Spinoza facing his Jewishness: the challenge of laïcité

Spinoza’s apostasy was long conceived as a veritable betrayal. Revolutionary, controversial, banished from the conservative circles of study, his thought saps the foundations of a tradition that until then had seemed immutable, marking a first step toward modernity. A precursor of biblical criticism, a herald of the movement of emancipation to which the Haskalah would later give its decisive impetus, Spinoza deliberately turned his back on sclerotic conceptual schemas and a sclerotic way of life, tainted with superstitions, refractory to all novelty. But if the term betrayal has often been used in his regard, it is not so much because the philosopher refused to submit to a multimillennial tradition, as because he is said, in Emmanuel Levinas’s words, to have “subordinated the truth of the Old Testament to that of the New.”¹ In a still severer spirit, one finds in Yitzhak Baer the following lines: “Spinoza is the only one (among the descendants of the Marranos) who, starting from a rejection of the Jewish tradition, sketched the contours of a new conception of history — antisemitic, of a singular kind […] His hatred of the Jews is, essentially, of Christian inspiration, but Christian faith is lacking in it… He is the first Jew to cut himself off from his religion and his people without effecting any official conversion to another religion.”² The passions, often, take precedence over objective analysis when it is a question of Spinoza. I propose to try, in these few lines, to understand the reasons for such animosity.

Son of one of the leaders of the community of Amsterdam, nourished on the Hebrew Bible, Spinoza distances himself, at barely twenty, from his community, abandons the yeshiva Keter Torah to study Latin and philosophy with a former Jesuit, then with Cartesian teachers at the University of Leiden, changes his first name from Baruch to Benedictus (such changes were frequent among Marranos eager for integration), reacts, by his own admission, only with a profound relief to the excommunication pronounced against him when he is but twenty-three, and presents Jesus, whom he does not hesitate to call the Christ, as the “way of salvation.” Expression of a resolute will to break with a mode of thought he judges erroneous, Spinoza’s attitude greatly resembles a renunciation. Yet, unlike a Uriel da Costa driven to suicide, or a Juan de Prado so tormented as to confess his error publicly, Spinoza will manifest, in appearance, neither regrets nor doubts. In a Holland reputed for its tolerance, but where the rabbinical and Calvinist authorities meant to impose on each person a preestablished mode of life and thought, he makes himself the champion of liberty of thought and action in the religious and political domains. He aspires to a religion stripped of all dogmatism and all ritual, a religion exclusively founded on “the cult of virtue,” the intellectual knowledge of God, and the search for the sovereign Good.

But before perceiving, in the lines of the Theological-Political Treatise (T.P.T.), this revolutionary modernism, the reader of the work is — it must be acknowledged — confronted with an ambiguity that can have no origin other than the ambivalence of Spinoza’s relation to his Jewish identity. One even has the feeling, when the philosopher evokes the “delirium” of the Rabbis,³ that he is settling his scores with the community that rejected him, relegating — consciously or not — his intellectual rigor to second place.

To understand this ambiguity, perhaps it is necessary to return briefly to Spinoza’s Marrano origins. A direct consequence of the Inquisition, crypto-Judaism, improperly called Marranism, forged within the Jewish communities of the Iberian peninsula and of the countries that received the exiles a new hybrid identity, difficult to grasp and the source of a psychological disequilibrium that long persisted, even once the danger had passed. Constrained, in order to survive, to display a façade of Catholicism, the conversos gave birth to a Judaism devoid of ritual, hence denatured, and tainted with Christian beliefs. Very schematically, two types of Marranos coexist in Spinoza’s environment: the true Ba’alei teshuva [penitents], sincere and convinced returnees, come back to an authentic Judaism, who plunge into a resolutely conservative attitude, follow the Halakha with an extreme — even extremist — rigor, and do not hesitate to denounce their heterodox coreligionists; and the intellectuals, or the less devout, who refuse to submit to a Law their families had long since neglected, a Law that seems to them foreign, anachronistic and coercive. Be that as it may, doubt, instability, a barely dissimulated atheism, and, for others, intransigence and sectarianism, seem to have been the major characteristics of these conversos or of their descendants. Many, moreover, lived in a latent feeling of guilt, conscious or unconscious. Uriel da Costa is doubtless one of the best examples of the ravages caused in men’s minds by Marranism. Finding answers to his questions neither in Christian dogmas nor in the Jewish practice he judges as absurd as it is alienating, he clashes with the Jewish and Calvinist authorities, whom he reproaches for their rigidity, even their obscurantism. After having denied the authority of the Talmud and the immortality of the soul (and after having called imbeciles all those who submitted to the Law!), he undergoes two excommunications. Unable to surmount this trauma, he takes his life in 1640, provoking deep turmoil in the community. Another excommunicated heretic, Juan de Prado, a friend of Spinoza, with whom he studied for a time at the yeshiva Keter Torah, is doubtless not unconnected to the hardening of the philosopher’s heterodox tendencies, even though it is established that the inquiry that was to lead to the philosopher’s herem was already under way when the two men became acquainted. Confronted with sectarian and intransigent rabbinical authorities, unable to adhere to beliefs he deems of another age, Prado retreats into a deism that denies any intervention of God in the course of history or of nature. Excommunicated twice, he too lives his herem very badly and feigns to retract, claiming nonetheless, simply, the right to belong to a community without accepting all its constraints, and in total liberty of conscience.

Yet, if excommunications were not rare in this Amsterdam community, eager to bring the descendants of the conversos back onto the “straight path,” the violence of the terms of the herem pronounced against Spinoza in 1656, when he had as yet published nothing, is unprecedented. The originality of this decree, accompanied by maledictions, is its irreversible character: “May the Eternal never pardon him his sins, may He kindle against this man all His wrath and pour out upon him all the evils mentioned in the Book of the Law. May his name be effaced in this world and forever…” While certain excommunications, even for apparently similar cases, were pronounced only for a determined length of time, longer or shorter, Spinoza, at 23, is excommunicated for life, with no possibility of reconciliation. What, then, was his fault? The archives are lacking to provide a precise answer to this question, if indeed such an answer ever existed. To detach oneself from a community, to study Latin (a step that was not exceptional in the Sephardic intellectual milieu, the Rabbis themselves often having a fairly good knowledge of Latin or Greek thought), or to forsake the synagogue — none of this suffices to justify such violence. It is therefore in the heresy of his thought that one must seek its causes, a thought already known to all even before any publication by the philosopher.

After being formed in a traditional Jewish school, Spinoza quickly perceives the limits of this teaching. Very young, it is toward the most rationalist philosophers, those who tend to display a keen critical sense, that Spinoza turns. An Ibn Gabirol, a Neoplatonist whose Jewish identity was not even perceived by the readers of the Fons vitae; an Ibn Ezra, the first Jewish thinker to have voiced doubts as to the authenticity of certain biblical texts (notably the second Isaiah); or even a Maimonides, who, as a good rationalist, rises up against a naïve understanding of the biblical anthropomorphisms. At the yeshiva, where he rubs shoulders with former Marranos, Spinoza rejects the traditional methods of study, judged anachronistic, dogmatic and sclerotizing. The intellectual effervescence that touches all of Europe in the course of the seventeenth century, and the heterodox tendencies of many Amsterdam intellectuals, contribute to giving birth in his mind to the first doubts. His acute intelligence, his critical sense and his love of truth will do the rest. As early as 1652, he is fully aware that to deepen his knowledge in philosophy, in science or in theology, he must learn Latin. Aged only some twenty years, Spinoza therefore joins the course of a former Jesuit, liberal and accused of atheism, Van den Enden. This step, which was of course not innocent for a Sephardic Jew raised in Hebrew culture and the respect of traditions, is doubtless the first step taken by the philosopher toward a rupture consummated later by his excommunication. It is in those years too that Spinoza discovers the thought of Descartes, who was winning ever more numerous adepts in the Holland where the French philosopher had settled. Now, in the eyes of the orthodox authorities of both camps, Cartesianism represented a danger for the true faith. Its ideas, liable to shake certainties and to lead to atheism, provoked debates that were virulent to say the least in the intellectual and religious milieus, Jewish and Christian. Yielding to this anti-Cartesian impulse, the universities of Utrecht (in 1642), then of Leiden (in 1646), condemned the philosophy of Descartes and forbade its teaching. This interdict was nonetheless defied by numerous professors whom Spinoza frequented at the end of the 1650s. It is therefore quite possible that the violence of Spinoza’s herem also had political motivations: Spinoza’s Cartesianism being known to all, it was important to prove to the civil and religious authorities of Amsterdam that the Jewish community tolerated within its midst not the slightest heresy, whether religious or philosophical. When they had been officially welcomed in Amsterdam, in 1619, the Jews had in fact received the injunction never to harm, in any manner whatsoever, the Christian religion.

Be that as it may, between 1654, the year of his father’s death, and 1656, the year of the herem, Spinoza enters into a logic of refusal of the past that has often been interpreted, notably by Eliane Amado, as a refusal of the self: “What is proper to Spinoza’s existential position is to feel himself Jewish and to want to think otherwise.”⁴ The excess of certain accusations leveled against the Hebrews does seem to bear out such an interpretation. Spinoza reproaches the Jews for their erroneous conception of God, their total absence of universalist vision, their contempt — even their hatred — of the Other, their obstinacy in perpetuating an anachronistic ritual which, in the absence of a State, has lost all legitimacy. The feeling of election, expression of the “arrogance” of the Jews, even becomes for the philosopher the principal source of anti-Judaism: taking up ancestral Christian arguments, Spinoza goes so far as to justify the hatred of which the Jews are victims, accusing them of having deliberately closed themselves off to the nations that nonetheless received them, of not having understood that “true joy and beatitude consist, for each person, only in the enjoyment of the good, and not in the glory of being alone in enjoying it, the others being excluded from it.”⁵ Now, everyone knows to what extent election appears, on the contrary, in numerous biblical texts, as the mark of an exemplary severity of God toward this people, which had to be more demanding of itself than of others: when Amos declares, “I have chosen you among all the families of the earth,” he adds, “that is why I will call you to account for all your sins.”⁶ An attentive reading of the Bible permits one to confirm unequivocally that election, far from being a gratuitous gift, implied above all an irreproachable moral conduct, without which the Covenant could at any moment be called into question. Moreover, never did the prophets, and still less the Talmud — which affirms that “the righteous of all the nations will have a part in the world to come” — exclude the non-Jewish peoples from what Spinoza calls “the enjoyment of the Good,” provided, of course, that they submitted to the Noachide laws, that is, to the laws of the most elementary and most universal morality. What Spinoza judges to be the hatred of the Other is in reality only the hatred of idolatry, of violence and of debauchery.

These accusations are not, however, the points of Spinozist thought most unacceptable to the orthodox of the community. By professing the identity of God and Nature, Spinoza saps the foundations of biblical thought (both Jewish and Christian) in all its components: divine transcendence, creation, revelation, prophecy, miracles, finality, free will — all these notions are denied, with philosophical arguments to support them. The most widespread error, Spinoza shows, is to consider Creation as a free and voluntary choice of God, who, henceforth, “would dispose all things” for man. The philosopher’s pantheist system leaves no place for the personal God of the Bible, a God free to act as He sees fit, a monarch, legislator or supreme judge, intervening in the course of our lives or of history, modifying the natural laws by miracle, and dispensing chastisements or rewards. Spinoza thus deprives God of all the anthropomorphic attributes the Bible lends Him, from the coarsest — the hand, speech, hearing, movement through space — to the most subtle: love, compassion, anger or jealousy. What he continues nonetheless, by convention or so as not to be accused of atheism, to call God, is in reality only the eternal and immutable Substance without which “nothing can be or be conceived,”⁷ a God, therefore, who exists only philosophically speaking. In this system, the prophet is no more than a man endowed with a fertile imagination, who did not hesitate — whether or not he was himself the dupe of his own teachings — to deceive his faithful: “To seek wisdom and the knowledge of natural and spiritual things in the books of the prophets is to depart entirely from the straight path.”⁸ As for the miracle, conceived as a derogation from the fixed and immutable order of Nature, it is reduced to an unusual event, which the Ancients, in their ignorance of its cause, attributed to God. The power of Nature being the very power of God, to admit that God could act contrary to the natural laws would mean “that He acts contrary to His own nature, and nothing can be more absurd.”⁹

There was already here enough to wound profoundly the consciences of a community in want of orthodoxy. But had he held to these philosophical opinions, Spinoza would have been only the revolutionary precursor of biblical criticism and of modern Judaism. The problem is that he does not content himself with engaging in an objective and rational study of the kind that would be conducted by the proponents of biblical criticism: after denouncing the limits of Moses’s teaching, he presents Christ as the way of salvation: “United immediately to God, he is the eternal son of eternal wisdom, and that is why he is the way of salvation.”¹⁰

Drawn, like many conversos, by certain aspects of Christianity, and notably by a universalist ambition that seems to oppose Jewish particularism, Spinoza is evidently far more indulgent toward the contradictions inherent in the New Testament than toward those he denounces in the Hebrew Bible. Without in any way justifying his thought, he attributes to Jesus qualities he refuses to Moses: Christ, according to him, would incarnate the Wisdom of God and would surpass the limits of human nature: “For Christ was not a prophet but the mouth of God.”¹¹ Whereas Moses is said to have proclaimed only laws useful for maintaining social cohesion and civil peace, Jesus, for his part, is said to have taught only the laws of universal morality. Perhaps the attitude of the Rabbis toward the philosopher, and the omnipresence of a superstition of another age, are responsible for these provocations. Doubtless, too, Spinoza wished to spare his Christian readers, who were largely in the majority. His intellectual honesty constrains him, to be sure, to acknowledge that the incarnation, the resurrection and the ascension, contrary to the laws of nature, are unacceptable to reason: concerning the notion of incarnation he writes: “To say that God took on a human form […] seems to me no less absurd than to say that the circle took on the form of a square.”¹² But he who refused to interpret the biblical anthropomorphisms metaphorically, on the pretext that they were not belied by other passages of the same Scriptures, does not hesitate to suggest a metaphorical interpretation of the resurrection, knowing full well, however, that Christianity conceives of this resurrection as a perfectly real phenomenon.

Spinoza, who meant to make of his philosophy a model of rigor, and for whom a life under the guidance of reason was the proper attribute of the free man, did not, then, escape the grip of a certain passion, which often plunges into perplexity the reader who would expect to find in the Treatise the mathematical coldness of the Ethics. In his presentation of Christianity and in his rejection of Judaism, the flagrant bias — even the bad faith — of certain accusations with polemical accents cannot but leave a doubt hovering over the intellectual serenity of the philosopher. It is quite evident that the echoes — traumatizing, whatever he may have said about it — of his herem “are quite perceptible through Spinoza’s language, which, when he comes to speak of the Jews, loses all philosophical sang-froid.”¹³

And yet, the Spinozist critique is no more that of a Christian, and “his Christ,” Geneviève Brykman shows very rightly, is “so little Christian, both from the point of view of the historical figure and on the doctrinal plane,”¹⁴ that Spinoza’s apparent attraction to Christianity is hardly credible. Despite a certain admiration for the message and the person of Jesus, it was never a question for him of adopting another faith, of replacing one revealed religion with another. He refuses just as much the miracles of Christianity as those of Judaism, scorns the intolerance of the clergy, denounces all ritual and every form of violence linked to religion: “I have many times seen with astonishment men proud to profess the Christian religion, that is, love, joy, peace […] combat one another with an incredible malevolent ardor.”¹⁵ Nor does he hesitate to hold up to derision certain Christian practices: to Albert Burgh, a Protestant converted to Catholicism, who told him he had attained knowledge and the way of salvation, Spinoza responds with an acerbic irony: “Misguided young man, who could have so fascinated you as to make you believe that you have swallowed the supreme and eternal Being, and that you possess Him in your entrails?”¹⁶

In reality, it is the Christians themselves, the first readers of Spinoza, who, by seizing on his apology for Christ, greatly contributed to arousing, in Jewish readers, distrust and rejection. It is important not to lose sight, through an analysis too oriented — should I say too Christian — of the T.P.T., of the philosopher’s original design: to preserve the liberty of thought and action of each person, whatever his affiliation. Spinoza wants to accede to the universal, far from all particularism, or, in a “fashionable” terminology, far from all communitarianism. Despite biting critiques and attacks doubtless in large part imputable to the context in which they are inscribed, he seeks to strip Judaism of all that is for him merely anachronistic ritual and superstition. The violent terms of the herem could only confirm him, if confirmation were needed, in his already firmly established opinion, according to which prejudices “reduce reasonable men to the state of brute beasts, by preventing all free use of judgment, all distinction of the true from the false.”¹⁷

If betrayal supposes a “going over to the enemy,” Spinoza, despite a few regrettable “slips,” did not, then, betray. He was simply ahead of his time. A century later, Cartesianism had made its way, and Mendelssohn was struggling vigorously against the very principle of the herem. In 1796, the civic emancipation of the Dutch Jews had been proclaimed, stipulating at last that “every Jewish person could decide on the expression to give to his Jewishness.”¹⁸ This proclamation would have allowed Spinoza to occupy, within his own community, the place he deserved. But in the seventeenth century, the secularization of Judaism — as of Christianity — was not on the agenda, and belonging to a religious community still supposed the unconditional acceptance of its laws. By refusing to see Judaism systematically reject all adaptation to the demands of modernity, and remain obstinately shut within the intellectual and spiritual frontiers of the ghetto, Spinoza laid the groundwork for a secularization of Jewish society, pursued in the eighteenth century by the Haskalah, then by the Reform movement that gave birth to liberal Judaism. In a difficult context, at a moment when minds were not yet ready for it, he gave birth to a hitherto inconceivable concept, that of the secular Jew. And the paradox is that he is in this the heir of the prophetic movement that already subordinated ritual to ethics: “When you offer me holocausts and oblations, I do not accept them… Spare me the noise of your songs, that I hear no more the sound of your lutes. But let good right gush forth like water, justice like a torrent that never runs dry!”¹⁹ In Spinoza’s humanist ethics, an ethics freed from dogmas and superstitions, the True is the only means of acceding to Joy, which is the union between the mind and God. As a precursor of modernity, this so controversial philosopher did but call with all his heart for a cult that would consist “in justice and charity alone, that is, in the love of one’s neighbor.”²⁰ And whatever he may have said of it, Emmanuel Levinas was not so very far removed from it…

Notes