There was once a Jew who, well into his adult life, began to think deeply about the trials of his people. One day, he entered a synagogue and, with lamentation and bitterness in his heart, began to pray, “Lord God, I beg you, have mercy on our trials. What is the cause of your anger and fury against your people, the sheep of your pasture? Why will the nations say, ‘Where is their God?’ Lord, hear now my prayer and my cries, and illuminate your desolate sanctuary. Have mercy on your people Israel.” And with great heaviness of heart, exhausted...

In medieval Christian sources, conversion very often takes the form of a narrative, in particular a narrative derived from biblical, largely New Testament, models. Conversion itself, as a textual drama of transformation, might be considered a Judeo-Christian invention of the late Second Temple period, a fusion of Hebrew tropes and Greek vocabulary. Although abundant images of religious change can be found in many religious traditions, both ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, early Christian renditions marked a decisive shift in the meaning and representation of conversion. In Greece, what first emerged as a distinctive notion of cultic exclusiveness within mystery...

In the beginning of his Little Work on His Conversion, written sometime in the middle decades of the twelfth century, Judah/Herman, the “former Jew” (quondam iudaeus), as he is called, observes the following in a letter to a certain Henry that precedes his conversion story: “I was not converted with that ease with which we often see many unbelievers . . . converted to the Catholic faith by a swift and unanticipated change [repentina et inopinata mutatione]. . . . [B]y contrast, my conversion was gained in the face of powerful waves of temptations . . . and, finally, with...

Before turning to what I have identified as the second effect (after the narration of conversion) of the twelfth-century shift in auctoritas—an intensified focus on language as a marker of authenticity—I wish to turn away briefly from the subject of conversion to Christianity. Looking instead at the wider conceptual framework in which conversion operated, this chapter steps back chronologically to consider Latin and Hebrew accounts of Christian conversion to Judaism (or, from a Christian perspective, apostasy from Christianity) written up through the twelfth century. Such sources are relatively scarce and mostly fragmentary, but despite these formidable limitations they...

On Friday, July 20, 1263, a converted Jew named Fra Pau Cristià (Friar Paul Christian), and also possibly called Saule (Saul) before his conversion, stood in the Royal Palace of Barcelona before two great men, King Jaume of Aragon and the great rabbi of Girona, Nahmanides.¹ This convert had been born in a Jewish community probably in northern Spain or southern France and, one assumes, had received a Jewish education. Apparently using what he had learned before converting, Fra Pau proposed to prove that the Talmud and other rabbinical sources actually argued that the awaited Messiah of Jewish tradition had...

Between the extreme and voluminous examples of Ramon Martí and Ramon Llull, the upheavals occasioned by the incorporation of Aristotelian logic into traditional polemical thought had run their course and driven the pursuit of authority, both through text and logical argument, to an impasse. While Martí had doggedly pushed the expansion of Christian auctoritas to its conceptual and linguistic limits, Llull had, in parallel fashion, elaborated the foundations of ratio to a rarefied degree of sophistication and complexity, and both had done so over a wide swath of writing (although Llull’s output dwarfs that of Martí, along with every other...

Deep within Abner/Alfonso’s staged debate between Christian and Jew in the Teacher of Righteousness, the Teacher makes the argument that one important indicator of Christian truth is its wide acceptance by all people, even those of other religions. He explains, “All the gentiles of the world, or most of them, accepted the faith of Jesus Christ. Even the Moors accepted it in most things, and they believe that Jesus the Nazarene was the Messiah and that he was to come for the salvation of the world.” As a result of this alleged belief, he tells the Jewish Rebel, the Moors...

There was once a queen who ruled a strange and distant island. She was a good and just queen but had not heard of any world religion. Her people, while upright by nature, lived without laws. One night, as she lay awake in her bed thinking with confusion on the true path, as she often tried to do, she was resolved to call together her wisest men. The next morning, after relating her concerns to a group of the advisors of her court, one wise man proposed sending out emissaries to look for the true religion, and so three of...