Our Guest Speaker, Paola Tartakoff, who will be presenting a Public Lecture and Research Seminar next week, was featured in the Jewish ledger this week.  “In 1341 in Aragon, a Jewish convert to Christianity was sentenced to death, only to be pulled from the burning stake and into a formal religious interrogation. His confession was as astonishing to his inquisitors as his brush with mortality is to us: the condemned man described a Jewish conspiracy to persuade recent converts to denounce their newfound Christian faith. His claims were corroborated by witnesses and became the catalyst for a series of trials that unfolded over the course of the next 20 months.”  This is the setting of Paola Tartakoff’s book,Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (University of Pennsylvania Press, Middle Ages Series, 2012), which lays bare the intensity of the mutual hostility between Christians and Jews in medieval Spain.  …  (excerpt from article – read full article here.)

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