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Should the Jewish ban on Spinoza be lifted?

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https://www.commentarymagazine.com/artic...za-lifted/

EXCERPT: [...] Spinoza was descended from Jews who had been forced to convert to Catholicism before reclaiming their ancient faith upon their arrival in Holland. [...] At the age of 24, and for reasons that remain shrouded 400 years later, Spinoza was expelled under a writ of Herem (excommunication) from the Jewish community of Amsterdam. After an attempt on his life, he left Amsterdam and lived first in a suburb of Leiden and then outside The Hague. He earned his living as a lens grinder and turned down a professorship at the University of Heidelberg because he thought it would interfere with his independence of mind. His motto was Caute—be careful, never say exactly what you’re thinking. Spinoza died of consumption at the age of 44; his greatest philosophical work, the Ethics, was published posthumously.

Spinoza occupies a central place in the development of Jewish history. He exemplified a distinctly modern form of Jewish identity. Yet even today, more than 300 years after his death, the question remains: What kind of Jew was Spinoza? What was the relation between Spinoza and Judaism, and how did he transform the Jewish tradition? And what was the influence of Spinoza—for better or worse—on modern Jewish life? Spinoza was without doubt the first to put what later became known as the Jewish Question at the center of modernity.

[...] Spinoza ridicules the idea that Jewish survival over the centuries of Diaspora had anything to do with God’s favor. It had less to do with divine providence than the hatred of the gentiles—which hatred, more than anything else, preserved the Jewish people intact. Indeed, so effective have these ritual forms (he mentions circumcision) been in inciting the hatred of the nations that Spinoza suggests that they will cause the Jews to exist in perpetuity. The conclusion to which the TTP leads is that the Jewish election is not a metaphysical privilege, but a political curse. Spinoza’s advice is that the Jews should abandon this dogma as quickly and as painlessly as possible. If anti-Judaism is the result of religious arrogance and aloofness, then the Jews should abandon this belief in order to avoid what would today be called “discrimination.”

[...] Finally, Spinoza argues that the preaching of Jesus and the apostles appealed to reason rather than fear and coercion. While the book of Moses presented God in figurative terms, the apostles appealed to “their own natural faculty of judgment.” Thus Jesus and Paul “philosophized” when speaking to the Gentiles, but they had to change their tactics when speaking to the Jews, who, Spinoza gratuitously adds, “despised” philosophy.

[...] Spinoza represents his universal or “catholic” (small c) religion as nothing less than a new theology for a new age that would supersede the earlier dispensations of Moses and Jesus. The essence of this new moral theology is an unprecedented teaching of toleration and noninterference with the beliefs of others. This new theology was intended not only to lay the basis for civil peace, but to foster a new regime of toleration that would gain the assent of both Jews and Gentiles. Thus he can confidently maintain that there are no dogmas of this new universal faith that would give rise to conflict among “decent men.” Rather, this new liberal theology would be tolerant to the varieties of religious experience so long as they accepted the norm of toleration in return. This means, among other things, the right of the individual to think and judge for him or herself in matters ecclesiastical.

The liberal society for the sake of which Spinoza has composed his new religion is to be neither specifically Jewish nor specifically Christian, but presumably neutral to any specific faith. The Spinozist sovereign serves as a kind of a baseball umpire.

The idea that the state should be neutral with respect to the different religions, while a staple of contemporary legal theory, was virtually unprecedented in Spinoza’s time. The TTP sets out to demonstrate that “not only can freedom be granted without endangering piety and the peace of the commonwealth,” but that “the peace of the commonwealth and piety depend on this freedom.” This new regime, a first in history, would be neither the virtuous city of classical antiquity nor the holy city of the Bible, but the commercial metropolis of modernity.

[...] Should the ban on Spinoza be lifted? The question is unanswerable in part because there is no one with the authority to do so. More to the point, would Spinoza himself want it lifted? Contrary to Cohen and Levinas, Spinoza was not, in fact, an “apostate.” He did not convert to Christianity but rather showed what it was like to live a life apart from the dominant religious communities of his age. Despite his attack on the Hebrew Scripture as a collection of ancient prejudices, despite his denigration of Moses and the prophets in comparison to Jesus and the apostles, and despite his attacks on the ceremonial laws of Judaism as an instrument of worldly well-being, Spinoza remains a recognizably and unmistakably Jewish figure. To put the matter a different way: The entire structure of modern Judaism would be unthinkable without him.

Indeed, he is the founder of two of the most distinctive forms of modern Judaism.

He was the first modern thinker to advocate the restitution of Jewish sovereignty and a Jewish state. In what has become, at least in Zionist circles, the most famous sentence of the book, we read: “Indeed, were it not that the fundamental principles of their religion had effeminated their minds, I would not hesitate to believe that they will one day, given the opportunity—such is the mutability of human affairs—establish once more their independent state, and that God will again choose them.”

[...] Spinoza’s ideas helped shape a new kind of psychological Jew who seeks liberation from tradition and dependence on external authority, who wishes to think for himself, and who values independence, self-mastery, and courage as the highest human virtues. Centuries before Marx or Freud, Spinoza was the prototype of the emancipated Jew. [...] Unlike the German poet Heinrich Heine, who converted two centuries later so that he could enjoy the benefits of full membership in the culture he wished to help shape and form, Spinoza did not believe the baptismal certificate was the “passport” to Western civilization. Spinoza’s emancipated Jew need not convert because he will be liberated from an ancient tradition that has been the cause of Jewish weakness; will live under a new, rational theology that provides for civil equality in place of the Mosaic law with its promise of special providence; and will be proffered a new promised land based on freedom of religion, commerce, and inquiry. The new type of Jew who is to inhabit this land will not only value his own freedom, but will also identify with certain liberal values such as love of social justice, a support for the underdog, and the universality of human rights. These are the values, as Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher has noted, of a new kind of individual, “the non-Jewish Jew.”

Spinoza’s critical analysis of Judaism did not grow out of self-hatred or anti-Judaism, but as a part of a project of liberalizing reform. His defense of the liberal state requires a religion that is itself quite liberal. He believed that the price of admission to this state entailed a radical secularization of Judaism both as a body of revealed law and as a distinctive way of life. His purpose was to strip all religions—both Judaism and Christianity—of their claims to exclusivity and reduce them to a handful of tenets that could provide the moral foundation of the modern state. Spinoza’s religion of reason would be stripped of all metaphysical claims that might give rise to controversy or could be used as a pretext for persecution.

Sound familiar?...
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