Even Bohan, Shaʿar 11, Chapter 15 of Shem Tov ibn Shaprut: Will Pork Be Eaten in the Messianic Era? The Pig That the Medieval Mumar Wished to 'Restore' to Himself: The Table of Edom and a Debate That Will Return.

BS"D

A Bookshop in El Escorial and a Chapter That No One Had Translated

There are books one does not look for: one finds them. La piedra de toque ('The Touchstone'), the edition of the Even Bohan (אבן בחן) of Shem Tov ibn Shaprut that José-Vicente Niclós produced for the CSIC in 1997 as part of the Bibliotheca Hispana Biblica, is today a rarity of which scarcely any copies remain in view. It was not until I came to live in Spain that I came across it, in the Librería Arias Montano (Librería Antonio Azorín), at number 1, calle Joaquín Costa, in San Lorenzo de El Escorial, the town of Philip II and his library. A volume of Hebrew erudition in the village of the monastery. I took it away as one takes something one scarcely dares to believe one has found.

And it was there, among the shelves, that the purchase turned into a question. A person, Doña Teresa, whose surname was Rodríguez-Rivera, assured me that her ancestors were, apparently, anusim, crypto-Jews, and that her family, for generations, does not eat or avoids pork. What she told me was not a document: it was a custom, and a custom, when looked at closely, is a form of archive. I thought of that inherited abstention, transmitted over centuries perhaps without anyone remembering its reason, and the question inverted itself: if pork was for that family the trace of a secret, what had pork been for those who made the opposite journey, those who did not hide the faith but exchanged it? How did the mumarim settled within the Iberian Catholic clergy justify eating it?

It turned out that the answer was written down, and that it lay within the very book I had just bought. In the Even Bohan, Shaʿar 11, chapter 15, Shem Tov ibn Shaprut has two voices dispute about the pig: a 'Trinitarian' who speaks with a convert's accent and a 'Unitarian' who answers him. The Trinitarian maintains, with texts from the Talmud, that when the Messiah comes pork will be permitted. And the chapter lies a single chapter away from the one that, according to Niclós, closes with the chronicle of the 1379 disputation at Pamplona with Cardinal Pedro de Luna. When I settled in Granada I devoted myself to studying it. Granada is not a neutral setting: in its Alhambra, in March 1492, the edict was signed that expelled the Jews from the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon. To study there a debate about pork and conversion, written more than a century before the edict, had something of reading the warning at the very site of the sentence.

It was then that I discovered what no bibliographical entry had announced to me: that this section has never been translated, either into Spanish or into English. There does exist, it is true, a doctoral thesis by Dr Libby Ruth Garshowitz (1992), Shem Tov ben Isaac ibn Shaprut's "Touchstone" ("Even Bohan"): Chapters 2–10, Based on MS. Plut. 2.17 (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana) with Collations from Other Manuscripts, which offers a translation of part of the work.[a] But by its very title it covers chapters 2 to 10, it is not recorded as reaching Shaʿar 11, and moreover it is an unpublished work, of the kind that sleep in a university repository and are not bought in any bookshop. So the chapter remained there, intact and without readers, and Doña Teresa's question remained unanswered: what did the mumarim say about pork, and what did a fourteenth-century Jew who knew them from within answer them?

There is a coincidence that I do not wish to pass over. Rodríguez-Rivera is also the surname that the genealogical tradition of the Ibn Yaḥya assigns to one of the converso branches of the lineage of Doña Paloma, of whom I shall speak below. I do not claim that Doña Teresa belongs to it. I say that, when I followed the thread of that surname, I found myself with the tradition that makes a Toledan Jewish woman the great-great-grandmother of Ferdinand the Catholic, and with a family that pork split into two tables. That thread ended up becoming this article.

And leafing through José-Vicente Niclós's introduction to La piedra de toque — the Even Bohan (אבן בחן) of Shem Tov ibn Shaprut — I was stopped by a figure out of a census office: in fourteenth-century Navarre the Jews were, according to the estimates that Niclós gathers, between 2 and 4 per cent of the population.[1] A tiny minority and yet so visible that in 1328 the sermons of the Franciscan Pedro Olligoyen in Estella sufficed to assemble several thousand 'killers of Jews'.[2]

But it was not the pogrom that stopped me. It was a silence. Neither Niclós nor the historians he cites ask why, in a Peninsula of three religions, the Church — and later the Inquisition — ended up choosing as proof of faith something that goes into the mouth. Not the creed, not the Our Father: the bacon. A theology verified with a frying pan. I say it with irony, but the irony has a file, and I shall open it below.

On the other side of the table there was a symmetrical question, and that was the one that cost me my sleep. If the medieval convert was persuaded that Yeshu was the Mashiaḥ (ḥalilah) and that with his coming the commandments had been left behind, why did he need a rabbinic argument to justify pork? One would suppose that his faith sufficed. It did not suffice. And the finding that organises this article is that the convert who wishes to defend pork before his former brethren does not open his Gospel: he opens the Talmud. He cites Pereq Ḥelek. He cites Ḥullin 17a. He cites R. Yehoshua ben Levi. And Shem Tov ibn Shaprut, who heard him, or read him, or feared him, answered him in a chapter that has never been translated into Spanish or into English.

What follows is that chapter in full, in Hebrew and in English; the Christian sources that explain why pork weighed so heavily; the philological analysis of the reply; the history of a family, that of Doña Paloma, which pork split into two tables; and a warning that is not archaeology: the same argument circulates today, under different lighting.

The Mumar, the Anus and the Man Who Wrote with Care

First, vocabulary, because the story demands it. Mumar (מומר) is the participle of the verb hemir (המיר), 'to exchange, to change': the one who exchanged his glory, to put it with Jeremiah 2:11 (וְעַמִּי הֵמִיר כְּבוֹדוֹ). Meshumad (משומד) comes from the root ש־מ־ד, 'to exterminate', that of the gezerot shmad, the decrees of extermination: the one who was destroyed, or let himself be destroyed. And anus (אנוס) is the coerced, from the same verb anas that appears in Esther 1:8 when it is established that none should be compelled (אֵין אֹנֵס). Three words for three consciences, and fourteenth-century Navarre had all three.

Niclós describes the climate without euphemism. The Church's offensive, above all from 1369, prefers doctrinal disputations, isolation and legal pressures so that the Jews should 'convert out of sadness', according to the formula attributed to Vincent Ferrer. From 1360 the first Navarrese converts are known, with Christian names — Carlos, Luis, Johan — that betray their godparents at baptism, and some of them were permitted and encouraged to take part in debates against their former brethren: that of Moses ha-Cohen of Tordesillas with Juan de Valladolid, in 1375, recorded in ʿEzer ha-Emunah; Pablo de Santa María, another convert, was appointed bishop of Burgos around 1389–1390. These converts, Niclós notes, feed on the Pugio Fidei of the Dominican Raymond Martini and on the arguments of Abner of Burgos.[3]

That is to say: the convert with a microphone. Hold on to that detail, because we shall see it at work in the first line of Shem Tov's chapter. A convert of this kind does not speak with the vocabulary of the born Christian. He speaks with that of the Talmud, which he carries in his memory.

Now, the man. Shem Tov ibn Shaprut was born around 1340 in Tudela; his family moved to Tarazona around 1378; there he practised moneylending and obtained a royal licence to practise medicine; and in 1379 he was obliged to dispute publicly at Pamplona with Cardinal Pedro de Luna, the future Benedict XIII. Niclós maintains that this episode was the origin of his major work.[4]

The Even Bohan has fifteen books. Books II to X rest on the Milḥamot ha-Shem of Jacob ben Reuben; XI is a commentary on the aggadah; XII contains the Hebrew translation of the Gospel of Matthew; XIII to XV refute the Christian creed.[5] Two things about that structure matter to me. The first: the chapter that I translate discusses a dictum of aggadah, and Niclós situates the Pamplona disputation at the end of chapter 16 of the book devoted to the aggadah; chapter 15, which I translate, belongs to that same Shaʿar 11 and lies a single chapter away from that disputation. The second: Shem Tov had in his own translator's workshop the Matthew 15 in which it is read that what enters by the mouth does not defile. He needed no one to explain to him what lay behind the mumar's ham.

And hold on to three more traits of this man. He is a logician by training: he wrote a commentary on Porphyry's Isagoge, now lost, and in book I of the Even Bohan he deploys his logic in every chapter. He is a physician: he commented on Avicenna's Canon in his ʿEn Kol. And he is a polemicist who, in the prologue, confesses without a blush that his exegesis of Scripture and of the aggadah is at times unprecedented, even 'against all the commentators', because what counts is that it be useful for answering the Christians, whether or not it coincides with what the authors said.[6] An author who declares his method in this way deserves to be read with a magnifying glass in hand. My suspicion — and I am going to put it to the test — is that chapter 15 is a textbook case.

Pork as a Baptismal Certificate

One must understand the mechanism before looking at the texts. Christianity did not declare the pig impure in itself: in contrast to the Jewish dietary laws and to the Qur'anic prohibition, Christian theology held that faith freed one from ritual dietary distinctions. In a territory where Jews and Muslims avoided it, eating it — or cooking with its fat — functioned as a public sign of belonging. The bibliography that I use describes it as a 'gastronomic' use of religious identity: it was not merely a matter of food, but of social surveillance and proof of orthodoxy.[7] The texts, in chronological order, speak for themselves.

The frontier is born, in the law of the Church, at the shared table, and still without pork. Canon 50 of the Synod of Elvira, from the early fourth century, says:

Si quis clericorum fidelium cum Iudaeis cibum sumpserit, a communione separetur, ut corrigatur.

'If any of the clerics [or] faithful takes food with Jews, let him be separated from communion, that he may be corrected.'[8]

The rule does not name pork, but it fixes the principle that will later be applied to the table: sharing food with Jews could call into question the Christian's religious separation. The one who did touch pork was, already in Visigothic Hispania, the Twelfth Council of Toledo (681), which allowed the Jews to go on avoiding pork, but required them to consume foods cooked in its fat as a sign of good disposition towards Christianity, in the abridged Latin formulation recorded by Rabello:

Iudaei carnem porcinam non edant, sed ea quae in adipe porci cocta sunt edant, in signum bonae voluntatis.

'Let the Jews not eat pork, but let them eat those things which have been cooked in the fat of the pig, as a sign of good will.'[9]

It is one of the clearest proofs that, from Visigothic Hispania onwards, pig fat functioned as a symbolic sign of submission or adhesion to the Christian order. Four centuries later, the Council of Coyanza (1050) returns to the table in the kingdom of León:

Nullus etiam christianus cum iudaeis in una domo maneat nec cum eis cibum sumat.

'Let no Christian, moreover, dwell in one house with Jews, nor take food with them.'

Again the text does not say 'whoever eats pork is a Christian', but it shows how the shared meal became a confessional frontier. And behind that frontier lies an ideology that deserves to be looked at squarely, because it is the one that Shem Tov is going to invert. Paulus Alvarus of Córdoba, in the ninth century, lamented that young Christians mastered Arabic and forgot Latin, and defined the patrimony to be defended in a sentence that may be read as the manifesto of Roman-Christian continuity:

Christiani non noverunt legem suam et Latini non attendunt linguam suam.

'Christians do not know their own law, and Latins pay no heed to their own tongue.'

The same work affirms without shame the succession of Israel: Nos uerus Srahel sumus, 'we are the true Israel'.[10] Hold that sentence beside Shem Tov's. When the Unitarian (the Jew) says that Edom 'will return to our people and to our faith', he will be answering, across the centuries, the one who declared that the true Israel was already Edom.

With the passage into the vernacular, pork ceases to be a matter for councils and becomes a matter for chronicles. Andrés Bernáldez, between the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth, accuses the converts of avoiding bacon and of cooking with oil instead of lard:

No comían tocino ni carne de puerco, ni cocinaban con manteca, sino con aceite.

'They did not eat bacon or pork, nor did they cook with lard, but with oil.'

Bernáldez does not limit himself to describing a practice: he turns the absence of pork into proof of 'judaisation'. Before him, the converso poet Antón de Montoro had employed the theme of pork and of the table in his satire on the condition of the conversos, and the formula attributed to him shows that, already in the fifteenth century, not eating pork could be read as suspicion of Judaism:

Duelos y quebrantos los sábados.

'Griefs and heartbreaks on Saturdays.'

The expression comes from the first part, chapter one, of Don Quijote de la Mancha, in the opening paragraphs of the work:

Una olla de algo más vaca que carnero, salpicón las más noches, duelos y quebrantos los sábados, lantejas los viernes, algún palomino de añadidura los domingos, consumían las tres partes de su hacienda.

'A stew of rather more beef than mutton, a hash on most nights, duelos y quebrantos on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, a pigeon by way of extra on Sundays, consumed three parts of his estate.'

-Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. IV Centenario (Madrid: Real Academia Española / Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, 2004), part 1, ch. 1, p. 27. (p. 31)

Such an expression alludes to the typical food of the Jewish Sabbath, but in the mouth of a convert it acquires a bitter tone: food had become an ethno-religious label.[11] From there to the inquisitorial records is a single step. Suspicion fell on those who avoided lard, bacon, sausages or pork; among the Moriscos couscous, aubergines and other culinary practices were also watched, and among the conversos of Jewish origin the principal indication was the avoidance of pork and the use of oil, in the formulation that the historiography records:

No comer tocino ni cosas cocidas con manteca de puerco.

'Not to eat bacon, nor things cooked with pig's lard.'[12]

This must not be read as automatic proof of crypto-Judaism: many practices could be cultural inheritance, family habit or simple preference. But within the inquisitorial framework, abstention from pork became a juridical and social indication of non-assimilation.

From the other side of the table, the Jewish polemicists had seen it with the same clarity. In the Sefer Milḥamot ha-Shem of Jacob ben Reuben — the work on which books II to X of the Even Bohan itself rest — and in the Nizzaḥon Vetus, Isaiah 65:3–4 ('those who eat swine's flesh') is applied to the Christians, and the argument condenses into one line:

כִּי אֵין אֻמָּה בְּכָל הָאֻמּוֹת אוֹכֶלֶת חֲזִיר בִּלְעָדֵיכֶם

'For there is no nation among all the nations that eats pork except you.'

The same Nizzaḥon Vetus, commenting on Isaiah 65:4, refers it to the Christian custom of seasoning bread with the fat of the pig:

חֲזִיר שֶׁבִּשְּׁלוּ בּוֹ; נוֹתְנִין אוֹתוֹ בִּכְלֵיהֶם עִם הַלֶּחֶם לְתַבְלוֹ, מִפְּנֵי הַחֵלֶב

'Pork in which they have cooked; they put it into their vessels with the bread, to season it, on account of the fat.'[13]

Around 1400, Lipmann of Mühlhausen, in his Sefer ha-Nizzaḥon, accuses the Christians of having abolished commandments of the Torah, and among them he names, alongside circumcision and the Sabbath, the eating of pork:

כמה מצות מהתורה … מילה ושבת ואכילת חזיר ושרצים ורבים כיוצא בהם

'How many commandments of the Torah … circumcision, and the Sabbath, and the eating of pork and of creeping things, and many others like them.'

And in another passage of the same book, he announces the punishment of the nations with Isaiah 66:17 and explains why no impure food resembles that of pork, with a saying from Qiddushin 49b:

אין אכילה כאכילת חזיר, שהרי אמרו רז״ל: עשרה קבין צרעת באו לעולם, תשעה נטלו חזירים, ואחת כל העולם כולו

'There is no eating like the eating of pork, for our Sages, of blessed memory, said: ten measures (qabin) of leprosy came into the world; the pigs took nine, and the whole world together, one.'[14]

Keep this last datum: it is the same line of Qiddushin 49b at the foot of which the Ritva records, as we shall see, that in the aggadah the name ḥazir belongs to Edom. Observe also the date. One generation after Shem Tov, a Jewish polemicist already takes it for granted that the Christian abolished pork. What you are about to read is not a retrospective invention, but a conversation that was already under way and that Shem Tov lived from within. Chapter 15 of the Even Bohan: Hebrew Text and Unpublished English Translation

The chapter is a dialogue between two voices: the Meshalesh (המשלש, 'he who triplicates', the Trinitarian) and the Meyaḥed (המיחד, 'he who unifies', the Unitarian). I respect the notation of the original that I use: parentheses mark variants or doubtful readings, and square brackets, restorations. I cite it as it stands, smoothing nothing, because each hesitation of the manuscript is also a datum.[15]

פרק ט"ו

אמר המשלש: הנה אמרו חכמינו ז"ל בפרק חלק: "למה נקרא שמו חזיר — שעתיד הב"ה להחזירו לנו". הנה יראה מזה שהמצות נתנו [לזמן, ולא להיות קיימות לעולם]. ועוד אמרו [על הפסוק] "ובתים מלאים כל טוב" [שנכלל בו אף בשר חזיר, ו]היה ההיתר להם. ומה שהוא נכלל בכלל "טוב" אחד אין מדרך החכמה העליונה [לאסרו לעולם]. אכן יראה ש[ההיתר חוזר] להם. ועוד אמרו בגמ', אמר ר' יהושע בן לוי: "אשר אנכי מצוך היום — היום לעשותם ולא מחר לעשותם", והיינו לימות המשיח, שאין אנו חייבים לעשות מצות התורה.

ענה המיחד: עם היות ש[פרק] חלק רומז לדברים [עתידים], [הנה הם] אינם ראויים לך, וכן שאר פרקים [שהבאת] לשתי טענות[יך].

האחת: לפי שכל אלו החכמים היו כמה שנים אחר חרבן בית שני, ועדין היו דורשין לזמן הבא אחריהם, כמו שאמרו: "הב"ה כו' להחזירו לנו" כו'; ובו יראה שבתחלה [היה כן, ו]לא יחדש עוד.

שנית: דע שחז"ל קראו לאדום חזיר, כמו שדרשו על [הפסוק] "יכרסמנה חזיר מיער", זו בני אדום; [ופירוש "להחזירו לנו" הוא] ש[ב]ימות המשיח ישובו בני אדום לעמנו ולאמונתנו, כדכתיב: "והיה כל הנותר מכל הגוים הבאים על ירושלם ועלו מדי שנה בשנה להשתחוות למלך י"י צבאות" כו'. ואדום היה מהנקבצים על ירושלם, דכתיב: "זכור י"י לבני אדום את יום ירושלם"; וכתיב: "ועלו מושיעים בהר ציון [לשפט את הר עשו]" וגו'; "והיה י"י למלך" וגו'. יראה שהש"י ימלוך על עשו ויחזור המלוכה לישראל, כברכת אביהם: “[ו]את אחיך תעבד, [והיה כאשר תריד ופרקת עלו מעל צוארך]”. ומזה [יראה] ש[המצות] לא יבטל[ו ב]ימות המשיח, [שהרי הגוים עצמם עתידים לעלות] ולחוג את חג הסכות.

ומה שאמרו חז"ל קודם, להתיר חזיר להם, וכן [על] "כל טוב" — אשיבך [בשלשה פנים].

האחת: שאמרו חזר ההתר להם, [ו]אין מונעין מלאכול אותם [בשעת הכבוש], להיות להם כמו בשאר העכו"ם, לפי ש[חז"ל אמרו שלא היו צריכים] להתעסק בשום דבר [מן ההכשר]; ואמרו שבשעת הכבוש לא נאמר להם דבר ש[יאסרם]. ופירשו על זה מאמרם "ובתים מלאים כל טוב": אין משתמע לאכול, רק לענין עושר. ובתים כתב, וכל טוב [מלאים], וגם כרמים וזיתים אשר לא נטעת וגו'; והוא שאמרו [שלא היה] חסר להם, שנאמר: "ובורות חצובים" כו'.

שנית: ש[ההיתר] בתחלה, היינו הוראת שעה; כאשר הותר להם יהיה ההתר במלחמה, [ו]לא שינה[ה התורה]; [ואין] כן תמיד, כמו שמצ[ינו בשאר הוראות שעה].

שלישית: דע שהחזיר עם היותו רע למאכל, הנה הוא טוב לדבר אחר, אם [להנאה] אם לסוך בשמנו; [ולפיכך] זה הוא נכלל בכלל "טוב" אחד, לא שיחזור עליו "כל טוב" כאשר פירשו [הם].

ונתמה [עליך שהבאת ראיה] לדרשת ר' יהושע, "היום לעשותם ולא מחר", [שאינה נאמרת על ימות המשיח אלא] ל[ענין] עולם הנשמות, כמו שאמרו: "היום מתן ומחר מקבל". וכוונתו ש[כל] הטוב שיעשה [האדם] בעולם הזה הוא אשר [ישלם] לו ליום [שכרו, אבל בעולם הנשמות] אין [מקום] לעשות עוד טוב, [ומה שיעלה לו שם הוא שכר מה שעשה כאן]. ועל זה אמרם: "היום לעשותם ולא מחר לעשותם, [ו]לא היום ליטול שכרם", והוא בעולם הנשמות, כדכתיב [בדברי] שלמה: "כי אין מעשה וחשבון ודעת וחכמה בשאול" כו'.

English Translation

Chapter 15

The Trinitarian said:² Behold, our Sages, of blessed memory,³ said in the chapter Ḥelek:⁴ 'Why is its name called ḥazir ("pig")? Because the Holy One, blessed be He,⁵ is destined to return it (le-haḥziro) to us.'⁶ From this it is seen that the commandments were given [for a time, and not to endure for ever].⁷ And they further said [on the verse] 'and houses full of all good things',⁸ [that it included even the flesh of the pig, and] that the permission (hetter) applied to them. And what is included in the category (kelal) of one 'good' — any one whatever⁹ — it is not of the way of the supreme wisdom¹⁰ [to forbid for ever]. Indeed it is seen that [the permission returns] to them.¹¹ And they further said in the Gemara: R. Yehoshua ben Levi said: 'Which I command you this day' (Deut 7:11): this day to do them, and not tomorrow to do them.¹² And this refers to the days of the Messiah (Mashiaḥ), in which we are not obliged to perform the commandments of the Torah.

The Unitarian answered: Although [the chapter] Ḥelek hints at [future] matters,¹³ [they] are not fitting for you, and so too the other chapters [that you have adduced] for [your] two claims.

The first: because all these Sages lived some years¹⁴ after the destruction of the Second Temple and were still expounding (dorshin) with a view to the time that would come after them, as they said: 'The Holy One, blessed be He, etc., to return it to us', etc.; and from this it is seen that at the beginning [it was so, and] that He will not innovate any further.¹⁵

The second: know that our Sages, of blessed memory, called Edom (Rome) 'pig', as they expounded on [the verse] 'The boar out of the forest ravages it' (Ps 80:14):¹⁶ these are the sons of Edom.¹⁷ [And the meaning of 'to return it to us' is] that [in] the days of the Messiah the sons of Edom will return to our people and to our faith,¹⁸ as it is written: 'And it shall come to pass that every one that is left of all the nations that came against Jerusalem shall go up from year to year to bow down to the King, the Lord of hosts', etc. (Zech 14:16). And Edom was among those gathered against Jerusalem, for it is written: 'Remember, O Lord, against the sons of Edom the day of Jerusalem' (Ps 137:7);¹⁹ and it is written: 'And saviours shall go up on Mount Zion [to judge the mount of Esau]', etc. (Obad 1:21); 'and the Lord shall be King', etc. (Zech 14:9).²⁰ It is seen that the Name, blessed be He, will reign over Esau, and that the kingship will return to Israel, according to the blessing of their father: '[And] you shall serve your brother; [and it shall come to pass, when you break loose, that you shall shake his yoke from off your neck]' (Gen 27:40).²¹ And from this [it is seen] that [the commandments] will not be annulled [in] the days of the Messiah, [since the nations themselves are destined to go up] and to celebrate the festival of Sukkot.²²

And as for what the Sages, of blessed memory, said earlier, to permit the pig to them, and likewise [on] 'all good things' — I shall answer you [in three ways].

The first: that they said 'the permission returned to them', and they were not prevented from eating them [at the time of the conquest], so that it should be for them as with the rest of the pagans,²³ since [the Sages said that they had no need] to concern themselves with any [matter of ritual fitness];²⁴ and they said that at the time of the conquest nothing was said to them that [would forbid them]. And in connection with this was interpreted their saying 'houses full of all good things': it is not to be understood of eating, but only as regards wealth.²⁵ For it wrote 'houses', and [full of] all good things, and also 'vineyards and olive trees which you did not plant', etc.; and this is what they said, [that there was not] anything lacking to them, as it is said: 'and hewn cisterns', etc.

The second: that [the permission] at the beginning, namely, was a temporary ruling (horaʾat shaʿah).²⁶ When it was permitted to them, the permission was to be in war, [and the Torah] did not change;²⁷ [it is not] so always, as we find [in other temporary rulings].

The third: know that the pig, although bad as food, is good for something else, whether [for enjoyment] or for anointing with its fat;²⁸ [therefore] it is included in the category of one 'good', and not that 'all good' should apply to it,²⁹ as [they] interpreted.

And we are astonished [that you brought a proof] from the exposition of R. Yehoshua, 'this day to do them and not tomorrow': [it is not said of the days of the Messiah, but] with regard to the world of souls,³⁰ as they said: 'Today is giving, and tomorrow receiving.'³¹ And his meaning is that [all] the good that [a man] does in this world is what [will be repaid] to him on the day [of his reward, but in the world of souls] there is no [room] to do any more good, [and what is credited to him there is the reward of what he did here]. And of this they said: 'this day to do them and not tomorrow to do them, [and] not this day to receive their reward'; and that is in the world of souls, as it is written [in the words of] Solomon: 'For there is no work, nor reckoning, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in Sheol', etc. (Qoh 9:10).³²

Notes

¹ Book 11, ch. 15 (ms. of Tortona, fols. 127v–128v). Square brackets indicate conjectural restorations of the Hebrew text; the superscript numbers refer to these notes.

² Ha-meshalesh is a denominal piʿel participle of shalosh ('to triple'), a medieval Hebrew designation of the Christian. Ha-meyaḥed, which unvocalised also admits the puʿal reading (meyuḥad), requires here the active: 'he who professes the unicity (yiḥud) of God'. 'Unitarian' bears no relation to modern Unitarianism.

³ Zikhronam li-verakhah (ז"ל). That the Trinitarian cites the Sages with a formula of reverence belongs to the repertoire of medieval polemic: arguing against the Jew from Talmud and midrash (Barcelona, 1263; Tortosa, 1413–14). He speaks from within the tradition ('our Sages', 'to us').

⁴ Pereq Ḥelek is Sanhedrin 10 (Mishnah 10:1: 'All Israel have a portion, ḥelek, in the world to come'), the seat par excellence of rabbinic eschatology; hence the Unitarian's concession ('it hints at future matters'). The saying about the ḥazir circulates in the sources as 'Aggadah' (Ritva on Qiddushin 49b), as midrash (Ṭaʿamei ha-Minhagim) or alongside Vayikra Rabbah (Recanati), without referring to Sanhedrin; the reference to 'Ḥelek' must be generic.

⁵ Ha-Qadosh Barukh Hu (הב"ה), 'the Holy One, blessed be He'. Further on appears HaShem Yitbarakh (הש"י), 'the Name, blessed be He' (n. 21). They are different epithets.

⁶ The paronomasia ḥazir / le-haḥazir (root ḥ-z-r, hifʿil 'to cause to return, to restore') is untranslatable and holds the chapter together. It reappears in 'the permission returns' (ḥozer ha-hetter), 'the kingship will return' (yaḥazor ha-melukhah) and 'should apply to it' (yaḥazor ʿalav). The crux is the ambiguity of the suffix -o: for the Trinitarian what is returned is the pig, that is, its licitness; for the Unitarian, Edom, who 'returns'. Ritva, Radbaz and Ṭaʿamei ha-Minhagim read 'to Israel'; Recanati, 'to us'. The Even Bohan has 'to us' in the mouth of the Trinitarian, so that one may read that 'us' as a Christian appropriation of 'Israel', which the Unitarian reverses with 'our people and our faith'. There exists, besides, a second tradition for the same etymology: 'because it returns the crown to its former state' (Vayikra Rabbah, according to Recanati) and 'it will return the kingdom to him who had it' (Midrash be-Ḥiddush on the Haggadah), which supports the Unitarian's political reading.

⁷ The background is mitzvot beṭelot le-ʿatid la-vo (Niddah 61b, concerning a garment with kilayim used as a shroud). The Maharal (Tiferet Yisrael, ch. 52) attributes to the Rashba an interpretation: the cessation concerns the state after death, the 'world of souls', not the resurrection nor the days of the Messiah, since 'there is no other difference between this world and the days of the Messiah than subjection to the kingdoms' (Berakhot 34b). It is the Unitarian's solution at the end of the chapter (n. 30). The Sefer ha-ʿIkkarim of Albo (III, 13–16), from the first half of the fifteenth century and therefore later than the Even Bohan, admits as a theoretical possibility a temporary divine law.

⁸ Deut 6:11. Ḥullin 17a: R. Yirmeyah bar Abba, in the name of Rav, understands 'houses full of all good things' as kutlei de-ḥazirei (Torah Temimah on qutlei), an expression of uncertain meaning — the word recalls kotel, 'wall' — which is here translated, from context, as 'pork'. The sugya links the permission to the seven years of the conquest and to the licitness of an 'unclean thing' (davar ṭamei). Rabbeinu Baḥya (on Deut 6:11) extends the dispensation to everything forbidden, save idolatry. Hetter ('permission, licitness') is a technical term and is transliterated.

⁹ Eḥad ('one') functions as an indefinite: 'any good whatever'. It acquires its full value in the third reply, which opposes ṭov eḥad ('one' particular good) to kol ṭov ('all good'), with the play between kol and kelal ('category') that translation loses.

¹⁰ Ḥokhmah ʿelyonah ('wisdom from on high') has here no sefirotic sense: it is the divine wisdom that governs legislation, in a rationalist key. The Trinitarian's premise is that what is 'good' is not forbidden for ever. Albo (Ikkarim III, 16) examines a related case, that of reopening what is forbidden when the reason for the prohibition ceases, such as fat and blood, and evokes under the heading 'Yelammedenu' the play 'YKVK matir ʾasurim' (Ps 146:7), where ʾasurim is at once 'captives' and 'forbidden things'.

¹¹ 'To them' refers to Israel, in the third person as against the 'to us' of the citation: the pronominal tension marks the suture between rabbinic citation and the author's own inference. The restoration [Ḥozer ha-hetter] rests on the identical formula in the Unitarian's first reply.

¹² Gemʾ designates the Talmud in general. The saying is in Avodah Zarah 3a, where it figures as an objection ('how can you say that? Did not R. Yehoshua say…?') within the sugya of the eschatological judgement of the nations, to whom God offers a 'light' mitzvah, the sukkah; it is discussed (gufa) at 4b. The citation in the Even Bohan differs from the vulgate in two points: it omits the lamed of le-maḥar (ve-lo maḥar as against ve-lo le-maḥar) and reads sekharam (3rd m. pl.), where 3a has sakhar and 4b sekharan (3rd f. pl., agreeing with mitzvot).

¹³ Romez ('hints, alludes') degrades the probative value of the passage; raʾuyim lekha is a turn of convenience ('they do not correspond to you, they do not serve you'). Underlying it is the polemical principle that aggadah is not binding (cf. the attitude of Nahmanides at Barcelona, 1263). The antecedent of hem is 'things' (devarim), not 'chapters'.

¹⁴ Kamah shanim is 'some years'. The chronology is schematic, since R. Yehoshua ben Levi was a Palestinian amora of the third century: the Unitarian opposes in bloc the first rabbinic epoch, still expectant, to the doctrine already settled.

¹⁵ The implicit subject is God. Echo of Qoh 1:9 and of Deut 13:1 (Heb.; 12:32 in the Christian versification: 'you shall not add to it nor take from it'). It is the immutability of the Torah, formulated by Maimonides in the ninth principle (Commentary on the Mishnah, Sanhedrin 10). Albo (Ikkarim III, 16) denies that Maimonides's proofs found a principle of faith.

¹⁶ Karsem is a biblical hapax. Rashi illustrates it with the Mishnaic usage (Peʾah 2:7, the field that 'the ants have gnawed'): 'to cut, to sever', hence 'to ravage'. The ʿayin of mi-yaʿar is suspended in the Masoretic tradition, and Rashi makes capital of it by reading also mi-yeʾor ('from the Nile'): while Israel deserves it, Esau is a beast of the river, impotent on dry land; once the punishment is decreed, a beast of the forest. The same commentary reserves 'the pig of the forest' for Amalek (by Dan 7:7).

¹⁷ Zo bnei Edom: zo is the formula of symbolic midrash. The equation pig = Edom/Rome is ancient: Bereshit Rabbah 65:1 applies Ps 80:14 to the 'wicked kingdom' that, like the pig at rest stretching out its hooves in order to seem pure, 'robs and plunders' while appearing just, and refers it to Esau. Vayikra Rabbah (according to Recanati, who unfolds it with the four animals of Lev 11 and the four beasts of Dan 7) confirms it: camel = Babylon; shafan = Media; hare = Greece; pig = Edom. In medieval exegesis Edom designates Rome and, by extension, Christendom, which gives the argument its polemical edge. Ritva on Qiddushin 49b refers the expression to Edom (as Ṭaʿamei ha-Minhagim cites it) and also records the interpretation that refers it to Amalek.

¹⁸ Shuv is a synonym of ḥazar: the Unitarian converts the transitive hifʿil (le-haḥazir, 'to return') into the intransitive 'to return', whereby the object restored ceases to be the licitness of the pig and becomes Edom itself. ʾEmunah means in medieval Hebrew 'creed, religion'.

¹⁹ Zech 14:16 says ha-baʾim ʿal Yerushalayim ('those who come against Jerusalem'), an atemporal participle that the Unitarian reads as past. Ps 137:7 uses zekhor le- ('remember against', that is, 'take into account'); the 'day of Jerusalem' is that of its fall (587/6 BCE). From this is inferred, by harmonisation, Edom's membership of the eschatological coalition of Zech 14:2.

²⁰ Obad 1:21 and Zech 14:16 share the link ve-ʿalu ('and they shall go up'). Obad 1:21 closes with ha-melukhah ('the kingship') and Zech 14:9 with le-melekh: the double verbal thread, by way of a gezerah shavah, allows the passage from Edom who 'goes up' to Edom subjected to the divine kingship and, thence, to the 'return' of the kingship to Israel. The second verse ('and the Lord shall be King') is Zech 14:9, not Obad.

²¹ 'The Name' is HaShem (cf. n. 5). Gen 27:40 is Isaac's blessing to Esau: 'you' (Esau) shall serve your brother; hence 'their father', the father of both. The sense of tarid is disputed ('you rebel', 'you wander', 'you toil').

²² Baṭal (qal, 'to cease, to cease to govern') is the verb of Niddah 61b (beṭelot); here it is negated: if the nations are to celebrate Sukkot, the commandments can hardly be abolished (cf. n. 7). Avodah Zarah 3a, where the saying of R. Yehoshua figures, deals with the eschatological offer of the sukkah to the nations, who reject it when God makes the sun blaze upon them: a thematic coincidence (Sukkot, nations, future) with the Unitarian's argument.

²³ Ḥazar ha-hetter lahem takes up the Trinitarian's expression in order to hand it back to him. 'The rest of the pagans' is sheʾar ha-ʿakum, where ʿAKU"M is an acronym of ʿoved kokhavim u-mazalot ('worshipper of stars and constellations'). The reading '[what is taken] from the other pagans' rests on Ḥullin 17a: during the seven years of the conquest the booty of the gentiles (shalal shel goyim) was lawful, not what belonged to Israel. Rabbeinu Baḥya records the position of Maimonides (Hilkhot Melakhim 8:1), according to which the permission holds for the hungry soldier, and the objection of Nahmanides, for whom the Torah permitted it unconditionally; the Unitarian's formula ('nothing was said to them that forbade it') comes closer to the latter.

²⁴ Hekhsher: 'ritual fitness'. The context of Ḥullin 17a (neḥirah as against sheḥiṭah) makes ritual slaughter also pertinent as an object of the dispensation.

²⁵ An argument from syntagmatic context: the enumeration of Deut 6:11 (houses, cisterns, vineyards, olive groves) is of immovable goods, not of foods. The 'etc.' omits the final clause of the verse, ve-ʾakhalta ve-savaʿta ('and you shall eat and be satisfied'); cf. Baḥya, who extends the permission even to vines with ʿorlah. The subject of ufereshu is impersonal ('it was interpreted'): the Sages or later exegetes.

²⁶ Horaʾat shaʿah is the technical device for preventing the inference of derogation: the anomaly is confined to its occasion (cf. Yevamot 90b, Elijah on Carmel).

²⁷ Without the restoration, shinnah can be read as 3rd m. sg. with God as subject, in symmetry with lo yeḥaddesh ʿod of the first reply (n. 15).

²⁸ Raʿ le-maʾakhal ('bad as food') agrees with the Maimonidean rationalisation of the prohibition (Guide of the Perplexed III, 48: filthiness of the animal's habits and food). Pig fat (axungia) as the base of ointments was common in the medieval pharmacopoeia, and was even used in Spain as Ungüento de Arthanita (or the historical Ungüento de Pan de Puerco). Curiously, the plant Cyclamen europaeum has been known in Spain since antiquity by the common name 'pan de puerco' ('pig's bread') (because wild boars dig up and eat its roots). The Ungüento de Arthanita, made from this root and pig's lard, was the official remedy in Spain from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century for purging the stomach and relieving pains of the belly when applied topically. The concept travelled to Mexico (New Spain) during the Conquest, where viceregal medicine fused the fat and the concept of 'pan de puerco' with the local herbal lore.

²⁹ Yaḥazor ʿalav means here 'to refer to, to apply to'; the repetition of the lexeme is not accidental (n. 6). On ṭov eḥad, see n. 9.

³⁰ Nitmah (1st pl.) is a plural of modesty. ʿOlam ha-neshamot designates the state of souls after death and before the resurrection (cf. Nahmanides, Shaʿar ha-gemul); it is the frame that the Maharal attributes to the Rashba (n. 7).

³¹ The scheme is: 'today', this world; 'tomorrow', the world of souls.

³² Solomon is the traditional author of Qohelet. Sheol is read as 'world of souls': without maʿaseh ('work') there is no precept, so that the impossibility of performing mitzvot is attributed to the post-mortem state and not to the days of the Messiah. Ḥeshbon means 'reckoning, account, reason'.

-R. Isaach Schem Tob [Šem Ṭov ben Yiṣḥaq ibn Šaprut], Lapis discernens. Eben bochen. Lapis discernens R. Isaach Schem Tob, scriptus a Iudaeo 5145 hoc est nostro 1385 in Tortona ab Obadia Amathia, ms. Plut. 2.17, fols. 127v–128v, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, https://tecabml.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/plutei/id/318538/rec/65, accessed 28 October 2026 (copied by Obadia Amathia at Tortona, 5145 [1385], according to the catalogue title); collated with Šem Ṭov ibn Šaprut, Even boḥan, ms. Cod. Parm. 2259, fols. [173–174], Biblioteca Palatina, Parma, National Library of Israel, Ktiv Project, https://www.nli.org.il/he/discover/manuscripts/hebrew-manuscripts/viewerpage?vid=MANUSCRIPTS#d=[[PNX_MANUSCRIPTS990000786800205171-1,FL14611742]], accessed 28 October 2026. Ch. 15: transcription of the Hebrew text (digitisation by Oraj HaEmet) and personal translation. How an Argument Is Dismantled

The Trinitarian opens with hinneh amru ḥakhameinu zikhronam li-verakhah: 'behold, our Sages, of blessed memory, said'. No born Christian speaks thus: he does not know who those sages are and would not bless them. It is the formula of one who grew up in the synagogue. Shem Tov has put into the mouth of his 'Trinitarian' the dialect of a mumar, and he does so on purpose: his reader is a Jew who is going to hear these arguments from the lips of a convert, or from his pamphlets, and must recognise them for what they are, reused Talmudism. Note, moreover, what does not happen: the Unitarian, in replying, does not dispute the vocabulary either. He says ḤaZa"L, 'our Sages', with the same naturalness. The two quarrel within the same house, and that is the drama of debating with a mumar: there is no neutral ground, because the adversary knows all the keys.

Let us pass from the voice to the scaffolding. For one who does not handle derash, it is useful to see the pieces bare. The first is a pun: ḥazir (חזיר), 'pig', sounds like le-haḥazir (להחזיר), 'to return' (hifʿil of ח-ז-ר), and hence the saying that the mumar attributes to the chapter Ḥelek: 'why is it called ḥazir? Because the Holy One, blessed be He, is to return it to us.' The inference is of a sinister elegance: if some day God 'returns' the pig, there is a day on which He permits it, and therefore the commandments are temporary. The second piece is Deuteronomy 6:11, 'houses full of all good things', which the Talmudic gloss identifies with kutlei de-ḥazirei. The passage of Ḥullin 17a reasons thus:

אֵימַת? אִילֵּימָא בְּשֶׁבַע שֶׁכִּבְּשׁוּ – הַשְׁתָּא דָּבָר טָמֵא אִישְׁתְּרִי לְהוּ, דִּכְתִיב: ״וּבָתִּים מְלֵאִים כׇּל טוּב״, וְאָמַר רַבִּי יִרְמְיָה בַּר אַבָּא אָמַר רַב: כֻּתְלֵי דַּחֲזִירֵי – בְּשַׂר נְחִירָה מִבַּעְיָא?

'When [does the doubt arise]? If you say, in the seven years in which they conquered: now that an unclean thing was permitted to them, as it is written, "and houses full of all good things", and R. Yirmeyah bar Abba said in the name of Rav: kutlei de-ḥazirei — is the flesh of neḥirah even in question?'[16]

The third piece is R. Yehoshua ben Levi in Avodah Zarah 3a:

הַיּוֹם לַעֲשׂוֹתָם וְלֹא לְמָחָר לַעֲשׂוֹתָם, הַיּוֹם לַעֲשׂוֹתָם וְלֹא הַיּוֹם לִיטּוֹל שָׂכָר

''Today' to do them, and not 'tomorrow' to do them; 'today' to do them, and not 'today' to receive reward.'[17]

With the three, the mumar builds his thesis: there is a messianic 'tomorrow' without commandments, a permission of pork already announced in the Talmud, and an argument from 'supreme wisdom' (derekh ha-ḥokhmah ha-ʿelyonah) according to which what falls under 'good' cannot be forbidden for ever. It is an intelligent scaffolding. And it is built with timbers of the Talmud.

Against that scaffolding, Shem Tov answers in three movements, and he begins with the soberest, which is why we tend to underrate it. The sages you cite lived a few years after the destruction of the Second Temple and expounded these things for a time that would follow them. It is an argument from literary genre: eschatological aggadah speaks in the future tense, and an announced future is not a pronounced sentence. Before discussing what 'to return' means, he removes the mumar's jurisdiction.

His second answer changes the plane. He does not discuss whether the pig is 'returned': he discusses what the pig is. 'Our Sages called Edom ḥazir.' The source is the Midrash Bereshit Rabbah 65:1, which, in explaining why the psalmist compares Rome to the boar of the forest (Ps 80:14), answers with an image that a mumar reader finds hard to hear:

מָה חֲזִיר הַזֶּה בְּשָׁעָה שֶׁהוּא רוֹבֵץ הוּא מְפַשֵּׁט אֶת טְלָפָיו כְּלוֹמַר שֶׁאֲנִי טָהוֹר, כָּךְ מַלְכוּת הַזֹּאת הָרְשָׁעָה גּוֹזֶלֶת וְחוֹמֶסֶת נִרְאֵת כְּאִלּוּ מַצַּעַת אֶת הַבִּימָה

'Just as this pig, when it lies down, stretches out its hooves, as if to say, "I am pure", so this wicked kingdom robs and plunders and appears as if it were laying out the dais [of justice].'[18]

Two precisions of honesty. The first: the identification is not unanimous. Rashi, on the same verse, reads 'the boar of the forest' as Amalek, and the Ritva, at Qiddushin 49b, records that some so interpreted it before recalling that in the aggadah the name belongs to Edom.[19] Shem Tov does not invent: he chooses, between two rabbinic lines, the one that serves him. The second: that choice is an act of method, and he himself declared it in his prologue. The effect matters. In medieval polemic Edom is Christendom. Then the pig of the midrash that the mumar wields to legitimise his table turns out to be the name of the mumar himself and of his new community. 'To return the pig to Israel' ceases to mean 'to return the ham' and comes to mean 'to return Edom'. And Bereshit Rabbah adds, as a gift, the portrait of hypocrisy: the pig that shows its cloven hoof in order to proclaim itself pure. For a Christian reader of Matthew 15:7, where Yeshu calls the Pharisees 'hypocrites' (ὑποκριταί), the irony is almost unbearable. The irony, it should be said, belongs to the text, not to me.[20]

There is, besides, a nuance of vocabulary that, in my judgement, reinforces Shem Tov's reading without his making it explicit. The hifʿil הֶחֱזִיר, 'to return', is in rabbinic Hebrew the verb of restitution: one 'returns' what was stolen (cf. the legislation on theft in m. Bava Qamma 9), one 'returns' the crown to its former state (maḥazir ʿatarah le-yoshnah, the formula that Recanati cites from Vayikra Rabbah, as you will see below). And look at what Bereshit Rabbah says of the pig in that same paragraph: it is the kingdom that robs and plunders (gozelet ve-ḥomeset). The name ḥazir thus does not promise the rehabilitation of a dish, but the return of what was stolen: the thief who, at the end of days, restores it to its owner. In that scheme the pig is not an object that changes its status, but a subject that changes its conduct. The mumar needed 'return' to mean 'permit'; the verb, in its natural ecology, means 'restore'.

Then comes the biblical apparatus, and philology begins to work. Shem Tov cites Zechariah 14:16: 'every one that is left of all the nations that come to/against Jerusalem'. The manuscript wavers between על and אל, and note 9 records the oscillation. I add that the Masoretic text reads על — 'those who came against Jerusalem' — and that this hostile preposition is precisely the one that his argument needs: Edom was among those gathered against Jerusalem (Ps 137:7, 'the day of Jerusalem'; cf. Zech 14:2, אספתי את כל הגוים אל ירושלם למלחמה), survives, goes up year after year to prostrate itself and to celebrate the festival of Sukkot. Zechariah 14:19 even fixes the punishment for the one who does not go up: 'this shall be the guilt of Egypt and the guilt of all the nations that do not go up to celebrate the festival of Sukkot'.

The architecture is a watchmaker's. Obadiah 21 ('let saviours go up to Mount Zion to judge the mount of Esau, and the kingship shall be the Lord's') and Zechariah 14:9 ('and the Lord shall be king over all the earth') are fused in the manuscript, and Genesis 27:40, 'and you shall serve your brother', closes the circle: the blessing of Isaac to Esau. Here there is a detail that I do not wish to let pass. The mumar, a reader of the Vulgate, had to hand another text about the two brothers, Genesis 25:23, maior serviet minori, 'the greater [elder] shall serve the lesser [younger]', which the Christian tradition, from Paul (Romans 9:12, ὁ μείζων δουλεύσει τῷ ἐλάσσονι), reads as the servitude of Israel before the Church. Shem Tov does not answer with 25:23: he opposes to it 27:40, the blessing pronounced over Esau. It is a professional's reply: against the oracle of the maternal womb, the oracle of Isaac's bed. Hence the conclusion: the commandments are not abolished in the days of the Messiah, 'since all [the peoples] will go up… to celebrate the festival of Sukkot'. The pig returns, yes. It returns to the sukkah.

Isaiah 66 confirms the architecture from the other flank, and it is a find that pleased me more than it should. Verse 17 condemns those who eat basar ha-ḥazir, 'the flesh of the pig', the creeping thing and the mouse: yaḥdav yasufu (יחדו יספו), 'together they shall perish'. Six verses later, in the same chapter, the prophet describes the world to come: ve-hayah middei ḥodesh be-ḥodsho u-middei Shabbat be-Shabbato yavo khol basar le-hishtaḥavot lefanai (והיה מדי חדש בחדשו ומדי שבת בשבתו יבוא כל בשר להשתחוות לפני), 'and it shall come to pass that from new moon to new moon and from sabbath to sabbath all flesh shall come to bow down before me' (Isa 66:23). Mark the play: basar, 'flesh', appears at both ends of the chapter. In verse 17 it designates what is eaten and perishes; in 23, the humanity that goes up to keep the sabbath and the new moon. The same chapter that announces the end of those who eat basar ha-ḥazir summons kol basar — all humanity, Edom included — to observe, in messianic time, the calendar of the Torah. Shem Tov offers the sukkah of Zechariah; Isaiah offers the sabbath and the new moon. To win, the mumar would have to explain why, if the commandments no longer apply, the prophet of the world to come goes on prescribing them to all flesh.

The third answer is the one that interests me most. The mumar had said that what is included in the category of 'good' (kelal ṭov eḥad) is not proper to the supreme wisdom to forbid for ever. Shem Tov answers in three ways. The first is historical: at the conquest, the permission fell upon the goods of the vanquished peoples, and the verse enumerates riches (ʿosher), namely houses, cisterns, vineyards and olive groves: it is not a dietary norm. The second is halakhic: what was permitted was horaʾat shaʿah, a temporary ruling during the war. Here runs the disagreement between Maimonides and Nahmanides that Rabbeinu Baḥya records: Maimonides (Hilkhot Melakhim 8:1) limits the permission to hungry troops, and Nahmanides extends it to the booty after the conquest of the cities.[21] Shem Tov does not choose: he travels both roads. The third is the one that gives him his signature.

'The pig, although bad as food, is good for something else': for enjoyment or for medicine, for anointing with its fat. That sentence is a piece of logic disguised as a footnote. In scholastic Hebrew kelal is the genus, the category that subsumes species, the term that Shem Tov explained to his pupils in the commentary on Porphyry's Isagoge. What he does here is what Porphyry teaches and what Aristotle calls homonymy: 'good' is not a genus predicated univocally of all its species. 'Good to eat' and 'good to anoint' are not species of one genus; they are different uses of one word. From the unguent utility of the pig its alimentary suitability does not follow. And the physician enters: the commentator on Avicenna's Canon knows what place pork fat had as an excipient of ointments, and his concession ('bad as food') coincides with the reason that Maimonides gives in the Guide of the Perplexed III, 48. It is a calculated concession: he accepts from the adversary what costs him nothing, and keeps the category.[23]

It is worth reading Maimonides's reason in full, because Shem Tov takes it as known and it is what sustains his concession. In the Guide of the Perplexed III, 48, Maimonides establishes the general principle — forbidden foods are harmful to the body — and dwells on the pig with a harshness that surprises in one who usually speaks of the Torah with moderation. I reproduce the passage in the modern Hebrew version and then in the original Judeo-Arabic, transcribed in Hebrew letters, with the editorial readings in parentheses and square brackets. My English renderings are made directly from the Judeo-Arabic and Arabic original:

הכלל: המאכלים האסורים רעים לגוף

ואומר, שכל המאכלים שאסרה עלינו התורה – תזונתם של כולם מגונה. ואין במה שנאסר עלינו מה שאפשר לחשוב בטעות שאין בו נזק פרט לחזיר ולחֵלב. ואין הדבר כן, (חזיר) כי החזיר לח יותר מן הראוי ורבה בו הפסולת, והתורה תיעבה אותו בעיקר משום גודל טינופו והיותו ניזון מן הטינופת. ידוע לך שהתורה הקפידה שלא יראו זיהומים אפילו בשדה, במחנה, וכל שכן בתוך הערים. ואילו היו ניזונים מחזיר היו נעשים השווקים, ואף הבתים, מטונפים יותר מבית הכסא, כמו שאתה רואה בארצות הפרנקים (=אירופה הנוצרית) היום. ידועים לך דבריהם ז"ל: "פי חזיר – כצואה עוברת דָּאמֵי (=דומה)" (בבלי ברכות כה,א).

'The principle: forbidden foods are harmful to the body. I say that all the foods that the Law has forbidden us are, as nourishment, blameworthy; and among what has been forbidden us there is nothing from which one might wrongly suppose that it carries no harm, save the pig and fat. But it is not so: the pig is moister than is proper and abounds in waste matter, and what the Law most abhorred was the extremity of its filthiness and its feeding on filth. You know that the Law was scrupulous that no impurities be seen even in the open country, in the camp, and all the more so inside cities. And if pigs were taken as food, the markets, and even the houses, would become filthier than the latrine, as you see now in the lands of the Franks (= Christian Europe). You know the saying of our Sages, of blessed memory: "The mouth of the pig is like excrement passing" (dami, "it resembles") (b. Berakhot 25a).'

And now the original Judeo-Arabic:

פאקול, אן כל מא חרמתה אלשריעה עלינא מן אלמאכל כלהא גד'א(ו)הא מד'מום, וליס פי מא חרם עלינא מא יוהם אנה לא צ'רר פיה אלא אלכ'נזיר ואלשחם, וליס אלאמר כד'לך, פאן אלכ'נזיר ארטב ממא ינבגי וכת'יר אלפצ'לאת, ואכת'ר מא כרהתה אלשריעה (לכת'רה')[לשדה'] קד'ארתה ואגתד'א(י)ה באלאקד'אר, וקד עלמת משאחחה' אלשריעה [עלי] רויה' אלאוסאך' ולו פי אלפחץ פי אלמעסכר פכיף פי דאכ'ל אלמדן, ולו אתכ'ד'ת אלכ'נאזיר גד'א(א) לצארת אלאסואק בל אלביות אקד'ר מן בית הכסא כמא תרי בלאד אלפרנג' אלאן, קד עלמת קולהם ז"ל פי חזיר כצואה עוברת ד[א]מי. וכד'לך שחום אלבט[ו]ן תשבע ותפסד אלהצ'ם ותולד דמא בארדא לזג'א, ואלחרק כאן אולי בהא. וכד'לך אלדם ואלמיתה עסרה' אלהצ'ם רדיה' אלגד'א, ומעלום אן אלטרפה תחלת נבלה היא.

فأقول، إن كل ما حرمته الشريعة علينا من المآكل كلها غذاء(و)ها مذموم، وليس فيما حرم علينا ما يوهم أنه لا ضرر فيه إلا الخنزير والشحم، وليس الأمر كذلك، فإن الخنزير أرطب مما ينبغي وكثير الفضلات، وأكثر ما كرهته الشريعة (لكثرة) [لشدة] قذارته واغتذاء(ي)ه بالأقذار، وقد علمت مشاحّة الشريعة [على] رؤية الأوساخ ولو في الفحص في المعسكر فكيف في داخل المدن، ولو اتخذت الخنازير غذاء(ا) لصارت الأسواق بل البيوت أقذر من בית הכסא كما ترى بلاد الفرنج الآن، قد علمت قولهم ז"ל في חזיר כצואה עוברת ד[א]מי. وكذلك شحوم البط[و]ن تشبع وتفسد الهضم وتولد دما باردا لزجا، والحرق كان أولى بها. وكذلك الدم والميتة عسرة الهضم رديئة الغذاء، ومعلوم أن الطرفة תחלת נבלה היא.

'I say, then (fa-aqūl), that all the foods that the Law (al-sharīʿa) has forbidden us have a nourishment (ghidhāʾ) that is blameworthy (madhmūm). And among what has been forbidden us there is nothing that gives the impression (yūhim) of being without harm (ḍarar), save the pig (khinzīr) and fat (shaḥm), but it is not so. For the pig is moister than is fitting and abounds in superfluities (faḍalāt). And what the Law most abhorred (karihathu) was the extremity of its filthiness (qadhāra) and its nourishing itself (ightidhāʾ) on filths (aqdhār). You already know the Law's scrupulousness (mushāḥḥa) concerning the sight of dirt (awsākh), even in the open ground (al-faḥṣ) in the camp (al-muʿaskar); how much more, then, within the cities. And if pigs were taken as food, the markets, nay the houses, would become filthier than the bet ha-kisse, as you see now in the lands of the Franks (bilād al-Faranj). You already know their saying, of blessed memory (zikhronam li-verakhah), about the pig: "like excrement passing" (ḥazir ke-ṣoʾah ʿoveret) [d[ā]mī]. Likewise, the fats of the entrails (shuḥūm al-buṭūn) satiate, spoil digestion (haḍm) and generate cold, viscous blood (dam bārid lazij), and burning (al-ḥarq) was more fitting for them. Likewise blood (dam) and carrion (mayta) are hard to digest (ʿusr al-haḍm) and poor nourishment (radīʾat al-ghidhāʾ). And it is known that the ṭerefah (ṭerefah, an animal torn) is the beginning of nevelah (teḥillat nevelah hi, carrion).'

-Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed III, 48 (modern Hebrew version and Judeo-Arabic original transcribed in Hebrew characters); Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Nizqei Mamon 5:9.

Three things in the text seem to me decisive. The first is Galenic physiology: 'moister than is proper and abounding in waste matter' is the vocabulary of the humours, the same that the commentator on Avicenna handled. The reason is corporeal, not symbolic. The second is civil hygiene: Maimonides does not speak of the pig on the plate, but of the pig in the city. If people fed on it, he says, the markets and even the houses would become filthier than a latrine. The third is the one that matters most to me for this article: he points out where that already occurs, 'as you see now in the lands of the Franks', that is, in Christian Europe. For a Jewish sage of Fustat, beside Cairo, the city with pigs is not a hypothesis: it is Edom. The pig of the midrash, the pig of the Guide and the pig of the table at Pamplona converge on one and the same map.

It is not an outburst of the Guide. In the Mishneh Torah (the Yad ha-Ḥazaqah), Maimonides records that the Sages forbade the raising of pigs anywhere, and gives a reason that is not one of ritual purity but of sanitary policing (Hilkhot Nizqei Mamon 5:9): מפני שהנזק מרובה ומצוי, 'because the damage is great and frequent'. The two adjectives, merubbeh and matzui, are those of an expert: the harm that occurs much and that occurs often. A prohibition whose reason is harm does not lapse with the calendar, does not dissolve with any 'tomorrow' and does not ask for faith: it asks one to look around.

And here I do something that a medievalist does not usually allow himself: letting the present corroborate the Middle Ages. In the state of Yucatán, in Mexico, Greenpeace México has denounced that 'the mass production of pigs is affecting the water in Yucatán'; that 'the wastewater that comes out of the pig megafarms filters directly through the soil and reaches the cenotes, contaminating all their water with waste'; and that 'the local communities are suffering physical ailments owing to the contamination of the water'. (Greenpeace México, communiqué on pig production and the contamination of the water of the cenotes in Yucatán, 18 October 2026.) The Yucatán peninsula is a calcareous platform without surface rivers, and its cenotes are everyone's water: the common space, the 'market' and the 'house' of Maimonides. I do not wish to force the analogy. Maimonides spoke of pigs in the streets of cities and of their waste; Yucatán, of industrial macro-exploitations. But the structure is identical: the harm is not symbolic, it is sanitary, and it is great and frequent. That a twelfth-century text should describe with such precision what a twenty-first-century communiqué denounces about an aquifer ought to give pause to whoever presents kashrut as superstition and, above all, to whoever presents the pig as the great one liberated by the Messiah: if the reason for its prohibition is harm, the mumar needed the pig to have ceased to be harmful. It has not ceased.

And here appears a hostile witness that I did not ask for. The Vulgate, the text that the mumar read in Latin, translates Deuteronomy 6:11 domos plenas cunctarum opum, 'houses full of all kinds of wealth': Jerome, without intending it, read kol ṭov as ʿosher, which is exactly the reading that Shem Tov proposes against the mumar. The LXX put ἀγαθῶν, 'goods', that is, possessions. By contrast, for Genesis 1:31 — 'and God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was ṭov meʾod' — the LXX use καλά, and from that root comes 1 Timothy 4:4: πᾶν κτίσμα θεοῦ καλόν, 'every creature of God is good'. My reading, and I present it as a reading, is that the kelal ṭov eḥad of the mumar is the Hebrew reflection of the Pauline καλόν, and that the polysemy of ṭov dismantles, without naming Paul, the argument of Paul.[22] There remains to answer, to close, the third piece of the mumar. Shem Tov displaces the 'tomorrow' to the ʿolam ha-neshamot, the world of souls: today one works, tomorrow one collects, and in Sheol, he says with Qohelet 9:10, 'there is neither work, nor reckoning, nor knowledge, nor wisdom'. He does not invent it: it is the line of the Rashba on Niddah 61b, which the Maharal gathers in the Tiferet Yisrael. The saying mitzvot beṭelot le-ʿatid la-vo refers to the release from the commandments after death, and Berakhot 34b says of the days of the Messiah that they are not distinguished from this world save by subjection to the kingdoms:

ומה שאמרו 'מצות בטילות לעתיד לבא', היינו אחר המיתה מיד, בעולם הנשמות … וכל שכן לימות משיחנו, שהרי אמרו (ברכות לד.) 'אין בין עולם הזה לימות משיחנו אלא שעבוד מלכיות בלבד'

'And what they said, "the commandments will be annulled in the time to come", means immediately after death, in the world of souls … and all the more so for the days of our Messiah, for they said (Berakhot 34b): "There is no difference between this world and the days of our Messiah except subjection to the kingdoms alone."'[24]

And now what I found on opening Avodah Zarah 3a: the dictum of R. Yehoshua ben Levi is not alone. It appears in a scene in which the nations claim the Torah and the Holy One, blessed be He, offers them, in place of all of it, a single 'easy' mitzvah: sukkah shemah, 'its name is sukkah'. Each makes his sukkah on his roof; the Holy One makes the sun of the dog days of Tammuz blaze; and each kicks his sukkah and goes away. It is there that the Gemara objects: 'and how can you say that to them? Did not R. Yehoshua ben Levi say: "today to do them and not tomorrow to do them"?' Answer: the Holy One, blessed be He, does not come with ṭarunya (an unreasonable demand) against His creatures. Read it slowly. The phrase that the mumar uses to say that in the Messiah there are no mitzvot is, on its page of origin, an objection within a scene in which a precept of the future is offered to the nations, and that precept is the sukkah. Shem Tov, in his second answer, has placed Edom celebrating the festival of Sukkot with Zechariah 14. I do not find that he himself says so; it is my reading. But that the sukkah should appear on both sides is a coincidence difficult to attribute to chance.

One last check, for rigour: is there any classical commentator who reads the saying about the pig as a permission? As far as I have been able to establish, none. Radbaz, asked about this very thing, resolves it by the plain sense:

וכבר נשאלתי על כיוצא בזה שאמרו ז"ל למה נקרא שמו חזיר שעתיד הקב"ה להחזירו לישראל ולפי הפשט איפשר לתרץ על הדרך אשר כתבתי כי יהיו ישראל אוכלים משמנים כאלו הותר להם בשר חזיר לא שיותר להם בשר חזיר ח"ו

'And I was already asked about something similar to this, namely what our Sages, of blessed memory, said: "why is its name called ḥazir? Because the Holy One, blessed be He, is destined to return it to Israel"; and according to the plain sense it is possible to resolve it in the way that I wrote, that Israel will eat rich foods as if the flesh of the pig had been permitted to them, not that the flesh of the pig will be permitted to them, God forbid!'[25]

Recanati, citing Vayikra Rabbah, shifts the sense towards the kingdom:

ובויקרא רבה למה נקרא שמו חזיר שמחזיר עטרה ליושנה. והכוונה היא על הכח שלו שהיא החיה הרביעית שראה דניאל וישוב עם שאר הכחות תחת כח ישראל

'And in Vayikra Rabbah: why is its name called ḥazir? Because it returns the crown to its former state. And the intention concerns its power, which is the fourth beast that Daniel saw, and it shall return, together with the other powers, under the power of Israel.'[26]

And a commentary on the Haggadah of the Seder ties it even to the bitter lettuce of the table:

עוד חזרת מלשון חזיר כדכתיב יכרסמנה חזיר מיער. ולמה נקרא שמו חזיר שעתיד להחזיר המלכות למי שהיה במהרה בימינו אמן

'Further, ḥazeret [lettuce] is from the language of ḥazir, as it is written, "the boar out of the forest ravages it". And why is its name called ḥazir? Because it is destined to return the kingdom to him who had it, speedily in our days, amen.'[27]

A permission never appears. What appears is abundance (Radbaz), the crown that returns (Recanati), the kingdom restored (the ḥazeret of the Passover Seder). What appears, in sum, is everything except what the mumar needed.

So far, the point-by-point refutation. But a discomfort remains with me, and I do not wish to hide it, because it is what makes the debate interesting: was the mumar so easy to defeat? If you read the contemporaries, no. One generation after Shem Tov, Yosef Albo, the Aragonese theologian who defended Judaism at the Disputation of Tortosa (1413–1414), writes in the Sefer ha-ʿIkkarim (III, 16) some lines that any mumar would have underlined with joy. He recognises that from expressions such as ʿolam or ḥuqqat ʿolam, 'for ever', eternity does not follow, and he asks, as he closes the discussion (qintzei le-millin, as in Job 18:2):

ואף אנו נאמר כי מה המונע שלא נאמר שתבא דת אלהית מתרת קצת אסורים, כמו חלב ודם ושחוטי חוץ

'And we too shall say: what prevents us from saying that a divine law might come that permits certain prohibitions, such as fat, and blood, and what is slaughtered outside [the Sanctuary]?'

And shortly after he confesses:

איני רואה שום ראיה ולא שום הכרח אל שיהיה שורש בפני עצמו לתורה אלהית בכלל ולא לתורת משה בפרט שלא תנוסח התורה ושלא תשתנה

'I see no proof and no necessity that there should be a root principle in its own right for a divine law in general, nor for the Torah of Moses in particular, that the Torah may not be abrogated and may not be changed.'[28]

Albo leans on his master Ḥasdai Crescas, the same who, according to Niclós, negotiated between 1391 and 1400 the entry into Navarre of the Castilian-Aragonese Jews who were fleeing from the riots, and who maintained that immutability is not a foundation of the faith but a belief that must be held by every follower of the Torah of Moses. Read it with the head of 1379. The debate did not pit a firm immutability against a sophistical convert. It was an open debate, within the most reflective Judaism, over whether the Torah could in theory be abrogated, and the mumar had there, without knowing it, a weighty ally. That is why Shem Tov's reply is more interesting than it seems: he cannot rest on a dogma of immutability that his own masters would have relativised. He has to go text by text, and he does.

And here is what intrigues me most. The list of prohibitions that Albo considers capable of being lifted — fat, blood, what is slaughtered outside — does not include the pig. And his reason is historical and contingent: those things were forbidden at the beginning because Israel was coming out of Egypt shetufim ba-ʿavodat ha-shedim, 'immersed in the worship of demons', and once that idolatry was forgotten, the motive lapses. Compare it with the concession that Shem Tov makes, almost in passing, in his third answer: the pig is 'bad as food'. It is the reason of Maimonides in the Guide III, 48: the flesh of the pig is harmful in itself, by its moisture and by the filth of its rearing and its food. A prohibition whose reason is intrinsic harmfulness does not lapse when idolatry ends. Shem Tov could not have known Albo's theory, but his concession works, seen from it, as a trap: by admitting that the pig is bad to eat, he takes the pig out of the only terrain where even the most liberal theory of abrogation could lift its prohibition. It looked like a gift to the adversary and it was a lock. One Lineage, Two Tables: Doña Paloma's Pot

I return to the bookshop in El Escorial and to Doña Teresa, because her question remained open and because her surname owed me an explanation. Rodríguez-Rivera: when I followed that thread, genealogy led me to a family that sums up this whole article, and that I found by the most improbable route. The genealogical tradition of the Ibn Yaḥya, the Sephardi clan that traced its lineage back to the House of David, identifies Doña Paloma — the Jewish woman of Toledo who joined in barraganía with Don Fadrique Alfonso of Castile, Master of Santiago and bastard son of Alfonso XI — with Yonati bat Gedalyah ben Yaḥya ha-Zaken. From that union was born Alonso Enríquez (1354–1429), first Admiral of Castile, and from him descend, through Fadrique Enríquez and through Juana Enríquez, King Ferdinand II of Aragon, the Catholic. If the identification is correct, the great-great-grandmother of the monarch who signed with Isabella the edict of 1492 was a Jewess of the House of David. I leave the documentary proof of that identification to the genealogists, and I repeat that I do not claim that Doña Teresa belongs to this lineage. What interests me is what happened afterwards, because the lineage split, and split at the table: exactly the place where Doña Teresa, among the shelves, assured me that her family has for generations not touched pork.

It is worth specifying what kind of union it was. A barraganía: the stable and public cohabitation, without blessing, that the Partidas tolerated and whose 'natural' children could be recognised and legitimated. It was not, as is sometimes supposed, the resort of a master whom his Order forbade to marry, because that of Santiago allowed its knights to marry with the master's licence. What closed that door was the difference of religion. And neither was it a marriage for halakhah. The Tur (Even ha-Ezer 16), following in this the discussion of Avodah Zarah 36b, distinguishes what is done 'in the manner of marriage' (derekh ishut), which the Rambam punishes with biblical lashes (Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Issurei Biʾah 12:1–13), from the woman whom the man 'reserves for himself' apart from it (yiḥedah lo bi-zenut), a rabbinic offence that the Tur aggravates with four prohibitions. Barraganía approximates the latter. That intermediate zone, the exclusive woman without formal marriage, divided the great decisors even among Jews. The Ra'avad (Rabbi Abraham of Posquières, d. 1198) objected to the Rambam that only she is a qedeshah who is available to anyone: the one reserved to a single man is the pilegesh of the biblical text, without lashes or prohibition of the Torah (gloss on Hilkhot Ishut 1:4). The Rambam, by contrast, reserved the pilegesh to the king and forbade her to the common man (Hilkhot Melakhim 4:4). Nahmanides (d. 1270) held it lawful in theory, but feared that, if the permission spread, it would lead to promiscuity. The Sheʾelat Yaʿavetz (II:15) analyses the whole dispute. Yet that debate referred to Jewish couples: with a Christian man, the framework remained that of Avodah Zarah 36b. Neither of the two worlds legitimised it: in Castile it was a cohabitation that in practice was widely tolerated when the woman was Jewish, and for the Jewish community it was a transgression. The son, by contrast, each world read in its own way: for Castile, a legitimisable bastard; for halakhah, through the maternal line, a Jew by birth.

What interests me is what happened afterwards, because the lineage split, and split at the table: exactly the place where Doña Teresa, among the shelves, assured me that her family has for generations not touched pork.

On one side remained the male relatives of Yonati, who kept their faith and left the Peninsula after 1492 and 1497; from them, according to that same genealogy, come the rabbinic lineages Charlap, Harlap and Don-Yahiya, resettled in the Ottoman Empire, in Eastern Europe and finally in Eretz Israel. For them abstention from pork was maintained as a biblical commandment (Lev 11), in plain light, without the defensive burden of dissimulation that characterised their relatives. On the other side, the branches that integrated into the converso nobility, among which the tradition cites the Rodríguez-Rivera, passed to New Spain. And there, in the files of the Tribunal of the Holy Office in Spain and Mexico of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the rejection of pork and of pig's lard was the principal 'indicator of judaisation': the test of the pot. If what Doña Teresa tells of her family is true, her abstention today would be the last echo of that test.

What those files reveal is an inventiveness of dissimulation that seems to me the exact counterpart of Shem Tov's adversary the mumar. The mumar used pork as theology; the crypto-Jew used it as scenography. Many were forced to buy pork or to hang a ham at the kitchen entrance to dispel the suspicion of servants and informing neighbours. In some trial testimonies the accused alleged that they threw pieces of bacon into the pot in front of strangers and then discreetly removed them or avoided eating them. Others resorted to the medical excuse: before a public banquet they alleged 'cold humours', stomach troubles or gout, in the Galenic language of the humours that Shem Tov handled as commentator on Avicenna, in order not to break the commandment in secret without being denounced. And there are documented sausages and stews made with fowl or minced beef and many spices to imitate the appearance and smell of Christian pork stews. And when the dissimulation is prolonged for generations, it ceases to resemble a dissimulation: it becomes taste, it becomes habit, it becomes the 'it's just that pork doesn't agree with me' with which, I imagine, more than one family explains without knowing it what its grandparents had to explain with a frying pan.

I want to dwell on the hanging ham, because it holds a symmetry that took me a while to see. It recalls the image of Bereshit Rabbah 65:1: the pig that, lying down, stretches out its hooves as if saying 'I am pure', the animal that simulates kashrut. Centuries later, the crypto-Jew hangs a ham to simulate terefut. Rome, in the midrash, is the pig that feigns being kosher; the secret convert is the Jew who feigns being a pork-eater. A hall of mirrors in which the same dietary sign is read the right way up in Navarre and upside down in Mexico, and in which no tribunal, neither that of the midrash nor that of the Holy Office, could look inside the pot. And Doña Teresa's pot, if her story is true, is the last mirror in that hall.

And there remains the insult. Marrano keeps, in the Peninsula, an evident relation with the pig, and one of the most widespread explanations makes it arise from popular contempt towards those who abstained from eating its flesh. Among the descendants of the anusim, in contrast, there circulates a rereading that leads it back to Hebrew and Aramaic as a mark of resistance and hidden fidelity to kashrut: popular etymology, of course, but revealing, because it turns into a blazon what the aggressor meant as stigma. There is even someone who has publicised in a video how pork and sausages became, in the Peninsula of the fifteenth century, a social instrument for demonstrating Christian faith and for inquisitorial suspicion.[29]

That distinction, between the one who uses pork in order to believe and the one who uses it in order to survive, is the one that the mumar of 2026 no longer needs to draw, because no one persecutes him. And it is, I suspect, the one that Doña Teresa carries unknowing in her kitchen: an inherited abstention without the theology that once explained it. So the question with which I left the bookshop — how did the mumarim justify eating it? — had a sister question that I understood only then: how is not eating it sustained, across centuries, when no one remembers why? Shem Tov answered the first with a sukkah. The second is answered, like the best answers, without words: in a pot that someone, generation after generation, goes on not filling with pork.

The Mumar of 2026: The Same Argument with Better Lighting

All of the foregoing would be archaeology if the chain had been broken in 1492. It was not broken: it changed audience and costume. In a good part of the messianic world, and in missionary organisations such as Jews for Jesus, abstention from pork is not demanded and, in many of their members, is openly discarded with the usual triad: Mark 7:19 ('declaring all foods clean', καθαρίζων πάντα τὰ βρώματα), Peter's vision in Acts 10 and the πᾶν κτίσμα θεοῦ καλόν of 1 Timothy 4:4. Not all, and it should be said: there is a messianic wing, supported by readings such as that of the biblical scholar Daniel Boyarin, which maintains the opposite — that, in its prolific imagination, the accursed Yeshu 'kept kashrut' and that the phrase in Mark 7:19 is a gloss of the narrator.[30] The two camps cannot both be right, and the medieval table had already decided which of the two won.

What is interesting is what the mumar of 2026 does not have and that of 1379 did. That of 1379 knew the Talmud, and for that reason had to resort to a true midrash to sustain something that his Gospel did not say. That of 2026 usually speaks to an audience that cannot verify a citation of Pereq Ḥelek nor knows that ḥazir and le-haḥazir sound alike without meaning the same. It is the ideal terrain for the phrase 'even the Talmud says that God will return the pig'. That is why I write this article before it is needed: to get ahead of an artifice that already had its medieval premiere and its answer. Whoever hears it tomorrow will know that it has already been answered, and by whom.

The answer fits into five questions that anyone can ask without knowing Hebrew, and all of them come out of chapter 15. The first: in what exact source is the saying? The mumar attributes it to Pereq Ḥelek, and it is not there as such (note 3 of the translation). The second: to whom does the verb return? 'To return it to us' is not 'to put it on the plate'. The third: what does the rest of the midrash say? That the pig is Edom and that Edom goes up to celebrate Sukkot (Zech 14). The fourth: what do those who cite it in the tradition say? Radbaz, Recanati and the commentary on the Haggadah read abundance, crown and kingdom; none, permission. The fifth, the one that disarms: if the pig has already returned, where is its sukkah?

And if the interlocutor changes lane and says 'legalism', it is well to remember that Shem Tov heard that too. His answer was not to raise his voice: it was to raise a sukkah. He demonstrated, with the prophet that the mumar himself recognises, that in the Messiah the commandments are not dissolved, they are universalised.

What Shem Tov Knew

Chapter 15 admits a superficial reading, that of the point-by-point refutation, and a profound one, which lets one see a thinker much finer than his detractors concede. This is what seems to me his contribution, ordered as an argument is ordered and not as a list is assembled.

He knows his adversary from within. He does not refute a cardboard Christian: he refutes a Jew converted to Catholicism, a mumar, and leaves him the Jewish accent in the first line. He works, moreover, with four independent refutations, each of which suffices by itself: the historical (they spoke after the Temple), the exegetical (the pig is Edom and Edom goes up to the sukkah), the halakhic (temporary ruling, wealth and not food) and the eschatological (the 'tomorrow' is the world of souls). It is defensive redundancy: the mumar has to win all four, and Shem Tov needs to win only one. He is also a logician by trade: the distinction between ṭov as genus and ṭov as homonym is, in his mouth, a direct application of Porphyry, and leaves the argument from 'supreme wisdom' without ground. He reads with an attention that today we would call textual criticism, because his manuscript wavers between על and אל in Zechariah 14:16, and he writes both variants and leaves them there, just as he records the oscillation between kutlei and kotlei in Ḥullin. He converts a concession into an attack: he accepts that the Sages speak of the pig, and all he does is change which pig they speak of. He does not write from the certainty that his exegesis is the only possible one, but from the conviction that it is the useful one, and he declared it in the prologue with a disarming intellectual sincerity. He is a physician, and therefore does not need to deny the virtues of the pig: he locates them outside the table. And he knows, perhaps the finest thing, that language is the battlefield. Each time the mumar says 'good', 'today', 'return', Shem Tov asks in what sense, and the sense escapes the adversary because he borrowed it.

There is a last point, a human one, that no philology resolves, and it is the one that brought me back to Doña Paloma. The mumar who cites Pereq Ḥelek to justify the ham and the anus who hangs a ham in the kitchen so that they do not burn him sit at the same table and have nothing in common. To the first, Shem Tov answers. To the second, no treatise of polemic dared to demand an account: the Inquisition measured the soul with a frying pan and did not distinguish between the one who eats out of theology and the one who eats out of fear. Between the one who uses pork to demonstrate his faith and the one who uses it to save his life there is a moral abyss that no tribunal of the time wished to measure, and which the split lineage of the Ibn Yaḥya, with some descendants who did not have to pretend and others who could not but do so, illustrates better than any treatise.

The balance, then. The mumar wished to 'return' the pig to the table and found a midrash that made it seem possible. Shem Tov opened the same midrash one line further down and discovered that what returned was not the pig but Edom, and that it returned to a sukkah. Whoever today cites le-haḥziro in order to eat ham has read the verb, but not the complement 'to us', nor the verse of Zechariah that follows it, nor the page of Avodah Zarah where the 'tomorrow' has a precept, nor the chapter of Isaiah that, six verses after condemning those who eat the flesh of the pig, summons all flesh to the sabbath and the new moon. And the question that I carry away, and leave on the table: if Edom has already returned to the faith of Israel, where is its sukkah? And if it has not returned, what are we celebrating with the ham? 

Notes

[a] Libby Ruth Garshowitz, 'Shem Tov ben Isaac ibn Shaprut's "Touchstone" ("Even Bohan"): Chapters 2–10, Based on MS. Plut. 2.17 (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana) with Collations from Other Manuscripts' (unpublished doctoral thesis, 1992).

[1] José-Vicente Niclós, Šem Tob ibn Šaprut, «La piedra de toque» (Eben Bohan): una obra de controversia judeo-cristiana, Bibliotheca Hispana Biblica 16 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1997), 8.

[2] Niclós, La piedra de toque, 9.

[3] Niclós, La piedra de toque, 14–15.

[4] Niclós, La piedra de toque, 17–19.

[5] Niclós, La piedra de toque, 24.

[6] Niclós, La piedra de toque, 22–23 and n. 66 (prologue of the Eben Bohan, p. 6 of his translation).

[7] Martha Daas, 'The Rhetoric of Impurity in Medieval Iberia', Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures (Project MUSE).

[8] Concilium Eliberritanum, canon 50, in Concilios visigóticos e hispano-romanos, ed. José Vives, Tomás Marín Martínez and Gonzalo Martínez Díez (Barcelona: CSIC, 1963); see also Daas, 'The Rhetoric of Impurity'.

[9] Concilium Toletanum XII (681), cited in Daas, 'The Rhetoric of Impurity in Medieval Iberia'; the abridged Latin formulation follows the discussion of Rabello collected there.

[10] Concilium Coinense (1050), cited in 'Jewish Believers in Jesus: Spain, 300–1300' (Caspari Center, 2022); Paulus Alvarus, Indiculus luminosus, ch. 15, in Corpus Scriptorum Muzarabicorum, ed. Juan Gil (Madrid: CSIC, 1973), 287–88, and §32; discussed in 'Instances of Cultural Appropriation in the Works of Paulus Alvarus and Eulogius of Córdoba', Frühmittelalterliche Studien (2025).

[11] Andrés Bernáldez, Historia de los Reyes Católicos Don Fernando y Doña Isabel, ed. Cayetano Rosell (Madrid: Rivadeneyra, 1870), discussed in Daas, 'The Rhetoric of Impurity'; Antón de Montoro, 'Duelos y quebrantos los sábados', in Cancionero de Antón de Montoro, ed. Marcella Ciceri and Julio Rodríguez-Puértolas (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1990), commented on in 'Placer y religión: por qué comer cerdo es algo muy español', El Confidencial, 31 March 2018.

[12] David Nirenberg et al., 'Food and Meaning: Christianity, Islam, and Dietary Practice in Medieval Spain', Viator 44 (2013); the discussion of Morisco and converso dietary indicators is summarised in Constable's study material and in 'Food and Identity in Medieval Spain'.

[13] Jacob ben Reuben, Sefer Milḥamot ha-Shem, and Nizzahon Vetus, §36 (Isa 65:3–4) and §103 (Isa 65:4), in David Berger, The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the Nizzahon Vetus with an Introduction, Translation, and Commentary (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979); the Hebrew form of the first passage, in Peʿamim: Studies in the Cultural Heritage of Oriental Jewry 98–99 (Yad Ben-Zvi).

[14] Lipmann of Mühlhausen, Sefer ha-Nizzaḥon (Hebrewbooks.org, no. 37598), §293, 356 (Ps 115), and §242, 300–301 (Isa 66:17); the saying about leprosy comes from b. Qiddushin 49b.

[15] Shem Tov ibn Shaprut, Even Bohan, Shaʿar 11, ch. 15; Hebrew text and English translation my own, unpublished.

[16] b. Ḥullin 17a (Babylonian Talmud, Vilna ed.).

[17] b. Avodah Zarah 3a (Babylonian Talmud, Vilna ed.).

[18] Bereshit Rabbah 65:1, ed. Theodor–Albeck; Ps 80:14 (MT).

[19] Rashi on Ps 80:14; Ritva, Ḥiddushei ha-Ritva on Qiddushin 49b; Abraham Isaac Sperling, Ṭaʿamei ha-minhagim, §94.

[20] Matt 15:7; Rom 9:12, in Novum Testamentum Graece, Nestle–Aland, 28th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2012); Gen 25:23, 27:40; Obad 21; Zech 14:2, 9, 16, 19, in Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia; Gen 25:23 (Vg), in Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, ed. Weber–Gryson, 5th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007).

[21] Rabbeinu Baḥya on Deut 6:11, who cites Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Melakhim 8:1, and the objection of Nahmanides.

[22] Deut 6:11 (Vg); Deut 6:11 and Gen 1:31 (LXX), ed. Rahlfs–Hanhart (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2006); 1 Tim 4:4 (NA28).

[23] Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed III, 48.

[24] Maharal of Prague, Tiferet Yisrael, ch. 52, who cites the Rashba; b. Niddah 61b; b. Berakhot 34b.

[25] Radbaz, Responsa, vol. 2, §828.

[26] Recanati, commentary on the Torah, on Shemini, who cites Vayikra Rabbah.

[27] Midrash be-ḥiddush, commentary on the Haggadah of Pesach.

[28] Joseph Albo, Sefer ha-Ikkarim: Book of Principles, ed. and trans. Isaac Husik, 5 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1929–1930), maamar 3, ch. 16.

[29] 'El cerdo nos salvó de la Inquisición' ('The Pig Saved Us from the Inquisition'), YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZJOFk9W10o.

[30] Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ (New York: The New Press, 2012).