Lorki, Joshua

Abstract

Aragonese Jewish intellectual and physician born in Alcañiz prior to 1370. HaLorki enters the historical record as the author of a Hebrew letter to Pablo de Santa María, the erstwhile Shlomo haLevi, rabbi of Burgos. Yehoshua also penned an Arabic medical tract entitled in Hebrew, Gerem haMa’alot, on the therapeutic value of foods and medicines.

Around 1411, Yehoshua haLorki converted to Christianity and took the name Jerónimo de Santa Fe. Thereupon, Avignon Pope Benedict XIII, at the end of February 1412, declared Jerónimo to be his personal physician and a member of his court. In August 1412, Jerónimo presented Pope Benedict with a treatise – Ad convincendum perfidiam Judaeorum, in which he argued that the messiah had already come, and in the personhood of Jesus. In August of the following year, Jerónimo wrote another polemic against the Jews, De Iudaicis erroribus ex Talmut in which he demonstrated, among other things, that the truth of Christianity was attested to in the corpus of rabbinic literature.

The first of these writings functioned as source material for Jerónimo as the chief representative of Christianity in a disputation that Benedict convened in the city of Tortosa with the representative of Jews from the Crown of Aragon. This 62 session debate began in February 1413 and came to an end in April 1414. The second essay was essential for Jerónimo when a second disputation was launched in San Mateo in June 1414, which lasted for 7 sessions. After this debate, Jerónimo participated in conversionary activities and devoted much energy towards the separation Jews from Christians. Documents from 1419 indicate that Hieronymus de Sancta Fide, the former Yehoshua haLorki, was already deceased.