Baruch Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza was expelled from his own community at twenty-three and ground lenses for a living. Born in Amsterdam in 1632 into a family of Portuguese Jews who had fled the Inquisition, he was educated in the Talmud Torah school, worked in the family importing business, and studied Latin, Descartes and the scholastics privately. In July 1656 the Amsterdam synagogue issued a writ of cherem against him in language of unusual severity, cursing him by day and night and forbidding anyone to come within four cubits of him or read anything he wrote. The specific charges were never recorded; the ideas he later published — that God and nature are the same, that the Bible is a human document, that the soul is not immortal in any personal sense — are presumably the reason. He never sought readmission and did not convert. He changed his name to Benedictus, moved to villages near Leiden and then The Hague, and supported himself grinding optical lenses, which was skilled work and which probably contributed to the lung disease that killed him. He declined a professorship at Heidelberg to keep his freedom. The Theological-Political Treatise, published anonymously in 1670, applied historical criticism to scripture and argued for freedom of thought and speech as necessary to a stable state. It was banned everywhere, including by the Dutch. The Ethics, written in geometric form with definitions, axioms and propositions, was published after his death. It identifies God with the totality of what exists, denies free will, and argues that freedom lies in understanding necessity. He died in 1677 at forty-four.

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