Sara Houle
May 14, 2001
Self and World

Baruch de Spinoza was an enigma of 17th century Europe. He was born in Amsterdam in 1632 to a family of Sephardic Jews, and died a mere 43 years later. Yet, during the short span of his lifetime, Spinoza was the focal point of more achievements and controversy than the vast majority of men who live twice as long as he did. At age 23, the blossoming philosopher was expelled from the Jewish community of Amsterdam and placed beneath a ban of excommunication. Because he had philosophical issues with Christianity as well, he did not flee to the arms of an organized church following his expulsion from Judaism. While today it may seem perfectly acceptable that a person should live outside of any organized religious faith, in the 17th century Spinoza was isolated and scorned for his refusal to accept what he deemed to be the superstitious elements of positive religions. Spinoza's turbulent life offers several valuable insights into the nature of society in 17th century Europe, hints of the changing attitude towards intellectual life that would develop over the next century in Europe, and an interesting psychological portrait of a man who refused to be encapsulated by the societal and philosophical barriers outside of which the vast majority of his contemporaries never journeyed.

In order to understand the environment from which Spinoza and the unique circumstances of his life sprung, it is first necessary to have a basic knowledge of the history of the Sephardic Jewish community of Amsterdam. The community had originated in Spain. While the Jewish community in Spain had been largely accepted and respected during the years that the Spanish peninsula was under Moorish control, the 15th century's Reconquista brought large numbers of Spanish Jews under the control of Christians, who were less tolerant than their Muslim predecessors. There were many forced conversions of Jews to Christianity in the early decades of the 15th century, and, unfortunately for those who had been given the choice to either be baptized or be killed, once they had been forcibly converted there was no way for them to revert to Judaism openly no matter how much they wished to do so, since once an individual had converted to Catholicism he was thereafter consigned to the authority of the Church and any hint that he was not living up to his forced baptismal vows would cast a suspicion of heresy upon him. However, this did not prevent all of the Jews who had been forced to covert to Christianity from practicing their faith; many kept up their Jewish religious practices and beliefs in secrecy. All Jews who had been forced to convert, who the Christians of Spain labeled either conversos or with the derogatory term "marranos", were suspect among their Christian neighbors even though many of the conversos were probably sincere in their new faith. With the instigation of the Inquisition in 1478, the conversos were placed under even closer scrutiny, and those discovered to be practicing Judaism in secret - over 13,000 people in the first 12 years of the Inquisition (Nadler, 3) - were severely persecuted. Anti-Semitic sentiment grew in the wake of these realized suspicions so that in 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella ordered the expulsion of all of the Jews from Spain, giving the whole of the Sephardic Jewish community the unenviable choice to either convert to Christianity, where they would be scrutinized and in danger of the Inquisition, or to permanently leave Spain. Large numbers of Sephardic Jews migrated to Portugal at the time of the expulsion, where they had been promised refuge by the Portuguese monarch. However, the promise was respected for only a few years. In 1497, forced conversions began in Portugal. Since the Jews had literally nowhere else to run, nearly the entire community converted. In 1547, the Inquisition spread to Portugal, and crypto-Judaic practices began to be strongly persecuted.

Due to the harsh treatment that the forcibly converted Jews received in Spain and Portugal, many conversos fled to lands that were beyond the reach of the Inquisition. The Netherlands, which was by then heavily Protestant, was one of the nations of Europe that was known for its relative religious toleration, and so a community of refugee Sephardim established itself in Amsterdam around the turn of the 17th century. Although the Dutch had allowed them into the city based upon the supposition that they would remain Christians, the conversos did not take long to revert to their Jewish faith. The Dutch granted the Portuguese Jewish immigrants the right to practice their religion openly, and by mid-century, when the Netherlands at last became permanently and officially severed from Spain, the Dutch government had also granted the Jews full citizenship in the Dutch Republic. These actions made Amsterdam one of the most tolerant cities in Europe at the time.

The conversos of Amsterdam vigorously went about resurrecting their Jewish faith, which was no small feat considering that many of the families who had escaped from Spain and Portugal had literally been Christian for generations by the early years of the 17th century. Many of the coversos had only retained rather sporadic, confused forms of Jewish practice and tradition during the century or more that their families had been Catholic. According to one scholar, "the converso communities in Spain and Portugal were effectively cut off from the mainstream Jewish world. Their grasp of the rules and practices of normative Judaism was, particularly among later generations, somewhat distorted and incomplete. Many laws and customs existed only in memory, as it had not been possible to observe them with any consistency" (Nadler, 15). Care needed to be taken so as to bring the conversos back to the path of Jewish orthodoxy, especially in the first generations after the arrival of the Jews in Amsterdam. Because of the long period of religious persecution that had preceded their generation's ability to practice the Jewish faith openly, the newly revived faith of the entire Jewish community in Amsterdam was in a very precarious state.

At the same time, there was philosophical and theological discord among the Christians of Amsterdam. The Calvinists of the Netherlands were experiencing internal conflicts between more conservative Calvinists and deviant sects that denied some fundamental principles of Calvinist doctrine, such as the centrality of Grace to salvation and the belief in predestination (Nadler, 12). Because of the presence of divergent members within their own faith community, the Dutch Christians were highly suspicious of any unorthodox theological statements, and ordered the Jewish community of Amsterdam to be vigilant as far as seeing to it that its members adhered closely to standard Jewish theology and the Law of Moses (Nadler, 11).

It was into this environment that Baruch de Spinoza was born in 1632. His parents were conversos who, like many of the other Jews in the community, had fled to Amsterdam from Portugal. His father, Michael, was a respected member of the Jewish community in Amsterdam and held several positions within the religious congregation and in charitable organizations besides being active in business interests (Nadler, 36-40). The family lived in the very heart of the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam (Nadler, 44). Spinoza's father saw to it that he attended a Jewish grammar school, where young Baruch would have begun to learn Hebrew. When Spinoza showed academic promise, his father sent him on to study more rather than to enter business, and he took up formal studies of the Torah, a route which might have led him to a position as a rabbi had his formal education not been cut short when his elder brother died and he entered into business along with his father when he was in his early teens (Nadler, 80-81). He continued his studies in the less formal environment of a yeshiva, so that in the end he became very well versed in the Bible, and had a superficial knowledge of the Talmud (Nadler, 93). By all appearances, then, the young Spinoza had a fairly idyllically normal and orthodox Jewish upbringing and education. Yet, Spinoza's vigorous mind would not allow him to remain within the bounds of normality for very long.

Spinoza's earliest biographer, a Frenchman named Lucas who was a contemporary and a personal friend of the philosopher, claimed that Spinoza precociously began to have doubts about the education that he was receiving in the Jewish schools beginning when he was very young:

"He was not yet fifteen years old when he raised difficulties which the most learned among the Jews found it hard to solve. And although such extreme youth is hardly the age of understanding, still he had enough of it to perceive that his doubts embarrassed his teacher" (Lucas, 42).

Lucas continues to describe how the young Spinoza, realizing the limitations of his teachers, then decided "to consult no one but himself in this matter [of seeking the Truth], but to spare no effort in order to discover her" (Lucas, 43). For young Baruch, the desire to discover the Truth would lead him to seek instruction outside of the Jewish community, as he determined that a solid education in Hebrew literature and the Jewish Bible was not enough to satisfy him intellectually.

Spinoza began studying Latin under a Christian instructor named Van den Enden (Nadler, 103). He learned other things from his new teacher as well, including a great deal about politics, the natural sciences, and humanist philosophers. At some point while he was studying under Van den Enden, Spinoza began to read Descartes (Nadler, 111), whose philosophy would form the framework within which Spinoza's rationalist philosophy and deistic, pantheistic theology would develop. Spinoza was steadily slipping away from Amsterdam's Jewish community. According to Lucas, Spinoza "had so little intercourse with the Jews for some time that he was obliged to associate with Christians, and he formed ties of friendship with [non-Jewish] intellectual people" (Lucas, 51). He also grew quite lax in his observance of Jewish laws and rituals, and did not attend religious services regularly (Nadler, 129). His father passed away, removing yet another tie to Jewish orthodoxy and the Jewish community from Spinoza's life.

Finally, in his very early twenties, Spinoza began to formulate philosophical and theological theories that went directly at odds with Jewish orthodoxy. The Writ of Excommunication that the Sephardic Jewish community of Amsterdam issued to accompany Spinoza's expulsion from their community and the Jewish faith claimed that he had "practiced and taught" some manner of "horrible heresies" (Writ of Excommunication). It must be assumed, then, that at some time before he turned age twenty-three, Spinoza was already speaking of and propagating at least some of the ideas that he would publish over the next several years. Many of these ideas, all of which were reached using a rationalist mindset that Spinoza adopted from his readings of Descartes, openly called into question the teachings of both Jewish and Christian theological orthodoxy at the time.

There are many ideas to be found in Spinoza's philosophical and theological works with which the orthodox thinkers among both Jews and Christians would have taken issue. In a work published perhaps only four years after his excommunication, and then later in his Ethics, Spinoza denied the personal immortality of the soul:

"We assign to the human mind the kind of duration that can be defined by time only in so far as the mind expresses the actual existence of the body, an existence that is explicated through duration and can be defined by time. That is, we do not assign duration to the mind except while the body endures. However, since that which is conceived by a certain eternal necessity through God's essence is nevertheless a something, this something, which pertains to the essence of the mind, will necessarily be eternal" (Ethics, part V, proof 23).

Part of a person's mind may continue to exist after their death, Spinoza argued, but the personal identity, mind and soul cease to exist in an individualized sense once the body ceases to be. Even more radically, Spinoza denied the existence of a personalized, anthropomorphic God and instead insisted that, if God is an infinite substance, perfect and indivisible, then "there can be, or be conceived, no other substance but God" (Ethics, part I, proof 14). Thus, according to Spinoza, everything in the universe must be of one substance with God. Spinoza's theology was therefore ultimately pantheistic. Since God did not exist in the sense of an individual, human-like Being, attempts by positive religions - including both Judaism and Christianity - to cast God in such a light were only catering to superstitions, according to Spinoza. In his Ethics, Spinoza forthrightly asserts that the entire process by which positive religions came about was based in superstitions and prejudices, even though those who developed them did not realize that they were enslaved to their natural tendencies:

"All men are born ignorant of the causes of things, [and] they all have a desire to seek their own advantage, a desire of which they are conscious. From this it follows, firstly, that men believe they are free, precisely because they are conscious of their volitions and desires; yet concerning the causes that have determined them to desire and will they do not think… Secondly, men act always with an end in view, to wit, the advantage that they seek… They are always looking only for the final causes of things done, and are satisfied when they find them… But if they fail to discover them from some external source, they have no recourse but to turn to themselves" (Ethics, part I, appendix).

According to Spinoza's Ethics, the ultimate consequence of humans "turning to themselves" and pondering the first cause of all that they see around them is that humans then constructed for themselves a creator of the things that they saw, since "they could not believe [the things of Nature] to be self-created" (Ethics, part I, appendix). They had "no information of the subject" (Ethics, part I, appendix), and, mired in superstition, developed their methods of worship in an almost childish effort to make their imagined, anthropomorphic deity love them better than the next person (Ethics, part I, appendix). In another theological work, his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza delved into Biblical criticism and argued against the notion that the first five books of the Hebrew Bible were composed by Moses, as was traditionally held according to the Jewish faith (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, chapter VIII). Instead, Spinoza argued that the Pentateuch was a compendium of works by several different authors, meaning that it was a work passed down through history rather than a work of divine revelation (Nadler, 131-132). In the same work, Spinoza argued against the idea that the Jews were a specially elected people (Nadler, 132).

It is easy to see why any of these deductions that Spinoza made would not sit well with the authorities of the Jewish community, and while precisely what arguments the twenty-three year old Spinoza must have been speaking about prior to his excommunication have been lost to history, the result of those arguments has not been. On July 27, 1656, the Sephardic community of Amsterdam excommunicated Baruch Spinoza. According to the document that was issued by the community on that occasion, the Jewish community had "tried various means and promises to dissuade him from his evil ways… but they effected no improvement, obtaining on the contrary more information every day of the horrible heresies which he practiced and taught, and of the monstrous actions which he performed" (Writ of Excommunication, 57). Spinoza's radical philosophies were almost certainly the cause of his expulsion more than any "monstrous action". From the point of view of the Jewish authorities, given the precarious spiritual state of the young Sephardic Jewish community in Amsterdam, which was still struggling in order to recover itself and its religious practices from its confused, unorthodox converso past, a philosopher whose ideas undermined some of the most fundamental concepts not only of Judaism but of positive religion as a whole simply could not be tolerated or allowed to potentially corrupt the minds of newly-practicing Jews whose ties to their ancestral religion were still tenuous at best. Excommunication from the Jewish community was a harsh measure to take, and carried with it the onerous specifications that every Jew within the community should immediately cut off ties with the expelled member. In the Writ of Excommunication against Spinoza, the governing council of the synagogue ordered:

"Nobody should communicate with him orally or in writing, or show him any favor, or stay with him under the same roof, or come within four ells of him, or read anything composed or written by him" (Writ, 57)

Lucas recorded the attitude of the Jews of 17th century Amsterdam towards the punishment of excommunication:

"Excommunication is such a grave matter among the Jews that the best friends of the excommunicated dare not render him any service, or even speak to him, without incurring the same penalty. Therefore those who fear the sweetness of solitude and the impertinence of the people prefer to bear any other penalty rather than the Anathema" (Lucas, 53-54).

The Jewish authorities had imposed the harshest penalty upon Spinoza that they were able to produce. It was, above all else, the penalty that would most effectively promote their ultimate goal of preventing what they saw as very dangerous views from being shared with the more impressionable Jews in the community. Yet, if we can trust Lucas' account, Spinoza was remarkably accepting of the excommunication:

"As soon as he heard of it, he prepared himself for retirement, and was so far from being alarmed by it that to the person who brought him the news he said: 'All the better; they do not force me to do anything that I would not have done of my own accord if I did not dread scandal" (Lucas, 51).

Despite the grace and relative nonchalance with which Spinoza received his punishment, being cast out of one's religious community in 17th century Europe was a matter of no small concern. At that time, society was clearly divided into sections within which a person was always categorized. There was a category for Christians, and there was a category for Jews, but there did not exist a category for a man like Spinoza, whose immense self-confidence in his ideas and the rationalist process that had produced them would not allow him to either bend to the will of the Jewish community or conversely to join the Christian community once he had been rejected by the Jews. Spinoza had equally grave reservations against Christianity as he had against Judaism. He laid many of these objections out for discussion in a letter to his close friend, Albert Burgh, dated 1675. Burgh, much to the dismay of his good friend Spinoza, had recently converted to Roman Catholicism when Spinoza wrote him the letter. Burgh had earlier composed a letter to Spinoza in which he attempted to justify his conversion from Calvinism to Catholicism and called upon Spinoza to attempt to justify his rejection of Catholicism. Spinoza, evidently, was not impressed by his friend's reasoning and sounds quite disappointed in his reply. "You must admit," Spinoza wrote to Burgh, "that personal holiness is not peculiar to the Roman Catholic Church, but common to all Churches. As it is by this, that we know 'that we dwell in God and He in us' (1 John, 4:13), it follows, that what distinguishes the Roman Catholic Church from others must be superfluous, and therefore founded solely on superstition" (Letter to Albert Burgh, 59). Spinoza seems to have found positive religions almost abhorrent; he demands that his friend "cast away this deadly superstition, acknowledge the reason which God has given you, and follow that, unless you would be numbered with the brutes" (Letter to Albert Burgh, 60). It is also striking how very pragmatic Spinoza can be with regards to religion; he notes, rather pithily, that "more men of learning and blameless life are found in the Roman Catholic Church than in any other Christian body; for, as it contains more members, so will every type of character be more largely represented in it" (Letter to Albert Burgh, 58).

These statements follow very logically from Spinoza's philosophy and theology. If our universe is in fact a pantheistic universe as Spinoza holds it to be, where God is not anthropomorphic but rather exists as the one substance that comprises everything in the entire universe, then differentiations between different religious faiths must be ultimately meaningless and superfluous. True to his Cartesian philosophical roots, Spinoza's theology must consist of a faith known through nothing but Reason, and an undiluted rational process that is as lucid and definitive as mathematics:

"I do not presume that I have found the best philosophy, I know that I understand the true philosophy. If you ask me in what way I know it, I answer: In the same way as you know that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles: that this is sufficient, will be denied by no one whose brain is sound, and who does not go dreaming of evil spirits inspiring us with false ideas like the true. For the truth is the index of itself and of what is false" (Letter to Albert Burgh, 59)

It is quite remarkable that Spinoza was able to maintain such a fearlessly self-confident attitude given the social situation into which his pariah status cast him. Spinoza was effectively isolated between two communities, neither of which approved of his philosophical content. The Jews exiled him. Christian theologians vehemently attacked him on philosophical issues and theological points that they had largely misinterpreted, including mistaking Spinoza's pantheism for atheism. If they had managed to grasp Spinoza's pantheism, many subsequently claimed that he was proposing that God was wholly a physical 'substance' - a thing - when in fact Spinoza's universal substance that was Nature extended also to the mind, so that the mind and the body were merely different expressions of the same substance. The points of disagreement hardly mattered, however, as the fact of the matter was that Spinoza was viewed as heretical and dangerous on all sides. The twenty-odd years that Spinoza lived beyond his excommunication were productive, though extremely trying years for the philosopher, whose position in limbo between the Jewish and Christian worlds at once provided him with the clarity to delve deeply into rationalist philosophy, and a plethora of challenges related to what his standing was in a world that had nearly unanimously rejected him.

Spinoza's standing in society was precarious, to say the least. There is some evidence, including an account relayed by Lucas, that the rabbis who had been responsible for Spinoza's excommunication were incensed at the fact that Spinoza seemed quite indifferent to his excommunication and was actually quite capable of surviving outside of the control of the Jewish community. Furious that "their thrust had missed" (Lucas, 54), they very soon thereafter attempted to convince the Protestants of Amsterdam to exile Spinoza from the city (Lucas, 54-56). Although Lucas claimed that Spinoza was in fact exiled, later historians do not think that this actually occurred, although the rabbis may have asked that the municipal government do so (Nadler, 157). While Spinoza eventually left Amsterdam in order to settle in smaller towns during the twenty years after his excommunication, he seems to have done so on his own accord.

Most of the discord that Spinoza faced came from philosophers and theologians, who either adamantly opposed his ideas or who feared that they might be associated with a man who was generally conceived to be a dangerous heretic if they did not speak out against him. Spinoza's letters to his friends abound with complaints about those who vehemently attacked him, often without understanding the philosophy that they were attacking first. In a letter to a German theologian and teacher named Henry Oldenberg, Spinoza described one of these instances:

"A rumor gained currency that I had in the press a book concerning God, wherein I endeavored to show that there is no God. This report was believed by many. Hence certain theologians, perhaps the authors of the rumor, took occasion to complain of me to the prince and the magistrates; moreover, the stupid Cartesians, being suspected of favoring me, endeavored to remove the aspersion by abusing everywhere my opinions and writings" (Letters to Friend and Foe, 22).

Spinoza goes on to claim that "the theologians were everywhere lying in wait" for him, and to admit that he put off publishing a version of his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus because he felt as if he should add notes to it in order to discredit the rumors and "prejudices" that were already floating around the intellectual community about its content before it was even published (Letters, 22). In the notes that Spinoza made to the treatise, he attempts to carefully explain such things as the fact that his inclusion of such statements as "since God's existence is not self-evident" (Tractatus, 127) were based in his rational method, since "we doubt the existence of God, and consequently everything else, as long as we do not have a clear and distinct idea of God, but only a confused idea" (Tractatus, supplementary note to chapter VI). Spinoza took great care in attempting to discredit claims that he was an atheist in an effort to maintain his own status within the intellectual community of his time.

Despite his efforts to explain himself to his readers, Spinoza continued to be misunderstood and expounded against, often by people who framed their arguments so poorly that it seems to have been rather annoying for Spinoza to attempt to respond to them. In one of his letters, to a physician in Utrecht named Isaac Orobio, Spinoza comments upon a pamphlet that had been published by an opponent of his ideas, writing to the man who had forwarded the pamphlet to Spinoza:

"I could hardly bring myself to reply to the pamphlet of that person, which you thought fit to send me… I will fulfill my engagement in as few words as I can, and will briefly show how perversely he has interpreted my meaning; whether though malice or through ignorance I cannot readily say" (Letters, 74).

It seems as if Spinoza probably felt as if such attacks were almost equal parts malice and ignorance. As evidenced in both his letter to Burgh and the letter to Orobio, he was supremely self-confident in his own reason, and therefore seemed very likely to attack his opponents for what he deemed to be rational shortcomings on the parts of his opponents and their arguments. At the same time, Spinoza seemed to have detected a malicious streak in many of his opponents; as evidenced in his letter to Oldenberg, he often felt as if he were surrounded by enemies - particularly, theologians who were simply lying in wait so that they could play a game of 'gotcha' with his published works. These psychological traits that can be gleaned from Spinoza's writings are quite consistent with what one would expect to find in the mind of a man who was, for the most part, surrounded by critics on every side.

Yet, Spinoza usually remained quiet publicly; while he took preemptive steps to attempt to avoid misunderstandings in his published works and would occasionally vent his frustrations in private letters, Spinoza was actually a highly private individual, probably owing at least in part to the fact that his privacy enabled him greater intellectual leeway than he would have had if he had been more visible. In one famous episode, the Palatine Elector offered Spinoza a chair in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. A professor at the university, conveying the invitation to Spinoza, wrote that Spinoza would have "the most extensive freedom in philosophizing, which [the Elector] believes you will not misuse to disturb the publicly established religion" (Nadler, 311). Spinoza respectfully declined the flattering offer, citing first that he might "abandon philosophical research if I consented to find time for teaching young students" (Letters, 82) and secondly, the fear that his occupying an important post would draw attention to himself and would consequently result in undue restrictions being placed upon his intellectual freedom:

"I do not know the limits, within which the freedom of my philosophical teaching would be confined, if I am to avoid all appearance of disturbing the publicly established religion. Religious quarrels do not arise so much from ardent zeal for religion, as from men's various dispositions and love of contradiction, which causes them to habitually distort and condemn everything, however rightly it may have been said. I have experienced these results in my private and secluded station, how much more should I have to fear them after my elevation to this post of honor" (Letters, 82-83).

Maintaining as low a profile as was possible was the safest route for Spinoza to follow in order to keep up his intellectual freedom. Furthermore, even when his works were condemned, he would not publicly rebut the condemnations (Nadler, 322).

Spinoza ultimately failed to escape attention, however. Towards the end of his life, the conservatives among the Calvinists of the Netherlands became more powerful and began to crack down on 'dangerous' reading materials, and some of Spinoza's works were condemned, meaning that it was then illegal to print, sell, or circulate his works (Nadler, 322).

The intellectual isolation that Spinoza experienced is particularly striking when one considers the degree to which the intellectual environment of Europe would change over the course of the next century. While Spinoza maintained a circle of friends and interlocutors who would journey to his home in order to exchange ideas with him, he was largely ostracized from most parts of the intellectual community. The fact of the matter was that intellectualism had yet to separate itself into what historian Jacob Katz called a "semineutral society" (Katz, 42).

In the 18th century, due to the efforts of scholars like the members of the circle who surrounded Moses Mendelssohn in 18th century Germany, the intellectual world would begin to morph into a society unto itself where individuals could exchange ideas on secular subjects, philosophy, and even theology without being trapped inside a rigid framework that was based upon those individual's place within the Christian-Jew religious dichotomy. If an intellectual environment such as the one that was developing in the 18th century had been in place in the 17th century, Spinoza would almost certainly have run into fewer problems presenting his philosophy to his peers. The intellectuals of a "semineutral society" would have been less concerned with their inability to categorize Spinoza, and less likely to simply label Spinoza an atheist as quickly as Spinoza's contemporaries had, based partially upon the fact that they had misunderstood his arguments concerning God, but probably mostly based upon the fact that the philosopher was neither a Christian nor a Jew, but rather one of the first known models of a modern man who was successfully living a mostly secularized life.

Because of the radical stands that he took in his philosophical and theological treaties, Baruch Spinoza was one of the most provocative figures of 17th century intellectualism. For many years after his death, Spinoza received very little positive attention; outside of Lucas, who was a good friend, most of Spinoza's early biographers fell squarely into the camp of Spinoza's critics, largely because a positive biography of Spinoza would not have been allowed to circulate among any sizable audience of readers (Wolf, 30-31). Regardless of whether or not Spinoza was atheistic or heretical, and regardless of whether his philosophical findings can stand up to the passage of time and the criticisms to which they were later submitted, Spinoza was a fascinating figure. He was at once self-confident in his rational capacity and cautious about publicizing his views due to fear of the intellectual enemies that he thought were constantly lying in wait for him to make any error. In several ways, his life with society was representative of the shift that would later occur among European intellectuals towards a more secularized worldview and lifestyle, though his society lagged behind him. Unfortunately for Spinoza, he was quite simply ahead of his time; he was a modern, secularized man who had been born into the early modern age, and into a society that still operated under the pretense that every European was either a Christian, a Jew, or an atheist, with no subtleties permitted in between the categories. His was a society into which a hearty dose of anxiety was injected whenever a person managed to successfully stand outside of the categories that it readily recognized, and Spinoza, independent and confident in the powers of the rational mind and his intelligible criticisms of positive religions, succeeded in prompting a sizable amount of anxiety on the part of the vast majority of his contemporaries.

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Katz, Jacob. Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770-1870. Syracuse University Press, New York: 1998.

"Letter to Albert Burgh". In The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History. Ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz. Oxford University Press, New York: 1995.

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Nadler, Steven. Spinoza: A Life. Cambridge University Press, New York: 1999.

Spinoza, Baruch. Letters to Friend and Foe. Dagobert D. Runes, ed. Philosophical Library, New York: 1966.

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