Technical Diagram from Joseph Delmedigo’s Elim

Born to converso parents and baptized as Manoel Dias Soeiro, Menasseh moved as a boy with his family to Amsterdam, where they reverted to open Judaism. In 1626, he established the first Hebrew printing shop in the Dutch capital. In his writings, he emphasized that the eternal life of the soul was assured to all the righteous of the nations. In 1650, he published his Esperança de Israel (The Hope of Israel) in several languages. In addition to his own writing and printing business, Menasseh Ben Israel was the third most important of the four ḥakhamim (rabbis) of the Sephardic congregation and was a gifted preacher. He was an interlocutor of Christian intellectuals on behalf of the Jewish community. Menasseh Ben Israel attended the 1655 Whitehall Conference and negotiated (unsuccessfully) with British leaders to obtain written permission for Jewish settlement in England.

Joseph Solomon Delmedigo (also known as Yashar) was born in Candia (Crete) but traveled to Padua to study at the university there, where he was a student of Galileo in astronomy, in addition to learning medicine and philosophy. He also visited Leone Modena in Venice. Delmedigo returned to Crete in 1613 to practice medicine. However, his pursuit of secular knowledge led him to embark on a life of wandering, first in the Middle East and later in Europe. Delmedigo later served as a physician in Germany. He wrote works on geography, astronomy, medicine, and chemistry, some of which have not survived. He finally settled in Prague in 1648 and remained there until his death.