he is held surety for Jusse Leo, the father of the physician and translator Leon Joseph of Carcassonne.30
Duran’s engagement in the activities of the local Jewish communal government seems to have been minimal. As noted earlier, in 1381 he was named a consiliarius, a member of the council of the aljama, but this appears to have been a brief, one-time appointment.31 The council, the highest-level Jewish communal body in Aragon and Catalonia, was responsible for monitoring and guiding a multitude of religious and social functions. It was not, in the late fourteenth century, so dominated by the upper classes of Catalonian Jewish society as had been the case in previous centuries.32 Duran’s brief experience with the council may have informed his ambivalent relation toward Jewish communal leadership. A decade later, a few years after the riots of 1391, his eulogy for Abraham ben Isaac ha-Levi of Girona includes sharp criticism of unnamed Jewish heads.33
CONVERSO
One of the most significant aftereffects of the traumatic events of 1391 was the creation of a substantial population of Christians who had been baptized against their will. Yet treatment by royal and church authorities of the converso communities in places like Barcelona, Girona, and Perpignan seems to have been at the very least inconsistent. In many cases, members of this first generation of forced converts seem to have been simply left alone, neither socially assimilated nor taught the principles of their new faith.34 Some have suggested that uncertainty within the church itself about the legal and religious validity of coerced conversion kept ecclesiastical authorities from looking too closely into the lives of forced converts.35 Often, it appears, they were permitted to remain within the Jewish quarter (the Call), despite formal prohibitions against contact between Jews and conversos. In 1393, Honoratus de Bonafide is recorded as having a house outside the Call, on the “platea” of the Dominicans; the house had belonged to his grandfather.36 Even though the conversos supposedly “formed a society apart, separated from both Jews and Christians,”37 as one scholar has written, the archives offer plenty of evidence of continuing financial transactions between them and Jews as well as Christians.
Engaging in some Jewish practices in these early years may have been, in some places, relatively easy. David Nirenberg concludes that “what is most striking about the earlier period is [the church’s] relative lack of interest in the specific contents of converso religious practice.”38 While we should allow for some rhetorical exaggeration, Shimon ben Tzemaḥ Duran (1361–1444) notes in passing that “in the case of these persecutions, and especially in that place [in Majorca], they let converts do whatever they want, and they are not forced to commit idolatry, and they are almost deemed to be Jews by them [Christians]”39 (my emphasis).
After his conversion, Duran does not, in fact, appear to have become assimilated into the Christian community in which he continued to pursue his livelihood. On the contrary: as we see from his literary works, he remained strongly, even fiercely, committed to preserving the integrity of the Jewish community around him and to asserting his own distance from Christianity. Even the archival record, increasingly sparse as it becomes, suggests a certain level of continuing involvement with the welfare of the Jews of Perpignan. In March 1393, we see Honoratus lending money to a Jewish widow for support of her three children.40 Nearly ten years later, in 1402, he appears as an arbiter in a dispute between two Jews, indicating that he was still esteemed enough by members of the Jewish community to be turned to for fair judgment.41 And as late as 1409, as noted in the Introduction, Honoratus seems still to be in a business partnership with the Jew Cresques Alfaquim.42
Although it has been often thought that Duran returned openly to Judaism in his later years, we have no evidence that he availed himself of this route; instead, what we have is continuous evidence of a public life as a Christian even as, in his writings—in Hebrew and presumably read only by Jews and conversos—he reveals an inner life as a Jew. As archival evidence attests, the man once known as Profayt Duran continued to reside and conduct business in Perpignan as a Christian. And yet during this same period, Duran also composed his two explicitly anti-Christian polemical works: Al tehi ka-avotekha (c. 1394/139543), the satirical letter purporting to be a message of congratulations to David Bonet Bonjorn, a recent sincere Jewish convert to Christianity, and Kelimat ha-goyim44 (1397/139845), a historical study intended to demonstrate that church dogma is incompatible with the teachings of Jesus as found in the Gospels themselves.
Amid the trauma visited upon the Catalonian Jewish community in the late fourteenth century, a particularly demoralizing factor was the voluntary conversion of a number of Jewish figures who then proceeded to work actively and conspicuously on behalf of their new religion. Abner of Burgos (c. 1270–1347), who became Alfonso de Valladolid, had been an earlier prototype; among his other activities aimed at converting Jews, he carried on a polemical correspondence with Isaac Pulgar.46 Another was Solomon ben Isaac ha-Levi, who, as Pablo de Santa Maria (c. 1351–1435), became bishop of Burgos and close adviser to Pope Benedict XIII. Joshua ha-Lorqi, who became a prominent friar named Jerónimo de Santa Fe (fl. 1400–1430), not only polemicized against the Jews but led the Christian side at the 1413–1415 Tortosa disputation.
Our knowledge of each of these cases derives in part from letters exchanged between the neophyte and one or more of his former coreligionists. These letters, written in Hebrew, were “public” documents. Alfonso’s correspondence with Isaac Pulgar (fl. first half of the fourteenth century) and Pablo de Santa Maria’s with the then-still Jewish Joshua ha-Lorqi must have been widely read and discussed.47 Duran’s Al tehi ka-avotekha, addressed to David Bonjorn, was itself such a public letter, and the numerous extant copies of it testify to a wide distribution.48 Nor is it surprising that many of Duran’s postconversion writings reveal a similarly acute awareness of the issues of heresy, voluntary or forced conversion, and the weakening of faith. For these loomed large in his environment and among his acquaintances, and would loom still larger after the Tortosa disputation.49 The culmination of this process was reached in the wake of Tortosa during the preaching activities of Vicent Ferrer (1350–1419), when many more in the Jewish communities began converting to Christianity. In fact, some communities that seemed to have survived 1391 relatively unscathed collapsed at this time, including the aljama of Perpignan, which by 1415 was reduced to a mere handful.50
Duran remained living in his old house, and we see him after conversion collecting old debts, an activity that supplied at least part of his income. The practice of medicine provided another part; some time before May 14, 1398, he obtained the title—available only to Christians—of magister in medicina.51 Both the title and his new status as a Christian would presumably have enabled him to charge more for his services than he could have done as a Jewish doctor. He now also sought further employment in an area in which he was immediately competent: the mathematics and astronomy he had studied and taught previously.
On May 1, 1392, no more than a few months after his forced baptism, the newly minted “Honoratus de Bonafide” was appointed a familiar of Joan I, king of Aragon, in the capacity of astrologer.52 Under Pere III and his successors, astrology, alchemy, and astronomy had become major interests for the royal court in Perpignan. Joan I (“el Cazador”) was known for his passion for hunting but also for his interest in astrology, numerology, and divination.53 Did Duran’s recent conversion now permit the king to offer this kind of patronage? Unlikely, for there is no evidence that Duran’s former religious status would have been an impediment; numerous Jews were associated with the court as physicians or astrologers. But Crescas de Viviers, Joan I’s chief court astrologer, had recently died, in the very riots that had affected Duran. Perhaps there was need for another astronomically competent astrologer. Duran’s title of magister in medicina would have constituted another mark in his favor, for astrology was practiced very often for specifically medical purposes, such as determining the best times for administering medications or letting blood.
Whatever
