The Secret Faith of Maestre Honoratus: Profayt Duran and Jewish Identity in Late Medieval Iberia by Maud Kozodoy (review)

Students of Maimonides' Moreh Ha-Nevukhim (Guide of the Perplexed) all know the commentary of Efodi. Historians of late fourteenth-century Iberian Judaism, and Jewish-Christian polemics, have long regarded Profayt (Profiat) Duran's sarcastic letter Al Tehi ka-avotekha ("Be Not Like Your Fathers") as a classic. And recent scholarship on medieval spirituality and on the history of the Jewish book has focused attention on Duran's introduction to his grammar of biblical Hebrew, the Ma'aseh Efod (although the grammar itself has yet to be given the linguistic attention it deserves). Nonetheless, the person Duran/Efodi has remained an enigma until now. Maud Kozodoy's beautifully written, carefully researched, and insightfully argued intellectual biography goes a long way toward illuminating and unifying our prior partial exposures of this obscure figure—and much more. She also uses Duran as a window onto the practices of medieval Jewish science, and she reconstructs his novel conception of converso Judaism which anticipates early modern ideas of an internalized subject and self.

Born in the 1350s in the small Jewish Catalonian community of Perpignan, Isaac b. Moses Halevi Duran possessed a remarkable command of biblical Hebrew and the Hebrew Bible and a broad knowledge of the classic medieval Jewish and Muslim philosophers, kabbalists, grammarians, exegetes, and medical authors. He also knew the Gospels and Christian scholastics (in Latin) well enough to criticize them. Professionally trained as a physician, he supported himself at various times as a money-lender and court astrologer. But Duran's true interests lay in mathematics, the calendar, astronomy, and Hebrew grammar. His treatises, commentaries, epistles, and speeches demonstrate mastery of all these fields, including technical and formal skill.

The first two parts of Kozodoy's book walk us through Duran's philosophical-scientific works on specific topics in mathematics, mathematical astronomy, numerology (especially the number seven), and the calendar. Because medieval science (so-called natural philosophy) can hardly be distinguished from philosophy, woven among these discussions are chapters on Duran's commentary on Maimonides' Guide (where Kozodoy, interestingly, shows that Duran was sensitive to Maimonides' skeptical leanings, a hotly debated current issue), shorter texts on philosophical and theological topics such as prophesy, and his polemical scientific study of the historical development of Christianity. Throughout these chapters Kozodoy's firm grasp of the medieval mathematics and science (some of it quite technical) and her lucid exposition of the philosophy are impressive.

Apart from explication of texts, Kozodoy has two larger aims in these chapters. First, using a rather unique manuscript corpus of epistles written by Duran, his marginal comments on other sources, writings by his students, and their notes on their study circles, Kozodoy describes how medieval Jewish intellectuals, excluded from the universities, engaged in science and transmitted its knowledge. This is a valuable contribution in its own right to the growing literature on medieval Jewish science. Second, Kozodoy aims to characterize what she calls Duran's "rationalism" which, she argues, is crucial to his Jewish identity. Unfortunately, nowhere does Kozodoy explicitly define what she means by this term. It does not mean what historians of early modern philosophy call by that name, and it also does not designate a particular philosophical position or set of doctrines, say, Aristotelianism or even (if one could formulate it) Maimonideanism. Although Maimonides deeply influenced Duran, Kozodoy convincingly shows how Maimonidean thought served Duran, not as a doctrine, but as a "framework for structuring his own ideas and a kind of linguistic protective coloration for concepts drawn from areas that ranged far wider" (79; see also 75)—from ibn Ezra and Judah Halevi to Gersonides and Narboni, and then Crescas and even Kabbalah. Sometimes she seems to mean by "rationalism": "the Maimonidean synthesis of...