Disputation of Tortosa
According to the Jewish Encyclopedia it was not a free and authentic debate, but was an attempt by Christians to force conversion on the Jews.
[1][2] Among the participants on the Jewish side were Profiat Duran and Yosef Albo as well as other rabbinic scholars such as Moshe ben Abbas, and Astruc ha-Levi.
As a followup of the disputations, in May 1415, a papal bull forbade the study of the Talmud and inflicted all kinds of degradation upon the Jews.
The aging antipope, who rejoiced at religious debate, jumped at the opportunity to bring the Jews to a disputation.
[5] At the start of the disputation on February 7, 1413, Geronimo presented the debate's principal points and the prohibition incumbent on the Jews from making any difficulties for Christianity over its course.
These include the passage which identifies the birthday of the Messiah as the day of the destruction of the Second Temple and the statement in the Talmud that the world will last 6000 years, of which the last two thousand would be the Messianic Age.
The Jews responded via a commentary to the midrashim that relied on both the surface (peshat) and comparative meaning (drash) to remove the messianic sting.
They also repeated the statement of Nahmanides in his own disputation that he is not obligated to believe in Aggadah, which led Geronimo to depict them as heretics by their own religion.
This point was to appear in an explicit and expanded form in the Sefer ha-Ikkarim ("Book of Fundamental Principles"), which Yosef Albo wrote following the disputation.
After two weeks of discussion, the head of the Dominican Order summed up, saying that the victory of the Christians is clear and that it was proven with certainty by the Jews' own midrashim that the Messiah has already come.
The Jews' main points were: the Diaspora still exists, even Christianity has not spread everywhere, the nations fight one another, there is no world peace, and people continue to sin.
The Christians forcefully argued that in the midrashim themselves it may be seen that the redemption brought by the Messiah is spiritual, that is, it is atonement for Man and the extrication of the souls from Hell.
Discussion turned to a new topic, around which revolved the earlier Disputation of Paris of 1240: "the errors, heresies, defilements, and blasphemies against the Christian religion" found in the Talmud.
At this point, the Jews apparently decided that it is better for them to keep quiet, and said that although they are convinced that the sages of the Talmud would know how to defend their words, they do not know how to do so.
[6] Vincent Ferrer passed through the communities and compelled the Jews to hear his sermons, then took his campaign north to France in 1416; that year a new king, Alfonso V, took to the throne in Aragon, and subsequently reversed all the anti-Jewish legislation of the Ferrer epoch, protecting the Jews and conversos firmly from the start of his reign and rejecting all attacks on them.
After the fact, Isaac Abrabanel criticized the weakness of the arguments brought forward by the Jewish religious leaders,[8] but it appears that under their duress, their ability to succeed was more limited.
