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In traditional religion, myth is inseparable from cult, which brings eternal reality into the mundane lives of worshippers by means of ceremonies and meditative practices. Despite the power of its symbolism, Lurianic Kabbalah would not have become so crucial to the Jewish experience had it not been expressed in eloquent rituals that evoked within the exiles a sense of transcendent meaning. In Safed, Kabbalists devised special rites to reenact Luria’s theology. They would make night vigils to help them to identify with the Shekhinah, whom they imagined as a woman, wandering in distress through the world, yearning for her divine source. Jews would rise at midnight, remove their shoes, weep, and rub their faces in the dust. These ritual actions served to express their own sense of grief and abandonment, and to link them with the experience of loss endured also by the Divine Presence. They would lie awake all night, calling out to God like lovers, lamenting the pain of separation that lies at the heart of so much human distress, but which is central to the suffering of exile. There were penitential disciplines—fastings, lashings, rolling in the snow—performed as acts of tikkun. Kabbalists would go for long walks through the countryside, wandering like the Shekhinah and acting out their own sense of homelessness. Jewish law insisted that prayer could have its deepest force and meaning only when performed communally, in a group of at least ten males; but in Safed, Jews were instructed to pray alone, to experience fully their very real sense of isolation and vulnerability in the world. This solitary prayer put some distance between the Jew and the rest of society, prepared him for a different type of experience, and helped him to appreciate anew the perilous isolation of the Jewish people in a world that constantly threatened its existence.
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But Luria was adamant that there was to be no wallowing; Kabbalists must work through their sorrow in a disciplined, stylized way until they achieved a measure of joy. The midnight rituals always ended at dawn with a meditation upon the final reunion of the Shekhinah with Ein Sof and, consequently, the end of the separation of humanity from the divine. The Kabbalist was instructed to imagine that every one of his limbs was an earthly shrine for the Divine Presence.
(#litres_trial_promo) All the world religions insist that no spirituality is valid unless it results in practical compassion, and Lurianic Kabbalah was true to this insight. There were severe penances for faults that injured others: for sexual exploitation, for malicious gossip, for humiliating one’s fellows, and for dishonoring parents.
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Finally the Kabbalists were taught the mystical practices that have evolved in most of the world faiths, which help the adept to access the deeper regions of the psyche and gain intuitive insight. In Safed, meditation centered on detailed, skilled reconfigurations of the letters composing God’s name. These “concentrations” (kawwanot) would help the Kabbalist to become aware of a trace of the divine within himself. He would become, leading Kabbalists believed, a prophet, able to utter a new mythos, bring to light a hitherto unknown religious truth, just as Luria had done. These kawwanot certainly brought Kabbalists great joy. Haim Vital (1542–1620), one of Luria’s disciples, said that in ecstasy he trembled and shook with elation and awe. Kabbalists saw visions and experienced a rapturous transcendence that transfigured the world at a time when it seemed cruel and alien.
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Rational thought has achieved astonishing success in the practical sphere, but it cannot assuage our sorrow. After the Spanish disaster, Kabbalists found that the rational disciplines of philosophy, which had been popular among the Jews of al-Andalus, could not address their pain.
(#litres_trial_promo) Life seemed drained of meaning, and without meaning in their lives, human beings can fall into despair. To make life bearable, the exiles turned to mythos and mysticism, which enabled them to make contact with the unconscious sources of their pain, loss, and desire, and anchored their lives in a vision that brought them comfort.
It is noticeable, however, that unlike Ignatius of Loyola, Luria and his disciples devised no practical plans for the political salvation of the Jews. Kabbalists had settled in the Land of Israel, but they were not Zionists; Luria did not urge Jews to end their exile by migrating to the Holy Land. He did not use his mythology or his mystical vision to create an ideology that would be a blueprint for action. This was not the job of mythos; all such practical planning and political activity were the domain of logos—rational, discursive thought. Luria knew that his mission as a mystic was to save Jews from existential and spiritual despair. When these myths were later applied to the practical world of politics, the results could be disastrous, as we shall see later in this chapter.
Without a cult, without prayer and ritual, myths and doctrines have no meaning. Without the special ceremonies and rites that made the myth accessible to the Kabbalists, Luria’s creation story would have remained a senseless fiction. It was only in a liturgical context that any religious belief became meaningful. Once people were deprived of that type of spiritual activity, they would lose their faith. This is what happened to some of the Jews who decided to convert to Christianity and remain in the Iberian Peninsula. This has also happened to many modern people who no longer meditate, perform rituals, or take part in any ceremonial liturgy, and then find that the myths of religion mean nothing to them. Many of the conversos were able to identify wholly with Catholicism. Some, indeed, such as the reformers Juan de Valdes (1500–41) and Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540), became important leaders of the Counter Reformation and thus made a significant contribution to early modern culture in rather the same way that secularized Jews such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Albert Einstein, and Ludwig Wittgenstein had a profound impact on later modernism after their assimilation into mainstream society.
One of the most illustrious of these influential conversos was Teresa of Avila (1515–82), the mentor and teacher of John of the Cross and the first woman to be declared a Doctor of the Church. She was a pioneer of the reform of spirituality in Spain and was especially concerned that women, who did not have the benefit of a good education and were frequently led into unhealthy mystical practices by inept spiritual directors, receive a proper grounding in religious matters. Hysterical trances, visions, and raptures had nothing to do with holiness, she insisted. Mysticism demanded extreme skill, disciplined concentration, a balanced personality, and a cheerful, sensible disposition, and must be integrated in a controlled and alert manner with normal life. Like John of the Cross, Teresa was a modernizer and a mystic of genius, yet had she remained within Judaism she would not have had the opportunity to develop this gift, since only men were allowed to practice the Kabbalah. Yet, interestingly, her spirituality remained Jewish. In The Interior Castle, she charts the soul’s journey through seven celestial halls until it reaches God, a scheme which bears a marked resemblance to the Throne Mysticism that flourished in the Jewish world from the first to the twelfth centuries CE. Teresa was a devout and loyal Catholic, but she still prayed like a Jew and taught her nuns to do the same.
In Teresa’s case, Judaism and Christianity were able to blend fruitfully, but other, less gifted conversos experienced conflict. A case in point: Tomás de Torquemada (1420–98), the first Grand Inquisitor.
(#litres_trial_promo) The zeal with which he attempted to stamp out residual Judaism in Spain may perhaps have been an unconscious attempt to extirpate the old faith from his own heart. Most of the Marranos had accepted Christianity under duress, and many, it seems, had never fully made the transition to the new faith. This was hardly surprising, since, once they had been baptized, they were watched closely by the Inquisition, and lived in constant fear of arrest on the flimsiest of charges. Lighting candles on Friday evening or refusing to eat shellfish could mean imprisonment, torture, death, or, at the very least, the confiscation of one’s property. As a result, some became alienated from religion altogether. They could not fully identify with the Catholicism that made their lives a misery, and, over the years, Judaism became an unreal, distant memory. After the Great Expulsion of 1492, there were no practicing Jews left in Spain and, even if Marranos wished to practice their faith in secret, they had no means of learning about Jewish law or ritual practice. In consequence, they had no real allegiance to any faith. Long before secularism, atheism, and religious indifference became common in the rest of Europe, we find instances of these essentially modern attitudes among the Marrano Jews of the Iberian Peninsula.
According to the Israeli scholar Yirmiyahu Yovel, it was quite common for conversos to be skeptical about all religion.
(#litres_trial_promo) Even before the Great Expulsion of 1492, some, such as Pedro and Fernando de la Caballeria, members of a great Spanish family, simply immersed themselves in politics, art, and literature, and appeared to have no interest in religion at all. Pedro, indeed, would scoff openly about being a fake Christian, which, he claimed, left him free to do as he wished without bothering about holy rules and regulations.
(#litres_trial_promo) Shortly before 1492, one Alvaro de Montalban was brought before the Inquisition for eating cheese and meat during Lent; he had thereby, significantly, broken not only a Christian fast but also Jewish law, which forbids the consumption of meat and dairy products together. He obviously felt no commitment to either faith. On this occasion, Alvaro escaped with a fine. He was not likely to feel warmly disposed to Catholicism. His parents had been killed by the Inquisition for practicing Judaism secretly; their bodies had been exhumed, their bones burned, and their property confiscated.
(#litres_trial_promo) Unable to retain even a tenuous link with Judaism, Alvaro was forced into a religious limbo. As an old man of seventy, he was finally imprisoned by the Inquisition for a repeated and deliberate denial of the doctrine of the afterlife. “Let me be well off down here,” he had said on more than one occasion, “since I don’t know if there is anything beyond.”
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Alvaro’s conviction meant that his son-in-law, Fernando de Rojas (c. 1465–1541), author of the tragicomic romance La Celestina, also came under suspicion. He therefore cultivated a careful facade of respectable Christianity, but in La Celestina, first published in 1499, we find a bleak secularism beneath the bawdy exuberance. There is no God; love is the supreme value, but when love dies, the world is revealed as a wasteland. At the end of the play, Pleberio laments the suicide of his daughter, who alone gave meaning to his life. “O world, world,” he concludes, “when I was young I thought there was some order governing you and your deeds.” But now
you seem to be a labyrinth of errors, a frightful desert, a den of wild beasts, a game in which men move in circles … a stony field, a meadow full of serpents, a flowering but barren orchard, a spring of cares, a river of tears, a sea of suffering, a vain hope.
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Unable to practice the old faith, alienated by the cruelty of the Inquisition from the new, Rojas had fallen into a despair that could find no meaning, no order, and no ultimate value.
The last thing that Ferdinand and Isabella had intended was to make Jews skeptical unbelievers. But throughout our story we will find that coercion of the sort they employed is counterproductive. The attempt to force people to accept the prevailing ideology against their will or before they are ready for it often results in ideas and practices which, in the eyes of the persecuting authorities themselves, are highly undesirable. Ferdinand and Isabella were aggressive modernizers who sought to suppress all dissidence; but their inquisitorial methods led to the formation of a secret Jewish underground and to the first declarations of secularism and atheism in Europe. Later some Christians would become so disgusted by this type of religious tyranny that they too would lose faith in all revealed religion. But secularism could be just as ferocious and, during the twentieth century, the imposition of a secularist ethos in the name of progress has been an important factor in the rise of a militant fundamentalism, which has sometimes been fatal to the government concerned.
In 1492, about eighty thousand Jews who had refused to convert to Christianity had been given asylum in Portugal by King João II. It is among these Portuguese Jews and their descendants that we find the most outright and dramatic instances of atheism. Some of these Jews desperately wanted to retain their Jewish faith, yet found it either difficult or impossible to do so because they had no adequate cult. The Jews who fled to Portugal in 1492 were tougher than the Spanish conversos: they preferred to be deported rather than abjure their faith. When Manuel I succeeded to the throne in 1495, he was compelled by Ferdinand and Isabella, his parents-in-law, to have the Jews in his domains forcibly baptized, but he compromised by granting them immunity from the Inquisition for a generation. These Portuguese Marranos had almost fifty years to organize an underground in which a dedicated minority continued to practice Judaism in secret and tried to win others back to the old faith.
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But these Judaizing Marranos were cut off from the rest of the Jewish world. They had received a Catholic education, and their imaginations were filled with Christian symbols and doctrines. They often thought and spoke about Judaism in Christian terms: they believed, for example, that they had been “saved” by the Law of Moses rather than by Jesus, a concept that has little meaning in Judaism. They had forgotten a great deal of Jewish law, and as the years slipped by, their understanding of Judaism became still more attenuated. Sometimes their only sources of information about the faith were the polemical writings of anti-Semitic Christians. What they ended up practicing was a hybrid faith that was neither truly Jewish nor truly Christian.
(#litres_trial_promo) Their dilemma was not unlike that of many people in the developing world today, who have only a superficial understanding of Western culture but whose traditional way of life has been so undermined by the impact of modernity that they cannot identify with the old ways either. The Marrano Jews of Portugal experienced a similar alienation. They had been forced to assimilate to a modernized culture that did not resonate with their inner selves.
Toward the end of the sixteenth century, some Jews were permitted to leave the Iberian Peninsula. A Marrano diaspora had already formed in some of the Spanish colonies, as well as in southern France, but here Jews were still not allowed to practice their faith. However, during the seventeenth century, Judaizing Marranos migrated to such cities as Venice, Hamburg, and—later—London, where they could openly return to Judaism. Above all, the Iberian refugees from the Inquisition poured into Amsterdam, which became their new Jerusalem. The Netherlands was the most tolerant country in Europe. It was a republic, with a thriving commercial empire which, during its struggle for independence from Spain, had created a liberal identity as a contrast to Iberian values. Jews became full citizens of the republic in 1657; they were not confined to enclosed ghettoes, as they were in most European cities. The Dutch appreciated the Jews’ commercial expertise, and Jews became prominent businessmen, mingling freely with gentiles. They had a vigorous social life, an excellent educational system, and a flourishing publishing industry.
Many Jews undoubtedly came to Amsterdam for its social and economic opportunities, but a significant number were eager to return to the full practice of Judaism. This was not easy, however. The “New Jews,” who had come from Iberia, had to be reeducated in a faith about which they were largely ignorant. The rabbis had the challenging task of guiding them back, making allowances for their real difficulties without compromising the tradition. It is a tribute to them that most Jews were able to make the transition; despite some initial tension, they found that they enjoyed their return to the ancestral faith.
(#litres_trial_promo) A notable example was Orobio de Castro, a doctor and professor of metaphysics, who had lived in Spain as a secret Judaizer for years. He had been arrested and tortured by the Inquisition, had recanted, and taught medicine in Toulouse as a fake Christian. Finally, weary of deception and a double life, he had arrived in Amsterdam in the 1650s to become a forceful apologist for Judaism and an instructor of other returning Marranos.
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Orobio, however, described a whole class of people who found it very difficult to adjust to the laws and customs of traditional Judaism, which seemed senseless and burdensome to them. They had studied modern sciences in Iberia, such as logic, physics, mathematics, and medicine, as Orobio himself had done. But, Orobio reported impatiently, “they are full of vanity, pride and arrogance, confident that they are thoroughly learned in all subjects.”
They think they will lose credit as erudite men if they consent to learn from those who are indeed educated in the sacred laws, and so they feign great science by contradicting what they do not understand.
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These Jews, living for decades in religious isolation, had been forced to rely on their own rational powers. They had had no liturgy, no communal religious life, and no experience of the ritual observance of the “sacred laws” of the Torah. When they finally arrived in Amsterdam and, for the first time, found themselves in a fully functioning Jewish community, they were not unnaturally bewildered. To an outsider, the 613 commandments of the Pentateuch seemed arbitrary and arcane. Some of the commandments had become obsolete, because they related to the farming of the Holy Land or the Temple liturgy and were not applicable in the Diaspora. Other injunctions, such as the abstruse dietary rules and the laws of purification, must have seemed barbaric and meaningless to the sophisticated Portuguese Marranos, who found it difficult to accept the explanations of the rabbis because they had become accustomed to thinking things out rationally for themselves. The Halakhah, the codified oral law that had been compiled in the first centuries of the Common Era, seemed even more irrational and arbitrary, because it did not even have biblical sanction.
But the Torah, the Law of Moses, has a mythos of its own. Like Lurianic Kabbalah, it had been a response to the dislocation of exile. When the people of Israel had been deported to Babylon in the sixth century BCE, their Temple destroyed and their religious life in ruins, the text of the Law had become a new “shrine” in which the displaced people cultivated a sense of the Divine Presence. The codification of the world into clean and unclean, sacred and profane objects, had been an imaginative reordering of a shattered world. In exile, Jews had found that the study of the Law gave them a profound religious experience. Jews did not peruse the text like moderns, simply for information: it was the process of study—the question and answer, the heated arguments, and immersion in minutiae—that gave them intimations of the divine. The Torah was God’s Word; by becoming deeply absorbed in it, committing to memory the words that God himself had spoken to Moses and speaking them aloud, they were bringing the divine into their own beings and entering a sacred realm. The Law had become a symbol, where they found the Shekhinah. The practice of the commandments brought a divine imperative into the smallest details of their lives, when they were eating, washing, praying, or simply relaxing with their families on the Sabbath.
None of this could be immediately perceived by the rational understanding upon which the Marranos had perforce relied all their lives. This type of mythical and cultic observance was alien and unknown. Some of the New Jews, Orobio complained, had become “unspeakable atheists.”
(#litres_trial_promo) They were, to be sure, not atheists in our twentieth-century sense, because they still believed in a transcendent deity; but this was not the God of the Bible. The Marranos had developed a wholly rational faith, similar to the deism later fashioned by Enlightenment philosophes.
(#litres_trial_promo) This God was the First Cause of all being, whose existence had been logically demonstrated by Aristotle. It always behaved in an entirely rational way. It did not intervene in human history erratically, subvert the laws of nature by working bizarre miracles, or dictate obscure laws on mountaintops. It did not need to reveal a special law code, because the laws of nature were accessible to everybody. This was the sort of God that human reason naturally tends to envisage, and in the past Jewish and Muslim philosophers had in fact produced a very similar deity. But it never went down well with believers generally. It was not religiously useful, since it was doubtful that the First Cause even knew that human beings existed, as it could contemplate nothing short of perfection. Such a God had nothing to say to human pain or sorrow. For that you needed the mythical and cultic spirituality that was unfamiliar to the Marranos.
Most of the Marranos who returned to the faith in Amsterdam were able to one degree or another to learn to appreciate halakhic spirituality. But some found the transition impossible. One of the most tragic cases was that of Uriel da Costa, who had been born into a converso family and educated by the Jesuits, but then found Christianity oppressive, cruel, and composed entirely of man-made rules and doctrines that seemed to bear no relation to the Gospels. Da Costa turned to the Jewish scriptures and developed a highly idealized, rationalistic notion of Judaism for himself. When he arrived in Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century, he was shocked, or so he claimed, to discover that contemporary Judaism was just as much a human construct as Catholicism.
Recently scholars have cast doubt on Da Costa’s testimony, and have argued that he had almost certainly had a previous encounter, however sketchy, with some form of halakhic Judaism, though he probably had not realized how deeply the Halakhah dominated normal Jewish life. But there is no doubting da Costa’s total inability to relate to Judaism in Amsterdam. He wrote a treatise attacking the doctrine of the afterlife and Jewish law, declaring that he believed only in human reason and the laws of nature. The rabbis excommunicated him and for years Da Costa led a miserable, isolated life until he broke down, recanted, and was readmitted to the community. But Da Costa had not actually changed his views. He found it impossible to live according to rituals that made no rational sense to him, and was excommunicated on two further occasions. Finally in 1640, crushed, broken, in despair, he shot himself in the head.
The tragedy of Da Costa showed that there was as yet no secular alternative to the religious life in Europe. You could cross over to another faith, but unless you were a very exceptional human being (which Da Costa was not), you could not live outside a religious community. During his years as an excommunicate, Da Costa had lived utterly alone, shunned by Jews and Christians alike, and jeered at by children in the streets.
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An equally telling, if less poignant, case was that of Juan da Prado, who arrived in Amsterdam in 1655 and must often have meditated upon Da Costa’s fate. He had been a committed member of the Jewish underground in Portugal for twenty years, but it seems that as early as 1645 he had succumbed to a Marrano form of deism. Prado was neither a brilliant nor a systematic thinker, but his experience shows us that it is impossible to adhere to a confessional religion such as Judaism by relying solely on reason. Without a prayer life, a cult, and a mythical underpinning, Prado could only conclude that “God” was simply identical with the laws of nature. Yet he continued his underground activities for another ten years. For him, “Judaism” seems to have meant fellowship, the close bonding he experienced in a tight-knit group which gave meaning to his life, because when he arrived in Amsterdam and fell afoul of the rabbis there, he still wanted to remain within the Jewish community. Like Da Costa, Prado had for years maintained his right to think and worship as he chose. He had his own idea of “Judaism” and was horrified when he encountered the real thing. Prado voiced his objections loudly. Why did Jews think that God had chosen them alone? What was this God? Was it not more logical to think of God as the First Cause, rather than as a personality who had dictated a set of barbarous, nonsensical laws? Prado became an embarrassment. The rabbis were trying to reeducate the New Jews from Iberia (many of whom shared Prado’s opinions) and could not tolerate his deism. On February 14, 1657, he was excommunicated. Yet he refused to leave the community.
It was a clash between two wholly irreconcilable points of view. From their own perspectives, both Prado and the rabbis were correct. Prado could make no sense of traditional Judaism, had lost the mythical cast of mind, and had never had the opportunity to penetrate to the deeper meaning of the faith by means of cult and ritual. He had always had to rely on reason and his own insights, and could not abandon them now. But the rabbis were also right: Prado’s deism bore no relation to any form of Judaism that they knew. What Prado wanted to be was a “secular Jew,” but in the seventeenth century that category did not exist, and neither Prado nor the rabbis would have been able to formulate it clearly. It was the first of a series of clashes between a modern, wholly rational worldview on the one hand, and the religious mind-set, formed by cult and myth, on the other.
As so often in these principled collisions, neither side behaved very well. Prado was an arrogant man, and he roundly abused the rabbis, threatening at one point to attack them in the synagogue with a drawn sword. The rabbis also acted less than honorably: they set a spy on Prado, who reported that his views had become still more radical. After his excommunication, he maintained that all religion was rubbish and that reason, not so-called “revelation,” must always be the sole arbiter of truth. Nobody knows how Prado ended his days. He was forced to leave the community and took refuge in Antwerp. Some said that he even tried to be reconciled with the Catholic church; if so, it was a desperate step which, once again, shows how impossible it was for an ordinarily constituted man to exist outside the confines of religion during the seventeenth century.
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Prado and Da Costa were both precursors of the modern spirit. Their stories show that the mythos of confessional religion is unsustainable without the spiritual exercises of prayer and ritual, which cultivate the more intuitive parts of the mind. Reason alone can produce only an attenuated deism, which is soon abandoned because it brings us no help when we are faced with sorrow or are in trouble. Prado and Da Costa lost their faith because they were deprived of the opportunity to practice it, but another Marrano Jew from Amsterdam showed that the exercise of reason could become so absorbing and exhilarating in itself that the need for myth receded. This world becomes the sole object of contemplation, and human beings, not God, become the measure of all things. The exercise of reason can itself, in a man or woman of exceptional intellect, lead to some kind of mystical illumination. This has also been part of the modern experience.
At the same time as the rabbis first excommunicated Prado, they also opened proceedings against Baruch Spinoza, who was only twenty-three years old. Unlike Prado, Spinoza had been born in Amsterdam. His parents had lived as Judaizing Marranos in Portugal, and had managed to make the transition to Orthodox Judaism when they arrived in Amsterdam. Spinoza, therefore, had never been hunted or persecuted. He had always lived in liberal Amsterdam, and had access to the intellectual life of the gentile world and the opportunity to practice his faith unmolested. He had received a traditional education at the splendid Keter Torah school, but had also studied modern mathematics, astronomy, and physics. Destined for a life in commerce, Spinoza had seemed devout, but in 1655, shortly after Prado’s arrival in Amsterdam, he suddenly stopped attending services in the synagogue and began to voice doubts. He noted that there were contradictions in the biblical text that proved it to be of human not divine origin. He denied the possibility of revelation, and argued that “God” was simply the totality of nature itself. The rabbis eventually, on July 27, 1656, pronounced the sentence of excommunication upon Spinoza, and, unlike Prado, Spinoza did not ask to remain in the community. He was glad to go, and became the first person in Europe to live successfully beyond the reach of established religion.
It was easier for Spinoza to survive in the gentile world than it had been for Prado or Da Costa. He was a genius, able to articulate his position clearly, and, as a genuinely independent man, could sustain the inevitable loneliness it entailed. He was at home in the Netherlands, and had powerful patrons who gave him a reasonable allowance, so that he did not have to live in abject poverty. Spinoza was not, as is often supposed, forced to grind lenses to earn a living; he did it to further his interest in optics. He was able to form friendships with some of the leading gentile scientists, philosophers, and politicians of the day. Yet he remained an isolated figure. Jews and gentiles alike found his irreligion either shocking or disconcerting.
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Yet there was spirituality in Spinoza’s atheism, since he experienced the world as divine. It was a vision of God immanent within mundane reality which filled Spinoza with awe and wonder. He experienced philosophical study and thought as a form of prayer; as he explained in his Short Treatise on God (1661), the deity was not an object to be known but the principle of our thought. It followed that the joy we experience when we attain knowledge was the intellectual love of God. A true philosopher, Spinoza believed, would cultivate what he called intuitive knowledge, a flash of insight that fused all the information he had acquired discursively and which was an experience of what Spinoza believed to be God. He called this experience “beatitude”: in this state, the philosopher realized that he was inseparable from God, and that God exists through human beings. This was a mystical philosophy, which could be seen as a rational version of the kind of spirituality cultivated by John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, but Spinoza had no patience with this type of religious insight. He believed that yearning for a transcendent God would alienate human beings from their own nature. Later philosophers would find Spinoza’s quest for the ecstasy of beatitude embarrassing, and would dispense with his God altogether. Nevertheless, in his concentration on this world and in his denial of the supernatural, Spinoza became one of the first secularists in Europe.
Like many modern people, Spinoza regarded all formal religion with distaste. Given his experience of excommunication, this was hardly surprising. He dismissed the revealed faiths as a “compound of credulity and prejudices,” and “a tissue of meaningless mysteries.”
(#litres_trial_promo) He had found ecstasy in the untrammeled use of reason, not by immersing himself in the biblical text, and as a result, he viewed Scripture in an entirely objective way. Instead of experiencing it as a revelation of the divine, Spinoza insisted that the Bible be read like any other text. He was one of the first to study the Bible scientifically, examining the historical background, the literary genres, and the question of authorship.
(#litres_trial_promo) He also used the Bible to explore his political ideas. Spinoza was one of the first people in Europe to promote the ideal of a secular, democratic state which would become one of the hallmarks of Western modernity. He argued that once the priests had acquired more power than the kings of Israel, the laws of the state became punitive and restrictive. Originally, the kingdom of Israel had been theocratic but because, in Spinoza’s view, God and the people were one and the same, the voice of the people had been supreme. Once the priests seized control, the voice of God could no longer be heard.
(#litres_trial_promo) But Spinoza was no populist. Like most premodern philosophers, he was an elitist who believed the masses to be incapable of rational thought. They would need some form of religion to give them a modicum of enlightenment, but this religion must be reformed, based not on so-called revealed law but on the natural principles of justice, fraternity, and liberty.
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Spinoza was undoubtedly one of the harbingers of the modern spirit, and he would later become somewhat of a hero to secularist Jews, who admired his principled exodus from the shelter of religion. But Spinoza had no Jewish followers in his lifetime, even though it appeared that many Jews were ready for fundamental change. At about the same time as Spinoza was developing his secular rationalism, the Jewish world was engulfed by a messianic ferment that seemed to cast reason to the winds. It was one of the first of the millennial movements of the modern period, which provided men and women with a religious way of breaking with the sacred past and reaching out for something entirely new. We shall often find this in our story. Few people are able to understand the intellectual elite who propounded the secularist philosophies of modernity; most have made the transition to the new world by means of religion, which provides some consoling continuity with the past and grounds the modern logos in a mythical framework.
It appears that by the mid-seventeenth century, many Jews had reached a breaking point. None of the other Jews of Europe enjoyed the freedom of the Marrano community in Amsterdam; Spinoza’s radical new departure had been possible only because he was able to mix with gentiles and study the new sciences. Elsewhere in Christendom, Jews were excluded from mainstream society. By the sixteenth century, no Jew was permitted to live outside the special Jewish district known as the “ghetto,” and this meant that inevitably Jews led an introverted life. Segregation increased anti-Semitic prejudice, and Jews naturally responded to the persecuting gentile world with bitterness and suspicion. The ghetto became a self-contained world. Jews had their own schools, their own social and charitable institutions, their own baths, cemeteries, and slaughterhouses. The ghetto was self-governing and autonomous. The kehilla (communal government) of elected rabbis and elders conducted its own courts, according to Jewish law. In effect, the ghetto was a state-within-a-state, a world unto itself, and Jews had little—and, often, little desire for—contact with the gentile society outside. But by the mid-seventeenth century, it seems that many were chafing against these limitations. Ghettoes were usually situated in unhealthy, squalid districts. They were enclosed by a high wall, which meant that there was overcrowding and no possibility of expansion. There was no room for gardens, even in the larger ghettoes of Rome or Venice. The only way that Jews could provide more accommodation for themselves was to add new floors to existing buildings, often on inadequate foundations, so that everything collapsed. There was constant danger of fire and disease. Jews were forced to wear distinctive dress, they suffered economic restrictions, and were often reduced to peddling and tailoring as the only professions open to them. No large-scale commercial ventures were permitted, and thus a large proportion of the population relied on charity. Deprived of sunlight and contact with nature, Jews deteriorated physically. They were also mentally confined and were out of touch with the arts and sciences of Europe. Their own schools were good, but after the fifteenth century, when the educational curriculum in Christendom was becoming more liberal, Jews continued to study only Torah and Talmud. Immersed as they were solely in their own texts and cultural traditions, there was a tendency for Jewish learning to degenerate into hair-splitting and a concentration on minutiae.
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The Jews of the Islamic world were not restricted in this way. Like Christians, they were accorded the status of dhimmi (“protected minority”), which gave them civil and military protection, as long as they respected the laws and supremacy of the Islamic state. The Jews of Islam were not persecuted, there was no tradition of anti-Semitism, and even though the dhimmis were second-class citizens, they were given full religious liberty, were able to run their own affairs according to their own laws, and were more able than the Jews of Europe to participate in mainstream culture and commerce.
(#litres_trial_promo) But events would show that even the Jews of the Islamic world were growing restless, and dreaming of greater emancipation. Since 1492 they had heard news of one disaster in Europe after another, and in 1648 they were horrified by reports of atrocities in Poland that would remain unequaled in Jewish history until the twentieth century.
Poland had recently annexed much of what is now Ukraine, where peasants formed cavalry squads to organize their own defense. These “cossacks” hated both Poles and Jews, who often administered the lands of the Polish nobility as middlemen. In 1648 the cossack leader Boris Chmielnicki led an uprising against the Poles which attacked Polish and Jewish communities alike. When the war finally came to an end in 1667, the chronicles tell us, 100,000 Jews had been killed and 300 Jewish communities destroyed. Even though these numbers were probably exaggerated, the letters and stories of the refugees filled Jews in other parts of the world with terror. They spoke of massacres in which Jews were cut to pieces, of mass graves in which Jewish women and children had been buried alive, of Jews being given rifles and commanded to shoot one another. Many believed that these events must be the long-awaited “birth pangs of the Messiah,” and turned in desperation to the rites and penitential disciplines of Lurianic Kabbalah in an attempt to hasten messianic redemption.
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When news of the Chmielnicki massacres reached Smyrna in what is now Turkey, a young Jew who was walking and meditating outside the city heard a heavenly voice telling him that he was “the Savior of Israel, the Messiah, the Son of David, the anointed of the God of Jacob.”
(#litres_trial_promo) Shabbetai Zevi was a scholarly young man and a Kabbalist (though not, at this point, versed in Lurianic Kabbalah), who would share his insights with a small band of followers. He had an appealing personality, but when he was about twenty he began to exhibit symptoms that we would today call manic-depressive. He used to hide away for days, sunk in misery in a dark little room, but these depressed phases would be succeeded by frenzied periods of “illumination,” when he was restless, unable to sleep, and felt that he was in touch with higher powers. Sometimes he would feel impelled to violate the commandments of the Torah, publicly uttering the forbidden Name of God, for example, or eating nonkosher food. He could not explain why he committed these “strange acts,” but felt that God had for some reason inspired him to do so.
(#litres_trial_promo) Later he became convinced that these antinomian acts were redemptive: God “would soon give him a new law and new commandments to repair all the worlds.”
(#litres_trial_promo) These transgressions were “holy sins”; they were what Lurianic Kabbalists would call acts of tikkun. It is likely that they represented an unconscious rebellion against the customary observances of Jewish life and expressed a confused desire for something entirely new.
Eventually Shabbetai’s behavior became too much for the Jews of Smyrna, and he had to leave the city in 1650. He then began a fifteen-year period, which he later called his “dark years,” during which he wandered through the provinces of the Ottoman empire, going from one city to another. He told nobody about his messianic vocation and may have abandoned the very idea of a special mission. By 1665 he was longing to free himself of his demons and become a rabbi.
(#litres_trial_promo) He had heard about a gifted young Kabbalist in Gaza who had set himself up as a healer, and set off to visit him. This Rabbi Nathan had already heard about Shabbetai, probably when both men, then unknown to each other, had lived in Jerusalem at the same time. Something about Shabbetai’s “strange acts” must have lodged in Nathan’s imagination, because, shortly before the arrival of his visitor, he had received a revelation about him. He had recently been initiated into Lurianic Kabbalah, and had made a retreat just before Purim, locking himself away, fasting, weeping, and reciting the Psalms. During this vigil, he had seen a vision of Shabbetai and heard his own voice crying aloud in prophecy: “Thus saith the Lord! Behold your Savior cometh. Shabbetai Zevi is his name. He shall cry, yea, roar, he shall prevail against my enemies.”
(#litres_trial_promo) When Shabbetai actually turned up on his own doorstep, Nathan could only see this as a miraculous confirmation of his prophetic vision.
How could Nathan, a brilliant thinker, have imagined that this sad, troubled man was his Redeemer? According to Lurianic Kabbalah, the soul of the Messiah had been trapped in the Godless realm created in the original act of Zimzum; from the very beginning, therefore, the Messiah had been forced to struggle with the evil powers of the “other side,” but now, Nathan believed, thanks to the penitential disciplines of the Kabbalists, these demonic forces were beginning to lose their hold on the Messiah. From time to time, his soul soared free and he revealed the New Law of the messianic age. But victory was still incomplete, and from time to time the Messiah fell prey once more to the darkness.
(#litres_trial_promo) All this seemed to fit perfectly with Shabbetai’s personality and experience. When he arrived, Nathan told him that the End was nigh. Soon his victory over the forces of evil would be complete and he would bring redemption to the Jewish people. The old law would be abrogated, and actions that had once been forbidden and sinful would become holy.
At first, Shabbetai wanted nothing to do with Nathan’s fantasy, but gradually he was won over by the power of the young rabbi’s eloquence, which, at least, gave him some explanation for his peculiarities. On May 28, 1665, Shabbetai declared himself to be the Messiah, and Nathan immediately dispatched letters to Egypt, Aleppo, and Smyrna announcing that the Redeemer would soon defeat the Ottoman sultan, end the exile of the Jews, and lead them back to the Holy Land. All the gentile nations would submit to his rule.
(#litres_trial_promo) The news spread like wildfire, and by 1666, the messianic ferment had taken root in almost every Jewish community in Europe, the Ottoman empire, and Iran. There were frenzied scenes. Jews started to sell their possessions in preparation for the voyage to Palestine, and business came to a standstill. Periodically, they would hear that the Messiah had abolished one of the traditional fast days, and there would be dancing and processions in the street. Nathan had given orders that Jews were to hasten the End by performing the penitential rituals of Safed, and in Europe, Egypt, Iran, the Balkans, Italy, Amsterdam, Poland, and France Jews fasted, kept vigil, immersed themselves in icy water, rolled in nettles, and gave alms to the poor. It was one of the first of many Great Awakenings of early modernity, when people instinctively sensed the coming of major change. Few people knew much about Shabbetai himself and fewer still were conversant with Nathan’s abstruse kabbalistic vision; it was enough that the Messiah had come and that at long last hope was at hand.
(#litres_trial_promo) During these ecstatic months, Jews experienced such hope and vitality that the harsh, constricted world of the ghetto seemed to melt away. They had a taste of something entirely different, and life for many of them would never be the same again. They glimpsed new possibilities, which seemed almost within their grasp. Because they felt free, many Jews were convinced that the old life was over for good.
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Those Jews who came under the direct influence of either Shabbetai or Nathan showed that they were ready to jettison the Torah, even though that would mean the end of religious life as they knew it. When Shabbetai visited a synagogue wearing the royal robes of the Messiah, and abolished a fast, uttered the forbidden name of God, ate nonkosher food, or called women to read the Scriptures in the synagogue, people were enraptured. Not everybody succumbed, of course—in each community, there were rabbis and laymen who were appalled by these developments. But people of all classes, rich and poor, accepted Shabbetai and seemed to welcome his antinomianism. The Law had not saved the Jews and seemed unable to do so; Jews were still persecuted, still in exile; people were ready for new freedom.
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This was all very dangerous, however. Lurianic Kabbalah was a myth; it was not intended to be translated into practical political programs in this way, but to illuminate the internal life of the spirit. Mythos and logos were complementary but entirely separate spheres and had different functions. Politics was in the domain of reason and logic; myth gave it meaning but was not intended to be interpreted as literally as Nathan had interpreted the mystical vision of Isaac Luria. Jews may have felt powerful, free, and in control of their destiny, but their circumstances had not changed. They were still weak, vulnerable, and dependent upon the goodwill of their rulers. The Lurianic image of the Messiah wrestling with the powers of darkness was a powerful symbol of the universal struggle against evil, but when the attempt was made to give the image concrete embodiment in a real, emotionally unstable human being, the result could only be disastrous.
And so indeed it proved to be. In February 1666, Shabbetai set out, with Nathan’s blessing, to confront the sultan, who had understandably been much alarmed by this wild Jewish enthusiasm and, with reason, feared an uprising. When Shabbetai landed near Gallipoli, he was arrested, taken to Istanbul, brought before the sultan, and given the choice of death or conversion to Islam. To the horror of Jews all over the world, Shabbetai chose Islam. The Messiah had become an apostate.
That should have been the end of the matter. The vast majority recoiled in disgust from Shabbetai and, in shame, returned to their normal life and to the full observance of the Torah, anxious to put the whole sorry business behind them. But a significant minority could not give up this dream of freedom. They could not believe that their experience of liberation during those heady months had been an illusion; they were able to come to terms with an apostate Messiah, just as the first Christians had been able to accommodate the equally scandalous idea of a Messiah who had died the death of a common criminal.
Nathan, after a period of intense depression, adapted his theology. The redemption had begun, he explained to his disciples, but there had been a setback, and Shabbetai had been forced to descend still further into the realm of impurity and take the form of evil himself. This was the ultimate “holy sin,” the final act of tikkun.
(#litres_trial_promo) Shabbateans, those who remained true to Shabbetai, responded to this development in different ways. Nathan’s theology was very popular in Amsterdam: now the Messiah had become a Marrano, clinging in secret to the core of Judaism, while conforming outwardly to Islam.
(#litres_trial_promo) Those Marranos who had long had trouble with the Torah looked forward to its imminent demise, once redemption was complete. Other Jews believed that they must continue to observe the Torah until the Messiah brought about full redemption, but that he would then institute a new Law which would contradict the old in every respect. A small minority of radical Shabbateans went further. They could not bring themselves to go back to the old Law, even on a temporary basis; they believed that Jews must follow their Messiah into the realm of evil and become apostates too. They converted to the mainstream faith—Christianity in Europe, and Islam in the Middle East—and remained Jewish in the privacy of their own homes.
(#litres_trial_promo) These radicals also presaged a modern Jewish solution: many Jews would assimilate with gentile culture in most respects, but would privatize their faith, keeping it in a separate sphere.
Shabbateans imagined Shabbetai living his double life in anguish, but in reality he seemed quite content with his Muslim persona. He spent his days studying the Shariah, the sacred law of Islam, and teaching the sultan’s spiritual adviser about Judaism. He was permitted visitors, and held court, receiving delegations of Jews from all over the world. They spoke of his great piety. Shabbetai was often to be seen in his home, sitting cradling the Torah scroll in his arms and singing hymns; people marveled at his devotion and his wonderful ability to enter sympathetically into other people’s feelings.
(#litres_trial_promo) The ideas in Shabbetai’s circle were quite different from those of Nathan’s, and far more positive toward gentiles. Shabbetai seems to have seen all faiths as valid; he saw himself as a bridge between Judaism and Islam, and was also fascinated by Christianity and Jesus. Guests reported that sometimes he behaved like a Muslim, sometimes like a rabbi. The Ottomans permitted him to observe the Jewish festivals, and Shabbetai was frequently to be seen with a Koran in one hand and a Torah scroll in the other.
(#litres_trial_promo) In the synagogues, Shabbetai tried to persuade Jews to convert to Islam; only then, he told them, would they return to the Holy Land. In one letter, written in 1669, Shabbetai vehemently denied that he had converted to Islam only under duress; the religion of Islam, he declared, was “the very truth,” and he had been sent as the Messiah to the gentiles as well as to the Jews.
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Shabbetai’s death on September 17, 1676, was a severe blow to Shabbateans, since it seemed to preclude all hope of redemption. Nevertheless, the sect continued its underground existence, showing that the messianic outburst had not been a freak occurrence, but had touched something fundamental in the Jewish experience. For some, this religious movement seems to have been a bridge that would enable them, later, to make the difficult transition to rational modernity. The alacrity with which so many had been ready to jettison the Torah, and the persistence of Shabbateans in dreaming of a new Law, demonstrated that they were ready to envisage change and reform.
(#litres_trial_promo) Gershom Scholem, who has written the definitive study of Shabbetai and Shabbateanism, has argued that many of these closet Shabbateans would become pioneers of the Jewish Enlightenment or of the Reform movement. He points to Joseph Wehte in Prague, who spread the ideas of the Enlightenment in Eastern Europe during the early nineteenth century and had once been a Shabbatean; Aron Chovin, who introduced the Reform movement in Hungary, was also a Shabbatean in his youth.
(#litres_trial_promo) Scholem’s theory has been disputed, and cannot be proved definitively one way or the other, but it is generally acknowledged that Shabbateanism did much to undermine traditional rabbinic authority and that it enabled Jews to envisage a change that would once have seemed taboo and impossible.
After Shabbetai’s death, two radical Shabbatean movements led to the mass conversion of Jews into the dominant faith. In 1683, about 200 families in Ottoman Turkey converted to Islam. This sect of donmeh (“converts”) had their own secret synagogues, but also prayed in the mosques. At its peak, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the sect numbered some 115,000 souls.
(#litres_trial_promo) It started to disintegrate in the early nineteenth century, when members began to receive a modern, secular education and no longer felt the need for any religion. Some donmeh youth became active in the secularist Young Turk rebellion of 1908. The second of these movements was more sinister and showed the nihilism that can result from a literal translation of myth into practical action. Jacob Frank (1726–91) was initiated into Shabbateanism while visiting the Balkans. When he returned to his native Poland, he formed an underground sect whose members observed Jewish law in public but in secret indulged in forbidden sexual practices. When he was excommunicated in 1756, Frank converted first to Islam (during a visit to Turkey) and then to Catholicism, taking his flock with him.
Frank did not simply cast off the restrictions of the Torah, but positively embraced immorality. In his view, the Torah was not merely outmoded but dangerous and useless. The commandments were the laws of death and must be discarded. Sin and shamelessness were the only ways to achieve redemption and to find God. Frank had come not to build but “only to destroy and annihilate.”
(#litres_trial_promo) His followers were engaged in a war against all religious rules: “I say to you that all who would be warriors must be without religion, which means that they must reach freedom under their own power.”
(#litres_trial_promo) Like many radical secularists today, Frank regarded all religion as harmful. As the movement progressed, Frankists turned to politics, dreaming of a great revolution that would sweep away the past and save the world. They saw the French Revolution as a sign that their vision was true and that God had intervened on their behalf.
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