Uncovering an Anti-Jewish Procedure in Fifteenth-Century Chambéry

New research sheds light on an anti-Jewish judicial process that took place in Chambéry in 1417. At the center of this discovery is a previously unedited and little-studied treatise, De publicatione haeresum contentarum in Talmud, written by the Portuguese cleric André Dias de Escobar, who was an eyewitness to the anti-Jewish procedure.His treatise constitutes one of the most important surviving sources for the Chambéry trial of the Talmud. It offers a detailed narrative of the events and records an extensive series of alleged confessions attributed to the prominent rabbi Samson de Louhans. The study demonstrates that the purported confessions do not reflect the lived realities and beliefs of the Jewish community in Savoy. Instead, they are shown to be constructed from well-established literary and polemical models circulating in medieval anti-Rabbinic literature. This finding fundamentally reframes the Chambéry trial as a paradigmatic example of a medieval anti-Jewish procedure shaped by textual strategies rather than empirical evidence. Thus, the trial emerges as a key witness to the deeply intertextual nature of anti-Rabbinic discourse during the Middle Ages, highlighting how legal persecution was underpinned by literary constructions.