One can even imagine Fabre commenting on the awkwardness or irony of the situation. Through all these years of doing business with Honoratus, he had known him by a different name and even as a different person: as Profayt Duran judeus.2
During the previous summer of 1391, anti-Jewish riots had broken out in Seville and, taking different forms in the highly diverse regions of Iberia, had spread through Castile to the Crown of Aragon, up to the northernmost parts of Catalonia.3 Jewish quarters were attacked, Jews were killed, and Jewish property was destroyed. Some Jews were dragged to the baptismal font and there converted to save their lives. Others died fighting or committed suicide rather than submit to baptism.4
In Perpignan, when the Call (the Jewish quarter) was attacked that August, the local Jews took refuge in the royal palace.5 Sporadic violence seems to have continued until the late spring of 1393, with considerable physical injury to person and property. In July of that year, Joan I gave a general pardon to the Christians of Perpignan, but explicitly excluded from this pardon those who had carried out attacks on Jews.6 Still, the atmosphere remained sufficiently threatening for a number of Jews to stay in the palace until 1394 or even later. Yet with a strong royal presence in the city, the Jewish community of Perpignan, unlike many others, survived more or less intact; only a handful of Jews were forced to convert.7 Among that handful was Profayt Duran.8
We can only speculate how Bernard Fabre addressed Duran on that day in 1392, and wonder at the tenor of their encounter. What instantly jumps out at us is that even in the immediate aftermath of the riots, when tensions were presumably still relatively high, a forced convert to Christianity—with the same Jewish partner as formerly, in front of the same Christian notary—could be found continuing his financial activities as though little had changed. But when, looking closer, we begin to consider the complexity of the situation, the questions only multiply.
Fabre was obviously aware of Duran’s change of religious status. Was he also aware that it was the result of forced baptism? Certainly he would also have known about the destruction of property and loss of life in the Jewish quarter of Perpignan. He might even have participated in the riots. Did he harbor any sense of responsibility, as a Christian and a citizen of Perpignan? As one of the notaries to whom the Jews habitually turned to record their financial activities, familiar with many by sight and with some quite well, how might he have felt?
And Duran? Standing before an official Christian notary as an unwilling convert to Christianity, did he find it expedient to signal identification with his new religion at the expense of his still-Jewish friend Alfaquim? If so, how might that have been expressed? They were not meeting in church, after all, or in a parochial context. What kind of behavior was required in this situation? Or was a discreet silence preserved by all? And what about Alfaquim’s attitude, both toward Duran, and toward his own Jewish status? Evidently he had not deemed it necessary to disassociate himself in business matters from the converso standing next to him. But Duran was one of only a very few converts in Perpignan in those years; most had been saved, while others had fled or been killed. Was Mosse sympathetic, resentful, suspicious? If they had been friends before, were they still?
That we are unable to answer most of these questions should alert us to the dangers of making assumptions about what conversion (forced or otherwise) meant for Jews in late medieval Iberia. While we know minimally that it included the physical act of baptism and that it resulted in a legal change of status, there are large uncertainties about other changes in appearance or behavior, even the most mundane. More intangible matters, such as attitudes or beliefs, are usually even less available to us.
An examination of Profayt Duran and his extant writings may not answer the above questions, but it can provide insight into the complexities of forced conversion. And we have a rich variety of textual material to draw on. Both before and after his conversion, Duran studied and privately taught astronomy, medicine, mathematics, and philosophy, producing Hebrew commentaries on, for example, ibn Rushd’s abbreviation of Ptolemy’s Almagest, the first book of ibn Sina’s al-Qānūn fi-l-ṭibb (“Canon of Medicine”), and Moses Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed. Later, Duran’s Hebrew writings expanded in range—and took a surprising direction.
Best known among his postconversion writings are two anti-Christian polemical works: Al tehi ka-avotekha (“Be Not Like Your Fathers,” c. 1395), a sarcastic epistle of “praise” that actually pours scorn on a recent voluntary convert to Christianity, and Kelimat ha-goyim (“Shame of the Nations,” c. 1397), a serious historical and textual attack on contemporary Christianity as a corruption of Jesus’ words and life. In addition, there are Ḥeshev ha-Efod (“Cincture/Computation of the Efod,” 1395), a concise work on the astronomical concepts behind the Jewish calendar; a 1393 funeral eulogy for a Girona rabbi; and Ma‘aseh Efod (“Work of the Efod,” 1403), a treatise on Hebrew grammar. One book, a historical record of the persecutions of the Jewish people, is lost.9
Several of Duran’s works were thus written when he was living as a converso and are hence of exceptional interest. Take, for example, the eulogy (hesped) that Duran composed in the winter of 1393 for Rabbi Abraham ben Isaac ha-Levi of Girona, who had perished as a result of the 1391 riots. Near the end of this lengthy hesped, Duran half-apologizes to the deceased’s son for not having been able to deliver his tribute in person, openly. In so saying, he alludes to his own forced conversion in a vivid image of flooding waters, expresses the agony of having to all appearances forsaken the religion of his fathers, and hints at the resultant dichotomy of a life in which inner orientation cannot correspond to outward practice. Repeated substitute terms for secrecy suggest some of the need to hide his identity, and the likely impossibility, for many reasons, of a newly converted Jew publicly eulogizing a rabbinic leader. “I have seen [fit], my brother, to arrange this [eulogy] for the honor of the elevated sage, the honored poet, your father of blessed memory, in secret and in hiding, for the Lord my God has silenced me and poured over me poisonous waters to drunkenness and to satiety. The malicious waters [mayim zedonim] have flooded me, a stream has passed over my head, this wickedness (Zech. 5:8)…. In secret his [Duran’s] soul (bound to yours) weeps, for is he not of another faith? Strange is his deed and alien his worship (cf. Is. 28:21). Your brother the Levite, whose song has been spoiled. This is his name forever and his memorial: Efod.”10 In its bitter tone, and its carefully oblique allusions to Duran’s own plight, the passage is highly evocative. That the mayim zedonim (“malicious waters”) are the waters of baptism is evident; in rabbinic literature, malkhut zadon (“kingdom of malice”) refers to the Roman Empire, and so by extension to Christianity. Into the last line, too, Duran weaves the term ‘avodah zarah, idol worship (lit: “strange work”), equating his own worship, Christianity, with idolatry.
It is here, too, that Duran proclaims his name to be “Efod.” It was common practice for a commentator to sign his glosses in the margins of a manuscript with an abbreviation of his name preceded by an initial aleph for amar (“said”). Following that custom, Duran would naturally always have signed his own marginal glosses with the acronym of “amar profayt duran”—namely, the letters alef peh dalet, spelling out Efod. By coincidence, however, efod is also the Hebrew word for one of the garments worn by the high priest in the Temple, a term redolent of the historical moment when the Jewish people were at their most splendid and triumphant.
By consciously taking his glossator’s signature as a pseudonym, Duran makes a symbolic statement about his new existence. As far as the church was concerned, the name Profayt Duran was no longer his; taking a new, Christian name was an integral part of the conversion process and represented rebirth into a new life. By reclaiming his old name in disguised form, and simultaneously transforming it by way of an emblem of the glories of the Jewish past, Duran silently signals his rejection of his new Christian identity.
And there is yet another facet to the term efod.
