was not wickedly stubborn has changed to our holy religion. Look at maestre Pablo, who is like a star in the heavens and was once called Don Solomon ha-Levi. Look at maestre Honorat, head of the sages, who was once called maestre Profayt. Look at your friend maestre Andrea Benedetto, once called maestre Solomon ha-Levi. They all were changed to the true religion and to the perfection of their souls.”17 “Maestre Pablo” is evidently Pablo de Santa Maria, a famous Jewish convert to Christianity, whose name had indeed been Solomon ha-Levi. “Andrea Benedetto” may have been someone familiar to Crescas Meir as a “friend.” But it is the second name mentioned—“maestre Profayt,” “head of the sages,” now known as “maestre Honorat”—that is of greatest interest. To both the sender and the recipient, this Jewish convert to Christianity, a scholar of standing, seems to have been as well known as Pablo de Santa Maria. His name had been maestre Profayt, and he had taken the Christian name Honorat.
Lippomano includes this maestre Profayt among the ranks of voluntary rather than coerced converts, leading me to suggest that he has particularly in mind the author of Al tehi ka-avotekha. As I discuss in greater detail in Chapter 8, that work, written in a mode of high sarcasm, assumes the voice of a sincere convert to Christianity who is (nominally) praising both the religion and the voluntary choice to embrace it. If, as seems likely, this text was available in Italy at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and Lippomano had read it, he well may have taken it at face value. As for the identification of the author with Duran, the extant text of Al tehi ka-avotekha does not mention the name Honorat; but this piece of information may have been transmitted orally along with copies of the text or in manuscripts no longer extant.
Whether or not I am reconstructing the background to Lippomano’s letter correctly, the significant fact resides in his connection of the two names. Finally we have here direct and nearly contemporaneous testimony identifying Profayt Duran the scholar with Honorat the New Christian. This in turn means that we can take the notarial documentation unearthed by the American scholar Richard Emery, and summarized above, as a reliable witness to the events of Duran’s life—a life reflected differently in two different sets of sources, archival and literary. Although we may still find it difficult to accept the idea of a New Christian writing anti-Christian texts without known repercussion, it appears that such was the case. As for how Duran might have been able to manage this feat, in Chapter 1 I discuss the possibilities as I see them in the context of his overall biography.
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With these diverse considerations in mind, the first part of this book places Duran within the late medieval Iberian world, beginning with a narrative of the events of his life. Much of what we know about those events derives from the registers of notaries like our Bernard Fabre, other archival documentation from Perpignan, and, later, from Navarre, Caspe, and Valencia. Beyond these relatively concrete data, less certain evidence may be gleaned from the marginalia and notes of his students, from contemporary manuscripts and their colophons, and, of course, from his own writings and correspondence.
Later, the first part explores further some of the key characteristic elements of Duran’s intellectual world. Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed was fundamental to Iberian Jewish philosophical thought, and Duran’s particular approach, as it appears in his youthful commentary to that book, is highly expressive of his fundamental rationalism. Here, too, through a look at unpublished autograph manuscripts by his students, this part assesses some of the different registers of Duran’s teaching: practical mathematics, astronomical skills, and numerology.
Part II examines a number of stress points where scientific thought reacts to the pressure of polemical interests. It looks first at Duran’s more mature scientific work and in particular at those interests that formed a component of his Jewish identity. Turning then to four points of friction between Jewish rationalism and the “problem” of Christianity, it considers, in roughly chronological order, Duran’s essay on the number seven; his calendrical work, Ḥeshev ha-Efod; his satirical letter, Al tehi ka-avotekha; and finally Kelimat ha-goyim, his historical critique of Christianity. Reading these works against the background of the Jewish-Christian polemic illuminates not only the fundamental centrality of rationalism and scientific expertise to Duran’s identity but the extent to which that polemic itself shaped the intellectual interests of the Iberian Jewish rationalist elite.
Part III addresses Duran’s reconception of Judaism under the pressures of his life as a converso. First it considers the 1393 eulogy in which, elevating the principle of inner “intention” above that of observance as the test of Jewish identity, Duran asserts that although the outward deeds of his fellow forced converts may be idolatrous, their hearts are pure—and that they therefore merit redemption along with the rest of the Jewish people.
Then it looks at Duran’s magnum opus, the grammatical work Ma‘aseh Efod. There he argues that the true purpose of Judaism is to acquire knowledge of the “wisdom of the Torah,” an activity he construes literally as contact with the Hebrew Bible. In Duran’s conception, reading and intensive study of the biblical text, vocal recitation of Psalms, or even, if necessary, just gazing at and contemplating the biblical text can offer Jews a means of attracting God’s providence and of atoning for their transgressions. In order to make sense of this system, Duran locates in the words of Scripture themselves an occult virtue whose power he interprets by drawing on ideas and terminology found in contemporary magical and medical theory. The ideal for him is memorization and contemplation: in brief, although he does not say so, a way of living a Jewish life that is highly suited to the circumstances of the converso.
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On this last point, a final introductory note. As we will see, in the eulogy written just a couple of years after his conversion, Duran defends the conversos on the grounds that their internal intentions are pure. A few years later, in Al tehi ka-avotekha, he argues against Christian beliefs using coded language that is itself based on a shared religious identity. A decade after his conversion, in Ma‘aseh Efod, he offers a concrete system for living one’s religious life internally. Similarities between Duran’s postconversion mode of thinking and writing and later converso thinking and writing suggest that both derive from the experience of a “double life,” with its radical disjuncture between external conduct and internal orientation, or between an externally constructed and an internally determined identity.18
If so, one must ask, how could this response have emerged so rapidly and so fully formed in Duran’s case, within just a few years of Iberia’s first and hitherto unprecedented wave of forced conversion? Could it be that the “split-identity” syndrome reflects something deeper, something fundamental to Jewish life in the urban and highly mobile world of late medieval Iberia—if not in the larger medieval world altogether?
These, at any rate, are some of the questions that hover in the background of the discussion in later pages, and to which I hope to offer answers, however partial, as we go along.
PART ONE
An Intellectual Portrait
Against a decidedly mixed background of prosperity and adversity, Jews in the Crown of Aragon enjoyed a brilliant and vigorous intellectual life throughout the fourteenth century—and the wealthiest and most cosmopolitan part of the Crown was Catalonia, in particular the royal seat of Perpignan. There, Jews excelled in the practice of medicine and composed works of philosophy, literature, exegesis, and more. The Jewish “intellectual effervescence”1 of this period was open to many different traditions and strains, with Arabic-influenced philosophical
