LIFE AND WORKS. On July 27, 1656, Bento de Spinoza was
excommunicated by the ma’amad (ruling board) of the Am-
sterdam Jewish community into which he had been born.
His father, Mikael, had been born in Vidigere (modern-day
Figueira), Portugal, and had a close personal and financial
relationship with the Portuguese merchant Abraham de Spi-
noza of Nantes, who was both his uncle and his father-in-
law. Bento was the son of Mikael’s second wife, Hanna De-
bora, who died when the child was scarcely six. Spinoza was
never trained to be a rabbi, as previously thought, and was
never a full-time pupil of Sha’ul Levi Morteira, a senior in-
structor in Talmud-Torah Ets Hayyim, although he may
have attended an adult group known as Yeshivat Keter Torah
that was led by Morteira. He apparently left school at age
thirteen or fourteen to work in his father’s business. From
1654, the year of Mikael’s death, to 1656, the firm Bento
y Gabriel de Spinoza was managed by Bento and his younger
brother Gabriel. In March 1656, several months before his
excommunication, Spinoza decided to take advantage of a
Dutch law that protected minors who had been orphaned,
and dispossessed himself of his father’s estate, which was
heavily burdened by debts.
The manuscript of the ban, written in Portuguese, the
language of all documents of the Amsterdam Jewish commu-
nity, is still preserved in the municipal archives of Amster-
dam but contains no signatures. Other contemporary docu-
ments suggest that young Spinoza’s heretical views, which
led to his excommunication, were reinforced especially by
Juan (Daniyye’l) de Prado. Excommunicated in 1658, de
Prado was also a member of Morteira’s Keter Torah circle
and had attacked biblical anthropomorphism, poked fun at
the idea of Jewish chosenness, and asserted that the world
was eternal and the immutable laws of nature constituted the
only form of divine providence. A report of Tomas Solano
y Robles to the Inquisition of August 8, 1659 also indicated
that Prado and Spinoza were excommunicated because they
thought the Law (Torah) untrue, that souls die with the
body, and that there is no God except philosophically
speaking.
The precise reasons for the excommunication of Spino-
za have been much discussed and debated. Steven Nadler has
argued strongly that it was Spinoza’s denial of personal im-
mortality of the soul that played the key role (Spinoza’s Here-
sy, 2001). In seventeenth-century Amsterdam, four commu-
nity rabbis are especially prominent, and each one of them
composed treatises in defense of immortality (Isaac Aboab,
Sha’ul Levi Morteira, Moses Raphael d’Aguilar, and
Menasseh ben Israel). Moreover, Morteira and Menasseh
tended to lump together the three doctrines that seem to
have played a role in Spinoza’s ban: the truth of the Torah,
divine providence, and immortality. Admittedly, the Dutch
may not have been unduly concerned with the goings on in
the Jewish community, but what is significant here is the psy-
chology of the community that banned Spinoza, convinced
as it was of the reality of such a threat.
Jonathan Israel, on the other hand, has argued eloquent-
ly and persuasively that it was Spinoza’s public and provoca-
tive repudiation of the fundamentals of Rabbinic Judaism
that made it impossible for the synagogue authorities not to
expel him (Israel, 2001, pp. 162–174). This is reinforced by
the exceptional severity of the excommunication formula
used in his case. Israel points out that if the core ideas of Spi-
noza’s mature system were already outlined in Spinoza’s
Short Treatise (1660–1661), and if he was capable of con-
vincing Oldenburg in 1660 that he had outflanked Carte-
sianism, then it seems most unlikely that if one assumes, as
most scholars do, that Spinoza started his philosophical odys-
sey around the time of his excommunication in 1656, just
four years before, that he could conceivably have reached
such a level of achievement so speedily. One must conclude
that he had begun his philosophical phase long before this,
as indicated by various strands of evidence. Thus Jarig Jelles
affirms in his preface to Opera Posthuma that long before the
ban in 1656, Spinoza had seriously engaged the Cartesian
philosophy, rebelling inwardly against the teachings of the
synagogue. Similarly, the eighteenth-century historian of
Amsterdam Sephardic Jewry, David Franco Mendes, stresses
that, even as a boy, Spinoza vacillated in his Jewish belief as
a result of his philosophical excursions. But the clearest
proof, argues Israel, is what Spinoza reveals in the autobio-
graphical passage of the Emendation of the Intellect (1658),
where he dwells on the long inner struggle he experienced
before he could tear himself loose from the double existence
he had been leading, in which outward conformity was un-
easily joined with inner turmoil. Spinoza was finally able to
cut the Gordian knot when, by 1655, his family business was
ruined and his father’s estate became encumbered by sizable
debts.According to Israel, the only personage who seems likely
to have guided Spinoza in a radical direction was his ex-Jesuit
Latin master Franciscus van den Ende. Thus was Spinoza’s
precocious genius caught up in the Cartesian ferment that
swept the Netherlands, and the resulting identity crisis that
smoldered within him since his early teens finally came to
a head through a confluence of circumstances, in 1656. The
ban was consequently the inevitable outcome of a long intel-
lectual struggle that could no longer be contained.Apart from the report in Lucas’s biography of Spinoza,
which elevates Spinoza to the status of a philosopher saint,
there is no evidence of an appeal by the Jewish community
that Spinoza be banished from the city of Amsterdam, and
no legal record of any forced exile of Spinoza. In fact, says
Nadler, Spinoza appears to have been in that city throughout
most of the period of his excommunication in 1656 to the
beginning of his correspondence in 1661 (Nadler, 1999,
pp. 156–158, 163). It also appears that sometime before
early 1659 he was either staying in or making periodic visits
to Leiden to study at the university there. By early 1661, Spi-
noza was already well known as one who “excelled in the
Cartesian philosophy.” Nadler further suggests that it maySPINOZA, BARUCH 8681