Baruch Spinoza: Judaism’s Most Famous Heretic

In 1656, the Jewish community of Amsterdam threw out one of its sharpest young minds. His name was Baruch Spinoza, and almost four hundred years later we’re still arguing with him. Today, we dig into his philosophy, why it scared everyone, and what it means for Jews today.

In this episode, we get into:

• Who Spinoza was: born in Amsterdam in 1632 to Portuguese conversos, orphaned young, and grinding lenses in The Hague for a living

• His big challenge: the Bible as a human book, the three angels visiting Abraham as a “baby fairy tale,” and God as the laws of nature

• The excommunication: Uriel da Costa, a name crossed out of the synagogue membership books, and a community of Inquisition refugees who really needed him to stop talking

• The Streisand effect, and whether booting him out made him more famous

• The line from Spinoza through the Enlightenment to the Reform Jewish movement

• Why most American Jews aren’t Spinozists (they still show up for the seder), and why Chayaleah thinks biblical criticism is the real slippery slope

Further Reading on Spinoza:

• Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (1999) and Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind (2001). OUP

• Daniel B. Schwartz, The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image (2012). Review: Jewish Review of Books, “Brother Baruch”

• Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza (2006)

• My Jewish Learning, “Spinoza”