In Berlin, where the Jews had been expelled in 1510, Leopold (Lippold) was a physician and favorite of the Margrave Joachim II of Brandenburg. After the death of his master he was accused of having poisoned him and executed in 1573. A new refuge was opened to the Jews in Holland, when this country gained its independence from Spain. A family of fugitive Marranos is said to have been driven to Emden, Hanover, by unfavorable winds, and thence they were advised to go to Amsterdam (1593). Moses ben Uri of Emden followed them and instructed them in Judaism. Some other converts followed, among them monks, statesmen and scholars. One of the most prominent rabbis of Amsterdam was Menasseh ben Israel, who in 1654, tried to obtain from Cromwell official permission for the Jews to resettle in England, whence they had been expelled in 1290. A bill introduced into Parliament for the readmission failed to pass, but prominent jurists rendered an opinion that the expulsion was not a legal act. The Jews already in London were not molested, opened a synagogue and acquired a cemetery in 1660. Charles II was favorable to the Jews, some of whom had assisted him financially before he had ascended the throne; in 1664 he confirmed their right of residence. About the middle of the seventeenth century a colony of Marranos from Amsterdam settled in Brazil, which was then under Dutch rule. When the Portuguese reconquered it (1654) the Jews were expelled and settled in the Dutch West Indies and New York, then New Amsterdam. Governor Stuyvesant objected to their landing, but the directors of the West India Company, among whom there were several Jews, overruled his decision. Meantime the Jews had settled in Rhode Island, where Roger Williams had promulgated full religious freedom in 1657. In Amsterdam the Portuguese community combined strict traditional piety with secular learning and great commercial activity. To the Portuguese Jews, Amsterdam owes its importance as the center of the diamond trade. Uriel Acosta, who held high office in Spain and emigrated to Holland in order to openly profess Judaism, became imbued with deistic ideas, was tried as a heretic and did penance. Then, excommunicated as a backslider, he became despondent and, having attempted to kill Rabbi Saul Morteira, committed suicide in 1640. Baruch or Benedict Spinoza (1633-1677) was also excommunicated, but disregarded all attempts to bring him back to Judaism. He is the originator of a famous system of philosophy, called Pantheism or Monism, laid down in his principal work, the “Ethics.” He also occupies a prominent place in the history of Biblical Criticism through his work, “Tractatus Theologico Politicus.”