"A brilliant schoolboy in 17th-century Amsterdam, Bento Spinoza-formally Baruch and later Benedict de Spinoza-quickly learns to keep his ideas to himself. When he is 23, those ideas prove so scandalous to his own Jewish community that he is cast out, cursed, and effectively erased from their communal life. The scandal shows no sign of waning as his ideas spread throughout Europe. At the center of the storm, he lives the simplest of lives, quietly...