Modern scholarly literature, since Graetz and Baer, has most commonly used Abravanel, but his own son Judah insisted on Abarbanel, and Sefer HaTishbi by Elijah Levita, who was a nearby contemporary, twice vowels the name as Abarbinel (אַבַּרְבִּינֵאל).

[citation needed] Abarbanel was born in Lisbon, Portugal, into one of the oldest and most distinguished Iberian Jewish families,[3] his antecedents having escaped the massacre in Castile in 1391.

A student of the rabbi of Lisbon, Joseph Chaim,[4] he became well versed in rabbinic literature and in the learning of his time, devoting his early years to the study of Jewish philosophy.

After the death of Afonso, he was obliged to relinquish his office, having been accused by King John II of connivance with the Duke of Braganza, who had been executed on the charge of conspiracy.

Together with his friend, the influential converso Don Abraham Senior, of Segovia, he undertook to farm the revenues and to supply provisions for the royal army, contracts that he carried out to the entire satisfaction of Queen Isabella I of Castile.

For a short time, he lived in peace undisturbed, but when the city was taken by the French, bereft of all his possessions, he followed the young king, Alfonso, to Messina in 1495, before going to Corfu.

Ferdinand is said to have hesitated, but was prevented from accepting the offer by Tomás de Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor, who dashed into the royal presence, and throwing a crucifix down before the king and queen, asked whether, like Judas, they would betray their Lord for money.

[7] Claimed descendants of Abarbanel include Russian author Boris Pasternak[8] and Brazilian media mogul and entertainer Silvio Santos.

His philosophy dealt with the sciences and how the general field relates to the Jewish religion and traditions, and his apologetics defend, the idea of the Messiah in Judaism while criticizing the Christian version.

He also took the time to include an introduction concerning the character of each book on which he commented, as well as its date of composition, and the intention of the original author, to make the works more accessible to the average reader.

Not only did this make it easier for scholars to find the answers they were looking for, but these lists of difficulties aided the average student in studying Abarbanel's work.

His opposition to philosophical allegory must also be ascribed to the conditions of his time, the fear of undermining the unquestioning faith of the simple Jew, and the danger to Jewish survival in exile.

This also explains Abarbanel's faith in the Messianic concepts of Judaism, as well as his need to make his work accessible to all Jews instead of writing merely for the scholars of his time.

[3] Due to the overall excellence and exhaustiveness of Abarbanel's exegetical literature, he was looked to as a beacon for later Christian scholarship, which often included the tasks of translating and condensing his works.

His exegetical writings are set against a richly conceived backdrop of the Jewish historical and sociocultural experience, and it is often implied that his exegesis was sculpted with the purpose of giving hope to the Jews of Spain that the arrival of the Messiah was imminent in their days.

Men such as Isaac Albalag, Shem-Tov ibn Falaquera, Gersonides, Moses ben Joshua, and others, were denounced by Abarbanel as infidels and misleading guides for assuming a comparatively liberal standpoint in religiophilosophical questions.

Abarbanel will not hear of this explanation, even for the bat kol of the Talmud, which, according to him, was an actual voice made audible by God—a miracle, in fact.

[15][3] Abarbanel felt deeply the hopelessness and despair, which possessed Spanish Jews in the years following their expulsion from Spain, and set himself, therefore, to champion and strengthen their Messianic belief.

They were first published together as an incunabulum in Constantinople on December 5, 1505 by the first printers in that city, David and Samuel ibn Naḥmias, who had fled in the same boat from Iberia to Naples.

The Naḥmias brothers had worked in the Portuguese printing house of Eliezer Toledano ben Avraham ibn Alantansi, the Jewish printer of Híjar.

"[17] Abarbanel's view on slavery, however, stood in direct contradiction to that of Rashi, who, citing an earlier Talmudic source,[18] wrote that the heathen were never included in the sanction of possessing slaves as the children of Israel were permitted to do, for the Scripture says (Leviticus 25:44): "Of them you shall buy, etc.