The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam

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

Prado and Da Costa were both precursors of the modern spirit. Their stories show that the mythos of confessional religion is unsustainable without the spiritual exercises of prayer and ritual, which cultivate the more intuitive parts of the mind. Reason alone can produce only an attenuated deism, which is soon abandoned because it brings us no help when we are faced with sorrow or are in trouble. Prado and Da Costa lost their faith because they were deprived of the opportunity to practice it, but another Marrano Jew from Amsterdam showed that the exercise of reason could become so absorbing and exhilarating in itself that the need for myth receded. This world becomes the sole object of contemplation, and human beings, not God, become the measure of all things. The exercise of reason can itself, in a man or woman of exceptional intellect, lead to some kind of mystical illumination. This has also been part of the modern experience.

At the same time as the rabbis first excommunicated Prado, they also opened proceedings against Baruch Spinoza, who was only twenty-three years old. Unlike Prado, Spinoza had been born in Amsterdam. His parents had lived as Judaizing Marranos in Portugal, and had managed to make the transition to Orthodox Judaism when they arrived in Amsterdam. Spinoza, therefore, had never been hunted or persecuted. He had always lived in liberal Amsterdam, and had access to the intellectual life of the gentile world and the opportunity to practice his faith unmolested. He had received a traditional education at the splendid Keter Torah school, but had also studied modern mathematics, astronomy, and physics. Destined for a life in commerce, Spinoza had seemed devout, but in 1655, shortly after Prado’s arrival in Amsterdam, he suddenly stopped attending services in the synagogue and began to voice doubts. He noted that there were contradictions in the biblical text that proved it to be of human not divine origin. He denied the possibility of revelation, and argued that “God” was simply the totality of nature itself. The rabbis eventually, on July 27, 1656, pronounced the sentence of excommunication upon Spinoza, and, unlike Prado, Spinoza did not ask to remain in the community. He was glad to go, and became the first person in Europe to live successfully beyond the reach of established religion.

It was easier for Spinoza to survive in the gentile world than it had been for Prado or Da Costa. He was a genius, able to articulate his position clearly, and, as a genuinely independent man, could sustain the inevitable loneliness it entailed. He was at home in the Netherlands, and had powerful patrons who gave him a reasonable allowance, so that he did not have to live in abject poverty. Spinoza was not, as is often supposed, forced to grind lenses to earn a living; he did it to further his interest in optics. He was able to form friendships with some of the leading gentile scientists, philosophers, and politicians of the day. Yet he remained an isolated figure. Jews and gentiles alike found his irreligion either shocking or disconcerting.37

Yet there was spirituality in Spinoza’s atheism, since he experienced the world as divine. It was a vision of God immanent within mundane reality which filled Spinoza with awe and wonder. He experienced philosophical study and thought as a form of prayer; as he explained in his Short Treatise on God (1661), the deity was not an object to be known but the principle of our thought. It followed that the joy we experience when we attain knowledge was the intellectual love of God. A true philosopher, Spinoza believed, would cultivate what he called intuitive knowledge, a flash of insight that fused all the information he had acquired discursively and which was an experience of what Spinoza believed to be God. He called this experience “beatitude”: in this state, the philosopher realized that he was inseparable from God, and that God exists through human beings. This was a mystical philosophy, which could be seen as a rational version of the kind of spirituality cultivated by John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, but Spinoza had no patience with this type of religious insight. He believed that yearning for a transcendent God would alienate human beings from their own nature. Later philosophers would find Spinoza’s quest for the ecstasy of beatitude embarrassing, and would dispense with his God altogether. Nevertheless, in his concentration on this world and in his denial of the supernatural, Spinoza became one of the first secularists in Europe.

Like many modern people, Spinoza regarded all formal religion with distaste. Given his experience of excommunication, this was hardly surprising. He dismissed the revealed faiths as a “compound of credulity and prejudices,” and “a tissue of meaningless mysteries.”38 He had found ecstasy in the untrammeled use of reason, not by immersing himself in the biblical text, and as a result, he viewed Scripture in an entirely objective way. Instead of experiencing it as a revelation of the divine, Spinoza insisted that the Bible be read like any other text. He was one of the first to study the Bible scientifically, examining the historical background, the literary genres, and the question of authorship.39 He also used the Bible to explore his political ideas. Spinoza was one of the first people in Europe to promote the ideal of a secular, democratic state which would become one of the hallmarks of Western modernity. He argued that once the priests had acquired more power than the kings of Israel, the laws of the state became punitive and restrictive. Originally, the kingdom of Israel had been theocratic but because, in Spinoza’s view, God and the people were one and the same, the voice of the people had been supreme. Once the priests seized control, the voice of God could no longer be heard.40 But Spinoza was no populist. Like most premodern philosophers, he was an elitist who believed the masses to be incapable of rational thought. They would need some form of religion to give them a modicum of enlightenment, but this religion must be reformed, based not on so-called revealed law but on the natural principles of justice, fraternity, and liberty.41

Spinoza was undoubtedly one of the harbingers of the modern spirit, and he would later become somewhat of a hero to secularist Jews, who admired his principled exodus from the shelter of religion. But Spinoza had no Jewish followers in his lifetime, even though it appeared that many Jews were ready for fundamental change. At about the same time as Spinoza was developing his secular rationalism, the Jewish world was engulfed by a messianic ferment that seemed to cast reason to the winds. It was one of the first of the millennial movements of the modern period, which provided men and women with a religious way of breaking with the sacred past and reaching out for something entirely new. We shall often find this in our story. Few people are able to understand the intellectual elite who propounded the secularist philosophies of modernity; most have made the transition to the new world by means of religion, which provides some consoling continuity with the past and grounds the modern logos in a mythical framework.

It appears that by the mid-seventeenth century, many Jews had reached a breaking point. None of the other Jews of Europe enjoyed the freedom of the Marrano community in Amsterdam; Spinoza’s radical new departure had been possible only because he was able to mix with gentiles and study the new sciences. Elsewhere in Christendom, Jews were excluded from mainstream society. By the sixteenth century, no Jew was permitted to live outside the special Jewish district known as the “ghetto,” and this meant that inevitably Jews led an introverted life. Segregation increased anti-Semitic prejudice, and Jews naturally responded to the persecuting gentile world with bitterness and suspicion. The ghetto became a self-contained world. Jews had their own schools, their own social and charitable institutions, their own baths, cemeteries, and slaughterhouses. The ghetto was self-governing and autonomous. The kehilla (communal government) of elected rabbis and elders conducted its own courts, according to Jewish law. In effect, the ghetto was a state-within-a-state, a world unto itself, and Jews had little—and, often, little desire for—contact with the gentile society outside. But by the mid-seventeenth century, it seems that many were chafing against these limitations. Ghettoes were usually situated in unhealthy, squalid districts. They were enclosed by a high wall, which meant that there was overcrowding and no possibility of expansion. There was no room for gardens, even in the larger ghettoes of Rome or Venice. The only way that Jews could provide more accommodation for themselves was to add new floors to existing buildings, often on inadequate foundations, so that everything collapsed. There was constant danger of fire and disease. Jews were forced to wear distinctive dress, they suffered economic restrictions, and were often reduced to peddling and tailoring as the only professions open to them. No large-scale commercial ventures were permitted, and thus a large proportion of the population relied on charity. Deprived of sunlight and contact with nature, Jews deteriorated physically. They were also mentally confined and were out of touch with the arts and sciences of Europe. Their own schools were good, but after the fifteenth century, when the educational curriculum in Christendom was becoming more liberal, Jews continued to study only Torah and Talmud. Immersed as they were solely in their own texts and cultural traditions, there was a tendency for Jewish learning to degenerate into hair-splitting and a concentration on minutiae.42

The Jews of the Islamic world were not restricted in this way. Like Christians, they were accorded the status of dhimmi (“protected minority”), which gave them civil and military protection, as long as they respected the laws and supremacy of the Islamic state. The Jews of Islam were not persecuted, there was no tradition of anti-Semitism, and even though the dhimmis were second-class citizens, they were given full religious liberty, were able to run their own affairs according to their own laws, and were more able than the Jews of Europe to participate in mainstream culture and commerce.43 But events would show that even the Jews of the Islamic world were growing restless, and dreaming of greater emancipation. Since 1492 they had heard news of one disaster in Europe after another, and in 1648 they were horrified by reports of atrocities in Poland that would remain unequaled in Jewish history until the twentieth century.

Poland had recently annexed much of what is now Ukraine, where peasants formed cavalry squads to organize their own defense. These “cossacks” hated both Poles and Jews, who often administered the lands of the Polish nobility as middlemen. In 1648 the cossack leader Boris Chmielnicki led an uprising against the Poles which attacked Polish and Jewish communities alike. When the war finally came to an end in 1667, the chronicles tell us, 100,000 Jews had been killed and 300 Jewish communities destroyed. Even though these numbers were probably exaggerated, the letters and stories of the refugees filled Jews in other parts of the world with terror. They spoke of massacres in which Jews were cut to pieces, of mass graves in which Jewish women and children had been buried alive, of Jews being given rifles and commanded to shoot one another. Many believed that these events must be the long-awaited “birth pangs of the Messiah,” and turned in desperation to the rites and penitential disciplines of Lurianic Kabbalah in an attempt to hasten messianic redemption.44

When news of the Chmielnicki massacres reached Smyrna in what is now Turkey, a young Jew who was walking and meditating outside the city heard a heavenly voice telling him that he was “the Savior of Israel, the Messiah, the Son of David, the anointed of the God of Jacob.”45 Shabbetai Zevi was a scholarly young man and a Kabbalist (though not, at this point, versed in Lurianic Kabbalah), who would share his insights with a small band of followers. He had an appealing personality, but when he was about twenty he began to exhibit symptoms that we would today call manic-depressive. He used to hide away for days, sunk in misery in a dark little room, but these depressed phases would be succeeded by frenzied periods of “illumination,” when he was restless, unable to sleep, and felt that he was in touch with higher powers. Sometimes he would feel impelled to violate the commandments of the Torah, publicly uttering the forbidden Name of God, for example, or eating nonkosher food. He could not explain why he committed these “strange acts,” but felt that God had for some reason inspired him to do so.46 Later he became convinced that these antinomian acts were redemptive: God “would soon give him a new law and new commandments to repair all the worlds.”47 These transgressions were “holy sins”; they were what Lurianic Kabbalists would call acts of tikkun. It is likely that they represented an unconscious rebellion against the customary observances of Jewish life and expressed a confused desire for something entirely new.

Eventually Shabbetai’s behavior became too much for the Jews of Smyrna, and he had to leave the city in 1650. He then began a fifteen-year period, which he later called his “dark years,” during which he wandered through the provinces of the Ottoman empire, going from one city to another. He told nobody about his messianic vocation and may have abandoned the very idea of a special mission. By 1665 he was longing to free himself of his demons and become a rabbi.48 He had heard about a gifted young Kabbalist in Gaza who had set himself up as a healer, and set off to visit him. This Rabbi Nathan had already heard about Shabbetai, probably when both men, then unknown to each other, had lived in Jerusalem at the same time. Something about Shabbetai’s “strange acts” must have lodged in Nathan’s imagination, because, shortly before the arrival of his visitor, he had received a revelation about him. He had recently been initiated into Lurianic Kabbalah, and had made a retreat just before Purim, locking himself away, fasting, weeping, and reciting the Psalms. During this vigil, he had seen a vision of Shabbetai and heard his own voice crying aloud in prophecy: “Thus saith the Lord! Behold your Savior cometh. Shabbetai Zevi is his name. He shall cry, yea, roar, he shall prevail against my enemies.”49 When Shabbetai actually turned up on his own doorstep, Nathan could only see this as a miraculous confirmation of his prophetic vision.

How could Nathan, a brilliant thinker, have imagined that this sad, troubled man was his Redeemer? According to Lurianic Kabbalah, the soul of the Messiah had been trapped in the Godless realm created in the original act of Zimzum; from the very beginning, therefore, the Messiah had been forced to struggle with the evil powers of the “other side,” but now, Nathan believed, thanks to the penitential disciplines of the Kabbalists, these demonic forces were beginning to lose their hold on the Messiah. From time to time, his soul soared free and he revealed the New Law of the messianic age. But victory was still incomplete, and from time to time the Messiah fell prey once more to the darkness.50 All this seemed to fit perfectly with Shabbetai’s personality and experience. When he arrived, Nathan told him that the End was nigh. Soon his victory over the forces of evil would be complete and he would bring redemption to the Jewish people. The old law would be abrogated, and actions that had once been forbidden and sinful would become holy.

At first, Shabbetai wanted nothing to do with Nathan’s fantasy, but gradually he was won over by the power of the young rabbi’s eloquence, which, at least, gave him some explanation for his peculiarities. On May 28, 1665, Shabbetai declared himself to be the Messiah, and Nathan immediately dispatched letters to Egypt, Aleppo, and Smyrna announcing that the Redeemer would soon defeat the Ottoman sultan, end the exile of the Jews, and lead them back to the Holy Land. All the gentile nations would submit to his rule.51 The news spread like wildfire, and by 1666, the messianic ferment had taken root in almost every Jewish community in Europe, the Ottoman empire, and Iran. There were frenzied scenes. Jews started to sell their possessions in preparation for the voyage to Palestine, and business came to a standstill. Periodically, they would hear that the Messiah had abolished one of the traditional fast days, and there would be dancing and processions in the street. Nathan had given orders that Jews were to hasten the End by performing the penitential rituals of Safed, and in Europe, Egypt, Iran, the Balkans, Italy, Amsterdam, Poland, and France Jews fasted, kept vigil, immersed themselves in icy water, rolled in nettles, and gave alms to the poor. It was one of the first of many Great Awakenings of early modernity, when people instinctively sensed the coming of major change. Few people knew much about Shabbetai himself and fewer still were conversant with Nathan’s abstruse kabbalistic vision; it was enough that the Messiah had come and that at long last hope was at hand.52 During these ecstatic months, Jews experienced such hope and vitality that the harsh, constricted world of the ghetto seemed to melt away. They had a taste of something entirely different, and life for many of them would never be the same again. They glimpsed new possibilities, which seemed almost within their grasp. Because they felt free, many Jews were convinced that the old life was over for good.53

Those Jews who came under the direct influence of either Shabbetai or Nathan showed that they were ready to jettison the Torah, even though that would mean the end of religious life as they knew it. When Shabbetai visited a synagogue wearing the royal robes of the Messiah, and abolished a fast, uttered the forbidden name of God, ate nonkosher food, or called women to read the Scriptures in the synagogue, people were enraptured. Not everybody succumbed, of course—in each community, there were rabbis and laymen who were appalled by these developments. But people of all classes, rich and poor, accepted Shabbetai and seemed to welcome his antinomianism. The Law had not saved the Jews and seemed unable to do so; Jews were still persecuted, still in exile; people were ready for new freedom.54

This was all very dangerous, however. Lurianic Kabbalah was a myth; it was not intended to be translated into practical political programs in this way, but to illuminate the internal life of the spirit. Mythos and logos were complementary but entirely separate spheres and had different functions. Politics was in the domain of reason and logic; myth gave it meaning but was not intended to be interpreted as literally as Nathan had interpreted the mystical vision of Isaac Luria. Jews may have felt powerful, free, and in control of their destiny, but their circumstances had not changed. They were still weak, vulnerable, and dependent upon the goodwill of their rulers. The Lurianic image of the Messiah wrestling with the powers of darkness was a powerful symbol of the universal struggle against evil, but when the attempt was made to give the image concrete embodiment in a real, emotionally unstable human being, the result could only be disastrous.

And so indeed it proved to be. In February 1666, Shabbetai set out, with Nathan’s blessing, to confront the sultan, who had understandably been much alarmed by this wild Jewish enthusiasm and, with reason, feared an uprising. When Shabbetai landed near Gallipoli, he was arrested, taken to Istanbul, brought before the sultan, and given the choice of death or conversion to Islam. To the horror of Jews all over the world, Shabbetai chose Islam. The Messiah had become an apostate.

That should have been the end of the matter. The vast majority recoiled in disgust from Shabbetai and, in shame, returned to their normal life and to the full observance of the Torah, anxious to put the whole sorry business behind them. But a significant minority could not give up this dream of freedom. They could not believe that their experience of liberation during those heady months had been an illusion; they were able to come to terms with an apostate Messiah, just as the first Christians had been able to accommodate the equally scandalous idea of a Messiah who had died the death of a common criminal.

Nathan, after a period of intense depression, adapted his theology. The redemption had begun, he explained to his disciples, but there had been a setback, and Shabbetai had been forced to descend still further into the realm of impurity and take the form of evil himself. This was the ultimate “holy sin,” the final act of tikkun.55 Shabbateans, those who remained true to Shabbetai, responded to this development in different ways. Nathan’s theology was very popular in Amsterdam: now the Messiah had become a Marrano, clinging in secret to the core of Judaism, while conforming outwardly to Islam.56 Those Marranos who had long had trouble with the Torah looked forward to its imminent demise, once redemption was complete. Other Jews believed that they must continue to observe the Torah until the Messiah brought about full redemption, but that he would then institute a new Law which would contradict the old in every respect. A small minority of radical Shabbateans went further. They could not bring themselves to go back to the old Law, even on a temporary basis; they believed that Jews must follow their Messiah into the realm of evil and become apostates too. They converted to the mainstream faith—Christianity in Europe, and Islam in the Middle East—and remained Jewish in the privacy of their own homes.57 These radicals also presaged a modern Jewish solution: many Jews would assimilate with gentile culture in most respects, but would privatize their faith, keeping it in a separate sphere.