Spinoza, born to Amsterdam's Portuguese Jews on 24 November 1632

On 27 July 1656, the sixth of Av 5416 in the Jewish calendar, the leaders of Amsterdam's Talmud Torah congregation issued a proclamation from in front of the ark of their synagogue on the Houtgracht. It was written in Portuguese, the everyday language of the congregation, and it named one of their own: Baruch de Espinoza, a 23-year-old merchant who had been running his late father's dried-fruit business with his brother Gabriel.3 sources3 sources

The lay board that governed the congregation, the ma'amad, said it had long known of his “evil opinions and acts” and had tried “by various means and promises” to turn him back. Instead it kept receiving reports of the “abominable heresies which he practiced and taught” and of his “monstrous deeds”. With the consent of the rabbis, it expelled him from the people of Israel.2 sources2 sources

Nobody was to speak to him or write to him, do him any favour, stay under the same roof or come within four cubits of him, or read anything he had written. Spinoza was not in the synagogue to hear it. It was the harshest writ of herem the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam ever pronounced, and it was never rescinded.2 sources2 sources

The young man it cursed had been born a few streets away. His father and grandparents had come from Portugal, and the community that expelled him had been founded by people who, like them, had fled the Inquisition.4 sources4 sources

Spinoza was born on 24 November 1632. No birth record survives, but he was almost certainly born in or near Vlooienburg, an artificial island raised in the bed of the Amstel in the 1590s, where most of Amsterdam's Sephardic Jews lived and where their congregations built their synagogues. The Stopera, the city hall and opera house, stands on the site today.3 sources3 sources

He was named Bento in Portuguese, Baruch in Hebrew and later Benedictus in Latin; all three mean “blessed”. Baruch was also the Hebrew name of his maternal grandfather, Henrique Garces, from Porto, who had settled in Amsterdam between 1598 and 1605 and was known there as Baruch Senior.2 sources2 sources

Amsterdam was one of the few places in Europe where Jews were not prevented from practising their religion privately. Portuguese New Christians are recorded there from 1592, and by 1618 they had formed three congregations: Beth Jacob, Neve Shalom and Beth Israel. On 3 April 1639 the three merged into one, Kahal Kadosh Talmud Torah, which began building its new synagogue on the Houtgracht that year.4 sources4 sources

The community called itself Portuguese, not Spanish, probably because the Dutch were then fighting for independence from Spain. Its members spoke Portuguese in daily life and business and used Spanish for scholarship, prose and poetry. Its charity reached far beyond the city: a dowry society founded in 1615 helped poor girls of the Nation living “from Saint-Jean-de-Luz to Danzig”, including places where Judaism was banned.3 sources3 sources

Spinoza's father, Michael d'Espinosa, was born in about 1587 or 1588 in Vidigueira, a wine town in the Alentejo north of Beja, near Évora. Its seigneurial rights had belonged to Vasco da Gama and then to his descendants. Michael was probably the second son of a prosperous merchant, Pedro Rodrigues Espinosa, and his wife, Mor Alvares.2 sources2 sources

Mor Alvares came from a New Christian family the Inquisition knew well. According to the historian Jonathan Israel, drawing on studies of the Inquisition's records, her grandfather Manoel Alvares was arrested in Vidigueira with several relatives in 1570, and several of her cousins were burned for “judaizing” at the auto-da-fé, the Inquisition's public ceremony of sentencing, in Évora in 1574.1 source1 source

In 1597 a new round of arrests took more of the family, among them Gabriel Alvares, secretary of an orphanage and a local tax collector, who was imprisoned with two of his sons and other relatives. They were tortured and stripped of their possessions. That year, Israel writes, Pedro fled Portugal with his son Michael, then about ten, to join relatives already settled in Nantes, in western France.1 source1 source

The dates are not settled. The Spinoza Web, a database run by Utrecht University, gives the early 1590s for the family's flight in one entry and 1605 in another, and has Pedro born in Vidigueira around 1550 to 1560; Israel says he was born in Lisbon around 1559. In Nantes the family lived outwardly as Catholics, in a tiny New Christian community that never numbered more than a dozen families.3 sources3 sources

Some of the Espinosas had moved on to Amsterdam by late October 1621, and Michael is documented there from the end of 1623. Pedro, who took the Jewish name Isaac de Espinosa, died in Rotterdam in 1627 and was buried in the Portuguese-Jewish cemetery, Beth Haim, at Ouderkerk aan de Amstel. Michael built up an import business in subtropical fruit and other foodstuffs and became a respected member of the community.3 sources3 sources

Spinoza's mother's family came from the north of Portugal. Her father, Henrique Garces, was from Porto, and her mother, Maria Nunes Garces, from Ponte de Lima. Where Hanna Deborah herself was born is uncertain. She married Michael in 1628, after the death of his first wife and cousin, Rachel.4 sources4 sources

Bento grew up with four siblings, Mirjam, Isaac, Rebecca and Gabriel. By the early 1650s the family rented a brick house at the corner of the Houtgracht and the Leprozengracht; both canals were filled in in 1882, and the Mozes en Aäronkerk now stands on the spot. His mother died on 5 November 1638, when he was nearly six. His father married a third time, and his stepmother, Hester, from Lisbon, brought him up from the age of about eight.3 sources3 sources

He went to the congregation's Talmud Torah school and was clearly gifted. He may have been groomed for the rabbinate, but he never reached the advanced study of the Talmud. At seventeen he left school to help run the family's importing business.1 source1 source

Michael d'Espinosa died on 28 March 1654, aged about 65, and was buried at Beth Haim. Bento and Gabriel took over the firm, but it carried heavy debts. In March 1656 Bento turned to the Dutch authorities. On 16 March the Amsterdam Orphan Chamber declared him a minor and appointed a guardian, the lawyer Louis Crayers, who two years later would protect Rembrandt's son Titus.4 sources4 sources

Crayers argued that Bento was owed his mother's share of the estate ahead of his father's creditors, and on 23 March the Hoge Raad, the supreme court of Holland, released him from his father's inheritance. Going to a Dutch court broke a rule of the Portuguese community, which required its members to settle disputes among themselves.2 sources2 sources

The ban came four months later. The ma'amad that year was six parnassim, the elected lay leaders, and a treasurer, the gabbai. The herem names no specific heresy and no specific deed, and Spinoza never mentions the episode in any surviving letter. Its full Portuguese text was copied onto page 408 of the congregation's register of resolutions, the Livro dos Acordos de Nação e Ascamot, now in the Amsterdam City Archives.2 sources2 sources

The entry raises questions of its own. Unlike similar records it is unsigned, and it comes after an entry dated weeks later. The eighteenth-century chronicler David Franco Mendes wrote that the public ceremony was not held until 22 Elul, about six weeks after the date on the writ. Kasher and Biderman suggest the community waited for him to recant before making the expulsion final.1 source1 source

Bans were common. The historian Yosef Kaplan counts forty people put under herem by the Portuguese Nation between 1622 and 1683, for offences from skipping synagogue to unpaid taxes. Most were worded in a matter-of-fact way. In 1639 Isaac de Peralta was banned for defying the ma'amad, insulting one of its members and, it was reported, attacking him in the street. He was readmitted after he asked forgiveness and paid a fine.1 source1 source

The curse formula used against Spinoza was old. Its Hebrew original was well known, and a Spanish translation had reached Amsterdam from Venice in 1618. Yet it is known to have been used only once more, against three alleged Karaites, followers of a Jewish movement that rejects rabbinic tradition, in 1712 according to Kasher and Biderman or 1718 according to the historian Natalia Muchnik.2 sources2 sources

The community had dealt with a dissenter before. Uriel da Costa, born Gabriel da Costa to a New Christian family in Porto, studied at Coimbra and came to Amsterdam with his family in 1614. He attacked rabbinic Judaism and was banned twice. In 1640 he submitted to a humiliating public penance in the synagogue, wrote an account of his life and killed himself.2 sources2 sources

Why Spinoza was punished so severely is still argued over. Some scholars point to the debt case. The biographer Steven Nadler takes the writ at its word: Spinoza was already voicing the ideas of his later books. Spanish travellers questioned by the Inquisition after returning from Amsterdam in the late 1650s said he told them he had been expelled for saying that the Law was not true, that God existed only “philosophically” and that the soul died with the body.2 sources2 sources

Denying that the soul survives death was especially dangerous, Nadler argues, for a community of former conversos who were not Dutch citizens and wanted to reassure their Calvinist hosts that it sheltered no such heretics. Muchnik places Spinoza among a wider current of doubt that ran through the Nação, fed by the experience of generations who had lived as Christians in public and Jews in private. In 1658 the community expelled Juan de Prado, a former New Christian physician who seems to have encouraged Spinoza's doubts.2 sources2 sources

Spinoza studied Latin with Franciscus van den Enden, a former Jesuit, and read Descartes. By about July 1661 he had left Amsterdam for rented rooms in Rijnsburg, near Leiden. In 1663 he moved to Voorburg, outside The Hague, and between 1669 and 1671 to The Hague itself, where he lodged first on the Stille Veerkade and later with the decorative painter Hendrick van der Spijck on the Paviljoensgracht.5 sources5 sources

The only book he published under his own name was an exposition of Descartes's Principles of Philosophy, in 1663. His Theological-Political Treatise came out anonymously in 1670. It argued that the Bible was a human work and defended freedom of thought, and one critic called it “a book forged in hell by the devil himself”.2 sources2 sources

His masterpiece, the Ethics, is laid out like a geometry textbook, with definitions, axioms and propositions, each proved from what comes before. Its God is not a person who plans, commands or judges. What Spinoza called “God or Nature” is the single, infinite substance of which everything is a part. There are no miracles and no purpose in nature, and the soul does not survive death as a person. Happiness, he argued, lies in a life guided by reason, not by fear and hope.2 sources2 sources

In the summer of 1675 he went to Amsterdam to have it printed. A rumour spread that he had written a book proving there was no God, theologians complained about him to the Prince of Orange and the magistrates, and he put the publication off. That same year the Portuguese Jews finished building their great new synagogue, the Esnoga, a short walk from his family's old house.3 sources3 sources

Spinoza died in his room on the Paviljoensgracht on 21 February 1677, of a lung disease, at the age of 44, and was buried in a churchyard in The Hague. His friends soon published his unpublished writings, the Ethics among them, as the Opera Posthuma, with a preface by Jarig Jelles, and in a Dutch translation, De nagelate schriften. In 1678 the Dutch authorities banned his works and set heavy penalties for anyone selling them.5 sources5 sources

The congregation that cursed Spinoza still meets in the Esnoga. Of the community's 4,300 Portuguese Jews, 3,700 were murdered in the Holocaust, but services resumed in the Esnoga on 9 May 1945, four days after the liberation of the Netherlands. Today about 630 people belong to the community, and announcements on everyday matters are still made in Portuguese.1 source1 source

Portuguese editions call him Bento de Espinosa. Joaquim de Carvalho's Portuguese translation of the Ethics was reissued in 1992. Portuguese scholars, Carvalho and António Borges Coelho among them, helped trace the family back to Vidigueira.1 source1 source

Portugal has also tried to make amends to the descendants of the Jews it drove out. In 2013 parliament voted unanimously to let descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled from Portugal apply for citizenship, as a historical reparation. The rules took effect in 2015, and applications rose quickly.3 sources3 sources

By April 2020 there had been 52,440 applications, and claims of abuse led to proposals to tighten or end the scheme. Lei Orgânica n.º 1/2026 of 18 May 2026 repealed the provision, article 6(7) of the Nationality Law, from the following day. Applications already pending are decided under the old rules.3 sources3 sources