In 1391, a horrifying wave of pogroms swept through Spain, leaving tens of thousands of Jews dead, and many others forcibly converted to Christianity. Among the latter was Profayt Duran of Perpignan, who took the name Honoratus de Bonafide and embarked on a successful career as court astrologer to the king of Aragon. But Duran—an accomplished rabbinic scholar, polymath, and author of a commentary on Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed—continued to write in Hebrew under the pseudonym Efod, and produced a number of works on Jewish theology, Hebrew grammar, and biblical exegesis, as well as two anti-Christian polemics. Duran’s life and work are the subject of Maud Kozodoy’s The Secret Faith of Maestre Honoratus. Eric Lawee writes in his review:
Kozodoy rightly lays stress on Duran’s rationalism as a key not only to his intellectual personality but religious identity. . . . [She] suggests, on the evidence of his writings, that Duran’s rationalism buttressed his Jewish pride and fortified his ongoing allegiance to Judaism after his conversion. Indeed, he seems to have identified rationality with Judaism, and Kozodoy shows how this conviction informed what are by far Duran’s most daring works: two brilliant and innovative polemics in which he subjected Christianity to theological ridicule and an exacting historical critique.
Duran wrote the first of his anti-Christian books about three years after his conversion. It takes the form of an epistle addressed to one of his contemporaries who was a genuine Jewish convert to Christianity. Here the innovation lies not so much in the work’s contents but in its form, especially the “barbed biblical allusion[s]” with which Duran pointed out the folly of an educated Sephardi Jew abandoning a faith in harmony with reason to embrace one at odds with it.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/2133/the-secrets-of-the-efod/