The Jewish philosopher Spinoza was one of the great Enlightenment thinkers. So why was he 'cancelled'?

We often think of cancel culture as a contemporary phenomenon, driven by social media and rife in our hyper-connected world. Key terms Yeshiva: Jewish educational institution, focussing on the study of religious texts Cherem : the total exclusion of a person from the Jewish community Zionism: ideology and nationalist movement that supports an independent Jewish state But Spinoza remained a scholar, and over the next few years, he began to lay the intellectual foundations for what would become one of the most celebrated bodies of work in European philosophy. Listen to the episode Photo shows Spinoza monument, Amsterdam David Rutledge interviews Spinoza scholar Stephen Nadler on The Philosopher's Zone. Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, called Spinoza "the first Zionist of the last 300 years", embracing him as not just a philosopher who happened to be born a Jew, but a profoundly and definitively Jewish philosopher. "They wanted to know: what were Spinoza's philosophical views, what were the historical circumstances of the ban, what might be the advantages of lifting the cherem, and what might be the disadvantages?"