Isaac Orobio de Castro יצחק אורוביו די קשטרו
a Spanish physician and professor who came through the Inquisition's torture and became the age's subtlest Jewish polemicist
Born about 1617 in Spain into a New Christian family, he studied medicine and philosophy, taught at the university of Alcalá and served as physician in noble households. The Inquisition arrested, tortured and held him; on release he crossed into France, where he became professor of medicine at Toulouse, and in 1662 he came to Amsterdam, returned to Judaism and took the name Isaac. He died there in 1687.
He fought two wars at once. Against Christian argument — his public disputation with the Remonstrant theologian Philipp van Limborch was printed in De veritate religionis christianae amica collatio (Gouda, 1687). And against scepticism inside the Nation itself: his writings against Juan de Prado and against the deist current are the most precise texts we have on what actually alarmed the Amsterdam community in Spinoza's generation.
His case shows what that community was: a university professor raised Catholic, returned to Judaism at forty-five, who became at once its chief defender in argument with Christian theology, in the scholastic language both sides shared.
On the timeline
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- The polemics against Juan de Prado and the deists — the argument inside the community, not only with Christianity
Documents of the period
- De veritate religionis christianae amica collatio, Gouda 1687 — the printed disputation with Van Limborch; the same volume holds da Costa's Exemplar
Scholarship
- Y. Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism: The Story of Isaac Orobio de Castro, Oxford — the biography and his place inside the Nation
Basis: documents and evidence.