Benedictus de Castro

Origins and early life

Benedictus de Castro — Baruch Nehemias by his Hebrew name — was born around 1597 in Hamburg, the son of Rodrigo de Castro, the Portuguese physician who had fled the Inquisition and returned openly to Judaism in the free city, where he founded a dynasty of doctors.

Work and career

Trained at Franeker and Padua, Benedictus became one of the leading physicians of northern Europe and a pillar of Hamburg's Portuguese Jewish community, which he served as its head. In 1631, when Christian physicians published slanders against their Jewish colleagues — accusing them of poisoning and ignorance — he answered under the pen name Philotheus Castellus with the Flagellum calumniantium, the Scourge of Slanderers, a defense of the Jewish physicians of Europe that the histories of medical ethics still cite.

His fame reached Stockholm: in 1645 Queen Christina of Sweden summoned him to her sickbed, and he became, by the records, the first Jew known by name to have entered the kingdom of Sweden, treating the queen and remaining in her service as physician-in-ordinary. He died in Hamburg on 31 January 1684, having outlived his queen's reign by three decades.