It is a testament to Spinoza that he still provokes controversy - The Jewish Chronicle

Baruch (Benedict de) Spinoza (1632-77) was the most important Jewish philosopher in history and one of the most important thinkers in the history of the Western World. Since he had much to say about Jews, Judaism and the ancient biblical scriptures, and considered himself a major expert in Hebrew, it matters how we interpret his relationship to Jewish religious tradition, culture and ethical thought and to the Jewish people more generally.

Spinoza was cherished and prized as one of the most ethically inspiring and uplifting of all thinkers by such creative geniuses of the Jewish people as Heinrich Heine, Moses Hess, Albert Einstein and David Ben-Gurion. But a longstanding viewpoint among Jewish writers and thinkers (of whom the renowned German Jewish academic and philosopher Hermann Cohen was the foremost representative) insisted on a very different view. Cohen (1842-1918) was one of the first Jews to become a full professor in Germany, and long maintained that Spinoza “hated the Jews and Judaism” and that this irreparable blot on his reputation is evident from his writings.

In December 2015, a symposium was organised in Amsterdam, “The Case Spinoza”. The focus was the herem (synagogue ban) imposed on Spinoza in July 1656 for openly defying rabbinic authority and questioning the sacred character of the Torah. Is the herem still relevant today? Should it be lifted? Many scholars present including myself suggested it should. But the symposium produced no result.

When my fellow Spinoza specialist Yitzhak Melamed, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, agreed to participate in making a film about Spinoza that was projected to include him being filmed speaking about the philosopher from within the complex of buildings around the 17th-century Portuguese Synagogue of Amsterdam, as well as inside the synagogue itself, Melamed was refused permission. A forthright letter from Rabbi Joseph Serfaty contended that his request “to create a film about this Epicouros in our synagogue… is incompatible with our centuries-old halachic, historic and ethical tradition and an unacceptable assault on our identity and heritage”. The rabbis and parnasim of the Amsterdam community “excommunicated Spinoza and his writings with the severest possible ban, a ban that remains in force for all time and cannot be rescinded”.

The filming request was refused and Melamed declared persona non grata in the Amsterdam synagogue complex, though the Ma’amad afterwards apologised to Professor Melamed for what had happened, saying that Rabbi Serfaty did not have their authority to act as he did.It is true that Spinoza was expelled under the “severest possible ban” and after his expulsion from the Jewish community on paper remained for the rest of his life extremely hostile to rabbis, orthodox rabbinic authority and strict orthodoxy. But did he hate Judaism? All the earliest sources for Spinoza’s life, including comments of his own, agree that his chosen initial sphere of study over many years, both before and for a time even after 1656, was the Hebrew language, Bible, and rabbinic law. His formal education within the Sephardic congregation probably did not continue after around 1645, and later reports that the young Spinoza studied to become a rabbi (which would have entailed graduating to the higher classes of the community school) seemingly have no basis in fact as the names of these students were recorded and his does not figure on the lists.

Nevertheless, over the next decade, from around 1644-45, while obliged to work part of his time in his father’s business trading with Portugal, the Canaries and North Africa, he continued seeking knowledge — but now as a freelance, independent-minded, inquiring youth, reading and studying largely on his own, something he was accustomed to do throughout the remainder of his life.

Furthermore, from contemporary testimony we know that until 1655 or 1656 he attended evening gatherings and adult education discussion classes at the synagogue, a component central to the Amsterdam Sephardic community culture, at the time composed largely of newcomers to formal Judaism (and the Low Countries) arriving from Iberian lands. Debate in these evening gatherings centred on issues of Torah and rabbinic law presided over by the rabbis, who were also the community’s head teachers. It was especially there, as for example the Sephardic poet-chronicler Daniel Levi de Barrios records, that Spinoza outspokenly challenged rabbinic explanations and claims.

It is fairly clear that Spinoza was expelled for defying rabbinic authority and for arguing that there is nothing sacred about the ancient scriptures or the Hebrew language: “For Scripture would be no less divine even if written in different words or a different language,” as he says in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus of 1670. For the rest of his life he remained vigorously hostile to “Pharisees”, the ancient sect from which he thought rabbinic tradition derived, and indeed to all strict orthodoxy, which he considered a distorted derivative from ancient Israelite tradition. But he was clearly considerably more sympathetic to the more flexible, less dogmatic Sadducees and to the ethical and political traditions of the ancient Israelites, especially in their “republican” period, the time of the Judges, before they made the mistake, as he saw it, of opting for monarchy under Saul and David. He was emphatic in maintaining that the ancient Israelite republic deserved our admiration for being better at guarding the peace with its neighbours and maintaining equitable social harmony within than most other forms of state.

Paradoxically, then, where Spinoza felt resentful of the religious establishment of his time, and bitterly opposed what he viewed as the fabrications of the Pharisees and rabbis, he felt a strong connection to the ancient Israelites and their republic and a still deeper connection, for all its fragmentariness and shortcomings, to the Hebrew language. Both immediately after 1656 and also in later life he had friendly relations and held conversations with Sephardic Jews, several of whom were observant.

If Spinoza was in reality not at all hostile to the culture and traditions of ancient Israelite society and religion, it is also true that he positively loved Hebrew as a language, a field he continued to study until his dying day — even if his views on Hebrew grammar and language diverged sharply from the accepted views of both Jews and Christians in his day. Spinoza held that in the condition in which it survived, after the Babylonian, Assyrian, Hellenistic and Roman massacres and persecutions of the Jews, Hebrew was actually more stunted, corrupted and depleted than other languages — and, being more fragmentary and depleted (with virtually no surviving words for most different kinds of birds and plants), there is also nothing holy or uniquely significant about it, something no other contemporary, Jewish or Christian, was prepared to say.

If his Jewish upbringing and education explains why in later life his non-Jewish friends sought to draw on his expertise in Hebrew and discuss interpretation of Hebrew words and phrases with him, this does not explain why, after provoking general uproar in Dutch society and far beyond with his Tractatus in 1670, Spinoza still ploughed on with his researches into Hebrew, still pondered the idiosyncrasies of the language while compiling an (unfinished) Hebrew grammar, which was first published in 1678 — and which he rightly believed, for all its defects and merits, differed radically in character from all previous Hebrew grammars.

Spinoza even hoped to usefully retranslate, for the enlightenment of his contemporaries, large parts of the Old Testament into Dutch (or Latin, it is not clear which), apparently composing a manuscript draft translation of a large part of the Torah which, dissatisfied with, he later burnt shortly before his death.

Jonathan Israel is Professor Emeritus of Modern European History at Princeton. His latest book, ‘Spinoza, Life and Legacy’, is published by OUP

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Jewish history