Page:Short Treatise on God, Man and His Wellbeing.djvu/31

Rh undoubtedly were Rabbi Saul Morteira and Rabbi Manasseh ben Israel. Saul Morteira was the senior Rabbi of Amsterdam. Born in Venice about 1596 he studied medicine under Montalto, the Marano Court physician of Maria de Medici. Montalto died suddenly while accompanying Louis XIII. to Tours, in 1616, and it was the desire to bury Montalto in a Jewish cemetery that brought Saul Morteira to Amsterdam, where the Jews had only recently (1614) acquired a cemetery in Ouwerkerk (also called Ouderkerk), not very far from the city. While in Amsterdam, Morteira accepted a call to the Rabbinate of the older of the two Synagogues there (the House of Jacob). A third Synagogue came into existence two years later, but in 1638 the three Synagogues were amalgamated, and Morteira acted as the senior or presiding Rabbi till his death, in 1660. Morteira had had a taste of Court life, and was not altogether wanting in philosophical appreciation ; but he was essentially medieval, strait-laced, prosy, and uninspiring. It is related that when Spinoza was but fifteen years old Morteira marvelled at the boy's acumen. By an irony of fate he also presided over the court of Rabbis who issued the ban against Spinoza in 1656.

In Manasseh ben Israel we have a different type of character altogether. He was born in 1604, and had a tragic infancy. His father, Joseph ben Israel, was one of a hundred and fifty Jews whom the Inquisition in Lisbon was about to consign to the flames, in 1605, when Mammon was successfully enlisted against the priests of Moloch. A million gold florins, eight hundred thousand ducats, and five hundred thousand crusados were paid to King Philip III., a hundred thousand crusados to the saintly ecclesiastics, and they became reconciled to spare their victims the flames of hell on earth even if it should entail their loss of heaven hereafter. At the auto-da-fé in January 1605 the unhappy Jews were paraded in penitential garb and