Da Costa Mattos, Vicente. Breve Discurso Contra Heretica Pefidia do Judaismo [“Brief Discourse Against the Perfidious Heresy of Judaism”]

(SEPHARDICA)

Pedro Craesbeeck

Lisbon

1622-25

FIRST EDITION. Two Parts in one volume. Two titles. Extensive Portuguese maginalia

RARE FIRST EDITION OF A WORK INSTRUMENTAL IN extirpating THE CRYPTO-JEWS OF PORTUGAL. In his magisterial history of the Spanish Inquisition, Henry Charles Lea sums up the direction taken by the present work: “If they [the “New Christians” or Marranos] desired to escape from Portugal, Portugal was quite as anxious to get rid of them, by extermination or otherwise. The pious intensity of hatred towards them finds expression, in 1621, in a ferocious work by Vicente da Costa Mattos, of which the declared object was to drive them from the land. All the old stories of their malice to Christians were raked together and set forth as uncontradicted truths. They were enemies of mankind, wandering like gypsies through the world and living on the sweat of others. They has possessed themselves of all trade, farming the lands of individuals and the royal patrimony, with no capital but industry and lack of conscience. They live only for the perdition of the world; of old, God punished those who ill-treated them, but now he punishes those who endure them; the decline of the Spanish kingdoms was the punishment sent by God for tolerating them...” See H.C. Lea, A History of the Inquisition of Spain (1907), pp. 272-3. Evidently, Lea was unable to obtain a copy of the present first edition of 1622, for in his footnote, he refers to the later revised edition (Lisbon, 1623)