Before his heresy trial, Spinoza had himself declared an orphan to escape debt
In March 1656 a young Amsterdam merchant asked city officials to rule him a legal orphan, freeing him from his late father's crushing debts. It worked, but it broke synagogue rules and wrecked his standing. Four months later his community cast him out, and Baruch Spinoza turned to grinding lenses and rethinking God.
Spinoza was born in Amsterdam on 24 November 1632 to a Portuguese-Jewish family whose ancestors had practised their faith in secret under the Inquisition before reaching the more tolerant Dutch Republic. His father Michael was a prosperous merchant and synagogue officer. The family lived on the Vlooienburg island near the Amstel, with Christians such as Rembrandt close by. Baruch lost his mother at six. Through her he was related to Uriel da Costa, a sceptic twice excommunicated for claiming religions were human inventions, whose ideas were still discussed when Spinoza was a teenager.
He studied Hebrew and the Torah at the Talmud Torah school, but his name disappears from its register after age fourteen. When his elder brother Isaac died in 1649 he was needed in the business. The First Anglo-Dutch War then ruined it: English ships seized much of the firm's cargo, and by the time his father died in 1654 the company was drowning in debt. By 1655 the family fortune had gone.
The orphan petition cleared him legally but violated the rule that disputes be settled within the community. On 27 July 1656 the leaders issued a herem against the 23-year-old, the harshest ever pronounced there, citing abominable heresies without spelling them out. The community, anxious not to unsettle the city authorities who tolerated it, had reason to distance itself. Spinoza left all religious affiliation behind, earned his living grinding lenses, and gathered a devoted circle of readers.
He published little while alive to avoid persecution. His Tractatus Theologico-Politicus questioned the divine origin of the Hebrew Bible and argued that clergy should hold no power in a secular, democratic state; Steven Nadler ranks it among the most important books of Western thought. The Ethics identified God with nature, a position read as pantheist, panentheist or atheist, and urged valuing this life over an afterlife. He died on 21 February 1677, and friends published his works after his death. Rebecca Goldstein called him the renegade Jew who gave us modernity.
Source: Baruch Spinoza
