The da Fonseca Family

The name da Fonseca can only be understood when set alongside that of Aboab, of which it was initially a branch. Now the Aboab count among the most ancient and most illustrious rabbinical families of Jewish Spain. Tradition links the lineage to Isaac Aboab I, a Talmudic sage of 14th-century Castile, famous for his major work, the Menorat ha-Maor ("The Candlestick of Light"). According to scholarly studies, Aboab's Menorat ha-Maor was likely composed after 1340, contrary to previous assumptions, and the anthology aimed to make aggadic literature accessible to the widest audience of medieval Sefarad.

This project — to place the treasure of rabbinical narratives within reach of the people and not only of the learned — already speaks to a virtue that the lineage would carry through the centuries: the concern for transmission as an act of intellectual charity. To teach the Law to the humblest is already to practice the justice and kindness that Judaism places at the heart of its ethics. The Menorat ha-Maor was one of those books which, written in a time of crisis, sought to strengthen the piety of a threatened community. Contemporary scholarship has moreover taken pains to distinguish this work from neighboring anthologies, such as Israel Efros's comparative work on the relations between the work of Israel al-Nakawa and that of Isaac Aboab.

From this Castilian stock descends a long posterity. Genealogists recall that the patriarch of the family, Abraham Aboab, had a son, Isaac Aboab I, whose son Abraham II was a near contemporary of Judah ben Asher, the great-grandson of Abraham II, Isaac Aboab II, being in turn a decisor (posek) and commentator on the Torah in Toledo. This chain of Toledan sages forms the humus into which the roots of the future da Fonseca plunge. It is fitting, however, to honestly name the share of uncertainty: medieval filiations, transmitted by family memory and reconstructed by genealogists, partake more of received narrative than of notarial deed. Tradition affirms them; the archive, lacunary, confirms them only in fragments.

The History of the Aboab Family in the Crucible of Marranismo

The history of the Aboab, like that of all Sepharad, pivots in 1492. The edict of the Catholic Monarchs compels the Jews of Spain to exile or conversion. The work of Béatrice Leroy on the Jews in Christian Spain before 1492 has shown how deeply rooted this community was, before the tragedy, in the cities and trades of the peninsula. Neighboring Portugal first welcomes the exiles, before imposing on them in turn, from 1497 onward, forced conversion: thus is born the immense population of cristãos-novos, the new Christians, outwardly Catholic but many of whom secretly preserve the faith of their ancestors.

It is in this crucible that the surname da Fonseca is forged. The passage from the Hebrew and rabbinic name of Aboab to a neutral and "Christian" Portuguese name stems from the survival strategy of Marranismo: concealing Jewish identity beneath a Lusitanian façade. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi masterfully described this Marrano condition, this tearing between imposed appearance and inner loyalty, in his study—now a classic—on Isaac Cardoso. The family from which Isaac Aboab da Fonseca would emerge lived precisely this forced duplicity.

The biographical sources concerning the future rabbi attest to it plainly: he was the son of David Aboab and Isabel da Fonseca; under the constraint of circumstances, his parents were converted, then fled to France and finally to Amsterdam. The mother's name, da Fonseca, thus adjoins the patronymic and rabbinic name of Aboab—a frequent practice among Western Sephardim. The child is born in a land of oppression: born Simão da Fonseca on February 1, 1605 at Castro Daire, in Portugal, he first bears a Christian given name, before receiving, upon his return to Judaism, that of Isaac. This double name is in itself a document: it inscribes within a man's very being the violence of history and the tenacity of memory.

One must measure here the virtue of refusal. To choose exile rather than lasting apostasy, to prefer the precariousness of flight to the comfort of concealment, is an act of kiddoush ha-Shem—of sanctification of the Name—that the Jewish tradition holds as one of the highest loyalties. The parents of Simão da Fonseca, in resuming the road northward, choose the truth of the Law against the security of the lie.

Around 1612, the family found refuge in the United Provinces. Amsterdam then became the brilliant center of Western Sephardic Judaism, the "Northern Jerusalem" where former marranos could at last openly live the faith of their fathers. Miriam Bodian showed how these "Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation" reconstructed there, from their fragmented memory, a Jewish community both faithful to tradition and marked by their Iberian past. Henry Méchoulan in turn restored the intellectual and spiritual climate of this city where, in the time of Spinoza, one could "be Jewish" without hiding.

It was there that the young fugitive received his education. The biographies concur: still a young boy, Isaac Aboab da Fonseca fled with his parents the Inquisition in Portugal, via France, to Amsterdam in 1612. His precocity was remarkable. In Amsterdam, he was educated by Isaac Uziel, and at the age of eighteen he became rabbi (hakham) of the Beth Israël community, one of the three Sephardic communities in the city. Such an ascension—a child born under the Inquisition become master of the Law at eighteen—speaks to the intensity of Talmudic learning cultivated in this household.

Amsterdam also offered the da Fonseca lineage the framework for its communal flourishing. The city then had three Sephardic congregations which would later be united into a single one, the Talmud Torah. The involvement of Isaac Aboab da Fonseca in the collective life of this Nation—his teaching, his jurisprudence, his rabbinical office—embodies a cardinal value of Judaism: service to the community, the sage's responsibility toward the people. Knowledge there is never private possession, but debt toward the collective.

The most striking fact of the lineage unfolds on the other shore of the Atlantic. The Dutch West India Company had conquered a portion of northeastern Brazil, and the Sephardim of Amsterdam settled there in great numbers, bringing with them their commerce and their faith. The city of Recife, capital of Dutch Pernambuco, became the cradle of the first organized Jewish community of the New World.

In 1642, the call came. Aboab da Fonseca was appointed rabbi of the synagogue Kahal Zur Israel in Recife, in the Dutch colony of Pernambuco, Brazil, a city occupied by the Dutch since 1624. By this appointment, he entered universal history: Aboab da Fonseca became thus the first congregational rabbi of the New World. His authority shone over a singular population: most of the European inhabitants of the city, after the Dutch occupation, were Sephardic Jews, originally from Portugal. Many followed him: in the wake of the Dutch conquest of Brazil, Isaac Aboab traveled in 1642 to Recife where he became the first rabbi of America, and numerous Jews followed him, leaving Amsterdam for Pernambuco.

This crossing — a rabbi from Europe bringing his people to a new continent — is a founding gesture. It extends, in the Atlantic world, the millennia-old history of the diaspora that Guilherme d'Oliveira Martins traced from Spain and Portugal to the New World. By laying the foundations of public Jewish life in the Americas, the da Fonseca lineage inscribes in the soil of Brazil an essential virtue: the courage to begin again, to build a community where none had ever existed, bearing the Law to the end of the known world.

But history was not idyllic. The Brazilian years were also years of trial. The Portuguese reconquest, preceded by a long war and a harsh siege, ruined the prosperity of this community. Aboab da Fonseca knew a few prosperous years, until the Portuguese rebellion caused the economic ruin of the Jews of Dutch Brazil; his salary greatly reduced, he nonetheless remained to lead and succor his people until the occupation of Recife. This refusal of abandonment, this perseverance of the pastor who stays beside his own when wealth dissolves and danger rises, is perhaps the most beautiful moral testimony of his life. Care for the other, solidarity in adversity, take there the concrete face of a man who accepts poverty so as not to desert.

From this trial was born a unique work. At the heart of the siege, in anguish and hunger, Isaac Aboab da Fonseca wrote what is held to be the first Hebrew literary work composed in the New World: the Zekher asiti le-niflaot El — "I have made memory of the wonders of God" —, an account in Hebrew of the events of Dutch Brazil, dated 1646 [Zakhor manuscript, corpus 9429947f-db70-4b1d-a11e-38c6a4d02042]. This text, part chronicle part thanksgiving, transforms collective suffering into praise: it makes history an act of piety, inscribing the trial of Pernambuco in the long memory of Israel, the one that, since Egypt, knows how to speak of the "wonders of God" upon emerging from peril.

The return to Amsterdam, after the fall of Recife in 1654, opens the last and long season of his life. Back at home, he resumed and expanded his magistracy. Back in Amsterdam, Aboab da Fonseca was appointed chief rabbi of the Sephardic community. His scholarly output then embraced several registers. A grammarian, he composed in the meantime the Hebrew grammar Melekhet ha-Dikduk. An exegete, he left a Parafrasis Comentada sobre el Pentateuco, a commented paraphrase of the Pentateuch in Iberian language, intended to nourish the piety of a community even more familiar with Castilian and Portuguese than with Hebrew [Zakhor manuscript, corpus 41bc95ea-c855-4442-b096-06dd1d3ea801]. This concern to reach the faithful in their own language extends, at three centuries' distance, the very intention of the Menorat ha-Maor: to make sacred speech accessible.

Finally a Kabbalist, he gave Amsterdam Jewry access to mysticism through his Hebrew translation of Casa de Dios y Puerta del Cielo by Abraham Cohen Herrera, known by the title Shaar ha-Shamayim, "The Gate of Heaven" [Zakhor manuscript, corpus 0cf44c64-eb90-4e57-ab65-188e2157a21a]. In translating Herrera, a thinker who had attempted to expound Lurianic Kabbalah within the categories of philosophy, Aboab da Fonseca became a bridge-builder between two spiritual universes. This contribution to Jewish thought — grammar, exegesis, mysticism, chronicle — sketches the portrait of a complete scholar, whose erudition irrigated all the needs of his community.

The magistracy of Aboab da Fonseca in Amsterdam knew two moments that, better than any other, reveal the tensions of a community and the dilemmas of a spiritual leader: the Spinoza affair and the building of the Great Synagogue.

In 1656, the Sefardi community pronounced the herem, the excommunication, of its most famous son. The archives attest that in 1656, he was one of several scholars who excommunicated the famous philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Studies of this foundational episode recall that among the rabbis who exercised the function of principal leaders of the community at the time of the excommunication were the hakham Saul Levi Morteira and the hakham Isaac Aboab da Fonseca. Honesty in the narrative demands that we not gloss over this moment: the rabbi who had, in Brazil, embodied faithfulness and courage, was also the judge of a man whom posterity made a hero of freedom of thought. There is a shadow here — or at least an irreducible tension between the safeguarding of a fragile community, barely emerged from Marranism and concerned with its survival in the face of Christian authorities, and the freedom of inquiry. This gravity, this acute awareness of what halakha and the cohesion of the group demanded, also belong to the truth of the lineage. Tradition and archive respond to each other here without contradiction: both inscribe Aboab da Fonseca in the register of guardians.

The second moment is one of glory. Under his authority, the community knew its material and symbolic apogee. During the reign of Aboab da Fonseca, the community flourished; the Portuguese synagogue, the Esnoga, was inaugurated on August 2, 1675, the 10th of Av 5435. This majestic edifice, which still stands today in Amsterdam, remains the most eloquent monument of the "Portuguese Jewish Nation" — visible stone of a faith long invisible. That the same man placed, as a child, his fugitive steps in this city, and presided, as an old man, over the consecration of its most beautiful synagogue, sums up the entire arc of a life and a lineage: from Marrano secrecy to assumed splendor.

Isaac Aboab da Fonseca passed away at the end of an almost centenarian existence. He died on April 4, 1693 in Amsterdam, aged eighty-eight, leaving descendants who perpetuated the name, notably a son, David Aboab da Fonseca, himself a rabbi. The lineage, anchored in the Portuguese Nation of Amsterdam, ramified through the Sefardi networks of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, those very networks whose social and family organization Minna Rozen studied and that Lionel Lévy followed from Livorno to Tunis.

The da Fonseca lineage traverses, in a single thread, the great trials and great victories of modern Sephardic Judaism: expulsion and Marranism, the return to light in Amsterdam, the Atlantic adventure of Brazil, reconstruction after disaster. Grafted onto the Talmudic stock of the Aboab of Castille, it carries forward, from one continent to another and from one century to the next, the same fidelity to the Law and the same concern for the people.

Of all the virtues that the tradition of Israel has borne through the ages, the one that this lineage expressed above all others is service to the community in adversity — that concrete form of kindness and collective responsibility. For Isaac Aboab da Fonseca was not merely a great scholar: grammarian, exegete, translator of the Kabbalah, chronicler of exile. He was above all the shepherd who crossed the ocean to bring the Law where it had never been, and who, when his salary was reduced and danger came, refused to abandon his own. This obstinacy in remaining, in teaching, in consoling and in rebuilding — from besieged Recife to triumphant Esnoga — inscribes the house of da Fonseca in the long Memory of Israel, that of a people who, from fountain to fountain, never ceased to remember the wonders of God. In this, a family born of persecution bequeathed to all a universal lesson: that knowledge has value only if it becomes service, and fidelity has meaning only if it endures in the midst of the storm.