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with a former priest who had also become a heretic in his own religion, by the name of Franciscus van den Enden.
    In fact, there are some who say that Baruch tried to marry van den Enden’s daughter but that she rejected him for another student of her father’s who wasn’t going to become an impoverished philosopher, like Spinoza, but rather a doctor. Some say that this young man gave the young lady in question a pearl necklace and that is what finally decided her. Whether it’s true or not that he had tried to marry this non-Jewish girl, Spinoza never did marry, and in fact it seems that he never again tried to.
    He lived alone, very simply, supporting himself by grinding lenses for telescopes and other optical instruments, and writing his blasphemous works. He had a small group of friends with whom he discussed his ideas. These were all Christians, although renegades among the Christians. Once he moved away from his old home, he had nothing more to do with Jews, nor with his old yeshiva friends, or even with his family. Because of the kherem , which in his case was permanent, no Jews were allowed to speak with him for the rest of his life, so he really had no choice here.
    He had been studying Latin, girls, because in those days all the goyisha scholars wrote in Latin. If Baruch wanted to reject his rabbayim and study apikorsus , then he would have to learn Latin. He was particularly interested in studying the works of René Descartes, who was a French-Catholic philosopher whom many of the so-called freethinkers in Europe were excited about.
    Descartes believed that there is a God, but he had still made the Catholic Church angry enough to put him onto its list of banned writers, called the Index. 8 The reason he was considered dangerous to the Catholics was that he had written that people should not believe in God unless they can prove His existence according to the strictest rules of logic. If there are errors in the proofs for God’s existence, then the believer should no longer believe. In other words, Descartes taught that there is no room for emunah , for faith.
    Spinoza agreed with this heresy of Descartes, only he, the Jew, went much further. Unlike Descartes, Spinoza would go on and argue for atheism, saying that the God that we can prove is nothing over and above nature, which, of course, girls, isn’t God at all, not for the Christians and not for the Jews. For no one. Spinoza wasn’t fooling anyone by playing around with words, saying that he believed in God, only making God be nothing more than nature, which of course everybody believes in. Who doesn’t believe in nature, since it’s what we see all around us? Really, girls, when you think about it, it’s ridiculous.
    It was ridiculous, at least the way that Mrs. Schoenfeld had presented it—which is why I found myself wondering whether she was doing justice to Spinoza’s thoughts. Otherwise, why would the goyim proclaim him a great philosopher? I knew enough to know that the thinkers whom the world called great weren’t stupid.
    But none of these ideas of his were yet known at the time of his excommunication, Mrs. Schoenfeld was explaining. All that the Amsterdam community knew was what the young men had reported about Spinoza’s views and the way that he had conducted himself in the synagogue when the accusations had been brought before him; they had heard for themselves the terrible way in which he had spoken to his former teacher, Rabbi Morteira.
    And so the parnassim voted to put Spinoza into kherem . Others from the Amsterdam community had also been placed in kherem , sometimes for a day or two, sometimes for longer. It depended, of course, on the khayt (the transgression). This community of returnees, trying to find their way back to Judaism, relied on the kherem as a means of guidance. Sometimes it was a matter of not keeping the law the right way, of buying meat from an unauthorized butcher or cheating in business. Or if someone wrote a