EVENT
The Cherem of 1656
The July 1656 excommunication of the twenty-three-year-old
Baruch Spinoza from the Amsterdam Sephardic community — the most severe cherem in the community's records, and the formative event of modern philosophy's most radical monism.
On the twenty-seventh of July, 1656, the Portuguese-Jewish community of Amsterdam pronounced a cherem against Baruch de Espinoza. The language was singular even by the standards of an era accustomed to religious censure. The rabbis cursed him with the curses of Joshua against Jericho, with the curse of Elisha against the children, with all the curses written in the Book of the Law. They ordained that no person should communicate with him, neither in writing nor in speech, that no person should do him service, that no person should stay under the same roof with him, that no person should come within four cubits of his presence.
Spinoza was twenty-three years old. The specific offenses were not recorded. What is known is that the community was itself a community of refugees — Sephardic Jews descended from families expelled from Spain and Portugal, who had built open Jewish practice in Amsterdam after generations of clandestine observance. What Spinoza proposed dissolved the boundaries on