Baruch Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza was born into a prominent Sephardic Jewish family in Amsterdam, meaning he had enough Jewish origin to choke a rabbi. His early education was steeped in Jewish texts and traditions, giving him a solid grounding in the very things he would later meticulously dismantle with the precision of a master surgeon. He probably knew more about Maimonides than your average yeshiva student, which just makes his eventual worldview all the more deliciously heretical.

His radical philosophical ideas, particularly his pantheistic views that equated God with nature and his critique of traditional religious authority, were not exactly a hit with the local synagogue. In 1656, the community decided they'd had enough of his inconvenient truths and issued a cherem, essentially kicking him out with all the pomp and circumstance of a particularly dramatic bar mitzvah gone wrong. He was cursed, ostracized, and officially told to go think his big thoughts elsewhere.

Despite (or perhaps because of) his excommunication, Spinoza went on to produce some of the most influential philosophical works in Western thought, like his Ethics. His ideas on metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, and political philosophy laid groundwork for the Enlightenment and continue to vex and inspire thinkers centuries later. He may have been persona non grata in the synagogue, but he became a rock star to subsequent generations of freethinkers, earning him maximum kvell-worthiness for intellectual bravery, if not for synagogue attendance.