A Sephardic Quevedo? Abraham Gómez Silveira, Between Controversy and Poetry

ABSTRACT

A book published in 2000, El barroco sefardí Abraham Gómez Silveira ( The Sephardic Baroque Abraham Gómez Silveira ), introduced us to this hitherto unknown author, baptised in Castile in 1651, who was educated at the school of the sacred congregation of the Sephardic Jews in Amsterdam. Abraham Gómez Silveira wrote tirelessly in defence of the Mosaic law, and against the false messiahs who were in his opinion Jesus Christ and the famous rabbi of Smyrna, Sabbataï Tsevi (died in 1676). This stance was in direct opposition to the inquisitorial Spain of his time, and yet his rhetoric and poetics were deeply influenced by Spanish literary culture. Gómez Silveira admired Queved, one of the greatest Baroque poets of Spain, and this avowed, sometimes rabid, anti‐Semite left a deep impression on him. This surprising kinship reveals an analogy of position in their respective groups: a radical and very personal desire for orthodoxy which, together with their verbal intemperance, condemns them, paradoxically, to semi‐clandestinity.