Yitzchak Aboab II
Also known as Last Gaon of Castile
1433 CE–1493 CE · Rishonim · Castile
R. Yitzchak Aboab II (1433-1493) was the last great Talmudic authority of Iberian Jewry before the 1492 expulsion — known to history as the 'Last Gaon of Castile'. Born in Castile, he was the senior disciple of R. Yitzchak Canpanton (the head of the Castilian iyun school) and trained a generation of major Spanish-Sephardic rabbis including R. Abraham Zacuto and R. Yitzchak Karo (uncle of R. Yosef Karo).
After the 1492 Edict, he led 30,000 Spanish-Jewish refugees to Portugal, where he negotiated the conditions of their settlement with King João II. He died in Porto seven months later, a few months before the Portuguese expulsion of 1497 that would scatter his followers. His Talmudic novellae are preserved in his students' citations.
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CastileקסטיליהIberia
What they did here
Born in Castile; studied under R. Yitzchak Canpanton, the founder of the Castilian iyun school. Led the major yeshiva of Castile in his maturity.
About Castile
Castile is a historic region of central Spain. It began as a county of the Kingdom of León, became a kingdom in the eleventh century, and was united with León in 1230 under Ferdinand III, forming the Crown of Castile, which led the Christian conquest of much of Iberia. The 1469 marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon joined the two crowns, laying the basis of the Spanish monarchy. Castile's large medieval Jewish communities produced major scholars, including kabbalists such as Joseph Gikatilla and Moses de León, whom most modern scholars regard as the main author of the Zohar; Jews who would not convert were expelled in 1492. Map coordinates are placed at Madrid as a regional centroid.
In Castile at the same time
In the same place & time
Sages whose lives overlapped with Yitzchak Aboab II’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
In the same tradition
Works
No works attributed in the corpus yet.