Joseph ha-Kohen

Origins and early life

Joseph ben Joshua ben Meïr ha-Kohen was born in Avignon on 20 December 1496, four years after his family, Jews of Cuenca in Castile, had been driven out of Spain by the expulsion of 1492. He was raised a Jew and remained one all his life.

Work and career

The family moved to Genoa in 1516 and then to Novi and Voltaggio, and Joseph practised medicine in the Italian cities, sharing the precarious life of the Jews of the peninsula: he was expelled from Genoa with the whole community in 1550, and again from other towns later. Out of that experience he wrote history in Hebrew, at a time when almost no one did. His Divrei ha-Yamim le-Malkhei Tsarfat u-Veit Ottoman, the Chronicles of the kings of France and of the Ottoman house, printed at Sabbioneta in 1554, is a history of the two great powers of his age written from the outside by a Jewish physician, and earned him the name of a second Josephus.

His Emek ha-Bakha, the Vale of Tears, finished in 1558, is a chronicle of the persecutions endured by the Jews from the destruction of the Temple to his own day, the first sustained attempt to write that history as a whole, and it remains a primary source for the expulsions, the massacres of 1391 and the Italian ghettos. He also translated Spanish accounts of the discovery of America into Hebrew and compiled a medical work.

He died at Genoa around 1575, and his chronicles were still being read and continued by other Jewish historians three centuries later.