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 90
... kabbalist . Manasseh ben Israel , another Amsterdam rabbi who has been briefly mentioned ( as having posed for Rembrandt ) ... kabbalistic triflers , whose insanity provokes my unceasing astonishment . " Nonetheless , despite Spinoza's ...
... kabbalist . Manasseh ben Israel , another Amsterdam rabbi who has been briefly mentioned ( as having posed for Rembrandt ) ... kabbalistic triflers , whose insanity provokes my unceasing astonishment . " Nonetheless , despite Spinoza's ...
Page 91
... kabbalistic influ- ences which were vividly alive in his Portuguese community . And Spinoza's system will offer us , as we shall see , its own solutions to the two mysteries that are most central to kab- balistic speculations : the ...
... kabbalistic influ- ences which were vividly alive in his Portuguese community . And Spinoza's system will offer us , as we shall see , its own solutions to the two mysteries that are most central to kab- balistic speculations : the ...
Page 109
... kabbalists , the vision- aries who had seen signs of the Messiah's imminent arrival , and in this way explained how it ... kabbalistic mysticism . Kabbalah would undergo , in the wake of the Sephardic tragedy , a profound transformation ...
... kabbalists , the vision- aries who had seen signs of the Messiah's imminent arrival , and in this way explained how it ... kabbalistic mysticism . Kabbalah would undergo , in the wake of the Sephardic tragedy , a profound transformation ...
Contents
Baruch Bento Benedictus | 3 |
In Search of Baruch | 17 |
The Project of Escape | 67 |
Copyright | |
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