Isaac Aboab da Fonseca

Origins and early life

Isaac Aboab da Fonseca was born Simão da Fonseca at Castro Daire, in Portugal, on 1 February 1605, into a family of Marranos — his father, Álvaro da Fonseca, was David Aboab in the faith the family kept in secret — and was seven when they fled the Inquisition, through Saint-Jean-de-Luz in France, to Amsterdam, where the child was circumcised and became Isaac; he was thus a Jew by birth and lineage who lived openly as one from childhood, which this fiche records as his route.

Work and career

A pupil of Isaac Uziel, he was ordained at twenty-one and became one of the rabbis of the Portuguese community of Amsterdam. In 1642, when the Dutch West India Company sent settlers to the Brazil it had taken from Portugal, he sailed with them to Recife as the rabbi of the congregation Zur Israel — the first rabbi to serve in the Americas. He stayed twelve years, through the Portuguese siege of the city, of which he wrote a Hebrew poem of thanksgiving, Zekher Asiti le-Nifla'ot El, the first Hebrew work composed in the New World, and returned to Amsterdam when Recife fell in 1654; some of his flock, turned away from Brazil, founded that year the first Jewish community of New Amsterdam, which became New York.

Back in Amsterdam he was one of the rabbis who signed the ban on Spinoza in 1656, translated the kabbalistic works of Abraham Cohen de Herrera into Hebrew, and — this fiche says it plainly — was swept, like most of his community, into the messianic fever of Sabbatai Zevi in 1666. Chief rabbi of the Portuguese Jews from 1660, he preached the inaugural sermon of the great Portuguese Synagogue of Amsterdam in 1675, and died on 4 April 1693, at eighty-eight.