Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity - Hardcover

Goldstein, Rebecca

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805242090 ISBN 13: 9780805242096

Publisher: Random House Inc, 2006

Synopsis

Part of the Jewish Encounter series

In 1656, Amsterdam’s Jewish community excommunicated Baruch Spinoza, and, at the age of twenty–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 Spinoza’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 Inquisition’ s persecution of its forced Jewish converts plays itself out in Spinoza’s philosophy. The excommunicated Spinoza, no less than his excommunicators, was responding to Europe’ s first experiment with racial anti-Semitism.

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

About this title

Product Description:

Betraying Spinoza In 1656, Amsterdam's Jewish community declared Baruch Spinoza excommunicated because he denied the immortality of the soul, the divinity of the scripture, and challenged the idea that the Torah was literally given by God. His writings remain as provocative today. Full description

Review:

Beautifully crafted. What seem like separate issues Spinoza s pioneering advocacy of complete freedom of thought in religious matters; the turmoil in the Jewish community; the fateful events in Amsterdam in the closing years of Spinoza s life; the philosophical developments of the seventeenth century; Spinoza s idea of a philosophical religion utterly purged of all anthropomorphism, even to the extent of denying that God is a person in any sense come together as if by themselves (the sure sign of a fine artist!) to answer my puzzle: how to understand Spinoza the human being, a man for whom reason itself was a kind of salvation.
Hilary Putnam, New York Observer"

"Beautifully crafted. What seem like separate issues--Spinoza's pioneering advocacy of complete freedom of thought in religious matters; the turmoil in the Jewish community; the fateful events in Amsterdam in the closing years of Spinoza's life; the philosophical developments of the seventeenth century; Spinoza's idea of a philosophical religion utterly purged of all anthropomorphism, even to the extent of denying that God is a 'person' in any sense--come together as if by themselves (the sure sign of a fine artist!) to answer my puzzle: how to understand Spinoza the human being, a man for whom reason itself was a kind of salvation."
--Hilary Putnam, New York Observer

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Inc
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0805242090
• ISBN 13: 9780805242096
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256