Amsterdam au temps de Spinoza. Argent et liberté, and: Être juif à Amsterdam au temps de Spinoza (review)

BOOK REVIEWS ~37 tions prior to his move to Oxford in the mid-165os, and most scholars have concentrated on the thought of the "mature Boyle"--the Boyle who was the leading member of the Royal Society after its formation in the early 166os. Further, almost nothing has been known about the sources of Boyle's thought. By publishing and so excellently annotating The Early Essays and Ethics of Robert Boyle Harwood has done much to alleviate these lacunae. I have checked random passages in Harwood's edition against the original manuscripts and have detected no errors in Harwood's edition. In fact, the deterioration of the manuscripts in many places has made Harwood's accurate transcription a Herculean task. JAN WOJCIK Auburn University Henry M~cholan. Amsterdam au temps de Spinoza. Argent et libertY. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, x99o. Pp. z77- FF 16o. Henry Mtchoulan. l~treJuif d Amsterdam au tempsde Spinoza. Paris: Michel Albin, 199L Pp. 184. NP. These two books by a leading historian of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews are exceedingly helpful in presenting the background world in which many early modern thinkers developed their ideas. Although both books have Spinoza in the rifle, a good deal of the content, especially of the first volume, is equally relevant to Descartes, Locke, and others who lived or sojourned in Amsterdam. Much mythology has grown up about the economic, political, religious, and social conditions in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century which is supposed to help us understand the early modern philosophers. And much has been learned in the last thirty to forty years about the actua/history of the Jewish community of Amsterdam and about Spinoza himself which is ignored in the histories of philosophy that persist in just repeating eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts. Therefore it is very good to have Mtchoulan's fine, not overly technical, accounts of both the overall world of Amsterdam, and the particular world of the Amsterdam Jews, to counteract and maybe even replace the old and tired myths. Amsterdam became inordinately rich and cosmopolitan in the seventeenth century . It attracted people of many cultures and many religious persuasions to participate in its economic miracle. It became the center of international trade, especially the colonial trade, the center of European banking, and the center of publishing for all of Europe. Mtchoulan shows that seventeenth-century Amsterdam, basically run by oligarchy , felt a constant strain between its desire for money and its desire for liberty. Attempts to enforce some kind of religious uniformity clashed with money-making activities. So, not because of any great tolerant philosophy, the Calvinist leaders of Amsterdam came to terms with Catholics, Jews, and even Socinians, and with a few exceptions the city fathers allowed the publication of all sorts of materials, since printing and publishing were also major money-making activities. It is in this milieu, with its 138 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31:1 JANUARY 1993 ups and downs of freedom, repression, the quest for gain, and the fear of losses, that the early modern philosophers and scientists were able to flourish. Mtchoulan's most recent work, P,tre Juif a Amsterdam au temps de Spinoza, provides much-needed correctives to the usual picture of the world Spinoza came from and reacted to. The book is not a full scholarly treatment of Amsterdam Jewry in the seventeenth century, but rather a picture, based on the best present scholarship, written for the general public. The usual story is mostly based upon the earliest biography of Spinoza by Colerus, plus German romantic accounts. Literature from Gebhardt's essay on Spinoza and the Marranos published in the 192os to the post-war writings by I. S. Rtvah, Mtchoulan, G. Nahon, Y. Kaplan, H. P. Salomon, myself, and others, have greatly enriched our understanding of what the Jewish community of the time was and was not. It was not a traditional Jewish community, studying medieval texts and cut off from the general society. It was a community formed almost entirely by people of Jewish origin who had been raised as Catholics in Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, and Belgium. Many had personally suffered Inquisition persecution, and fled to...