Uriel da Costa אוריאל דה קושטא

Born at Porto about 1585 and named Gabriel; he studied canon law at Coimbra and served as treasurer of a church benefice. In 1614 the family fled Portugal by way of Amsterdam to Hamburg, where he returned to Judaism and took the name Uriel. From 1623 he was in Amsterdam. He died there in April 1640, by his own hand.

What he wrote. The Propostas contra a Tradição (c. 1616) are lost: they are known from reports and from Leone Modena's refutation Magen ve-Tzinnah. The Exame das tradições phariseas (Amsterdam, 1624) denies the immortality of the soul and the divine authority of the Oral Law; the book was seized and burned. The Latin autobiography Exemplar humanae vitae was written in 1640 and printed in 1687 by Philipp van Limborch as an appendix to his Amica collatio — the same volume that contains the disputation with Isaac Orobio de Castro.

There were two bans: about 1616–18, when the Venetian rabbinate condemned the Propostas and the Hamburg community placed him under herem; and the Amsterdam one, confirmed and renewed after the Exame appeared in 1624, when he was denounced to the city magistrates, briefly imprisoned and fined some three hundred guilders.

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.

Three corrections, the first weightier than the others. For three centuries his book was thought lost, and his doctrine was reconstructed from Samuel da Silva's hostile quotations. The unique surviving copy was identified in the Royal Library at Copenhagen and published in facsimile, with translation and commentary, only in 1993: everything written about da Costa before that works from his opponent's paraphrase. Next: the authenticity of the Exemplar was long disputed — the text is suspiciously well shaped and reaches its Latin readers through a Christian polemicist; scholarship now inclines to authenticity, but it is a rhetorically constructed apologia, the sole source for the most famous scenes, and no communal record corroborates it. And last: he was not Spinoza's teacher, mentor or acquaintance — Spinoza was seven when he died. That link is a nineteenth-century literary invention, fixed by Karl Gutzkow's drama Uriel Acosta (1846), through which the story entered Russian and Jewish culture.