Betraying Spinoza (12 page)

Among the masses leaving the land of Sepharad in those anguished summer months were the kabbalists, the visionaries who had seen signs of the Messiah’s imminent arrival, and in this way explained how it was given to them to have so many divine secrets revealed, and how it was that the people with whom God had made his covenant were being subjected to such unholy torment. They had predicted that the year of 5250, or 1490, would bring the final redemption. What kind of effect did the expulsion and the other horrors that had both preceded and would follow this calamity have on these mystical visionaries? They would take the kabbalist tradition with them, many of them eventually finding their way to the ancient city of Safed, in the northern hills of Galilee. According to tradition, the Messiah, from the House of David, would arise in the Galilee and make his way from there to Jerusalem. Presumably, this is why the Spanish kabbalists, forced from their homes in Gerona, chose this destination, making it the new center of kabbalistic mysticism.

Kabbalah would undergo, in the wake of the Sephardic tragedy, a profound transformation. How could it not have affected their mystical apprehension of the universe? How could men who read the world—its natural laws and its history—as a divine code not have interpreted the great calamity in symbolic terms? “I think that the afflictions visited on the Jews in all the Christian kingdoms between the years 5250–55 (1490–95) … are the messianic birth pangs,” wrote Joseph She’altiel b. Moses ha-Kohen on the island of Rhodes in 1495, in the margin of a manuscript he was composing.
¹⁰

The catastrophe of the Spanish expulsion changed the nature of kabbalah. The kabbalists of pre-1492 had not been particularly messianic. They had conceived of spiritual salvation as compatible with life in
galut
, in exile. Their spiritual efforts were bent on uncovering the esoteric meaning of the universe in order to effect a personal union with the Godhead, individual salvation. It was in the wake of the Sephardic disaster that kabbalah would become increasingly apocalyptic and messianic.
¹¹

In the sixteenth century, the kabbalistic giant Isaac Luria, known as Ha-Ari, or the Lion, would come to Safed, and Lurianic kabbalah, still the essence of modern kabbalah, would emanate from out of the narrow medieval alleyways and synagogues of that golden-lit city to sweep across the lands of the Diaspora, infiltrating all levels of Jewish life. It transformed not only practice, with new rituals of meditation and purification, but the very way Jews constructed and understood the narrative of their own religion.

Originally a recluse who would see his wife and children only on the Sabbath, Luria believed himself to see visions of the prophet Elijah, who initiated him into the esoteric system. Luria’s mother was Sephardic, though his father was Ashkenazic, and among his small circle of disciples, many of whom believed him to be the Messiah, were Sephardic refugees from the Inquisition. Among the inner circle were Joseph Karo, whom you will recall was the author of the
Shulkhan Arukh
(The Set Table), which Orthodox Jews, Ashkenazic and Sephardic, regard as the official compendium of Jewish Law. Karo, who was born in Toledo, had messianic motivations for his codification of
halakha
, since the right observance of the Law would hasten the coming of the Messiah. Also in Luria’s inner circle was Hayyim Vital, originally of Calabria, who was responsible for writing down the lectures of Luria in the form in which they were disseminated throughout Jewry.

Lurianic kabbalah, transmitted from his visions of Elijah, offered a new narrative to explain the moral history of the suffering world, and the role that the Jews were chosen to play in that moral history. It is a tale of a shattering— a
shevirah
—at the very beginning of the creation of the world, when the
Ein Sof
, or That Without End, contracted itself so that the world could be created. The divine light entered into the ten vessels that were waiting to receive it, and some were shattered, the shards falling into the abyss from which the world arose, carrying sparks of the light that were trapped within. From the moment of its first being, then, the world was not as it ought to have been. The exile of the Jews is the historical symbol for the disruption and displacement brought about by the
shevirah
. As Gershom Scholem writes: “This situation of not being where one ought to be, viz. of being removed from one’s rightful place, is what is meant by the term ‘exile.’ In fact, since the breaking of the vessels, exile is the fundamental and exclusive— albeit hidden—mode of all existence. In Lurianism the historical notion of exile had become a cosmic symbol.”
¹²
So, too, spiritual advance must be seen on a cosmic scale. It is
tikkun ha-olam
—healing the world—which in mystical terms is described as the gathering up of the shards of the broken vessels, the divine light caught within them. The rituals and prayers of purification that Ha-Ari devised—what is often called “practical kabbalah”—were means of effecting the
tikkun
. When all is restored to its rightful place, the Messiah will come; his arrival will not deliver our redemption to us, but rather signal that redemption has, through man’s spiritual efforts, been achieved.

The majority of the Sephardic exiles were not kabbalists, and they headed not toward Galilee but to the far closer land of Portugal, where history would not wait long to deliver them another of its cruel twists. For though the Inquisition had not yet arrived in this part of the Iberian Peninsula, it soon would, and with equal if not greater ferocity. Manuel I declared, in 1497, a mere five years after the Spanish expulsion, that all his Jewish subjects must be forcibly converted. Not wishing to make the same economically ruinous mistake as the Spanish rulers (whose daughter, Isabella, was his fiancée), Manuel had not given his Jews the opportunity for emigrating. He wanted to extirpate Judaism while retaining the highly lucrative skills and resources of the formerly Jewish. He also decreed, after entreaties from the Sephardim, that he would give the New Christians a period of grace in which to adjust to their new faith; backsliding into Judaism would not be punished until 1527, a period which was then extended to 1534. Practically, this meant that Portuguese crypto-Judaism had some time to evolve its secret practices, and it proved far more tenacious there than in Spain. Also the Portuguese
conversos
were, by definition
annusim
, choosing the traumas of exile from the beloved Sepharad over conversion. Such stalwarts were predisposed toward Marranism.

In fact, a highly complicated culture of fraught subterfuge evolved in Spain and even more intricately in Portugal, an elaborate congeries of masked identities and coded phrases, to be understood only by those who shared the mortal secret. Outward Christian behavior was not what it appeared to be—there are still Spanish Catholics who, before entering a church, mumble a meaningless “incantation” that they were taught to recite by their equally uncomprehending elders, and which linguists have unraveled into a degenerated Hebrew, disavowing the rituals in which the worshipper is about to engage.

The externalities may sometimes have been bogus, but the veiled internality was tenuous as well, its precise content blurring with the years. The crypto-Jews may have disassociated themselves from their assumed identity, but, inevitably, the outward forms seeped inward. The Jewishness they were guarding became unconsciously Christianized, absorbing the symbolism and themes of the Church. As the philosopher Yirmiyahu Yovel describes it: “Religious duality penetrated the consciousness and the subconsciousness of the most ardent Judaizers. Even the Marrano martyrs and heroes were rarely Jews in the conventional sense. The clandestine character of worship, the Catholic education, the lack of Jewish instruction, the mental mixture of faiths, and the isolation from Jewish communities outside Iberia created a special phenomenon in the history and sociology of religion: a form of faith that is neither Christian nor Jewish.”
¹³

Of course, not all of the
conversos
were stricken by religious duality, at least not consciously. Many, perhaps the majority, were genuine in their conversion, indoctrinating their children in the new faith. Even if the original
conversos
were not motivated by Christian zeal, their offspring, brought up as Catholics, often were. Some became important figures in the history of Christianity itself, important in both conventional and, perhaps even more interestingly, unconventional ways, their torn identity playing a role in the development of Christianity.

St. Teresa of Ávila, for example, the brilliant mystical writer and Carmelite reformer, belonged to a New Christian family, even though many of the Catholic Web sites I’ve visited list her simply as deriving of Spanish noble stock. It’s true that her grandfather, a Toledan merchant named Juan Sánchez de Toledo, transferred his business to Ávila, where he succeeded in having his children marry into families of the nobility, which was a path to which many
conversos
aspired as a way of securing some degree (by no means absolute) of security against the charges of secret Judaizing. The future Catholic saint was born in 1515, twenty-three years after the Great Expulsion. She became one of the
alumbrados
, or illuminated ones, as the Spanish Christian mystics were known. (She was also the teacher of St. John of the Cross, another
alumbrado
and author of
Dark Night of the Soul
.) Her extraordinary personality, as well as the Christian sincerity of her upbringing, can be inferred from this tale of the saint I got from a Catholic Web site: “Her courage and enthusiasm were readily kindled, an early example of which trait occurred when at the age of 7 she left home with her brother Rodrigo with the intention of going to Moorish territory to be beheaded for Christ, but they were frustrated by their uncle, who met the children as they were leaving the city and brought them home (Ephrem de la Madre de Dios,
Tiempo y Vida de Sta. Teresa
).”

St. Teresa’s
Interior Castle
, written reluctantly as a guide for her Carmelite Sisters, is one of the classic Christian texts, a masterpiece of mystical literature. The castle, or mansion, as its known in Spanish, is the soul, which has, in her metaphorical vision, seven rooms. Spiritual advance, made through the medium of prayer, is a progressive movement through these rooms, drawing ever nearer to the center of the mansion, which is where one finds unity with God. Teresa makes of spiritual activity an entirely inward private process, the self ’s communing with itself alone, with all external influences, other than God Himself, rendered irrelevant; and the case can be made that her approach to spirituality has much to do with her
converso
background.
¹⁴

Spinoza, too, will emphasize the entirely inward and self-reliant process of spiritual advancement—though in his case the medium is not prayer but mathematically rigorous reason. It is intriguing to speculate how the Marrano psyche, necessarily oriented inward, found such different expressions in these two spiritual geniuses.

By the 1550s the full force of the Inquisition fell on all
conversos
suspected of Judaizing; and they were
all
suspected. Life was so unendurable, even for those who were faithfully Christian, that some in Portugal returned to Spain, where at least less attention was paid to each and every New Christian. In 1580 the two kingdoms were united, making travel between them easier. And although emigration had been outlawed for them, many
conversos
, whether secret Judaizers or not, tried to escape the Iberian Peninsula. Some left clandestinely, others secured permission to go on business trips from which they never returned, though there was always the fear as to what repercussions would befall relatives left behind. There are even reported cases of
conversos
obtaining permission to make a pilgrimage to the Vatican, and in this way effecting their escape.

By the sixteenth century the term “Portuguese” was simply understood through much of Europe, Asia, and Latin America as meaning Jewish, as more and more New Christians tried to circumvent the laws against immigration. A chosen destination was the city of Amsterdam, whose burghers may not have welcomed the refugees with open arms, but were not inclined to pry into personal religious beliefs, as long as they were praticed with decorum and discretion.

Sephardim began arriving in Amsterdam as early as 1590, some eleven years after the Union of Utrecht (1579) and the birth of the United Provinces of the Netherlands as a Protestant state now independent from Catholic Spain. They didn’t openly reveal themselves as Jews for several years. One of the legends is that foreign chanting was heard one night, coming from a darkened house. The Calvinists suspected papists and brought the authorities to investigate. The chanting, however, turned out to be Hebrew, which, though curious, wasn’t as threatening to the Protestants as a cadre of Catholics would have been.

In 1614 the Jews were able to purchase some land right outside Amsterdam, in Ouderkerk, as a burial ground. They had to wait until 1615 before Jewish settlement was officially recognized, though outward worship was still forbidden, and the conservative Calvinist clergy were always a hostile force with which to contend. The esteemed legal scholar Hugo Grotius, who had been one of those consulted when the legal status of the newly arrived Jews was being considered, opined that “plainly, God desires them to live somewhere. Why then not here rather than elsewhere? … Besides, the scholars among them may be of some service to us by teaching us the Hebrew language.” But knowing that the Jews had their share of “atheists and impious people,” he demanded the condition that all Jews over the age of fourteen state their faith in God, Moses, the prophets, and the afterlife.