Betraying Spinoza by Rebecca Goldstein Page B

would be heavily influenced by these kabbalistic preoccupations, and the influence fell, though in subtle ways, on Spinoza, too. It is not that Spinoza has any sympathy at all for Jewish mysticism, or for mysticism of any sort for that matter. Spinoza’s rationalism is not mysticism. It is, rather, Cartesianism, though with some major tinkering. But the ultimate mysteries he seeks to solve with his revamped Cartesianism are nowhere to be found in Descartes—nor in Galileo, nor in any of the “scientist rationalists” who precede him. Instead, Spinoza turns the Cartesian methodology, meant to focus in the “natural light of reason,” to illuminate the mysteries of the kabbalists, no matter their dubious methods of enlightenment: the beginning of all things, the Ein Sof ’s relationship to creation and to our knowledge, the mysteries of evil and of suffering.
    These three strains in Jewish scholarship—the legalistic analysis of the Talmud; the rationalist semiphilosophical approach represented by Maimonides (semiphilosophical in the sense that not all questions are open to philosophy: religion has the final say); the mystical confabulations of the kabbalah—are, quite obviously, in tension with one another. The Talmud famously warns against the other two approaches, but the kabbalistic one in particular: “Whoever ponders on four things, it were better for him if he had not come into the world: what is above, what is below, what was before time, and what will be hereafter.”
    The story is told of four who went into the garden or orchard (it is the Persian word pardes ) of mystical study. One went mad, one became an apostate, and one took his life. Only one came out whole, and this was Rabbi Akiva. Again the Talmud cautions that no one should study kabbalah who has not yet attained the age of forty, marriage, and a full belly—a degree of mundane ballast to safeguard against being “blasted by ecstasy” (as in Ophelia’s speech).
    Though the influence of ancient Greece made itself felt in both the Maimonidean philosophical and kabbalist ecstatic strains in Sephardic culture, still some of the most prominent participants in the Golden Age voiced wariness of the Hellenist legacy. For example, Judah Halevy (before 1075–1141), who was perhaps the greatest of all the Hebraic-Spanish poets, and whose religious poetry found its way into the liturgy, acknowledges the heavy influence of Greek philosophy on his Judeo-Spanish culture in his poetic admonition:
Turn aside from mines and pitfalls .
Let not Greek wisdom tempt you ,
For it bears the flowers only and not the fruits .
    To balance the impression of stern rectitude on the part of Judah Halevy, it is only fair to share other stanzas that show him in a softer, more sensual mood. (Iberian sensuality also contributed its flushed warmth to the heady concoction of the Golden Age of Spanish Jewry):
Pity me, you of the hard heart and soft hips ,
Pity me, let me bend the knee before you!
My heart is pure, but my eyes are not!
    There were other exoticisms, in addition to philosophy, mysticism, and poetry, that bloomed in the garden of Sephardic Judaism. Science, too, and particularly medicine, attracted many Spanish Jews. Rulers often had their own Jewish physicians, and often these physicians were themselves philosophers or poets or both. Both Maimonides and Judah Halevy had been doctors. And Jews contributed to Spanish science in other ways as well. For example, King Alphonso X commissioned Isaac ibn Said, the cantor of Toledo, to compile correct astronomical tables. The Alphonsine Tables were completed in 1256, the most complete heavenly topography ever assembled.
    It had not only been in intellectual, spiritual, and cultural inroads that the Spanish Jews had broken new ground, but also in more worldly-minded ways as well. They were not only poets and philosophers, scholars and mystics, but treasurers and advisers and landowners. Court Jews, who helped rulers in