Immanuel Aboab

Origins and early life

Immanuel Aboab was born in Porto around 1555 into a family of New Christians whose genealogy the Encyclopaedia Judaica traces with unusual precision: his father, Henrique Gomes, bore the Hebrew name Isaac Aboab; his grandfather, Duarte Dias, was Abraham Aboab, a Jew forcibly baptized in the mass conversion of the Portuguese Jews in 1497, and the grandson of Isaac Aboab II, the 'last gaon of Castile', who had led the exiles of 1492 into Portugal.

Work and career

His father died young and he was raised by that grandfather, a Jew in secret in a Catholic city. In 1585, at thirty, he left Portugal for Italy and there, in Pisa and Ferrara and finally Venice, lived openly as the Jew he had been born, a leader of the Spanish and Portuguese congregation of Venice and a tireless defender of the Marranos who followed the same road, negotiating on their behalf with the authorities of the Republic.

His life's work was a book written for them: the Nomologia, or Discursos legales, composed in Spanish so that the New Christians could read it, a defense of the Oral Law — the rabbinic tradition of Mishnah and Talmud — against the Marranos who, knowing Judaism only from the Bible of their Catholic upbringing, doubted that the rabbis had any authority, and a history of the transmission of the Law from Moses to his own day.

Later years

He went up to Jerusalem in his last years and died there in 1628; the Nomologia was printed at Amsterdam the following year, and remained for a century the handbook by which returning Marranos learned what Judaism was.