HENT DE VRIESThis contact, moreover, could already have been broken in the community itself in
which he was born, where the ideas, customs and preoccupations of Marranism were
still very vivid memories, and interest in the Kabbalah and eschatological waiting
were prevailing over the attraction that the advanced dialectic of the Talmud and
rabbinical discussion had to exercise....... This is significant beyond its biographical importance. In the critique that
theTheologico-Political Treatisemakes of it, rabbinical exegesis of Scripture is, as it
were, separated from its Talmudic soul, and consequently appears as a blind and
dogmatic apologetic of the ‘‘Pharisees’’ who are attached to the letter (but who are
quick to give it an arbitrary meaning) and as a forced reconciliation of obviously
disparate texts.^10
Spinoza might therefore not have been acquainted with the ‘‘open-ended dialectic’’ of
‘‘oral Law,’’ of an ‘‘ ‘ontology’ of meaning’’ that the ‘‘life of the Talmud’’ exemplifies more
than anything else.^11 Or again: ‘‘For Spinoza, all knowledge that sums up a temporal
experience, everything that assumes a poetic style, bears the mark of the imaginary. The
Bible, conditioned by time, is outside adequate ideas.’’^12 In other words, Spinoza failed to
see a certain hermeneutic whose ‘‘polysemy of meaning’’ is premised on exegesis, not on
a text’s genesis, and whose effective history moves well beyond the subjective intentional-
ity of the author’s—or first readers’—ideas, presupposing a creative role in the ‘‘produc-
tion of meaning [sens].’’^13 This is the ‘‘gift of prophecy,’’ whose structure has, according
to Levinas, become the model for allmoderninterpretation of Scripture, literature, and,
indeed, philosophy: ‘‘the religious moment of any reading of books and of all poetic
pleasure.’’ To affirm such polysemy even has philosophical repercussions, since it ‘‘per-
mits us to understand in what sense, while there may be numerous possible interpreta-
tions of Spinozism itself, they do not exclude its truth but testify to it.’’^14
Furthermore, Spinoza does not allow for the possibility that Derrida, speaking of
Kant’s philosophy of religion, calls a principle of ‘‘verification’’:^15 the possibility that the
imagination (or superstition, myth, and, by implication, even idolatry and blasphemy)
might become true. Or, as Levinas says: ‘‘It is in Spinoza that images—associated with
knowledge of the first kind—receive from the second and third kind only an explanation,
not a deepening.... The Spinozan way of ‘explaining’ images instead of seeking within
them a knowledge (however embryonic) of the true, is in Descartes, in whose writings
the sensible is not the source of the true, but the sign of the useful.’’^16 But Levinas takes a
more nuanced view than Jean Lacroix’s interpretation (who in this echoes Zac), according
to which Spinoza, in theTheologico-Political Treatise, indicates merely a ‘‘nonphilosophi-
cal’’ route to salvation. In this view, the ‘‘understanding of Scripture through Scripture’’
implies that ‘‘it is forbidden to seek philosophical concepts in Scripture’’—a ‘‘thesis,’’
Levinas comments, to which Spinoza’s ‘‘enterprise’’ in this work cannot be ‘‘reduced,’’
even though it is ‘‘a very important one.’’^17 True enough, Levinas goes on to suggest, in
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