Spinoza

Richard H. Popkin

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781780744698
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This authoritative new introduction draws on both Richard H. Popkin's unparalleled scholarship and a wealth of historical and philosophical sources to highlight the real influences behind Spinoza's thought.
Popkin reconstructs Spinoza the man, and his theories, contrasting these findings with some of the popularity held misconceptions. Locating him within the context of his family and background, the author assesses the impact on Spinoza of everything from his infamous excommunication, to his affection for Euclidian geometry and the work of Descartes.
With a full account of Spinoza's groundbreaking Tractatus and Ethics, and an overview of his influence on both of his contemporaries and those who were to folow, this concise survey offers a variety of new perspectives, and will be warmly welcomed by students, scholars and interested readers alike.

Chapter One

The Jewish community

Spinoza was born on November 24, 1632 in Amsterdam, the son of a Jewish Portuguese mother and father. Practicing Jews had been expelled from Spain in 1492 and a large number of them went to Portugal. In 1497 the Portuguese Jews were given a choice of accepting Christianity or being banished. Many of the Jews who remained both in Spain and Portugal, and who were forcibly converted to Christianity, secretly retained some of their Jewish affiliation. The Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions were established to police the activities of the converted Jews (conversos) and to find out which of the conversos were marranos (people who still secretly practiced some aspect of Judaism). The Inquisition had no control over unconverted Jews, who were not considered heretics since they were not Christians, but it did have jurisdiction over the converted and baptized Jews. Spinoza’s parents, who were crypto-Jews, or marranos, had been arrested in Portugal and charged with carrying on Jewish practices. They confessed and promised not to do it again and were released with fines and social disabilities, such as wearing a jacket on which was written the crimes that they had committed. This garment was also hung in the church so everyone would know their situation. If they were found backsliding again, the penalty could be death at the stake. Rather than risk this, Spinoza’s parents fled from Iberia, going first to France and then to the Netherlands.⁵

From the early seventeenth century, a free Jewish society had developed in the northern Netherlands that attracted a stream of persecuted Sephardic Jews,* such as Spinoza’s parents, from Spain, Portugal, Italy, and France. The territory was originally under the control of the Duke of Burgundy. In the early sixteenth century, when Charles V, who was the duke, became the king of Spain, control of the Netherlands passed to the Spanish crown. Charles’s son, Philip, sought to unite the parts of his father’s empire, including the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands, and to impose uniform laws on them. The northern Netherlands rebelled against Spanish inquisitorial persecution of Protestants in what is now Belgium. The rebellion began when the Spanish authorities tried to establish the Inquisition in the southern Netherlands. Centers of rebellion developed at Leiden and other northern cities. The Dutch, after a stubborn fight, managed to separate from Spanish control in 1568 and over the following years developed into an independent country consisting of seven provinces and the city of Amsterdam. After the rebellion, there was a problem of who was in charge of the Dutch territories. The highest official, the prince of Orange, was called the “stadholder,” that is, the regent holding the territory for the monarch. This new nation had no clear sovereignty and the society developed as a compromise between the Calvinist House of Orange and the political forces in the various Dutch provinces.⁶

In 1619, the Synod of Dordrecht tried to establish a unified religion for the new state. However, it quickly became clear that there was a great split within the most powerful group, the Calvinists, and that there was enormous diversity of religious belief throughout the country. Some of this was the result of a large Catholic population in the southern part of the Netherlands – half the population was Catholic at the time – and another element was the various religious groups that either developed within the country or came from other lands. A book published in 1673 called La Religion des Hollandois (The Religion of the Dutch) claimed that the Netherlands was a religious madhouse, having over a hundred different religions functioning at the same time.⁷ The orthodox Dutch Reform Church regarded itself as the established church and tried to control religious diversity through its edicts. However, the Netherlands was the economic and commercial center of colonial trade, with commerce passing through the country to the rest of Europe and beyond. Any attempt that interfered with commercial developments was resisted, such as the effort to impose religious uniformity. Most of the time the government would choose not to go along with attempts by the orthodox Calvinists to bring about religious conformity, finding it more beneficial for the economic development of the country to permit a wide diversity of religion. Although attempts to make Catholicism illegal did become law, this law was not enforced. Hence, the Netherlands became the most religiously tolerant part of Europe by default and not by a constitutional process. As traders from all over the world came to Amsterdam, various religious groups settled there and the Dutch authorities made minimal efforts to control and contain them.⁸

Many Dutch Protestants, like their English counterparts, the Puritans, saw the great change in their nation as part of the preparation for the Millennium, the second coming of Jesus and his thousand-year reign on earth. Dutch religious writers were excited about the theological significance of their military victory over the Catholic Spaniards, the rapid development of their new economy, and their success over the watery forces of nature (they had figured out how to clear the water off the land with the help of dyke construction, windmills and canals and how to make agriculture and commerce flourish in what had been a marshy terrain). Within this outlook, the role of the Jews took on a special significance. According to the Book of Revelation, the Jews would convert freely and spiritually to Christianity as the penultimate step before the return of Jesus. As a result, the Jewish community in the Netherlands was cultivated by Protestant leaders in the hope that signs of their conversion would soon become apparent.⁹

Early in the seventeenth century, the Dutch political authorities also began to take notice of Spanish and Portuguese Jews living in the Dutch Republic. They first regarded them as cohorts of their Spanish enemies because they spoke Spanish. When they discovered they had also been persecuted by the Spaniards they agreed to let them carry on their religious life in the Netherlands. Although the Jewish community in Amsterdam at the time was operating in a Christian society, it was not under the usual rules and regulations that governed Jews in other Christian lands such as Germany or Italy. The question of what status the Jews had was partially worked out in some unwritten regulations of 1616 that made it legal for Jews to have their own private religious services as long as they did not commit blasphemy or annoy their Christian neighbors. In the accepted rules, the Jews were told not to write anything against Christianity and not to publish anything that would cause scandal, whatever that might be. The Dutch authorities seemed to have had only a vague idea of the new world they were entering into by allowing a non-Christian group to have a legally protected status. In the course of the next fifty years, the Jewish community and the surrounding Dutch Christian community had to test what was acceptable to each side. The Jews were not encased in a ghetto but could live wherever they pleased. This led to social mixing that was unusual for its time. Some of the discussions indicate that the authorities and the Dutch society were upset by sexual interaction and by certain kinds of economic activities, including extravagant memorial monuments and ostentatious home ornamentation. But these discussions also show that they were favorably impressed by how the Jewish community carried on its religious activities except when these became too boisterous.¹⁰

The question of exactly what Jews could or could not do was taken up by the distinguished legal authority Hugo Grotius, who was asked to formulate some laws that would define how Jews could function in a Christian society, albeit a diverse Christian society. Grotius proposed a moderate plan with some restrictions. But before his plan could be adopted, Grotius himself had to flee religious persecution.¹¹

In the end, the Dutch authorities made an informal agreement with the Spanish and Portuguese Jews that they could live openly in Amsterdam and other cities as long as they did not cause scandal or allow any of their religious brethren to become public charges. The Jewish community grew quickly. Its members were mainly marranos who had very little training in Judaism. The community basically created its own version of Jewish practices and beliefs, mingling freely with other religious groups. At first, they shared a building in which to worship with some English dissident Protestant groups, albeit, of course, at different times. They encouraged their neighbors to see how they practice their religion and Amsterdam soon became the only place in Europe where Christians could mingle freely with Jews in their synagogues and discuss their differing views. The Jewish community developed educational and cultural institutions to keep up their Iberian heritage and to guide their religious beliefs and practices. Services were conducted in Spanish and Portuguese and there were classes teaching more or less the same subjects as were taught in Catholic schools in Spain and Portugal.

Many of the Iberian Jews who came to the Netherlands were quickly engaged in international commerce. In the first half of the seventeenth century, Amsterdam became the center for the transport of goods from overseas empires into Europe and the center of international banking. Many Sephardic Jews took part in the Dutch economic miracle of the time and became wealthy. The leaders of the community were both the important commercial laymen and the rabbis. The power rested with the laymen (the parnassim) who appointed the rabbis and made the decisions for the community. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the community carefully protected the status of the parnassim as the ultimate authority. When rabbis from other parts of the world came and tried to get them to adopt certain views, the community would insist that only the parnassim could decide these matters. During this period the rabbis were selfselected, with little formal training, and treated as employees to be hired and fired at the will of the parnassim. To enforce any religious claims, the rabbis needed the backing of the parnassim, who were usually the wealthiest members of the group. Spinoza’s father, Michael Espinosa, served for a couple of years as a parnas.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that informal debates between Christians and Jews and criticisms of each other’s religion started occurring in the streets of Amsterdam. Also, after 1617, there are indications that criticisms of Christianity by Jews were being circulated in manuscript and that a professor at Leiden was attempting to refute these views. Elijah Montalto, the Jewish physician to Queen Marie de Medici of France, had written a critique of the Christian interpretation of Isaiah 53 and also a controversial work opposing his, Montalto’s, views to those of some Catholic theologians.

A different kind of anti-Christian work came on the scene sometime in the late 1620s. A Lithuanian Caraite rabbi, Abraham Isaac of Troki (1533–1594), had written a work in Hebrew in 1592 called Chizzuk Emunah (The Fortification of the Faith).¹² The manuscript is a very forceful attack on basic Christian concepts and arguments for the Christian interpretation of the Old Testament. The work appeared in several languages in Amsterdam – Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Dutch – and soon became very popular.¹³ Technically, it did not break the original understanding that the Jews would not write anti-Christian material in Amsterdam since this was written elsewhere and the wide distribution of the Troki manuscript suggests there was no effort to suppress it.¹⁴

Domestic anti-Christian works start appearing at the end of the 1650s. The first is the monumental writing of over four hundred pages by Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira, the chief rabbi of Amsterdam during Spinoza’s time, entitled Providencia de Dios con Israel. This was apparently written in 1659, a year before his demise. It is a massive, learned attack on Christian theology and dogma. Many manuscripts of it exist, some elegantly illustrated, some, like the Troki manuscript, looking like medieval illuminated manuscripts. In addition, Morteira gave sermons from the time he became a rabbi in Amsterdam. Recently 550 of his sermons have been discovered in Budapest by Professor Marc Saperstein, who is gradually analyzing them and making them available. These are Hebrew copies made by Morteira himself of sermons he gave in Portuguese. In these, there is a recurring theme of attacking Catholicism because of what it had done to the Spanish and Portuguese Jews and of showing the advantages of Judaism over the religion of Portugal and Spain. In the work written at the end of his life, the attack broadens to include Calvinism as well and to challenge the central theses of Christianity and to answer Christian anti-Jewish works such as those by Pablo de Santa Maria and Sixtus of Sienna.¹⁵

A few years later, two more Amsterdam Jewish intellectuals produced large anti-Christian writings – Isaac Orobio da Castro and Moses Raphael d’Aguilar. Orobio and d’Aguilar discussed their opposition to Christianity and their worries about deviant Jewish views.¹⁶ Orobio said on the flyleaf of a manuscript of his work that still exists in Amsterdam that he did not publish it for fear of causing scandal but that he sent it to the Jesuits in Brussels who liked it very much. Orobio’s explanation may account for why the others also did not publish. But perhaps a more interesting question is why they started writing these strong attacks on Christianity from 1659 onward. Such literature does not exist at any other time in Jewish history and each of these polemics was to have an important afterlife in the Enlightenment when they became available to non-Jewish readers.¹⁷

It was evidently acceptable to the Dutch Christian community that the synagogue could have open discussions in the sermons criticizing Christianity provided these were predominantly directed against Catholicism, the common enemy of the Dutch Calvinists and the Spanish and Portuguese Jews. As long as nothing was said about Jesus they avoided committing blasphemy on this score. An analysis of some of Morteira’s sermons indicates that there he used a sort of crypto language, whereby the former Christian, now Jewish, members of the audience would get a message that might escape other Christian listeners. In this way, the preacher could say things about Christianity obliquely which, if said directly, would have been blasphemous.¹⁸ Orobio de Castro also took part in a public disputation with the Protestant leader Philip van Limborch, a liberal Calvinist. This debate was published in 1687 and again in the early eighteenth century and attracted much attention; the volume is cited fairly often.

Probably the most virulent anti-Christian writing of the time is the work called the Porta Veritatis. It is not mentioned in any of the literature about anti-Christian writings of the time in the Netherlands. It surfaces for the first time we know of when Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, a teacher of Spinoza, sold a copy of it in 1655 or 1656 to the Regius professor of Hebrew at Cambridge, Ralph Cudworth. Menasseh was then in England negotiating the possible readmission of the Jews. Cudworth, who had just met him, asked him why he did not accept Christianity. Menasseh showed him this manuscript, the Porta Veritatis, in Latin and sold it to him for ten pounds. Cudworth spent a good deal of effort trying to refute it and his unfinished efforts are still in the British Library. He also complained to the authorities about it. It was willed by him to Bishop Richard Kidder of Bath and Wells, who said it was so awful that nobody but a true and believing Christian should be allowed to look at it and had it put under lock and key at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.¹⁹

While most of the other members of the Jewish community had been born in Christian lands as Catholics, and in some cases Protestants, and reverted to Judaism when they got to Amsterdam, young Spinoza was from the first generation of Jews born in Amsterdam who had never suffered from anti-Jewish regulations. He had learned a little about the persecutions in Spain from his parents and sermons in the synagogue. Did he also learn some of his later biblical criticism from the anti-Christian views being circulated in the Jewish community? Though he never refers to any of the unpublished anti-Christian polemics, similar arguments to those of Troki and others turn up in Spinoza’s critique of modern Bible interpreters. Spinoza’s argument for the unity of substance is close to Troki’s arguments against the doctrine of the Trinity. More relevant is that Spinoza’s evaluation of some of the biblical passages about divine activities strikes similar notes to Troki’s resistance to anthropological readings by Christians of his time. It is hard to imagine that Spinoza could have grown up in Amsterdam without coming into contact with this literature and without discussing it with others.

In the period leading up to Spinoza’s break with the Jewish community the records of the synagogue indicate that a lot of deviant behavior went on and that the efforts to set up a rigid society were not working at all. Congregants had to be told repeatedly that they should give up attending Christian church services, that they should not eat non-Kosher food, and things of this sort. In 1651, Isaac Lopes Suasso moved to Amsterdam and joined the synagogue. He was a merchant from Belgium who had lived his life up until then as a New Christian and his brother was professor of Catholic theology at Bordeaux. There is no evidence that Lopes Suasso was a marrano, secretly practicing Judaism. His decision to move to Amsterdam seems to have been guided by economic forces, moving his business from Antwerp to Amsterdam and marrying the daughter of Abraham de Pinto, who happened to be the richest Jewish merchant in Amsterdam. Lopes Suasso was made secretary treasurer of the group in 1653. The by-laws stated that one could only be a parnas after three years of membership but this was o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Jewish community
• 2 Early intellectual life in Amsterdam
• 3 The excommunication
• 4 Outside the synagogue: millenarian Protestantism and radical politics
• 5 Rijnsburg
• 6 The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus: religion and political society
• 7 The Ethics
• 8 Later life and posthumous influence
• Select Bibliography
• Notes
• Index