Isaac Orobio de Castro

Origins and early life

Isaac Orobio de Castro was born Baltasar Orobio de Castro in Bragança, in Portugal, around 1617, into a family of Marranos — descendants of the Jews forcibly baptized in 1497 who kept their faith in secret — who moved to Seville when he was a child, and this fiche states his route into this directory as it stands in the records of two countries: the Inquisition of Spain tried him as a secret Jew, and the synagogue of Amsterdam received him as a Jew returned.

Work and career

He studied philosophy and medicine, taught metaphysics at the University of Salamanca and practiced as a physician in Seville, a Catholic to all appearances, until a servant denounced him in 1654; the Inquisition held him for three years, tortured him on the rack and the pulley, and released him in 1656 as a penitent, with the sanbenito on his back. He left Spain for France, taught medicine at Toulouse under the protection of the crown, and in 1662 went to Amsterdam, where he was circumcised, took the name Isaac and became one of the leading men of the Portuguese community, a physician and a philosopher in Spanish and in Latin.

He spent the rest of his life defending the faith he had recovered: against Juan de Prado, the Marrano deist who had led him toward doubt in Spain; against Spinoza, whose Ethics he answered in the Certamen philosophicum of 1684 while remaining, the sources say, on friendly terms with the man; and against Christianity itself, in the Prevenciones divinas, which circulated in manuscript among the Marranos of Europe for a century, and in the public debate on the truth of the Christian religion that he held in 1687 with the liberal theologian Philipp van Limborch, who printed it with a candor rare in that age. He died in Amsterdam on 7 November 1687.