“August 19. Next day I returned to Amsterdam, where I went to a synagogue of the Jews, being Saturday; the ceremonies, ornaments, lamps, law, and scrolls afforded matter for my wonder and enquiry. The women were secluded from the men, being seated above in galleries, and having their heads muffled with linnen after a fantastical and somewhat extraordinary fashion.
“They have a separate burying-ground, full of sepulchres with Hebrew inscriptions, some of them very stately. In one, looking through a narrow crevice, I perceived divers bookes lye about a corpse, for it seems when any learned Rabbi dies, they bury some of his books with him. With the help of a stick I raked out some of the leaves, written in Hebrew characters, but much impaired.”
“Aug. 28. I was brought acquainted with a Burgundian Jew who had married an apostate Kentish woman. I asked him divers questions; he told me, amongst other things, that the world should never end, that our souls transmigrated, and that even those of the most holy persons did pennance in the bodies of bruits after death, and so he interpreted the banishment and salvage life of Nebucodnezer; that all the Jews should rise again, and be lead to Jerusalem.... He showed me severall bookes of their devotion, which he had translated into English for the instruction of his wife; he told me that when the Messias came, all the ships, barkes, and vessels of Holland should, by the powere of certain strange whirle-winds be loosed from their ankers and transported in a moment to all the desolat ports and havens throughout the world wherever the dispersion was, to convey their breathren and tribes to the Holy Citty; with other such like stuff. He was a merry drunken fellow.” It was the age of Messianic dreams. Oppression had kindled the longing for deliverance, and the Jews all over Europe were eagerly looking to the advent of the Redeemer: an expectation which in the minds of the untutored and the enthusiastic took strange shapes. But even then there were Jews affected by other than Messianic chimeras.
In the Dutch synagogue which Evelyn visited on that Saturday in August 1641, he may perhaps have seen a boy; a wide-eyed, thoughtful little Hebrew of some nine years of age. Evelyn would have fixed his intelligent gaze upon that child’s face, had he had any means of divining that the diminutive Hebrew body before him clothed a soul destined to open new doors of light to Christian Europe. The boy was Baruch Spinoza, born on the 24th of November, 1632, of parents who, for their faith, had given up wealth and a happy home in sunny Spain, and had sought freedom on the foggy shores of the North Sea. Rabbinical lore was young Spinoza’s first study; mediaeval Hebrew wisdom, largely made up of Messianic and Cabbalistic mists, his next; to be followed by the profane philosophy of Descartes: altogether a singular blend of mental nutriment, yet all assimilated and transformed by young Baruch’s brain; a multitude of diverse guides, yet all leading the original mind the same way—not quite their way. Study bred independent thought, and independent thought translated itself into independent action. Baruch ceased to frequent the synagogue; for the synagogue had ceased to supply him with the food for which his soul craved. ♦1656♦ A bribe of 1,000 florins a year was offered by the Rabbis, but was firmly rejected; excommunication followed, and curses many and minute, not unaccompanied by an attempt at assassination; but they were serenely disregarded. Baruch was not Uriel. For answer he translated himself into Benedictus, and the name was not a misnomer; for he was soon to become known as one of the kindliest of men, as well as one of the deepest and boldest of thinkers that our modern world has seen.
When the two goddesses appeared to Spinoza, as they do to every one of us once in our lives: the one plump and proud and persuasively fair, the other modest of look, reverent, and unadorned; and they offered to the young Jew of Amsterdam the momentous option of paths, he did not long hesitate in his choice. Turning his back upon the world, and a deaf ear to its Siren songs of success, he chose to earn a modest livelihood by making lenses. Too honest to accept the Synagogue’s price for hypocrisy, he was too proud even to accept the gifts of disinterested friendship and admiration, and too fond of his freedom to accept even a professorial chair of Philosophy. Like his great contemporary and compatriot Rembrandt, Spinoza was incapable of complying with the world’s behests or of adapting himself to its standards. The public did not inspire him, and its applause left him profoundly unmoved. He scorned the smiles as much as the frowns of Fortune, and calmly pursued his own path, undaunted by obloquy, unseduced by temptation: a veritable Socrates of a man, voluntarily and wholly devoted to the humble service of Truth. In meditation he found his heart’s delight, and, while grinding glasses for optical instruments in his solitary attic, he excogitated other aids for the eye of man. A quiet pipe of tobacco, a friendly chat with his landlord or his fellow-lodgers and their children, and, when bent on more violent dissipation, a single-combat between two spiders, or the antics of a foolish fly entangled in their toils, furnished the cheerful ascetic with abundant diversion. On those last occasions, his biographer tells us, “he would sometimes break into laughter.” ♦1677♦ And having lived his own life, Spinoza died as those die whom the Olympians love: in the meridian of manhood and intellectual vigour, leaving behind him the memory of a blameless character to his friends, and the fruits of a mighty genius to the world at large. For the goddess to whom he had dedicated his whole life did not despise the sacrifice.
Every man who is born into this world is either a Greek or a Jew. Spinoza was both. His teaching may be described as a recapitulation of the world’s thought. Hellenic rationalism and Hebrew mysticism found in his work an organic union. Briefly stated, the lesson which the Jewish sage taught the Western mind, like all great lessons, was a very simple one: that man is not the centre of creation; that the universe is a bigger affair than the earth; and that man holds an exceedingly small place even on this small atom of a planet. Old Europe was gradually growing to the suspicion that one book did not contain the whole of God’s truth between its covers—that it did not constitute a final manifestation of the will of God. She was now to hear, much to her astonishment and indignation, that the human race did not engross the whole attention of Providence. It was an elementary lesson enough; but it came as a revelation even to minds like Lessing’s and Goethe’s. It was a salutary lesson, too; but it was too new to be recognised as such. Man is a creature of conceit; the Tractatus would teach him humility. Therefore, the Synagogue anathematized it, Synodical wisdom condemned it, the States-general interdicted it, the Catholic Church placed it upon the Index: they all execrated it; none of them understood it. Posterity has embraced it. To-day who would be a thinker must in mental attitude, if not in doctrine, be a Spinozist.[125]
CHAPTER XVII
IN ENGLAND AFTER THE EXPULSION
The banishment of the Jews from England by Edward I., in 1290, was not quite so thorough as is popularly supposed to have been. A small section of the community remained behind, or returned, under the disguise of Lombards. This remnant, according to Jewish tradition, was finally driven out in 1358; but there is on record a petition to the Good Parliament which shows that, even after that date, some of them continued to lead a masked kind of existence in England. The same inference is to be drawn from the fact that the House for Jewish Converts, built by Henry III. in the thirteenth century, continued in existence till the seventeenth. Broadly speaking, however, Edward’s expulsion cleared England of Jews. But, while removing the objects of Christian hatred, it did not diminish the hatred itself. Although the “unclean and perfidious” race had, to all intents and purposes, vanished from men’s eyes, the legend of their wickedness and misanthropy lingered in tradition and was consecrated by literature. In the middle of the ensuing century we find Gower, the poet, representing a Jew as saying:
“I am a Jewe, and by my lawe
I shal to no man be felawe