Spinoza on Circumcision and Ceremonies

Even if we did not know that our mind is eternal, we would still regard as of the first importance morality, religion, and absolutely all the things we have shown (in Part IV) to be related to tenacity and nobility.¹

INTRODUCTION

The May 2012 decision by a regional court in Cologne, Germany, that the circumcision of a four-year old Muslim boy “represents grievous bodily harm,” caused an outcry among German Jews and Muslims.² They were rightly concerned that an overzealous concern to protect the human rights of vulnerable children had infringed on religious freedom. Moreover, the ruling demonstrated an almost unfathomable historical amnesia by the court and rights advocates.³ Not surprisingly, Spinoza has been mentioned by some in the context of these debates. In a review published in The Forward, Allan Nadler mocked the Chief Rabbi of Britain, Sir Jonathan Sacks, who attacked the decision of the Cologne court through a reference to Spinoza, as one who wrote that circumcision had the power to sustain Jewish identity over the centuries: “That Spinoza—who considered the ritual practices of Judaism entirely archaic and often barbaric—is marshaled by an Orthodox chief rabbi in the defense of any Jewish rite is quite incredible, especially given what Spinoza actually had to say about circumcision.”⁴ Prominent modern Jewish philosophers, such as Hermann Cohen and Emmanuel Levinas, have attacked Spinoza more systematically on just these grounds.⁵ For them, Spinoza represents the stereotype of a self-hating Jewish intellectual who betrays the Jewish people as a condition of his acceptance to the enlightened Republic of Letters. They also accuse him of advocating the view that Christianity supersedes Judaism. In other words, a spiritual Christianity fulfills and ultimately replaces a carnal Judaism. It may be, as Levinas puts it, that Christianity is only the “penultimate” stage on the road to the intellectual love of God, but he still “subordinated the truth of Judaism to the revelation of the New Testament”⁶ in service of a secular Enlightenment.

Recent scholarly commentators have, albeit in more moderate terms, echoed this critique. In his book, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity, Steven B. Smith argues that Spinoza seeks to replace the “old dispensation” with the “new.” Like Levinas, he thinks that this is a two-step process. First, Spinoza wants to replace Judaism, which “is presented as the archetypal religion of fear,” with Christianity, which at least contains the seeds of reason: “Spinoza’s philosophical interpretation of Jesus and the apostles as the bringers of a true universalist religion of reason stands in stark contrast to his depiction of Moses and the prophets as men of limited intellect and vivid imagination” (p. 103). Of course, as Spinoza points out, Christianity has some of its own problems, mostly related to the varying rhetorical strategies that the apostles used to spread the faith and the sectarianism that resulted. So the second stage results when there is “a religion that will combine or synthesize the practical realism of the prophets with the rationalism and universalism of the apostles” (p. 105). Smith understands the role of religious ceremonies in light of this developmental scheme. In Judaism, ceremonies or ritual observances “make no contribution to blessedness” but exist in order to foster obedience to the state. In Christianity, there are still some ceremonies, which as in Judaism, do not lead to blessedness but only have a social function. But their role becomes increasingly marginal (p. 107). Finally, when we arrive at the end-stage of the evolutionary spiritual process—the “new dispensation,” which Smith identifies with the rise of a secular world-view based on autonomy—there is no need for external rituals of obedience organized around God, since individuals are self-directed through reason to the common good defined by “civil religion” (pp. 200–1). Even more recent commentators, such as Steven Nadler and Susan James, I would argue, hold to much the same view.⁷

At the core of these readings are two views: (1) Spinoza is committed (a) to a theological version of supersessionism, the view that, as the Oxford English Dictionary...