The Book of Nestor the Priest and the Toledot Yešu in the Polemics of Abner of Burgos/Alfonso of Valladolid

Abstract

The polemical writings of the Castilian Jewish convert Abner of Burgos/Alfonso of Valladolid (d. c. 1347) can be considered uniquely valuable from a variety of perspectives: they contain many citations and references not found in other texts of the period; they include texts written in both Hebrew and Romance and so constitute a point at which these Iberian intellectual traditions overlap; they take a variety of textual forms, including polemical dialogue, exegesis, philosophical argumentation, and first-person testimony recounting the author’s conversion to Christianity; and they make reference to contemporary events, shedding light on Jewish and Christian religious life in the first half of the fourteenth century.1 While scholars have been exploring this corpus of writings for over a century now, it continues to yield new and valuable information about a host of topics, including Jewish-Christian debate half a century before the calamitous riots of 1391, the history of Romance Bible translation, and the transmission of Hebrew and Arabic philosophical texts in Castile, among others. However, many questions remain to be explored.2