Duran on ahitophel: The practice of Jewish history in late medieval Spain

Abstract

Such a view is based in part on a failure to document appraisals of the Jewish past in terms of realpolitik before the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. However, such an attitude toward the past is to be found in a little-known work of Profayt Duran, written before 1492. Profayt Duran has not received the attention he deserves. His apologetic works Al Tehi KeAvotekha and, more evidently, Kelimat Ha-Goyim reflect his critical approach toward the texts of the past that, beneath the apparently conventional scholastic Hebrew, points subtly forward to the scholarly assumptions of the sixteenth century rather than to medieval sources and antecedents.2 An echo of this approach, less faint than might be imagined, is also heard in Duran's criticism of the Talmudists and in other passages of the Introduction to the Ma' aseh 'Efod. One may perhaps try to nuance the usual models of Jewish historiography, which privilege a sudden rupture or a "sudden rise of Jewish historiography in the sixteenth century,"3 and postulate a radical division between a "pre-modern" attitude toward the past, in which realism is not to be found, and the modern attitude of realistic appraisal of the Jewish past. To this effect, and after some biographical and methodological preliminaries, I analyze a relevant text by Profayt Duran and propose a context for the characteristics revealed by my analysis.