Uriel de Costa - Righteous Jew Shot Himself
March 3, 2024
Most people think Judaism is synonymous with the Old Testament. But Uriel de Costa (1585-1640) became a heretic because he upheld the Law of Moses.
In 14th & 15th century Spain, over 250,000 Jews were forced to become Christians on pain of death or expulsion. The family of Uriel de Costa was among these "conversos" or "Marranos." A member of the nobility and very wealthy, Uriel studied at a Jesuit University and became a priest. However, he began to question his faith: "Reason whispered in my ear something utterly irreconcilable with faith."
He read the Old Testament and found it offered "fewer difficulties." He believed in Moses and "decided to live according to his law." So he gave up his ecclesiastical office and beautiful home and sailed to Amsterdam with his family. It was a "place where we felt the Jews could live in freedom and fulfill the commandments."
De Costa had a rude awakening. Biblical Judaism no longer existed.
He could not find a basis for most Jewish customs in the Bible. He found that the Old Testament did not speak of resurrection or immortality of the soul.
Ironically for a man who left his home for religious freedom, Amsterdam Jewry would not let him deviate from their opinion "in the slightest." He was threatened with excommunication and exclusion from the community. He insisted on religious freedom and was expelled.
De Costa "believed in doing something pleasing to God [by] defending freely and openly the law of Moses," he wrote in his autobiography, "Example of a Human Life."
But he was ostracized by the Jewish community and lived in great loneliness. After seven years, he sought reconciliation. He describes the penance he was required to endure from this primitive people, who are not a religion but a satanic cult masquerading as a religion. He was stripped to the waist, tied to a column and made to recite a psalm while being lashed 39 times.
"No monkey could have invented a more despicable, tasteless and ridiculous action," he wrote.
The sting of this humiliation stayed with De Costa and he could not execute the reconciliation. He shot himself. As a suicide, he could not be buried in a marked grave in the Jewish cemetery.
CONCLUSION
Faced with Christian intolerance, De Costa discovered its Jewish counterpart. Like many Marranos, he was stranded between two worlds.
He belonged to the tradition of the Sadducees and later the Karaites who insisted on adherence to the written law. But these groups had been suppressed by the Pharisees who dominated Judaism with the oral tradition (Talmud) and the Satanic pseudo mystical Cabala. (The Cabala pretends Cabalists can be God without becoming God-like, i.e. morally perfect.)
The Old Testament strikes me as a mixed bag. You have to scour it for valid parts. Certainly, it contains the same kind of xenophobia as the Talmud. But the Prophets' denunciation of corruption and decadence ring true.
De Costa should probably have melded back into Christian society. Instead, he remained loyal to his God to the end.
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Source: The Secret Jews by Joachim Prinz (1973)
James C said (March 4, 2024):
"De Costa had a rude awakening. Biblical Judaism no longer existed."
I had a similar experience; I went looking for the first century Christian church. I haven't found it anywhere.
What I found was that, to one degree or another, all the churches of organized "Christianity" have been spiritually defiled. They may have come out of the great whore in protest, calling themselves "Protestants." But to one degree or another they all share doctrines of the great mother church, "the mother of the harlots" (Rev. 17:5). A woman is used in symbolic prophecy to represent a church, but the daughters of the great whore are fallen women.
Still we are told that there exists 144,000 "who were not defiled with women" (Rev. 14:4). IMO, they must be scattered individuals because they certainly don't belong to organized religion.