Isaac Abarbanel
(1437 - 1508), Jewish courtier, scholar, and writer

Offshoot of a distinguished Ibero-Jewish family, Abravanel spent forty-five years in Portugal, then passed the nine years immediately prior to Spanish Jewry's 1492 expulsion in Castile. At that time an important figure at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella, he chose Italian exile over conversion to Christianity and spent his remaining years in various centers in Italy where he composed most of his works, a combination of prodigious biblical commentaries and involved theological tomes.

Abarbanel came to Castile in flight from João II, having been implicated in a noble conspiracy against this Portuguese monarch whose father he had served closely for decades. (He denied involvement in the conspiracy -- indeed, the conspiracy's existence.) Once in Spain, Abarbanel quickly established himself as a leading homme d'affaires and royal servant. By 1485, he had relocated to the Spanish heartland at Alcalá de Henares in order to oversee tax-farming operations for Cardinal (Pedro González de) Mendoza, the "third king of Spain (tercer rey de las Españas)." At the same time, Abarbanel supported the Spanish monarchs' campaign against Granada, Islam's last Iberian citadel, offering extensive loans.

Though Granada's fall in January 1492 might, in retrospect, seem a glaring portent of Spanish Jewry's imminent demise, Abarbanel may have found little to disturb the idea that the "royal alliance" in which the Jews of Spain (Hebrew sefarad) had long placed their trust (relying on courtiers like himself to provide the key link between monarch and Jewish community) was essentially healthy. The government's four-year renewal of contracts with Jewish tax-farmers in 1491, Abarbanel among them, spoke for itself. Intensification of persecution against Spain's converso population on the part of the Spanish Inquisition could be seen as divine retribution due to those who had abandoned Judaism. It is possible, then, that Abarbanel celebrated Granada's fall, as did other Spanish Jews, rather than seeing in it an event that augured badly for Judaism's future in the land of his ancestors.

However Abarbanel's lack of clairvoyance may be appraised, Ferdinand's and Isabella's signing of an order of expulsion against Jews in Spain and her possessions clearly took Abarbanel by surprise. With the death knell of Spanish Jewry having been sounded, grave concerns imposed themselves on him and his family in the three months given to Jews to convert or settle their affairs and leave. Beyond working to salvage some of his vast wealth, Abarbanel must have been concerned with the effects of a zealously-mounted Christian missionizing effort of which his family was made a special target. Abarbanel's eldest son, Judah, got wind of a planned kidnapping and forced baptism of his own first-born son (named Isaac, after his father, in keeping with longstanding Hispano-Jewish tradition). In a poem written a decade later and directed towards this son, then living as a forced convert to Christianity in Portugal, Judah related how Spain's king ordered "that my child, still nursing, should be seized / and brought into his faith on his behalf." The hope, it would seem, was to induce Judah and perhaps his father to convert and remain in Spain. In the event, the Abarbanels set sail for Italy where Abarbanel senior went on to produce one of the largest and most diverse Hebrew literary corpora of medieval or early modern times. (Judah Abarbanel would gain fame there as Leone Ebreo, whose Dialoghi d'amore became an influential work of Renaissance Neoplatonism.)

Isaac Abarbanel's scholarship was already well-attested during his Iberian years, finding its most notable written expression in biblical commentaries on the books of Joshua, Judges, and Samuel composed by Abarbanel soon after his arrival in Castile. Among other things, these works display Abarbanel's broad knowledge of, and at times extraordinarily ecumenical attitude towards, Christian scholarship. (One Latin biblical interpreter with whom he carried on a running, albeit tacit, conversation was his older Spanish contemporary Alfonso de Madrigal "el Tostado.") These commentaries also manifest Abarbanel's novel interests in and approaches to questions regarding the authorship and origins of biblical books, some of which imply the impress of a humanist sense of historicity on Abarbanel's exegetical thought-processes. Seen from this vantage-point, these commentaries offer perhaps the earliest example of Renaissance stimulus in works of Hebrew literature composed beyond Italy.

Though he spent the closing years of his life in Italy, Abarbanel never ceased to view himself as an Iberian (Sefardic) Jew. Indeed, in his final words which have come down, he describes himself as one "unable to be at peace when . . . the exile of Jerusalem in sefarad remains in dispersion."