Bento de Espinosa, in Hebrew - Baruch de Spinoza, and later to be known as Benedictus de Spinoza - was born in Amsterdam on 24 November 1632. His father, Miguel, had been born in Portugal but his father, Isaac, fled Iberia after the Jews were expelled from Spain and then later from Portugal. Isaac took his young son Miguel and the rest of the family and beat it to Nantes, France. In 1615 the Jews were thrown out of Nantes and Isaac took the brood to Rotterdam in the Netherlands. After Isaac died in 1627, Miguel - with his uncle Manuel - took the de Spinosas to Amsterdam where they sloughed off their Christian-Converso skins and resumed the open practice of Judaism. At these times and in these places a Jew might have 3 or 4 working names. Jewish, Spanish-Portuguese, Dutchified, and Latinized - if, like Baruch, they were going to be writers or public men. So Baruch is sometimes Bento, sometimes Benito, and sometimes Benedictus. All of them mean 'Blessed.' Names get away from us, Blessed or not, especially when they note too much. Skippy's got a Catholic name with 3 saints. He's got a Euro-name with 8 parts: 2 male, 2 female, 2 describing his 'minor nobility,' and 2 families. Which may be why Kenny just calls him Skippy while Barber Perfect nails his attributes with one term: Lucky. But names will peg you into someone's elses reality - if you let them. After the ADAM Jews - both Sephardi and Ashkenazi - threw Baruch out of official Jewdom, slapping him with Cherem when he was just 24 years old and before he had published a word - the young Jew Baruch became the non - denominational Benedictus. A handle which could get him published in the Latinized West.
There were 2 strains of Jews living in ADAM in the 17th Century and they were very different. The Sephardic Jews came north from warm Iberia: Spain, North Africa, Portugal. Their Jewishness had been molded by their experiences during the 'Convivencia' - the mythical golden age of Muslim rule in Andalucia - when the 3 great faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam had been nourished by enlightened Caliphates and Islamic cities like Toledo, and Cordoba, Sevilla, and Granada were world centers of art and philosophy, mathematics and astronomy, and Alchemy - the queen of the sciences - at a time when the cities of northern europa were filthy and artless, ruled by Christian idiots who killed everything which did not, somehow, give of Christ. Iberian Jews had become cultured and educated in the larger worlds outside their own faith and were finding a place within them. The Ashkenazi - 'German' Jews were from Northern Europa where the weather and the history were colder to them. In the 11th and 12th Centuries the Sephardi owned more than a third of the estates in the country of Barcelona. Jayne Hill still lives on an ancient Sephardic estate on the foot of Monjuic - the 'Jew's Mountain.' Up north, the Ashkenazi were terrorized, marginalized, pogromed. Up north, the Jews were accused of spreading plague. During the dark days of Crusade, Northern Christian Armies would routinely practice their combat skills by killing Jews - 'On the Road' - as they moved south towards the Holy Land. To grok the effects on population from a Jew's sitz em leben consider this: At the end of the 11th Century, 97% of world Jewry was Sephardic and only 3% Ashkenazi. By the middle of the 17th Century - the time of Spinoza and the Golden Age of Holland - "Sephardim still outnumbered Ashkenazim 3 to 2." But then by the end of the 18th Century Askenazim outnumbered Sephardim 3 to 2. Why? The two homefronts for the Jews had turned inside out. Ottoman Muslim rule made life for Sephardim miserable and their numbers plummeted. While, conversely, the living conditions for Euro-Ashkenazim inproved greatly in Christian Europa. By the time Hitler got his hands on the Jews of Europe the Askenazi were a full 92% of the world's Jews.
