Page:Short Treatise on God, Man and His Wellbeing.djvu/40

ever since the Renaissance, and it affected young Jews as it affected others. For example, in 1628 there arrived in Amsterdam a Jewish scholar, Joseph Delmedigo by name, who had studied at the University of Padua. He was well versed in philosophy, medicine, physics, and mathematics, as well as in Hebrew literature, and he had also studied astronomy under Galileo. He seems to have stayed several years in Amsterdam, where Manasseh ben Israel published a selection of his works for him. He was a remarkable product of that age of conflict between the old and the new. Unsettled by the new spirit of the age, yet faithful to the old, his mind inclined now towards scepticism and again towards mysticism, and his nomad life was at once typical and expressive of a restless, vacillating mind seeking in vain to regain its equilibrium. And, to judge from contemporary complaints, Amsterdam Jewry had not a few of such religious malcontents, and the leaders had to cope with the trouble as best they could. Already in 1623 Samuel da Silva, a Jewish physician at Amsterdam, was called upon to write a defence of the immortality of the soul, and the inspiration of the Bible, against the sceptical views aired by Uriel da Costa. In 1632 Manasseh ben Israel published the first part of his Conciliator, wherein he sought to reconcile the apparent inconsistencies of Scripture. The Marano refugees, like others who threw off the yoke of Roman Catholicism, turned back to the Bible, and the difficulties which some of them encountered there may have been one of the causes which prompted Manasseh's enterprise. Spinoza, no doubt, knew this book. But he probably appreciated the problems which it attacked much more than the solutions which it offered. And if the Bible already presented difficulties, how extravagant and unwarranted must have appeared that elaborate superstructure which the Rabbis had reared upon it "line upon line and precept upon precept"! At all events, Spinoza's difficul-