Don Isaac Abravanel

There is a kind of person who, when the floor gives way, reaches for a pen. Isaac Abravanel was that person on a grand scale. He handled the money of kingdoms, advised crowns in two countries, and lost almost everything more than once, and what he left behind is not a memoir of grievance but a shelf of biblical commentary thick enough to stop a door. He treated catastrophe as a research problem. The remarkable thing is how often that worked.

Born into one of the most distinguished Jewish families of the Iberian peninsula, Abravanel lived the whole arc of late-medieval Sephardi grandeur and its collapse. He served at the Portuguese court, then the Castilian one, then the courts of Italy. He was present, and powerful, at the very moment Spanish Jewry was destroyed by decree in 1492, and he went into exile with his people rather than convert to stay. Then he sat down and kept writing.

That refusal is the heart of the matter. Abravanel did not stop being a statesman when statesmanship failed him. He turned the same intelligence on the text, asking the questions a man of affairs asks: who holds power here, what does the institution actually do, why did the kingdom fall. He made interpretation a second statesmanship, and he is read for it five centuries later.

Three courts and two expulsions

Abravanel began in the service of Afonso V of Portugal, where he managed substantial financial affairs and grew wealthy. When Afonso died and Abravanel was implicated, almost certainly unjustly, in a conspiracy against the new king, he fled to Castile in 1483, leaving his fortune behind. He rebuilt. Within a few years he was lending to and managing revenue for Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic monarchs whose marriage had joined the Spanish kingdoms.

It is one of history's bleaker ironies that he served the very crown that, in March 1492, ordered the expulsion of all Jews from Spain. Tradition holds that Abravanel pleaded with the monarchs and even offered money to have the edict revoked, and that the effort failed. He could have stayed; men of his standing were offered the option of conversion. He left instead, in the summer of 1492, among the tens of thousands who chose exile over the baptismal font.

The rest of his life was Italian. He went first to Naples and served its king; when the French invaded, he followed the court into exile again, then moved through Sicily, Corfu and Monopoli before settling, finally, in Venice, where he undertook diplomatic work and where he died in 1508. He is buried in Padua. Four kingdoms employed him. None of them could make him stop.

The statesman's eye on the text

What makes Abravanel distinctive among the great Jewish commentators is the angle of his reading. He wrote sweeping commentaries on the Torah and the Prophets, and he prefaced each biblical book with long introductory questions, a method that lets you watch him think. Because he had governed, he read scripture for its politics. His treatment of the Books of Samuel and Kings is famously sceptical about monarchy itself; he reads the people's demand for a king as a falling-away, and argues that republics can be better governed than kingdoms, an opinion he had earned the hard way at three or four courts.

He also wrote against the despair of his moment. In a trilogy of works on redemption, including Ma'ayanei ha-Yeshu'ah and Yeshu'ot Meshicho, he gathered and defended the Jewish hope for a messianic future, partly as an answer to the conversionist pressure that 1492 had made so acute. To a community reeling from expulsion, he offered not consolation in the soft sense but argument: reasons to keep faith, set out with a lawyer's thoroughness. He had lost the kingdoms. He had not lost the case.