From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics (only Ch. 1)

This is a pioneering study that traces the remarkable career of the seventeenth-century Marrano physician and Jewish apologist, Isaac Cardoso. Born in Portugal in 1604, Cardoso was raised and educated in Spain, where he lived for several decades as a nominal Christian. After teaching philosophy and medicine at the University of Valladolid, he came to Madrid, where he rapidly gained access to its vibrant social and intellectual life, and ultimately rose to be physician at the royal court. In 1648, at the height of his fame, he abruptly left Spain for Italy. In Venice he emerged openly as a professing Jew, and subsequently settled in Verona as physician in the ghetto. There he summed up his scientific and philosophic views in his Philosophia libera , and finally wrote his magnificent defense of the Jew and Judaism, Las excelencias de los hebreos .Though focused on Cardoso, Professor Yerushalmi's study is not only a biography but also a history of "Marranos," the crypto-Jews of Spain and Portugal, in the seventeenth century. It explores the wide range of the Marrano phenomenon, its social milieu, the nature of Iberian anti-semitism, the relationship between Marranism and Jewish Messianism, and important aspects of the Judeo-Christian polemic. New insights are offered into the scope of Jewish knowledge available to Marranos in Spain and Portugal, and their integration and re-education in the Jewish communities to which they fled. Above all, the author has attempted to see the "two lives" of Cardoso - that of the Iberian Marrano, and that of the Jew in an Italian ghetto - as a unity. To do so, he has integrated a vast array of original sources in Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Hebrew, and several other languages.This book won the only Clarke F. Ansley Award given in 1966.[Taken from the inside of the dust jacket]