The document was read in the synagogue on 27 July 1656 and entered in the congregation's minute book, where it survives. Its formulae are conventional and its intensity is not. It invokes the anger of the Lord against the man, blots out his name from under heaven, and separates him for evil from all the tribes of Israel. It then sets out the practical terms: no one is to communicate with him orally or in writing, to show him any favour, to stay under the same roof with him, to come within four cubits of him, or to read anything he has written.
What the writ does not do is state the charge. It says that the elders had long known of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Espinoza, that they had endeavoured by promises and by threats to turn him from his evil ways, and that daily they received more information about the abominable heresies which he practised and taught. No heresy is named.
The silence has kept the question open for three and a half centuries. Spinoza had published nothing in 1656. The Theological-Political Treatise appeared in 1670 and the Ethics after his death in 1677, so the congregation was acting on what he was saying rather than on what he had written. Contemporary reports of his views attribute to him doubts about the immortality of the soul, about angels, and about the divine authorship of the Torah in the form it had come down.