Joseph Colon Trabotto - Early Years

Early Years

Colon (whose name is related to the French word colombe, or 'dove') was a scion of the Trabotto family, which was known for its large number of scholars. After the final expulsion of Jews from the French Kingdom in 1394, his family emigrated first to the Franche-Comté and subsequently settled in the city of Chambéry, the capital of the Duchy of Savoy, which was home to a significant population of rabbinic scholars. Among these were Yohanan Treves, the last chief rabbi of France and Jacob HaLevi, renowned as Maharil Jacob ben Moses Möln.

The exact year and place of Joseph Colon's birth cannot be determined, but is estimated to be at the beginning of the 1420s in Chambéry, a city whose Jewish population was overwhelmigly made up of individuals of French, rather than German, origin. It was within this ambience that the young Joseph Colon received his Talmudic education, which was heavily imbued with the style, traditions and Talmudic methodology of medieval French Jewry. Chiefly, he studied under the tutelage of his father, Solomon Trabotto, a noted Talmudist and Kabbalist, though he does refer to others as his teachers, and recalls participating in learned discussion with other local scholars. Colon left Chambéry in the early 1450s and settled in the Italian Piedmont, which had become part of the Duchy of Savoy. This move was the result of a combination of new opportunities on the other side of the Alps, combined with increasing anti-Judaism in Trans-Alpine Savoy. It was not, however, as Grätz claims ("Gesch." 3d ed., viii. 253), a consequence of the expulsion of the Jews from Savoy, which only occurred in 1471. For a time he led a wandering life, and was forced to gain his living by teaching children.