Ten years ago, researchers discovered in the Vatican archives a rare manuscript of Benedict Spinoza’s Ethics, which had come into the possession of the Roman Inquisition in 1667 because of its theologically suspicious content. While the Church banned the book much as, decades earlier, the Amsterdam Jewish community had expelled the philosopher for his unorthodox opinions, the 18th-century German intellectual Novalis would later proclaim Spinoza “a God-intoxicated man.” In England, Spinoza’s work would later appeal to the secular proto-Zionist novelist George Eliot as well as the religious conservative Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Clare Carlisle and Yitzhak Melamed urge readers to take seriously the possibility that Spinoza was not the atheist many have made him out to be, and that his oft-quoted invocation of “God or Nature” may in fact betray the influences of his Jewish youth:

Spinoza confessed that “I favor an opinion concerning God and Nature far different from the one Modern Christians usually defend.” Yet he aligned himself with older religious traditions, both Jewish and Christian: “That all things are in God and move in God, I affirm with Paul, and . . . with all the ancient Hebrews, as far as we can conjecture from certain traditions, corrupted as they have been in many ways.” Spinoza’s reference to “certain traditions” may allude to Kabbalistic literature in which the identification of God and Nature is ubiquitous. In pre-modern Hebrew, the literal meaning of Kabbalah is “tradition,” and in the 17th century the Kabbalah was widely regarded as an ancient wisdom of the mysteries of being.

The separation of God from nature that Spinoza, in 1675, recognized as distinctively “modern” was sharpened in 18th-century deism, and found striking expression in the image . . . of a divine designer whose relation to the natural world was analogous to a watchmaker’s relation to a watch. We can now recognize this anthropomorphic deity as the God of those modern atheists who caricature religious belief as a wish-fulfillment fantasy about a cosmic father-figure.

Looked at this way, deist and atheist challenges to traditional religion, far from following in Spinoza’s footsteps, are decidedly un-Spinozist. If the 17th-century churches had been more attentive to the Ethics they might have better fortified their God against the ravages of secularism to come. Instead, Protestants and Catholics alike denounced Spinoza as an atheist.

[Yet] Spinoza’s religion does not fit easily into any pre-existent category. Like Thomas Aquinas, he treated religio not as a system of beliefs but as a virtue—the virtue of honoring God.

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.