While San Vicente and Pablo de Santa María were thus engaged in reducing to despair the Jews of Castile, the other great Converso, Gerónimo de Santafé, was laboring in a more legitimate way for their conversion in Aragon. He had been appointed physician to the Avignonese pope, Benedict XIII, who had been obliged to cross the Pyrenees, and who, on November 25, 1412, summoned the aljamas of Aragon to send, in the following January, their most learned rabbis to San Mateo, near Tortosa, for a disputation with Gerónimo on the proposition that the Messiah had come. Fourteen rabbis, selected from the synagogues of all Spain, with Vidal ben Veniste at their head, accepted the challenge. The debate opened, February 7, 1414, under the presidency of Benedict himself, who warned them that the truth of Christianity was not to be discussed but only sixteen propositions put forward by Gerónimo, thus placing them wholly on the defensive. Despite this disadvantage they held their ground tenaciously during seventy-nine sessions, prolonged through a term of twenty-one months. Gerónimo covered himself with glory by his unrivalled dialectical subtilty and exhaustless stores of learning and his triumph was shown by his producing a division between his opponents.[342] [Sidenote: _OPPRESSION OF THE JEWS_] During this colloquy, in the summer of 1413, some two hundred Jews of the synagogues of Saragossa, Calatayud and Alcañiz professed conversion. In 1414 there was a still more abundant harvest. A hundred and twenty families of Calatayud, Daroca, Fraga and Barbastro presented themselves for baptism and these were followed by the whole aljamas of Alcañiz, Caspe, Maella, Lérida, Tamarit and Alcolea, amounting to about thirty-five hundred souls. The repressive legislation was accomplishing its object and hopes were entertained that, with the aid of the inspired teaching of San Vicente, Judaism would become extinct throughout Spain.[343] To stimulate the movement by an increase of severity towards the recalcitrant, Benedict issued his constitution _Etsi doctoribus gentium_, in which he virtually embodied the Ordenamiento de Doña Catalina, thus giving to its system of terrible repression the sanction of Church as well as of State. He further forbade the possession of the Talmud or of any books contrary to the Christian faith, ordering the bishops and inquisitors to make semi-annual inquests of the aljamas and to proceed against all found in possession of such books. No Jew should even bind a book in which the name of Christ or the Virgin appeared. Princes were exhorted to grant them no favors or privileges and the faithful at large were commanded not to rent or sell houses to them or to hold companionship or conversation with them. Moreover they were prohibited to exercise usury and thrice a year they were to be preached to and warned to abandon their errors. The bishops in general were ordered to see to the strict enforcement of all these provisions and the