Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (New York: Schocken, 2006).
I picked up this book during winter vacation, but didn't get time to read it until the last week or so. It's the fifth title in Schocken's Nextbook Jewish Encounters series, with eleven titles currently in print and another sixteen under contract. The author, Goldstein, is a philosopher and novelist, and has an open, accessible writing style.
It's a light book, only some 260 pages of text plus a chronology of Spinoza's life, endnotes, and acknowledgments. There's no bibliography nor index, which makes it hard both to assess the argument's significance and to review it once you've finished reading. I'll come back to both those points below. Goldstein knows Spinoza's philosophy well, but she doesn't appear to be breaking new ground. (I could be wrong about that last bit, as I know hardly anything about him myself...) Rather, she's interested in situating the philosopher's work in the context of his life, and I'd say she does that fairly well.
More on the flip...
Before getting into what I think is really quite good about the book, I've got a few complaints. First, I'm not at all certain she explains the title of the book anywhere within it. For example, I only caught one reference in the text to a "betrayal" of Spinoza, on p. 195 when she writes:
To indulge in an imagined sense of his life would count perhaps as one more betrayal of Spinoza.
Now, I was reading the book at bedtime, so perhaps I carelessly missed the previous "betrayals" she alludes to here (though the word appears nowhere in her brief discussion of Leibniz's public rejection of Spinoza as a supposed atheist, pp. 7-8). This is just one of many places where an index could help a reader -- much less a reviewer -- better interpret the book. In the closing words of her Acknowledgments, however, she references (p. 287) "The Spinoza of Market Street," a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer:
The protagonist of Singer's story, Dr. Nahum Fischelson, also ends up betraying Spinoza, delivering a last line that I now usurp as my own: "Divine Spinoza, forgive me. I have become a fool.
Both of these "betrayals" employ a straightforward use of the word, in the sense of committing a treason against. One of Goldstein's reviewers, on the other hand, attempts to explain away the title like this (scroll to the end of the page):
Goldstein illuminates Spinoza by "betraying" him—by showing how Spinoza's universalist philosophy arose from his predicament as a renegade Jewish thinker, excommunicated by the Jewish community in seventeenth century Amsterdam.
I like that metaphoric use of the term and I think it works to describe her project in the book, but I would also have liked her to be more upfront about what she was doing.
Moving on to the subtitle, she does an excellent job defining Spinoza as a "renegade Jew," but she does a poor job defending the statement that he "gave us modernity." Again, I don't take issue with the notion that Spinoza's conceptions of personal identity and of the nature of the divine are central to modern sensibility, but rather Goldstein doesn't actually make the case that they are. Several times in the book (e.g., p. 186) she mentions teaching a philosophy course on "Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz," but she never makes a sustained argument in the book linking these three together. In the conclusion of the book (pp. 259-263), she appears to argue that Spinoza came to influence modernity through Locke, who resided in Amsterdam in the years after Spinoza's death and interacted with his former social network, and whose ideas on religious freedom might be seen as derived from Spinoza's philosophy. Unfortunately, however, Goldstein herself admits (p. 260):
Locke's strong empiricist tendencies... would have disinclined him to read a grandly metaphysical work such as [Spinoza's] The Ethics
so any influence the Dutch philosopher could have had on the Scot could only have come through that shared network of friends. But even the evidence for that shared network is weak, as Goldstein can only say that Locke "almost certainly met men" who had studied with Spinoza.
She would have been on stronger ground, it seems to me, fleshing out the philosophical affinities between Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, and showing how that outlook contributed to the development of modernity. Again, she alludes to that kind of argument in the book, but nowhere provides it in a sustained way.
With all that bad, what does she do good? Well, she does an excellent job situating Spinoza as a Jewish thinker, notwithstanding his excommunication from the Amsterdam Jewish community years before he began publishing his work. While she is weak on explaining why he was excommunicated (the historical record has maddening gaps that make it impossible to state with certainty the specific cause), she beautifully recreates the worldview of Amsterdam's Jews in the seventeenth century, tracing the community's origins back to Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and demonstrating the impact on them of forced conversion and inquisitorial persecution.
Now, I've read a little bit on the Spanish Inquisition, for example in James Carroll's Constantine's Sword, in Patricia Seed's Ceremonies of Possession in the New World, and in Karen Armstrong's A History of God, among others. Anyone really familiar with the subject can see I haven't read the main works -- as I understand it, this is the central book.
Goldstein brings the Inquisition to life in a way I haven't seen before. She frames her discussion around the question of identity, in particular just what does it mean to be a "Jew." In sixteenth century Spain, with the torturers and executioners plying their trade on those deemed to be hiding their Jewishness, this age-old question for the children of Abraham acquired a relevance and an urgency it probably would not attain again until the twentieth century.
Identity, Goldstein insists, is always slippery. As you get closer to defining it, it slips further away from you. It's hard enough she tells us to even get a philosophical sense of the self -- what is it, after all, that links the me of today with the me of my childhood? -- so how can we proceed to identify that which makes each of us part of a larger entity, a people? In the case of Jews, are we defined by our genetic makeup, by adherence to the laws of Moses, or by belonging to an active Jewish community? That is, is Jewishness an essential part of our being, or is it an attribute of our selves that we acquire and sustain while alive?
In Spinoza's philosophy, religious identity is not essential, but is rather an attribute attained in life. The Jews of Spain and Portugal, however, had no such luxury. After suffering forced conversion to Christianity in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, they were then subjected to persecution in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries on the belief their conversions were insufficiently sincere. The Christian lords of the Iberian peninsula viewed Judaism as essential -- inalterable -- and also as a threat to the pure Christian community they dreamed would usher in the Second Coming of the Messiah and the establishment of a global state of grace. Hidden Jews in the Christian midst had to be ferreted out by any means necessary, and once discovered the false Christians had to suffer a particular cruel death -- to be burned alive at the stake.
Some of the Jews persecuted by the Inquisition were in fact crypto-Christians. Their ancestors accepted forced conversion because the state required it, but they continued to respect Mosaic law as best they could behind closed doors. Goldstein repeats the stories of Catholics in New Mexico who burned shabbat candles inside cupboards every Friday night and who ate special unleavened bread around Easter time, without ever realizing these were traditions converted Jews had attempted to keep alive. There is also an incantation some Spanish Catholics apparently repeat prior to entering a cathedral -- nonsense words, as far as the speakers know -- which linguists have determined actually traces back to a Hebrew phrase absolving the speaker from responsibility for what they are about to do. These Crypto-Christians were the kind of people the Inquisition initially looked for, and they did exist.
But many other Spanish Jews sincerely converted to Christianity. The Inquisition however made no distinction among them. All were fair game, and thousands were ultimately killed -- victims of a bureaucratic machine chillingly similar to the twentieth century one once characterized in the phrase "the banality of evil." Where twentieth century Jews responded to the Holocaust by flocking to the once controversial Zionist movement, in the seventeenth century many Jews sought comfort in the mysticism of Kabbalah. (I should make clear that the twentieth century comparisons here are my own. Goldstein doesn't touch the subject.)
Goldstein traces Kabbalah back to the work of the eleventh century writer Ibn Gabirol who lived in Catalunya and wrote in Arabic (pp. 87-88). Gabirol was interested in the origin of the universe, and also sought theological explanations for the conundrum of human suffering. As Goldstein puts, Kabbala asks:
Why did God ... have to create the world? .... As the kabbalistic tradition [furthermore] meditates on the beginning of all things, so, too, it ponders the awful mystery of suffering, most poignantly, most bafflingly, represented by the example of children who suffer, children who die (pp. 88-9).
These two central preoccupations of Kabbalah became more urgent when Spanish and Portuguese Jewry found itself facing the unleashed fury first of forced conversion and then of Inquisitorial persecution. In the sixteenth century Isaac Luria renovated Jewish mysticism, providing Kabbalah with the particular cast it retains today. According to Goldstein, it was Luria who developed the metaphor of the ten divine vessels of light whose shattering at the beginning of time released the divine sparks which must be regathered in order for salvation to occur (pp. 110-12).
Spinoza was born in Amsterdam of Portuguese Jewish refugees, and grew up in the thriving community there of Sephardic Jews. This was a community of Marranos, New Christians and Crypto-Christians alike, all of whom for two or three generations had openly practiced Christianity and only some of whom had practiced a bastardized Judaism in private. Once in (relatively) tolerant Amsterdam, they had to relearn orthodox Judaism, and they sought the expertise of Ashkenazi Jews to found their own yeshiva. By the time Spinoza was born, in 1632, the community had three rabbis, one of whom (Isaac Aboab) was an out-and-out kabbalist and another (Manasseh ben Israel) at least dabbled in Jewish mysticism. According to Goldstein, both served as Spinoza's instructors in the yeshiva (p. 90). In fact, on at least one occasion, Spinoza complained
I have read and known kabbalistic triflers, whose insanity provokes my unceasing astonishment (ibid).
One of Spinoza's instructors, Aboab, became a whole-hearted follower of Sabbatai Zevi (pp. 226-229), the seventeenth century false messiah whose conversion to Islam (and consequent debunking of his claims to be a Jewish prophet) antedated the publication of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus in which that quote appeared.
Goldstein's argument is that the fundamental questions at the center of Spinoza's philosophy represent his effort to refute the kabbalism he had been exposed to at yeshiva, and that his answers to those questions helped reorient Western Europe from a medieval mindset to one we could recognize as modern. That philosophical discussion is well-fleshed out in the book. Rather than trying to recapitulate here, I recommend you go read it there. She is a much better writer -- and an exponentially better philosopher -- than I.