“Rebekah—” Bento strained to keep his voice calm. “This is the last time, the very last time, we shall be with one another. The cherem means absolute exile. It will forbid you to speak to me or contact me in any way ever again. Ever again. Think of how you, how all three of us, will feel if our last meeting is bitter and devoid of love.”
Gabriel, too agitated to remain seated, also stood and paced about. “Bento, why do you keep saying ‘last’? Last time we will see you, last request, last meeting? How long is the cherem? When will it end? I’ve heard of one-day cherems or one-week cherems.”
Bento swallowed and looked into the eyes of his brother and sister. “This will be a different type of cherem. I know about cherems, and if they do it properly, this cherem will have no end. It will be for a lifetime, and it will be irreversible.”
“Go back to the rabbi,” said Rebekah. “Take his offer, Bento, please. We all make mistakes when we are young. Rejoin us. Honor God. Be the Jew you are. Be your father’s son. Rabbi Mortera will pay you for life. You can read, study, do anything you want, think anything you want. Just keep it to yourself. Take his offer, Bento. Don’t you see that for the sake of our father he is paying you not to commit suicide?”
“Please,” Gabriel clasped Bento’s hand, “take his offer. Make a new start.”
“He would be paying me to do something I cannot do. I intend to pursue truth and to devote my life to knowing God, whereas the rabbi’s offer demands I live dishonestly and thus dishonor God. I shall never do that. I shall follow no power on earth other than my own conscience.”
Rebekah began to sob. She put her hands behind her head and rocked as she said, “I don’t understand you, don’t understand, don’t understand.”
Bento went to her and put his hand on her shoulder. She shrugged it away, then raised her head and turned to Gabriel. “You were too young, but I remember, as if it were yesterday, our blessed father bragging that Rabbi Mortera called Bento the best student he’d ever seen.”
She looked at Bento, tears cascading down her face. “The cleverest and the deepest, he said. How our father beamed when he heard you might be the next great scholar, perhaps the next Gersonides. That you would write the great seventeenth-century Torah commentary! The rabbi believed in you. He said that your mind retained everything and that none of the synagogue elders could stand up to you in debate. And yet now, despite this, despite your God-given gifts, look at what you’ve done. How could you throw everything away?” Rebekah took the handkerchief Gabriel held out.
Bending to look directly into her eyes, Bento said, “Rebekah, please try to understand. Maybe not now but perhaps sometime in the future you will understand these words: I took my own path because of my gifts, not despite them. Do you understand? Because of my gifts, not despite them.”
“No, I do not understand it, and I shall never understand you, even though I have known you since birth, even though the three of us slept in the same bed for so many years after mother died.”
“I remember,” said Gabriel. “I remember us sleeping together and you reading us stories from the Bible, Bento. And secretly teaching both Rebekah and Miriam to read. I remember how you said it was so unfair that girls weren’t taught to read.”
“I told my husband that,” said Rebekah. “I tell him everything: I told him how you taught us, and read to us, and questioned everything, all the miracles. And how you used to run to father and ask, ‘Father, father, did that really happen?’ I remember your reading to us about Noah and the flood and asking father whether God could really be so cruel. You asked, ‘Why did he drown everyone? And how did the human race start again?’ And ‘Who could Noah’s children marry?’—the same question you asked about Cain and Abel. Samuel believes those were the first signs of your malady. A curse from birth. Sometimes I think I’m to blame. I confessed to my husband that I used to giggle at everything you said, all your blasphemous remarks. Maybe I encouraged you to think that way.”
Bento shook his head. “No, Rebekah, take no blame for my curiosity. It is my nature. Why do we seek to take blame for something happening for reasons outside of ourselves? Remember how father blamed himself for our brother’s death? How many times did we hear him say that if he hadn’t sent Isaac to make deliveries of coffee beans into other neighborhoods, he would never have caught the plague. It’s Nature’s course. We can’t control it. Taking blame is just a way of deceiving ourselves into thinking we are powerful enough to control Nature. And, Rebekah, please know that I respect your husband. Samuel is a fine man. It’s just that we disagree about the source of knowledge. I don’t believe that questioning is a malady. Blind obedience without questioning is the malady.”
Rebekah had no reply. The three lapsed into silence until Gabriel asked, “Bento, a forever cherem? Is there such a thing? I’ve never heard of it.”
“I’m sure that’s what they will do, Gabriel. Rabbi Mortera says they must do this to show the Dutch we can govern ourselves. Perhaps it’s best for everyone. It will reunite you and Rebekah with your community. You will have to join with the others and obey the cherem. You must be a part of the shunning. You, like everyone else, must obey the law and avoid me.”
“Best for everyone, Bento?” asked Gabriel. “How can you speak like that? How can it be best for you? How is it best to live among people who despise you?”
“I will not stay here; I’ll live elsewhere.”
“Where could you live?” asked Rebekah. “Are you planning to convert to Christianity?”
“No. Rest easy about that. I find much wisdom in the words of Jesus. They are similar to the central message in our Bible. But I shall never ascribe to any superstitious views about a God who, like any human, has a son and sends him on a mission to save us. Like all religions, including our own, the Christians imagine a God who has human attributes and human desires and needs.”
“But where will you live, if you’re going to remain a Jew?” asked Rebekah. “A Jew can live only with Jews.”
“I’ll find a way to live without a Jewish community.”
“Bento, you may be gifted, but you’re also a simple-minded child,” Rebekah said. “Have you really thought it through? Have you forgotten Uriel da Costa?”
“Who?” asked Gabriel.
“Da Costa was a heretic who got a cherem from Rabbi Modena, Rabbi Mortera’s teacher,” said Rebekah. “You were still an infant, Gabriel. Da Costa challenged all our laws—the Torah, the skullcap, the tefillin, circumcision, even the mezuzahs on our doors—just like your brother. Worst of all he denied the immortality of our soul and the resurrection of the body. One by one other Jewish communities in Germany and Italy also expelled him by cherem. No one here wanted him, but he kept pleading to come back. Finally we accepted him. Then he started his lunacy again. And once again he begged for forgiveness, and the synagogue held a ceremony of penance. You were far too young, Gabriel, but Bento and I saw that ceremony together. Do you remember?”
Bento nodded, and Rebekah continued, “In the synagogue he had to strip, and he received thirty-nine terrible lashes to his back and then after the ceremony ended had to lie down in the doorway while everyone in the entire congregation stepped on him as they left, and all the children chased him and spit on him. We didn’t join them—father wouldn’t permit it. A short time after that he took a gun and shot himself in the head.”
“That’s what happens,” she said, turning to Bento. “There is no life outside of the community. He couldn’t do it, and you won’t either. How will you live? You will have no money—you won’t be permitted to run a business in this community—and Gabriel and I will be forbidden to help you. Miriam and I took an oath to our mother that we’d take care of you, and when Miriam was dying, she asked me to look out for you and Gabriel. But now I can do nothing more. How will you live?”
“I don’t know, Rebekah. My needs are few. You know that. Look around.” He swept his arm around the room. “I can do with little.”
“But
answer me, how will you live? Without money. Without friends?”
“I am thinking of working with glass for a living. Grinding lenses. I think I’ll be good at that.”
“Glass for what?”
“Spectacles. Magnifying glasses. Maybe even telescopes.”
Rebekah looked at her brother in amazement. “A Jew grinding glass. What has happened to you, Bento? Why are you so bizarre? You have no interest in real life. Not in a woman, a wife, a family. You used to say all the time when we were children that you wanted to marry me, but for years—ever since your bar mitzvah—you’ve never mentioned marriage again, and I’ve never heard you take any interest in any woman. It’s unnatural. You know what I think? I think you never recovered from our mother’s death. You watched her die, wheezing and struggling to breathe. It was awful. I remember how you held my hand on the funeral barge taking her body to Beth Haim burial ground at Ouderkerk. You would not speak a word that whole day—you just fixated on the horse pulling the barge along the canal. The neighbors and friends were wailing and keening so loud that the Dutch bailiffs boarded and hushed us. And then, all through the burial ceremony, you had your eyes closed as though you were sleeping standing up. You didn’t see how they circled mother’s body seven times. I pinched you when she was placed in the ground, and you opened your eyes and were terrified and tried to run away when everyone started throwing handfuls of dirt on her. Maybe it was too much—maybe you were scorched too badly by her death. You hardly talked for weeks after that. Maybe you never got over it, and you won’t risk loving another woman, won’t risk another loss, another death like that. Maybe that’s why you won’t let anyone matter to you.”
Bento shook his head. “That’s not right, Rebekah. You matter to me. And Gabriel matters to me. Never seeing you again will be painful. You speak as though I’m not human.”
Rebekah continued as though she hadn’t heard him, “I believe you haven’t recovered from all the deaths. At our brother Isaac’s death you showed so little feeling, as though you weren’t even comprehending it. And then when Father told you that you had to stop your rabbinical studies to take over the shop, you simply nodded. In one instant your whole life was changed, and yet you just nodded. As though it were of little matter.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” said Gabriel. “Losing our parents is not the explanation. I’ve lived in this same family, suffered the same deaths, and I don’t think like Bento. I want to be a Jew. I want a wife and family.”
“And,” said Bento, “when did you hear me say a family was unimportant? I am full of happiness for you, Gabriel. I love the idea of you starting your family. It deeply pains me to think I shall never see your children.”
“But you love ideas, not people,” interjected Rebekah. “Maybe it comes from the way Father raised you. You remember the honey board?”
Bento nodded.
“What?” asked Gabriel.
“When Bento was very young, maybe three or four—I don’t remember—Father taught him how to read with a strange method. Later he told me it was common teaching practice hundreds of years ago. He gave Bento a board on which was painted the entire aleph, bet, gimmel and covered it with honey. He told Bento to lick off all the honey. Father thought it would help Bento love the Hebrew letters and love language.
“Maybe it worked too well,” Rebekah continued. “Maybe that’s why you care more about books and ideas than you care for people.”
Bento hesitated. Anything he might say would make matters worse. Neither his sister nor his brother could open their minds to his ideas, and perhaps that was best after all. If he succeeded in helping them see the problems of blind obedience to the authority of the rabbi, then their hopes of contentment in their marriages and their community would be jeopardized. He would have to leave them without their blessing.
“I know you’re angry, Rebekah, and you, too, Gabriel. And when I see this from your viewpoint, I can understand why. But you cannot see it from mine, and it saddens me that we must part without understanding. Small comfort that it may be, my parting words are these: I promise you that I shall live a holy life and follow the words of the Torah by loving others, doing no harm, following the path of virtue, and directing my thoughts upon our infinite and eternal God.”
But Rebekah was not listening. She had more to say. “Think of your father, Bento. He does not lie next to his wives, neither our mother nor Esther. He lies in hallowed ground next to the holiest of men. He lies in his eternal sleep, honored for his devotion to the synagogue and to our law. Our father knew about the imminent arrival of the Messiah, and he knew about the immortality of the soul. Think—think how he would feel about his son Baruch. Think how he does feel, because his spirit does not die. It hovers, it sees, it knows the heresy of his chosen son. He curses you at this moment!”
Bento could not restrain himself. “You are doing precisely what the rabbis and scholars do. And this is precisely where they and I part company. You all proclaim with such certainty that our father’s spirit watches me and curses me. Whence cometh your certainty? Not from the Torah! I know it by heart, and it doesn’t contain a word of this. There is no evidence whatsoever for your claims about Father’s spirit. I know you hear such fairy tales from our rabbis, but don’t you see how it serves their purposes? They control us by fear and hope: fear of what will happen after death and hope that if we live in some particular fashion—one that is good for the congregation and for the continued authority of the rabbis—we will enjoy a blissful life in the world to come.”
Rebekah had put her hands over her ears, but Bento merely spoke louder, “I say to you that when the body dies, the soul dies. There is no world to come. I shall not permit the rabbis or anyone else to forbid me to reason, for it is only through reason that we can know God, and this quest is the only true source of blessedness in this life.”
Rebekah stood and prepared to leave. She moved close to Bento and looked into his eyes. “I love you as you once were in our family,” and she hugged him. “And now”—she slapped him hard in the face—“I hate you.” She grabbed Gabriel’s hand and tugged him out of the room.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
MUNICH—1919
The next morning, while Alfred waited for Spinoza’s book in the library line, a dream from the night before drifted into his mind: I’m walking and talking with Friedrich in the forest. Suddenly he vanishes, and I’m alone and pass other people who seem not to see me. I feel invisible. I am unseen. Then the forest darkens. I feel frightened. That was all he could recall. There was more, he knew, but he could not retrieve it. Strange, he thought, how fleeting dreams could be. In fact he had not even remembered having a dream at all until this snippet simply popped into his mind. The recollection must have been prompted by a linkage between Spinoza and Friedrich. Here he was in line to get Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, the book that Friedrich had suggested he read before attempting to read the Ethics. How odd that Friedrich came to mind so often—after all, they had only met twice. No, that wasn’t entirely true. Friedrich knew him as a child. Perhaps it was simply the singular, oddly personal nature of their conversation.
When Alfred arrived in the office, Eckart had not yet put in an appearance. That was not unusual, as Eckart drank heavily every evening and his morning working hours were irregular. Alfred began browsing through the preface of Spinoza’s book, which described what he intended to prove. No problem reading this book—the prose was crystal clear. Friedrich was right, it was a mistake to have started with the Ethics. The very first page riveted Alfred’s attention. “Fear breeds superstition,” he read. And: “Weak and greedy people in adversity use prayers and womanish tears to implore help from God.” How could a seventeenth-century Jew have written that? Those were the words of a twentieth-century German!
The next page described how the “pomp and ceremony invested in religion clogs the mind of men with dogmatism, crowds out sound reason leaving not enough room for even a modicum of doubt.”
Amazing! And it didn’t stop there! Spinoza went on to speak of religion as “a tissue of ridiculous mysteries” that attracts men “who flatly despise reason.” Alfred gasped. His eyes grew wider.
The Hebrews as God’s “chosen people”? “Nonsense,” said Spinoza. An informed and honest reading of Mosaic law, Spinoza insisted, revealed that God favored the Jews only by selecting for them a thin strip of territory where they could live in peace.
And scripture the “word of God”? Spinoza’s powerful prose scattered that idea to the winds as he claimed that the Bible contains only spiritual truth—namely, the practice of justice and charity—not terrestrial truths. All those who find terrestrial laws and truths in the Bible are mistaken or self-interested, Spinoza insisted.
The preface ended with a warning, “I ask the multitude not to read my book,” and went on to explain that the “superstitious, unlearned populace, who hold that reason is nothing but a handmaid to theology, will gain nothing from this work. Indeed their faith may be disturbingly unsettled.”
Stunned by these words, Alfred could not help marveling at Spinoza’s audacity. The short, biographical introduction stated that though the book was published anonymously in 1670 (when Spinoza was thirty-eight) the identity of the author was widely known. To state these words in 1670 took courage: 1670 was only two generations after Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy and only a single generation after Galileo’s trial by the Vatican. The introduction noted that the book was quickly banned by the state, by the Catholic Church, by the Jews, and soon after, by the Calvinists. All that spoke well for it.
There could be no denying the extraordinary intelligence of the author. Now, finally, finally, he understood why the great Goethe and all the other Germans he loved so much—Schelling, Schiller, Hegel, Lessing, Nietzsche—revered this man. How could they not admire a mind like this? But, of course, they lived in another century and knew nothing about the new science of race, nothing of the dangers of poisoned blood—they simply admired this mutation, this extraordinary blossom emerging from slime. Alfred looked at the title page: “Benedictus Spinoza”—hmm, Benedictus, a name with the greatest possible distance from a Semitic name. The biographical sketch noted that he was excommunicated by the Jews in his twenties and never again had contact with a Jew. So he was not truly a Jew. He was a mutation—the Jews recognized he was not a Jew, and, in taking this name, he must have realized it too.