The Conversion of Isaac Da Costa

Abstract

In 1822 Isaac da Costa converted to Christianity, together with his wife Hanna Belmonte (1800–1867) and his friend the physician Abraham Capadose (1795–1874), who is well-known for his battle against vaccination. Da Costa presented his conversion as a quest for personal truth, which individuals have to appropriate for themselves. His own conversion narrative ultimately resolved the dialectics between free personal conversion and the outer personal and socio-political circumstances and constraints (the death of his father, the emancipation of the Jews in the Netherlands) in favour of the authenticity of the individual decision. From a structural point of view his choice of the ‘religion of my fathers’ was also a conversion to modernity. After his conversion Da Costa became a public figure in the Netherlands and he played a leading role in the early nineteenth-century Dutch revival movement, the Réveil.