Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition by Nirenberg David

Author:Nirenberg, David [Nirenberg, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Norton
Published: 2013-02-03T23:00:00+00:00

“A Jew First, after a Cartesian, and Now an Atheist”

If Spinoza was not singular in his “anti-Judaism,” he was nearly unique in his Judaism, and in this, too, he proved fruitful for the future of European thought. For Spinoza’s friends, like his biographer Jean Maximilien Lucas, there could be no better proof of Spinoza’s greatness than his Judaism, or rather, than his ability to emerge from the blindness of that Judaism into the light of reason:

But what I esteem most in him is that, although he was born and bred in the midst of a gross people who are the source of superstition, he had imbibed no bitterness whatever, and that . . . [h]e was entirely cured of those silly and ridiculous opinions which the Jews have of God.

Insofar as Spinoza (like Jesus, Paul, and Muhammad) presented his truths as both a fulfillment and an overcoming of Judaism, he sowed the seeds of a claim to status as a prophet of reason (though we should remember that “prophet” was not high praise for Spinoza!). The Christian flavor of the claim is well described by the historian Adam Sutcliffe:

Once again, a Jewish outcast upholds the deepest spiritual truths of Judaeo-Christianity, in rebellion against the dogmatic and primitive group that first, and most drastically, corrupted this message. The dawn of Enlightenment is thus given a subliminally millenarian tinge, with Spinoza performing the key Messianic role as its necessarily originally, and then no longer, Jewish harbinger.22

To the vast majority of western Europe’s scribbling classes, however, Spinoza was no savior. He was rather the false Messiah, a “prince of Atheism,” a “new Mohammad” whose goal was to destroy all true religion. The reformed ministers of Leiden were clear in their verdict when they successfully urged the government to ban Spinoza’s collected work in 1678: “Perhaps since the beginning of the world until the present day . . . , [this book] surpasses all others in godlessness and endeavours to do away with all religion and set impiety on the throne.” According to one recent count, of the thirty published reactions to Spinoza’s Treatise that appeared in Germany between 1670 and 1700, only three expressed even qualified approval for some part of its argument. The rest were unequivocal, even scatological, in their condemnation. The Presentation of Four Recent Worldly Philosophers, for example, speaks of “the abominable doctrines and hideous errors which this shallow Jewish philosopher has (if I may say so) shit into the world.”23

Like the Presentation’s anonymous author, most denouncers found it easy enough to draw a straight line from Spinoza’s Jewishness to his ideas. After all, Judaism had long been associated in Christian (and Muslim) thought with the murderous denial of divine truth. Christians knew that Jews believed in God, but insofar as they had preferred to crucify him rather than give up their stubborn worldliness, they could easily be aligned with atheism. Spinoza’s detractors could draw on fifteen hundred years of research attributing Jewish origins to skepticism, materialism, and atheism. These genealogies could all be telegraphed in brief allusions.

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