[Avodah] yovel

[kennethgmiller at juno.com]

Referring to my earlier post, R' Eli Turkel wrote:

> I was completely lost by the argument below. The original
> discussion was the 10 lost tribes.
> If someone intermarries we have 2 possibilities.

I'm going to respond to these 2 possibilities in reverse sequence.

> If a non-Jewish man marries an ephraim woman then the child is
> Jewish but not from Ephraim since the tribe follows the father.
> Hence, in any case of intermarriage the child is lost to the
> tribe.

I thought that the only truly tribe-less Jew is the ger. Why wouldn't a child of an intermarriage belong to the mother's tribe, that is, the maternal grandfather's tribe? But that's off topic; you want to stick to the laws of inheritance. Okay.

There are two possibilities: The mother had one or more brothers, or the mother did not have any brothers.

If his mother had brothers, then the father's land would go to the child's uncles, and not to him. But that would be true even if the child's father had been Jewish, so her choice of a partner would have had no effect at all on the tribe's land.

But if the mother did not have any brothers, then the mother (and her sisters) would indeed inherit some of Ephraim's land. (Is this not what we learn from Bnos Tzelafchad?) And then, when the mother dies, why wouldn't he inherit his mother's land?

My conclusion is that in the case of a Jewish woman who marries a non-Jewish man, the tribe ends up with the same amount of land as if she had married a Jew.

Now to RET's first case:

> If an ephraim man marries a nonJew then the child is not Jewish.

That's true. And so, because the child is not related to him, and not his heir, the land will go to the father's brothers, who are also from Ephraim. If the father's brothers also married out, then the inheritance will go to a second cousin, or a third cousin, but in any event it will go to *someone*. (That's why, when the Gemara needs to concoct a case of a person who died without heirs, that person is a childless ger.)

We may not know who that person is, but there is definitely someone who gets it, and that person will be from Ephraim (unless the entire shevet died out) and my understanding is that Eliyahu Hanavi be the shadchan for each person and his land.

Akiva Miller

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