Uriel da Costa

Uriel da Costa and the young Spinoza. Depiction by Samuel Hirszenberg 1901.

Uriel da Costa ( Latinized Uriel Acosta , originally and until 1614 Gabriel da Costa , temporarily Adam Romes ; born 1585 in Porto ; died April 1640 in Amsterdam ) was a religious philosopher , theology critic and free thinker of Portuguese-Jewish origin. He lived and died on the cusp of the Early Enlightenment , and his autobiography contains one of the earliest printed defenses of deism .

Life

Portugal

Uriel da Costa was baptized with the Christian name Gabriel da Costa at his birth. His parents were grandsons of Portuguese Jews who had been forced to convert to Catholicism in 1497 . While the members of the father's family had become devout Catholics over the generations, several of the mother's relatives, Branca Dinis, were indicted as secret Jews ( Marranos ) before the Inquisition . Her grandmother and father were given light sentences in 1544; an aunt was burned at the stake in 1568. One of her brothers left Portugal in 1598 and converted to Judaism in Amsterdam; several of her cousins ​​also lived as Jews in Italy.

Gabriel da Costa's father, Bento da Costa Brandão, a trader and tax farmer, raised the son as part of the Catholic culture of the Portuguese upper class. In October 1600 Gabriel da Costa enrolled at the Jesuit College in Coimbra to study canon law . He interrupted his studies after four months, resumed it in 1604 and had to abandon it in 1608 because of the death of his father. From 1609 to 1611 he held the office of treasurer at the collegiate church of Cedofeita, a suburb of his hometown. In 1603 he had received the minor orders of the Catholic clergy .

According to his autobiography, the young Gabriel da Costa was so conscientious in the Catholic faith that the fear of the punishments of hell tormented him unbearably. At 22, he found comfort in the thought that there might be no life after death . It struck him that God only promises the Israelites in the Old Testament rewards or punishments in this world. Despite the threat of the Inquisition , he began to learn about Judaism by studying the Latin Bible and obeying some of its rules. In 1610 he won some family members for the Jewish faith . Some of them, in their later confessions before the Inquisition, gave a picture of the prayers and customs that made up Gabriel da Costa's private Judaism.

Around 1611 Gabriel da Costa resigned his church office and on March 5, 1612 married Francisca (from 1614: Rachel) de Crasto, a woman from Lisbon , who was also of Jewish descent. The couple settled in the village of Vila Cova da Lixa in northwestern Portugal, where Gabriel da Costa managed the income of a nobleman. In February 1614 he disappeared from the village, went with his wife, mother and brothers to Viana do Castelo and embarked there for Amsterdam.

Amsterdam, Hamburg and again Amsterdam

Gabriel da Costa, his mother and three of his brothers also publicly returned to Judaism on their arrival in Amsterdam, he was circumcised and changed his first name from Gabriel to Uriel. Around the beginning of 1615 Uriel da Costa settled with the women and a brother in Hamburg and joined the Portuguese community there. He lived from sea trade with his brother-in-law who had stayed in Porto.

Immediately after his return to Judaism, Uriel da Costa is said to have protested against the fact that many Jewish traditions do not follow the Bible but the Talmud . However, for the first two years he seems to have shared the way of life of the Hamburg Jewish community without contradiction. In 1616 he distributed a list of eleven Jewish regulations in which he saw a falsification of the biblical laws, which was entitled: Propostas contra a tradição (theses against tradition). The Hamburg Jewish rulers turned to the rabbinate in Venice for advice on religious law , which condemned da Costa's views as a heresy in the style of the Sadducees and Karaites . The Sephardic communities of Venice and Hamburg occupied Uriel da Costa in August 1618 with the spell (Herem). However, his brothers and his Amsterdam cousin Dinis Eanes continued to work with him in commercial transactions (as a merchant he used the pseudonym Adam Romes or Romez , commuting between Amsterdam and Hamburg ), so the ban did not harm him significantly.

Uriel da Costa's strong sense of honor prevented him from revoking his theses, rather he was working on a document in their defense. He came to the conclusion that the idea of ​​an immortal soul was unbiblical: the human soul is a physical life force in his blood and perishes when he dies. The Hamburg doctor and philosopher Samuel da Silva succeeded in gaining insight into the manuscript; he published the three most provocative chapters with a polemical refutation, which appeared in Amsterdam in 1623 ("On Immortality of the Soul").

Copy of humanae vitae

When the attacked moved to Amsterdam himself - his wife had died in December 1622 - the local community there pronounced the ban on him on May 15, 1623. He then decided to make his point of view public and had his manuscript entitled Exame das tradições phariseas conferidas com a lei escrita por Uriel, Jurista Hebreo, com reposta a Samuel de Silva seu falso calumniador (Examination of the Pharisee traditions by comparison with the Scripture law, by Uriel, Jewish legal scholar, together with a reply to a certain Samuel da Silva, his false slanderer) in Amsterdam in spring 1624. The first half of this work criticizes the Talmudic interpretations of the Bible, the second proves from this the mortality of the soul. This was the first public attack on the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the afterlife. The city council of Amsterdam had the printed edition burned in public; the author had previously been imprisoned and later exiled to Utrecht , where he lived for five years.

In 1629 Uriel da Costa's cousin Dinis Eanes succeeded in getting the "heretic" back into the Amsterdam Jewish community. Da Costa had had to vow not to contradict the Jewish religion in words or deeds. After the death of his wife, he planned a second marriage. In 1632, however, it became known that he did not follow the Jewish dietary rules at home and spoke disparagingly of Judaism towards Christians. The community then expelled him again, probably in 1633, and his brothers and cousin no longer supported him because they felt they had been betrayed.

The exile lived impoverished and shunned, in cohabitation with a maid, near the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam. In reflecting on his experiences he came to the conviction that all religions, the Christian, the Jewish and also those of the Bible, are nothing more than the work of man. They could not convey true knowledge of God; on the contrary, they favor lies and hatred. People would only be able to live happily and peacefully with one another if they gave up their religions and only followed reason and nature.

In order to escape his loneliness and return to the community "as a monkey among monkeys", Uriel da Costa in 1639 again pretended a return to the Jewish faith. He declared himself ready to submit to the flagellation (Hebrew Malkut or Makkot ), which rabbinical law prescribes as a penitential ritual. Uriel da Costa was through this degrading ritual, which was performed in the synagogue, which was fully occupied with men and women - 39 lashes on the bare upper body, then he had to lie down on the threshold of the church so that all those present could step over him -, so hit that a few days later, in April 1640, he shot himself with a pistol. He had previously tried to shoot his cousin, whom he believed responsible for this last humiliation, but failed.

Before his death he wrote an autobiographical text in Latin in which he describes his life and his philosophical views: Exemplar humanae vitae (example of a human life). In it he presents his path as an incessant individual search for a religion without belief in the afterlife . The documents of the Inquisition suggest that his return from Christianity to Judaism was inspired by traditions from the family and the Portuguese environment. In any case, Uriel da Costa only later brought his unusual career into an inner logic. “He had to explain to the reader, without making himself unbelievable, how, in the 56 years of his life, he could be a follower, a fanatical follower every time , of five different ideologies: Catholicism, Marranism, Orthodox Judaism, Sadducee Judaism and more naturalistic Deism ”(IS Révah: Uriel da Costa , p. 535).

Aftermath

The manuscript of the copy humanae vitae was found in Uriel da Costa after his suicide and used by Christian theologians for anti-Jewish propaganda. The Arminian Philippus van Limborch was the first to publish the work in Gouda in 1687 as an appendix to his work De veritate religionis Christianae amica collatio cum erudito Iudaeo ("Friendly conversation with a learned Jew about the truth of the Christian religion") and delivered without wanting to , the critics of religion since then, one of their classic texts.

Uriel da Costa's rebellion in Amsterdam's Sephardic Judaism anticipates that of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza , whose family was related by marriage to his , by forty years . His suffering as a free thinker in a religious world made him appear as a martyr of the Enlightenment . Translations of the copy humanae vitae appeared in most European languages ​​from 1790 onwards.

Many thinkers and writers after him have analyzed and interpreted Costa's criticism of religion. B. Johannes Müller (1672), Pierre Bayle (1720), Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1774), Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1774), Johann Gottfried Herder (1795) or Alfred Klaar (1909).

Israel Zangwill treats Uriel da Costa in his "Dreamers of the Ghetto" (1898).

Karl Gutzkow drew on Costa's work exemplar humanae vitae and on ideas from Herder for his tragedy Uriel Acosta (1846), which was edited in Hebrew (translation by Salomon Rubin , Vienna 1856) and Yiddish (e.g. by Moshe Lifshits ). until the middle of the 20th century was played a lot (in it the figure of "Ben Akiba" invented by the poet, popularized by a modification of the Bible verse Koh. 1,9, "Everything was already there"). Gutzkow's novella The Sadducees of Amsterdam (1834) is less well known .

Uriel da Costa's life story is based on the novels Ein Gewürm der Erde ( Um bicho da terra , 1984) by Agustina Bessa-Luís and the expulsion from hell (2001) by Robert Menasse .

Uriel da Costa's main work Exame das Tradições phariseas from 1624 was considered lost for a long time. It was not until 1989 that Herman Prins Salomon discovered a copy in the Royal Library of Copenhagen .

Works

• Propostas contra a tradição , 1616
• Sobre a mortalidade da alma do homem , in: Semuel da Silva: Tratado da inmortalidade da alma , 1623
• Exame das tradições phariseas conferidas com a lei escrita , 1624
• Copy humanae vitae , 1640 (first edition 1687)

Editions and translations

• Carl Gebhardt (ed.): The writings of Uriel da Costa (= Bibliotheca Spinozana , 2). Winter, Heidelberg 1922 (with introduction and translation).
• Herman Prins Salomon, Isaac SD Sassoon (Eds.): Uriel da Costa: Examination of Pharisaic Traditions. Exame das tradições phariseas. Facsimile of the unique copy in the Royal Library of Copenhagen. Brill, Leiden 1993, ISBN 90-04-09923-9 (with introduction and English translation)
• Uriel Acosta, Document of a Human Fate. Retranslated from Latin by Oskar Jancke. Verlag Die Kuppel, Aachen 1923 (p. 43: "A few days after writing this book, Uriel Acosta ended his life with a pistol shot.")
• Hans-Wolfgang Krautz (Ed.): Exemplar humanae vitae - example of a human life. Stauffenburg, Tübingen 2001, ISBN 3-86057-186-9 (text and translation)
• Omero Proietti (ed.): Uriel da Costa e l '"Exemplar humanae vitae", Quodlibet, Macerata 2005, ISBN 88-7462-034-9
• Uriel da Costa, Exame das tradiçoẽs phariseas - Esame delle tradizioni farisee (1624) , ed. by Omero Proietti, eum, Macerata 2015 ISBN 978-88-6056-403-0

literature

• Yehuda Eisenstein (Ed.): Uriel da Costa . In: Ozar Yisrael . Volume 2. Edition Menorah, Vienna 1924 (in Hebrew script).
• Moritz Freier: Uriel Acosta . In: Georg Herlitz (greeting): Jüdisches Lexikon . Volume 1. Jewish publishing house at Athenaeum, Frankfurt / M. 1987, ISBN 3-610-00400-2 (reprint of the Berlin 1927 edition).
• Josef Kastein : Uriel da Costa or The Tragedy of Minds . 2nd Edition. Löwit-Verlag, Vienna 1935.
• Konrad Müller : "The copy humanae vitae" by Uriel da Costa . Sauerländer Verlag, Aarau 1952.
• Steven Nadler: Spinoza. A life. Cambridge University, Cambridge 1999, ISBN 0-521-55210-9 , pp. 86-94
• Friedrich Niewöhner : Uriel da Costa . In: Andreas B. Kilcher (Ed.): Metzler Lexikon Jüdischer Philosophen. Philosophical thinking of Judaism from antiquity to the present . Metzler, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-476-01707-9 .
• Jean-Pierre Osier: D'Uriel da Costa à Spinoza . Berg International, Paris 1983, ISBN 2-900269-31-8 .
• Israël Salvator Révah (author), Carsten Lorenz Wilke (ed.): Uriel da Costa et les Marranes de Porto. Cours au Collège de France 1966-1972 . Center Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian, Paris 2004, ISBN 972-8462-37-9 .
• Günter Stemberger : History of Jewish Literature . Beck, Munich 1977, ISBN 3-406-06698-4 .
• Michael Studemund-Halévy : Uriel da Costa. In: Kirsten Heinsohn (ed.): The Jewish Hamburg. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 3-8353-0004-0 , p. 51.
• Salomon Wininger : Great Jewish National Biography . Kraus reprint, Nendeln. Volume: Abarbanel - Ezobi . 1979, ISBN 3-262-02104-0 (reprint of the 1925 edition of Cernăuti).
• Stephan Wyss: Passagalia. Aesthetic explorations about Uriel da Costa, about the farewell to the triune God and about the appearance of the other in the ambiguous . Edition Exodus, Lucerne 1996, ISBN 3-905575-01-9 (+ 1 CD).
• Tradizione e illuminismo in Uriel da Costa. Fonti, temi, questioni dell'Exame das tradiçoẽs phariseas , edited by O. Proietti e G. Licata, eum, Macerata 2016, ISBN 978-88-6056-465-8 Index

Web links

Wikisource: Uriel da Costa  - Sources and full texts

• Literature by and about Uriel da Costa in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Michel Abitbol: Histoire de juifs - de la genèse à nos jours . In: Marguerite de Marcillac (ed.): Tempus . Éditions Perrin, Paris 2016, ISBN 978-2-262-06807-3 , pp. 359-360 .