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