Betraying Spinoza (10 page)

The Amsterdam Jewish community would be heavily influenced by these kabbalistic preoccupations, and the influence fell, though in subtle ways, on Spinoza, too. It is not that Spinoza has any sympathy at all for Jewish mysticism, or for mysticism of any sort for that matter. Spinoza’s rationalism is not mysticism. It is, rather, Cartesianism, though with some major tinkering. But the ultimate mysteries he seeks to solve with his revamped Cartesianism are nowhere to be found in Descartes—nor in Galileo, nor in any of the “scientist rationalists” who precede him. Instead, Spinoza turns the Cartesian methodology, meant to focus in the “natural light of reason,” to illuminate the mysteries of the kabbalists, no matter their dubious methods of enlightenment: the beginning of all things, the
Ein Sof
’s relationship to creation and to our knowledge, the mysteries of evil and of suffering.

These three strains in Jewish scholarship—the legalistic analysis of the Talmud; the rationalist semiphilosophical approach represented by Maimonides (semiphilosophical in the sense that not all questions are open to philosophy: religion has the final say); the mystical confabulations of the kabbalah—are, quite obviously, in tension with one another. The Talmud famously warns against the other two approaches, but the kabbalistic one in particular: “Whoever ponders on four things, it were better for him if he had not come into the world: what is above, what is below, what was before time, and what will be hereafter.”

The story is told of four who went into the garden or orchard (it is the Persian word
pardes
) of mystical study. One went mad, one became an apostate, and one took his life. Only one came out whole, and this was Rabbi Akiva. Again the Talmud cautions that no one should study kabbalah who has not yet attained the age of forty, marriage, and a full belly—a degree of mundane ballast to safeguard against being “blasted by ecstasy” (as in Ophelia’s speech).

Though the influence of ancient Greece made itself felt in both the Maimonidean philosophical and kabbalist ecstatic strains in Sephardic culture, still some of the most prominent participants in the Golden Age voiced wariness of the Hellenist legacy. For example, Judah Halevy (before 1075–1141), who was perhaps the greatest of all the Hebraic-Spanish poets, and whose religious poetry found its way into the liturgy, acknowledges the heavy influence of Greek philosophy on his Judeo-Spanish culture in his poetic admonition:

Turn aside from mines and pitfalls
.

Let not Greek wisdom tempt you
,

For it bears the flowers only and not the fruits
.

To balance the impression of stern rectitude on the part of Judah Halevy, it is only fair to share other stanzas that show him in a softer, more sensual mood. (Iberian sensuality also contributed its flushed warmth to the heady concoction of the Golden Age of Spanish Jewry):

Pity me, you of the hard heart and soft hips
,

Pity me, let me bend the knee before you!

My heart is pure, but my eyes are not!

There were other exoticisms, in addition to philosophy, mysticism, and poetry, that bloomed in the garden of Sephardic Judaism. Science, too, and particularly medicine, attracted many Spanish Jews. Rulers often had their own Jewish physicians, and often these physicians were themselves philosophers or poets or both. Both Maimonides and Judah Halevy had been doctors. And Jews contributed to Spanish science in other ways as well. For example, King Alphonso X commissioned Isaac ibn Said, the cantor of Toledo, to compile correct astronomical tables. The Alphonsine Tables were completed in 1256, the most complete heavenly topography ever assembled.

It had not only been in intellectual, spiritual, and cultural inroads that the Spanish Jews had broken new ground, but also in more worldly-minded ways as well. They were not only poets and philosophers, scholars and mystics, but treasurers and advisers and landowners. Court Jews, who helped rulers in administrative and financial capacities, came to have real political clout. They were sent on diplomatic missions. They established family dynasties, so that they constituted their own “nobility.” According to some estimates, the Jews of the eleventh and twelfth centuries owned more than a third of all the estates in the county of Barcelona. A culture at once distinctively Jewish was yet contributing to the culture at large, and both cultures were incalculably the better for it.

While the Spanish Jews were reaping the benefits of relative Moslem tolerance, rising to lustrous preeminence in the arts and sciences, the Jews of Christian northern Europe, the Ashkenazim, were pressed into squalid marginality or worse. The worse was truly terrible. Jews had been accused of causing the Black Plague by poisoning the wells, and mobs burned masses of them alive.

In the towns of northern Europe—in Rouen, and Cologne, and Prague, and Mainz, and Worms—the Jews were on the brink of a wild terror that came down on them in the form of the Holy Crusades. “The Unholy Crusades” is what the Jews called them. In 1095, Pope Urban II had called for a Crusade to liberate the Holy Land from Moslem rule, and the knights and feudal lords, with the masses that they mobilized, wreaked their fury on the Jews they encountered on their way east, reasoning, “Why wait until we get to the Holy Land to punish the nonbelievers?” The French exegestist Rashi, whose commentaries on all the sacred Jewish works are still the first commentaries that an Orthodox child studies and will continue to consult throughout his life of scholarship, had witnessed the ravaging of the communities of the Rhine, the destruction of the centers of learning in which he himself had studied and taught. He composed a heart-wrenching prayer addressed not to God but to the Torah, beseeching that it intercede on High, so that its words, and not the Crusaders’ swords, would prove victorious in Jerusalem. “Explain thy lovely words for men to understand,” Rashi wrote, a poignant plea from a scholar devoted to explaining each and every word of all of Holy Scripture, sometimes spinning out an elaborate interpretation from nothing more than an extra squiggle over a Hebrew letter.

In England the accession of the Crusader Richard had spelled disaster for the Jews, who were set upon by mobs in many towns. The most dramatic atrocity had taken place in York, during the Third Crusade. Jews had sought refuge in a castle. Surrounded by their enemies, with no hope of escape, they committed mass suicide. The first of the blood libels, accusing Jews of murder for ritualistic purposes, took place at Norwich in the twelfth century. And even when English rulers had offered protection to their Jewish communities, they had levied such exorbitant taxes on them, enriching the royal coffers, that finally the Jews were too impoverished tobe of any use. The culmination came in 1290. Edward I banished the now useless Jews from England, decreeing that every one of them must leave by All Saints’ Day.

One of Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
, “The Prioress’s Tale,” tells of a widow’s child murdered by the Jews because he was singing the hymn to the Virgin “Alma redemptoris mater” while walking on the “Jewes Street” in some unspecified Asian city. The Jews cut his throat and then threw him into a pit, in Chaucer’s telling, where he miraculously continued to sing, so that the ritual murder was discovered and the Jews of the town were triumphantly tortured and massacred. Chaucer himself refers to the twelfth-century story of Hugh of Lincoln, one of the early blood libels. The poet could not himself have known any English Jews, since they had been banished from England a century before, but the tales of the libels lived on as poetic inspiration.

France, too, had banished its Jews in the thirteenth century, King Louis IX (canonized in 1297 by Pope Boniface VIII) canceling all Christian debts to them and confiscating their property. They were eventually invited back, again for the economic advantages they could offer, but their position always teetered precariously toward disaster, and they were subject to ongoing systematic attempts to get them to see the “Jewish error” of their ways and convert.

It was under the expansive tolerance of sophisticated Moslem life that the perfumed essence of Sephardic culture had been distilled, a culture poetic, philosophical, scientific, mystical, and also worldly. At certain times, among certain more fundamentalist Moslem groups, the tolerance abated. Maimonides, for example, had been forced to flee, as a boy, with his family, from his birthplace in Cordoba when it was conquered by the Almohades, a Moslem sect that demanded the conversion of all Jews. But, for the most part, Moslem rule proved conducive to Sephardic flourishing.

The Christian attempt to regain control over Spain had begun almost coterminously with the Moslem conquest in 711; the mountainous northwest region had always remained Christian. Over the centuries there was a steady erosion of Moslem dominion, especially as Moslem rule had been destabilized by invasions from the Moslem Berbers, whose outlook was far less enlightened than the Moors. By the end of the fifteenth century, the Moslems ruled over only Granada. But Sephardic culture continued on, and the Moslem and Jewish blend was at times and places enhanced, too, by Christian intermingling, achieving a state that was called
convivencia
, literally “living together.”

As the Christians unified their hold on Spain, the sorts of intolerance that had dominated in other European lands began to creep into Sephardic existence as well. The first blood libel came to Spain in 1250. Soon after, the most famous Sephardic rabbi of the day, Nachmanides, provoked by an apostate Jew, engaged in a formal disputation on the relative merits of Christianity and Judaism. Nachmanides also known as the Ramban, came from the city of Gerona, the center of mystical Judaism, and he himself was an important kabbalistic thinker. The famous disputation, however, was held in Barcelona in 1263 over a span of four days, before the king and gathered bishops. Nachmanides had secured permission to speak frankly, and so he did, arguing that the evidence that Jesus had ushered in messianic times was scant, for had not the prophet Isaiah foretold of the perfect peace that would follow upon the Messiah’s coming?

Yet from the days of Jesus until now that whole world has been filled with violence and pillage. The Christians, moreover, shed more blood than other nations; and how hard it would be for you, your Majesty … and for these knights of yours if they were not to learn war any more?

There were to be many more such formal disputations, not only in Spain but throughout Christian Europe, often with the set purpose of determining the fate of the Jewish communities in which they were held. Riots, torture, forced conversions, and murder increasingly concluded these staged debates. Nachmanides would be the last Jewish representative who would speak with what he had thought was impunity; in fact, he was brought to trial for publishing his own account of the debate and, though acquitted, was forced to leave Spain, resettling in Jerusalem.

Now once again, with the turning of the tide against the Jews, the ranks of the New Christians swelled in Spain. The upper Jewish classes, in particular, converted to Christianity in increasing numbers. And Nachmanides’ uncensored words, charging Christianity with shedding more blood than other nations, took on prophetic tones.

The practice of burning heretics at the stake was introduced in the last years of the twelfth century. The Holy Inquisition was a procedure devised and named by Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) for exposing Christian heretics, though it was another pope, Gregory IX, who established it as an institution. It was to last for 350 years. Its stated targets were Christian heretics; the Church claimed no official authority over non-Christians. But since the mere presence of Jews was seen as conducive of heresy, they were to suffer severely at the hands of the Inquisition, most especially when the Inquisition took on a new ferocity as it entered Spain and then Portugal. And of course all New Christians were ipso facto Christians, and thus fell under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition.

The first mass burning of Jews at the stake took place in 1288, following a blood libel. This was in Troyes, France (where Rashi himself had lived a century before). But the Inquisition had already infiltrated Spanish life by this time, quietly at first. Right around the time of Nachmanides’ public disputation, Pope Clement IV granted the Inquisition freedom to interfere in Jewish affairs by allowing the inquisitors to pursue converted Jews who had relapsed into their former faith.
Conversos
,some of whose families had become Christians centuries before, at the time of the Visigoths, were considered true Christians by the Church, and the lapse of any Christian back into Judaism was punishable by death. Therefore, the Inquisition had jurisdiction over their souls and went after them in elaborate ceremonies of intrigue and torture.

The attitude toward Jews had changed in Spain well before the Inquisition took on its full formidable power. By the mid-1300s, the mobs, incited by the anti-Semitic tirades of priests, were attacking Jews, the authorities intervening only when Christian lives and property were threatened. In 1391, a year which is a blood-soaked marker for the changing fortunes of the Jews of Spain, marauders went from town to town throughout Castile and Aragon, massacring men, women, and children. Sometimes women and children were sold as slaves to the Moslems. All the synagogues of Barcelona were destroyed, and the community that had existed for eight hundred years came to an end. The mounting numbers of
conversos
after 1391 reflected the markedly different situation that now confronted the Jews.