“In Amsterdam I Created the Idea of a Jewish State…”: Spinoza and National Jewish Identity (in Hebrew)

Spinoza was the first philosopher to classify Judaism as nationalism according to the modern secular understanding of the term, and not as religion. He showed that the original laws of the Torah of Moses were as a state constitution directed exclusively toward down-to-earth objectives. God was the king, but the world was not theocratic because the kingdom of God was not established as a church; that is, Moses did not consider himself, nor did he appoint beneath him, a leader that presumed to personify the authority of God, who acts and supervises directly (or through the laws of nature).