‘Spinoza: Six Reasons for the Excommunication of the Philosopher‘
Directed by David Ofek, Produced by Yair Qedar
Hebrew, English
New York Jewish Film Festival

“Spinoza: Six Reasons for the Excommunication of the Philosopher,” a silver screen biography of the life and legacy of one of philosophy’s founding fathers, Baruch “Benedict” Spinoza, makes high drama of wrinkled manuscripts and Latinate disputations. The film, coming in at less than an hour, makes a compacted and forceful case that this excommunicated Dutch Jew, a scion of conversos and a hope of heretics, changed the world. 

Spinoza’s thoughts can fairly be credited as the first rays of the Enlightenment. One biographer, Reebecca Goldstein, names him as the “renegade Jew who gave us modernity.” Albert Einstein calls himself a “believer in Spinoza’s God,” and the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel notes, “You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all.” The French thinker Gilles Deleuze anointed him as “the prince of philosophers,” a font of many revolutions of the mind.  

“Spinoza” is the latest entry in a monumental series called “HaIvrim,” or “The Hebrews,” produced by Yair Qedar. Running to 18 films, it describes itself as a “documentary project focused on the Hebrew & Jewish literary canon.” Among those who have earned its stylish treatment are Chaim Nachman Bialik, Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, Karl Marx, Yosef Haim Brenner, and Vladimir Jabotinksy. Spinoza, one could say, is the group’s rogue rabbi.

Spinoza descended from Portuguese Sephardic Jews, and the family of the man whose pen would scratch us toward the Age of Reason had for generations trembled before the Catholic Church’s Inquisition. Spinoza’s grandfather, Henrique Garcês, was only circumcised and given the name “Baruch” after his death. His peripheral place at the Beth Haim of Ouderkerk aan de Amstel cemetery — by the slaves — is a marker that peripherality was an inheritance. 

Just as Prague claims Kafka and Istanbul belongs to Orhan Pamuk, Spinoza and Amsterdam have long been linked. In the 17th century, the canal-lined “Venice of the North” was a haven of tolerance for Jews. Spinoza was born there in 1632. His first language was Portuguese, and his education was both classical and immersed in the sacred scriptures of the Jews. He lived in a golden age when a rabbi like Menasseh ben-Israel could count a giant like Rembrandt as a friend.

In 1656, though, Spinoza’s relationship with the Jewish community turned to ash. In front of the sacred ark, the leaders of the Talmud Torah congregation read aloud a writ of herem, or excommunication, against the 24-year-old. It declared that “by decree of the angels and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, with the consent of God, Blessed be He.”

The proclamation, which is unequaled in Amsterdam’s annals for its ferocity, pronounces, “Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him, but the anger of the Lord and his jealousy shall smoke against that man.” God, it predicts, “shall separate him unto evil out of all the tribes of Israel.”

The ban against Spinoza is still in effect, which this film’s crew learned the hard way. Their request to film at Amsterdam’s Portuguese Synagogue was rejected, and the movie’s principal character, a professor of Spinoza, Yitzhak Melamed, received a letter declaring him persona non grata and banning him from the premises because his research amounts to “an unacceptable assault on our identity and heritage.”

The core of what made — and makes — Spinoza so radioactive to the pious is a Latin phrase he coined, Deus, sive Natura, meaning “God or Nature.” He thought the two amounted to the same thing, and in his masterpiece, the “Ethics,” he developed a dense and mathematical language to argue that God is not a separate entity from the world but blended into sunflowers and stars, dirt, and digestion. 

Spinoza anticipated biblical criticism, teaching that the Hebrew Bible was not revealed at Sinai but came down haphazardly through the centuries, the product of many quills who created a “corrupt and mutilated” document eventually collated into something like its final form by Ezra the Scribe. Court documents also appear to disclose another reason for rancor — Spinoza turned for adjudication to secular, rather than rabbinic, courts.

“Six Reasons” translates this difficult philosopher — understood only by a coterie in his own lifetime, and by not many more since — into a lovely visual language. Director David Ofek reaches for images of Amsterdam, the paintings of the Dutch Masters, and a computer-generated schema that evokes something between a black hole and an acid trip. The idea is that Spinoza was, as was said of Shakespeare, of his time, and for all time.

Professor Melamed, clad in a kippah but with the skeptical mien of a philosopher, is a sure-handed guide to Spinoza’s afterlife. It begins with his burial on church grounds, though he never converted to Christianity. We meet a diverse array of the Spinoza-haunted, from Dutch archivists to Israeli professors to a distant relative, Itamar Mendes-Flohr, who admits that he is dyslexic and has never read his ancestor’s words but whose finely wrought craft suggests a response.

When asked to describe his lifelong devotion to the Dutch dissident, Mr. Melamed explains that Spinoza was a “wild beast” who pursued his quarry beyond the bounds of his age. That chase left Spinoza “homeless,” but his arresting theses now render him an icon. At a time of war, “Six Reasons” is a reminder that Israel is producing work that makes it not only the site of the Jewish past, but the engine of its cultural future.