Dr. Bernard Drachman, speaking at the Jewish Center on Saturday morning, scored those specific Jewish organizations who have arranged to celebrate the tercentenary of the birth of Baruch Spinoza which occurs next Thursday.
Dr. Drachman holds that Spinoza was a Jew neither in the religious nor national aspect and that he was out of sympathy with the Jews as a people. Therefore it is lacking in self respect to arrange celebrations “in honor of one utterly devoid of sympathy with his ancestral faith and people and whom his brethren felt compelled to disavow and thrust from their midst. “It is time that Jews had sufficient pride not to claim as their own those connected with them only by the accident of birth, but who stand outside of the camp of Israel and in whose hearts there is nothing of the faith and love and loyalty which are the only true bases of Jewish brotherhood.”
At the same time, Dr. Drachman said that “individual Jews, who are interested in philosophy, may with propriety offer homage to Spinoza, the mighty thinker, whose ratiocinations have profoundly influenced the thought of civilized mankind and we may all feel a certain measure of gratification that a man of such distinction sprang from our race.”
Baruch Spinoza was hailed as one of the four or five greatest Jews of all time by the Rev. John Haynes Holmes, speaking Sunday night before the congregation of the Community Church.
“This immortal philosopher,” Mr.
Holmes said, “was called by Renan ‘the greatest Jew of modern times.’ I should call him one of the four or five greatest Jews of all time. This in spite of the fact that he was ex-communicated by the synagogue, and thus cast out of his own spiritual household.
“Spinoza’s contribution to philosophic thought was stupendous in its range and depth. At once a rationalist and a mystic, he presented a system of three basic ideas which constitute the foundation of all modern science. First, he asserted the fundamental idea of unity—the unity of mind and matter, of body and soul, of God and nature. It was because he saw no transcendant God that he was called an atheist, but he felt supremely the imminent God who is at one with all things. Secondly, Spinoza found the substance of the world to be a process, a movement, a life. The cosmos was a living thing, animated in every part. God again! Lastly, he found in this living nature the reign of law; and he called this universal law the divine will. Again, God!
“In these principles do we see the reality of all scientific thought. There can be no science and no philosophy today without Spinoza. Is it any wonder that the greatest of modern scientists, Albert Einstein, himself a Jew, calls Spinoza his master, and accepts Spinoza’s God as his own? This God, the immanent life of all, whose abode is space, whose will is law, is the deity of all intelligent and educated men in our time. Einstein calls the worship of this God a cosmic religion, in which mind and soul meet in the union of all truth. Perhaps the only truly religious men are philosophers, scientists—and saints!”
Dr. Henry Neumann of the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture calls Spinoza a physician of the mind.
“He was not popular; he was a physician of the mind,” Dr. Neumann said. “His insistence that a man’s conduct does not depend upon his religious beliefs particularly identifies him as a forerunner of the Ethical movement.”
“His life was fruitful despite its brevity,” Dr. Neumann said. “The great passion of his life was more light for the eyes of the soul. An outstanding classic in the history of the fight for freedom of thought is found in his treatise on ‘Religion and Politics.’ Our debt to him is great.”
“The great thing about Spinoza was his secret of blessedness. He found it through living under the direct authority of reason. He did his part in building the temple of reason.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
