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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"O God, open my lips that my mouth might declare Your glory." -- Sabbath Amidah |
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Part 7 - Common Prayer January 1680 to August 1682 |
1680 dawned a hopeful year. Although the rabbis of
Constantinople clung tenaciously to their decree of
excommunication, they had not succeeded in eliminating Rational
Judaism; in fact, almost thirteen years after the ban had been
announced, the effect seemed to be quite the opposite. Of the
thirty thousand Jews in Constantinople, eleven thousand called
themselves Rationalists, and Rational meeting halls existed in
every Jewish neighborhood. Balat, where Spinoza lived and the
new Rational Synagogue stood, was still the center of the
community, but many Rational Jews had also moved to neighboring
Eyp. This district was not historically Jewish, but in the past
decade it had become home to three thousand Rational Jews, and
was the first neighborhood to become predominantly Rational.
There were Rationalists outside Constantinople as well. The
Galilee colony, under royal protection and strengthened by a
decade of bountiful crops, was now more than twenty-five hundred
strong, and there were meeting halls in Salonika, Smyrna and even
Safed. There were also kindred spirits in Europe; Spinoza
received daily correspondence from court Jews in London, the
German states, and the cities of the Italian peninsula. In the
Netherlands, where Spinoza's works were still banned by the
local rabbinate and the decree of William of Orange [FN1], it was
dangerous for Rational Jews to declare their allegiance openly,
but it was rumored that meetings were held secretly in private
homes.
There were probably fewer than twenty thousand Rationalists all
told - a small fraction of the worldwide Jewish diaspora [FN2] -
but the movement's membership was disproportionately drawn from
the most educated and influential sectors of world Jewry.
Rational philosophy was flourishing, and there was even talk of
establishing an annual Rational journal in which the writings and
correspondence of influential thinkers could be circulated. Thus
far, there were none of those to equal Spinoza, but several whose
works would have impact on the subsequent development of the
sect.
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During this time, Spinoza himself had largely been occupied with
other things. His wife Sarah had recovered from the year-long
illness that followed the birth of their child, but his family
was still both a responsibility and a delight. Also, much as he
tried to avoid it, he was sometimes forced to deal with the
minutiae of administering a growing community. All the same, he
found time to correspond with philosophers throughout the West,
and many of these long-distance dialogues laid the groundwork for
his later treatises.
One of the most important colloquies of this period in Spinoza's
life was his decade-long exchange with John Locke. By 1680, a
collection of these letters had already been published by Haham
Saltiel, and another would be released in 1686. To the modern
eye, the letters reveal an erudite and often pointed discourse
between two keen minds, but they also show that the political
ideas that Spinoza would incorporate years later in The State
were already coalescing. [FN3] In the course of his conversation
with Locke, Spinoza developed his conception that the law, rather
than ruler or subject, should be supreme, and that a democratic
government within constitutional limits was the best method of
guaranteeing this state of affairs. [FN4] In his earlier
letters, Spinoza had favored unrestrained democracy, but by the
end of the first published volume, he had come to believe that a
king or elected leader was necessary to act as judge in order to
ensure that the people or their representative bodies did not
overstep their constitutional bounds. The best such restraint
would be a board of men "versed in the natural and civil Law,"
but a monarch or consul could also perform this function if
trained in philosophy and statecraft.
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The other of Spinoza's important correspondents was Isaac Newton.
Most of Spinoza's letters to Newton concerned mathematics and the
physical sciences, in which Spinoza had a long-standing interest,
but Newton's ideas about methods of learning also made an
impression on the Jewish philosopher. The concept of gaining
knowledge through observation and controlled experiments had its
limits - after all, one could not observe God or subject Him to a
controlled environment - but it might have some utility in
problems of law and ethics. As Spinoza wrote to Newton in the
autumn of 1680, perhaps all laws should be closely studied after
their enactment in order to determine their effect on the ills
they were designed to solve, and automatically repealed if they
did not have the desired effect within a given period. The full
development of this concept would await the publication of The
State, but it was already beginning to influence the philosophy
of the Rational movement.
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At the same time, another dramatic event was taking place among
Rationalists, in which Spinoza would have little part - the
development of a Rational liturgy. This was, in a way, not as
radical as it sounded. To be sure, the core rituals of Jewish
religious services - the Barechu or call to prayer, the Shema and
related prayers, the Amidah and, on certain days, the prayers
associated with Torah reading - had not changed for centuries.
The readings that surrounded them, though - especially the
piyyutim, or hymns - varied from place to place and were often
in a state of flux. The Yigdal hymn, for instance, had not
entered the liturgy until the fourteenth century, and Adon Olam -
set to music so hauntingly by Salomone Rossi - had done so only
in the fifteenth. Congregations throughout history had added
hymns to the service, or replaced them with others more to their
liking.
The standardization of the Rational liturgy was in most respects
a change of this sort rather than a radical revision. Neither
the leading Rational rabbis nor their congregations were ready to
give up the familiar rituals entirely, and the core liturgies
were preserved practically unchanged. Indeed, there was little
reason to change them - there was nothing in the Shema that was
objectionable to Rational Judaism, and the Amidah - a silent
prayer in which the different aspects of God were contemplated -
seemed well suited to the development of Spinoza's "third
knowledge." Some of the wording of the Amidah was altered to
fit the Rational conception of God as universal substance rather
than free-willed agent, but the order and general substance of
the service remained the same.
In other ways, the new Rational liturgy ratified changes that had
already been made. One of these was the period of discussion
that had come to follow the Amidah, in which a subject chosen
prior to the service - the week's Torah portion, or a problem of
law or philosophy - was debated. In some meeting halls, this
discussion had turned into a sermon of sorts, while in others it
was more participatory, but the new liturgy made some form of
discussion mandatory. "After silence, voices; after
contemplation, sharing."
Many of the piyyutim that were not included in the Rationalist
prayer book had also been omitted by most Rational congregations
for some time. The Yigdal, for instance, was unacceptable
because it embodied Maimonides' thirteen principles of faith,
which Spinoza had rejected as contrary to reason. The Aleinu was
likewise abandoned, as was the verse of the Lecha Dodi that
mentioned the Messiah. However, the remainder of the Lecha Dodi
- a joyous song of greeting to the Sabbath - was retained, as was
Adon Olam. [FN5]
The creative force of the new ritual, however, was what it added
rather than what it took away. New piyyutim that had been
written by Rational poets throughout the Ottoman realm and Europe
were collected, and important philosophical passages were
included at key points in the service. The liturgy was not
entirely standardized; many of the readings were optional, and
those that were debatable from a Rational point of view were
included for the judgment of the congregation. Thus it was that
the rituals that had grown up in diverse Spinozan meeting halls
- even the passages from the Zohar that were sometimes
contemplated in Safed - were collected for the benefit of the
movement as a whole. With the publication of the Sefer
Haberachot Tziburot - the Book of Common Prayer - in January
1682, Rational Judaism had found its voice.
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At the same time, a long-standing dispute concerning the Rational
movement's communal status was settled. Despite having been
excommunicated fifteen years since, the Rationalists were still
technically part of the Jewish millet, and subject to its civil
authority. In practice, this had meant a variety of things. In
towns where Rationalism was weak and orthodox Judaism was strong,
the rabbinate persecuted or expelled the Rationalists. In cities
like Constantinople where the Rationalists were strong enough to
defy the rabbis, they were effectively under no civil government
at all. This state of affairs was unacceptable both to the
Rational leaders and the Sultan's court, although for opposite
reasons.
In 1680, Haham Saltiel and Rabbi Benvenisti, who had become the
Rationalists' political leaders, had petitioned the Sultan to be
granted the status of a millet. With the aid of their allies at
court, they pointed out that each of the Christian denominations
was a millet unto itself, and that the Rationalists were now a
separate Jewish denomination by the rabbis' own decree. Granting
official status to the Rationalists would provide them with
protection on the one hand, and regularize their government on
the other, all to the benefit of the Sublime Porte and the law.
On February 17, 1682, their petition was heard, and Sultan Mehmet
IV issued a firman declaring the Rational Jews to be a millet
subject to the Sultan's authority. Baruch Spinoza, the reluctant
rabbi, was now an even more reluctant governor.
Not all the consequences of victory could be foreseen. Although
the firman granted a measure of recognition to the Rational
movement, it also increased the opposition of the forces at court
who resented its influence. This resentment increased further in
the spring of 1682, with the emergence of the first Rational
society among Ottoman Muslims. The founder of this society, a
physician named Ismet Celer [FN6], was careful to acknowledge the
authority of the Sultan and the qadis, and to emphasize that the
purpose of Rational philosophy was to provide guidance where the
law of Islam did not reach. These concessions prevented Celer
from being condemned as an apostate and the Rational Society from
being closed out of hand, but the reactionaries viewed it - and
its progenitor - with suspicion. The old rumors spread by
Sabbatai Zevi in the years before his death were circulated
again, and forces were at work that would cause great danger for
the community in years to come.
In 1682, though, those forces whispered rather than shouted. And
in August of that year, Spinoza received a letter from the far-
off province of New York, written by a man who claimed to be a
Rational Jew. It described a constitution that had been
promulgated for a new colony, by a proprietor who listed
Spinoza's work among his inspirations. This wondrous place,
where the rights of freemen were guaranteed as never before and
liberty of conscience promised to all, was called Pennsylvania.
[FN7]
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[FN1] In OTL, William of Orange banned Spinoza's works in 1674 at
the request of the Amsterdam church council. Given that
Spinoza's ATL treatise on religion would be at least as
provocative to them as the Theological and Political Treatise was
in OTL, they will probably still prevail upon William to ban his
books after the death of Jan de Witt. This might make things
interesting in England after 1689, when William of Orange
becomes the male half of William and Mary - but then again, it
might not, because Rationalism will have an established foothold
and there would be less support for the ban from Parliament, the
Church of England, and the local rabbinate. I don't claim to
know William's mind, but I'll go with the theory that his
opposition to Spinoza was political rather than personal, and
that Spinoza's ideas will be a somewhat better fit with the
Glorious Revolution than in Holland during the post-de Witt
reaction.
[FN2] I don't have any exact figures, but most estimates of the
world Jewish population in the late 1600s put it at around one
million. At that point, the Jewish population was still
declining toward a low point that would be reached in the mid-
18th century, when restrictions on marriage and childbearing in
Europe were at their most severe and the Turkish community had
been depleted by disease and assimilation. The Jewish population
turnaround will probably occur sooner in the ATL, although
nothing's etched in stone at this point.
[FN3] In OTL, Locke's treatises on government were not published
until 1690, but it is likely that many of the ideas expressed in
those works were formed much earlier. Similarly, I'm assuming
that Newton's conception of the scientific method was formed
before the publication of Optics in 1704. Certainly, many of
the discoveries made by Newton in the 1660s and 1670s seem to
bear the stamp of that method.
[FN4] Spinoza expressed similar sentiments in OTL, in chapter 16
of the Theological and Political Treatise, but he seemed to
believe that popular government was self-limiting and that no
explicit constitutional limitations were necessary. In the ATL,
his political theories will be influenced by Locke's conception
of a social contract, which he will interpret as a set of supra-
legal norms that constrain the sovereign power.
[FN5] All right, Adon Olam is a bit debatable from a Spinozan
point of view, but it can be rationalized, and I wanted to keep
the one Jewish hymn that can be sung to anything.
[FN6] This character is not historical.
[FN7] Pennsylvania's "First Frame of Government," promulgated by
William Penn on May 5, 1682, together with the bill of rights
adopted by the prospective colonists in England, can be found at
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/states/pa04.htm The ATL
version is substantially the same, with the addition of a supreme
court that had the power to decide, subject to override by six
sevenths of the legislature, whether new laws were in conformance
with the bill of rights.
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