A brisk and engaging biography of Baruch Spinoza, the man who inspired many secular Jewish thinkers, is least convincing when it offers him as an example of ‘cancel culture’
In December 2021, the philosopher Yitzhak Melamed posted on social media a letter that he had received from the rabbi of the Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam. Melamed had written requesting permission to film there for a documentary on the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who had been emphatically expelled by the 17th-century Jewish community. The rabbi sternly explained that the elders of that community had “excommunicated Spinoza and his writings with the severest possible ban, a ban that remains in force for all time and cannot be rescinded”. Furthermore, not only was the ban – known as a cherem – still apparently in full force, but it was contagious: because Melamed has “devoted his life to the study of Spinoza’s banned works”, he too was now declared “persona non grata in the Portuguese synagogue complex”. When Melamed was interviewed about these events on the BBC World Service, he wryly commented: “I don’t completely buy the image of this kind of zealotry, partly because the synagogue itself is selling puppets of Spinoza in their shop.” It’s true: I visited in early 2022 and bought what was then the last puppet in stock, which now sits on the mantelpiece in my office and looks down at me when I teach.
Melamed’s letter – which prompted an apologetic reply from the synagogue’s board insisting that the rabbi had gone rogue – is mentioned in an endnote to Ian Buruma’s brisk and readable new biography of Spinoza. The whole affair exemplifies the philosopher’s near unparalleled ability to provoke strong opinions, ranging from reverence to outrage, several centuries after his death: no mean feat for a man who wrote difficult philosophy in Latin aimed at a select readership, and lived a determinedly unworldly life, never leaving the country of his birth. What distinguishes Spinoza, as Buruma compellingly shows, is that he is exemplary in two seemingly opposed ways. On the one hand, his was a parochial, intensely local life that encapsulates the tensions and extremes of his age: the multilingual, shapeshifting identities of Dutch Jews, and the violent struggles between warring political and Christian factions. On the other hand, Spinoza has often seemed to stand outside time or to belong to modernity, with his impulse towards (highly restricted) democracy, and his disinclination to adhere to any religion once he and Judaism had rejected each other. No wonder that so many secular Jewish thinkers, from Heine and Marx to Freud and Einstein, looked to him as a model.
