The Secret Faith of Maestre Honoratus. Maud Kozodoy

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