Have you ever heard of Selemoh Ha-Levi, the chief rabbi of the Spanish city of Burgos in the late XIVth century?
After the horrifying pogroms of 1390-1391, Rabbi Ha-Levi decided it made no sense to live in terror. So he converted to Christianity, went to Paris, became a Doctor of Theology, returned to Burgos, and, under the name of Pablo de Cartagena, became the bishop of the same city where he used to be chief rabbi.
His wife had refused to convert and they divorced. Cartagena managed to place both of his sons in bishoprics and lived to be 85, which was no mean feat in that era.
As a bishop, Cartagena wasn’t just sitting on his ass. He became a scholar of history and together with his brother, also a convert, created famous accounts of history. Cartagena achieved great prestige and power in the ecclesiastical world of the XVth-century Castille and Aragon.
Cartagena’s son Alonso was a bishop, a royal ambassador, a personal friend of the Pope, and the founder of a great school of history. The vision of history these scholars promoted was that of Spain as Sepharad, the Jewish homeland whose original pre-Roman language was Hebrew. They didn’t mention the word Sepharad, of course, but that was the direction of their work.
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