Thinkers Timeline

Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher. He is one of the most important thinkers of the early modern period. He was born on 24 November 1632 in Amsterdam. His family was Portuguese Jewish. They had fled Portugal to escape violent persecution by Catholic rulers. The Netherlands at the time was unusual in Europe. It was more tolerant of Jews than most countries. But Jewish communities there stayed careful, afraid of upsetting their Christian neighbours. Young Baruch (Hebrew for 'blessed') was a brilliant student of Hebrew and Jewish religious texts. His father ran a small trading business. When the father died, Spinoza helped manage it for a short time. But by his early twenties, he was moving away from traditional Jewish belief. He read Descartes and other new European philosophers. He began to question the Bible. He asked whether miracles really happened. He doubted that God was a person who ruled the world from outside it. In 1656, when he was 23, the Jewish community of Amsterdam formally expelled him. The document is one of the harshest such orders in Jewish history. It cursed him and forbade any Jew from speaking to him or even coming within four paces of him. The exact reasons were not recorded. His dangerous religious ideas are the most likely cause. He never tried to rejoin. He made his living grinding lenses for microscopes and telescopes. This was precise, patient work. He lived simply, in rented rooms, never marrying. He refused a university chair at Heidelberg because he feared it would limit his freedom to think. He published only two books in his lifetime, one of them anonymously. His greatest work, the Ethics, came out after his death. He died on 21 February 1677, aged 44, probably from a lung disease made worse by glass dust from his work.