From the Files of the Portuguese Inquisition: Isaac de Castro Tartas’s Latin Ego-Document, 1645

Abstract

A semi-autobiographical essay written in polished Latin in his own defense by Isaac de Castro Tartas, a Portuguese-Jewish prisoner and victim of the Portuguese Inquisition, is published and analyzed here, historically and linguistically, for the first time. It is accompanied by an English translation. The autograph copy of Castro’s extraordinary essay, found in his Lisbon inquisitorial dossier, reveals a young man whose vision was deeply informed both by his Jesuit education in France, where he and his family lived as crypto-Jews, and by his exposure to early ideas of freedom of conscience in Dutch lands where he later lived. Probably composed in early 1645, it offers a life narrative some elements of which can be confirmed by other sources. In his firm defense of his right to profess Judaism, Castro deployed dialectical skills he learned from the Jesuits, while making a radical argument for freedom of conscience of a kind few Europeans of his day were articulating.