The Participation of a Court in the Jewish Conversion Process

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 3 (Summer 2004) 437–470 ARTICLES The Participation of a Court in the Jewish Conversion Process JOSHUA KULP THE PRIMARY PURPOSE of this article is to address the development of the rabbinic laws and expectations concerning the participation of a court in the Jewish conversion process. As well as helping to expand our understanding of the gradual formalization of the conversion process throughout the rabbinic period, this study bears weight on a disputed issue in the comparison of early Christianity with Judaism. Scholars have long debated the similarities and differences between Jewish proselyte baptism and the baptism performed by John the Baptist. They frequently highlight the claim that for the Jews there is no official ‘‘baptizer,’’ as one of the distinguishing differences between the two practices.1 Here I suggest that tannaitic literature assumes that the convert immerses and even converts himself without the aid of other Jews, and certainly without the aid of a ‘‘baptizer.’’ This assertion strengthens the claims of those scholars who affirm this essential difference between John’s baptism and Jewish proselyte immersion. By comparison, Rowley claims that this difference is not as great as some earlier scholars thought.2 According to Rowley, My thanks to Christine Hayes, Michael Pitkowski, Joel Roth, and Ethan Tucker for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this article. A portion of the article is a passage in bKet upon which I commented in my doctoral dissertation , ‘‘A Critical Edition and Commentary to Babylonian Talmud, Ketubot, Chapter One’’ (Bar-Ilan University, 2003). The dissertation was written under the supervision of Professor Shamma Friedman and I thank him for his comments on both this article and the dissertation. The dissertation was written with the financial support of the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Scholarship. 1. The question of the similarity between the two rituals can, for our purposes, be separated from the question of the antiquity of Jewish proselyte baptism. Since I will argue that the procedure employed in the two rituals is different, it will make no difference whether or not Jewish proselyte baptism existed in John’s time. 2. H. H. Rowley, ‘‘Jewish Proselyte Baptism and the Baptism of John,’’ HUCA 15 (1940): 313, 322–25. The Jewish Quarterly Review (Summer 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. 438 JQR 94:3 (2004) the fact that the Jews required witnesses for proselyte immersion shows that ‘‘the ceremony was fundamentally an administered act’’ (p. 324). Similarly, Taylor brings evidence that ‘‘argues against the view that John’s baptism must have been quite different from other Jewish immersions because he actively baptized by putting people underwater.’’3 Her argument is based on the assumption that Jewish conversion required the presence of witnesses, which would make it somewhat closer to John’s role in the conversion process. As I will attempt to prove, the lack of any participatory role for witnesses in a convert’s immersion as reflected in earlier sources, and certainly the lack of participation of a court, makes these arguments difficult to sustain. In the first half of this article I will survey the rabbinic sources that reflect the participation of a court in the conversion process, or lack thereof. Tannaitic sources generally assume that conversion is performed by the converting Gentile himself—with no requirement for the participation of other Jews. There are occasional hints that the convert may appear before a Jewish body or singular representative before he converts, but this is not the dominant trend. Often these early sources should be understood as reflecting the process of acceptance of the convert after the conversion has taken place. These sources do not state explicitly upon what basis the convert might be examined, but one can guess that the examiner(s) might investigate the purported convert’s sincerity, his understanding of the meaning of his conversion, and whether he had fulfilled the physical steps necessary to convert. While some tannaitic sources do reflect a rabbinic desire to participate in conversions, there are none that make this demand a priori; nor are...