The Tikvah Podcast

In July of the year 1263, the Dominican friar Pablo Christiani met to debate the rabbi Moshe ben Nachman, sometimes known as Nachmanides, to discuss whether Jesus was the Messiah, and thus whether Christianity or Judaism had a greater claim to truth. They  conducted this debate in the court of King James of Aragon, who famously guaranteed the rabbi’s freedom of speech, allowing Nachmanides to even advance arguments that, being regarded as heretical by Christian clergy, would have otherwise caused him to be imprisoned or worse. These proceedings are known, famously, in history as the Disputation of Barcelona. To fully understand the context of this debate, one has to know something more about the Dominican friar Pablo Christiani: he was not born Pablo Christiani. In fact, he was born as a Sephardic Jew with the birth name of Saul. Only later in life, having lived as a Jewish man and having been exposed to some Jewish learning, did he convert to Catholicism. Joining the Dominican order as a friar, Saul—newly du