This is an unbelievable story. This recent Hanukkah eve (on Sunday), Rabbi Joseph Sefarti of Amsterdam’s Portuguese Jewish community has declared world-renowned Benedict (Baruch) Spinoza scholar Yitzhak Melamed of Johns Hopkins University a “persona non grata” in the Portugeuse synagogue complex. The reason: Melamed was requesting to film part of a documentary on Spinoza inside the synagogue library’s archive – a library which Spinoza himself may have been studying. Spinoza was excommunicated by the Jewish community in 1656 at the age of 23, for his thoughts which were considered heretic – although at that point, he had not yet published...
Monitoring Antisemitism Intel
