The Story of the Jews Volume 2: When Words Fail: 1492--Present

by Simon Schama

the alternative systems of monotheistic belief. Until Spinoza, there was nowhere else to go for a thinking Jew who wished nonetheless to uncouple himself from the literal prescriptions of religious literature or a literal reading of the Bible. Now Spinoza had created just such an oasis of understanding. ‘Secular Jew’, the casual term of choice for multitudes of Jews, is perhaps too much of an oxymoron for this as it seems closer to the atheism which Spinoza repeatedly and vehemently rejected. Spinoza did not regard the universe as a self-created piece of material machinery; on the contrary, the essence of its operational genius was identical with the uncaused God. But the difficulty of grasping this understanding as somewhere a Jew could go and still be a Jew, meant he would have no following until generations, centuries, later. Until, in fact, there were scientists like Albert Einstein, who regarded himself unequivocally as a Jew, who was never separate from Jewish history, and who also pitied the aridity of atheism, deaf, as he scornfully put it, ‘to the music of the spheres’; but when pressed on his belief in God in 1929, Einstein explained that ‘I believe in Spinoza’s god who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and doings of mankind’. For the vast majority of Jews in Spinoza’s world, however, this was not enough. The philosopher was asking them to abandon exactly what had kept them together over the millen...