350 Years Later: The Excommunication of Spinoza

This piece is a week late. I did not post it because of the war. Never the less, I feel it is relevant, if indirectly, to what is happening with attempts to silence UOJ, a controversial blogger. Such attempts have precedent, and are unfortunately, part of larger tradition of attempting to silence not only swashbuckling dissenters, but also towards uncomfortable ideas and the persons who broach them. Some of these ideas and concerns that have been condemned throughout our history were not motivated by an anti-religious bias; they were merely grappling with concepts, often with the incontrovertible.

If our rabbis had merely condemned specifics of Spinoza’s writing instead of severing him from the Jewish community and Jewish life, it is possible that many of our best and brightest would not have developed the assumption to operate outside the parameters of Normative Judaism.

Personal condemnations, bans, and excommunications are not always efficacious; they can have the opposite effect.

Spinoza was forced to operate outside the Jewish community, and therefore did just that.

Yet his legacy is massive. He influenced world leaders and thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein.

But the rabbis’ excommunication of Spinoza did more than cast Spinoza himself from the Jewish community’s ranks. It also ensured that many of the great Jewish thinkers in the future would henceforth operate outside of traditional Judaism. Many haredi Jews will insist that Jewish genius is more common in the haredi world than outside of it because of intensive Talmudic training, but this may be wishful thinking, as even a portion of their most prominent leaders believed to be geniuses possibly lack a necessary secular component to their education and understanding of the world to have full relevance in the general marketplace of ideas; nor perhaps, do some of them even fully understand what they are considering banning. Even if they do understand, they are confined to a large degree by the ignorance of their constituency.

Spinoza’s shadow of indictment and continued popularity has long implied a communal resentment of the treatment he received. He is looked upon as a martyr, not only for justification of secularism, but for freedom of thought itself.

By excommunicating Spinoza, the Jewish clergy laid fertile and reasonable grounds for an explosion of secularism.