Uriel da Costa

Uriel da Costa (Portuguese: [uɾiˈɛɫ dɐ ˈkɔʃtɐ]; c. 1585 – April 1640) or Uriel Acosta (from the Latin form of his Portuguese surname, Costa, or da Costa) was a philosopher and skeptic who immigrated from Portugal to the Dutch Republic.

Costa was born in Porto with the name Gabriel da Costa Fiuza. His parents were cristãos novos, or New Christians, Christians who had converted from Judaism to Catholicism, also known as Marranos, in order to avoid the civil persecutions of Jews in Spain and Portugal. His father was an international merchant and tax-farmer.

Costa also occupied an ecclesiastical office. While a student of canon law, he began to read the Bible and contemplate it seriously. He was aware that his family had Jewish origins, and in the course of his studies, he began to consider a return to Judaism. After his father died, he began to very carefully reveal his newfound sentiments to his family. Ultimately, in 1617, the whole family decided to return to Judaism; they fled Portugal for Amsterdam, which was widely known at the time to be a unique sanctuary of European religious freedom, and which would soon become a thriving center of the Sephardic diaspora.

However, upon arriving in the Netherlands, Costa very quickly became disenchanted with the kind of Judaism he saw in practice there. He came to believe that the rabbinic leadership was too consumed by ritualism and legalistic posturing. In 1623 he published a book titled An Examination of the Traditions of the Pharisees, which questioned fundamental aspects of Judaism regarding immortality of the soul. Costa believed that this was not an idea deeply rooted in biblical Judaism, but rather had been formulated primarily by rabbis. The work further pointed out the discrepancies between biblical Judaism and Rabbinic Judaism; he declared the latter to be an accumulation of mechanical ceremonies and practices. In his view, it was thoroughly devoid of spiritual and philosophical concepts.

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