Before his expulsion from it, the hothouse world of Amsterdam’s Sephardim — as Jews who derived from Spain (Sepharad in Hebrew) continue to be called to this day — had been Spinoza’s world as well. Yet when it closed its doors to him, he made no attempt to reenter it or any other Jewish community.
Excommunication, as it was practiced in his community, was not as severe and final a punishment as the word now suggests. The period of isolation from the community (the terms of excommunication did not extend outside of Amsterdam) typically lasted anywhere from a day to several years. The imposed banishment was a tool of chastisement resorted to with quite common frequency, fundamentally a form of public embarrassment with which to exert control over the volatile mix contained within “the Portuguese Nation,” as the Amsterdam Sephardim continued to identify themselves.
Whereas others among the chastised had obediently— and sometimes desperately — sought reconciliation, Spinoza calmly removed himself from any further form of Jewish life. Nor did Spinoza seek out another religion. In particular, he did not convert to Christianity, though it would have been convenient for him to do so. Spinoza opted for secularism at a time when the concept had not yet been formulated.
He supported himself by grinding lenses, which was no lowly menial occupation, as it is often presented to have been in romanticizing versions of the philosopher’s life, but was rather a craft that drew extensively from Spinoza’s serious interest in the science of optics. The quality of his wares was highly valued by other scientists of his day. The important Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, who discovered Saturn’s rings as well as one of its four moons, preferred Spinoza’s lenses to all others. “The [lenses] that the Jew of Voorburg has in his microscopes have an admirable polish,” Huygens wrote to his brother in 1667.1 The one part of the romantic lens-grinding legend that is sadly true is that the dust from the optical polishing was unhealthy for Spinoza, whose mother and brother had both died young from tuberculosis. He himself succumbed to the disease at the age of forty-four.