Jean paul egide martini biography of abraham

MARTINI, RAYMOND ° (–), Spanish Dominican friar and polemicist. Born in Subirat, Catalonia, Raymond lived for a long time in a monastery in Barcelona, temporarily also in Tunis where he engaged in missionary activity among Jews and Arabs. He studied Hebrew and other Oriental languages at the college of Murcia, founded to train selected friars in the conduct of religious disputations with Jews and Muslims for the purpose of converting them to Christianity. Raymond was able to read rabbinical writings with ease. He took an active part in the disputation with Naḥmanides at *Barcelona in where Pablo *Christiani was the Christian spokesman (see *Barcelona, Disputation of). In he was appointed a member of the first censorship commission to examine Jewish books for passages allegedly offensive to Christianity. After the disputation of Barcelona, Raymond Martini became one of the chief executors of the anti-Jewish policy of the church.

Raymond's main work is his Pugio Fidei ("The Dagger of Faith"; c. ), divided into three parts of which the second and third are devoted to anti-Jewish polemics. The last part contains extracts from the Talmud, the Midrash, and later rabbinical writings (Rashi, etc.). The book is clearly an attempt to regain the ground lost after

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