[lbo-talk] salt

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Fri Nov 14 01:27:33 PST 2008


I had heard that he actually got thrown out of the community for going to the Dutch secular authority in order to resolve a business dispute, rather than first turning to the sectarian authorities.... robert wood

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(You mean `religious authorities' rather than `secular' in the last sentence?)

According to several biographies and histories I've read, Spinoza was thrown out of or banned from the extended congregational community (the Jewish ghetto), by the head rabbi of Amsterdam's Talmud Torah synegoue for propogating materalist herasy. This was the same rabbi who trained Spinoza in Hebrew and Latin in school when Spinoza was a teenager. Their despute was both theological and personal hence the usual Writ of Cherim.

It's difficult to tell the specifics of the conflict, but it came down to Spinoza's fascination with Descartes, and his intellectual friendships with the Cartiseans and rising so-called scientific minded supporters of the `New Sciences', aka Galileo et al. He must have spoken about it in public, before getting printed.

After the official Writ, the Jewish community was banned from any contact, including doing business with Spinoza. He became an silent partner with his brother to run their father's merchant trade in dried fruit from Spain, Portugal and North Africa. Spinoza gave it up interest in the family business and turned to the lens grinding trade. Lens grinding was new and not part of the traditional trade guild system, which was dominated in other countries by both merchant guilds and the church. Lens grinding was Spinoza's entrance into the sciences of astronomy, microscopy, and optics as well as mathematics, via geometry.

The secular authorities were attempting to remain neutral in the whole affair between religious fanatics lead by the Calvinists. The DeWiit brothers held power in a delicate balance between the Calvinists and a threatened re-establishment of a monarchy from the English exiled William of Orange, the Orangists... Calvinist mobs assasinate the DeWitt brothers... Retrenchment is afoot, the thriving publishing trades that printed books in philosopy and science are threatened, Spinoza goes into obscurity, but the radical enlightenment prevails muted in Locke and Liebniz.

I lose track somewhere in these perginations.

CG



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