Excommunicated, Secular- But Still Jewish
Excommunicated, Secular— But Still Jewish Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano of Reason The Adventures of Immanence by Yirmiyahu Yovel Princeton University Press, 1989. 2 vols., 244 pp; 225...
...This is his true heresy...
...While "Baruch was the last of the medievals...Benedictus was the first of the moderns...
...What is far less clear is what contribution Yovel makes to our understanding of Spinoza's philosophy...
...Like the Marranos, Spinoza does not belong...
...Coming from a family of former Marranos and living in Amsterdam, a community in which very recent Marranos took up residence and open Jewish identity, Spinoza was profoundly affected by their personal, religious and intellectual patterns...
...Yovel makes his argument in chapters devoted to Spinoza and Kant, Hegel, Heine, Hess, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud...
...In his second volume, Yovel traces the role of immanence in Western thought from the 18th to the 20th century...
...Such a God has no independent power to intervene in the natural order...
...He was, in Yovel's formulation, a Marrano of reason, a thinker fully committed to the results of rational inquiry but one who masked his true beliefs in order not to give public offense...
...What matters is the claim that his writing is esoteric and that it must be read with the conscious awareness that he presents us with a puzzle to be solved or a veil to be torn away...
...Yovel begins with an extensive survey of the world of Marrano thought and style...
...In painstaking detail, he shows us how Spinoza was influenced by that world...
...in other cases, hardly any...
...He interprets Spinoza's stance and style against the background of his Marrano (Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity in Spain) associations...
...We have here a clear example of the principle that tracing the presumed historical origins and influences of a philosopher's work does not necessarily provide us with deeper insight into his philosophical doctrines...
...Taken by themselves as historical studies, they represent a significant contribution to our understanding of the topics and thinkers under discussion...
...As historian of philosophy Harry A. Wolfson suggested in 1934, we can distinguish between the Spinoza who was Baruch and the Spinoza who was Benedictus...
...Although esoteric writing is by no means the invention of Spinoza, Yovel holds that in his case it reflects far more the Marrano influence than the influence of such earlier figures as Maimonides...
...The types are, by his own admission, very different, but they share the denial of any force or power that transcends the world...
...Nevertheless, he was never free of his identity as a Jew—a heretic, as Yovel notes, but still a Jew...
...God does not command, reward or punish...
...In cases where he does not claim direct influence, Yovel draws interesting and useful parallels between Spinoza and Marrano thinkers and writers...
...This phenomenon is intimately connected with the historical setting of modernity...
...He contends that in some cases the influence was a direct result of Spinoza's association with prominent former Marranos...
...One can only wonder whether BOOK S anything substantive in our understanding of this dimension of Spinoza's philosophy is affected by the claim that his roots are in the Marrano world...
...Yovel locates Spinoza's heresy in his philosophy of immanence...
...No existing social or religious framework provides a niche into which he fully fits...
...This point can hardly be settled definitively...
...They present us with an illuminating account of Marrano thought and a no less illuminating account of later thinkers...
...There is nothing other than the world, nothing outside it...
...Spinoza appears to be more nearly a peg on which to hang the discussions of the topics in this book than the subject of an original philosophical investigation...
...Fascinating and instructive as Yovel's account of that world is, it does little to give us any new insight into Spinoza's philosophy...
...He follows his rational insight wherever it leads...
...225 pp, $45.00 per set Reviewed by Marvin Fox Baruch Spinoza, the great 17th-century philosopher, has been a particularly fascinating figure for modern Jews searching for a way to be Jewish without being religious...
...Traditional doctrine and practice no longer bind him, nor do they constrain his thought...
...But what matters is not the source of Spinoza's esotericism nor the model he imitates...
...After his excommunication, Spinoza was destined to live in detachment from the Jewish community that had ostracized him...
...He finds this doctrine and style of philosophizing widely present...
...God is an alternate name for the order of nature, the power that is immanent in the world...
...Typical of the Marrano pattern, as professor Yovel represents it, is Spinoza's deliberately equivocal style of writing...
...His shift from the philosophical categories and intellectual framework of the Middle Ages was accompanied by a shift in his religious outlook and in his self-definition as a Jew...
...He was viewed by some later interpreters as profoundly religious, but, as Wolfson put it, Spinoza's "reputed God-intoxication was really nothing but a hangover of an earlier religious jag...
...Having already paid the price of excommunication, he is the consummate outsider and, as such, is capable of viewing the established teachings and communities with critical detachment...
...To speak of nature as God, however, is simply to use religious language in a nonreligious way...
...of Chicago, 1990...
...he can afford to do so because he is no longer subject to the established ways...
...He concludes that while he may have had predecessors, Spinoza was certainly the first truly prominent and influential secular Jew, one whose teaching and personal example con-' tinue to be held in high regard...
...He hides behind a mask that veils his true position and intentions...
...Fox's most recent book is Interpreting Maimonides: Studies in Methodology, Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy (Univ...
...Thus, whether derived from Spinoza or not, the Spinozistic heresy is seen as pervading the central core of Western thought for the last three centuries...
...The same is true of Spinoza's use of such religious terms as love of God, salvation, etc...
...What Yovel is trying to show, however, is that in all these thinkers there is a commitment to a philosophy of immanence...
...This philosophy entails Spinoza's denial of the existence of a transcendent God who antedates the world and who controls it through his will...
...He continued to use the language of medieval philosophy but forged a body of philosophic doctrine that broke with the fundamental religious principles shared by Moslims, Christians and Jews...
...These volumes are filled with remarkable learning covering a wide range of subjects...
...In choosing immanence as the way to understand God, Spinoza, according to Yovel, broke with the religious tradition that dominated Western thought for nearly two millenia...
...In some cases there is evidence for some direct influence by Spinoza...
...Marvin Fox is Philip W. Lown Professor of Jewish Philosophy and director of the Lown School of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University...
...His basic doctrines are set forth by Yovel in a way not significantly different from our established understanding...
...In these volumes, Yirmiyahu Yovel raises the question of whether Spinoza was the first secular BOOKS Jew...
...Yovel now provides a new account of Spinoza as heretic...
...66 MOMENT • OCTOBER 1990...
Vol. 15 • October 1990 • No. 5
