Expectations and Expulsion: The Shifting Imperial Positioning of Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508)

The life of merchant, scholar and court Jew Don Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508) is most emblematic of Jewish ambiguity vis-à-vis the rise of the Iberian empires. In the first 46 years of his fascinating life, he was involved in various ways in Portuguese commercial expansion as well as in court politics. As will be demonstrated in this seminar, his Jewish positioning vis-à-vis Portuguese empire building was expressed during this period in the form of a Christian–Jewish collaboration. He seemed to entertain the fantasy that Jews could play an important role in the nascent Portuguese empire, intervening between the Christian conquerors and the subjected “Moors” or black Africans. The decade leading to the 1492 expulsion provided a tragic, sobering correction to this view, putting an end to the Jewish collaborative approach to Christian Iberian expansionism. After 1492, Abravanel wandered between Naples, the island of Corfu and a Venetian port city (Monopoli) in the Puglia region, finally settling in Venice for the last five years of his tormented life. During this decisive decade and a half after the 1492 expulsion, Abravanel succeeded in reconstructing his position as Jewish leader, this time of the newly scattered Sephardic Jewry. He then became one of the major voices in the first years of the Sephardic exile, writing an extensive biblical exegetic work together with philosophical commentaries of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed. The extensive and fascinating work written in the immediate aftermath of the expulsion offers us a unique opportunity to reconstruct Abravanel’s new positioning after having become, together with the Sephardim, a victim of Iberian imperial expansion. The life and thoughts of Abravanel are so well documented that a precise mapping of his imperial successive positioning before and after 1492 is possible.