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

by Simon Schama

There is no reliable documentary evidence, however, that Spinoza was anywhere near van den Enden in the years preceding his ban, much less that he was already a disciple of René Descartes’ mind–body dualism. The mentors of Spinoza’s disbelief at this period were all Jewish ex-conversos with strong ties to Spain and Portugal. Prado, who had inherited many of Uriel da Costa’s heresies, may well have become informal tutor to the more profound younger man. In August 1659, two (friendly) witnesses before the Madrid Inquisition – Friar Tomas Solana y Robles and Captain Miguel Perez de Maltranilla – testified to having met both Prado and Spinoza the previous year.42 They were described indivisibly as having the same opinions and having suffered the same fate of being expelled from the Jewish community for deciding that the Law of Moses was false. What was meant by ‘false’ seems very likely to have been the explosive argument Spinoza would later articulate in the Tractatus Theologicus-Politicus, that the Torah should be understood essentially as an act of political constitution rather than a revelation.43 Just as confrontational was the insistence, shared by Prado and Spinoza and inherited from Uriel da Costa, ‘that souls died in the body and that there was no God except philosophically’.