Betraying Spinoza by Rebecca Goldstein

method of existence or action.
VIII. By ETERNITY , I mean existence itself, in so far as it is conceived necessarily to follow solely from the definition of that which is eternal.
Explanation .— Existence of this kind is conceived as an eternal truth, like the essence of a thing, and, therefore, cannot be explained by means of continuance or time, though continuance may be conceived without a beginning or end.
    A XIOMS .
I. Everything which exists, exists either in itself or in something else.
II. That which cannot be conceived through anything else must be conceived through itself.
III. From a given definite cause an effect necessarily follows; and, on the other hand, if no definite cause be granted, it is impossible that an effect can follow.
IV. The knowledge of an effect depends on and involves the knowledge of a cause.
V. Things which have nothing in common cannot be understood, the one by means of the other; the conception of one does not involve the conception of the other.
VI. A true idea must correspond with its ideate or object.
VII. If a thing can be conceived as non-existing, its essence does not involve existence.
    P ROPOSITIONS .
P ROP . I. Substance is by nature prior to its modifications.
Proof .—This is clear from Def. iii. and v.
P ROP . II. Two substances, whose attributes are different, have nothing in common.
Proof .—Also evident from Def. iii. For each must exist in itself, and be conceived through itself; in other words, the conception of one does not imply the conception of the other.
Spinoza’s “memoir”: the opening pages of The Ethics , stating definitions, axioms, and the first two propositions.
    The community into which he was born was also, as he would be, obsessed with issues of identity. They, too, were in the process of trying to construct a new identity, to save themselves by realigning their identities with what they took to be their essential selves. The confluence of preoccupations with identity and salvation can’t be irrelevant. It can’t be irrelevant to the way that Spinoza would react to his community, to the way that they would react to him, to the ferocity of their mutual disavowal.
    For the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam, too, questions of identity were meshed into the project of escape, of bringing out into the open the secret but true identity that they had been forced for a century to conceal, the Jewishness they took to be essential to themselves. The contingencies of external causality had shaped their passive identity as well, and they, too, sought to wrest that passivity back and reshape it, to actively and freely redefine themselves.
    They lived in Amsterdam, mainly concentrated into two districts, the Vlooienburg and the Breestraat (later called the “Jodenbreestraat”—“Jews’ Broad Street”), but not because they were required to live in a ghetto, as in the Jewish community of Venice, which was also predominantly Sephardic, but simply because their communal life necessitated it. There were synagogues, kosher butcher shops, and of course the Talmud Torah, that model school that Mrs. Schoenfeld had praised to us, even though it had failed to inculcate its Jewish values into its most famous graduate. A Polish scholar named Shabbethai Bass visited Amsterdam and came away even more impressed with it than Mrs. Schoenfeld had been:
[In the schools] of the Sephardim … I saw “giants [in scholarship]: tender children as small as grasshoppers,” “kids who have become he-goats.” In my eyes they were like prodigies because of their unusual familiarity with the entire Bible and with the science of grammar. They possessed the ability to compose verses and poems in meter and to speak a pure Hebrew. Happy the eye that has seen all these things. 3
    The area of Amsterdam where the Jews mostly lived was a business and mercantile area, as well as being residential, surrounded by canals on which barges and boats were anchored right beside the streets. Engravings of the