Baruch Spinoza And The Naturalization Of Judaism

2 Baruch Spinoza and the Naturalization of Judaism
steven nadler

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) occupies a somewhat awkward position in the historiography of Jewish philosophy. In the standard story – or at least those versions of it that move beyond the simplistic description of how his philosophy represents a radical and heretical break from what comes before – he is presented either as theculmination of the Jewish medieval rationalist tradition (especially Maimonides and Gersonides) or as the father of modern Jewish thought, and sometimes as both. These are important (but still all too infrequently studied) perspectives for understanding Spinoza’s metaphysical, moral, and political ideas, and not just their antecedents and their legacies, but their substantive content as well.1While most scholarly attention has been devoted to the seventeenth-century Cartesian background of Spinoza’s philosophy, his system also needs to be situated (as Harry Wolfson and others have recognized)2 in a Jewish philosophical context. But is this enough to give him a rightful place in a “Companion” to Jewish philosophy? After all, Thomas Aquinas was strongly influenced by Maimonides, and ourunderstanding of the Summa Theologiae is deepened by a familiarity with the Guide for the Perplexed, but no one of course has ever suggested that St. Thomas is a Jewish philosopher. Does the additional fact that Spinoza, unlike Thomas, is Jewish alone qualify him for membership in the canon of “Jewish philosophers”? A number of significant factors appear to point to, indeed demand, a negative answerto this question. First and foremost, Spinoza was expelled as a young man from the Amsterdam Portuguese-Jewish community with the harshest writ of cherem ever issued by the congregation’s leaders.3 This seminal event in his biography is mirrored in the fact that for the rest of his life he clearly did not regard himself as Jewish. One is struck, for example, by the way the Jewish people areregarded in the Theological-Political Treatise (published anonymously in 1670; henceforth, TTP) from the third-person perspective. He seems in his writings, including his extant correspondence, to lack all identification
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and sympathy with Jewish religion and history, and even to goout of his way to distance himself from them. And there is the issue of the content of his philosophy. Spinoza rejected the providential God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as an anthropomorphic fiction; he denied the divine origin of the Torah and the continued validity of the Law of Moses; and he argued that there is no theologically, metaphysically, or morally interesting sense in which the Jewsare a chosen people. How, then, can one possibly regard him as a Jewish philosopher without doing a grave injustice to his personal experience, his own sense of identity, and the spirit of his philosophical thought? However, philosophy (and this is its important difference from religion) never requires one a priori to adopt one set of substantive beliefs over another. That is, philosophy neverprescribes particular answers in advance. Rather, it demands only that one ask certain kinds of questions and approach them in a certain kind of way (that is, through rational inquiry). And this is as true for Jewish philosophy as it is for, say, the philosophy of mind. Being a Jewish philosopher does not require one to think of oneself as a Jew; nor does it demand that one regard Jews or theJewish religion or Jewish history in a certain way; nor, finally, does it call upon one to adopt specific theological, metaphysical, or ethical ideas.4 Being a Jewish philosopher means only that an individual of Jewish descent5 is, in his or her philosophical thinking, engaged in an honest dialogue with a particular canonical philosophical and religious tradition and wrestling with a certain set of...