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 Here, too, through a look at unpublished autograph manuscripts by his students, this part assesses some of the different registers of Duran’s teaching: practical mathematics, astronomical skills, and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 rationalism thriving alongside kabbalah and the Talmudic scholarship of northern France. Other strong elements in the elite culture of rationalist Iberian Jews were the secular sciences, especially astronomy;2 in the fifteenth century, the most important astronomer in the Iberian Peninsula was the Jew Abraham Zacut (1452–1510) of Salamanca.3 Iberian and Provençal Jews were often also to be found as master clockmakers and as manufacturers and repairers of scientific instrumentation for the court. Mallorcan Jews, for their part, were involved in royal mapmaking, the most well known being the map illustrators Abraham and Jafudah Cresques.4
As noted in the Introduction, Profayt Duran’s own scientific activity is of interest not only for the light it can shed on Jewish identity but also for what it can tell us about the transmission of science outside the orbit of the university. It has long been thought that Iberian science was relatively “backward” by the standards of other European centers. But as recent research has shown, that is a misapprehension.5 Iberian universities were indeed weak in comparison with those of northern Europe, but they were not where the practice of science primarily took place. Jews, in any event, were excluded from the universities, although they had access to Hebrew translations of some of the texts being studied there. In examining how Duran taught subjects like mathematics and astronomy, we can thus grasp how science in general might have been transmitted in a nonuniversity context in Iberia. In interpreting this material, we will also gain insight into the role of court patronage and into the practical orientation of the science promoted in the service of the Aragonese kings. Finally, in observing the multiple contexts in which scientific information was conveyed, we should also arrive at a deeper understanding of the ties that bound together the tiny circle of the Jewish intellectual elite.
In many ways, as a member of this urban Jewish elite, Duran was utterly unexceptional. His education and background were, as we will see, fairly standard for his social class. He was both a moneylender and a physician, the two most prevalent professions among the Jews of late medieval Iberia