In 1391, a horrifying wave of pogroms swept through Spain, leaving tens of thousands of Jews dead, and many others forcibly converted to Christianity. Among the latter was Profayt Duran of Perpignan, who took the name Honoratus de Bonafide and embarked on a successful career as court astrologer to the king of Aragon. But Duran—an accomplished rabbinic scholar, polymath, and author of a commentary on Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed—continued to write in Hebrew under the pseudonym Efod, and produced a number of works on Jewish theology, Hebrew grammar, and biblical exegesis, as well as two anti-Christian polemics. Duran’s life and work are the subject of Maud Kozodoy’s The Secret Faith of Maestre Honoratus. Eric Lawee writes in his review:

Kozodoy rightly lays stress on Duran’s rationalism as a key not only to his intellectual personality but religious identity. . . . [She] suggests, on the evidence of his writings, that Duran’s rationalism buttressed his Jewish pride and fortified his ongoing allegiance to Judaism after his conversion. Indeed, he seems to have identified rationality with Judaism, and Kozodoy shows how this conviction informed what are by far Duran’s most daring works: two brilliant and innovative polemics in which he subjected Christianity to theological ridicule and an exacting historical critique.

Duran wrote the first of his anti-Christian books about three years after his conversion. It takes the form of an epistle addressed to one of his contemporaries who was a genuine Jewish convert to Christianity. Here the innovation lies not so much in the work’s contents but in its form, especially the “barbed biblical allusion[s]” with which Duran pointed out the folly of an educated Sephardi Jew abandoning a faith in harmony with reason to embrace one at odds with it.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.