The Earthquake Synod

The Earthquake Synod was held on 21 May 1382 in London, England. It was called by Archbishop of Canterbury William Courtenay to address 24 of the theses put in writing in recent years by John Wycliffe.

During the meetings, an earthquake in the Dover Straits happened at 3:00pm with an estimated intensity of VII to VIII on the Modified Mercalli intensity scale, which runs from I (so mild it is felt by no one, perhaps only detectable by instruments) to XIII (which represents total destruction).

The earthquake destroyed the bell tower of Canterbury Cathedral. A manor house and church in Kent were damaged. In London, some miles away, Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's Cathedral also sustained damage.

At the Synod in London, the monastery where it was being held felt the shaking which alarmed many of the participants. The archbishop cleverly used the earthquake as a sign of favor, declaring:

This earthquake portends the purging of the kingdom from heresies. For as there are shut up in the bowels of the earth many noxious spirits, which are expelled in an earthquake, and so the earth is cleansed, but not without great violence: so there are many heresies shut up in the hearts of reprobate men, but by the condemnation of them the kingdom is to be cleansed, but not without irksomeness and great commotion.

Of the 24 theses, 10 (such as his rejection of transubstantiation) were considered heretical. The rest (for example, criticizing Church hierarchy and matters of wealth vs. poverty) were considered simply erroneous and should be ignored.

The synod decreed that those who professed any of the heretical 10 ideas should be prosecuted. For this to happen, though, needed the cooperation of secular authority, but the House of Commons rejected the bill that would have made it into law. In November he was summoned to stand before a synod at Oxford, where many of his colleagues were sympathetic to his views. Again, the secular powers would not condemn him and he kept his freedom and his views.

He was summoned to Rome in 1383, but he had a stroke and could not travel; he died in the following year. The Church did not succeed in getting him declared outright as a heretic until years after his death, in 1415 at the Council of Constance (probably called because Wycliffe's ideas were being spread by Jan Hus). In order to deal with things definitively, the order was given to burn Wycliffe's books along with his body. His corpse was exhumed (but, burials being what they were, there is a theory that the body dug up was a man who had been buried next door), burned, and the ashes scattered in the river. (The illustration shows his burning from a 16th century book on martyrs.)

For a change, let's talk about earthquakes in the Middle Ages next time. See you then.

Wycliffe and Controversy, Part 2

After getting in trouble for his writings and being told officially not to discuss the points he raised, John Wycliffe decided he would raise different points.

After being released from confinement in Black Hall at Oxford, he wrote (in both Latin and English for wider awareness) De incarcerandis fedelibus ("On the Incarceration of the Faithful"). In it he declared that excommunication and incarceration were wrong, and those treated with such punishments should be allowed to appeal to the king.

The nobility and the mainstream population liked his reasoning, but the Church of course objected to the idea that the king could overrule their punishments. Pope Gregory XI, who had written against Wycliffe earlier, died before he could respond to this new essay.

Wycliffe then started speaking out even more strongly against the institution of the papacy and other Church practices than he had earlier. He argued before Parliament that those who sought sanctuary in churches could be forcibly removed. Excommunication, he believed, should require a trial before Parliament and a Synod. He repeated his contention that the Church should divest itself of wealth and property, that priests should be poor.

In 1381, he went too far (again) with his ideas about the Last Supper, rejecting the doctrine of transubstantiation. This was indeed a step too far, in that he lost the support of men like John of Gaunt, the young King Richard II's powerful uncle.

This happened in the summer of 1381, and from May to October the peasant uprisings collectively called the Peasants Revolt occurred. Wycliffe's teachings, spread about in English and emphasizing egalitarianism, certainly helped to fire up the countryside to rebel against the hierarchy that they recognized as oppressive. Wycliffe did not approve of the destruction caused by the Revolt, but he was often referenced by followers who took part. One of the most egregious acts during the Revolt was the killing of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Sudbury.

Sudbury was succeeded by William Courtenay, who had been Wycliffe's enemy for awhile. In 1382 Courtenay called an assembly in which he was going to deal with Wycliffe. This led to the interestingly named Earthquake Synod. Let me tell you how that went down (that's an earthquake joke) tomorrow.

Wycliffe and Controversy, Part 1

The Middle English Bible translated from the Vulgate (supposedly by John Wycliffe) wasn't in itself controversial. But Wycliffe wrote De civili dominio ("On Civil Dominion") in 1377, advocating that the Church divest itself of property and live in poverty. He had a powerful ally in John of Gaunt, who disliked the power many clergy had because of revenues from property. This revenue could have instead gone to support royal military needs (the Hundred Years War was an ongoing concern for England).

Pope Gregory XI censured 19 of the points in De civili dominio. The Bishop of London, William Courtenay, summoned Wycliffe to a convocation at St. Paul's Cathedral (shown above in a mural by Ford Madox Brown [link]). Wycliffe was accompanied by an armed John of Gaunt and other nobles. An argument between Gaunt and the bishop took place over whether Wycliffe would be allowed to sit during his investigation. Gaunt made it clear that he supported Wycliffe's suggestions on limiting the clergy and stormed out with Wycliffe.

The Church had its supporters, of course, and there were riots attacking Gaunt's disrespect of the clergy that started the next day.

That was in February. In May, the pope sent a papal bull against Wycliffe to five people, including King Edward III and the chancellor of Oxford. When Wycliffe returned to Oxford he was confined for a time to Black Hall (a college building now memorialized in Blackhall Road in central Oxford). Wycliffe's friends eventually obtained his freedom.

In March 1378 he was again summoned to be questioned for his views. King Edward had died, and his very young grandson Richard II was king. Sir Lewis Clifford confronted the investigation on behalf of the new king's mother, Joan of Kent, and forbade the assembled clergy from condemning Wycliffe. The clergy simply forbade him from speaking out on his controversial views.

Wycliffe instead decided to make new controversies. I'll talk about them tomorrow.

Wycliffe's Bible

John Wycliffe (c.1324-1384) was one of my very earliest posts (before I started to include illustrations because they were boring). My post referred to him as a reformer, but he was also a philosopher, a scholastic, a priest, and a professor of theology and Master at Balliol College at the University of Oxford.*

He was a prolific author, and because of this he is credited with authorship of the earliest English translation of the Bible. Whether he was responsible for translating all of it from Latin into English, he may have been a driving force behind the work. (There are a couple other men whom scholars say would have been part of the translation project to spread his ideas.)

The followers of his ideas were later derogatorily called Lollards. He and they believed that there should be less hierarchy in a world where all men were created by God to be equal in His sight. Wycliffe questioned the legitimacy of a papacy, the importance of sacraments, and many policies of the Church.

Because he believed in the "democratization" of religion, he wanted a Bible that could be read by (or perhaps more commonly to) those who did not know Latin. Hence the Wycliffe Bible or Middle English Bible (MEB). Translations of the Vulgate (the 4th-century Latin version attributed to St. Jerome) appeared over the course of several years, starting near the end of Wycliffe's life through 1395. More manuscripts of the MEB exist from the Middle Ages than those of any other religious text. Not all are complete, and if you collate several manuscripts to include any material that exists in any of them, you have a very long work that includes material not generally found in a modern Bible. You can find a "complete" version here.**

Tomorrow I'll talk about the official attitude toward this Bible.

*In my second Chaucer novel that you see to the right, the young Geoffrey encounters him. (Balliol is also where Lord Peter Wimsey got a first in History.)

**I have currently finished a 100,000-word novel (and am 45,000 words into a sequel) about the lives of Jews who converted to Christianity and joined Henry III's Domus Conversorum. All quotations I use from the Bible—and there are many—are from Wycliffe.

What is in Tanakh?

Tanakh is the Hebrew Bible. Christians might ask "isn't that just the Old Testament?" Well, yes and no. They contain many of the same books, but the organization of them is different. The Christians add more books.

The name Tanakh is an acronym for the three divisions of the Hebrew Bible. They are the Torah, the Nevi'im, and the Ketuvim. The Torah includes the five Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.

The Nevi'im ("Prophets") includes the books of the prophets: the former prophets in Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, and the latter prophets in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the 12 minor prophets (Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi) combined into a single book.

The Ketuvim or "Writings" include three divisions: Psalms, Proverbs, and Job as a group, followed by a group of five that are the Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther. The final division contains Danuel, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles.

The middle division of the Ketuvim ties into several of the Hebrew festivals. The Song of Songs connects to Passover, Ruth to Shavuot, Lamentations to Tisha B'Av (which is like a Jewish Valentine's Day), Ecclesiastes to Sukkot, and Esther to Purim.

Because some of these are combined, the total number of books in the Hebrew Bible is 24. The Christian Old Testament breaks these up into 39 books. You can see the divisions and the different ordering of the books in the illustration. If it is illegible, you can see the original and much more information about their differences here.

One Christian Bible, however, contained 48 books in its Old Testament. Truth be told, I use it for medieval research. I'll explain next time.

What is in Halakha?

Halakha comes from the Hebrew root halakh,which means "to walk" or "to go." Halakha therefor means "the way to walk/go." It is the collected body of Jewish religious laws, coming from the Torah and developed through rabbinic tradition. So what does it include?

The Torah is first and foremost. It is the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. This is the Written Torah, along with 613 commandments (mitzvot) that are found throughout the Torah. Of the 613, 248 are positive commandments to do something; 365 are negative commandments, things not to do.

Next comes the Talmud, the Oral Law developed by rabbis over the ages to interpret the Torah to determine proper rules when new situations arise.

Then there are rabbinic decrees about public welfare. These are called Gezerah and Takkanah. Gezerah are called a "protective fence" around Torah Law, decisions created to make sure of adherence to Torah Law. One example is the sabbath prohibition against cooking, because cooking would require lighting a fire and kindling a fire is a Torah prohibition on the sabbath. Takkanah (from the word for improvement) is a revision of a law to satisfy new conditions, or to avoid a greater problem. For example, commandments to fast on certain holy days are overridden for the sickly who need food.

There are also Minhag, from the word for "custom," a long-standing tradition. The order of prayers at some celebrations is a Minhag, not laid down by anything in the Torah or Talmud. For example, on the seventh day of Sukkot there is a custom to beat willow branches. This is believed to date to the time of the Hebrew prophets, though there is no law that demands it.

There is also the Tanakh to be taken into account. I'll explain that tomorrow.

The Maimonidean Controversy, Part 2

European Jews were not accustomed to contemplating either Arabic philosophy or what they called "Greek wisdom," the works of Aristotle, Plato, etc. Those texts were only slowly transmitting across Europe in the 13th century. They were therefore unprepared for some of the conclusions that Maimonides (seen here as a statue in his hometown of Cordova) came to with his rationalistic-philosophical approach to questions of the divine.

One of the controversies was Maimonides' statement that since God created the laws of Nature, He would not violate them. Therefore, once a body starts to putrefy, bodily resurrection was not to be expected. Instead, there would be a spiritual resurrection, but the body remained corrupted. This did not sit well with some.

But Maimonides' blend of Aristotelianism with Jewish tradition, "reason versus revelation" so to speak, was becoming more widespread at the same time that Christian Europe was asserting itself on the Arabic/Muslim world via the Crusades and the effects of the Reconquista were being felt in the Iberian Peninsula. This was also right at the height of the Albigensian Crusade, with its desire to stamp out any deviation from "accepted religious policy" by any means possible. You had many groups all feeling threatened by "The Other," and wanting to take great lengths to prevent other doctrines from gaining ground.

This is also the time, in 1232, when Yonah Gerondi and others convinced secular (Christian) authorities to round up and burn Maimonides' work in Montpellier, causing the men to be condemned by followers of Maimonides and inspiring secular authorities to later burn several wagonloads of Talmud (and no doubt related Jewish documents).

By 1300, however, men like Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus read and quoted The Guide For the Perplexed. Aquinas was interested in using reason to prove the existence of God, and quoted Maimonides' Guide several times (although Aquinas misunderstood a lot of Maimonides, according to what I see here.)

Being quoted by an eminent theologian of the 14th century helped bring Maimonides into the mainstream without the threat if having his books burned. The influential "Rabbi of Spain," Shlomo ibn Aderet, who was dabbling in the Kabbalah, was more accepting of thoughts outside the mainstream and saw no reason why Maimonides' works ran counter to the collective body of Halakha, Jewish religious law. The modern view coincides with Aderet's, and Maimonides is considered a valuable voice in Jewish thought.

About Halakha: what does it contain? What besides the Torah and Talmud gets counted as important? Since I'm currently interested in this topic myself, I'm going to look into it and get back to you.

The Maimonidean Controversy, Part 1

Recent posts have talked about different individual's attitude toward Maimonides and what they did about it—sometimes with radical consequences.

Besides studying all the known Jewish religious texts, Moses ben Maimon (1138 - 1204) was a rabbi, knew medicine (he was the personal physician of Saladin) and astronomy. He became well-known and liked in Egypt (he lived in Cairo for a time), but he also had some very vocal critics.

The chief issue is that he took a rationalist-philosophical approach to the world and came to conclusions that were contradictory to what many believed. A couple that I have mentioned before were:

•The power of prophecy does not require intervention by God. Any human being, through the application of logic and reason, study and meditation, has the potential to become a prophet.

•In a treatise on resurrection, he emphasizes that God would not violate the laws of Nature which He has created, and therefore any bodily resurrection would only be temporary; true resurrection to come is spiritual.

He really got under people's skin when he criticized the Geonim, the rabbinic scholars who took donations from sponsors. Maimonides felt they should learn a profession and support themselves, as he did.

After his death, his The Guide for the Perplexed was translated into Hebrew (he had been writing in Arabic). Jewish scholars around the Mediterranean who were familiar with Arabic philosophy could see and parse the influences on Maimonides' work, but when his work became accessible to European Jews it kicked off a new stage of controversy.

In the early13th century, European scholars were unfamiliar with concepts of science and philosophy. Aristotle's works were just being re-discovered in the West thanks to Arabic translations in Spain from the original Greek versions. Other works of philosophy were starting to spread because 1204 was not only Maimonides' death but also the Sack of Constantinople, which started bringing Greek treasures—including intellectual treasures—to the West.

I'll go into more about how the controversy heated up in Europe tomorrow. Meanwhile, you can read a little more about Maimonides and the intellectual evolution of Western Europe in my post on Scholasticism.

Learning a Lesson

Yonah Gerondi had an Italian student in Barcelona named Hillel ben Samuel (c.1220 - c.1295) The grandson of a known Talmudic scholar, Hillel grew up to be a physician and Talmudic scholar himself. While practicing medicine in Rome, he became friends with Maestro Isaac Gajo, the pope's physician.

Hillel was strictly orthodox in his Judaism, proclaiming his absolute belief in the miracles outlined in the Torah and Talmud, despite some of these stories being considered more symbolic by other scholars. He wrote a book that covered the philosophic works of the time from Arabs, Christians, Jews, and Muslims.

He also translated some of the works of Thomas Aquinas into Hebrew, accepting Aquinas' idea of the soul's immortality. He referred to Aquinas as the "the Maimonides of his age."

Hillel had originally been opposed to Maimonides, but changed after he saw his teacher, Gerondi, change his attitude toward Maimonides. Gerondi had been opposed to Maimonides' rationalist approach to religious questions, and had caused the authorities of Paris to round up copies of Maimonides' works and burn them, specifically the Guide for the Perplexed. Gerondi regretted convincing the Christian leaders to take such a bold action against Jewish literature, especially when years later they burned all the copies they could find of the Talmud. Hillel saw Gerondi's regret, and how he radically hanged his attitude toward Maimonides.

Hillel moved to Forli in northern Italy when he was much older. While there he learned that a Tosafist (someone known for writing commentaries on the Talmud), a French Jew named Solomon Petit, was speaking out strongly against Maimonides. Aware of how Gerondi's anti-Maimonidean crusade turned out, Hillel addressed two long letters to his friend Isaac Gajo, explaining what had happened and asking him not to give any support to Petit's complaints.

What was the problem with Maimonides? What was the controversy about? I'll give you a taste of that tomorrow.

Burning the Talmud

Yonah Gerondi, or Jonah ben Abraham Gerondi (c.1200 - 1263), was a 13th century rabbi from Catalonia in Spain. He was a cousin of Nachmanides and one of the teachers of Shlomo ibn Aderet.

He was part of a faction that was opposed to Maimonides, whose Guide for the Perplexed was very popular. The Guide's logical and philosophical examination of concepts such as whether God was corporeal or whether something could be created from nothing contradicted many earlier scholars.

Gerondi organized a victory over Maimonides' teaching by convincing the authorities in Paris to round up any copies of the Guide for the Perplexed and burn them. Unfortunately for Gerondi, this attack on the works of a fellow Jew inspired anger of local Jews against Gerondi. Some years later, on the same public spot where Maimonides' works had been burned, the authorities burned several wagonloads of the Talmud and other works.

Gerondi felt remorse, blaming himself for originally bringing Christian authorities into the philosophic debate between Jews. In the synagogue at Montpellier in France he proclaimed publicly his shame at fighting against Maimonides.

Vowing to do penance by traveling to Israel and prostrating himself on Maimonides' grave, he left France but was stopped at Barcelona and then in Toledo. He stayed in Toledo and became known as a great Talmudic scholar who also frequently quoted Maimonides. He died suddenly in 1263, some said because he never finished his vow to do penance in Israel.

His attitude toward Maimonides and the shift after the burning of the Talmud is told to us by his student, Hillel ben Samuel. Hillel was not only a Talmudic scholar but also a physician. Tomorrow I'll tell you how he learned his lesson from Gerondi's story.

The Rabbi of Spain

Born in 1235 in Barcelona, Shlomo ben Avraham ibn Aderet became known as the Rabbi of Spain because of his reputation for knowledge and wisdom. He had famous teachers: Nachmanides and his cousin, Yonah Gerondi.

Aderet became a banker, but was an expert on the Talmud and was treated as the leader of Spanish Jewry. He was rabbi of the Barcelona Synagogue for 50 years. People came from all over to hear him lecture on the Talmud. His fame spread to the point that questions were sent to him from all over Europe and the Mediterranean. Three thousand of these questions and his responses still survive.

He was a great defender of Judaism from external and internal forces. When the Dominican Raymond Martini read the Talmud and found passages that he believed supported Christianity, he also found passages that he said blasphemed. Martini wrote a document condemning the Talmud. Aderet wrote a response to this document. On the other hand, when a Muslim attacked Christian priests for falsifying the Bible, Aderet refuted his statements.

Aderet cared about authenticity, and "pure Judaism." Although he defended Maimonides when he got into trouble with authorities for some of his interpetations, Aderet did not approve of Maimonides' philosophic-rationalistic approach that saw reason as the best tool in understanding the divine rather than faith. In fact, Aderet was part of the beth din (the rabbinical court of law) in Barcelona that forbade men younger then 25 from studying secular philosophy or natural science, lest they be led astray by worldly thinking. (They were allowed to study medicine.) He was quite adamant about avoiding being led astray, writing: 

In that city [Barcelona] are those who write iniquity about the Torah and if there would be a heretic writing books, they should be burnt as if they were the book of sorcerers.

Trying to enforce this ban created much hostility in his final years as rabbi. He was also sympathetic to those who wanted to study Kabbalah. but spoke out against people who took it to an extreme and considered themselves more than just men, namely people like Nissim ben Abraham of Avila and Abulafia.

Aderet died in 1310. Some of his students became famous in their own right. But I want to say something more about one of his teachers, Yonah Gerondi, who got involved in a religious controversy that led to an anti-jewish event I've mentioned before. I'll explain tomorrow.

False Messiahs, Part 2

Yesterday we started looking at some of the predictions about the Jewish Messiah appearing in the 12th century. The 13th century had its own claimants as well. Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia was one.

Born in Aragon in 1240, he was taught the Torah and Talmud by his father after the family moved to Navarre. When Abulafia was 18, his father died, and the young man began wandering the world, eventually deciding to go to Israel and find the Ten Lost Tribes. Unfortunately, the Crusades had made a journey to Israel dangerous, so he returned to Europe, studied the Guide for the Perplexed of Maimonides, and started having visions.

He studied Kabbalah, and immersed himself in the Sefer Yetzirah, finding in it the path to perfection for a human being. In 1280 he went to Rome to convert Pope Nicholas III to Judaism. Hearing of his intention, the pope gave orders to burn the heretic as soon as he arrived. Before Abulafia reached Rome, however, he heard that Nicholas died of a stroke, so he returned to Messina where he was imprisoned for a month by the Order of Friars Minor.

In Messina he is reported to have declared himself a prophet and the Messiah, which angered the local Jewish congregation. A letter against Abulafia written by the influential Shlomo ben Aderet of Barcelona—who was making it his life's work to speak out against the rise of false Messiahs—helped put an end to Abulafia's career. Up until 1291 he was in Malta and writing his own works on meditation and symbolism, after which he disappears from records.

The other major "Messiah" of this century was Nissim ben Abraham, whom we discussed in the story of Abner of Burgos.

It is interesting that there was enough concern about false Messiahs that Shlomo ben Aderet had a career about denouncing and disproving them. Let's take a look at Shlomo next, the "Rabbi of Spain."

(The illustration is from William Holman Hunt's 1860 "The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple.")

False Messiahs, Part 1

Yesterday's post explained how Abner of Burgos' conversion to Christianity from Judaism may have started with doubts after treating patients who were distraught after a promised Jewish Messiah failed to appear.

As it turns out, there were more than a couple claims about the appearance of the Messiah. The 2nd, 5th, 7th, and 8th centuries had their share. In the Middle Ages, there were quite a few, some documented, some not so much, like the one reported to have been simply killed by the French in 1087.

A teacher in Morocco, Moses ben Abraham Dar'ī, believed a Messiah would appear at Passover in 1127 to specifically free the Jews in the territories controlled by the Almoravid dynasty.

Menaḥem ben Solomon was born in Iraq. Growing up he studied the Torah and Talmud and, calling himself David Alroy or David el-David (meaning "David son of King/David") claimed to be the Messiah, calling on Jews to rise up against their caliph and then go to Jerusalem where they would free it from the Muslims. (Yes, a Jewish crusade in the 1160s!)

Stories of his results differ, but Benjamin of Tudela wrote that the sultan had David brought to him, asked him "Are you the king of the Jews?" to which David replied "I am." whereupon he was thrown into prison. Three days later he "rose again"; that is, he miraculously appeared in the midst of the sultan's council, then evaded arrest by turning invisible, making the 10-day journey back to his native town, Amadiya, in one day. The sultan threatened to put all Jews in his domain to death unless David surrendered. The governor of Amadiya bribed David's father-in-law to kill David.

Maimonides in his Iggeret Teman (Epistle to Yemen) tells the story of a Yemenite Messiah. Born in Fez in Morocco, he grew up at a time when the Muslims were trying to get all Jews to convert. The Yemenite Messiah claimed the troubles this caused were a sign that a Messiah would soon appear to liberate them. He started preaching that property should be distributed to the poor and people should start repenting for their sins. After a year of becoming a public nuisance the Muslims arrested him. He himself suggested that they kill him so he could prove himself by returning to life. He was beheaded, and his story ends there.

I'll tell you a more tomorrow.

Abner of Burgos, Converso

Abner of Burgos (c.1270 – c.1347) converted to Christianity from Judaism around 1320, taking on the name Alfonso of Valladolid or "Master Alfonso." He was well into adulthood, so his conversion was not a rebellion against his parents' culture, nor was it a young man's quest for something "different," nor was it forced upon him by an oppressive Christian government. So what happened?

The Jewish belief in a messiah gave rise to many claims over the centuries that he was imminent. In Avila, in central Spain, a Jew named Nissim ben Abraham actively preached that the messiah would appear in 1295 on the last day of the month of Tammuz (which can fall in late June or early July). Nissim was said to be a simple man who was inspired by an angel and wrote a mystic work, "The Wonder of Wisdom."

Many were convinced by Nissim, and they eagerly awaited the messiah. Like predictions of the Second Coming or of the End of the World, no messiah appeared. What they experienced, however, was a rain of crosses that stuck to their clothing (so they described to Abner). The disappointment and depression that followed among Nissim's adherents was profound.

Abner, a scholar of the Bible and the Talmud as well as a doctor, found himself being turned to by these disappointed people, treating them and trying to assuage their grief. Curiously, his discussions with these people about the lack of a messiah and their report of the appearance of the Christian symbol made him think "outside the box" about Judaism and its promises.

In a post-conversion work by Abner, Moreh tsedeḳ ("Teacher of righteousness"), he described how some 25 years after Avila he had a dream/revelation of a man who told him to become a "teacher of righteousness." About three years later he had the same dream, but this time noticed that the man had crosses on his clothes. This was his tipping point: he chose to embrace Christianity. He became a Neo-Platonic Christian and wrote treatises against Judaism. He believed that his version of Christianity was superior to others' and to Judaism. He preached that conversion to Christianity was the only way for Jews to get out of their perpetual Exile.

He was appointed sacristan of the collegiate church of Valladolid. This made some Jews accuse him of converting for material gain. What they did not understand, however, was that a sacristan was far from a lucrative position. He wrote extensive works (not all extant, or available in English) supporting conversion of Jews. He also debated rabbis. His arguments to King Alfonso XI of Castile that a Jewish prayer, the Birkat haMinim, blasphemed the Christian God and cursed Christians, led to the prayers being declared forbidden as off February 1336. The Birkat declares a curse on all heretics (so he had an ironic point, I guess).

We have his works, but no record of his death. 1347 was the last known record of him publishing. It is possible that he was a victim of the Black Death.

There were a few claims of a Jewish Messiah in the Middle Ages (and earlier and later). We'll look at some of them tomorrow.

The Christian Kabbalah

Scholars and philosophers of the later Middle Ages became interested in the mysticism found in the Jewish Kabbalah and tried to blend it with Christian concepts of the divine.

Ramon Llull (c.1232–1316), who also wrote of worldly affairs like knighthood, was one of the first known Christians to look at Kabbalah, although his study of it was mostly to develop ways to debate Jews and influence conversion to Christianity. His interest got him in trouble because the concepts he was talking about attracted the attention of the Inquisition.

The conversion of Spanish Jews did bring Kabbalistic concepts to Christian theology, especially in Spain prior to 1492. One prominent converso was Abner of Burgos (c.1270 – c.1347), a Bible and Talmud scholar who had a dream of crosses after he developed religious doubts because of a failed Messianic movement in 1295. He embraced and used Jewish sources to try to prove the validity of Christianity.

Another converso was Pablo/Paulus de Heredia (c.1405), who wrote an "Epistle of Secrets" which is considered the first true work of Christian Kabbalah. Not the scholar that Abner was, Pablo's work misquotes Kabbalah sources and "quotes" sources that are non-existent.

A Christian who adopted Kabbalistic ideas was Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), a student of Marsilius Ficino. (The illustration shows Pico in the center with Ficino in red next to him.) Kabbalah was introduced to him by another tutor, Rabbi Johanan Alemanno, whose idea was that the study of magic was the ultimate goal and expression of intellectual and spiritual mastery. Pico became convinced that the Kabbalah was necessary to understand the world and the divine, and had a Jewish convert translate the entire body of kabbalistic literature into Latin for him (now being published in its entirety). Pico's "900 Theses" became a foundation of Western esotericism.

So how exactly does a lifelong Jew decide to convert to Christianity (I mean, when not being forced)? Let's examine Abner of Burgos' personal journey tomorrow, and whether he did it for financial gain.