The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (7 page)

T
here are very few details of her life. What is known is in the Gospels, mostly picturesque references written by sages who lived more than a century after her death. We know of her, of course, due to the great life and death of her son. Yet Mary, daughter of Galilean parents, with the Hebrew name, Miriam, became the most influential woman and mother in human history.

In the art of the early church, she is depicted as a queen to Jesus, the emperor. The largely illiterate flock of the young church needed visual stimulus to aid in their prayer and to comprehend biblical stories. The Byzantine Church sought to move worshipers away from pagan ties. With the almost geometric increase of saints and martyrs vying for attention, and in direct conflict with the proscription against graven images in the Old Testament, the Church mass-produced icons of their faces, including otherworldly, often sorrowful portraits of Mary.

Oil painting by Gerard David,
The Virgin Feeding the Child from a Bowl of Soup.

In the fifth and sixth centuries Christian religious leaders sublimated worship of Hellenic and Egyptian gods (among others), retaining from these symbols their most loving features. The “cult of Mary” was awarded August 13 each year as the Feast of the Assumption, on the day formerly reserved for Isis and Artemis, pagan goddesses of fertility and the hunt.

Through the following centuries, the common people assigned to Mary the spirit of all motherhood. The special place in their hearts and aspirations for the Virgin influenced the development of Christianity and world culture simultaneously. After the terrors of the Dark Ages (reflected in what was a harsh religious environment), people sought a more humane environment in which to pray. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the idolatry of Mary, called “Mariology,” made her the most beloved figure in history. No longer was the demanding God sternly casting damned souls into Hell. The Blessed Virgin would save her children, give them warmth, good health, hope. She had pity, a mother’s compassion.

Mary became for many medieval Christians almost a part of the Trinity. Although a role for her in the Trinity was denied by theologians, her developing role as protector and intermediary with God transformed the Church into a more caring institution.

Church fathers from Augustine to Popes in recent times took special care in defining her place in the religious hierarchy. The Gospels stated that Jesus was “born of a woman.” Some assigned this the Hebraic definition meaning that Jesus was a human being, truly a man. Without a human parent, his activity among men would be too supernatural. Others denied the virgin birth, asserting that they did so in the name of humanity. How could Jesus be human if not born as others were? This question of the guarantee of the Incarnation remains controversial. Like belief in Jesus as divine, it remains fundamentally a matter of faith.

Although textual variants in the Gospel of Matthew include lines that “Joseph begat Jesus,” the greatest amount of Christian writings concerning Mary are about her virginity. It is the almost unanimous teaching of Catholicism that Mary conceived Jesus with her virginity intact.

That her virginity was unimpaired was tied to the Pauline concept of original sin. All people are inherently sinful, said Paul. The later Church (as late as the 1800s in official dogma) declared that she was immaculate. At the very moment of her conception she was freed from sin.

It was stated by theologians in the fourth century that Mary was the
theotokos,
the “God bearer.” When Jesus was pronounced divine at that time by the Church, her title as the Mother of God followed logically. Her sacred purpose inspired icon painters in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Others viewed her as the symbol of humanity’s redemption through nature. The minnesingers and troubadours of the Middle Ages sang praises to her perfect nobility. Through her, chivalry was born. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Italian Renaissance artists saw her as the exemplar of ideal beauty. “Ave Maria,” full of grace, was sung with consoling warmth in Catholic churches. Much of the loveliness of Christian art was inspired by the physical beauty of woman, personified by Mary’s image.

Mary became the Church’s symbol of family and the central role of the mother. Christian visions of apocalypse and terror (inspired no doubt more from the plague of life in the Dark Ages than from religion) were transformed into dreams of mercy and compassion.

In modern times, the symbol of Mary, full of warmth and grace, has been altered by some philosophers, psychoanalysts, feminists, and entertainers. Recast as a female goddess figure, cited as the origin of the “whore/Madonna” syndrome of male oppression, or exploited by an Catholic Italian American rock star into one of the most profitable (and debased) show business reputations, the myth of Mary, even if corrupted, retains remarkable powers.

D
uring the time of Rembrandt, there lived in Amsterdam a shy and courteous young man who studied rabbinical law and the Holy Scriptures, but who at the age of twenty-four so outraged his fellow Jews that he was violently chastised and excommunicated from his religion and community.

Baruch de Spinoza was the son of prosperous Portuguese immigrants who had fled the religious and political persecution of the Inquisition for the safety and freedom of Holland. These Portuguese Jews had concealed their religion in their homeland through conversion, but had still practiced Judaism secretly. Spinoza was able to witness firsthand the conflict between these newly arrived “Conversos” (or converts) and the Ashkenazic or Talmudic Jews who had resided in Amsterdam for centuries. Added to the turmoil was the availability in this free society of a secular education. Young Baruch not only learned the classics of literature and philosophy, but also was able to study Latin and, horror of horrors, the New Testament taught to him by an ex-Jesuit priest.

While a young student he became a member of a group of radical thinkers and at the same time learned the craft of grinding optical lenses. By temperament he was slightly melancholic but remarkably even, never quick to respond in anger. He managed to subsist on a barely nutritious diet consisting mainly of buttered porridge and gruel flavored with raisins.

It is not entirely clear how the dispute with the Jewish community arose. However, he was accused of denying the existence of angels, the orientation of the Bible by God, and the immortality of the soul. The official excommunication document may still be read today; its virulence was obviously intended to leave him in unending torment. Spinoza was thrown out of his community and even threatened with assassination. Ironically, the Portuguese and Spanish refugees of Amsterdam, safe in their bourgeois existence, had conducted their own Inquisition.

Baruch (“blessed” in Hebrew) changed his name to the Latin equivalent, Benedictus, and after some wandering, finally settled in The Hague. Other than a small state pension and an annuity from an admiring friend, he supported himself through his lens craft. All other offers for help were quietly rejected, even a professorship at the prestigious university in Heidelberg. He preferred a scholar’s life, austere, ascetic, the monk’s habit of the poor workman. He died at age forty-four, alone, of a lung disease caused by his repeated breathing in of toxic dust from grinding glass.

Despite this life of virtual obscurity and sobriety, Spinoza is recognized as one of the central figures in the history of philosophy. Despite his excommunication, many philosophers correctly call him a “God-intoxicated man.” Despite his denial of divinity as the original source of the Bible, Spinoza is commonly regarded as the first modern biblical critic. And despite his reverence for reason, his work has elicited a baneful irrationality from many important philosophers and writers who followed him.

Spinoza’s philosophy was expressed in a theological and political study, the
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
(the only book of his published while he lived) and the
Ethics.
He was surely influenced by the rational teachings of Maimonides, but was also marked by the anti-rationalism of the Jewish mystics or cabalists. This combination of reason and “unreason” carried his philosophical investigations out of Jewish tradition to a point of no return.

While Spinoza believed in resolving disputes through reason, he did not believe, as did Maimonides, that the Messiah would come through strict obedience to God’s law. Rather, Spinoza urged that religious writings be cast aside as worthless and artificial. Only through pure intellect could man’s passions be tamed. Spinoza then sought a prescription for what he perceived as the disease of the emotions. Sin was not due to evil but was caused by ignorance. Suffering was not an isolated event but was instead a part of an infinitely larger and uncaring whole. If man only accepted that he was part of an unchanging order of nature, of God (they were the same to Spinoza), then hatred and sorrow, worry and upset, anger and deceit, would vanish.

God is not only everything (pantheism), God is
in
every mode of life. Nothing is left to chance. There is no free will. If we would only realize this, we would be liberated. Albert Einstein, echoing Spinoza, is quoted as having said that “the Old One does not play dice.”

In his
Ethics,
Spinoza used Euclidean geometry as essential proof of the inevitability of his philosophy. Not only has God predetermined everything, but also Spinoza’s use of geometric progressions makes his philosophy appear immutable and absolute.

Spinoza’s approach to biblical analysis revolutionized the way people viewed religious tradition. His rational discussions of biblical tales in their historical context exposed the sometimes superstitious and complex commentaries of Talmudic teachings. Spinoza’s cold-blooded observations led the way for Voltaire and others during the French Enlightenment of the eighteenth century to ridicule Christianity and what they considered its cartoon cousin, Judaism. Inadvertently, Spinoza gave anti-Semites an intellectual basis for attack. While revealing the Bible to be an inexact history, his method undermined permanently the foundations of organized religion and had a long-term and deadly effect on the Jewish community.

Contemporary philosophy rejects much of Spinoza while remaining in awe of him. Each new generation finds something of itself in his words. The German Romantic writers at the beginning of the 1800s imposed their own world on Spinoza; the great poet Goethe considered Spinoza essential to an understanding of the cosmos. In the last century, the eminent British philosopher Bertrand Russell found weakness in Spinoza’s ideas, preferring the twentieth-century scientific view that facts are never fully discovered by reasoning but rather by observation. Yet Russell adored Spinoza with an uncharacteristic ardor, urging that his philosophy be used to flee the insanity of modern life, so that we may never again be paralyzed by the bitterness of despair.

S
hepherd, mercenary, bandit, lyric singer, ritual dancer, polygamist, slayer of Goliath, adulterer, conqueror, empire builder, father, king. Of all the over three dozen men and women who ruled the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah for more than four hundred years, David was surely the greatest figure. Revered by Christians as a forerunner of Jesus of Nazareth, cherished by Islam as a prime example of the virtuous qualities exhibited by the Prophet, David is to Jews, with all his human frailties, one of the most admired of all men. His name may be derived from the term
davidum, which
signifies a military marshal.