Solomon ibn Verga

Origins and early life

Solomon ibn Verga was born in Spain about 1460, a Jew by birth, and in 1487 the Jewish communities of Castile sent him to collect the ransom for the Jewish captives of Malaga.

Work and career

He was expelled with all Spanish Jewry in 1492, took refuge in Portugal, and was caught there by the forced mass baptism of 1497, after which he lived as a marrano in Lisbon; this fiche states that episode plainly, and states equally that once the conversos were permitted to leave he went to the Ottoman Empire and lived and wrote openly as a Jew again. He was an eyewitness to the Lisbon massacre of 1506, in which a mob killed some two thousand New Christians over three days, and his account of it is one of the primary sources historians use.

His book Shevet Yehudah, the Rod of Judah, printed at Adrianople about 1550, is a chronicle of sixty-four persecutions of the Jews from antiquity to his own time, compiled from his father's notes, from his own experience and from documents. What sets it apart from the martyrologies of its age is that it asks why: it stages debates between kings, churchmen and Jewish spokesmen, and looks for social, economic and political causes of hatred rather than resting on divine judgement, which is why modern scholarship treats it as a founding text of Jewish historiography. It was translated into Latin, Yiddish, Spanish and German, and read for centuries. He died about 1554.