A haunting portrait of Arthur Rosenberg one of Nazism's chief architects and his obsession
with one of history's most influential Jewish thinkers In The Spinoza Problem Irvin Yalom
spins fact and fiction into an unforgettable psycho-philosophical drama. Yalom tells the story
of the seventeenth-century thinker Baruch Spinoza whose philosophy led to his own
excommunication from the Jewish community alongside that of the rise and fall of the Nazi
ideologue Alfred Rosenberg who two hundred years later during World War II ordered his task
force to plunder Spinoza's ancient library in an effort to deal with the Nazis' "Spinoza
Problem." Seamlessly alternating between Golden Age Amsterdam and Nazi Germany Yalom
investigates the inner lives of these two enigmatic men in a tale of influence and anxiety the
origins of good and evil and the philosophy of freedom and the tyranny of terror.
