Nadene Goldfoot
The Spanish Inquisition, commonly remembered as starting 1492, caused many Jews to be forced to convert to Catholicism, the prevailing religion of those days. They did this under duress, the most extreme sort of duress. Many continued to practice their religion in secret.
" Abraham Aboab (probably identical with Abuhafa Ham in Jacobs, "Sources," p. 19) is the oldest Aboab known to us. He lived at Pelof, Aragon. He received in 1263 from the king Don Jaime a tower called Altea, with the surrounding dairy farms and all rights and privileges of ownership.
ISAAC ABOAB was born in the 14th century, writer and author of THE CANDELABRUM OF LIGHT Menorat ha-Maor, which was a famous collection of homilies and aggadic teachings intended to emphasize the ethics of Judaism. The book became a best seller both in the original and in following copies in Spanish, German and Yiddish translations. It is part of a whole literature of such ethical works that arose at the time as a poplar reaction to the people's present concentration of esoteric and abstruse rabbinic studies.
ISAAC ABOAB (1433-1493) came from this family that were not about to be forced to do anything. He was a Talmudic and biblical scholar, called the last Gaon of Castile and among the 30 Jewish leaders who journeyed to Portugal in 1492 to ask permission for exiled Spanish Jews to enter the country. He settled and died in Oporto. "Porto (Portuguese pronunciation: [ˈpoɾtu]) is the second-largest city in Portugal after Lisbon and one of the major urban areas of the Iberian Peninsula." "Isaac Aboab, rabbi of Castile, the supercommentator of Naḥmanides, who died in 1493." It may be that the trip to Portugal was too much for him at the age of 60.
His family was traced back to Immanuel Aboab, same family of Spanish origin who sometimes spelled their surname as Aboaf, who was born c1555 and died c1628, a scholar and a writer. Being his parents were Marranos (hidden Jews), he emigrated to Italy where he was able to revert to Judaism. His intention was to live in Palestine, but on the actual way there on the trip, he died.
His writings were meant to win back Marranos to Judaism and included Nomologia, a defense in Spanish of the TALMUD. (Hebrew for TEACHING). He could have meant either the Palestinian or the Babylonian Talmuds. They both had the same purpose, citing much of the same material, but coming from different Biblical commentators. They also included rabbinic tradition; in other words, how different rabbis handled cases in point.
ISAAC DE FONSECA ABOAB died in 1693 at age 88. "Isaac Aboab was born in 1605 in Castrodaira, Portugal; his parents were David Aboab and Isabel da Fonseca. Out of fear of the Inquisition the family had themselves baptized; Isaac got the name Simao da Fonseca. Nevertheless, the family was not safe; they fled the persecution to St. Jean-de-Luz, very near the border in France and from there to Amsterdam,where they arrived about 1612. His father became a member of Neve Salom.."
He was the 1st rabbi in the Western Hemisphere. Surprisingly enough, he was born as a Marrano in Portugal. Portugal had at first received Jews wanting to remain as such, but the CHURCH got to them too, and in a few years turned on their Jewish subjects, giving them the same choices as Spain had done-convert or leave. His parents had moved to Holland as a child. When he reached age 21, he entered the service of the Amsterdam Jewish community, having studied and graduated as a rabbi. He was exposed to much more of the Western world as well that would have great affect on him.
In 1642, now a rabbi, he moved to Recife in Brazil which was under Dutch rule at that time. However, the Portuguese recaptured the city in 1654, forcing all the Jews including Isaac to flee. He returned to Amsterdam where he was appointed Hakkham (the smartest) and served as head of the religious academy. He was a member of the tribunal which excommunicated Spinoza. We've had Jewish turncoats since then, some even in our own present time, and I've not heard of this happening again of someone being excommunicated.
It's worthy to note that New York City was originally called New Amsterdam, an Recife played a part in the first Jews being able to enter this new settlement. " It was a 17th-century Dutch settlement established at the southern tip of Manhattan Island that served as the seat of the colonial government in New Netherland. The factorij became a settlement outside Fort Amsterdam. The fort was situated on the strategic southern tip of the island of Manhattan and was meant to defend the fur trade operations of the Dutch West India Company in the North River (Hudson River). In 1624, it became a provincial extension of the Dutch Republic and was designated as the capital of the province in 1625. There is the well-known story of Jews in a rowboat asking to enter, refugees from Recife and being denied. Finally, the right people were contacted in Holland and they gained admittance. Even then, it's all in who you know that oftentimes helps in saving your life.
Isaac was a well-known rabbi-preacher and was able to sway the wealthier members of the community to build THE AMSTERDAM GREAT SYNAGOGUE.
He himself was a follower of SHABBETAI TZEVI in1666. This rabbi was in reality a pseudo-messiah, a disappointment to many. He was born in Smyrna, Turkey and was attracted to Kabbalah in his youth and early manifested manic depressive traits which grew more pronounced throughout his life. Remember, this was in the days before such things were known about. The horrors of the Chmielnicki Massacres -the brutal murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews led by a Cossack leader in 1648 and had set him off to hearing heavenly voices telling him he would redeem Israel. He had many followers who thought he was the Messiah. He was not the first nor the last to be known as another false messiah.
It was this Aboab rabbi who was able to publish a Spanish translation of the Five Books of Moses together with a commentary. I note that it was this rabbi who believed in a false messiah but excommunicated Spinoza for his methods of deduction and what he thought was logical thinking.
Spinoza Benedict (Baruch or Bento Spinoza) 1632-1677) was a Dutch philosopher descended from a family of Portuguese Marranos. His grandfather and father had also escaped to Amsterdam and had returned to Judaism and were also leaders in their community. Spinoza had a regular Jewish education. His teachers included Manasseh ben Israel.
Spinoza studied beliefs of the Renaissance ; prevailing thinking of those days along with philosophy, especially that of Descartes. Rene Descartes ( 31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. A native of the Kingdom of France, he spent about 20 years (1629–1649) of his life in the Dutch Republic after serving for a while in the Dutch States Army of Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange and the Stadtholder of the United Provinces. "His basic strategy was to consider false any belief that falls prey to even the slightest doubt. This “hyperbolic doubt” then serves to clear the way for what Descartes considers to be an unprejudiced search for the truth."
In Spinoza’s Ethics, he wrote a section titled “Treating of God and What Pertains to Him,” in which he discusses God’s existence and what God is. He starts off by saying: “whether there is a God, this, we say, can be proved”. His proof for God follows a similar structure as Descartes’ ontological argument. Descartes attempts to prove God’s existence by arguing that there “must be some one thing that is supremely good, through which all good things have their goodness”. Spinoza’s argument differs in that he does not move straight from the conceivability of the greatest being to the existence of God, but rather uses a deductive argument from the idea of God. Spinoza says that man’s ideas do not come from himself, but from some sort of external cause. Thus the things whose characteristics a man knows must have come from some prior source. So, if man has the idea of God, then God must exist before this thought, because man cannot create an idea of his own imagination.
His unorthodox religious views led to his formal excommunication by the Sephardi community in 1656. This forced Spinoza to move from the Amsterdam community by 1660 and become a lens polisher to earn a living. He didn't stop writing, though. By 1670 he published his THEOLOGICO -POLITICAL TREATISE but anonomously. It started Bible criticism that pointed out internal contradictions. "His name lived on, also in a literary sense. After his death his name and the date of his death were printed on each side of the Sephardic Ketuba, the marriage settlement. These forms were still in use after tens of years."
Samuel Aboab (1610-1694) was also a rabbi but lived in Venice, Italy. He was a Talmudic scholar and author of halakhic responsa (Devar Shemuel) and other ethical writings. It was Venice who had the first ghettos for Jews. They were locked in . Marranos were allowed to settle in Venice after 1589. There were about 5,000 Jews living in this city then with a most vigorous intellectual life.
"On March 29, 1516, the Senate of the Republic of Venice signed a decree mandating that all Jews residing in the city live together in a monitored and gated area, separated from the Christians; thus Jews were relocated to a small island encircled by walls, where a foundry used to be (in the Venetian dialect, ‘getto’ was the word for foundry). That marked the establishment of the first Jewish ghetto in Europe, and the first ghetto in history to be called just that: ghetto, a word that would later become common throughout Europe." "The ghetto’s gates were opened in 1797, when Napoleon conquered Venice. "
This family covered about 300 years of producing leaders in the Marrano community defending Judaism from at least the 1300s to the 1600s. The question; environment or genetics comes into play. i'd say a goodly amount of it is genetics, but environment works on those genes.
Aboab, the "surname of an ancient and widely distributed Spanish family, among whose members were many most able scholars. The family can be authentically traced to the thirteenth century, and representatives thereof are to be found in Holland, Italy, Turkey, Africa, and America. Some branches of this family, in which the names Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and Samuel frequently occur, can be followed genealogically. This is because Jews usually name after the deceased. Through marriage, and by following the Spanish custom of joining together the paternal and maternal names, there arose the families of Aboab y Cardoso, Aboab y Lopez, Aboab y Brandaõ, Aboab y Coronel, Aboab y Osorio, Aboab de Paz, etc. EJ has a family tree chart. (Encyclopedia Judaica and biographies starting in 1263.
Resource: The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Aboab_I
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_Baruch_Spinoza
https://www.dutchjewry.org/drieluik/isack_aboab_da_fonseca/isack_aboab_da_fonseca.htm
http://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/344-aboab
Book: Finding Our Fathers by Dan Rottenberg
 |
| Marranos were the conversos who they were after, and to get one to confess took tools of torture of which they had lots of. |
" Abraham Aboab (probably identical with Abuhafa Ham in Jacobs, "Sources," p. 19) is the oldest Aboab known to us. He lived at Pelof, Aragon. He received in 1263 from the king Don Jaime a tower called Altea, with the surrounding dairy farms and all rights and privileges of ownership.
ISAAC ABOAB was born in the 14th century, writer and author of THE CANDELABRUM OF LIGHT Menorat ha-Maor, which was a famous collection of homilies and aggadic teachings intended to emphasize the ethics of Judaism. The book became a best seller both in the original and in following copies in Spanish, German and Yiddish translations. It is part of a whole literature of such ethical works that arose at the time as a poplar reaction to the people's present concentration of esoteric and abstruse rabbinic studies.
 |
| This Abahov synagogue in Safed, Israel is said to have been designed by rabbi Aboab. |
His family was traced back to Immanuel Aboab, same family of Spanish origin who sometimes spelled their surname as Aboaf, who was born c1555 and died c1628, a scholar and a writer. Being his parents were Marranos (hidden Jews), he emigrated to Italy where he was able to revert to Judaism. His intention was to live in Palestine, but on the actual way there on the trip, he died.
His writings were meant to win back Marranos to Judaism and included Nomologia, a defense in Spanish of the TALMUD. (Hebrew for TEACHING). He could have meant either the Palestinian or the Babylonian Talmuds. They both had the same purpose, citing much of the same material, but coming from different Biblical commentators. They also included rabbinic tradition; in other words, how different rabbis handled cases in point.
ISAAC DE FONSECA ABOAB died in 1693 at age 88. "Isaac Aboab was born in 1605 in Castrodaira, Portugal; his parents were David Aboab and Isabel da Fonseca. Out of fear of the Inquisition the family had themselves baptized; Isaac got the name Simao da Fonseca. Nevertheless, the family was not safe; they fled the persecution to St. Jean-de-Luz, very near the border in France and from there to Amsterdam,where they arrived about 1612. His father became a member of Neve Salom.."
In 1642, now a rabbi, he moved to Recife in Brazil which was under Dutch rule at that time. However, the Portuguese recaptured the city in 1654, forcing all the Jews including Isaac to flee. He returned to Amsterdam where he was appointed Hakkham (the smartest) and served as head of the religious academy. He was a member of the tribunal which excommunicated Spinoza. We've had Jewish turncoats since then, some even in our own present time, and I've not heard of this happening again of someone being excommunicated.
It's worthy to note that New York City was originally called New Amsterdam, an Recife played a part in the first Jews being able to enter this new settlement. " It was a 17th-century Dutch settlement established at the southern tip of Manhattan Island that served as the seat of the colonial government in New Netherland. The factorij became a settlement outside Fort Amsterdam. The fort was situated on the strategic southern tip of the island of Manhattan and was meant to defend the fur trade operations of the Dutch West India Company in the North River (Hudson River). In 1624, it became a provincial extension of the Dutch Republic and was designated as the capital of the province in 1625. There is the well-known story of Jews in a rowboat asking to enter, refugees from Recife and being denied. Finally, the right people were contacted in Holland and they gained admittance. Even then, it's all in who you know that oftentimes helps in saving your life.
Isaac was a well-known rabbi-preacher and was able to sway the wealthier members of the community to build THE AMSTERDAM GREAT SYNAGOGUE.
He himself was a follower of SHABBETAI TZEVI in1666. This rabbi was in reality a pseudo-messiah, a disappointment to many. He was born in Smyrna, Turkey and was attracted to Kabbalah in his youth and early manifested manic depressive traits which grew more pronounced throughout his life. Remember, this was in the days before such things were known about. The horrors of the Chmielnicki Massacres -the brutal murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews led by a Cossack leader in 1648 and had set him off to hearing heavenly voices telling him he would redeem Israel. He had many followers who thought he was the Messiah. He was not the first nor the last to be known as another false messiah.
It was this Aboab rabbi who was able to publish a Spanish translation of the Five Books of Moses together with a commentary. I note that it was this rabbi who believed in a false messiah but excommunicated Spinoza for his methods of deduction and what he thought was logical thinking.
Spinoza Benedict (Baruch or Bento Spinoza) 1632-1677) was a Dutch philosopher descended from a family of Portuguese Marranos. His grandfather and father had also escaped to Amsterdam and had returned to Judaism and were also leaders in their community. Spinoza had a regular Jewish education. His teachers included Manasseh ben Israel.
Spinoza studied beliefs of the Renaissance ; prevailing thinking of those days along with philosophy, especially that of Descartes. Rene Descartes ( 31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. A native of the Kingdom of France, he spent about 20 years (1629–1649) of his life in the Dutch Republic after serving for a while in the Dutch States Army of Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange and the Stadtholder of the United Provinces. "His basic strategy was to consider false any belief that falls prey to even the slightest doubt. This “hyperbolic doubt” then serves to clear the way for what Descartes considers to be an unprejudiced search for the truth."
In Spinoza’s Ethics, he wrote a section titled “Treating of God and What Pertains to Him,” in which he discusses God’s existence and what God is. He starts off by saying: “whether there is a God, this, we say, can be proved”. His proof for God follows a similar structure as Descartes’ ontological argument. Descartes attempts to prove God’s existence by arguing that there “must be some one thing that is supremely good, through which all good things have their goodness”. Spinoza’s argument differs in that he does not move straight from the conceivability of the greatest being to the existence of God, but rather uses a deductive argument from the idea of God. Spinoza says that man’s ideas do not come from himself, but from some sort of external cause. Thus the things whose characteristics a man knows must have come from some prior source. So, if man has the idea of God, then God must exist before this thought, because man cannot create an idea of his own imagination.
His unorthodox religious views led to his formal excommunication by the Sephardi community in 1656. This forced Spinoza to move from the Amsterdam community by 1660 and become a lens polisher to earn a living. He didn't stop writing, though. By 1670 he published his THEOLOGICO -POLITICAL TREATISE but anonomously. It started Bible criticism that pointed out internal contradictions. "His name lived on, also in a literary sense. After his death his name and the date of his death were printed on each side of the Sephardic Ketuba, the marriage settlement. These forms were still in use after tens of years."
Samuel Aboab (1610-1694) was also a rabbi but lived in Venice, Italy. He was a Talmudic scholar and author of halakhic responsa (Devar Shemuel) and other ethical writings. It was Venice who had the first ghettos for Jews. They were locked in . Marranos were allowed to settle in Venice after 1589. There were about 5,000 Jews living in this city then with a most vigorous intellectual life.
"On March 29, 1516, the Senate of the Republic of Venice signed a decree mandating that all Jews residing in the city live together in a monitored and gated area, separated from the Christians; thus Jews were relocated to a small island encircled by walls, where a foundry used to be (in the Venetian dialect, ‘getto’ was the word for foundry). That marked the establishment of the first Jewish ghetto in Europe, and the first ghetto in history to be called just that: ghetto, a word that would later become common throughout Europe." "The ghetto’s gates were opened in 1797, when Napoleon conquered Venice. "
This family covered about 300 years of producing leaders in the Marrano community defending Judaism from at least the 1300s to the 1600s. The question; environment or genetics comes into play. i'd say a goodly amount of it is genetics, but environment works on those genes.
Aboab, the "surname of an ancient and widely distributed Spanish family, among whose members were many most able scholars. The family can be authentically traced to the thirteenth century, and representatives thereof are to be found in Holland, Italy, Turkey, Africa, and America. Some branches of this family, in which the names Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and Samuel frequently occur, can be followed genealogically. This is because Jews usually name after the deceased. Through marriage, and by following the Spanish custom of joining together the paternal and maternal names, there arose the families of Aboab y Cardoso, Aboab y Lopez, Aboab y Brandaõ, Aboab y Coronel, Aboab y Osorio, Aboab de Paz, etc. EJ has a family tree chart. (Encyclopedia Judaica and biographies starting in 1263.
Resource: The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Aboab_I
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_Baruch_Spinoza
https://www.dutchjewry.org/drieluik/isack_aboab_da_fonseca/isack_aboab_da_fonseca.htm
http://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/344-aboab
Book: Finding Our Fathers by Dan Rottenberg
