This ambitious study presents Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) as the
most outstanding and influential thinker of modernity--and examines
the question of whether he was the "first secular Jew." A
number-one bestseller in Israel, "Spinoza and Other Heretics" is
made up of two volumes--The Marrano of Reason and The Adventures of
Immanence. Yirmiyahu Yovel shows how Spinoza grounded a
philosophical revolution in a radically new principle--the
philosophy of immanence, or the idea that this world is all there
is--and how he thereby anticipated secularization, the
Enlightenment, the disintegration of ghetto life, and the rise of
natural science and the liberal-democratic state.
The Marrano of Reason
The Marrano of Reason finds the origins of the idea of immanence
in the culture of Spinoza's Marrano ancestors, Jews in Spain and
Portugal who had been forcibly converted to Christianity. Yovel
uses their fascinating story to show how the crypto-Jewish life
they maintained in the face of the Inquisition mixed Judaism and
Christianity in ways that undermined both religions and led to
rational skepticism and secularism. He identifies Marrano patterns
that recur in Spinoza in a secularized context: a "this-worldly"
disposition, a split religious identity, an opposition between
inner and outer life, a quest for salvation outside official
doctrines, and a gift for dual language and equivocation. This same
background explains the drama of the young Spinoza's
excommunication from the Jewish community in his native Amsterdam.
Convention portrays the Amsterdam Jews as narrow-minded and
fanatical, but in Yovel's vivid account they emerge as highly
civilized former Marranos with cosmopolitan leanings, struggling to
renew their Jewish identity and to build a "new Jerusalem" in the
Netherlands.
General
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