The Spinoza Problem (15 page)

“We had similar but not identical environments. For one thing, Eugen did not have my bad luck of encountering a Jew-loving headmaster in the Realschule.”

“What? Headmaster Peterson? Impossible. I knew him well when I attended that school.”

“No, not Peterson. He was on sabbatical my senior year, and his place was taken by Herr Epstein.”

“Wait a minute, Alfred—I’m just beginning to recall Eugen telling me a story about you and Herr Epstein and some serious trouble you got into just before your graduation. What happened exactly?”

Alfred told Friedrich the entire story—about his anti-Semitic speech, about Epstein’s fury, about his immersion in Chamberlain, about the forced assignment of reading Goethe’s comments about Spinoza, and about his promise to read Spinoza.

“Quite a story, Alfred. I’d like to see those chapters in Goethe’s autobiography. Promise that you’ll point them out to me some day. And tell me this: Did you keep your promise to read Spinoza?”

“I tried again and again but could not get into it. It was such abstruse fluff. And the incomprehensible definitions and axioms in the beginning were an insurmountable roadblock.”

“Ah, you started with the
Ethics
. A big mistake. It’s a difficult work to read without a guide. You should have begun with his simpler
The Theological and Political Treatise
. Spinoza is a paragon of logic. I put him up there in my pantheon of Socrates, Aristotle, and Kant. Someday we must meet again in the Fatherland, and if you wish, I shall help you read the
Ethics
.”

“As you can imagine, I have highly charged feelings about reading the work of this Jew. Yet the great Goethe revered him, and I did give my oath to the headmaster to read him. So you could help me understand Spinoza? Your offer is kind. Even enticing. I shall try to make our paths cross in Germany, and I look forward to learning about Spinoza from you.”

“Alfred, I must return to my mother, and as you know, I leave tomorrow for Switzerland. But I wish to say one last thing before we part. I feel in a bit of a dilemma. On the one hand I care about you and wish only for your welfare, but on the other hand I am burdened with some information that may pain you but will, I think, ultimately lead you to some truths about yourself.”

“How can I, as a philosopher, refuse to pursue the truth?”

“I expected no less a noble answer from you, Alfred. What I must tell you is that your brother over the years and even last month has spent
hours with me discussing the fact that his mother’s grandmother—your great-grandmother—was Jewish. He said he once visited her in Russia and that, even though she had converted to Christianity in childhood, she acknowledged her Jewish forebears.”

Alfred silently glared into the distance.

“Alfred?”

“I deny this. This is a scurrilous rumor that has long hovered about, and I resent your propagating it. I deny it. My father denies it. My aunts, my mother’s sisters, deny it. My brother is a confused fool!” Alfred’s face was suffused with anger. Refusing to meet Friedrich’s gaze, he added, “I cannot imagine why Eugen embraces this lie, why he tells others, and why you tell me.”

“Please, Alfred.” Friedrich lowered his voice to nearly a whisper. “First, let me assure you I do not propagate it. You are the only person I have mentioned this to, and it shall remain that way. You have my oath, my German oath. As for why I told you—let’s reason it out. I did say to you I had a dilemma: telling you seemed painful, and yet
not
telling you seemed worse. How can I pretend to be your friend and not tell you? Your brother told me this, and it seemed relevant to our discussion. Good friends, not to mention fellow philosophers, can and should speak of everything. Your resentment to me is great?”

“I am stunned that you say this to me.”

Friedrich thought of his supervision with Bleuler, who had admonished him many times: “You do not have to say everything you think, Doctor Pfister. Therapy is not a place for you to feel better by discharging troublesome thoughts. Learn to hold them. Learn to be a vehicle for unruly thoughts. Timing is everything.” He turned to Alfred. “Then, perhaps I erred and should have kept it to myself. I must learn that there are some things that must be left unsaid. Forgive me, Alfred. I told you out of friendship, out of my belief that your unbridled passion may ultimately be self-destructive. Look how close you came to being thrown out of the Realschule. Your future education, your degree, your bright future ahead of you would have all been sacrificed. I wanted to help make sure such events did not happen in the future.”

Alfred looked far from persuaded. “Let me ponder upon it. And now I know you must be on your way.”

Taking a folded sheet of paper out of his shirt pocket and handing it to Alfred, Friedrich said, “Should you wish to see me again for any reason—a continuation of any part of our discussion, guidance for reading Spinoza, anything—here is my current address in Zurich and my contact information in Berlin, where I shall be after three months. Alfred, I do hope we meet again.
Auf wiedersehen
.”

Alfred sat glumly for fifteen minutes. He emptied his stein and stood to leave. He unfolded the sheet of paper Friedrich had left, stared at Friedrich’s addresses, then ripped it into quarters and threw it on the floor, and headed out of the beer hall. Just as he reached the exit, however, Alfred stopped, reconsidered, walked back to his table, and bent down to retrieve the pieces of the torn page.

A
bout 10 o’clock the following morning the Spinoza brothers were hard at work in their shop, Bento sweeping and Gabriel opening a newly arrived crate of dried figs. They were interrupted when Franco and Jacob appeared at the door and stood there hesitating until Franco said, “If your offer is still open, we would like to continue our discussion. Please, we are available any time that is convenient for you.”

“I am glad to resume,” Bento said, but turning to Jacob, he asked, “You wish this also, Jacob?”

“I wish only what is best for Franco.”

Bento considered that response for a moment and replied, “Wait one minute, please,” and then, after a whispered conference with his brother in the back of the shop, Bento announced, “I can be at your service now. Shall we walk to my house and continue our study of the scriptures?”

The massive Bible was on the table and the chairs in place as if Bento had been expecting them. “Where shall we begin? We touched on many questions last time.”

“You were going to tell us about Moses not writing the Torah,” said Jacob, speaking in a softer, more conciliatory manner than the day before.

“I’ve studied the matter for many years and believe that a careful and open-minded reading of the books of Moses provides much internal evidence that Moses could not possibly have been the author.”

“Internal evidence? Explain to me,” said Franco.

“There are inconsistencies in the story of Moses; some parts of the Torah contradict other parts, and many passages don’t hold up to simple
logic. I’ll give examples and start with an obvious one that others before me have noted.

“The Torah not only describes the manner of Moses’ death and burial, and the thirty days’ mourning of the Hebrews, but further compares him with all the prophets who came after him and states that he surpassed them all. A man obviously cannot write about what happens to him after his death, nor can he compare himself with other prophets yet to be born. So it’s certain that part of the Torah cannot have been written by him. Not true?”

Franco nodded. Jacob shrugged.

“Or look here.” Bento opened the Bible to a page marked by a thread and pointed to a passage in Genesis 22. “You see here that Mount Moriah is called the mount of God. And historians inform us it acquired that name
after
the building of the Temple, a great many centuries
after
the death of Moses. Look at this passage, Jacob: Moses clearly says that God will at some future time choose a spot to which this name will be given. So earlier it says one thing and later an opposing thing. You see the internal contradiction, Franco?”

Both Franco and Jacob nodded.

“May I present another example?” Bento asked, still troubled by Jacob’s outbursts of temper at their last meeting. Confrontations were always uncomfortable for him, but at the same time he was thrilled to finally share his thoughts with an audience. He steadied himself; he knew what to do—a temperate delivery and a presentation of undeniable evidence. “The Hebrews in the time of Moses indisputably knew what territories belonged to the tribe of Judah but absolutely did not know them under the name of Argob or the Land of the Giants, as cited in the Bible. In other words, the Torah uses names that did not come into existence until many centuries after Moses.”

Seeing nods from both, Bento continued. “Similarly, in Genesis. Let’s consider this passage.” Bento turned to another page marked with a red thread and read the Hebrew passage for Jacob: “and the Canaanite was
then
in the land.” Now that passage could not have been written by Moses because the Canaanite were driven out
after
the death of Moses. It has to have been written by someone else looking back upon that time, someone who knew that the Canaanite had been driven out.”

After nods from his audience, Bento went on, “Here’s another obvious problem. Moses is supposed to be the author, and yet the text not only speaks
of Moses in the third person but also bears witness to many details concerning him; for instance, ‘Moses talked with God’; ‘Moses was the meekest of men’; and that passage I cited yesterday, ‘The Lord spoke with Moses face to face.’”

“This is what I mean by internal inconsistencies. The Torah is so crammed with them that it is clearer than the sun at noontime that the books of Moses could
not
have been written by Moses, and it is irrational to continue claiming Moses himself was the author. Do you follow my argument?”

Again Franco and Jacob nodded.

“The same can be said for the book of Judges. No one can possibly believe that each judge wrote the book bearing his name. The way the several books are connected one with the other suggests that they all have the same author.

“If so, then who wrote it, and when?” asked Jacob.

“The dating is helped by such statements as this”—he turned to a page in Kings for Jacob to read—“‘In those days there was no king.’ You see the wording, Jacob? That means this passage had to be written after a kingship was established. My best guess is that a major writer-compiler of the book of Kings was Ibn Ezra.”

“Who is he?” asked Jacob.

“A priestly scribe who lived in the fifth century BC. He was the one who led five thousand Hebrew exiles from Babylon back to their home city of Jerusalem.”

“And when was the entire Bible compiled?” asked Franco.

“I think we can be certain that before the time of the Maccabees—that is, around 200 BC—there was no official collection of sacred books called the Bible. It seems to have been compiled from a multitude of documents by the Pharisees at the time of the restoration of the Temple. So please keep in mind that what is holy and what is
not
holy is merely the collected opinion of some very human rabbis and scribes, some of whom were serious-minded, blessed men while others may have been struggling for their own personal status, battling upstarts in their own congregation, getting hunger pangs, thinking about dinner, and worrying about their wives and children.
The Bible was put together by human hands
. There is no other possible explanation for the many inconsistencies. No rational person could imagine that a divine omniscient author deliberately wrote with the object of contradicting himself freely.”

Jacob, looking confounded, attempted a parry. “Not necessarily. Are there not learned Kabbalists who suggest that the Torah contains deliberate errors that contain many hidden secrets and that God has preserved from corruption every word, indeed every letter, of the Bible?”

Bento nodded. “I have studied the Kabbalists and believe they wish to establish that they alone possess the secrets of God. I find in their writings nothing that has the air of a divine secret, but instead only childish lucubrations. I wish us to examine the words of the Torah itself, not the interpretation of triflers.”

After a brief silence he asked, “Have I now made clear to you my thoughts about the authorship of the scriptures?”

“That you have,” said Jacob. “Perhaps we should move on to other topics. For example, please address Franco’s questions about miracles. He asked why the Bible is replete with them and yet there are none to be seen since then. Tell us your thoughts about miracles.”

“Miracles exist only through man’s ignorance. In ancient times any occurrence that could not be explained through natural causes was considered a miracle, and the greater the ignorance of the masses about the workings of Nature, the greater the number of miracles.”

“But there are great miracles that were seen by multitudes: the Red Sea parting for Moses, the sun staying still for Joshua.”

“‘Seen by multitudes’ is solely a manner of speaking, a way of trying to claim the veracity of unbelievable events. In the case of miracles I am of the opinion that the larger the multitude that claimed to have seen it, the less believable is the event.”

“Then how can you explain these unusual events that happen at precisely the right moment, when the Jewish people were in peril?”

“I’ll start by reminding you of the millions of precisely right moments when miracles do
not
occur, when the most pious and righteous of individuals are greatly imperiled, cry out for help, and are answered only with silence. Franco, you spoke of that at our very first meeting, when you asked where were the miracles when your father was burned to death. Right?”

“Yes,” Franco agreed softly, glancing at Jacob. “I said that, and I say it again—where were the miracles when the Portuguese Jews were in peril? Why was God silent?”