Background
He was born as Gabrel da Costa in Porto to a Marrano family. His father was a devout Catholic who taught his son equestarianism.
He was born as Gabrel da Costa in Porto to a Marrano family. His father was a devout Catholic who taught his son equestarianism.
In Coimbra Da Costa was apprenticed in the legal profession, and then became a minor church official.
However, his studies of Jesuit teachings had raised grave doubts in his mind and, under the impact of the study of the Bible, he became strongly attracted to Judaism and the Jewish people. But, without the possibility of firsthand acquaintance of Jews, he constructed his own romanticized version of Judaism. He converted his family (his father had died) and in 1617 they decided to flee in order to live as Jews openly and to avoid the prying of the Inquisition. The family sailed to Amsterdam, where he and his four brothers had themselves circumcised and openly identified themselves as Jews.
For fourteen years, he was boycotted and lived a life of isolation; even children in the street called him “Renegade! Heretic!” However, he did not want to live cut off indefinitely and eventually he decided to take nominal steps (“I will be an ape among apes”) to rejoin the community. But the reconciliation did not last long and Da Costa was soon again expressing unorthodox views.
“I doubted whether Moses’ law was in reality God’s law and decided it was of human origin,” he wrote, and embraced a natural law, calling himself a deist. He rejected established religion and ceased Jewish practices. The community’s anger was again roused when he tried to dissuade two Christians, an Italian and a Spaniard, who had come to Amsterdam to adopt Judaism, from converting. He gave them a frightening picture of Judaism and warned them against putting the yoke of rabbinic Judaism around their necks. When they reported his remarks, he was again excommunicated and remained in almost complete isolation for a further seven years.
Again Da Costa could suffer it no longer and applied to rejoin the community. The price was a public penance, a humiliating ceremony held in Amsterdam’s Portuguese Synagogue. Hundreds gathered to hear his recantation in which — clothed in sackcloth — he declared he deserved a thousand deaths, after which he was subjected to thirty-nine lashes of the whip. Finally he had to prostrate himself on the threshold of the building as the departing throng spat at him and trampled him. Completely devastated by the experience, he went home, wrote a few pages of autobiography, and then took two pistols, fired first at a passing relative (whom he missed) and then shot himself.
However, Da Costa was soon disillusioned when he discovered that official Judaism was very different in practice from the concept he had imagined. He found the ritual burdensome and rigid and was soon openly criticizing the “pride and arrogance” of the Amsterdam rabbis, calling them “the Pharisees of the Amsterdam synagogue.” Moreover he prepared a book, "An Examination of the Pharisaic Traditions Compared with the Written Laws", doubting the doctrines of the immortality of the soul (which he regarded as non biblical) and of reward and punishment. The elders of the community saw this not only as a heretical threat to their faith but as endangering their own recently won status in Christian society. In 1624, Da Costa was excommunicated, arrested, briefly imprisoned, and fined, and his book was burned.