ABSTRACT
Medieval religious polemic often made use of the confessional discourse of converts to lend factual credibility and emotional weight to the doctrinal arguments being made against the convert’s former religion. Petrus Alfonsi, a twelfth-century Jewish convert to Christianity, styled his Dialogi contra Iudaeos as a disputation between Moses, his erstwhile Jewish self, and the new Christian Petrus. 1 Nicholas Donin, a former Jew, argued for the Christian side in the Paris Disputation of 1240. Pablo Christiani, another converso, debated Nahmanides in the Barcelona Disputation of 1263. 2 The former Joshua Halorqui, baptized Jerónimo de Santa Fe, took on his former coreligionists in the Tortosa Disputations of 1413–14, and authored the anti-Jewish tract Hebraeomastix. 3 In the case of these and other conversos who participated in anti-Jewish polemic, the disputant’s command of Hebrew and knowledge of Talmud—and often his familiarity with Arabic culture and science—were the crucial rhetorical underpinnings for attacks on Judaism and Islam. The persuasive power of the theological argument was bolstered not only by the convert’s “insider” knowledge of his former religion, but also the personal account of conversion, the confession of his earlier sin and error.
