Back to alternative history
Contents
1. Preface
2. Spinoza's World, 1664
3. The Sabbateans
4. The Disputation
5. The Holy Land
6. Marriage
7. Common Prayer
8. America
9. Gottfried and Sophia
10. The Sublime Porte
11. Spinoza's World, 1691
12. Mustafa and the Janissaries
13. Naomi
14. Regime Change
15. Tulips
16. Twilight
17. Spinoza's World, 1712
18. Epilogue
Appendix
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Spinoza in Turkey |
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"All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as
practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can
I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?" -- Immanuel
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason |
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Part 16 - Twilight November 1707 to June 1710
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Queen Sophia's letter inviting Spinoza to return to London
reached Constantinople on his seventy-fifth birthday. Spinoza
regretfully declined; he was in no condition to travel at his
age, and he had no desire to take up another civil post. The
Spinozas would continue to exchange affectionate correspondence
with the new Queen, but they would not come back to Britain.
If Anne Stuart had been Brandy Nan, Sophia was the Philosopher
Queen. Although she was two years older than Spinoza, she
remained vigorous and took an active hand in the country's
affairs. Although she was careful to season her government with
experienced administrators, she was true to her intellectual
leanings and appointed many members of the Royal Society to high
office. Leibniz was appointed to increase the efficiency of the
civil service, and, although Newton was displeased at the favor
shown to his rival, he was assuaged by his appointment as Royal
Astronomer with the additional task of improving British
schools.
Sophia proved popular with the British public. Many of them were
pleased by her adoption of British ways; she had accepted the
Church of England upon her accession and had made herself fluent
in the English language. The masses were also impressed by her
calm, generosity and democratic sensibilities - and, even more,
by her grandmotherly manner. Her accession was thus largely
untroubled; an abortive Jacobite rebellion flared briefly in
1708, but it was quickly crushed. [FN1]
It was Sophia's very democratic sensibilities, however, that
slowed the pace of her reforms. As a believer in constitutional
rule, she was unwilling to invade Parliament's prerogatives or
circumvent its authority. Thus, although Sophia implemented many
administrative reforms, her ability to effect substantive
legislation was far less. Relaxation of property qualifications
for the franchise, and full civic rights for Catholics and Jews,
would have to wait - and despite Sarah's plea that the Queen
"remember the ladies" when effecting her reforms [FN2], she was
unable to do so.
Naomi Spinoza Adi was able to do more. Her chance came at one of
the annual freemen's meetings at which the statutes passed by the
Allegheny legislature were ratified. Among the measures taken up
at the 1708 meeting was a law on the licensing and regulation of
midwives, and, as the official reports relate, Naomi suggested
that "in a Matter that so concerns the Welfare of the female Sex,
the consent of the Women of the Province also be obtained."
The arguments made for and against this measure are uncertain, as
the provincial journal of the time did not record the substance
of debates. Naomi's proposal was less radical in Allegheny than
it would have been in many other places; there was no law that
explicitly prohibited women from voting, and women had always
spoken at freemen's meetings. Naomi herself had considerable
prestige as one of the province's founders, and she may well have
voted at the infrequent meetings of the corporation that held
official title to the colony. Some of those present at the
meeting may even have been aware that the Massachusetts charter
of 1691 permitted propertied women to vote, and that a few had
actually done so. [FN3] Nevertheless, the measure was apparently
controversial, as the reports reveal that "the Business of the
Meeting was occupied for half a Day in its Consideration."
In the end, it was decided that the colony's women could indeed
claim a voice on a matter affecting them so profoundly. It is
likely that many of those who supported Naomi's proposal believed
that women would be enfranchised for that one occasion only. The
total number of votes recorded on other issues taken up by the
meeting, however, make clear that at least some women cast
ballots on these measures, and it is known that women voted at
the legislative elections later that year. The precedent had
been set, and it could not so easily be undone. [FN4]
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1708 was also the year that Herz Behrens came to Allegheny. The
previous year, he had published another in his series of novels,
The Princess. Unlike his other stories, however, The
Princess was not set in ancient Israel. Instead, it involved a
young marrano woman - the title character - who marries the crown
prince of Spain and becomes a beloved daughter to the royal
family. There comes a time, however, when she decides that she
must return to the faith of her fathers, and announces that
henceforth she will worship as a Jew. On doing so, she finds
that all the king's love for her is worth nothing; the single
act of professing the Jewish faith outweighs all else, and she
is condemned to be burned at the stake.
It is widely believed today that The Princess was an
announcement of Behrens' desire to emigrate - a message that he
was tired of living in a world where the sin of being a Jew
outweighed all other aspects of a person's character, and that he
was unwilling to wait for the currents of emancipation he had
helped to set in motion to run their course. There may be some
truth to this belief; he certainly expressed similar sentiments
in his correspondence with the Spinoza family. It is more
likely, however, that his departure was due to friction with his
father, who was becoming more orthodox in his old age, and
attraction to a woman he had recruited as a colonist. It was
rumored in Europe at the time that the widowed Behrens had sold
his interest in the family firm for a woman, and it is certain
that he remarried shortly after his arrival in America. The
romance of his departure served only to stir interest in the
colony, even while Behrens himself was establishing homes in
Allegheny and Philadelphia and becoming one of America's shipping
magnates.
Some of the neo-Mu'tazilites also went into shipping. The
majority of them - especially the exiles - were educated,
multilingual people with international connections, and trade
came as naturally to them as it did to the Jews. In at least one
case, that of Demir Celer's trading expedition to India, this was
to have far-reaching results. Celer, a cousin of the Rational
Society's founder, was one of those who had stayed in London
rather than going to America or returning to Constantinople. By
the time the Ottoman political climate turned back in the neo-
Mu'tazilites' favor, he had already become a prosperous London
merchant, and saw no reason to change his situation. His love
of travel, however, frequently led him to accompany his own
ships in search of markets, and that was how he found Bombay.
Forty years before, Bombay had been an insignificant town that
was not even mentioned on most maps of India. In 1661, though,
the Bombay archipelago had been ceded to the British crown, and
the East India Company purchased the islands seven years later.
The city thus passed into the hands of the energetic Governor
Gerald Aungier, who built up India's first British port by
encouraging skilled workers and merchants to settle there. In
his three short years as governor, Bombay's population grew from
less than 20,000 to almost 60,000, and it became a polyglot city
of Parsis, Jews, Hindus and Muslims of all sorts. By the turn of
the century, Bombay was home to India's first printing press, and
it had become a local center of Islamic scholarship.
It was thus only natural that, when Demir Celer set eyes on
Bombay in 1708, he decided to make it the headquarters of his
business. In January 1709, he sent for his family and opened a
warehouse and offices in the port district. In time, he and the
other neo- Mu'tazilites who followed would be ranked among the
great families of Bombay, and the neo-Mu'tazilite school
established there would rival those in Philadelphia and Cairo.
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In Constantinople, 1709 was a productive year for the Spinozas.
In the spring, Sarah published a medical treatise, the first of
two that she would write. Entitled On the Complaints of Women,
it was one of the first attempts at an organized study of female
diseases and childbirth. She drew on both the fragmentary
sources already available - correcting many of their mistakes in
the process - and her own experience, outlining the most
effective remedies for feminine complaints and the proper
procedures for prenatal care and delivery. Her treatment of
pregnancy and childbirth was especially advanced for the time;
among other things, she synthesized the delivery techniques of
midwives and physicians, and recommended that persons attending
at a birth have clean hands.
At the end of the year, Spinoza published his own last major
work, Metaphysical Thoughts. [FN5] In this treatise, he
returned to many of the themes he had treated in the Ethics
many years before - the nature of God, life and death. It is
likely that the last of these, especially, occupied his mind in
light of his age and failing health; the vigor that had sustained
him through seventy- eight years was declining rapidly.
Metaphysical Thoughts also built on the universal system
Spinoza had devised in Mind and Matter, in which ideas and
atoms were separately formed out of the motes that were the
essence of God. The logical corollary of this, Spinoza wrote, was
that thoughts existed separately from the body, and formed part
of the immortal essence of mankind. The physical death of the
body therefore did not mean the death of the person; indeed,
provided that the person had properly attuned his mind during
life, he would pass into a wholly metaphysical state in which he
would have perfect understanding of the divine essence. It was
this stage that was commonly referred to as the afterlife -
although, according to Spinoza, this term was a misnomer because
no actual death occurred.
Elsewhere in Metaphysical Thoughts, Spinoza also emphasized
that human beings were the only creatures in which the physical
and metaphysical aspects of God were mixed, and thus the only
ones capable of conducting the synthesis of experimentation and
intuition that was science. God, as he had previously explained,
had no need of science, and animals had no conception of it; it
was humans' unique mixture of the faculty of reason and the
limitations of a physical body that caused them to seek knowledge
in this manner. Thus, far from being antithetical to faith or
human nature, scientific inquiry was part of what made human
beings human, and part of what God had designed them to do. With
Metaphysical Thoughts, Spinoza brought his reconciliation of
science and reason to a close that he, at least, found
satisfying.
It was shortly thereafter that the Tulip Period came to a close.
In January 1710, Numan Kprl died, and a struggle ensued over
the succession to the Grand Vizier's chair. This time, the
transfer of power was settled by palace intrigue rather than
revolution, but by April, the conservative faction had gained the
upper hand.
The new Grand Vizier moved quickly to consolidate his power. The
remainder of the Kprl family, as well as almost a hundred
other prominent neo-Mu'tazilites, were exiled; most went to
Pennsylvania, although some made their way to Cairo and Bombay.
Spinoza, too, found himself unwelcome; he was old and no longer
politically active, but he nevertheless represented an ideology
that had no place in the new order. He was quietly told that
neither he nor the Rational Jewish would be harmed if he
resigned his titular governorship and emigrated to Palestine,
and he accepted just as quietly. In June 1710, fifty years to
the day after Spinoza first set eyes on Constantinople, he and
Sarah left the city never to return.
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[FN1] As in OTL, the Jacobites rose before they were ready.
[FN2] Abigail Adams likely won't be with us in this timeline, so
somebody had to say it.
[FN3] They held this right until 1780. During the 18th century,
women also voted in New Jersey and, according to at least one
account, Essex County, Virginia. (The citation given to support
the Virginia precedent is an article in the 18 October 1797
edition of the Norfolk Weekly Journal and County
Intelligencer.)
[FN4] This development might have startled Spinoza in OTL. As
the unfinished eleventh chapter of the Political Treatise
indicates, his OTL views on feminism were quite conventional for
the time. In the ATL, of course, he's had Sarah to set him
straight.
[FN5] The fact that one of Spinoza's works in OTL had this title
is, of course, purely coincidental.
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