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>Thus, there is confusion within Judaism surrounding the legality or illegality of resorting to magical practices is revealed in the work of Yishaq ben Moseh ha-Levi (? - 1414), better known as Profiat Durán, who was an astrologer to King John I of Aragon. This author criticizes the custom of wise Jews to resort to sources foreign to Judaism, to which he attributes calamities suffered by the Hebrew communities of Germany, France and Spain; he insists on the need to return to Jewish sacred literature and, in particular, refers to the book of Psalms stating that it was the devotion of the Jews of Aragon to this book that saved them from the misfortunes suffered by their fellow believers in other Hispanic territories in the year 1391. But the most significant thing is that his authentic passion for the book of Psalms also leads him to praise the book called Sefer Shimush Tehil Lim (Book of the Surgical Use of the Psalms), probably the most important Jewish magical treatise of the entire Middle Ages and the Renaissance and of which thirty manuscripts with different versions are preserved. The controversy surrounding the admissibility or inadmissibility of magic in Judaism became more acute in the last days of the Middle Ages and the first Renaissance, and expressed in the confrontation between the rationalist Maimonides school and the Kabbalistic and Neoplatonic movements of Jewish mysticism
