Spinoza's Excommunication by Steven Nadler

1656

With the judgment of the angels and with that of the saints, we put under herem, ostracize, and curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, with the consent of Blessed God and with the consent of this entire holy congregation, before these holy scrolls, with the 613 precepts that are written in them; with the harem that Joshua on put on Jericho, with the curse with which Elisha cursed the youth, and with all the curses that are written in the law. Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night, cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out, cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not forgive him. The fury and zeal of the Lord will burn against this man and bring upon him all the curses that are written in the book of laws. And may the Lord erase his name from under the heavens. And may the Lord separate him for evil from all the tribes of Israel, with all the curses of the covenant that are written in this book of law. And you that cleave unto the Lord your God, all of you alive today.

The document concludes with the warning that “no one should communicate with him orally or in writing, nor provide him any favor, nor be with him under the same roof, nor be within four cubits of him, nor read any paper composed or written by him.” It was the most vitriolic ban ever issued by that community in the 17^th century, and it was never rescinded.

The obvious question is, why was Spinoza excommunicated with such extreme prejudice? Neither his herem nor any document from the period tells us exactly what his ‘evil opinions and acts’ were supposed to have been, nor what ‘abominable heresies’ or ‘monstrous deeds’ he is alleged to have taught and practiced. He was only twenty-three years old at the time and had not yet published anything. Nor, as far as we know, had he even composed a treatise .Spinoza never referred to this period of his life in his extant letters. Turning away from his Jewish studies – and perhaps the Keter Torah yeshiva- to seek a  philosophical and scientific education elsewhere might have incited his “teachers” within the Jewish community, particularly Mortera. And the rabbis would surely not have been happy with is attending lessons at Van den Enden’s, if indeed  he was doing so at this time.[1] Moreover, if after the end of the period of mourning for his father he did begin to drift from regular attendance at the synagogue and proper observance of Jewish law (perhaps with regard to respect for the Sabbath or compliance with dietary laws) then the parnassim might have resorted to the threat of a herem to bring him back into the fold. But none of this is sufficient to explain the vehemence of his excommunication.

Spinoza would not have have been alone in his lax conformity to orthodox behavior . . . nor would he have been alone in frequenting gentile establishments or maintaining educational and intellectual communications with non-Jews. These Portuguese-Jewish merchants were in constant commercial and social contact with their Dutch neighbors and business associates. . .neither could the real problem have been Spinoza’s pursuit of secular learning. Amsterdam’s Portuguese Jews were not obscurantists inhabiting a cultural or intellectual ghetto. The rabbis were well read in the pagan classics of Greece and Rome, as well as in the modern classic of Holland, France, Italy and Spain. Even the kabbalistic Aboab owned works of such down-to –earth thinkers as Machiavelli, Montaigne, and (shockingly) Thomas Hobbes.

 One scholar has argued that Spinoza’s herem was directly related to the machinations he undertook to relieve himself of the debts he had inherited from his father and to establish himself as a privileged creditor on that bankrupt estate. Under Dutch law Spinoza had not reached the age of legal majority by the skin of his teeth,(he had already passed it in the eyes of the Jewish community) and furthermore, having already declared his willingness to take responsibility for his father’s account by settling with some creditors, he then had himself declared an orphan by the municipal authorities, thus relieving himself of any further responsibility.

The Amsterdam Sephardim did not recognize an heir’s claim to any part of an estate until all debts encumbered by that estate had been settled. Spinoza’s appeal to Dutch law circumvented financial traditions that had existed for centuries and undermining the Jewish community’s jealously guarded reputation for trustworthiness in business affairs,  shirking commitments to many Portuguese Jewish merchants. “Michael Spinoza’s financial disaster and Baruch Spinoza’s appeal for release from his father’s estate on the grounds of minority must have shaken the Jewish community.”

An yet, as compelling as Vlessing’s case is, the text of Spinoza’s herem suggests, rather explicitly, that his offense was more than just a matter of financial irregularity, even communal misbehavior that, by Jewish law, was illegal. . . it’s till hard to avoid the conclusion that it was precisely his ideas- ‘abominable, heresies and evil opinions’-that occasioned the final and irrevocable ostracism.

Evidence that this is so is found in a report that an Augustinian monk, Tomas Solano y Robles, made to the Inquisition in 1659 when he returned to Madrid after some traveling that had taken him to Amsterdam in 1658. The Spanish Inquisitors were no doubt interested in what was going on among the former marranos in northern Europe who had once been within its domain and who still had connections with conversos back home. Thomas told them that in Amsterdam he had met Spinoza and Prado, who were apparently keeping each other company after their respective excommunications. He claimed that both men told him they had been observant of Jewish law but ‘changed their mind’ and that they said that they were expelled from the synagogue because of their views on God, the soul and the law. They had, in the eyes of the congregation, ‘reached the point atheism.’

Charges of ‘atheism’ are notoriously ambiguous in early modern Europe and rarely provide a clue as to what exactly the subject of the accusation believed or said.[2] But if we take as our guide Spinoza’s written works, most of which were not published until after his death, it is not difficult to imagine the kinds of things he must have been thinking –and probably saying –around late 1655 and early 1956, particularly with the help of Brother Tomas’s report, as well as the report made to the Inquisition  on the following day by Captain Miguel Perez de Maltranilla, another recent visitor to Amsterdam. For all Spinoza’s writings, both those he completed and those unfinished contain ideas on whose systematic elaboration he was working continuously from the late 1650 onward.

Spinoza basically denies that the human soul is immortal in the sense of enjoying life after death. Although he is willing to grant that the mind (or part of it) is eternal and persists in God even after the death of the body, he believes that the personal soul – if there is such a thing- perishes with the body. Thus, there is nothing to hope for or fear in terms of eternal rewards or punishment. In fact, he suggests, hope and fear are merely the emotions that religious leaders manipulate in order to keep their flocks in a state of worshipful submission. The notion of God as a free judge who dispenses reward and punishment is based on an absurd anthropomorphizing. “ They maintain that the Gods direct all things for the use of men in order to bind men to them and be held by men in the highest honor. So it has happened that each of them has thought up from his own temperament different ways of worshiping God.” Superstition, ignorance, and prejudice are thus at the basis of organized religion.

In truth, he insists, God is simply the infinite substance in which all things exist and, as such, is identical with Nature. Everything else follows from God’s nature with an absolute necessity. Spinoza also denies that human beings are free in any significant sense, or that they do anything ‘of themselves’ that would contribute to their salvation and well being.

One of the primary lessons of the later Theological-Political Treatise is that the first five books of the Hebrew Bible were not in fact written by Moses, nor are its precepts literally of divine origin. Rather, while there is indeed  a ‘divine message’ conveyed by its moral teaching, the Bible was the work of a number of later authors and editors, and the text is the result of a natural process of historical transmission. Spinoza also maintains that if the Jewish people are ‘elected’ in any meaningful sense, it is only a matter of their having achieved, through natural causes, a ‘temporal physical happiness’ and autonomous government . . .the notion of the Jews as a chosen people’ has no metaphysical or moral significance; and such an election is not necessarily something unique to them. The Jews are neither a morally superior nation nor a people surpassing all others in wisdom. If the ‘foundations’ of the Jewish religion ‘did not make their [the Jews] hearts unmanly, I would absolutely believe that some day, given the opportunity, they would set up their state again, and God would choose them anew.”

These are not sentiments likely to endear one to the rabbis of a Jewish community in the 17^th century,

 [ Nor with the Orthodox Calvinists- the primary supporters of the ‘Orange Dynasty” in Amsterdam.’ When push came to shove, after the wetsverzetting in 1672, the  Cartesians professors would disavow him as well, to save their own skins as best they could. Henry Oldenburg, corresponding secretary of the British Royal Society would also conclude that Spinoza’s opinions were insupportable. Even Johan de Witt, the true champion of toleration and the Dutch Republic  would eventually find Spinoza’s views ‘excessively democratic’. But for all that Spinoza was never without colleagues and prudently managed his affairs well enough to avoid arrest, imprisonment or to be cut down by a mob.]

[1] Mortera was the chief rabbi at Spinoza’s synagogue and consider him one of his most promising students.  An ex-Jesuit, Franciscus van den Enden set up a kind of preparatory school to which prominent families in Amsterdam , reluctant to use the public Latin school run by strict Calvinists, sent their their sons (and sometimes daughters) to give them the language skills and humanistic background that they would need for their studies at university.

[2] John Calvin was subjected to them in the 16th century.  Many of the Spinoza’s beliefs resemble Calvin’s though the  Reformer had to be a good deal more circumspect about the way he presented them, often cloaking their ‘revolutionary’ aspects under the rubric of ‘God’s mysteries’ about which mankind had yet to acquire capacity to discern, in a similar fashion that Hobbes’ ‘pulled his punches’ to some degree and thought Spinoza was bold and took great risks in his enunciations. I do not follow this comparison explicitly here but the readers should keep in mind that ‘the Orthodox Calvinists’ of Spinoza’s time- his great enemies-were ‘shy’ with respect to Calvin’s own ‘doctrines’ so one can easily imagine Calvin insisting, if he had been live in the 17^th century, that he was  not a Calvinist. But Spinoza did have ‘unorthodox’ colleagues in the Calvinist community; the author does not pursue how that might have influenced him, say, in propounding the idea of Predestination.