Spinoza's theology, although original, owes much to the cultural soil that nourished it. His parents were among the many “Marranos” - Portuguese Jews who in their native country had been compelled outwardly to embrace Roman Catholicism - who had emigrated to Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century. In the freedom of their new country, the immigrant Marrano community set out to recover its full religious heritage, and to shed beliefs and practices contrary to it. However, some of its members, of whom Spinoza was one, not only remained attached to non-Jewish elements in their Marrano culture, but, having embraced the revolution in the physical sciences associated with Galileo, Bacon, and Descartes, wished to pursue its implications for religion. When he was twenty-three, partly because he would not renounce these non-Jewish interests, the Amsterdam synagogue expelled and cursed him. Yet even among the radical Christians who befriended him, and who repudiated the Trinitarian and Christological doctrines he found absurd, only a small circle of intimates were prepared to follow him when he jettisoned the conception of God as a supernatural creator of the natural universe, and developed a “naturalized” theology, in which the natural universe, as conceived in Baconian-Cartesian natural science, derives its existence from nothing above and beyond it.