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 91
... Spanish Jewry increased , so increased the redemptive pre- occupations of the Spanish kabbalists . In the time of exile , they speculated , the truth , too , had been exiled . The re- demption of the world is intimately intertwined with ...
... Spanish Jewry increased , so increased the redemptive pre- occupations of the Spanish kabbalists . In the time of exile , they speculated , the truth , too , had been exiled . The re- demption of the world is intimately intertwined with ...
Page 93
... Spanish poets , and whose religious poetry found its way into the liturgy , acknowledges the heavy influence of Greek philosophy on his Judeo - Spanish culture in his poetic admonition : Turn aside from mines and pitfalls . Let not ...
... Spanish poets , and whose religious poetry found its way into the liturgy , acknowledges the heavy influence of Greek philosophy on his Judeo - Spanish culture in his poetic admonition : Turn aside from mines and pitfalls . Let not ...
Page 94
... Spanish science in other ways as well . For example , King Alphonso X commissioned Isaac ibn Said , the cantor of Toledo , to compile correct astronomical tables . The Alphon- sine Tables were completed in 1256 , the most complete heav ...
... Spanish science in other ways as well . For example , King Alphonso X commissioned Isaac ibn Said , the cantor of Toledo , to compile correct astronomical tables . The Alphon- sine Tables were completed in 1256 , the most complete heav ...
Contents
Baruch Bento Benedictus | 3 |
In Search of Baruch | 17 |
The Project of Escape | 67 |
Copyright | |
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