Conclusion: Textual Truths

In the preceding chapters I have used the various texts recorded in Hebrew aljamiado in Iberia in the mid-fifteenth century and collected into ms Parm. 2666 as lenses through which to explore the way each text and the collection as a whole pulls together various strands of contemporary Iberian culture and intellectual currents such as humanism, scholasticism, Kabbalah and Judeo- Andalusi Aristotelianism to articulate and give shape to a redefinition of individual belief. The present study of this collection has illustrated how the intentionality of its compilers—the thought processes behind the combina- tion of these texts and the reasoning of why these texts were recorded and not others—sheds light on the concerns of Jewish and converso readers of the gen- eration before the expulsion. Because of the Jewish background of the copyists and its intended readers, as discussed in the introduction and the preceding chapters, this articulation of personal belief and of the role of the individual in society is one that derives from and is destined for a converso and/or Jewish audience. The works collected in ms Parm. 2666 reveal copyists and readers open to and highly educated in the ideas of medieval Christian scholasticism, the terminology and concepts of Judeo-Andalusi Maimonidean thought, early humanist discourses on political and moral philosophy, Kabbalistic and rab- binic exegesis, and even profane court poetry in the Romance vernacular. The breadth and depth of the familiarity that these texts reveal speaks to a learned reading public seemingly with access to the whole of Iberian cultural patrimony—from the libraries of the monarchs to those of the leading rabbis and Jewish community leaders. While the power and prestige conveyed by the cultural formation of the individual/s who compiled and read this collection is evident in the allusions and citations recorded in these texts, the content and nature of the texts, however, reveal the preoccupations and anxieties of some- one concerned with developing and improving a single, individual intellect. In these works the reader is presented with guides on how to become erudite and proficient in the arts and in the practical skills of political and social life, including the ability to make good decisions. We do not find in these works, though, a religious guide to spiritual or intellectual development. In fact, in works such as the Danza and the Visión the narrative is explicit in its denial of any single religious belief system as an answer to the metaphysical plight of the individual. For the mid-fifteenth-century Jewish and converso readers, the truth was found in Romance vernacular, even if this vernacular was garbed in the robe of

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004282735_009 250 Conclusion the Jewish tradition, the Hebrew alphabet. The use of Hebrew, in all likelihood simply the alphabet first learned by the copyists, serves as reminder, though, of the adaptability and openness of the Jewish tradition in Iberia—a tradition that had, for example, in an earlier historical moment accommodated Maimonides’ Arabic language treatises such as the Guide written in Hebrew characters or Moses ibn Ezra’s (c. 1055–1138) masterful critique of Jewish history and Hebrew poetry composed in Arabic, Kitāb al-Muḥaḍarah wal-Mudhakarah. The use of Hebrew in ms Parm. 2666 also serves on the material level to further reflect the way in which this collection is a witness to an individual ethics, not just of reading, but of textuality. It is designed for a readership confronting a shifting cultural and religious landscape. In the midst of public debates about whether Judaism or Christianity could provide adequate systems of thought and intel- lectual homes for those Jews and conversos not just faced with the choice between one set of beliefs and another, but also with deciding what role their cultural baggage—centuries of intellectual traditions and scholarship around issues of individual belief and communal obligations—should have in such a decision. The texts in ms Parm. 2666 offers a personalized response. This manuscript speaks to the awareness among such Jews and conversos in Iberia of certain points of comparison between Iberian Judaism and Christianity: the belief in a single God and in God’s justice and providence, for example. It also underscores that for this manuscript’s creators, the deeply entrenched Judeo-Andalusi reliance on reason and the sciences continued to provide a viable means of investigating such issues of belief. ms Parm. 2666, with an art of memory at its very center, offers a material artifact that shows how its compilers and readers sought to reconcile Judeo-Andalusi philosophical ideas with the new realities of Christian Iberia. Whether these compilers and read- ers were converts or not is less important than the fact that we find in these texts, both individually and in their collection together, the negotiation of the Judeo-Andalusi textual past (including the intellectual currents of Kabbalah and Maimonidean rationalism) with that of the Christian textual past (includ- ing the scholasticism of Aquinas, Isidore and Alain de Lille). Additionally, the texts bring both textual traditions into dialogue with the even older traditions of Senecan moral philosophy—all contextualized as part of what would be useful in allowing an individual to achieve la bienaventuranza. All of these traditions—the competing intellectual currents in the learned circles of the Jewish and converso elite in fifteenth-century Iberia—can serve to direct the individual to the highest truth: a truth that lies beyond any single faith or creed. The compilers and readers created in ms Parm. 2666 a guide that neither confirms nor denies the truth of either Judaism or Christianity. However, it does not simply offer an Averroist picture of the universe in the sense that crit-