The Stranger Within Your Gates: Converts and Conversion in Rabbinic Literature (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Stranger Within Your Gates: Converts and Conversion in Rabbinic Literature Leonard Victor Rutgers Gary G. Porton. The Stranger Within Your Gates: Converts and Conversion in Rabbinic Literature. Chicago Studies in the History of Judaism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Pp. xiii + 410. $29.95. Conversion to Judaism is a topic that has traditionally attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. In the first chapter of this fundamentally important book on converts and conversion in rabbinic literature, Gary Porton points out how his work differs from previous scholarship on this topic. Porton is not primarily [End Page 109] interested in converts, but rather in how the rabbis viewed them. In addition, Porton’s book is structured in such a way as to drive home an important methodological point: rabbinic texts on converts and conversion must be evaluated separately and on their own terms before they can be fitted into a larger, more general history of conversion. That such an approach leads to insights that differ radically from commonly held views on conversion to Judaism may be evident. For example, where earlier scholars maintained that a standard conversion ceremony had come into existence in Jewish circles as early as the first or second century c.e., Porton’s meticulous analysis of the rabbinic materials now shows that such ceremonies do not predate the late ancient-early medieval period, and that even by this time not all rabbis agreed as to what rites should be performed to make such a ceremony into an acceptable and religiously valid one. Porton’s book divides into four parts. Chapter 1 addresses methodological issues, offers a review of previous scholarship, and briefly describes a view that, as Porton shows in subsequent chapters, stands at the basis of rabbinic discussions of conversion, namely the concept that the People of Israel formed, at one and the same time, an ethnic group and a religious community. In chapters 2 through 6 Porton offers an descriptive-analytical survey of virtually every passage in rabbinic literature that bears on converts and conversion. Porton examines such passages within the larger literary context in which they appear. Furthermore, Porton treats rabbinic discussions of conversion according to the collection of texts in which such disussions have been included. Thus in chapter 2 Porton presents evidence from the Mishnah, in chapter 3 references contained in the Tosefta, and in chapter 4 the material that has been preserved in early Midrashim including Sifra, Mekhilta deRabbi Ishmael, Sifré Numbers, and Sifré Deuteronomy. Chapters 5 and 6 contain, finally, a comprehensive survey of references to converts and conversion that have been transmitted in the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds. These five chapters are important not only because of the wealth of evidence they contain, but also because they show that not every passage in rabbinic literature that refers to converts deals with the phenomenon of conversion as such. Porton points out that next to passages that focus on conversions specifically, other passages refer to converts only in the context of discussions that have little to do with conversion at all (such as discussions of what should happen to someone’s property when he or she dies without leaving a heir). Thus, in rabbinic literature converts are not infrequently mentioned only to help refine rabbinic ideas and doctrines on issues where conversion as such is not at stake. In chapters 7 through 10 Porton turns from a text-critical and contextual analysis of individual texts to a thematical and more comprehensive discussion of issues such as the conversion ritual (chapter 7), marriages between converts and Israelites (chapter 8), “converts as newborn children” (chapter 9), and “converts and the Israelite way of life” (chapter 10). While such a presentation of the evidence inevitably leads to repetitions (Porton is obligated to cite many of the passages discussed earlier in the descriptive-analytical chapters), this way of treating rabbinic passages on conversion has several advantages. Among other [End Page 110] things, Porton is able to show that rabbinic ideas on conversions were not static, but rather that they evolved over time. Comparably, on the basis of a comprehensive discussion of the data Porton succeeds in documenting the extent to which...