Spinoza taught an intellectual love for his God, a God himself incapable of love. Though his enemies called him an "atheistic Jew," he himself emphas… - Benedictus de Spinoza

Some of Spinoza's ideas are part and parcel of our culture, but to the best of my knowledge Spinoza is absent as a reference from the modern efforts to understand the biology of the mind. This ab­sence is interesting in itself. Spinoza is a thinker far more famous than known. Sometimes Spinoza appears to rise out of nothing, in solitary and unexplained splendor, although the impression is false—in spite of his originality he is very much a part of his intellectual times. And he appears to dissolve as abruptly, without succession—another false impression given that the essence of some of his forbidden proposals can be found behind the Enlight­enment and well beyond in the century that followed his death.

Can the seventeenth-century rationalist, who produced one of the most ambitious philosophical systems in the history of Western philosophy, be considered, by any stretch of interpretation, a Jewish thinker? Can he even be considered a Jew? Benedictus Spinoza is the greatest philosopher that the Jews ever produced, which adds a certain irony to his questionable Jewishness.

ceux que l’on croit être le plus pleins de mésestime d’eux-mêmes et d’humilité, sont généralement le plus pleins d’ambition et d’envie