ABSTRACT
Spinoza could never have made an impact on Christian philosophers if he had lived in the time of Maimonides. His voice would have been muffled by the almighty Catholic Church. The Reformation suddenly encouraged some free thinking. The gates were set ajar and the trickle turned into a flood. Spinozistic idealism became the fashion among the Christian thinkers. But the Jews shut themselves out from this new mode, not so much because of a reactionary state of mind, but because of much more lucid counterarguments.
