Moses ha-Kohen de Tordesillas
Spanish Rabbi
Moses ha-Kohen de Tordesillas (fl. 1370s) (Hebrew: משה הכהן) was a Spanish Jewish controversialist of the fourteenth century.
An attempt was made to convert him to Christianity by force. Despite persecution, he remained true to his convictions, although he was robbed of his possessions and reduced to poverty. He was chosen rabbi by the community of Ávila.
He was forcefully made to participate in a religious debate, around the year 1372, with the Jewish convert to Christianity John of Valladolid, in the presence of Christians and Muslims. Moses was acquainted with the Christian sources, and refuted in four debates the arguments of his opponent, who tried to prove the Christian dogmas from the Scriptures.
Soon afterward he was obliged to enter upon a new contest with a disciple of the convert Abner of Burgos, with whose writings, especially with his Mostrador de Jeosticia, Moses was thoroughly acquainted. In 1374, at the desire of the members of his community, he wrote, in the form of a dialogue between a Jew and a Christian, the main substance of his debates, which treated of the Trinity, of the virginity of Mary, of sacrifice, of the alleged new teachings of Jesus and of the New Testament, of the seven weeks of Daniel, and of similar matters. His book, which is divided into seventeen chapters, dealing with 125 passages emphasized by Christian controversialists, is entitled "'Ezer ha-Emunah" (The Support of Faith אמונה).
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This entry incorporates text from “Moses ha-Kohen de Tordesillas” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.