Our Favorite Heretic by Allan Nadler.
Romantic rehabilitations of Jewish history’s most notorious heretic, Baruch Spinoza, seem — like Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura (God or Nature) — to be without end. German romantics crowned this radical unbeliever a “God-intoxicated man.” Zionists claimed the excommunicant as an ideological ancestor of modern Jewish nationalism. The array of uses and misuses of Spinoza by those who seek in him a forebear is testimony to the boundlessness of the human imagination, ironically enough the very “affect” that Spinoza viewed as the cardinal enemy of reason and human happiness.
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