History of Jewish Philosophy

Spinoza, whom Bertrand Russell considered the most “lovable” of the great philosophers[1], thought that there is really only one thing, which he called “God, or Nature”. In the summer of 1656, at the age of 24, he was found guilty of heresy, excommunicated from the Amsterdam synagogue, and cursed with “all the curses of the firmament”. Is this man’s thought part of “Jewish philosophy”? Many subsequent thinkers and scholars have taken the view that it is; for Moses Hess, nineteenth‐century precursor of Zionism, it was “the supreme spiritual manifestation of Judaism in modern times”. There is now a Spinoza Institute...