POLITICS AND RELIGION IN THE ERA OF RAMON LLULLcourts where hostility to the Jews had become a significant
priority. The king of France, Louis IX (d. 1270), initiated the
burning of Jewish books, among them the great law code
known as the Talmud which was deemed anti-Christian,
though the Jews protested that the Talmud did not even
mention Christianity. In 1240 a public disputation was held
in Paris in which a certain Nicholas Donin, a converted Jew,
attempted to show up the fundamental faults in Judaism.^18
Increasingly, Christian attention focused on the works the
Jews themselves trusted, especially the Talmud, whose con-
tents were made known to Christians by such converts as
Donin. Judaism was seen as a rabbinic distortion of the faith
practised in the days of the Temple, during, indeed, the life
of Jesus. The Talmud was argued to contain a whole body
of rules that reformed biblicalJudaism into something quite
different. Judaism as practised in the thirteenth century was
thus nothing less than a Jewish heresy that had long ago
departed from the religion of ancient Israel. Such a critique
of Judaism was moulded in part by the awareness of vigorous
factional debates within Judaism, particularly in Spain, which
had spilled over into southern France in the early thirteenth
century. The question that then arose was whether it was still
appropriate to guarantee the right of Jews to practise what
was no longer the religion of Jesus's day.^1 Y
Leaders of the campaign against the Jews were the Dom-
inican friars, and to a lesser extent their Franciscan rivals.
The Dominicans had been founded in Languedoc at the
very start of the thirteenth century, to combat the menace
of the Cathar and Waldensian heresies. When the order
found itself under the leadership of a Catalan, Ramon de
Penyafort, who was a close associate of both James the Con-
queror and of Pope Gregory IX, the Dominicans hardly
surprisingly became interested not just in Christian heresy,
but in the question of the relationship between a Christian
society and its Jewish or Muslim subjects. Penyafort was an
energetic moral reformer: usury, not least the charging of
unfair interest by Christian merchants, was another of his
acute concerns, and here too can be seen reflected the
- H. Maceo by, judaism on Trial. Jewish-Christian disputations in the Middle
Ages (London/Toronto, 1982), prints the key texts in translation. - ]. Cohen, The friars and the Jews (Ithaca, NY, 1982), pp. 78-9, 242.