I. Life

Spinoza was born into an immigrant Jewish merchant family from Portugal and grew up in the Jewish milieu of Amsterdam. He began working in his father’s business in 1649. In 1656 he was excommunicated from the Jewish community for heresy. In 1660 he moved to Rijnsburg, where he worked as a lens grinder, wrote his earliest philosophical works, and began the first draft of his Ethica. He moved to Voorburg in 1663. With a lifelong interest in the politics of …