Kiddushin 4:3 - 4:4

כל האסורים לבא בקהל – even though we have taught in the beginning (Mishnah 1), that illegitimate children and Gibeonites who were circumcised at the time of Joshua are permitted to marry each other, it comes to tell us, for example, that an Ammonite or Moabite convert may marry an illegitimate child, an illegitimate child of unknown fatherhood and a foundling whose mother and father are unknown.

ר"י אוסר – It explains in the Gemara (Kiddushin 74a-b) that this is how it should understood. Rabbi Yehuda who prohibits a convert [marrying] an illegitimately-born woman, that these words refer to a convert of all the other heathens who is permitted to enter the congregation [of Israel], he is the one who is prohibited to marry an illegitimately-born woman, according to Rabbi Yehuda who holds that a congregation of converts is a congregation. But an Ammonite or Moabite convert who is prohibited from entering the congregation [of the LORD], Rabbi Yehuda would admit that he is permitted to [marry] an illegitimately-born woman.

ודאן בודאן מותר – such as an illegitimately-born child with a Gibeonite.

ודאן בספיקן – An illegitimately born child and a Gibeonite with an illegitimate child of unknown fatherhood and a foundling whose mother and father are unknown.

ספיקן בספיקן – an illegitimate male child of unknown fatherhood with an illegitimate female child of unknown fatherhood and a male foundling whose mother and father are unknown with a female foundling whose mother and father are unknown and [the case of] a male foundling whose mother and father are unknown with an illegitimate female child of unknown fatherhood. Even though each of these contains a doubt, it is prohibited, lest one was really “kosher/fit” and the other was unfit. And the Halakha is according to Rabbi Eliezer.

וכותי – this is its doubt, since they are not expert in the laws of Jewish divorce and betrothal. And nowadays, they (i.e., the Rabbis) made them to be like complete heathens for all their matters.

ארבע אמהות – two from the side of the father and two from the side of the mother.

שהם שמונה – four from [the side of] the father and four from [the side of] the mother. And what are they? Her mother, her mother’s mother, the mother of her father’s mother, the mother of the mother of her father’s mother, the mother of her father, the mother of her father’s mother, the mother of her father’s father, the mother of the mother of her father’s father. We examine them so that there was not among one of them a disqualification/blemish.

ואם היתה לויה וישראלית – And a Kohen comes to marry her.

מוסיפין עליהן עוד אחת – one mother for each and every pair, such as her mother, and her mother’s mother, and the mother of her mother’s mother, and similarly for all of them, and that we examine the mothers, but we don’t examine the fathers, lest there is a disqualification in her father or in her father’s father, because it is the manner of people, when they put each other to shame through a dispute, they put each other to shame through traced genealogy for if there was any disqualification from the side of the fathers, it was known. But the women do not put each other to shame with disqualification of genealogy but rather through unchastity, and if there is within them a matter of disqualification of genealogy, it has no voice. And this obligatory examination is not mentioned, other than with a family that raises a protest against her legitimacy, but a family that does not have an suspicion about he, does not require an examination, for all families stand under a presumption of fitness, and the man alone must check when he comes to marry a woman from a family where there is a doubt, but the daughter of Kohen who comes to marry does not have to check upon the man [and his family], for there is no specific law prohibiting women of legitimate birth to marry men of illegitimate birth (see Talmud Yevamot 84b), and the daughter of a Kohen is permitted, ab initio, to marry a convert and a man unfit for the priesthood because of his father’s illegitimate connection, and the same law, all the more so, applies for the daughter of a Levite and an Israelite woman.