One of the perennial questions asked by scholars of the great 17th-century philosopher Benedict Spinoza is what, and how much, to make of the Jewish upbringing he thoroughly rejected. Yitzhak Melamed, a philosophy professor who has similarly distanced himself from his ultra-Orthodox upbringing, has written a forceful reinterpretation of Spinoza’s thought that seeks to overturn much 20th-century scholarship on the subject. His special target is the late Harry Austryn Wolfson, himself a “talmudic prodigy turned unbeliever,” who discerned a talmudic mind at work in Spinoza’s thought processes. In his review of Melamed’s book, Michah Gottlieb wonders if the two former yeshiva students turned scholars have something in common (free registration required):
While Melamed rejects Wolfson’s interpretation of Spinoza, . . . he does intimate that he shares a kinship with Wolfson in a different respect. In his acknowledgments, [for instance], Melamed refers to his own numerous discussions of [Spinoza] since emigrating from the ultra-Orthodox “holy city of Bnei Brak.” . . .
On close inspection, one can discern a talmudic sensibility that informs Melamed’s approach to Spinoza, albeit one that differs from Wolfson’s. Like Wolfson, Melamed explores how Spinoza uses key philosophical sources through careful textual analysis and dialectical argument. But while Wolfson’s dialectic was more internal to Spinoza and his purported sources—asking why and how Spinoza departed from his medieval predecessors—Melamed’s dialectic is usually directed at a prominent modern interpretation of Spinoza. . . .
If Wolfson’s approach was akin to that of the [latter] talmudic sages in relation to their mishnaic predecessors, Melamed’s is more like tertiary medieval Jewish commentators such as Tosafot who defended their interpretations by refuting such prior commentators as Rashi. . . . [T]he level of Melamed’s attention to detail combined with his logical acuity is unusual even among Spinoza scholars and may owe something to his talmudic training.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/1962/re-intoxicated-by-god/