Prologue: Baruch, Bento, Benedictus1. Huygens, Oeuvres complètes, 6:181.2. Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe I. i. 148. This is from a letter to Leibniz of Johan Georg Graevius, professor of rhetoric, and from Leibniz’s reply to him.3. “In a series of open letters to Mendelssohn, Jacobi claimed that the late Lessing’s conversations proved him to be a Spinozist, and, therefore, in Jacobi’s eyes, a fatalist. Such an allegation posed a severe challenge to Enlightenment thought, for by pigeonholing Spinoza as the fatal example of rationalism’s dire consequences, Jacobi forged Lessing’s alleged admission of his Spinozoism into an indictment of the Enlightenment as a whole.” Willi Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), p. 12.4. The Correspondence of Spinoza, Letter VI, to Oldenburg, 1662.II. In Search of Baruch1. This was the congregation’s lay governing board, which oversaw excommunications, rather than the community’s rabbis.2.
