The Jewish philosopher Spinoza was one of the great Enlightenment thinkers. So why was he ‘cancelled’? – ABC News
Posted By admin on October 4, 2020
We often think of cancel culture as a contemporary phenomenon, driven by social media and rife in our hyper-connected world.
But really, punishing people for their ideas and opinions has been going on for as long as people have been thinking.
Take the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. In the mid-17th century, Spinoza was charged with heresy and cast out from his Amsterdam Jewish community.
Since then, he's gone on to be canonised as one of the great Enlightenment thinkers and even embraced as a hero of Judaism.
But un-cancelling a cancelled philosopher is harder than you might expect, and three centuries later, there are still plenty of people who would prefer to see Spinoza hang onto his outcast status.
Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632 and raised in the city's Talmud Torah congregation.
He had a traditional Jewish upbringing and education, attending the local yeshiva until the age of 17, when he went to work in his father's importing business.
Yeshiva: Jewish educational institution, focussing on the study of religious textsCherem (hrem): the total exclusion of a person from the Jewish community Zionism: ideology and nationalist movement that supports an independent Jewish state
But Spinoza remained a scholar, and over the next few years, he began to lay the intellectual foundations for what would become one of the most celebrated bodies of work in European philosophy.
At the time, however, Spinoza's ideas weren't being celebrated within his own community.
While Spinoza's exact heresies weren't documented, rumours began to swirl of his unorthodox views, and he started clashing with the local religious authorities.
It's said that at one point, a fanatic shouting "Heretic!" attacked Spinoza with a knife on the steps of the local synagogue.
Things finally came to a head on July 27, 1656, when the congregation issued a writ of cherem or excommunication against the 23-year-old philosopher.
Spinoza is vaguely accused of "evil opinions", "abominable heresies" and "monstrous deeds", but what religious wrongs did he actually commit?
His later philosophical work particularly the Ethics, published posthumously in 1677 could offer some answers.
In it, Spinoza articulates a conception of God that would have been highly offensive to any observant Jew at the time.
Spinoza's God lacks all the attributes of the God of the Torah, having no will or emotions, no psychological traits or moral character. His God makes no plans or judgments, issues no commandments, and possesses no wisdom or goodness.
Spinoza's God is neither transcendent nor supernatural, being more or less reducible to Nature. Indeed, Spinoza's preferred term for this entity is "God or Nature".
It's all a far cry from the God of Abraham and Moses, who led the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt and hardly surprising that Spinoza's ideas landed him in such hot water with the religious authorities of his day.
What's more surprising is that Spinoza has, over the centuries, gone on to become a highly regarded figure in contemporary Judaism, if still a controversial one.
David Rutledge interviews Spinoza scholar Stephen Nadler on The Philosopher's Zone.
But not all modern Jews have adopted his ideas or extracted a definitive theology from them.
Certainly, from an Orthodox Jewish perspective, Spinoza remains as problematic today as he did in the 17th century.
But even anti-Spinozans will admit that many of the big questions that lie at the foundations of modern Judaism What does it mean to be a Jew? What must Jews believe? Is it possible to have a secular Jewish identity? are either direct responses to Spinoza, or spring from the history of his interpretation.
Spinoza has even been hailed as a proto-Zionist.
The documentary evidence for this is slim largely based on his assertion in his text Tractatus Theologico-Politicus that the Jewish people would "one day ... establish once more their independent state", provided they could summon the requisite "manliness" to do so.
The passage is more of a loose speculation than a prescient endorsement of a Jewish state, but 19th-century European Zionists took it to mean that Spinoza had envisaged a Judaism based on nationalism.
Elsewhere in his work they found a champion of the kind of Jewish identity that they saw in themselves and their project: reason-based, democratic, and at pains to separate rabbinic authority from political governance.
And this notion of Spinoza as a secular saint of Zionism carried through to the birth of the modern state of Israel in 1948.
Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, called Spinoza "the first Zionist of the last 300 years", embracing him as not just a philosopher who happened to be born a Jew, but a profoundly and definitively Jewish philosopher.
So taken was Ben-Gurion with Spinoza that in 1953, he published a laudatory article about the philosopher that kicked off a raging debate about the justice of his excommunication three centuries earlier.
Calls rang out within the Israeli parliament and the international Jewish press to have the original cherem rescinded, and opinions were sought from chief rabbis worldwide.
The debate remained inconclusive, largely because neither David Ben-Gurion nor most of the world's Jewish leaders had the authority to reverse the original decision.
According to Steven Nadler, a long-standing Spinoza scholar and philosophy professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the only people authorised to lift the cherem against Spinoza is the community that issued it in the first place the Talmud Torah congregation of Amsterdam.
As it happens, the Amsterdam congregation still exists.
In December 2015, they held a symposium to debate the proposition that the ban should be lifted.
Scholars from four continents were invited to the symposium, to act as an advisory committee. One of the scholars was Professor Nadler.
"They didn't want us to express an opinion as to whether the cherem was good or bad," he recalls.
"They wanted to know: what were Spinoza's philosophical views, what were the historical circumstances of the ban, what might be the advantages of lifting the cherem, and what might be the disadvantages?"
The debate was held before an audience of over 500 people and, at its conclusion, the current rabbi of the congregation handed down his opinion: that Spinoza should remain where he was, officially cancelled, and (to quote the 1656 decision) "expelled from the people of Israel".
Despite the ruling, Professor Nadler says most members of the community would have liked to see the cherem lifted.
"It would have been a great PR move," he says.
"[To annnounce,] 'Look, we're not the intolerant community of the 17th century, Spinoza is one of us and we're proud to own him.'"
But the rabbi thought differently.
Professor Nadler says the religious leader asked: "Who am I to overrule my 17th-century predecessors? Am I that much wiser than them?"
The rabbi also held that Spinoza's religious views, considered beyond the pale in 1656, had not really been made any less problematic by the passage of time.
Once a renegade, always a renegade particularly when the renegade in question remained proud and unrepentant in his heresy.
"Spinoza knew the rules of the game," says Professor Nadler.
"The rabbis warned him, and his response was 'Hey, you know what? I'm leaving anyway.'
"So you can't call the cherem a terrible miscarriage of justice."
So Baruch Spinoza, rebel philosopher and abominable heretic, remains officially cancelled for the foreseeable future.
Fortunately for philosophers and secular Jews, but also for Orthodox Jews who welcome a provocative challenge to their theology his works remain.
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