believe what he has written with his hands.
In his efod are prophecies, not sorceries, and in his mysteries no image or terafim (Hos. 3:4).104
According to Bonafed here, Duran’s true beliefs are not known to those “servants” around him, though they do appear accurately and faithfully in his writings: it is there that his “perfect” thoughts are to be found and the secret of his faith revealed. But there is the hint here, too, of a religious problem; Bonafed seems to be defending Duran from accusations of idolatry (“no image or terafim”). These lines, brief and “poetic” as they are, may be taken to suggest that Bonafed was to some extent aware that Duran was unable to express his thoughts except in his books, under a pseudonym.
Around the same time, in 1413, a young man named Joseph Zarqo arrived in Pisa, a town on the northeastern coast of Italy, a short boat ride from Nice but easily reachable as well from any port on the Provençal or Catalonian shore of the Mediterranean. Looking for shelter and support, Zarqo wrote a letter, including a number of laudatory poems, to the local patriarch, Yeḥiel ben Metatia. He recommended himself to Yeḥiel in particular on the strength of his having been a student of the Efod, who, he averred, used to speak “day in and day out” in praise of Yeḥiel. He describes Duran thus: “The prince, the captain, a cunning workman (Is. 40:20) whom no secret troubles (Dan. 4:6), a bundle of the myrrh of learning and wisdom in all visions (Dan. 1:17) and riddles, crown and testimony (2 Kings 11:12) to the law and to its witness (Is. 8:20), my teacher and master, the Efod.”105 Immediately noticeable here is the pointed double reference to the book of Daniel, not the most common element in the standard lexicon of literary allusions. But it suits. Daniel is known primarily for his iconic resistance to the blandishments of the local pagan religion while in the service of the Chaldean king. Zarqo emphasizes the reason Daniel was taken into the king’s palace—namely, his exceptional learning and his ability to interpret visions. By means of this rhetorical identification, the Efod emerges from Zarqo’s description as distinguished in two principal ways: first, he was a master of arcane scientific knowledge; second, despite living in a gentile world, he was not defiled by it. Quite to the contrary, the Efod was a crown and support to the Torah. If I am not reading too much into these allusions, it would seem that Zarqo, too, was aware of Duran’s problematic situation.
In addition, the letters from Italy in 1420 and 1422, mentioned in the Introduction, demonstrate that Duran’s forced apostasy was known as far away as that country. It is significant that the Christian writer Marco Lippomano holds up the conversion of maestre Profayt/maestre Honorat as on a par with that of Solomon ha-Levi/Pablo de Santa Maria, suggesting that both individuals were known to the Christians as sincere converts. On the other hand, his Jewish correspondent, in his reply, seems to believe (or chooses to claim) that both conversions were, to the contrary, forced and insincere.
There is yet one more, unfortunately undated, trace of Duran as unwilling convert. An anonymous two-line Hebrew “joke” appears jotted down in a manuscript near the glosses on Judah Halevi’s Kuzari attributed to the Efodi. It goes like this: “One asked the Efodi, ‘Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel [Is. 63:2]?’ And he answered, ‘Why has the son of Jesse not come [1 Sam. 20:27]?’”106 The imagined exchange, conducted by means of two direct biblical quotations, turns on a traditional medieval pun. The word adom, in the scriptural context meaning “red,” alludes to Edom, the biblical nation that, beginning in the medieval period, was understood to be Christendom. The real question thus is: why do you bear the outward appearance of a Christian? The answer, put into the mouth of Duran, is taken from Saul’s query to Jonathan: Where is David (“the son of Jesse”)? By genealogical association, David stands in for the messiah, and so Duran’s response amounts to the retort “Because the messiah has not yet come!”
This humorous (and slightly bitter) couplet expresses some of our own bewilderment with Duran’s choice. It also suggests one particular view of why conversos might have remained living as Christians: namely, they had despaired of the promised messianic redemption. Had God in fact rejected the Jewish people and chosen the Christian community? And yet at the same time, the joke also presumes that the conversos’ Christianity was not a true change of belief but rather a foreign garment that might be cast off when the right moment arrived.
I would thus argue that Duran’s activities were not widely known. His more innocuous-seeming writings were made possible by his use of the pseudonym Efod, his dangerous polemical works by their anonymous circulation. We must also recognize that Duran was writing as a New Christian for barely a decade, and these were the chaotic years directly following the upheaval of 1391. It was not yet clear, perhaps, whether this group of New Christians, so obviously converted under absolute physical compulsion, might not be officially permitted to return to Judaism. The poems by contemporaries convey their appreciation of Duran’s difficulties in subtle allusions and biblical references, seeming to believe that these hints in ornate Hebrew verse were safe enough. In turn, the fact that Duran’s last dated work was in 1403, and that as far as we know he lived another thirty years without writing more, may suggest a recognition that it was no longer possible to continue. Perhaps he despaired of his self-imposed task; perhaps he was warned by friends in high places to desist; perhaps attention was beginning to be paid in the wrong places.
* * *
Having traced Duran’s biography to its end, I next turn to his scientific pedagogy and then explore his intellectual background through the lens of his youthful commentary on Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed and his philosophical responsa. In these works, Duran reveals an orientation reflective of many of the trends in fourteenth-century Iberian Jewish thought, and especially the rationalism that shaped its worldview.
CHAPTER 2
Scientific Transmission
Outside the University
As was the case in general for the Iberian Jewish elite, Duran’s education included basic scientific knowledge. But scientific activity, in particular astronomy, was also unusually central to Duran’s thought and made up a large proportion of his writings. He taught mathematics and astronomy at a practical level, studied more advanced texts, and corresponded on astronomical and numerological issues with his peers.
Histories of early modern science in the Iberian Peninsula depict a rich legacy of empirical, experimental, and practical activity.1 The imperatives of Spanish and Portuguese overseas commerce and empire building encouraged such fields as cartography and navigational instrumentation.2 Redrawing the map of the world, Iberians made extraordinary progress in the utilitarian and commercial sciences of “metallurgy, medicine, agriculture, surgery, meteorology, cosmography, cartography, navigation, military technology, and urban engineering.”3
The achievements of sixteenth-century Spain, while spurred by the discoveries of the New World, did not emerge from a vacuum. As early as the end of the thirteenth century, with the colonization of the Balearic Islands, an extensive maritime trade began to be carried out by Catalan merchants in networks centered in Barcelona and Perpignan, reaching beyond the Balearics to southern Italy and Sicily. One result of this political and economic expansion and its consequent technical needs was that by the end of the fourteenth century, the Kingdom of Aragon-Catalonia had become a center of scientific activity, and by the fifteenth century Spain and Portugal were the most technically developed countries in Western Europe.4 This progress continued until the seventeenth century, when Spanish scholars would choose to rework medieval philosophy and science rather than to replace them with the new theoretical systems of the scientific revolution.
In the creation of late-medieval Iberian science, the royal court, however peripatetic in reality, was a primary source of patronage.5 For in contrast
