God in the Enlightenment. William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. xiv + 322 pp. $34.95.
rera or his writings, and we have no idea whether or not he ever read him. As he tries to explain why Herrera’s works did not make it into print in Amsterdam, a center for Jewish publishing in Europe, Beltrán says that “this fact could be explained by the widely extended animadversion to Kabbalah in the bosom of the Amsterdam Jewish community, especially showed by Saul Levi Mortera” (8). However, there were some Kabbalah enthusiasts among the Amsterdam Portuguese Jews, especially Rabbi Aboab. There was also Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, who owned his own printing press and published whatever he wanted. After a long, dense introduction that does not, in fact, really introduce either Herrera or his works, Beltrán turns to a number of philosophical themes in which he finds the influence of Herrera on Spinoza. Most revolve around the nature of substance and its causal relationship to the “modes” that (to use a kabbalistic term) “emanate” from it, as well as God as causa sui and the attributes that constitute its essence and the amor Dei intellectualis with which Spinoza’s Ethics culminates. Beltrán argues, in contrast with other studies of an influence of Herrera upon Spinoza that tend to focus on Spinoza’s earliest writings, that there is a discernable trace of Herrera’s “syncretism of kabbalah and philosophy” in the Ethics. The topic is, of course, fascinating, and Beltrán is an expert and erudite guide to Herrera’s writings. Does he prove his case? I, for one, remain skeptical, but that does not diminish the interest in the inquiry or the skill with which it is carried out (although Beltrán spends too much time engaging with the secondary literature). However, the book is not especially well written, and there are a number of typographical errors and, more frustratingly, infelicities in the English (e.g., we’re told that modes “inherit in God,” when what is meant is “inhere in God”) and a serious and confusing overuse of commas. For the price that the publisher Brill charges for this book, one would expect a better edited and more well-executed final product.