The Spinoza Problem (19 page)

Astonished, Baruch looked into the rabbi’s eyes. “What do you mean ‘work with you’? Your words mystify me. Keep in mind I am a shopkeeper, and I am under
cherem
.”

“The
cherem
is pending. It is not reality until I have pronounced it publicly at the synagogue. Yes, the parnassim holds ultimate authority, but I have great influence with them. Two newly arrived Marranos, Franco Benitez and Jacob Mendoza, gave witness, highly damaging witness, yesterday to the parnassim. They reported that you believe God is nothing more than Nature and that there is no world to come. Yes, that was damaging, but between you and me, I distrust their testimony, and I know they distorted your words. They are the nephews of Duarte Rodriguez, who remains incensed at you for turning to
the Dutch court to avoid your debt to him, and I am persuaded that he has ordered them to lie. And, trust me, I am not the only one who believes that.”

“They did not lie, Rabbi.”

“Baruch, come to your senses. I’ve known you since your birth, and I know that from time to time you, like anyone else, can harbor foolish thoughts. I beseech you: study with me; let me purify your mind. Now listen to me. I will make you an offer that I would make to no one else on earth. I am certain I can grant you
a lifelong pension that will permanently take you out of the import-export business and into a life as a scholar
. You hear that? I offer you the gift of a life of scholarship, a life of reading and thinking. You can even think forbidden thoughts while you seek the confirmatory or negating evidence from rabbinical scholarship. Think about that offer: a lifetime of total freedom. It comes with only one stipulation:
silence
. You must agree to keep to yourself all thoughts that are injurious to our people.”

Baruch seemed frozen in thought. After a long silence, the rabbi said, “What do you say, Baruch? Now, when it is time for you to speak, you remain silent.”

“More times than I can remember,” Baruch responded in a calm voice, “my father spoke of his friendship with you and his high regard for you. He also told me of your high opinion of my mind—‘limitless intelligence’ were the words he attributed to you. Were these indeed your words? Did he cite you correctly?”

“Those were my words.”

“I believe the world and everything in it operate according to natural law and that I can use my intelligence, provided I employ it in a rational mode, to discover the nature of God and reality and the path to a blessed life. I’ve said this to you before, have I not?”

Rabbi Mortera placed his head in his hands and nodded.

“And yet today you suggest that I spend my life confirming or negating my views by consulting rabbinical scholarship. That is not and will not be my way. Rabbinical authority is not based on purity of truth. It rests only on the expressed opinions of generations of superstitious scholars, scholars who believed the world was flat, circled by the sun, and that one man named Adam suddenly appeared and fathered the human race.”

“You deny the divinity of Genesis?”

“Do you deny the evidence showing that there were civilizations long predating the Israelites? In China? In Egypt?”

“Such blasphemy. Do you not realize how you jeopardize your place in the world to come?”

“There is no rational evidence for the existence of a world to come.”

Rabbi Mortera looked thunderstruck. “This is exactly what Duarte Rodriquez’s nephews quoted you as saying. I had thought they were lying at the orders of their uncle.”

“I believe you did not hear me, or did not want to hear me, when I said earlier, ‘
They did not lie
, Rabbi.’”

“And the other charges they made? That you deny the divine source of the Torah, that Moses did not write the Torah, that God exists only philosophically, and that ceremonial law is not sacred?”

“The nephews did not lie, Rabbi.”

Rabbi Mortera glared at Baruch, his anguish turning to anger. “Any single one of these charges is cause for
cherem
; together they deserve the harshest cherem ever issued.”

“You have been my Hebrew teacher, and you have taught me well. Allow me to repay you by composing the
cherem
for you. You once showed me some of the most brutal
cherems
issued by the Venetian community, and I remember every word of them.”

“I said earlier you would have time enough for insolence. Now, I see, it already begins.” Rabbi Mortera paused to collect himself. “You want to kill me. You want to destroy my work utterly. You know that my life work has been the vital role of the afterlife in Jewish thought and culture. You know about my book,
The Survival of the Soul
, which I placed into your hands at your bar mitzvah. You know of my great debate with Rabbi Aboab about that matter and my victory?”

“Yes, of course.”

“You shrug that off lightly. Do you have any idea of the stakes involved? If I had lost that debate, if it were decreed that
all
Jews have an equal status in the world to come and that virtue would be unrewarded and transgression would have no penalty, can you not foresee the repercussions upon the community? If they are insured a place in the world to come, then what is the incentive to convert back to Judaism? If there is no penalty for wrongdoing, can you imagine how the Dutch Calvinists would regard us? How long
would our freedom last? Do you think I was playing a child’s game? Think of the implications.”

“Yes, that great debate—your words have just demonstrated that it was not a debate about spiritual truth. No doubt that is why the Venetian rabbinate was confounded. Both of you argued for different versions of the afterlife for reasons that have nothing to do with the reality of the afterlife. You attempt to control the populace through the power of fear and hope—the traditional cudgels of religious leaders throughout history. You, the rabbinical authorities everywhere, claim to hold the keys to the afterlife, and you use those keys for political control. Rabbi Aboab, on the other hand, took his stand to minister to the anguish of his congregation who wanted to offer help for their converso families. This was not a spiritual disagreement. It was a political debate masquerading as a religious debate. Neither of you offered any proof for the existence of the world to come, either a proof from reason or even proof from the words of the Torah. I assure you it is not to be found in the Torah, and you know that.”

“You obviously did not assimilate what I’ve been telling you about my responsibility to God and to the persistence of our people,” Rabbi Mortera said.

“Much of what religious leaders do has little to do with God,” Baruch replied. “Last year you gave a
cherem
to a man who bought meat from a kosher Ashkenazi butcher rather than a Sephardic butcher. You think that was relevant to God?”

“It was a short
cherem
highly instructive about the importance of community cohesion.”

“And I learned last month that you told a woman who came from a small village without a Jewish baker that she could buy bread from a Gentile baker provided she tossed a wood chip into his oven so as to participate in the baking.”

“She came to me distressed and left my presence relieved and a happy woman.”

“She left a woman with a mind more stunted than before, a woman even less able to think for herself and to develop her rational faculties. This is exactly my point: religious authorities of all hues seek to impede the development of our rational faculties.”

“If you think our people can survive without control and authority, you are a fool.”

“I think that religious leaders lose their own spiritual direction by meddling into the business of the political state. Your authority or consul should be confined to counsel about inward piety.”

“The business of the political state? Have you not understood what happened in Spain and Portugal?”

“That is precisely my point: they were religious states. Religion and statehood must be separated. The best imaginable ruler would be a freely elected leader who is limited in his powers by an independently elected council and who would act in accord with public peace and safety and social well-being.”

“Baruch, you have now succeeded in persuading me that you shall live a lonely life and that your future will include not only blasphemy but treason as well. Be gone.”

As he listened to Baruch’s footsteps clattering down the stairs, Rabbi Mortera looked upward and muttered, “Michael, my friend, I have done what I could for your son. I have too many other souls to protect.”

I
magine the scene: a shabbily dressed, unemployed, unpublished immigrant youth, soup kitchen spoon in shirt pocket, barges into the office of a well-known journalist, poet, and politician and blurts out, “Can you use a fighter against Jerusalem?”

Surely an ill-fated beginning of a job interview! Any responsible, well-bred, sophisticated editor in chief would be quick to dismiss the intruder as puerile, bizarre, and possibly dangerous. But no—the time was 1919, the place was Munich, and Dietrich Eckart was intrigued by the youth’s beautiful words.

“Well, well, young warrior, show me your weapons.”

“My mind is my bow, and my words are—” Taking a pencil from his pocket and waving it aloft, Alfred exclaimed, “My words are my arrows!”

“Well said, young warrior. And tell me of your exploits, your assaults against Jerusalem.”

Alfred trembled with excitement as he recounted his anti-Jerusalem exploits: his near-memorization of Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s book, his anti-Semitic election speech at age sixteen, his confrontation with the suspected Jew Headmaster Epstein (he omitted the Spinoza part), his revulsion at the sight of the Jewish-Bolshevist revolution, his recent, rousing anti-Jew speech at the Reval town meeting, his plan to write an eyewitness account of the Jewish Bolshevists in revolt, his historical research into the menace of Jewish blood.

“An excellent beginning. But only a beginning. Next we must inspect the caliber of your weapons. In twenty-four hours, bring me a thousand
words of your eyewitness account of the Bolshevist revolution, and we’ll see if it merits publication.”

Alfred made no move to leave. He glanced again at Dietrich Eckart, an imposing man with a shaved head, dark-rimmed glasses shielding blue eyes, short fleshy nose, and a broad, rather brutal chin.

“Twenty-four hours, young man. Time to begin.”

Alfred looked about him, obviously reluctant to leave Eckart’s office. Then, timidly: “Is there a desk, a corner, and some paper I might use? I have only the library, which is now crammed with illiterate refugees trying to stay warm.”

Dietrich Eckart signaled to his secretary. “Show this applicant to the back office. And give him some paper and a key.” To Alfred, he said, “It’s poorly heated but quiet and has a separate entrance, so you may work though the night, if necessary.
Auf Wiedersehen
, until tomorrow at precisely this time.”

Dietrich Eckart put his feet on his desk, tamped out his cigar in the ashtray, and leaned back in his chair for a catnap. Though only in his early fifties, he had been unkind to his body, and his flesh hung heavily upon him. Born into a wealthy family, the son of a royal notary and attorney, he had lost his mother in childhood, his father a few years later, and in his late teens had drifted into a drug-immersed Bohemian life, which soon dissipated the fortune left by his father. After a series of false starts in the arts and radical political movements, and a year of medical school, he slipped into serious morphine addiction, which necessitated psychiatric hospitalization for several months. He then became a playwright, but none of his work ever saw the stage. Fully convinced of his literary merit, he placed the blame for his failure on the Jews, who he believed controlled German theaters and were offended by his political views. His desire for revenge gave birth to a career as a professional anti-Semite: born again as a journalist, he launched
Auf gut Deutsch
as the latest of a series of publications intended to combat the power of the Jews. In 1919 the time was propitious, his journalistic style compelling, and soon his paper became required reading for those interested in nefarious Jewish machinations.

Though Dietrich’s health was poor and his energy level low, his thirst for change was huge, and he avidly awaited the arrival of the German savior—a man of extraordinary force and charisma who would lead Germany to its
rightful position of glory. He saw immediately that this young handsome Rosenberg was not that man: Rosenberg’s pitiful craving for approval stuck out too obviously from behind his brash presentation. But perhaps there might be a role for him in preparing the way for the one yet to come.

T
he following day Alfred sat in Eckart’s office, nervously crossing and uncrossing his legs, as he watched the publisher read his thousand words.

Eckart removed his glasses and looked up at Alfred. “For someone who has a degree in architecture and has never written such prose before, I would say this work is not without promise. It’s true that these thousand words contain not a single grammatically correct sentence, but despite that inconvenient fact your work has some power. There is tension, there is intelligence and complexity, and there are even a few, not enough, graphic images. I hereby announce that your journalistic virginity is at an end. I will publish this article. But there is work ahead: Every sentence shrieks for help. Pull your chair over here, Alfred, and we’ll go over it line by line.”