Between 1391-1492, large numbers of Spanish Jews underwent baptism, some under threat of violence, and some of their own volition. As Jewish husbands and wives, parents and children, found themselves intimately-related to kinfolk who professed Chrtistianity, a range of rabbinic legal problems arose pertaining to marriage, divorce, inheritance and other matters of personal status. Rabbi Zemah b. Shlomo Duran of 15th century Algiers was from a family of rabbis who addressed many of these legal queries.

In the excerpted passage of the Responsum, R. Zemah reprimands the interlocutor for the term he had used in referring to former conversos. This population, he emphasizes, are of Jewish stock, and thus must not be perceived as converts to Judaism.

As in the excerpted passage from Orobio de Castro (of seventeenth century Amsterdam), R. Zemah's remarks point to the emergence of a "biological" definition of Jewishness (among Iberian Jews and conversos) and stresses the need to distinguish, theologically, between New Christians who revert to their ancestral faith and Old Christians who convert to Judaism.

↑ Back to top