Anonymous asked Staff ago Dear Daat Emet staff,
Is it true that there is a Halachic ruling that one must kill a little Gentile girl with whom a Jew slept, because she caused him to sin?
Enigma
jsadmin Staff answered 20 years ago
Dear Enigma,
According to Maimonides, if a Jew has sex with a Gentile woman, the woman must be killed. In his opinion, a Gentile woman who sleeps with a Jew is judged like an animal who has slept with a Jew; her fate is death by stoning, as written in the Torah: “If a man has carnal relations with a beast, he shall be put to death, and you shall kill the beast” (Leviticus 20:15). The sages of the Mishnah (Sanhedrin 7:4) ask why the animal, who has no sense, is killed. They said, “If a man sinned, what sin has the beast committed?” Their answer was that the man came to mishap because of [the animal] and so the Scripture said to stone her.” From this strange and cruel ruling about an animal Maimonides drew an analogy to a Gentile woman (that Gentile women are to be judged as animals) and wrote: “If a Jew has intercourse with a Gentile woman, be she three years and a day or a grown woman, single or married, even if the Jew is nine years and a day old, since he had intercourse with the Gentile woman deliberately, she is killed, for a Jew came to mishap because of her, as is the case with an animal” (Maimonides, Laws of Forbidden Sexual Relations 12:10). He also wrote this ruling in Sefer HaMitzvot (commandment 427).
But Maimonides’s words were not accepted by the religious arbiters, for there is no precedent in the Talmud or the medrashim. The Ramak (Rabbi Moshe Hakohen of Luniel), in his gloss on Maimonides, wrote: “We must study to find where Maimonides drew this from, for one who has intercourse with a Gentile only violates a rabbinic prohibition, so this is no mishap.” The Magid Mishneh (Rabbi Vidal or Toulouse) made a similar claim: “For this [ruling by Maimonides] I have found no explanation…”
Therefore the Jerusalem Beit Din allowed a Jew who had been married to a Gentile woman to remarry her once she had converted (Rulings — Jerusalem Court for Torts and Clarification of Relationships, volume 7, pg. 513).
N.B. The censor removed this ruling from the Vilna printing of Maimonides’s works.
Sincerely,
Daat Emet