Laguna, Daniel Israel Lopez. Espejo Fiel de Vidas, que Contiene los Psalmos de David en Verso [“Faithful Mirror of Life,” Containing the Psalms of David in Verse]

“One of the Most Remarkable Products of Jewish-Spanish Literature” - M. Kayserling Laguna was a Portuguese marrano, who persecuted by the Inquisition, fled to Jamaica, where he openly professed Judaism, and was naturalized there in 1693. In the New World, Laguna was motivated “to make the Book of the Psalms accessible to such of his co-religionists as had escaped from the Inquisition, but who, in their ignorance of the Hebrew tongue, did not know what they read.” See M. Kayserling, The Jews in Jamaica and Daniel Israel Lopez Laguna, in: JQR, Vol. XII (1900), pp.715. “At Jamaica, Laguna completed the poetical work which he had begun in prison, a Spanish paraphrase of the Psalms. In the introductory poem he relates his varied experiences, and in several of his versions of the Psalms he alludes to his sufferings in the dungeons of the Inquisition. With this work, the fruit of 23 years of labor in Jamaica, he went to London… Here he found a patron in Mordecai Nunes Almeyda, who arranged to have the work printed…Laguna subsequently returned to Jamaica and died at the age of seventy.” See A. Rosenthal Ltd., Catalog XI (1948), p. 32 (no. 511). Laguna was, notes Cundall, "the most noted and respected Jew in Jamaica at the time...[His Psalms] was the earliest book printed by a resident of Jamaica under British rule." See Cundall, History of Printing in Jamaica (1935)