AMSTERDAM (JTA) – More than 350 years after this city’s Portuguese Jewish community excommunicated Baruch Spinoza and banned his writings for eternity, the philosopher’s books are for sale at the ...

(JTA) — More than 350 years after this city’s Portuguese Jewish community excommunicated Baruch Spinoza and banned his writings for eternity, the philosopher’s books are for sale at the souvenir shop ...

The beginning of Baruch Spinoza’s heresy may have begun with his uncircumcised grandfather. As a child in the 17th century, Spinoza visited the Beth Haim cemetery on the outskirts of Amsterdam, ...

Baruch Spinoza’s life was a product of paradox. The 17th century, in Europe, was a time of both barbarous sectarianism and unprecedented human achievement. It was an era of new ideas — ideas that ...

Rachel Kadish’s "The Weight of Ink" is like A.S. Byatt's "Possession," but with more seventeenth-century Judaism. The world is full of secret places. Behind a cupboard door, concealed by a secret ...

Throughout the course of his life, physicist Albert Einstein, the publisher of the theory of relativity, affirmed his belief in pantheism, a theological doctrine based on the work of 17th-century ...

An Emperor of Nothing This morning in Slate I encountered a rather peculiar piece, The Original Jewish Genius: How the Gaon of Vilna helps explain Jewish intellectual achievement. The reason I found ...

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. Ad Policy A portrait of Benedict ...