The Harshest Herem

Baruch Spinoza was born Bento de Espinosa on 24 November 1632 in Amsterdam, into a family of Portuguese Jewish descent that had fled the Iberian Inquisition to settle in the Dutch Republic, one of the few places in seventeenth century Europe offering meaningful religious toleration to openly practicing Jews. He was raised and educated within Amsterdam's Portuguese-Jewish community, but by his early twenties had developed philosophical positions serious enough to alarm its leadership.

On 27 July 1656 the community's leaders issued a writ of herem, formal excommunication, against the twenty three year old Spinoza, citing vague references to horrible heresies and abominable heresies without specifying their exact content in the surviving document, itself an unusual omission historians have long debated. It was, by every account, the harshest ban that community had ever pronounced against one of its own members, permanently cutting Spinoza off from Jewish communal life; it was never rescinded, though a symbolic modern effort to lift it was debated in Amsterdam more than three centuries later. Spinoza spent the rest of his life outside organized religious community, earning a living as a lens grinder and dying in The Hague on 21 February 1677.