Diogo Pires
Diogo Pires · Arts & Literature
Portuguese Marrano who became one of the great neo-Latin poets of the Renaissance, 'Didacus Pyrrhus', and lived out his life openly as a Jew, Isaiah Cohen, in Ragusa
1517, Évora, Portugal — 1599 (ou 1607 selon certaines sources), Raguse (Dubrovnik, Croatie)
Évora, Louvain, Anvers, Ferrare, Ancône, Raguse
Diogo Pires is recognized among Jewish contributors to Arts & Literature — Portuguese Marrano who became one of the great neo-Latin poets of the Renaissance, 'Didacus Pyrrhus', and lived out his life openly as a Jew, Isaiah Cohen, in Ragusa
Origins and early life
Diogo Pires was born in Évora in 1517 into a family of Marranos — Portuguese Jews forcibly baptized in 1497 who kept their faith in secret — and left Portugal around 1535, when the Inquisition was being established there, never to return. He studied at Louvain and lived in Antwerp, then followed the road of the Portuguese exiles into Italy: Ferrara, where his first book of poems appeared in 1545, Venice, and Ancona, from which the persecution of Pope Paul IV, who burned twenty-four Marranos in 1556, drove him out.
Work and career
He settled in Ragusa, today Dubrovnik, and there, at last, he lived openly as a Jew under the name Isaiah Cohen, a member and at times the spokesman of the small Jewish community of the republic, while continuing to publish under his Latin names, Didacus Pyrrhus Lusitanus and Flavius Eborensis. He was one of the finest Latin poets of his century — elegies, epigrams, the moral distichs of the Cato Minor printed at Venice in 1592 and 1596 — praised by the humanists of Italy and studied today by scholars of Renaissance Latin.
Later years
He wrote the elegy for the tomb of his friend and countryman the physician Amatus Lusitanus, who died at Salonika in 1568, and he himself died in Ragusa, in 1599 by most accounts, and was buried in its Jewish cemetery; he is not to be confused with his namesake Diogo Pires who, as Solomon Molcho, was burned at Mantua in 1532.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/pyrrhus-didacus
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Portuguese Marrano who became one of the great neo-Latin poets of the Renaissance, 'Didacus Pyrrhus', and lived out his life openly as a Jew, Isaiah Cohen, in Ragusa
Source: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/pyrrhus-didacus
