Free Download PDF First Modern Jew Spinoza and the History of an Image By Daniel B. Schwartz

Sinopsis

On a blustery October morning five years ago, I went to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in lower Manhattan to speak at a most unusual semiseptcentennial. Headlining the YIVO schedule for that day was an event entitled: “From Heretic to Hero: A Symposium on the Impact of Baruch Spinoza on the 350th Anniversary of His Excommunication, 1656–2006.” The list of speakers read like a “who’s who” of recent Spinoza scholarship, with names like Steven Nadler, author of Spinoza: A Life, the definitive biography of Spinoza in English; Steven B. Smith, a leading authority on Spinoza’s political thought; and above all Jonathan I. Israel, author of two magisterial works on Spinoza and the European Enlightenment. Household

names for me, but not, I figured, for those outside the academy, even for the stereotypical New York Jewish culture-bearers.

I did not know what size audience to expect, but an auditorium that seated 250 filled to three-quarter capacity seemed optimistic. I guessed wrong. By the time I arrived the event had already sold out. This came as a surprise not only to me. One journalist, blogging about the conference in the New York Observer, wrote: “I almost didn’t get in. The conference was sold out, there were scores of people waiting for an extra

ticket on 16th St. I of course played the press card, but happily for all of us, Yivo lowered the screen in its main hall, allowing the overflow to watch the event on simulcast.”1 Whether they sat in the auditorium or the hall just outside, well over three hundred New Yorkers chose to spend their Sunday afternoon listening to six hours of lectures on a seventeenth-century philosopher whom few in the audience, frankly, were likely to have read.

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