The Sephardi family name Abravanel, first mentioned around 1300, became famous among Jews in Spain in the fifteenth century. After the expulsion in 1492, members of the family were scattered in Italy, North Africa, and the Ottoman Empire. Others were baptized in Portugal at the time of the forced conversion of 1497 but as marranos preserved the name clandestinely and revived it in the seventeenth century in the Sephardi communities of Amsterdam, London, and the New World.

One of the largest branches of the Abravanel family settled in Naples, where throughout the fifteenth and early…