Spinoza and early Friends
Helen Gould looks at their relationship
Quaker missionaries traveled to Amsterdam in 1656 seeking to establish Quakerism and to convert Jews to Quakerism. Scholars have established that Spinoza sought out and established contact with them, and it is extremely likely that Spinoza became the Hebrew translator for the Quakers, translating into Hebrew Margaret Fell’s first two letters, really bookletts, to the Jews. Spinoza fits all that we know about the translator, and there is no evidence that any other Dutch Jew showed any interest in Quakerism. We know about this partly from letters from William Ames and William Caton to Fell. Isabel Ross in Margaret Fell: Mother of Quakerism, writes of the two books of Fell’s, that ‘she makes an impassioned appeal for men everywhere to turn to the Light of God, as it is in the heart, to turn away from formal outward religion to the inner Spirit. There is ample quotation from the Old Testament.’ And there is no explicit mention of Christ.
