Baruch (Latin name, "Benedictus") Spinoza (1632-1677) was born in Amsterdam to a prosperous Jewish merchant family that had come to Holland from their native Portugal to escape persecution. He attended the local school for Jewish boys where already at a young age he began arguing with his students and teachers, telling them that the bible offered no reason for believing in angels or the immortality of the soul and that its authors were as ignorant about physics as they were about theology. When his rabbi and teachers failed to silence him with arguments they tried to bribe him but he persisted until finally the entire Jewish community excommunicate him in 1656 and he was even banished from Amsterdam.

In 1670 Spinoza published his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (Treatise on Theology and Politics); Christian theologians banned it, calling it a work "forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the devil." As a result, his masterpiece, the Ethics, did not appear in print until after his death. He thus has the distinction of being banned both by Christian and Jewish theologians.

In 1686 ... a year before his death, he was visited by Leibniz, who came to Spinoza to learn not his philosophy but his techniques for grinding lenses! Leibniz had heard of Spinoza as one of the greatest lense makers in Europe and had sent him one of his own research articles on optics; in his reply, Spinoza had included the Tractatus which deeply influenced Leibniz's own philosophical development. From that point on, according to Leibniz's account, he "conversed with him often and at great length," until Spinoza died a year later, his lungs having been destroyed by years of inhaling glass from the grinding of lenses.

bio by Daniel Kolak in Lovers of Wisdom
(Wadsworth, 1997)