Baruch Spinoza Emancipator of reason

Abstract

On the occasion of the tercentenary of Baruch Spinoza's death, which is currently being marked throughout the world by symposia of one kind or another, re-assessing the significance of the contribution this great Jewish philosopher has made to modern thought beyond his own time, we reprint the following article by the late Professor Hyman Levy, which appeared in The Jewish Quarterly (Vol. 4, No 1, Summer 1956). The occasion, then, was the tercentenary of Spinoza's excommunication (July 27, 1956) when a monument was erected on the philosopher's grave in The Hague, bearing the Hebrew inscription, ‘Amcha’ (literally, ‘Your people’, but in the ordinary usage meaning ‘one of your people’ or ‘one of us’). The black basalt headstone was taken from a quarry in Galilee, with a bas relief of Spinoza's head sculptured by a Dutch-Jewish artist, Johan G. Wertheim. At the time the then Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, led a campaign for the excommunication of Spinoza to be revoked, against the opposition by the Jewish religious authorities which still persists to this day.