Solomon Molcho שלמה מולכו

Born in Portugal about 1500 under the name Diogo Pires, apparently to a family of anusim—those baptised by force. He served as secretary to the High Court of Appeals: a career a Jew could not have had.

In 1525–26 David Reubeni came to Portugal, and Pires's life broke in two. He circumcised himself and took the name Solomon Molcho. What passed between him and Reubeni the sources tell differently: by some, Reubeni rebuffed him and he left against his will; by others, it was Reubeni's influence that brought him back to Judaism. There is no exact picture.

He went east. He became a scholar of Talmud and Bible and studied kabbalah with Rabbi Joseph Taitazak at Salonika; there in 1529 he published Sefer ha-Mefoar—his homilies on the Talmud and the Midrash. Rabbi Joseph Karo and Rabbi Solomon Alkabetz afterwards referred to him.

Back in Italy he spoke of a near redemption and made predictions. Two are remembered: the flooding of the Tiber at Rome—which came on 7 Tishrei 5291—and an earthquake in Portugal in Tevet of the same year. After that Pope Clement VII gave him a hearing; when the Inquisition condemned Molcho to the stake, the pope saved him by putting another man in his place.

In 1532 he came with Reubeni to Regensburg to the Emperor Charles V—with a banner bearing Hebrew letters and a proposal for a joint army. The emperor ordered both seized and sent to Mantua. An ecclesiastical court condemned Molcho to burning. A pardon was offered him—at the price of returning to Christianity; he refused and was burned in 1532.

He never declared himself the messiah, and it is wrong to call him a false messiah: he spoke of the nearness of redemption and died sanctifying the Name. How he was regarded in the Jewish world, then and since, has never been simple—and so it remains.

A robe and a banner attributed to him were kept in the Pinkas synagogue at Prague; the earliest mention of them is 1628. Today they are in the Jewish Museum in Prague. The attribution comes from tradition, not from a document.