A Marrano family in Amsterdam
Baruch Spinoza was born in Amsterdam on November 24, 1632, into the community of Portuguese Jews who had made the Dutch Republic their refuge. His ancestors had been crypto-Jews in Portugal, outwardly Christian “New Christians” secretly Jewish, who suffered under the Inquisition; his father’s family left Vidigueira in 1597 and lived for a time as Christians in Nantes before settling in Holland, where they could return openly to Judaism. His father, Michael, was a prosperous merchant who served as an officer of the newly united Talmud Torah congregation.
Spinoza had three names, all meaning “blessed”: Bento, the Portuguese name he used in business; Baruch, his Hebrew name in the synagogue; and Benedictus, the Latin name under which he later wrote. His mother, Hannah Deborah, died when he was six. The family lived on the Vlooienburg, an artificial island on the Amstel, along the Houtgracht canal; Christians lived nearby too, including Rembrandt. Through his mother, Spinoza was related to Uriel da Costa, a sceptic twice excommunicated by the community, who died in 1640 after a humiliating public penance, a story the young Spinoza certainly heard discussed.
A merchant’s son, a restless mind
Spinoza attended the community’s Talmud Torah school, where boys learned Hebrew, translated the weekly Torah portion into Spanish and studied Rashi’s commentary. His name disappears from the school register after about the age of fourteen; he was probably needed in the family business, especially after his older brother Isaac died in 1649. During the First Anglo-Dutch War English ships captured much of the firm’s cargo, and by 1654, when his father died, the business was crippled by debt.
In March 1656 Spinoza went to the Amsterdam city authorities and had himself declared an orphan and a legal minor, freeing himself from his father’s debts, a legally valid step, but one that violated the community’s rule that business disputes be settled internally and damaged his standing as a merchant. By then he was also studying Latin with Franciscus van den Enden, a former Jesuit and political radical who probably introduced him to the philosophy of René Descartes, and mixing with freethinkers and dissenting Christians.
The herem of 1656
On July 27, 1656, the sixth of Av, 5416, the leaders of the Talmud Torah congregation, including Rabbi Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, pronounced a writ of herem, or excommunication, against the twenty-three-year-old Spinoza. It was the harshest ban the community ever issued. It cursed him by day and by night, and forbade any member to speak with him, do business with him, read anything he wrote or come within four cubits of him. Yet it never specified his offences, referring only to his “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds” attested by witnesses in his presence.
Historians still debate the precise reasons. Spinoza had published nothing, but if he was already voicing the ideas of his later work, that God is not a lawgiving person, that the soul is not immortal in the traditional sense, that the Torah was not written by Moses, the community, anxious to protect its fragile tolerance in a Calvinist city, had every reason to act. Unlike most such bans, his was never lifted, because he never sought to return. Over the centuries many, including Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion, appealed for its revocation. At a symposium in Amsterdam in 2015 the community’s chief rabbi, Pinchas Toledano, again declined, saying he had neither the authority nor the will to rescind it.
The lens-grinder of Rijnsburg and Voorburg
Spinoza did not convert to Christianity or join any church. He lived from then on as an independent thinker, studying for a time at Leiden University, gathering a circle of devoted friends, among them Jarig Jelles, Lodewijk Meyer, Pieter Balling and Adriaan Koerbagh, and earning his living by grinding optical lenses and making microscopes and telescopes, work whose quality the scientist Christiaan Huygens admired. Around 1661 he moved to the village of Rijnsburg near Leiden, and in 1663 to Voorburg, near The Hague.
In 1663 he published a geometrical exposition of Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, the only book to appear under his own name in his lifetime. He corresponded with scholars across Europe, including Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society in London, and in 1676 he received a visit from the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who spent several days in conversation with him. He sealed his letters with a ring engraved with a rose and the Latin word Caute, “Be careful.”
A treatise for a free republic
In 1665 Spinoza set aside his main philosophical project to write the Theological-Political Treatise. His friend Adriaan Koerbagh had recently published a book denying the divine authorship of the Bible and the possibility of miracles, and had died in prison as a result. Spinoza published his own treatise anonymously in 1670, in Latin, with a false publisher’s name and a fictitious place of printing.
Its arguments were explosive. The Bible, Spinoza argued, should be read like any other historical document, by studying its languages, its authors and its context; much of the Pentateuch was written long after Moses. Prophets were people of vivid imagination and moral insight, not authorities on nature or philosophy. Religion should be reduced to the practice of justice and charity, and clergy should have no power over the state. And the state itself exists to free people from fear: in a free republic, he concluded in the book’s final chapter, every person should be allowed to think what they like and say what they think. He called democracy the most natural form of government. The book was quickly condemned and banned, and its authorship was soon an open secret.
God or Nature: the Ethics
Spinoza regarded the Ethics as his life’s work. Written in the manner of Euclid’s geometry, with definitions, axioms and propositions, it argues that there is only one substance, infinite and self-caused, which he called “God or Nature” (Deus sive Natura). Everything that exists, every body, every mind, is a mode of that single substance. God is not a person who chooses or commands, but the necessary order of nature itself; mind and body are one and the same thing seen in two ways.
From this metaphysics Spinoza drew an ethics of liberation. Human beings are part of nature and governed by its causes; we believe ourselves free only because we are conscious of our desires but ignorant of what causes them. True freedom comes through understanding: by grasping the causes of our passions, we turn them from forces that enslave us into sources of active joy, culminating in what he called the “intellectual love of God.” Whether this God is pantheist, panentheist or no God at all has been argued ever since.
Death in The Hague
In 1670 Spinoza moved to The Hague, where he lived modestly in rented rooms. In 1673 he declined an offer of a professorship of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, apparently fearing it would limit his freedom to think. He worked on a Hebrew grammar and on an unfinished Political Treatise intended to show how states, and especially democracies, can function well.
His health had long been poor, probably from a lung disease such as tuberculosis, perhaps worsened by the glass dust of lens-grinding. He died in The Hague on February 21, 1677, aged forty-four, attended by his physician friend Georg Hermann Schuller. His friends spirited away his manuscripts before they could be seized, and within the year published his collected works, the Opera Posthuma, including the Ethics. The authorities promptly banned them too.
The renegade Jew and Jewish memory
Spinoza did not keep a Jewish identity after his excommunication; he argued that without observance of Jewish law there was nothing to sustain a separate Jewish identity, and in the Treatise he denied that the Jews were chosen in any metaphysical sense. Yet his relationship with the Jewish people has proved anything but simple. Moses Mendelssohn wrestled with his ideas in the eighteenth century; Heinrich Heine admired him; secular Jews and Zionists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reclaimed him as the first modern Jew, a man who showed that one could leave the community’s religion without converting to another.
Albert Einstein, asked in 1929 whether he believed in God, replied that he believed in “Spinoza’s God” who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists. The novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein called him “the renegade Jew who gave us modernity.” In Amsterdam today, his books are sold in the gift shop of the very synagogue that cast him out.
Legacy
Few philosophers have had a larger influence on the modern world. Spinoza’s method of reading the Bible historically founded modern biblical criticism. His case for freedom of thought and expression, the separation of religious authority from political power and the legitimacy of democracy made him one of the founders of the radical Enlightenment and of liberal political thought. His vision of a single, law-governed nature, of mind and body as one, and of the passions as natural phenomena to be understood rather than condemned, anticipated themes in modern science, psychology and philosophy of mind.
He lived his principles: modest, frugal, avoiding controversy and quarrels, he refused honours that might compromise his independence, and he wrote not to mock or condemn human beings but to understand them. The excommunicated lens-grinder of the Houtgracht became one of the great architects of the free, secular society, the kind of society that, in his own century, had given his family refuge.
Sources & further reading
Baruch Spinoza, Wikipedia · Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Wikiquote · 3 centuries after excommunication, is it time to lift ban on Spinoza?, JTA · Baruch Spinoza, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.