One Line in a Book Doth a Blog Entry Make

 

Matthew Stewart’s The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World had been sitting unread on my bookshelf for several months. A couple days ago I decided it was time to actually read it. One sentence in Chapter 2 makes me glad I did.

The book revolves around the lives and philosophical positions of Baruch de Spinoza and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Both of them were born during the eventful 17^th century, when religion and the role of the nation-state were being challenged in complex and often violent ways. Spinoza was born into a family of Jewish ancestry who had fled the Iberian peninsula during the Catholic Church’s convulsions of intolerance, an event we now refer to as the Spanish Inquisition. Like many Jews and conversos (also known as New Christians, these were Jews who nominally converted to Catholicism in order to save their lives), Spinoza’s family ended up in the religiously tolerant Dutch Republic. Protestant and leaning toward democracy, the Dutch were considered a bastion of openness in the European theater of 17^th century religious conflict. Fueled by slavery and the spice trade, the people of Holland were affluent and enjoyed a high standard of living. Despite the openness of religious ideas, their unprecedented access to books and learning, and a republican government based on value in the community Jews were still only nominal citizens in their adopted homeland. In an effort to appease the Dutch Protestant authorities, an untoward comment by an individual in the Jewish community could easily result in isolation and ex-communication. Indeed this was the fate of Spinoza, who was banished from Amsterdam’s Jewish community on July 27, 1656 for practicing and teaching “abominable heresies” (Stewart 33).

The man who declared Spinoza “should be excommunicated and expelled from the people of Israel” in Holland was none other than Rabbi Saul Morteira (Stewart 33). Apparently the rabbi had taken to Spinoza and fancied the younger man as one of his followers. Rabbi Morteira, however, was sorely disappointed when Spinoza used his keen intellect in ways that challenged both the mentor-rabbi and the community that the elder man led. As a result, the rabbi laid a harsh judgment against Spinoza and the younger man spent the rest of his life as an outsider.

Interestingly, Rabbi Morteira also had a run-in with another man of keen intellect in the decade before he ex-communicated Spinoza. In this instance, the rabbi became engaged in a "doctrinal dispute" regarding the question of "entry to heaven for all Jews" (Stewart 26). As a result of the argument, Rabbi Morteira "engineered a humiliating demotion for his rival and did not rest until he had hounded the offending rabbi off to Brazil" (Stewart 26). It is this simple and, arguably, obscure sentence that makes me happy to have picked up Stewart's book. Why? Because while I was in Recife, I had the opportunity to visit the synagogue (now a museum) where Morteira's rival ended up.

Here's the story: The "offending rabbi" that Morteira hounded out of Amsterdam is known as the Rabbi Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, who arrived in Recife, Brazil in 1642. Fonseca, along with a small community of other Jews, established one congregation comprised of three synagogues in what is now known as Old Recife. Under a by-law approved by the Dutch West India Company in 1629 which stated "let them not be molested or subject to indignities in their consciousness or in their homes," Jews were given freedoms in the Americas that they had never experienced in their Iberian homeland. When Fonseca arrived in Recife, he became the rabbi for the Kahel Zur Israel (Congregation Rock of Israel), a synagogue located on a street called Joodenstraat (Street of theJews) in the oldest part of the city.

This photo of Fonseca was taken from a display board inside the museum showing the rabbi as a learned man of books. According to the museum display, he is known as the author of the first Hebrew text written in the Americas.

The museum also showed portions of the original structure built in the 1630s, including pipes, ceramics and a small rock-lined pit for the men to bathe themselves as an act of consecration prior to worship.

The young man pictured here, whose name I regrettably did not catch, served as our guide. He is a college student at the university in Recife, where he is studying history. His English was very good, a sign of his family's social status, and he offered helpful insight about the building's history. The rock wall behind him is part of the original synagogue. The book on the seat next to him was one I purchased. It was written by the curator, Tania Neumann Kaufman, entitled Lost Footsteps, History Recovered: The Jewish Presence in Pernambuco, Brazil. The book was translated from Portuguese to English by Paul Webb.

Unfortunately for the Jews of the New World, the Dutch incursion into Brazil was defeated by the Portuguese in 1654. As a result, all people of Jewish descent were forcibly removed from Brazil in a New World extension of the Spanish Inquisition. Many of those returned to Holland, but an important contingent traveled north to New Amsterdam, a recently formed city along the eastern coast of North America. Today, New Amsterdam is known as New York City. The renaming took place when the British kicked the Dutch out in 1664. (Those poor Dutch were getting quite a thrashing in those years) The rest is United States history.

One consequence of the Jewish migration from Brazil to New Amsterdam was that it became one of the earliest and most diverse cities to be established in the New World, a hallmark of New York that continues to this day.

One final note: Rabbi Isaac Aboab da Fonseca did not travel to North America when the Jews were expelled from Brazil. Instead he returned to Amsterdam where he became a leading figure in the Torah Or, a devout society which "met six days a week for half an hour" to study Maimonides' Sephardic text known as the Mishnah Torah (Bodian 107). Thus, one can surmise that the rabbi's experiences in Brazil served to consolidate his reputation as a scholar and a religious elite. And so, while his life only receives one passing reference in a book about 17th century philosophers, he is viewed within Hebrew history as an important figure during a challenging era.

Works Cited

Bodian, Miriam. Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Kaufman, Tania Neumann. Lost Footsteps, History Recovered: The Jewish Presence in Pernambuco, Brazil. Trans. Paul Webb. Recife: Ensol, 2004.

Stewart, Matthew. The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World. New York: Norton, 2006.