Utilidades del agua de la nieve, del bever frio i caliente [“The Uses of Water and Snow and of Cold and Hot Beverages.”]

Fernando Cardoso was born in 1603 to a New Christian family of crypto-Jews in Trancoso, Portugal. He studied medicine in Spain and gained access to the highest social circles, eventually became physician to the Court of Philip IV. The publication of the present work secured him a place in the annals of Spanish medical history. As suggested by its title, this treatise discusses the relative benefits of cold and hot beverages, as well as the medicinal properties inherent in water, snow and ice. Despite the extremely favorable reception of the work, his ability to live the dual life of a Converso proved intolerable and he disappeared from Madrid, re-emerging in Venice where he joined the Sephardi community as a professing Jew and reclaimed the name Isaac. It was there that he published the work for which he is celebrated, Las Excelencias de los Hebreos. A masterpiece of Jewish anti-defamation, the work is both an erudite defense of Jewry as a whole and a justification of Cardoso’s own choice to live as a Jew. See Y.H. Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso, A Study in Seventeenth-Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics (1971) pp. 169-176.