Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

In 1656, Amsterdam’s Jewish community excommunicated Baruch\nSpinoza, and, at the age of twenty–three, he became the most famous\nheretic in Judaism. He was already germinating a secularist\nchallenge to religion that would be as radical as it was original.\nHe went on to produce one of the most ambitious systems in the\nhistory of Western philosophy, so ahead of its time that scientists\ntoday, from string theorists to neurobiologists, count themselves\namong Spinoza’s progeny.

\n
\n

In_Betraying Spinoza,_Rebecca Goldstein sets out to\nrediscover the flesh-and-blood man often hidden beneath the veneer\nof rigorous rationality, and to crack the mystery of the breach\nbetween the philosopher and his Jewish past. Goldstein argues that\nthe trauma of the Inquisition’s persecution of its forced Jewish\nconverts plays itself out in Spinoza’s philosophy. The\nexcommunicated Spinoza, no less than his excommunicators, was\nresponding to Europe’s first experiment with racial\nanti-Semitism.

\n
\n

Here is a Spinoza both hauntingly emblematic and deeply human,\nboth heretic and hero—a surprisingly contemporary figure ripe for\nour own uncertain age.

\n
\n
\n

From the Hardcover edition.

\n\n