Benedict de Spinoza is one of the most influential philosophers in the history of Western thoughts and is recognised as one of the pioneers the Existentialism. He was born to a Jewish family exiled from Portugal to Amsterdam, Holland in his parents’ generation (http://wrex2009.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/maranos-ancestors-of-spinoza-the-philosopher/).
When he was born to a family of Jewish merchants in Amsterdam on 24 November 1632, he was ‘originally called Baruch, a name that he later translated into its Latin equivalent Benedict’ (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14217a.htm ). His father, Michael de Spinoza, was ‘a prosperous merchant and Warden of both the synagogue and the Amsterdam Jewish school’ (http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/philosophers/spinoza.html) and his mother, Hana Debora, was Michael’s second wife. It is also known that his father Michael married a third wife called Hester de Espinosa in 1641, when Baruch was about eight years old.
In his early years, Baruch studied at the Amsterdam Jewish school, where he showed ‘rapid progress in Hebrew and the study of the Talmud, and his teachers, especially Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira, had the greatest hopes of his future’ (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14217a.htm), in accordance with his father’s wish, to make him a Rabbi.
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| Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira |
It is uncertain how and when young Baruch began to divert from his firmly established reputation as a hopeful for becoming a Rabbi and accounts from biographers describing the period from 1651 to 1654 occasionally do not match coherently. By ignoring some subtle differences in these descriptions, important things that occurred in Spinoza’s life can be summed up in the following three; (1) by 1651, he could hardly get on with the Jewish community and ‘he was looked upon with suspicion by orthodox Jews’ (ibid), (2) he came across with the philosophy of Rene Descartes, and (3) he has acquainted with a private school manager called Franz van den Enden, who was also known as ‘ex-Jesuit and freethinker’ (ibid).
For reading the text in full: http://wrex2009.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/the-excommunication-of-benedict-baruch-spinoza/
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