ACOSTA (Da Costa), Uriell. — Rationalist Jew, born in Oporto between the years 1580 and 1585, died in Amsterdam in 1640. From 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 accepting anything beyond a vague deism, fled with his family to Amsterdam, where he converted to Judaism with his mother and four brothers, changing his baptismal name Gabriele to Uriel.
Dissatisfied even with the Jewish religion, A. soon began to deny the immortality of the soul and future retribution, as he excluded them from the Hebrew Bible. On 14 August 1618, he was excommunicated for the first time in Venice and Hamburg. The physician Samuel da Silva opposed him with the *Tratado da immortalidade da alma* (1623); A. then published the *Examens das tradições phariséas conferidas com a ley escripta* (Amsterdam 1624), which attacks the doctrines and customs of rabbinism, advocating a return to Sadduceeism. For this, he was expelled as an atheist from the Amsterdam synagogue, imprisoned by the civil tribunal, which commuted his sentence to a fine of 300 florins; his book was destroyed. A. then took refuge for a few years in Hamburg. After nine years of isolation even from his family, who abhorred him, he publicly recanted and was readmitted to the community (1633), but soon revealed himself persistent in his errors; he openly denied the divine origin of Mosaic law. Again excommunicated after six years (1639), he submitted once more in the Amsterdam synagogue, where he underwent flogging; but shortly afterward, after attempting the life of a relative, he took his own life (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 behest of the Sephardic community of Venice, to which A. had sent his writing against Pharisaic traditions.