Benedict De Spinoza (1632-77), the frail, frugal, reclusive lens-grinder, may have been the most passionately dispassionate thinker in the history of the Western mind. No philosopher was so rigorously cautious and chary with his words; none trimmed his thoughts down to such irreducibly geometric crystals that he could claim “to consider human actions and desires in exactly the same manner as though they were lines, planes, and solids.” No philosopher, certainly, has been more intoxicated by the mind’s ability to think and intuit everlasting truths: “When the mind regards itself and its own power of activity it feels pleasure.”

Spinoza was born into a family of well-to-do Jews who had fled the Portuguese Inquisition and settled in the Netherlands. Seventeenth-century Calvinist Holland had proved a clement haven for these Sephardi Jews, offering not only religious freedom but also the opportunity of engaging in lucrative commercial ventures outside their former home on the Iberian Peninsula. Holland itself had recently seceded from Spanish rule and was becoming a commercial power, so it is not surprising that members of the Jewish Spanish-Portuguese colony, given their education and their familiarity with international commercial and diplomatic practices, should have prospered there.

Jews in Holland managed their internal affairs discreetly, hoping to arouse as little Calvinist scrutiny as possible. In fact, most of them—who because of their ancestors’ forced conversion to Catholicism on the Iberian Peninsula were known as converses—wanted nothing more than to put the past behind them and return to their ancestral religion. Amsterdam Jewry, while retaining its cosmopolitan, multilingual, and secular orientation, had become doctrinally orthodox.

It was in this community that the young Benedict, born Baruch, Spinoza received an excellent Jewish education and became thoroughly versed in Hebrew Scripture and medieval Jewish philosophy. His father, a prominent member of the community, was also the warden of the Jewish school the young boy attended. But Spinoza’s stunning intellectual gifts were obvious from the very start, and it was only a matter of time before the precocious youth ventured beyond the confines of his Jewish studies. Descartes, science, and the vibrant intellectual climate of the mid-17th century were irresistible allures.

The precise circumstances which finally led in 1656 to Spinoza’s excommunication from the Jewish community as a heretic are not clear. What is known is that the young Spinoza fell under the influence of several men, each of whom helped, in some cases perhaps inadvertently, to propel him away from established Judaism. An early cultural model was the perfectly respectable Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, a humanist diplomat who had met Oliver Cromwell and was a friend of both the famed jurist Hugo Grotius and the painter Rembrandt. Then there was the German ex-Jesuit, Francis Van den Enden, Spinoza’s Latin teacher. It was under Van den Enden’s tutelage that Spinoza became interested in the natural sciences and in the spirit of free inquiry which animated his mentor’s circle. He also associated with Collegiants, a Christian sect practicing a tolerant and non-dogmatic faith.

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The Jewish community approved neither of Spinoza’s association with freethinking and Christian intellectuals like Van den Enden nor with the sort of biblical inquiry in which Spinoza was beginning to engage, especially after having read works by the French Calvinist converso Isaac de La Peyrère. But what exercised the community even more was Spinoza’s friendship with Dr. Juan de Prado, a Jewish heretic and Deist who had recently fled Spain.

The Jewish community of Amsterdam had experienced religious sedition before, most notably in the case of Uriel da Costa, a fugitive converse from Portugal who had converted back to Judaism while still in Portugal and who then fled the clutches of the Inquisition to start a new life in the Netherlands. Once in Holland, however, da Costa, whose knowledge of Judaism was rudimentary, began to attack the belief in the immortality of the soul and a host of other rabbinical precepts which he could not find anywhere in the written Torah and therefore regarded as violations of Jewish law. Like Spinoza after him, da Costa had a sharp eye for biblical inconsistencies. He also criticized the wardens of established Judaism and was vocally intolerant of superstitious and obscurantist notions which, he said, passed for religious adherence among members of the fold. As a result, Uriel da Costa was excommunicated by the Amsterdam rabbinate—not once, but twice. (He has left a moving autobiographical account of the scene of his recantation in the Amsterdam synagogue.) So humiliated was he by the public flogging at the synagogue, and so overwhelmed by daily harassment, doubt, and an overwrought religious sensibility, that at the age of fifty-five he shot himself in the head.

Spinoza was eight years old at the time. Then, in his early twenties, it became both his and Prado’s turn to face the authorities. Prado pleaded with them and disavowed his views; rumored subsequently to have relapsed to his old ways, he was finally excommunicated in February 1657. Spinoza never did recant; after being placed under a probationary ban, he was excommunicated in July 1656.

Excommunication put many hurdles in Spinoza’s path. From that moment he was no longer able to live or run a business from within the Jewish community. He was never married and was temporarily banished from Amsterdam. Spinoza is supposed to have written a defense of his views, but the text no longer exists; it is believed that he incorporated many of its arguments into his Theological-Political Treatise.

Until his death in 1677, Spinoza was to live quietly in Rijnsburg, Voorburg, and The Hague, earning his living by grinding and polishing lenses. He devoted much of his time to writing and to friendships which developed as a result of his philosophical interests. He published very little; the only work to appear bearing his name was a short treatise on Descartes. But his circle of admirers was not small, and several sought (unsuccessfully) to provide him with an income.

In light of Spinoza’s own political views, it is not surprising that he should have befriended the liberal-minded Jan de Witt. Both men advocated religious tolerance and freedom of thought, and both supported secular constitutional forms of government. It was to defend de Witt’s ideas against the Calvinists that Spinoza wrote his Theological-Political Treatise, wherein he undertook to expose the ills that result when governments suppress free thinking by appealing to religious authority. The work was not only a criticism of the prevailing anti-liberal climate in Holland, but clearly reflected Spinoza’s personal views and experiences vis-à-vis the rabbinate.

Spinoza, in fact, went one step further. Not only did he criticize bigotry and its appeals to the Bible, but he questioned the authority—and the authorship—of the Bible itself. The Treatise, published anonymously in 1670, was immediately condemned. Nor did it win any converts to Jan de Witt’s cause: in 1672, both Jan and his brother Cornelius were savagely lynched by a frenzied mob in The Hague. A year later, Spinoza himself, suspected of treason, was very nearly lynched by a similar mob. Wisely he refrained from publishing his Ethics during his lifetime. In 1677, having attained some degree of fame among European thinkers, Spinoza died of consumption, aggravated by the dust he had inhaled as a lens grinder.

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Spinoza’s distrust of the unenlightened, as expressed in his Treatise, reflected a deep-seated ambivalence. On the one hand, the multitude worshipped an anthropomorphic God whose miracles, prophets, sacred texts, and institutions seemed conceived to keep mankind in a state of perpetual bondage to error and confusion. On the other hand, Spinoza realized only too well that religion—not philosophy—and revelation—not reason—were the fitter means to instruct the public in those things which reason itself recognizes as good. Spinoza’s views on this subject are as complex as they are slippery, and not always easy to reconcile. Though he advocated an idealized form of republican democracy, he was so frightened of public anarchy that he regarded the willful submission to authority as preferable to “agitation and rebellion.” Just as it was more reasonable to teach the multitude unreasonable beliefs than to despoil them of belief altogether, so in politics it was more reasonable to submit to an unreasonable state of affairs than to sow sedition.

Spinoza, then, wielded a deft double pen. The secular tone is unmistakable; he was, after all, one of the earliest propagators of the modern democratic spirit:

The ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain, by fear, nor to exact obedience, but contrariwise, to free every man from fear, that he may live in all possible security; in other words, to strengthen his natural right to exist and work without injury to himself and others. No, the object of government is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or puppets, but to enable them to develop their minds and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled; neither showing hatred, anger, or deceit, nor watched with the eyes of jealousy and injustice. In fact the true aim of government is liberty.

But if it is impossible to miss the secular in Spinoza, it is equally difficult to overlook a strain that can only be called religious. Spinoza advocated not only man’s right to be free and to think freely, but man’s duty to think well, to think the truest thoughts. For herein lay ultimate salvation: in man’s capacity to transcend his own finitude, his own temporality, and unite with the knowledge of the true essence and causes of things. By means of such knowledge, man not only arrives at a clear and distinct apprehension of things as they are but enters into communion with Nature, with God, with the infinite Mind.

Indeed, there exists a strange collusion between the secular and the religious in Spinoza. Philosophy is the intellectual love of God, said the man who was branded an atheist. The road to that “union” with the infinite intellect—long, tricky, and elaborate—spans the entirety of The Ethics, but at the end of it, all dualisms and contrarieties overcome, we are led to see how body and mind, thought and extension, the eternal and the temporal, God and Nature, are one.

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In his new two-volume work on Spinoza,¹ Yirmiyahu Yovel, a professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, tries to fit Spinoza’s notorious complexity into a mold of his own devising. The concept of salvation through philosophy, he writes, aside from illustrating the philosopher’s secularism, is altogether grounded in his culture as a Jew. And not only as a Jew: Spinoza’s thinking, according to Yovel, betrays specifically Marrano “patterns,” Marrano conflicts, and Marrano solutions. Moreover, these same “patterns” appeared later in Spinoza’s philosophical “inheritors,” and indeed came to be the informing characteristics of the minds responsible for shaping all of modern European consciousness.

Now, what does Marranism have to do with Spinoza? Spinoza’s ancestors, as we have seen, were converses—Jews living in Spain or Portugal who had converted to Catholicism either forcibly or for convenience. Most of these converses became Christian in name only; the vast majority continued to remain observant Jews in secret. They were called Marranos from a word meaning apostate, hypocrite, or pig.

Conversion, particularly in Spain, had proved a wise move in the late 14th and 15th century, for as New Christians, Jews were finally allowed to enter into mainstream Spanish society. And so they did, accumulating wealth, plucking coveted diplomatic, administrative, and financial posts, reaching legal, literary, medical, and especially ecclesiastic prominence, and contracting alliances with Spain’s leading aristocratic families. As Spinoza himself was to write about them in his Theological- Political Treatise:

As these renegades were admitted to all the native privileges of the Spaniards, and deemed worthy of filling all honorable places, it came to pass that they straightaway became so intermingled with the Spaniards, as to leave of themselves no relic or remembrance.

The list of famous converses and descendants of converses in the Golden Age is so long and has such intricate reaches in so many domains of Spanish cultural life that it must sometimes seem that any Spaniard of distinction either had, or might have had, or was at one time or another suspected of having, Jewish blood.

Over time, many Marranos shed every vestige of Judaism to become thoroughly assimilated Catholics. In Spain, some achieved fame as Christians: Santa Teresa de Avila, San Juan de la Cruz, Juan de Valdés, and possibly even Tomás de Torquemada, the founder of the Catholic Inquisition. The father of Uriel da Costa was one such devout Christian. As for those not so thoroughly gone, by the beginning of the 17th century they were so isolated from the rest of world Jewry, and the pressures to conform were so overwhelming, that their clandestine religion, when they practiced it, had become stripped to its bare essentials. Without Hebrew, without books, without even a proper recollection of ritual, the Marranos observed a rudimentary, garbled form of Judaism which relied heavily on what Yovel terms “Christian symbols and categories.” Queen Esther became Saint Esther, and the concept of salvation through the law of Moses became a flimsy read-aptation of the idea of salvation through Christ.

Above all, what distinguished these hybrid Jews was a certain habit of mind, what Yovel terms “Marrano patterns”:

Marrano patterns include a this-worldly disposition; a split religious identity; a metaphysical skepticism; a quest for alternative salvation through methods that oppose the official doctrine; an opposition between the inner belief and the outer world; and a tendency toward dual language and equivocation.

These “patterns” would also characterize the tortured and ambivalent psychology of those who, like Uriel da Costa, eventually found their way back to Judaism if not beyond it. Indeed, Yovel for his purposes here includes in his definition of Marranos not only Jews forced to wear a Christian mask but those who, by dint of impersonating another faith, ultimately became neither Jewish nor Christian. Where did the fundamental allegiance of such Jews now lie? “The unassimilated Marrano is the true wandering Jew,” Yovel writes, “roaming between Christianity and Judaism and drifting between the two and universalism.”

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Yovel understands well the sinuous land elusive turns, the duplicity, the cultivated prudence, the striking capacity for embracing opposites that typify the condition characterized by the scholar Carl Gebhardt as the “split Marrano consciousness.” Yet, as persuasive as his analysis of Marranism may be in its own terms, it applies to a very small number of Jews in the 16th and 17th century, and it is not in the least clear that Spinoza was among them. He was not, after all, a Marrano himself, had never known the Office of the Inquisition, had never even set foot on Iberian soil. He was born and educated in Holland, and unlike most Marranos in Spain and Portugal, he had also received an excellent Jewish religious education.

Yet Yovel insists that Spinoza had “internalized” the Marrano “frame of mind,” both through osmosis, as it were, and more directly by fraternizing with that other tormented and divided Jew from Spain, Dr. Juan de Prado. In effect, Prado, in Yovel’s theory, serves as the missing link between Spinoza the native Dutch Jew and Spinoza the Marrano.

For Yovel, Spinoza not only shared Marrano ambivalence, he transposed its tensions to an even higher plane. For he was an alien among aliens, an ex-orthodox, now secular, reputedly atheist Dutch Jew writing in Latin and busily erecting an irreducibly logical system which, in its purported aim to free mankind from spiritual and intellectual bondage, would further alienate him from Jews, Christians, and co-nationals alike. As a thinker, then, Spinoza was almost bound to practice ambivalence, caution, and dissimulation in the highest degree.

In his work, says Yovel, thanks to the “Marrano-like splits” and tensions operating from within, Spinoza deployed with exquisite cunning strategies eminently familiar to all Marranos: concealing his ideas about government, religion, man, and God by means of textual devices intended to ward off uninvited, uninitiated, unenlightened, and hence potentially unfriendly readers, all the while trying to seduce and placate them with palliative verbal measures. He was always addressing a mixed audience, with whom he was obliged to converse and negotiate in a polyphonic mode. This is what Yovel means by the expression “Marrano of reason”: one who practices the art of reason in secret, or at least in the privacy of a select few.

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Most of what Yovel has to say about Spinoza as a “Marrano of reason” is not new. With certain differences, the philosopher Leo Strauss suggested something very similar forty years ago. Yet Yovel is determined to prove it, and he devotes 127 of the 204 pages in his first volume to the task. The task is not an easy one—and he does not succeed at it. Indeed, his method is not so much to show the Marrano “split” in Spinoza as simply to repeat over and over again that it exists.

As for concrete examples of Marrano “equivocation” itself, what Yovel puts forth is so frothy and diffuse that it utterly fails to convince. In particular, he devotes a 42-page chapter to a discussion of a single literary work (admittedly, a masterpiece) written by a converse at the very beginning of the 16th century—the play La Celestina by Fernando de Rojas. Other critics, most notably Stephen Gilman, Americo Castro, and Fernando Pallardó, have written on Jewish aspects of La Celestina. For his part, Yovel sets out to show how the work betrays a Marrano preoccupation with masks and deceit and, on a broader level, how it “reflects a metaphysical world view which is neither Christian nor Jewish.” He looks for figures of doubleness, anything ranging from punning to irony, any reference to concealment, prudence, equivocation, hypocrisy. He seizes on every detail he can, and then imputes an ironic or subversive twist to it, asserting that it “can be” or “probably is” intended to be read as a hidden reference to former Jews. Thus, one of the characters in the play says he is no longer able to trust anyone. Yovel: “[This] is also a cardinal rule of survival among Marranos under the Inquisition: trusting everyone is a fatal mistake.” Another character says, “They call an overtly devout man a hypocrite.” Yovel: “This admonition fits the Marranos equally well.”

Yet, amazingly, Yovel never mentions non-converso plays or literature in which double identity and doubletalk play important roles. In fact, the number of such Renaissance and Baroque works staggers the imagination. Probably no period in history has placed such an inordinate stress on equivocation and casuistry as did the Counter-Reformation. This is evidenced not only in literature but in the works of the myriad Jesuit pamphleteers let loose in the Christian world, and in the actions of Catholic spies who, when captured in Protestant nations, were able to lie without impugning their faith by resorting to elaborate forms of silent chicanery. (Montaigne, Bacon, and Pascal were eminently familiar with their modes.) And if the Jesuits used dissimulation to further their cause, so did their adversaries within Catholicism, men unsatisfied with the state of the Church but not quite ready to attack it openly. These practiced what went under the name of “legitimate” or “honest” dissimulation, voicing their doubts in private, avoiding public confrontations, and continuing to observe their religion in conformity with established usage. After all, as Otto Brunfels wrote in 1527, majority opinion “either despises or is incapable of understanding the truth.” Did Spinoza think differently? Was not his motto caute (cautiously)?

Among Protestants, too, we find the same habit of mind Yovel has fastened upon as quintessentially Marrano. There was, for example, what Calvin called Nicodemism. The Nicodemites were men who had converted to Protestantism but secretly continued to adhere to the Roman Catholic Church. According to Carlo Ginzburg in his book II Nicodemismo (1970), the subtleties and ambiguities of Nicodemism made it a “religion for intellectuals.” Nicodemites were temporizers, men who (as the Oxford English Dictionary defines them), “comply for the time; who seek to gain time; who adapt or conform to the time and circumstances.” One of the works cited in the OED also appears in Ginzburg’s book: The Temporysour (that is to saye: the Observer of Tyme, or he that changeth with Tyme). Marranos were also temporizers. In his The Present State of the Jews (1675), Lancelot Addison, Joseph Addison’s father, writes the following:

That there are many such Temporizing Jews especially in Spain and Portugal, I have been assured from their own mouths; and what is more observable, some have ventured to affirm, that there want not Jews among the very Judges of the Inquisition. [Quoted by Cecil Roth in History of the Marranos. ]

Jews may have been the original temporizers of early modern Europe; but by the time Spinoza was writing, the practice had become cast in a predominantly Christian mold. One could as easily call Spinoza a “Nicodemite of reason” as a “Marrano of reason.”

Finally, totally overlooked by Yovel is a book in Spinoza’s library. Among the works by Spanish authors—including Cervantes, Montalván, Góngora, and Quevedo—was one by the Jesuit moralist Baltasar Gracián, entitled El Criticón. Gracián was to the 17th century what Machiavelli had been to the 16th. No man was shrewder, none offered a more detailed crash course in hypocrisy and “double dissimulation”; his Criticón is a travelogue in the realms of deceit and doubledealing. That Yovel should seek to anchor his case on the converso Rojas, whose work appeared 150 years before Spinoza’s excommunication, yet fail to mention the Jesuit Gracián, whom Spinoza had almost certainly read and who died just two years after Spinoza’s excommunication, suggests the shakiness of his ground.

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The attempt to tie Spinoza’s thinking to Marrano “patterns” and Marrano antecedents must therefore be judged a failure; intriguing on its face, the proposition remains to be proved. And the same goes a fortiori for Yovel’s attempt in his second volume, The Adventures of Immanence, to project these same Marrano “patterns” forward in time and on the basis of them to stake a claim for Spinoza as the spiritual father of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and the entire tradition of modern secularism.

By “immanence” Yovel seems more or less to mean the secular or, as he terms it, the “this worldly.” Spinoza, for him, personifies the Jew who is not necessarily an adherent of a doctrinal religious community but who nevertheless is indissolubly fused to that community’s heritage. Such a Jew solves the resultant schism in his soul by redefining his own allegiance to law, land, people, and community. No longer does the concept of redemption, for example, entail passage to another world, but it is “understood as a collective event in the immanent world.” Ironically, according to Yovel, this very redefinition, which Spinoza was the first to accomplish, has a Jewish warrant; in fact it is endemic to Judaism itself, which is a religion already and always predisposed to “immanentism”:

In its deep structure, . . . the program of the Theological-Political Treatise entails a kind of universalization of Judaism. Judaism, as a “political” religion and as a religion of “commandments only,” becomes the paradigm for what must take place in the world as a condition for rational progress. The message of Judaism is extended into a universal system in which historical Judaism, though abolished as a particular religion, fundamentally informs the system that replaces it.

In other words, Spinoza’s rational secularism, and by extension the secular outlook of legions of Jews today, may look like “heresy,” but it is actually a kind of fulfillment, if not a higher realization, of Judaism itself.

Once again, the proposition has a certain surface-charm. But whatever can be said for or against it as an abstract idea, in Yovel’s exposition its persuasiveness depends crucially on the cogency of his prior hypothesis concerning a Marrano “mind” invested by a deep-seated schism which in turn paved the way to the secular-immanentist world view. Unable to make his case with the materials he has chosen to fashion it from, Yovel in his second volume turns once again to a whole series of scattered, broad, and needlessly reductive parallels and contrasts that in the end obfuscate more than they clarify.

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Spinoza is a thinker notoriously difficult to understand. Bayle, Vo ltaire, Diderot, Novalis, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, and Coleridge are only some of his more eloquent misreaders. Yirmiyahu Yovel, then, is in distinguished company. But in approaching this philosopher one is still well advised to heed Leo Strauss’s warning against “the attempt to understand Spinoza better than he understood himself.” For the failure which inevitably results from such an attempt “exposes one to the danger of understanding, not Spinoza, but a figment of one’s imagination.”

¹ Spinoza and Other Heretics, Princeton University Press. Volume I: The Marrano of Reason, 244 pp., $24.50; Volume II: The Adventures of Immanence, 225 pp., $29.50.