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Isaac ben Judah Abarbanel (; 1437–1508), commonly referred to as Abarbanel (; also spelled Abravanel, Avravanel or Abrabanel), was a Portuguese Jewish politician, philosophy, Bible commentator, and financier.Chambers Biographical Dictionary, , page 1
The name's etymology is uncertain. Some say it comes from Ab Rabban El, meaning "father of the rabbis of God", which seems to favor the pronunciation "Abrabanel".
He used his high position and the great wealth he had inherited from his father to aid his co-religionists. When his patron Afonso captured the city of Arzila, in Morocco, the Jewish captives faced being sold as slaves. Abarbanel both contributed large sums to the ransom and personally arranged for collections throughout Portugal. He also wrote to his learned and wealthy friend,Cultural intermediaries: Jewish intellectuals in early modern Italy By David B. Ruderman, Giuseppe Veltri Vitale (Yehiel) Nissim da Pisa, on behalf of the captives.
After the death of Afonso, he was obliged to relinquish his office, having been accused by King John II of connivance with the Duke of Braganza, who had been executed on the charge of conspiracy. Abarbanel, warned in time, saved himself by a hasty flight to Castile in 1483. His large fortune was confiscated by royal decree.
At Toledo, his new home, he occupied himself at first with Biblical studies, and in the course of six months produced an extensive commentary on the books of Joshua, Judges, and Samuel. Shortly afterward, though, he entered the service of the house of Castile. Together with his friend, the influential converso Don Abraham Senior, of Segovia, he undertook to farm the revenues and to supply provisions for the royal army, contracts that he carried out to the entire satisfaction of Queen Isabella I of Castile. During the Reconquista, Abarbanel advanced considerable sums of money to the king. When the Jews were ordered banished by the Catholic Monarchs of Spain with the Alhambra Decree, he did all in his power to induce the king to revoke the edict. He unsuccessfully offered the king 30,000 ducats (approximately £60,000 at the time). He left Spain with his fellow Jews and went to Naples, where, soon after, he entered the service of the king. For a short time, he lived in peace undisturbed, but when the city was taken by the French, bereft of all his possessions, he followed the young king, Alfonso, to Messina in 1495, before going to Corfu. In 1496, he settled in Monopoli, before finally landing in Venice in 1503, where his services were employed in negotiating a commercial treaty between Portugal and the Venetian republic.
Several times during the mid to late 15th century, he personally spent large amounts of his personal fortunes to bribe the Catholic monarchs to permit the Jews to remain in Spain. Abarbanel is claimed to have offered them 600,000 crowns for the revocation of the edict. Ferdinand is said to have hesitated, but was prevented from accepting the offer by Tomás de Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor, who dashed into the royal presence, and throwing a crucifix down before the king and queen, asked whether, like Judas, they would betray their Lord for money. In the end, he managed only to get the date for the expulsion delayed by two days.
He died in Venice in 1508 and was buried in Padua next to its rabbi, Judah Minz. Owing to the destruction of the Jewish cemetery there during the Siege of Padua in 1509, his grave is now unknown. Bones from the cemetery were reburied in 1955, and there is a tradition that the remains of Abarbanel and Minz are among them. Claimed descendants of Abarbanel include Russian author Boris Pasternak and Brazilian media mogul and entertainer Silvio Santos.
His commentaries are divided into chapters, each of which is preceded by a list of questions or difficulties that he sets out to explain over the course of the chapter. Not only did this make it easier for scholars to find the answers they were looking for, but these lists of difficulties aided the average student in studying Abarbanel's work. In his commentary on the Torah, these questions have no fixed number, sometimes amounting to over 40, but in his commentary to the Prophets he limits himself to six. Abarbanel rarely forayed into the world of grammatical or philological investigation in the vein of Abraham ibn Ezra or David Kimhi before him, instead focusing on a content-based investigation of the Scripture at hand.
Occasionally, Abarbanel digresses from the subject under discussion, particularly in his commentary on the Torah. His style and presentations are prolix and often repetitive. Some of his interpretations derive from homilies delivered in the synagogue. He vehemently fought the extreme rationalism of philosophical interpretation, as well as interpretations based on philosophical allegory. At the same time, he himself had recourse, especially in his commentary on the Torah, to numerous interpretations based on philosophy.
His opposition to philosophical allegory must also be ascribed to the conditions of his time, the fear of undermining the unquestioning faith of the simple Jew, and the danger to Jewish survival in exile. This also explains Abarbanel's faith in the Messianic concepts of Judaism, as well as his need to make his work accessible to all Jews instead of writing merely for the scholars of his time. Although his commentary often differed from kabbalistic interpretations, Abarbanel nonetheless believed that the Torah had a hidden meaning in addition to its overt significance, thus he interpreted passages in the Torah in various ways. His commentary to Deuteronomy 25:5 demonstrates both his knowledge and endorsement of kabbalists and kabbalistic understanding of Scripture. Side by side with philosophical concepts (entitled "the analytical way", "the scientific", or "the method of wisdom") he gives "the way of the Torah", i.e., the moral and religious tenets to be derived from the text.
He quoted extensively from the Midrash, but allowed himself to criticize his source, when in his view, it did not align with the literal meaning of the text. He explains, "I shall not refrain from pointing to the weakness inherent in their statements where they are homiletical in nature and are not accepted by them as authoritative" (Introduction to Joshua).
Overall, Abarbanel's exegetical writings are notable for these distinctions:
However, the major characteristic that separated Abarbanel from his predecessors was his unflagging commitment toward using the Scripture as a means of elucidating the status quo of his surrounding Jewish community; as a historical scholar, Abarbanel was able to contemporize the lessons of the historical eras described in the Scripture and apply them successfully in his explanations of modern Jewish living. Abarbanel, who had himself taken part in the politics of the great powers of the day, believed that mere consideration of the literary elements of Scripture was insufficient, and that the political and social life of the characters in the Tanakh must also be taken into account. Due to the overall excellence and exhaustiveness of Abarbanel's exegetical literature, he was looked to as a beacon for later Christian scholarship, which often included the tasks of translating and condensing his works.
His exegetical writings are set against a richly conceived backdrop of the Jewish historical and sociocultural experience, and it is often implied that his exegesis was sculpted with the purpose of giving hope to the Jews of Spain that the arrival of the Messiah was imminent in their days. This idea distinguished him from many other philosophers of the age, who did not rely as heavily on Messianic concepts.
A characteristic instance of his vacillation is afforded by his most important religious work, the Rosh Amanah ( The Pinnacle of Faith) (Amsterdam, 1505), whose title derives from Song of Songs 4:8. This work, devoted to the championship of the Maimonidean 13 articles of belief against the attacks of Hasdai Crescas and Joseph Albo, ends with the statement that Maimonides compiled these articles merely in accordance with the fashion of other nations, which set up axioms or fundamental principles for their science. However, he holds that Judaism has nothing in common with human science; that the teachings of the Torah are revelations from God, and therefore are all of equal value; that among them are neither principles nor corollaries from principles.
Abarbanel cites Averroes and Al-Ghazzali in claiming that the sciences originated among the Jews, divinely inspired as the Torah, and were thence transmitted to the Greeks and Romans via the Chaldeans and Egyptians.
Abarbanel agrees with and supports some of Maimonides' ideas, but he assails Maimonides' conception that the prophetic visions were the creations of imagination. Abarbanel will not hear of this explanation, even for the bat kol of the Talmud, which, according to him, was an actual voice made audible by God—a miracle, in fact.Commentary on Gen. 16 In like manner, Abarbanel exceeded all his predecessors in combating Maimonides' theory of the "Heavenly Chariot" in Ezekiel. Aṭeret Zeḳenim 24, and commentary on The Guide for the Perplexed part III, 71–74, ed. Warsaw
These three books are considered the separate parts of a larger work entitled Tower of Salvation (, Migdāl Yəshuʿot).
The first work is in the form of a commentary upon Daniel, in which he controverts both the Christian exposition of and the Jewish rationalistic approach to this book. Curiously enough, in opposition to the Talmud and all later rabbinical tradition, he counts Daniel among the prophets, coinciding therein—but therein only—with the current Christian interpretation. He is impelled to this by the fact that Daniel furnishes the foundation for his Messianic theory. The remainder of his commentary is devoted to an exhaustive and caustic criticism of the Christian exposition.
The second work is probably unique in being an exposition of the doctrine concerning the Messiah according to the traditional testimony of Talmud and Midrash. His third apologetic work contains a collection of Messianic passages of the Bible and their interpretations, in the course of which Abarbanel criticizes the Christian interpretation of these passages.
Scholars including Jonathan Schorsch and David M. Goldenberg point out Abarbanel's comments on the Book of Amos as indicative of very humanistic sentiments: "Abarbanel responded with unconcealed anger to the comment of a tenth-century Karaite from Jerusalem, Yefet b. Ali, on the issue of Black promiscuity. Yefet had interpreted a biblical verse (Amos 9:7) to refer to Black women as being 'promiscuous and therefore no one knows who his father is.' Abarbanel: 'I don't know who told Yefet this practice of promiscuity among Black women, which he mentions. But in the country of my birth Portugal I have seen many of these people and their women are loyal to their husbands unless they are prisoners and captive to their enemies. They are just like any other people.'" Schorsch argues that concerning Abarbanel's views about the connection between slavery and the curse of Ham, Abarbanel was influenced by the writings of his contemporaries and predecessors, including Christian and Muslim writers, as well as the culture around him, and was hardly considered unique in his views. Abarbanel's commentary on Amos 9:7 and other writings, argues Schorsch, show the complexity of Abarbanel's views of Blacks. "Abarbanel's conflicting passages regarding Blacks were written at different times and addressed different realms of discourse, the one abstract myth, the other actual living Blacks." Schorsch shows how contemporary travel books described Ethiopians as barbarians, stealing each other's children to sell to Muslim foreigners. "Hence, the many statements that Ethiopians engaged in relations... with their siblings or parents. In this view, families, a cultured product, would not have been known to primitives who lived like animals. Yet Abarbanel dismissed all these derogatory notions when defending the behavior of actual Blacks living in Portugal."
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