In this way these unfortunate exiles were forced into certain unpleasant trades which made them the natural enemy of both the rich and the poor, and then, as soon as they had established themselves, these same enemies turned against them, called them names, locked them up in the dirtiest part of the city and in moments of great emotional stress, hanged them as wicked unbelievers or burned them as renegade Christians. It was all so terribly silly. And besides it was so stupid. These endless annoyances and persecutions did not make the Jews any fonder of their Christian neighbors. And as a direct result, a large volume of first-rate intelligence was withdrawn from public circulation, thousands of bright young fellows, who might have advanced the cause of commerce and science and the arts, wasted their brains and energy upon the useless study of certain old books filled with abstruse conundrums and hair-splitting syllogisms and millions of helpless boys and girls were doomed to lead stunted lives in stinking tenements, listening on the one hand to their elders who told them that they were God’s chosen people who would surely inherit the earth and all the wealth thereof, and on the other hand being frightened to death by the curses of their neighbors who never ceased to inform them that they were pigs and only fit for the gallows or the wheel. To ask that people (any people) doomed to live under such adverse circumstances shall retain a normal outlook upon life is to demand the impossible. Again and again the Jews were goaded into some desperate act by their Christian compatriots and then, when white with rage, they turned upon their oppressors, they were called “traitors” and “ungrateful villains” and were subjected to further humiliations and restrictions. But these restrictions had only one result. They increased the number of Jews who had a grievance, turned the others into nervous wrecks and generally made the Ghetto a ghastly abode of frustrated ambitions and pent-up hatreds. Spinoza, because he was born in Amsterdam, escaped the misery which was the birthright of most of his relatives. He went first of all to the school maintained by his synagogue (appropriately called “the Tree of Life”) and as soon as he could conjugate his Hebrew verbs was sent to the learned Dr. Franciscus Appinius van den Ende, who was to drill him in Latin and in the sciences. Dr. Franciscus, as his name indicates, was of Catholic origin. Rumor had it that he was a graduate of the University of Louvain and if one were to believe the best informed deacons of the town, he was really a Jesuit in disguise and a very dangerous person. This however was nonsense. Van den Ende in his youth had actually spent a few years at a Catholic seminary. But his heart was not in his work and he had left his native city of Antwerp, had gone to Amsterdam and there had opened a private school of his own.