Rishonim
Naples in the Rishonic era was ruled by the Aragonese dynasty from 1442 onward, and before that by the Angevin kings—a cosmopolitan port city where Greek, Latin, and Semitic tongues mingled in the markets. The Jewish community, though smaller than in Rome or Venice, maintained a distinct quarter and enjoyed relative stability under Christian rule, unlike the violent upheavals afflicting Spanish and French Jewry. Scholars gathered around biblical and philosophical study; the city became known for commentarial work blending Aristotelian thought with Jewish tradition, drawing learned refugees from across Christian Europe and the Mediterranean. The harbor itself—crowded with merchant vessels from Genoa, Venice, and the Levant—symbolized Naples as a crossroads where Jewish traders and intellectuals could still circulate freely even as expulsions closed doors elsewhere. Don Isaac Abarbanel, the great biblical commentator and statesman, lived and worked here before the Spanish expulsion of 1492 forced him and many Sephardic families to seek shelter in the Kingdom of Naples, briefly reinvigorating the city's Jewish intellectual life in its final decades of medieval independence.