Solomon de Oliveyra


Solomon de Oliveyra was a Dutch rabbi, poet, and philologist. He has been described as the "preeminent and omnipresent Hebrew poet of Jewish Amsterdam" in the late seventeenth century.

Biography

Oliveyra was born in Lisbon or Amsterdam, the son of fugitive Marrano and Jewish scholar David Israel de Oliveyra.
He was preacher at several philanthropic institutions, and successor of Moses Raphael de Aguilar as teacher at the Keter Torah in Amsterdam. He was also a member of the rabbinical college of the Spanish-Portuguese community of the same city, becoming its president after Jacob Sasportas' death in 1698. He was for a time an adherent of the Sabbatian messianic movement.
As early as 1652 Oliveyra published a Portuguese translation of the Canon of Avicenna, which was used by Sousa in his Vestigios de Lingua Arabica em Portugal. Even as a youth, however, he devoted himself mostly to Hebrew poetry, writing occasional and liturgical poems, generally in imitation of older piyyutim. These poems are found in the author's Hebrew rhyming dictionary Sharshot gavlut, which was published together with his Ayyelet ahavim, a Hebrew textbook on rhetoric with exercises. In addition, some two dozen Hebrew poems on tombstones at the Beth Haim Cemetery at Ouderkerk aan de Amstel are ascribed to Oliveyra.
He died on 23 May 1708, leaving in manuscript a collection entitled Peraḥ shoshan, containing various treatises on the fine arts, grammar and logic, the virtues, the festivals, the calendar, and other topics.

Publications