Your People Shall Be My People: Conversion to Judaism through the Centuries

Dr. Miriam Bodian (UTexas at Austin)

Throughout Jewish history non-Jews have joined the Jewish people. How they’ve done so, why they’ve done so, and how the Jewish community has supervised the transition have changed strikingly from one historical context to another. Yet some features of conversion to Judaism, or giyyur (in rabbinic terms), have been remarkably stable over the long period since rabbinic law became normative throughout the Jewish diaspora. In this talk we’ll look at major milestones in this long history, from biblical times to the eve of the modern period.

Miriam Bodian is Professor of History Emerita at the University of Texas at Austin. Her recent book Conversion, in the Rutgers Keywords in Jewish Studies series, examines both conversion to Judaism and conversion from Judaism over the long sweep of Jewish history. She is the author of the prize-winning book Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam, and Dying in the Law of Moses: Crypto-Jewish Martyrdom in the Iberian World.

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