Nathan Lopes Cardozo

Nathan Lopes Cardozo (born 1946) is a Dutch-Israeli rabbi, philosopher, and scholar of Judaism. A sought-after lecturer on the international stage for both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences, Cardozo is known for his original and often fearlessly controversial insights into Judaism. His ideas are widely debated on an international level on social media, blogs, books and other forums.

Nathan Lopes Cardozo was born on 26 July 1946 in Amsterdam. Nathan was named after his father's youngest brother who was killed in the Holocaust. His father was a secular Jew who was proud of his Portuguese Jewish origin. His mother was an orphan who, when her Christian parents died, was raised by his father’s Jewish family, and though not Jewish, she was an integrated part of the community and spoke their language. Later on, she saved her husband and his family during the Holocaust by hiding them in her apartment in the center of Amsterdam while it was under Nazi occupation. Many times she risked her life by telling the Nazis that her husband and family were already taken to the concentration camps.

Due to his birth to a non-Jewish mother Cardozo was technically not halakhically Jewish either (natural-born Jewish status is conferred through one’s mother), but at age sixteen he formally converted to Judaism through the Amsterdam Rabbinate, formed by Hacham Salomon Rodrigues Pereira, Chief Rabbi Aron Schuster and Rabbi Benjamin Pels. His mother later converted to Judaism as well.

He studied for 12 years in Ultra Orthodox yeshivot but, after intensive studies in Jewish and general philosophy, carved out his own unprecedented approach to understanding Judaism. He is the founder and dean of the David Cardozo Academy in Jerusalem and its think tank, which focus on finding new halachic and philosophical approaches to dealing with the crisis of religion and identity among Jews and non-Jews, including in the State of Israel.