Читать книгу The Secret Faith of Maestre Honoratus - Maud Kozodoy - Страница 9

CHAPTER 1

Honoratus de Bonafide,

olim vocatus Profayt Duran, judeus

Born most likely in the mid- to late 1350s, Profayt Duran belonged to a relatively well-off family that had been settled in Perpignan, a city at the northernmost tip of Catalonia, for at least a generation.¹ In absolute numbers, the Perpignan Jewish community was not impressive: hearth-tax rolls indicate between one hundred and three hundred families out of a total population of approximately eighteen thousand over the course of the fourteenth century, a size far below that of the Jewish community either in Barcelona or in Narbonne in southern France.² But despite its small numbers, the Perpignan community flourished.

Under King Pere III (r. 1336–1387) and his successors Joan I (r. 1387–1396), Martí I (r. 1396–1410), and Fernando I (r. 1412–1416), Perpignan became a vigorous trading hub, its surrounding area having been transformed economically by the rising production of raw materials—wool, saffron, wheat, and oil—to meet the demands of a surging market.³ It was also a vibrant urban center, the second-largest Catalonian town after Barcelona. Jews took part in its broad commercial success; among cities in Catalonia, Perpignan was one of the two main centers for the provision of credit by Jews.⁴ In addition, as it was a royal seat, court patronage ensured a subsidy for Jewish scientific and other expertise.

Aside from its commercial promise, Perpignan was strikingly cosmopolitan, serving as a fertile meeting place and way station for Jewish philosophers, astronomers, physicians, and scientific craftsmen. Not only had it been the mainland capital of the island kingdom of Majorca from the thirteenth century until that kingdom became part of the Crown of Aragon in 1344, it was also an inland border city, set between Iberia and Provence and displaying cultural allegiances to each.⁵

Legally and administratively part of the Crown of Aragon, Perpignan had strong ties in northern Catalonia, in particular with Girona, Besalú, and Castelló d’Empuries, the three most important Jewish settlements in the neighboring province of Girona.⁶ At the same time, its Jews enjoyed close connections with the world of southern France, especially after the influx of Provençal Jews caused by the repeated French expulsions of the fourteenth century.⁷ Menaḥem ha-Meiri (1249–1315), the great leader of Perpignan Jewry in the early fourteenth century, associated his city with Provence, devoting a book to celebrating the Provençal customs of his hometown and deprecating those of the Sefaradim (“Iberian Jews”).⁸ Two important fourteenth-century Perpignan philosophers, Moshe Narboni (c. 1300–c. 1362) and Joseph ibn Kaspi (c. 1279–c. 1340), were of southern French extraction, with families originating in Narbonne and Argentières respectively.⁹

EDUCATION

Duran’s education seems for the most part to have been characteristic of his class. To begin at the most fundamental level, his knowledge of the Hebrew Bible was both comprehensive and subtle. Not only does he cite Scripture lavishly, but he does so with wit and elegance. By the middle of his life, he was capable of composing a Hebrew grammar whose examples are all taken from the Bible.

Duran was also versed in basic rabbinic literature, which he similarly cites regularly. His literary use of this material, however, does not imply more than a superficial training in rabbinics. Indeed, if Duran’s later description of an average student’s Talmud study is reflective of his own experience, he would have learned merely “some rules [i.e. the thirteen exegetical principles] and … the ways of give-and-take with challenges and responses.” For Duran, a comprehensive mastery of the Talmud is only for those few “whom the Lord calls”;¹⁰ for the rest, Talmud study consists in using its general laws to extract hidden rulings, and even that, he notes, cannot be mastered except by attending a yeshivah and studying with the scholars there. Elsewhere he refers to having done this himself in his youth.¹¹

In religious philosophy, Duran knew both Jewish authors and those Muslim philosophers whose works had been translated into Hebrew and which had, in a sense, become “naturalized” into medieval Jewish philosophy. His precise use of those philosophical sources will be discussed in greater depth below.

As for languages, while Duran wrote exclusively in Hebrew, he would certainly have spoken Catalan, the local vernacular of Perpignan. He could also read Latin well enough to be able in the late 1390s to write his attack on contemporary Christianity (Kelimat ha-goyim) based on the Gospels and Christian scholastic writers, and even to include a critique of Jerome’s Latin translation of the Hebrew Bible. It is conceivable that he also knew some Arabic, for he makes reference to variant Arabic readings in his commentary on ibn Rushd’s Epitome of the Almagest—though these references could also have been taken from a second- or third-hand source.¹² If he did know some Arabic, his familiarity would most likely have been connected to his training as a physician.

For, again like many of his class and education, Duran was a physician.¹³ Through the fourteenth century in the Crown of Aragon, Jews made up close to a third of all urban physicians, of whom, in this same period at least fifty are recorded as living or practicing in Perpignan. In addition to earning a substantial livelihood, successful Jewish physicians enjoyed high social status as well as privileges that included exemption from taxes, the right to move freely at night, and the right not to wear the Jewish badge while traveling.¹⁴ In Perpignan, as in Provence, physicians seem to have formed a large part of the wealthiest stratum of the Jewish community, and were hence in possession of the necessary capital to be active in moneylending.¹⁵ Well educated, they were often the guardians and perpetuators of Jewish scientific, philosophical, and literary culture.¹⁶

Beginning in 1387, the archives refer to Duran variously as magister, phisicus, and medicus. In Hebrew manuscripts by copyists and contemporaries, his name likewise appears often with the title—maestre—of a medical professional. At some point he composed a brief, explanatory Hebrew commentary on the first book of the Canon of Medicine by ibn Sina (Avicenna, c. 980–1037).¹⁷ Certainly his philosophical writings disclose a broad familiarity with medical issues. For example, in Ma‘aseh Efod, Duran uses frequent medical examples and illustrations, includes an aside on the biblical disease of tzara‘at, and inserts medicine into his general pedagogic curriculum, pointing to it as a science that conduces to spiritual and religious perfection and defending it vigorously against Naḥmanides.¹⁸ His eulogy for Abraham ben Isaac ha-Levi of Girona begins with an extended medical parable comparing the suffering Jewish people to a patient in agonizing pain, a pain that is resistant to healing both because of the faulty temperament of the patient and because of the grievousness of the wound.¹⁹

Although all of this, with the possible exception of the commentary on the Canon of Medicine, is certainly consistent with a medical professional, nowhere is there an indication of substantially greater knowledge than might be expected from a well-educated member of the intellectual elite. For Duran, like many others of that Jewish elite, the practice of medicine formed part of his professional identity, and its principles formed part of his education, but his writings do not reveal any deep concern for medicine as a field of inquiry or of theory. He may have belonged to the medical profession, but his scientific activity was focused beyond it, toward such topics as mathematics, the calendar, astronomy, and Hebrew grammar.

Astronomy in particular seems to have spurred his independent intellectual activity. As we will see below, over the course of his life Duran studied an impressive roster of technical astronomical works: among others, Ptolemy’s Almagest, ibn Rushd’s Epitome of the Almagest, Jābir ibn Aflaḥ’s Correction of the Almagest, al-Farghānī’s Elements of Astronomy, Levi ben Gerson’s Astronomy (part of his Wars of the Lord), and Joseph ibn Naḥmias’s Light of the World.

During his early years Duran also pursued philosophical studies, acquiring a thorough grounding in the rationalist intellectual culture of late medieval Iberian Jewry. Later in life, he reflected that he had spent too much time in philosophy as a young man: “Perhaps one will speak and object … that I inclined to the study of the books of the philosophers more than was proper, since apprehending it was easy, and I neglected study of the Torah, which is my life…. I too acknowledge that I strayed in this from the path of intellect and did not listen to the voice of my teachers.”²⁰

Distinguishing among Jewish philosophical cultures in the late Middle Ages, Dov Schwartz has remarked that Iberian thinkers tended toward synthesis and interdisciplinary activity (combining philosophy, science, and kabbalah), whereas Provençal thinkers adopted “extreme and sharply defined positions.”²¹ In addition, in Schwartz’s view, while Iberian writers were open to their Provençal coreligionists and freely cited them, the reverse was not true.²² In both of these respects, Duran belongs to the Iberian Jewish philosophical culture.

Duran studied the Guide of the Perplexed intensively, writing a now well known commentary on the book discussed in Chapter 3. From references to Rabbi Nissim of Girona (1320–c. 1380), in terms indicating that he is still alive, we may conclude that at least part of the commentary was written at some point in Duran’s twenties.²³ He had not yet become a doctor but was nearly mature enough to be appointed consiliarius of the Perpignan aljama (which happened in 1381).²⁴

It is also possible that he wrote a commentary to Judah Halevi’s Kuzari, if one relies on the evidence of a few glosses in one manuscript, perhaps excerpted from a longer work. Those glosses refer to passages from the beginning of book II and, since they also allude to the Guide, suggest a date later than his Guide commentary.²⁵ Like Duran’s glosses to the Guide, those on the Kuzari form a running commentary aimed primarily at clarifying vague referents and awkward syntax. Strikingly, in one of his final comments, referring to a series of passages in the Kuzari that deal with the Jewish calendar, Duran writes that the topic is “a hidden matter that should properly have a treatise of its own devoted to it.” This helps to place the Kuzari glosses earlier than Duran’s 1395 calendrical work Ḥeshev ha-Efod. Indeed, it may have been his study of this particular passage in the Kuzari that led Duran to attempt a full discussion of the subject.

Of Duran’s remaining two commentaries, one, very brief, is on the first book of ibn Sina’s Canon of Medicine , and the other is on the Hebrew translation of the Epitome of Ptolemy’s Almagest by ibn Rushd (Averroes, 1126–1198), a nontechnical summary of the primary textbook of medieval astronomy. The latter commentary will be discussed in Chapter 2.

It is likely that Duran’s commentaries arose directly out of his own pedagogical activity. His remarks on ibn Rushd’s Epitome of the Almagest, for example, seem to have been taken down by his students in the margins of manuscripts and later collected in more elaborate form in a single text.²⁶ Distinctive to all of Duran’s commentaries, in striking contrast to his epistles and independent treatises, is that none opens with an introduction. This, too, suggests that the commentaries derive from marginal glosses and were not conceived as independent works, where, by contrast, Duran is unfailingly conscientious about introducing the subject and clarifying important premises and definitions. Another distinguishing mark is that all are attributed to the Efod, and not (as in the case of several other works) to “Profayt Duran ha-Levi.” This again points to the likelihood that they originated as marginal glosses, which, as noted, were normally signed with an acronymic abbreviation of the glossator’s name, preceded by an alef for amar (“he said”). Stylistically, too, they are all similar: Duran’s glosses are often mere restatements, rephrasing or summarizing difficult sentences and providing cross-references to other relevant works and clarifications of vague allusions and referents.

At some point before 1382, Duran married a woman named Astrugua.²⁷ In the second half of the thirteenth century, Perpignan Jews had tended to marry at about the age of eighteen, sometimes younger; a century later, Duran may have done so as well.²⁸

Like most Jews with some wealth to exploit, Duran lent money to Christians. Starting in the 1370s, both alone and in joint ventures, he did so regularly. Over the next couple of decades, and especially in 1389, 1390, and the early part of 1391, references to him in the archival records frequently concern such transactions.²⁹ This activity, though curtailed after his conversion, continued throughout his life; as late as 1409, he is found collecting old debts through his proctor Cresques Alfaquim. Duran also appears in the archives in a variety of other economic transactions, as witness or proctor for Jews in financial matters. In his first appearance (August 11, 1372), 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 may have been the decisive factor, Duran was evidently skilled in the astronomical techniques needed to practice as an astrologer, as well as in the principles of astrology itself. While he only occasionally alludes to astrological concepts in his writing, we may presume that he was known for this proficiency in at least some court circles. In this connection, one of his students records Duran’s astrologically informed clarification of an obscure comment by Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1164) on the Bible. According to Duran’s explanation, biblical sacrifices—which presumably mitigated the consequences of negative astrological configurations—were instituted on the new moon, the first day of the month, because it is at the time of the conjunction of the moon and the sun that “the judgments of the lower world are decreed.” Similarly, sacrifices were offered on the seventh day of the month because on that day the aspect of the moon relative to the sun is negative. In addition, Passover and Sukkot—and the sacrifices associated with those holidays—were set to begin on the fifteenth day of the month, when the sun and moon are in opposition, again a negative configuration.⁵⁴ Similar material appears in Duran’s letter on the number seven (“On the Hebdomad”).

In 1395, Duran completed his first independent treatise, Ḥeshev ha-Efod, a manual on the Jewish calendar. As I discuss in Chapter 7, this text, composed a mere three or so years following his conversion, shows his unabated interest in Jewish issues. The twenty-third chapter, composed in verse form, contains a unique reference to Duran’s Hebrew name, Isaac ben Moses ha-Levi:

And this will be an ordinance for thee for generations until the High Priest stands at the mystery of the Urim and Tummim.

It was composed by Isaac son of Moses, a Levite; his Rock is not like [their] images.⁵⁵

It is a gift for Moses, great in works, of the house of Hasdai, Levites of the pure ones⁵⁶

Who will grow and flourish like the palm tree, in his day may the Rock gather the scattered ones,

And the rest of my acquaintances and friends and noble ones and those who listen to me, [the] companions,

May God bring them together to Mount Zion in song and verse, on the wings of eagles.⁵⁷

These lines, full of longing for the messianic age, invoke an image of the high priest restored to his place in the Temple, arrayed in his sacred garments and “standing at the mystery” of the Urim and Tummim. Duran may be relying here on the exegetical tradition that construed the biblical Urim and Tummim as some sort of astronomical instrument, perhaps an astrolabe, by which the future could be foretold, hence of particular relevance in a treatise devoted to the computation of the calendar.⁵⁸ And the Urim and Tummim were likewise closely associated with the efod, another of the priestly garments regarded as useful in astrological divination.⁵⁹

At the very end of this work, Duran again makes reference to the Urim and Tummim, in a similar context:

And with this, what was intended [in this book] has been completed. It will suffice for the whole time that this exile continues, until the [high] priest stands at the Urim and Tummim, and also [it will be useful] in those days, [because] in that time I think that the fixed [times] for the festivals of the Lord will continue, according to the secret of the above-mentioned intercalation, for its foundation is in the mountains of true investigation, and its reasons were explained, [reasons] that stand as [long as] the days of the sun upon the earth, and they indicate its perpetuity, like the perpetuity of the Torah, and all the more so, according to the opinion of the one who says that it is an inheritance for us from Moses our Teacher, peace be upon him.⁶⁰

Here Duran evidently associates the Urim and Tummim specifically with the restoration of the Temple service. Strongly evocative of his rationalist suppositions is the suggestion that because the Jewish calendrical rules are based on “true investigation” (presumably, astronomy), which is as enduringly true as the Torah itself, they will remain valid into the messianic age.

Finally, Duran includes in his introduction to Ḥeshev ha-Efod a direct reference to his pseudonym and its relation to the year of the riots: “And as for me, from the day when the Lord poured out his anger like water upon the exile of Jerusalem which is in Sefarad, this is my name forever, in the efod is its surrogate [temurah]. Therefore have I called it Ḥeshev ha-Efod.”⁶¹ In its biblical context (Lev. 27:10), temurah, “surrogate” or “substitute,” refers specifically to the exchange of one sacrificial animal for another. Duran is signaling that his personal Hebrew acronym, Efod, is also a token of his new identity, not only a way of atoning or offering up a sacrifice for an apparent desertion of the faith but an actual surrogate for the Honoratus de Bonafide he has become in the eyes of society. It is as the Efod that Duran writes his postconversion works; he titles them according to his new identity, The Cincture of the Efod (Ḥeshev ha-Efod) and The Work of the Efod (Ma‘aseh Efod).

In the poem quoted above, Duran dedicates Ḥeshev ha-Efod to an individual named Moses of the house of Hasdai, a Levi.⁶² It is possible though by no means certain that the Hasdai here refers to Hasdai Crescas. Duran does mention students of his, also “of the sons of Hasdai,” who are again labeled Levites in his introduction to Ma‘aseh Efod (1403), but these are equally difficult to identify.⁶³

Dedicatees are not necessarily friends, or even acquaintances, but there are in fact a number of individuals whom we can associate with Duran. These are his correspondents, whom we know from the epistles addressed to them. Since they sometimes refer to each other in their letters, they constitute a kind of “circle.”

For example, Duran wrote a letter concerning an astronomical question to a Shealtiel Gracian.⁶⁴ In that letter, Duran refers to an En Meir Crescas, apparently known to both of them, who had in his hands a discussion of the quadrant about which Shealtiel Gracian had inquired. Another, unnamed student, in a manuscript recording astronomical notes, many of which derive from Duran, includes an excerpt from the technical section of Duran’s letter to Shealtiel. Solomon Bonafed (1370/1380–c. 1445) of Zaragoza, a poet and avid correspondent, circa 1413 addresses a poem to Profayt Duran, and mentions him in a letter to their apparently mutual friend Shealtiel Gracian.⁶⁵ In 1393, Duran composed his eulogy for Rabbi Abraham ben Isaac ha-Levi of Girona and sent it to the rabbi’s son, Joseph; Meir Crescas transcribed a copy of this eulogy into a manuscript of his own. David Bonet Bonjorn, the son of the famous Perpignan astronomer, was the “addressee” of Al tehi ka-avotekha, and the astronomically inclined student mentioned above seems to have been working with a manuscript that had been copied by David Bonjorn’s father, Bonet David Bonjorn (Jacob ben David Po‘el, Perpignan, fl. 1361), as we will see in the following chapter.

Duran seems also to have been acquainted with the two sons of Benveniste ben Lavi (d. 1411). Introducing Duran’s explication of one of Abraham ibn Ezra’s riddle poems, Meir Crescas mentions the request his master received from “two golden cherubs, youngsters, from among the great ones of the land, and from its noble ones, the great sons of Benveniste.”⁶⁶ One of these sons was the poet Vidal de la Cavalleria (otherwise known as Joseph ben Benveniste ben Lavi, or Vidal Abenlavi, d. between 1445 and 1456), also of Saragossa. He, too, was a friend of Solomon Bonafed,⁶⁷ and is known to have converted to Christianity at some point before May 22, 1414. About Joseph ben Lavi’s brother, little is known beyond his name: “Juan de la Cavalleria, also called Bonafos.”⁶⁸

Four acquaintances of Duran bore the name of Joseph. First is Joseph ben Lavi (Benveniste). There is, second, a student “Joseph,” who composed an introductory poem to his copy of Duran’s Ḥeshev ha-Efod,⁶⁹ but we have no way of identifying him. Then there is Joseph, son of Abraham ben Isaac ha-Levi of Girona. And fourth is the Joseph Zarch/Zarqo found in Italy using Duran’s name as a passport to the good graces of Yeḥiel of Pisa.⁷⁰

All of these individuals make up what we know for certain of Duran’s circle of students and correspondents, which was probably considerably larger.

LATER CAREER

At some point, Duran seems to have left Perpignan to work as a doctor among the wealthy and influential members of Christian society, first as a royal physician in Navarre and later returning to the Crown of Aragon. It is easy to imagine the professional and political connections with influential Aragonese that Duran might have developed after twenty years serving the royal house. His connections would have meant lucrative work as physician to notables in northern Iberia. Between 1404 and 1411 there is no record of Duran’s presence in Perpignan.⁷¹ In 1406 a maestre Honoratus Bonafidey was summoned from Tudela, where he was living, to Pamplona to aid in treating the king of Navarre, and retained at an annual salary of 300 florins. He remained at the Navarrese court until, it seems, the second half of 1408.⁷² These moves should not on the face of it be too surprising. In general, Catalonian Jews were highly mobile and many belonged to extended families with branches in numerous cities and smaller towns.⁷³

After returning to Perpignan in 1411, probably for business reasons, Duran appears again as a medical professional with connections to centers of power. On April 22, 1412, he was a minor participant in the events of the so-called Compromise of Caspe, a town close to Saragossa and about halfway between Perpignan and the city of Valencia. There, nine representatives, three from each of the Aragonese realms (Catalunya, Valencia, and Aragon proper), were to choose a new king. After a chaotic two-year interregnum, succession to the Crown of Aragon was finally settled, ultimately in favor of the Trastamaran Fernando I.

At some point during the proceedings, one of the Valencian representatives, Giner Rabasa, was declared incompetent due to advanced age; one of the two physicians testifying to Rabasa’s mental state was magister Honoratus Bonefidei of Perpignan.⁷⁴ The other was magister Jerónimo of Alcanyís (magistrum Geronimum, ville Alcanicii), whom we should identify as the former Jew Joshua ha-Lorqi, mentioned above. Joshua ha-Lorqi was a native of Alcanyís, he was a doctor, and as noted he adopted the name Jerónimo de Santa Fe upon his conversion to Christianity.⁷⁵ It is even thought that ha-Lorqi’s conversion to Christianity took place in 1412 in the town of Alcanyís itself, approximately eighteen miles from Caspe, and under the sponsorship of none other than the preacher and anti-Jewish agitator Vicent Ferrer.⁷⁶ Indeed, Ferrer was the second representative from Valencia, and a partisan of Fernando. At this point in April 1412, ha-Lorqi’s conversion would have been quite recent, and it would have been natural for him to have accompanied Vicent Ferre to Caspe.

It seems almost too much to contemplate these two famous converts working together on a medical case, consulting each other’s professional opinion and presumably making some sort of conversation while in each other’s company. One of them, whatever his state of mind at that point in 1412, had spent years being internally loyal to Judaism; the other had just completed his voluntary and evidently sincere conversion to Christianity. Did the two conversos find themselves on opposite sides in an argument over Judaism and Christianity? Or did Honoratus have to pretend to agree with Jerónimo with regard to the “errors of the Jews”? Tantalizingly, it was evidently around this very year that Jerónimo decided to encourage Pope Benedict XIII to hold a public debate—what was to become the infamous Tortosa disputation. Did something about the encounter between these two prompt Jerónimo’s decision? It is of course impossible to say.

After Caspe, Duran may have continued on to Valencia, where a magister in medicina Honoratus de Bona Fe registered his will (no longer extant) on May 26, 1427. Presumably he had remarried; a wife Saura was named as his sole heiress. Honoratus de Bona Fe died in Valencia January 20, 1433.⁷⁷ He would have been in his late seventies.

One wonders why Duran left Perpignan, first for an apparent absence of almost seven years and then, after returning in 1411, for Caspe and finally Valencia. A number of possibilities present themselves. His connection with the Aragonese court may have been affected by adverse developments there, possibly related to his position as astrologer. Presumably, he and his abilities had been viewed with favor by Joan I when he was appointed familiar of the court in 1392. Precisely because this position was that of astrologer-physician, however, Duran’s place may have been jeopardized after Joan died in 1396. Joan’s brother and successor Martí I had a far less enthusiastic attitude toward astrology; in 1398/9, the court poet Bernat Metge (1346–1413) wrote Lo Somni, an attack on Joan and his astrological and magical interests.⁷⁸ Still, Martí did not make an aggressive attempt to purge the court of astrologers and their books, and, as far as we know, Duran remained in Perpignan, in one capacity or another, until his first prolonged absence starting in 1404.

In any case, astrology may not have been the real issue at all. In 1413, after the two-year interregnum, the new Aragonese king Fernando I began his rule, and his attitude toward Jews and conversos did not bode well for those among the latter who harbored lingering Jewish sympathies. Perhaps, then, his election was one of the factors driving the newly returned Duran away from the royal seat.⁷⁹ Fernando supported both Vicent Ferrer and Jerónimo de Santa Fé; the latter was both the king’s physician and, as noted, the guiding force in the Tortosa disputation (January 1413–December 1414): an event that followed quickly on the Compromise of Caspe. The atmosphere in courtly circles may have become perilous.

As for the destination of Valencia, if that identification is correct, Duran’s move there is somewhat puzzling. One might have expected an attempt to flee to Italy, where he might return to practicing Judaism openly now that his life in Perpignan was ending. Evidently, however, his purpose in leaving Perpignan was not to live openly as a Jew. He appears in the Valencia archives as Honoratus, and thus presumably was still living outwardly as a Christian in his new city. Could the choice of Valencia be connected to a decision to remain living the life of a converso? Valencia had a relatively vigorous converso community that, despite inquisitorial activity, seems to have survived and was aided in its Judaizing, as Mark Meyerson has documented, by the neighboring Jewish community of Morvedre, the largest in the kingdom of Valencia.⁸⁰ If one were to seek out a community in which it might be possible to live as an actively Judaizing converso, among a large group of other converts from 1391, Valencia could have been the place.

And yet his decision to leave Perpignan and to end his life in Valencia may have been less complicated than I have portrayed it. When Duran traveled earlier to Tudela and Pamplona, or for that matter to Caspe, he seems to have been pursuing opportunities related to his medical profession. So here, too, once again, professional and pragmatic interests could have been at the back of his movements.

HOW DID HE DO IT?

Scholars have repeatedly wondered how, as a New Christian, Honoratus de Bonafide could have written works in Hebrew, let alone anti-Christian polemics, without retaliation by the Inquisition. While there is no way to know for certain, it is possible to speculate about the circumstances that may have made this possible.

One consideration is that intense danger to Judaizers from inquisitors had not yet fully crystallized. The official Spanish Inquisition, notoriously active against backsliding conversos in Seville, did not begin to function in Castile until 1481. In Catalonia, it was established only in 1483 and in the Crown of Aragon a year later. What was active earlier in Aragon was the Papal Inquisition, which, having begun as an ecclesiastical response to the late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century Cathar heresies, traditionally dealt with issues other than Judaizing.

This is not to say that it altogether refrained from investigating relapsed conversos. In 1346, a backsliding convert had been burned at the stake by the Roussillon office of the Aragonese Papal Inquisition. That regional office sat in Perpignan, presumably in the Dominican monastery: that is, just across the street from the house that appears to have belonged to Profayt Duran.⁸¹ One of the most famous inquisitors general, the Dominican preacher Nicholas Eymeric (c. 1320–1399), 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 words stir up the dead and how goodly it is (Is. 14:9) for a man

to 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.