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Dec. 15, 2006
Jewish rebels with causes
Spinoza and Lazarus dealt with anti-Semitism in unique ways.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY
Sadly, anti-Semitism has been a constant of Jewish life. While
there have been periods of relative peace and freedom, they are
the exception, not the rule. Two recent biographies – of the
17th-century philosopher Baruch (Bento or Benedictus) Spinoza and
the 19th-century poet Emma Lazarus – span almost seven centuries
of history and both describe the ways in which their subjects' lives
were affected not only by rampant anti-Semitism, but by their own
complex attitudes towards their fellow Jews.
Spinoza believed in reason above all else. For him, radical objectivity
was the key to attaining spiritual contentment, of knowing God.
He did not value superstition, mysticism or any system of belief
that ultimately depended on faith. He believed that, "[t]he
virtue is in believing because you know, which requires proof,"
writes Rebecca Goldstein in Betraying Spinoza.
It was thoughts like these that led to Spinoza's being excommunicated
on July 27, 1656, at age 23, by the Portuguese-Jewish community
in which he had been raised and educated. The community, comprised
mainly of former Marranos who had fled the Inquistion, had settled
in the Netherlands only decades earlier. Jews were still being persecuted
elsewhere and it is this fact, coupled with Jews' long history of
suffering, that, according to Goldstein, drove Spinoza – who
only lived till age 44 – to examine human behavior and, in
particular, concepts of identity.
Among Spinoza's many postulates was that humans are capable of changing:
"we can critically evaluate the judgments that [our emotions]
contain and, if they are wrong, correct them," writes
Goldstein of his philosophy. "Since the process of correcting
erroneous judgments is expansive – to understand is to expand
ourselves into the world, reproducing the world in our own minds,
appropriating it into our very selves – to understand one's
emotions, even the most painful of them, is necessarily pleasurable.
It requires one's getting out of oneself, seeing oneself clearheadedly
as just another thing in the world, treating one's own emotions
as dispassionately as a problem in geometry."
As difficult as this manoeuvring outside of one's self is to do,
Spinoza believed that it was the path to liberation. Once people
saw the "world as it is, unwarped by one's identity within
it," they would understand that there was nothing inherently
special about their own efforts to exist and flourish that didn't
pertain to others' same efforts.
In this way, Spinoza arrived at a "concept of personal identity
in which the question of who is Jewish and who is not simply could
not meaningfully arise." However, for his particular community,
"seeking its Jewish identity with such passion, Spinoza's solution
was the most damnable betrayal one of their own could commit. It
was to deny that he was one of their own. It was to deny meaning
to the very phrase 'one of their own.' "
Lazarus, who is best known for her poem "The New Colossus,"
which is on a plaque mounted in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty,
also dealt with "the Jewish problem" in a manner not embraced
by most of her compatriots (Jewish or not). She saw an urgent need
for both "the secularization and spiritualizing of the
Jewish nationality," where spirituality entailed living ethically,
not religiously. In the early 1880s, she wrote of the need for a
Jewish homeland in Palestine - not necessarily for American Jews,
but for their "oppressed brethren of less fortunate countries";
Russia, for example, from which many Jews were emigrating at the
time.
In Emma Lazarus, author Esther Schor presents not just a
poet, but a writer of essays, plays, translations and many politically
influential missives. Lazarus was a lone, brave voice on many issues
– but not always with pure motives. On the immigration issue,
for instance, she worked hard to ease the situation for Russian
Jews new to the United States, but did so, in part, because "the
refugees presented an image of the Jew – backward, ignorant,
superstitious – that many American Jews [incuding Lazarus]
found demeaning," writes Schor.
To garner support for a Jewish homeland, Lazarus depicted a horrible
future in which Jewish refugees from around the world emigrated
to America. As cited by Schor, Lazarus wrote that these Jews would
either relinquish the piety that "has preserved their moral
tone and given them a certain amount of dignity or else, true to
the traditions of their race, they would bulwark themselves within
a citadel of isolation and defiance, and accept matyrdom and death
rather than forego that which they consider their divine mission...."
Ironically, much of Lazarus's short life – she died at 38 –
was focused on trying to "assimilate America to Judaism."
According to Schor, poems such as "The New Colossus" and
"Little Poems in Prose" were efforts to remake America
"in the image of a Jewish calling - a mission to repair the
world."
It is for her poetry that most people remember Lazarus. However,
writes Schor, Lazarus "did what no woman of her day did, what
no Jew of her day did. She lived the double life of American Jewry
with no apology. She emboldened American Jews to be proud of their
doubleness, to learn and cherish their heritage, to claim a future
as a nation." She "spoke as men spoke, where mainly men
were speaking ... she took on philosophers and rabbis, professors
and philanthropists, genteel anti-Semites and parochial Jews. And
she was not afraid to face herself: her own shame at being sister
to the 'caftaned Jew'; her own erotic desires; her vaulting, later
chastened, ambition."
Both Emma
Lazarus and Betraying Spinoza are part of the Jewish
Encounters series being published by Schocken Books. Forthcoming
topics by various authors include the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Marc Chagall,
military Jews, the Hebrew alphabet, Jews and power, etc. The Independent
has previously reviewed David Mamet's The Wicked Son and
Sherwin B. Nuland's Maimonides.
Every book thus far has been very well written. Of the two reviewed
here, Emma Lazarus was more compelling, partly because there
was more historical information available about her and partly because
the concepts being discussed were less complicated. Imagine the
difficulty in not only writing about philosophies of truth and existence,
but about a man who believed in the insignificance of personal identity.
Goldstein compensates by describing aspects of the Jewish community
at large, both in Spinoza's day and in the centuries leading up
to it, as well as imagining what he was like, given what little
is documented. The generality, however, does not allow us to feel
as connected to Spinoza as we are to Lazarus after reading about
her. But perhaps this is OK because, as Goldstein says, to know
Spinoza would be to betray him.
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