Yet the most celebrated case was that of Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza is widely
known as one of the leading figures of seventeenth-century European philos-
ophy and an early voice of the European Enlightenment. His parents were
crypto-Jews who returned to Judaism. As a young man, he was a lens grinder
and eventually studied optics. As a Jewish philosopher, Spinoza broke with
the preceding Jewish philosophical tradition, whose primary aim had been to
synthesize and reconcile Judaism and Greek philosophy. Spinoza separated
these two traditions.
In 1656, his heretical views of Judaism led the Jewish community to
excommunicate him. Unlike Da Costa and De Prado, Spinoza left the Jewish
community without converting to Christianity or to any other religion. He
opted instead to join the community of deist philosophers in Amsterdam.
Spinoza’s ability to leave the Jewish community without converting was
made possible by the mood of religious toleration, and by the emergence in
Amsterdam of what historian Jacob Katz termed a neutral society.
In 1670, Spinoza published a philosophical critique of Judaism and religion
in general, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. In this work, he distinguished
between two dimensions of western religion: natural law and dogma. Natural
law he defined as those aspects of religion that are comprehensible through
human reason without revelation. Thus, he argued that human beings did not
need God to tell them not to kill each other; human reason could deduce this
law simply by noting that without a prohibition on murder, the human species
would cease to exist. Spinoza placed Judaism’s core belief in monotheism and
ethical and moral tradition in this category. The rest of Judaism he defined as
dogma, a time-bound collection of rules “ordained in the Old Testament for
the Hebrew only ... it is evident they formed no part of the divine law and
have nothing to do with blessedness and virtue.”
Spinoza claimed that Judaism and other western religions shared the same
natural laws and were different only with respect to dogma. Since the latter
was non-essential, he concluded, there was no essential difference between
Judaism, Catholicism, the various Protestant denominations, or other faiths.
In this regard, he rejected normative Judaism as vehemently as he rejected
Christianity. Ultimately, Spinoza had little impact during his lifetime. A cen-
tury after his death in 1685, subsequent generations of Jews living in the late
eighteenth, the nineteenth, and even the twentieth century would discover in
Spinoza a blueprint, or at least a useful point of departure, in reorienting
Judaism to a changing world.
The establishment of Jews in Amsterdam created a foothold for Jews to
return to England. In some sense, conditions for Jews in England in the sev-
enteenth century were similar to those in the Netherlands. Expelled in
1290, as late as the 1640s the only Jews in England were a small enclave of
crypto-Jews. As in the Netherlands, by the mid-seventeenth century,
Catholics and Protestants had largely set aside religious disputes in favor of a
The age of enlightenment and emancipation, 1750–1880 141