Thomas de Pinedo

Origins and early life

Thomas de Pinedo was born at Trancoso in Portugal in 1614, his father from the noble Pinheiro family and his mother from the Jewish Fonseca family, and he was raised as a New Christian in a household of converso descent under the Inquisition.

Work and career

He was educated by the Jesuits at Madrid, where he became one of the best Greek scholars in Spain, and when the Inquisition closed in on his family he fled to the Netherlands. At Amsterdam he returned openly to Judaism and took the name Isaac de Pinedo, and this fiche records that step as the site records every declared return or departure: he lived the rest of his life within the Portuguese Jewish community of the city.

His life's work was an edition with a Latin translation and commentary of the Ethnica of Stephanus of Byzantium, the great geographical lexicon of late antiquity, published at Amsterdam in 1678 and dedicated to the burgomasters of the city. It remained the standard reference for a century and a half and was cited by the leading Hellenists of his own time and after. In the dedication and in the notes he wrote openly against the Inquisition and against the persecution that had driven him from Iberia, an unusual thing to print under his own name.

He was a kinsman of the marrano poet Miguel de Silveira. He died at Amsterdam on 13 November 1679, the year after his book appeared.