'Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah': Paving the way for secular Jewish identity - review

In the beginning was Uriel da Costa. Then came Baruch Spinoza.

A mercurial recusant born in 1585 in Porto, Portugal, da Costa was a Catholic scion of prosperous Portuguese crypto-Jewish Conversos who relocated first to Hamburg, then to Amsterdam, a mercantile and tolerant city where Jews thrived. Well versed in Christianity, da Costa embraced Judaism, then renounced it, finding as much fault with his new faith as he had done with his old one. He especially took umbrage at regimented rabbinical rules and rituals, which he saw as bereft of spirituality and perversions of the Torah.

Then again, it’s not as if he worshiped the Torah. The Pentateuch, he insisted, had been neither divinely inspired nor authored by Moses. Ah, and there was no such thing as an immortal soul, and so the afterlife was a delusion. His opinion mirrored the belief of ancient Sadducees, who denied the existence of undying souls and the hereafter but lost out to the Pharisees, who believed in both despite no scriptural backing for them in the Tanach. Yet da Costa went even further by declaring all religions to be man-made creations. 

Such views were beyond blasphemous and da Costa, a stubborn fellow, was declared herem (excommunicated) not once but twice. He was shunned, castigated, and maltreated by local Jews, his relatives among them. Alone and miserable, he decided to recant. This he did, but then he was also whipped and forced to lie prostrate at a synagogue’s threshold for people to step over him. He never recovered from such debasement and shot himself in April 1640. 

Uriel da Costa and Baruch Spinoza: Dutch Jews excommunicated

Baruch Spinoza, a fellow Portuguese Jew, was a boy of seven in Amsterdam that year, but he too would soon be excommunicated. 

Da Costa’s iconoclasm probably influenced Spinoza’s interrogative philosophy, yet whereas the former, a quixotic contrarian, has been largely forgotten, the latter, a more profound thinker, remains a towering figure in the history of philosophy. Goethe, Hegel, Nietzsche, Einstein, Marx, Freud, Ben-Gurion — they all admired Spinoza if not for the same reasons. Some of them lauded him for his borderline atheism; others for his scientific naturalism and rejection of superstition; still others for his alleged proto-Zionism; and the rest for his psychological insights in the vein of “Know thyself,” the ancient Greek apothegm of introspective inquiry.  

In some biographies of Spinoza, da Costa, a distant relation of Spinoza’s, is relegated to a footnote. Not so in Ian Buruma’s new book, Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah, where da Costa’s no-holds-barred skepticism lays the groundwork for his landsman’s own refutation of normative religious beliefs. The Dutch journalist and author, who is of Christian and Jewish descent, calls Spinoza “freedom’s messiah” as per Heinrich Heine’s view of him as a Christ-like figure. If we are to take this epithet at face value, then da Costa prefigured Spinoza the same way that John the Baptist heralds Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospels. What da Costa started, Spinoza completed. 

A Sephardi merchant’s cerebral son who studied in a yeshiva, Spinoza was a learned man in Europe’s most liberal city during a period of febrile intellectual ferment at the height of the Dutch Golden Age. Gedogen, the prudent Dutch practice of turning a blind eye to certain unlawful and undesirable activities, benefited freethinkers like Spinoza, whose family lived in the waterlogged city’s Jewish quarter in Vlooienburg, a rectangular artificial islet in the Amstel River. Among the Spinozas’ neighbors was Rembrandt, a philosemitic Protestant who resided among Jews and used them as models for his Bible-themed paintings “amid lumberyards, artists’ studios, and synagogues discreetly tucked away in private houses.” 

To be sure, Buruma notes, Jewish immigrants from Iberia were expected to behave in the Calvinist town, but behave they did. And if saving face required turning their noses up at their uncouth Ashkenazi brethren, so be it, for these refugees fleeing religious persecution farther east were “filthy, penniless, dressed in rags and had to beg,” the author writes. “The fine manners of the Spanish gentry were evident even in Spinoza’s behavior, although he had no aspirations toward any kind of high life or grandiosity.”

After his father’s death, Spinoza was to take over the faltering family business, but he had other ideas. Leaving his younger brother Gabriel in charge of his patrimony, he fell in with a bohemian crowd of kindred spirits lured by the siren call of Enlightenment philosophy. In 1656, as the bubonic plague ravaged Europe, Spinoza was ostracized in absentia by Amsterdam’s rabbinical authorities. He was just 23. In the herem, vituperative curses were issued against him for “abominable heresies,” but what these were are now obscure, as Spinoza had yet to publish any of his treatises, albeit his outspoken views on religion echoed those of da Costa’s and other rationalists. In any case, he didn’t seem much bothered by it. To get away from the madding crowds, though, he moved to the countryside and thence to The Hague, where he made do by grinding and polishing lenses for microscopes and telescopes, two seminal inventions of the time. He also put pen to paper on his philosophical works, of which two would be published in his lifetime, earning him fame and infamy in equal measure across Europe. 

Today, Spinoza’s ideas might seem fairly innocuous, but they were radical in his day. Repudiating the biblical God, the philosopher propounded a rarefied form of pantheism by equating God with nature. “Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can exist or be conceived without God,” he wrote. Albeit strictly mechanistic, the universe is infused with an immanent divine essence, which lacks transcendence and agency. By necessity, then – and herein lay his true subversion – the world is an amoral place where good and evil are human inventions, with our moral judgments predicated on our protean values and self-interest. Knowingly or not, Spinoza reached the same conclusion, we should note, as had Protagoras, a pre-Socratic philosopher from the 5th century BCE who averred that moral principles weren’t absolute, deriving as they did from individual preferences and cultural norms. 

In the 17th century, denying the divine origins of morality challenged the very premise of the Judeo-Christian ethos. Yet to Spinoza, the absence of an interventionist deity who commanded us to follow his tenets didn’t mean we could act nihilistically as we pleased. Far from it. A gentle and courteous soul, Spinoza behaved impeccably, lived frugally, and aired his views cautiously for fear of causing public uproar. In his Ethics, written in Latin and published anonymously to avoid drawing too much attention to it, Spinoza counseled temperance and virtuous conduct guided not by divine revelation but by intuitive human reasoning.

Understanding human nature and cultivating contemplative self-knowledge, he posited, could help identify the causes of unhelpful passions to liberate us from them. Like Stoics and Buddhists, Spinoza believed that happiness, or at least peace of mind, lay in a mastery of emotions. He practiced what he preached, leading a celibate life of almost ascetic rigor. He prized his independence and privacy, the better to devote himself freely to reading and ruminating before his death at age 44 from either tuberculosis or silicosis. Not even his impending demise seemed to bother him. “The free man thinks least of all of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death,” he wrote.

Beyond his contributions to philosophy, Spinoza helped pioneer secular scholarship of the Bible by stressing its human authorship. If scripture was man-made, then parsing it for esoteric insights to divine God’s ways was folly, he surmised. And if there was no biblical God, Jews couldn’t have been His chosen people; therefore, abiding by Mosaic laws like keeping kosher was a waste of time. In fact, it was positively harmful because with their diehard, cliquish adherence to archaic customs and traditions, Jews made themselves perennial targets for persecution. “Spinoza’s argument for assimilation is naïve, and if it had been made by a gentile, it could easily be construed as a form of antisemitism,” Buruma points out. Yet even as Spinoza panned Judaism, he waffled on Christianity by extolling Jesus as a purveyor of love and wisdom who, albeit fully human, intuited sublime moral laws. Was this stark dichotomy, Buruma ponders, because Spinoza felt it safer to stick it to powerless Jews than to powerful Christians? Or because he saw Jesus as an ideal spiritual leader who freed himself from stultifying rabbinical rules and rites to distill his teachings into a simple moral code? Or else because he was less familiar with the New Testament than he was with the Old? 

Perhaps all three, but Spinoza’s intimate familiarity with Christian scriptures is certainly in doubt, since they are no less vulnerable to criticism than the Hebrew Bible. For instance, Jesus often says one thing in one canonical Gospel, only to say the opposite in another. “I tell you, if you are angry with a brother, you will be judged,” he announces in Matthew 5:22. In Luke 14:26, though, he has this to say: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” So which is it? Either way, the morality on display here is questionable at best.

“Because the Christian rule to do unto others as you would have them do unto you is supposed to be universal, and the Christian faith, ideally, makes no tribal or national distinctions, it comes closer to Spinoza’s idea of a practical civic religion that promotes charity and justice,” Buruma writes. If so, this idealized view of Christianity overlooks its entire history with incessant schisms, doctrinal disputes, and sectarianism, not to mention unrelenting intra-religious wars and persecution of “heretics,” “witches” and Jews. Some universalism. Besides, that “Christian rule” is in fact the Golden Rule, which was already well known to ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Indians, Chinese and Jews. 

Buruma’s biography of Spinoza has been published in the “Jewish Lives” series by Yale University Press, and the format requires the Dutch author to be succinct. He does a fine job of condensing into 200 readable pages the gist of excellent scholarship on Spinoza by British historian Jonathan Israel and American philosopher Steven Nadler. Yet brevity can also be misleading. 

“In Marx’s [classless] utopia,” Buruma writes in passing, “there would no longer be a ‘Jewish problem.’” Well, yes, but that would hardly have profited Jews, since Marx’s solution entailed getting rid of them. “What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money,” Marx, a baptized son of Jewish parents, huffed in his essay “On the Jewish Question” in 1844. “Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time,” he opined in a passage that wouldn’t look out of place in Mein Kampf. 

And lest anyone miss his point, this patron saint of communism elucidated: “An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible…In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.”

Spinoza championed both religious and individual freedom, so it‘s doubtful he would have shared Marx’s conclusion. Just the same, the herem against him remains in place, which is a shame, for Spinoza showed nonreligious Jews, in Buruma’s words, “a way to reconcile their Jewish background with modern rationalism.” He deserved not sanction but credit for that.■

• Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah (Jewish Lives)
• Ian Buruma
• Yale University Press, 2024
• 216 pages; $23.20