Isaac Orobio de Castro

Isaac (Balthazar) Orobio de Castro was born in Braganza, Portugal, to a family of New Christians. He studied medicine at the University of Alcalá, in Alcalá de Henares, Spain. Found guilty of judaizing by the Inquisition court of Seville, he was imprisoned for two years. De Castro ultimately left Spain for France and taught surgery and pharmacology for almost two years at the University of Toulouse. In 1662, he and his family reached Amsterdam, returned to Judaism, and joined the Sephardic community there. He was a fierce polemicist and held disputes with heterodox members of the Sephardic community like Prado and Baruch Spinoza and with several Christian theologians. Most of de Castro’s writings, written in Spanish, were not published during his lifetime because of censorship.