Las Excelencias de los Hebreos (The Excellences of the Hebrews), Isaac (Fernando) Cardoso, Amsterdam: David de Castro Tartas, 1679

441 pp. (8 1/4 x 6 1/4 in.;  210 x 160mm).  [8], 331, [2], 333-431 pp., pp. 257-264 misbound. Title decorated with a woodcut showing a hand gathering flowers, with the motto: el que me esparsio me recogera (He who has scattered me will gather me). This copy with the additional frontispiece preceding part two, headed: Las excelencias y calunias de los Hebreos, with another floral motif and the motto: Ellos maldiziran y yo bendizire'(They shall curse and I shall bless). Front free endpaper with owners' notes, marginalia throughout. Contemporary mottled calf gilt, spine in six compartments over raised bands, gilt-tooled and lettered, marbled endpapers.



 

Aharon van David de Pinto; Jacob Henriques de Pinto.

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso. A Study in Seventeenth~Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics; Wolf I, 1265; Rib.Santos, 313, Kayserling, 34, Palau 44099, Neves 30; Den Boer, Spanish and Portuguese Printing, 315.

First edition of Cardoso's masterwork of Jewish apologetics

Born in Portugal in 1604 to a family of crypto-Jews, by the age of 20, Fernando Cardoso was already teaching philosophy at the University of Valladolid, where he also received his doctorate in medicine in 1625. By 1630 he was in Madrid where he rapidly gained access to the highest literary and social circles and eventually became a physician at the court of Philip IV.  While in the Spanish capital Cardoso published a number of scientific and philosophical treatises in addition to his poetry.

Until 1648, Cardozo, an active Judaizer, continued to live outwardly in Spain as a Christian.  Although never prosecuted by the Inquisition, living a double life ultimately proved intolerable and in 1648, together with his younger brother Miguel [Abraham], he suddenly disappeared from Madrid and re-emerged in Venice where he joined the Sephardi community as a professing Jew, abandoning the name Fernando in favor of the Hebrew name, Isaac. In 1653, he relocated to Verona where he served the Jewish community as a physician for some 30 years until his death in 1683. It was in Verona that he wrote his apologetic masterpiece, Las Excelencias de los Hebreos.

Las excelencias is divided into two parts, each with ten chapters. The first part extols the 'excelencias' or admirable qualities of the Jewish people while in the second section Cardoso refutes ten 'calunias' (slanders) against the Jews.

Prof. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Cardoso's biographer has called Las excelencias de los Hebreos "a masterpiece of Jewish anti-defamation ... Erudite, passionate, eloquent, it is all the more impressive and interesting as the work of a former Marrano who only came into the full possession and knowledge of his Jewish heritage in middle age. For while the book is, explicitly, a defense of Jewry as a whole, it is also, on a personal level, a justification of his own choice to live as a Jew."

The bibliography of Cardoso's writings, enumerated on the front free endpaper is probably in the hand of Aharon van David de Pinto (ca. 1740). The remaining entries on that page as well as the numerous annotations throughout the book in Hebrew, Spanish, Dutch and Greek are those of Jacob Henriques de Pinto. Both were descended from Jacob de Pinto, to whom Cardoso dedicated the work.