1568. Conversos is Safed: Locking the Door or Opening It?

JEWISH MOMENTS IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL

1568. 

Conversos is Safed: Locking the Door or Opening It?

The arrival of Conversos in Safed and other towns of the Land of Israel posed urgent questions for Jewish society. Were they to be embraced as ba‘alei teshuvah, “penitents” in the ancestral land, or treated with suspicion and kept at arm’s length? Sources from sixteenth‑century Safed reveal two broad approaches. One sought, sometimes creatively, to re‑admit these Jews to full communal life. The other, rooted in halachic and moral concerns, placed significant obstacles in their path and reinforced their separation.

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Locking the Door or Opening It: this was the question the sages of Safed had to struggle with when relating to the numerous contingents of conversos from Spain and Portugal arriving to the Holy Land. The overall picture is of a community torn between empathy and fear, between the desire to reopen the door to Jews emerging from the darkness of the Inquisition and the anxiety that doing so might compromise halachic categories or communal integrity.

R. yaakov Berab, Safed’s leading halachic scholar, famously sought to renew classical semichah and ultimately a Sanhedrin. Among his motivations was the need for a proper judicial framework to address grave sins, including conversion to Christianity, often treated as analogous to offenses punishable by karet, that is, being spiritually being cut off from the Jewish people.  Only a Sanhedrin could administer the traditional thirty‑nine lashes used as a formal act of atonement.  R. Berab’s initiative was never fully implemented, but the very fact that he waged a sustained halachic campaign to ease conversos’ return shows that he believed the community in the Land of Israel had to find solutions to bring them back into Jewish society. R. Yosef Karo, R. Berab’s successor as leading halachic authority in Safed, reinforced this welcoming tendency in his legal writings. In the case of the apostate’s sons, he ruled that the one who came to the Land of Israel and returned to Judaism was fully equal, in inheritance law, to any other Jew, while those who remained Christian had no claim.

More broadly, in the summer of 1568 four leading rabbinic authorities in Safed, R. Yosef Karo, R. Israel di Curiel, R. David ben Zimra, and R. Moshe di Trani, sent a letter to the community of Candia, Crete. They protested sharply against reports that former conversos living there were being cursed, humiliated, and labeled apostates. The Safed sages denounced this behavior and called for the excommunication of those who harmed them, arguing that such conduct prevented them from returning fully to Judaism.  From Safed, a leading center in the Land of Israel, they thus articulated an ethic of openness toward returnees across the Mediterranean.

The kabbalists of Safed added a powerful spiritual rationale to this inclusive stance. R. Moshe Cordovero taught that the blemish of conversion was external and did not alter the inner Jewish essence of the soul. Through penance the external stain could be removed and the soul’s purity revealed.  In turn, R. Moshe Alshich stressed the exalted spiritual standing of those who had survived apostasy and returned, arguing that they were on a higher level than martyrs who died sanctifying God’s name, because they remained alive to carry the burden of guilt and to repair it.  R. Shlomo Alkabetz composed a prayer for redemption that vividly describes conversos leaving their comfortable homes, undertaking a dangerous journey, and coming to Zion to rebuild its ruins.  He asks God to remember their suffering and calls on Jewish society to recognize their sincere desire to reconnect with Torah in the Land of Israel.

On the other side, a more restrictive approach emphasized either the halachic complications arising from generations of life under Christianity or the moral ideal of martyrdom. R. Moshe di Trani, ruled in his responsa that while individual conversos who had secretly maintained Jewish observance could be readmitted, their descendants were a serious problem. After more than a century of clandestine existence, he feared that many families had intermarried casting doubt on their Jewish status.  He therefore treated many descendants as possibly not Jewish, which meant they could not marry freely into the broader community or serve as valid witnesses in Jewish courts.

R. Yom Tov Tzahalon, a student of R. Yosef Karo and R. Moshe di Trani, explored these issues at length. In one briefing he initially assumes that a family living as conversos for 120 years should be treated as gentile, since valid Jewish marriages could not be presumed.  He then complicates his own position by suggesting that conversos often married among themselves, which would mitigate some concerns and make it easier to reintegrate their descendants.  His internal debate reveals the social anxiety surrounding the issue: even rabbis sympathetic to the conversos struggled with the halachic consequences of generations spent in Christian society.

Other Safed sages took a more explicitly moral‑theological line that cast the original decision to submit to baptism in harsh light. R. Elisha Gallico, a student of R. Yosef Karo, argued that a Jew facing forced conversion must first flee if at all possible. If escape is impossible, he wrote, one should be prepared to die rather than convert. R. Elazar Azikri, a student of R. Moshe di Trani, adopted a similar stance, as did R. Shmuel de Uceda, a student of R. Gallico. Without denying the horrors of Iberian persecution, this line of thought tended to judge those who accepted conversion even under extreme pressure as having failed the ideal test of martyrdom, an attitude that inevitably colored their view of returnees in the Land of Israel.

In practice, these stricter perspectives reinforced social barriers. Halachic doubts about lineage and status made many long‑established families hesitant to intermarry with people of converso background. The continued existence of a distinct Portuguese or “Penitents” congregation in Safed, with its unusual leaders, suggests that even in a relatively sympathetic environment former conversos often remained a semi‑separate entity of ex‑Christians. This distinction damaged their status and, despite the efforts of some rabbis and leaders, made it more difficult for them to become fully part of the community rooted in the Land of Israel.