Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (70 page)

In other words, the family tree of Karl Marx, a web of distinctly Jewish names; of places stretching to the shtetls of eastern Europe, yet returning again to the Rhineland, and always Trier; of dates reaching back many centuries, but seeming to build toward the single date of May 5, 1818. The chart's stark specificity, like winter branches shorn of foliage, exposes the unspeakable implication that this one family survived. It illuminates the wonder that in generation after generation, despite pogroms and expulsions, Blood Libels and Inquisitions, book burnings and autos-da-fe, Jewish men and women—
these
Jewish men and women—found each other, loved each other, gave life to children, lit candles, studied Torah, all the while with a throng of rabbis proclaiming the Shema.
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Seen in the skeletal truth of a family tree, the arc of this story reveals itself, transcending the instances, which are all we usually see, to the sum of their meaning. Some Jewish historians, as we saw, decry the "lachrymose tradition," as if what we have been recounting is a story only of misery. And there is an unbroken chronicle of suffering over time in the very names of this family, and in the places—Alsace, Ansbach, Cologne, Mainz, Krakow—where its women bore their children. The family tree is itself the Book of Lamentations. Open it to any verse, and it will weep. Yet open it and read what else is written there: suffering balanced by a history of affirmation of which outsiders are barely aware. One family's longevity in a world that did not want it manifests a triumph of political resistance and religious faithfulness, which for Jews were the same thing. And more. This chart, so crowded with names, reveals the Jewish secret: how kinship ultimately transcends itself; how one family becomes a people.

Since the time of Constantine—the time, that is, that the young, fiercely ambitious tetrarch left Trier to impose his unrelenting vision of unity first on his fellow tetrarchs, then on the empire, then on the Church—people who identified themselves as Jews, even when that identification was less than clear, were forced to stand apart. Unlike Christians, and unlike the Muslims who came later, they were not allowed to proselytize, and those who would join them as converts did so at their peril. Jews could abandon their religion, but they could not expand it, except through procreation. This meant that, over time, the religion did, in fact, become a people, as kinship became a kind of nationhood. While the various races of Europe, through the migration, conquest, and intermarriage, were blurring the lines of what had initially set them apart, and while Catholic Christianity was gathering itself around an absolutist universalism, Judaism was being reduced down to a narrowly defined kinship religion. This was happening as a result not of anything intrinsic to Torah, Talmud, or the "Israelite" character, but of the world of sacred intolerance in which Jews were forced to live.
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Time, in other words, was putting its stamp on a people, giving them the cohesion that underwrites the wonder of their survival, while moving them, by virtue of that cohesion, ever more surely into the center of a target that had first been hung, yes, by Trier's own Constantine, only half a dozen city blocks away from here.

On May 5, 1818, however, the age of Jewish cohesion, kinship, and nationhood was presumed by many Europeans—including many Jews, including perhaps Heinrich Marx, that day's proud father—to have passed. Karl Marx would use his remarkable life to expand the idea, saying time was up for religion as such. Yet the conflict he ignited, raging for a century, would prove it was not so. One of his many biographers, Werner Blumenberg, emphasizes the significance of Marx's ancestral Jewishness, recalling Marx's own statement: "The traditions of all dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the minds of the living."
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But I wonder, looking at the map of his human past, how could Marx have known what a nightmare of experience weighed on him? And once he so crudely turned his back on that experience, how could his soul not have been deeply troubled?

40. Spinoza: From Rabbis to Revolution

A
FULL APPRECIATION
of Karl Marx presumes an understanding of his precise relationship to the rabbinic tradition that weighed on his living mind, whether he knew it or not. Yet that tradition came to him not directly, through religious channels to which he was only tenuously related, but indirectly, through the philosophical and political innovations that had reshaped society at the birth of modernity. The bridge figure standing between the rabbis and the philosophers was Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677), a philosopher who lived his entire life in Holland, less than two hundred miles from Trier. Like Marx two centuries later, Spinoza was born a Jew, but by the time he died he was branded an atheist, a materialist, an anarchist, and a revolutionary. In fact, his writings, derived from the mystical tradition of Judaism, gave shape to the authentic religious impulse of the post-Copernican age, and his call for political tolerance, born of his experience as a twice-exiled Jew, anticipated the idea of liberal democracy. And because his association with theological and political innovation was perceived by Christians through the lens of anti-Jewishness, Spinoza became a modern version of the ancient enemy, especially when the Church set itself against the Enlightenment, of which he was one progenitor.
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As is true of so much in this long narrative, Spinoza's story begins with the cross, and as his name indicates, it begins in Iberia. In 1596, in Portugal, Spinoza's grandmother had been denounced as a secret Jew by her own father and aunt. Her son, Spinoza's father, witnessed the autos-da-fe as a child, and "he would have told [Spinoza] with revulsion of the
sanbenitos,
yellow robes slashed with black crosses, which surviving 'penitents' had to wear thereafter at mass, and in the street on religious feast days."
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We saw earlier that the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V had implemented at least some policies that were favorable to Jews, and in that tradition, but also because it meshed with his efforts to fend off Protestantism and to nurture support among the merchant class, he allowed new Christian refugees from Iberia to settle in Amsterdam, which was the beginning of the Jewish community there. Spinoza's father, while still a child, came as a refugee to Amsterdam. There, he married a woman of Portuguese and Spanish ancestry, some of whose own relatives had been pursued, and burned, by the Inquisition.
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The fires of such conflict were not limited, of course, to Iberia. The Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), a ferocious contest between Catholics and Protestants that raged from Bohemia to Scandinavia, was well under way when Spinoza was born, and would not end until the Peace of Westphalia, when he was sixteen. That treaty, which established the territorial sovereignty of states and the religious boundaries of Europe, is sometimes regarded as signaling the end of the Counter-Reformation.
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During that period, sometimes regarded as having begun with the papal approval of the Jesuits in 1540, with the establishment of the Roman Inquisition in 1542, or with the opening of the Council of Trent in 1545,
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Roman Catholicism pursued two purposes at once—a rigorous internal reform of the religion, represented above all by the intellectual and moral vigor of the Jesuits, and a fierce combat with those whom the Church regarded as enemies. The combat was waged figuratively, through a steady stream of anti-Protestant anathemas issued from Rome, and literally, through the Inquisition and the continent-wide conflicts we lump together under the rubric of religious wars. The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of Huguenots in Paris in 1572 would be a particular marker of the age.

And throughout the time both before and after Spinoza's birth, the Catholic Hapsburgs, from their solid base in Iberia, tried to reclaim imperial dominance over the French and Germanic realms, and even over Sweden and England. Their success in what we think of as Austria-Hungary would not be matched in northern Europe, and the disaster of the so-called invincible Armada (1588), when the Spanish fleet of more than 130 vessels was destroyed off the coast of England, would stand out as one of history's great turning points.

In the same period, the Hapsburgs lost control of the northernmost provinces of the Netherlands to the Protestant William of Orange. Once that happened, many
conversos
who had moved north from Iberia reverted to the practice of Judaism. The Dutch Calvinists established their own religion as the orthodoxy of their republic in 1619. They were not known for being tolerant, but they were so fiercely opposed to papists that they rather liked it when Jews renounced their ties to Catholicism. Jews were "welcomed at first as fellow victims of Spanish cruelty."
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While the United Provinces of the Netherlands were still holding off the Spanish enemy to the south, the merciless rigidities of Calvinism were directed toward Catholics, not Jews. On one occasion, the Protestant police of Amsterdam raided a discreet gathering of worshipers whose use of a foreign language, presumably Latin, had been overheard. The Calvinist officials thought they were nabbing surreptitious Catholic Mass-goers, but what they found were Jews observing the Sabbath—in Hebrew, not Latin. Two Jews were arrested, but in short order they were released.
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Soon enough, synagogues were permitted in Amsterdam, and Spinoza's father emerged as a leader in the city's Jewish community, which numbered about a thousand when Spinoza was born. His father named him Baruch, which in Hebrew means "blessed," and is Latinized as Benedict. Young Spinoza's mother tongue was Spanish, but he learned Hebrew, too, and he received instruction in the Iberian tradition, studying Jewish and Muslim masters, including Maimonides and Averroès, who shaped his introduction to philosophy, and to Aristotle, far more than the Christian scholastics did—a background that would distinguish him, for example, from René Descartes (1596–1650).

Spinoza was schooled in Talmud, with its attachment to the idea that interpretation is essential to meaning, and in Lurianic Kabbalah, with its devotion to the emanations of God in creation. Spinoza's grounding in "the Jewish philosophical, literary, and theological tradition," as one of his biographers put it, was "something that no other major philosopher of the period possessed."
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Eventually he learned Latin, and paired himself intellectually with a Dutch humanist and disciple of Descartes, Franciscus van den Enden. Like Descartes, Spinoza pursued a broad line of inquiry, ranging across what would later be termed the separate disciplines of physics, mathematics, philosophy, political science, and theology. It is beyond our scope to delve into the complex questions that formed the intellectual challenges of the time. Suffice to note that the great problem that presented itself to these thinkers concerned the relationship of spirit to matter, of mind to body, of God to creation. One solution to this problem, speaking generally, was to conclude that the relation between such entities was extrinsic. Descartes's apothegm, "I think, therefore I am," gives primacy to mind, with a consequent devaluation of body, a dualism that would stamp the modern age, and that can be recognized as dividing the emotional from the rational, the individual from the community, the scientific from the artistic, the pragmatic from the moral. A key political innovation of the time, the separation of church and state, reflects this dualistic spirit. A God conceived in such terms is the God of deists, the Creator as clockmaker, who wound up the cosmos and set it going, to work its way without God's participation or presence. The genius of Thomas Jefferson depended utterly on the prior genius of René Descartes.

But Cartesian dualism comes at a cost, reducing the human being, the soul, in a famous image, to a prisoner in the machine of the body. Much of the negative legacy of the Enlightenment can be tracked to this idea, from the "rugged individualism" of the capitalist democracies, to the spirit-devaluing materialism of Marxism, to the contemporary American confusion about the relationship between public and private spheres in politics, as if character can be divorced from virtue.

For our purposes, it is instructive to note that Spinoza, reflecting the tradition that set him apart, resolved the question of the relationship of matter to spirit differently than Descartes and others did. "Nothing exists save the one substance—the self-contained, self-sustaining, and self-explanatory system which constitutes the world." This is Roger Scruton's summary of Spinoza's metaphysics. "This system may be understood in many ways: as God or Nature; as mind or matter; as creator or created; as eternal or temporal. It can be known adequately and clearly through its attributes, partially and confusedly through its modes ... All things that exist, exist necessarily, in thoroughgoing interdependence."
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This is a philosophy of "both-and," not "either-or," and it has tremendous implications for religion and for politics. If God lives in all that is, then a human being may have no great need of the mediating institutions of church or synagogue to be in contact with the divine. Similarly, a political society's main goal should be respect for every member as equal to every other, since all are instances of God's presence. The sovereign is to be valued no more than any citizen.

These principles did not lead Spinoza to advocate doing away with institutions of religion or the state, as some of his critics maintained, but only to seeing them
sub specie aeternitatis,
"from the point of view of eternity," to cite a well-known phrase of his, instead of from the point of view of time.
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Human institutions, as we might put it, are not absolute, and our ultimate happiness is grounded in recognizing this. Not even the Scriptures are absolute: Spinoza was one of the first to read the Bible with a sense of how its composition reflected the contingencies of time and place; he read in the light of what we call historical criticism. He argued that the real test of religion was whether it prompted the love of the neighbor—hardly an original conviction, but one impossible to consider apart from the opposite experience he and so many of his contemporaries of various denominations were having in that era. Particular dogmas of whatever stripe, he said, "must all be directed to this one end: that there is a Supreme Being who loves justice and charity, whom all must obey in order to be saved, and must worship by practicing justice and charity to their neighbor."
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