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The Uses and Misuses of Spinoza

The beguiling Dutch philosopher’s life and work is prone to misunderstandings and misreadings. A recent biography goes so far as to recruit him into the culture war.

A few defining events form the core of every account of him: his birth in Amsterdam’s Jewish community and his banishment from it; his retreat to the countryside, where he drafted the Ethics while grinding glass lenses; his extensive association with fringe Dutch Protestant groups. There’s the assertion that “Spinoza was a good enough student to attend yeshiva…where he acquired sufficient knowledge to become a daring critic of biblical texts.” But among the most surprising discoveries made in the archives of the Amsterdam community in the last century were enrollment lists for Morteira’s “yeshiva-level” classes. For three and a half centuries, great thinkers from Leibniz and Hume to Marx and Nietzsche have found Spinoza’s metaphysics as fascinating as it is nearly unfathomable, but fortunately Buruma can tell you what it all means with enough space left over for a nice long rant.

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