Die Lebensgeschichte Spinozas (review)

When Jakob Freudenthal published Die Lebensgeschichte Spinozas in 1899, it was the first collection of biographical documents on Spinoza, who was then still seen as something of an ascetic and isolated philosopher. This view had been suggested by Jarig Jelles’ preface to Spinoza’s Opera posthuma. Bayle had also used Spinoza’s unique vita when arguing for his claim that an atheist could live a virtuous life. While this had offered a pretext for reading Spinoza since the end of the seventeenth century, once he was “christianized” by German idealism it became increasingly a way to ignore his critique of religion, as well as his Jewish roots. Our knowledge of Spinoza’s life was further extended by the findings of Carl Gebhardt, who, in a series of articles beginning in 1922, pointed to Spinoza’s association with Jewish heresy in Amsterdam. As a result, Spinoza’s turn to modern science and philosophy was seen as due, to some extent, to his association with Jewish heresy in Amsterdam. The next great step in Spinoza historiography was taken in 1932 by Mordechai Vaz Dias and Willem Tak, who published new biographical material showing us the young merchant Spinoza.

Although none of the documents found since have changed our picture of Spinoza’s life as dramatically, they have never been collected in one place. Thanks to Walther’s new edition, we now have almost all of these documents in two large volumes with a rich commentary, the first of which includes the documents and their German translations, while the second provides the tools for studying them: a concordance to Freudenthal’s edition of 1899; a chronology of Spinoza’s life; an extensive biographical bibliography (indeed, almost too extensive, divided as it is into so many sections and sorted according to year of publication); and indexes of authors, persons, and subjects. A genealogical tree of Spinoza’s family is another nice feature.

Of the 214 documents contained in this edition, 96 are new. Walther has omitted those documents from the Freudenthal edition that he felt were not relevant to Spinoza’s biography. Nevertheless, some superfluous material remains. At note 59 there is a report on Spinoza’s beliefs during his youth, written c. 1770, that is not a source and therefore of no biographical value. Likewise, Spinoza is not mentioned in the list of students from the higher grades at the Thora School. The documents themselves are divided into “Biographies” (Lebensbeschreibungen) and “Documents” (Dokumente). However, sections of Stolle/Hallmann’s travel diary have been placed with the Spinoza biographies, even though they do not provide a description of Spinoza’s life, and biographical remarks from Jelles’ introduction to Spinoza’s Opera posthuma have been added, even though they were never intended to be a biography. Walther’s arrangement would have been justified if Freudenthal’s title for chapter I, ‘Sources’ (Quellentexte) had been kept instead of ‘Biographies’.

The “Documents” section is divided into new subsections: “Family” (Die Familie); “Father: Religious and Economic Activity” (Der Vater: Religiöse und wirtschaftliche Aktivitäten); “Spinoza’s Life” (Spinozas Leben); and “Acquaintances and Oral Reports” (Umgang und mündliche Äuβerungen). But the third section, “Spinoza’s Life,” contains some rather disparate documents. The personal and therefore subjective statements of Pufendorf, Limborch, Leibniz, Sand, Tschirnhaus, Schuller, and others are offered here together with documents from church synods, courts, and Jewish institutions—which seems to undermine the point of having a separate fourth section. The personal statements in the third section are as subjective as those in the fourth and should have been collected together in one separate section of personal documents that could have been further divided. The present arrangement reflects the editor’s own decisions about which personal statements about Spinoza include information about himself and acquaintances and which do not, as the latter have been excluded. This is a significant change of editorial principles from Freudenthal, who collected personal statements about Spinoza and left their assessment up to the reader.

The second...