Joseph Albo and the Reformulation of Jewish Dogma

Joseph Albo (c. 1380–1444), a student of Hasdai Crescas active in Aragon in the early fifteenth century, is best known for his participation as a Jewish delegate in the Disputation of Tortosa (1413–1414), a lengthy forced public debate convened under the auspices of the antipope Benedict XIII (Pedro de Luna) and driven largely by the converted Jew Joshua Lorki (who took the name Jerónimo de Santa Fe), which subjected Jewish communities in Aragon to sustained missionary pressure and contributed to a wave of conversions in its aftermath. Albo's major philosophical work, Sefer ha-Ikkarim (The Book of Principles), completed around 1425, was composed in this charged apologetic climate and is best understood, in part, as an attempt to give Judaism a systematically defensible, philosophically clarified set of core beliefs capable of withstanding both internal rationalist erosion and external Christian polemical pressure.