Uriel da Costa: the recantation, the thirty-nine lashes and the shot

Gabriel da Costa was reading canon law at Coimbra and serving as treasurer of a church benefice when his family fled Portugal in 1614. At Hamburg he returned to Judaism and took the name Uriel. About 1616 he circulated the Propostas contra a Tradição, an argument against the oral tradition; the Venetian rabbinate condemned it and the Hamburg community banned him. From 1623 he was at Amsterdam, and in 1624 he printed the Exame das tradições phariseas, denying the immortality of the soul and the divine authority of the Oral Law. The book was seized and burned, the author denounced to the city magistrates, briefly imprisoned and fined some three hundred guilders.

He remained under ban a very long time — the sources give seven years and fifteen, and cannot be reconciled. In 1640 he submitted: he recanted publicly in the synagogue, received thirty-nine lashes and, by his own account, lay across the threshold while the congregation stepped over him. Days or weeks later he shot himself, having first — again by his own account — tried to shoot a kinsman, the pistol misfiring.

He is the first Jew in Europe to print the argument that the immortality of the soul does not follow from Scripture — precisely the charge levelled at Spinoza a generation later. The Exame also entered the Catholic Index: a single book condemned at once by the synagogue, the Amsterdam magistracy and Rome.

Three corrections. The first outweighs the others: for three centuries the book was thought lost and its content reconstructed from the hostile quotations of Samuel da Silva, whose refutation appeared a year before the book itself. The unique surviving copy was found in the Royal Library at Copenhagen and published in facsimile with a translation only in 1993 — everything written about da Costa before that works from his opponent's paraphrase. Second: the authenticity of the Latin autobiography Exemplar humanae vitae was long disputed; it is now held substantially genuine, but it is a rhetorically constructed apologia transmitted through a Christian polemicist, the sole source for its most famous scenes, and corroborated by no communal record. Third: Spinoza was seven when da Costa died; the link between them is a nineteenth-century invention fixed by Gutzkow's drama Uriel Acosta (1846), through which the story entered the Russian and Jewish stage.