Solomon ibn Verga שלמה אבן וירגה
author of Shevet Yehudah, a collection of accounts of persecutions
He lived in Spain, then in Portugal—as a Marrano—and saw the Lisbon massacre of 1506 with his own eyes. Later he fled to the Ottoman Empire, where the book was apparently written.
Shevet Yehudah holds sixty-four accounts, and it is not a chronicle: they stand out of order and are not bound by a common narrative. Alongside them are descriptions of religious disputations and customs. The book passed early beyond Jewish readership: first printed in Turkey about 1550, then in Yiddish at Cracow in 1591, then in Spanish, Latin and German.
It was written by three men. Judah ibn Verga gathered the first material, Solomon rewrote it and added his own, and Solomon's son Joseph finished and edited the whole. Where one ends and the next begins cannot be separated from the text.
His dates are not established. The Jewish Encyclopedia says only "Spanish historian of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries"; catalogues give 1460–1554, but nothing documents it, and we do not print those years. Isidore Loeb warned as early as 1892 that part of the book's material belongs to legend; as a source for popular memory it is the more valuable for that, but it should not be taken for a chronicle.
On the timeline
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Solomon ibn Verga, Shevet Yehudah (first ed., Turkey, c. 1550) — sixty-four accounts of persecutions, disputations and customs
Scholarship
- Jewish Encyclopedia, “Ibn Verga, Solomon” — placed in the fifteenth–sixteenth centuries without exact dates; the book as the work of three; Loeb's criticism
- Reference literature: years of life — the years of birth and death by the agreed count of the reference literature; where the source says «about», it is marked as such
Basis: documents and evidence.