In 1954, when he was Prime Minister of the State of Israel, David Ben-Gurion wrote to the rabbi of the Sephardic Jewish community of Amsterdam, Salamon Rodrigues Pereira, asking him to revoke the decree of excommunication (in Hebrew, «jerem») issued almost 300 years earlier, in 1656, against the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Obviously, Rabbi Rodrigues refused to do so.

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was born in Amsterdam, the son of Jewish immigrants from Portugal, where they had been forced to convert to Catholicism and were able to return to their former faith thanks to the relative safety and tolerance they found in Holland. His father, Miguel, a wealthy merchant, was a member of the governing committee of the synagogue and the school his son attended. The young Spinoza received a traditional education in the Talmud and Torah, in addition to self-studying the classics of medieval Jewish philosophy. He spoke Portuguese, Hebrew, Spanish, Dutch, and Latin. His father died when he was 21.

Spinoza broke with traditional dogmas. Steven Nadler says: “The God Spinoza presents in his book Ethics is a far cry from the traditional God of monotheistic religions. What Spinoza calls ‘God or Nature’ (Deus sive Natura) lacks all the psychological and ethical attributes of a providential deity. His God has no personal will, emotions, or preferences; he formulates no plans, issues no commands, has no expectations, and makes no judgments. Spinoza’s God is neither good, nor wise, nor just. For him, it is a mistake to think of God in normative or value terms. What God is, for Spinoza, is Nature itself.” Therefore, for Spinoza, there is no Divine Creation, no free will, nothing after death, no divine reward or punishment, no revelation on Mount Sinai, no reason to pray or supplicate, etc. He argued that belief in a divinity had created an immense superstructure of habits, institutions, and rituals—the entirety of organized religion—which, in turn, had led to the enslavement of the human mind. His books were also placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books.

Excommunication meant that Spinoza lost all ties with other Jews, including his family. He was able to maintain contact with a handful of them, but lived the rest of his life in the company of Christian humanist intellectuals. His work reflects a keen concern for the Jewish question and is a constant dialogue with the Torah, the prophets, the rabbis, and philosophers such as Maimonides. He never converted to Christianity, but took the Latin name Benedict instead of Baruch. Spinoza was a kind and gentle soul, calm, benevolent, and gregarious, who rarely lost his temper. His critics admit that, despite disagreeing with his philosophy, he was one of those rare individuals who demonstrated that one can live a holy and secular life without God.

The importance of Spinoza’s ideas would be seen centuries later with the arrival of the Enlightenment in Europe, especially in the Jewish communities of Germany. The new Reform Jews, the secular Zionists, the enlightened European Jews, even the Yiddishists, all saw in Spinoza’s ideas the theoretical justification for their positions. Why did Ben-Gurion want to abolish the cherem? Because for him, Spinoza represented the ideal Jew, the secular Jew who is completely detached from rabbinic Judaism. Because Spinoza was, without a doubt, the first secular Jew.

By Marcos Gojman.

Bibliography: Articles by Steven Nadler, Steven B. Smith, Daniel B. Schwartz, and other sources.