THE WANDERING JEW
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by those of the faith in which he had been born. Neither Descartes
nor Leibnitz could free themselves to the same extent from the
shackles of the medieval scholastic tradition in philosophy.
Spinoza was brought up under the influences of Spain, Holland,
Germany, England, and the Italy of the Renaissance-all the trends
of human thought that were at work at that time shaped his mind.
His native Holland was in the throes of bourgeois revolution. His
ancestors, before they came to the Netherlands, had been Spanish–
Portuguese
Maranim,
crypto-Jews, at heart Jews, outwardly Chris–
tians, as were many Spanish Jews on whom the Inquisition had
forced the baptism. Mter the Spinozas had come to the Netherlands
they disclosed themselves as Jews; but, of course, neither they nor
their close descendants were strangers to the intellectual climate of
Christianity.
Spinoza himself, when he started out as independent thinker
and as initiator of modem Bible criticism, seized at once the cardinal
contradiction in Judaism, the contradiction between the monotheistic
and universal God and the setting in which that God appears in the
Jewish religion---:as a God attached to one people only; the con–
tradiction between the universal God and
his
"chosen people." You
know what the realization of this contradiction brought upon Spi–
noza: banishment from the Jewish community and excommunica–
tion. He had to fight against the Jewish clergy which, having itself
recently been a victim of the Inquisition, was infected with the
spirit of the Inquisition. Then he had to face the hostility of the
Catholic clergy and Calvinistic priests. All his life was a; struggle to
overcome the limitations of the religions and cultures of
his
time.
Among Jews of great intellect exposed to the corradiation of
various religions and cultures some were so tom by contradictory in–
fluences and pressures that they could not find spiritual balance and
broke down. One of these was Uriel Acosta, Spinoza;'s elder and fore–
runner. Many times he rebelled against Judaism; and many times
he recanted. The rabbis excommunicated him repeatedly; and re–
peatedly he prostrated himself before them on the floor of the Am–
sterdam Synagogue. Spinoza had the great intellectual happiness of
being able to harmonize the conflicting influences and to create out
of them a higher outlook on the world and an integrated philosophy.
Almost in every generation, whenever the Jewish intellectual,
