Betraying Spinoza Read Online Free PDF Page B

and told them that they had spoken with Spinoza several times and that his views were full of heresies, and that he didn’t deserve to be held in such high esteem as a brilliant scholar by his former teachers. They said that Spinoza had spoken of the Jews as “a superstitious people born and bred in ignorance, who do not know what God is, and who nevertheless have the audacity to speak of themselves as His people, to the disparagement of other nations.” 6 Spinoza had said that so far as the authorship of the Torah was concerned, it had been by someone other than Moses. The Five Books of Moses, he was saying, weren’t written by Moses, but rather by someone who had come many generations later, and someone who had known more about politics than about religion. It would take only some small good sense to discover the imposture, this apikorus said, and whoever continued to believe in it was as naïve as the Jews of Moses’ time.
    This is how it often is, girls—that the vilest accusations against the Jews come from irreligious Jews themselves. It is as if, betraying the special task of holiness that Ha-Shem bestowed on the Jewish people, they must go to the opposite extreme, become leaders of godlessness among men.
    I don’t have to remind you girls that Karl Marx was Jewish.
    Spinoza refused to defend himself against his accusers. He said only that he was sorry for everyone there who had chosen to judge him so hastily and so harshly. Rabbi Morteira, informed of how his former prize student was accounting for himself at the synagogue, now rushed there and confronted the apikorus himself. He asked Spinoza whether this was to be the fruit of all the pains that he, his former teacher, had taken with his education, and whether he wasn’t afraid of falling into the hands of the living God? The scandal was great, but there was still time to repent. But if there was to be no sign of contrition, then the community would have no choice but to excommunicate him.
    And do you know, girls, how this so-called philosopher, whom the world has decided to call great, answered his former rebbe, how he threw off his derekh eretz together with all else that he had been taught? He answered his teacher that he understood very well the seriousness of the charges against him and the nature of the threats that were hanging over his head, and in return for the trouble Rabbi Morteira had taken to teach him the Hebrew language, he, Spinoza, was quite willing to show him the proper method of excommunicating someone.
    When Rabbi Morteira heard the way this young man spoke to him, with so much chutzpa, he dismissed everyone and left the synagogue. He saw that he had been completely mistaken in who this young man was. Before, he had told people that he was as impressed with Spinoza’s character as with his mind, 7 that it was rare that one so brilliant would also be so modest. But now he saw that the situation was exactly the reverse. Baruch Spinoza was a monster of arrogance. There was no way of reasoning with this young man, as brilliant as he no doubt was.
    Human intelligence is the greatest gift that Ha-Shem gave to human beings, making us closer to the malakhim —the angels—than to the beasts of the field. But if we forget from Whom we got this divine gift, if we begin to believe that we are somehow the source of our own intelligence and that we are capable of figuring out everything for ourselves without relying on the Torah, then we fall even below the animals. This is why all philosophy is apikorsus . The very word apikorsus , girls, comes from the name of a Greek philosopher, someone who was called Epicurus, who believed that pleasure is all that people have to live for.
    After this confrontation in the synagogue, Spinoza moved away from the community, taking rooms with a non-Jewish friend of his outside of Amsterdam. He had already, for some time now, been mixing with non-Jews, preferring them to his own people. He had been studying Latin