in pride of race--in racial instinct, but he was great enough to
know that all men are God's children, and that to set up a fixed,
dogmatic standard regulating every act of life has its serious
penalties. He was a Jew so big that he knew that the cruelty and
inhumanity visited upon the Jews by Christians was first taught to these
Christians by Jews--it is all in the Old Testament. The villainy you
have taught me I will execute. It shall go hard, but I will better the
instruction.

The Christians who had persecuted Jews were really orthodox Jews in
disguise, and were actuated more by the Jewish Law expressed in the Old
Testament, than by the life of Jesus, who placed man above the Sabbath
and taught that the good is that which serves.

And so Benedict Spinoza, the Rabbi, gentle, spiritual, kind, heir to the
Jewish faith, learned in all the refinements of Jewish Law, knowing
minutely the history of the race, knowing that for which the curses of
Judaism were reserved, perceiving with unblinking eyes the absurdity and
folly of all dogmatic belief, gradually withdrew from practising and
following "Law," preferring his own commonsense. There were threats,
then attempts to bribe, and again threats and finally excommunication
and curses so terrible that if they were carried out, a man would walk
the earth an exile--unknown by brothers and sisters, shunned by the
mother that gave him birth, a moral leper to his father, despised,
rejected, turned away, spit upon by every being of his kind.

And here is the document:

By the sentence of the angels, by the decree of the saints, we
anathematize, cut off, curse, and execrate Baruch Spinoza, in the
presence of these sacred books with the six hundred and thirteen
precepts which are written therein, with the anathema wherewith
Joshua anathematized Jericho; with the cursing wherewith Elisha
cursed the children; and with all the cursings which are written in
the Book of the Law; cursed be he by day, and cursed by night;
cursed when he lieth down, and cursed when he riseth up; cursed
when he goeth out, and cursed when he cometh in; the Lord pardon
him never; the wrath and fury of the Lord burn upon this man, and
bring upon him all the curses which are written in the Book of the
Law. The Lord blot out his name under heaven. The Lord set him
apart for destruction from all the tribes of Israel, with all the
curses of th