Jewish Encounters Series: Betraying Spinoza : The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (Paperback)

from ashergabbay

On the face of things, reading a book about Baruch Spinoza is not an easy task for a religious Jew. After all, Spinoza is one of the great rationalist philosophers who started his "career" by annoying his Jewish community in Amsterdam so much that eventually it was decided to penalise him with th...

from WarnerToddHuston

Betraying Spinoza, One Jew's journey for us all, Rebecca Goldstein has taken an interesting angle in her discussion on the rationalist philosopher, Baruch Spinoza. She has couched his work as a result of a specific Jewish journey, that of Jews who immigrated to Amsterdam during the Spanish Inquis...

from drbrand

The world is the all-embracing web of necessary truths, intelligible through and through―and our own individual salvation rests in our knowing this. Goldstein writes a deeply engaging biography of Spinoza, centering around his complicated identity as a first generation Dutch Jew of Sephardic/Port...

from carioca

I loved this book. Not only I am fascinated by Spinoza, but Rebecca Goldstein does a fantastic job introducing him as a person, philosopher and Jew. She aptly describes his environment growing up, providing biographic elements in a manner that illustrates her various assertions about the reasons ...

from Devil_llama

Part biography, part philosophy, this book attempts to deal with the vastness of the Spinoza legacy from a personal angle - a sense of connection made during the author's years in an Orthodox Jewish high school. As a young philosophy professor, she was asked to teach a class on Spinoza, and set o...