Many people ask me whose picture I used for this account. The portrait looks like something by Rembrandt or one of his contemporaries. It evokes a sense of time-honored education, of required reading in school—dusty and boring. And yet I chose it deliberately. The portrait belongs to a revolutionary: Baruch de Spinoza. Spinoza, born in Amsterdam in 1632 to a family of Portuguese refugees, was a true rebel. Today’s rebels buy into or adopt ready-made rebellions by blindly joining a group, hanging a Che Guevara poster on their bedroom wall, or going out and smashing something. That’s tame. Spinoza was different. As Spinoza was growing up, his family lived in a tolerated Jewish community in Protestant Amsterdam. An rigid minded Jewish community in a rigid minded Protestant country. He had read neither Marx nor Gramsci nor Lenin nor Bakunin, because they lived much later. He stayed at home and thought long and hard, eventually concluding, among other things, that the entire world around him is a part of God. The universe is God. Not the God of the Christians or the God of the Jews or of any other religion, from the one and only true holy book no. 1, 2, or 5. But rather the one, indivisible God. God, he found out, is not an old man with a long beard who gets angry and writes books, but an eternal universe that surrounds us all. That was more than 100 years before the French Revolution. It was such a radical, shocking thesis that he was formally excommunicated from his Jewish community. The Dutch government banned his writings. Spinoza had to move several times to escape persecution. He lived in poverty as a lens grinder and died at the age of only 45. Along with René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, he is considered one of the most influential philosophers of the 17th century. He is regarded as one of the first Rationalists. In doing so, he paved the way for the Enlightenment. A Jewish thinker was among the first to encourage us to think for ourselves. In times of rising anti-Semitism, even among educated people, we should maybe reflect on what the Jews among us have given us time and again over the centuries—and how little gratitude they have received in return. #Jews #jewishculture #philosophy #antisemitism #history