Alfonso de Zamora

Origins and early life

Alfonso de Zamora was born in 1476 in Zamora, in Castile, and raised a Jew — a trained Talmudist formed in the last generation of open Jewish learning in Spain before the expulsion of 1492; the Spanish reference works describe him plainly as a judeoconverso, a Jew who passed through conversion, and a dedicated bio-genealogical study has reconstructed his family.

Work and career

What Spain's Jews had been forced to abandon, he carried into the new age of print: engaged for the greatest scholarly enterprise of Cardinal Cisneros, he prepared the Hebrew column and the Aramaic Targum of the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, printed at Alcalá between 1514 and 1517 — the first printed polyglot Bible of the age, still studied today. He became the first holder of the chair of Hebrew at the University of Alcalá, wrote a pioneering Hebrew grammar and dictionary for Christian students, and spent decades copying and correcting Hebrew manuscripts.

Through his hands, the language and learning of Sepharad survived inside the Spanish Renaissance. He died at Alcalá de Henares in 1544 or 1545.