Juan de Prado

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Juan (Daniel) de Prado (* around 1612 in Andalusia , † around 1670 in Antwerp ) was a Spanish - Jewish doctor and philosopher.

Life

Juan de Prado was born in Spain around 1612 into an originally Portuguese - Marran family from Vila Flor . He grew up in Lopera ( province of Jaén ). He studied theology at the University of Alcalá de Henares and medicine at the University of Toledo , where he graduated with a doctorate in 1638. His crypto-Jewish activities have been known since that time . Accordingly, he drew the attention of the Inquisition . When the pressure of the Santo officio on his family members increased, he moved with his wife and mother around 1650 as personal physician to the Archbishop of Seville to Rome and from there to Hamburg in 1654 . Here he entered the Sephardic community and took the name Daniel. In 1655 he moved to Amsterdam , where he entered the Talmud Torah community and enrolled as a practicing doctor in the Collegium medicum .

In Amsterdam he took courses with the Orthodox Rabbi Morteira and studied the writings of Maimonides and Crescas . A circle of young Jewish intellectuals formed around Prado to discuss new ideas. Young Spinoza is said to have been among them. Prado represented ideas similar to those of Uriel da Costa before him . He too doubted the divine origin of the Mosaic Laws and questioned the authority of the rabbis. He rejected the dogma of the immortality of the soul and took the deistic view of the primacy of natural law . The result was that Prado (at the same time as Spinoza) was threatened with ban by the Jewish community in 1656 . Although he publicly revoked his ideas in the synagogue , he was indicted again along with Daniel Ribeira and finally excommunicated from the community in 1658 . His renewed request to the community to free him from the ban was rejected.

Prado left Amsterdam around 1660 and retired to Antwerp, which was then Spanish. Contact with Amsterdam did not break off completely. In the 1660s his former friend and current opponent Isaak Orobio de Castro addressed several letters from there to him; so the Epistola Invectiva Contra Prado (1663/64), in which the controversial ideas of Prado are presented in detail. Dr. Juan de Prado probably died in the Antwerp area between 1666 and 1672. The Marran poet Miguel de Barrios dedicated a (derogatory) poem to his death in Amsterdam in 1672.

Literature (selection)

  • Natalia Muchnik. Une vie marrane: Les pérégrinations de Juan de Prado dans l'Europe du XVIIe siècle . Paris 2005. ISBN 978-2745311887
  • Steven Nadler: Spinoza. A life. Emphasis. Cambridge 2001. ISBN 0-521-00293-1
  • Yirmiyahu Yovel: Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano of Reason . Princeton 1989. ISBN 0691020787
  • Yosef Kaplan: From Christianity to Judaism. The story of Isaac Orobio de Castro . Oxford 1989. ISBN 978-1904113140
  • Israël S. Revah: Spinoza et Juan de Prado . Paris 1959.
  • Carl Gebhardt : Juan de Prado . In Chronicon Spinozanum . 3 (1923), pp. 219-291.
  • Entry: Prado, Juan (Daniel) de. In: Encyclopaedia Judaica . 2nd Edition. Volume 16, Detroit / New York a. a. 2007, ISBN 978-0-02-865944-2 , pp. 446-447 (English).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gebhardt 1923
  2. ↑ a b Revah 1959
  3. ↑ Nadler 2001
personal data
SURNAME Juan de Prado
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Daniel de Prado
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Spanish doctor and philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH around 1612
PLACE OF BIRTH Andalusia
DATE OF DEATH around 1670
Place of death uncertain: Antwerp