Lifting the Ban? Spinoza and the Boundaries of Belonging
Daniel B. Schwartz
Credit: Samuel Hirszenberg, “Excommunicated Spinoza,’ 1907-Wikimedia commons
Daniel B. Schwartz is a professor of Jewish history at George Washington University.
On February 21, 2027, Jews around the world will observe—or at least take note of—the 350th yahrzeit of Baruch Spinoza. He died on that date in 1677 in The Hague, alone, from tuberculosis, at the age of forty-four. Spinoza had lived the last two decades of his life as an excommunicate. In 1656, at twenty-three, he was permanently expelled from the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam with extraordinary vehemence—condemned, cursed, and cut off from the people among whom he was raised.
There will be no official mourning prayers in February 2027, no lightings of yahrzeit candles or recitations of psalms. But there will almost certainly be lectures, symposia, and essays, particularly in academic and cultural venues. That much has become tradition. Over the past century, Spinoza’s anniversaries—of his birth in 1632, his death, and even of his herem (excommunication)—have become occasions for scholarly reflection. I myself took part in a 2006 event at YIVO commemorating the 350th anniversary of the herem; its 300th anniversary in 1956 was noted in smaller ways.
That last category—memorializing an excommunication—is a curious one. After all, the purpose of the herem was to erase Spinoza from Jewish memory. The fact that we now acknowledge it—occasionally even with reverence—underscores just how far we’ve come from the assumptions of the early modern world. The initial effort to silence Spinoza has, by now, only amplified his voice.
The dynamic began in earnest with the 1927 sesquicentennial, marked around the globe, of Spinoza’s death. While the most elaborate festivities took place in The Hague, there was also a commemorative event at the newly founded Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It wasn’t the first Jewish tribute to Spinoza, but it was the most historically charged: held on Mount Scopus, at a university aspiring to embody a modern Hebrew renaissance. A philosopher once cast out by his community was now being honored by the flagship institution of the Ahad Haamian ideal—a cultural center secular in spirit, capacious in scope, and rooted in Jerusalem.
At the center of the ceremony stood Joseph Klausner (1874–1958): Russian Jewish Zionist, literary critic, professor of modern Hebrew literature, architect of secular Hebraism, and controversial author of the first Hebrew biography of Jesus. In his keynote lecture, Klausner lauded Spinoza’s genius and vouched for “the Jewish character of Spinoza’s philosophy.” But his speech is remembered mostly for its closing flourish:
To Spinoza the Jew, it is declared 250 years after his death, from the heights of Mount Scopus, from our Temple in miniature—the Hebrew University in Jerusalem: …the herem is nullified! The sin of Judaism against you is removed and your offense against her atoned for! You are our brother, you are our brother, you are our brother!
One can easily imagine the murmur through the lecture hall as audience members, jolted to attention by the finale, looked at their neighbors in disbelief, asking, “Did Klausner—Klausner!—just lift the herem on Spinoza?” Of course, he had no authority under Jewish law to do so. For Klausner, though, that was beside the point. Zionism, as he understood it, was not only a political project but a cultural reckoning: a chance to right old wrongs and rewrite the terms of Jewish belonging. In Klausner’s hands, Spinoza was not merely forgiven—he was reabsorbed.
Klausner’s “amnesty” may have lacked a halakhic foundation, but it was never meant as a legal act. It was a symbolic act of sovereignty—a declaration that modern Jewish identity could define its own terms, outside the bounds of rabbinic control. As Julie Cooper has argued, Klausner’s reclamation of Spinoza formed part of a broader critique of the “religionization” of Jewishness in exile, where Jewish identity had become increasingly defined by ritual and belief. Yet Klausner’s thrice-repeated “You are our brother” echoed the traditional formula for lifting a herem, now repurposed in a radically secular key, a gatekeeping gesture that asserted the prerogative of Zionists like Klausner to define the boundaries of Jewish belonging and determine the parameters of Judaism’s future.
That future—as well as the meaning we ascribe to Spinoza’s excommunication—remains unsettled. What are we to make of the herem today? How should we interpret its historical purpose, its cultural afterlife, and the calls to annul it now? This essay is an attempt to grapple with these questions and also to suggest why, in our eagerness to reconcile past judgments with present values, we should not rush to erase the lines those judgments were meant to uphold.
The 1927 commemoration at Hebrew University set a tone for what followed, but it also built on a rehabilitation already well underway. By the 19th century, Spinoza had been recast by Jewish thinkers in divergent ways: as a forerunner of emancipation (Heinrich Heine, Berthold Auerbach), as the first to articulate a modern Jewish nationalism (Moses Hess), and as a “new guide for the perplexed” (Salomon Rubin). At that time, Spinoza’s image was conflicted—he was considered an atheist or a “God-intoxicated man,” a materialist or an idealist, a secular prophet reclaimable for modern Jewish identity or a philosophical apostate who marked its outer limits. Spinoza came to embody not only Enlightenment rationality, but Romantic wholeness, and existential vitality. Few figures have been claimed so fervently, and so contradictorily.
The herem only heightened his allure. It was intended to silence and exclude, but it became a focal point of fascination reframed over time as a mark of integrity or defiance. Like Galileo’s confrontation with the Catholic Church, Spinoza’s excommunication gave his life the shape of moral parable—though Spinoza, unlike Galileo, never formally yielded. That he was cast out for ideas he refused to disavow lent his legacy narrative power. Spinoza became a cultural icon as much as a philosopher, compelling even to those who had never read his work. The herem itself has been revisited in memoir, drama, and historical study, from Berthold Auerbach’s Spinoza: A Historical Novel (1837), the first fictionalization of his excommunication, to David Ives’s play New Jerusalem (2008), which reimagines Spinoza as a secular Jew seeking inclusion on his own terms.
Not all Jews joined the project of rehabilitating Spinoza. The philosopher Hermann Cohen viewed Spinoza not merely as a philosophical adversary but as an heir to the medieval apostates who had renounced Judaism and turned against it. In his late writings, Cohen described Spinoza’s departure from Judaism as a “humanly incomprehensible betrayal.” Leo Strauss, too, resisted efforts to fold Spinoza back into Jewish tradition. To Strauss, reclaiming Spinoza as a Jewish thinker risked obscuring just how decisively he had broken with Jerusalem in favor of Athens. One could admire his integrity, but not retroactively restore him to the fold. In different ways, both thinkers were drawing a line: Spinoza had crossed it, and modern Jews ought not pretend otherwise.
Yet the impulse to reclaim Spinoza proved irresistible for many. As my late teacher Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi once put it, Spinoza became “the first culture hero of secular Jews.” His symbolic power extended not only through philosophy and literature but also into politics. In the early years of Israeli statehood, David Ben Gurion openly praised Spinoza and sought to revive the debate over the herem. He wrote to leading rabbis and public intellectuals, asking whether the time had come to formally lift the ban. The inquiry prompted real deliberation, including a statement from Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Herzog, who ultimately declined to endorse any repeal. The ban, Herzog said, had applied only during Spinoza’s lifetime and no longer held force. In his view, the herem had become a historical artifact best left undisturbed.
In the 2010s, the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam came closer than ever to formally reconsidering Spinoza’s excommunication. Remarkably, the initiative came not from outside critics but from within the Mahamad itself—the very body that had pronounced the ban centuries earlier. For the first time, the guardians of Spinoza’s herem appeared willing to reexamine it.
The trustees commissioned four leading scholars of Spinoza and 17th-century Sephardic Amsterdam to write independent reports on the historical context of the ban and the case for or against its annulment. They also sought the opinions of several Orthodox rabbis, including the community’s senior hakham, Rabbi Pinchas Toledano.
The inquiry culminated in a public event, jointly sponsored by the CRESCAS Institute for Jewish Education and the University of Amsterdam. On a Sunday in early December 2015, before a packed audience, the four scholars presented their findings. Then came the central confrontation: a spirited exchange between two rabbis. Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo, an iconoclastic Orthodox ba’al teshuvah who has long regarded Spinoza as his intellectual hero, issued an emotional plea to lift the ban. Rabbi Toledano answered with stern resolve: “How on earth can we even consider removing the herem from a person with such preposterous ideas…? The moment we rescind the herem, it would imply that we share his heretic views.”
With the chief rabbi so strenuously opposed, the Mahamad was never likely to proceed. And yet, despite the stalemate, something had shifted. A decree once treated as frozen in time was now openly debated.
Then came 2021. An Israeli filmmaker working on a documentary about Spinoza’s excommunication requested permission to shoot footage inside Amsterdam’s Portuguese Synagogue (the Esnoga), including scenes of Professor Yitzhak Melamed, a leading Spinoza scholar at Johns Hopkins University, conducting research in the community’s archives. It seemed like a routine request. The response suggested otherwise. Melamed—an Israeli born in Bnei Brak who remains observant—received a stinging letter from Rabbi Joseph Serfaty, the community’s spiritual leader at the time. Citing the continued validity of the herem, Serfaty not only denied the request but declared Melamed persona non grata. “You have devoted your life to the study of Spinoza’s banned works and the development of his ideas,” Serfaty wrote. “Your request to visit our complex and create a film about this Epicouros [heretic]… is incompatible with our centuries-old halachic, historic and ethical tradition and an unacceptable assault on our identity and heritage.”
Melamed posted the letter online, and it quickly gained traction. L’Express in France captured the moment with its headline: “A Specialist of Spinoza, Banned from a Synagogue 365 Years After the Philosopher’s Death.” The Mahamad—the community’s lay governing council, composed mostly of non-observant members—moved swiftly to override Serfaty’s decision. They issued a public apology to Melamed, reaffirmed their authority over the Esnoga, and invited him to film. But when Melamed and his crew arrived, the Mahamad again reversed course, requesting that no filming take place inside the synagogue.
The fallout was sharp and revealing. The same Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo who had publicly advocated lifting the herem at the 2015 symposium condemned the exclusion of Melamed as a betrayal of Jewish intellectual openness. Eric Schliesser, a political philosopher at the University of Amsterdam, took a more ambivalent view. While critical of Serfaty’s tone and the symbolic gatekeeping, he noted that a small, historically vulnerable community might reasonably resist participation in a film likely to frame the herem as a badge of backwardness. Seen in that light, Serfaty’s stance—however clumsy—was not entirely without precedent or rationale.
Serfaty was nonetheless dismissed from his post soon afterward.
The controversy laid bare a set of deeper, unresolved questions. What is the role of boundaries in a Jewish community today? Can there be solidarity without exclusion? And who gets to decide these things—not just within a single synagogue, but across the diffuse and often fragmented Jewish world?
These questions hovered especially over the matter of Spinoza’s ban. What, precisely, would it mean to lift it now? Before we can answer that question, we need to understand what the herem meant in its original context.
***
The Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam that expelled Spinoza on July 27, 1656, was composed of former conversos—Jews who had lived as Catholics in Iberia for generations, often under Inquisition scrutiny, secretly adhering to Jewish customs before seeking refuge in the more tolerant Dutch Republic.
Their return to Judaism required difficult, and sometimes dangerous, decisions: they were leaving behind homes, identities, and livelihoods to reconstitute Jewish life in a new land. Amsterdam offered the promise of security and relative tolerance, but that promise carried unspoken conditions. The Portuguese Jews could not appear to be a source of transgressive ideas or behaviors that might threaten the broader social and political order—or so it was widely perceived.
Responsibility for maintaining communal discipline fell to the lay governing council, the Mahamad. It often acted with remarkable assertiveness, but this assertiveness may have masked deeper insecurities. The community lacked a formal charter or exclusive legal jurisdiction; individuals paid taxes directly to the city and could appeal to secular courts. The Mahamad’s authority, then, rested not on legal monopoly but on its capacity to maintain internal order and preserve communal privilege through discretion. There was no formal quid pro quo with the Amsterdam regents, but an implicit understanding prevailed: the price of toleration was orderly conduct, which in turn required strict boundary maintenance and communal discipline.
The Mahamad pursued all three aims through regulation, education, and, when necessary, excommunication. The herem was not reserved for egregious heresy alone; it was invoked with surprising frequency in cases of ethical misconduct, public defiance, or personal insubordination. Even the esteemed Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel was excommunicated for one day in 1640, after challenging the Mahamad’s authority over communal appointments.
At the same time, the Mahamad was operating in a community where belief and belonging were still fragile. The former “New Christians” who had reembraced Judaism in Amsterdam brought with them not only intellectual and devotional reflexes shaped by Catholicism, but also, at times, a skepticism born of the converso experience. Having moved between two revealed religions, each claiming exclusive truth, they emerged, in some cases, with a deeper doubt in religious authority itself. Figures like Uriel da Costa—and, in Spinoza’s own generation, Juan de Prado—articulated doubts about rabbinic tradition, divine providence, and the authority of religious law. Whether or not such dissent was widespread, it clearly troubled the leadership, which feared the corrosive effect of doctrinal laxity and philosophical unbelief. Yerushalmi cautioned against overstating the prevalence of such views, rightly emphasizing how many conversos managed to rejoin normative Jewish life. But the concern was real. The Mahamad’s authority depended not only on its outward dignity but on its ability to police the boundaries of thought within. And in Spinoza, they faced a challenge of a different magnitude.
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He was not merely another unruly member. Born in Amsterdam in 1632 to a respected family—his father, Michael Spinoza, had served on the Mahamad—Baruch Spinoza was a product of the very institutions he would later scandalize. He received a rigorous Jewish education and showed signs of extraordinary intellectual ability from a young age. Stories that he was being groomed for the rabbinate or that he was seen as the community’s next great spiritual leader are likely more myth than fact, the kind of retrospective coloring that tends to gather around figures later deemed heretical. But it is hard not to imagine that the community had pinned some hopes on him. His command of Hebrew texts, classical commentaries, and medieval philosophy marked him as unusually gifted. That such a student, shaped by the system he would go on to reject, should turn against its foundations made his eventual dissent more alarming.
After the death of his father in 1654, Spinoza began to drift from communal life. At first, his withdrawal might have seemed like ordinary backsliding: he stopped attending synagogue and let his membership dues lapse. But over time, rumors that Spinoza was expressing unsettling ideas began to spread.
We don’t know exactly how far Spinoza’s thinking had progressed by the time of his excommunication. He had not yet formulated the full metaphysical system that would appear in his posthumously published Ethics (1677), in which God is identified with Nature. But if we take seriously both the earliest biography of Spinoza and the 1658 testimony of a Spanish visitor to Amsterdam who met him, the young renegade was already questioning foundational Jewish beliefs: the existence of a personal, providential God; the divine origin of the Torah; and the immortality of the soul. Most strikingly, if we accept the view that his Theological-Political Treatise (1670) began as an apologia written around the time of the herem, then Spinoza was already arguing that Jewish survival owed nothing to divine chosenness or covenant. Instead, it stemmed from natural and mutually reinforcing causes—especially the community’s adherence to distinct rituals like circumcision and the animosity that such separateness provoked in others. What the community took as sacred proof of its election, Spinoza reframed as historically contingent and even grimly ironic.
For a community that had gone to great lengths to reclaim its Jewish identity after generations of forced concealment—a community where some saw Amsterdam as a New Jerusalem—Spinoza’s views were corrosive. His views seemed to deny the meaning of their return, the sacrifices they had made, and the spiritual coherence of the community itself. Spinoza’s ideas struck at the foundations of its hard-won identity.
In this light, there is no question that Spinoza’s excommunication was a deliberate attempt to draw a boundary—sharply and unmistakably. It was a decision born of fear, perhaps, but also of principle. The Mahamad saw in Spinoza not just a dissenter, but an existential threat to the fragile project they had built.
This doesn’t make the excommunication admirable, nor does it preclude critique. But it forces us to see the herem as an attempt, misguided or not, to defend the tacit bonds of communal solidarity: the often-unspoken understandings of who we are and what we hold sacred, without which no community can hold together. It was the action of a community trying to survive—and to affirm, contra Spinoza, that its survival mattered.
The herem sought to erase Spinoza’s memory from Jewish life. It could not have failed more spectacularly. For generations of Jewish intellectuals, especially those who had ruptured with family or tradition, Spinoza became a figure of deep identification: the first secular Jew, the first modern Jew, the first Jew like them.
That sense was reinforced visually by the 1907 painting by Samuel Hirszenberg, which depicted Spinoza shortly after his expulsion. On cobblestone streets, the excommunicated Spinoza walks alone in the foreground, dignified and absorbed in a book, while the elders of the Amsterdam synagogue glower behind him. If the philosopher’s words had earned admiration, Hirszenberg’s canvas gave shape and color to his exile. It captured the spirit of the emerging myth: Spinoza as dissident, martyr, icon.
But admiration is not the same as absolution. To admire Spinoza at the edge is one thing; to lift the herem is to pretend the edge no longer exists.
The question of whether the herem might be formally reconsidered has hovered in the background for nearly a century. Klausner’s 1927 flourish in Jerusalem gestured toward annulment in spirit; by the 1950s, the possibility of lifting the ban was discussed more seriously in Zionist, academic, and rabbinic circles. These were scattered efforts, but they planted a seed: if Spinoza could be embraced as a Jewish thinker, why not retroactively restore him to the community?
In part, the renewed interest reflects Spinoza’s rising stature well beyond Jewish thought. Since the late 20th century, he has become newly central across multiple fields: reclaimed by post-Marxist and post-structuralist thinkers for his radical philosophy of immanence without teleology, cited by neuroscientists for his rejection of mind-body dualism, embraced by secular thinkers for offering a sense of spiritual depth and metaphysical wholeness without recourse to theological transcendence, and cast by intellectual historians as the architect of a radically democratic Enlightenment. In a cultural landscape searching for alternatives to both religious fundamentalism and liberal complacency, Spinoza has come to seem not only timely, but prescient.
As his reputation has grown, so too has the desire to formalize his return, and to reconcile the brilliance of his philosophy within the boundaries of the community that expelled him. The impulse feels generous, enlightened, magnanimous—a long-overdue gesture of cultural maturity. One might reasonably ask: what harm could it do?
And yet I think we should remain opposed—not despite Spinoza’s legacy, but because of it.
***
Before anything else, one must consider that Spinoza had already walked away. If Albert O. Hirschman’s influential triad model of “exit, voice, and loyalty” offers any guidance, Spinoza chose to exit. He did not attempt to reform Judaism from within. Nor did he remain outwardly loyal while quietly harboring dissent. He had defected, and he accepted the consequences. Upon learning of his excommunication, Spinoza is reported by his earliest biographer to have said: “All the better; they do not force me to do anything that I would not have done of my own accord if I did not dread scandal.”
He continued to live in the Netherlands as a private citizen and never again affiliated himself with any Jewish community. Whatever Spinoza was in the eyes of others, there is no indication that he still thought of himself as Jewish in any meaningful religious, cultural, or communal sense. The concept of the “secular Jew,” so central to modern Jewish life, would have made little sense to him. Were one to say, “Ah, so you’re a secular Jew?” Spinoza would likely have blinked in confusion.
Yet many Jews today do see him in those terms: as a forerunner of modern secular Jewish identity, someone whose intellectual daring resonates with those who have themselves broken with tradition. That identification is understandable. But there is a difference between finding inspiration in Spinoza and reasserting institutional authority over him—even in the act of seeming to redress a past wrong. A formal lifting of the herem crosses a line. It risks transforming symbolic kinship into communal reintegration—asserting, once again, the power to declare who belongs.
That power to name and claim—to decide who counts as Jewish and who does not—has a long and fraught history. In some contexts, it has taken the form of exclusion or excommunication, often with devastating consequences. In others, it has involved symbolic inclusion that turned out to be another form of control. Hegel, for example, saw in Spinoza’s metaphysics the very traits he associated with Judaism: abstraction, rigidity, an inability to reconcile the finite and infinite—a position that Hegel believed had to be philosophically superseded.
Today, the rhetorical dynamics have changed, but the impulse to define and disqualify persists. Gil Troy and Natan Sharansky, for instance, have written of contemporary anti-Zionist Jews who, in their eyes, “un-Jew” themselves by abandoning Jewish peoplehood for the sake of social justice and revolution. On the other end of the spectrum, consider the case of philanthropist George Soros: reviled on the right as a puppet-master bent on global domination—a meme drawn straight from the lexicon of modern antisemitism—but also as someone who is “hardly a Jew,” according to Rudy Giuliani. President Trump went further, declaring earlier this year that Senator Chuck Schumer was “not Jewish anymore. He’s a Palestinian.” These statements uncannily echo Viennese mayor Karl Lueger’s infamous line in 1895: “I decide who is a Jew.”
Lifting the herem has come to seem, in some circles, like a moral reflex—a way of reassuring ourselves that we, unlike our ancestors, are tolerant, inclusive, and unafraid of dissent. But that reflex can also become a dodge. We flatter ourselves with the fantasy that our communities no longer draw lines, when in fact we do, and we must.
Communal boundaries are not relics of the past. They remain real, necessary, and fiercely contested. We can and should debate where those lines are drawn—but not whether they exist. Even the most pluralistic communities define themselves by shared values, loyalties, and norms. These can evolve, of course, but the act of setting boundaries is essential to any enduring collective identity.
What troubles me about lifting the herem on Spinoza is the implication that we’ve outgrown such tensions—that we have transcended the kind of conflicts that once made sharp breaks seem necessary. That too is a delusion. Ours is not a boundaryless age. If anything, the lines have become more deeply felt and the need to protect them has become more volatile. The American Jewish community is fractured: over Israel/Palestine, over the meaning of antisemitism, over the legitimacy of Jewish nationalism, and over the very definition of Jewish peoplehood. These disputes are not intellectual. They determine who feels welcome in any given Jewish space—and who does not.
To cite just one recent example: in 2024, Jewish Voice for Peace released a Passover Haggadah titled Exodus from Zionism, featuring sections like “Four Questions for Times of Genocide” and “10 Spiritual Plagues of Genocidal Zionism.” Whatever one’s view of Israeli policy, this was not a call for reflection or even repair. The text sought not to challenge Jewish tradition, but to invert it, weaponize it, and ultimately sever it from itself. It was not an effort to provoke conversation, but to delegitimize the very frameworks that hold Jewish communal life together. That many Jews found it intolerable was no surprise; it was plainly intended to be so.
That doesn’t mean the lines are always well-drawn, or that dissent should be discouraged. But as Bret Stephens recently wrote in SAPIR, the value of viewpoint diversity—though important—is not absolute. “Virtually every institution,” he notes, “including those with a sincere commitment to free speech, will have defensible reasons not to tolerate certain extreme or damaging views.” Jewish institutions are not neutral platforms. They are value-driven communities. And while they should foster open inquiry, their goal is not openness for its own sake; their goal is the cultivation of a coherent identity rooted in moral, historical, and spiritual commitments. That doesn’t preclude dissent. But it does mean there will always be views that fall outside the boundaries of communal legitimacy. Denying that reality mistakes pluralism for entropy.
This is where Spinoza remains instructive—not as a perfect analogy, but as a caution. He accepted his exclusion. He didn’t seek vindication or rehabilitation. He walked away with clarity and resolve. That doesn’t make the herem just. But his unflinching, unapologetic response rendered the stakes bracingly clear. To challenge a community’s foundations is a moral act; so too is accepting the cost of that challenge.
Spinoza’s clarity, integrity, and resolve still inspire. Yet his herem reminds us that even the “freedom to philosophize”—essential to liberal democracy—can tug against communal cohesion in ways that sometimes break the bonds that hold us together. To lift the herem now would be to act as though that tear no longer matters. But it does—and it always will.
