History of the Jews, Vol. 5 (of 6). Graetz Heinrich
of members of a family to one another. The best in Judaism and other revealed religions is borrowed from the religion of nature. The latter knows only love and union; the others, on the contrary, arm parents and children against one another on account of the faith. This theory was the suggestion of his bitterness, because his relatives avoided him, and showed him but little consideration. Da Costa appears to have put forward as the religion of nature what the Talmud calls the Noachian commandments.
In spite of his complete falling away from Judaism, he resolved, as he himself states, on the intervention of his nephew, and after passing fifteen years in excommunication (about 1618–1633), to alter his course of life and actions, make a confession, or rather put his signature to such a document, an act of what he himself describes as thoroughgoing hypocrisy, designed to purchase repose and comfort, at the cost of conviction. But his passionate nature robbed him of both. He could not impose renunciation upon himself to conform to the religious usages of Judaism, but transgressed them immediately after his penitent confession. He was detected by one of his relatives, and they all, especially the nephew who had brought about the reconciliation, were so embittered that they persecuted him even more relentlessly than those less nearly connected with him. They again renounced intercourse with him, prevented his marriage, and are said to have injured him in his property. Through his passionate hatred of Judaism, which he had confessed with his lips, he committed an act of folly which exposed his true sentiments. Two Christians, an Italian and a Spaniard, had come from London to Amsterdam to attach themselves to Judaism. When they consulted Uriel da Costa on the subject, he gave a frightful picture of the Jewish form of religion, warned them against laying a heavy yoke on their necks, and advised them to continue in their own faith. Contrary to promise, the two Christians betrayed Da Costa's remarks on Judaism to the leaders of the community. The war between them and him broke out afresh. The rabbis summoned him a second time before their tribunal, set before him his religious transgressions, and declared that he could escape a second severe excommunication only by submitting to a solemn penance in public. More from a sense of honor than from conviction he refused this penance, and so was a second time laid under the ban, much more severe than the first, in which condition he continued for seven years. During this time he was treated by the members of the community with contempt, and even spat upon. His brothers and nephews behaved with the greatest severity towards him, because they thought by that means to force him to repentance. They reckoned on his helplessness and weakness, and they did not reckon amiss.
Da Costa meanwhile had reached middle age, had been made submissive by conflicts and excitement, and longed for repose. By process of law, which he had instituted against the Amsterdam authorities, he could obtain nothing, because he could not put his complaints into a tangible form; he consented, therefore, to everything demanded for his humiliation. His public penance was to be very severe. There was no definite prescription on the subject in the religious Code, which, in fact, is opposed in spirit to public penance; the sinner is not to confess aloud his transgressions against religion, but in silence to God. Judaism, from its origin, objected to confession and the mechanical avowal of sins. For this reason it remained for the college of rabbis to appoint a form of penance. The Amsterdam rabbis and the communal council, consisting of Marranos, adopted as a model the gloomy form of the tribunal of the Inquisition.
As soon as Da Costa had consented to his humiliation, he was led into one of the synagogues, which was full of men and women. There was to be a sort of auto-da-fé, and the greatest possible publicity was given to his penance because the scandal had been public. He had to ascend a stage and read out his confession of sins: that he had desecrated the Sabbath, violated the dietary laws, denied articles of faith, and advised persons not to adopt Judaism. He solemnly declared that he resolved to be no longer guilty of such offenses, but to live as a true Jew. On a whisper from the first rabbi, probably Saul Morteira, he went to a corner of the synagogue, stripped as far as the girdle, and received thirty-nine stripes with a scourge. Then he was obliged to sit on the ground, after which the ban was removed. Not yet having satisfied the authorities, he had to stretch himself out on the threshold of the synagogue, that those present might step over him. It was certainly an excessive penance which was imposed upon him, not from a desire of persecution or vengeance, but from religious scrupulousness and mimicry of Catholic forms. No wonder that the disgrace and humiliation deeply wounded Da Costa, who had consented to the punishment, not from inward repentance, but from exhaustion. The public disgrace had shaken his whole being, and suggested thoughts of revenge. Instead of pitying the rabbis as the creatures of historical conditions, he hated them with a glowing feeling of revenge as the refuse of mankind, and as if they thought of nothing but deception, lying, and wickedness. His wounded sense of honor and heated imagination saw in the Jews of the Amsterdam community, perhaps in all the Jews on the earth's surface, his personal, venomous foes, and in Judaism an institution to stir up men to hatred and persecution. Thinking that he was surrounded by bitter enemies, and feeling too weak for a fresh conflict, he resolved to die, but at the same time to take vengeance on his chief persecutor, his brother (or cousin). To excite the sympathy of his contemporaries and posterity, he wrote his autobiography and confession, which, however, contain no new thoughts, only bitterness and furious attacks against the Jews, intermingled with fresh aspersions of them in the eyes of Christians: that even at this time they would have crucified Jesus, and that the state ought not to grant them freedom of religious profession. This document, drawn up amidst preparations for death, breathed nothing but revenge against his enemies. After he had finished his impassioned testament, he loaded two pistols, and fired one at his relative, who was passing his house. He missed his aim, so he shut the door of his room, and killed himself with the other weapon (April, 1640).
On opening his residence after the report of the shot, they found on the table his autobiography, "An Example of Human Life," in which he brought Jews and Judaism to the bar, and with pathetic sentences described them as his excited imagination in the last hour suggested. By this act and legacy Da Costa showed that he suffered himself to be overpowered by his feelings rather than guided by reason. He was neither a thinker nor a wise man, nor was his a manly character. As his system of thought was not well balanced, leading him to oppose what existed as false and bad, because it was in his way, he left no lasting impression. His Jewish contemporaries persisted in stubborn silence about him, as if they wished his memory to fall into oblivion. He acted like a boy who breaks the windows in an old decaying building, and thus creates a draught.
The second seditious thinker of this time, Leo (Judah) ben Isaac Modena (born 1571, died 1649), was of another stamp, and was reared in different surroundings. Leo Modena was descended from a cultivated family which migrated to Modena, in Italy, on the expulsion of the Jews from France, and whose ancestors, from lack of intellectual clearness, despite their education, fostered every kind of superstition and fanciful idea.
Leo Modena possessed this family peculiarity in a high degree. He was a marvelous child. In his third year he could read a portion from the prophets; in his tenth, he delivered a sort of sermon; in his thirteenth, he wrote a clever dialogue on the question of the lawfulness of playing with cards and dice, and composed an elegy on the death of the teacher of his youth, Moses Basula, in Hebrew and Italian verses having the same sound – a mere trifle, to be sure, but which at a riper age pleased him so well that he had it printed. But the marvelous child did not develop into a marvelous man, into a personage of prominence or distinction. Modena became, however, the possessor of astonishingly varied knowledge. As he pursued all sorts of occupations to support himself, viz., those of preacher, teacher of Jews and Christians, reader of prayers, interpreter, writer, proof-reader, book-seller, broker, merchant, rabbi, musician, match-maker, and manufacturer of amulets, without ever attaining to a fixed position, so he studied many departments of knowledge without specially distinguishing himself in any. He grasped the whole of biblical, Talmudic, and Rabbinic literature, was well read in Christian theological works, understood something of philosophy and physics, was able to write Hebrew and Italian verses – in short, he had read everything accessible through the medium of three languages, Hebrew, Latin, and Italian. He remembered what he read, for he possessed an excellent memory, invented a method of sharpening it still more, and wrote a book on this subject. But Leo Modena had no delight either in knowledge or poetry; neither had value for him except so far as they brought bread. He preached, wrote books and verses, translated and commented, all to earn money, which he wasted in card-playing, a passion which he theoretically considered most culpable, but in