Meir Crescas’s notes differ in style from the informal, hurried, and economical notes of our first, anonymous student. In this case, he has made a clear attempt at uniformity and legibility, possibly so that others might ultimately read what he has written. It is also conceivable that he copied the material within a relatively contained period of time, perhaps from an earlier notebook collection. Nevertheless, these notes, too, represent the record of a study group.
Crescas writes: “Said the scribe [that is, Meir Crescas himself]: I did not think it proper to copy more from his explanation of this section from the notebook of one of the companions, as we hear the words of the sage [only] sometimes and rarely. And this [passage] indeed, with difficulty and with great labor [is still] ambiguous, since in what remains I am not certain it agrees with the opinion of the sage and it was not clear to me that it comes from his mouth. And I shall pass to what I have attained from him regarding the section ‘Speak to the priests’ [Lev. 22:26–23:44], along with the rest of the faithful companions.”25
These lines, like the class notes of our first student, evoke a scene of several adult disciples studying together, sometimes with and sometimes without their master, each perhaps with a notebook that may be shared with other members of the group. Something similar may have taken place among the circle of students led by the Provençal astronomer and philosopher Levi ben Gerson in the mid-fourteenth century, whose “school” has been described by Ruth Glasner.26 They too termed their master moreinu or ḥakham, and they too appear to have considered themselves a group of companions (ḥaverim), with Levi ben Gerson himself referred to as he-ari she-ba-ḥavurah, “the lion in the company.”27 The main difference is that here Profayt Duran does appear to have attended the class in person on at least some occasions, while there the students gathered as a group but without the teacher’s presence. Another example may be that of Abraham Rimoch who explains in the introduction to his commentary on Psalms that he has “settled down with [his] few disciples who have stayed with [him].”28
In these student groups we might be glimpsing a model for the “circles” of scholars whose importance in the development of philosophical thought in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries has been stressed by Dov Schwartz.29 The existence of such study circles and groups of individuals separated in space but in contact on topics of mutual interest illustrates how scattered members of the Jewish elites—a very small subset of an already small and marginal group—could and did maintain a sense of cultural identity and cohesion.
As for when this manuscript might have been written, Crescas refers consistently to Duran as maestre Profayt Duran ha-Levi or maestre Profayt ha-Levi, that is, by his preconversion name. Still, it is in the 1393 eulogy, the last text of the set copied here, that Duran announces his new Hebrew name as “Efod.” The manuscript was clearly completed after that year, and thus at minimum a year or two after Duran’s conversion. Moreover, at the end of the explanation just mentioned, Meir writes that “this is what was transmitted to us of this explanation in secrecy and hiding.”30 It sounds very much as though Duran were communicating with his students while at the same time living as a Christian. Did they meet clandestinely? Did Duran write out his explanations of ibn Ezra and pass them secretly to one of his students? Striking, too, is the fact that Duran’s students do not seem to have been particularly disturbed by the fact of his baptism. That he was concurrently pretending to be a Christian (and attending mass?) did not apparently disqualify him from providing teachings on biblical interpretation; it only seems to have made their meetings more difficult and so less frequent.
As I have mentioned, Meir Crescas also chose to add one passage not by Duran. To all appearances Crescas’s own, it is a further comment on the appearances of the number seven in the Bible and in particular two aspects of that number that he has found in Duran’s epistle on the hebdomad. The first is that seven represents rest in this harsh world, like the holiday of Shemini Atzeret on the seventh day of Sukkot; Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in the seventh month; the shemittah year, which takes place every seventh year; and the Jubilee year, occurring once every forty-nine (seven times seven) years. His second point is that the square of seven is forty-nine, which represents a cycle of return. Then he offers his own opinions, gleaned from “books and his own mind.” First: seven represents the creation of the world. Second: since man is a social creature, he must devote six days to maintenance of the body, the house, or the city. The Sabbath, on the other hand, is one day set aside from the week to contemplate metaphysics and to cleave to the separate intellect. Meir Crescas would thus seem to share Duran’s philosophical rationalism, a rationalism that thinks of the Sabbath as inculcating belief in God’s creation of the world (through its association with the number seven), and the Sabbath as a time for metaphysical study.
Who were these students of Duran? Although it was common enough for parents who could afford the expense to hire tutors for their young children, it seems plain that Duran’s disciples were long past that age. Meir Crescas himself was no child: in the opening to his essay on the number seven, Duran twice addresses him as gevir, “master,” and treats him in terms of respect and flattery that one can hardly imagine a teacher employing toward a youngster (unless, perhaps, he were of a truly exalted station in life).
Aside from study circles and personal correspondence, another method of transmitting scientific knowledge was via the learned epistle. These, like the letters Duran sent to Meir Crescas, were evidently circulated among interested parties and copied into notebooks or manuscripts.31 One example is Duran’s Ḥilluf ha-yamim ve-haleilot (“The Variation of the Days and the Nights”), a brief treatment of the equation of time—that is, variations in the length of the day according to the time of year and the latitude. The text explains why and how the true solar day varies over the course of the year, and why it is necessary to define a mean solar day for astronomical measurements. Another is his letter to Shealtiel Gracian on the differences between the true and the median conjunction, which, just like the question about the equation of time, explains why astronomy, for its own computational purposes, defines the “mean” behavior of the celestial motion and how this mean relates to the actual, true motion of the earth and planets.
In both these epistles, Duran displays his understanding of the geometrical models used in medieval astronomy. Both topics may have been related to understanding the workings of astronomical tables, which could include tables for the equation of time as well as tables of eclipses (which, when they take place, do so either at conjunction or opposition). The tables of Jacob Bonjorn, for example, astronomer to Pere III, specified for an observer in Perpignan the true conjunctions and oppositions of the sun and moon for the years 1361 through 1391, including the date and time for each conjunction (and opposition), a correction for finding the time of the true conjunction in previous or later cycles, and the true positions of the sun and moon at the time of the conjunction.32
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Current scholarship has argued that in general the imprint of the court as a locus of scientific activity was less important in early modern Spain than it was in Renaissance Italy, Spanish science being more strongly shaped by the needs of a specifically maritime empire.33 In the case of the Jews, however, the court seems to have been the primary factor. Although the flourishing of an important family of Jewish cartographers in fourteenth-century Majorca would seem to offers a prime example of Jewish science shaped by the needs of a maritime kingdom, the Jews in question, as Gabriel Llompart and Jaume Riera have shown,