“…After Gersonides, many Jewish philosophers did likewise, and some of them, like Rabbi Hasdai Crescas (c. 1340-1410/11), who rejected the concept of intellectual love, and Leon Ebreo (c. 1465-after 1523), who accepted it, had a distinct influence on Spinoza's theory of amor Dei intellectualis (NADLER 2014, 104). Noa Lahav Ayalon (2021) has convincingly argued for a single concept of essence that can be conceived rationally as shared or unique, as Spinoza's accounts of essence point to "a single, specific, and unequivocal notion that has various expressions and can be perceived in different ways." Neither dualistic nor monadological, the individual cannot thus be evoked in a Hobbesian-like methodological atomism that allows for the civic constitution of the body politic, but rather refers us back to "human essence as an idea with shared properties between individual humans" (AYALON 2021, 33), including friendship, commonwealth, and love.…”