$pinoza, the First Jew?

 

Yimzzya/au loyal

Baruch Spinoza. Romantic legend notwithstand-

ing, his solitude was not of a social nature. On
the contrary, Spinoza had a gift for friendship and was
surrounded by loyal friends as well as by inquisitive
intellectuals. Some of his friends even saw to his liveli-
hood, thus refuting yet another legend: that the lonely
and ostracized Spinoza, on the brink of starvation, was
forced to grind lenses for a living, an occupation which
hastened his death. Spinoza did earn a supplementary
income through the practice of this highly demanding
art, but he engaged in it primarily because of his inter-
est in optics, a science that was then undergoing vigor-
ous development.

?How goes it with our Jew from Voorburg?? Chris-
tian Huygens, the great Dutch scientist, asks his brother
in a letter from France, referring to the latest advances
of their competitor in lens-grinding. By posing this
question, Huygens not only throws light on Spinoza?s
preoccupation with avant-garde technological research
but, indirectly, on Spinoza?s existential situation as a
Jew. Banned from the Jewish community by of?cial
decree in 1656, indifferent to Jewish law, and abjuring
the God of Israel?along with the gods of every other
historical religionFSpinoza nonetheless is regarded as
?our Jew from Voorburg,? even after he had joined the
international community of scholars.

,Spinoza thus exempli?es the situation of the modern
Jewm?secular, assimilationist, or national?without him-
self falling neatly into any of these categories. Countless
Jews in the coming centuries were to ?nd themselves in
a similar predicament. The secular Jews tried to de?ne
their Jewishness in terms of the Jewish people (or nation);
and the assimilationisrs tried to leave the people and
merge into gentile society. Most often, however, they
were thrust by the attitudes of the gentiles (or by what
Sartre calls their ?look.?) back into the existential Jewish
situation they tried to escape. Spinoza himself perceived
the Jew?s inability to escape his condition, but was
unable to offer an alternative.

That the world regarded him as a Jew was one of the

eldom, if ever, was a philosopher so lonely as was

 

Yirmiyabu lbvel is a professor ofpbilosopby a! the ebrew
University and founder of the Jerusalem Spinoza Institute.
This tax! is adapted from lair two-volume Spinoza and Other
Heretics, which will be published by Princeton University
Press in February.

40 TIKKUN VOL. 5, No.1

hallmarks of Spinoza?s loneliness. He refused to identify
with any of the cultural or religious associations of his
day. Intellectually he was a loner, the individual par
excellence who demands to be defined solely in terms
of his private being and beliefs, not in terms of any
social or historical framework supposed to provide him
with the essential ingredients of his identity. The only
affiliation Spinoza accepted, at least theoretically, was
political. He regarded himself as a citizen of the Nether-
lands Republic, which he even referred to as his ?home-
land." Nevertheless, in several respects (ethnic, linguis-
tic, and partly also political), he lived as an alien in that
country. He was the son of recent irnmigrants?his
family had its origins in Spain and Portugal, the arch-
enemies of the Netherlands. In terms of religion, his
family had been Jewish, then for several generations
officially Catholic (Marrano), and subsequently became
Jewish again; both poles of this religious duality were
at variance with the dominant Calvinist culture of the
young Netherlands Republic.

 

That the world regal-tied him as a
Jew was one of the ballawrks of
szizoza?s loneliness.

 

Nor did Spinoza enjoy the full civil status that was
accorded to Christians from birth. Born into the rela?
tively foreign milieu of the Jewish-Portuguese quartet
of Amsterdam, he was probably not entirely ?uent in
the languageof the country. In fact, it is unclear which,
if any, of the languages he knew was predominantly his
own. As a child, he evidently spoke Portuguese at home;
at the same time he learned Spanish, which as an adult
he liked to use for his casual reading (travels, drama,
history, and so on). He later learned Latin, which he
adopted for his philosophical studies. He knew He-
brew from an early age, but as the scholarly language
of the classroom and the yeshiva, not as a living tongue;
and he seems to have picked up Dutch ?by osmosis,?
learning enough for all practical purposes without
making it his truly active language. Only one of his
essays-The Short lifetime, discovered some two hundred
years after his death?is in Dutch; but some scholars
believe that it is actually someone else?s translation of
Spinoza?s Latin.

bar, then, was Spinoza?s language? He had

none. Like many Jews, he was a polyglot,

lacking a single language in which he was
exclusively and genuinely at home and which domi-
nated his life and semantic universe. Nor was there
a single society to which he belonged. Having left
the Jewish congregation, he was never fully integrated
within the Dutch republic. His belonging to it was
more an abstract political stance than a living experi?
ence. Spinoza regarded the state as the individual?s
direct frame of reference without the mediatiou of reli-
gion, church, corporation, or any other body which
claims to be ?a kingdom within a kingdom.? Yet such
an intellectual position is importantly different from an
existential sense of belonging.

The difference evolved into a real breach with the
overthrow of the government in 1672 and the murder of
Johan de \Vitt, leader of the republic and its ruling
oligarchy, whom Spinoza had supported and perhaps
befriended. Ultz'ma barbarorum.? (?The height of bar-
barismI?) Spinoza cried out when de Witt and his
brother were butchered by a mob in the center of the
Hague?just a few blocks from where Spinoza lived?
while the guardians of law and order looked on. Spi-
noza?s reaction was not just a momentary one. The
knife that dissected the murdered republican ruler also
lacerated Spinoza?s body politic. The return of the mon-
archy was accompanied by an increase in mob rule, as
the House of Orange owed its strength to the popular
masses which supported it against the liberal bourgeoi-
sie. Monarchy and mob?these were two loosely related
political forces of which Spinoza had been apprehen-
sive all his life. With the liquidation of the republican
regime, Spinoza?s attachment to his homeland was pre-
sumably attenuated not only (or not necessarily) be-
cause of his origins or his nonconformist thinking, but
also because of his inability to rediscover himself and
acquiesce in the country?s prevailing political practices
and values.

In an era when it was virtually impossible for anyone
to exist and ?nd his identity other than from within a
recognized religioos framework, Spinoza, the typical
individual, left the Jewish synagogue but did not enter
any church. He refused to be baptized, nor did he join
any of the radical sects that ?ourished in the Nether-
lands: neither the Mennonites nor the Remonstrants,
though he agreed with some of their political positions;
neither the Quakers, in whose service he might have
earned his living for a time following his excommuni-
cation, nor the Collegiants, among whom he resided
for a period in Rijnsburg, ?nding among them friends
and disciples.

Even among rationalist philosophers, Spinoza was

unique to the point of solitariness. He transcended the
conceptual universe of Descartes and of Leibniz, and
also of skeptical deism, no less than the world of tra-
ditional faith. These other thinkers postulated a ?God
of the philosophers? as part of their rational systems,
but preserved his role as Creator and First
Cause. Spinoza alone refused to assign God such a
role. Rather, be identified God with the totality of the
universe itself. His conception, indeed, remained rut
generz's in the annals of philosophy. As a result, Spinoza
was rejected and despised not only by the traditional
philosophical establishment but also by the Cartesian
innovators and revolutionaries.

The identi?cation of God with the world implies a
more profound rejection of Judaism and Christianity
than ordinary atheism. Spinoza does not contend that
there is no God, or that only the inferior natural world
exists. Such a contention is itself steeped in a Christian
worldview. Spinoza contends, on the contrary, that by
virtue of identifying the world with God, immanent
reality itself acquires divine status. Only Christianity
considers the world of the here and now so base and so
insigni?cant that denial of the transcendent divinity
which gives it meaning robs the world of any signi?-
cance whatsoever. The problem and anxiety of modern
skeptics and atheists is usually Christian at root and
subject to the categories of Christianity. Spinoza is far
more radical in rejecting Christian (and Judaic) cate-
gories than the ordinary atheists?and as such is excep-
tional even among them.

Indeed, Spinoza?s espousal of secularity makes him a
true harbinger of modernity. Yet the new principle be
enunciated could not change his own life as an indi-
vidual, because that principle was as yet untenable in
the social reality. A single individual exemplifying it
was fated, in a crucial sense, to suffer an alienated
existence. Religious af?liation was the individual?s pass-
port to social acceptance. It was possible to abandon
Catholicism, but only by taking up Protestantism (Lu-
theranism, Calvinism, and so forth), or, in exceptional
instances, Islam or Judaism. But to renounce all his-
torical religions was tantamount to opting for social
and existential isolation. Membership in the secular
body politic alone was not yet a viable form of social
identity, as Spinoza was bound to discover. Neverthe-
less, he articulated and exempli?ed in his person what
was to emerge in time as the. overriding principle of
modern life.

The same may be said with regard to Spinoza?s rela-
tion to his own people and what we may term the
secularization of Jewish life. Alone and alienated, he
pre?gured what later generations would call ?Jewish
secularism.?

SPINOZA 41

JUDAISM AND THE SURVIVAL or THE Jaws

which proved useful to later Jewish reformers

and anti-Semites alike. For Spinoza, Judaism is
fundamentally a political religion that was designed
speci?cally for the ancient Hebrews as the basis for a
theological regime. \When the Temple was destroyed
and the Jews were deprived of their political existence,
their religion also lost its meaning. Judaism became
historically obsolete and self-contradictory because the
political nature of the Jewish religion no longer corre-
sponded to the nonpolitical existence of the Jews in the
Diaspora. In the absence of a Jewish body politic, Jew-
ish religion is super?uous. To sustain this view Spinoza
must turn to a sociohistorical analysis, showing that the
essence of the ancient Jewish religion was theocratic,
that is, a political regime where the laws of God are
also the supreme civil authority.

Of course, Spinoza?s main interest is in the present??
with his analysis of Jewish existence in exile, from
which he also projects back into the Jewish past. The
Jews in Palestine never lived under an absolute the-
ocracy. The almost full coalescence of law and religion
emerges only in the phantom state Spinoza criticizes??
and with which, we may add, he had an existential
clash. Only in exile is it possible to say as Spinoza says
in painful reproach that ?everyone who fell away from
religion ceased to be a citizen, and was, on that ground
alone, accounted an enemy.? In this type of reality, a
critic of religion like Spinoza was forced to relinquish
his membership in the Jewish community. In the ancient
Jewish states, however, both in the First and the Second
Temple periods, there were many Jews who disavowed
religious authority or transgressed against its laws with-
out'being considered enemies; or who took issue (like
the Sadducees) with the Oral Law and with the very
principle of theocracy, and yet were legitimate, even
in?uential, citizens of the polity. A person like Spinoza
would conceivably have been better off, certainly less
alienated, in ancient Israel. And it is quite probable
that in depicting the idealized and somewhat imaginary
theocracy of the ancient Israelites, Spinoza is projecting
a negative print of what he considers the distorted life
of the Jewish exile.

But even if Judaism as a religion has lost its raison
d??tre with the destruction of the Temple, the Jewish
people continue to survive. For centuries they zealously
preserve their phantom ?homeland,? rooted, as it is,
in religious Superstition. Moreover, like Spinoza?s own
parents and fellow Marranos, they prevail even in the
face of forced conversion and cruel persecution, return-
ing openly to Judaism after generations of secret prac-

pinoza?s image of Judaism is anchored in a thesis

42 TIKKUN VOL. 5, No. 1

tice. From a logical point of view, there is something
incomprehensible in all this, a kind of theoretical scan-
dal; and empirically, at least prima facie, this poses
a riddle.

Thus Spinoza, in his own way, faces the same prob-
lem that has perplexed Jews and Christians alike: that
amazing Survival of the Jewish people. The Jews main-
tain that they are God?s chosen people who, even though
sinners, yearn for redemption. Christians, on the other
hand, maintain that the Jews were God?s chosen people
who, because they rejected Jesus as the Messiah, are
themselves rejected by God.

 

In abandoning the observant
Judaian of lais day but refusing to
convert to Christianity Spinoza
unwittingly embodied
the aiternatiues wine/9 Kay in wait
for Jews of later generations.

 

Spinoza, not surprisingly, must dismiss both explana-
tions as transcendent. What is demanded is a purely
natural explanation, based upon social and 
cal causes. Signi?cantly, the twofold explanation Spinoza
offers is drawn in part from his Marrano background.
What preserved theJews, he says, was gentile hatred of
the Jews from without and the power of their religious
faith (?superstition?) from within.

Gentile hatred of the Jews, in Spinoza?s view, en-
hances their survival. So intensely do the Jews differen-
tiate themselves from other peoples that they cannot
help but arouse animosity and revulsion. As a result,
even if many individuals are ostracized and lost to their
people, the external pressure reinforces the Jews? sur-
vival as a group. This is a modern, essentially secular,
explanation which has by now become banal (the last
important writer to use it was Sartre). Spinoza, how-
ever, was among the ?rst, if not actually the ?rst, to
express it so 

As Spinoza knew from his own experience and from
Marrano history, the external factor may remain effec-
tive long after the internal factor has lost its validity.
For this reason, apparently, Spinoza believed that even
if the Jews became wholly secularized individually, they
would still exist as Jews (and be called by that name)
collectively; from that point of view, gentile hatred
would preserve them in perpetuo.

It was, therefore, particularly ingenious of Spinoza
to choose the Marranos, rather than ordinary Jews,
to illustrate his theses. The Marranos suffered from a

(Continued on p. 94)

Jews. It is not surprising that many of the two million
Jews remaining in the Soviet Union have begun to fear
for their lives. Their fear may be?and I believe it
is?wexaggerated. But it is understandable.

There are virtually no Jews in Poland. The resurgence
of does not, therefore,
present a real threat to the few survivors. Rather, such
ideologies pose a potential danger to the existence of
a stable and decent democratic order. SOme of this
movement?s slogans are remarkably similar to those
prOpagated by the ?Russophiles? in the Soviet Union.
Others are homespun. In particular, advocacy of un-
bridled laissez-faire and contempt for the institutions
of social welfare states such as Sweden (or, for that
matter, virtually all other industrial societies in the
West) often go hand in glove with a rejection of demo-
cratic processes as a whole, with praise for ?strong arm?
rule?and with anti-Semitism.

Thus, the proli?c writer and head of the right-wing
Union for a Realistic Policy, Janusz Korwin-Mikke, in
an appearance on state-supported Polish television, de-
nounced democracy and called for a ?general to bring
some order into the country? if it continues to drift
into ?anarchy and chaos.? In the democratic weekly
Dgodm?k he said that ?the left Jewish
intelligentsia had led Poland into the war with Hitler,?
and that in 1939 Hitler ?still had relatively clean hands.?
When the prominent journalist Robert Nowak, writing
in the same newspaper, reminded Korwin-Mikke of
such events as Kristallnacht, he replied that there ?was
no evidence that Hitler had any hand in it.?

Nowak expressed outrage that such ?trash? should
appear in a ?respectable journal.? Nevertheless, Korwin-
Mikke continues to be published in ?respectable jour-
nals.? Nor is he unique. Maciej the close
adviser of Cardinal Glemp, specializes in articles on
the ?Judeo-Masonic conspiracy.? His friends, now active
in various ?National Democratic? groups, issue lea?ets,
organize meetings, and regularly denounce ?Jews? such
as Bronislaw Geremek, the floor leader of Solidarity in
the Sejm (parliament), Adam Michnik (whose father
was a Jew but who considers himself a Christian), and
Jacek Kuron (a loo-percent Pole). Adam Michnik may
consider all these writings ?awkward and tactless.? My-
self, I consider them potentially more dangerous and
certainly much more offensive to Polish democracy than
Shamir?s mean-spirited epithets.

A few more remarks: In his article, Wan
szawski suggests that the Polish church shOuld ?educate
the faithful about the Shoah,? and that ?perhaps the
Sunday which falls every year before or after Holocaust
Remembrance Day should be set aside for this pur-
pose.? Yet surely a single remembrance mass once a
year is hardly enough to ?educate the faithful? not only

94 TIKKUN VOL. 5, No. 1

about the Shoah, but about the evils of anti-Semitism.

I agree that Jews, as \?C?arszawski suggests, should
contribute to the ?creation of the new interfaith center"
near Auschwitz. They should also support all scholarly
efforts in the area of Polish -Jewish relationswpublica-
tions, conferences, courses for Polish students, and the
like. But it seems to me that they would be well advised
not to participate in ?elitist? dialogues until the church
initiates an honest and systematic dialogue with its own
flock, including priests who feel that in the past Jews
killed Christian children in order to improve the quality
of Jewish blood.

Finally, Solidarity: As this article was going to press,
I read of Lech Walesa?s statements about Polish?Jewish
relations, made during his November visit to the United
States. The Polish leader still equates the Holocaust
with Nazi crimes against the Polish nation and refuses
to criticize the primate. But in urging his fellow Poles to
reexamine their history?or as the Solidarity spokesman,
Janusz puts it, ?to deal with the past in
order to better deal with the future??Solidarity is
taking an important step in the right direction. It will
be interesting to see whether this?and more--will
soon be reflected in Solidarity?s Etgodm'k Solidaritosc
and Gama Wyboraa. l]

SPINOZA, THE FIRST SECULAR JEW
(Cozztz'izzred?'om p. 42)

unique brand of anti-Semitism several hundred years
before the onset of modern anti-Semitism. For the first
time in Jewish history, anti-Semitism stemmed not from
opposition to the Jewish religion but from a hostility to
Jewish exisrence itself: it was existential anti-Semitism.
The converso who disavowed the Jewish religion and
sincerely sought to assimilate into Christian society
found that he was still discriminated against because of
his ancestry__and his blood. This existential anti-Semitism
reemerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
and was given its most inexorable expression in the
crematoria of Auschwitz; but the earlier version is to be
found in Iberia in the waning days of the Renaissance.
The concept of ?racial purity? adduced by modern
anti-Semites, and that of ?blood purity? propounded
by their Iberian predecessors, are two sides of the same
coin: hatred of the Jew no longer depended on his
religion but was anchored in his very being. There is
something tainted, contemptible, and abhorrent in the
mere existence of the Jew per se. The Jew can convert
to Christianity or (like Spinoza) disavow all religion;
yet, willy-nilly, he will continue to be subsumed under
that ?universal name of the class or nation? and remain,
thereby, an object of loathing.

"in" ?11-'52:

 

Auschwitz is the logical conclusion of this type of
anti-Semitisrn; for if the stigma inhetes in the Jew?s very
existence, it can only be expunged by physical exter-
mination. But the Iberian Inquisition never dreamed of
going as far as that. During the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, exile was the common practice for getting
rid of the Jews. Only the ?enlightened? modern era
made physical extermination possible. Yet through Mar-
rano history Spinoza could have peered into a deep
structure of Jewish existence: he made the discovery?
to which he was still unable to give conceptual ar-
ticulation?that Jewish existence was broader in scope
than Jewish religion, and the two could not be simply

identi?ed.

SECULARIZATION AND THE ew 


as Spinoza then the first secular Jew? What

can be said con?dently is that Spinoza took

thex?rst step in the eventual secularization
of Jewish life by examining it empirically as a natural
phenomenon subject solely to the forms of secular
history. In doing so he opened a breach between the
Jewish religion and traditional community, on the one
hand, and the broader totality of Jewish life on the
other. Yet the question remains of how to interpret this
new Judaism. A multiplicity of alternatives, some (but
not all) of them contradictory, present themselves, all
contained as logical possibilities in Spinoza's position
though he himself was historically unable to choose
from among them.

1. Arsz'mz'thtz'on, which would place the individual
directly within the universal dimension of society;
his link to the state, as the political sovereign, would
then be his only binding af?liative relationship.

2. Religious reform, which would sever Jewish attach-
ment to an autonomous political authority and
make of its believers, say, German, French, or US.
citizens ?of the Mosaic faith.?

3. Secular nationalism, stressing the concept of the
Jewish people (independently of religion and of
political citizenship), as the basic existential and
collective dimension of Jewish identity.

4. Zz'om'rm, entailing the renewal of Jewish political
existence within an independent state, a possibility
that Spinoza actually foresaw [in a famous and
often-quoted passage of his 
Treatise, which fired the imagination of many modern
Zionists from Moses Hess to David Ben-Gurion).

These alternatives are neither exhaustive nor mutu-
ally exclusive, and each entails several nuances. Nor are
they equally inferable from Spinoza?s position. Assimi-

 

 

   

For more information call:
Kibbuiz Ami Federation
Hashim-tar Hatzair
ISO 51h Ave. #911
New York, NY. 10011
New York: (212) 242-0532
San Francisco (415) 324-2345
Toronto: (416) 7364339

 

 

G-
a?

 

 

lation, in Spinoza?s theory, may solve the problem for
individuals but not for the entire people, since gentile
hostility alone will preserve the Jewish people forever.
Religious reform within Judaism, though not incom-
patible with his views, was not on Spinoza?s agenda;
the only reform be envisaged went in the direction
of a popular universal religion. As for the renewal
of the Jewish state, Spinoza could not recommend its
theocratic form, and its secular variety was still devoid
of meaning for him. Although he knew that Jews, Mar-
ranos, and a nonbeliever such as himself were referred
to as belonging to the same nation (and suffered similar
conditions), the notion of Jewish national existence,
as separate from religion, did not yet exist for him
as a de?ned theoretical concept. Had Spinoza claimed
for himself the right to disavow religion yet remain
within the congregation, we might have been able to
view him as, consciously, the ?first secular Jew.?

But he did not. That title belongs, if to anyone, to
Spinoza?s older and less gifted (if more complex) friend,
Dr. Daniel de Prado, a former Marrano and secret
Judaizer in Spain. Shortly after emigrating to Amster-
dam and openly returning to Judaism, Prado expressed
his doubts about all historical religions, became friendly
with Spinoza, recanted, relapsed, and was excommuni-
cated about a year after Spinoza; yet unlike Spinoza he
insisted on his right to remain within the community
while rejecting the commandments of [Jaime/9a.

Imbued with broader intellectual interests, Spinoza?s
message of secularity was meant for the world as a

TIKKUN VOL. 5, No. 1 95

whole. He evidently assumed (correctly, at the time)
that within Judaism this struggle was hopeless. What
trapped him tragically at the personal level was this
lack of perspective for change within Judaism. On the
one hand, he knew he could not escape his Jewish
condition, nor did he seek to do 50; yet neither did he
attempt to rehabilitate himself as a Jew (not even in
the explicit direction of secular Judaism). Thus he was
caught up in a double negation, rejecred by the gentiles
as a Jew and by the Jews as a heretic.

ecause the concept of secularJudaism is a mod-
ern one, and has an inevitable social dimension,
it cannot be realized by the traditional congre-
gation. The Jewish body to which the secularJew wishes
to go on belonging as a ?citizen? is no longer the auton-
omous medieval congregation but the Jewish people.
In Spinoza?s time, however, only the medieval commu-
nity structure could offer an expression of Jewish af-
?liation. The very concept of secularity was not yet
established, let alone the more complex idea of Jewish
secularism. People were identi?ed above all by their
religion?and this applied especially to the Jews. To
belong to a particular society one had to belong to the
religion it confessed. True, Spinoza used his critique of
Judaism to ?ght against this linkage of ?citizenship?
and religion. Yet whereas he offered a clear secular
message to society at large, he had no solution for
Judaism as such. Spinoza fought for the secularization
of individuals and of states, but he lacked the modern
concept of a nonpolitical secular Jewish nation.
Marrano history and his own fate as a ?Marrano of
reason? provided him with an optic ?ber, penetrating
into the depth of theJewish situation and distinguishing
between the religion of the Jews and their actual, more
fundamental existence. But Spinoza did not develop
this insight beyond the theory that gentile hostility
preserves the Jews and will do so forever.While offering
Western society a clear, positive doctrine of secularity,
for his own people Spinoza had only a cry of protest.
He could neither accept nor ?nd a way to sever the link in
Judaism betWeen ?citizenship? and religious observance.

LIFTING THE BAN

From time to time, petitions are made to have Spi?
noza?s ban revoked. In 1925, the late Israeli historian,
Joseph Klausner, stood on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem
and proclaimed: ?Baruch Spinoza, you are our brother."
In the early 19505, Israel?s prime minister, David Ben-
Gurion, conducted a campaign to have the ban lifted.
And in 1953, the then Chief Rabbi of Israel, Yizhak
Halevi Herzog, replied to an application from the late
G. Herz Shikmoni, director of the ?Spinozaeum? in

96 TIKKUN VOL. 5, No. 1

Haifa, asking him if the excommunication was still in
force frOm the point of view of balak/Ja. In reply to
the question of whether the excommunication was in-
tended to apply only to Spinoza's lifetime or also to
future generations, Rabbi Herzog did not rule, leaving
the matter open to further consideration. But with
regard to the ban on Spinoza?s works, the rabbinical
ruling was clear:

I have examined the text of the proclamation [the
writ of excommunication] and I have found . .. that
the intention is not speci?ed for future generations,
but only for the period of Spinoza?s lifetime. . .. It
seems that the ban on the reading of Spinoza's
books and compositions no longer stands.

Yet all these attempts to have the ban revoked are
really beside the point. Spinoza does not need certi?-
cation by any authorities, whoever they may be, and
one cannot but be struck by the astonishing discrep-
ancy betWeen his actual impact on intellectual history
and the attempts to grant him belated institutional
legitimization. The ban was signi?cant because it iso-
lated Spinoza from the actual Jewish community of his
day, and whoever wishes to revoke it today is three
hundred years late. The demand to revoke the ban
would escape its anachronistic quality only if it were to
have some symbolic meaninghnational, perhaps, or
ideological?rather than purely religious. Such a case,
however, would entail the contradiction of both adopt-
ing the religious concept of the ban (as implied in the
demand to revoke Spinoza?s) and at the same time
rejecting it (by changing its meaning).

Lastly, and this is perhaps the crux of the matter,
who in the Jewish world today might be authorized to
accept Spinoza back into the Jewish. fold? The Luba-
vitcher Rebbe? The prime minister of Israel? The board
of the Jewish Theological Seminary? The B?nai B?rith?
There is no longer a single normative Judaism today?a
developmentpf which Spinoza himself was a harbinger.

In abandoning the observant Judaism of his day but
refusing to convert to Christianity, Spinoza unwittingly
embodied the alternatives which lay in wait for Jews of
later generations following the encounter of Judaism
with the modern world. As a result of this encounter,
there is no longer one norm of Jewish existence today.
There are Orthodox and secular Jews, Conservative
and Reform Jews, Zionist and anti?Zionist Jews, and
nuances and subcategories within all of these; in fact,
Judaism today is determined by the way actual Jews live
it, and not by any one compulsory model. In his life,
if not his work, Spinoza himself foretold this develop-
ment, and so he remains central to centemporary think-
ing about Judaism and the complexities of its existence
and survival. Cl