Spinoza’s Lasting Legacy Of Freedom And Inquiry

As luck would have it, I found myself in Amsterdam last November the night a pogrom broke out.

My six-hour layover coincided with a soccer match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax Amsterdam, after which North African immigrants hunted down and violently assaulted Israeli fans. I was safely at the airport during the worst of the attack, but the jodenjacht, or “Jew hunt,” as its perpetrators gleefully called it, resulted in the brutal beating of dozens of fans and the hospitalization of at least ten. Muslim youths forced Jewish supporters of Maccabi to take shelter in hotels, restaurants, and even the city’s famed canals, all to the relentless soundtrack of “Free Palestine” and “kankerjoden,” or “cancer Jews.”

Incredibly, in the city where, some 80 years earlier, the Nazis had hunted down Anne Frank and her family, along with tens of thousands of other Jews, the festering sore of antisemitism was again metastasizing.

But Amsterdam wasn’t always a hostile place for Jews, as Ian Buruma elegantly demonstrates in his concise, absorbing biography of Baruch/Benedict Spinoza, Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah. A controversial figure with profound teachings about human liberty and flourishing, Spinoza’s ideas could only have taken root in such a unique political and religious milieu as 17th century Holland. “Freedom of thought was his main preoccupation,” Buruma, a Dutch-born writer and professor at Bard College, writes of his subject. “Not only did he think that the best political order was one that protected the right to think and write in peace, but also that this very freedom would help to maintain such an order.”

Indeed, the city — which for centuries was known to Jews simply as the Mokum, or place — and Holland more generally, was once a beacon of religious freedom that welcomed tens of thousands of Spanish and Portuguese exiles in the wake of the expulsion. Amsterdam’s Jews prospered for centuries under the liberal Dutch republic and repaid the benevolence in kind. “We no longer look upon Castille and Portugal, but upon Holland as our fatherland,” the rabbi of Amsterdam’s Portuguese synagogue proclaimed in 1642. “Hence, no one need wonder that we shall say daily prayers for Their Excellencies the States General … and also for the noble governors of this world-renowned city.”

But religious freedom didn’t always signify religious harmony, and 17^th century Holland was riven by denominational squabbles over the niceties of Calvinist doctrine. The Jewish community, too, divided at least partially along ethnic and ritual lines, with wealthy Sephardim at times lording it over poorer Ashkenazim.

These divisions carried over into various religious disputations, including a prelude to the Spinoza contretemps. In the 1620’s, Uriel Da Costa, a descendant of Portuguese conversos, returned to Judaism in Amsterdam only to find himself put into herem — excommunication — after publishing a book that cast doubt on the soul’s immortality. Buruma reckons that the Jewish community felt a sense of obligation to the Christian authorities by whose grace they flourished to stamp out heresies even to their own faith. “They now had to be perfect Jews,” he writes, even at the expense of dissenting coreligionists like the abased Da Costa, who took his own life in 1640.

Less than a decade earlier, Baruch Spinoza had been born to an affluent family of Portuguese Jewish immigrants who had previously converted to Christianity under duress. In his early twenties, while studying in yeshiva, he left the confines of the institutions of Amsterdam’s parochial Jewish community for the cultural and intellectual delights of the city. He befriended Franciscus van den Enden, a lapsed Jesuit who wrote poetry, staged plays, and sold artwork.

His encounter with the ideas surrounding him led to questioning his interlocutors in yeshiva, most prominently Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira. Like Da Costa, he doubted the immortality of the soul, arguing additionally that scripture doesn’t unequivocally declare God’s incorporeality. By 1656, the elders had had enough: “With the judgment of the angels and with that of the saints,” they announced in a public ceremony, “we put under herem, ostracize, and curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza … The fury and zeal of the Lord will burn against this man and bring upon him all the curses that are written in this book of the law.”

At this point, Spinoza had not yet published anything at all, but shortly after the ban, he wrote, in his Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-Being, that a thinking person can be free by “directly uniting his intellect with God,” which he equated with nature — itself an inflammatory proposition to Jews and Christians alike. He declared his own personal freedom by departing Amsterdam in 1661 for the quiet village of Rijnsburg where he took up grinding glass for lenses to support himself.

Over the next several years, Spinoza wrote his most enduring works, including the Theological-Political Treatise, in which he explained that “separating belief from philosophy was the main purpose of this whole work.” In advocating a civil religion to which people of all faiths could subscribe, he conspicuously criticized the Jewish people, thus further alienating himself from his former community. The Jews, he wrote, “had absolutely nothing which they can attribute to themselves beyond all the nations,” and, worse, they had “separated themselves so from all the nations that they have drawn the hatred of all men against themselves.” (Despite Spinoza’s self-evident withdrawal from Judaism, Buruma insists, “there is no evidence that conversion to Christianity in any form ever tempted him.”)

Spinoza, who later decamped for The Hague, considered himself lucky to reside in a polity that so profoundly respected freedom of religion, and he didn’t hesitate to express his appreciation for those who made it possible. “We happen to have that rare good fortune,” he wrote in the Treatise, “that we live in a republic in which everyone is granted complete freedom of judgment, and is permitted to worship God according to his mentality.” Even so, Spinoza’s liberalizing views were sufficiently controversial among orthodox Calvinists — especially in the wake of the 1672 Orangist revival — that he had to publish this seminal work under a penname and only in Latin, not Dutch.

Undeterred, he pressed his intellectual campaign for freedom in 1675 in his Ethics, perhaps his most lasting philosophical legacy. “A free man,” he famously wrote, “i.e., one who lives according to the dictate of reason alone, is not led by Fear but desires the good.” The same rational impulse that motivates the individual, Spinoza contended, also impels a well-ordered political community toward the common good. The book, however, saw publication only after his death, in 1677, at age 44.

Over the years, Spinoza’s liberalizing legacy has been claimed by many thinkers and movements across political, cultural, and religious spectra. Marx regarded him, per Buruma, as “the prophet of social transformation,” while Freud considered him a “man who sought salvation through self-knowledge.” Zionists like David Ben Gurion and Moshe Hess heralded his proto-Zionism, while writers ranging from Wordsworth to Goethe to Heine celebrated his naturalism. Even Einstein, in the wake of World War II’s devastation, praised his steadfast resistance to “fear, hate, and bitterness.”

Spinoza’s ideas ramify especially powerfully today, when global and national communities again find themselves cleft by suspicion and enmity. Reviving interest in the Spinozan tradition is especially urgent now, Buruma contends, because “liberal thinking is being challenged from many sides where ideologies are increasingly entrenched, by bigoted reactionaries as well as by progressives who believe there can be no deviation from their chosen paths to justice.”

Postmodernism, wokeism, alternative facts, and ideological conformity permeate contemporary discourse and threaten liberty in its most elemental form. By contrast, freedom, truth, integrity — all values under assault during the Amsterdam pogrom and in the Western world more widely — require careful, diligent cultivation. As Buruma adeptly and passionately urges, we would do well to reexamine Spinoza’s oeuvre for such inspiration.

Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel and an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Reach him at [email protected].