Elijah Benamozegh (1822 – 1900), kabbalist over Spinoza: "il grandissimo genio"

In het verlengde van het blog van gisteren “Had Spinoza zijn Deus sive Natura en amor Dei intellectualis uit de kabbala?” zag ik dat ik al eerder op 20 januari 2011 in een blog over Samuel David Luzzatto een verwijzing had naar dit boek:

CoverAlessandro Guetta, Philosophy and kabbalah: Elijah Benamozegh and the reconciliation of Western thought and Jewish esotericism. Transl. Helena Kahan, SUNY Press, 2009, waarin het hoofdstuk Pantheism: The Great Error of Our Age & de paragraaf “Spinoza's Error: Downward Union.”

Als ik dan daarin lees dat Elijah Benamozegh een artikel schreef “Spinoza et la Kabbale," [in: Univers Israélite 29 (1864)], en dat hij in zijn boek Teologia, op pagina 77 Spinoza typeert als: "il grandissimo genio", ja dan móet ik uiteraard een blog aan deze geleerde wijden. Ik doe dat door die niet zo lange paragraaf “Spinoza's Error: Downward Union” hierna op te nemen.

Eerst iets over Elijah Benamozegh. Volgens Brill is hij geboren in 1823, volgens wiki (zie foto) in 1822. Hij werd geboren in een Italiaanse familie van kooplieden en rabbijnen. Hij werd een orthodoxe rabbijn en een bekende kabbalist destijds hoog gewaardeerd als een van de beste joodse geleerden. Een halve eeuw diende hij als rabbijn zijn gemeente in Livorno. Zijn Israel and Humanity (1863) is in het Engels vertaald in 1995. Zoals dan meestal het geval is, lees je op Wikipedia niet dat hij zich ook serieus en uitgebreid heeft bezig gehouden met Spinoza voor wie hij grote bewondering had, maar tegenover wie hij ook kritisch stond.

Als achtergrond (zo haal ik uit het genoemde boek) dient dat de historicus en filosoof Emile Saisset in 1875, toen in Frankrijk n.a.v. de Duitse Pantheismusstreit de controverse erover nog in volle gang was, een artikel over het pantheïsme schreef en daarin Spinoza’s filosofie als het volmaakste voorbeeld van deze vorm van denken typeerde. Het artikel was een bijdrage aan de Dictionnaire des Sciences l'hilosophiques, geredigeerd door Adolphe Franck, die – leerling van de filosoof en politicus Victor Cousin – zelf diepgaand vertrouwd was met de kabbala. H. Maret had al eerder in een “Essai sur le panthéisme dans les sociétés modernes” (Paris, 1840) Spinozisme en kabbalisme aan elkaar gelijkgesteld en beide als een van de grote vormen van filosofie beschouwd die tenderen in de richting van een eenheid/monisme. Volgens hem hadden zijn joodse tijdgenoten eenzelfde neiging daar ze volgens hem wilden ontsnappen aan de "rabbijnse onverzettelijkheid zonder hem die ze hebben verworpen en wiens bloed over hen is gekomen, te willen aanbidden." Zijn kritiek was, zoals het dan meestal gaat, gebaseerd op ethische argumenten, zoals de ontkenning van de vrije wil en de atheïstische ontwikkelingen in Duitsland.

Benamozegh’s hierboven vermelde essay “Spinoza et la Kabbale” ontstond in deze context. Het werd door Avraham Berliner, in "Rabbi Eliah Benamozegh" [Judische Presse, XXXI (1900), 85] briljant geacht en verdiende z.i. een ereplaats in de geschiedenis van de filosofie; Renan was er ook content over. Benamozegh gaf in het begin van zijn essay meteen aan dat hij door Saisset, die hij in zijn jeugd las, op dit onderwerp gekomen was. Het essay, filosofie gemengd met filologie, groef naar de bronnen van Spinoza’s filosofie. De scheidingslijn tussen pantheïsme en kabbala was, zoals hierna zal blijken, sterk terminologisch van aard.  

Hier volgt dan (zonder verwijzingen) de zeer informatieve paragraaf:

 

                  SPINOZA'S ERROR: DOWNWARD UNION

Among a great number of philological as well as theoretical points made in this essay, one essential idea stands out: the kernel of the Spinozist system was to be found in Kabbalah, though it distorted a key detail which provided the distinction between transcendentalist and pantheistic thinking.

Spinozist philosophy's debt to Kabbalah was illustrated in a set of quotations, drawn mainly from the Dutchman's letters, but also through strictly philosophical points. Taking as his starting point the possibility of a Maimonidean source, as suggested by Saisset, Benamozegh wondered whether the Spinozist triad composed of substance and its two known attributes, thinking substance and extended substance, should not be regarded as parallel to the three kabbalistic terms, sefer, sofer, and sippur, mentioned in the Sefer Yetzirah and themselves strictly related to the traditional gnoseological triad of knowledge, knowing subject, and known object.

Partially following Franck, but producing his own interpretation, Benamozegh translates sefer (literally "book") as unique substance, sofer ("scribe") as "res cogitans," and sippur ("story") as "res extensa.” These three elements corresponded to the sefirot keter ("crown," also identified by Franck with substance), hokhmah ("wisdom"), and binah ("intelligence"). The latter three sefirot were represented respectively by Kabbalists using the dot, the letter "yod," and the letter "he," their shape evoking the three dimensions of extension.

With the correspondence worked out, the argument could then be advanced. For Benamozegh, binah (intelligence) represented not the material extension but the idea of extension: the logical thing, ideal matter. For reasons that have yet to be explained—including, perhaps, the sheer number of terms in die Kabbalistic lexicon—Spinoza appears to have taken binah for malkhut ("kingdom"), actual material extension. Taking the idea of matter—an aspect of substance—for matter itself, Spinoza thus identified God with Nature, and thereby took a step toward pantheism at precisely the point where Kabbalah stopped short.

"Spinoza resembled his precursors, the Kabbalists, in almost every respect except one, and on that one point they were separated by a gulf."

Substance and matter were dodim, "lovers," rather than re'im, "compan-ions," or "equals" as substance and metaphysical matter were. So Benamozegh wrote in notes published in 1897. By this he meant that the tendency toward union between God and matter remained, in effect, a tendency, in which distinctions were preserved.

Spinoza's error—and it goes without saying that this was a deliberate choice rather than mere inattentiveness—lay in eliminating distinctions. In Benamozegh's words, this led him to draw the celestial world downward.

At the end of the day, the Livornese rabbi's scholarly arguments were intended to use Spinoza's prestige to boost that of Kabbalah. He admitted as much in a letter written to Vessilo Israelitico some sixteen years after the essay in question: since all the great contemporary philosophical systems, including Kantianism, were derived from Spinozism, demonstrating how it had drawn on Kabbalah was tantamount to recognizing the great relevance of the "philosophy of the Hebrews." This was the way Benamozegh took part in the Spinoza-centered debate just discussed—slotting pantheism, without denunciation, into place alongside Kabbalistic doctrines: a criticism devoid of any animosity toward the excommunicated Jew the Dutch philosopher was.

The Italian scholar Mino Chumla has demonstrated that the crux of the "Spinoza question" in Jewish circles concerned "Jewish modernity." An increasing number of different positions regarding Spinoza's philosophy were in fact being reached among nineteenth-century Jewish intellectuals. Themes of tradition and "betrayal" arose alongside, and in addition to, the issues of doctrinal orthodoxy seen in Maret and Gioberti, and the ethical concerns found in authors such as Saisset and Franck.

In France, Salomon Munk’s Mélanges de philosophie juive et arabe (1859) evoked the strict relationship between tradition and reason, where the former also needed to extend to include the esoteric tradition. Esotericism would enable the rights of reason to be maintained when the dogma of revealed truth began to be imposed in an authoritarian manner. In this sense, Spinoza's utter escape from tradition could be seen as an unsound rationalism that failed to take into account the previous conquests of reason!

The clearest, and most virulent, rejection of Spinoza came, however, from the Italian grammarian, biblicist, and poet, Samuel David Luzzatto (1800-1865). On several occasions, in separate works, and two articles in particular, as well as in personal correspondence, Luzzatto dispatched Spinoza's position as deterministic and antifinalistic. Thus far, nothing very new. The attack is, however, taken farther, into the arena of the philosopher's private life. In the introduction to Ha-Mishtaddel his commentary on the Pentateuch, scathing remarks are made about a man who left his community and found himself alone, abandoned and betrayed by those he considered his friends. According to Luzzatto's reasoning, this proved the falseness and impiety of his position.

Luzzatto, it is true, was first and foremost antiphilosophical: "My God is not that of Ka.n.t. but that of Ta.na.k. [Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible]," he wrote to Leopold Zunz with studied irony. He can be defined principally as an antimodernist mind, despite some major traits of his intellectual personality running counter to this interpretation. For instance, when attempting to explain manifestations of evil in history, he has no hesitation in associating Robespierre "and his friends" with Nero and Attila, as examples of absolute negativity, and Napoleon, the inheritor of the French Revolution, is referred to as a tyrant whose fall was an act of providence.

Living in a Jewish community within the Austro-Hungarian Empire which enjoyed early emancipation in the late eighteenth century, Luzzatto appears to be faithful to the concept of a multiethnic state within which the various national and religious communities enjoy comparative autonomy. Hence his emphasis on the importance of connections across the community and his severe condemnation of Spinoza the individualist, and traitor.

Benamozegh was, as we shall see, an enthusiastic follower of the Italian "Risorgimento," which was to lead to the creation of a unified state. From a historical perspective, such a nation-state was incontestably more "modern" than a multinational empire.

This is simply one paradox among many to surface when the two characters are compared; on the one hand, the scholar who was a central reference point for Europe's "enlightened" Jewish intellectuals and on the other, the Kabbalist, of whom the German Avrahim Berliner wrote:

"With his extraordinary abilities, and the rare gifts his mind possessed, he could have brought those who had wandered from it back to Judaism. But he was born under an unlucky star—geographically speaking—and spent his entire life trying to show the primordial and fundamental nature of Kabbalah, inhabiting a thoroughly Oriental mind."

Uit:

               

 

 

 

 

Reacties

J. G. Wachter pretendeert in zijn ELUCIDARIUS CABALISTICUS te hebben aangetoond "dat Spinoza overduidelijk cabaliseert (Spinozam apertissime cabalizare) en zich beroept op de overeenstemming van de traditie (= Hebreuwse 'kebel') der oude Hebraeen met hemzelf". Misschien lukt het je, Stan, ook nog een rijmpje te maken op 'cabalizare'?

Geen rijmpje maar een blogje