Story

Don Isaac Abravanel

1437-1508 CE

Biblical Narrative

Don Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508) — statesman, biblical commentator, philosopher, and royal financier — was the last great Jewish public man of medieval Christian Iberia, and the man whose name became, for the generations after the Spanish Expulsion, almost synonymous with exile itself. Born in Lisbon to a family that traced its lineage to King David through the exilarchs of Babylonian Jewry, he served three crowns in succession: King Afonso V of Portugal, then Ferdinand and Isabella of Castile and Aragon, then King Ferrante I of Naples. Three times he rose to the heights of finance and royal counsel; three times he was driven into flight.

His Castilian post — comptroller of taxes for the Crown — placed him in the throne room of the Catholic Monarchs in late March 1492, when the Alhambra Decree of expulsion was issued. Tradition (preserved in his own Commentary on Kings, in the chronicle of his son Judah, and in the chronicle of Eliyahu Capsali of Crete) records that Abravanel pleaded with Ferdinand to revoke the decree, offering 300,000 ducats from his own funds and from the Jewish community of Castile. The king wavered. Then, the chronicle records, the Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada burst into the chamber, threw a crucifix on the table, and cried, "Judas Iscariot sold his Master for thirty pieces of silver. Your Highness would sell him a second time?" Ferdinand left the chamber. The decree stood.

Abravanel was permitted to depart Castile with his fortune; tens of thousands of poorer Jews were not. He sailed for Naples, was appointed treasurer to King Ferrante I, and within two years was again in flight when the French king Charles VIII invaded the Italian south. He spent his final years in Venice, then the most tolerant of the Italian republics for refugee Sephardim. There, between 1495 and his death in 1508, he wrote the works for which he is now remembered: massive biblical commentaries on the Torah, the Former and Latter Prophets, Daniel, and a trilogy of messianic treatises — Rosh Amanah, Yeshu'ot Meshicho, and Ma'ayanei ha-Yeshu'ah — written to comfort a shattered people with the certainty that the Messiah was at hand.

He calculated, on the basis of the prophecies of Daniel, that the Messiah would come no later than 1503, and probably already in 1496. He was, of course, wrong. But the messianic literature he produced in those years became the cornerstone of Sephardic religious culture in exile. In Salonika, in Amsterdam, in the courts of Italy and the synagogues of Morocco, his commentaries — and especially his political reading of the Bible, in which kingship is a divine concession to human weakness rather than an ideal — were copied, printed, and read for four centuries.

Though he tarry, I will wait for him every day, until he comes — for the appointed time is set, and the vision will yet speak.Don Isaac Abravanel, Yeshu'ot Meshicho (The Salvation of His Anointed), Venice, 1497

Archaeology · History · Genetics

The standard scholarly biography of Abravanel remains Benzion Netanyahu's Don Isaac Abravanel: Statesman and Philosopher (1953; revised editions 1968, 1998). Netanyahu — father of the future Israeli prime minister — wrote a polemical, magisterial study that established the basic chronology and extracted from the chronicles a coherent narrative. Later scholarship, especially Eric Lawee's Isaac Abarbanel's Stance Toward Tradition (2001), has refined Netanyahu's portrait considerably, showing Abravanel to be more deeply engaged with Christian scholastic biblical commentary — Nicholas of Lyra, Paul of Burgos, and the Latin Glossa Ordinaria — than earlier historians had recognized.

Abravanel's commentaries are, formally, the last great achievement of medieval Sephardic biblical exegesis. They are also, formally, a hybrid: they import the questio-format of Christian scholastic commentary (a problem is posed, opposing positions are surveyed, a resolution is offered) into a Hebrew rabbinic framework. This was a deliberate borrowing. Abravanel had served at the courts of Catholic monarchs; he knew the form. The result is a biblical commentary that is simultaneously Jewish and European in a way that no commentary before him had quite been.

On political theory, Abravanel's reading of 1 Samuel 8 (the demand of Israel for a king) is the locus classicus. He argues, against most of the medieval tradition, that the Israelites' request was sinful precisely because it was a request for monarchy as such — and that the divine ideal had been the loose magistracy of the Judges. He cites the political experience of Venice, Florence, and Genoa as living evidence that republics can govern well. This argument was without close precedent in earlier Jewish thought; it had clear precedent in the Aristotelian and Ciceronian political tradition that Abravanel had absorbed at the Iberian courts.

On messianism, Yeshu'ot Meshicho and Ma'ayanei ha-Yeshu'ah were studied as quasi-canonical works in the Sephardic diaspora for two centuries. Their detailed calculation of the messianic year — based on the seventy weeks of Daniel — fed directly into the messianic ferment of the 16th century, including the Lurianic milieu of Safed and, ultimately, the Sabbatian movement of 1665–1666. Modern scholars (Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Moti Benmelech) have traced how the reading practices Abravanel established became the matrix in which every subsequent Sephardic messianic claimant was evaluated.

His commentaries on Daniel were, for the exiled Sephardim of the sixteenth century, what the Book of Lamentations had been for the exiles of Babylon: a structure within which to mourn, and a calendar within which to wait.Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor (1982, paraphrased)