LITMIR.BIZ

      Introduction

      One summer day in 1392, magister Honoratus de Bonafide, a Christian physician and astrologer of King Joan I of Aragon, appeared before Bernard Fabre, a Perpignan notary. He was accompanied by Mosse Alfaquim, a Jew, also of Perpignan, who was acting as his proctor. The three men had known each other for years. Bernard Fabre had recorded Honoratus’s financial transactions for over a decade, since as early as 1380, and had done so several times over the previous two years.¹ But this time the notary must have looked at the two men before him with surprise and some emotion—perhaps embarrassment or sympathy, perhaps amusement or mockery. One can even imagine Fabre commenting on the awkwardness or irony of the situation. Through all these years of doing business with Honoratus, he had known him by a different name and even as a different person: as Profayt Duran judeus.²

      During the previous summer of 1391, anti-Jewish riots had broken out in Seville and, taking different forms in the highly diverse regions of Iberia, had spread through Castile to the Crown of Aragon, up to the northernmost parts of Catalonia.³ Jewish quarters were attacked, Jews were killed, and Jewish property was destroyed. Some Jews were dragged to the baptismal font and there converted to save their lives. Others died fighting or committed suicide rather than submit to baptism.⁴

      In Perpignan, when the Call (the Jewish quarter) was attacked that August, the local Jews took refuge in the royal palace.⁵ Sporadic violence seems to have continued until the late spring of 1393, with considerable physical injury to person and property. In July of that year, Joan I gave a general pardon to the Christians of Perpignan, but explicitly excluded from this pardon those who had carried out attacks

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