Amsterdam

by Russell Shorto

  While there was ample reason for Jewish leaders to expel Spinoza from their community, it’s possible to see also some level of irony in their action. Sephardic tradition, forged under the hot Iberian sun, was unusually open to philosophical inquiry. After Spain and Portugal had ejected the Jews, Amsterdam had opened itself to them and offered a place for that tradition to live again. Spinoza, one might say, simply took up the ancient call to search and question—and was ejected for his efforts just as the Jews had been.

  Meanwhile, Spinoza’s reaction to the excommunication is at least as interesting as the act itself. He had a right to appeal it, but he did nothing. He seems to have treated it as a relief. “All the better,” he was quoted by a contemporary as saying; “they do not force me to do anything that I would not have done of my own accord if I did not dread scandal. But, since they want it that way, I enter gladly on the path that is opened to me.” He simply left. He said good-bye not only to the community as a whole but to his family and went off in search of new meaning. What is amazing about his attitude is that the herem put him in an almost unique position. Everyone, in the seventeenth century, belonged to a formal faith. Your church or synagogue was not simply a place you visited for services: it was your community; it was a basic part of your identity and your legitimacy in the eyes of society. After his excommunication, Spinoza didn’t convert to Christianity or some other faith. As the philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein says, “Instead, Spinoza was to offer something rather new under the seventeenth century’s European skies: a religion of reason.”

  The year 1653 may have been for some in the Dutch Republic a bit like 1960 was for many Americans. There had been a great war, and people were anxious now to put both it and the postwar period behind them. There was a sense of something fresh and modern on the wind. And a new, unprecedentedly young leader stepped to the fore. Johan de Witt was a brilliant intellectual—a mathematician as well as a lawyer, who contributed to the development of linear algebra and whose work was admired by Isaac Newton—who was also strikingly attractive and, although the scion of one of the aristocratic Dutch families, an ardent republican. At the age of twenty-eight, he was named grand pensionary of the States of Holland, the closest thing the country had to a prime minister. De Witt took it as his mission to keep the nation on its course of representative government (though it should be noted that De Witt’s idea of democracy was limited to the regent class: only they would hold power on provincial councils). As De Witt saw it, the new, enlightened political world would be one in which people who took over from kings and princes would not be “those who spring from their loins” but men chosen by “merits.”

  Here, many believed, were the fruits of the long war against Spain. The ascent of a leader like De Witt, surely, was what William the Silent had meant by his repeated refrain of “freedom.” Spinoza and his fellow republicans were vividly aware of the remarkable experiment their nation was undertaking. Pieter de la Court, a prominent republican with ties to De Witt, wrote what became a best-selling book in which he outlined the benefits of an open, tolerant society. In it he linked Dutch liberalisms in politics, religion, and the economy and contrasted these with the historic situation in neighboring countries: “neither in France nor England was there any liberty of religion, but a monarchical government in both, with high duties on goods imported and exported.” Whereas: “freedom or toleration, in and about the service or worship of God, is a powerful means to preserve many inhabitants in Holland, and allure foreigners to dwell amongst us.”

  Spinoza idolized De Witt, thrilled at the historic opportunity his nation had, and determined to devote his work to furthering the cause of Dutch liberalism. He had moved from Amsterdam to a Collegiant community in the village of Rijnsburg; now he moved to another village, this one on the outskirts of The Hague, so that he could be near the center of power. He would later express his euphoria and his mission in a form that serves to this day as a crystalline expression of the value of tolerance:

  Now seeing that we have the rare happiness of living in a republic, where everyone’s judgment is free and unshackled, where each may worship God as his conscience dictates, and where freedom is esteemed beyond all things dear and precious, I have believed that I should be undertaking no ungrateful or unprofitable task, in demonstrating that not only can such freedom be granted without prejudice to the public peace, but also, that without such freedom, piety cannot flourish nor the public peace be secure.

  It was a world in which the word freedom was often tied to looseness, laxness, immorality, and neglect and in which religion and religious rules and morality were almost universally seen as necessary to maintain basic order in society. Spinoza gave himself the mission to show that freedom was not a threat to order but rather necessary for public peace as well as for faith.

  It was a heady challenge. People were not ready for it. It’s tempting to draw parallels with our time. Then as now, society was divided into two basic factions. There were those who felt that the idea of liberalism contained promise for a better world. And there were others, probably the vast majority, for whom the idea of liberalism contained the seeds of destruction for everything they knew.

  For a time, though, the republicans were ascendant, and they glowed. De Witt had entered office in a time of war. In the balance of power between England and the Dutch Republic, the Dutch had the larger trading empire while England had more military might. English ships had been harassing Dutch trading and shipping vessels for several years when in 1652 war broke out. The war was ruinous for both sides. For the Dutch, their global shipping network was all but strangled. In Amsterdam, merchants toted up their losses. The herring fleet was decimated; in all, they figured 1,200 Dutch vessels had been taken or destroyed.

  Johan De Witt stepped into this quagmire and negotiated a treaty with Oliver Cromwell, the English regicide and revolutionary leader who was in the process of being named lord protector, that was breathtaking in its boldness and cunning. Despite their obvious nationalistic differences, De Witt and Cromwell had a common desire: to keep the House of Orange out of power. As far as Cromwell was concerned, the present Willem of Orange—the son of the Willem who had died following his attempted storming of Amsterdam in 1650, and the latest in the line that stretched back to William the Silent—was a threat, for he was the grandson of Charles I, the man Cromwell had recently ordered decapitated. For De Witt, the same Prince of Orange was even more of a threat: to his government, yes, but also to the very idea of republican government. That the person in question was three years old was a mere detail to both men. Orangist forces within the Dutch provinces were already lined up behind the young Willem III.

  The boldness and cunning in the treaty consisted in a so-called secret annex, which was not published with the full treaty. According to it, the Dutch agreed that Willem III would never be named stadholder, or hereditary monarch. The secret annex worked because it applied only to the province of Holland. Officially, De Witt was the leader of that province only, and, officially, Willem III would, if nominated for it, become stadholder of that province. But, with Amsterdam in the fore, Holland had grown in power to such a point that its leaders dictated the course the nation took. Thus, Holland’s republican leader colluded with the English enemy to dupe his opponents in other provinces so as to block the ascendancy of a new hereditary leader in his home province.

  In pamphlets and pulpits Orangists around the country raged in protest once the secret provision became known, but the treaty was already signed and De Witt and his forces were, for the time being, unstoppable. With the end of English attacks at sea, fleets of Dutch vessels returned to the waters, and the mighty Dutch trading empire reached new heights. Seemingly everything under the sun now came sailing into the IJ and from there into the canals and warehouses of Amsterdam. The fact that you drink coffee and tea may be indirectly thanks to De Witt’s secret annex to the Treaty of Westminster, for it was in the immediate aftermath of the treaty that Dutch coffee
and tea imports reached such volumes that those commodities became permanently affixed to the European way of life. The VOC penetrated remotest Burma and extracted everything from tin to elephant tusks. Dutch traders became dominant in India and Ceylon. They began the colony that would evolve into South Africa and set up posts in Persia and Canton. It was during this period that the VOC became the largest and wealthiest company in the history of the world, with, ultimately, fifty thousand people in its service.

  All of this wealth benefited Holland more than the other provinces, further strengthening its hand, and De Witt’s. And it benefited Amsterdam most of all. The city’s per capita income grew to four times that of Paris. Amsterdam completed its expansion, engulfing whole islands in the eastern harbor and building new walls around itself. And the wealth further transformed the city’s social fabric, with more and more immigrants pouring in, to the wonder and disdain of many. The English poet Andrew Marvell reflected the envious scorn his countrymen felt toward the near neighbor that had outstripped their nation in economic might by dismissing the very physical being of Holland, which

  scarce deserves the name of Land,

  As but th’ Off-scouring of the Brittish Sand.

  Marvell singled out Amsterdam and its population of mixed races and religions and ideas for particular derision:

  Sure when Religion did it self imbark,

  And from the east would Westward steer its Ark,

  It struck, and splitting on this unknown ground,

  Each one thence pillag’d the first piece he found:

  Hence Amsterdam, Turk-Christian-Pagan-Jew,

  Staple of Sects and Mint of Schisme grew;

  That Bank of Conscience, where not one so strange

  Opinion but finds Credit, and Exchange.

  The redoubling of trade translated as well into cultural advances. We can bundle these advances into one set of statistics. All the arenas of life that burgeoned in the period—physics, medicine, politics, art, industry, finance—reduce, ultimately, to books, for new achievements in every field were eventually transmitted through print. The number of bookshops in Amsterdam at this time has been estimated at a staggering four hundred, and at one point the city had roughly a hundred publishers. One of the most remarkable statistics I have ever encountered is the estimate by H. de la Fontaine Verwey (who then held the chair in “the science of the book” at the University of Amsterdam) that in the seventeenth century one-half of all books published in the entire world were published in the Dutch provinces. Factoring in another estimate would mean that about 30 percent of the world’s published books in the seventeenth century came out of Amsterdam.

  De Witt’s opposition, meanwhile, was down but not out. It consisted of two factions: the Orangists, who believed (as did nearly all Europeans) that a country needed a monarch as its leader and figurehead, and the orthodox Calvinists, who believed (as did nearly all Europeans) that a country’s government needed a biblical foundation. The Orangists got a boost from England in 1660 when, following Oliver Cromwell’s death, Charles II (who had been sheltered for a time by the House of Orange in The Hague) was restored to the throne of England. Orangists were now able to turn back republican arguments that there was a movement toward democracy sweeping Europe and to claim instead that the flawed English experiment of government without a monarch had come to its inevitable end. Propagandists staged a play about William the Silent to remind everyone that the House of Orange had led the way in the war against Spain.

  De Witt was undeterred. A second trade war erupted with England, and under De Witt’s order Michiel de Ruyter, the great Dutch admiral, sailed up the Thames, into the Medway, and destroyed the heart of the English navy, in what has been called the worst defeat in English naval history. The attack brought a quick end to the war at terms that were favorable to the Dutch.

  It was in this moment of world-historic growth, and amid consistent attacks from the Orangist/Calvinist party against the Dutch republicans, that Spinoza put aside the great, deep, and arcane work of philosophy he was embarked on (his Ethics) in order to write a frankly political book. His decision to title it Tractatus Theologico-Politicus somewhat obscures the fact that he intended it for a broad audience. While he called the book a “theological-political treatise,” its real purpose was to separate theology from politics. The basis of politics, he declared, in what was truly a first in history, should be individual liberty. And, he went on, “democracy is of all forms of government the most natural and most consonant with individual liberty.”

  There it is: the basis of modern, Western, liberal society, expressed in sharp, declarative print. And where would Spinoza look to find a model for such a society and to use as proof that ensuring individual liberty actually brings gains to society? Not far. “The city of Amsterdam reaps the fruit of this freedom in its own great prosperity and in the admiration of all other people,” he wrote. “For in this most flourishing state, and most splendid city, men of every nation and religion live together in the greatest harmony, and ask no questions before trusting their goods to a fellow-citizen, save whether he be rich or poor, and whether he generally acts honestly, or the reverse.”

  The book came out in early 1670 and circulated rapidly. And there for the first time people read, in black and white, someone arguing that the Bible was the work of human beings, that it contained errors, that it was packed with superstitions, that its purported miracles were nonsense since intelligent modern men and women knew that the laws of nature were inviolable, and that government should be founded not according to religious ideas (for “laws dealing with religion and seeking to settle its controversies are much more calculated to irritate than to reform”) but rather on rational, scientific, secular principles.

  “Reviews” came quickly. A spontaneous chorus of reactions rang from every level of church body in the Netherlands about the book and its contents: “blasphemous,” “dangerous,” “monstrosities,” “obscenities.” The provincial synod of South Holland used language that a publicist today might cherish for the attention it was sure to bring, calling it “as obscene and blasphemous a book as, to our knowledge, the world has ever seen.” It might possibly have brought a wry smile to Spinoza that the response to his book arguing that religion and politics should be kept apart included religious authorities complaining to political authorities, political authorities agreeing with religious authorities and encouraging the States General to ban it, and political authorities calling the book (as the court of Holland did) “soul-corrupting.”

  It wasn’t only church authorities that attacked the book. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the great German philosopher (who is often paired with Spinoza in undergraduate philosophy syllabi today), was appalled by its “astounding critique of Sacred Scripture.” Even Dutch republicans, whose side in the political struggle Spinoza hoped to support with his critique, condemned the book. In 1674 the States General banned the Tractatus in the Dutch Republic.

  Spinoza knew the book would be hot, which was why the title page not only did not include his name but gave a bogus publisher and even lied about the place of publication (“Hamburg”) in order to deflect some of the rage. It took a few months, but word leaked out that the excommunicated Jew of Amsterdam had written what was perceived as an attack on all religion and on the foundation of every government in Europe.

  Spinoza was stunned by the response. He had been naive enough to think that a nice little controversy roiled by this “popular” book might pave the way for his Ethics, which he intended as the complete statement of his philosophy. He quickly realized the storm surrounding the Tractatus had the opposite effect: his Ethics was published only after his death. Perhaps the bitterest moment for him came when Johan de Witt, his leader and hero, joined in the condemnation of his book.

  In fact, even if De Witt had believed all the arguments of the Tractatus (which is doubtful: De Witt was a republican but not truly a democrat) it would have been political suicide to support the book. In a classi
c instance of political distancing, De Witt even refused to meet with Spinoza, lest such a meeting be used by his enemies. But De Witt’s enemies still tried to link him to the book. One referred to the Tractatus as a book “forged in hell by the apostate Jew working together with the devil” and said (inaccurately) that it had been published “with the knowledge and complicity” of De Witt.

  Spinoza may have hoped the Tractatus would help the grand pensionary, but it did the reverse. De Witt’s time was at an end. Years of skillful diplomacy in the European theater—in which he had manipulated numerous heads of state—combined with the massive profits Dutch companies had garnered, had led to the buildup of black clouds of resentment abroad. They erupted in 1672, and the ensuing storm marked the end of the Dutch golden age.

  As if in monarchic reaction to the boisterous republicanism that had flourished under De Witt, two of history’s most exuberantly aristocratic kings—Charles II of England and Louis XIV of France—attacked the little Dutch Republic simultaneously. The causes of the twin wars were numerous, and included money, but among Charles’s interests was seeing his nephew Willem of Orange put on a Dutch throne. De Witt was caught with his guard down. He had kept the Dutch army weak, out of fear that Orangists would use it to install Willem as stadholder. Now foreign armies invaded on two fronts, and Dutch towns were all but defenseless. A combined Anglo-French fleet, led by James, Duke of York and brother to King Charles, quickly decimated Dutch shipping. More than 130,000 troops crossed from the east onto Dutch soil. Cities that had stood up to Spain for eighty years collapsed in a week. Thousands of townspeople were killed seemingly overnight. Rioting broke out; city councils, desperate to save their people, voted to capitulate.