SOSA, MARTIN ALFONSO DE:

By: Joseph Jacobs, Schulim Ochser

Portuguese envoy at and governor of Goa, in the middle of the sixteenth century. In Cranganore, sixteen miles from Cochin, which at that time had a large Jewish community, he discovered several bronze tablets with ancient inscriptions. An old Jewish philologist of Calcutta declared that they were written in "Malabaric, Chaldaic, and Arabic" and referred to privileges which had been granted to the Jews of that locality. He translated all the inscriptions into Hebrew, and they were later rendered into Portuguese. The Hebrew translation of one of these privileges was in the possession of a certain Leo, cantor of the Greene Street Synagogue in New York, in the fifties of the nineteenth century. See Cochin.

J. S. O.