The Spinoza Problem Read Free

and your family had to flee, to escape the Inquisition.”
    “But what can I—”
    “My father was burned at the stake just a year ago. His crime? They found pages of the Torah buried in the soil behind our home. My father’s
brother, Jacob’s father, was murdered soon after. I have a question. Consider this world where a son smells the odor of his father’s burning flesh. Where is the God that created this kind of world? Why does He permit such things? Do you blame me for asking that?” Franco looks deeply into Spinoza’s eyes for several moments and then continues. “Surely a man named ‘blessed’—Bento in Portuguese and Baruch in Hebrew—will not refuse to speak to me?”
    Spinoza nods solemnly. “I will speak to you, Franco. Tomorrow midday?”
    “At the synagogue?” Franco asks.
    “No, here. Meet me here at the shop. It will be open.”
    “The shop? Open?” Jacob interjects. “But the Sabbath?”
    “My younger brother, Gabriel, represents the Spinoza family at the synagogue.”
    “But the holy Torah,” Jacob insists, ignoring Franco’s tugging at his sleeve, “states God’s wish that we not work on the Sabbath, that we must spend that holy day offering prayers to Him and performing mitzvahs.”
    Spinoza turns and speaks gently, as a teacher to a young student, “Tell me, Jacob, do you believe that God is all powerful?”
    Jacob nods.
    “That God is perfect? Complete unto Himself.”
    Again Jacob agrees.
    “Then surely you would agree that, by definition, a perfect and complete being has no needs, no insufficiencies, no wants, no wishes. Is that not so?”
    Jacob thinks, hesitates, and then nods warily. Spinoza notes the beginnings of a smile on Franco’s lips.
    “Then,” Spinoza continues, “I submit that God has no wishes about how , or even if , we glorify Him. Allow me, then, Jacob, to love God in my own fashion.”
    Franco’s eyes widen. He turns toward Jacob as though to say, “You see, you see? This is the man I seek.”

CHAPTER TWO
    REVAL, ESTONIA—MAY 3, 1910
    Time: 4 PM
    Place: A bench in the main corridor outside Headmaster Epstein’s office in the Petri-Realschule
    Upon the bench fidgets the sixteen-year-old Alfred Rosenberg, who is uncertain why he has been summoned to the headmaster’s office. Alfred’s torso is wiry, his eyes grey-blue, his Teutonic face well-proportioned; a lock of chestnut hair hangs in just the desired angle over his forehead. No dark circles surround his eyes—they will come later. He holds his chin high. Perhaps he is defiant, but his fists, clenching and relaxing, signal apprehension.
    He looks like everyone and no one. He is a near-man with a whole life ahead of him. In eight years he will travel from Reval to Munich and become a prolific anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic journalist. In nine years he will hear a stirring speech at a meeting of the German Workers’ Party by a new prospect, a veteran of World War I named Adolf Hitler, and Alfred will join the party shortly after Hitler. In twenty years he will lay down his pen and grin triumphantly as he finishes the last page of his book, The Myth of the Twentieth Century. Destined to become a million-copy best seller, it will provide much of the ideological foundation of the Nazi party and offer a justification for the destruction of European Jews. In thirty years his troops will storm into a small Dutch museum in Rijnsburg and confiscate Spinoza’s personal library of one hundred and fifty-one volumes. And in thirty-six years his dark-circled eyes will appear bewildered and he will shake his head no when asked by the American hangman at Nuremberg, “Do you have any last words?”

    Young Alfred hears the echoing sound of approaching footsteps in the corridor, and spotting Herr Schäfer, his advisor and German teacher, he bolts to his feet to greet him. Herr Schäfer merely frowns and shakes his head slowly as he passes and opens the headmaster’s door. But just before entering, he