Duran was in many ways typical of his class and world, and could not have been the sole individual who found a way of rationalizing nonobservance under the circumstances of forced conversion. Still, we should not generalize too broadly. There was a wide variety of responses to this situation. Duran opens a window and shines an especially brilliant light onto one of them.
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Profayt Duran’s significance resides not only in his experience of forced conversion but also in another realm, seemingly unrelated but actually, in the Iberian-Jewish world, integral to his and others’ identity. This is the realm of rationalism and scientific activity. His scientific activities and writings, in and of themselves, tell us much about the consumption and transmission of the sciences by Jews in late medieval Iberia. Beyond this, his conception of Judaism as a fundamentally rational religion, one with a proud heritage of scientific learning, played a central role in his polemical works. Attending to this aspect of things can illuminate the attitudes, motivations, and self-perception of an entire class of medieval Jewish scholars.
In the case of Duran, extant are scientific epistles he composed to fellow scholars, collections of his writings by students, notes from study circles, and the recorded evidence of his insights in the margins of manuscripts used in those circles. By looking at these traces of Duran’s teaching activity, we see a rarely examined facet of Iberian science at the transition point between the medieval and early modern periods: namely, the transmission of mathematical and astronomical knowledge through small groups.
The content of this transmission, as we will see, exhibits many of the qualities—pragmatism, utilitarianism, technological emphasis—characteristic of the same urban culture and royal patronage system that made Jews and conversos such an important factor in Iberian science in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. At the same time, other qualities in Duran’s work would seem to derive from more internal factors, in particular the powerful influence of Maimonides’ Guide.
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The central puzzle of Profayt Duran’s life is how to understand his literary production in the context of his forced baptism. Most conversos from 1391 left no writings at all. Among the few exceptions, some evidently found it possible to continue to compose in Hebrew; Solomon da Piera was one, but he confined himself to the relatively innocuous realm of verse. We can presume that many forced converts settled into their lives as Christians, and we know of others who left for northern Africa or Italy where they returned to the outward practice of Judaism. Duran, however, remained in Perpignan, and after his conversion not only wrote in Hebrew but, in addition to other works, wrote and circulated two extraordinarily sharp anti-Christian polemics.
How could a newly baptized Jew have done this in Iberia at the end of the fourteenth century without retaliation from the Inquisition (here, the Aragonese Papal Inquisition)? And another puzzle: ten years after his forced baptism, Duran wrote a Hebrew grammar, Ma‘aseh Efod, that appears to be aimed at the still-Jewish community and makes almost no reference to the author’s own forced conversion. Since, on the basis of these seeming mysteries, some scholars have either denied that Duran was converted at all12 or have seen in Ma‘aseh Efod a sign that Duran either must have fled the country to live openly as a Jew or somehow otherwise managed to “return to Judaism,” a quick review here of the evidence will be useful.
Over two hundred extant manuscripts are attributed to Profayt Duran ha-Levi or the Efod. They include mathematical and astronomical commentaries, scholarly epistles, and philosophical responsa as well as full-fledged treatises like the Hebrew grammar Ma‘aseh Efod and his earlier work on the Jewish calendar. They also include the two anti-Christian polemics. Taken together, they present a portrait of a well and broadly educated rationalist Jewish intellectual, a student of mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy, dedicated at the same time to the study and promotion of the Hebrew Bible and to the refutation of Christianity.
A Profayt Duran, judeus, also appears in numerous notarial records from Perpignan. According to the archival material, at some point between April 18, 1391, and March 20, 1392, this Profayt Duran was baptized and took the name Honoratus de Bonafide. The key document was written January 14, 1393, and records the repayment of a debt. It includes the words magister Honorat Bonefidey phisicus olim vocatus Perfeyt Duran judeus (“maestre Honorat Bonefidey, physician, formerly called Perfeyt Duran, Jew”).13 The rest of the archival documents show that this Perfeyt/Profayt Duran (orthographic variations are common) remained in Perpignan for years, took part in official interactions with local notaries, such as Bernard Fabre, under his New Christian name, and presumably conducted himself in public as a Christian. From these same sources we also know that he obtained the official medical title magister in medicina and was appointed by the king to the royal court as an astrologer.14
Some historians have nevertheless objected that no evidence exists to prove that this Honorat/Profayt Duran is “our” Profayt Duran.15 After all, they point out, many medieval Jews bore identical names, and the extant documents are too fragmentary to exclude the existence of another such person of the same name. Support for the identification, they add, is circumstantial, relying for the most part on the lack of any evidence to the contrary.
As against this, one might adduce the dates attested in the archival documents, which are consistent with the dates of “our” Duran’s life and literary activity; the fact that several manuscripts associate the literary Profayt Duran with Perpignan, home of the “archival” Duran;16 the additional fact that the literary Duran possessed the astronomical expertise necessary to work as a royal astrologer; and so on. To all of which, the presumable retort might be: just more circumstantial evidence, still no smoking gun.
Something much closer to definitive proof has, however, recently come to light. Hebrew letters, written in Italy between 1420 and 1422 and now published, strengthen the claim that the “archival Duran” and the “literary Duran” are in fact the same man. In one of these letters, an Italian Christian named Marco Lippomano, writing to a Jew by the name of Crescas Meir, refers to certain of his correspondent’s fellow Jews who have had the wisdom to convert to Lippomano’s religion: “And see, I consider that, among the Jewish people, anyone who has been wise among them and 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