ABSTRACT
Some of the contrasts and comparisons between Spinoza and Pascal were set out by Léon Brunschwig in 1923, in Spinoza and his Contemporaries. Their main writings on religion both appeared in the same year, covering much of the same subject-matter. Brunschvicg dwelt on the biographical ironies. Pascal received a rational education and was a prodigious geometer, but came to defend the ‘Judaic interpretation of religion’. Spinoza received a purely Jewish education and ‘grew up as though in the midst of some oriental colony’ in Amsterdam, but turned out to be the founder of modern biblical exegesis.1
