Pascal in Potentia… Isaac Da Costa on Spinoza and Pantheism

STUDIA ROSENTHALIANA 42-43 (2010-2011), 149-163 doi: 10.2143/SR.43.0.2175924

Pascal in potentia… Isaac da Costa on Spinoza and Pantheism

IRENE ZWIEP

Introduction: Da Costa and Jewish emancipation

‘ ie Menschheit? Das ist ein Abstraktum, es hat von jeher nur D Menschen gegeben und es wird nur Menschen geben.’1 The famous remark by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to the German historian Heinrich Luden (1778-1847) summarizes one of the fundamental dilemmas of historiography: the tension between, on the one hand, the historical patterns we impose upon the past and, on the other, the individual fates that help us draw up those patterns yet by the same token seem to defy them. The career of the Dutch-Jewish writer Isaac da Costa (1798-1860), whose thoughts on the life and work of Baruch Spinoza are at the heart of this contribution, is a case in point. Self-confessed Sephardi nobleman, Romantic Dutch-national poet, Protestant convert and spokesman of the pietistic Christian Reveil Movement, Da Costa’s biography reflects the deeply experimental nature of Dutch-Jewish life during the first decades of the nineteenth century, when the parallel searches for a Jewish-gentile ecumene and for a new Dutch-Israelite identity dominated the intellectual arena.2 Both Da Costa’s search for a new identity and his choice to join a clearly-defined ecumenical space, are strategies that were followed by many after 1796, the year in which civic equality had been granted to the Jews in the Low Countries. The fact,

1. ‘Mankind? That is an abstraction. There have always been, and always will be, only men.’ Quoted from O. Spengler’s Untergang des Abendlandes. Umriße einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte. Ungekürzte Sonderausgabe in einem Band (Munich 1980), p. 28f. 2. For the Dutch-Jewish Enlightenment as a quest for an intellectual sphere without religious or cultural difference, cf. my forthcoming article ‘Jewish Enlightenment (Almost) without Haskalah: the Dutch Example’, in Jewish Culture and History 12 (2011 ). 150 IRENE ZWIEP however, that Da Costa chose to realize that new Jewish identity outside the sphere of Enlightenment and, especially, outside the realm of Juda- ism, neatly illustrates the truth of Goethe’s observation. Da Costa’s famous assertion that he ‘had remained, no had become a Jew only when (…) professing [him]self a Christian’ indeed seems to illustrate the individual paradox rather than the collective process of early nineteenth-century Jewish emancipation.3 For Da Costa, however, there had been neither paradox nor irony in those words, which he had noted down in the preface to his messianic Israel en de volken. Een over- zicht van de geschiedenis der Joden tot op onzen tijd of 1848, a history of the Jewish people from its biblical beginnings until the most recent – and according to Da Costa upsettingly revolutionary – times. Like his conversion in 1822, his oft-quoted dictum can (to a certain extent at least) be interpreted as his personal, individual commentary on collective Jewish emancipation and on the threat he believed this unprecedented novelty posed to both the natural and the divine order of the universe. When viewed against the longue durée of universal history, Da Costa believed, Jewish political emancipation was nothing short of Jewish religious apostasy. While discussing the phenomenon in Israel en de volken, he was quick to identify the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn as the prime instigator and role model of this collective folly. Under the guise of enlightened rationalism, he claimed, Mendelssohn had succeeded in lur- ing his less-gifted fellow-Jews into imitating the ‘Mendelssohnian paradox’, i.e., into covertly adopting the values and mores of Christianity while remaining overtly loyal to traditional ‘Rabbinism’ – a reproof that resounds with echoes of the famous Lavater affair of 1769, when the Swiss pastor Johann Caspar Lavater (1741-1801) had challenged Mendelssohn to either refute the Christian religion or else embrace its principles. Following Mendelssohn’s death in 1786, Da Costa argued, the philosopher’s many epigones (scathingly dismissed as ‘de Joodsche Emanci patievrienden’)4 had continued to tempt their co-religionists

3. ‘Ik bleef toch wel (neen! Ik werd eerst recht) Israëliet, toen ik (…) mij Christen beleed’, in I. da Costa, Israel en de volken (Utrecht 1848), Voorrede. For a detailed analysis of Da Costa’s biography as a ‘Jewish fate’, cf. J. Meijer’s doctoral thesis Isaac da Costa’s weg naar het Christendom. Bijdrage tot de geschiedenis der joodsche problematiek in Nederland (Amsterdam 1946), and idem, Martelgang of cirkelgang. Isaac da Costa als joods romanticus (Paramaribo 1954). 4. Israël en de volken, p. 372. PASCAL IN POTENTIA… ISAAC DA COSTA ON SPINOZA AND PANTHEISM 151 into pseudo-Christianity, thus causing them to forsake their divinely determined role in history (which had been to live as Jews until the coming of the Messiah, only to confirm the Christian truth through their unanimous conversion upon His arrival). In Da Costa’s view, the Jews’ recent struggle for socio-political equality implied a perverse negation of both Christian theology and Jewish history. ‘What should a Christian clinging on to the Gospel of Grace… think of this new development in the history of Abraham’s ancient offspring… [it is] a disruption of religion and the social order, an assault on, and subver- sion of Judaism and Christianity, which serves, in one word, Apostasy and Revolution,’ he exclaimed at the conclusion of his diatribe against Mendelssohn and his disciples.5 It is clear that, whatever his motives had been in 1822, in 1848 Da Costa was ready to see his own conversion as an attempt at salvaging both Christianity and Judaism, in an effort to restore, through his personal example, the divinely ordained order of the world and the purpose of Jewish history – by remaining, or rather, by becoming a Jew by entering the ecumene of the Dutch Prot- estant Church.6

Da Costa and the ‘Amsterdam Spanish Peninsula’

Da Costa’s complex stance on Judaism and Christianity, combined with his life-long fascination for Sephardic history and nobility (including his own alleged noble lineage)7 make us curious after his judgment on those ancestors whose history had likewise been marked by a tension between the two rivalling faiths: the Iberian conversos who, at the onset of the seventeenth century, had chosen to settle in

5. Ibid., p. 376f. 6. Da Costa’s Jewish-national sentiments on the Jews’ role in universal redemption are likewise reflected in his Vijf en twintig stellingen over de nationale wederoprichting van Israël en de wederkomst van de Heere Jezus Christus in heerlijkheid (‘Twenty-five propositions regarding the national re-establishment of Israel and the return of the Lord Jesus Christ in glory’) of 1855. 7. In the early 1820s, Da Costa had tried in vain to obtain formal recognition of his noble status, which he had managed to trace back to converso circles in late-medieval Spain and Portugal. His research into Jewish aristocracy culminated in a serial publication entitled ‘Adelijke geslachten onder de Israëliten’, which first appeared in the Dutch historical-genealogical monthly De Navor- scher (1857-1858) and was integrated into later editions of Israel en de Volken (e.g., Haarlem 1873, p. 460-537). For a chronological account of young Da Costa’s enthralment with the Sephardic past, cf. Meijer, Isaac da Costa’s weg, p. 78-90. 152 IRENE ZWIEP the port city of Amsterdam and had built a Jewish community that had never quite managed (nor wished) to shed off its gentile past. We know from various sources that Da Costa felt a deep affinity with ‘the Spanish peninsula of the seventeenth century’ as he once labelled it.8 On the one hand, this affinity ran along familial lines. Da Costa was a direct descendant of Joseph da Costa, the younger brother of the notorious seventeenth-century Amsterdam dissenter Uriël da Costa, whose character and beliefs (as understood by his great-grandnephew Isaac) will be briefly touched upon below. On a more spiritual level medieval Spain, even if it had been transposed to the relative grandeur of Golden Age Amsterdam, was cherished by Da Costa as the oriental haven of the West, a sphere that was more congenial to his own romantic persona of ‘Oriental, Nobleman, Bard’ (‘Oosterling, Edel- man, Dichter’)9 than the ‘lauwe Westerstranden’, the chilly beaches that adorned the western shores of the newly founded Kingdom of the Netherlands. Occupying the entire ‘Third Book’ of Israel en de volken (i.e. 235 out of a total of 588 pages of Jewish ‘world history’), Da Costa’s reconstruc- tion of medieval and early modern Sephardic history seems to reflect this longstanding partiality.10 Within the present framework, to examine in detail the entire section would mean to surrender analysis to mere description; instead, I have chosen to concentrate on a passage that offers us an exemplary summary of the intricate Jewish-Christian agenda that nourished Da Costa’s historical thinking. In the following we shall con- sider at some length his critical, but by no means disparaging views on the life and work of Baruch Spinoza, son of converso noblemen and father of Pantheism, whose intellectual career (not unlike Da Costa’s own) had transcended the boundaries of traditional Judaism yet whose ideas had always remained, or so Da Costa claimed, essentially true to the spirit of Judaism.

8. ‘Ik behoor tot het Spaanse schiereiland van de zeventiende eeuw…’, in a letter to his friend Van Hogendorp, dated 15 March 1821; quoted in Meijer, Isaac da Costa’s weg, p. 81. 9. Again in a letter (dated 6 July 1821) to Dirk van Hogendorp, quoted ibid., p. 97. 10. Within this section, the account of the conversos’ fortunes in Amsterdam seems compara- tively modest (p. 385-421). NB: In the three remaining books, Da Costa had divided Jewish history into ‘national’ (i.e. mainly biblical) history (book 1), the history of the medieval Diaspora (book 2) and, a slightly less conventional category, the history of the various diasporic centres between the Reformation and the year 1848 (book 4). PASCAL IN POTENTIA… ISAAC DA COSTA ON SPINOZA AND PANTHEISM 153

In Israel en de volken the brief portrait of Spinoza, inserted between the hardly more comprehensive biographies of Uriël da Costa and Isaac Orobio de Castro, was included in a chapter on Schrijvers en Geleerden, i.e. on the Sephardi writers and scholars who had enriched the cultural tapestry of seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Those familiar with nineteenth-century Jewish literature will realize that this straightforward inclusion of Spinoza in the early modern Jewish canon was, at the time, a fashionable Jewish choice.11 Those familiar with our author’s wide- ranging oeuvre will know that Da Costa had made that choice before he started working on his 1848 summary of Jewish history. It required, however, the messianic context of Israel en de volken and the interfer- ence of a second, devoutly Christian text for him to formulate his ultimate reading of Spinoza and his philosophy. Indeed Da Costa’s final assessment of Spinoza can boast of a rather elaborate proto-history. Its origins can be traced back to the late 1830s, when Da Costa had included a – largely dismissive – exposé on Spinoza’s Pantheism in a long and ardent rehabilitation of his deceased mentor, the Dutch poet and polymath Willem Bilderdijk (1756-1831).12 A few years later the Dutch historian Hendrik Jacob Koenen (1809-1874), an old friend of Da Costa (though not necessarily a kindred Christian spirit), had interpolated the passage almost verbatim in his portrait of Spinoza in his own Geschiedenis der Joden in Nederland.13 As we shall see, Koenen’s more detailed – and biased – version of Spinoza’s vita in its turn served as a point of dialogical departure in Da Costa’s messianic, Jewish-national ‘counter-history’ of 1848.14

11. As Dan Schwartz has pointed out in The First Modern Jew. Spinoza and The History of an Image (Princeton, NJ 2012), in the wake of the Pantheist controversy Spinoza was reinterpreted as an icon of Jewish modernity in circles of German Jewish intellectuals, especially from the 1830s onwards; see also the concluding remarks below, p. 162. 12. ‘Goethe en Bilderdijk’, in Stemmen en beschouwingen over godsdienst, staat-, geschied- en letterkunde (Amsterdam 1839), p. 169-186, 367-377, 402-410, 462-471, esp. 402-410. 13. H.J. Koenen, Geschiedenis der Joden in Nederland (Utrecht 1843), p. 349-356. Under the heading ‘Theosophie en Philosophie’, Da Costa’s summary was quoted p. 353ff. NB: in 1834, Koenen and Da Costa had co-founded the Dutch periodical Nederlandsche Stemmen (later: Stem- men en beschouwingen) over godsdienst, staat-, geschied- en letterkunde, in which Da Costa had published his apologetic essay on Bilderdijk. Upon Da Costa’s death in 1860 Koenen published an extensive obituary, after a eulogy held in June 1860, in the Jaarboek van de Maatschappij der Neder- landsche Letterkunde (1860), p. 305-368. 14. Israël en de volken, p. 402-407. 154 IRENE ZWIEP

As the following ‘archaeological’ reading will show, in the course of this prolonged genesis the historical Spinoza got enmeshed in a series of typically nineteenth-century discourses that touched upon such dispa- rate disciplines as Protestant theology and Jewish historiography. In each of these contexts, Da Costa’s analysis stands out as relatively cutting edge, being informed by most relevant texts and engaging in urgent contemporary discussions. Yet at the same time it can be seen to depart from mainstream, Christian as well as Jewish discourse in its ultimate inter- pretation (again, most prominently in Israel en de volken) of Spinoza as a deeply religious, essentially Jewish and therefore virtually Christian philosopher. But for the fact that his unfaltering rationalism had closed both his eyes and his heart to the truth of Christianity, Da Costa’s Spi- noza might have been a distinguished precedent for the author’s own ‘converso’ response to nineteenth-century modernity.

Da Costa 1839: Bilderdijk, Goethe and Spinoza’s ‘sadly corrupted’ Pantheism

A chronic scepticism of the Enlightenment and its many revolutions was but one of the traits Da Costa had inherited from his teacher Willem Bilderdijk. Other preoccupations the two had shared were a penchant for Dutch national poetry, a lasting fascination for nobility, and a highly individual approach to history and theology which, though eminently eclectic, was soon interpreted as ‘Romantic’ and ‘Calvinist’. Finally, in staunch opposition to the prevailing Zeitgeist, both authors took up a critical stance towards Jewish emancipation, which they condemned as a ruinous form of pseudo-Christianity that would forestall the divinely ordained conversion of the Jews in Messianic times.15 In 1839, eight years after Bilderdijk’s death, Da Costa’s feelings of indebtedness culminated in a lengthy panegyric of ‘den Nederlandschen

15. For the impact of Bilderdijk’s historical ideas and Romantic personality (which included Bilderdijk’s noble alter ego Guilelmus van Teisterbant) on the adolescent Da Costa, see Meijer, Isaac da Costa’s weg, p. 67-74. For a critical reassessment of Bilderdijk’s alleged ‘Romanticism’ and ‘Calvinism’, see J. van Eijnatten, ‘Willem Bilderdijk (1756-1831). De ideeënwereld van het gefnuikt genie’, Nederlandse letterkunde 1 (1996), p. 281-291 and, more extensively, his monograph Hogere sferen. De ideeënwereld van Willem Bilderdijk (1756-1831) (Hilversum 1998). For Bilderdijk’s views on Judaism, see esp. L. Engelfriet’s doctoral thesis Bilderdijk en het Jodendom. Bilderdijks waardering van het joodse denken in confrontatie met zijn tijd (Zoetermeer 1995). PASCAL IN POTENTIA… ISAAC DA COSTA ON SPINOZA AND PANTHEISM 155

Hoofddichter onzer eeuw’ (‘the chief Dutch poet of our century’), whose reputation meanwhile had fallen prey to ‘scorn and lack of appreciation’.16 In order to add persuasive force to his laudatio, Da Costa decided to compare the master’s ‘alleroorspronkelijkst genie’ (‘most authentic genius’) with that other ‘intellect of the highest order’, i.e. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, an established European literary hero and, most convenient for any comparison, only seven years Bilderdijk’s senior.17 For the sake of rhetoric and exoneration, Da Costa could not have made a better choice. Where Bilderdijk perhaps fell short in terms of literary grasp, quality and impact, he had been, like Goethe, an ‘encyclopaedic bibliophile’,18 an erudite omnivore whose Weltanschauung, it must be added, may have been slightly less systematically Protestant than Da Costa wished to acknowledge. Yet against the background of the ‘anthropocentric’ Christian Goethe,19 who had admired biblical literature but had renounced divine revelation in favour of ‘poetic, sensual Spinozist Pantheism’,20 Bilderdijk’s reputation as the epitome of Calvinist orthodoxy might be easily restored. Thus, while the first seventeen pages of ‘Goethe en Bilderdijk’ con- sisted of an animated sketch of two parallel literary lives, governed by analogous political forces yet nourished by two diametrically opposed dispositions,21 the remaining twenty-seven pages were reserved for answer- ing that one burning question: had Bilderdijk and Goethe been good enough Christians for their admirers to follow in their footsteps without jeopardizing their souls? Unlike the previous section, this part of the essay contained precious little overt comparison. Instead, Da Costa drew away

16. ‘Goethe en Bilderdijk’, p. 367. 17. Ibid., p. 169f. 18. Van Eijnatten, ‘Willem Bilderdijk’, p. 285. 19. Cf. Da Costa, ‘Goethe en Bilderdijk’, p. 375: ‘Dus toont zich Goethe (…) hier klaar genoeg de man die (…) het wezen des Christendoms afwijst en miskent, maar zich den naam en enkele elementen van hetzelve blijft voorbehouden, om daarmede eene Godsdienst op zijne eigene hand te bouwen. Een Godsdienst, een Christendom van eigen bedenking! (A Religion, a Christian- ity of his own design!).’ 20. Ibid., p. 407; Bilderdijk obviously rejected pantheism, but in his ontology certain pantheist affinities may be discerned, cf. Van Eijnatten, Hogere sferen, p. 358f. 21. ‘Goethe en Bilderdijk’, esp. p. 172ff., where Da Costa compared the energetic Goethe’s ‘lust for life’ with the introverted Bilderdijk’s continuous struggle and suffering from life (‘levens- lijden’). 156 IRENE ZWIEP our attention from Bilderdijk’s alleged flaws by spelling out the spiritual errors of his German colleague who, we are told, had been ‘a heathen rather than a Pharisee by nature’.22 Quoting at length from Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit, Da Costa described how in the heat of the Ger- man Pantheismusstreit of the 1770s and 80s Goethe had developed a penchant for Spinoza’s Ethics, preferring the unselfish amor dei, the unilateral love of man for an abstract deity, over the historical acts of grace by a much more personal God.23 He made mince-meat of Goethe’s theology, which likewise seemed to deny the historical truth of revealed religion and instead had been inspired by nature, conscience and reason, features that had tempted the greatest minds into atheism, Deism and, most dangerous of all, Spinozan Pantheism.24 Historically speaking, he admitted, the com- bination of Spinoza and Goethe might seem a ‘singular juxtaposition of names’ (‘zonderlinge zamenvoeging van namen’); from a philosophical perspective, however, one could safely speak of a Wahlverwantschaft.25 In a crucial passage, Da Costa then explained that in fact all those of great intellect, sensitivity, culture and erudition ran the risk of becoming ensnared by Spinoza’s Pantheism. In this all-too cultivated (‘overbe- schaafde’) time and age, he cautioned, not even the Dutch Reformed Church had been able to avoid its attractions, witness ‘het Spinozisme der Van Hattems, Van Leenhofs, Deurhofs’.26 Da Costa wisely limited his enumeration of culprits to such early eighteenth-century Spinozists as Frederik van Leenhof (1647-1720), the rational theologian Willem Deurhof (1650-1717) and the antinomian libertine Pontiaan van Hattem (1614-1706), whose books had been burned posthumously in the city of Middelburg.27 Simultaneously, however, he referred to the fact that on the pages of Stemmen en beschouwingen warnings were still being issued against the ‘vague and impure sentiments’ that could easily tip over into Pantheism. Thus we find that, while in the second half of the century Dutch theologians gradually discovered Spinoza as the precursor of a

22. Ibid., p. 369. 23. Ibid., p. 402. 24. Ibid., p. 404. 25. Ibid., p. 403. 26. Ibid., p. 404. 27. For these Reformed Spinozists and their impact, see M. Wielema, The March of the Lib- ertines. Spinozists and the Dutch Reformed Church (1660-1750) (Hilversum 2004), ch. 4, 5 and 6 respectively (p. 103-204). PASCAL IN POTENTIA… ISAAC DA COSTA ON SPINOZA AND PANTHEISM 157 new liberal theology,28 in 1839 the orthodox Da Costa was deeply engaged in a battle against the new ‘German Idealist’ Spinozism, whose philosophical abstractions posed a distinct threat to the God of orthodox Protestantism. He would not, however, go as far as to condemn the historical Spinoza as the ‘great leader of our modern infidels’, as many others had done before him. Instead he argued that Spinoza’s Pantheism had been of a subtly spiritual kind, since it ‘had taken its point of departure in a high but sadly corrupted truth from the [Jewish] Religion in which he had been born and raised (…): Jehova, the Being whose name was I AM’.29 There is little need to emphasize that this sensitivity towards Spi- noza’s Jewish background was an element that distinguished Da Costa’s evaluation of Spinoza’s own views from other Christian judgments. Da Costa’s use of contemporary Christian sources speaks volumes in this respect. For his synopsis of Spinoza’s metaphysics, for example, he had relied on Karl Ludwig Kannegiesser’s Abriß der Geschichte der Philosophie of 1837, which he had consulted in a recent Dutch translation.30 In a few tersely formulated paragraphs Kannegiesser (1781-1864) had managed to offer his readers not only a fairly readable introduction to substance monism and Spinoza’s concept of God as eternal being and thought (§117), but also a harsh catalogue (§119) of the various ‘Unrichtigkeiten und Mängel dieses Systems’ (‘errors and shortcomings in the system’), which had included such defects as utter incomprehensibility and bad psychology.31 Da Costa naturally concurred with Kannegiesser’s conclusion that Spinoza’s greatest fault had been to burden his fellow-men with an abstract rationalism that would never satisfy their hearts, since it failed to celebrate God as a living ‘Geist, creator, father and source of love’.32 He could not, however, whole-heartedly subscribe to Kannegies- ser’s verdict that Spinoza-the-philosopher had been a heathen rather than

28. Cf. H. Krop, ‘Spinozism and Dutch Jewry between 1880 and 1940’, in H. Berg and J. Frishman (eds), Dutch Jewry in a Cultural Maelstrom 1880-1940 (Amsterdam 2007), p. 112-120. 29. ‘Goethe en Bilderdijk’, p. 405. 30. Ibid., p. 405ff., a passage that was basically a simplified excerpt from J.J. le Roy’s translation Beknopte geschiedenis der wijsbegeerte, sedert de vroegste tijden tot op den tegenwoordigen (Rotter- dam 1838), p. 259ff. 31. ‘Die Einheit des Denkens und der Aufdehnung lässt sich durchaus nicht begreifen. Spi- noza ist auch ein schechter Psychologe’; Abriß, p. 128. 32. Ibid. 158 IRENE ZWIEP a Jew or a Christian.33 Yet since the principal objective of his essay was to exonerate Bilderdijk, not Spinoza, he limited his dissent to the observation that Spinoza’s thought had been ‘lamentable’ (rather than objec- tionable), since it was the unfortunate – and by no means atheist – spin- off of an otherwise venerable Jewish dogma: the unity of God’s being.34 Ten years later, the messianic narrative of Israel en de volken eventually would allow him to argue that Spinoza had been both a Jew and – if only in potentia rather than in actu – a Christian. In 1839, the Christian Da Costa had waged war on the rising new Spinozism in order to prevent his God from being reduced to an abstraction – a battle that was as much a matter of Protestant faith as of personal religious sentiment. Perhaps we might say that, from a similar sentiment, the Jew Da Costa had rejected the parallel efforts (likewise inspired by German Idealism) to reduce Judaism to an abstract religious idea rather than to cherish it as an immediate socio- cultural presence. Of course there had been various tangible reasons behind his conversion in 1822, notably his relations with Willem Bilderdijk and other Christian intellectuals, and the fact that his wife Hanna Belmonte (1800-1867) came from a convert background. Still, if we allow ourselves a certain measure of speculation, we might also interpret his trading the new theoretical conception of Judaism for the living God of Christianity as a critique of current attempts to reinvent Judaism as a purely abstract ‘religiöse Idee’.35 A reinvention which, Da Costa believed, had disturbing political implications and would have a downright catastrophic impact on the divinely ordained course of history.

Da Costa 1848: Proving Spinoza’s Religiosity

Ten years after his first intellectual encounter, Da Costa once more returned to Spinoza, this time formulating a somewhat more outspoken

33. ‘(…) weder Jude noch Christ; aber war er als Denker ein Heide, so scheint er als Mensch ein Christ, oder wenigstens ein sittlich guter Mensch gewesen zu sein.’; ibid. 34. ‘(…) wij behoeven heden ten dage wel naauwlijks te herinneren, dat deze befaamde Denker in zijne beklagelijke bespiegelingen wel allerminst Athëist was (…)’; ‘Goethe en Bilderdijk, p. 404f. 35. An early example is found in Immanuel Wolf’s ‘Über den Begriff einer Wissenschaft des Judentums’, Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judentums 1 (1822), p. 1-24. PASCAL IN POTENTIA… ISAAC DA COSTA ON SPINOZA AND PANTHEISM 159 view on the philosopher’s life and work. In this second account, Da Costa not only offered his readers a faithful rendering of the relevant paragraphs in Koenen’s Geschiedenis der Joden in Nederland, which had meanwhile appeared and, as has been remarked earlier, included quite a few lines from his own 1839 essay.36 He also treated his audience to a – typically Da Costan – rehabilitation of Spinoza’s religiosity, which, as we shall see, had been firmly rejected by the devout Christian Hendrik Koenen. As mentioned above, in his 1843 account Koenen had quoted at length from Da Costa’s previous summary of Spinozan Pantheism; in Israel en de volken, Da Costa in his turn copied the underlying format of Koenen’s exposé as well as the few well-known facts from Spinoza’s biography (his Jewish and Latin education; the influence of Descartes; the cherem and his leaving Amsterdam; his modest lifestyle and contacts with scholars and leaders of the Republic), which Koenen said he had retrieved from such early sources as Moréri’s Grand dictionaire historique (1671), Bayle’s Dictionaire historique et critique (1697), Colerus’s Vie de Spinosa (1706) and L’histoire et la religion des Juifs (1707) by the French theologian Jacques Basnage (1653-1723). Closely following Koenen, Da Costa presented Spinoza’s biography parallel to the life and leanings of his fellow-dissident Uriël da Costa, whose ‘Sadducean errors’ (i.e. denial of the afterlife) and ‘disconsolate Deism’ constituted the natural counterpart of Spinoza’s scepticism.37 In Koenen’s description, Spinoza and Uriël da Costa had been presented as two equally mis- guided, radical kindred spirits.38 By contrast, in Da Costa’s adaptation the latter was recast as a ‘bejammerenswaarden Sadduceër’,39 a tragic hero whose heart-rending fate (featuring doubt, humiliation and sui- cide) served as the ideal decor for an exposition of Spinoza’s excellent character and career – much as, ten years earlier, the Romantic Goethe had featured as the contrapuntal ‘ignoble villain’ of the pious Willem Bilderdijk.

36. See above, n. 13. 37. Koenen, Geschiedenis der Joden, p. 347ff. 38. ‘[Spinoza] kwam tot een verschillend uiterste van dat, waartoe die URIËL DA COSTA, van wien wij vroeger spraken, verviel; ofschoon beiden in een ander opzicht wederom de treffendste overeenkomst vertoonen’; ibid., p. 356. 39. Israel en de volken, p. 399-402, esp. p. 402. 160 IRENE ZWIEP

Given his view of Spinoza and Uriël da Costa as two equally way- ward radicals, it should not surprise us that Koenen had sided with Kan- negiesser rather than with Da Costa when it came to determining Spi- noza’s religiosity. This difference in appreciation even led him to tacitly ‘correct’ Da Costa on this point, a deviation which becomes quite sig- nificant in a quotation otherwise as literal as Koenen’s. Koenen, disin- clined to reproduce Da Costa’s Jewish agenda, omitted the latter’s char- acterization of Spinozan Pantheism as the unfortunate corruption of an essentially Jewish axiom.40 Instead he concluded, quoting directly from Kannegiesser, that Spinoza had been neither a Jew nor a Christian41 and that, as an heir to the Jewish tradition of scepticism, he should not be judged by the standards of Protestant orthodoxy.42 Having been born as Jews, both Uriël da Costa and Spinoza could not have mended their ways unless they had experienced a divine revelation of the kind ‘the Tharsian Israelite Saulus [had received] on his way to Damascus: the revelation of JESUS, which has always been an offence to the Jews and a folly to the Greeks…’43 ‘[D]ie den Jood eene ergernis is, en den Griek eene dwaasheid’: when it came to estimating the Jewish potential for conversion, Koenen certainly was less generous than his converso fellow- Christian Isaac Da Costa. Five years later, however, it was Da Costa’s turn to take up the gauntlet and polemicize with Koenen, again tacitly, on the matter of Spi- noza’s religious identity and, even more between the lines, on the Jews’ capacity for Christianity. Da Costa began his revision of Koenen by stressing the opposition between Spinoza’s moderate character and Uriël da Costa’s sadly destructive temperament. Where the latter had only destroyed, shattering both truth and error in the process, Spinoza had built ‘with characteristic serenity and mathematical reasoning a system of

40. Koenen, Geschiedenis der Joden, p. 354. 41. See above, n. 33. 42. ‘Doch het moet desniettemin steeds worden in het oog gehouden, dat de Joodsche Wijs- geer, wien het twijfelen aan de overleveringen zijner Vaderen reeds vroeg geleerd was, en wien geen hooger licht over de openbaring Gods in CHRISTUS was opgegaan, niet naar den maatstaf eener Christelijk-gereformeerde rechtzinnigheid kan beoordeeld worden’; Geschiedenis der Joden, p. 356. 43. ‘Maar wat ook had hen op de rampzalige helling, op welke zij, van de inzettingen der Vaderen af, nederdaalden, kunnen terughouden? (…) Wat anders, dan datgene, wat den Tharzi- schen Israëliet op den weg naar Damascus wedevoer [sic]: de openbaring van dien JEZUS, die den Jood eene ergernis is, en den Griek eene dwaasheid’; ibid. PASCAL IN POTENTIA… ISAAC DA COSTA ON SPINOZA AND PANTHEISM 161 philosophy and ethics that not only survived its maker but, through the confusions and movements of our century, has occasionally resurfaced with new vigour and enthusiasm,’ he wrote.44 The historical focus of Israel en de volken, he then argued, did not allow for a theoretical exposé on Pantheist metaphysics. He did, however, wish to make one, purely historical observation, viz. that Spinoza’s original Pantheism had distinguished itself from later developments by its manifest affinity with Juda- ism or, in Da Costa’s words, by its ‘clear mark of Israelite origin’.45 On that distinctly Jewish basis, he continued, Spinoza had formulated not only the most coherent, but also the most congenial (‘gemoedelijkste’) of all false doctrines, since his secular rationalism had culminated in the belief that ‘to know God and to love him unconditionally was the begin- ning of ultimate bliss’. And since Spinoza’s life had always mirrored this essentially religious philosophy, Da Costa concluded, it was beyond doubt that his character would have made him an ornament to any Chris- tian society,46 indeed not unlike Da Costa himself, who upon his conversion became one of the leading figures of the pietistic Dutch Reveil Movement. ‘In SPINOSA lag de aanleg tot een PASCAL – SPINOSA was a PASCAL in potentia!’ Though put in parenthesis, this final exclamation contained the essence of Da Costa’s argumentation.47 For by explicitly comparing Spinoza to the French mathematician Pascal (1623-1662), who in ‘the year of grace 1654’ experienced a divine encounter and became a devout believer, Da Costa wished to imply that Spinoza too might have accepted God’s Truth, if only he had studied the teachings of Christianity ‘away from the artificial light of sheer rational contemplation’.48 Compared with his condemnation of Moses Mendelssohn’s rationalistic rejection of Christianity, Da Costa’s judgement of Spinoza’s rationalistic failure to see the light was conspicuously mild. In his portrayal of the Ashkenazi Mendelssohn, Enlightenment and hypocrisy vis-à-vis Christianity went hand in hand; in the case of Spinoza, Sephardic (converso) nobility had

44. Israel en de volken, p. 403. 45. ‘…het stellige kenmerk van een Israëlitischen oorsprong’; ibid. 46. Ibid., p. 406. 47. Ibid. 48. ‘(…) zoo hy dat Christendom (…) als Goddelijk historisch feit buiten het kunstlicht van bloote bespiegeling had durven onderzoeken (…)’; ibid. 162 IRENE ZWIEP ensured at least a basic susceptibility to Christianity, which unfortu- nately had been eclipsed by the philosopher’s overwhelming rationalism. Thus, while distancing himself from the pernicious example set by Men- delssohn, Da Costa (almost) succeeded in creating an alternative, and certainly no less distinguished, role model for his own, highly singular, response to Jewish modernity.

Concluding remarks

In the previous section we have seen how in the work of two nineteenth-century Christian authors Jewish historiography became the medium for debating current religious matters, if only between the lines. Due to the growing presence of Spinozism in contemporary philosophy and theology, both Koenen and Da Costa had felt prompted to test the historical Spinoza against the criteria of orthodox Protestant- ism. In judging Spinoza according to Dutch Reformed standards, Da Costa thus followed recent trends in Christian thinking, which gener- ally stressed Spinoza’s secularism or, in nineteenth-century terms, assumed that he had been ‘a heathen rather than a Jew or a Christian’. However, in identifying Spinoza as an essentially Jewish and therefore virtually Christian thinker, Da Costa obviously departed from mainstream Christian thinking. His choice to ‘mobilize’ Spinoza as an (almost) fellow-convert and thus as a precedent for his own solution to the dilemmas of his time, resembles the interpretations of various young German-Jewish intellectuals, who had just discovered Spinoza as a precursor of Jewish modernity and as a model for their own, nineteenth- century choices. Their evaluations of Spinoza’s affinity with Judaism wavered between attempts to reclaim Spinoza for the Jewish national past and the – related – wish to stress his universal dimensions and present him as the ultimate Jewish gift to mankind.49 Barely interested in this Jewish cultural-nationalist agenda, Da Costa adopted the approach but used it to vindicate a completely different project: his

49. A typical example is found in Moses Hess’s essay ‘Christus und Spinoza’, included in Rom und Jerusalem. Die letzte Nationalitätenfrage of 1862 (ed. Vienna and Jersualem 1935, p. 153-179). In the last paragraph of the essay, self-proclaimed Spinozist Hess obliquely referred to Spinoza as the second, ‘modern’ Messiah, who had heralded the final stage in world history, in which ‘der geistige Entwicklungsprozeß der welthistorischen Menschheit vollendet sei’ (p. 179). PASCAL IN POTENTIA… ISAAC DA COSTA ON SPINOZA AND PANTHEISM 163 leaving the Jewish polity in order to join the Christian, spiritual rather than political ecumene. If anything, Da Costa’s idiosyncratic appropria- tion of this emerging intellectual strategy once again proves the broader truth of Goethe’s reflections on the tension between individual and collective, between fate and history. Jewish history, too, is but an abstraction. There have always been, and always will be, only Jews – even if they tried to salvage their Judaism by turning to Christianity, as the Romantic ‘Oriental, Nobleman, Bard’ Isaac da Costa had chosen to do.