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Baruch Spinoza

1. Biography

Bento (in Hebrew, Baruch; in Latin, Benedictus: all three names mean “blessed”) Spinoza was born in 1632 in Amsterdam. He was the middle son in a prominent family of moderate means in Amsterdam’s Portuguese-Jewish community. As a boy he had undoubtedly been one of the star pupils in the congregation’s Talmud Torah school. He was intellectually gifted, and this could not have gone unremarked by the congregation’s rabbis. It is possible that Spinoza, as he made progress through his studies, was being groomed for a career as a rabbi. But he never made it into the upper levels of the curriculum, those which included advanced study of Talmud. At the age of seventeen, he was forced to cut short his formal studies to help run the family’s importing business.

And then, on July 27, 1656, Spinoza was issued the harshest writ of herem, ban or excommunication, ever pronounced by the Sephardic community of Amsterdam; it was never rescinded. We do not know for certain what Spinoza’s “monstrous deeds” and &l

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In March, 1668, Adriaan Koerbagh, a Dutch physician in his mid-thirties, hired Johannes Van Eede, a printer in Utrecht, to publish his new book, “A Light Shining in Dark Places, to Shed Light on Matters of Theology and Religion.” But Van Eede, after setting the first half of the manuscript, became uneasy about its highly unorthodox contents. Koerbagh argued that God is not a Trinity, as the Dutch Reformed Church taught, but an infinite and eternal substance that includes everything in existence. In his view, Jesus was just a human being, the Bible is not Holy Writ, and good and evil are merely terms we use for what benefits or harms us. The only reason people believe in the doctrine of Christianity, Koerbagh wrote, is that religious authorities “forbid people to investigate and order them to believe everything they say without examination, and they try to murder (if they do not escape) those who question things and thus arrive at knowledge and truth, as has happened many thousands of times.”

Now it was about to happen to Koerbagh himself. Van Eede, either outraged because of his

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Bates College

Baruch Spinoza (Dutch, 1632-1677)

Considered one of the most important philosophers of the early modern period, Spinoza’s writings covered a vast variety of subjects, ranging from ethics to metaphysics to Biblical criticism. His two most important works, Ethics and Theologico-Political Treatise, remain highly influential in today’s study of philosophy. During his lifetime, he took extremely naturalistic views on God, the world, and humans and laid foundations for democratic political thought and critique of sectarian religion.

Spinoza’s career as a philosopher was not without controversy. For the time period, his radical views on divinity and the Hebrew Bible—such as denying humans had an immortal soul—led to him being labeled as a heretic and effectively exiled from the Amsterdam Jewish community into which he was born. Following his death, his works were banned throughout the States of Holland and were added to the Index of Forbidden Books created by the Catholic Church. Spinoza’s ideas and works sparked renewed interest in the nineteen