The Regency Council of the Spanish kingdom…

1411 CE

The Regency Council of the Spanish kingdom of Castile and Leon, inspired by the Jewish apostate Paul of Burgos, reinstitutes all the anti-Jewish legislation initiated by Alfonso the Wise (1252-1284).

As Solomon ha-Levi, his original name, Paul of Burgos had been, in the 1380s, the most wealthy and influential Jew of Burgos, a scholar of the first rank in Talmudic and rabbinical literature, and a rabbi of the Jewish community.

His father, Isaac ha-Levi, had come from Aragon or Navarre to Burgos in the middle of the fourteenth century.

Solomon ha-Levi also apparently filled the office of tax-farmer at the same time.

His scholarship and intelligence, no less than his piety, had won the praise of Spanish Talmudic authority Isaac ben Sheshet, with whom he had carried on a learned correspondence.

He had received Christian baptism on July 21, 1391 at Burgos, taking the name Paul de Santa Maria.

French historian Leon Poliakov writes that he converted in the aftermath of the great massacres of Jews which began on June 6, 1391 He himself said that he had been persuaded by the works of Thomas Aquinas.

At the same time, his brothers Pedro Suarez and Alvar Garcia, and his children, one daughter and four sons, aged from three to twelve years, had been baptized.

His wife, Joanna, whom he had married in his twenty-sixth year, remained faithful to Judaism, and will die in that faith in 1420, afterward being buried in the Church of S. Pablo, built by her husband.

Paul had spent some years at the University of Paris, receiving the degree of doctor of theology after several years, then visited London, where he probably remained only a short time, sending a Hebrew satire on Purim to Don Meïr Alguades from that city.

Appointed archdeacon of Treviño, in 1402 (or 1405) ha had became Bishop of Cartagena.

Some historians have written that following his conversion, Paul, like fellow convert Joshua ha-Lorki (Gerónimo de Santa Fe) took an active role in persecuting Spanish Jews.

Kenneth Levin has stated that when a wave of forced conversions of Jews to Christianity began in 1411, Paul "took a leading role in the assault on Spain’s remaining Jews and was responsible for drawing up edicts that isolated the Jews, stripped them of many communal rights, and, most importantly, deprived them of almost all means of earning a living, leaving them with the choice of death by privation for themselves and their families or conversion."

Levin also argued that Paul converted for social and economic (as opposed to religious) reasons following the wave of anti-Jewish violence and forced conversions throughout Spain in 1391.