Spinoza, Liberalism, Science, and Contemporary Judaism

For centuries Benedict Spinoza has been regarded as everything from an antisemite to anti- Biblical. These and similar charges are not supported by recent analyses. Spinoza was an intellectual figure who believed deeply in a Deity while opening up the Torah to the same kind of criticism that would be seen in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Not a "liberal" in the modern political sense, he expressed a passionate faith in freedom of conscience. Not a modern epistemologist, he built his knowledge theory on intuitive reasoning which is similar to that of contemporary physicists. Spinoza is a unique figure in Jewish intellectual history and deserves to be seen as a Jewish philosopher who anticipated biblical criticism by two centuries.