1632 -1677
This philosopher comes from my hometown, Amsterdam, He is from the same Sephardic Jewish stock as my mother's famiiy. His family escaped from Portuguese Catholic persecution to Holland.
All the Jews that escaped to the Netherlands had for some generations been practicing their religion in secret if at all, and had forgotten many of the jewish customs and rules. So in Spinoza's time the rabbis made up their own laws of the synagogue to build a new kind of religious community appropriate for living at the time in Amsterdam.
SPINOZA was born to such parents. But being a free thinker and philosopher in a free city decided to stand up against the rabbis and consequently was expelled from the synagogue and then from his family.
He moved to Rijnsberg near Leiden and made a comfortable living from lens grinding, whilst continuing to publish his controversial philosophical works anonymously due to the possibility of being convicted of heresy. He never married or fathered children, but his works have lived on ever since.
He continues to be relevant, a most modern radical philosopher, and to my mind the most clear seeing about the nature of life on earth, people, animals, plants, and the mysteries of the Cosmos.
