Don Isaac Abravanel and Late Medieval Jewish Political Thought

Don Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508) occupied an unusually prominent political position among medieval Jewish philosophers, serving as a senior financial official and advisor to King Afonso V of Portugal, later to the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella of Castile and Aragon, and finally, after 1492, to the Kingdom of Naples — a career of high statecraft that gives his philosophical writing on politics and kingship a distinctly practical, experientially grounded character rare among his more purely academic predecessors. Abravanel was among the Jews expelled from Spain by the Alhambra Decree of March 31, 1492, an edict he reportedly petitioned personally and unsuccessfully against before the Spanish court, and this catastrophe, together with the earlier trauma of the 1391 massacres that had already reshaped Iberian Jewish communal life, forms the immediate historical backdrop to the eschatological urgency running through much of his mature philosophical and exegetical work.