Tres tratados médicos de la Ets Haim: entre traducciones, apuntes enciclopédicos y polémicas médicas del siglo XVII

The aim of this paper is to offer a review of the medical historiography that developed in the context of the Sephardic community of Amsterdam during the seventeenth century. By means of three manuscripts, housed in the Jewish library Ets Haim, the oldest Jewish library in the world, I show the interest that these practically unknown works arouse, not only because of the clinical issue itself, but also because they fill an important gap in terms of the inheritance and transmission of knowledge, as well as the confirmation of the existence of cultural networks in which the Western Sephardim played a key role. As a result of this interrelation of scholars and relations based on cultural interest, some polemical writings arose at the same time, focused purely on scientific matters, such as the one I present next to these three manuscripts. It is an opuscule -written in Latin and appended to other pages of a polemic completely unrelated to medical matters- whose clues open the hypothesis of its very probable attribution to the Sephardic physicist Zacuto Lusitano. It is therefore in the interest of this study to offer new lines of research and work.