and bind upon him His garment, to be priest at the Urim,”90 conceals the word Efod in a play of words very much like that employed by such contemporary poets as Vidal Benveniste who for one reason or another wove their names into their verse.91
In fact, there is little reason to think that Kelimat ha-goyim was widely known to be by Duran at the time, or even that it was widely circulated; as noted below in Chapter 9, there are only three extant manuscripts from the fifteenth century, and none is written in a Sephardic hand. Several manuscripts bear superscriptions attributing the work to him, but most of these are very late, primarily seventeenth and eighteenth century.92 Evidence from contemporaries is scanty and tends rather to suggest that the manuscripts circulated anonymously. Shem Tov ben Isaac ibn Shaprut of Tudela, in two copies of his Even boḥan, the earliest of which was completed in 1405,93 seems to know the work, and even to have used it as a prototype for his twelfth chapter, borrowing Duran’s arguments as well as his quotations from Nicholas de Lyra and Peter of Lombardy.94 However, Shem Tov does not mention the name of the author, either out of discretion or because he simply does not know it: “I saw the treatise of a great and wise author [which] disputes with the Christians about the roots of their faith and makes known to them … that their faith has neither root nor essence, even from the foundations of their faith—which are the Gospels and the [writings of] the Apostles—and I saw of the author [there was none] like him and in his image and in his similitude and I depended on him for some of the passages he adduced from the books of the Christians.”95 The Castilian Joseph ibn Shem Tov (d. 1480) identifies the author of Sefer ha-kelimah (which he describes in such a way as to make it certain he means the book known to us as Kelimat ha-goyim) with the author of Al tehi ka-avotekha. But he, too, refrains from explicitly giving a name.96
As for Al tehi ka-avotekha, it is signed with Duran’s preconversion name, Profayt Duran ha-Levi, and indeed Emery thought that Duran had “passed it off as having been written before his conversion.”97 As I will suggest below, it is also possible that Duran meant to protect himself by writing the work in a mode of high sarcasm, making his true meaning difficult to decipher. But again, it is not at all clear that Honoratus de Bonafide was known to be writing as a Jew, let alone that he was identical with the Efod. While at least some members of Duran’s own circle seem to have been aware of the conversion and knew that Duran authored works in Hebrew after it, their written references to this fact are strikingly allusive.
Take, for example, a prefatory poem composed for Ma‘aseh Efod and found in two manuscripts, one of which is in a fifteenth-century Sephardic hand.98 The poem was written by one Isaac Cabrit, very possibly a younger contemporary of Duran’s by that name who lived in Perpignan around 1409–1414, translated a medical work from Latin, and later converted to Christianity in 1418, becoming Ludovicus de Ripisaltes.99 Most of the poem is devoted to praise of the grammatical content of the work but it refers to Duran as one “called by the name of Levi, this scholar who changed his worship.”100 These words suggest that the author of the work, the Efod, was known by the poet to have been a convert. If this Isaac Cabrit was the physician who lived in Perpignan at the same time as Duran, he would certainly have known him as Isaac ben Moses ha-Levi and known, too, that he had been forced into Christianity.
Another example: around the time of the Tortosa disputation, Solomon Bonafed addressed yearning verses to maestre Profayt, ba‘al ha-Efod (“days have passed and I have not seen him”), calling on him to rise to the defense of Judaism in its time of crisis.101 In the first half of this lengthy poem, Bonafed addresses the Efod exclusively; but in the second half he cites other figures like the sons of Lavi (“the princes and masters of song”), who are distant from him,102 and laments the loss of Hasdai Crescas.103 In this poem, too, there seem to be some allusive references to Duran’s double life:
Lamp of the generation, encircled by a crown of cloud (Ps. 97:2),
source of understanding, whose robes Time bears (Song 5:7).
Perfect in knowledge, his thought no one knows (Job 37:16) but his
heart, and it is not revealed to his servants.
Upon the tablet of his books are the secrets of his faith even if they do
not comport with his deeds.
His words stir up the dead and how goodly it is (Is. 14:9) for a man
to believe what he has written with his hands.
In his efod are prophecies, not sorceries, and in his mysteries no image or terafim (Hos. 3:4).104
According to Bonafed here, Duran’s true beliefs are not known to those “servants” around him, though they do appear accurately and faithfully in his writings: it is there that his “perfect” thoughts are to be found and the secret of his faith revealed. But there is the hint here, too, of a religious problem; Bonafed seems to be defending Duran from accusations of idolatry (“no image or terafim”). These lines, brief and “poetic” as they are, may be taken to suggest that Bonafed was to some extent aware that Duran was unable to express his thoughts except in his books, under a pseudonym.
Around the same time, in 1413, a young man named Joseph Zarqo arrived in Pisa, a town on the northeastern coast of Italy, a short boat ride from Nice but easily reachable as well from any port on the Provençal or Catalonian shore of the Mediterranean. Looking for shelter and support, Zarqo wrote a letter, including a number of laudatory poems, to the local patriarch, Yeḥiel ben Metatia. He recommended himself to Yeḥiel in particular on the strength of his having been a student of the Efod, who, he averred, used to speak “day in and day out” in praise of Yeḥiel. He describes Duran thus: “The prince, the captain, a cunning workman (Is. 40:20) whom no secret troubles (Dan. 4:6), a bundle of the myrrh of learning and wisdom in all visions (Dan. 1:17) and riddles, crown and testimony (2 Kings 11:12) to the law and to its witness (Is. 8:20), my teacher and master, the Efod.”105 Immediately noticeable here is the pointed double reference to the book of Daniel, not the most common element in the standard lexicon of literary allusions. But it suits. Daniel is known primarily for his iconic resistance to the blandishments of the local pagan religion while in the service of the Chaldean king. Zarqo emphasizes the reason Daniel was taken into the king’s palace—namely, his exceptional learning and his ability to interpret visions. By means of this rhetorical identification, the Efod emerges from Zarqo’s description as distinguished in two principal ways: first, he was a master of arcane scientific knowledge; second, despite living in a gentile world, he was not defiled by it. Quite to the contrary, the Efod was a crown and support to the Torah. If I am not reading too much into these allusions, it would seem that Zarqo, too, was aware of Duran’s problematic situation.
In addition, the letters from Italy in 1420 and 1422, mentioned in the Introduction, demonstrate that Duran’s forced apostasy was known as far away as that country. It is significant that the Christian writer Marco Lippomano holds up the conversion of maestre Profayt/maestre Honorat as on a par with that of Solomon ha-Levi/Pablo de Santa Maria, suggesting that both individuals were known to the Christians as sincere converts. On the other hand, his Jewish correspondent, in his reply, seems to believe (or chooses to claim) that both conversions were, to the contrary, forced and insincere.
There is yet one more, unfortunately undated, trace of Duran as unwilling convert. An anonymous two-line Hebrew “joke” appears jotted down in a manuscript near the glosses on Judah Halevi’s Kuzari attributed to the Efodi. It goes like this: “One asked the Efodi, ‘Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel [Is. 63:2]?’ And he answered, ‘Why has the son of Jesse not come [1 Sam. 20:27]?’”106 The imagined exchange, conducted by means of two direct biblical quotations, turns on a traditional medieval pun. The word adom, in the scriptural context meaning “red,” alludes to Edom, the biblical nation that, beginning in the medieval period, was understood to be Christendom. The real question thus is: why do you bear the outward appearance of a Christian? The answer, put into the mouth of Duran, is taken from Saul’s query to