Zwanenburgwal: Where Spinoza Was Born
Why is it significant?
Stand where the Zwanenburgwal meets the broad Amstel, with the long modern bulk of the city hall and opera house beside you, and the water slapping at the quay.
Key Facts
| Place | Zwanenburgwal: Where Spinoza Was Born |
|---|---|
| Address | Amstel 3, 1011 PN Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.36760, 4.89890 |
| Part of Walk | Mokum's Lost Quarter: The Jewish Heart of Amsterdam and the Plantage |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand where the Zwanenburgwal meets the broad Amstel, with the long modern bulk of the city hall and opera house beside you, and the water slapping at the quay. Nearby, a memorial remembers the Jewish men and women who resisted the occupation between 1940 and 1945, and a few steps along the canal a bronze philosopher stands in a cloak covered with birds and plants. Start with him.
His name was Baruch, or Bento, de Spinoza, and he was born in 1632 into a family of Portuguese Jewish merchants, on the island of Vlooienburg, which lay just about where you are standing. His parents had come from a world of fear. In Portugal and Spain, Jews had been forced to convert, and the Inquisition hunted those suspected of practising in secret. Amsterdam was different. Here they could live openly as Jews again, trade, pray and argue.
And argue Spinoza did. He began to question everything: whether God could be separate from nature, whether scripture was written by God at all. In 1656, at the age of twenty-three, his own congregation expelled him with a ban of exceptional severity, cursing him by day and by night, and forbidding anyone to speak with him or read his words. He never went back. He ground lenses for a living, and wrote some of the most radical books of his century.
The statue, by the artist Nicolas Dings, was unveiled in 2008, and on its base is a line from his political writing: the purpose of the state is freedom. It is a strange and beautiful irony that the city which gave his people refuge, and the community which cast him out, both now claim him with pride.
Spinoza's Amsterdam was the beginning of something extraordinary: for three centuries this corner of the city was the Jodenbuurt, the Jewish quarter, so much a part of Amsterdam that the city's own nickname, Mokum, comes from the Hebrew word for place. This walk follows that quarter from its flourishing to its destruction. Walk a few steps east, into the bustle of the Waterlooplein market.