Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

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Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (Jewish Encounters Series)

Part of the Jewish Encounter series

In 1656, Amsterdamâ€™s Jewish community excommunicated Baruch Spinoza, and, at the age of twentyâ€“three, he became the most famous heretic in Judaism. He was already germinating a secularist challenge to religion that would be as radical as it was original. He went on to produce one of the most ambitious systems in the history of Western philosophy, so ahead of its time that scientists today, from string theorists to neurobiologists, count themselves among Spinozaâ€™s progeny.

In Betraying Spinoza, Rebecca Goldstein sets out to rediscover the flesh-and-blood man often hidden beneath the veneer of rigorous rationality, and to crack the mystery of the breach between the philosopher and his Jewish past. Goldstein argues that the trauma of the Inquisitionâ€™ s persecution of its forced Jewish converts plays itself out in Spinozaâ€™s philosophy. The excommunicated Spinoza, no less than his excommunicators, was responding to Europeâ€™ s first experiment with racial anti-Semitism.

Here is a Spinoza both hauntingly emblematic and deeply human, both heretic and heroâ€”a surprisingly contemporary figure ripe for our own uncertain age.

From the Hardcover edition.
Country USA
Brand Schocken
Manufacturer Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Binding Paperback
ItemPartNumber 9780805211597
Color Tan
ReleaseDate 2009-08-11
UnitCount 1
EANs 9780805211597

Country	USA
Brand	Schocken
Manufacturer	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Binding	Paperback
ItemPartNumber	9780805211597
Color	Tan
ReleaseDate	2009-08-11
UnitCount	1
EANs	9780805211597

Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (Jewish Encounters Series)

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