ACOSTA (DA COSTA), URIEL. — Jewish rationalist, born in Oporto between 1580 and 1585, died in Amsterdam in 1640. Of a wealthy Marrano family, he studied philosophy and canon law at the University of Coimbra (1604–1608). Appointed treasurer of a collegiate church in Oporto (1610), he resigned around 1615 and, no longer admitting anything beyond a vague deism, fled with his family to Amsterdam, where he converted to Judaism together with his mother and four brothers, changing his baptismal name Gabriele to Uriel.
Dissatisfied with the Jewish religion as well, A. soon began to deny the immortality of the soul and future retribution, as doctrines excluded by the Hebrew Bible. On 14 August 1618 he was excommunicated for the first time in Venice and Hamburg. The physician Samuel da Silva rose against him with the Tratado da immortalidade da alma (1623); A. then published the Examen das tradições phariseas conferidas com a ley escripta (Amsterdam 1624), which opposed the doctrines and practices of rabbinism, advocating a return to Sadduceeism. He was therefore expelled as an atheist from the synagogue of Amsterdam and imprisoned by the civil court, which commuted his imprisonment to a fine of 300 florins; his book was destroyed. A. then took refuge in Hamburg for several years. After nine years of isolation even from his family, which detested him, he made a public recantation and was readmitted to the community (1633), but soon revealed himself to be obstinate in his errors; he also openly denied the divine origin of the Mosaic law. Excommunicated again, after six years (1639) he submitted once more in the synagogue of Amsterdam, where he underwent flagellation; but shortly thereafter, after attempting to take the life of one of his relatives, he killed himself (April 1640), leaving his autobiography under the title Exemplar humanae vitae.
The restless A. anticipated Spinoza. He provoked many reactions in the Jewish circles of his time: in Italy, Leone Modena (d. 1648) wrote two works in Hebrew to refute him, at the request of the Sephardic community of Venice, to which A. had sent his work against the Pharisaic traditions.
BIBLI: C. Gebhardt, Die Schriften des U. da Costa in Bibliotheca Spinozana, II, Amsterdam 1922; C. Michaelis de Vasconcellos, U. da Costa, Coimbra 1922; A. B. Duff and P. Kaan, Une vie humaine, par U. da Costa, Paris 1926. — L'Exemplar vitae humanae was published in 1687 by the Dutchman Filippo Limborch, who refuted it, in an appendix to the book De veritate religionis christianae: amica collatio cum erudito Judaeo; subsequently by H. Jellinek, U. A.'s Selbstbiographie, lateinisch und deutsch, Leipzig 1847; the most recent editions are those of A. Klaar (Berlin 1909), O. Jancke (Aachen 1923), and Duff and Kaan. — The tragic fate of this freethinker was bound to attract writers: K. Gutakow dedicated to him the novella Die Sadduzder von Amsterdam, 1834, and the tragedy Uriel A., Leipzig 1847, translated into Hebrew by Salomon Rubin, Vienna 1856; I. Zangwill, a chapter of Dreamers of the Ghetto, Philadelphia 1898, pp. 68–114. Antonino Romeo