The Spinoza Problem (17 page)

Alfred stayed for several weeks longer in Reval, struggling to support himself by teaching art at German-speaking schools. On one occasion he was astonished by winning a small prize for two of his drawings—the first and only money his art would ever generate. The following evening, in a celebratory mood, he wandered into a town meeting and stood rapt in the
back of the audience listening to a debate about the future of Estonia. Suddenly, as in a trance, he impulsively strode to the front of the hall and delivered a short impassioned speech about the dangers of Jewish Bolshevism looming in neighboring Russia. Was he perturbed when the Jewish owner of a large warehouse interrupted and led a large group of Jews to the exit in protest? Not at all. Alfred’s lips curled into a knowing smile, fully persuaded it was a good thing to have cleansed his audience. He didn’t wish those Jews evil. He hoped they would be warm and happy in their own kitchens. He just wanted them gone from Reval. Slowly the seeds of a grand idea germinated: gone not just from Reval, not just from Estonia, but gone from all of Europe. The Fatherland would only be safe, only be prosperous, when every Jew had left Europe.

Day by day his resolve grew to emigrate to Germany; he would dwell no more in an insignificant peripheral country. Estonia, now being emptied of Germans, headed for an unstable future as a weak independent country or, worse, immediate takeover by the Jewish-Russian Bolshevists. Yet how to leave? The roads out of Estonia were closed, and all trains had been commandeered by the military for the dejected army troops returning to Germany. Trapped and directionless, Alfred had his first visit from the angel of good fortune.

In the working-class café where Alfred often dined, he sipped his beer and ate sausages while reading
The Brothers Karamazov
. He read in Russian but had a German copy open on the table and stopped from time to time to evaluate the accuracy of the translation. Soon, annoyed by the noisy merriment at an adjoining table, he stood to search for a quieter spot. As he scanned the café, he chanced to overhear a conversation in German at the other table.

“Yes, yes, I’m leaving Reval,” said a middle-aged baker in a white apron, dusty with flour, that strained to contain an enormous belly. He smiled broadly as he opened a bottle of celebratory schnapps for his three companions, poured a glass, raised it over his head, and toasted them. “I drink a farewell to you, my dear friends, and hope we meet in the Fatherland. For once in my life I did something smart—baker smart.”

He pointed to his head and then to his belly. “I brought the military commander two loaves of my German bread and my best apple-raisin strudel, toasty warm, right out of the oven. His military aide tried to look
fierce and take them from me, saying he would deliver them to the commander, but I stared him down and promised to return later with a strudel for him, which was now baking in my oven. What’s more, I told him that the commander asked me to deliver it personally—
that
I made up on the spot. Then I walked into the commander’s office, showed him my gift, and begged him to let me go to Berlin. ‘It would go bad for me once the army left,’ I told him. “The Estonians would treat me as a collaborator because I bake good German bread and pastry for the troops. Here, look at this bread, heavy and crisp. Smell it. Taste it.’ I broke off a chunk and put it into his open mouth. He chewed, and his eyes lit up with delight. ‘Now smell the strudel,’ I said as I held it to his nose. Again and again he inhaled the aroma steaming from it. Soon he was intoxicated: his eyes went in circles, and he began to weave on his feet. ‘Now, open your mouth for a taste of heaven.’ He opened his mouth. Like a mother bird I fed him bits of strudel, choosing pieces packed with raisins, and he began to moan with delight as he chewed. ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he said and without another word ordered me a hardship pass to Germany. So I board the train tomorrow morning, and you, my friends, are welcome to the dough that rises in my oven as we speak.”

Alfred ruminated about what he had heard for three days and then woke up one morning determined to emulate the baker’s boldness. Arriving at the military headquarters with three of his best sketches of Reval, he, like the baker, told the aide-de-camp that he wished to deliver his gift directly to the commander. The aide’s resistance quickly evaporated when Alfred offered him a gift of one of the sketches. Ushered into the commander’s presence, Alfred presented his sketches and commented, “Here is a small remembrance of your time in Reval. I have been teaching Germans how to draw, and now I want nothing more than to teach Berliners my craft.” The commander inspected Alfred’s work, his lower lip protruding in appreciation of the sketches. When Alfred described his town meeting speech and the exodus of the Jews from the audience, the commander warmed even more and volunteered on his own that Alfred might not be safe in Estonia after the German military evacuation and offered him the last seat on a train to Berlin leaving at midnight that very evening.

Home! Finally heading home to the Fatherland! A home that he had never known. That thought crowded out all bodily discomfort during the several-day, freezing train trip to Berlin. Once he arrived, his exuberance
was dampened by the sight of the drooping military parade of the returning defeated German army down the Unter den Linden. Berlin, Alfred learned quickly, was not to his liking, and he felt more alone than ever. He spoke to no one at the immigrants’ relief station where he boarded, but he listened hungrily to conversations. “Munich” was on everyone’s lips. Avant-garde artists were there, anti-Semitic political groups as well, and Munich was the meeting place for radical White Russian anti-Bolshevistic agitators. The pull to Munich was irresistible and, convinced that his destiny lay there, Alfred within a week had hitched a ride on a cattle truck to Munich.

His funds running low, Alfred took his free lunch and supper at the Munich emigrants’ center, which offered decent food but required the indignity of bringing one’s own spoon. Munich was open, sunny, bustling, crammed with galleries and street artists. To his chagrin, he examined the watercolors of the street artists—their work was far better than his, and they weren’t selling. At times, anxiety set in: how would he live? Where would he find work? But for the most part, he felt unconcerned; confident that he was in the right place, he knew that sooner or later his future would be revealed to him. While he waited, he spent his days in art galleries and in libraries reading all he could find on Jewish history and literature and began sketching an outline for a book,
The Trace of the Jew
.

Again and again, Spinoza’s name appeared in his readings of Jewish history. Even though he had left Reval with all his belongings in only one suitcase, he still retained his copy of Spinoza’s
Ethics
but, recalling Friedrich’s advice, did not try to read it again. Instead he placed his name on the library waiting list for Spinoza’s other book,
Theological-Political Treatise.

As he strolled the streets of Munich trying unsuccessfully to peddle some sketches, good fortune struck once again when he looked up at a building that bore a placard:
Edith Schrenk: Dancing Instruction
. Edith Schrenk—he knew that name. Years ago his estranged wife, Hilda, and Edith had been dancing students in the same class in Moscow. Though he was shy by nature and had only spoken with Edith once or twice, he longed for a familiar face and tapped meekly on her door. Edith, dressed in a black leotard with a stylish aqua foulard around her neck, greeted him cordially, asked him to sit, offered him coffee, and inquired about Hilda, whom she had always liked. During the course of a long conversation Alfred described his uncertainty about his future, his interests in the Jewish question, and his experience during the Russian Revolution. When he mentioned he had been writing
a personal account of the dangers of Jewish Bolshevism, Edith put her hand on his.

“Why, then, Alfred, you must pay a visit to my friend Dietrich Eckart, the editor of the weekly newspaper
Auf gut Deutsch
. He has similar views and might be interested in your observations about the Russian Revolution. Here’s his address. Be sure to use my name when you see him.”

Without delay Alfred rushed out and headed to a life-changing meeting. On the way to Eckart’s office, he searched for
Auf gut Deutsch
at two newsstands but was told they had sold out. As he climbed the stairs to Eckart’s third-floor office, he recalled how Friedrich had warned him that impulsive fanatical actions could be his undoing. But throwing that advice to the wind, Alfred opened the door, introduced himself to Dietrich Eckart, mentioned Edith’s name, and impulsively blurted out, “Can you use a fighter against Jerusalem? I am dedicated, and I will fight until I drop.”

T
wo days later, as Bento and Gabriel were opening the store for business, a young boy wearing a skullcap ran up to them, stopped to catch his breath, and said, “Bento, the rabbi wants to talk to you. Right now. He is waiting at the synagogue.”

Bento was not surprised: he had been expecting this summons. He took his time putting his broom away, drank the last sip of coffee in his cup, nodded farewell to Gabriel, and silently followed the young boy toward the synagogue. With a look of grave concern on his face, Gabriel stepped outside and watched the two recede into the distance.

In his study on the second floor of the synagogue, Rabbi Saul Levi Mortera, dressed in the style of a prosperous Dutch burgher with camel-hair trousers and jacket and silver-buckled leather shoes, irritably tapped his pen on his desk awaiting Baruch Spinoza. A tall, imposing sixty-year-old man with a razor sharp nose, frightening eyes, stern lips, and a well-trimmed gray goatee, Rabbi Mortera was many things—an honored scholar, a prolific author, a fierce intellectual warrior, a survivor of bitter battles with competing rabbis, a gallant defender of the sanctity of the Torah—but he was not a patient man. It had been almost thirty minutes since he had sent his messenger, a lad in bar mitzvah training, to fetch his wayward former student.

Saul Mortera had presided majestically over the Amsterdam Jewish community for thirty-seven years. In 1619 he had been appointed to his first post as the rabbi of Beth Jacob, one of the three small Sephardic synagogues in the city. When his congregation merged with Neve Shalom and Beth Israel in 1639, Saul Mortera was chosen over other candidates to take the post of head
rabbi of the new Talmud Torah Synagogue. A mighty bulwark of traditional Jewish law, he had for decades protected his community from the skepticism and secularism of the wave of Portuguese immigrants, many of whom had been forced to convert to Christianity and few of whom had had early traditional Jewish instruction. He was weary—indoctrinating adults into the old ways is hard work. He appreciated all too well the lesson all religious teachers ultimately grasp: it is essential to capture students when they are very young.

A tireless educator, he developed a comprehensive curriculum, hired many teachers, personally offered daily Hebrew, Torah, and Talmud classes to the older students, and endlessly dueled with other rabbis in order to uphold his interpretations of the laws of the Torah. One of his bitterest struggles had taken place fourteen years earlier with his assistant and rival, Rabbi Isaac Aboab de Fonseca, over the question of whether unrepentant Jewish sinners, even Jews forced under pain of death from the Inquisition to convert to Christianity, would live eternally in the world to come. Rabbi Aboab, who, like many members of the congregation, had converso family members remaining in Portugal, held that a Jew always remained a Jew and that all Jews would ultimately enter the blessed world to come. Jewish blood persevered, he insisted, and could be erased by nothing, not even conversion to another religion. Paradoxically, he supported his claim by citing Queen Isabella of Spain, the great enemy of the Jews, who acknowledged the indelibility of Jewish blood when she instituted the
Estatutos de Limpieza de Sangre
, blood laws that prevented “New Christians”—that is, Jewish conversos—from holding important civic and military positions.

Rabbi Mortera’s hard-line position was consonant with his physique—unyielding, uncompromising, oppositional—and he insisted that all unrepentant Jews who broke Jewish law would be forever barred from the blissful world to come and would instead face eternal punishment. The law was the law, and there were no exceptions, even for those Jews who yielded under threat of death from the Portuguese and Spanish Inquisition. All Jews who were uncircumcised or violated dietary laws or failed to observe the Sabbath, or any of the myriad religious laws, were doomed for all eternity.

Mortera’s unforgiving declaration infuriated Amsterdam Jews, who had converso relatives still dwelling in Portugal and Spain, but he would not budge. So acrimonious and divisive was the ensuing debate that the elders of the synagogue petitioned the rabbinate of Venice to intervene and provide
a definitive interpretation of the law. The Venetian rabbis reluctantly agreed and listened to the delegates’ arguments, often offered in shrill voices, for each side of the knotty controversy. For two hours they pondered their response. Stomachs churned. Dinner was delayed, and finally they reached a unanimous decision not to decide: they wanted no part of this thorny controversy and ruled that the problem must be solved by the Amsterdam congregation itself.

But the Amsterdam community could not reach resolution and, to prevent a descent into irreparable schism, sent an emergency second delegation to Venice pleading even more strongly for outside intervention. Ultimately the Venetian rabbinate reached a decision and supported the view of Saul Mortera (who, by the by, had been educated in the yeshiva of Venice). The delegation bearing the rabbinical decision rushed back to Amsterdam, and four weeks later many members of the congregation somberly stood at the harbor and waved farewell to the downcast Rabbi Aboab and his family, as their goods were loaded onto a ship headed for Brazil, where he would assume rabbinical duties in the distant seaside city of Recife. From that point on, no rabbi in Amsterdam would ever again challenge Rabbi Mortera.