In 1656, Amsterdam's Jewish community declared Baruch Spinoza excommunicated because he denied the immortality of the soul, the divinity of the scripture, and challenged the idea that the Torah was literally given by God. His writings remain as provocative today.
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In 1656, Amsterdam's Jewish community declared Baruch Spinoza excommunicated because he denied the immortality of the soul, the divinity of the scripture, and challenged the idea that the Torah was literally given by God. His writings remain as provocative today.
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Rebecca Goldstein begins her study "Betraying Spinoza: "The Renegade Jew who Gave us Modernity" (2006) by asking why a book on Spinoza is appropriate for as series of books called "Jewish Encounters" which the publisher describes as "a project devoted to the promotion of Jewish literature, culture, and ideas." Spinoza (1632 -- 1677) was excommunicated with great vehemence from the synagogue in Amsterdam in 1656, and he never returned to it. While some Jewish thinkers have proposed over the years a symbolic, posthumous lifting of the excomminication, there are, for most readers, unbridgeable differences between Spinoza's thought and traditional Judaism. And Goldstein, a professor of philosophy, a distinguished novelist, and a MacArthur fellow, never suggests any such approach, to her credit. Why, then, an introductory book about Spinoza in a series devoted to "Jewish literature, culture, and ideas"? And why a book about "betraying" Spinoza?
Goldstein's answers are a mixture of the personal, historical, and philosophical. Raised in an Orthodox Jewish family, Goldstein received her early education in an all-girls religious school in Brooklyn. Her "secular" education in the school included an overview of intellectual history in which her teacher impressed upon her charges a highly negative view of Spinoza as an atheist and apostate with a highly arrogant view of the power of human reason and a philosophy which was both pagan and untenable. Goldstein became fascinated with Spinoza. Goldstein chose to become a philosopher (she does not tell us why) in the analytical tradition which is, for reasons different from those offered by Goldstein's early mentor, also highly critical of Spinoza's attempt at metaphysics. She was assigned to teach a course in continental rationalism: Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz; and, she tells the reader, returned to the philosopher with fresh eyes. Thus, part of the answer to the question "why Spinoza" is personal, as the philosopher reminded Goldstein of the orthodox religion of her childhood and then became a figure Goldstein in adulthood grew to admire and to teach.
Goldstein's answer also is in part historical. Much of her book is an exploration of the information that scholars have been able to discover about Spinoza's life and about the Amsterdam Jewish community in which he was raised. The Jewish community in Amsterdam were, for the most part, recent refuges from Portugal. They had fled to escape the terrors of the Inquisition. Many of the immigrants were Marranos who had on the surface converted to Christianity but remained internally Jewish. These "New Christians" were the target of the Inquisition and were at risk of a terrible death if they were discovered. Spinoza was raised among a community that was trying to recover its Judaism in a city, Amsterdam, of openness for its time. Goldstein traces various strands of Jewish thought, the rationalism of Maimonides and the Kabbalism that developed in response to it, shows how they were related to the persecution of the Jews by the Inquisition, and discusses their continued influence on Spinoza's own radical thinking.
Goldstein's history is informed by her talents as a novelist. She tries to get inside the young Spinoza and to think about how we would have felt in realizing that he could not accept the teachings of his elders, in his excommunication, in a possible failed love affair, and in other glimpses that scholars have given us of his inner life. Goldstein tries to see Spinoza's writings, chiefly the Ethics and the Tractatus, as memoirs and as personal documents. She is fully aware of the paradoxical character of this approach as no philosopher more that Spinoza tried to get beyond the personal and the idiosyncratic to find a truth "sub specie aeternitatis" that was the same for all people everywhere independent of personal foibles, ingrained prejudices, and beliefs. She gives a good introductory overview of Spinoza's religious critique in the Tractatus and of the exposition of his full philosophy in the Ethics while trying to tie them in to the history of the Marrano's and the Amsterdam Jewish community, to Spinoza's own life, to the development of a scientific world outlook, and to the tumultuous politics of the Amsterdam of Spinoza's day.
And how does Goldstein see herself as "betraying" Spinoza? One might suppose that she would consider the Judaism of her youth and find a way of returning to and adopting it. Here again, this is not what Goldstein is about. She appears committed in a full, honest, and for me highly commendable way to modernity and to the secularism which Spinoza helped bring about. Goldstein "betrays" Spinoza by her commitment to the imagination and to the value of particularity as opposed to what she finds as Spinoza's cosmic and impersonal rationalism. She suggests that some of Spinoza is inconsistent with her feelings as a lover, mother, and novelist. Thus, her book is pointedly dedicated to "Steve" with the addition "DESPITE SPINOZA." And when she points out that the mature Spinoza "could have little considered regard for imagination, a faculty not known for its skill in grasping logical entailments, and therefore a faculty to be deemed both cognitavely and ethically negligible" she observes simply: "But here I disagree." (p. 196) Goldstein refers throughout the book to her love for her two daughters which in Spinozistic terms may verge on the irrational but which she will not give up. And in her brief but good bibliography, Isaac Bashevis Singer's magnificent story "The Spinoza of Market Street", has the last word, as Goldstein quotes the words of its protagonist, a life-long student of Spinoza, saying under the power of love for a woman: "Divine Spinoza forgive me. I have become a fool." It is in appreciation of the power and worth of certain emotions rather than in a retreat from secularism that Spinoza is deemed to be "betrayed".
I have studied Spinoza for many years and learned a great deal from Goldstein's book. I appreciate her candor and refusal to lapse into sentimentality. Goldstein has written a thoughtful and highly personal account of a great philosopher that will be valuable to those who know his thought and to those coming to it for the first time.
Robin Friedman
David A R
Jul 12, 2014
God is above it all
Dr. Goldstein is a brilliant Professor of Philosopy who was raised as an Orthodox Jewish girl. She had serious troubles dealing with Orthodox Jewish Absolutism - Specifically that God had his "Chosen People" and that the Jews are unique.
Dr. G liberated herself from Orthodoxy and became an outstanding Professor of Philosophy.
The same was ( with a couple o exceptions) true of Spinoza too. He was a believer in God but not the Jehova of the tribes of Israel. He believed in the God of Plato "Truth and Beauty" God is in everything- but he is not petty and jealous as portrayed int he Old Testament. Spinoza was banished by his fellow Jews but he wrote difficult to read but sublime treatises on the nature of God.
edwardmccreeryroberts
Aug 16, 2008
Spinoza Discovered
Rebecca Goldstein tells a beautiful story in a beautiful way. She writes so clearly, setting out what one needs to know to appreciate the singular contribution of Spinoza's philosophy, courageously worked out by Spinoza nearly 500 years ago and published fearlessly for all the world to benefit. His concept of a rational relationship between man and god, nature, the divine, the mystery, we-know-not-what, is so excitingly possible, and so readily meaningful to modern man that I have bought several copies of Goldstein's book to give to people I love, to give them the opportunity to discover what I have discovered.
