Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira רבי שאול לוי מורטירה

Born about 1596 at Venice, died at Amsterdam on 10 February 1660. At thirteen he went to Paris as secretary to the Marrano physician Elijah Montalto at the court of Marie de' Medici; in 1616 he brought Montalto's body to Amsterdam for Jewish burial and stayed. He became hakham of the Beth Jacob congregation and, from 1639 after the union of the three congregations, senior hakham of Kahal Talmud Torah. Six hundred guilders and a hundred baskets of peat; an obligation to preach three times a month; and the top class of the Keter Torah yeshiva — Talmud and Jewish philosophy.

His work was re-education. His congregation consisted overwhelmingly of former conversos raised as Catholics. Marc Saperstein has shown the sermons doing four things systematically: legitimating the returnees, taking Catholic doctrine apart from inside (Morteira knew it well), explaining galut as providence, and warning against scepticism. Providencia de Dios con Ysrael argues that the survival and continued election of Israel in exile is itself the demonstrable working of providence — against Christian supersessionism and against converso despair.

He sat on the rabbinate the ma'amad consulted before the herem on Spinoza of 27 July 1656, and on the body that dealt with Uriel da Costa. He also taught Moses Zacuto. In temper he held the rationalist, anti-kabbalistic pole of Amsterdam learning — Maimonides, Gersonides, Crescas — in tension with Aboab da Fonseca's Lurianism: the fault line ran inside a single synagogue.

Three corrections. "Morteira was Spinoza's teacher and Spinoza his prize pupil" is largely legend: Morteira taught the top class of Keter Torah, and Spinoza left the school at about seventeen to run his father's business, with no evidence that he ever reached that class; the affecting scene of master and apostate comes from the hostile early lives of Colerus and "Lucas." He was not Sephardi by descent: Daniel Levi de Barrios calls him "de Alemania natural," and current scholarship reconciles this by making him Venice-born of a family of Ashkenazi origin. And his manuscripts are often cited as printed books: one book appeared in his lifetime, Giv'at Sha'ul (1645).