THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

SPINOZA
their hosts in Holland demanded the excommunication of a man whose
doubts struck at Christian doctrine quite as vitally as at Judaism.
Protestantism was not then the liberal and fluent philosophy which it
now becomes; the wars of religion had left each group entrenched im-
movably in its own creed, cherished now all the more because of the
blood just shed in its defense. What would the Dutch authorities say to a
Jewish community which repaid Christian toleration and protection by
turning out in one generation an A Costa, and in the next a Spinoza?
Furthermore, religious unanimity seemed to the elders their sole means
of preserving the little Jewish group in Amsterdam from distegration, and
almost the last means of preserving the unity, and so ensuring the survival,
of the scattered Jews of the world. If they had had their own state, their
own civil law, their own establishments of secular force and power, to
compel internal cohesion and external respect, they might have been
more tolerant; but their religion was to them their patriotism as well as
their faith, the synagogue was their center of social and political life as
well as of ritual and worship; and the Bible whose veracity Spinoza had
impugned was the "portable Fatherland" of their people; under these
circumstances, they thought, heresy was treason, and toleration suicide.
One feels that they should have bravely run these risks; but it is as
hard to judge another justly as it is to get out of one's skin. Perhaps'
Menasseh ben Israel, spiritual head of the whole Amsterdam community
of Jews, could have found some conciliatory formula within which both
the synagogue and the philosopher might have found room to live in
mutual peace; but the great rabbi was then in London, persuading Crom-
well to open England to the Jews. Fate had written that Spinoza should
belong to the world.
4. RETIREMENT AND DEATH
He took the excommunication with quiet courage, saying: "It compels
me to nothing which I should not have done n any case." But this was
whistling in the dark; in truth the young student now found himself
bitterly and pitilessly alone. Nothing is so terrible as solitude; and few
forms of it so difficult as the isolation of a Jew from all his people. Spinoza
had already suffered in the loss of his old faith; to so uproot the contents
of one's mind is a major operation, and leaves many wounds. Had Spinoza
entered another fold, embraced another of the orthodoxies in which men
were grouped like kine huddling together for warmth, he might have
found in the role of distinguished convert some of the life which he had
lost by being utterly outcast from his family and his race. But he joined
no other sect, and lived his life alone. His father, who had looked forward
to his son's preeminence in Hebrew learning, sent him away; his sister
7 As suggested by Israel Abrahams, art. Jews* Encyclopedia Britannica.
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