Paul of Burgos

His wife, Joanna Benvenisti, whom he had married in his twenty-sixth year, refused to convert from Judaism, dying in that faith in 1420; she was afterward buried in the Church of S. Pablo, built by her husband.

Following his conversion, Paul, and later his younger colleague and fellow convert Joshua ha-Lorki (Gerónimo de Santa Fe), took an active role in proselytizing Spanish Jews.

His intelligence and scholarship, as well as his gift of oratory, gained for him the confidence of King Henry III of Castile, who in 1406 appointed him keeper of the royal seal, in succession to Pero Lopez de Ayala.

Paul, who even after he had been baptized continued to correspond with several Jews, including Joseph Orabuena, chief rabbi of Navarre, and Joshua ibn Vives, became a strong proponent of conversion from Judaism.

In the same spirit the chief object of the edict which he drafted as chancellor of the kingdom, and which was promulgated in the name of the regent, the widowed queen mother Catherine of Lancaster, at Valladolid on January 2 (not 12), 1412, was the conversion of the Jews.

This law, which consisted of twenty-four articles, was designed to separate the Jews entirely from the Christians, to regulate their commerce, to allow them their own lifestyle and customs, giving the choice either to live within the close quarters of their ghetto or to accept baptism.

A few years after his baptism he wrote Additiones (which consist of addenda to Nicholas of Lyra's postils on the Bible, and have been frequently printed), and in his old age a Historia Universal in Spanish verse.