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 3
... century rationalist , who produced one of the most ambitious philosophical systems in the his- tory of Western philosophy , be considered , by any stretch of interpretation , a Jewish thinker ? Can he even be considered a Jew ...
... century rationalist , who produced one of the most ambitious philosophical systems in the his- tory of Western philosophy , be considered , by any stretch of interpretation , a Jewish thinker ? Can he even be considered a Jew ...
Page 96
... century story of Hugh of Lincoln , one of the early blood libels . The poet could not himself have known any English Jews , since they had been banished from England a century before , but the tales of the libels lived on as poetic ...
... century story of Hugh of Lincoln , one of the early blood libels . The poet could not himself have known any English Jews , since they had been banished from England a century before , but the tales of the libels lived on as poetic ...
Page 286
... Century Spain ( New York : Random House , 1995 ) , as well as his The Marranos of Spain : From the Late 14th Century to the Early 16th Century According to Hebrew Sources ( Ithaca , N.Y .: Cornell University Press , 1999 ) ; Jane S ...
... Century Spain ( New York : Random House , 1995 ) , as well as his The Marranos of Spain : From the Late 14th Century to the Early 16th Century According to Hebrew Sources ( Ithaca , N.Y .: Cornell University Press , 1999 ) ; Jane S ...
Contents
Baruch Bento Benedictus | 3 |
In Search of Baruch | 17 |
The Project of Escape | 67 |
Copyright | |
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