Miguel de Barrios

Origins and early life

Miguel de Barrios was born in 1635 at Montilla in Andalusia to a Marrano family of Portuguese origin: his father Simon de Barrios, whose Jewish name was Jacob Levi Caniso, and his grandfather Abraham Levi Caniso were secret Jews, and his father fled to Portugal and then to Algiers to escape the Inquisition.

Work and career

Miguel left Spain in 1650, went to Livorno, where he professed Judaism openly and took the name Daniel Levi, sailed for the Caribbean in 1660 with a group of settlers, lost his wife within weeks of landing at Tobago, and came back to Europe. This fiche states plainly the double life he then led for more than twenty years: he settled at Brussels as Captain Miguel de Barrios in the Spanish army of Flanders, living outwardly as a Catholic officer and courting patrons with Spanish verse, while making regular journeys to Amsterdam where he lived as the Jew Daniel Levi with his second wife Abigail and his children.

He wrote in Spanish for both worlds, and his output is enormous: the Flor de Apolo (1665), the Coro de las Musas (1672) dedicated to Charles II, plays, panegyrics for princes, and, on the Jewish side, poems on the martyrs burned by the Inquisition, Contra la verdad no hay fuerza on the auto-da-fé of Córdoba of 1665, the Triumpho del govierno popular defending the constitution of the Amsterdam community, and the historical accounts of its synagogues and academies that remain a principal source for its history.

Later years

In 1674 he came permanently to Amsterdam, fell for a time into messianic exaltation over Sabbatai Zevi and into a fast that nearly killed him, was brought back by the rabbis, and lived his last years in poverty, writing for patrons who paid little. He died in Amsterdam in February 1701.