Amsterdam's Jewish Community Issued Spinoza the Harshest Excommunication Ever Recorded — He Was 23

On the morning of July 27, 1656, the parnassim — lay leaders — of Amsterdam's Talmud Torah Sephardic congregation read aloud, in Hebrew and Portuguese, a herem against the 23-year-old Baruch Spinoza. The text is preserved. It calls down on him "the curse of the morning and the curse of the evening," forbids any member of the community to speak with him in writing or by word of mouth, to come within four cubits of him, or to read anything he writes. It is the harshest such pronouncement in the surviving Amsterdam communal records, and unlike most herems it lists no specific charges — only "abominable heresies" and "monstrous deeds." Modern historians infer he had been articulating, in conversation around the synagogue, what would become his pantheist theology, in which God is identical with nature and traditional Mosaic miracles are conceptually impossible.

Spinoza did not return. He moved out of his father's house, anglicized his name to Benedict, and spent the rest of his life as a working tradesman: he ground optical lenses for telescopes and microscopes — Christiaan Huygens praised the quality of his glass — and corresponded with much of the European intellectual establishment. He turned down a chair at Heidelberg in 1673 because he was convinced the offer would, in the end, constrain his thinking.

He died on February 21, 1677, at 44, of what was almost certainly tuberculosis aggravated by years of inhaling glass dust. His friends rescued his manuscripts and published them later that year as the Opera Posthuma. The collection included the Ethics, his "chief project," which he had finished by 1675 and held back from print. The herem has never been rescinded.