Spinoza and Kabbalah

Elijah Benamozegh was an uninvited guest at the philosophers' banquet. Self-taught in western philosophy and modern sciences, he was a stranger in the room of Parisian metaphysical debates. Born in Livorno in 1823 to a family emigrated from Marocco, his first education was done by his maternal uncle, Rabbi Yehuda Coriat, author of important kabbalistic works. This first schooling was only Hebraic, and included the complete reading of the Zohar. Thus read under the guidance of an authentic traditionist, the Zohar would remain the metaphysical inspiration of Benamozegh.

This first schooling encompassing the vast span of Hebrew culture, which he shared with Spinoza, should have established his competence as a judge of the latter. But his "Spinoza and Kabbalah", published in 1863 in the very parochial L'Univers Israélite, went almost unnoticed.

That the question of the influence of Kabbalah on Spinoza's ontology should be problematic is in itself a wonder. It never escaped the acuity of careful readers, Leibniz among them. After the most recent research in the field, it has become hardly deniable. The long obfuscation of the fact that the starting point of Spinoza's speculation on the absolute unity of ultimate Being and the production of the finite by the infinite lays in the kabbalistic books he owned and read, cannot be explained but by a conspiracy of ignorance and interest.

Compared to the subtlety and profundity of the ontological discussions among the kabbalists, Spinoza's simplification posing as rationalism might pale and show itself as a closure of the mind bordering on charlatanism.

But Benamozegh's contribution is a lot more than a landmark in the retrieval of Spinoza's intellectual background. He reveals here his philosophical acumen in picking up in Spinoza's system the weakest link: the modes infinite, immediate and mediate. The exact status and function of these modes, at the same time individuality and infinity, is an old puzzle in the interpretation of Spinozism.

Benamozegh's main goal in this article was clearly to elevate the intellectual status of Kabbalah in the eyes of his audience: to diagnose Spinoza's ontology as an aberration of Kabbalah is both proving that Kabbalah is an ontology and that Spinoza's language might be used as a tool to formulate the rational exposition of that ontology.