In 1656, Baruch Spinoza was placed under a severe herem, or ban, by Amsterdam's Portuguese Jewish congregation. The reasons are debated, but his ideas were judged dangerously unorthodox. He later became one of the most influential philosophers of the early modern period.

Spinoza's life embodied the risks of intellectual independence in a confessional age. His thought later influenced poets and prose writers interested in nature, necessity, freedom and a non-anthropomorphic sense of the divine.