his famous formulation that freedom of thought reached a
limit only when it posed a “clear and present danger” appears
to have been made under Spinoza’s influence. Moreover,
Spinoza had special appeal for the young American Jewish
intellectuals who were children of the first wave of immi-
grants from eastern Europe. Morris Raphael Cohen (1880–
1947) had, as a youthful Marxist, valued Spinoza the cosmo-
politan who had rejected Judaism, and Lewis Feuer described
Horace M. Kallen’s The Book of Job as a Greek Tragedy (New
York, 1918) as “embedded in a Spinozist matrix.” Some of
the greatest Jewish scientists and philosophers in modern
times, such as Albert Einstein, Samuel Alexander, and Henri
Bergson, also felt a deep affinity with Spinoza (see Feuer,
pp. 36–79).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The best critical edition of Spinoza’s works is that by Carl Geb-
hardt, Spinoza Opera, 4 vols. (Heidelberg, 1925; a fifth vol-
ume was added in 1987). According to Nadler, this will be
superseded by an edition from the Groupe de Recherches
Spinozistes. A useful edition with translation and notes of
Spinoza’s Tractatus Politicus is by A. G. Wernham, Benedict
de Spinoza, The Political Works (Oxford, 1958). For Spino-
za’s Compendium of Hebrew Grammar, see Baruch Spinoza,
Hebrew Grammar, ed. and trans. by Maurice J. Bloom (New
York, 1962). A new and reliable translation of Spinoza’s
works by E. M. Curley is The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol.
l (Princeton, N.J., 1985; vol. 2, forthcoming). In the mean-
time, there has appeared Spinoza, Complete Works, with
translations by Samuel Shirley, edited with introduction and
notes by Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis, 2002). A com-
prehensive bibliography of Spinoza up to 1942 is Adolph S.
Oko’s The Spinoza Bibliography (Boston, 1964), which has
been supplemented by Jon Wetlesens’s A Spinoza Bibliogra-
phy, 1940–1970, 2d rev. ed. (Oslo, 1971). See also E. M.
Curley’s bibliography in Spinoza: Essays in Interpretation, ed-
ited by Eugene Freeman and Maurice Mandelbaum (LaSalle,
Ill., 1975), pp. 263–316; Wilhelm Totok’s Handbuch der
Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 4, Frühe Neuzeit 17 (Frank-
furt, 1981), pp. 232–296; and Theo van der Werf, H. Sieb-
rand, and C. Westerveen’s A Spinoza Bibliography, 1971–
1983 (Leiden, 1984).
The best biography of Spinoza is Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life
(Cambridge, U.K., 1999); supplemented by his Spinoza’s
Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind (Oxford, 2001). See
also A. Kasher and S. Biderman, “Why was Baruch De Spi-
noza Excommunicated?” In Sceptics, Millenarians, and Jews,
edited by David S. Katz and Jonathan Israel (Leiden, 1990),
pp. 98–141. For Spinoza’s Marranism and his relationship
to later thinkers, see Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other
Heretics: The Maranno of Reason and The Adventure of Imma-
nence (Princeton, N.J., 1989) 2 vols. Thomas McFarland,
Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford, 1969); David
Bell, Spinoza in Germany from 1670 to the Age of Goethe
(London, 1984). For the Pantheism Controversy, see Freder-
ick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason (Cambridge, Mass., 1987)
44-108; and Gerard Vallée, J. B. Lawson, and C. G. Chap-
ple, The Spinoza Conversations between Lessing and Jacobi
(Lanham, Md., 1988). For Jewish critiques of Spinoza, see
Hermann Cohen, “Spinoza über Statt und Religion, Juden-
tum und Christentum,” (1905), reprinted in Cohen’s Jüdis-
che Schriften (Berlin, 1924) 3.290–372; and Menahem Dor-
man, The Spinoza Dispute in Jewish Thought (Hakibbutz
Hameuchad, 1990; in Hebrew). For Spinoza and modern
psychological theory, see David Bidney, The Psychology and
Ethics of Spinoza (reprint, New York, 1962); and Antonio
Damazio, Looking For Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling
Brain (New York, 2003). For Spinoza in the former Soviet
Union and in America, see G. L. Kline, Spinoza in Soviet Phi-
losophy (London, 1952); and Lewis S. Feuer, “Spinoza’s
Thought and Modern Perplexities: Its American Career,” in
Barry S. Kogan, ed., Spinoza: A Tercentenary Perspective
(Cincinnati) pp. 36-79. A good brief introduction to Spino-
za is Stuart Hampshire’s Spinoza (Baltimore, 1951). The
most detailed and illuminating commentary on Spinoza’s
Ethics is Harry A. Wolfson’s The Philosophy of Spinoza, 2
vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1934). A comprehensive introduc-
tion and commentary (in Hebrew) on the Short Treatise,
along with a Hebrew translation by Rachel Hollander-
Steingart, can be found in Ma’amar qatsar ’al Elohim, ha-
adam, ve-oshero, edited by Joseph Ben Shlomo (Jerusalem,
1978). A similar edition of De Intellectus Emendatione with
Hebrew commentary is Ma’amar ’al tiqqun ha-sekhel, trans-
lated by Nathan Spiegel and edited by Joseph ben Shlomo
(Jerusalem, 1972). Detailed analyses of Spinoza’s Theologi-
cal-Political Treatise can be found in Sylvan Zac, Spinoza et
l’Interpretation de l’Ecriture (Paris, 1965); Leo Strauss, Spino-
za’s Critique of Religion (New York, 1965); and André Malet,
Le Traité Theologico-Politique de Spinoza et la pensée biblique
(Paris, 1966). See also the important study of J. Samuel
Preus, Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority (Cam-
bridge, U.K., 2001); Steven Frankel, “Politics and Rhetoric:
Spinoza’s Intended Audience in the Tractatus Theologico-
Politicus,” Review of Metaphysics 52.4 (June 1999): 897–924;
Steven Frankel, “The Piety of a Heretic: Spinoza’s Interpre-
tation of Judaism,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy
11.2 (November 2002): 117–134; Shlomo Pines, Studies in
the History of Jewish Thought, edited by Warren Z. Harvey
and Moshe Idel (Jerusalem, Israel, 1997), 660–734 (The
Collected Works of S. Pines, vol. 5); and Frank Leavitt, “The
Christian Philosophy of Benedict de Spinoza,” Daat 26
(1991): 97–108 (Hebrew).
Indispensable collections of documents on Spinoza’s life are I. S.
Révah’s Spinoza et le dr. Juan de Prado (Paris, 1959) and
“Aux origines de la rupture spinozienne,” Revue des études
juives 3 (July–December 1964): 359–431, and A. M. Vaz
Dias’s Spinoza Mercator & Autodidactus (The Hague, 1932),
translated from Dutch in Studia Rosenthaliana 16 (Novem-
ber 1982) and supplemented by four related articles. A sti-
mulating account of the social-political context of Spinoza’s
work is Lewis S. Feuer’s Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism
(Boston, Mass., 1958). Two important and provocative in-
terpretations of Spinoza from the viewpoint of contemporary
philosophy are E. M. Curley’s Spinoza’s Metaphysics: An Essay
in Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass., 1969) and Jonathan
Bennett’s A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics (Indianapolis, Ind.,
1984).
Useful collections of essays on Spinoza include Studies in Spinoza:
Critical and Interpretive Essays, edited by S. Paul Kashap
(Berkeley, Calif., 1972); Spinoza: A Collection of Critical Es-
says, edited by Marjorie Grene (Garden City, N.Y., 1973);8686 SPINOZA, BARUCH