=2. The Amsterdam Jews at the Time of Spinoza.=――In November 1632, when the Amsterdam synagogue had been built just four-and-thirty years, there was born to one of the Spanish Jewish families there resident, called d’Espinoza, a son who received the name of Baruch. To understand at all his sad and wonderful story, it is necessary, first of all, to see in what ways their residence in Holland had affected the refugees from Spain and Portugal. Though, at the date of Spinoza’s birth, nearly forty years had passed since Jews from the Peninsula had settled in Holland, the community in Amsterdam were far from being good Dutch Jews, in any complete sense of either word. They were good according to their lights, but their lights had come to burn low and false, through the long, fierce glare of the Inquisition. They were Dutch in any practical ordinary interpretation of grateful loyalty, but in language, in manners, and in modes of thought, they were still Spanish. And as Jews, these emancipated Marannos fell also distinctly short of the standard. Their very earnestness was in some sort against them. They were not content to be ‘witnesses,’ they would be judges. Their consciousness of their own long neglect of all the forms of Judaism was so keen, that they sought relief from this self-reproach in hunting out cause for reproach in others, and they were, in truth, terror-stricken when any member of the community questioned any doctrine or abandoned any practice of Judaism. They did not seem to realise that to be Jewish in every minute observance, is not quite the same thing as to fulfil the Jewish Law in the sense in which the prophet Micah exhorted us――to ‘do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God.’