"All True, All Holy, All Divine": Jewish Identity in the Polemics and Letters of Isaac Orobio de Castro, a Former Portuguese New Christian in 1600s Amsterdam

An important consequence of the expulsion and forced conversions of Jews from Spain and Portugal at the end of the 1400s was the establishment of communities of these individuals and their descendants in Italy, the Ottoman Empire, northwestern Europe, and colonial Latin America. During the 1600s, Amsterdam stood out from these other locales as a center of settlement by people of Sephardic, or Iberian Jewish, roots for at least two reasons. First, the émigrés from the Iberian Peninsula were in fact conversos or New Christians, that is, baptized Catholics of Jewish descent, who upon arrival in the Dutch republic could build a Jewish identity that was denied them in Spain and Portugal. Second, mercantile opportunities and a religious environment more tolerant of Jews helped the Iberian arrivals turn the city into a great center of Sephardic economic, cultural, and spiritual life. One such émigré, the physician and polemicist Isaac Orobio de Castro, exemplified the diverse intellectual elite of the New Christian Portuguese people who became "New Jews" in such a setting. This article argues that repression of Jewish identity in Iberia led Orobio to engage in polemics with Protestant, Catholic, and, in the case of Juan (Daniel) de Prado, converso thinkers, in which he expounded Judaism as a divinely inspired faith and legitimated what for him was its superiority to Christianity. Additionally, in his epistolary correspondence with Prado, Orobio successfully cataloged the ways in which the deistic beliefs of his fellow former New Christian fell outside accepted Jewish teachings of the time, even as such beliefs foreshadowed an incipient transition to Jewish identity not rigorously bound to biblical teachings. In the following pages, I will briefly outline how conditions in Amsterdam enabled Orobio to espouse rabbinic Judaism there, as well as the peripatetic life that led him to Holland. Then I will consider the three responses of Orobio to Prado in order to demonstrate how the former's view of Judaism—as the bearer of a divine law that an all-powerful God gave to the Jewish people, esteemed above other peoples—led him to criticize sharply the heterodox views of his friend for denying the unique status of this religion. Finally, I will examine the treatises La observancia de la divina ley de Mosseh (Observance of the Divine Law of Moses) and part 1 of Prevenciones divinas contra la vana idolatría de las gentes (Divine Forewarnings against the Vain Idolatry of Catholics) that he directed, respectively, to Huguenot and Catholic opponents, as documents that assert a Jewish identity by attacking foundational teachings of Christianity.

A condensed summary of the establishment of the Sephardic community of Amsterdam and its Iberian and Jewish characteristics during the 1600s will help contextualize the arrival there of Orobio and explain his defense of Judaism in anti-Christian terms.¹ Financial woes resulting from political imperialism contributed to increased emigration of New Christians from Spain and even more from Portugal, especially during the sixty-year period between 1580 and 1640, when Spain annexed the crown of its smaller neighbor.² Thus, early in the seventeenth century, the Duke of Lerma, the valido, or favorite minister, of King Felipe III, agreed to accept 170,000 cruzados from Portuguese conversos in exchange for granting them permission to leave the peninsula. Prior to this bribe lifting the prohibition on travel, New Christians wishing to travel outside Iberia might serve as ship's crew or captain, and in the case of Portuguese conversos, obtain a license to trade in the Indies if the Spanish crowned deemed them necessary to overseas commerce.³ The subsequent Twelve Years Truce of 1609–1621 further stimulated emigration by enabling Portuguese converso merchants to participate in Amsterdam's trade with Dutch colonies in the East and West Indies,⁴ as well as position them to form commercial networks with New Christians in these and other overseas outposts.

Then, during the 1620s, Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares and valido of Felipe IV, invited Portuguese converso bankers to...