Menasseh ben Israel #4 - Writings for non Jews?

Award winning author Professor Steven Nadler
Vilas Research Professor and William H. Hay II Professor (Columbia, Ph.D. 1986)
Director of UW-Madison’s Institute for Research in the Humanities
Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Author:
Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi of Amsterdam (“Jewish Lives”, Yale, 2018)
Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge, 1999; second edition, 2018);
The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God, and Evil (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2008);
The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy: From Antiquity through the Seventeenth Century (2009), co-edited with Tamar Rudavsky;
A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton, 2011)
The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter: A Portrait of Descartes (Princeton, 2013).

MENASSEH BEN ISRAEL

#4 Did Menasseh write for non-Jews?
• Had many gentile friends
• Very respected by gentile scholars
• Biggest audience for his books ere gentiles
• But also wrote for Jews such as, Guide to a Jewish Home
• Walked a very fine line