Rodriguez:

By: Joseph Jacobs , Meyer Kayserling

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many persons bearing the surname Rodriguezwere condemned by the Inquisition to death at the stake or to lifelong imprisonment on the ground that they were "Judaizantes" or secret confessors of Judaism. Miguel Rodriguez and his wife, Isabel Nuñez Alvarez, the owners of a synagogue situated in the Calle de los Infantes, Madrid, in which the secret Jews held their services, together with Leonor Rodriguez and her husband, Hernan Baëz (Vaëz), were publicly burned in Madrid July 4, 1632. At the great auto da fé held in Madrid June 30, 1680, Catalina Rodriguez, called "la Paquina," who had died in the prison of the Inquisition at S. Jago de Compostella at the age of seventy, was burned in effigy; and on Nov. 30, 1721, Maria Rodriguez, ninety years old, and her daughter, both of Granada, were led to the stake in that city. In Cuenca a whole family named Rodriguez, husband, wife, and several sons and daughters, were condemned to lifelong imprisonment, June 29, 1722. The same fate befell the following: a Julian Rodriguez in Cuenca on Nov. 22, 1722; another Julian Rodriguez, likewise of Cuenca, who was a book-dealer of Madrid, on Feb. 20, 1724, in Madrid; Gabriel Rodriguez and his wife, also of Cuenca, on March 12, 1724, in Valladolid; Juan or Samuel Rodriguez of Bordeaux, aged fifty-one, who was a writing-teacher in Hornachos, Estremadura, imprisoned in 1723; Juan Rodriguez of Bayonne, resident in Antequera, in 1725; and the business woman Isabel Rodriguez of Constantine, in 1726; and many others.

Abraham Ḥayyim Rodriguez:

Rabbi in Leghorn about 1750. He was the teacher of Malachi ha-Kohen, and was highly praised by Azulai and honored as a cabalist by J. Pacifico in an elegy. Rodriguez left-many legal decisions, forty-seven of which, dealing with subjects of the four ritual codes, were published after his death by his daughter (the widow of the learned Ḥayyim Hezekiah Fernandez Africano) under the title "Oraḥ la-Ẓaddiḳ" (Leghorn, 1780). The first decision, entitled "Oraḥ Mishor," based upon the ritual codex Yoreh De'ah, called forth the "Sifte Dal" of an anonymous writer, in response to which Rodriguez wrote fifty-eight counter-observations entitled "Teshubot Ḥen Ḥen." These are printed together with the above-mentioned "Oraḥ la-Ẓaddiḳ."

Alonso Rodriguez:

Spanish physician of the fifteenth century; born in Seville. He lived at Saragossa, where, together with Alonso de Rivera of Cordova, also a physician in Saragossa, he was burned at the stake March 12, 1488.

David Cohen Rodriguez:

Ḣakam in Amsterdam; author of a sermon in Spanish, "Sermon Moral. Pregado Neste K. K. de Talmud Torah 27 Menahem, 5480" (= Sept. 1, 1720), Amsterdam, 1720.

Henrico Rodriguez:

Portuguese physician and Marano; friend of Rodrigo de Castro. He settled in Hamburg before 1594, and left it a few years later on account of the plague.

Manuel Rodriguez:

Marano and poet. At first he was an Augustinian monk, and later he became a tutor at Antwerp. He was the author of the drama "Herodes Saeviens" (Antwerp, 1626) and of a Latin ode on the physician Emanuel Gomez in Antwerp ( ib. 1643).

Raphael Rodriguez:

Ḥakam in Amsterdam; son of Judah Rodriguez. He was the author of a funeral dissertation, "Sermão Funeral as Deploraveis Memorias de Benjamin Levi de Vittoria" (Amsterdam, 1719).

Samuel Levi Rodriguez:

Spanish poet in Leghorn; died 1683. Daniel Levi de Barrios gives some of his poems and bemoans his death.

J. M. K.