Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano of Reason [Hardcover]

Yirmiyahu Yovel (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0691073449 | ISBN-13: 978-0691073446 | Publication Date: November 1989 | Edition: 1ST

This ambitious study presents Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) as the most outstanding and influential thinker of modernity--and examines the question of whether he was the "first secular Jew." A number-one bestseller in Israel, Spinoza and Other Heretics is made up of two volumes--The Marrano of Reason and The Adventures of Immanence offered as a set and also separately. Yirmiyahu Yovel, Professor of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, shows how Spinoza grounded a philosophical revolution in a radically new principle--the philosophy of immanence, or the idea that this world is all there is--and how he thereby anticipated secularization, the Enlightenment, the disintegration of ghetto life, and the rise of natural science and the liberal-democratic state. The Marrano of Reason The Marrano of Reason finds the origins of the idea of immanence in the culture of Spinoza's Marrano ancestors, Jews in Spain and Portugal who had been forcibly converted to Christianity. Yovel uses their fascinating story to show how the crypto-Jewish life they maintained in the face of the Inquisition mixed Judaism and Christianity in ways that undermined both religions and led to rational skepticism and secularism. He identifies Marrano patterns that recur in Spinoza in a secularized context: a "this- worldly" disposition, a split religious identity, an opposition between inner and outer life, a quest for salvation outside official doctrines, and a gift for dual language and equivocation. This same background explains the drama of the young Spinoza's excommunication from the Jewish community in his native Amsterdam. Convention portrays the Amsterdam Jews as narrow-minded and fanatical, but in Yovel's vivid account they emerge as highly civilized former Marranos with cosmopolitan leanings, struggling to renew their Jewish identity and to build a "new Jerusalem" in the Netherlands.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 264 pages
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr; 1ST edition (November 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691073449
• ISBN-13: 978-0691073446
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,239,241 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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0 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars well researched and written, but a hagiography, July 6, 2010

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Joseph M. Hennessey (Weston, MA, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Spinoza and Other Heretics. Vol. 1 (Paperback)

In this book, Yirmiyahu Yovel supplies an important component for understanding the thought world and tremendous philosophical impact of Baruch Spinoza. The philosophes of the enlightenment, and their 20th and 21st century disciples, love to style themselves 'critical,' but I usually find, as with this book, that they are critical of everyone except themselves and their allies. The great exception to this generalization is Peter Gay, The Enlightenment, in which on virtually every page he pokes fun at the pretensions of Voltaire and co., even though he is a fan of the enlightenment.

Spinoza is clearly the intelllectual great great etc. grandfather of contemporary leftism. He was a condescending elitist, writing in doublespeak, with the overt, non threatening meaning for the huddled masses, and the covert, subversive meaning for his in-the-know buddies and their descendants. He was also a big fan of the [Leviathan, Nanny] state having all power, with no intermediaries, least of all religious ones.

On p. 175, Yovel writes: "Only Christianity considers the world of the here-and-now so base and so insignificant in and of itself, that denial of the transcendent divinity who gives it meaning robs the world of any significance whatsoever." Here, Yovel exhibits his ignorance of Christianity. Try out John3:14, "God so loved the world, that he sent his only Son" to take on flesh, to live in this immanent world, etc. Yovel's comment is just a weak form of Marx's sound bite that Christianity is opium for the people. Christian social doctrine and praxis has done more concrete good for the earthy world, creating hospitals, universities, soup kitchens, stopping slavery and racial prejudice, etc. than all other religions combined. If his comment were true of any religion, it might be Buddhism, which does seem to want to transcend these messy bodies of ours.

On p. 197, Yovel refers to the "...modern world which was to emerge after the French Revolution." At least he's honest. Spinoza, by being so heretical that his Jewish community in Amsterdam had to eject him, by being the godfather, if you permit the phrase, of the deconstructive historical-critical Biblical interpretation ideology, was the intellectual parent of the visciously anti-religious, especially anti-Christian, anti-Catholic, enlightenment. The french revolution was the enlightenment in action, guillotining tens of thousands of innocents. The french revolution was the prototype for all later revolutions, especially the Bolshevik. Nice modern world you helped to create, Baruch.

On p. 177, Yovel writes: "Spinoza's espousal of secularity makes him, indeed, a true harbinger of modernity." This statement betrays how old-fashioned, how 20th century-ish, modern as opposed to post-modern, the whole book from 1989 is. In the typical narrow, secular agnostic way, Yovel blithely believes he encapsulates all of modernity, when it was only the modernity of the degenerate western europe and a few soi-disant cosmopolitan cities and universities on the 2 coasts of the USA. The rest of the world, and the rest of the USA, are predominantly religious, we know from Samuel Huntington.