History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  The trouble with Spinoza’s pantheism, however, was that he pushed it to the point where it was impossible to make valid distinctions between it and atheism. He himself insisted he had not said that the material world, as we see it and treat it, was God. He states in his Ethics that ‘We easily conceive the whole of nature to be one individual,’ because one individual can be part of a larger one, ad infinitum. But he does not see God as a person. He states in terms that to credit God with such attributes as ‘will’ or ‘intellect’ would be like asking Sirius to bark, just because we call it the Dog Star. In fact he only retains the word God at all for historical and sentimental reasons. Identifying God with the whole of reality, he has to agree with the atheist when the latter insists that reality cannot be divided into a part which is God and one which is non-God—both of them deny an effective contrast.89 But if God cannot be isolated from anything else, it is impossible to say He ‘exists’ in any sense an ordinary person can grasp. Spinoza was saying: ‘There is no God in the sense we have always understood the word.’ To most people that is atheism. The German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716) knew Spinoza well and was certainly in a position to penetrate his mind on this matter. He was a careerist, and he has often been accused of cowardice in seeking to distance himself from Spinoza’s work as it attracted opprobrium. But he correctly summed up Spinoza’s position in the religious spectrum thus: ‘He was truly an atheist in that he did not acknowledge any Providence which distributes good fortune and bad according to what is just.’90

  Spinoza’s work represents the hypertrophy of one aspect of the Jewish spirit: its tendency not just to rationalize but to intellectualize. He was one of those who thought it might be possible to resolve all disputes and conflicts of opinion and reach human perfection by a process of logic. He believed the problems of ethics could be solved by geometrical-type proofs. He was thus in the tradition of Maimonides, who argued that perfect worldly peace could be achieved through reason—that was how he thought the Messianic Age would come. But Maimonides imagined this state being reached when the Law was fully observed in all its noble rationality. It would be achieved on the basis of Revelation, through the Torah. Spinoza, however, did not believe in Revelation and wanted to scrap the Torah. He thought the end could be achieved by pure intellect.

  That led him into a posture of anti-humanism. He sought to give man what he called ‘all the remedies against the emotions’. To a limited extent this is attractive. Spinoza wanted to overcome passion. He certainly practised what he preached. He never in his life became angry, despite much provocation, or lost his temper. He was self-disciplined, self-denying to the point of heroism. All sin was due to ignorance, he argued; miseries have to be understood, seen in relation to their causes, and as part of the whole order of nature. Once this is grasped, one does not yield to sorrow, hatred, the desire for revenge. ‘Hatred is increased by being reciprocated; on the other hand, it can be destroyed by love. Hatred which is completely vanquished by love is transformed into love; and love is thereupon greater than if hate had not preceded it.’ But Spinoza’s ‘love’ is a peculiar thing. All is predetermined. He does not believe in free will. So hope and fear are bad; so are humility and repentance. ‘He who repents of an action is doubly wretched or infirm.’ Whatever happens is God’s will. The wise man tries to see the world as God sees it. Only ignorance makes us think we can alter the future. Once we grasp this we can free ourselves from fear; thus freed, we meditate not on death, but on life. When we understand ourselves and our feelings, from which passion has been removed, we can love God. But this is not person-to-person love, of course, since God is not a person but everything; and love is not a passion, but understanding. God, or rather ‘God’, has no passions or pleasures or pains; loves and hates no one. So ‘he who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return’. Or again: ‘the intellectual love of the mind towards God is part of the infinite love wherewith God loves himself’.91

  It is not hard to see why Spinoza appeals to a certain cerebral but heartless type of philosopher, like Bertrand Russell; or why other people find him bloodless, even repellent. Among contemporaries Spinoza, like Hobbes—from whom he acquired a certain chilly rigour—inspired genuine fear. It might have been better if he had felt free to abandon the use of code-words like ‘God’ altogether, and written plainly. His influence on other key European writers was incalculable. He fascinated both French intellectuals, such as Voltaire, and the Germans, such as Lessing, who remarked: ‘There is no other philosophy than the philosophy of Spinoza.’ But so far as the Jews themselves were concerned, he simply mined out one vein of inquiry: he carried the rationalist tradition of Maimonides not so much to its logical conclusion as out of Judaism altogether.

  There remained the irrationalist tradition. It had triumphed in the fourteenth century. Its kabbalah had been received into normative Judaism. It had received a stunning blow with the apostasy of Shabbetai Zevi. Shabbeteanism had gone underground. The antics of Jacob Frank showed that this tradition, too, could take the enthusiastic and the obstinate out of Judaism. The huge emotional energy and fervour which had powered the messianic movement in the 1660s remained. Was there no way it could be allowed to express itself and yet at the same time remain harnessed—if only loosely—to the Judaic chariot?

  In the eighteenth century the problem was not confined to Judaism. The scientific revolution that preceded the industrial one was already under way by 1700. Newton’s theory of a mechanical cosmos, governed by iron mathematical laws, had triumphed. At the top of society, scepticism was spreading. Established religious leaders were cool, urbane, worldly, inclined to tolerance because they did not care deeply about fine points of doctrine for which their predecessors had killed and been killed. But the masses, whose lives were hard, needed more. Men arose to give it to them. In Germany there was the Pietist Movement. In England there were the Wesley Brothers and their Methodism. In America there was the first Great Awakening. In eastern Europe, where more than half of all the Jews now lived, there was hasidism.

  Pious fervour among the Jewish masses of Poland was not just a religious force. It had radical undertones. Jewish society was authoritarian and often oppressive. It was run by an intermarried oligarchy of rich merchants and lawyer-rabbis. The system of councils gave this elite formidable powers and the franchise which elected it was narrow. The oligarchy was not closed, for education offered a ladder of ascent. In theory even the poor had full access to it. The cathedocracy was, of necessity, a meritocracy too. Yet most of the poor remained, and felt, powerless. They were nothing in synagogue. They might petition against a rabbi; but no notice was taken if his family background was right. On the contrary: many local ordinances punished all those ‘who gossip and jest about the deeds of the town notables’. The spirit of oppression was felt not just communally, but within families. The ghetto was a patriarchy as well. A father was entitled to use force to teach Torah to a son once he was twelve. After he was thirteen, the Deuteronomic Law of the Rebellious Son applied. In theory a defiant son could be taken before the elders, convicted and stoned to death; he could be scourged even on the first offence. The Talmud said no such case had ever occurred, but the shadow of the Law lay over the son. A daughter could be contracted into marriage by her father while she was still a minor. In theory she could reject the husband when she became bogeret, at twelve and a half, but this rarely happened. Children were taught that honouring parents was equivalent to honouring God.92 In short, there was an excessive amount of subordination in the ghetto.

  But it is one of the glories of the Jews that they do not meekly submit to their own appointed authorities. The Jew is the eternal protestant. And Jewish tradition, albeit often reluctantly, gives the protestor a place. It also allows a holy man to operate outside the standard religious structure. We have already come across the ba’al shem, the Master of the Divine Name. This type went back to the days of the Babylonian geonim. From the
sixteenth century there were numbers of them in Ashkenazi Jewry, performing practical kabbalah. A few were genuine scholars. Most wrote amulets or performed folk-medicine cures, by means of special prayers, incantations, herbs and bits of animals. They specialized in mental disorders and casting out dybbuks.

  In about 1736 one of these men, Israel ben Eliezer, later known as the Ba’al Shem Tov (c. 1700-60), or the Besht, from the initials, felt the call. He was an orphan, born in Okop in backward Podolia. At various times he had helped in the ritual slaughterhouse, worked in the claypits of the Carpathian mountains, served as a synagogue watchman and a sexton, and kept an inn. Portraits usually show him with a pipe in hand or mouth. He was a man of the people. He was quite outside the line of apostolic succession of rabbis, which in theory could be traced back to Moses. He had little learning. No authentic work of his has survived. Letters bearing his signature may be forged. His homilies were put down in writing by disciples. He worked outside the synagogue system and never seems to have preached there. But, like John Wesley, he travelled around the country. He wrote amulets. He cured and purged men of their evil spirits, did in fact all the things an ordinary holy man would do. But in addition he had genuine charisma: men and women felt themselves capable of higher aspirations, or purer behaviour, in his presence. This impression of intense, though homely, sanctity was reinforced by his cures, which were often spectacular, by his dreams in which he correctly foretold events, by his mystical states and by the miracles attributed to him.93

  All this made him an influential individual. As he became known, he held his court, like a famous rabbi, and people came to see him from long distances. What made him the founder of a movement, however, was his creativity. He was responsible for two new institutions. The first was his revival of the ancient concept of the zaddik, or superior human being—superior because of his special capacity to adhere to God. The idea was as old as Noah. But the Ba’al Shem Tov gave him a special role. With the apostasy of Shabbetai Zevi, messianism had become discredited. The Besht had no time for Frankism or any messianic sect which moved away from Jewish monotheism. As he put it, ‘The Shekinah wails and says that as long as a limb is attached to the body there is hope of a cure. But when it is severed it cannot be restored, and every Jew is a limb of the Shekinah.’ So he had no intention of travelling down the road to severance. But he recognized that the vanished Messiah had left a hole in Jewish hearts. He filled it by reviving the zaddik, who (he taught) descends from the heights, rather like God’s grace and mercy. The zaddik, in Ba’al Shem Tov’s teaching, was not a messiah, but not quite an ordinary human being either—somewhere between the two. Moreover, since the zaddik did not claim a messianic role, there could be many of them. Thus a new kind of religious personality arose, to perpetuate and spread the movement.

  Secondly, he invented a revolutionary form of popular prayer. This was important because it enabled ordinary, humble Jews to contribute. The great strength of Lurianic kabbalah had been the feeling among the masses that they could hasten the coming of the Messiah by their prayers and piety. The Ba’al Shem Tov achieved a similar element of popular participation by the new theory of prayer which he and his successors taught. He stressed that prayer was not so much a human activity as a supernatural act, in which man breaks down the barriers of his natural existence and reaches into the divine world. How does man do this? He takes the prayer-book and concentrates all his mind on the letters. He does not read, he wills. As he does so, their actual shapes dissolve and—this is a typical kabbalistic idea—the divine attributes concealed in the letters become spiritually visible. It is like seeing through a transparent object. The Besht called it ‘entering into the letters of the prayers’ or the ‘heavenly halls’—a man knew he was worthy when he ‘passed into the halls of the prayers’.94

  The Besht taught that, in order to enter in, the man has to annihilate his personality and become nothing. He thus creates a vacuum, which is filled up by a sort of supernal being, who acts and speaks for him. When the words of the prayer-book blur and merge into a single point, the transformation occurs, the man ceases human activity and, instead of the man sending up his words, they are sent down into his mouth. The mouth continues to speak but the spirit supplies the thoughts. The Besht said: ‘I let the mouth speak whatever it wants to say.’95 His successor, leader in the second generation of Hasidism, Dov Baer, explained that the spiritual power which made this divine possession possible arose because the Torah and God were actually one, and divine energy, as it were, was stored up in the letters of the book. A successful act of contemplative prayer released this power. Dov Baer used another simile: ‘When a man studies or prays, the word should be uttered with full strength, like the ejaculation of a drop of semen from his whole body, when his [entire] strength is present in that drop.’96

  Hence hasidic ceremonies became very noisy affairs. They scorned the synagogue. They had their own shtiblekh, or prayer houses, where they assembled in their rustic clothes and broad fur hats. Some smoked or drank if they felt like it. When they prayed, often at the top of their voices, they swayed and clapped their hands. They sang a tune called a niggun and danced to it. They had their own special prayers, a mixture of Polish Ashkenazi and Luriac Sephardi. They were poor, rough people. They shocked the Jewish establishment, particularly when their practices spread all over Poland and into Lithuania. They were quickly accused of secret Shabbeteanism. There were angry calls for their suppression.

  In Elijah ben Solomon Zalman (1720-97), the gaon of Vilna, the early hasidics found a dedicated enemy. The gaon, even by the standards of Jewish infant prodigies, was a spectacular child. He had delivered a homily in the Vilna synagogue at the age of six. His secular as well as his religious knowledge was awesome. When marriage at eighteen brought him independent means, he purchased a small house outside Vilna and concentrated entirely on study. His sons said he never slept more than two hours a day, nor more than half an hour at a time. To eliminate distractions, he closed the shutters even in daytime and studied by candlelight. To stop himself falling asleep, he cut off the heating and put his feet in a bowl of cold water. As his power and influence in Vilna grew, so his devotion to study intensified. He did not despise kabbalah, but everything had to be subordinated to the demands of the halakhah. He regarded hasidism as an outrage. Its claims to ecstasy, miracles and visions were, he said, all lies and delusions. The idea of the zaddik was idolatry, worship of human beings. Most of all, its theory of prayer was a substitute for, an affront to, scholarship—the be-all and end-all of Judaism. He was the cathedocracy personified, and when asked his opinion about what should be done to the hasidim, he replied: persecute them.97 Fortunately for the orthodox, the hasidim had started to use unorthodox knives for the shehitah or ritual slaughter. The first herem was proclaimed against them in 1772. Their books were publicly burned. There was another herem in 1781, stating: ‘They must leave our communities with their wives and children…and they should not be given a night’s lodging. Their shehitah is forbidden. It is forbidden to do business with them, to intermarry with them, or assist at their burial.’ The gaon wrote: ‘it is the duty of every believing Jew to repudiate and pursue them with all manner of afflictions and subdue them, because they have sin in their hearts and are a sore on the body of Israel’.98

  But the hasidim replied with their own excommunications. They issued pamphlets to defend themselves. In Lithuania, and Vilna in particular, the gaon created an enclave of halakhic orthodoxy and scholarship, before departing to end his days in Erez Israel. But elsewhere hasidism established itself permanently as an important and seemingly necessary part of Judaism. It spread west into Germany and thence into the world. The orthodox attempt to destroy it failed. Indeed it was soon abandoned, as both scholars and enthusiasts united in the face of a new and common enemy—the Jewish enlightenment or haskalah.

  Although the haskalah was a specific episode in Jewish history, and the maskil or enlightened Jew is a special type peculiar t
o Judaism, the Jewish enlightenment is nevertheless part of the general European enlightenment. But it is, more particularly, linked to the enlightenment in Germany, and this for a very good reason. The movement in both France and Germany was concerned to examine and readjust man’s attitude to God. But whereas in France its tendency was to repudiate or downgrade God, and tame religion, in Germany it sought genuinely to reach a new understanding of and accomodation with the religious spirit in man. The French enlightenment was brilliant but fundamentally frivolous; the German was serious, sincere and creative. Hence it was to the German version that enlightened Jews felt attracted, which influenced them most, and to which they in turn made a substantial contribution.99 For perhaps the first time Jews in Germany began to feel a distinct affinity with German culture, and thus sowed in their hearts the seeds of a monstrous delusion.