Einstein said he believed in Spinoza's God, and Hegel claimed that anyone who disagreed with Spinoza was not a philosopher at all. Yet at 23, Baruch Spinoza was hit with an excommunication so absolute that his family erased him, and the ban has never been lifted. This episode traces how a young merchant in seventeenth-century Amsterdam became the renegade who gave us modernity. It begins with the generational trauma of Portuguese Jews who had survived the Inquisition, the conditional tolerance of the Dutch Republic, the death of his older brother that pulled him from school into the counting house, and the Anglo-Dutch war that sank the family business into debt.

The hosts explain how Spinoza's decision to petition the Dutch orphan chamber rather than the Jewish council, combined with his unorthodox ideas, triggered the chilling 1656 writ of ...