Baruch Spinoza ברוך שפינוזה

Born at Amsterdam on 24 November 1632, son of the merchant Michael de Espinosa; died at The Hague on 21 February 1677. He lived at Amsterdam until 1656–60, then at Rijnsburg near Leiden, at Voorburg, and from 1670 at The Hague. He lived by grinding lenses; in 1673 he declined a chair at Heidelberg.

One book appeared in his lifetime under his own name, an exposition of the principles of Descartes' philosophy (Amsterdam, 1663). The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus appeared in 1670 anonymously and with a false Hamburg imprint; the Synod of Dordrecht condemned it and the Court of Holland banned it in 1674. The Ethics and the rest appeared in the Opera Posthuma of 1677, and in 1678 the States of Holland banned those too.

The herem entry stands in the community's Livro dos Acordos, dated 6 Av 5416, and was proclaimed in the synagogue. The text is unrelentingly harsh: they "excommunicate, expel, curse and damn" Baruch de Espinoza; no one is to speak with him, write to him, do him a favour, stay under one roof with him or within four cubits, and no one is to read anything he has written.

What is known: the date; that the decision was the ma'amad's — the lay board's — "after investigation in the presence of the honourable hakhamim, with their consent"; that it is the harshest herem the community ever issued and one of the few never lifted; and that he was twenty-three.

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

Hence three corrections. The herem bears no signature at all: unlike comparable entries of the period it carries no gabbaim's signatures, so the common statement that "Morteira and Aboab signed Spinoza's excommunication" is wrong both 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 in 1656. And the herem was not unprecedented in kind — the community issued dozens, usually briefly; it was unprecedented in degree: in its violence, in never being lifted, and in forbidding the reading of books not yet written.

What the external sources say: the deposition of Fray Tomás Solano y Robles 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 of the da Costa affair a generation earlier. Odette Vlessing proposes another: that Spinoza's application to the Amsterdam civil court over his father's estate was itself a breach of communal discipline. The explanations do not exclude one another.