The integration of enslaved women into the households of Portuguese conversos who settled in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced complex and ambiguous forms of Judaizing. Immersed in domestic and ritual environments marked by Jewish practices of varying visibility, these women stood at the intersection of the exploitative logic of enslavement and the hope for inclusion or recognition offered by an (often) informal participation in the religious life of their masters. While ideal conversion presupposed voluntary commitment, the actual behaviors frequently consisted of the partial practice of rituals, which was difficult to define and deemed problematic by Jewish authorities.
This paper analyses different accounts of Judaizing and multiple perspectives of protagonists involved —slave owners, rabbis, members of the community, and Christian authorities. Owners could either encourage or hinder the religious integration of their slaves, depending on ideological concerns, halakhic requirements, or domestic strategies. Rabbis, who were responsible for determining their religious status, interpreted such situations through a halakhic tradition, long shaped by the realities of enslavement, generating a complex stratification of belonging. When converso communities developed more structured forms of religious authority, their norms influenced the conditions under which their slaves converted more directly.
Finally, the intervention of Catholic authorities, in particular the Roman Inquisition, placed enslaved women, who had been baptized in Portugal, and were later accused of Judaizing, on the same level of responsibility as their owners. A comparative reading of inquisitorial records, rabbinic responsa, and communal statutes thus reveals the plurality of possible definitions of enslaved women's religious identity, and highlights the tensions among coercion, integration, and recognition within Jewish households