Miguel de Silveira

Origins and early life

Miguel de Silveira was born about 1578 at Celorico da Beira in Portugal into a Marrano family, one of the Portuguese Jewish houses forcibly baptized in 1497 that kept their identity across generations; he was a relative of the scholar Thomas de Pinedo, and no source disputes his converso origin.

Work and career

He studied medicine and mathematics at Coimbra, went to Madrid, where he moved in the literary circles of the Spanish golden age and knew Lope de Vega and Quevedo, and served as physician and mathematician to noble patrons. This fiche states plainly both what is established and what is debated: in 1634 he was denounced to the Inquisition and fled to Naples, then under Spanish rule, and while his converso descent is undisputed, older writers cited by the Jewish Encyclopedia doubted whether he ever practised Judaism openly, so that his personal religion remains uncertain.

His life's work, El Macabeo, was printed at Naples in 1638 at the expense of the Spanish crown: twenty cantos in Spanish octaves on Judas Maccabee and the revolt against Antiochus, written by a man of Jewish descent for a Catholic court, dedicated to the king, and read ever since as a poem with two faces. To Spanish readers it was a heroic epic on a biblical subject in the manner of Tasso; to readers of his own origin it was the story of a people who took up arms rather than abandon their law, published in the very empire whose Inquisition burned their kin.

Scholars now study it as one of the principal literary documents of Marrano consciousness. He died at Naples about 1638, shortly after the book appeared.