Nadler starts his book with an attempt to a historical explanation of the excommunication (cherem) of Spinoza from the Jewish Sephardic community of Amsterdam in 1656. The historical material offered is not new. We can find it, for example, in Nadlers earlier Spinoza-biography, published in 1999 (Spinoza, A Life, Cambridge University Press), and also in a number of other biographical and historical studies. Hence, there is no historical information in the first three chapters of this book which is not known to every reasonably well-informed Spinoza-scholar. The exact reason (or reasons) for Spinoza’s excommunication from the Sephardic community is still not known to us. We can only speculate on this matter on the basis of more or less reliable historical sources. Nadler too engages himself in this kind of speculation. On the basis of a, not all too reliable, espionage-document of the Spanish Inquisition, he argues that one of the main reasons for Spinoza’s excommunication would be his heterodox view of the immortality of the human soul. The immortality of the human soul was, although not so central for Judaism in general, an established and dear article of faith in the Sephardic community in Amsterdam.

This historical introduction is followed by what may be considered as the more interesting part of the book: a philosophical inquiry into Spinoza’s ideas about the immortality and/or eternity of the human mind, accompanied by a comparison of his philosophy with the ideas of the Jewish medieval philosophers Maimonides and Gersonides on this issue. The main conclusion of this inquiry is that there is some correspondence between Spinoza’s thought and that of Maimonides and Gersonides on the topic of the immortality of the soul. To my opinion this correspondence is not very profound and the differences between these thinkers might be even greater. The two medieval thinkers are mainly operating along the Aristotelian lines of the active and passive intellect, whereas Spinoza is operating along the lines of his highly original conceptions of God as Substance or Nature and of the human mind as a mode of the divine attribute of thinking and a finite part of the infinite intellect of God.

Nadler’s discussion of Spinoza’s conception of the eternity of the human mind is not very sophisticated and profound. In this discussion there is a systematic lack of accurate definition and analytical distinction between different notions and concepts such as substance, mode, mind, body, immortality, eternity, essence, existence, necessity, truth, intuitive knowledge et cetera. The definition and distinction of all these notions are of primary importance for the understanding of a geometrical thinker, whose hall-mark is deductive reasoning on the basis of these notions. There is also a lack of knowledge with regard to the other, more elaborated studies on the issue of the eternity of the human mind, for example, the great French commentaries by Martial Gueroult, Alexandre Matheron and Pierre Macherey, who are not even being mentioned in the bibliography. The reason for this lack cannot be the language, for there are other French studies which are mentioned such as the solid study of Pierre-Franois Moreau (Spinoza: L’expérience et l’éternité, Paris, 1994). The person who is seeking a profound understanding of Spinoza’s difficult conception about the eternity of the human mind may better go to another book; this book might only be used as a general introduction to the topic.

My general conclusion after reading the book is that the value of it can neither be that it provides new historical information about the case of Spinoza’s excommunication nor that it gives deep theoretical and philosophical insights into Spinoza’s thought on the issue of the eternity of the human mind. Its value is more limited: it may introduce readers who are not all too well informed on both areas to some fascinating aspects of Spinoza’s life and philosophy.