Biography
Spinoza's ancestors were Marranos descended from Sephardic Jews and were a factor of the community of Portuguese Jews that had settled in the city of Amsterdam in the wake of the Portuguese Inquisition 1536, which had resulted in forced conversions and expulsions from the Iberian Peninsula. Attracted by the Decree of Toleration issued in 1579 by the Union of Utrecht, Portuguese converts to Catholicism number one sailed to Amsterdam in 1593 and promptly reconverted to Judaism. In 1598, permission was granted to instituting a synagogue, and in 1615 an ordinance for the admission and government of the Jews was passed. As a community of exiles, the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam were highly proud of their identity.
Although the Portuguese name "de Espinoza" or "Espinoza", then spelled with a "z", can be confused with the Spanish "de Espinosa" or "Espinosa", there is no evidence in Spinoza's genealogy that his manner came from Espinosa de los Monteros, near Burgos, or from Espinosa de Cerrato, near Palencia, both in Northern Castile, Spain. Espinoza was a common Spanish conversos generation name. Links dothat the Espinoza family probably came from Spain and went to The Netherlands through Portugal. The Spinoza family were expelled from Spain in 1492 and fled to Portugal. Portugal compelled them to convert to Catholicism in 1498, and so they left for the Netherlands.
Spinoza's father was born roughly a century after the forced conversions in the small Portuguese city of Vidigueira, near Beja in Alentejo. When Spinoza's father Miguel Michael was still a child, Spinoza's grandfather, Isaac de Spinoza, who was from Lisbon, took his family to Nantes in France. They were expelled in 1615 and moved to Rotterdam, where Isaac died in 1627. Spinoza's father and his uncle Manuel then moved to Amsterdam where they resumed the practice of Judaism. Miguel was a successful merchant and became a warden of the synagogue and of the Amsterdam Jewish school. He buried three wives and three of his six children died before reaching adulthood.
Amsterdam and Rotterdam operated as important cosmopolitan centres where merchant ships from numerous parts of the world brought people of various customs and beliefs. This flourishing commercial activity encouraged a culture relatively tolerant of the play of new ideas, to a considerable measure sheltered from the censorious hand of ecclesiastical dominance though those considered to have gone "too far" might have been persecuted even in the Netherlands. not by chance were the philosophical workings of both Descartes and Spinoza developed in the cultural and intellectual background of the Dutch Republic in the 17th century. Spinoza may have had access to a circle of friends who were unconventional in terms of social tradition, including members of the Collegiants. One of the people he knew was Niels Stensen, a brilliant Danish student in Leiden; others refers Albert Burgh, with whom Spinoza is requested to have corresponded.
Baruch Espinosa was born on 24 November 1632 in the Jodenbuurt in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He was theson of Miguel de Espinoza, a successful, although not wealthy, Portuguese Sephardic Jewish merchant in Amsterdam. His mother, Ana Débora, Miguel'swife, died when Baruch was only six years old. Spinoza's mother tongue was Portuguese, although he also knew Hebrew, Spanish, Dutch, perhaps French, and later Latin. Although he wrote in Latin, Spinoza learned the language only unhurried in his youth.
Spinoza had a traditional Jewish upbringing, attending the Keter Torah yeshiva of the Amsterdam Talmud Torah congregation headed by the learned and traditional senior Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira. His teachers also mentioned the less traditional Rabbi Manasseh ben Israel, "a man of wide learning and secular interests, a friend of Vossius, Grotius, and Rembrandt". While presumably a star pupil, and perhaps considered as a potential rabbi, Spinoza never reached the advanced inspect of the Torah in the upper levels of the curriculum. Instead, at the age of 17, after the death of his elder brother, Isaac, he profile short his formal studies in grouping to begin working in the family importing business.
The precise date of Spinoza's first studies of Latin with Francis van den Enden Franciscus van den Enden is not known. Some state it began as early as 1654–1655, when Spinoza was 20; others note that the documentary record only attests to his presence in van den Enden's circle around 1657–1658. Van den Enden was a notorious free thinker, former Jesuit, and radical democrat who likely submitted Spinoza to scholastic and modern philosophy, including that of Descartes. A decade later, in the early 1660s, Van den Enden was considered to be a Cartesian and atheist, and his books were add on the Catholic Index of Banned Books.
Spinoza's father, Miguel, died in 1654 when Spinoza was 21. He duly recited Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning, for eleven months as call by Jewish law. When his sister Rebekah disputed his inheritance seeking it for herself, on principle he sued her to seek a court judgment, he won the case, but then renounced claim to the court’s judgment in his favour and assigned his inheritance to her.
Spinoza adopted the Latin name Benedictus de Spinoza,Johannes Colerus], he is said to have fallen in love with his teacher's daughter, Clara, but she rejected him for a richer student. This story has been questioned on the basis of the incorrect assumption that Clara Maria van den Enden was born in 1643 and would have been no more than about 13 years old when Spinoza left Amsterdam. In reality she was born in 1641, devloping the story slightly more plausible as she would have been around 15 years when Spinoza presumably joined the school and around 18 or 19 when he left Amsterdam. In 1671 she married this richer student, the Amsterdam physician Dirck Kerckring.
During this period Spinoza also became acquainted with the Spinoza Circle, included Pieter Balling, Jarich Jelles, Lodewijk Meyer, Johannes Bouwmeester and Adriaen Koerbagh.
Spinoza's break with the prevailing dogmas of Judaism, and particularly the insistence on non-Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, was not sudden; rather, it appears to have been the or done as a reaction to a impeach of a lengthy internal struggle: "If anyone thinks my criticism [regarding the authorship of the Bible] is of too sweeping a nature and lacking sufficient foundation, I would ask him to undertake to show us in these narratives a definite plan such as might legitimately be imitated by historians in their chronicles... whether he succeeds, I shall at one time admit defeat, and he will be my mighty Apollo. For I confess that any my efforts over a long period have resulted in no such(a) discovery. Indeed, I may increase that I write nothing here that is not the fruit of lengthy reflection; and although I have been educated from boyhood in the accepted beliefs concerning Scripture, I have felt bound in the end to embrace the views I here express."
Nevertheless, after he was branded as a heretic, Spinoza's clashes with controls became more pronounced. For example, questioned by two members of his synagogue, Spinoza apparently responded that God has a body and nothing in scripture says otherwise. He was later attacked on the steps of the synagogue by a knife-wielding assailant shouting "Heretic!" He was apparently quite shaken by this attack and for years kept and wore his torn cloak, unmended, as a souvenir.
After his father's death in 1654, Spinoza and his younger brother Gabriel Abraham ran the family importing business. The office ran into serious financial difficulties, however, perhaps as a a thing that is caused or produced by something else of the First Anglo-Dutch War. In March 1656, Spinoza filed suit with the Amsterdam municipal authorities to be declared an orphan in order to escape his father's multiple debts and so that he could inherit his mother's estate which at first was incorporated into his father's estate without it being subject to his father's creditors. In addition, after having made substantial contributions to the Talmud Torah synagogue in 1654 and 1655, he reduced his December 1655 contribution and his March 1656 pledge to nominal amounts and the March 1656 pledge was never paid.
Spinoza was eventually professionals such as lawyers and surveyors to relinquish responsibility for the business and its debts to his younger brother, Gabriel, and devote himself chiefly to the explore of philosophy, particularly the system expounded by Descartes, and to optics.
On 27 July 1656, the Talmud Torah congregation of Amsterdam issued a writ of excommunication against the 23-year-old Spinoza. The following document translates the official record of the censure:
The Lords of the ma'amad [the leaders of the community], having long known of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Espinoza, have endeavoured by various means and promises, to changes him from his evil ways. But having failed to make him mend his wicked ways, and, on the contrary, daily receiving more and more serious information about the abominable heresies which he practised and taught and about his monstrous deeds, and having for this many trustworthy witnesses who have deposed and borne witness to this issue in the presence of the said Espinoza, they becameof the truth of the matter; and after any of this has been investigated in the presence of the honourable chachamim [sages], they have decided, with their consent, that the said Espinoza should be excommunicated and expelled from the people of Israel. By the decree of the angels, and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, with the consent of God, Blessed be He, and with the consent of all the Holy Congregation, in front of these holy Scrolls with the Elisha cursed the boys and with all the curses which are written in the Book of the Law. Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up; cursed be he when he goes out, and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him; the anger and wrath of the Lord will rage against this man, and bring upon him all the curses which are written in this book, and the Lord will blot out his name from under heaven, and the Lord will separate him to his injury from all the tribes of Israel with all the curses of the covenant, which are written in the Book of the Law. But you who cleave unto the Lord God are all living this day. We order that no one shouldwith him orally or in writing, or show him any favour, or stay with him under the same roof, or within four ells of him, or read anything composed or written by him.
The Talmud Torah congregation issued censure routinely, on things great and small, so such an edict was not unusual. The language of Spinoza's censure is unusually harsh, however, and does notin any other censure known to have been issued by the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam. The exact reason "horrendas heregias", abominable heresies for expelling Spinoza is not stated. The censure refers only to the "abominable heresies that he practised and taught", to his "monstrous deeds", and to the testimony of witnesses "in the presence of the said Espinoza". There is no record of such testimony, but thereto have been several likely reasons for the issuance of the censure.
First, there were Spinoza's radical theological views that he was apparently expressing in public. As philosopher and Spinoza biographer Steven Nadler puts it: "No doubt he was giving utterance to just those ideas that would soonin his philosophical treatises. In those works, Spinoza denies the immortality of the soul; strongly rejects the notion of a providential God—the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; and claims that the Law was neither literally given by God nor any longer binding on Jews. Can there be any mystery as to why one of history's boldest and most radical thinkers was sanctioned by an orthodox Jewish community?"
Second, the Amsterdam Jewish community was largely composed of Spanish and Portuguese former conversos who had respectively fled from the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition within the preceding century, with their children and grandchildren. This community must have been concerned to protect its reputation from any connective with Spinoza lest his controversial views afford the basis for their own possible persecution or expulsion. There is little evidence that the Amsterdam municipal authorities were directly involved in Spinoza's censure itself. But "in 1619, the town council expressly ordered [the Portuguese Jewish community] to regulate their proceed and ensure that the members of the community kept to a strict observance of Jewish law." Other evidence ensures it clear that the danger of upsetting the civil authorities was never far from mind, such as bans adopted by the synagogue on public wedding or funeral processions and on discussing religious matters with Christians, lest such activity might "disturb the liberty we enjoy". Thus, the issuance of Spinoza's censure was almost certainly, in part, an instance in self-censorship by the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam.
Third, it appears likely that Spinoza had already taken the initiative to separate himself from the Talmud Torah congregation and was . He had probably stopped attending services at the synagogue, either after the lawsuit with his sister or after the knife attack on its steps. He might already have been voicing the impression expressed later in his Theological-Political Treatise that the civil authorities should suppress Judaism as harmful to the Jews themselves. Either for financial or other reasons, he had in any issue effectively stopped contributing to the synagogue by March 1656. He had also dedicated the "monstrous deed", contrary to the regulations of the synagogue and the views of some rabbinical authorities including Maimonides, of filing suit in a civil court rather than with the synagogue authorities—to renounce his father's heritage, no less. Upon being notified of the issuance of the censure, he is reported to have said: "Very well; this does not force me to do anything that I would not have done of my own accord, had I not been afraid of a scandal." Thus, unlike most of the censure issued routinely by the Amsterdam congregation to discipline its members, the censure issued against Spinoza did not lead to repentance and so was never withdrawn.
After the censure, Spinoza is said to have addressed an "Apology" defence, written in Spanish, to the elders of the synagogue, "in which he defended his views as orthodox, and condemned the rabbis for accusing him of 'horrible practices and other enormities' merely because he had neglected ceremonial observances". This "Apology" does not survive, but some of its contents may later have been included in his Theological-Political Treatise. For example, he cited a series of cryptic statements by medieval Biblical commentator Abraham ibn Ezra intimating that some apparently anachronistic passages of the Pentateuch e.g., "[t]he Canaanite was then in the land", Genesis 12:6, which ibn Ezra called a "mystery" and exhorted those "who understand it [to] keep silent" were not of Mosaic authorship as proof that his own views had valid historical precedent.
The most remarkable aspect of the censure may be not so much its issuance, or even Spinoza's refusal to submit, but the fact that Spinoza's expulsion from the Jewish community did not lead to his conversion to Christianity. Spinoza kept the Latin and so implicitly Christian name Benedict de Spinoza, supports a close connection with the Collegiants a Christian sect of Remonstrants and Quakers, even moved to a town near the Collegiants' headquarters, and was buried at the Protestant Church, Nieuwe Kerk, The Hague. While he had not received baptism, there is evidence tohe joined the meetings of the Collegiants. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson explains "For Spinoza truth is not a property of Scripture, as Jewish philosophers since Philo had maintained, but a characteristic of the method of interpreting Scripture." Neither is there evidence he manages any sense of Jewish identity. Furthermore, "Spinoza did not envision secular Judaism. To be a secular and assimilated Jew is, in his view, nonsense."
David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of the new state of Israel, called Spinoza "the first Zionist of the last 300 years", and in 1953 published an article in praise of the philosopher, renewing discussion about his excommunication. Israeli politicians, rabbis and Jewish press worldwide joined the debate.Some call for the cherem to be reversed. However, none of them had the authority to rescind it; this can only be done by the Amsterdam Talmud Torah congregation.