Patrick Comerford
Isaac Abendana (ca 1640-1699) has been described as ‘the first notable Jew of the modern period.’ He and his older brother Jacob Abendana (1630-1695) served successively as the haham or rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in London at the end of the 17th century.
Both brothers were early pioneers in the dialogue between Jewish and Christian theologians in the 17th century in England and across Europe. They were also influential figures in Jewish and Hebrew studies in both Cambridge and Oxford, and for 37 years Isaac Abendana had a virtual monopoly on Hebrew studies at the two universities.
Their stories are part of the early story of the Sephardic communities in Amsterdam and London, including the beginnings of Bevis Marks Synagogue. But they also provide direct links to the sufferings of secret Jews or Maranos in Spain in the immediate aftermath of the Inquisition.
Abendana or Abendanan (Ibn Danan, ן׳דנא, אבן – דנא) is a Sephardi Jewish surname of Arabic origin associated with a number of Spanish and Portuguese or Sephardic Jewish families in Amsterdam and London. The first person to assume the name was Francisco Nuñez Pereira or Francisco Nunes Homem, the descendant of a ‘Marano’ who had been forced to convert from Judaism to Christianity.
He was born in Funchal, Madeira, and later fled Spain and the Spanish Inquisition at the beginning of the 17th century. He settled in Amsterdam, where he married his cousin Justa Pereira (1588- ) in 1605. He returned to Judaism in Amsterdam, took the name David Abendana, and became one of the founders of the first synagogue in Amsterdam. He died on 14 February 1625.
His eldest son, Manuel Abendana, was the ḥaham or rabbi of the Amsterdam congregation and died on 15 June 1667.
The brothers Jacob and Isaac Abendana were the sons of Joseph Abendana. Although their family originally lived in Hamburg, Jacob was born in Spain or Morocco and Isaac was born in Spain. They were still young when the family moved to Hamburg and then to Amsterdam.
Jacob studied at the rabbinical academy in Rotterdam and was appointed haham or rabbi of Rotterdam in 1655. On 3 May 1655 he delivered a memorial sermon on a Marrano named Nunez and Abraham Nuñez Bernal who was burned alive in Córdoba by the Spanish Inquisition the previous year. The Irish-born scientist John Desmond Bernal believed Abraham Nuñez Bernal was his ancestor.
The brothers Jacob and Isaac and Abendana worked together in producing Hebrew books for the Christian market and got to know some of the eminent Christian Hebraists of the day.
They published a Bible commentary by Solomon ben Melekh in Amsterdam in 1660. This includes Jacob’s own commentaries on the Pentateuch, the Book of Joshua, and part of the Book of Judges. A second edition was published in 1685.
Jacob Abendana went to Leiden seeking subscribers for his books. There he met the German Calvinist theologian Antonius Hulsius (1615-1685) and helped in his studies. Hulsius tried to convert Abendana to Christianity, initiating a lifelong correspondence that Hulsius later published. The Abendana brothers also engaged with other Christian scholars, including Johannes Buxtorf of Basel, Johann Coccejus of Leyden, and Jacob Golius of Leyden.
Jacob Abendana spoke at the dedication of the new synagogue in Amsterdam in 1675. Five years later, in 1680, he moved to London as haham or rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese or Sephardi synagogue in Creechurch Lane.
The synagogue was the first synagogue founded in England since the expulsion of Jews in 1290. It was founded in 1657 by a group of ‘Marrano’ merchants who had been living in London, openly professing to be Spanish Catholics but secretly continuing to practise Judaism. They acquired a house in Creechurch Lane for use as a synagogue, and continued to worship there 1701, when the Bevis Marks Synagogue was built.
Jacob Abendana was the haham in London for 15 years. During those years, he completed a Spanish translation of the Mishnah, along with the commentaries of Maimonides and Obadiah of Bertinoro. Although his work was never published, it was frequently cited by Christian theologians. Jacob died in London on 12 September 1685 and was buried in the Portuguese cemetery at Mile End.
Meanwhile, Jacob’s younger brother Isaac Abendana, who was born in Spain ca 1640, had already moved to England in 1662. He had lived at Hamburg and Leyden, where he studied medicine, and like Isaac he had an extensive correspondence with leading Christian theologians of the day, including Ralph Cudworth, a leading figure among the Cambridge Platonists and master of Christ’s College, Cambridge.
Isaac Abendana was approached by Adam Boreel who, with John Durie and Samuel Hartlib, who wanted to persuade a learned Jew to come to England to translate the Mishnah into Latin. Isaac arrived in Oxford on 3 June 1662 and soon introduced himself to Edward Pococke and other prominent Hebraists there.
John Lightfoot (1602-1675), a Christian Hebraist at Cambridge, secured an academic position for Abendana in Cambridge, and from 1663 until 1667, he was paid by Trinity College while he worked on his Latin translation of the Mishnah.
He seems to have left Trinity in less than friendly circumstances, but by 1669 he had a proper position in Cambridge, paid by the university. He taught Hebrew and rabbinical studies at Cambridge and completed his unpublished Latin translation of the Mishnah for the university in 1671. His manuscript translation of the Mishnah is in six large quarto volumes and is in the Cambridge Library.
While he was at Cambridge, Abendana also sold Hebrew books to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. He spent much of the period between 1681 and 1685 in London, where his brother Jacob was the haham of the Sephardi community.
Isaac took a teaching position in Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1689, and continued to teach there until he died in 1699. In Oxford, he compiled a series of Jewish almanacs for Christians in 1695, 1696, and later, which he dedicated to the president of Hertford College. His calendars and other works were posthumously published in an elaborated edition as the Discourses on the Ecclesiastical and Civil Polity of the Jews (1706).
Some sources suggest that after his brother Jacob died in London in 1685, Isaac became haham of the Spanish Portuguese Synagogue in London.
Isaac Abendana died on 17 July 1699 while he was visiting his friend Arthur Charlett, master of University College, Oxford. Charlett told the antiquarian Thomas Tanner that ‘Old Abendana rising at 4 to see me, having lighted his Pipe, fell down dead’.
A merchant Jew passing through Oxford brought Abendana’s body to London for burial. His death brought to an end to his 37-year Oxbridge career, when he had a virtual monopoly on Hebrew studies at the two universities.
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
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