Petrus Alphonsi (died after 1116) was a Spanish physician, writer, astronomer and polemicist who was born and raised as a Jew and later in life converted to Christianity in 1106. He is also known just as Alphonsi,Tolan, xv and as Peter Alfonsi or Peter Alphonso, and was born Moses Sephardi. Born in Islamic Spain, he mostly lived in England and France after his conversion.
Life Petrus Alphonsi was born at an unknown date and place in the 11th century in Spain, and educated in al-Andalus, or Islamic Spain. As he described himself, he was baptised at Huesca, capital of the Kingdom of Aragon, on St. Peter's Day, 29 June 1106, when he was probably approaching middle age; this is the first clear date we have in his biography.Tolan, 9 he took the name of Petrus Alfonsi (Alfonso's Peter).
By 1116 at the latest he had emigrated to England, where he seems to have remained some years, before moving to northern France. The date of his death is as unclear as that of his birth.Tolan, 10–11 He was famous as a writer during his lifetime, and remained so for the rest of the Middle Ages, with over 160 surviving medieval manuscripts containing works of his. The most common are his Dialogi contra Iudaeos (Dialogue Against the Jews), an imaginary conversation between a Jew and a Christian, and Disciplina Clericalis (A Training-school for the Clergy), in fact a collection of Eastern fables.
Petrus was born a Jew while living in al-Andalus, and after he rose to prominence, he converted to Christianity. This environment gave him an advantageous knowledge of Christianity, Judaism and Islam that would later prove useful in his polemics. John Tolan mentioned in his book Petrus Alfonsi and His Medieval Readers that "Alfonsi's texts were received enthusiastically—he became an auctor, an authority to be quoted. His success was due in large part to his ability to bridge several cultures: a Jew from the [Muslim] world of al-Andalus." His knowledge of these different religions is what makes Alfonsi unique and why he is essential to be studied when looking at anti-Judaic polemics.
Petrus' upbringing placed him in an atmosphere that provided a significant impetus to launch him as one of the most important figures in anti-Judaic polemics. According to Tolan, Petrus Alfonsi was reared in a society in turmoil: a place of chaos and political instability, where Islam and Christianity were becoming a larger influence. His background was conveniently placed in the centre of contention between religions and circumstances that surrounded his upbringing, and provided the framework for polemics that would shape Medieval Judaic perception.
In the Dialogus Alphonsi relates that he traveled to England as magister in liberal arts. He spent several years there as court physician of Henry I of England (reigned 1100–1135).
The presence of Alfonsi in the West Country in the years before that date may have contributed to the flowering of Arabic science in that region from the 1120s onwards.Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, art. "Alfonsi, Petrus" He discussed astronomy with Walcher of Malvern. Petrus passed on the Arabic system of astronomical graduation. They may have collaborated on a work on eclipses.PDF, p. 19.
Works
Disciplina Clericalis
Alfonsi's fame rests chiefly on a collection of 33 tales, composed in Latin at the beginning of the 12th century. This work is a collection of oriental tales of moralizing character, translated from Arabic. Some of the tales he drew on were from tales later incorporated into Arabian Nights, including the "Sindibad the Wise" story cycle (not to be confused with Sindbad the Sailor) and "The Tale of Attaf". It established some didactic models that would be followed by other medieval authors.
The collection enjoyed remarkable popularity, and is an interesting study in comparative literature. It is entitled Disciplina Clericalis (A Training-school for the Clergy), and was often used by clergymen in their discourses, notwithstanding the questionable moral tone of some of the stories. The work is important as throwing light on the migration of fables, and is almost indispensable to the student of medieval folk-lore. Translations of it into French, Spanish, German, and English are extant. At the beginning of the 13th century an anonymous versifier rendered some sentences and tales from the Disciplina Clericalis by Petrus Alphonsi (1110 circa) into the elegiac metre. This was the origin of the Alphunsus de Arabicis eventibus. Joseph Jacobs discovered some of the stories at the end of Caxton's translation of the fables of Æsop, where thirteen apologues of "Alfonce" are taken in fact from the Disciplina Clericalis.Jacobs, Jewish Ideals, 1896, pp. 141–143. He lays stress on Alfonsi's importance as one of the intermediaries between Eastern and Western folk-lore, and quotes one of Caxton's stories from "Alfonce."
An outline of the tales, by Douce, is prefixed to Ellis' "Early English Metrical Romances." Nearly all the stories are adopted in the Gesta Romanorum. Chapters ii and iii were done into Hebrew and issued under the title, Book of Enoch,.Constantinople, 1516; Venice, 1544 and 1605. An early French translation of this Hebrew language extract was made prior to 1698 by Piques, and August Pichard published another version in Paris, 1838.
Friedrich Wilhelm Valentin Schmidt produced a scholarly edition in 1827.: Labouderie, Vicar-General of Avignon, published it at Paris in 1824 with a French translation of the fifteenth century.
Dialogi contra Iudaeos
Like many converts of his time, Alfonsi was accused of bad faith by the Jewish community and to counter this, as well as to show his zeal for his new faith he wrote a work attacking Judaism and defending Christianity. It became one of the most widely read and used anti-Jewish polemical texts of the Middle Ages, as Tolan shows. Alfonsi wrote the Dialogues in 1110; he presents them as a disputation between his former Jewish self (Moses) and his current Christian self (Peter). He divides the work into twelve "Dialogues" or chapters: and the first four attack Judaism, the fifth attacks Islam, and the last seven defend Christianity.
Up until the Dialogi contra Iudaeos, the Augustinian tradition was followed in Christendom which allowed relative tolerance to the Jewish people, and for the most part up until this point the attacks on the Jewish people were localized and more importantly, not organized. There was no literature before Petrus Alfonsi's Dialogi condemning Judaism as a whole. There was no document for people to latch on to and group up against the Jewish people.
Alfonsi attempted to prove Christianity by disproving Judaism. For Alfonsi, there existed a difficulty in proving Christianity through the invalidity of Judaism since the basic tenets of Christianity originate in the Old Testament. At the time, some believed if a polemicist proves the nullification of binding of the Mosaic ("Old") Law, then ipso facto he or she also proves the invalidity of Christianity. He attempted to avoid this problem by challenging the Talmud and rabbis.
This work presented a point of view contrary to previous Christian philosophy because Christians claimed that the Jews were blindly practicing the Old Law. Petrus Alfonsi initiated a differing idea that “the Jews no longer followed the Old Law; they follow a new and heretical law, that of the Talmud.” Petrus’ belief was that the Jewish leaders were knowingly and willfully leading their flock astray. He believed that they purposely lied in order to conceal their sin of killing Jesus, in spite of the fact that they knew that he was the Son of God. Petrus Alfonsi also claimed that the Talmud was written to keep the Jewish people from seeing that Jesus was the Son of God; he called the Talmud “a fabric of lies” and a “heretical book.”
What makes this doctrine so radically different from some previous Christian polemics of the time is that they tried to prove the validity of Christianity by pointing out scriptures in the Old Law that confirmed that Jesus was the Son of God. With this belief, it portrayed the Jews as a people who would eventually see the truth and would ultimately convert to Christianity. Petrus’ new concept claimed that the Jewish leaders were blatantly lying and had attempted to cover up the truth. This new concept obviously would create a new type of tension between Christians and Jews, and Alfonsi inadvertently affected Anti Semites to rebring [deicide] as a charge against all Jews.
The Augustinian tradition afforded Jews in Europe a tolerance throughout the Latin West that was not shared among other religions. This tradition did not place any emphasis on Judaism being heretical, but rather pointed to the fact that the Jews had a pivotal part to play in the spreading of Christianity. This doctrine was originally written to explain why Jews were not converting to Christianity. Since the Jews were the ones who had kept the law, it would seem logical that they would know whether the savior had come, and this seemed to present a problem within Christian society. Daniel J. Lasker said of Petrus' ideology that “These innovations signaled the beginning of the end of the relative Christian tolerance of Jews and Judaism inspired by the writings of Augustine.” Other authors before Petrus had used harsher rhetoric; there was seldom any deviation from the Augustinian tradition.
The Augustinian tradition assumed that, once the Jews’ purpose was served, they would convert to Christianity, but Jews in general were not converting and people were looking for a new explanation. Alfonsi attempted to explain this discrepancy by claiming that Judaism is heretical, and that the Jewish leaders have knowingly covered up the truth. He made his claim specific to the religion and Jewish leaders, but not to the people as a whole.
Alfonsi's polemical work did not signify that the twelfth century was filled with violence between religions, or that many who professed to be Christians were actively crusading against the Jews for conversion. At this time, the Augustinian tradition remained and Christians assumed that the Jews would just progress towards becoming Christians. During Alfonsi's life, his work set the stage and afforded the language that would enable later persecutions, rather than his polemics developing out of Jewish persecution. Although Alfonsi may not have been the man who was forcibly converting Jews, his writings did enable later polemicist to fabricate even bolder claims of the Talmud including that it was satanic. These new writings and ideals influenced the thought of many others in the Latin West for years to come.
Petrus Alfonsi's Dialogi contra Iudaeos was not an entirely new polemical concept; he used the same arguments and cited the same Old Testament prophecies that polemicists before him had been using. Before Alfonsi's Dialogi contra Iudaeos, Medieval Latin knew very little about the religious beliefs and practices of the Jews living within their own city. Most Christians did not know the contents of the Talmud, and some did not even know of its existence. This lack of knowledge provided a problem for Christians who were trying to prove the superiority of Christianity over Judaism, and they were doing this without even knowing the basics of Judaism.
What made Petrus Alfonsi's work unique and gave him a level of influence that was unmatched by any of the preceding polemicists was his knowledge of Judaism combined with his new concept on how to perceive it. As stated earlier, Petrus’ unique upbringing gave him a particular advantage to be an authority on polemics. Because Petrus came from Iberia, a place where polemics were initiated from actual dialogue and actual knowledge of rival religions, he was able to bring his Andalusian polemic with his firsthand knowledge of Judaism out of Iberia to Latin Europe, and transform the Latin polemical tradition.