Manoel Bocarro Francês

Origins and early life

Manoel Bocarro Francês was born at Lisbon about 1588, the son of Fernando Bocarro, a Marrano physician — one of the Portuguese Jews forcibly converted in 1497 who kept their faith in secret.

Work and career

He studied medicine at Coimbra and Alcalá, and published in 1619 a poem, the Anacephaleoses, whose astrological prophecies about the restoration of Portugal drew the attention of the Inquisition. Fearing arrest, he left Lisbon in 1625 for Rome, and thereafter lived in Italy, in Hamburg and in Amsterdam. This fiche states plainly that once beyond the reach of the Inquisition he professed Judaism openly, under the name Jacob Rosales, and that he was denounced to the Lisbon Inquisition in absentia in 1658, by which time he was long out of its reach.

He practised medicine and taught mathematics, corresponded with Galileo, who encouraged him to write on astronomy and astrology and whose work he defended, and published treatises on comets, on the calendar and on medicine in Latin, Portuguese and Spanish. In 1647 the Emperor Ferdinand III created him a count palatine in recognition of his scientific work, an unusual honour for a professing Jew, and he served as a diplomatic agent for the Portuguese crown in Hamburg during the war of restoration against Spain.

He ended his life in Italy, at Florence or Livorno, about 1662. His career shows what the Iberian Jewish exile made possible: a man who had to hide his religion to study in Portugal became, once free, both a Jew and a count of the Holy Roman Empire.