Daf Ditty Yevamot 30: Conversos

1
MISHNA: In the case of three brothers, two of whom were married to two sisters and one
who was married to an unrelated woman, the following occurred: The husband of one of the
sisters died childless, and the brother who was married to the unrelated woman married, i.e.,
performed levirate marriage with, the deceased brother’s wife and later died himself, childless. In
this situation, both women happen for levirate marriage before the other, remaining, brother.

2
The first woman is dismissed due to the prohibition proscribing the sister of one’s wife, as she
is the sister of this brother’s wife, and the second woman is dismissed due to her status as the
first woman’s rival wife. Following the first levirate marriage, this second woman became the
rival wife of the sister and is therefore exempt from levirate marriage as well. If, however, the
brother married to the unrelated woman performed only levirate betrothal but had not yet
consummated the levirate marriage with the sister, and he died, the unrelated woman, whose
halakhic status with regard to yibbum is similar to that of a sister’s rival wife, must perform ḥalitza
and may not enter into levirate marriage.

3
GEMARA: The Gemara deduces the following halakha from the second clause of the mishna:
The reason that the mishna requires ḥalitza is specifically because he, the brother who was
married to the unrelated woman, performed levirate betrothal with the sister. Consequently,
had he not performed levirate betrothal with her, the unrelated woman would be permitted
to enter into levirate marriage as well. This is true despite the fact that the levirate bond could
potentially render her the rival wife of his wife’s sister. Rav Naḥman said: That is to say, the
levirate bond is not substantial; the woman requiring levirate marriage is not considered married

4
to the yavam. And this is true even if the levirate bond was with a single brother, as this widowed
sister happened for levirate marriage only before the brother who was married to the unrelated
woman; her levirate bond was with him alone.

MISHNA: In the case of three brothers, two of whom were married to two sisters and one
who was married to an unrelated woman, the following occurred: He who was married to the

5
unrelated woman died, and one of the husbands of the sisters married his wife, and then died
childless as well.

The first woman, i.e., the sister who was originally married to the brother who performed levirate
marriage, is dismissed and is exempt from levirate marriage due to her status as the sister of his
wife. And the second woman, i.e., the unrelated woman who had entered into levirate marriage,
is dismissed as her rival wife.

If, however, he performed levirate betrothal with the unrelated woman, and then died, then this
unrelated woman must perform ḥalitza and may not enter into levirate marriage, as levirate
betrothal rendered her status with regard to yibbum as similar to the rival wife of his wife’s sister.

6
GEMARA: The Gemara asks: Why do I need this mishna as well? This principle is identical to
the principle behind the ruling in the previous mishna, and therefore this ruling can easily be
deduced from the previous ruling. Now, just as there, when his wife’s sister became rival wife
of the unrelated woman who was already the brother’s wife, you say that the unrelated woman
is forbidden despite the fact that the forbidden relative joined later, here, where the unrelated
woman became the rival wife of his wife’s sister afterward, is it not all the more so clear that
she is exempt as a rival wife?

7
The Gemara answers: This mishna was unnecessary, and this is how the duplication occurred: The
tanna taught this mishna at first, and with regard to that previous case saw it fitting to render
her permitted, and he permitted her to the brother, for he held that if the forbidden relative joined
the man’s household later, then she would not render the first wife prohibited as the rival wife of
a forbidden relative. And then the tanna subsequently retracted and saw it fitting to render the
woman forbidden. He decided that this woman should be considered the rival wife of a forbidden
relative as well, and therefore rendered her forbidden to the brother.

And since that case was novel, it was beloved to him, and he taught it earlier. In truth, it would
have now been possible to eliminate the present mishna, for there was no longer any novelty in it;
its ruling could be derived by an a fortiori argument from the previous ruling. However, a mishna
does not move from its place. Since this version of the mishna had already been fixed, it was
deemed inappropriate to remove it completely, and it remained in place despite the fact that it was
no longer necessary.

8
MISHNA: In the case of three brothers, two of whom were married to two sisters and one
who was married to an unrelated woman, the following occurred: One of the husbands of the
sisters died, and he who was married to the unrelated woman married the deceased husband’s
wife, and then the wife of the second brother, the other one of the sisters, died. Afterward, the
brother who was married to the unrelated woman died, leaving two women for levirate marriage
before the remaining brother: The unrelated woman and the woman who was previously prohibited
as the sister of his deceased wife. In this case, the sister is forbidden to him forever. She is not
forbidden due to her status as his wife’s sister, as his wife already died and one’s wife’s sister is
permitted after the wife’s death. However, since she was already forbidden to him at one time,
she is forbidden to him forever. When she first happened before the brothers for levirate marriage,
before the third brother married her, she was forbidden to the second brother as his wife’s sister.
Therefore, she is forbidden to him forever. In addition, she exempts her rival wife, the unrelated
woman, from levirate marriage.

9
GEMARA: Rav Yehuda said that Rav said a principle on this matter:

‫ וֵּמת ַאַחד‬,‫ֵיְשׁבוּ ַאִחים ַיְחָדּו‬-‫ה ִכּי‬ 5 If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no
-‫ִתְהֶיה ֵאֶשׁת‬-‫ל ֹא‬--‫לוֹ‬-‫ֵמֶהם וֵּבן ֵאין‬ child, the wife of the dead shall not be married abroad unto one
‫ ְיָבָמהּ ָיב ֹא‬:‫ ְלִאישׁ ָזר‬,‫ַהֵמּת ַהחוָּצה‬ not of his kin; her husband's brother shall go in unto her, and
.‫ וְּלָקָחהּ לוֹ ְלִאָשּׁה ְו ִיְבָּמהּ‬,‫ָﬠֶליָה‬ take her to him to wife, and perform the duty of a husband's
brother unto her.

Deut 25:5

10
 Any yevama to whom the verse “Her brother-in-law will have intercourse with her” cannot be
applied at the time that she happens before him for levirate marriage because she was forbidden
to him at that moment, is then forever considered to be like the wife of a brother with whom she
has children, and she is forbidden to him.

The Gemara asks: What is Rav teaching us with this statement? We already learned this in the
mishna: She is forbidden to him forever, since she was forbidden to him at one time.

11
The Gemara answers: This was necessary lest you say that this ruling applies only in cases where
she was not eligible at all during the first time that she happened before the brothers for levirate
marriage. Such is the case in the mishna, when she was forbidden to the yavam as his wife’s sister
the entire time that she was eligible for levirate marriage. Even though his wife died after the other
yavam married this woman, because she was forbidden to him that entire time, she is forbidden to
him forever. But in cases where she was eligible at some point during the first time she
happened before the brothers for levirate marriage, such as in the scenario where the brother’s
wife died prior to the time when his other brother married her, one could say that she would be
permitted. In that case, since the prohibition had in the meantime been canceled and she was
indeed rendered eligible for levirate marriage with him during the period of the first time she
happened before him, one might think that she would now be permitted. It is for this reason that
Rav teaches us that even in this scenario she would be forbidden to him forever.

Summary

12
The Mishnah of daf 30a illustrates a rule that comes up many times in Yevamos.1

Rabbi Yehuda quoted Rav as encapsulating it that any yevama who cannot do yibum when she
“falls” to her yovom is compared to an eishes ach who has children. What are the mechanics of
this rule? Why should it be this way, if afterwards she becomes fit to do yibum?

The Acharonim learn an explanation from Tosfos on daf 2a. Tosfos asks an intriguing question,
based on our Gemara here. If a yevama who can’t do yibum when her husband dies can’t do it
later, either then even if she is a niddah she should not be able to do yibum afterwards? She was
forbidden to the yovom at the time of “falling”?

Tosfos offers two answers, each one fundamental. First he points out that this is different from
achos ishah and the like. There, the issur applies only to the yovom and not to other people. Niddah,
however, is relevant to everyone.

Secondly, he asserts that such a situation would violate the well-known adage, “Derocheho darchei
noam” – the ways of the Torah are pleasant. The Gemara on daf 87b uses this possuk in a similar
fashion, that once we absolve a yevama from yibum, we will not afterwards require her to do
chalitza. A niddah, on the other hand, is a natural, regular deferral common to all marriages and
her delay is not contrary to “noam.” Now, we need to explain the first answer of Tosfos some
more. If the rule is that once a yevama is forbidden she stays that way forever, what difference
does it make that the issur was one that is relevant to everyone – still, she was forbidden at that
time?

Rav Shlomo Heiman (Siman 2) identifies the focal point of the issur here as the Gemara puts it –
eishas ach without the hetter of yibum. Only if the issur is connected to eishas ach does it stay in
force even if later the circumstances change. Niddah doesn’t fit into the parameters of the rule.
The second answer of Tosfos has a different theme. The issue is that we don’t want to drag her
back into yibum and chalitza (especially if she already remarried), so the actual issur doesn’t
matter.

Rav Shmuel Rozovsky says this answer of Tosfos learns the rule as one of zikah. If zikah didn’t
take effect right away, it won’t later, either (Shiurei R’ Shmuel, note 188). Just to clarify, darchei

1
https://res.cloudinary.com/ouinternal/image/upload/v1594990793/outorah%20pdf/Yevamos_030_EnglishTopicsonChoveres.pdf

13
noam is not an emotional barometer that the Rabbis should decide what feels right or not. Rav
Elchonon Wasserman emphasizes that this possuk serves to assess what the Torah had in mind.
Since it is not “noam” for her to return to yibum activities, it must not be what the Torah meant!

Another place the Gemara invokes this possuk is in Sukkah 32, deliberating what precisely
hadasim (and lulavim) are. One suggestion offered is a prickly plant, which the Gemara rejects
since it is not “pleasant” to have to hold such a thing. There, too, this possuk identifies what the
Torah intended (Kovetz Hearos 6:1). A possible ramification of these two ways of understanding
the Gemara is what the Minchas Chinuch (273:4) addresses.

What is the halacha if at the time of her husband’s death the yevama is forbidden to her yovom
with both an asei and a lav, but then later the asei is removed? The asei of yibum is docheh a lav
but not an asei. Thus, at first she was forbidden to do yibum, but afterwards became permitted.

(His case is a yevama ketana arusa whose yovom is a Kohen Gadol. The Rambam says a Kohen
Gadol is forbidden to ketanos with an asei. When she grows up, that asei stops, and only the lav
of marrying a widow remains.)

The Minchas Chinuch deliberates the question and does not decide it. Here, then, is an instance
where the original issur was not eishes ach but an issur asei, and subsequently was removed. This
would depend on the two answers of Tosfos! If only eishes ach triggers the rule, here it would later
be permissible; an exception to the rule.

But if the issue is “darchei noam,” even in this case they would stay without zikah (Rav Dovid
Povarsky, hearos on Minchas Chinuch).

Another difference between the two approaches may be if a yevama does yibum to one brother
and then he dies. Another brother was forbidden to her the first time around and is now permissible.
Could they do yibum? Returning to the two concepts that R’ Shmuel put forth, let’s see if they fit
here. If the issue is one of eishes ach, that applies here, too. But if the subject is zikah, since this
is a second yibum opportunity (nefila shniya) it may yet take effect.

Rav Elchonon Wasserman quotes Rashi on 2b that they are indeed forbidden, and therefore proves
that the point is eishes ach and not zikah (Ibid. 1:2). That Rashi is discussing the case of ‫בעולמו‬
‫ היה שלא אח אשת‬, a brother who was not yet born when the first brother passed away. The yevama
did yibum with a different brother who then was niftar. The younger brother remains forbidden to
her.

R’ Elchonon finds this difficult to fit into the second answer of Tosfos – what is “unpleasant” about
her marrying this brother after her husband dies? He explains that this also revolves around the
issur of eishes ach – not zikah.

Since it was not permitted earlier, it never can become muttar. (Rashi says the new brother was
born after the first man’s death but before yibum of the second brother. This is disputed later in
the Mesechta.) Thus, he’s understanding both answers of Tosfos as relating to eishas ach, and not
zikah. This is unlike R’ Shmuel above.

14
Summary

PERFORMING YIBUM AFTER AN "ISUR ERVAH" IS REMOVED

Rav Mordechai Kornfeld writes:2

The Mishnah describes a case in which a Yevamah was forbidden to one of the brothers of her
husband, and then the prohibition was removed. The Mishnah states that since she was forbidden
to that brother for one moment, she remains forbidden to him forever.

The Mishnah refers to a case in which two brothers (Reuven and Shimon) are married to two sisters
(Leah and Rachel), and a third brother (Levi) is married to an unrelated woman. When Reuven
dies childless, his wife, Leah, falls to Levi for Yibum. She may not do Yibum with Shimon because
she is an Ervah to him ("Achos Ishto," the sister of his wife, Rachel). After Levi does Yibum with
Leah, the wife of Shimon dies. Then, Levi dies childless. Although Shimon's wife died and thus
Leah is no longer an Ervah of "Achos Ishto" to Shimon, Leah nevertheless remains forbidden to
him because for one moment -- at the time she first fell to Yibum -- she was an Ervah to him, and
thus she remains an "Eshes Ach she'Lo b'Makom Mitzvah."

Rav Yehudah in the name of Rav says that the same Halachah applies during the first Nefilah to
Yibum. If, at the time the woman fell to Yibum for the first time, the Yavam was married to her
sister, then even if the sister dies afterwards the woman remains exempt from Yibum. The Gemara
says that one might have thought that there is a difference between when there are other brothers
who can do Yibum with the Yevamah and when there are no other brothers except the one to whom
the Yevamah is an Ervah. When there are other brothers, one might have thought that she may do
Yibum with Shimon if her sister, Shimon's wife, dies.
Why does the presence of other brothers give more reason to assume that the Yevamah may do
Yibum with her sister's husband after her sister dies?

(a) RASHI implies that the logic for the difference is that since there is an existing Zikah (due to
the presence of the other brother to whom the woman is Zekukah), when the brother to whom she
was forbidden until now becomes eligible for Yibum with her, the Zikah extends to that brother as
well. In contrast, when -- at the time of the death of her husband -- there was no other brother to
whom Zikah applied, Zikah cannot be created from nothing when her prohibition to the surviving
brother is removed.

(b) Another explanation may be suggested based on the words of TOSFOS earlier (2a, DH
v'Achos Ishto). According to Tosfos, Zikah may take effect either at the moment the husband dies
or at any time after he dies. The Mishnah here asserts that his wife remains forbidden to the
brothers forever when she was forbidden at the moment she fell to Yibum not because Zikah
cannot take effect after the moment of her husband's death. Rather, the reason is that "Deracheha

2
https://www.dafyomi.co.il/yevamos/insites/ye-dt-030.htm

15
Darchei No'am" -- the ways of the Torah are ways of pleasantness, and it would not be pleasant
for a woman who was exempt from Yibum (and was permitted to remarry) to become obligated to
do Yibum (and need to separate from her husband if she already remarried) at a later time. For this
reason, if a Yevamah was forbidden to the Yavam at the time of her husband's death, she remains
forbidden to him regardless of any eventuality, and she is permitted to marry others. (The Gemara
mentions the logic of "Darchei No'am" later (87b) with regard to a case in which a man died and
left behind a child, but then the child died. Since, at the time of the man's death, there was no
obligation for his widow to do Yibum (because he left behind living offspring), his wife cannot
become obligated to do Yibum when the child dies. Once she was already permitted to marry
someone else, she remains permitted.)

According to this approach, the Gemara here is clear. If "Deracheha Darchei No'am" is the reason
why she does not fall to Yibum when the Isur Ervah to Shimon is removed, then one might have
thought that such logic applies only when she was exempt from Yibum entirely (such as when
there was only one surviving brother to whom she was forbidden with an Isur Ervah) and she was
permitted to marry others. However, in a case in which she was not exempt from Yibum because
there was another brother to whom she was not an Ervah, there is no unpleasantness involved if a
second brother is required to perform Yibum, even if he was forbidden to her when she first fell to
Yibum. This does not involve a lack of "Darchei No'am" because, anyway, she was not permitted
to remarry until she did Yibum or Chalitzah with the other brother.

Rav teaches that even in such a case, requiring her to do Yibum with the brother to whom she was
originally forbidden is considered a lack of "Darchei No'am." It indeed is unpleasant for a woman
to be required to do Yibum with a brother with whom she thought all ties were severed. (The
prohibition in such a case because of "Darchei No'am" does not mean that she is not prohibited
with an Isur of "Eshes Ach" to that brother. Rather, it means that it is logical that the Torah would
not require her to fall to Yibum in such a case, and thus the Isur of "Eshes Ach" remains and the
Zikah does not take effect.)

(According to Tosfos' explanation, there are two different reasons for why a Yevamah remains
forbidden forever after the first Nefilah and why she remains forbidden forever after
the second Nefilah. Her prohibition during the first Nefilah is due to the logic of "Darchei No'am"
-- she cannot be required to do Yibum with a man with whom she had no obligation of Yibum. This
logic, however, does not prohibit her to that Yavam when she falls to him from a second Nefilah,
since there is an entirely new cause for her to fall to him. Rather, during the second Nefilah she is
forbidden to him because she is his "Eshes Ach she'Lo b'Makom Mitzvah" from the first Nefilah,
and thus she can never become permitted to the Yavam. This approach is problematic, however,
because the Gemara later (32a) seems to associate the two Isurim. The Gemara there says that
once the Mishnah teaches that a Yevamah who was once forbidden remains forbidden after the
second Nefilah, it is obvious that if she was once forbidden she should remain forbidden during
the first Nefilah.)

Once And Again

16
Steinzaltz (OBM) writes:3

There are two Mishnayot on today’s daf that are almost identical. In both of them, the scenario
opens with three brothers, two of whom are married to sisters, while the third brother is married to
an unrelated woman.

In the first Mishna, we learn that if one of the sisters becomes widowed and fulfills
the mitzva of yibum with the brother to whom she is permitted (she cannot marry the brother who
is married to her sister), should that brother now die with no children, neither she nor
her tzara (fellow wife) will become yevamot to the surviving brother. She cannot because he is
married to her sister; her fellow wife cannot because she is the tzara of a woman forbidden to
the yavam.

In the second Mishna, it is the brother who is married to the unrelated woman who dies, and his
wife fulfills the mitzva of yibum with one of the surviving brothers. Should that brother die, as
well, neither she nor her tzara (fellow wife) will become yevamot to the surviving brother. She
cannot because she is the tzara of a woman forbidden to the yavam, since he is married to her
sister.

The Gemara asks the obvious question – why do we need both of these Mishnayot? Aren’t the
cases so similar that there is no need to repeat the rule a second time?

The Gemara’s response is that we really do not need both, and that the rule of the second Mishna
can be understood from the first. Nevertheless, once it was taught, Mishna lo zaza mimkoma – the
Mishna is not moved from its place.

This idea is connected with a time when the Mishnayot were truly an oral tradition, and students
learned them by heart in order. Leaving out or combining Mishnayot may have been very
confusing to those students, so Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi (who edited the Mishna) chose to leave
in Mishnayot even if they were not essential, since they were part of a long-studied tradition.

The case of this Mishnah is of three brothers, two of them, Reuven and Shimon, are married to
sisters, Rachel and Leah, while Levi, the third brother, is married to Sara, an unrelated woman.
Reuven divorces Rachel, and following this divorce, Levi, the third brother, dies. Reuven takes
Levi’s yevama, Sara, for yibum. Reuven now dies.4

3
https://steinsaltz.org/daf/yevamot30/
4
https://www.dafdigest.org/masechtos/Yevamos%20030.pdf

17
The halacha is that Sara is permitted to be taken by Shimon for yibum, and she is not considered
to be a co-wife of Rachel, because their marriages to Reuven did not coincide at any point. Tosafos
asks why the Mishnah illustrates its point with a case of three brothers, as noted
above. The Mishnah could have given a case of two brothers married to two sisters.

One of them divorced his wife, married another woman, unrelated to the sisters, and then he died.
This new wife is permitted to be taken for yibum, as she is not considered a co-wife with the sister
who was divorced. What, then, asks Tosafos, does the Mishnah gain by choosing a case of three
brothers, rather than two? Tosafos explains that the illustration of three brothers provides us with
the ability to show Rav Nachman’s insight of

We must remember that Rav Nachman holds like Rav Yirmiya, that
the moment of evaluating eligibility for yibum is when the brother is all alive and married, not
later, when the death of the brother occurs. If we hold that ‫ זיקה‬is affected, Sara, the nonrelated
woman, would be prohibited as a co-wife of the sisters. Sara’s availability for yibum while Reuven
is still married to Rachel creates a cowife relationship which determines Sara’s status even if
Reuven divorces Rachel before taking Sara as a wife. The ruling of the Mishnah that Sara is
permitted must be due to

This insight can only be illustrated with three brothers. The parallel case with two brothers would
have no implication regarding ‫זיקה‬, because Sara would be permitted if she was never married until
after the divorce, or she would be a bonafide co-wife of Rachel if married to Shimon before the
divorce.

This Tanna holds that the death of the husband causes her to fall to yibum whereas this Tanna
holds that it was her original marriage that causes her to fall to yibum.

R av Yosef Engel (1) questions the nature and origin of the prohibition that restricts the widow to
marry a stranger before yibum or chalitza. One could say that the relationship she had with her
deceased husband has not been severed entirely, just weakened and her “married” status was
downgraded from a transgression that carries the death penalty to a simple prohibition as a
“yevama l’shuk.”

Alternatively, one could say that her relationship with her deceased husband has been severed
entirely and a new prohibition was created, namely yevama l’shuk. Furthermore, if the relationship
with the deceased husband was severed completely what is the nature of the new prohibition? Is it
a general prohibition or is it a prohibition that falls under the category of marriage-related
prohibitions?

One difference between the two approaches would be relevant to the law that concerning marriage-
related prohibitions one is obligated to forfeit one’s life rather than violate a prohibition.

18
Consequently, if the prohibition against marrying a stranger is marriage related it would demand
giving up one’s life rather than violating the prohibition but if it is a general prohibition there
would be no such obligation (2).

Rav Yekusiel Yehudah Halberstam (3), the Klausenberger Rebbe, suggests that our Gemara
addresses this issue. The Gemara mentions the dispute whether it is the death of the husband that
causes his widow to fall to yibum or whether it was the original marriage that causes her to fall to
yibum. According to the approach that maintains that it is the death of the husband that causes her
to fall to yibum it could be suggested that a new prohibition is created at that time unrelated to her
previous status as a married woman.

On the other hand, if one takes the approach that it was the original marriage that causes the widow
to fall to yibum one could suggest that the prohibition against marrying a stranger is a continuation
of her married status rather than a newly created prohibition

On today’s daf we find that the Tanna taught the chiddush first since it was beloved to him. This
is the way of the Gedolim; they have a never-ending thirst for Torah, especially for new and
innovative ways of seeing things.

Rav Eliezer Yehudah Finkel, zt”l, the Rosh Yeshiva of Mir, learned under the Chofetz Chaim, zt”l,
when he was a young man. The winters in Radin were very fierce. There was a tremendous amount
of rain at the beginning and end of the winter, bracketing a mid-winter abundance of snow that
made traveling almost impossible.

Throughout the winter in Radin, Rav Finkel’s shoes were horribly torn, and he had no money to
replace or repair them. He also had six students in whom he hoped to cultivate the ability to be
mechadeish. To this end, he paid them a ruble each month to present him with a powerful and true
chiddush every month.

Although he certainly could have relegated the rubles for whatever he wished, he chose to give up
on the shoes (which cost half a ruble for the best pair), to encourage these six students to use every
instant of their time toiling in learning.

His father, the Alter of Slabodka, zt”l, did not wish to take money from the yeshiva to pay for his
son’s shoes even though he had ample opportunity. The Alter even went so far as to ignore the
powerful entreaties of his wife and the treasurer of the yeshiva when shoes were purchased for all
the bochurim in Slabodka.

19
For the bochurim, yes. For his own son? No. Years later, after Rav Eliezer Yehudah Finkel settled
in Yerushalayim, it was known that even in the hardest times one could always secure money for
one’s Shabbos needs. One merely needed to go to the Mirrer Rosh Yeshiva and tell him a true
chiddush. A chiddush was so precious to him that he would gladly pay all of the person’s Shabbos
expenses for the pleasure!

Rachel Scheinerman writes:5

We now find ourselves midway through the third chapter of Yevamot. We opened this chapter
with a series of mishnah’s about the hypothetical case of four brothers, two of whom married
sisters and then subsequently died childless, leaving both sisters as potential yevamot of the
remaining two brothers. After that, we moved on to a series of mishnah’s about three brothers, two
of whom married sisters.

Each of these mishnah’s presents a slightly different problem that, as the rabbis expertly show us,
teases out unique aspect of the laws of levirate marriage. Together, these cases test the nature and
boundaries of forbidden relationships (and how those might change with the end of marriage —
by death or divorce) as well as the legal status of different steps in the levirate process (from
levirate bond through betrothal and finally completed marriage). At the bottom of today’s page,
we encounter another interesting gray area — uncertain betrothal and marriage.

You may be asking yourself: Do we really need all of these cases? Indeed, on today’s page, even
the rabbis themselves wonder about this. This comes up in the case of two mishnah’s that present
exceptionally similar cases. In the first, two brothers marry two sisters while a third brother marries
an unrelated woman. One of the brothers married to sisters dies childless so the brother who was
married to an unrelated woman performs levirate marriage with the widow. Then this brother, now
married to two women, also dies childless leaving one remaining brother with two potential
yevamot — one of whom is the sister of his wife. The mishnah says both women are now
dismissed — the first because she is the sister of the living brother’s wife, and the second because
she is the co-wife of the first. But if the second brother had performed only levirate betrothal, then
instead the unrelated woman performs halitzah.

In the second mishnah, we again have three brothers, two of whom married sisters and one who
married an unrelated woman. But in this case, it is the brother married to the unrelated woman who
dies childless. Now one of the brothers married to sisters takes on the widow and subsequently
dies childless. This leaves us in a similar position: One remaining brother and two potential
yevamot, one of whom is the sister of his wife. A similar solution is offered: Both potential
yevamot are dismissed — unless of course the second brother only performed levirate betrothal,
in which case the unrelated woman performs halitzah.

You may now be thinking exactly what the Gemara is:

5
Myjewishlearning.com

20
Why do I need this second mishnah? The principle is identical.

Indeed, the end scenario is identical — as is the legal answer. So why do we need the second
mishnah?

One might expect that the rabbis will unearth a fine legal distinction between these two cases, or
perhaps posit that different circumstances surround the two cases. Instead, they offer a very
different explanation for the redundancy:

The tanna (early rabbi) taught this (second) mishnah at first, and with regard to that previous
case saw it fitting to render her permitted, and he permitted. And then the tanna subsequently
retracted and saw it fitting to render the woman forbidden.

Originally, the Gemara explains, the tanna who taught the second mishnah taught something
different than what we just read! He taught that when the second brother died, the wife who was
not the sister of the remaining brother was permitted to him. She was not discounted because of
her co-wife (the living brother’s sister). This made both mishnah’s necessary, as they taught similar
cases with different legal rulings.

However, the tanna subsequently changed his mind and decided the non-related woman was
forbidden to the third brother on account of her co-wife in both scenarios — which is why the
mishnah now reads the way it does. It also means that both mishnah’s end up teaching essentially
the same thing. So why, then, do we still have the second mishnah, now rephrased to reflect the
tanna’s change of heart? Two reasons:

Since it was beloved to him he taught it first and a mishnah does not move from its place.

The tanna was attached to the case and for that reason taught it first, before the previous mishnah
that, when taught first, renders this one redundant. The other reason, the Gemara explains, is that
a mishnah, once fixed, is not removed. And so this beloved mishnah ⁠— which once taught
something novel but, since its original teacher had a change of heart was rendered redundant ⁠—
lives on. It is now taught under the other teaching, and while it doesn’t teach us something novel
about levirate marriage, it does tell us something profound about how the rabbis approached their
learning.

Rabbi Johnny Solomon writes:6

The first Mishna (Yevamot 1:1) in Massechet Yevamot (2a) discusses the situation where a man
with more than one wife dies such that one of these two wives is prohibited to marry her brother-
in-law - with the rule being that both women are exempt from yibum.

With this in mind, the Mishna (Yevamot 3:8) in our daf (Yevamot 30b) raises the question of
whether this law still stands in a situation where it is not entirely certain that those women were
married to the man who died (i.e. where doubt exists whether the formal act of marriage occurred
6
www.rabbijohnnysolomon.com

21
- which is known as ‫ספק קידושין‬, or where doubt exists whether, at some stage or another, one of
them had received a divorce from her husband before he died - which is known as ‫)ספק גירושין‬.

As the Mishna explains, given the possibility that they were married (and therefore neither yibum
or halitzah is required), and given the possibility that they were not married (and therefore either
yibum or halitzah is required), yibum may not be performed with the co-wife but halitzah is
required.

Looking beyond this Mishna and its related halachot, I was then thinking about the words ‫ספק‬
‫ קידושין‬and ‫ ספק גירושין‬which, in this case, are clearly speaking about a situation where some doubt
exists about whether a technical Jewish marriage or divorce has occurred, and this then led me to
consider whether there are marriages where all the technical aspects were performed correctly but
it is highly questionable whether what exists between those two people can truly be called a
marriage, and whether – in rarer cases - there are divorces where all the technical aspects were
performed correctly, but the couple still choose to overlap each other’s lives to such an extent that
it appears that the couple have yet to accept the fact that they are now divorced.

Halachically, we would never call these instances of ‫ ספק קידושין‬and ‫ספק גירושין‬. Still, in a similar
vein to the kinds of cases of ‫ ספק קידושין‬and ‫ ספק גירושין‬described in our Mishna, such relationships
are very confusing because they reflect a status where neither party truly knows where they stand
with the other.

Though infrequent, there are instances where halacha considers a couple to have a ‫ ספק קידושין‬or
‫ספק גירושין‬. But what is less rare is where a couple that are halachically married live in constant
doubt about the comfort within, and the quality of, their marriage. And where this is so, their task
is to think carefully about the options they have – individually and as a couple - to make things
better for themselves.

The Bride by Edward Alfred Angelo Goodall

22
 What does the intent to marry accomplish?

Mark Kerzner writes:7

We saw that the Sages instituted “an intent to marry” in the case of yibum, which looks like
a regular engagement. Note, however, that the couple is already married in some sense: the
mitzvah of yibum is accomplished by intercourse, and strictly speaking, no other formalities
are required. Therefore, what does the declaration of this intent accomplish, an engagement
or a complete marriage?

That was the question posed by Rabbah. Abaye asked – for what practical purpose are we
asking? If it is for a Kohen to allow him to bury her if she dies – the answer is clear: even for
a real engaged bride, a Kohen is not allowed to go to the cemetery, and certainly not for one
with whom there is only an intent to marry. And if the question is, do we need a chuppah
marriage ceremony, then the answer is clear also: he could do a yibum even against her will,
so now that he made a declaration, does it make it any worse? Of course, he does not need a
chuppah!

However, Rabbah answered that this is not so simple. Before the declaration, he indeed had
the right to do yibum. But now that he made it, maybe he lost this right, got the right of a
mere engagement instead, and does need a chuppah.

The question remains without a conclusive proof, and besides it concerns only the opinion
of Beit Shammai, while the practical law always accords with the opposing opinion of Beit
Hillel.

7
www.talmudilluminated.com

23
 Yerushalmi and the Conversos

MARINA RUSTOW writes:8

8
Jewish History , 2014, Vol. 28, No. 1, Special Issue: From History to Memory: The Scholarly Legacy of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi

(2014), pp. 11-49 Published by: Springer

24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
 An “auto-da-fé,” the lethal ritual of public penance for being Jewish during
the period of the Inquisition in Spain, when the country’s Jews either fled or
were forcibly converted.

43
How did sephardic marriages change throughout the diaspora?

44
 • The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-
Cultural Trade in the early modern period
• https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/sephardim

Marriage Ceramonies

• Sephardim: The Jews from Spain

• https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=O3_mP5FywxAC&oi=fnd&pg=
PR7&dq=sephardic+marriage+ceremonies+in+spain&ots=DzYjHvdhEH&sig=ntwH4ZIl
ML_yBjxHEgEVlAo4jwk#v=onepage&q=marriage%20ceremony&f=false
• Kiddushin- Jewish wedding ceremony
• Two parts: “Betrothal” and “Marriage”
• Used to be separate events but became one in the nineteenth century.
• Customary for the bride-to-be to have a ceremony a few days before the wedding
as a sort of farewell to the single life. Basically a bachelorette party.
• During this ceremony the bride-to-be goes to the Mikvah to purify herself before
the wedding.
• She goes to the Mikvah dressed in luxurious clothing and jewelry which is usually
sent over by the groom.
• Under the Chuppah (nuptial canopy), the officiating Rabbi blesses a glass of wine,
and both the bride and groom share the glass. This symbolizes their obligation to share
everything.
• After this, the groom places a gold ring on the bride’s finger and recites the phrase
“Behold, you are consecrated to me with this ring according to the law of Moses and
Israel.”
• Next is the reading of the Ketubah (marriage contract), usually in aramaic, followed
by the seven blessings ending with the breaking of the glass.
• After the marriage was consummated the bride and groom were celibate for seven
days.

Motivation for Marriage

• The Origin of the Curaçao Sephardim and The Bond which Held the Diaspora
Together
• https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10161/11622/M%20Gall
etta%20Lewis.pdf?sequence=1https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10
161/11622/M%20Galletta%20Lewis.pdf?sequence=1
• Personal gain was a priority when choosing a partner during the diaspora
• Since the situations the Jews were placed in as migrants promoted marriage within
the community, families often wanted to keep their wealth in the family
• Jews also arranged marriages for the sake of raising their social status
• Due to the strong oppression toward the Jews, men would marry non-Jews to
remain alive
• Often happened while they were moving around
• Caused by economic downfall in hometown

45
Dowry

• The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural

Trade in the early modern period
• https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Q9UCudXJs-
wC&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=sephardic+jewish+marriage+diaspora&ots=T9aFW8922b&si
g=1L0n4-
2oRFVYF7oK2NX8rHqJuuk#v=onepage&q=sephardic%20jewish%20marriage%20dias
pora&f=falsehttps://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Q9UCudXJs-
wC&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=sephardic+jewish+marriage+diaspora&ots=T9aFW8922b&si
g=1L0n4-
2oRFVYF7oK2NX8rHqJuuk#v=onepage&q=sephardic%20jewish%20marriage%20dias
pora&f=false
• Citation: Citation: De Lara, Yadira Gonzalez. “The Familiarity of Strangers: The
Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period - By
Francesca Trivellato.” The Economic History Review, vol. 63, no. 2, Wiley Subscription
Services, Inc, 1/5/2010, pp. 553–54, doi:10.1111/j.1468-0289.2009.00519_24.x.
• Jewish marriage contracts included three payments- a dowry (nedyna), a dower
(tosefet) and an additional sum (mohar) which depended on the bride’s status as a virgin
or not.
• Brides’ family paid the nedyna
• Husbands’ family paid the tosefet which was half the nedyna in most Sephardic
customs
• Husbands’ family paid the mohar
• Sums were merged to create the entirety of the husband’s assets
• If a wife died before husband, all assets were transferred to him
• If a husband died before wife, she was entitled to what her family had paid and the
50% sum if she had children. If she was childless she usually would receive 25%
• This protected Sephardic capital
• Dowry paid by the bride's family to the grooms. Brides had to claim to familial
assets other than the dowry, which was to be returned at the time of the husband’s death or
if he was insolvent.
• Dowries experienced inflation, causing fathers and brothers to pay daughters/sisters
dowries using real estate. This was not very common amongst Livornese Jews, though.
• Unlike Christians, Sephardic did not favor their eldest born son in passing on the
estate. Instead, they divided it equally amongst all sons and they managed the estate
together.
• 1725- Solomon Aghib advised his sons to stay united despite the estate, and not
allow it to fracture family relations.

46
Marrying outside of Judaism

• A Network of Converso Families in Early Modern Toledo: Assimilating a

Minority
• https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=uAlpyEJCzTgC&oi=fnd&pg=P
A70&dq=jewish+converso+marriages++&ots=t4UfFk1i9I&sig=GaiiBclkWhgR7KgyFx
R-
jptPdCE#v=onepage&q=marriages&f=falsehttps://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&
id=uAlpyEJCzTgC&oi=fnd&pg=PA70&dq=jewish+converso+marriages++&ots=t4UfFk
1i9I&sig=GaiiBclkWhgR7KgyFxR-jptPdCE#v=onepage&q=marriages&f=false
• Conversos were generally chosen as marriage partners when Christian men did
not wish to spend so much money on “a sustainable Old Christian spouse”
• Juan de Herrera, for example, married his daughters to Conversos because he
desired to keep the estate he inherited in the family
• These marriages were often condemned by men like Cardinal Siliceo who
considered these intermarriages to be a greater crime than selling false goods.
• He highlighted that Old Christians should remain with Old Christians and used
the derogatory term Marranos to convey that Conversos should only marry other
Conversos.
• These marriages were often arranged with the daughters of Conversos, who were
mostly assimilated, and aristocrats
• Conversos were also forced to marry Old Christians in the towns of Llerena and
Ocana as a means of bringing the Jews fully into the Chrisitan religion
• Many Old Chrisitan were advised against intermarriage, yet the fact of the matter
was that wealthy Conversos offered large settlements for the marriage to be arranged

47
Inter-marriage

• The Familiarity of Strangers : The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-

cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period/Levirate marriage and the
family in ancient judaism
o Citation: Lisa Mazansky Zashin. “Sephardim: The Jews from Spain.”
Hispanic Review, vol. 63, no. 2, University of Pennsylvania, 1/4/1995, pp. 212–
14, doi:10.2307/474557.
o Levirate Marriages
o Levirate marriage is a term synonymous with “widow-inheritance” and it
was a common practice in ancient Judaism
o If a wife’s husband died and she was left a widow, she was to marry her
brother-in-law
o There are three characteristics of a levirate marriage: 1. The new husband
is related to the original spouse 2. The marriage is seen as legitimate and 3. Any
children the couple have together are considered the offspring of the deceased
o Levirate is linked to inheritance as the children of the wife and the levir
receive the inheritance left by the deceased
o https://bir.brandeis.edu/bitstream/handle/10192/26070/Weisberg.pdf?sequ
ence=1&isAllowed=y
o Citation: Dvora E. Weisberg. Levirate Marriage and the Family in Ancient
Judaism. Brandeis University Press, 2009.
o Levirate marriages were common enough among sephardic Jews that the
community leaders feared the Catholic church would charge them with bigamy
o In 1671, Jewish men were prohibited from remarrying unless they gave up
the dowry from their initial marriage. This was meant to deter levirate
o Main reasons for levirate
o “raise liquid capital and how to ensure its transfer to succeeding
generations.”
o According the the Rashbaz, if either the brother or husband was converted
to christianity as a Marrano/Crypto Jew before the marriage, levirate should not
be practiced
o https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=9y_FvYcR0cYC&oi=fn
d&pg=PR8&dq=jewish+levirate+spanish+inquisition&ots=y5r9j-
TC6O&sig=RtaGkxpDtOvvBzUBUIDDJbDG7TY#v=onepage&q=marriage&f=f
alse
o Citation: Gretchen D. Starr-LeBeau. “The Marranos of Spain: From the
Late 14th to the Early 16th Century According to Contemporary Hebrew
Sources.” The Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 31, no. 1, Sixteenth Century
Journal, 1/4/2000, pp. 205–06, doi:10.2307/2671318.

Bibliography

48
Dowry:
Trivellato, Francesca,. “The Familiarity of Strangers : The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early
Modern Period.” Book. New Haven, Conn. ; London : Yale University Press, 2012.
Tivallato’s book breaks down the realities of life for Sephardic Jews living amongst the diasporas. The novel provides an
overarching account of Sephardic life and pinpoints key components of Jewish cultural life such as marriage. Trivellato explains
the significance of the dowry, what the dowry was composed of, and how the dowry was executed in cases of death, divorce, as
well as under regular circumstances. Tivallato provides the Hebrew terms associated with the dowry and explains key components
pertinent to the wife and the husband’s families. She is able to provide insight into family life and the significance of the dowry in
terms of maintaining status as marriages were performed. She is also able to contextualize the dowry in terms of who it benefited
and how women were protected even if something happened to their spouse.
Glazer, Mark. “The Dowry as Capital Accumulation among Sephardic Jews of Istanbul, Turkey.” International Journal of Middle
East Studies 10, no. 3 (1/8/1979): 373–80. doi:10.1017/S0020743800000167.
Mark Glazer’s paper provides key insights about the use of dowry for Sephardic Jews in Istanbul. The paper describes the role of
the dowry as a mechanism to maintain status for women, as well as its ability to ensure a bright economic future. He explains that
there were three main ways of utilizing the dowry: development of a man’s business potential, securing a positive economic future,
and capital accumulation. Glazer also analyzes how the dowry contributed to already entrenched class structures in the Sephardic
world, as marriages tended to occur between individuals within the same class ranks. On the contrary, Glazer also sheds light on
the dowry as an equalizer. Men who showed potential in the business world received large dowries in some cases because of their
perceived skills. This allowed men from lower ranks to reach a higher economic strata. This paper uses firsthand and secondhand
sources to provide insight into the dowry, including both the benefits and pitfalls of the practice.

Inter-marriage:
Weisberg, Dvora E. “Levirate Marriage and the Family in Ancient Judaism.” Book. Waltham, Mass. : Hanover, NH : Brandeis
University Press ; University Press of New England, 2009.
This novel by Dvora Weisberg covers the prevalence of Levirate Marriages otherwise known as “widow-inheritance” in Sephardic
Jewish life. Weisberg highlights the commonality of levirate marriage, which is the practice of marrying off a widow to her brother-
in-law or another relative of her deceased spouse. Throughout the novel, Weisberg explains the practice of levirate, its legality, and
why it was seen as an effective method of capital accumulation. Another component she explains are the consequences of levirate
on the relationship between Sephardic Jews and the Catholic church. In fact, many Jewish community leaders feared bigamy
charges from the church and advised their communities against levirate marriages. The book uses firsthand quotations from
prominent Sephardic figures to explain levirate marriages and the consequences they led to.
Netanyahu, B. “The Marranos of Spain : From the Late 14th to the Early 16th Century, According to Contemporary Hebrew
Sources.” Book. Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1999.
Netanyahu’s book explains what it meant to be a Marrano Jew in the Sephardic diaspora as well as the long-term effects of having
a large population of Sephardic Marranos. In terms of levirate marriage, Netanyahu writes about the impact of conversion on
levirate if it was done before or during the marriage. He explains that according to the Rashbaz, a prominent Rabbi and scholar
throughout this time period, if either the brother or deceased husband was converted to christianity as a Marrano/Crypto Jew before
the marriage, levirate should not be practiced. Netanyahu analyzes Hebrew sources in order to recount and explain Marrano life.
This book is able to shed light on the “otherness” of Marranos, despite the fact that they remained to practice Judaism privately.

Sephardic Marriage Customs:

Díaz Más, Paloma. “Sephardim : The Jews from Spain.” Book. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Díaz Más’s book talks about Sephardic Jewish customs throughout history. Starting from the Spanish Inquisition, Díaz Más traces
the origins of these everyday customs, and follows them through Mediterranean Europe until the Sephardim make their way to the
United States and Israel in the nineteenth century. The book starts with talking about the historical background of Sephardic Judaism
by discussing Jews in the Iberian Peninsula. The book then talks about the Inquisition, and how the Sephardim lived in the East,
Morocco, etc. While Díaz Más puts a large amount of focus on the survival of the Sephardic language and literature, she takes the
time to mention the more everyday customs. She provides a great amount of detail into the customs, especially with marriage, and
mentions how they’ve survived, or changed, today.
Angel, Marc. “Exploring Sephardic Customs and Traditions.” Brooklyn, NY: KTAV Publishing House, 2017.
Rabbi Marc D. Angel’s book shows that everyday minhagim, or customs, are a way for a Jewish community to express their
religious beliefs. The book brings in essays from leading students of Sephardic minhagim pertaining to areas like Shabbat, holidays,
marriage, etc. Like Díaz Más, Angel puts a heavier focus on different customs, this case being Shabbat and high holidays. However,
he too writes about the everyday customs, marriage included, and provides a brief historical context of Sephardic Jewry. He also

49
mentions how the Sephardic Jews had to rely on the Sephardic halakhic authority at the time. He mentions names such as Rabbi
Isaac Alfasi, Maimonides, and Rabbi Yosef Karo, the author of the Shulhan Arukh.

Motivations for Marriage

Lewis, Melissa. “The Origin of the Curaçao Sephardim and The Bond which Held the Diaspora Together.” (2015).
Melissa Galletta Lewis’s paper on the Curacao Sephardim in the Diaspora highlights that the purpose of marriage deviated from
the customary in the Sephardic diaspora. The intentions for marriage were primarily to maintain or improve familial economic and
social status, and for some, marriage was merely a means of survival. Lewis provides context of Sephardic Jewry from the Spanish
Inquisition, up until the Jews reached the New World and eventually settled in Curacao to emphasize the hardships the Jews had
endured. While mentioning the constant relocation of the Jews in the diaspora, Lewis emphasizes the difficulties Jews faced when
trying to have economic stability. Therefore, once families had higher amounts of wealth, they would arrange marriages with other
wealthy families to maintain their current economic position. Meanwhile, she also discusses that men found themselves moving
around a lot because they could not find stability where they resided. They would then marry a non-Jew while traveling to avoid
being killed.
Gerber, Jane S. “The Jews of Spain : A History of the Sephardic Experience.” Book. New York : Free Press, 1992.
Jane S. Gerber’s book on the history of Sephardic Jews focuses on the renewal of Jewish life after the Spanish Inquisition.
Specifically, she focuses on the bonds between mercantile families, and how they were strengthened for Jews living in the diaspora.
Their friendships were more formal and virtually mirrored business partnerships. However, Gerber emphasizes that these “formal
friendships” were solidified through marriage. These arranged marriages also focused on putting one’s own blood before their
marriage, so marriage was reliant on the current status of a family’s partnership, as opposed to the couple’s own likings. Also,
Gerber mentions the implications for the partnerships between the wealthy within their communities in the Sephardic Diaspora.
Since the wealthy made decisions on behalf of the community families would use their partnerships as a means of communal
influence and power.

50
 Pedro Berrugete, ‘Saint Dominic presiding over an Auto-da-fe,’ 1493-1499

Men and Women of the Nation

How the Inquisition’s conversos defined Jewish religious and ethnic identity in
ways that are still prevalent today

DAVID L. GRAIZBORD writes:9

Since the 19th century, it has become a truism among many Jews that the principal if not the only
determinant of Jewish identity is Jews’ relationship to a “religion” called “Judaism.” Corollaries
to this truism abound. For instance, practically since the establishment of the State of Israel it has
been common for the country’s citizens, notably its elites—government officials, university
scholars, and journalists—to refer to the “religious” and “secular” “sectors” of Israeli Jewish
society. Correspondingly, many Jewish Israelis view themselves as either “religious” or “secular.”
Many other Israeli citizens, particularly among those of Mizrahi and/or Sephardi background,
carve out what they perceive to be a middle ground between religion and secularity by referring to
themselves as “traditional”—that is, neither ultra-secular (that is to say, anti-religious in principle),
nor ultra-observant of Halakhah. In all cases, Jews’ approach toward to their ancient “religion” is
what supposedly defines the type of Jewishness that they embody.

The emphasis on the binary of Jewish “religion” and irreligion is especially pronounced in the
United States, where national censuses have typically categorized Jewish identity in terms of
“religion,” but never “ethnicity” or “nationality.” A particularly striking finding of a much-
discussed 2013 Pew study of American Jews is that a vast majority of respondents whom the
researchers categorize as “Jews of no religion” are married to non-Jews, and in over half of those

9
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/men-and-women-of-the-nation

51
cases are raising either non-Jewish children (37%) or children who partake of both Christian and
Jewish religious celebrations (18%), evidently without a sense of contradiction.

This wide-open, seemingly relativistic approach toward Christian and Jewish self-identities flies
in the face of much sociological and historical experience. For centuries, people of Jewish origin
who have assimilated fully into larger, non-Jewish communities and have ceased to have
meaningful contact with real or imaginary Jews have been, in effect, non-Jews except in the most
technical, halakhic sense, as well as in the eyes of anti-Jewish bigots for whom Jewishness is
essential and indelible. To cite but one example, a colleague recently shared with me that her father
had raised her as a member of the Methodist Church, never divulging that he was a Jew whose
first language was Yiddish. The man had never converted to Christianity yet never mentioned,
much less cultivated Jewish connections. She only discovered his Jewish origins after a relative
conducted genealogical research long after the man’s death.

The above observations concerning Israeli and American Jews would have little or nothing to do
with the work of Yosef Kaplan, an early modernist historian, if the unique historical experiences
of judeoconversos and “New Jews” (judíos nuevos) of the Western Sephardi Diaspora of the 1600s
and 1700s did not already adumbrate the important polarity of “religion” and “ethnicity” that
informs modern definitions of Jewishness in Israel, in the United States, and probably elsewhere.
In this brief essay, I would like to consider the historical development of that polarity, especially
as it entrenched itself early on in the experience of judeoconversos and “New Jews, ”also known
collectively as the nação/nación. As Kaplan’s work has proven, during the early modern centuries
these subjects often assumed the polarity and used it to build their concepts of personal and group
selfhood.

It bears mentioning that none of the historical terrain I will survey is uncharted, and none of my
insights are particularly inaccessible. The facts are well known. What I wish to do is put them
together in a way that allows me to reflect on them in ways that defy facile characterizations of
Jews’ difference and that of many New Christians as a matter of “religion,” as distinct from a
comprehensive way of life. The point is too de-naturalize the idea of “Judaism” that has long been
entrenched as a descriptor of Jews and of many of their Christianized descendants. As I will explain
that concept and all it conveyed are things that Iberian Jews adopted and their New Christian and
New Jewish descendants internalized over centuries as Ibero-Christian culture encroached upon,
and in the case of judeoconversos, enveloped their lives. I am interested in noting the sometimes
subtle, sometimes accretive, and sometimes sudden shifts in imagination and discourse that
resulted in Jews and conversos’ changed assumptions about the nature and meaning of Jewish
identity.

Specifically, I wish to provide a few snapshots of the process by which the concept of “Judaism,”
also called “The Law of Moses” as a “religious” marker of judeoconverso and New Jewish
identities took shape, came to prominence in Jewish-Christian polemics in Iberia, and then became
central to the lives of judeoconversos and New Jews. In the sections that follow I will show how
this long-term process effectuated the fateful, perceptual fracture of Jewish identity into “religious”
and “ethnic” components.

52
As scholars of the ancient world know, “Judaism” is not a Jewish term, but a Greek one: Iudaismos.
The word emerged from within a Hellenic cultural matrix to designate the laws and customs of the
people of the Israelite state of Judah. For that people, however, there was no “Jewish religion,” in
the Western sense of a systematic, much less creedal theology and associated rituals of God-
worship, all anchored in private belief as the sine qua none of identity and community. It is telling
that the pre-modern Hebrew language had no word for “religion,” yet included several terms that
designated what the Greeks themselves recognized as the Judahite ethnos.

As the Greek empire-builders of the ancient world understood, Judahites (or Judeans) were
characterized by their way of life. Judeans lived as they did not because they had evaluated, as if
in a laboratory, all available ways of life and determined theirs to be the most cogent, truthful,
aesthetically appealing, spiritually uplifting, or philosophically elegant, but simply because they
were Judeans and they perceived their distinctive way of life to be their ancestral inheritance. In
the traditional terms of the writers and editors of the Tanakh, the way of life of the Judahites had
originated in the commands of their national God. That deity had freed the Israelites and had forged
a covenant with them as the extended family of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that is to say, as an
ethnic collectivity. At the foot of Mt. Sinai, the Children of Israel, including those of the Tribe of
Judah, had promised to observe, not to “believe” in or to assess the validity of the terms of that
covenant; in the famous words of Exodus 24:7, na’aseh ve-nishmah.

To be sure, Judeans’ lives entailed behaviors and ideas that modern social science would classify
as “religious” in the sense that they expressed an idealized relationship between humans and the
transcendent; sought to enact that relationship; and conveyed an understanding of the proper order
of the universe. However, ancient Judahites did not distinguish between realms of “religion” and
the “secular” (as distinct from the holy and the profane) much less between social and political life
on one hand, and theology and worship on the other. Indeed, the perceived coextension of kinship,
politics, economy, theology, cosmology, worship, law, and social customs was part and parcel of
many ancient cultures. Thus, for instance, ancient Egyptian heads of state were considered to be
“High Priests of Every Temple” as well as Gods. By the same token, for Judeans of the First and
Second Temple Periods, the core “religious” act of Temple pilgrimage was a way of following
national law, and thus affirming loyalty to the divine sovereign, a figure the Hebrew Bible depicts
as the true head of the Israelite polity (e.g., Sam. 8:7). Offering sacrificial animals and agricultural
products at the Temple was as much a matter of paying taxes to the state, specifically to the
governing priestly class, as it was a matter of expiating sin and articulating any inner “spiritual”
convictions. Arguably, the latter understanding of religion as an essentially “confessional” matter
of private conscience would only become dominant in the West under the impact of the Protestant
and Catholic Reformations.

Just as Judeans did not approach their Temple as a “religious” shrine (let alone a “house of
prayer”), so too generations of Tanna’im, and Amora’im after the destruction of the Second
Temple did not approach being Judean as a matter of “spirituality” and upholding “religious”
obligations. Indeed, these men were not engaged in the construction of anything they called a
Jewish “religion,” much less “Judaism.” The Mishnah, the Gemaras, and associated rabbinic texts
present a host of theological ideas, but they formulate no systematic theology. Classic rabbinic
texts assign a positive value to the concept of emunah (faith, loyalty, trust), but stress neither it,
nor persuasion, as necessary to Jewish identity.

53
By the same token, Rabbinic norms concerning “religious conversion” are nothing of the kind;
they are procedures for giyur, a noun denoting a process of adoption or, to borrow a modern term,
naturalization whereby non-Judeans are integrated with the Jewish nation—the extended Jewish
family—and socialized as Jews, specifically, as gerim, meaning “those [strangers] who dwell
with” Jews. Notably, Rabbinic texts generally do not speak of “[the] Jews” ([ha-]Yehudim) but
rather, of the collective “Israel,” whose redemption would be communal and occur in history, in
the world, not in an ethereal and timeless realm. Because Jewish tradition has it that the Torah was
revealed to the entire community at Sinai, divine guidance, and hence redemption itself, is assumed
to be public and collective, not private and individual.

Halakhah and Aggadah were both intended primarily to fashion and to explain the national way
of life of Israel, a complex of law and lore the rabbis sometimes called “The Life of Torah.” The
sages configured the latter as an all-encompassing cultural system of and for Israel. By contrast,
the conceptual organization of reality into two realms, the abstract and the concrete—in
Aristotelian terms, “form” and “matter”—was basically foreign to that way of life. Greek
philosophical dualism influenced the rabbis, to be sure, as it did many other Judeans in the
homeland and in the Diaspora. As Erich Gruen observes, the relationship between “Hellenism”
and “Judaism” was not one of zero-sum opposition; and inasmuch as Jews became Hellenized to
some extent, this generally did not result in “syncretism.” Rather, Jews reexamined their traditions
in light of the Greek culture(s) they encountered throughout the Mediterranean, yet they
endeavored to express and thus ultimately retained their cultural distinctiveness. Notably, pagan
Hellenism did not overthrow the monistic assumptions of rabbinic discourse, which became
normative among Jews by the Middle Ages.

However, Hellenic dualism did become a primary, shaping component of Christianity—and hence
of Christian understandings of Jews. According to the Pauline letters, for instance, non-Judeans’
adoption of the belief that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah signaled that the Old Israel “of the
Flesh,” had been superseded by a New, multinational, indeed un-national “Israel of the Spirit.”
Paul had it that a majority of the “Carnal Israel” had forsaken God and thus ensured the Judean
People’s perdition, at least until the emergence from within its ranks of a “saving remnant” (Rom.
11:5). In Pauline Christianity, not only could one be “Israel” and not a Judean, then, but
membership in the spiritual Israel, the verus Israel, effaced all national distinctions to forge a
single, undifferentiated body of believers (Gal. 3:28, Col. 3:11).

Fatefully, Christian theology for the most part followed Paul’s disapproving, if somewhat
ambiguous conception of the genealogical Israel of his day. Though Christianity eventually
developed variants that closely associated the ethnicity and religion of discrete groups of
believers—witness the emergence of ethnically-specific churches such as the Armenian—
Christianity as a transnational cultural system consistently divorced the “spiritual,” namely the
“religious,” from the “temporal,” including kinship and its corollary, nationality.

By the Middle Ages, entire Christian civilizations had developed in accordance with this dualistic
worldview. Christian social institutions assumed a sharp contrast between the secular and the
religious—or as Jesus and his disciples had allegedly put it, the world and heaven, Caesar and
God, and body and spirit. Jews were central to this imaginary system, both as tolerated inferiors
who were integral parts of Christians’ economic and social life (per Augustine of Hippo), and as

54
symbols of carnality, often demonized, persecuted, and humiliated. At any rate, Jews’ imputed
“blindness” to the spiritual message of God, and their “obstinacy” in continuing to live in
accordance with their supposedly earth-bound character, became axioms of Christian theology. As
David Nirenberg has recently argued, Jews and Judaism were correspondingly central to the self-
definition of Christianity.

With the consolidation of the Christian Reconquista, anti-Judaism took the form of a centuries-
long series of missionary campaigns. Unprecedented fiscal and political pressure upon
Iberian kehillot accompanied these polemical assaults. The Jews’ sense of their unprecedented
vulnerability and of the relative futility of rhetorical counterattacks is already palpable in the words
of Yaakov ben Reuven of Huesca (12th century), author of the anti-conversionist
treatise, Milchamot ha-Shem: “What should the afflicted reply to he who afflicts him? … How can
we be declared innocent by judges who are both princes and judges? Oh, the muzzle is upon our
mouths and our tongue. … Are we not stricken and broken in our time more so than in previous
times? We are an exiled and captive nation, beaten and afflicted by the enemy.”

Led mainly by local clergymen, theologians and preachers, the Hispano-Christian crusade against
Judaism led to the near-destruction of Castilian and Aragonese kehillot from 1391 to 1415, and to
the concomitant problem of judeconversos. The outlines of the story are well known: By the end
of the Tortosa Disputation in 1414-1415, some half to two-thirds of Castilian and Aragonese Jews
had become titular Christians. Irrespective of their Christian sincerity or lack thereof, in many if
not most cases the converts and their immediate (baptized) descendants still lived among or
relatively close to Jews and had extensive social, economic, and familial relations with them. This
meant that for the first time, the religion and the ethnicity of tens of thousands of people once
known and still widely regarded as “Jews” were at odds: New Christians were “Jewish” as
concerned their social and economic relations, their ethnic culture, and their social reputation, yet
their religious identity was at least theoretically identical to that of the majority population.

The massive scale of this phenomenon obligated rabbis, clergymen, and local and state officials to
struggle like never before to disentangle the Jews from the former Jews both conceptually and in
practical terms. In effect, these authorities had to redefine the meaning of Jewishness and
Christianness given the ambiguities in the social status and behavior of judeoconversos. Two
questions delineated the challenge: Were these New Christians still Jews? If so, of what did their
Jewishness consist of?

Canon law and rabbinic law, each in its own way, provided reasonably clear answers to these
questions. Christian norms had it that a Christian was a person whose baptism was valid in the
eyes of the Church. (In acceding to the establishment of a Holy Office effectively controlled by
the crowns of Castile and Aragon in 1478-80, Pope Sixtus IV legitimated the earlier mass
conversions of Iberian Jews as “not absolutely forced.”) Halakhah, for its part, had it that Jews
who turned away from God by joining a non-Jewish community, were but sinning Jews, and thus
still part of kehillat Israel. My impression is that this legal principle was generally upheld in the
medieval Jewish Diaspora notwithstanding differences of opinion between various poskim.

Yet, the complexity and fluidity of the new social and cultural landscape in the crowns of Castile
and Aragon generated doubts that checkmated these hard-and-fast definitions. For instance, Iberian

55
rabbis faced the legal dilemma of having to determine the fate of wives or husbands whose spouses
had converted to Christianity before undergoing halakhic divorces. Similarly, Christian city
councilmen, regional parliaments, and royal officials had to resolve a host of unprecedented legal
and fiscal matters. To mention but one bone of contention: Were judeoconversos responsible for
paying “Jewish” taxes they had incurred before their conversion to Christianity? For the most part,
governmental bodies answered in the affirmative, thereby branding as quasi-Jewish the Christian
population that they ostensibly sought to assimilate.

As time passed, however, the original converts and their descendants became partially of fully
integrated with the larger Christian community of faith. From 1391 to 1492, the center of gravity
of Jewish life in Castile and Aragon shifted to rural areas. This outcome owed much to
segregationist legislation, as well as to the fact that from 1478 to about 1530, inquisitorial tribunals
controlled by the Castilian and Aragonese crowns succeeded in violently suppressing real and
alleged “Judaizing” among New Christians. Most of the practices of fraternization between Jews
and New Christians that had alarmed Christian observers in the cities, where the tribunals were
most active, subsided. Significantly, new definitions of Jewishness born of the original crisis of
cultural classification acquired an unprecedented social force.

Of particular interest in this connection is the promulgation as early as 1436 of private and
municipal statutes of “Cleanness of Blood.” The latter concept formally recast and stigmatized
Jewishness as a matter of descent rather than of official religious status, much less of demonstrable
belief and behavior. Equipped with this new notion of purity, “Old Christians” began to treat
questions of morality and religious fealty as matters of familial heredity.

For their part, Jews acquired a correspondingly acute consciousness of their genealogy. In this they
echoed some of their ancestors’ earlier fixation with the (allegedly) “noble” Judean pedigree of
the Judeo-Andalusi group. Eleazar Gutwirth has found evidence of a new genealogical turn in
Jewish letters of introduction from the late 1300s and early 1400s. These letters differ from older
ones in explicitly distinguishing between “good” Jewish families—that is to say, families whose
members had not converted—and families sullied by Christianization. A fateful message of the
letters was that while Iberian Jews may share ethnicity, their differing fealty to God rendered them
essentially separate. What now mattered for purposes of determining a Jew’s character as a Jew,
was not only the quality of his or her behavior as an observer of mitzvot, but the caliber of his or
her yichus.

Paradoxically, the highly-charged environment of religious propaganda that preceded and

accompanied the mass conversions and continued until the final expulsion of Iberian Jews in 1492-
1498, pulled Jewish discourse on identity in a non-genealogical direction as well: Jewish
intellectuals echoed the terms in which the Christian debate against “Judaism” painted Jewish
culture. Specifically, whether for purposes of debate or true conviction, or both, some Jewish
intellectuals tacitly adopted the Christian definition of the Jews’ way of life as a “faith” founded
on theological propositions, and hence analogous to Christianity. Evidence of this internalization
includes subtle rhetorical turns whereby Jewish polemicists conveyed that Jewish culture is a kind
of faith-based theology defensible via rational argument or intuition, and in that sense a sort of
inverted mirror-image of Christianity, rather than the self-evidently valid and exclusive way of life
of a people per se. In this understanding, Jewish “faith” did not follow solely from the prior

56
existence of a people subject for centuries to a legal covenant with God, but from the absolute
“Truth” of Judaic theology, especially the revelation at Sinai and the prophetic messages of the
Hebrew Bible.

In one respect, this shift in emphasis was to be expected. Anti-Jewish polemics, riots, and the
resulting mass conversions of Iberian Jews radically restructured relations between Jews and
Christians in the Spain of the late Reconquista. Explicitly defending Jewish culture against the
claims of an ascendant Christianity was now an existential priority for Jews. Relativistic arguments
along the lines of “Each person may be saved in his or her own [religious] law” could scarcely
withstand Anti-Judaism’s aggressive, zero-sum approach.

Francisco de Goya, ‘Escena de Inquisición,’ 1812-1819

We must also consider that Sephardi Jews’ portrayal of their culture as a theologically-grounded
and logically validated “faith” was nothing new. In fact, the portrayal far antedated the
persecutions of the late Middle Ages. Arguably, the rabbis of the Mishnah and both Gemaras had
already configured “the Life of Torah” as a kind of philosophy, albeit far from a systematic one.
At any rate, modern scholarship has frequently noted affinities between the Tannaitic and Amoraic
groups on one hand, and Hellenic philosophical schools, especially the Stoics, on the other. Greek
philosophy likewise shaped the thought of Philo, Sa’adia Gaon, and several other important late
antique and early medieval Jewish writers. More significant from the standpoint of this essay is
that Greco-Arabic thought had a shaping influence on Sephardi intellectuals of the Middle Ages.
We may view the long-running struggle between Maimonideans and traditionalists in high
medieval Provençe and the Iberian Peninsula in this light. One of the main foci of the Maimonidean
controversy was, to greatly simplify, whether Jews’ faith should be anchored primarily on an
intuitive apprehension of an abstract, divine Truth via the traditional study of holy texts
and halakhic performance, or on the rationalistic study of both nature and Jewish traditions.

57
On one extreme of the philosophical spectrum, some Sephardi and Judeo-Provençal thinkers
argued for a sharp differentiation between the spirit of Halakhah, which they accepted,
and halakhic practice, which they allegedly neglected and ridiculed. This distinction approximated
the dualism and the repudiation of Jewish law that still undergird Christianity. Among the claims
characteristic of this tendency among Jewish intellectuals were that the Torah should not be read
literally, as its true meaning was allegorical; thus, for instance, the patriarchs Abraham and Sarah
should be read as the Aristotelian categories of form and matter; the twelve tribes of Israel as the
signs of the zodiac; and the four kings mentioned in Genesis 14:1 as the four elements.

In order to fully understand how and why dualistic notions of “Judaism” implicated themselves
into the discourse of Jews and judeoconversos in the late Reconquista, it is useful keep in mind the
intellectual precedents just surveyed. However, we must also return to the fact that the perceptual
shifts in question took place in the context of a bitter confrontation with Christianity throughout
the realms of Castile and Aragon. A poignant illustration of this phenomenon is a letter that the
Aragonese scholar Yehoshua ha-Lorki sent circa 1400 to his erstwhile teacher, the former Shlomo
ha-Levi, who had by then become the prominent cleric Pablo de Santa María.

In his letter, ha-Lorki considers several of his teacher’s possible motives for converting, including
greed, hedonism, despair at the continued misery of the Jewish people in exile, and openness to
the seductive appeal of pure philosophical rationalism. After examining and discounting these
motives one by one, ha-Lorki concludes that his former master must instead have become
convinced of the truth of the Christian claim that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, “and that all
the prophecies that speak of the Messiah and the redemption fully conform with his particulars;
that is to say with his birth, death, and his resurrection.”In other words, ha-Lorki calculated that
the sagacious ha-Levi had become intellectually persuaded by Christian exegesis and theology—
the very foundations of anti-Jewish polemics.

That a wise man of Israel had accepted Christians’ allegorical reading of the Tanakh filled ha-
Lorki with “surging doubts” and “horror.” And yet ha-Lorki was ideologically closer to
Christianity than he cared to admit. We know this because, as Benjamin Gampel has noted, the
author described his wayward teacher as a master of “two Torahs.” By this the pupil did not
mean torah she bi-ktav and torah she be-al peh. Rather, ha-Lorki meant the Torah and the
Christians’ holy scriptures. In a word, ha-Lorki had internalized the standard Christian
understanding of divine revelation, according to which God had given humanity two “laws,” the
Old Testament and the New. Notice also that ha-Lorki made reference to Jesus’ “resurrection”
without qualification, as if tacitly assenting to the claim that Jesus had indeed conquered death.

It may well be the case that ha-Lorki was the same man who later converted to Christianity and
became the anti-Jewish activist Gerónimo de Santa Fe. If so, we can surmise that the psychological
pressure of his master’s defection—and Christian aggression and political success in general—
weighed heavily on ha-Lorki’s understanding of Jewish culture. But even if we were to prove
conclusively that the letter writer was not the person who became Gerónimo de Santa Fe, his
anguished letter is nonetheless a significant sign of change in the way that at least some learned
Iberian Jews understood their identity. Simply put, the writer implied that Jewish culture was
founded upon an “old” revelation, one threatened by the intellectual force and evident worldly
success of a “new” and possibly “true” dispensation.

58
Ha-Lorki’s tacit adoption of this premise represents a critical concession to anti-Judaism. To put
it simply, Jews could look around them, survey the ruin of Jewish life in the Hispano-Christian
realms, and find in the zero-sum relationship between the “old” and the “new” religions a
compelling description of reality. No appeal to Jews’ collective memory—to their ancestral
inheritance, to God’s exclusive promises to the Jewish nation—and to evidence of Jewish
wellbeing outside of Castile and Aragon could then fully allay such an apprehension. By the very
terms of the debate that their Christian assailants had forced Jews to join, Judaism must therefore
be invalid. Articulate converts such as Pablo de Santa María and Gerónimo de Santa Fe often
argued as much. To them, baptism was a politically obvious choice. The wide disparity of coercive
power between a persecuting faith-community par excellence, and their ethno-religious
community of origin, was blatant. By joining the Christian body of believers, these men partook
of the latter’s full control over the agenda of inter-group relations.

Sophisticated turncoats, though, were far from the only ones who adopted the language of
“religion,” “truth,” and “belief” to describe Jewish culture. Jewish intellectuals who imperiled their
lives by defending their community publicly did so as well. Let us look for example at the
delegation of rabbis who participated under duress in the Tortosa Disputation (1413-1414).
Shlomo ibn Verga’s idealized account of the event has the Jewish representatives addressing to
(Anti-)Pope Benedict XIII the following rebuke of their Christian counterpart, none other than
Gerónimo de Santa Fe:

It is noteworthy that before issuing the above-quoted response, the members of the Jewish
delegation at Tortosa had allegedly appealed to the Pope’s forbearance with a different complaint:
As Jews, they argued, they were not accustomed to debating Christians; they did not occupy
themselves with the “syllogism and logic” that Gerónimo was now employing against them, but
rather relied on their “tradition” for guidance. All the same, the coercive framework of the
disputation forced them to construct a counter-polemic comprehensible to their hostile
interlocutors. In doing so they translated and thus reconfigured aspects of their culture into non-
Jewish terms.

In 1492, the expulsion of Jews from Castile and Aragon brought to an end a century of acrimony
between Jews and Christians in those realms. New Christians were left radically isolated from their
Jewish relatives, indeed from any other living source of Jewish culture. Even

59
if judeconversos wished to cultivate some secret identity worthy of the name “Jewish,” the
difficulty of doing so was nearly insurmountable.

As the 16th century progressed, these conditions did not change substantially. A few Jewish texts
were available to educated conversos, as were a few scraps of practical Jewish knowledge that
handfuls of Jewish travelers managed to bring into the peninsula. Ultimately, however,
Spanish conversos had no choice but to become deeply Christianized and Hispanicized. Those
among them who had not been reared as openly-professing Jews could scarcely develop anything
more than vague and distorted notions of Jewish life. This is not to say that some conversos did
not exhibit patterns of dissidence as well as a sense of alienation. But as regards nonconformity,
many if not most instances of “Judaizing” discovered after the brutal inquisitorial purges of 1480-
1530 appear to be little more than figments of a quasi-Jewish anti-Christianity, so to speak. Much
of the concrete substance of “Judaizing” consisted of ideas and practices derived from the “Old
Testament” (not the Hebrew Bible), anti-Jewish works, and inquisitorial and other Christian
religious propaganda, including some propaganda that preserved ethnological traces of Hispano-
Jewish life. In several cases inquisitorial persecution itself, and not the burning embers of a
“remembered faith,” was what suscitated the practice of various forms of religious heterodoxy
among judeoconversos.

One does not need to accept the position that the Holy Office perpetrated a grand, centuries-long
hoax to see that many if not most specific accusations of “Jewish” ritual performance leveled
against New Christians focused on mere ethnological details, such as avoiding pork, that are
neither violations of Canon Law nor make anyone a Jew in halakhic or even biblical terms. New
Christians’ real or alleged theological violations, by contrast, go to the heart of our problem. The
language that Old and New Christians employed to describe these latter infringements is not only
reminiscent of the anti-Jewish rhetoric of the period of the mass conversions. The language also
underscores the fact that toward the 16th century, the concept of a soul-saving Jewish “faith” in
the Christian mold became fully ingrained as the chief marker of real and
imagined judeoconverso difference in a society that had entirely rid itself of Jews.

Historians have treated the phenomenon of anti-converso rhetoric from the 15th to the 17th
centuries at length. Suffice it here to note that the focal point of the opprobrium was the “vomit of
Judaism” (cf. II Pet. 2:22) to which judeoconversos were allegedly wont to return. For instance, in
1449, the New Christian Bishop Alonso de Cartagena (1384-1456) wrote:

60
As the above quotation suggests, Bishop Cartagena, the son of Pablo de Santa María, vehemently
opposed legislation that barred New Christians from public office and other honors on the basis of
their Jewish ancestry. His point here was that Jewish blood and impure religion—by implication,
Judaism—should not be conflated (yet notice that the Bishop conflates “Judaism” and “Judaizing,”
thereby indicating his internalization of a Christian idea of Jewishness). To avoid this error, the
Bishop proposed that Christians disassociate Jewish kinship and ethnicity from Jews’ socio-
religious identity.

An interesting antipode to this position is the following fragment of a poem entitled “Comparison
of the Old Law.” Its author was Cartagena’s allegedly New Christian contemporary, Juan de Mena
(1411-1456). Here the poet presents Jewish kinship—symbolized by the motif of Jewish
marriage—and a pure, sanctifying Jewish law, as coterminous:

61
Mena’s poem paints Jewish endogamy, and by extension trans-generational Jewish identity, as a
corollary of observing the physical minutiae of Jewish law. In this respect he captures something
of the traditional interconnection between Jewish kinship and Jewish legal and behavioral norms.
However, Mena departs from anti-Jewish rhetoric by not condemning those norms and attendant
rituals as means to attaining holiness. Paradoxically, in this he echoes Cartagena’s understanding
of Christianity as a law that served to cleanse the individual Jew of impurity and thus bring him
or her to an elevated existential state.

This underlying similarity between the Bishop’s concept of Christianity and the poet’s view of
Jewish law anticipates yet another shift in judeoconversos’ conception of Jewish culture,
irrespective of whether they viewed it through hostile lenses, as Cartagena did, or relatively benign
lenses, as Mena did. Where we encounter it in New Christian writing of the late 15th and 16th
centuries, Jews’ distinctiveness now usually appears as the symbolic entity, “Judaism”—a “Law
of Moses” parallel and opposite to the “Law of Grace” (or “The Law of Our Lord Jesus Christ,”
or “The Law of Our Holy Mother, the Church”). In this understanding, Judaism’s function is
identical to that of Christianity, namely, to purify and thus save the individual souls of believers.

Inquisitorial edicts of faith painted precisely that “Law of Moses” in bright, didactic colors. Yet,
several of the confessions from that period still carry a considerable verisimilitude, for they depict
in spontaneous-sounding language ethnological practices that baptism by itself could scarcely
eliminate. In any case, the defendants could still witness or remember Jews’ performance of these
practices, and so could confess, sincerely or otherwise, to having undertaken the practices
themselves. For instance, in April of 1486, Constanza Nuñez begged forgiveness from inquisitors
for, among other things, preparing tables for mourners, ritually bathing the bodies of deceased
household members, and donating oil to a synagogue. Yet, she declared that she had done these
things “in recognition of the Law of Moses, thinking that doing them would help me to be saved”
(emphasis added). Inquisitorial rhetoric had left its mark.

The stress of early testimony such as Nuñez’s usually fell on behavior, not on inner convictions
per se. This is logical given that the testimony concerned a population of recent converts whose
lives before baptism had been characterized by an all-encompassing way of life anchored in the
practice of law, consonant with the phrase, na’aseh ve-nishma. The idea of individual soul-
salvation by means of the Law of Moses, however, was a new element in the denunciations and
confessions alike. In time, that element became the ideological focus of edicts of faith as well as
of countless accusations and admissions of crypto-“Judaism.” Inquisitors focused on the
theological aspect with persistence and obtained the hackneyed and monotonous responses they
sought. Here is one from 1590:

62
Not that all the confessions were entirely formulaic (the rest of Isabel de la Vega’s was not). Some
were trustworthy, some were not; some were ambiguous, and many more defy easy
characterization. What interests me here, though, is their increasing focus on a concept of the “Law
of Moses” as the dark, decrepit correspondent of Christianity.

By the 16th century and well into the 17th, Old and New Christians had become accustomed to
relying heavily on that concept. They spoke of “Judaism” and “Judaizing” as though they were
synonymous, and often described both as a matter of faith in a few theological propositions
accompanied by the performance of simple rites, such as fasting and omitting the names of Jesus,
the Saints, and the Holy Spirit while praying. A pivotal implication of this view was that a person
who merits the title “Jew” is not only someone who belongs to the Jewish ethnos per se, but
someone of any background who believes in “Judaism” therefore “Judaizes” by practicing
“ceremonies of the Jews” as the Inquisition understood them.

A societal fixation on tainted lineage as the determinant of Jewishness does not seem to have
unsettled the hegemonic understanding of Jewishness in the Iberian Peninsula as a matter of
internal, personal faith distinct from ethnicity. A telling example is that of the Holy Office. The
Spanish tribunals adopted blood-cleanliness as a requirement of entry for all its functionaries in
the 16th century, thereby excluding potential recruits who could not prove that their lineage was
free of Jews or Moors. Inquisitorial protocols themselves were designed to extract extensive
genealogical information from detainees. One of the first things that suspects had to state under
interrogation was their “stock and origin.” If the suspects admitted that they were New Christians,
this reinforced an inquisitorial presumption of Judaizing. All the same, the Holy Office prosecuted
and convicted several alleged Judaizers who declared that they were Old Christians. In other
words, the conceptual separation of kinship and religion held firm. What mattered is what a
defendant believed—or was “found” to believe—about God and salvation.

Portuguese and, to a lesser extent, Spanish New Christians established themselves across the
Atlantic and the Mediterranean as a highly successful trading nation in the mid-17th century. Those
among them who became Jews in exile from the Peninsula articulated variants of the idea that the
Law of Moses is a saving faith distinct from ethnicity and enshrined that idea as the theological
crown of their newly Judaicized ethno-polities, namely, the kehillot of New Jews in the Western
Diaspora. Civic leaders and cultural luminaries of New Jewish cohort were especially instrumental

63
in defining, propagating, and glorifying this notion. With such titles as Israel Avenged and The
Excellences of the Hebrews, the works of newly Judaicized polemicists of the 1600s may be
viewed as attempts by their authors to repudiate their earlier Christian educations.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, however, these writers transvalued and exalted precisely
the Christian concept of the Law of Moses that was an ideological and social taboo in their native
lands. Hence, for example, Isaac Orobio de Castro’s La observancia de La divina Ley de
Mosseh (mid-17th century) devoted much attention to the question of soul-salvation through
divine law and not divine grace. In Orobio’s words, “Christianity is not the means that God
proposed to Israel in order to save it”; rather, “This is the true means for salvation: to return to
God” by observing the Law of Moses, “for which He helps us with internal inspirations, or with
holy persuasions. …” Orobio’s diction, like that of other New Jewish polemicists who responded
to Christian provocations or wished to preempt them was but a token of the relatively novel idea
that “Judaism” is the Jews’ salvific “religion,” a “faith” commensal, yet ultimately distinct from
their overarching nationality.

In keeping with the ingrained dualism under discussion, the Hebrews of the Portuguese and
Spanish Nation, as the New Jews styled themselves, understood their ethnicity as commensal with
the Law of Moses, yet unique and independent from it. Hence, they considered New Christians
who professed Christianity in the Iberian Peninsula, as well as Old Christians who married New
Christians, or who participated in the nação’s trading networks, as members of the national
collective. The bottom line is that white adult men of Iberian origin could at least aspire to become
part of the Nation irrespective of their internal convictions and public religious profession. The
key was forging a social, economic, and/or familial connection to the ethnic collective. Yet, by the
same token, Old Christians who died at the stake professing their “Judaism” became heroic
symbols of the “Judaism” to which New Jews of the Nation committed themselves publicly.
Ethnicity and religion, then, had become parallel and competing elements of identity thanks to
the judeoconversos’ internalization of Ibero-Christian models.

About a century after the publication of Orobio, Moses Mendelssohn configured a new model of
Jewish identity in terms similar to those that undergirded the Nation’s self-understanding.
Mendelsohn’s “Judaism” was akin to the official faith of the Judeo-Portuguese and Judeo-Spanish
Nation outside the “lands of Idolatry” in that it was a “religion” of internal conviction and reason
of and for a specific ethnos. Mendelssohn was confident that Jews would freely embrace their
heritage once freed from the bonds of a halakhically-configured and politically autonomous
community. Later still, advocates of Reform(ed) Judaism would argue explicitly that they had
evolved out of Jewish peoplehood and now comprised a religious group alone.

Needless to say, the historical conditions that gave rise to these outcomes varied radically from
those that challenged and shaped the lives of peninsular New Christians and of the New Jews of
the Western Sephardi Diaspora. The outcomes themselves varied dramatically as well. While
proponents of Jewish Enlightenment at the dawning Modern Period sought to subsume Jewish
nationality or even disown it under the banner of religion, the Men of the Nation built and zealously
maintained their communal institutions and their ethno-political autonomy as a framework for their
nationality, sometimes essentializing the latter to such an extent that they treated Judeo-Portuguese
and Judeo-Spanish nationhood as an innate bodily inheritance.

64
The historical terrain I have skimmed here brings the reasons for this into focus. For centuries,
metaphysical dualism had encroached upon and made inroads in Hispano-Jewish intellectual life;
then the Iberian churches, supported by the laity and by the Spanish and Portuguese monarchical
states, had forcibly imposed that dualism upon judeoconversos. The nação grappled with this
situation as best it could. Ultimately, the Men (and Women) of the Nation opted to exalt their
ethnicity and clothe loosely it in religious garb. A lasting irony of this approach is that it failed to
reknit together the qualities of kinship and religion quite as its most pious proponents desired.
The nação’s circumscribed Law of Moses was never a sufficient social cement. As an imagined
community, the Judeo-Portuguese and Judeo-Spanish Nation officially brandished its Bom
Judesmo, or good (or proper) Judaism, yet in reality it always transcended religion, and comprised
numerous genuine Christians, cultural commuters, skeptics, and simply undisciplined individuals.
In this sense at least, the New Jews and their children were, as Yosef Kaplan’s work suggests, like
modern Jews, secularists included, who feel their Jewish ethnicity in their bones, but who still
regard “religion” in the narrow, Christian sense, as the distinctive Jewish trait and central point of
reference, even in the breach.

The Legal and Social Bonds of Jewish Apostates and Their Spouses
according to Gaonic Responsa

URIEL SIMONSOHN writes:10

10
The Jewish Quarterly Review , Fall 2015, Vol. 105, No. 4 (Fall 2015), pp. 417-439

65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
References:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/43998240.pdf?refreqid=fastly-
default%3A55ecd14780c1e4d0075c234ac4a6c782&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2F
control&origin=search-results

86