Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play — and Kindle via Send to Kindle
- ✓ Choose your format — EPUB or PDF
- ✓ Instant download after purchase
- ✓ Yours to keep — no subscription
Israel and the Gentiles
1848 · translated from the Dutch · 452 pages
Israel and the Gentiles
by Isaac da Costa
About the text. The free scan is set in Fraktur — old German blackletter — and the archive’s OCR read it as ordinary Latin type, turning und into unb and ist into ift throughout. The page images are sound and perfectly readable; the searchable text underneath them is not. We publish no damage count for this one, because the count measures characters and these are the wrong words spelled correctly. The full German text is public domain and free — linked below.
On this page: a summary of Israel and the Gentiles, and our clean edition as a PDF or EPUB.
Isaac da Costa was a Portuguese-Jewish poet of Amsterdam, a pupil of Bilderdijk, who converted in 1822 and became a central figure of the Dutch Réveil. Israel and the Gentiles is his history of the Jewish people from the beginning to his own century — written not as detached scholarship but as a sustained argument about where that history has been going, by a man who had staked his life on the answer.
The convert behind the argument
Da Costa was born into the Sephardic community of Amsterdam and trained in law and letters under the poet Willem Bilderdijk, whose circle drew him toward Christianity. He and his wife were baptized in 1822, to considerable scandal, and he spent the rest of his life as poet, historian and lay theologian of the Dutch revival movement — never repudiating his Jewish identity, and writing consistently about the continuing place of Israel.
Summary
The book traces Jewish history from the patriarchs through the dispersion, the medieval communities, the Iberian expulsions and the modern era — and it is unusually attentive to the history of Jewish converts to Christianity, treating figures such as Paul of Burgos and his sons at length.
Its argumentative frame is providential: da Costa reads the survival and the suffering of the Jewish people as evidence for, rather than against, the claims of the faith he had come to, and closes with expectations about the future of Israel that align him with the Réveil’s broader prophetic interests.
Written by an insider to the community he describes, and published in English in 1850, it was among the more widely circulated Dutch religious works of its century in the English-speaking world.
Who was Isaac da Costa?
Isaac da Costa (1798–1860) was born in Amsterdam into a distinguished Portuguese-Jewish family. He studied law and classical letters at Leiden and became the leading disciple of the poet Willem Bilderdijk, through whose circle he came to Christianity.
He and his wife Hanna were baptized in 1822. He became a central figure of the Dutch Réveil, the evangelical revival movement of the period, and wrote poetry, history and polemic — including the Bezwaren tegen den geest der eeuw (Objections to the Spirit of the Age), which caused a national controversy. He continued to write about the Jewish people and their future throughout his life.
Which edition of Israel and the Gentiles is this?
The 1850 English edition is free at Archive.org, with the Dutch text of 1876 also freely available. Our edition is a corrected typesetting of the English.
This edition follows the English translation of Isaac da Costa’s Israel and the Gentiles, published at London by James Nisbet in 1850. The book was written in Dutch as Israël en de Volken.
THE BOOK HAS NO CHAPTERS, and that is the whole difficulty of it. Da Costa divides his history into four Books, and the longest of them runs to fifty-five thousand words without a break on the page. Nothing in the printed text marks a smaller division — no numerals, no headings, nothing.
But the printer put a subject in the running head of every page, and the index at the back of the volume lists those subjects in order with the page each begins on. So the sections in this edition are the book’s own: “Flavius Josephus”, “The Jews and Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaulx”, “Maimonides”, “Uriel da Costa”, “The Prospects of Israel”. A hundred and twenty-two of them, taken from the index and located by the page numbers in the running heads. We have invented none of them and reworded none of them.
Where a subject begins in the middle of a sentence — which happens, because a running head describes a page and not a section — the section starts at the beginning of the paragraph the subject begins in, so that no section opens mid-clause. Six subjects fall so far inside a paragraph that no honest cut could be made at all, and those are not made into sections: their text stays where the book has it. They are the Jews at our Saviour’s birth, the Jews in the Roman Empire under Constantine, the Jews in the Greek Empire, the Jews and the Crusades, the Sephardim in Italy, and the Jews in Prussia.
The four Books are kept as the four parts of the edition, and the translator’s preface, da Costa’s own preface and his introduction each stand on their own, as they do in the volume.
What has been repaired is damage done by the scanner, not by the author or his translator. Running heads, page numbers and the digitizer’s watermark have been removed; words broken at a line ending have been rejoined; letters the scanner confused have been restored where the book’s own vocabulary settles the question. Da Costa’s spelling of Hebrew and Spanish names is his own and is left alone, including the forms that are no longer usual — Sephardim, Vaidiquinos, Marranos, Chasidim.
Prepared by T.S. Baker Books, 2026.
Common questions
- What is Israel and the Gentiles?
- Isaac da Costa’s history of the Jewish people from the patriarchs to the nineteenth century, written as a providential argument about the meaning and direction of that history by a Sephardic Jew who had converted to Christianity.
- Who was Isaac da Costa?
- A Dutch poet and historian (1798–1860) from the Portuguese-Jewish community of Amsterdam, a pupil of the poet Bilderdijk, who was baptized in 1822 and became a leading figure of the Dutch Réveil.
A note on the text. Israel and the Gentiles is in the public domain. What you’re buying is our edition: the careful typesetting and correction. The original text is also available free here.
That free scan shows at least 0.6 errors per 1,000 characters (OCR mistakes, stray marks, broken words). Our edition corrects them.
Related reading
The same task, a different community
A Muslim Brought to Christ
Imad-ud-din Lahiz · 1884
Imad-ud-din was a Muslim scholar and preacher who converted and spent the rest of his life writing in Urdu for the community he had come from, as da Costa did in Dutch for his.
On the same shelf
De l'harmonie entre l'Église et la Synagogue
David Drach · 1844
Also listed in Why Did Christianity Spread So Fast?.
On the same shelf
The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah
Alfred Edersheim · 1883
Also listed in Why Did Christianity Spread So Fast?.
More like this
We publish first-person accounts of changed lives, and translate works into English that have never been in it. Pick what you want to hear about — nothing is pre-selected, and every email carries a one-click unsubscribe.
Related collection