Page 37 of The Spinoza Problem


  “Yes, yes, but time is precious today, and we cannot cover all issues. Let’s work on reason and freedom. I’m most disinclined to deal now with the issue of women.”

  “Will you not at least agree that this is another area to consider in the future?”

  “Perhaps. I’m not certain.”

  “Then simply allow me one final comment, and we’ll move on to other topics.” Without waiting for a response Franco hurried on. “It is clear that you and I have very different attitudes toward women, and I think I have an idea of the causative network. Are you interested?”

  “I should be, but I feel some reluctance to hear you out.”

  “I’ll continue anyway—just for a minute. I think it stems from our different experiences with women. I’ve had a very loving relationship with my mother and now with my wife and daughter, and my guess is that your attitudes toward women are necessarily negative because of your previous contact with them. From what you’ve told me your experiences have been bleak: your mother died when you were a young child, and your subsequent mothers—your older sister and then your stepmother—also died. The whole community knows of your harsh rejection by your remaining sister, Rebekah. I’ve heard she filed suit contesting your father’s will so that you wouldn’t receive his estate. And then there is Clara Maria, the one woman you loved, and she wounded you by choosing another. Aside from her I’ve never heard you mention a single positive experience with a woman.”

  Bento remained silent, nodding for a few moments, slowly digesting Franco’s words, and then said, “Now to the other topics. First, there’s something I haven’t said to you—and that is how much I admire your courage in speaking out to your congregation urging moderation. Your public opposition to Rabbi Aboab was based on what I call ‘adequate’ ideas—driven by reason rather then by passion. I’d also like to hear more about your vision of the new Judaism you hope to create. Earlier, I may have diverted the discussion.”

  Both knew their time was running out, and Franco spoke quickly. “I hope to create a different kind of Judaism based on our love for one another and our shared tradition. I plan to hold religious services that have no mention of the supernatural and that are based on our common humanity, drawing wisdom from Torah and Talmud that leads to a loving and moral life. And, yes, we will follow Jewish law but in the service of connection and moral life, not because it is divinely ordained. And pervading all of this there will be the spirit of my friend, Baruch Spinoza. As I plan for the future, I sometimes imagine you as a father. My dream is to build a synagogue to which you would send your own son.”

  Bento brushed away a tear running down his cheek. “Yes, we are of one mind if you believe we should use enough ceremony to appeal to that part of our nature that still requires it but not so much as to enslave us.”

  “That is indeed my position. And is it not ironic that, though you try to change Judaism from the outside and I from the inside, we both encounter cherem, you already and mine no doubt to come?”

  “I agree with the second part of your statement—the irony of our both encountering cherem—but, lest you misunderstand, let me say yet once again that it is not my intent to change Judaism. It is my hope that a vital dedication to reason should eradicate all religions, including Judaism.” Bento glances at the clock. “Alas, it is time, Franco—almost two o’clock—and the trekschuit will be here shortly.”

  As they strolled to the trekschuit landing, Franco said, “I have one final thing I must say to you—that book you are planning to write about your critique of the Bible?”

  “Yes?”

  “I love you for writing it, but please, my friend, be cautious. Do not put your name on this book. I believe what you say, but it will not be listened to in a reasonable way. Not now, not in our lifetime.”

  Franco boarded. The boatman loosened the moorings, the horses strained at their ropes, and the trekschuit pulled away from the dock. Bento gazed at the barge for a long while. The smaller it grew as it moved toward the horizon, the larger loomed his cherem. Finally, when no trace of Franco remained, Bento backed slowly away from the dock, back into the arms of solitude.

  EPILOGUE

  In 1670, Bento, age thirty-eight, finished his Theological-Political Treatise. His publisher, quite correctly, predicted that it would be deemed inflammatory. Thus it was published anonymously, under the imprimatur of fictitious publishers in fictitious cities. Its sale was quickly prohibited by both civil and religious authorities. Nonetheless, numerous underground copies circulated.

  A few months later Spinoza moved from Voorburg to The Hague, where he lived the remainder of his life, first renting a modest attic room in the home of the Widow Van der Werve and then, a few months later, even less expensive quarters—a single large room in the house of Hendrik Van der Spyck, a master painter of home interiors. A life of tranquility—that’s what Spinoza wanted and found in The Hague. There he spent his days reading the great works in his library, working on the Ethics, and grinding lenses. Evenings he smoked his pipe and chatted amiably with Van der Spyck, his wife, and their seven children, except for the times he was too engrossed in his writing to leave his room, often for days on end. On Sundays he sometimes accompanied the family to listen to the sermon at the nearby Nieuwe Kerk.

  With a cough that never improved and often produced blood-flecked sputum, he grew noticeably weaker from year to year. Perhaps the inhalation of glass dust from optical work had compromised his lungs, but most likely he had tuberculosis, like his mother and other family members. On February 20, 1677, he felt so weak that he sent for a doctor, who instructed Mrs. Van der Spyck to cook an old hen and feed Spinoza the rich broth. She followed instructions, and he seemed better the next morning. The family attended church in the afternoon, but when they returned two hours later, Bento Spinoza, at the age of forty-four, was dead.

  Spinoza lived his philosophy: he attained Amor dei intellectualis, freed himself from the bondage of disturbing passions, and faced the end of his life with serenity. Yet this quiet life and death left in its wake a great turbulence that roils even to the present day, as many reach out to revere and reclaim him while others expel and excoriate him.

  Though he left no will, he made a point of instructing his landlord, in the event of his death, to ship his writing desk and all its contents immediately to his publisher, Rieuwertsz, in Amsterdam. Van der Spyck honored Spinoza’s wishes: he tightly secured the desk and shipped it to Amsterdam by trekschuit. It arrived safely, containing in its locked drawers the Ethics and other precious unpublished manuscripts and correspondence.

  Bento’s friends set to work immediately editing the manuscripts and letters. Following Spinoza’s instructions, they removed all personal material from the letters, leaving only philosophic content.

  A few months after his death, Spinoza’s Posthumous Works (containing the Ethics, the unfinished Tractatus politicus, and De Intellectus Emendatione, a selection from Spinoza’s correspondence, along with a Compendium of Hebrew Grammar and the Treatise on the Rainbow) was published in both Dutch and Latin, again with no author’s name, a fictitious publisher, and false city of publication. As expected, the state of Holland quickly proscribed the book in an official edict, accusing it of profane blasphemies and atheist sentiments.

  As word spread of Spinoza’s death, his sister, Rebekah, who had shunned him for twenty-one years, reappeared and presented herself and her son, Daniel, as Bento’s sole legal heirs. However, when Van der Spyck gave her an accounting of Spinoza’s possessions and debts, she reconsidered: Bento’s debts for past rent, for burial expenses, for barber and apothecary were probably greater than the value of his possessions. Eight months later, the auction of his possessions (primarily his library and lens-grinding equipment) was held, and, indeed, the proceeds fell short of what he owed. Rather then inherit debts, Rebekah legally renounced all claims to the estate and once again vanished from history. Bento’s small outstanding obligations were met by the brother-in-law of Ben
to’s friend Simon de Vries. (Simon, who had died ten years earlier, in 1667, had offered to leave Bento his entire estate. Bento had declined, saying that it was unfair to Simon’s family and that, moreover, money would be only a distraction to him. Simon’s family offered Bento an annual annuity of five hundred guilders. That, too, Spinoza declined, insisting it was more than he needed. He finally agreed to a small annuity of three hundred guilders.)

  The auction of Spinoza’s property was conducted by W. van den Hove, a conscientious notary who left a detailed inventory of the 159 books in Spinoza’s library, with precise information about the date, publisher, and format of each book. In 1900 George Rosenthal, a Dutch businessman, used the notary’s list to try to reassemble the philosopher’s book collection for the Spinozahuis at Rijnsburg. Great care was taken to purchase the same editions, with the same dates and cities, but, of course, these were not the very same books that Spinoza had held in his hands. (In chapter 32 I imagine a scene in which Alfred Rosenberg is unaware of this fact.) Eventually George Rosenthal was able to collect 110 of the 159 books in Spinoza’s original collection. He also donated another 35 pre-seventeenth-century books, as well as works on Spinoza’s life and philosophy.

  Spinoza was buried under the flagstones inside the Nieuwe Kerk, causing many to assume that he had undergone a late conversion to Christianity. Yet, given Spinoza’s sentiment that “the notion that God took upon himself the nature of man seems as self-contradictory as would be the statement that the circle has taken on the nature of the square,” a conversion seems highly unlikely. In liberal seventeenth-century Holland, the burial of non-Protestants inside churches was not rare. Even Catholics, who were far more disliked in Protestant Holland than Jews, were occasionally buried inside the church. (In the following century, policy changed, and only the very wealthy and prominent were buried there.) As was the custom, Spinoza’s burial plot was rented for a limited number of years, and when there was no longer maintenance money available, probably after ten years, his bones were disinterred and scattered in the half-acre churchyard next to the church.

  As the years passed, the Netherlands claimed him, and his prominence grew such that his portrait was featured on the Dutch thousand-guilder banknote until the euro was introduced in 2002. Like all portraits of Spinoza, the banknote portrait was based on scanty written descriptions; no likenesses of Spinoza were drawn during his lifetime.

  A plaque was placed in the Nieuwe Kerk churchyard in 1927 to commemorate the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of Spinoza’s death. Several Jewish enthusiasts from Palestine, who wished to reclaim Baruch Spinoza as a Jew, were involved in the commemoration. The Latin inscription reads: “This earth covers the bones of Benedictus Spinoza, once buried in the new church.”

  In Palestine, at about the same time as the unveiling of this plaque, Joseph Klausner, the renowned historian and later a candidate in Israel’s first presidential election, delivered a speech at Hebrew University in which he declared that the Jewish people had committed a terrible sin in excommunicating Spinoza; he called for a repudiation of the idea that Spinoza was a heretic. He ended, “To Spinoza, the Jew, we call out . . . from atop Mount Scopus, out of our new sanctuary—the Hebrew University of Jerusalem—the ban is rescinded! Judaism’s wrongdoing against you is hereby lifted, and whatever was your sin against her shall be forgiven. Our brother are you, our brother are you, our brother are you!”

  In 1956, the three-hundredth anniversary of Spinoza’s excommunication, Heer H. F. K. Douglas, one of Spinoza’s Dutch admirers, conceived the idea of constructing an additional memorial next to the 1927 plaque. Knowing that Ben-Gurion, the prime minister of Israel, much admired Spinoza, Heer Douglas asked for his support. Ben-Gurion enthusiastically offered it, and when the word spread in Israel, members of a humanistic Jewish organization in Haifa, who considered Spinoza the progenitor of Jewish humanism, offered to contribute a black basalt stone as part of the memorial. The formal unveiling of the monument was well attended and included governmental representatives of both Holland and Israel. Ben-Gurion did not attend the unveiling but visited the memorial in an official ceremony three years later.

  The new plaque, placed next to the 1927 plaque, contained a relief of Spinoza’s head and the single word “Caute” (caution) found on Spinoza’s ring seal, and, below that, the black Israeli basalt stone sealed to the plaque contains the Hebrew word (amcha), meaning “Your People.”

  Some Israelis took issue with Ben-Gurion’s attempts to reclaim Spinoza. Orthodox members of the Knesset were so outraged by the idea of Israel honoring Spinoza that they called for the censure of both Ben-Gurion and the foreign minister, Golda Meir, for instructing the Israeli ambassador in Holland to attend the unveiling.

  Earlier, in an article, Ben-Gurion addressed the issue of Spinoza’s excommunication. “It is difficult to blame the Jewish community in seventeenth century Amsterdam. Their position was precarious . . . and the traumatized Jewish community had the right to defend their cohesion. But today the Jewish people do not have the right to forever exclude Spinoza the immortal from the Community of Israel.” Ben-Gurion insisted that the Hebrew language is not complete without the works of Spinoza. And indeed, shortly after the publication of his article, the Hebrew University published the entire body of Spinoza’s work in Hebrew.

  Some Jews wished Ben-Gurion to appeal to the Amsterdam rabbinate for reversal of the excommunication, but he declined and wrote: “I did not seek to have the excommunication annulled, since I took it for granted that the excommunication is null and void. . . There is a street in Tel-Aviv bearing Spinoza’s name, and there is not one single reasonable person in this country who thinks that the excommunication is still in force.”

  The Rijnsburg Spinoza library was confiscated by Rosenberg’s ERR in 1942. Oberbereichsleiter Schimmer, the working head of the ERR in the Netherlands, described the seizure in his 1942 report (later to become an official Nuremburg document): “The libraries of the Societas Spinozana in Den Haag and of the Spinoza-House in Rijnsburg also were packed. Packed in eighteen cases, they, too, contain extremely valuable early works of great importance for the exploration of the Spinoza problem. Not without reason did the director of the Societas Spinozana try, under false pretenses which we uncovered, to withhold the library from us.”

  The stolen Rijnsburg library was housed in Frankfurt along with the greatest store of plunder in world history. Under Rosenberg’s leadership, the ERR stole over three million books from a thousand libraries. When Frankfurt came under heavy allied bombardment in 1944, the Nazis hurriedly moved their plunder to underground storage sites. Spinoza’s library, along with thousands of other uncatalogued books, were sent to a salt mine at Hungen, near Munich. At the war’s end, all the Hungen treasures were transferred to the American Offenbach central depot, where a small army of librarians and historians searched for their owners. Eventually Dirk Marius Graswinckel, a Dutch archivist, came upon Spinoza’s books and transferred the entire collection (minus only a handful of books) to the Netherlands on the Mary Rotterdam, a Dutch ship. They arrived in Rijnsburg in March 1946 and were once again placed on display at the Spinoza Museum, where they may be viewed to this very day.

  For the month awaiting trial, Alfred remained in solitary confinement in the Nuremberg prison, meeting only with the attorney preparing his defense, an American military physician, and a psychologist. It was not until November 20, 1945, the first day of the trial, that he saw the other Nazi defendants as they assembled before the presiding judicial body and the teams of prosecutors from the United States, Great Britain, Russia, and France. Over the next eleven months all would assemble in the same room 218 times.

  There were twenty-four defendants, but only twenty-two were present for the trial. A twenty-third, Robert Ley, had hanged himself with a towel in his cell two weeks earlier, and the twenty-fourth, Martin Bormann, the “dictator of Hitler’s antechamber,” was to be tried in absentia, though it was widely believed that he had been ki
lled as the Russians overran Berlin. The defendants were seated on four wooden benches arranged in two rows, with a row of armed soldiers standing at attention behind them. Alfred was seated second in the front right bench. On the front left bench were Göring; Hess; Joachim von Ribbentrop, Nazi minister of foreign affairs; and Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, supreme commander of the military. In the months of detention preceding the trial, Göring had been withdrawn from drugs, lost twenty-five pounds, and now appeared sleek and jovial.

  On Alfred’s right was Ernst Kaltenbrunner, highest surviving SS officer. On his left were Hans Frank, governor-general of occupied Poland; Wilhelm Frick, Reich protector of Bohemia-Moravia; and at the end of the bench, Julius Streicher, editor of Der Stürmer. Alfred must have been relieved he did not have to sit next to Streicher, whom he found particularly repulsive.

  In the second row were such eminences as Admiral Dönitz, the Reich president after Hitler’s suicide and the commander of the U-boat campaign, and Field Marshal Alfred Jodl. Both maintained a haughty military bearing. Next sat Fritz Sauckel, head of the Nazi slave labor program; Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Reich commissioner of the Netherlands; and then Albert Speer, Hitler’s close friend and architect—a man whom Alfred hated almost as much as Goebbels. Next there were Walther Funk, who turned the Reichsbank into a depository for gold teeth and other valuables seized from concentration camp victims, and Baldur von Schirach, head of the Nazi youth program. The two other defendants in the back row were lesser known Nazi businessmen.