202 EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAINpossible protector if such enforced conversion should be attempted,
sought to persuade King Charles the Bald (840-877) to seek Bodo-
Eleazar's extradition, although to no avail. He himself had mean-
while been engaged in a polemical literary debate with Paul Alvar of
Cordoba, a leading Christian layman of possible Jewish descent. Their
exchange of letters survives in only one manuscript and unfortunately
at some subsequent point an offended Christian cut out Eleazar's
contribution. However it has been possible for this to be reconstructed
with a fair degree of probability from Alvar's citations of his oppon-
ent's arguments.^46
Eleazar attacked Christianity at one of its most vulnerable points,
its claim to be heir to the promises made by God to Israel in the Old
Testament. The continued survival of the Jews was a particular stum-
bling block here, and Eleazar pointed out very pertinently that their
present low material condition was no guarantee of the validity of
Christian claims. Had not the temples of the pagans once been
magnificent? He also criticised some Christian arguments based upon
key Biblical texts, but which depended upon mistranslation of the
central Hebrew words. He also accused the Christians of worshipping
three gods not one, of making a mortal man divine and of believing
in the impossible in their doctrine of virgin birth.
Eleazar's attempt to persuade the amir to act against the Christians
went unheeded and nothing is known of his eventual fate. Paradox-
ically his aim of destroying Christianity in Al-Andalus by means of
the action of the state was probably the product of ways of thought
that survived from his own discarded past, for, as in the case of the
Visigothic kingdom, secular compulsion towards religious uniformity
and orthodoxy was very much a product of the late Roman Christian
tradition. Normally Jewish proselytising was eirenic and, as with Bodo-
Eleazar's own conversion, aimed at individuals using the kind of ra-
tionalist and exegetical arguments that he had advanced against Alvar.
The Christians of Al-Andalus had far more to fear from the challenge
of Islam than from that of Judaism, although, as in the Visigothic
period, there is evidence from the eighth century of Jewish ideas and
practices influencing local Christian communities. In about 730
Evantius, Archdeacon of Toledo, wrote condemning Christians of
Zaragoza who were claiming that anyone eating the blood of animals
would thereby become unclean, and from 764 comes the fragment of
a letter rebuking Cordoban Christians who wished to fast jointly with
the Jews on the Day of Atonement.^47 It seems clear that the two