Primrose Road

I picked Betraying Spinoza up after hearing author Rebecca Goldstein talk at last week's Nextbook: Jews and Power conference. Goldstein briefly discussed the challenges inherent in writing a "Jewish" Spinoza biography and focused mainly on her personal narrative of encountering Spinoza as a high school student at an Orthodox Jewish Bais Yaakov school. Despite my distrust of personal narrative, I decided that the book was worth a read.

What Goldstein offers is far more than a personal narrative of her experience as a young Orthodox woman hearing the story of Baruch Spinoza's excommunication from Amsterdam's Portuguese Jewish community due to his insistence on reason over superstition, being told that Jews should avoid Spinoza, who asked questions that he shouldn't have asked. She presents a captivating speculative biography (though, in my view, she doesn't do enough to announce that the bio is speculative) of the philosopher, deriving her narrative of Spinoza's life from historical documents describing seventeenth-century Amsterdam and Spinoza's own work. Perhaps most interesting are the moments when Goldstein subtly analogizes the Dutch Jewish community headed up by Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira to the post-Holocaust religious Jewish community in the 20th and 21st century: severe unthinkable trauma, she suggests, led to three possibilities for people in the community: "fierce religiosity, messianic and mystical," "disappointment, disillusion, attempts to argue with the rabbis about what true Judaism ought to be," and "ultimate rejection and a return to Christianity," to which many had converted when the Inquisition came to Portugal a generation earlier (120-121).

Interestingly, Goldstein argues against her high school teacher's assertion that Spinoza was an atheist simply because he believed in reason over superstition and because he claims in his Ethics that one is naturally inclined to preserve oneself before anyone else. (No wonder this work led, via Locke, to some of the ideas on which America was founded ...) Reading Spinoza's ethics of love, Goldstein seems to find a frustrating God in his work: "He who loves God cannot endeavor that God will love him in return" (237). The mistake made by "superstitious" religions is that they carry on as though God were a tyrant, requiring believers to act in certain ways in order to earn his love.

Another important strength of the book was Goldstein's ability to explain relatively complicated philosophical ideas to a general audience, especially in relation to what she labels the "if-is" gap (a gap that, she notes, Spinoza closes up). This book could conceivably be used, therefore, as a "way in" to Spinoza for students.

In sum, read it.