There is great background material in this very personal tribute to Baruch Spinoza on the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition and ultimate expulsion if Jews from both those countries.

It’s funny but my family visited Spain recently and while we spent so much time taking in the muslim influence in the country, the history of torture, of burning people at the stake, converting Jews to Catholicism, and rescinding their citizenship was wholly missing from the story.

While Cordoba, Girona, and Barcelona were great centres of Jewish life and letters, including the rise of Kaballa mysticism.

Goldstein see s this history and the subsequent rise of the Sephardim community in Amsterdam as central to Spinoza’s inspired rationalism. ( )

A memoir, biography, history, and philosophical explication in the sometimes excellent Jewish Encounters Series by the author of Plato at the Googleplex, which I think I bombed. I’m probably not smart enough to grok most of this, and some of it was screaming for me to write a question mark in the margin:

It may be objected that, as we understand God as the cause of all things, we by that very fact regard God as the cause of pain. But I make answer, that, in so far as we understand the causes of pain, it to that extent, ceases to be a passion, that is, it ceases to be pain; therefore in so far as we understand God to be the cause of pain, we to that extent feel pleasure. [Really?]

That is what the problem of evil comes down to: the stubborn stupidity of mankind. [A weak answer before the Theory of Evolution, but certainly inadequate now.]

This book certainly held my attention and it is an outstanding and clever overall production. ( )

This is the first book I’ve read by Rebecca Goldstein, a philosopher-novelist (a fascinating combination of professions). The title is interesting. It turns out that “betraying” Spinoza is the attempt to understand him in his biographical context, having grown up in the Sephardic community in Amsterdam, a group that shared a precarious identity as Jews after having lived for generations as “Christians” on the Iberian peninsula. Goldstein suggests that Spinoza’s “rebellion,” leading to the unusual step of life-long disfellowship from the synagogue, was that he sought to dismiss all personalized aspects that usually contribute to identity.
Goldstein not only places Spinoza’s philosophy in the context of his personal life, but she also draws a parallel between it and the mysticism of St. Teresa of Ávila, whose spirituality was an inward, private practice, albeit employing a different medium, prayer, instead of Spinoza’s mathematically rigorous reason. “It is intriguing to speculate how the Marrano psyche, necessarily oriented inward, found such different expression in these two spiritual geniuses” (p. 115).
I enjoyed reading this in parallel to Spinoza’s Ethics. Although Spinoza’s approach, which Goldstein terms “radical objectivity” differs from Goldstein’s own, that of analytic philosophy, she is a sympathetic commentator. It was helpful to me to have Goldstein explain two crucial terms in Spinoza’s project that had puzzled me, “nature” and “substance,” confirming my suspicion that he must mean something other than we conventionally do.
The prose is elegant and accessible. I particularly liked the author's recollection of her first exposure to Spinoza as a high school student in an Orthodox yeshiva in lower Manhattan at the hands of Mrs. Schoenfeld, whose condemnation of this “heretic” piqued young Goldstein’s interest. This, together with a recreation of Spinoza late in life in the final chapter, demonstrate how Goldstein’s two activities of philosophy and novel-writing join in a delightful way. An excellent book.
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The world is the all-embracing web of necessary truths, intelligible through and through―and our own individual salvation rests in our knowing this.

Goldstein writes a deeply engaging biography of Spinoza, centering around his complicated identity as a first generation Dutch Jew of Sephardic/Portuguese origin, apostatizing from his faith and excommunicated from his community. His radical rationalism replaced any need for religious dogma. From logic, he derived a whole system of being, which Goldstein describes in beautiful detail. She weaves her own relationship with the philosophy of Spinoza into his biography, describing her yeshiva teacher warning of his apostasy, as well as her years teaching his Ethics in a class on 17th century rationality. Her illuminating descriptions of the state of Jewish thought during the 17th century, specifically among the Dutch Jewry, were crucial in imagining how Spinoza might have developed his beautifully poetic philosophical system. ( )

"By decree of the angels and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, with the consent of God, Blessed be He, and with the consent of the entire holy congregation, and in front of these holy scrolls with the 613 precepts which are written therein; cursing him with the excommunication with which Joshua banned Jericho and with the curse which Elisha cursed the boys and with all the castigations which are written in the Book of the Law. Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him, but then the anger of the Lord and his jealousy shall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are written in this book shall lie upon him, and the Lord shall blot out his name from under heaven. And the Lord shall separate him unto evil out of all the tribes of Israel, according to all the curses of the covenant that are written in this book of the law. But you that cleave unto the Lord your God are alive every one of you this day." -- excerpt from the excommunication of Baruch de Espinoza, July 27, 1656.

Bertrand Russell describes Spinoza as "the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers." I cannot disagree. As remarkable as his philosophy is, his conduct is even more so.

Goldstein titled her book Betraying Spinoza because she hopes to reconstruct his identity and demonstrate how it influenced his thinking, while recognizing that his formal philosophy endeavors to abrogate the concept of identity. Through an analysis of Jewish history at large (and the 17th century Amsterdam Jewish community in particular) and making the occasional educated guess, she makes the compelling case that Spinoza, in rejecting Judaism, was a sort of Jewish savior. By destroying the Jewish conceit of being God's "chosen people," he undercuts all forms of essentialism, religious or otherwise.

His impact on John Locke is noted. The leap to his influence on the deism that informed the thinking of those who would found the United States is short. When I am at my most pessimistic I think of the philosopher, and those like him, and I allow myself to hope. ( )