Instead, the
Judaizer agitators considered that in addition to the faith in Christ Jesus, the Risen Crucified, the pagans would have to integrate into the chosen people of God and, as a sign of integration, they had to be circumcised.
And in the Syrian civil war today, the opposition forces call Basilar al-Assad a Jew, and he in turn calls the al-Qaeda troops fighting against him
Judaizers and Zionists.
At least we can suppose that if the two deponents had cared to abide strictly by normative standards of Jewishness, they would have refrained from crossing the border into Spain and Portugal, where widespread anti-converso prejudice not only compelled converso returnees to suspend their observance of Halakhah (Jewish Law), the supposed bedrock of their normative Jewish identity, but also exposed them to the influence of Christianity, not to mention the possibility of persecution, incarceration, ruin, and perhaps even death, as putative "
Judaizers," regardless of what they believed or did.
Shapiro patiently uncovers various classifications that destabilize the notion of a fixed Jewish identity: New Christian, Converso, and Marrano, under the Inquisition;
Judaizer, false Jew (Christian masquerading as Jew), and counterfeit Christian in early modern England.
Significantly, by the seventeenth century, the term "Portuguese" was applied even to Castilian-born conversos whose parents or grandparents had Portuguese origins.(26) Since the Judaizing tendencies of the families who crossed the border from Portugal to Spain were notorious, the term "Portuguese" became virtually synonymous with "
Judaizer".
Like Luther, Hus was dubbed a
Judaizer by his Catholic enemies who had only the flimsiest evidence for such an allegation.
(4) A crypto-Jew from a prominent family in Benavente, Spain, that resettled in Nueva Espana, as Mexico was known in colonial times, Carvajal was arrested in 1589 by the Inquisition under the suspicion of being a
Judaizer, i.e., a proselytizer.
The charge of "
Judaizer" would be leveled at any Messianic Jew who was too visible, but Messianic ritual was tolerable in small doses.