Rishonim
Lisbon in the Rishonic era was a city transformed by conquest and reconquest, passing from Muslim Umayyad hands to Christian Portuguese rule in 1147, and becoming the dynastic seat of the Portuguese crown by the fourteenth century. The Jewish community there—among the largest and most prosperous in the Iberian Peninsula—enjoyed relative security under Christian monarchs who valued Jewish physicians, financiers, and scholars; they lived in a distinct judaria near the cathedral, with synagogues, schools, and markets humming with both Iberian and North African Jewish culture. The intellectual life was vivid and cosmopolitan: biblical exegesis, Kabbalah, and legal codification flourished, drawing on the golden heritage of Spanish Jewry even as that world convulsed with expulsions and conversions. The city's harbor—one of Christendom's great ports—made it a meeting place for Sephardic traders and refugees fleeing persecution elsewhere. When the Portuguese monarchy finally expelled the Jews in 1496-97, following Spain's expulsion five years before, that golden age ended abruptly; many of Lisbon's scholars, including the Abarbanel family, scattered to the Ottoman Mediterranean and beyond, carrying their learning and manuscripts into exile.