26 Facts About Isaac Abarbanel

Isaac Abarbanel was born in Lisbon, Portugal, into one of the oldest and most distinguished Iberian Jewish families, his antecedents having escaped the massacre in Castile in 1391.

Isaac Abarbanel is quoted as saying that he counted Joseph ibn Shem-Tov as his mentor.

Isaac Abarbanel used his high position and the great wealth he had inherited from his father to aid his co-religionists.

Isaac Abarbanel both contributed large sums to the ransom and personally arranged for collections throughout Portugal.

Isaac Abarbanel wrote to his learned and wealthy friend, Vitale Nissim da Pisa, on behalf of the captives.

Isaac Abarbanel, warned in time, saved himself by a hasty flight to Castile in 1483.

Isaac Abarbanel unsuccessfully offered the king 30,000 ducats.

Isaac Abarbanel left Spain with his fellow Jews and went to Naples, where, soon after, he entered the service of the king.

Isaac Abarbanel is claimed to have offered them 600,000 crowns for the revocation of the edict.

Isaac Abarbanel died in Venice in 1508 and was buried in Padua next to its rabbi, Judah Minz.

Isaac Abarbanel's philosophy dealt with the sciences and how the general field relates to the Jewish religion and traditions, and his apologetics defend, the idea of the Messiah in Judaism while criticizing the Christian version.

Isaac Abarbanel believed that mere commentary was not enough, but that the actual lives of the Jewish people must be deliberated on, as well, when discussing such an important topic as the Bible.

Isaac Abarbanel took the time to include an introduction concerning the character of each book on which he commented, as well as its date of composition, and the intention of the original author, to make the works more accessible to the average reader.

Isaac Abarbanel's 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.

Isaac 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, Isaac Abarbanel digresses from the subject under discussion, particularly in his commentary on the Torah.

Isaac Abarbanel vehemently fought the extreme rationalism of philosophical interpretation, as well as interpretations based on philosophical allegory.

Isaac Abarbanel 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.

Isaac Abarbanel 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".

Isaac 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 be taken into account.

Isaac Abarbanel was essentially an opponent of philosophy, despite his authority on the subject, because his entire understanding of the Jewish religion was based on God's revelation in Jewish history.

Isaac Abarbanel agrees with and supports some of Maimonides' ideas, but he assails Maimonides' conception that the prophetic visions were the creations of imagination.

In like manner, Isaac Abarbanel exceeded all his predecessors in combating Maimonides' theory of the "Heavenly Chariot" in Ezekiel.

Isaac Abarbanel felt deeply the hopelessness and despair, which possessed Spanish Jews in the years following their expulsion from Spain, and set himself, therefore, to champion and strengthen their Messianic belief.

Isaac Abarbanel is impelled to this by the fact that Daniel furnishes the foundation for his Messianic theory.

Yet Isaac Abarbanel dismissed all these derogatory notions when defending the behavior of actual Blacks living in Portugal.