עמנואל אבוהב

Rav Immanuel Aboab (c. 5315/1555–5388/1628) was a Portuguese-born chacham and writer who labored to bring the anusim back to open Yiddishkeit. He was born in Porto into one of the well-known families of Christian Spain, a family that had already given Rav Yitzchak Aboab, author of Menorat HaMaor, and his own great-grandfather Rav Yitzchak Aboab of Castile (1433–1493). Orphaned young, he was raised by his grandfather Avraham Aboab, son of Rav Yitzchak of Toledo, and in 1585 he left for Italy so as to live openly as a Jew.

He wandered for years from place to place. In Pisa he held a disputation with an English scholar in 1597; in Reggio Emilia he came to know the mekubal Rav Menachem Azaryah of Fano; in Corfu he became acquainted with Orazio del Monte, a commander of the Venetian republic and a nephew of the duke of Urbino, with whom he corresponded in Latin and Italian in 1607. At Ferrara he argued with a Christian scholar over the vernacular translations of the Chumash, holding that only the Hebrew is faithful to the original and that the Latin and Greek renderings are corrupted. From Spoleto and other Italian towns he came at last to Venice, where the Spanish-Portuguese kehillah invited him to serve as its chacham, and where in 1603 he stood up in defense of his fellow Jews.

From 1615 to 1625 he labored on his Nomologia o Discursos Legales, written in Spanish in defense of the Oral Law and containing a list, in order of the generations, of the chachamim who carried it. Three years after finishing it he went up to Eretz Yisrael, following his daughter Garcia, who maintained two yeshivot there, one in Tzfat and one in Yerushalayim. The Nomologia was printed by his heirs in Amsterdam in 1629, the year after his passing, and again there in 1727; a Hebrew translation by Moshe Orfali appeared in 5757/1997.