Moses Gideon Abudiente

Origins and early life

Moses Gideon Abudiente was born about 1602 at Lisbon into a Marrano family — the Jewish Encyclopedia identifies the Abudientes as a Marrano house of Lisbon whose earliest recorded bearer, Gideon Abudiente, lived at the end of the sixteenth century — and the family emigrated in the early seventeenth century to Amsterdam, where it returned openly to Judaism.

Work and career

That return is the key to his life's work. The Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam and Hamburg were people who had been raised as Catholics, spoke Portuguese and Spanish, and had to learn from nothing the Hebrew that their ancestors had lost under forced baptism; entire generations came back to a religion whose language they could not read. Abudiente wrote for them the Grammatica Hebraica, printed at Hamburg in 1633, a Hebrew grammar in Portuguese, plain, practical and aimed at adults beginning from the alphabet.

It was among the first such works and it served the Sephardi communities of northern Europe for generations. He settled at Glückstadt and then Hamburg, worked as a merchant and a teacher, and wrote Hebrew and Spanish verse, including poems on the death of members of the community. In 1665-1666, when the messianic movement of Sabbatai Zevi swept the Jewish world, he published Fin de los Dias, an enthusiastic tract announcing the redemption; this fiche notes plainly that he was among those swept up in that hope, as many of the leading men of Amsterdam and Hamburg were, and that the movement collapsed with Zevi's conversion to Islam. He died at Hamburg on 24 February 1688; his descendants in England anglicized the name to Gideon.