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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"Thus in the beginning, all the world was America." -- John
Locke, Second Treatise on Government, s.49. |
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Part 8 - America December 1682 to July 1685 |
By the time Spinoza responded to the letter from America, its
author was already dead. Mail service was slow and uncertain in
those days, especially between the Ottoman Empire and British
North America, and the response arrived in New York scant days
before 1682 turned to 1683. When the ship captain asked where he
might deliver a letter to Asser Levy, he was directed instead to
Levy's widow. [FN1]
Three months before, Levy had written the final chapter in a life
that spanned three continents. As a child during the 1630s, he
had accompanied his parents from Holland to Recife, after the
Dutch had seized part of Brazil from the Portuguese. [FN2] There
the Jewish community had thrived; at its height in the 1640s,
almost 1500 Jews lived in Recife, and the town boasted two
synagogues. Levy's parents were not rich, but his father was an
honest butcher, and he learned that trade in his father's house.
By the end of the 1640s, though, it had become clear that the
Dutch position in Brazil was untenable. As Recife came under
rebellion and siege, many Jews returned to Holland; when the city
was finally taken in 1654, less than seven hundred remained. The
Dutch inhabitants, including the Jews, were given three months
to vacate the colony with their possessions and ships. Most
drifted back to Amsterdam or to the West Indies, but in September
1654, the St. Catherine arrived in New Amsterdam bearing 23
Jewish passengers. Among them was Asser Levy. [FN3]
Thanks to the insularity of its established merchants and the
prejudices of Governor Peter Stuyvesant, New Amsterdam was not
hospitable to Jews. Stuyvesant, in fact, attempted to deport the
Jewish settlers, only to be vetoed by the directors of the Dutch
West India Company. Failing in that, he contented himself with
subjecting the Jews to indignities, and it was one of these that
turned Levy into a leader of the Jewish community.
Under the law of New Amsterdam, every freeman between the ages of
16 and 60 was required to serve in the militia. Stuyvesant
forbade the Jews this duty, and ordered instead that Jewish men
of military age pay a tax of 65 stuivers per month in its stead.
Most of the Jews complied, but Levy was both an able-bodied man
and a poor one, and he much preferred to stand guard rather than
pay this onerous tax. In November 1655, he and another Jewish
settler, Jacob Barsimson, petitioned the New Amsterdam council
for the right to "keep guard with other burghers, or be free from
the tax which others of their nation pay, as they must earn their
living with manual labor." The council denied their petition,
remarking snidely that if they were aggrieved by the tax, they
were free "to depart whenever and whither it pleases them." [FN4]
Levy and Barsimson refused to depart, or to acknowledge the
decision. Instead, day after day, they appeared for military
training with their muskets, and stood guard on the city walls.
After two years, the council finally relented and enrolled them
in the militia. Through unceasing pressure and the patronage of
the Company, the Jews of New Amsterdam won other rights as well -
the right to sell at retail, to practice trades, to engage in
commerce with the Indians. By the end of 1657, the Company
granted the Jews the status of second-class burghers - a rank
that did not confer political rights, but permitted Jews to
exercise the other privileges of freemen.
Through all this, Asser Levy prospered. In 1660, he was licensed
to practice the butcher's trade in New Amsterdam, and he became a
landowner the following year. He became a trusted agent of Dutch
merchants and then a merchant in his own right, traveling as far
as Albany and Holland on trading expeditions. Even as the
British encroached on New Netherland and an increasing number of
Jews deserted the colony, Levy stayed and expanded his business;
when the British took New Amsterdam in 1664, his was one of the
three Jewish households remaining in the city.
Under British rule, the Jews of New York retained their
privileges. In some ways, in fact, their position improved; the
Jewish inhabitants, along with other Dutch burghers, were
granted the rights of English freemen, including the right to
vote. Levy exercised this right, and others as well; in 1671, he
became the first Jew to sit on an American jury. In one case, he
was quite literally called upon to administer poetic justice;
Peter Stuyvesant, the man who once tried to deport him, was the
defendant in one of the civil cases that came before the court
during his term. Levy gave Stuyvesant more justice than the
Dutch governor would have given him, though; he found for the
defense. [FN5]
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It was around this time that Levy became aware of Rational
Judaism. It was only natural that Rationalism would appeal to a
self-made man like Levy, whose struggle to advance himself had
frequently run afoul of established authority. Levy was also not
an insular Talmudic scholar; he was a man of the world who took
a gentile partner at his butcher shop, was called upon by non-
Jews to administer their estates and lent New York's struggling
Lutheran congregation money to build its first church. In New
York, a community where there were no rabbis and where the
ancient traditions no longer applied, a religion that adapted
Jewish ethics to modern circumstances made perfect sense. Some
of the Jews who migrated to New York from England and the West
Indies were infected by his enthusiasm, and by 1673 he was
holding Rational meetings at his home and sending missives to
European and Ottoman Rationalists along with his dispatches of
goods. When he died in September 1682, his estate included a
spice box, a Kiddush goblet, a musket, pistols, two swords - and
a prized copy of the Rational Book of Common Prayer, which had
arrived earlier that year from Constantinople. [FN6] Nor was
this the only copy of the book in New York; of the city's ten
Jewish households, six attended Levy's Rational meetings.
By the time Spinoza's letter arrived, his estate was largely
settled, and his widow and brother-in-law were considering
relocation. [FN7] The family had prospered in New York, but
conditions were still not ideal; retail sale had again been
closed to Jews, and the community had been denied permission to
build a synagogue. Pennsylvania, with its constitution
guaranteeing liberty of conscience, offered the hope that these
disabilities might be remedied. Thus it was that when the Levy
family received Spinoza's request that they present his
compliments to William Penn, they decided to do so in person. In
the spring of 1683, Levy's brother- in-law, Simon Valentine van
der Wilden, arrived in Philadelphia with his family and announced
that he intended to take up residence as a general merchant.
[FN8]
Van der Wilden's arrival unknowingly triggered Pennsylvania's
first constitutional crisis. Under Article 2 of the bill of
rights that accompanied the Frame of Government, any inhabitant
who held 100 acres of land or paid "scot and lot to the
government" was to be reckoned a freeman of the province, with
the right to vote and be elected to office. As a Dutch burgher
who had been naturalized with the British conquest of New
Amsterdam, van der Wilden qualified as an inhabitant, and
claimed that his payment of taxes entitled him to exercise
freeman's rights. His claim was supported by many of the
settlers, but others less friendly to him pointed out that
Article 34 restricted the franchise to those "such as possess
faith in Jesus Christ."
Like his formidable brother-in-law, van der Wilden was not one to
give up without a fight. Asser Levy had voted in New York, where
freedom of conscience was not protected as zealously as in
Pennsylvania; why, then, should his family not possess the same
rights in a place where their religion had greater freedom? In
July 1683, as the Sultan's army stood outside Vienna, van der
Wilden petitioned the provincial council to resolve the apparent
conflict between the two sections and declare that he was a
freeman of the colony.
The petition was heard in August before the council's committee
on justice and safety. Many of the members were disposed to
grant his petition. The provisions of Article 34 had not been
enacted with any malice against Jews; the framers simply had
never imagined that any Jew would want to settle in the province.
In addition to asserting his natural rights, however, van der
Wilden argued that, as a Rational Jew, he in fact had "faith in
Jesus Christ." As proof, he entered a copy of On Religion
into evidence, pointing out the passages where Spinoza had
described Jesus as a philosopher- prophet equal to any of those
in the Old Testament. Thus, although he did not believe in
Jesus' divinity, he belonged to a faith that held Jesus in great
respect and taught that his words were both rational and godly.
It was an argument worthy of any English barrister, and one that
provoked a storm of debate. Some councillors were unwilling to
concede such an elastic interpretation of the word "faith," but
they were impressed at hearing Jesus praised by a Jew, and the
fact that the Rationalists were hard-working people who worshiped
in meeting halls made them seem a sober and godly folk. And
besides, Pennsylvania needed merchants, and the Levy name was a
by-word for honesty throughout the New World. A New England
court had once remitted a Jewish peddler's fine "as a token of
respect to Mr. Assur Levy" [FN9], and now this same respect
carried the day before the Pennsylvania council.
The council's decision, although accepted by most, did not sit
well with a number of influential citizens. Thus it was that
the first case to come before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court - an
innovation that Spinoza had inspired William Penn to adopt -
concerned the work of Spinoza himself. The argument on both
sides was heated, but in the end, the court ruled by a vote of
four to one that the council's interpretation of the bill of
rights was permissible. In the election of February 1684, van
der Wilden cast his vote along with the other freemen, the first
step in a civic life that would lead to his election as justice
of the peace. [FN10]
Across the ocean, Spinoza was also considering emancipation. The
early 1680s were a turbulent time in the Ottoman Empire and
Europe, but a placid one for him, and a time of creativity for
him and his family. His daughter Naomi, at the age of five, was
already showing a prodigious talent for the flute, and both
Spinoza and Sarah carried on a thriving correspondence with
intellectuals throughout the Western world.
At the same time, Spinoza was making up for his long drought in
publications. In 1682 and 1683, he published several treatises
on mathematics and logic, the most important of which was On the
Regulation of Reason. This treatise was a comprehensive
discourse on methods of deduction and common logical fallacies.
In many ways, it was a compilation of what had gone before -
relatively few of the concepts discussed in the book originated
with Spinoza - but it was a compilation of practically
encyclopedic scope, and it was among the first treatises to
attempt to reduce logical arguments to symbols and quasi-
mathematical equations. By modern standards, Spinoza's attempts
at symbolic logic were clumsy and amateurish, but he would
provide inspiration to Liebniz and others with greater
mathematical skill than him.
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The following year, Spinoza published the first of his important
political works, On Emancipation. Although this pamphlet is
not generally considered a major work in a philosophical sense,
it would profoundly influence the debate on the status of the
European Jewish communities during the coming decades. Boiled
down to its essence, it was a plea for equality; just as Spinoza
had argued that an ideal religion permitted freedom of conscience
to its members, an ideal state would not discriminate between its
inhabitants on the basis of their faith. He argued that Jews had
been cited by Ottoman and English monarchs as having the
qualities of useful citizens, and that Jews in fact had held
citizenship in the empire that was Rome. When the decree of
Caracalla granted citizenship to all free men of the empire, Jews
were not excepted, and they had diligently fulfilled the
responsibilities of that role for more than two centuries after.
How much more then, Spinoza argued, should Jews be granted
citizenship in the modern age, especially since the Jewish
community itself was taking steps to rid itself of its
insularity and hidebound customs.
With the publication of On Emancipation, Spinoza formally cast
Rational Judaism as a mediator between Jewish tradition and the
Enlightenment. Others before him had pled for equality, but he
was the first to argue that Jews could be both Jewish and
Western, and that there was a middle path between ghettoization
and total assimilation. The book was widely circulated among
the educated Jews of London and the German courts, many of whom
were wrestling with the same issue, and a collection of their
letters and essays was published the following year under the
title Commentaries on Emancipation. The struggle for equality
would not be completed for centuries to come, but the debate had
begun.
In Philadelphia, the debate continued. In the spring of 1685,
the Jewish question was once more in the public eye with the
arrival of six Jewish families from Newport, Rhode Island. The
Newport Jewish community had existed for at least eight years,
but its members - unlike the burghers of New York - were still
treated as foreigners rather than inhabitants of the province.
The significance of this was brought home to them in early 1685,
when the entire community was arrested for violating the
Navigation Act of 1660 and their property was impounded. They
were ultimately acquitted by a jury, but they decided to leave
Rhode Island. [FN11] Some drifted back to the West Indian
islands from whence they had came, others to New York, but the
Rationalist families - who had corresponded with their
counterparts in other colonies - chose Pennsylvania.
Some alarmists among the population argued that the Newport Jews
were the spearhead of a Jewish invasion, but the growing respect
in which van der Wilden was held by the community calmed the
worst of the rhetoric. Ultimately, in July 1685, the council
issued them letters of denization permitting them to reside and
transact business in Pennsylvania, although it stopped short of
granting them the naturalization that van der Wilden had
obtained as part of New Amsterdam's terms of surrender. It would
be almost a decade before any Jews outside the Levy family won
the vote in Pennsylvania, but the seed of a great Rational
Jewish community had been planted.
In the same month, five thousand miles away, Spinoza received a
letter from the Duchess Sophia of Hanover. [FN12] An avid patron
of philosophy, Sophia had learned of Spinoza from Duke Ernst
August's court factor, Leffmann Behrens, and from his historian,
Gottfried von Leibniz. She was, it seemed, particularly
interested in his theories on emancipation.
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[FN1] Some accounts give the date of Asser Levy's death as 1681,
others as 1682. Jacob Rader Marcus, whose treatise on the Jews
of colonial America is IMO the most thorough, hedges his bets and
says that Levy died in "1681 or 1682." I'm exercising authorial
privilege and going with 1682. If necessary, I'll assume that
Levy's adoption of Rationalism led him to healthier habits and
prolonged his life for an extra year - that seems a small enough
butterfly.
[FN2] Authorial privilege again. None of the sources I
consulted, including Marcus, had any indication of the
circumstances or even the date of Levy's birth. His legal name -
Asser Levy van Swellem - indicates that his family, at least,
came from the city of Schwelm in Westphalia, but Levy himself
could just as easily have been born in Holland or Brazil. Leo
Hershkowitz, a history professor at Queens College, believes
based on Dutch court records that Levy was born in Lithuania, and
that his family may have migrated through Schwelm to Holland and
Brazil. I'm going with the theory of a European birth; a Recife
birth would make him 24 years old or less at the time of his
arrival in New Amsterdam, and IMO his fairly early rise to
community leadership indicates that he was older than that. The
exact European country in which he was born is immaterial to this
story, and is left as an exercise for the reader.
[FN3] My major source of information on the Recife community, in
addition to Marcus, is Eli Faber, A Time for Planting: The First
Migration, 1654-1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,
1992).
[FN4] The minutes of the council session in which this occurred
are recorded in Morris Schappes' fascinating collection of
primary sources, A Documentary History of Jews in the United
States, 1654- 1875 (New York: Citadel Press, 1950).
[FN5] True story.
[FN6] With the exception of the prayer book, these items were all
part of Levy's estate in OTL. The estate was appraised at £553,
although he was probably much wealthier than that.
[FN7] Asser Levy's family moved to Long Island after his death in
OTL. In the ATL, they're simply moving a little farther.
[FN8] This is an advance of nearly forty years over OTL.
Although the Jewish community of Philadelphia was one of the most
influential in eighteenth-century America, it didn't get its
start in OTL until 1720, when Isaac Miranda settled in
Philadelphia.
[FN9] Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1492-1776, v.1, p.247
(Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1970).
[FN10] In OTL, of course, this controversy never occurred, and
Jews didn't have the franchise in Pennsylvania until the
Revolution. There were no Jews in Pennsylvania during the
formative years between 1682 and the fourth Frame of Government
in 1701, and there was thus no thought of exempting Jews from the
anti-Catholic tests and oaths included in the constitutions of
this period. IMO, though, it isn't implausible that the
Pennsylvania Jewish community in the ATL might be enfranchised in
the manner described. As discussed above, Jews voted in New York
during the 1600s, and there were several other colonies,
including New Jersey and South Carolina, that had Jewish
freemen. William Penn wasn't an anti- Semite in OTL, and he
would be even less so in the ATL given his acquaintance with
Spinoza's work; this, combined with the presence of a relatively
assimilated form of Judaism in Pennsylvania during the 1680s,
would IMO create the conditions under which enfranchisement could
occur.
[FN11] This happened in OTL. The Newport Jews of OTL, however,
migrated exclusively to Barbados and New York. In the ATL, the
Rationalists among them will become the nucleus of the
Philadelphia Jewish community.
[FN12] At this time, she isn't yet an Electress.
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