugal to the Netherlands, picking up Dutch. They also often replaced their Portuguese names with Hebrew ones, or in many cases, took on Dutch names. Josef de los Rios became Michael van der Riviere, for example. Luis de Mercado became Louis van der Markt. All of these blows to the identity of the Marranos people underpin the book, and the author uses these details to probe the main question: What role did a Jewish identity have in making Baruch Spinoza the renegade philosopher that he was?
To find an answer, Goldstein goes back to her yeshiva teacher's criticism of Spinoza:
It would be a Jew, at least someone who had been born a Jew, who would take goyisha philosophy much further than it had ever gone before into godlessness and immorality. It would be a Jew who would make philosophy into one long argument against the existence of God and against the difference between right and wrong.
As a young man Spinoza had been an apt pupil, but he soon began asking questions for which he knew his rabbis didn't have answers. He would not keep quiet. He sought to demonstrate that the truths of ethics have their source in the human condition and nowhere else, that our human nature is transformed merely in our knowing of it. He also began to argue that the Torah nowhere commits an individual to believe that the soul survives the body's death. On the contrary, he began asserting that there were many places where the Torah said the exact opposite.
When word of Spinoza's ideas got back to the rabbis, they were horrified. Here was one of their most brilliant students spouting ideas not even non-Jewish heretics would dare utter. What would the goyim think? When the rabbis questioned him, Spinoza refused to defend himself or his ideas.
It seems, as Goldstein acutely observes, that Spinoza--like many Jews--was an outcast from birth: "Spinoza" means "thorn" in Portuguese. Moreover, the signet ring the philosopher wore was inscribed with the word caute (Latin for "cautiously") and engraved with the image of a thorny rose. As Goldstein points out, "The name Spinoza strangely suits. Spinoza, as a Jew, presents himself to us adorned in a crown of eternally thorny questions."
After he was excommunicated, Spinoza removed himself from the community. He did not convert to Christianity. Rather, he opted for secularism at a time when the concept had not yet been formed. He found a simple job as a lens grinder where he could write his books in private and live an insular existence. Goldstein suggests that the loneliness of Spinoza's secularized spirituality stems from an individual forced to live outside the bounds of a religious identity.
In successive chapters, Goldstein gives a synopsis of Spinoza's most prominent works--Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and the Ethics--noting how Spinoza's struggle with identity and with secularism plays out in the works themselves. Tractatus, for example, argues for the separation of church and state. Spinoza published it anonymously, hoping that the work would make a mark so that he'd be able to publish his real masterpiece, The Ethics, under his own name. But Tractatus was not well received, and the author's true identity was soon known throughout Europe. Anyone remotely associated with the writer was deemed a pariah. Spinoza became a thinker one could admire only in secret. Again insularity became paramount.
The ideas Spinoza espoused in Tractatus would later be found in John Locke's treatises on government, which would, in turn, be read and used by the Founding Fathers in the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In addition, Goldstein points out:
What Spinoza has to say about the importance of allowing the discovery of nature to proceed unimpeded by religious dogma could not speak more pertinently to some of the raging controversies of our day, including the recurring public debate in America over Darwin's theory of evolution.
In the end, Betraying Spinoza achieves two ends: It gives novice philosophy readers a well-written survey in the rationalist's most important works, and it serves as a case study in how heritage makes us all who we are. Henri Bergson might have very well been thinking of Spinoza when he mused that "the present contains nothing more than the past," and that "what is found in the effect was already in the cause."
Spinoza took tragedy--his family's and his own--and deeply internalized it in his philosophy. He used reason and logic to give himself identity when it was denied his community by the Inquisition, and denied himself by Jewish scholars and leaders. The product was a framework that not only made it possible for him to live, but also created a new manner of thinking that forms a cornerstone of modern philosophical thought.
Kathryn DeVito is a freelance writer in Washington.