The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Karen Armstrong
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arrived in Amsterdam and, for the first time, found themselves in a fully functioning Jewish community, they were not unnaturally bewildered. To an outsider, the 613 commandments of the Pentateuch seemed arbitrary and arcane. Some of the commandments had become obsolete, because they related to the farming of the Holy Land or the Temple liturgy and were not applicable in the Diaspora. Other injunctions, such as the abstruse dietary rules and the laws of purification, must have seemed barbaric and meaningless to the sophisticated Portuguese Marranos, who found it difficult to accept the explanations of the rabbis because they had become accustomed to thinking things out rationally for themselves. The Halakhah, the codified oral law that had been compiled in the first centuries of the Common Era, seemed even more irrational and arbitrary, because it did not even have biblical sanction.
But the Torah, the Law of Moses, has a mythos of its own. Like Lurianic Kabbalah, it had been a response to the dislocation of exile. When the people of Israel had been deported to Babylon in the sixth century BCE, their Temple destroyed and their religious life in ruins, the text of the Law had become a new “shrine” in which the displaced people cultivated a sense of the Divine Presence. The codification of the world into clean and unclean, sacred and profane objects, had been an imaginative reordering of a shattered world. In exile, Jews had found that the study of the Law gave them a profound religious experience. Jews did not peruse the text like moderns, simply for information: it was the process of study—the question and answer, the heated arguments, and immersion in minutiae—that gave them intimations of the divine. The Torah was God’s Word; by becoming deeply absorbed in it, committing to memory the words that God himself had spoken to Moses and speaking them aloud, they were bringing the divine into their own beings and entering a sacred realm. The Law had become a symbol, where they found the Shekhinah. The practice of the commandments brought a divine imperative into the smallest details of their lives, when they were eating, washing, praying, or simply relaxing with their families on the Sabbath.
None of this could be immediately perceived by the rational understanding upon which the Marranos had perforce relied all their lives. This type of mythical and cultic observance was alien and unknown. Some of the New Jews, Orobio complained, had become “unspeakable atheists.”33 They were, to be sure, not atheists in our twentieth-century sense, because they still believed in a transcendent deity; but this was not the God of the Bible. The Marranos had developed a wholly rational faith, similar to the deism later fashioned by Enlightenment philosophes.34 This God was the First Cause of all being, whose existence had been logically demonstrated by Aristotle. It always behaved in an entirely rational way. It did not intervene in human history erratically, subvert the laws of nature by working bizarre miracles, or dictate obscure laws on mountaintops. It did not need to reveal a special law code, because the laws of nature were accessible to everybody. This was the sort of God that human reason naturally tends to envisage, and in the past Jewish and Muslim philosophers had in fact produced a very similar deity. But it never went down well with believers generally. It was not religiously useful, since it was doubtful that the First Cause even knew that human beings existed, as it could contemplate nothing short of perfection. Such a God had nothing to say to human pain or sorrow. For that you needed the mythical and cultic spirituality that was unfamiliar to the Marranos.
Most of the Marranos who returned to the faith in Amsterdam were able to one degree or another to learn to appreciate halakhic spirituality. But some found the transition impossible. One of the most tragic cases was that of Uriel da Costa, who had been born into a converso family and educated by the Jesuits, but then found Christianity oppressive, cruel, and composed entirely of man-made rules and doctrines that seemed to bear no relation to the Gospels. Da Costa turned to the Jewish scriptures and developed a highly idealized, rationalistic notion of Judaism for himself. When he arrived in Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century, he was shocked, or so he claimed, to discover that contemporary Judaism was just as much a human construct as Catholicism.
Recently scholars have cast doubt on Da Costa’s testimony, and have argued that he had almost certainly had a previous encounter, however sketchy, with some form of halakhic Judaism, though he probably had not realized how deeply the Halakhah dominated normal Jewish life. But there is no doubting da Costa’s total inability to relate to Judaism in Amsterdam. He wrote a treatise attacking the doctrine of the afterlife and Jewish law, declaring that he believed only in human reason and the laws of nature. The rabbis excommunicated him and for years Da Costa led a miserable, isolated life until he broke down, recanted, and was readmitted to the community. But Da Costa had not actually changed his views. He found it impossible to live according to rituals that made no rational sense to him, and was excommunicated on two further occasions. Finally in 1640, crushed, broken, in despair, he shot himself in the head.
The tragedy of Da Costa showed that there was as yet no secular alternative to the religious life in Europe. You could cross over to another faith, but unless you were a very exceptional human being (which Da Costa was not), you could not live outside a religious community. During his years as an excommunicate, Da Costa had lived utterly alone, shunned by Jews and Christians alike, and jeered at by children in the streets.35
An equally telling, if less poignant, case was that of Juan da Prado, who arrived in Amsterdam in 1655 and must often have meditated upon Da Costa’s fate. He had been a committed member of the Jewish underground in Portugal for twenty years, but it seems that as early as 1645 he had succumbed to a Marrano form of deism. Prado was neither a brilliant nor a systematic thinker, but his experience shows us that it is impossible to adhere to a confessional religion such as Judaism by relying solely on reason. Without a prayer life, a cult, and a mythical underpinning, Prado could only conclude that “God” was simply identical with the laws of nature. Yet he continued his underground activities for another ten years. For him, “Judaism” seems to have meant fellowship, the close bonding he experienced in a tight-knit group which gave meaning to his life, because when he arrived in Amsterdam and fell afoul of the rabbis there, he still wanted to remain within the Jewish community. Like Da Costa, Prado had for years maintained his right to think and worship as he chose. He had his own idea of “Judaism” and was horrified when he encountered the real thing. Prado voiced his objections loudly. Why did Jews think that God had chosen them alone? What was this God? Was it not more logical to think of God as the First Cause, rather than as a personality who had dictated a set of barbarous, nonsensical laws? Prado became an embarrassment. The rabbis were trying to reeducate the New Jews from Iberia (many of whom shared Prado’s opinions) and could not tolerate his deism. On February 14, 1657, he was excommunicated. Yet he refused to leave the community.
It was a clash between two wholly irreconcilable points of view. From their own perspectives, both Prado and the rabbis were correct. Prado could make no sense of traditional Judaism, had lost the mythical cast of mind, and had never had the opportunity to penetrate to the deeper meaning of the faith by means of cult and ritual. He had always had to rely on reason and his own insights, and could not abandon them now. But the rabbis were also right: Prado’s deism bore no relation to any form of Judaism that they knew. What Prado wanted to be was a “secular Jew,” but in the seventeenth century that category did not exist, and neither Prado nor the rabbis would have been able to formulate it clearly. It was the first of a series of clashes between a modern, wholly rational worldview on the one hand, and the religious mind-set, formed by cult and myth, on the other.
As so often in these principled collisions, neither side behaved very well. Prado was an arrogant man, and he roundly abused the rabbis, threatening at one point to attack them in the synagogue with a drawn sword. The rabbis also acted less than honorably: they set a spy on Prado, who reported that his views had become still more radical. After his excommunication, he maintained that all religion was rubbish and that reason, not so-called “revelation,” must always be the sole arbiter of truth. Nobody knows how Prado ended his days. He was forced to leave the community and took refuge in Antwerp. Some said that he even tried to be reconciled with the Catholic church; if so, it was a desperate step which, once again, shows how impossible it was for an ordinarily constituted man to exist outside the confines of religion during the seventeenth century.36