ABSTRACT
Cedric Cohen Skalli
The multilingualism of Don Isaac Abravanel
The rediscovery of a Portuguese epistle of Isaac Abravanel (1437–1507) at the end of the nineteenth century revealed that he was an accomplished writer of letters in Portuguese, but also shed a light on the multilingual and multicultural background of his whole work. Abravanel’s multilingualism was not only a literary phenomenon. It was grounded, first and foremost, in his daily social and economic activities as a merchant, banker, court Jew, and communal leader, which constantly led to interactions that took place in Portuguese, Castilian, Italian, Latin, and Hebrew, with Christians and Jews. This article attempts to clarify this context by confronting and analyzing two historical accounts of the capture of the Moroccan city of Arzila by the Portuguese in August 1471, one in a Hebrew letter of Don Isaac Abravanel (1472), and the other in the Portuguese Chronica de el Rei Affonso V (1497–1504) written by the chronicler, Rui de Pina (1440–1521).
