is known to have personally prosecuted Jews or former Jews, though in the case of one of them, the former Jew and Dominican friar Ramon de Tarrega, the charge was not Judaizing but philosophical heresy.82
Before 1391, efforts had been made to shield conversos both from Jews and from Old Christians.83 There is even evidence of recourse against the Inquisition: in a document from 1356, Pere III pardons a Jew of Perpignan for heresy even though he had been convicted “both by us and by the inquisitor.”84 Indeed, through much of the fourteenth century, Jews who had converted in France would flee to Aragon, there to take up their lives as Jews once again.85 Even into the beginning of the fifteenth century, Jews in the Crown of Aragon were to some extent protected by the king as a valuable asset. Anxious to retain control over their tax revenue, the king attempted to keep legal cases involving Jews and former Jews within the royal, secular court system and out of the hands of the Inquisition.86
But this was before 1391, when the absolute number of conversos was quite small and there was no converso problem per se. As mentioned earlier, David Nirenberg has argued that between 1391 and about 1415, Christian authorities were not particularly concerned about Judaizing on the part of converts; this only became an issue around 1430. What they were worried about was preventing conversos from fleeing the country, and making sure that the still-remaining Jews were segregated from Christians.87 Again, this is not to say that relapsing conversos were never prosecuted, only that it happened less than one might imagine given the number of unwilling new converts. And perhaps it was precisely those numbers that made vigilant oversight of their religiosity impractical.
By the first quarter of the fifteenth century, however, the Papal Inquisition in Aragon was actively engaged in pursuing backsliding conversos; King Martí I, then at the end of his life, censured the inquisitors for “ransacking converso homes on questionable grounds.”88 But by this point, Duran had ceased composing works in Hebrew, and was to all appearances settled into the peripatetic life of a royal physician.
True, this was a world in which any literate individual among the now numerous conversos could presumably have informed the Christian authorities of Duran’s activities. But such a scenario presumes that the Hebrew works by Duran circulated among people who knew them to be written by a New Christian. As for Ḥeshev ha-Efod and Ma‘aseh ha-Efod, on the surface they were perfectly innocuous: treatises on the calendar and on grammar unlikely to prompt inquisitorial investigation. Those Jews (and conversos) who might have read them might well have had little awareness of their problematic aspects. Not only that, but they were written under a pseudonym (Efod) and apparently by a Jew, despite the veiled allusion to conversion at the end of the introduction of Ḥeshev ha-Efod. Presumably, there would be a problem only if the Efod were widely known to be identical with Honoratus de Bonafide.
The real concern in any case would have been the two polemical texts. In the case of Kelimat ha-goyim, none of the extant manuscripts are signed. We now think that the work is Duran’s mainly because, in discussing the Eucharist, the author notes in passing: “as I wrote in a letter,” an apparent reference to Al tehi ka-avotekha, where he does in fact discuss the Eucharist, and in similar terms. In addition, two poems—one a dedication and one a conclusion—appear in some of the manuscripts.89 The very last line of the concluding poem, “God will command His mercy, to renew His world, and bind upon him His garment, to be priest at the Urim,”90 conceals the word Efod in a play of words very much like that employed by such contemporary poets as Vidal Benveniste who for one reason or another wove their names into their verse.91
In fact, there is little reason to think that Kelimat ha-goyim was widely known to be by Duran at the time, or even that it was widely circulated; as noted below in Chapter 9, there are only three extant manuscripts from the fifteenth century, and none is written in a Sephardic hand. Several manuscripts bear superscriptions attributing the work to him, but most of these are very late, primarily seventeenth and eighteenth century.92 Evidence from contemporaries is scanty and tends rather to suggest that the manuscripts circulated anonymously. Shem Tov ben Isaac ibn Shaprut of Tudela, in two copies of his Even boḥan, the earliest of which was completed in 1405,93 seems to know the work, and even to have used it as a prototype for his twelfth chapter, borrowing Duran’s arguments as well as his quotations from Nicholas de Lyra and Peter of Lombardy.94 However, Shem Tov does not mention the name of the author, either out of discretion or because he simply does not know it: “I saw the treatise of a great and wise author [which] disputes with the Christians about the roots of their faith and makes known to them … that their faith has neither root nor essence, even from the foundations of their faith—which are the Gospels and the [writings of] the Apostles—and I saw of the author [there was none] like him and in his image and in his similitude and I depended on him for some of the passages he adduced from the books of the Christians.”95 The Castilian Joseph ibn Shem Tov (d. 1480) identifies the author of Sefer ha-kelimah (which he describes in such a way as to make it certain he means the book known to us as Kelimat ha-goyim) with the author of Al tehi ka-avotekha. But he, too, refrains from explicitly giving a name.96
As for Al tehi ka-avotekha, it is signed with Duran’s preconversion name, Profayt Duran ha-Levi, and indeed Emery thought that Duran had “passed it off as having been written before his conversion.”97 As I will suggest below, it is also possible that Duran meant to protect himself by writing the work in a mode of high sarcasm, making his true meaning difficult to decipher. But again, it is not at all clear that Honoratus de Bonafide was known to be writing as a Jew, let alone that he was identical with the Efod. While at least some members of Duran’s own circle seem to have been aware of the conversion and knew that Duran authored works in Hebrew after it, their written references to this fact are strikingly allusive.
Take, for example, a prefatory poem composed for Ma‘aseh Efod and found in two manuscripts, one of which is in a fifteenth-century Sephardic hand.98 The poem was written by one Isaac Cabrit, very possibly a younger contemporary of Duran’s by that name who lived in Perpignan around 1409–1414, translated a medical work from Latin, and later converted to Christianity in 1418, becoming Ludovicus de Ripisaltes.99 Most of the poem is devoted to praise of the grammatical content of the work but it refers to Duran as one “called by the name of Levi, this scholar who changed his worship.”100 These words suggest that the author of the work, the Efod, was known by the poet to have been a convert. If this Isaac Cabrit was the physician who lived in Perpignan at the same time as Duran, he would certainly have known him as Isaac ben Moses ha-Levi and known, too, that he had been forced into Christianity.
Another example: around the time of the Tortosa disputation, Solomon Bonafed addressed yearning verses to maestre Profayt, ba‘al ha-Efod (“days have passed and I have not seen him”), calling on him to rise to the defense of Judaism in its time of crisis.101 In the first half of this lengthy poem, Bonafed addresses the Efod exclusively; but in the second half he cites other figures like the sons of Lavi (“the princes and masters of song”), who are distant from him,102 and laments the loss of Hasdai Crescas.103 In this poem, too, there seem to be some allusive references to Duran’s double life:
Lamp of the generation, encircled by a crown of cloud (Ps. 97:2),
source of understanding, whose robes Time bears (Song 5:7).
Perfect in knowledge, his thought no one knows (Job 37:16) but his
heart, and it is not revealed to his servants.
Upon the tablet of his books are the secrets of his faith even if they do
not comport with his deeds.
His
