Have we finally discovered the real reason for Spinoza’s excommunication?
A documentary details how controversial ideas about God, Mosaic law and finances all may have played a role in the philosopher’s exile
Artist Itamar Mendes-Flohr, descended from Baruch Spinoza’s sister, bears a striking resemblance to the philosopher. Photo by Dror Lebendiger
By PJ Grisar January 18, 2024
The beginning of Baruch Spinoza’s heresy may have begun with his uncircumcised grandfather.
As a child in the 17th century, Spinoza visited the Beth Haim cemetery on the outskirts of Amsterdam, getting there by boat, because Dutch Christians wouldn’t allow Jews to have their noisy funeral processions on the road. In the graveyard, he would have noticed that one of his grandfathers, born to a family of forced converts in Portugal, was buried away from his relatives and next to the graves of people enslaved by Jewish families, simply because he died without having had a bris.
Scholar Yosef Kaplan believes that Spinoza, then just a boy but later a revolutionary philosopher, questioned why Jews had to travel on canals to mourn their loved ones and why his Christian-born grandfather (whose foreskin was posthumously removed) was kept in a far-off plot away from the rest of the family. What’s more, a new documentary argues, were Spinoza alive today he might bristle over a newer indignity: that Amsterdam’s Jewish community, centuries after being commanded to avoid roads to bury their dead, barred the descendants of Jewish-owned slaves from celebrating their freedom inside the cemetery where their own relatives were laid to rest. The last argument may be presentist, but can’t be so easily dismissed.
According to Spinoza: Six Reasons for the Excommunication of the Philosopher, a documentary directed by David Ofek, Spinoza was preoccupied by a sense of arbitrary injustice that underpinned his existence as a Jew living in a Christian society. Spinoza’s anger over his own faith’s stringency fueled his deep interrogation of tradition, paving the way for an iconoclastic argument that the law of Moses, far from divinely inspired, was the work of a mortal dictator trying to curb an unruly nation of unenlightened slaves.
This monumental challenge to halacha would be more than enough for Spinoza’s herem, his excommunication, ordered when he was 24 and, almost 347 years after his death at age 44, still in place in the Amsterdam Portuguese Sephardic community that raised him. But Ofek’s film, which uses as its starting point that community’s well-publicized refusal to allow Spinoza biographer Yitzhak Malamed to film in its synagogue, aims to clarify the motive for the vague — if forceful — denunciation of Spinoza that remains in effect to this day.
Dividing Spinoza’s life and thought into six possible “reasons” for his excommunication, Malamed visits experts in Israel, Amsterdam and at Columbia University, where the supposed death mask of Spinoza is kept. Spinoza’s writings argued that God and nature were one and the same, that faith was “foolishness and prejudice,” and that a “network of necessity” rather than free will governed the universe. Those would seem sufficient offenses for a congregation of his time, and many of his beliefs are contrary to Orthodox Judaism now. Still, his exact offense is undefined.
“Perhaps it’s because he was one of the first to perceive the Bible as a human creation,” Malamed suggests. “Perhaps it’s because he called for the separation of religion and state. In any case, over the years the ban became symbolic, a symbol of the struggle to express your opinions in the face of powers greater than you.”
This notion of forbidden ideas (the Catholic church also banned Spinoza’s work, and the film shows a book of his that managed to survive by attaching a false front page — the heretical equivalent of a textbook shielding a comic) runs throughout the documentary. Malamed briefly applies the censoring of Spinoza’s thoughts to a ban that existed for Palestinians in the West Bank on books by Karl Marx and the Arabic translation of Menachem Begin’s memoir. In a risible moment we see a video of chief rabbi of Amsterdam, Pinchas Toledano, telling an audience, in reference to Spinoza, that “even freedom of speech has its boundaries.”
Such an idea would have been anathema to Spinoza, who, nonetheless, found a kind of solace in his philosophy, envisioning reality — which he saw as synonymous with God and nature — as a causal chain, represented in the film as an endless array of interlocking animated gears, over which one had limited power. For Spinoza, Tel Aviv University philosopher Noa Naaman-Zauderer says in the film, “to be free is to act, that is, to create outcomes with [one’s] own forces,” not from external ones.
It’s possible Spinoza’s banishment could be explained by a moment where he created his own outcome. If one studies the herem ruling, as the film shows Malamed doing, it’s clear that the rabbis decided it years before Spinoza’s major works were set down on paper, but only four months after he, bypassing a rabbinic court, appealed to the Dutch courts to mitigate his responsibility for his dead father’s debt. (By Dutch law, Spinoza was still a minor, but not by the law of his own community.)
Did Spinoza live his philosophy, recognizing the external forces that would lead to a more favorable decision? Whatever the case, the move was likely perceived as a threat to the authority of an already at-heel population that, not long before, had survived the existential threat of the Inquisition.
Ofek’s film, one of several from producer Yair Qeder’s project The Hebrews, focusing on the lives of notable Jews, fits the style of its subject in its expansive but approachable presentation. In under an hour, it provides a satisfying primer on a mind that upended Western thought, and even manages to find living relatives whose own artistic projects echo Spinoza’s gracious worldview, in which a person can find contentment by recognizing her small place in eternity.
But most compelling is the film’s suggestion that Spinoza’s ultimate beef, and the central problem the Amsterdam authorities had with him, lay in how he confronted existing power structures, both on earth and in a heavenly hierarchy.
Was he a forerunner of liberation theology? Might he have, with his small but devoted group of followers, founded a new stream of Judaism?
I’ll leave that question to experts. In the meantime, it should be uncontroversial to say that, far from being atheistic, apostatic or antithetical to the culture that raised him, Spinoza’s challenge to dogma is as freeing — and as Jewish — an act as exists in our tradition.
The documentary Spinoza: 6 Reasons for the Excommunication of the Philosopher is playing at the New York Jewish Film Festival Wednesday, Jan. 17. Tickets and more information are available on the festival’s site.
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