Moses, Leonard Baskin
Faculty Colloquium
Frankel Center Faculty Colloquium Series 2007-08
All colloquium events take place on Fridays at 12 noon in
202 S. Thayer Street, Room 2000
“Authorizing Apostasy in Medieval Iberia: Abner of Burgos & the Evolution of Anti-Jewish Polemic”
Ryan Szpiech, Assistant Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures
Date: Friday, April 4, 2008
Time: 12 noon
Place: 2000 Thayer Building, 202 S. Thayer St.
The Castilian Jew Abner of Burgos (c.1270-c.1347), known after his conversion to Christianity as Alfonso of Valladolid, wrote various anti-Jewish polemics in Hebrew that included arguments similar to those made previously by Dominican missionaries. Principle among his works is the Moreh Zedek, which survives only in a contemporary Castilian translation as Mostrador de justicia. This paper considers the Mostrador de justicia, together with Abner/Alfonso's later work, in light of two related but distinct groups of texts: thirteenth-century Dominican writing that uses postbiblical Jewish sources in support of Christian arguments (rather than simply Biblical proof texts, or testimonia); and 12th- and 13th-century conversion narratives contained within anti-Jewish polemics. By looking at the question of how textual authority is constructed in both groups of polemical texts, Szpiech shows that although Abner/Alfonso does show direct familiarity with the Talmudic arguments from the Disputation of Barcelona, his own conversion story is very similar to conversionary narratives based on the convert's appeal to expert knowledge of his erstwhile faith. Because Abner/Alfonso's texts were intended for a Jewish readership, they evince a concern for the rhetorical demands of what Abner/Alfonso imagined as “real” persuasion and appeal. Specifically, by including his personal testimony as a convert alongside the traditional exegetical use of proof texts, he attempted to distance himself from the Christian polemical tradition and expand the basis of his argumentative authority. By framing his polemic within the narrative of his own conversion and by addressing his Jewish reader directly, Abner/Alfonso works to put his own authorial testimony on par with textual sources and invites his reader to see his own struggle and conversion as a model to be emulated. I conclude that by implicating himself in his own text and by aiming to authenticate his use of textual authorities with his own personal testimony and imitation of Jewish textual norms and style, Abner/Alfonso introduces ambiguity and self-contradiction into his text by mixing the appeal to alterity common in conversionary narratives and thirteenth-century polemics with an appeal to identity and sameness which he deemed necessary to establish an authoritative voice with his projected Jewish reader. Abner/Alfonso’s polemic is caught in a paradoxical opposition between identity and alterity, dramatized in the Mostrador through the voices of Christian and Jew, and in this sense his text can be read as the culmination (and exhaustion) of the thirteenth-century polemical appeal to authenticity as a device to establish textual authority. Ultimately, Abner/Alfonso's dual authorial voice in his polemic both invokes and undermines the alterity that serves to justify his polemical authorship. As this internal polemic moved from the drama of his early text into the external manifestation in his later, public polemical activity, the internal split between his riven authorial voice within the text and his authoritative presence outside it represents what in later converso writers becomes an emblematic experience of the deep divide between public and private identity.
The Judaic Studies Faculty Colloquium Series is open to Faculty, Students and Fellows associated with Judaic Studies.
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