Familieminder

THE MOCATTA FAMILY.

The Mocattas were a Spanish Jewish family which appears

to have been originally settled in the province of Seville. Its

purely Arabic name carried it back to an early period in the

history of the Jews of the Peninsula when the Moors were still

in occupation of the land. A branch of the family took part in

the Diaspora of 1489 and settled in Italy. No materials for a

connected story of the Italian Mocattas are yet available. The

earliest references to them are found on the tombstones in the

ancient Jewish Cemetery on the Lido at Venice, where the deaths

are recorded of one Grazia, wife of Davide Emanuele Moccate

(1546) and of her son Elias Davide Emanuele Mocatte (1542). In

1638 Isaac Mocatta practised medicine at Leghorn and married

Rachel, a daughter of the famous Jewish physician, Moses Cor-

dovero. Almost contemporaneous with him and probably a rela

tive was Michael Diaz Mocatta who was well known as a printer

in Leghorn. Some of the Italian Mocattas subsequently settled

in Amsterdam, and obtained some prominence in the Jewish com

munity there. Isaac Mocatta divided with Abraham de Acosta the

first presidency of the United Jewish Community of Amsterdam

when the three Synagogues were amalgamated in 1679—1680.

Menasseh ben Israel dedicated the second part of his »Conciliador«

to Jacob Mocatta who was one of the wardens of the Jewish

Congregation at Recife in Pernambuco in 1641, and was appa

rently the first of his name to set foot in the New World.

The Mocattas who remained in Spain after the great expul

sion, and who had necessarily to conform to Christianity, appear

to have taken the baptismal name of Nunes Marchena, no doubt