Spinoza and other heretics. Volume 1, The Marrano of reason / Yirmiyahu Yovel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Yovel, Yirmiyahu, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Crypto-Jews.

Immanence (Philosophy)--History--17th century.

Immanence (Philosophy).

Spinoza, Benedictus de, 1632-1677.

Spinoza, Benedictus de.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (266 pages)

Place of Publication:

Princeton, New Jersey ; Oxford : Princeton University Press, [1989]

Summary:

This ambitious study presents Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) as the most outstanding and influential thinker of modernity-and examines the question of whether he was the "first secular Jew." A number-one bestseller in Israel, Spinoza and Other Heretics is made up of two volumes-The Marrano of Reason and The Adventures of Immanence. Yirmiyahu Yovel shows how Spinoza grounded a philosophical revolution in a radically new principle-the philosophy of immanence, or the idea that this world is all there is-and how he thereby anticipated secularization, the Enlightenment, the disintegration of ghetto life, and the rise of natural science and the liberal-democratic state.The Marrano of Reason finds the origins of the idea of immanence in the culture of Spinoza's Marrano ancestors, Jews in Spain and Portugal who had been forcibly converted to Christianity. Yovel uses their fascinating story to show how the crypto-Jewish life they maintained in the face of the Inquisition mixed Judaism and Christianity in ways that undermined both religions and led to rational skepticism and secularism. He identifies Marrano patterns that recur in Spinoza in a secularized context: a "this-worldly" disposition, a split religious identity, an opposition between inner and outer life, a quest for salvation outside official doctrines, and a gift for dual language and equivocation. This same background explains the drama of the young Spinoza's excommunication from the Jewish community in his native Amsterdam. Convention portrays the Amsterdam Jews as narrow-minded and fanatical, but in Yovel's vivid account they emerge as highly civilized former Marranos with cosmopolitan leanings, struggling to renew their Jewish identity and to build a "new Jerusalem" in the Netherlands.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

Note on Sources

CHAPTER 1. Prologue: Heretic and Banned

CHAPTER 2. Spinoza, the Marrano of Reason

CHAPTER 3 . The Split Mind: New Jews in Amsterdam

CHAPTER 4. Marranos in Mask and a World without Transcendence: Rojas and La Celestina

CHAPTER 5. Spinoza, the Multitude, and Dual Language

CHAPTER 6. Knowledge as Alternative Salvation

CHAPTER 7. Epilogue Spinoza and His People: The First Secular Jew?

Afterword to Volume I

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

ISBN:

9780691237633

0691237638

OCLC:

1273975535