A01=Yirmiyahu Yovel
Antipope
Aphorism
Apostasy
Atheism
Author_Yirmiyahu Yovel
Baruch Spinoza
Cartesianism
Category=QDH
Christian mortalism
Converso
Counter-Reformation
Critical philosophy
Crypto-Judaism
Dark Enlightenment
Deism
Deprecation
Deus ex machina
Divine law
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
European wars of religion
Excommunication
Exegesis
Existentialism
Fundamentalism
Gentile
Gershom Scholem
God
Heresy
Hermeneutics
Heterodoxy
Infidel
Jews
Jihad
Judaism
Judaizers
Justification (theology)
Kabbalah
La Celestina
Law of Moses
Maimonides
Marrano
Messianism
Milgram experiment
Multitude
Neoplatonism
New antisemitism
Nominalism
On Religion
Philosopher
Philosophical language
Philosophy
Picaresque novel
Polemic
Political religion
Positivism
Quibble (plot device)
Rabbi
Radicalism (historical)
Reason
Reform Judaism
Religion
Remonstrants
Richard Popkin
Rule of reason
Sacred history
Secularization
Spinozism
Superstition
Theocracy
Theology
Thomas Aquinas
Uriel da Costa
Zealots (Judea)
Product details
- ISBN 9780691020785
- Weight: 369g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 28 Jan 1992
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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 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.
Yirmiyahu Yovel (1935–2018) was professor emeritus of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
