Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew who Gave Us ModernityPart of the Jewish Encounter series In 1656, Amsterdam's Jewish community excommunicated Baruch Spinoza, and, at the age of twenty-three, he became the most famous heretic in Judaism. He was already germinating a secularist challenge to religion that would be as radical as it was original. He went on to produce one of the most ambitious systems in the history of Western philosophy, so ahead of its time that scientists today, from string theorists to neurobiologists, count themselves among Spinoza's progeny. In Betraying Spinoza, Rebecca Goldstein sets out to rediscover the flesh-and-blood man often hidden beneath the veneer of rigorous rationality, and to crack the mystery of the breach between the philosopher and his Jewish past. Goldstein argues that the trauma of the Inquisition' s persecution of its forced Jewish converts plays itself out in Spinoza's philosophy. The excommunicated Spinoza, no less than his excommunicators, was responding to Europe' s first experiment with racial anti-Semitism. Here is a Spinoza both hauntingly emblematic and deeply human, both heretic and hero--a surprisingly contemporary figure ripe for our own uncertain age. |
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Page 19
... SPINOZA The Ethics , Part IV , Appendix V first heard the name Baruch Spinoza uttered as an admoni- tion , a cautionary tale of unbridled human intelligence blindly seeking its own doom . This is what happens , the voice of my teacher ...
... SPINOZA The Ethics , Part IV , Appendix V first heard the name Baruch Spinoza uttered as an admoni- tion , a cautionary tale of unbridled human intelligence blindly seeking its own doom . This is what happens , the voice of my teacher ...
Page 22
... Baruch Spinoza suggested that she had seen his type before , and so , she feared , had we . A boy who thinks he knows better than his rabbis and the Torah , who flaunts the Law and flirts with girls . Baruch Spinoza , a bumulke . Mrs ...
... Baruch Spinoza suggested that she had seen his type before , and so , she feared , had we . A boy who thinks he knows better than his rabbis and the Torah , who flaunts the Law and flirts with girls . Baruch Spinoza , a bumulke . Mrs ...
Page 158
... Baruch Spinoza in 1656. In fact , we don't know which of the two rabbis actually read out the writ of ... Spinoza's rooms in the Hague after he died and then wrote a sanctimoniously indignant biography of the philosopher , tells us that ...
... Baruch Spinoza in 1656. In fact , we don't know which of the two rabbis actually read out the writ of ... Spinoza's rooms in the Hague after he died and then wrote a sanctimoniously indignant biography of the philosopher , tells us that ...
Contents
Baruch Bento Benedictus | 3 |
In Search of Baruch | 17 |
The Project of Escape | 67 |
Copyright | |
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