On July 27, 1656, the small Jewish community in the Dutch city of Amsterdam issued a decree expelling a heretic from its midst. The accused, a twenty-fouryear-old man named Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), was condemned for unspecified “monstrous deeds” and soon forced to leave the city of his birth.
Spinoza, whose work also earned the enmity of Holland’s Christian majority, was widely denounced as an atheist and became one of the most hated men of his generation. Yet his philosophy and ethics were rooted in his belief that love of God was the highest human good.
Born into a family of Sephardic Jews who had fled to Amsterdam to escape the Portuguese Inquisition, Spinoza received a standard Jewish education at the city’s Talmud Torah school. The exact reason for his expulsion from the community is unknown, but the rabbis were sufficiently enraged that the edict not only expelled Spinoza, but also barred other Jews from having any contact whatsoever with the young dissenter.
Forced to leave the city, Spinoza settled near The Hague, where he worked as a lens grinder while laboring over the manuscript of his most influential work, Ethics. The book was published posthumously, after he died at age forty-four of a lung infection caused by inhaling toxic glass dust.
A compilation of his views on religion and philosophy, Ethics provides ample explanation for why the Jewish community condemned Spinoza. In the book, he rejected the traditional Judeo-Christian concept of God as the world’s creator who ruled by divine intervention in the affairs of mankind.
Instead, Spinoza redefined God to mean the impersonal forces of nature and logic. The universe, he wrote, was ruled by logic, not by the providential acts of God. People had no free will, he believed, since logic determined everything. The only way to be happy was to seek understanding of God and recognize one’s inability to change the course of fate.
Although shunned in his lifetime—and for a century afterward—Spinoza’s beliefs would form the basis of the Enlightenment.