Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (71 page)

In a culture conditioned to think in categories of Cartesian dualism or of a pre-Copernican cosmology that split the heavens and the earth, Spinoza was taken either as an atheist who reduced everything to matter (at various times, of course, both Christians and Jews had been taken to be atheists) or as a pantheist who believed God was everywhere. Descartes saw everything from the point of view of the detached and thinking "I." Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), especially in his
Critique of Pure Reason,
would dismiss the idea that the world seen from the point of view of the thinking subject could be reliably known, since perception is always filtered through categories of perception like space and time. But Spinoza's hope, whether his critics grasped it or not, was to see the world from the point of view not of the self, not of its condition in space and time, but of God. Reason, he believed, pointed human beings toward nothing less.
Sub specie aeternitatis
defined for Spinoza the meaning of happiness and the content of salvation.

There were limits to his thought—for example, the leap to "eternity" takes the bondage of time with too little seriousness, and it misses the sacred character of time as well. In such a system, there can be an angelic flight from the world as it is, and the angelic can be as inhuman as the demonic. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz (1646–1716), his near contemporary, was like Spinoza in pursuing mathematics as a way of knowing the mind of God, but he missed the complexity of Spinoza's thought, which led Leibnitz to accuse Spinoza of reducing creatures to mere "modes or accidents"
¹²
of divine being. Such criticism notwithstanding, it is impossible to encounter Spinoza in a narrative like this and not be struck by the deep humanity of his vision. Because he took nature so seriously, effectively rejecting the distinction between the sacred and the profane, he influenced the development of mathematics and science, which in his system were nothing less than a pursuit of the holy. And because he affirmed the godliness of every person, he contributed to the growing acceptance of religious tolerance not only as a primordial public virtue but as a measure of true piety. But this is the way we read Spinoza now, aware that after him scientists lost a sense of the sacred, with deadly results, and that a thoroughly secularized politics proved to be, if anything, even more intolerant than the ancient theocracies.

In his own time, even in Calvinist Holland, Spinoza was investigated by the Spanish Inquisition, which sent spies to Amsterdam, perhaps anticipating a reconquest of the Dutch republics. In 1659, little more than half a century after Spinoza's father's mother was denounced as a Jew to the Inquisition in Portugal, a Dominican priest. Fray Tomás Solano y Robles, reported to the Inquisition of Madrid that he had met with Spinoza in Holland, and that Spinoza was "content to maintain the heresy of atheism, since [he] felt that there was no God except philosophically speaking (as [he] had declared), and that souls died with bodies, and that faith was unnecessary."
¹³
Not surprisingly, each of Solano's assertions fails to do justice to the nuances of Spinoza's thought, but others misread him too. For a time, he was banished from Amsterdam by the civil authorities, and in 1670, the Calvinist Synod of North Holland banned his recent
Theologico-Political Treatise.
This work affirmed what we recognize as basic tenets of human rights and constitutional polity, including the anti-theocratic idea that only a secular government can uphold the freedom of conscience of every citizen. Nothing had driven home the importance of that freedom in his own life more than the experience he had had years earlier in his own Jewish community.

Before being banned by the Calvinists and investigated by the Catholics, Spinoza had been excommunicated by the Amsterdam synagogue. That was in 1656, when the philosopher was just twenty-three years old, before he had published anything. It is not clear what offense of thought or behavior drew that wrath down on him. His pious father had died in 1654. Records show that until 1655, Spinoza himself was attending synagogue regularly and contributing to its support. The decree of excommunication begins, "The Lords of the Mahamad announce that having long known of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch d'Espinosa, they have endeavored by various means and promises to turn him from his evil ways."
¹⁴

Clearly, Spinoza's later articulation of religious tolerance, based on the equality of sects, could have been taken to undercut Judaism's sense of itself as the chosen of God; his notion of God's immanence in nature could have been understood as idolatrous; his rejection of a three-tiered pre-Copernican cosmology could be read as a violation of Scripture; his dismissal of the anthropomorphic idea of God prevalent among both Jews and Christians could seem impious; and in any case, his study of Descartes and other heterodox thinkers would have been a grave violation. The rigidities of the age affected Jews, too, and it is easy to grasp the offense the mature Spinoza might have represented, and to guess that, even when young, he was an unconventional thinker. Still, there is something tragic in the way his Jewish contemporaries seem to have missed Spinoza's echoing of Luria's idea of
tsimtsum,
the self-emptying of God into creation, for it is here that the kernel of the philosopher's great idea can be found.
¹⁵
If those who knew him best dismissed him, it is no wonder that others would follow in a shallow reading of his work. "We order that nobody should communicate with him," the decree concludes, "neither in writing, nor accord him any favor, nor stay with him under the same roof nor within four cubits in his vicinity, nor shall he read any treatise composed or written by him."
¹⁶
Baruch would be Benedict from now on.

Perhaps Spinoza was driven to tolerance as an act of self-defense. In a later age, such would be said of Jews when they became advocates of civil liberties. What matters for us is that Spinoza composed a first draft of a pluralistic ideal, one that would take hold in the political imaginations of, among others, transients passing through Holland just then on their way to North America. For that matter, Spinoza's ideas seem to have influenced John Locke, who spent some years exiled in Holland not long after Spinoza's death, in 1677. Locke was in flight from the religious intolerance holding sway in England.
¹⁷

Just as Catholic authoritarianism would be undone by a nascent liberal democratic spirit that Spinoza helped to shape, so the Protestant (both Calvinist and Lutheran) denigration of humankind as infinitely unworthy of an all-powerful and distant God gave way to an Enlightenment hope that humans could take responsibility for their lives and the world, a hope tied to Spinoza's idea that humans participate in the divine. To repeat, for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Spinoza would be either neglected or dismissed as an atheist or misunderstood as having been a "God-intoxicated" pantheist
¹⁸
whose notion that everything is divine made scientific objectivity impossible. But in the years immediately after his death, an incubation period of modernity, Spinoza's influence was widely felt. His ideas, Leibnitz said in 1704, were "stealing gradually into the minds of men of high station who rule the rest and on whom affairs depend, and slithering into fashionable books, are inclining everything towards the universal revolution with which Europe is threatened."
¹⁹
The century of revolution did, of course, break over Europe. If Spinoza is little credited with the beneficial effects of the birth of liberal democracy, not to mention of a theology freed from superstition,
²⁰
it should not surprise us, given this history, that he would nevertheless be blamed for the negative aspects of a revolutionary era. Marxists, but not Marx, would claim him as a progenitor of their dialectical materialism. When Spinoza's celebration of nature was cut loose from its mooring in God, and when the shift from theological to secular states was accompanied by monstrous acts of violence, it could seem that the new intoxication was for blood. In that context, the fact of Spinoza's Jewishness—"a renegade lew and the Devil," as a condemning synod of the Reformed Church had put it
²¹
—would always be highlighted. It would be as if by hating Spinoza as a father of modernism, his accomplishments could be reduced to an act of revenge on behalf of Iberian Jewry. Voltaire, to whom we turn now, is an exemplar of this racist reduction, a demonstration of how even the liberalizing forces of the Enlightenment could be turned, according to the ancient pattern, against the very people who had helped prepare for them. Of Spinoza the great French philosopher wrote in 1772: "Then a little Jew, with a long nose and wan complexion I ... Walking with measured tread, approached the great Being. / Excuse me, he said, speaking very low, / But I think, between ourselves, that you don't exist."
²²

41. Voltaire and the False Promise of Emancipation

E
MANCIPATION,
" in its Latin root, refers to a son's being set free from the domination of his father, and that was surely the essence of it for Heinrich Marx, who, against his rabbi father, prided himself on being a man of the Enlightenment. He believed, with the philosophes who came after the misread Spinoza, that the mysteries of existence could be accounted for by the methods of natural science, by reason alone. Thus, Heinrich Marx's Jewish religion was nothing to him. As a young lawyer starting out in Trier early in the nineteenth century, he had the tremendous advantage, at first, of perfect timing. The French Revolution had marked a new day. As is always true in history, all that preceded the storming of the Bastille had prepared for it, yet the summer of 1789 was a true rupture in time. After the Revolution, the intellectual, political, social, even the religious landscape would never look the same. One of the great thresholds of history, transforming everything, including the human mind, the French Revolution was bound to alter the place of Jews, and it did.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man—"Men are born and remain free and equal in rights"—meant that rights would now be seen as residing in individuals, not in governments or institutions.
¹
Therefore, rights are not bestowed, and cannot be taken away. Power resides neither in tradition nor in any institution, whether of the social-political order or of the Church, but in individual freedom. The principle, of necessity, extended to all persons. That included Jews, too, as was made clear by the French National Assembly's Law Relating to Jews, passed on November 13, 1791. Not since before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70
C.E.
had Jews been full citizens of a state anywhere in the world, but now in France they were just that. The human leap forward represented by the ideals of
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité
nowhere proves its authenticity more powerfully than in its inclusion of Jews, the pariah people of Europe. Yet in relation to Jews, the dark side of such idealism would be evident as well. The Revolution's new age, as defined by its most extreme adherents, assumed a "new" human being. Those who proved to be "old" human beings, whether by attachments to the king, to the Church, or only to the wrong faction, were simply killed. In 1793, under Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre (1758–1794), the Reign of Terror showed what happens to those who prove unable or unwilling to reinvent themselves according to the demands of civic "virtue."
²

In the case of Jews, the reinvention assumed the renunciation of Jewish "nationhood," as if, after fifteen hundred years of enforced separation, Jewish identity could be reduced to "mere" religion, as the philosophes had reduced Christianity; as if Jewish cult and culture could be reduced to Sabbath candles and circumcision, both of which are practiced in private. But custom and piety could no longer be publicly at the service of the group. "To the Jew as an individual—everything," one deputy of the National Assembly declared; "to the Jews as a nation—nothing."
³
Another participant in the assembly debate ominously defined the meaning of such a principle: "Let us begin by destroying all the humiliating signs which designate them as Jews, so that their garb, their outward appearance, shows us that they are fellow citizens." Was the Enlightenment offer of such uniformity all that different from Torquemada's? An optimistic Jew could think so. "Let us restore them to happiness," Robespierre said, summing up the program, "by restoring to them the dignity of human beings and of citizens."
⁴
It is useful to recall that the full title of the National Assembly's Declaration of Rights indicates a limited reach, since it refers to the "Rights of Man
and Citizen
." Robespierre, known as "the Incorruptible," enforced his idea of citizenship with the guillotine, the weighted blade of which soon enough took his head, too.

The structure of the Jewish kinship system, rooted in the biblical idea of peoplehood but shaped in the millennium-long experience of exclusion, was a mystery to those outside it. Jewish religion was attached to Jewish "nationhood" like flesh to bone, soul to body. The frame of reference of even avowedly secular figures was still Christianity, which had evolved differently. Jewish leaders, including the so-called Great Sanhedrin convened by Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), would not, or could not, make such distinctions clear. Judaism would come to be seen solely as a religion, a category that, especially as diluted by the Cartesian dualism of the Enlightenment, would be far too thin to contain the multifaceted complexity of Jewish life.
⁵
There was a fuse attached to this miscomprehension, and eventually it would explode the ideal of emancipation, and much else. But in the early period, when the hopes of many were running high, and when the shifting tectonic plates of the new society were still settling, real openings appeared, and Jews moved to fill them. They were the greatest beneficiaries of the Revolution, as the Roman Catholic Church, after the monarchy itself, was its greatest casualty.