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By Dr.Fred Reiss
 WINCHESTER, California—The year is 1655. Twenty-three Jews, escapees from the Inquisition in the Portuguese colony at Recife, Brazil are battling Peter Stuyvesant, governor of New Amsterdam (later New York), for the right to remain in the New World. The Dutch West Indies Company rules they can remain, provided they take care of their own poor. Manasseh Ben Israel is on his way to London to meet with England’s Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, with the purpose of inducing him to permit Jews to return to England. Cromwell discreetly gives permission a year later. In the East, Bogdan Chmielnicki offers his allegiance to the czar, and Russia subsequently invades parts of Poland. As the cities fall to the Russians, the Jews are exterminated or forcibly expelled. Those who can, flee to Holland. Meanwhile, in Amsterdam, the most liberal city in Europe, Baruch Spinoza, described by his contemporaries as a small and handsome man, with black hair and moustache, and pale complexion, stands before the members of his congregation, accused of heresy. The following year, the leadership permanently excommunicates him.
Betraying Spinoza by Rebecca Goldstein is part memoire, part philosophical discourse, part historical narrative, and part psychological investigation. In short, Betraying Spinoza is a work that seeks to understand what made Spinoza “run”. Goldstein begins by telling of a personal experience in which she, as a student in an all female yeshiva, first learns about Spinoza, the apostate Jew, from her teacher, Mrs. Schoenberg. Yet, in the course of learning about him, she is strangely drawn to him. Years later, as a philosophy instructor at a New England college, she is assigned to teach a course about the three philosophers who are generally credited with creating modernity—Descartes, Leibnitz, and Spinoza. Now as teacher, she rediscovers Spinoza, and sees him through fresh eyes.
Professor Goldstein raises the question of how could Spinoza, the offspring of Marrano Jews, reject the existence of God, and conclude that “logic alone is sufficient to reveal the very fabric of reality? In fact, logic alone is the very fabric of reality.” Spinoza does not need God to explain the world. He
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asserts that the error of religions is to look for God too high up and too far out. In addition, Spinoza rejects prophecy, especially Moses as a true historical figure. He denies that the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, is divinely written, and asserts that there is no afterlife with rewards and punishments. He calls the belief in a messiah and the idea of resurrection false convictions.
Goldstein takes her readers on an historical tour. She tells of the competing seventeenth century Jewish-religious forces of rabbinic Judaism, which stress the legalistic and ritualistic aspects of the Torah and the Talmud, and the growing Kabbalah movement, which emphasizes a secret Torah and the imminent coming of the Messiah. Betraying Spinoza also provides the reader with a summary of the politico-religious forces within Amsterdam that constrain its Jews. Amsterdam, ruled by the Calvinists at that time, showed remarkable religious tolerance, but hardly by American standards. Jews were permitted to practice their religion quietly. All the Jews of Holland wanted was to escape the scrutiny of the church.
Unfortunately, the Spinoza affair shattered that tranquility.
Goldstein concludes by asking what was it like to be Spinoza, first scorned by the Jewish community and later by much of Christendom? What compelled him, as the top student in his yeshiva, to reject not just Judaism, but all religions, and substitute “love” for God? Physically, Spinoza is graceful and weak. Intellectually, he is strongly independent and perceptive of the arguments made by the rabbis, which he refers to as God’s final causes. The destiny of the Jewish people is intertwined with the final causes. But, Spinoza dismisses this proposal as meaningless, and if one rejects the final causes, then one is forced to abandon a separate destiny for the Jewish people. This leads him to conclude that the Jews brought the travails of history on their own head by believing that they are the Chosen People. Later, he would reject salvation through Jesus, and dismiss Christianity as having a special path to God. For Spinoza there is only rational thought. Indeed, as Goldstein points out, taken to its logical conclusion, Spinoza is a secularist in an age in which the term does not even exist.
Betraying Spinoza is a remarkable book in that it successfully unites the social and political history of the Jews in Holland from the Spanish Inquisition to Spinoza’s death with Spinoza’s difficult to read and more difficult to comprehend philosophical works.
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