Baruch de Spinoza, a Dutch philosopher of…

Baruch de Spinoza, a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Jewish origin, is the most famous of the Jews in Holland at this time.

Spinoza has became known in the Jewish community for positions contrary to prevailing Jewish belief of this period, wherein he harbors critical positions towards the anti-maimonidean dominance of Jewish religious texts that has persisted since the Maimonidean Controversy.

The Jewish community of Amsterdam on July 27, 1656, issues to him the writ of cherem, a kind of excommunication.

Righteous indignation on the part of the synagogue elders at Spinoza's heresies is not the sole cause for the excommunication; there is also the practical concern that his ideas, which disagree equally well with the orthodoxies of other religions as with Judaism, will not sit well with the Christian leaders of Amsterdam and will reflect badly on the whole Jewish community, endangering the limited freedoms that the Jews had achieved in that city.

The terms of his cherem are severe.

He is, in Bertrand Russell's words, "cursed with all the curses in Deuteronomy and with the curse that Elisha pronounced on the children who, in consequence, were torn to pieces by the she-bears."( The cherem, atypically, will never be revoked.)

Following his excommunication, he adopts the first name Benedictus, the Latin equivalent of his given name, Baruch; they both mean "blessed".