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BARUCH OR BENEDICT? SPINOZA AS a 'MARRANO' 1. 'Marranos

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BARUCH OR BENEDICT? SPINOZA AS a 'MARRANO' 1. 'Marranos CHAPTER ONE BARUCH OR BENEDICT? SPINOZA AS A ‘MARRANO’ 1. ‘Marranos’ How Jewish was the greatest philosopher the Netherlands ever produced? He was born in 1632 in Amsterdam as Baruch de Spinoza, but after his expulsion from the Portuguese synagogue in 1656 he called himself ‘Bene- dictus’ de Spinoza. Some of his earliest critics considered his Jewish back- ground to be evident from his writings. Thus, as early as 1674 Willem van Blijenbergh argued that Spinoza’s comments in the TTP on Adam reminded him of the work of ‘rasende Thalmudisten’.1 Yet this observa- tion was hardly representative of the early reception of the TTP, and Van Blijenbergh was mainly struck by its resemblance to the views held by Lodewijk Meyer, Adriaan Koerbagh, Thomas Hobbes, and, of course, René Descartes. Van Blijenbergh knew perfectly well that Spinoza had been responsible for the anonymous TTP, and he had closely studied his 1663 introduction to Cartesianism. Eigtheenth and nineteenth-century readers of Spinoza also acknowledged his Jewish background, but the more recent insistence on the Marrano roots of Spinozism is relatively new.2 Over the past few decades several specialists bent on rendering Spinoza into an essentially Jewish author have sought to do so by exploring the affiliation of both his life and thought with the culture of the so-called ‘Marranos’. They believe to have discovered a pattern of behaviour in Spinoza’s intellectual biography originating among the medieval Jewish inhabitants of Spain and Portugal.3 The history of the Jewish community of the Iberian peninsula is well known: after having been tolerated for several 1 Van Blijenbergh, De Waerheydt van de Christelijke Godts-Dienst, 131. 2 For a very large collection of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Spinozana: Boucher (ed.), Spinoza, 6 vols. See esp. the texts by Karl Pierson, Solomon Schindler, Joseph Strauss, and Michael Friedländer. 3 Almost all of the relevant material has been collected by Gebhardt and Révah. See the Introduction by Carl Gebhardt to his edition of Die Schriften des Uriel da Costa and his ‘Juan de Prado’. The various studies by Israel Révah of this issue have been collected by Henry Méchoulan, Pierre-François Moreau, and Carsten Lorenz Wilke in: Révah, Des marranes à Spinoza. See more recently also Osier, D’Uriel da Costa à Spinoza; Albiac, La Synagogue vide; Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics. Two older, famous studies which concentrate on 2 chapter one centuries by Arab and Christian princes, by the end of the fourteenth cen- tury the Jews of Spain and Portugal were being forced to convert to the Catholic faith. As a consequence, so the story goes, a considerable part of the ‘sefardim’ reverted to a strategy of concealment and deceit: while they made it look as if they embraced Christianity, they secretly contin- ued to adhere to the main principles of Judaism. These ‘new Christians’ or ‘conversos’ were also called ‘marranos’—a nasty term, meaning ‘pigs’. In the course of the fifteenth century, however, the tension between out- ward conformity and secret loyalty to the ways of their ancestors started to draw attention and a new wave of anti-Jewish measures forced many ‘Marranos’ to move to Portugal, where initially the pressure to conform appears to have been less intense than it was now becoming in Spain. It would seem that Spinoza’s own family belonged to these refugees who during the sixteenth century had to escape from persecution once again: by the end of the century thousands of Jews had left Portugal in order to settle in Venice, Livorgno, Hamburg or Amsterdam, where they suddenly had the chance to live as Jews—or not.4 The Portuguese-Jewish community which was founded in Amsterdam was the first of its kind in the province of Holland. While its leaders were trying to establish a Jewish ‘orthodoxy’, and arguably more importantly a set of properly Jewish practices, some Amsterdam Jews of Iberic extrac- tion, or so the story continues, started to question their own inheritance.5 For now a unique opportunity presented itself: all of a sudden, Jews were able to choose, for instance, between Judaism and the Reformed creed. We know that around the middle of the seventeenth century Protestant divines launched a major offensive encouraging Jews to convert.6 Many of the philo-semitic initiatives of the time were inspired by millenarian expectations. The conversion of the Jews, many Reformed theologians felt, would no doubt facilitate the imminent Second Coming, and this time the Jewish sources of Spinoza, without any reference to the Marranos: Wolfson, The Phi- losophy of Spinoza and Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing. 4 Roth, A History of the Marranos; Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain. 5 Nahon, ‘Amsterdam, métropolis occidentale’; Schwetschinski, ‘The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam’; Israel, ‘Sephardic Immigration into the Dutch Republic’; Fuks-Mansfeld, De Sefardim in Amsterdam tot 1795; Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism; Méchoulan, Être Juif à Amsterdam au temps de Spinoza; Popkin, The Third Force, Chap- ter 9; Vlessing, ‘The Jewish Community in Transition’; Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation. 6 Melnick, From Polemics to Apologetics; Katchen, Christian Hebraists and Dutch Rabbis; Van den Berg and Van der Wall (eds.), Jewish-Christian Relations in the Seventeenth Cen- tury; Van Rooden, Theology, Biblical Scholarship and Rabbinical Studies..
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