1 My thanks to Clifford Ando, David Cantor-Echols, Sara Lipton, Consuelo Tovar Larrucea, and Sofía Torallas Tovar for their generous counsel on councilors ancient and medieval. Readers looking for a fuller treatment of the office may turn to François Foronda’s “La privanza dans la Castille du bas Moyen Age. Cadres conceptuels et stratégies de legiti- mation d’un lien de proximité,” Annexes des Cahiers de linguistique et de civilisation hispan- iques médiévales 16 (2004): 153–97. CHAPTER ONE CHRISTIAN LOVE, JEWISH “PRIVACY,” AND MEDIEVAL KINGSHIP David Nirenberg The teachings and writings of William Chester Jordan have touched many fields, among them the histories of medieval governance and of medieval Judaism. Indeed he himself has done a great deal to bring those two fields together: to teach us, that is, that governance in medieval Christian Europe was often thought of in terms of Judaism, and that Judaism was also a key term of Christian politics. Since sensitivity to that interplay is one of the many intellectual gifts he gives his students, an offering of its fruits can serve as synecdoche for all the others. In this vein, I propose here to explore the relationship between medieval representations of courtiers as hypo- critical “Jews” and the reality of Jews in medieval courts by focusing on the Jewish associations that stalk one Spanish word and the office it came to designate. The word is privado, and the office that of administrative confi- dante, close counselor, intimate minister (compare the English political pleonasm “privy secretary”).1 The word itself awakens curiosity, since it was not an innocent entrant into medieval political vocabulary. Before it was Spanish (or English) it was Latin, privatus, and in that language it had a checkered constitutional past. To Romans in the Republic it designated more or less the opposite of the political: an individual without magisterial power. As Cicero has it in De inventione I.25, “Concerning the fortune of an individual we ask: whether slave or free, poor or rich, privatus or with public power (potes- tate)….” This sense was transmitted by Isidore of Seville in his Etymologies: “privatii are foreign to public offices. The name is the opposite of that given