Leaving the Jewish Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History - Hardcover

Endelman, Todd

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 069100479X ISBN 13: 9780691004792

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2015

Synopsis

Between the French Revolution and World War II, hundreds of thousands of Jews left the Jewish fold--by becoming Christians or, in liberal states, by intermarrying. Telling the stories of both famous and obscure individuals, Leaving the Jewish Fold explores the nature of this drift and defection from Judaism in Europe and America from the eighteenth century to today. Arguing that religious conviction was rarely a motive for Jews who became Christians, Todd Endelman shows that those who severed their Jewish ties were driven above all by pragmatic concerns--especially the desire to escape the stigma of Jewishness and its social, occupational, and emotional burdens. Through a detailed and colorful narrative, Endelman considers the social settings, national contexts, and historical circumstances that encouraged Jews to abandon Judaism, and factors that worked to the opposite effect. Demonstrating that anti-Jewish prejudice weighed more heavily on the Jews of Germany and Austria than those living in France and other liberal states as early as the first half of the nineteenth century, he reexamines how Germany's political and social development deviated from other European states. Endelman also reveals that liberal societies such as Great Britain and the United States, which tolerated Jewish integration, promoted radical assimilation and the dissolution of Jewish ties as often as hostile, illiberal societies such as Germany and Poland. Bringing together extensive research across several languages, Leaving the Jewish Fold will be the essential work on conversion and assimilation in modern Jewish history for years to come.

About this title

About the Author

Todd M. Endelman is professor emeritus of history and Judaic studies at the University of Michigan. His books include The Jews of Britain and Broadening Jewish History.

From the Back Cover

"Through his broad-ranging exploration of radical assimilation and conversion away from Judaism in the modern Occident over the past three centuries, Endelman examines a topic that other Jewish historians have ignored. In so doing, Endelman provides a complete portrait of how Jews responded to the challenges first brought on by Emancipation and Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. His magisterial work will richly reward students of Jewish history and multiculturalism, as well as students of modern culture."--David Ellenson, chancellor, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion

"An astonishingly comprehensive, lucid, and beautifully crafted work. With sure command of the full range of early modern and modern Jewish history, Endelman casts his net wide in a study that explores every significant manifestation of radical assimilation in Jewish life over the last several centuries. His superb book is a reminder of the great clarity a first-rate historian can bring to opening up the past as well as present."--Steven J. Zipperstein, Stanford University

"Covering all of Europe and the United States, and drawing on a massive body of sources, Leaving the Jewish Fold is a pioneering work on a topic of great significance--Jews who converted or radically assimilated away from Judaism. It will be the definitive book on the subject and essential reading for scholars and advanced students of modern Jewish history."--Derek J. Penslar, University of Toronto and University of Oxford

"This original and important book is the first to broadly investigate conversion and radical assimilation in modern Jewish history. Delving into Jewish history and historiography from the eighteenth century to the near present, and the history of Jews in the United States and Europe, this is an impressive work. It will be widely read."--David Feldman, Birkbeck, University of London

From the Inside Flap

"Through his broad-ranging exploration of radical assimilation and conversion away from Judaism in the modern Occident over the past three centuries, Endelman examines a topic that other Jewish historians have ignored. In so doing, Endelman provides a complete portrait of how Jews responded to the challenges first brought on by Emancipation and Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. His magisterial work will richly reward students of Jewish history and multiculturalism, as well as students of modern culture."--David Ellenson, chancellor, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion

"An astonishingly comprehensive, lucid, and beautifully crafted work. With sure command of the full range of early modern and modern Jewish history, Endelman casts his net wide in a study that explores every significant manifestation of radical assimilation in Jewish life over the last several centuries. His superb book is a reminder of the great clarity a first-rate historian can bring to opening up the past as well as present."--Steven J. Zipperstein, Stanford University

"Covering all of Europe and the United States, and drawing on a massive body of sources,Leaving the Jewish Fold is a pioneering work on a topic of great significance Jews who converted or radically assimilated away from Judaism. It will be the definitive book on the subject and essential reading for scholars and advanced students of modern Jewish history."--Derek J. Penslar, University of Toronto and University of Oxford

"This original and important book is the first to broadly investigate conversion and radical assimilation in modern Jewish history. Delving into Jewish history and historiography from the eighteenth century to the near present, and the history of Jews in the United States and Europe, this is an impressive work. It will be widely read."--David Feldman, Birkbeck, University of London

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Leaving the Jewish Fold

Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History

By Todd M. Endelman

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-00479-2

Contents

Preface, ix, 
Abbreviations, xi, 
Introduction, 1, 
1 Conversion in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, 17, 
2 Conversion in the Age of Enlightenment and Emancipation, 49, 
3 Conversion in the Age of Illiberalism, 88, 
4 Defection and Drift—Early- and Mid-Twentieth Century, 147, 
5 Integration and Intermarriage—Midcentury to the Present, 190, 
6 Conversions of Conviction, 225, 
7 Neither Jew nor Christian—New Religions, New Creeds, 275, 
8 In Baptism's Wake, 310, 
Conclusion, 360, 
Notes, 369, 
Index, 415, 

CHAPTER 1

Conversion in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

... in converting Jews to Christians, you raise the price of pork.

—William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, act 3, scene 5

I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.

—Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"

ONE

Christian interest in the conversion of the Jews is as old as Christianity itself. In its earliest years, immediately following the death of Jesus, his followers labored to spread their version of their ancestral faith, with its identification of Jesus as the messiah, among their fellow Jews. There was little that was extraordinary in this, since the Jewish population in the Land of Israel was divided at the time into various sects, each of which asserted its own distinctive religious claims. Then, in the second half of the first century, Christianity ceased to be an exclusively Jewish sect. Its apostles—Paul above all—shifted its doctrinal outlook, broadening it to encompass Gentiles and severing its links with Jewish practice and scriptural interpretation. They created a "universal" religion, one whose goal was the salvation of humankind, rather than a "national" one, whose concern was the fate of one people. Because its aspirations were transnational, Christianity was a missionary faith from its inception. Spreading the Good News, the evangelion, to all the peoples of the world was at its core. It did not, it could not, look with indifference on those who had never heard its message or those who, having heard, rejected or ignored it. In this sense, Christianity was radically different from other religions and cults in the Roman Empire, including the various Jewish sects, which tended to be indifferent to the spiritual fate of those outside their own community.

Christian concern with the evangelization of the Jews was particularly intense. This was because Christianity came into the world as a Jewish sect, claiming to be the heir of biblical Israel and arbiter of its scriptural tradition. The validation of its own claims required the negation of Jewish claims. The key figure in this process was the apostle Paul, a Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia in Asia Minor, who embraced Jesus after a conversionary experience on the road to Damascus. Paul created the theological foundation for the Christian understanding of Judaism, especially its attitude toward the Torah and the Jewish past that Christianity claimed as its own. This foundation shaped Christian thinking about the conversion of the Jews and continues to influence Western attitudes toward Jews to this day, even in secular circles. Because Paul started with and built on Hebrew scripture and, thus, the history of biblical Israel, he needed to reconfigure the Jewish understanding of its relationship to God. He accepted that the Hebrew Bible was God's revelation and that the Jews were the people to whom this revelation had been made and with whom God had made a covenant (the signs of which were circumcision and the commandments). But the coming of Jesus, according to Paul, enlarged the arena of divine history, making God and salvation available to all humankind. Faith in Jesus—as the messiah, the savior whose death atoned for human sin—replaced observance of the commandments (including the Temple sacrifices). God's promises to the Jews remained operative, but the definition of Israel, the recipient of those promises, was recast. The followers of Jesus, rather than old-style commandment-observing circumcised Jews, became the true Israel. They were now the elect, or chosen, of God.

What then of the Jews? For their denial of Jesus (as well as earlier rebellions against God), they were to endure, for the time, divinely imposed punishment. In Paul's words, "God's wrath has come upon them at last!" (I Thessalonians 2:16). (Later the Church Fathers saw evidence of God's wrath in the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the Jews' dispersion.) Paul's condemnation of the Jews, however, was tempered by his belief that because they were the first chosen of God, the recipients of his law, the split between Jews and the church would not last forever. As God's first love, the Jews would be reconciled to him in the future—when they saw the error of their ways, repented, and were converted. He envisioned their reconciliation with God and the true Israel in his famous olive-tree metaphor in Romans 11:17–24, in which he likened Jews to broken branches of an olive tree and Christians to wild olive shoots "grafted in their place to share the richness of the olive tree." After reminding Christians not to gloat over their ascendance, since "it is not you that support the root [God's initial revelation to biblical Israel] but the root that supports you," he emphasized that God's call to the Jews was irrevocable: "For if you have been cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree, and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these branches be grafted back into their own live tree." For Paul and, later, for the Church Fathers, the reattachment of the Jews to the olive tree of Christian belief was divinely foreordained. God had not rejected "his people whom he foreknew," for they were "beloved for the sake of their forefathers" (Romans 11:2, 28).

Paul's recasting of God's relationship to the Jews, especially as rearticulated by Augustine of Hippo (354–430), became normative, influencing the treatment of Jews by both the state and the church for centuries afterward. Its influence was critical in three ways. First, it assigned the Jews a place within the divine economy of salvation. At the beginning of history, according to Paul, the Jews received God's revelation and law; at its end, they would be reconciled with God, their return signaling (or catalyzing, in some accounts) the final redemption. This formula was critical to the survival of Europe's Jews in the medieval period, for assigning them a purpose in the divine drama of salvation created a theological barrier to their elimination. It did not prevent churchmen from disparaging Jews, or princes from maltreating them—indeed, Paul's critique fueled Christian hostility—but it did become an ideological obstacle to their mass destruction. Second, by linking Christian salvation to the fate of the Jews, it prevented Christianity from ignoring them, either in theory or practice. Unlike religions that emerged outside the orbit of Judaism, Christianity could not simply leave Jews alone. Woven into its very fabric was an impulse to undo their error, to transform them into Christians. In some periods this impulse was strongly felt; in others, it was barely acknowledged, but it remained there nonetheless, capable of springing to life when the social, political, and cultural context changed. Third, it rooted Christianity, which lacked antiquity, in the same revealed text that was the foundational document of Judaism. Thus, when Christians interpreted Hebrew scripture, they could not ignore the earlier, competing reading of the Jews, to whose ancestors, they believed, God first revealed himself.

The earliest followers of Jesus took their message to Jewish communities throughout the Roman world. In Thessalonica, Paul spoke in the synagogue on three consecutive Sabbaths, explaining and proving, with christological interpretations of Hebrew texts, that it was necessary for the messiah to suffer and rise from the dead. While "some of them were persuaded," most were not (Acts 17:2–4). Christian preaching to Jews often created an uproar, which at times led to violence. Paul boasted, perhaps with some exaggeration, that he had suffered imprisonment and "countless beatings" and was "often near death": "Five times I have received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I have been beaten with rods; once I was stoned" (2 Corinthians 11:23–25). The results of early Christian preaching to Jewish communities were disappointing, for there was nothing in pre-Christian Jewish tradition to encourage Jews to believe in a messiah whose suffering would be redemptive and whose coming would abrogate the Torah. Paul himself acknowledged the failure of the mission. "It was necessary," he told the Jews of Antioch in Pisidia, "that the word of God should be spoken first to you." But "since you thrust it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life," he and his fellow apostles had turned to the Gentiles (Acts 13:46). When the Jews of Corinth "reviled him," he told them: "Your blood be upon your heads! I am innocent. From now on I will go to the Gentiles" (Acts 18:6).

Failing to make headway among the Jews, the new movement turned to the pagan Gentiles—with better results. By the time of the destruction of the Temple (70), the majority of Christians were of non-Jewish background. This, however, in no way weakened Christianity's theological entanglement in Judaism. Indeed, the opposite was true. The movement's failure to convince the Jews that their own scripture substantiated Christian belief was a source of anxiety; Jewish "blindness" was an ongoing challenge to the Christian drama of salvation. If the Jews, the recipients and guardians of the Torah, denied its christological meaning, who was to say that the New Israel's understanding was correct? One response to this challenge was to rail even more against Judaism's legitimacy and the Jews' character. The enmity of Christian leaders was also fed by social and religious interaction between Jews and Christians that continued for one or two centuries after the revolts against Rome. For many early Christians, the border between Judaism and Christianity was fuzzy. It was not uncommon for Christians to visit the synagogue on Saturdays, imitate Jewish liturgical practices, and observe Jewish customs. Such "judaizing" enraged church leaders, who needed, for both psychological and theological reasons, to assert Christianity's uniqueness. One way of doing this was to treat Judaism with increasing contempt and demonize its adherents, characterizing them as evil, vicious, and scheming. The venomous treatment of Judaism in the writings of Church Fathers who experienced "judaizing" tendencies firsthand (like John Chrysostom in late-fourth-century Antioch) reflects this acute need.

The attitudes of the apostles and the Church Fathers were decisive in shaping the mythic image of the Jew in medieval and early modern Europe. But before the fourth century, when Constantine agreed to tolerate Christianity (313) and Theodosius made it the state religion of the Roman Empire (381), these views had little impact on Jewish-Christian relations. Without state recognition or support, often persecuted, Christianity was in no position to activate its anti-Jewish polemic. Jewish leaders, for the most part, were able to ignore the movement, whose numbers were still minuscule and claims, in their eyes, preposterous. The Jewish communities of the Roman Empire were prosperous and secure. For the rabbis who forged normative, rabbinic Judaism, Christianity was irrelevant. The Mishnah, Jerusalem Talmud, and early midrashim took no interest in it.

When Christianity became a state religion, its polemic against Judaism gained a powerful ally. Christian princes embodied the church's theological animus in statutes and policies whose purpose was to demonstrate Judaism's inferiority. This shift in Christianity's fortunes was eventually catastrophic for Jews who lived in its orbit, for it led over time to their marginalization in state and society and, equally important, their stigmatization in culture and thought. These two inter related developments, one political and social, the other cultural and psychological, form the backdrop to and undergird the history of Jewish conversions to Christianity from this point until well into the twentieth century. When Jews left Judaism to become Christians, they did so in a world in which Christian constructions of Judaism and the Jews were hegemonic. This means that even the most heartfelt, sincere conversions occurred in a context in which Judaism and the Jews were stigmatized. Since no Jew ever lived outside time and place, no conversion, however voluntary, spiritual, or spontaneous in theory, escaped the impress of the circumstances in which it took place, circumstances in which there was an imbalance of power and status between the two religions. In this sense, Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus is utterly atypical—not so much because it was sudden and emotional (although few medieval or modern Jewish conversions were, in fact) but because it occurred in a context in which Jews had not been marginalized for centuries. Whatever the meaning of Paul's transformative experience for the sociology or psychology of religion, it is not paradigmatic for the history of Jewish conversions in Christian Europe.

TWO

For centuries following Christianity's political triumph, the church made no concerted effort to convert the Jews. It did not allocate resources to the task, or develop ways to reach Jews, or create "persuasive lines of argumentation designed specifically for the Jewish mentality." When missionizing occurred, it was sporadic, the work of zealous prelates acting on their own initiative. The absence of more systematic conversionary programs was due, in part, to the influence of Paul's ambivalent teaching about the Jewish people. Paul, it will be recalled, both damned the Jews, for clinging stubbornly to their law and, at the same time, assigned them a central role in the Christian drama of salvation. Augustine, the most important influence on medieval Christian thinking after Paul, reinforced this ambivalence with his innovative doctrine of Jewish witness, which, in effect, sidetracked interest in the conversion of the Jews. In contrast to those Church Fathers who saw no place for Jews in a well-ordered Christian society, Augustine taught that the collective survival of the Jews served a divine end: It vindicated the claims of Christianity in the eyes of Christians themselves by pointing to the truth of christological prophecy. Deprived of their kingdom, scattered throughout the world, subjected to the rule of Christian princes, they survived in exile, miserable and forlorn, as living evidence of the error of Judaism and, conversely, the truth of Christianity. Jewish dispersion and wretchedness were potent proof of Jewish sinfulness and obduracy. Because Jews served this function, they were not to be slain. Nor, moreover, were they to be coerced into relinquishing the practice of their religion, however wrongheaded it was, for their stubborn adherence to it was itself evidence of its falsity. This did not mean that Augustine and the early medieval churchmen who followed him disowned the idea of the conversion of the Jews. However, because they were concerned, first and foremost, with the witness function of Jewish survival, they thought of their conversion as an event that would occur only in the future, at the end of time. If so, why evangelize them here and now? Although churchmen in the early middle ages did not emphasize the positive role of the Jews in the way Augustine had, they never repudiated his formula, which continued to influence Christian thinking about Jews until the Crusades and, to some extent, even beyond.

The absence of systematic Christian evangelization of the Jews in the first millennium says little about whether Jews converted and, if so, how frequently. While missionary activity was occasionally productive, conversions often occurred in its absence, since the motives that led Jews to become Christians often were unconnected to missionary claims and were, rather, the outcome of shifting hopes and expectations. At any time there were some Jews who found it easier or more satisfying to live as Christians than as Jews. Moreover, in the first millennium, social contacts between Christians and Jews were closer than in later centuries—as repeated church decrees ordering Christians to keep their distance from Jews testify—and thus it was almost inevitable that there would be conversions in both directions. While it is impossible to know, even remotely, how many there were, it is clear that their numbers were negligible. Christian chroniclers, prelates, and theologians do not speak of incidents of mass conversion or wholesale communal apostasy. Jewish sources are equally silent about any substantial exodus. What evidence there is suggests a conversion here and a conversion there, but little that was noteworthy. One notable exception to this generalization was the forced conversion of the Jews of Visigothic Spain. The Visigoths, who conquered Spain in the mid-fifth century, belonged to the Arian sect, in contrast to the majority of the Spanish population, which was Roman Catholic. In 587, the Visigoth king embraced Catholicism and he and his successors pushed relentlessly to unify the kingdom religiously. In 613, Sisebut ordered the forced conversion of all the Jews in the kingdom. In a foretaste of the well-known events centuries later, the policy was a failure. The converts were not absorbed into the Catholic population but instead remained a clearly defined group, often loyal to their old creed. Church councils meeting at Toledo from 633 on repeatedly threatened harsh penalties for those who relapsed and returned to Jewish practice. These measures culminated in 694 with an order enslaving the "Jews" (the converts and their descendants), confiscating their property, and removing their children to Christian homes. Whether the policy was implemented, and if so how harshly, is not known. In any case, it became a moot issue with the Arab conquest of Spain in 711.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 069100479X
• ISBN 13: 9780691004792
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 440