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Baruch Spinoza
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Baruch Spinoza is one of the most revered and scrutinized philosophers of the Enlightenment. An atheist at a time when witches were still burned at the stake, his treatises on democracy, free speech and free inquiry were branded as unpardonable heresies by Jew and Christian alike. Spinoza was a Portuguese Jew whose family had fled the Inquisition and established itself in the relatively open society of Amsterdam during the height of mercantilism. An extraordinarily gifted student of the Talmud, he began questioning the conventional wisdom of Judaism, and religion itself, in his adolescence and was excommunicated by his own mentor and rabbi. Spinoza ... became, at an early age, a minority of a minority, or a “double-exile” of 17th-century Europe.
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Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher and religious thinker who was born on November 24, 1632 in Amsterdam. His family was Spanish-Portuguese Jews who were refugees to Holland. Spinoza was taught his early education from Jewish sources. He later went on to study other Jewish thinkers such as Maimonides, Gersonides, and Crescas.
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In his Theological-Political Treatise, Baruch Spinoza (1632-77) set forth an account of the proper relationship between church and state. The matter was of considerable personal import: Spinoza's ancestors were Jews who fled the Inquisition, and Spinoza himself was excommunicated from the Jewish community in Amsterdam. In his Treatise, Spinoza argued that the sovereign should respect freedom of belief, including religious belief. But he maintained as well that the sovereign should establish a religion consisting of basic moral teachings, and while other religions should be allowed to function, the sovereign should have authority over all external religious practices, including the power to review excommunications. There is a strong resemblance between these views and those expressed in the opinions of Justice Antonin Scalia. Scalia believes that while the legislature cannot attack an individual's beliefs, it should have broad authority to set the boundary between church and state.
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Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) occupies a somewhat awkward position in the historiography of Jewish philosophy. In the standard story - or at least those versions of it that move beyond the simplistic description of how his philosophy represents a radical and heretical break from what comes before - he is presented either as the culmination of the Jewish medieval rationalist tradition (especially Maimonides and Gersonides) or as the father of modern Jewish thought, and sometimes as both. These are important (but still all too infrequently studied) perspectives for understanding Spinoza's metaphysical, moral, and political ideas, and not just their antecedents and their legacies, but their substantive content as well. While most scholarly attention has been devoted to the seventeenth-century Cartesian background of Spinoza's philosophy, his system ... needs to be situated (as Harry Wolfson and others have recognized) in a Jewish philosophical context. But is this enough to give him a rightful place in a “Companion” to Jewish philosophy? After all, Thomas Aquinas was strongly influenced by Maimonides, and our understanding of the Summa Theologiae is deepened by a familiarity with the Guide for the Perplexed, but no one of course has ever suggested that St. Thomas is a Jewish philosopher.
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Baruch 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 — known to his fellow Portuguese as Bento — 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.
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Baruch Spinoza was born in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, to parents Miguel de Espinosa and his second wife, Ana Débora, who were of Sephardic Jewish descent. They were a part of the community of Portuguese Jews that grew in the city after the Alhambra Decree in Spain (1492) and the Portuguese Inquisition (1536) had expelled them from the Iberian peninsula. Débora died when Spinoza was only six years old. His father was a successful importer/merchant and Baruch had an orthodox Jewish upbringing; ... his critical, curious nature would soon come into conflict with the Jewish community. After wars with England and France took the life of his father and decimated his family's fortune, he was eventually able to relinquish responsibility for the business and its debts to his brother, Gabriel, and devote himself to philosophy and optics.
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Baruch Spinoza