Joseph Penso de la Vega

A Sephardic merchant and poet born in Amsterdam, Joseph Penso de la Vega was descended from Portuguese New Christians. At the age of seventeen he wrote an allegorical drama in Hebrew, Asire ha-tikvah (The Prisoners of Hope). He was active in literary academies organized by the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam, and, for a certain time, in a literary academy of Livorno, which fostered works in Spanish, his primary literary language. Following the financial crisis that struck Amsterdam in 1687, he published Confusión de confusiones (Confusion of Confusions), in which, with sharp wit, he described the workings of the bourse and the dangers awaiting imprudent investors.