The beguiling Dutch philosopher’s life and work is prone to misunderstandings and misreadings. A recent biography goes so far as to recruit him into the culture war. Ad Policy A portrait of Benedict ...

Mr. Buruma is the author of “Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah.” The Enlightenment philosopher Baruch Spinoza almost died for his ideals one day in 1672. Spinoza, a Sephardic Jew born in Amsterdam in 1632, ...

In March, 1668, Adriaan Koerbagh, a Dutch physician in his mid-thirties, hired Johannes Van Eede, a printer in Utrecht, to publish his new book, “A Light Shining in Dark Places, to Shed Light on ...

40 pages into Ian Buruma’s fascinating biography of the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, some very modern language leaps from the page. “When people are banished from their community,” Buruma ...

Here are the opening lines of the herem, the philosopher Spinoza’s excommunication from the Amsterdam synagogue. With the judgment of the angels and with that of the saints, we put under herem, ...