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121 ch a p t er 4 A War of Words Translating Authority in Thirteenth-Century Polemic Der Jargon der Eigentlichkeit ist Ideologie als Sprache. [The jargon of authenticity is ideology as language.] —t h e od or a d or n o , Der Jargon der Eigentlichkeit (The Jargon of Authenticity) 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 already come. According to his Hebrew account of the events, Nahmanides then said, “If these Sages [of the Talmud] believed in the messiahship of Jesus . . . how could they have remained in the Jewish religion? . . . Why did they not apostatize and turn to Jesus’ religion as did Friar Paul . . . who [apparently] understands the words better than they themselves did?”2 Nahmanides’ statement, the first of many intricate arguments in the debate, reveals much about how he viewed Fra Pau’s conversion. Not only was the friar one who, in the talmudic dictum describing Jesus, “burns his food in public [she-hiqdiaḥ tavshilo ba-rabim],” a euphemism for a disciple who uses his Jewish education against Judaism. He was also one who spoke as if he “underst[ood] the [rabbis’] words better than they themselves did.” For Nahmanides, according to his assertions in his Hebrew account, apostasy to Christianity like that of Fra Pau came cheek-by-jowl with the dubious claim to chapter 4 122 expertise in reading. As we will see, his main strategy of defense against this claim was to impugn his adversary’s linguistic and textual knowledge . But his opening remark sums up an attitude that would define Western ideas about conversion throughout the thirteenth century: conversion and apostasy were enacted through the use and abuse of authorities and by displaying the knowledge of original works in their original languages. In the thirteenth century, conversion came to be tied inextricably to translation. In Chapter 2 I claimed that the increasing appeal to philosophical ideas within Christian apologetics around the dawn of the twelfth century led to an expansion of the foundations of proof to include narrativized experience alongside reason and authority. By expressing and framing claims through an emplotted testimony of transformation, Christian conversion accounts such as that of Moses/Petrus framed the authoritative use of non-Christian sources such as Talmud and Qurʾān without conceding any belief in their truth as textual witnesses. The testimony of the convert, portrayed as an expert in his preconversion faith, could serve as an explicit deprecation of his former corpus of authorities, but also as a constant evocation of that corpus through the rehearsal of its abrogation and defeat. The sequence of narrative, encompassing past and present in a kind of paradigm of evolution, provided a diachronic space in which the Jewish past, like the preconverted self, could be evoked at the same time it was rejected. This slippage in the authoritative foundations (auctoritas) of argument in which conversion was associated with knowledge of nonChristian books led to two key developments in the thirteenth century : an increasing attention to the original language and content of such books as markers of their authenticity and a decisive shift from the rejection of those sources to an appeal to them. These two areas converge in the disputes of Dominicans in the second half of the thirteenth century, including those attributed to the convert Fra Pau at the Disputation of Barcelona in 1263 and again at a sermon given in Paris a decade later, and even more in the oeuvre of Ramon Martí. In the ideas of both Dominicans, there is a notable shift toward the treatment of non-Christian sources as auctoritates, as valid proof texts, which, albeit flawed, are not devoid of authority, even of Christian authority. As these came to play the role of auctoritates, brought malgré soi into the service of Christian ideas, there arose an intensified concern with the authenticity and original form of those sources as the primary means of evaluating their intrinsic worth. In this...

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