
JUDAICA CARDOSO (ISAAC FERNANDO) Las excelencias de los Hebreos, FIRST EDITION, 1679
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JUDAICA
Footnotes
First edition of an important work of Jewish apologetics, in which the author describes the virtues of the Jewish people, and refutes common anti-Jewish stereotypes, also including much information on the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition. Born in Portugal, Fernando Cardoso (1604-1683) travelled to Spain to take up a position as physician to the Court of Philip IV, living there as a Christian. Subsequently he moved in 1648 to Verona in Italy, where he joined the Sephardi community as a professing Jew. Here he wrote Las excelencias de los Hebreos, "a defense of Jewry as a whole, it is also, on a personal level, a justification of his [Cardoso's] own choice to live as a Jew" (Y.H. Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso: a Study in Seventeenth-Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics, 1981).