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Home , Jerusalem (Mendelssohn), Pain (philosophy), Personality, Uriel da Costa

REVS UP THE ENGINE: Mazya tweaks the nerve-racking action through a number of comically cunning devices The Philosopher,

Yes, two potent strikes against “Love Burns.” Yet on the third pitch, Edna Mazya the Heretic, the smacks the ball smartly out of the park. Again without revealing the plot, I’ll just say she pours on a series of episodes in which the cuckolded Ilan makes bad move and His Lovers after bad move, each time leaving the read- er crying frantically, “No, no, don’t do that How did Spinoza, one of the wildest and most unmanageable thinkers — oh, Lord — now what can possibly hap- of all time, become domesticated? pen?” Mazya moreover tweaks the action Benjamin Lazier heart. He is incarnate. He lacks pas- through a number of comically cunning sion and personality, or what Goldstein devices. One — which is so quintessen- PINOZA-BEAR IS CUTE. HE’S calls the “pounding pulse of subjectivity.” tially Israeli — is denying Ilan any priva- cuddly. He has a cassette player But her Spinoza does not feel this lack as cy. Our hero can do virtually nothing, even in his tummy. Touch his shiny, loss. He seeks it, as gain. He has set out sys- in the dead of night, without red heart, and he speak to tematically to purge every particularity, observed. One mild example is when he your disabled child about loss, every feeling, every contingency of circum- roots through the trash bins in his apart- Sgrief, fear, and nap time, tasks for stance that makes up his sense of who he is ment block to find something his wife has which he is specially trained. And for 150 in favor of a “view from eternity.” By tossed away. In doing so Ilan discovers he bucks, he’s yours. estranging ourselves from what most of us is being watched by two neighborhood Spinoza-Bear is but the latest stage in understand as most emphatically us, children who demand to know what he is the domestication of perhaps the most wild Spinoza thinks we achieve something more doing. Told he is looking for something, and unmanageable thinker in history. Wild, satisfying and true — proximity to the the children demand to know what it is. because Spinoza rebuffed all social entrap- divine. Spinoza calls it amor dei intellectu- Told what it is, the children demand to ment: Expelled from the Jewish community alis, the love of God. We might know why he must find it. Told why he of in 1656, he declined to call it ecstasy or ek-stasis, a “standing out- must find it, the children demand to help return, refused Christianity, and so lived a side” of the . It is akin to , him look. And when the object — a preg- secular life before it was (institutionally) pursued not through , not through hal- nancy testing kit — is found, the children possible to do so. demand to know the test results. And on it Unmanageable, because goes. Spinoza has been appropriated Betraying Spinoza: by just about everyone, but in The Renegade Jew IMILARLY, MAZYA GLEEFULLY incompatible ways and never Who Gave Us conjures dramatic conjunctions that for long: To judge by his By Rebecca Goldstein Swould drive anyone crazy. A major reception, he is both rationalist Schocken/Nextbook revelation occurs for Ilan and Naomi — the and mystic, materialist and 289 pp.; $20 sort of thing that will likely alter their pantheist, ascetic and hedonist, future forever — just as a horde of impor- philosopher and Jew. He is the tant dinner guests arrives. Ilan seethes with father of both liberal democra- secrets — but often in the company of his cy and the totalitarian state. He Conversation with Spinoza: best friend, a wily police detective in is Hegel and Marx, devil and A Cobweb Novel whom for of plot Ilan dare not con- Christ, atheist and intoxicated By Goce Smilevski fide. And more than once, just as Ilan is with God. David Ben-Gurion (translated from the Macedonian about to take some fateful step, someone hoped to rescind his ban, Leo by Filip Korzenski) dies on him, and by doing so affects his Strauss to reinstate it. Even the Northwestern University Press fate profoundly. German dental association 152 pp.; $17 (paperback) The cover blurb compares “Love once felt obliged to put in a Burns” to certain darker works by Woody few good words for the vener- Allen. In fact, “Love Burns” would make a able Jewish heretic. lucinogens, but through reason. It will leave better Woody Allen movie than many a Rebecca Goldstein improvises on one of you transformed. recent Woody Allen movie. Meanwhile, it the standard themes of Spinoza interpreta- This, in the tiniest of nutshells, sums up makes for a terrific read. ¥ tion in her book, “Betraying Spinoza: The one prominent theme of Spinoza’s “.” Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity.” The book was published in 1677, but Contributing Editor Matt Nesvisky writes fre- Her Spinoza presents himself more as Tin posthumously, since its teachings spelled quently about books for The Report. Man than Spinoza-Bear. That is, he has no danger for its author. It denied a providen-

THE REPORT OCTOBER 16, 2006 55 BOOKS tial God, a transcendent God, a personal all sectarian forms of , Goldstein proved a boon. His doubt about one reli- God. It equated God instead with the active suggests, tackles the historical problem of gion predisposed him to have doubts and creative force in nature, not beyond it. Jewish by rendering meaningless about them all. This led him in turn to If there is a Spinozistic slogan, it is this: the categories used to justify anti-Jewish reflect on the sort of political order best Deus sive natura. God, or nature. They are violence in the first place, the kind used to suited to protecting those who doubt, and one and same. For these reasons and others, classify as “in” or “out” or somewhere to enabling those who do not to live Spinoza’s threatened the monotheistic in between. A cynic might retort: Spinoza’s together in peace. Hence perhaps his orthodoxies, and invited the charge of pan- plan to save the Jews came at the cost theism, that all is divine. of whatever made them Jewish. The “Ethics” also cemented Spinoza’s Whatever the case, neither the reputation (among some, but by no means classifications nor the violence they all or most) as the coldest and most imperi- spawned were imposed exclusively ous of thinkers, given his suspicion of the by Christians. They were a fixture passions and the waywardness they produce also among the Portuguese Jews in — religious superstition for example, or Amsterdam, many of them former romantic love. Enter now Goldstein the , and shaped Spinoza in psychoanalyst. What kind of heartbreak unexpected ways. He must have was so terrible to endure that its prospect known of , driven to led a man to protect himself by ripping his suicide by a community intolerant of own heart from his chest? That is the ques- his preference for Biblical over rab- tion Goldstein poses in her book. binic . Soon thereafter, To pose the question about the origins of Spinoza would bear the brunt of that Spinoza’s thought is already, Goldstein fury himself. But he would not plead thinks, to betray him. It presumes that for clemency. Instead, he embraced Spinoza’s counsel to transcend the particu- his ban, the story goes, as that which lar was itself prompted by the accidents of he would have chosen for himself. his birth, his home and his history, rather Goldstein recounts all this and more. than the product of pure deduction in the But she betrays Spinoza, she claims, style of a mathematical proof. Spinoza was by crafting a memoir of a Benedictus famous for pursuing philosophy more geo- indebted always to his Baruch, of a metrico, in the manner of geometry, and he philosopher who would always once remarked that he knew the of his remain a Jew. philosophy as he knew the sum of the In the process, Goldstein writes angles of a triangle. He asked after another memoir — her own. She appetites as he did lines, planes and bodies. introduces us to Spinoza through the But would the truth of such a theorem be remonstrations of a teacher from her any less if its discovery or its need were Orthodox day school on the Lower born not of the but the heart? East Side of New York: the well- Goldstein fears it would. She sets out intentioned but hapless Mrs. nonetheless to discover the life pulsing Schoenfeld. Poor Mrs. Schoenfeld. between its lines. And so she reads the She warns against . She coun- “Ethics” as an autobiography writ large. sels against the hubris of raising rea- Very large. She thinks of the “Ethics” as son above God. She despairs that one response to the heartbreak of Jewish Jews like Spinoza and Marx have history itself, and so we are treated to a done more for goyische philosophy romp through a thousand years: from the than the goyim. But in the act of pro- eighth century, when Muslims first con- tecting her charges, she corrupts them greatest legacy. Spinoza came down on quered chunks of Spain, to the flowering of instead. Or at least the ones like Goldstein, the side of liberal , and to the under Muslim rule, to the who earned a PhD in goyische philosophy theocrats of his day committed to the efforts by to reconcile Judaism at Princeton, and who takes some pleasure fusion of church and state he had this to with Aristotle, to the advent of Spanish kab- in correcting her erstwhile teacher with say: You are ultimi barbarorum — the balism, to the origins of the , ide- what she since has learned. Spinoza, greatest of barbarians. ologies of blood-purity, and the converso Goldstein imagines, must have been a lot Goldstein may well have betrayed phenomenon, to the exodus first to like herself — a Hebrew school renegade, Spinoza. But in so doing, she maintains a in 1492 and then around the globe, and unpersuaded by the Mrs. Schoenfelds of his fealty to much of what Spinoza has finally to the lurching attempts by “New day, and suffering like Goldstein from a become, Spinoza-Bear not least. Part of Christians” to reinvent themselves as newly “telltale gnaw in his chest,” a sign of infes- Spinoza’s message, after all, is that we are old Jews in Amsterdam and elsewhere. tation by the sharp-toothed rodents of necessarily disabled in our learning and What does any of this have to do with doubt. hence our living, but that the emendation the “Ethics”? A philosophy that dissolves In Spinoza’s case, the pestilence of the may yet be in our grasp.

56 THE JERUSALEM REPORT OCTOBER 16, 2006 Goldstein’s book is akin to a work of of thoughts that make having a body a both- No. Spinoza gets the boot when he meets “fanfic,” a genre of writing in which the er. But that’s all. He has no interest in the itinerant canine, imitates his yelps and devotees of a fictional world — say, the uni- Spinoza the liberal democrat, Spinoza the howls for his friends, and then forgets to verse of Harry Potter — extend the original non-Jewish Jew, Spinoza the first secular mention that the howls were Beagle’s and in unexpected and unauthorized directions. human being, or Spinoza the founder of not his own when his friends — some “Slash” is a sub-genre of fanfic. Its hall- modernity. Those are not his stories. friends! — rat him out to the Jewish coun- mark is to force the original characters into Still, along the way, the Macedonian cil of Amsterdam. This is not revisionist sexually compromising Novel of the Year (2002) introduces the history, but revisionist historical fiction at positions, the more out- argument of the “Ethics” and also a surprise, its worst, and so in a weird way at its best. landish the better — say, a fresh take on the origins of Spinoza’s ban. After all, if you’re going to revise, you Harry Potter with Severus To understand, we must familiarize our- might as well revise big. Snape, or Dumbledore with a figure hitherto unknown to For all that, the story is occasionally with his big, red bird. scholars of the 17th century — a (fictitious) endearing. Smilevski claims to have known Think of it as fanfic with man by the name of Accipiter Beagle. at an early age that he would one day write an X-rated twist. You can Accipiter Beagle. What kind of a name about Spinoza. If the novel seems born in find it on the Internet, or so is that? Accipiter is for hawk. The part of adolescent depravity, it seems born I’m told. Beagle was a famous research vessel. The also of a pre-pubescent sense that Spinoza allusions are important, because Accipiter was a lonely boy, and that he could have OCE SMILEVSKI Beagle turns out to have authored a book used some friends. This is cute. has produced called “A Brief History of Time,” lost to But Smilevski takes it upon himself to Gsomething that is posterity until a fraud named Stephen provide them by conscripting each and unprecedented in several Hawking discovered it in the Cambridge every reader of his book for the job. The

Spinoza has been appropriated by just about everyone: He is both rationalist and mystic, ascetic and hedonist, philosopher and Jew. He is Hegel and Marx, devil and Christ, atheist and intoxicated with God.

centuries of reflection archives and published it under his name. conversation to which the title refers turns upon Spinoza. Accipiter Beagle also has weird ideas about out to transpire between Spinoza and — “Conversation with the origins of man. He thinks we descend you. This is less cute. It means that you will Spinoza: A Cobweb from apes! Later, a poseur called Charles be the one who gets Spinoza to admit to Novel” is no less than the Darwin would pay homage to the forebear fantasies about the 12-year-old girl who first documented instance from whom he stole his theory by adopting teaches him Latin, or about the 15-year-old of Spinozaslash ever to Beagle’s name for his boat. boy whom he instructs in Descartes, or — find its way into print, at Accipiter Beagle hails from Macedonia. may God (or nature) help us — about ejac- least with a reputable pub- He is also the following: a martial-arts expert ulating on the corpse of his pupil. Smilevski lisher. The Jewish heretic abducted as a child by Ottoman Janissaries, likens his novel to a cobweb, but the reader is no stranger to calumny. who turned to after inadvertently is not so much spider as prey. Satan incarnate, leader of murdering his parents and siblings at the The book does not lack cause for praise, errant men, wretched behest of the vile Turks, whose teachings and will prove especially fun for those pygmy, vile worm of the combine what will in time become 20th-cen- interested in what happens when one earth: He has suffered tury with 19th-century evolution Balkan intellectual feasts on the postwar AVI KATZ these and other slanders with hermeticism, , kabbala, and reception of Spinoza in France, not to men- from former co-religionists and Christians the pre-Adamite theory of the 19th-century tion a host of academostars like Gilles alike. But I think it safe to say that no one — Isaac de la Peyrere, who would Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Shoshana Felman, until Smilevski — has fabricated a portrait meet his end at the hands of the Inquisition and Mieke Bal. But in the of the philosopher that would have made for declaring men born of apes rather than end, there is something unseemly about even the parnasim of Amsterdam blush: the product of intelligent design, and who needling the most reserved and Apollonian Spinoza as a bisexual pederast with a pen- therefore prefigures the situation of belea- of philosophers to cop to the most chant for necrophilia, self-love and some- guered evolutionists everywhere, from John Dionysian of wants. It just makes you feel times both at once. Scopes to the few maskilim left in Kansas, icky to read. ¥ Oy. Tehran or B’nei Brak. In impulse, Smilevski’s book is not so Spinoza is excommunicated, as it turns Benjamin Lazier teaches European intellec- different from Goldstein’s. He wants to out, not because he denied the tual history, and Western humanize the most impersonal and to sen- of the , and not, as Goldstein suggests, humanities at Reed College. He is at work sualize the least creaturely of thinkers. So for bringing suit against his sister over their on a book, “Redemption Through Sin: he imparts to Spinoza a body and the kind father’s assets in a civil, non-Jewish court. Judaism and Heresy in Interwar Europe.”

THE JERUSALEM REPORT OCTOBER 16, 2006 57