The herem on Spinoza

Baruch de Espinoza, aged twenty-three, was excommunicated by an entry in the community's Livro dos Acordos dated 6 Av 5416; the decree was proclaimed in the synagogue. Its language is exceptional: they "excommunicate, expel, curse and damn" him; cursed be he by day and cursed by night; let no one speak with him, write to him, do him a favour, stay under one roof with him or within four cubits; and let no one read anything he has written.

What is known. The date. That the decision was taken by "the Lords of the ma'amad" — the lay board of parnassim — "after investigation in the presence of the honourable hakhamim, with their consent." That it is the harshest herem in the community's history and one of the few never lifted. That it forbids reading his writings.

What is not known is what he actually said or did. The document names no proposition, no witness, and shows no trace of warning: only "abominable heresies" and "monstrous deeds."

And this: he had written nothing at the time. The Tractatus appeared fourteen years later, the Ethics twenty-one years later, posthumously. To derive the reasons for the herem from the mature philosophy is inference, not evidence.

The external sources are late and indirect. Fray Tomás Solano y Robles's deposition to the Spanish Inquisition (Madrid, 1659) reports that Spinoza and Juan de Prado held that God exists only philosophically, that the soul dies with the body and that the Law is not true. Steven Nadler builds on this the argument that the decisive charge was the denial of the soul's immortality — the very charge in the da Costa affair a generation before. Odette Vlessing offers another explanation: that Spinoza applied to the Amsterdam civil court to be declared of age and to renounce his father's insolvent estate — stepping outside communal jurisdiction, which was itself an offence. The explanations do not exclude one another.

Three corrections. The herem bears no signature at all: unlike comparable entries of the period it carries no gabbaim's signatures. The common statement that "Morteira and Aboab signed Spinoza's excommunication" — found in the Encyclopaedia Judaica and in Russian accounts alike — is wrong in letter and in substance: this was a decision of a merchants' board, not a verdict of a beit din. He was not excommunicated "for pantheism," "for the Ethics" or "for the Tractatus": none of those texts existed. And in kind the herem was not unprecedented — the community issued dozens, usually briefly; it was unprecedented in degree.

The Portuguese community of Amsterdam has more than once declined to annul it — the question was last considered formally in 2015: a disciplinary act of a particular seventeenth-century board is not theirs to revoke.