Isaac Abravanel's Concept of Monarchy

Vol. 10, No. 3 Spring 1992 ISAAC ABRAVANEL'S CONCEPT OF MONARCHY by Rochelle 1. Millen Rochelle 1. Millen, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Religion at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. She has published in the area ofJewish philosophy as well as feminism and halakhah. 47 Historians sometimes date the beginning of the Renaissance with the art of Giotto, the early fourteenth-century Florentine painter, sculptor, and architect, or with the literary works of Petrarch. Certainly, by the time of the deaths of Giotto and Petrarch in the 1370s, Europe had actively stirred from its medieval slumber, and humanism, in its many forms, was developing at a rapid pace. Yet while Europe lumbered forward from the Dark Ages toward the light of Renaissance classicism and humanism, the fate of its Jewish community was otherwise.l One of the last flourishing Jewish communities on European soil-and the most populous2 -was expelled from Spain in 1492. The Spanish expulsion is a watershed in Jewish history. It marks the end of a period ofgreat cultural richness and diversity among the Jews of the Iberian peninsula-indeed a renaissance, and the beginning of three hundred years of medievalism. Thus, while Europe as a whole moved toward the flowering of art, literature, and classical learning as the transition to the modern world, the Jews of Europe became increasingly cut off from the centers of western culture. The late medieval period of European Jewish history may be said to have spanned 1492-1789, from the Spanish expulsion till the French Revolution. 'Jews were e."'