Spinoza: A Life (review)

If a new biography of Spinoza has been overdue for some time now, Steven Nadler’s Spinoza: A Life presents not only a refreshingly new standard account but a captivating study of the philosopher and his age. Nadler’s thorough integration of the most recent historical research in seventeenth-century Dutch and Jewish studies enriches his portrayal of Spinoza’s life with a wealth of background information that allows Spinoza to be situated with more precision and aplomb than before. Carefully and extensively researched, this contextualization synthesizes recent research into a richly textured picture. But while documentation of details of Spinoza’s character, personality, and life is relatively scarce, and little new important material has surfaced, the critical significance of Nadler’s thoughtfully argued study consists in breaking new grounds for a sharper, historically more sophisticated approach to Spinoza.

But Nadler’s biographical study points beyond the task of simply disposing of the weave of legends surrounding a mythical icon that has inspired generations of philosophers, critics, poets, and afficionados. More than just sorting the chaff from the wheat, Nadler’s careful examination of historical sources offers a Spinoza who—stripped from the aura of imprecision—might have become less of an easily comprehensible but also less of a mysterious and enigmatic figure. Given the sparsity of confirmed data about Spinoza’s family, his upbringing, education, and his, as it were, quasi-retired life, the attempt to reconstruct his biography presents a daunting project. And indeed, Spinoza’s semi-reclusive life style did not exactly increase the chances for much of reliable reporting, and much of the anecdotal material might, in fact, be more indicative of the aloofness which many contemporaries might have felt towards the social anomaly which Spinoza’s existence presented for them. Turning to the external factors, Nadler draws from a wealth of sources fleshing out the historical, social, political, and cultural backgrounds of the various milieus that made the world, or rather, worlds of Spinoza.

By unfolding the history of the early Sephardi settlement in the Netherlands, the economic, social, and cultural life of the Jewish community in which Spinoza grows up, and by tracing the family history of the Spinozas and reconstructing their social role in the Amsterdam Jewish community, Nadler follows Spinoza’s development from a young merchant’s early defaulting and career change to a life as independent thinker whose small but enthusiastic circle of friends served as crucial conduit to prominent figures in the world of politics, academe, letters, and religion. From the thoughtful reconstruction of the various social and intellectual spheres in which Spinoza moved, it becomes clear that his personal and theoretical options can only be fully understood if the specific particular social, political, and religious contexts in which they were formulated are given proper recognition.

The formidable complexity of the religious life of Christian sects and groups of all shades and persuasions was matched by the tension and pressure to conform that kept the Jewish community in check as the religious debates and controversies marked their members’ anxieties of returning to a tradition they had been forced to abandon under the sway of Inquisition. Ironically, the trauma of forced conversion and the experience of loss along with the anguished desire for exculpation led to acute forms of internalization of repression and persecution. Reproducing the mechanism of power and domination in an environment that seemed to champion the ideas of freedom of religion, speech, and thought may thus be perceived as paradoxical development, but this is how the Amsterdam Jewish community protected itself from further dangers of transgression and digression from the right path. The fear of sin and idolatry led those who had recently returned to their old belief to the conviction that their spiritual indemnity could only be safeguarded by strict adherence to the most orthodox Rabbinical authorities.

But there were also the intricate, unusually free arrangements that defined the Dutch republic as a newly emerging anomaly in the midst of a still largely feudal and early absolutist Europe. The...