Arguably, no historical thinker has had as varied and fractious a reception within modern Judaism as Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (1632–77), the seventeenth-century...
Daniel B. Schwartz is a professor in history at George Washington University specializing in modern European and American Jewish intellectual, cultural, and urban history. He is the author of Ghetto: The History of a Word, which traces the various and contested meanings of the word "ghetto" from sixteenth-century Venice to the present. His other books include Spinoza's Challenge to Jewish Thought: Writings on His Life, Philosophy, and Legacy and The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image, which was co-winner of the 2012 American Academy for Jewish Research's Salo W. Baron Prize for best first book in Jewish studies and a finalist for the 2012 National Jewish Book Award in history.
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