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.
"From the Hardcover edition."
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