Yosi Yisraeli

This article presents a short treatise on inter-faith oaths, hitherto unnoticed, by the theologian and canonist Alonso de Madrigal, “El Tostado” (c.1438). It shows that Madrigal approved Jewish oaths on the Torah based on an extraordinarily favorable attitude towards the Hebrew Bible – claiming it was a Christian book no less than a Jewish one. Furthermore, Madrigal discussed the practice of Christians who swear on the Torah– examining whether it constitutes a sin of Judaization. Thus, his treatise offers us an early testimony on the problem of converso Judaization and their habit of swearing “like Jews”. Madrigal’s positions on this issue were very different from the inquisitorial norms that would dominate the Peninsula by the end of the century. He was willing
to approve converso behaviors that would be deemed as scandalous within only a few years.  Hence, illustrating how dynamic was the accusation of Judaization. As it will be suggested, Madrigal’s unique position concerning oaths on the Torah was a part of a larger intellectual approach toward the Bible and the Jewish origins of the Church, that was popular among Iberian scholars of the early 15th century.

This article presents three stories that were secretly expurgated from Pablo de Santa María's (d.1435) biography, published by Cristóbal de Sanctotis in his 1591 edition of Pablo's Scrutinium scripturarum. The three censured texts all concern Pablo's mysterious noble lineage and are based on local rumors in the town of Burgos. As I sugget, the 1591 edition was prepared as a part of the Santa María family's campaign to obtain a royal exemption from all purity of blood regulations (which they successfully did in 1604). As part of this public and legal effort, Pablo was celebrated for his exceptional accomplishments, virtues and lineage, and his image was recrafted to meet the inquisitorial ideals of sixteenth-century Spain as vehemently anti-Jewish. Yet, at certain points, this creative effort seemed to have crossed the line, provoking a royal intervention to quietly remove three textual units from the new edition. After introducing the evidence for this unusual procedure, the three texts (that survived in one copy of the edition) are presented in full. According to the first, Pablo's father belonged to the De la Cavallería family from Saragossa, which allegedly obtained special royal privileges on account to their noble origins that go all the way to the Bible. The second censured text, tells that Pablo's mother was the biological daughter of King Alfonso XI and Queen Maria of Portugal, who traded her with a Jewess for an infant boy (that would become King Pedro I of Castile). The third rumor claims that Pablo's mother was the lovechild that Juan Núñez III de Lara had with a certain noble maiden, and whom they gave to Jewish parents to raise.

This article revisits two Latin antitalmudic texts penned by the converted bishop of Burgos, Pablo de Santa María (c. 1352-1435). It argues, in contrast to previous assessments, that far from being a failed replica of Christian scholastic formulas, they echo the conversionist or "apostatic" argumentation that proselytes to Christianity were making in Jewish quarters, a polemic that was not shaped by a scholastic-inquisitorial perspective but rather was still very much rabbinic in style and methods. The article traces echoes of this intra-Jewish polemic, using the extraordinary corpus of Abner of Burgos (d. 1347). It focuses on three themes: the antirabbinic allusions to Zechariah's prophecy; the historical-hermeneutical brawl over the identity of Edom; and the notion of talmudic-demonic alliance. Evaluating the potential agency that Pablo's peculiar texts could have had among Christian readership, I propose that his critique of talmudic literature undermined important aspects of the Christian antitalmudic tradition, reframing the Talmud according to rabbinic conventions.

This article addresses Joshua HaLorki's discussion of faith (emunah), as it appears in his famous letter to the convert Pablo de Santa Maria. It suggests that ha-Lorki weighed against each other competing models of faith, that he deemed crucial for the issue of conversion,  As I argue, the choice upon which ha-Lorki contemplated was not between the religion of the intellect and mystic beliefs, as some have argued; but rather between the volitional model of scholastic fides, and the religion of tradition.

This article deals with the transfer and fusion of scientific-biblical knowledge among Jews, converts, and Christians in the 1390s. Following up on hints supplied by a cryptic Hebrew report, the article tracks and explores a biblical-scientific discovery revealed by the convert Pablo de Santa María (the former Shelomo Halevi) in his commentary on Genesis 1:9. In that text, Pablo combined the latest Christian scientific theories of his day with Jewish biblical traditions and thus shaped a new explanation for both the baffling equilibrium between earth and water and the scriptural formulation: “Let the waters be gathered”. As the article shows, while naturalistic readings of this passage were quite common among Christians, in the Sephardic intellectual elite to which Pablo belonged it was almost a doctrinal principle to take these words as pointing to divine intervention in the order of nature. Accordingly, Pablo’s new providential-physical explanation made a significant impression on his Christian audience and became, in a famous Hebrew epistle by the crypto-Jewish convert, Profayt Duran, a token of his scholarly accomplishments. For us, however, it can provide a remarkable example for the kind of intellectual synergy among Jews, converts, and Christians in those years.

This article presents a new reading of the polemical strategies and arguments embodied in the “anti-Jewish” tractate by the converted bishop of Burgos, Pablo de Santa María (c.1352–1435), the Scrutinium scripturarum (c.1432). It suggests the Scrutinium reflected a unique polemical dynamic that emerged between converts and Jews following
the mass conversions of 1391 and the early fifteenth century, regarding the spiritual assimilation of converts to their new faith. Grappling with the new challenges faced by converts, the Scrutinium articulated a Christian approach toward rabbinic traditions and Jewish skepticism that differed dramatically from the scholastic–polemical traditions
that were employed at the disputation of Tortosa. Its introduction of rabbinic esotericism provided its Latin-reading audience new historical and theological grounds for the integration of rabbinic authority within Christian scholarship and history. In doing so, it embodied what could be considered a distinct “converso voice,” which challenged the customary religious boundaries between Judaism and Christianity.

Alonso Fernandez de Madrigal (c.1410-1455) – the bishop of Ávila — is widely known as a key figure in the emerging school of Salamanca and as one of the most prolific writers of his generation. Yet, it seems that his contribution to the development of Biblical criticism in the 15th century has not been fully acknowledged yet. This paper argues that Madrigal was able to create a unique synthesis between the linguistic criticism of the “Vulgate” that conversos around him developed based on their rabbinic knowledge, and the new theoretical apparatus of philology and translation that evolved in the Italian Humanism. Thus, under a thick veil of scholastic rhetoric and gestures, Madrigal introduced bold claims about the Latin text of the "Vulgate" and Jerome’s function as a translator that preceded the rise of "biblical humanism" in Italy. This paper explores one such example, in which Madrigal acknowledge that some defects in Jerome’s translation reflect an exegetical misjudgment that originated from Midrashic literature.