He apparently left school at age thirteen or fourteen to work in his father's business. From 1654, the year of Mikael's death, to 1656, the firm Bento y Gabriel de Spinoza was managed by Bento and his younger brother Gabriel. In March 1656, several months before his excommunication, Spinoza decided to take advantage of a Dutch law that protected minors who had been orphaned, and dispossessed himself of his father's estate, which was heavily burdened by debts.
The manuscript of the ban, written in Portuguese, the language of all documents of the Amsterdam Jewish community, is still preserved in the municipal archives of Amsterdam but contains no signatures. Other contemporary documents suggest that young Spinoza's heretical views, which led to his excommunication, were reinforced especially by Juan (Daniyye'l) de Prado. Excommunicated in 1658, de Prado was also a member of Morteira's Keter Torah circle and had attacked biblical anthropomorphism, poked fun at the idea of Jewish chosenness, and asserted that the world was eternal and the immutable laws of nature constituted the only form of divine providence.
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