Hostname: page-component-76d6cb85b7-2r2wp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-07-10T06:41:18.963Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Re-Narrating Judaism: A New Reading of the Additiones of Pablo de Santa Maria

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 July 2026

Zachary Young
Zachary Young*
Affiliation:
University of Florida, USA
*
Email: young.zachary@ufl.edu
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article challenges the narrative of ubiquitous late medieval Christian anti-Judaism by presenting Pablo de Santa Maria’s remarkably nuanced portrayal of Judaism (c. 1400–1430). Pablo, the rabbi of Burgos who had become its bishop, lived and wrote at the intersection of Judaism and Christianity. While longstanding historiographical misconceptions about the nature of Pablo’s intellectual and pastoral project have stifled interest in Pablo’s prolific Latin writings, recently scholars like Yosi Yisraeli have argued that these Latin writings actually contain intellectual innovations of profound importance to the development of Christian Hebraism. This article reads Pablo’s Latin writings not primarily within the Christian intellectual tradition but rather as a response to the contemporary phenomenon of large-scale Jewish baptism. Pablo was seeking to negotiate the integration of these baptized Jews into Christianity, which required him to construct positive narratives about Judaism to dispute (or at least complicate) the prevalent negative narratives. More broadly, while recent scholarship has treated Christian narratives of Judaism as emanating from intra-Christian disputes, this article suggests Christian views of Judaism were in fact formed and contested through the persons and identities of baptized Jews.

Keywords

Jewish ChristianityBiblical interpretationConversionconversosPablo de Santa Maria

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , First View , pp. 1 - 17
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Society of Church History

I. Introduction

Pablo de Santa Maria, the fifteenth-century bishop of Burgos in Castile, constructed an innovative and remarkably positive Christian narrative of Judaism. Pablo’s positive idea of Judaism was novel and even revolutionary within this genre of Christian theological writing. Throughout Christian history, as scholars like David Nirenberg and Jeremy Cohen have shown, the category of “Judaism” has frequently served as a rhetorical foil and a negative to Christianity’s positive.Footnote 1 Pablo’s writings, by envisioning a Judaism that was compatible with Christianity (rather than antithetical to it), constituted a significant theological departure from this model. Pablo’s critics were highly aware of the radical import of his project; the heated argument between Pablo and his critics about the valence of Judaism within Christianity anticipated the debates about the propriety of Jewish practices among converso descendants of baptized Jews who raged later in the century.Footnote 2

Pablo’s motives to construct this positive vision of Judaism were dramatically different from the motivations of anti-Jewish theological writers. Previous Christian constructions of Judaism had been aimed at attempting to define Christianity, using Judaism as an antithetical (and largely imagined) category to refine this definition. By contrast, Pablo was navigating the aftermath of a widespread – and often violent – baptismal campaign that had resulted in the incorporation of hundreds of thousands of Castilian Jews into the Church between 1391 and 1416.Footnote 3 Pablo himself had been a Jewish scholar of some prominence before his own baptism around 1391.Footnote 4 After his baptism, Pablo enjoyed a meteoric rise to become royal chancellor of Castile, Bishop of Cartagena, Bishop of Burgos, close advisor to antipope Benedict XIII, and esteemed colleague of Pope Martin V.Footnote 5 Pablo was uniquely situated to leverage his ecclesiastical and secular power to negotiate the terms of the integration of his fellow baptized Jews into Christianity.

Pablo’s extensive Latin writings proposed a new model of conversion by which Jews might become part of the Catholic Church without negating their Jewish identity and practices. Especially in the aftermath of mass conversion, as Claude Stuczynski has argued, Pablo advocated for Jews (whatever their degree of volitional consent in baptism) to maintain some essential continuities with Jewish identity.Footnote 6 This new vision for Jewish conversion required problematizing the negative vision of Judaism that was deeply rooted in Christian history as well as latent in abrogationist conversionary thinking. This article examines how, to create intellectual space for another method of conversion wherein the newly baptized might be Christians and yet remain Jews, Pablo rewrote the Christian narrative of Judaism.Footnote 7

To undertake this significant revision of Christian thinking, Pablo confronted one of the loci classici of Christian constructions of Judaism – that is, the Christian tradition of Biblical interpretation.Footnote 8 In his massive Additiones ad Postilla, a crucial work in the history of Latin Biblical commentary, Pablo criticized and revised the canonical Christian commentaries on hundreds of Scriptural passages.Footnote 9 In this text, Pablo problematized the Franciscan theologian Nicholas of Lyra’s focus on the literal, arguing that both the metaphorical and typological perspectives of earlier thinkers and the more recent interpretations of Thomas Aquinas were essential intermediaries for proper understanding.Footnote 10 The Additiones has been analyzed as part of the tradition of Latin Biblical interpretation by scholars like Deanna Klepper, and as part of the nascent tradition of Christian Hebraism (that is, that Jewish sources are necessary to properly understand Christianity), preeminently by Yosi Yisraeli.Footnote 11 My argument in this article, however, is that the Additiones can and should be read more specifically as a challenge to prevailing Christian constructions of Judaism, specifically aimed at the negotiation of Jewish entry into the Church.Footnote 12 In this article, I identify and analyze key passages in the Additiones that support such a reading.

It has been difficult for previous generations of scholarship to read the Additiones as anything other than anti-Jewish, in part due to some relatively well-known passages wherein Pablo is purported to harshly attack Judaism.Footnote 13 However, even though these passages have contributed to facile narratives about Pablo-as-apostate, Yisraeli recently argued that they are certainly not representative of Pablo’s broader work.Footnote 14 Any work composed over decades (such as the Additiones) will invariably include a variety of perspectives; these passages are incidental, while the attempt to negotiate a positive role for Judaism stands out as integral to Pablo’s writing.Footnote 15 More decisively, as Yisraeli has noted, these purportedly anti-Jewish passages attack not Judaism as a whole but reliance on the Talmud in particular. Fitting into ongoing intra-Jewish polemic as to the role of the Talmud, Pablo aimed not to construct an anti-Jewish argument but to identify some parts of Judaism (for example, the tradition of in-depth linguistic analysis of Hebrew texts known as grammatism) that might fit best into Christianity.Footnote 16

While Pablo attacked other forms of Judaism to construct a form of Judaism that would be compatible with Christianity, the main intellectual work of Pablo’s project was rather to confront Christian ideas that would preclude any sort of Judaism from entry into the Church. Mainstream Christian theology viewed Judaism as a Christ-killing religion with observances that were not only obsolete but actively harmful; furthermore, Judaism was allied with Christendom’s enemies.Footnote 17 While not challenging these widely held beliefs on their face, Pablo sought to undermine them by finding loopholes. Pablo presented a vision of Judaism that possessed a blessing of eternal validity, was innocent of the sins it was often charged with, was imbued with valid observances, and was not at all opposed to Christianity. This vision of Judaism – created more by confronting Christian theology than by intervention in intra-Jewish disputes – was Pablo’s attempt to make his broader (and entirely practical) argument about conversion: that Jewish people could and should make their way in the Church without entirely abrogating their Jewish identity or practice.Footnote 18

This article presents Pablo’s attempt to re-narrate the Christian story of Judaism. This article will successively engage with Pablo’s attempts to explain (i) the initial calling of the Jewish people; (ii) the activity of the Jewish people during the time of Christ; (iii) the status of the Jewish people during the time of the Church; and finally (iv) the role of the Jewish people at the end of time. By subverting traditional Christian understandings of Judaism, each of these retellings of the Christian story of Judaism was specifically designed to negotiate the position of Pablo and his baptized Jewish contemporaries.

II. The Initial Calling of the Jewish People

The common Christian narrative about the Jewish people presumed that their calling in the Hebrew Bible was essentially superseded: that the blessings of “Israel” primarily referred to the Christians, and that Jews had lost their unique place in salvation history.Footnote 19 This narrative hinged upon considerations about the supposed transfer of blessing that had happened at the time of Christ: by rejecting Christ, the Jewish people had also rejected the divine blessing which had come instead to abide in the Church. In engaging with some of these Hebrew Bible source texts indicating blessing for the Jews’ ancestors, Pablo argued that these blessings still referred literally to the Jewish people and not to the Church. While not explicitly rejecting the narrative of replacement, Pablo argued that the calling of the Jewish people was permanently fixed upon the Jewish people and not subject to transfer to the Church.

In particular, Pablo made this argument in his exegesis of the story of Noah and his three sons, in the book of Genesis. Genesis narrates that Noah’s son Ham offended against his sleeping father in some way. This fault was remedied by Ham’s brothers Shem and Japheth. Upon arising, Noah then cursed Ham and blessed Shem and Japheth. Noah prayed for Japheth a blessing of God’s enlargement, and for Shem that “he” would dwell in Shem’s tents.Footnote 20 Nicholas of Lyra, upon whose text Pablo was commenting, took the “he” to signify multiple meanings: that both God and Japheth might dwell in Shem’s tents.Footnote 21

This passage was a critical locus for analyzing the contemporary state of human affairs because Ham, Shem, and Japheth were understood as the ancestors of the rest of humanity.Footnote 22 Interpreters were then interested in understanding who descended from each of these three brothers, and how Noah’s powerful patriarchal blessing might explain the contemporary state of the nations descended from each.Footnote 23 Infamously, the curse of Ham was later used as a proof text for the subjugation of “Hamitic” Africans.Footnote 24 In some medieval texts, however, Ham was used as a figure for the servitude of the Jewish people.Footnote 25 Medieval texts invested in literality, such as the Postilla used by Pablo, took Shem as the ancestor of the Jews and Japheth as the father of the Gentiles more broadly.Footnote 26

In light of this, the blessing for “he” to dwell in Shem’s tents was a crucial phrase to interpret. God dwelling in Shem’s tents was easy to understand as a reference to the tabernacular worship of the Jews.Footnote 27 For Japheth to dwell in Shem’s tents was harder to understand, however. The conventional interpretation of this phrase was as a prophecy of replacement: that the prerogatives of this worship, at one time given to Shem (that is, the Jews), were now open to Japheth (the Gentiles), and furthermore, that Japheth now was the occupant of these tents.Footnote 28

Pablo embraced the simple incarnational reading of this passage, reading it as prophetic of God’s dwelling with the Jewish people through the incarnation of Christ in Jewish flesh. When it came to Japheth dwelling in Shem’s tents, however, Pablo challenged the replacement reading. Rather than Japheth displacing Shem from the tent (that is, the Gentiles replacing the Jews), Japheth would dwell as a guest in a tent that still belonged to the Jews. Rather than being replaced by substitution, then, the Jews still had an ongoing role in salvation through the present.

It shouldn’t be omitted in this explanation, that God dwells in the tents of Shem. This is the highest and most ineffable habitation of God, when the word of God dwells among us (John 1). This habitation was first and foremost in the tent of the glorious Virgin, descended from Shem, about which the Church reads in the office in Sirach 23. “And who created me, rests in my tent.” Therefore in these blessings, the status of both laws of God is foretold. The first blessing says: “Blessed by the Lord God be Shem,” by which is understood the worship of the one God remaining in the sons of Shem, which as in the postilla refers to the status of the old law. The second blessing says: “God will dwell in the tents of Shem,” which refers to the new law, in which God dwells in the tents of Shem by assuming flesh in the aforesaid way, and in which he also dwells sacramentally in the sacrifice of the altar, and also by a greater outpouring of grace. The explanation that “he dwells in the tents of Shem,” understood as referring to Japheth, should not be understood as saying that Japheth dwells in the tents of Shem, to the exclusion of Shem from that tent. Rather, it means that Japheth can dwell with Shem in Shem’s tents; however, the primacy remains with this Shem, as in Romans: “First to the Jew and then to the Greek.” Therefore, in the tabernacles treated here, they are principally those of Shem.Footnote 29

In both his Latin and Spanish writings, Pablo applied this argument about the abiding blessing in Shem (making Japheth a perpetual sojourner) to understand specifically the ongoing Jewish nature of the Church.Footnote 30 In Pablo’s analysis, the prophetic application of this passage showed that the Church was still essentially a Jewish phenomenon and that Gentiles were guests. The implication was that baptized Jews should be treated with precedence and honor in the tent of divine worship that ultimately belonged to them. Unsurprisingly, this argument was immensely controversial; Pablo’s most prominent critic, the Franciscan Matthias Thoring, argued that baptized Jews retained no special privileges and that Pablo only made such a subversive argument out of a desire to favor his own people. The controversies raging around these ideas would later find embodiment in the debate about the privileged or non-privileged status of Jewish Christians later in the fifteenth century.Footnote 31 These later debates were evidently preceded by Pablo’s arguments, which even toward the beginning of the fifteenth century were specifically designed to negotiate the smooth integration of Jewish people into Christianity on favorable terms.

III. The Activity of the Jewish People During the Time of Christ

In his attempt to retell the story of the Jewish people through a favorable hermeneutic, Pablo needed to confront the issue of Jewish culpability in Christ’s death. According to the common Christian understanding, the Jewish people had collectively assented to the crucifixion of Christ, provoking an ongoing outpouring of divine wrath upon them.Footnote 32 The stigma of this wrath was such that Jewish people becoming Christian would need to shed any sort of connection to this problematized quantity of Judaism.

Rather than challenging outright this highly entrenched theology of deicide, Pablo accepted the theory on its face but immediately raised a loophole that qualified the theory by asserting the limited nature of Jewish guilt.Footnote 33 Pablo argued that not all Jews were so stigmatized, but only many Jews. In particular, drawing on the arguments of Maimonides, Pablo argued that – just as the Levites were not guilty of the various sins committed by the people in the Hebrew Bible – neither had the Levites assented to the death of Christ.Footnote 34 Then, the Jewish descendants (literal and metaphorical) of the Levites were freed from this stigma and could honorably continue in their connection to Judaism. This argument, while ostensibly affirming the theory of deicide, was in fact intended to subvert it.

The grounds for Pablo’s subversive reading of the theory of Jewish guilt were a careful reading of the passion narrative. Pablo noticed that – while John implicates “the Jews” as well as the chief priests and scribes in Jesus’ death – none of the passion narratives ever implicate the Levites. This indicated that the Levites were not guilty of the death of Christ and, therefore, that the Levitical calling was not abrogated.

Although the people of Israel were guilty of idolatry many times, as is clear in many and various passages of Scripture, the Levites however never were guilty of idolatry, as explained in Deut. 33, about those words which are said over Levi “you judged at the waters of contradiction.” The waters refer to the people who said “Crucify him, crucify him,” and “let his blood be upon us and upon our children.” In the praise[?] of Levi it adds “who said of his father,” and as in the gloss. From this it is clear, that Levi was separated from those who cried out, “Crucify him,” and therefore [was separated] from the crime the other Israelites committed in the killing of Christ, in which the chief priests and the others clearly participated in. The truth of this gloss is from the literal interpretation of the gospel, where is expressly mentioned all the different kinds of Hebrews who participated in the passion of Christ: pontiffs, priests, high priests, scribes, Pharisees, and so on. About the Levites, however, the Gospels make no mention, as is clear from looking at the way the four Gospels each treat the Passion. With this also it is noted that the Gospels frequently distinguish the Levites from the priests, as in John 1, “The Jews sent priests and Levites,” and others. From which it follows that the prophecy of Jacob in Gen. 49, “Simeon and Levi are brothers,” which is alleged by the postilla to apply to the passion of Christ [that it refers to the Pharisees and the priests respectively working together to kill Christ], is understood to refer to Simeon as the Pharisees and their descendants, and to Levi in the person of the priests or high priests descended from Aaron, but not however to the Levites who are distinguished from the priests. The prophecy of Moses applies to the tribe of Levi, who – distinguished from the priests – were innocent both of the sin of the calf and of the sin of the killing of Christ, and also (according to the Hebrews) from whatever idolatries.Footnote 35

This focus on Leviticality as a way to narrate Judaism as conformable with Christianity was certainly personal to Pablo. Pablo held his own Levitical ancestry in high regard, even arguing that this ancestry translated into Christianity and justified his and his family’s sacerdotal roles within the Church.Footnote 36 In his conversion narrative at the start of these Additiones, Pablo argued that he and his sons retained Leviticality in a way that was meaningful to their ecclesiastical status.Footnote 37 This text serves not only as a justification for Pablo’s own claims but as a broader theory that certain constructions of Judaism might be conformable with Christianity.

This emphasis on Levitical innocence (against a general background of Jewish guilt) might seem self-serving, given Pablo’s own close identification with Leviticality. A critic might perceive this theology as Pablo’s attempt to differentiate himself from the Jewish massa damnata, setting himself – and only himself – apart against most Jews whose persecution he would justify and even sanction. However, in the background of other of Pablo’s passages as well as what is known about Pablo’s proximate community of Christians retaining Jewish identity, this picture is significantly nuanced. For instance, Pablo’s close Jewish Christian intimates, as his (close or distant) relatives, were also likely Levites.Footnote 38

Furthermore, at the close of his addition to John 11, Pablo seemed to gesture to a broader sort of Leviticalness where Levites, ciphering Christian believers, were mixed in with other Jews; and that such individuals might become Christians without losing the privileges of their ancestry or their connection to Judaism – even if their relatives were unbelieving. Beyond justifying himself, Pablo presented a picture of a Jewish Christian community that was based upon this loophole in the generally negative Christian theology of Judaism. If individuals claimed Leviticality – whatever the nature of their ancestry – they might be absolved from responsibility for the death of Christ, which would enable them to become good Christians while remaining Jews.

This loophole, then, was broader than is immediately evident in itself. Moreover, the existence of this loophole offered a viable theory for other Jewish Christians to construct similar loopholes.Footnote 39 In later generations, conversos argued (with some synchronies to Pablo’s argument on these points) that the Jewish diaspora in Spain had existed before the time of Christ. Spanish Jews were therefore innocent in Christ’s death and the penalties that it entailed.Footnote 40 While not addressing the anti-Judaism that would require “Jew” to be a negative label referring to some things and practices, this new theology opened up a door for the practical entrance of Jews into the Church without abrogating Judaism.Footnote 41 The Levitical call and potential for divine service created a new image and narrative of Judaism that provided a pathway toward Jewish inclusion in the Church.

In addition to revising and qualifying the image of Jews as Christ-killers, Pablo revisited other narratives that had been treated as loci of Jewish guilt. For instance, against the traditional assertion that the Jews sinned in the burial of Christ, Pablo argued that the Jewish burial of Christ was, in fact, honorable and that Jews could be charged with no sin in this matter. Instead, it was the Muslims and heretics who sinned regarding the burial of Christ by denying it.

‘And he will be given a burial with the impious’ cannot be seen as referring to the Jews. They sinned maximally in the death of Christ, but in his burial they did not. For Christ was buried meritoriously and honorably. This instead refers to those who err about the divinity of Christ believing him to be only human, like Photinius and Nestorius and other heretics…and also to those who deny that Christ died and was buried, like the Saracens. For Mohammed in his wicked Quran expressly says that Jesus was not hung [on the cross] or killed. This error is excluded by the prophet, who says that ‘He will be given a burial with the impious.’ And there is a sense that the impious refers to the soldiers guarding the tomb… And the following, ‘with a rich man,’ refers to the noble Joseph of Arimathea.Footnote 42

Similarly, Pablo argued that it was not the Jews who were responsible for the death of John the Baptist.Footnote 43 These controversial beliefs about the limited nature of Jewish guilt were aimed at destigmatizing Judaism, in turn reconceptualizing the nature of the conversion required for Jews to enter the Church.Footnote 44

IV. The Status of the Jewish People in the Time of the Church

The common narrative of Jewish people, arguing for the changeable nature of the Jews’ calling and the absolute culpability of the Jews for the death of Christ, furthermore asserted that the current state of Judaism was extremely poor. Jewish conversion to Christianity was (ostensibly) very rare, and when Jews did become Christians, they needed to give up all of their Jewish practices.Footnote 45 Because Judaism was spiritually harmful, Jewish practices were incompatible with Christianity and Jews were only compatible with Christianity if they underwent a process of conversion that constituted rejection of every aspect of Judaism. Pablo attempted to subvert this understanding both of Jewish conversion to Christianity and of the valence of contemporary Jewish practices.

Even though Christian sources upheld that Jewish conversion was theoretically possible, the classical Augustinian theory of Judaism and Christianity attached no particular priority to Jewish conversion to Christianity.Footnote 46 Judaism existed as a mute but useful witness to Christianity, showing off its own obsolescence; even if Jews might become Christian at the end of times, proselytism perhaps only ran the risk of bringing some of their obsoleted practices.Footnote 47 In the thirteenth century, aggressive proselytism movements (spearheaded by the Dominicans) had pushed for Jewish assimilation into Christianity.Footnote 48 These strategies, however, were more theoretical than actual: the Dominican program was largely unsuccessful. By contrast, in Pablo’s time, a large community of baptized Jews had come into existence.Footnote 49 These persons required Pablo to (re)theorize both the narrative of Jewish conversion to Christianity and the Christian image of Jews and their practices.

While other sources of his time, after the model of Augustine, treated Jewish conversion as largely eschatological, Pablo saw Jewish acceptance of Christianity as a present reality.Footnote 50 For instance, Pablo noted that every day more and more Jewish people were being converted to the Christian faith. This apologetic argument used a close grammatical reading to counter Lyra’s assumption that only at the end of time Jews would convert:

[Hosea] does not say “The sons of Israel will return, and seek the Lord their God, and David their King will come,” but “and they will seek David their King.” This is as if to say: they will seek him who has already come; and this prophecy is fulfilled in those who every day are being converted from them, regarding whom it is said: in the later days, and not in the time of the end of the world. The later days refer to the time of the new law, which is not succeeded by any other law, as is explained in Micah 4 in the postilla; this is a good argument against them.Footnote 51

Pablo explicitly denied the eschatological nature of these contemporary conversions, instead seeing baptized Jewish persons as constituting a regular part of the Church. Furthermore, against those who might see Jewish conversion as only eschatological, Pablo argued that baptized Jewish members were always a distinctive component of the Church. Pablo noted the long history of baptized Jewish persons in the life of the Church in Spain, even arguing that the Jewish component was constitutive of the broader Church and that throughout history Jewish believers had a distinct role in the life of the Church.

“They are converted towards the evening” can be understood as referring to the Jews who in this intermediate [non-eschatological] time after the spreading of the Gospel are being converted constantly. It says “towards the evening,” meaning in the sixth age of the world. Of these there have been not a few who have gone around the city (that is the church) against heresy, or also against the accusations of [other] Jews, as is clear from the deeds and writings that we find principally in Spain. Julianus Pomerius, of Hebrew descent, was the third archbishop of Toledo, the successor and prime imitator of blessed Alfonso, as is clear in the history of Rodrigo of Toledo. Similarly Petrus Alfonsi, of this nation, who wrote a solemn dialogue for the confirmation of the Catholic faith. Similarly the teacher Alfonso [i.e. Abner] of Burgos, a great philosopher and Biblical scholar, who in his sixties received the faith of Christ and was baptized. He became the sacristan of Valladolid and wrote many works confirming the faith and refuting the errors of Jews who did not believe. And also others. …Footnote 52

Although Pablo recognized a long history of Jewish participation in the Church, it certainly did not escape Pablo’s notice that these conversions were more frequent in his own day; if in the past this Jewish constituent of the Church was mostly abstract, in his own context it was more literal. Furthermore, the nature of these conversions had significantly changed. While Pablo highlighted individual conversions to Christianity in his historical narrative, in Pablo’s own day, there were entire communities of baptized Jews that – by their continued existence – subverted the expectation that Jews would assimilate to Christianity.

Not only was Pablo aware of these communities, but he himself was embedded within such a community. Pablo’s closest advisors, as bishop of Burgos, were other baptized Jewish persons, and his literary wors were dedicated to them.Footnote 53 Rather than being buried in his diocesan cathedral, Pablo chose to be buried in an area reserved for baptized Jewish persons in a Dominican monastery.Footnote 54 Pablo’s son, another Jewish Christian, was his successor as the Bishop of Burgos, and Pablo framed this succession as intimately connected to their shared Judaism.Footnote 55

These communities undermined the assumptions that presented Jewish salvation as only possible through individual conversion and de facto assimilation.Footnote 56 As some people continued to assert the necessity of Jewish assimilation, many of the tensions that would swirl around conversos later in the fifteenth century were already present in Pablo’s own day. Gentile Christians had negative attitudes toward baptized Jews, not so much because of their Jewish ancestry but because of how they continued to be perceived as close to Judaism. Even Pablo, who had ascended to the pinnacle of political and ecclesiastical power, faced pushback for his perceived Judaism; other baptized Jews likewise were mistreated by their Gentile Christian counterparts.Footnote 57

The root of these Christian opinions about baptized Jews was a negative perspective on Jewish practices. To foster the reconceptualization of Jewish participation in the Church as communal rather than individual and assimilative, Pablo needed to challenge these opinions as to the inherently destructive nature of all Jewish practices. The Thomistic school of interpretation with which Pablo affiliated himself prohibited all Jewish practices as mortifera (that is, deadly) to any practitioners; in attempting to destigmatize some of these practices, Pablo needed to reinterpret Thomism.Footnote 58 Again, while not challenging this theology on its face, Pablo sought to restrict the scope of its condemnations. These mitigations served to present a more positive image of Judaism, challenging Christian narratives about Jewish-Christian immiscibility; even as they potentially opened the door for some forms of Judaism (like a purported Levitical Judaism) to be practiced within the Church.

Thomism divides the commandments of the Hebrew Bible into three parts: the moral law, the ceremonial law, and the juridical law.Footnote 59 St. Thomas Aquinas argued that the commandments belonging to the moral life (for example, the Ten Commandments) constitute a “moral law” which is universal and eternal in its validity, while the other commandments constitute a particular law for Israel that is not universally binding. While the limited scope of many of these commandments would certainly be acknowledged by the Judaism of St. Thomas’s time, Thomas went further and argued that not only are these commandments not universally binding, but in the present age, they are binding nowhere and indeed harmful.Footnote 60 In particular, these commandments are harmful because they are designed to foreshadow the future coming of the Messiah; now that the Messiah has come, a continued observance of these anticipatory commandments would essentially be a statement that the Messiah has not yet come, which would be a denial of Christianity.Footnote 61 In other words, then, the practice of Judaism was an active denial of Christianity, requiring Jews to entirely cease being Jews if they were to become Christians.

While remaining within the framework of Thomism, Pablo exploited an ambiguity in this theory: many practices from the contemporary observance of Judaism do not correspond directly to any of the three types of law.Footnote 62 In particular, Pablo considered the Jewish practice of prayer as not belonging to the deprecated ceremonial and juridical laws, and therefore still permissible under a Christian framework. Prayer was not a figurative act aimed at foreshadowing a now-realized Messianic redemption, but rather a heartfelt act of supplication toward God that was not subject to any sort of ban.Footnote 63 Pablo argued that such prayers, as long as they were uttered worthily (that is, sincerely), were not offensive within the Christian framework.

About the second it says: New moons and sabbaths and fasts I cannot bear; they are a burden to me. In this is shown the elimination of observance of festivities that are not just useless, but harmful, as it says: “My soul hates.” And it is clear, that this is speaking about after the passion of Christ and the preaching of the Gospel, when these observances are mortifera. Consequently the 11th [point]: “When you extend your hands.” Here note, that extending their hands like in sacrifices is not prohibited, when it says: “They shall not be offered anymore.” For prayer to God does not pertain to the ceremonial of the Old Testament or to its observances. For a certain mode of prayer is not given in the Old Law, that it might be ceremonial or figurative, but prayer pertains to the precept of charity or religion. Therefore it is not emptied by the new law, like sacrifice and festivities, and so their prayer is not prohibited, but just warned that it might not be empty, as it says: the multiplication of their prayers I will not hear.Footnote 64

By whom was Pablo envisioning the offering of these Jewish prayers? On the surface, Pablo’s argument was that these prayers – when offered by contemporary Jews – do not offend God, unlike their other acts. However, were it a discussion on the virtue of the religious practices of unbaptized Jews, the conversation would be entirely speculative; the prospect of banning Jewish observance of the ceremonial law by unbaptized Jews was not contemplated even by the most extreme figures of Pablo’s time.Footnote 65 This argument is rather contextualized by the presence of a liminal community of baptized Jews, who needed to know what sort of Jewish practices might be acceptable for them to practice within Christianity. It was regarding these Jews who accepted the “new law” in baptism that the question of the (lack of) emptiness of various practices was relevant.Footnote 66 By asserting a new vision of Judaism as not perhaps entirely mortifera for Christians, Pablo was negotiating the communal entrance of Jews into the Church on terms other than abrogation. A novel Christian narrative of Judaism would permit baptized Jews to retain Jewish practices, such as (in this case) rabbinic Jewish prayer.

V. The Role of Jewish People at the End of Time

Finally, Pablo sought to revise the image of Jews as connected to the antichrist. Contemporary Christians believed that the antichrist would come out of the Jewish people (particularly out of the tribe of Dan).Footnote 67 This marked the Jewish people as not just a source of evil in the past, but a continuing source of evil in the present/future. In his commentary on Ezekiel 38, however, Pablo argued that the antichrist would come out of the north – that is, as Pablo indicated, out of Christian Europe. This suggestion, aiming to change Christian views of history for the benefit of Judaism in general and Jewish Christianity in particular, was an incendiary suggestion.

Pablo argued that each of the four cardinal directions was allusive to one of the major religions of the world.Footnote 68 The east referred to Christians, who worshiped facing in that direction (that is, toward the rising of the sun); the south referred to Muslims, who faced Mecca, which was southerly of Europe; and the west referred to Jews, leaving the northerly facing group as originating in Europe and among Europeans. It was in this last group that Pablo situated the followers of the antichrist:

It is better [compared to the Postilla’s etymology] to say that ‘Gog’ is the name of the Antichrist… Magog is the name of one of the sons of Japheth, as in Gen. 10. And this is applicable in our own interpretative situation, since it can be understood that a people descended from Magog will be the main followers of Gog or the Antichrist… For the people descended from Magog are said to be in the northern corner of the world, facing which direction (as it says) the followers of the Antichrist will worship. This is just as Christians worship facing east, Hebrews facing west, and Saracens facing south. Therefore, the followers of the antichrist from [and to] the north remain [not part of the other three groups], and they will spread this over the entire world.Footnote 69

The westward orientation assigned to Judaism requires some explanation. Generally, Jewish synagogues are set up facing toward Jerusalem, although some sources do allude to the possibility of worship in other directions and even to the possibility of specifically westerly worship. In his explanation of Exodus 19, however, Pablo elaborated that this was not his referent, but rather that in the original worship of Mt. Sinai the Jewish people were situated east of the tabernacle and therefore – even though they now worship towards Jerusalem from wherever in the world they may be – that their original (and perhaps essential) worship was facing the west.Footnote 70 This ethnography of Judaism, in turn, absolved the Jews from any association with the antichrist, instead controversially choosing to lay the association on traditionally Christian Europe.Footnote 71

By removing the stigma of the antichrist from the Jews, Pablo completed his ambitious attempt to challenge Christian narratives regarding Judaism. While conventional theology held that the blessings of the Jews had been transferred to the Christians, Pablo argued that Judaism was still blessed and that the Church was inherently a Jewish phenomenon. While conventional theology held that Judaism had been cast off from God as a consequence for the Jewish crucifixion of the Messiah, Pablo argued that a significant faction of Jews were, in fact, not at all guilty of these sins. While conventional theology held that Judaism was now a negative quantity and that Jews might be saved only through rejection of Judaism and assimilation into Christianity, Pablo argued that some Jewish practices were not problematic and that communal integration of Jews into the Church under more lenient terms might be possible. Finally, while conventional theology allied Jews with present and future enemies of Christianity, Pablo argued that the Jews were not in any way connected with Christendom’s enemies.

This narrative construction of Judaism was not merely a theological exploration; it was an attempt to bring theological weapons to bear to support Pablo’s ongoing project of negotiating Jewish entry into the Church. Pablo himself was embedded within a baptized Jewish community and indeed often faced pushback for these connections from Gentile laypeople under his episcopal jurisdiction. In order to defend his pastoral agenda, Pablo deconstructed the prevalent narrative about the ills of Judaism and replaced it with a narrative about the high status of Judaism. This narrative was adopted by the later fifteenth century converso movement to justify the high standing of descendants of baptized Jews in the Church; to contest the converso movement, its critics also contested Pablo’s narratives and writings. The controversies that swirled around Pablo, his writings, and his ideas throughout the century were reflective of the revolutionary nature of his program to construct a place for Jewish people within the Church.

References

1 See David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (W. W. Norton, 2013); Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law (University of California Press, 1999); Sara Lipton, Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (Metropolitan Books, 2014); et al. Compare to Chazan’s argument in a different but related vein that Judaism was cast in the role of “the enemy”: Robert Chazan, Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism. (University of California Press, 1997); Robert Chazan, Daggers of Faith (University of California Press, 1989), ch. 1.

2 For an example of criticisms in Pablo’s times, see the “Replica” printed alongside Pablo’s text by Matthias Thoring; Yosi Yisraeli, “Between Jewish and Christian Scholarship in the Fifteenth Century: The Consolidation a ‘Converso Doctrine’ in the Theological Writings of Pablo de Santa Maria” (PhD diss., Tel Aviv University, 2014), 78; Claude B. Stuczynski, “Pro-Converso Apologetics and Biblical Exegesis,” in The Hebrew Bible in Fifteenth-Century Spain: Exegesis, Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts, eds. Jonathan Decter and Arturo Prats (Brill, 2012), 167. Rather than merely pointing out Pablo’s Jewish origins, as Yisraeli claimed, Thoring perceived Pablo to be actually instituting Jewish practices in the Church. Also see the Letter from a Franciscan appended as a prologue to Pablo’s writings: Biblia sacra cum glossa, interlineari & Ordinaria, Nicolai Lyrani Postilla & Moralitatibus, Burgensis Additionibus, & Thoringi Replicis (Lyons, 1545); in vol. 1, 7r. In this letter, Yisraeli, “Between Jewish and Christian Scholarship,” 80 and also 245 n. 67 – though I read the tone of this letter far less aggressively than Yisraeli (the “Simeon” reference is positive, not negative), and also far more proximately related to questions of Judaism and Christianity. For later fifteenth-century debates about the Jewishness of Christianity and its implications for conversos, see, for example, John Edwards, “New Light on the ‘Converso’ Debate?: The Jewish Christianity of Alfonso de Cartagena and Juan de Torquemada,” in Cross, Crescent and Conversion: Studies on Medieval Spain and Christendom in Memory of Richard Fletcher, eds. Simon Barton and Peter Linehan (Brill, 2008); Bruce Rosenstock, New Men: Conversos, Christian Theology, and Society in Fifteenth-Century Castile. Papers of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar 39 (University of London, 2002); Claude Stuczynski and Yosi Yisraeli, “What is Converso Paulinisms?” Hispania Judaica Bulletin 15 (2024); Benzion Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, 1st ed. (Random House, 1995).

3 For the scope and scale of this baptismal movement, see Paola Tartakoff, Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250–1391 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Cecil Reid, Jews and Converts in Late Medieval Castile: Breaking with the Past (Routledge, 2021); Benjamin Gampel, Anti-Jewish Riots in the Crown of Aragon and the Royal Response (Cambridge University Press, 2016); as well as the bibliography in n. 15 of Yosi Yisraeli and Yanay Israeli. “Defining ‘Conversos’ in Fifteenth-Century Castile: The Making of a Controversial Category,” Speculum 97, no. 3 (2022).

4 For the historiography of understanding Pablo’s conversion, see Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain. vol. 2. (Jewish Publication Society, 1966), 141–151; Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition, 168–206. See Ryan Szpiech, “From Convert to Convert: Two Opposed Trends in Late Medieval and Early Modern Anti-Jewish Polemic,” in Revealing the Secrets of the Jews: Johannes Pfefferkorn and Christian Writings about Jewish Life and Literature in Early Modern Europe, eds. Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Hess (De Gruyter, 2017), 231. Nuancing this, see Yosi Yisraeli, “Constructing and Undermining Converso Jewishness: Profiat Duran and Pablo de Santa Maria,” in Religious Conversion: History, Experience and Meaning, eds. Ira Katznelson and Miri Rubin (Ashgate, 2014), and the discussion below.

5 For biographical work on Pablo, see Francisco Cantera Burgos, Alvar Garcia de Santa Maria y Su Familia De Conversos (Instituto Arias Montano, 1952); Luciano Serrano, Los Conversos: Pablo de Santa Maria y Alfonso de Cartagena (Instituto Arias Montano, 1942). More recently, useful work on Pablo has been conducted largely from an intellectual and/or cultural historical perspective: Yisraeli, “Constructing and Undermining;” Yosi Yisraeli, “From Christian Polemic to a Jewish-Converso Dialogue,” in Interreligious Encounters in Polemics between Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Iberia and Beyond, eds. Mercedes Garcia-Arenal, Gerard A. Wiegers, and Ryan Szpiech (Brill, 2019); Ryan Szpiech, “A Father’s Bequest: Augustinian Typology and Personal Testimony in the Conversion Narrative of Solomon Halevi/Pablo de Santa María,” in The Hebrew Bible in Fifteenth-Century Spain: Exegesis, Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts, eds. Jonathan Decter and Arturo Prats (Brill, 2012); Ryan Szpiech, Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Ryan Szpiech, “Scrutinizing History: Polemic and Exegesis in Pablo de Santa María’s Siete Edades Del Mundo,” Medieval Encounters 16 (2010): 96–142; Benjamin Gampel, “A Letter to a Wayward Teacher: The Transformations of Sephardic Culture in Christian Iberia,” in Cultures of the Jews, ed. David Biale (Schocken Books, 2002).

6 See Stuczynski, “Pro-Converso Apologetics,” 156–157. Pablo’s own assertion of Levitical continuity in Zachary Young, “‘We Are Descended from Levitical Blood:’ Early 15th Century Typologies of Office and the Construction of Converso Post-Supersessionism.” Medieval Encounters (forthcoming). For the broader sense of Pablo as a figure uninterested in reifying traditional boundaries between Judaism and Christianity, see Yisraeli, op. cit. For the problems posed by mass conversion post-1391, see Chazan, From Anti-Judaism to Antisemitism, 172; Szpiech, “Scrutinizing History,” 98; et al. For analysis of attempts by later conversos to replicate these constructions of Jewish and Christian identity, see Rosenstock, New Men; Edwards, “New Light”; Yisraeli and Israeli, “Defining ‘Conversos’.”

7 For narratives about Judaism as related to the real treatment of Jews, see Jeremy Cohen, “The Jews as Killers of Christ in the Latin Tradition, from Augustine to the Friars.” Traditio 39, no. 2 (1983): 1–27.

8 See Deeana Klepper, The Insight of Unbelievers: Nicholas of Lyra and Christian Reading of Jewish Text in the Later Middle Ages (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), ch. 1; Cohen, The Friars and the Jews, ch. 1; Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 157.

9 In particular, Pablo was proposing to amend the Postilla of Nicholas of Lyra, itself a commentary on the Ordinary Gloss. The Postilla was itself a novel text focusing on literal rather than metaphorical interpretations. See Philip Krey, “Many Readers but Few Followers: The Fate of Nicholas of Lyra’s ‘Apocalypse Commentary’ in the Hands of His Late-Medieval Admirers,” Church History 64, no. 2 (2009): 185–201; Klepper, The Insight of Unbelievers. For some of the many texts on the Additiones, see Yisraeli, “Constructing and Undermining,” 200, n. 36; Szpiech, “A Father’s Bequest,” 178, n. 6; Serrano, Los Conversos, 109ff, and so forth. For a codicology of the manuscripts of the Additiones, see Cantera Burgos, Alvar Garcia de Santa Maria, 339–340.

10 See Stuczynski, “Pro-Converso Apologetics,” 166–167; Klepper, The Insight of Unbelievers. For Pablo’s relationship with Thomistic thought, see (for instance) Yosi Yisraeli, “When Christian Science and Jewish Providence Collide: Conversion and Biblical Discoveries in the 1390s,” Hispania Judaica Bulletin 14 (2019).

11 Klepper, The Insight of Unbelievers; Yisraeli, “Between Jewish and Christian Scholarship,” see also Szpiech, “From Convert to Convert,” 221. For the constructions connecting literality to Judaism, see Stuczynski, “Pro-Converso Apologetics,” 166–167.

12 Along these lines, see the suggestion at Yisraeli, “From Christian Polemic,” 161 and 164ff; Szpiech, “Scrutinizing History.”

13 Yosi Yisrael, “Jewish Echoes of Anti-Talmudic Literature: Revisiting ‘The Talmud in the Additiones of Paul of Burgos,’” Association for Jewish Studies 46, no. 2 (2022): 347–73; Chen Merchavia, “The Talmud in the Additiones of Paul of Burgos,” The Journal of Jewish Studies 16, nos. 3–4 (1965): 115–34; also see Yisraeli, “Between Jewish and Christian Scholarship.”

14 Yisraeli, “Jewish Echoes of Anti-Talmudic Literature.”

15 For the Additiones as composed over a long time, see Szpiech, “Scrutinizing History,” 104–105, n. 17; Yisraeli, “Between Jewish and Christian Scholarship.”

16 Compare to Shalom Sadik, Ideology of Apostasy – the Ideology of Jewish Spaniards Who Converted to Christianity (Magnes Press, 2020), who argued that Jewish Christians from a particular strain of Judaism usually retained their attachment to that strain of Judaism within Christianity.

17 For the idea of Jewish observances as actively harmful (mortifera), see Summa Theologica, IIb, Q. 93, art. 1, and also Aquinas’ commentary on Colossians and on Galatians. This concept of course predated Aquinas; Aquinas himself cited Jerome’s Letter 75 to Augustine (although he cited it as Augustine’s position, not Jerome’s position in opposition to Augustine’s). More generally, the criticism of Jewish Christian acceptance of Jewish practices goes back to very early Christian debates about the nature of “Judaizing.” For Aquinas’ perspective on the Jewish people and Judaism more broadly, see Jeremy Cohen, The Salvation of Israel: Jews in Christian Eschatology from Paul to the Puritans (Cornell University Press, 2018), ch. 3. For the increasing perception of Judaism as allied with Christianity’s enemies, see Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 157ff; also Chazan, Daggers of Faith, ch. 1.

18 In particular, see the emphasis on Hebrew and rabbinic prayer (below).

19 Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism. For analyses of the early developments of these ideas, see Abel Mordechai Bibliowicz, Jews and Gentiles in the Early Jesus Movement (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013); Matthijs den Dulk, Between Jews and Heretics: Refiguring Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho (Routledge, 2018).

20 Genesis 9:25–28.

21 This is Lyra’s interpretation: Biblia, vol. 1, 57r.

22 Philip Almond, Noah and the Flood in Western Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2025), ch. 4.

23 See Biblia, vol. 1, 57r; M. Lindsay Kaplan, Figuring Racism in Western Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2018), ch. 4 (various examples).

24 For Ham as the father of Africans, see Kaplan, Figuring Racism in Medieval Christianity, 120ff; also Pablo’s reference, cited in M. Jean Sconza, History and Literature in Fifteenth-Century Spain: An Edition and Study of Pablo de Santa Maria’s Siete Edades Del Mundo (Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1991), 109. The interpretation of Ham’s curse as justifying African slavery started in 1453: see David Wacks, “The Curse of Ham in Medieval Iberia and the Enslavement of Black Africans.” Paper presented at MLA 2021, accessed at https://davidwacks.uoregon.edu/2020/12/30/ham/.

25 See Kaplan, Figuring Racism in Medieval Christianity, ch. 4; also Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 29.

26 Again, this is Lyra’s interpretation: Biblia, vol. 1, 57r. It is shared by some other medieval writers: see Robert E. Lerner, The Feast of St. Abraham: Medieval Millenarians and the Jews (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), ch. 2. For other texts’ de-emphasis of this literality (in comparison to Lyra), see Kaplan, Figuring Racism in Medieval Christianity, 115. Contra Kaplan, 128, the increasing focus on literality can date back to the Postilla and not to early Protestantism.

27 Biblia, vol. 1, 57r.

28 Biblia, vol. 1, 57r.

29 Addition iii to Genesis 9 (Biblia, vol. 1, 57r). All translations are my own.

30 Pablo made a comparable argument in his Spanish-language historical poem Siete Edades. He argued that Japheth was the father of the Greeks, Romans, and “noble Christians” (lindos xristianos); that Ham was the father of the Canaanites and Africans; and that Shem was the father of the Israelites and all Jews, who “after holy baptism are unified with the other lineage” (aunque ya despues por ssanto baptism sson unos con otros linaje mesclado). Sconza, History and Literature in 15th Century Spain, 66; quoting fol. 13r of the Siete Edades; also 109. While similarly targeted at removing the sense that Jews were cursed and instead preserving the possibility of Jewish integration, Pablo’s Latin text seems far more radical in its assertions. More generally, the difference in purpose between Pablo’s Latin and Spanish writings has been difficult to discern; see Szpiech, Scrutinizing History.

31 The controversy that this interpretation aroused is attested to in the hostile reply of Pablo’s critic, Thoring, who claimed that the interpretation was a reflection of Pablo seeking to benefit his own people: Biblia, vol. 1, 57v. I am grateful to Yosi Yisraeli for this note. On the replica, see Stuczynski, “Pro-Converso Apologetics,” 167–168 (n. 64).

32 See Jules Isaac, The Teaching of Contempt: Christian Roots of Anti-Semitism (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1964); Cohen, “The Jews as the Killers of Christ,” esp. 20; Cohen, The Friars and the Jews,143–144; Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 205; Chazan, Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism, 13; Chazan, From Anti-Judaism to Antisemitism, xiii; Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism. 2nd ed. (Wipf and Stock, 1997); Stefan Rohrbacher, “The Charge of Deicide: An Anti-Jewish Motif in Medieval Christian Art,” Journal of Medieval History 17, no. 4 (1991): 297–321. Pablo himself, accepting the recent intensification of the theory of deicide as proposed by Lyra (Cohen, “The Jews as the Killers of Christ,” 20), refers to the “maximal sin” committed by those who crucified Jesus, but qualifies those guilty of this sin, in addition to Isaiah 53 (quoted and discussed below).

33 Compare Cohen’s reading that Pablo was in fact challenging the theory of intentional deicide elsewhere: Cohen, “The Jews as the Killers of Christ,” 27. On the converso desire to reread deicide, see Stuczynski, “Pro-Converso Apologetics,” 158.

34 Addition ii to John 11 (Biblia, vol. 5, 220v). I am grateful to Yosi Yisraeli for the note about the connection to Maimonides, further situating this passage in a shared Jewish-Christian discourse.

35 Addition ii to John 11 (Biblia, vol. 5, 220v-221r), my emphasis. Similarly, in addition to Ex. 32: Biblia, vol. 1, 201r (Addition vii to Ex. 32).

36 Young, “We are Descended from Levitical Blood”; also see the works of Nirenberg on the emergence of genealogy as a boundary in the unsettled religious landscape of contemporary Castile: David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 1996), esp. 31 for converso claims of privileged descent seemingly linked to this theological discursus of Pablo; for the broader background of Pablo’s claims of genealogical significance in the context of contemporary Jewish and Christian debate, see Yisraeli, “Constructing and Undermining Converso Jewishness.”

37 Biblia, vol. 1, 4v.

38 Pablo’s sons, to whom the volume was dedicated, were Levites by hereditary definition. For the role of Pablo’s other relatives, Archivo Catedral de Burgos (ACB): ACA 61 no. 44; RR 45 f. 172, and many others. The term “Jewish Christian” here refers to Jews who were baptized and continued to think of themselves in continuity with Judaism.

39 For Pablo’s broader theory of Jewish primacy as expressed in the Scrutinium and echoed in later sources, see Stuczynski, “Pro-Converso Apologetics”; Claude B. Stuczynski, “Converso Paulinism and Residual Jewishness: Conversion from Judaism to Christianity as a Theologico-Political Problem,” in Bastards and Believers: Jewish Converts and Conversion from the Bible to the Present, ed. P. Maciejko and T. Dunkelgruen (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). For the later resonances, also see Rosenstock, New Men. The Scrutinium was Pablo’s abridged companion volume to the Additiones; for the relationship between these two texts, see Szpiech, Scrutinizing History, 101–102.

40 Jeffrey Gorsky, Exiles in Sepharad: The Jewish Millennium in Spain (The Jewish Publication Society, 2015), and others; also Rosenstock, New Men, 36–37. Compare to Pablo’s commentary on Obadiah (Biblia, vol. 4, 372v): the “exiles of Jerusalem in Sepharad possessing the South” refers to a (Jewishly coded) Spain controlling cities in Morocco before the Islamic conquest.

41 For the idea of incorporating different aspects of Judaism into the Church as a feature of the early fifteenth century religious landscape, see Yosi Yisraeli, “Alonso de Madrigal on Torah-Oaths: Who Is a Judaizer in the Early Fifteenth Century?,” Sefarad 18, no. 2 (2023): 331–59, at 332; Yisraeli, “Constructing and Undermining Converso Jewishness,” 215 (posed as an unanswered question).

42 Addition i to Isaiah 53: Biblia, vol. 4, 90v. Surprisingly, Pablo did not appear to connect the Muslims further to the denial of the burial of Christ by citing (real or purported) Islamic attacks on the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

43 Addition to Matthew 23 (Biblia, vol. 5, 72v-73r).

44 This was the understanding of Pablo’s Franciscan critic; for instance, in the replica to Isaiah 53 (Biblia, vol. 4, 90v).

45 On the Augustinian theory, see Cohen, The Friars and the Jews, introduction-ch. 1; Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, ch. 1. For the history of this fear, see Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (Yale University Press, 2010), 293; as well as the notes below.

46 Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 37 (compared to the later view expressed on 358ff); also the work of Fredriksen in Augustine and the Jews, esp. in epilogue. For other contemporary reasons why some powers were not interested in Jewish conversion, see Paola Tartakoff, “Christian Kings and Jewish Conversion in the Medieval Crown of Aragon,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 3, no. 1 (2011): 27–39; See also Chazan, Daggers of Faith, 5; ch. 1.

47 For the association between baptized Jews and “Judaizing,” see Cohen, The Friars and the Jews, 85–93. This, at least, is the consistent fear attested by ecumenical councils, including Lateran IV and Florence; Visigothic professions of faith, and so forth. For these charges of Judaizing, see also Klepper, The Insight of Unbelievers, 4–5.

48 Cohen, The Friars and the Jews; Cohen, “The Jews as Killers of Christ,” 24; Chazan, From Anti-Judaism to Anti-Semitism, 172; Chazan, Daggers of Faith, 5.

49 Compare to the simpler integration of the smaller communities that had previously formed: Chazan, From Anti-Judaism to Anti-Semitism, 172. For the history of this new community, see works by Tartakoff, Reid, and Gampel, op cit. The narrative of the formation of this community has been colored by the proximity of these mass conversions to the anti-Jewish riots of 1391 and to the significant anti-Jewish legislation of the 1410s. Pablo, in particular, has often been represented as a champion of discrimination (that is, by Baer and Netaynahu); see Szpiech, “From Convert to Convert,” 234. For Pablo’s perspective as different from the perspectives of such as Vincent Ferrer, see Young, “We are Descended from Levitical Blood.” For Pablo as describing a new sort of Jewish community that was connected to Christianity, see Yisraeli, “Constructing and Undermining.” For Pablo’s own interpretation of 1391, see Szpiech, “From Convert to Convert,” 234; Michael Glatzer, “Pablo de Santa Maria on the Events of 1391,” in Antisemitism Throughout the Ages, ed. Shmuel Almog (Oxford University Press, 1988).

50 See Cohen, The Salvation of Israel.

51 Biblia, vol. 4, 337r (Addition to Hosea 3); my translation (with the other passages in this article) and my emphasis. None of the other scholarship on Pablo cites this passage, although a number of works cite Pablo’s Scrutinium passage where he refers back to Hosea; see, for instance, Cohen, The Salvation of Israel, 195. Again, this is an example of the Scrutinium and the Additiones as parallel works. Compare Pablo’s language about the prevalence of conversion to the very similar language of Vincent Ferrer: Opera omnia (Valencia, 1693), vol. 3, 116 (quotidie convertunt/quotidie convertuntur). Strikingly, Augustine used this same language to describe the abundant conversion of pagans to Christianity as compared to the few conversions of Jews (Letter 93, no. 26). Could suggesting that Jewish conversion in the present compared to pagan conversion in the past be a component of theological strategy or argument?

52 Addition to Psalm 58 [59]: Biblia, vol. 3, 168r-v. A similar passage appears in the Scrutinium Scripturarum, Pablo’s abridged companion to the Additiones, at 2.6.14 (532ff, 1591 Burgos edition). For analysis of these passages, see Yisraeli, “From Christian Polemic,” 167–168; Yisraeli, “Between Jewish and Christian Scholarship,” 302ff; Cohen, The Salvation of Israel, 191.

53 See note above.

54 Archivo Historico Nacional, clero reg perg 187, no. 15.

55 For Alonso’s own perceived role as a member of a Jewish Christian network, see ACB, vol. 73, fol. 27; ACV, vol. 1, ff. 7–9. See also Young, “‘We are Descended from Levitical Blood.’”

56 See Chazan, From Anti-Judaism to Antisemitism, 172. While Nirenberg asserted that the problem with these baptized Jews was perceived to be their excessive assimilation (“Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities,” 10), there are many cases of conspicuous non-assimilation. See also Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, ch. 6, for examples of perceived “Judaizing” (that is, non-assimilation); Yisraeli and Israeli, “Defining ‘Conversos,’” 616; Yisraeli, “Alonso de Madrigal on Torah-Oaths,” 331; Nicola Jennings, “Reforming the Church and Re-Framing Identity: Converso Prelates and Artistic Patronage in Fifteenth Century Castile,” in The Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond, ed. Kevin Ingram (Brill, 2021); Guillermo Lopez Juan, “Converso Evangelization, Funerary Practices, and Social Integration in Valencia, 1391–1482,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 16, no. 3 (2024): 389–415; Guillermo Lopez Juan, “The Conversos of Valencia: Prosopography of a Socio-Religious Community.” Jewish History 34 (2021): 273–303.

57 See, for instance, the pushback faced by Pablo, referenced in Juan Torres Fontes, “Fechas Murcianas de Pablo de Santa Maria,” Murgetana 51 (1978): 87–94. Profiat Duran cited this mistreatment as an argument for Jews to detach themselves from Christianity; see Yisraeli, “Constructing and Undermining,” 202; Frank Ephraim Talmadge, The Polemical Writings of Profiat Duran: “The Reproach of the Gentiles” and “Be Not Like Unto Thy Fathers” (Merkaz Z. Shazar, 1981), 81.

58 For the Thomistic concept of mortifera, see Summa Theologica, IIb, Q. 93, art. 1, and also Augustine’s commentary on Colossians and on Galatians. This concept of course predated Aquinas; Aquinas himself cited Jerome’s Letter 75 to Augustine (although he cited it as Augustine’s position, not Jerome’s position in opposition to Augustine’s). More generally, the criticism of Jewish Christian acceptance of Jewish practices goes back to very early Christian debates about the nature of “Judaizing.” For Aquinas’ perspective on the Jewish people and Judaism more broadly, see Cohen, The Salvation of Israel, ch. 3.

59 Summa Theologica, 1b, 98ff, and others. Again, this division was not restricted to Thomism; see Philip Ross, From the Finger of God: The Biblical and Theological Basis for the Threefold Division of the Law (Mentor, 2010).

60 Summa Theologica, 2a, Q. 103.

61 Summa Theologica, 2a, Q. 103; see also Session 11 of the Council of Florence (2/4/1442); also see the below passage.

62 This sense of a distinction between ancient and contemporary Judaism reflects a growing Christian awareness in the 150 years since Thomas of the inequality between Biblical Jews and contemporary Jews. See Cohen, Living Letters of the Law (esp. ch. 9); Cohen, The Friars and the Jews; etc.

63 Compare to Madrigal’s position on Torah oaths: Yisraeli, Alonso de Madrigal on Torah-Oaths, 347.

64 Addition ii to Isaiah 1 (Biblia, vol. 4, 7r-8r). Note that this goes directly against Lyra’s argument about Jewish prayers in the Postilla. For this passage in another Jewish-Christian dispute, see David Berger, The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the Nizzahon Vetus (ACLS Humanities, 2008), 96.

65 For the debate on Pablo’s connection to the restrictive Laws of Valladolid, see notes elsewhere. While these Laws sought to prescribe Jewish participation in society, they did not attempt to regulate the practice of Judaism; Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, and others.

66 Compare to Yisraeli, “Alonso de Madrigal on Torah-Oaths,” 349ff, on whether baptized Jews might take oaths on the Torah; and 354ff, on whether they might pray in Hebrew.

67 See Bernard McGinn, Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination With Evil (Harper Collins, 1994); Philip Almond, The Antichrist: A New Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2020), tracing the Danitic typology back to Irenaeus; C. E. Hill, “Antichrist from the Tribe of Dan.” The Journal of Theological Studies 46, no. 1 (1995): 99–117; Cohen, The Salvation of Israel, ch. 4–6.

68 For a similar construction by Augustodunensis, see Cohen, The Salvation of All Israel, 162–3.

69 Addition to Ezekiel 38: Biblia, vol. 4, 264v.

70 Addition i to Exodus 19: Biblia, vol. 1, 162v.

71 Pablo’s Franciscan critic challenged this assertion: “This interpretation from Burgensis very much disrespects Christians… The Antichrist will be received by the unbelieving Jews as their false expected Messiah, and they will adhere to him by persecuting the Church, which is in Europe, but Burgensis refuses to understand this, perhaps due to his affection for his nation.” (Biblia, vol. 4, 264ff). Others, such as Wycliffe, also objected to the Danitic nature of the Antichrist: Almond, The Antichrist.