Note 143 — Chapter V

Castro, Bibl. Esp., Tom. I. p. 199. Sanchez, Tom. I. p. 182; Tom. IV. p. xii.

I am aware that Don José Amador de los Rios, in his “Estudios Históricos, Políticos y Literarios sobre los Judios de España,” a learned and pleasant book published at Madrid in 1848, is of a different opinion, and holds the three poems, including the Doctrina Christiana, to be the work of Don Santo or Santob of Carrion. (See pp. 304-335.) But I think the objections to this opinion are stronger than the reasons he gives to support it; especially the objections involved in the following facts, viz.: that Don Santob calls himself a Jew; that both the manuscripts of the Consejos call him a Jew; that the Marquis of Santillana, the only tolerably early authority that mentions him, calls him a Jew; that no one of them intimates that he ever was converted,—a circumstance likely to have been much blazoned abroad, if it had really occurred; and that, if he were an unconverted Jew, it is wholly impossible he should have written the Dança General, the Doctrina Christiana, or the Ermitaño.

I ought, perhaps, to add, in reference both to the remarks made in this note, and to the notices of the few Jewish authors in Spanish literature generally, that I did not receive the valuable work of Amador de los Rios till just as the present one was going to press.