Menasseh (Manasseh) ben Israel, the Jewish scholar, philosopher, and theologian, was probably born in Madeira. His father, a victim of the Spanish Inquisition, escaped with his family to La Rochelle and then to Amsterdam, where Menasseh studied in the growing Jewish community. At eighteen he became a teacher and preacher. Although very successful in his rabbinical career, Menasseh could not support his family with his salary and so became a printer, establishing Holland's first Hebrew press. He printed his own first published work, an index to the Midrash Rabbah (1628). Most of his subsequent works are in Spanish, Portuguese, or Latin.

Menasseh's vast erudition in Jewish and Christian theology and philosophy and classical and contemporary literature attracted notice in 1632, when the first part of his El Conciliador appeared in Frankfurt (the second, third, and fourth parts appeared in Amsterdam, 1641–1651; the book...