Season 1, Episode 115

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Joan grants Hasdai Crescas authority to apply Jewish law to certain cases in the aljama of Zaragoza.¹

Today’s Document

• Subject: jurdistictional ruling in favor of the existing administrators of the aljama
• Date: April 18, 1387
• Day of the Week: Thursday
• Language: Latin
• Archival Reference Number: ACA CR R1891 f106r
• Link to PARES
• Place: Barcelona
• Sender: Joan
• Recipients: Hasdai Crescas, the leader of the Zaragoza Aljama

Historical Thinking Notes

• Sourcing: by this time in his life, Joan had shifted away from the default anti-semitism of his youth and acted to increase Jewish authority over the governance of aljamas; the recipient of this document, Hasdai Crescas, was a Jewish philosopher in the tradition of Iberian Jewish philosphers like Maimonides;

• Contextualization: within the Jewish aljama, a leadership struggle was taking place and Hasdai Cresces was a member of the oligarchic elite who faced resistence from lower social classes²; later, during the Anti-Jewish Riots of 1391, Joan attempted to defend the Jews in the Crown of Aragon but did not do this with every means at his disposal

• Corroboration: the documents examined in Episode 112 and Episode 129 also relate to the governance of the Jewish aljama in Zaragoza, but those documents focus on a particular case in the court system; for comparisons to other aljamas, see the several episodes tagged with Jewish History

• Close-Reading: the document entrusts Hasdai Cresces but at no point addresses the concerns of the parties in opposition to him; the first line includes the phrase ‘legem ebrayacem’ for Hebrew Law, and it is quesitionable how much Joan knew of Jewish Law or how the codification of those laws might operate within the aljama

What is this document doing?

• This document reinforces the direct royal authority over the governance of the Zaragoza aljama and initiates a reform of its political structure.
• The document invests Hasdai Cresces with a legal authority backed by the monarch.

Questions

• How well did Joan know Hadsai Cresces?
• Did this action from Joan put an end to the internal political conflict in the Zaragoza aljama? If not, why not?
• What kind of process did Hasdai Cresces go through in order to obtain this decree from Joan?

AI Usage

I gave an initial transcription by Gemini to Claude for a reconciliation. Claude then produced a translation with footnotes. While this workflow generated an accurate general sense of the meaning of the document, somehow both LLMs erroneously inserted Valencia into this document, either through a dramatic mis-transcription or some underlying pattern recognition. This is a good example of the jagged frontier for AI competency.

Bibliography

• Baer, Yitzhak. A History of the Jews in Christian Spain. Jewish Publication Society of America, 1961.
• Gampel, Benjamin R. Anti-Jewish Riots in the Crown of Aragon and the Royal Response, 1391-1392. Cambridge University Press, 2016.
• Guerson de Oliveira, Alexandra. “Coping with Crises: Christian-Jewish Relations in Catalonia and Aragon, 1380–1391.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 2012.

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