Abraham Seneor

Origins and early life

Abraham Seneor was born in 1412 in Segovia — his dates rest on secondary sources, and this fiche says so.

Work and career

For half a century he stood at the summit of Castilian Jewry as its rab mayor, the crown-appointed court rabbi and judge of the Jewish communities of Castile, while serving the Catholic Monarchs as one of their principal financiers and tax administrators. He had helped arrange the very marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella that united the crowns. When the edict of expulsion fell upon Spanish Jewry in 1492, the old man — eighty years of age — did not go into exile: under royal pressure, and with the king and queen standing as his godparents, he was baptized at Guadalupe in June 1492 together with his son-in-law Meir Melamed, taking the name Fernán Pérez Coronel — this fiche states the conversion plainly, and he figures here for the Jewish life that came before it.

He remained in royal service, founder of the Coronel lineage that scholars still trace, and died in 1493, within a year of the catastrophe of his people.