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This chapter assesses how, in Amsterdam, Rabbi Moses Raphael d'Aguilar became Isaac Orobio de Castro's mentor in Jewish matters. Isaac asked him many questions regarding Jewish law and biblical exegesis, and d'Aguilar answered them conscientiously. An instructive example of this consultative arrangement with d'Aguilar is to be seen in one such enquiry that was made a short time after Orobio's return to Judaism and his joining the Congregation Talmud Torah in Amsterdam. At this period, when many a gnawing doubt was robbing him of rest and clouding the happiness of his integration into Jewish religious life, Orobio addressed five questions to Moses d'Aguilar on various topics, some involving biblical exegesis and some concerned with Halakhic matters. These questions, together with the rabbi's answers, have been preserved in manuscript. The chapter then considers the relationship between Orobio and Juan de Prado. Both were born into Portuguese crypto-Jewish families that settled in southern Spain, found refuge in Amsterdam, and became absorbed in the Jewish community there.

This chapter addresses Isaac Orobio de Castro's critique of the Arbor Scientiæ (1663) of the Franciscan theologian Raymond Lull. Having read the translation of Spanish officer don Alonso de Zepeda, Orobio composed a short tract. In this treatise, Orobio did not set out to deal with Lull's theology in full. Rather, he chose to rain shattering blows on the way in which Lull had attempted, in accordance with his overall system, to prove the existence of the holy trinity, also questioning the methodological structure on which Lull's religious philosophy was in general based. Meanwhile, the speed with which Orobio integrated himself into the Portuguese-Jewish community is eloquent not only of the extent to which the congregation had attuned itself to the social and spiritual absorption of crypto-Jews reverting to Judaism, but also of Orobio's own readiness to play an active part in the communal life of its membership. The chapter then considers Orobio's medical practice in Amsterdam.

This chapter discusses Isaac Orobio's encounters with philosophers, theologians, and poets. In 1684, Orobio published in Amsterdam his Certamen Philosophicum, Propugnatae Veritatis Divinae ac Naturalis adversus Joh. Bredenburg. This work was received with marked respect in philosophical circles in Holland and abroad, and it constituted Orobio one of the leaders of the campaign against Barukh Spinoza's philosophy. The chapter then considers the debate which took place in Amsterdam between Orobio and Christian theologian Philip van Limborch. It also looks at how, in 1685, a number of writers, poets, and lovers of poetry and art in the Portuguese-Jewish community of Amsterdam founded a literary society with the name of La Academia de los Florido. Orobio was a founder-member and one of the regular participants in its proceedings.

This chapter examines the intellectual world of Isaac Orobio de Castro. A great respect for Seneca and for the Stoics of antiquity is to be felt in writings of Orobio and others of the Portuguese community. Its source lies quite certainly in the neo-Stoic revival in Spain at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth. Members of the Amsterdam congregation swelled the ranks of this new veneration for Seneca under the impress of contemporary Spanish thought. The chapter then considers scholasticism and ‘fideistic scepticism’. While from scholasticism Orobio took the conceptual basis of his thinking, in a significant amount of what he wrote, one may distinguish his openness to the critique of scepticism, and particularly of that fideistic scepticism that had struck root in intellectual Catholic circles in western Europe, with France as its centre. The chapter also reflects on Orobio's political and social attitudes.

This epilogue highlights how the life and literary undertakings of Isaac Orobio de Castro are symbolic of the fate and fortunes of the Spanish and Portuguese Sephardi diaspora in seventeenth-century western Europe. His passage from Christianity to Judaism is a faithful mirror of the history of a whole community that succeeded in dropping the mask of a Christian conformity that had been forcibly imposed upon them by life in a society where the open profession of Judaism was proscribed, and in finding their bearings again within the Jewish community. Their reversion to Judaism was the result of changes both subjective and objective. The cruelty of the Inquisition that spread its terror through the ‘New Christian’ population of the Iberian Peninsula made it impossible even for those who wished to do so to become indistinguishably integrated into Christian society. But in addition to this, the yearning of crypto-Jews to reintegrate openly into Judaism in lands where this was feasible was principally nurtured by their feeling of Jewish identity which, for many of them, generations of an enforced life of Christian conformity had not dulled. The history of the Alvares de Orobio family offers an instructive example of this phenomenon.