Leaving the Jewish Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History [Pilot project. eBook available to selected US libraries only] 9781400866380

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Leaving the Jewish Fold

Leaving the Jewish Fold Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History

Todd M. Endelman University of Michigan

Princeton University Press Princeton and Oxford

Copyright © 2015 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu Jacket design and illustration by Marcella Engel Roberts Jacket photo © Eldad Carin/Shutterstock All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Endelman, Todd M., author.   Leaving the Jewish fold : conversion and radical assimilation in modern Jewish history / Todd M. Endelman, University of Michigan.    pages cm   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978–­0-­691–­00479–­2 (cloth : alk. paper)—­ISBN 0–­691–­00479-­X (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Jews—­Conversion to Christianity—­History. 2. Christian converts from Judaism—­History. 3. Jews—­Conversion to Christianity—­Europe—­History. 4. Christian converts from Judaism—­Europe—­History. 5. Jews—­Cultural assimilation—­Europe. 6. Jews—­Europe—­Identity. 7. Europe—­Ethnic relations. I. Title.   BV2620.E53 2015   248.2'4608992404—­dc23  2014017972 British Library Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Janson Text Printed on acid-­free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Miriam Abigail Endelman Noa Bess Endelman Maya Shirleen Margolis Ari Jacob Margolis

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

Notes369 Index415

Preface

This book has been many yearsin the making. I began work on it in the late 1970s, after completing my first book, The Jews of Georgian England (1979). The choice of subject was, in part, a consequence of my interest in the history of Jewish integration into European society, a theme I explored in the British context in my first book. It was also inspired by a suggestion made to me by Haym Soloveitchik, then dean of the Bernard Revel Graduate School at Yeshiva University, where I was teaching at the time, that I consider a project on Jewish converts to Christianity in the modern period. In the academic year 1981–­82, with the support of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, I was able to work full-­time on the project. I soon realized it would be impossible for me to write the ambitious book I initially envisioned given the paucity of secondary literature on the social history of European Jewry in the modern period. So instead I narrowed my focus and worked on what became Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History (1990). However, my interest in comparing the incidence and character of conversion in different lands never flagged. I returned to the topic and worked on it intermittently during the years that I taught at Indiana University (1979–­85) and the University of Michigan (1985–­2012). During this period I wrote a dozen articles about conversion and other forms of radical assimilation, but devoted as much time, if not more, to other projects, including The Jews of Britain (2002) and Broadening Jewish History (2010). My retirement in 2012 finally provided me with the time to complete the book. I would like to think that it has benefited from its decades-­long gestation, allowing me to test my ideas in numerous forums and to think long and hard about the problems it raises, but this may be wishful thinking on my part. In any case, I have no doubt that it has benefited from the boom in the writing of modern Jewish history in the last three or four decades. When I started my doctoral studies, in 1971, modern Jewish history was not a well-­developed academic subject and the historical literature I had to master was not overwhelming. While this no doubt eased the burden of preparing for my doctoral examinations, it also hampered the task of thinking about modern Jewish history in a comparative context. In this sense, there has been an upside to the length of time I have spent on the book, even if it was unintended.

x • Preface

The number of friends and colleagues who have contributed to this project—­by answering questions, suggesting relevant books and articles, and reading chapters at various stages—­is very large indeed, and to list all of them would tax the patience of readers. I must, however, acknowledge the contribution of one friend in particular, Victor Lieberman, whose interest in the project was unflagging and whose careful reading of the complete manuscript was an enormous help. I also would like to acknowledge the extraordinary forbearance of my editor at Princeton University Press, Brigitta van Rheinberg, who never once reminded me that the manuscript was long overdue. And, as always, I am indebted to my wife, Judy, who did ask me, more than once, when the book would be finished. Her love and good cheer, especially her readiness to laugh at comments that I thought were witty, sustained me. I am also grateful for financial support from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Humanities Institute and the Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. While I was working on this book, I spent three extended periods as a fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. The Centre’s country estate, Yarnton Manor, was for me a haven of tranquility and an oasis of gentility. I have always profited from my time there. For understandable reasons, the Centre is disposing of the estate and moving to central Oxford. It is with a sense of regret that I note that I am part of the last cohort of scholars to live and work at Yarnton Manor. I have dedicated this book to my four grandchildren, all of them residents of Brooklyn, a hotbed of Jewish enterprise and creativity. They are too young to read this book now, but I want them, as well as their parents, to know how much their lives have enriched my own life, offering me pleasures I had not known before they came into the world.

Abbreviations

AJHQ American Jewish Historical Quarterly AJA American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati AJYB American Jewish Year Book CMJ Church Mission to the Jews Collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford BSPGJ British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Jews DNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography HUCA Hebrew Union College Annual JC London Jewish Chronicle JPS Jewish Publication Society JSS Jewish Social Studies LBIYB Leo Baeck Institute Year Book LSPCJ London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews NYT New York Times PAAJR Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research RNS CUL Redcliffe Nathan Salaman Papers, Cambridge University Library REJ Revue des Études Juives TJHSE Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England ZDSJ Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden

Leaving the Jewish Fold

Introduction Historical writing about Jews unfortunately focuses too much on great events and persecutions. The undermining impact of assimilation, more important but more difficult to capture, still awaits its historians. —Arthur Ruppin1

Jewish history is not only the history of men and women who saw themselves as representatives of the Jewish collective and who sought to promote national or religious Jewish interests. It must also deal with those who hoped for the disappearance of the Jews, as well as the successes and failures of these assimilationists in their efforts to disappear forever into Gentile society. —Ezra Mendelsohn2 At the heart of the current debateabout multiculturalism are questions about the terms on which racial and ethnic minorities are to be integrated into the American mainstream. Diehard segregationists aside, the parties to the debate agree that there should be room at the American table for persons of diverse backgrounds. They also agree that those who wish to be included must embrace some of the behavioral and attitudinal norms of the dominant group. What divides them are questions about the extent to which they must do so, the distance they must travel in effacing their distinctiveness in order to gain access to centers of social, economic, and political life. They do not agree about the extent and the character of their transformation. So they ask how they are to reshape their tastes and beliefs, as well as their dress, speech, and deportment, querying which inherited customs and outlooks are out of step with conventional thinking and behavior and thus obstacles to social and material success. What is at

2 • Introduction

stake in the multiculturalism debate, then, is the price to be paid for inclusion rather than the right to be included. This problem is neither novel in the history of the West nor peculiar to the United States and its unusually heterogeneous population. It first arose in acute form in regard to the Jews of Western and Central Europe in the wake of the French Revolution and the process of Jewish political emancipation it inaugurated. Before the era of liberal revolutions, Jews constituted a semiautonomous corporation wherever they lived, a well-­defined social and political unit, marked off from their neighbors by virtue of their religion, national background, legal and fiscal status, and, in most cases, their social habits, occupational profile, language, and costume as well. When economic and political upheaval weakened or even dissolved the corporate structure of European states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Jews became citizens and were incorporated as individuals. Both Jews who welcomed emancipation and the demise of the traditional Jewish community and their Christian supporters assumed that with the disappearance of old-­regime disabilities Jews would lose their distinctive social and cultural characteristics and become indistinguishable, more or less, from their fellow citizens, except in regard to their religion. Their shared hope was that Jews would become Frenchmen or Germans or Hungarians of the Jewish faith, their “Jewishness” restricted to the private sphere of worship, ritual, and doctrine. They envisioned the abandonment of Jewish peoplehood and the softening of Jewish particularism. For both, the emancipation of the Jews and their social, cultural, and economic transformation went hand in hand. Among Christians, however, there was a split between conservatives and liberals about which should come first—­emancipation or acculturation. The former insisted that emancipation was a reward, a favor to be bestowed on the Jews only after they had had proved themselves worthy of incorporation into the nation-­state, that is, after they had become less alien, while the latter believed that the removal of legal disabilities was a prerequisite for acculturation, a precondition that would enable the Jews to become more like their neighbors. To advocates of multiculturalism, this linkage, this insistence on cultural homogeneity, is unacceptable. However, in the context of the time, it represented an advance, a sharp break with the past, when baptism into the Christian faith was the sole avenue to acceptance and the sole cure for what allegedly ailed the Jews, setting them apart from the rest of the Western world. Moreover, while supporters of emancipation conceded that Jewish morals and customs were corrupt and in

Introduction • 3

need of reformation, they did not attribute this to the Jews’ religion or any imagined spiritual or corporeal essence. Rather, good children of the Enlightenment that they were, they believed that if Jews were unsocial, unproductive, and immoral, it was because Christian misgovernment, ill-­will, and ill-­treatment had made them that way. In 1781, in one of the earliest tracts urging the integration of Jews into state and society, the Prussian bureaucrat Christian Wilhelm Dohm made this explicit: “Everything the Jews are blamed for is caused by the political conditions under which they now live, and any other group of men, under such conditions, would be guilty of identical errors.”3 Central to this line of reasoning was the conviction that human character was not fixed but plastic and subject to environmental influence. Buoyant about the future and firm in their faith in human perfectibility, liberals and enlightened bureaucrats believed that toleration would cleanse the Jews of their “errors” and “ills,” rendering them more like everyone else. While there was agreement that emancipation required an overhaul of Jewish behavior and identity, there was no agreement—­not even much discussion—­about the parameters of this transformation. Indeed, in retrospect, the vagueness of what was demanded of the Jews is striking. What did proponents of their transformation mean when they called for their reformation, regeneration, enlightenment, or amalgamation? At a minimum, they intended that Jews should speak and dress like other citizens, adopt secular education and culture, and identify with their countries of residence, becoming law-­ abiding, ­patriotic, productive citizens. About these matters, there was little confusion. But more than this was expected. The “clannishness” or “tribalism” of the Jews, their concentration in commerce and finance, and their adherence to “backward” religious customs, including ­dietary laws that were believed to hinder social intercourse—­these too were considered ripe for reform. But, again, those who demanded the reformation of the Jews failed to detail what they considered sufficient change and to establish criteria to measure it. For example, did the evolution of street traders into shopkeepers, wholesale merchants, and department store magnates meet their expectations? Or did it demonstrate emancipation’s failure, that is, the Jews’ inability to escape trade (with its allegedly deleterious impact on character and morals) even when given the freedom to do so? Just as striking was the failure of both Jews and Christians to envision the final aim of Jewish acculturation and integration, to describe in even broad strokes the hoped-­for outcome of emancipation.4 Were

4 • Introduction

Jews to toil in fields, factories, and workshops in the same proportion as Christians? Were they to scatter throughout the land, taking up residence in every town and village? Were they to mix socially with Christians as much as they did with their own kind? Were they to find husbands and wives outside the tribal fold? Were they, in time, to lose all external marks of Jewishness and become, in effect, invisible? However fuzzy their vision of the future, Jews eager to leave “the ghetto” believed they needed to mute or abandon the marks of Jewish particularism. Obtaining emancipation, social acceptance, and civic respect, the argument went, required them to broaden their cultural horizons, throw off outworn habits, modernize their religious practices and beliefs, normalize their occupational structure, and befriend their Christian neighbors and workmates. From the mid-­eighteenth century to the mid-­twentieth century, Jewish communal leaders who ­championed integration made the transformation of the Jewish people a central focus of their public activity. Having left “the ghetto” themselves, they created movements (Haskalah, Reform Judaism, Wissenschaft des Judentums) and institutions (charity and trade schools, modern seminaries, settlement houses, youth clubs) to hasten the transformation of the less acculturated Jewish masses, for they were convinced that their own fate was tied to the state of the Jewish population as a whole. By erecting institutions to modernize Jewish life, they also hoped to make a public statement about the willingness—­indeed, eagerness—­of the Jews to abandon old habits and acquire new ones. The transformation of Jewish life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was not a uniform process. Its pace varied from state to state and from region to region. In general, it was more rapid, sweeping up larger numbers of Jews, in liberal, laissez-­faire, industrializing states (such as Great Britain and the United States) than in societies where noble latifundia, old-­regime political structures, and premodern values remained dominant (such as Poland and Russia). Changes in Jewish life were also more far-­reaching and more rapid in urban centers than in small towns and villages. (It should be remembered that on the eve of the modern period most European Jews did not live in large cities.) Yet, wherever change occurred, it failed to uproot well-­entrenched views about Jewish otherness, neither erasing the stigma of Jewishness nor ushering in an era of unconditional social acceptance. Jews became “less Jewish” but opposition to their full acceptance persisted. Some claimed this was because Jews were still “too Jewish”: they had changed too little, thus failing to uphold their end of the emancipation contract. From a later vantage point, however, it seems that no

Introduction • 5

amount of change would have been sufficient to undo the legacy of centuries of Christian contempt and disparagement. In medieval and early modern Europe, Jews occupied a disproportionate amount of space in the Christian imagination. Whatever their position was in fact, they were invariably the imaginative other, the standard by which what was Christian (and good) was measured, the collective embodiment of all manner of unpleasant habits and traits, the readily available screen on which Christians projected their fears and anxieties. While the Enlightenment and the scientific and industrial revolutions did much to undermine the doctrinal foundations of Christianity, which had, of course, initiated the tradition of viewing Jews as demonic outsiders, they did not eliminate the stigma attached to Jewishness. The perception that Jews were different in kind from non-­Jews was too well entrenched, too rooted in Western culture and thought, to disappear when the religious doctrines that engendered it in the first place weakened. As a result, Jews everywhere, even in liberal states like Britain, France, and the United States, found that being Jewish remained problematic to one degree or another. In the best circumstances, Jews still faced social discrimination and cultural stigmatization; in the worst, legal disabilities, verbal abuse, and physical violence. Most Jews in Europe and America, whether attached to tradition or not, were able to tolerate the exclusion and stigmatization that accompanied their entry into the modern world, largely because they were still embedded in Jewish social and kinship networks that nourished and satisfied their material and emotional needs. Their sense of self-­worth was linked to what Jews, not non-­Jews, thought of them. To be sure, the hostility of non-­Jews, whatever forms it took, was troublesome and could be disruptive or painful. Indeed, in the late-­nineteenth and early-­twentieth centuries, Western Jewish leaders acted to combat antisemitism by establishing defense organizations, such as the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens in Germany and the Anti-­Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith in the United States. But, finally, for most Jews whatever intolerance persisted was tolerable. Still, there was a minority of Jews in all lands who were unwilling or unable to endure the burden of being Jewish. Driven by hunger or ambition, in search of fame or status, peace of mind or even a roof over their heads, they sought relief in radical assimilation, that is, they ceased to identify themselves as Jews and cut their ties to Judaism and the Jewish community. The most common form of escape was conversion to Christianity, but there were other forms of radical assimilation

6 • Introduction

as well. In some liberal states, Jews were able to take Christian spouses and merge into non-­Jewish circles without being baptized. In Central Europe, it became possible for Jews to secede from the state-­sponsored Gemeinden without joining a Christian denomination and to declare themselves officially konfessionslos. Other radical assimilationists took more imaginative paths, burying their Jewishness in the cause of socialism, science, or art. Still others dreamed of or even created universalistic, nonrevealed syncretic religions, of which the Ethical Culture movement in the United States was the most successful example. Common to all of these strategies, however different from each other, was the desire to shed the stigma of Jewishness, to be free, once and for all, of a highly charged, troublesome label. All were responses to the same condition—­the burden of Jewishness—­and, in this sense, they constitute a distinct, coherent phenomenon. This book is an account of radical assimilation, a history of Jews who did not want to be Jews, in Europe and North America from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. It casts its geographic net wide, drawing on the experience of Jews in lands with very different political systems, cultural traditions, and socioeconomic structures. It considers leakage from the Jewish community in settings as diverse as Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, London, and New York. It does not, however, move methodically from decade to decade and from country to country, bringing into focus the extent and character of conversion at all times and in all places. This kind of account would be tedious to read and, moreover, impossible to write, given the evidence, which at times is episodic and anecdotal. There is another reason, as well, that this account is not strictly chronological. Jewish history in Europe and America did not unfold in a uniform way and at a uniform pace. The status of Jews in the czarist empire in the early nineteenth century, for example, little resembled the status of Jews in Great Britain and the United States at the time, and thus conversions in the former were more “medieval” than “modern” in regard to the circumstances in which they occurred. The flight from Jewishness is not a staple of Jewish historical writing5 and, it could be argued, is marginal or even irrelevant to its central themes. After all, Jews who did not want to be Jews and separated themselves (or at least tried to) from other Jews were, quite literally, on the periphery of Jewish communal life, if not altogether outside it. They were either indifferent to the future of Jewry or zealous for its demise. Some were rabid Jew-­haters; others blended successfully into non-­Jewish society and never looked back. From this perspective, it

Introduction • 7

follows that radical assimilation falls outside the orbit of Jewish history or, at best, that it is a minor footnote to it. Why then reintroduce converts and other radical assimilationists into the historiographical fold from which they earlier fled? My answer is that leakage was not a marginal phenomenon, either in terms of its character or, in a few contexts, in terms of its demographic impact. While the number of Jews who left the fold in any year was never staggeringly high (with one or two exceptions), the cumulative demographic impact was substantial, especially among the wealthy and the well-­educated. At the same time, radical assimilation was the most extreme form of strategies—­ acculturation and integration—­that all Jews who entered the modern world pursued. True, converts were aberrant in the sense that they transgressed communal norms, but it is also possible to view them in a different light: not as outsiders, free of all links to other Jews, but as occupants of the far end of a broad spectrum of assimilatory behavior, as actors responding to the same pressures and tensions that be­deviled other Jews. What set them apart from their contemporaries was the radical nature of their response, their search for total rather than partial incorporation into the surrounding society. Their reaction to discrimination and stigmatization differed in degree, not in kind, from that of other acculturated Jews. The contexts in which radical assimilation occurred—­especially those in which it flourished—­constitute a central element in this story. Conversion was not a random phenomenon, appearing by chance here and there, in no apparent pattern. Nor was it linked to character “flaws” (cravenness, ambition, cowardice) that were more marked among some groups of Jews than others. It was, rather, determined by how Jews viewed their present and future chances for success and happiness while remaining Jewish. Since their perceptions reflected, in turn, the ebb and flow of antisemitism, the cultural climate of the time, and the flexibility or inflexibility of the social structures that shaped their lives, the study of radical assimilation illuminates far more than Jewish responses to the shortcomings of emancipation. It equally illuminates the history of the states in which Jews lived. It identifies those cultural ideals, social structures, and political systems that allowed Jews to participate extensively in civic and social life without having to obscure or jettison their ties to Judaism and the Jewish community. Conversely, it identifies those settings in which this was difficult or impossible. The study of radical assimilation in historical context, thus, addresses the ongoing debate about the strength of antisemitism in various European states in the late-­nineteenth and early-­twentieth

8 • Introduction

centuries, particularly the debate about the uniqueness of German antisemitism, a question given new life by the publication of Daniel Goldhagen’s controversial best seller Hitler’s Willing Executioners in 1996.6 Unlike conventional studies of antisemitism, which examine its role in politics and high and low culture, this book looks at anti­ semitism through the eyes of those who were its target and seeks to gauge its force by weighing its impact on their behavior. Acculturated, ambitious Jews who viewed the future pessimistically were more likely to leave the tribal fold than those who remained hopeful about their chances for success. When earlier generations of Jewish historians wrote about conversion, they tended to judge those who left the fold rather than explore their motives and the circumstances that led to their departure. Moral condemnation, for example, characterized the attitude of Heinrich Graetz (1817–­91), the preeminent Jewish historian of the nineteenth century. In his treatment of the salon Jewesses of late-­eighteenth-­and early-­nineteenth-­century Berlin, most of whom became Christians, he vilified their behavior, accusing them of losing their virtue (literally) to the Prussian nobles who visited them. The latter, “the embodiment of selfishness, licentiousness, vice, and depravity,” corrupted and seduced these weak women in the absence of their businessmen husbands. “If the enemies of the Jews had designed to break the power of Israel, they could have discovered no more effectual means than infecting Jewish women with moral depravity, a plan more efficacious than that employed by the Midianites, who weakened the men by immorality.” In a burst of moral indignation, he concluded: “These talented but sinful Jewish women did Judaism a service by becoming Christians.”7 While Graetz’s condemnation was unusually vigorous, his basic attitude toward those who left the fold was not untypical, then or later. Well into the twentieth century, much that was written about converts was judgmental. Solomon Liptzin (1901–­95), writing at midcentury (and very much under the sway of the collapse of emancipation in Germany), suggested that the downfall of these women was their passion to be Germans, “nothing but Germans,” which led them to hurl themselves “madly, hysterically, into the arms of an overidealized German culture.” For him, the damage they did was incalculable: “Their dangerous experiment unleashed forces that raged with undiminished intensity throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”8 The implication was that these women bore responsibility (by having set a bad example?) for tens of thousands of conversions that occurred in Germany in the decades that followed.

Introduction • 9

The urge to judge and to entertain is apparent in accounts of well-­ known converts that were published in Eastern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Historians and journalists—­S. L. Tsitron (1860–­1930), A. N. Frenk (1863–­1924), Shaul Ginsburg (1866–­1940), and Matthias Mieses (1885–­1945)—­published popular works telling the stories of Jews who became famous, or notorious, after becoming Christians.9 Their subjects were converts who succeeded as civil servants, industrialists, landowners, writers, intellectuals, academics, and journalists. They included converts who, not content to quit Judaism, became vicious antisemites, like Jacob Brafman (c. 1825–­79), author of the most successful anti-­Jewish text in Russian history, The Book of the Kahal (1869). They included as well converts whose reaction was the opposite, who, having won recognition outside Jewish society, used their influence to defend their former coreligionists in the press and before government officials. Here the classic example is the St. Petersburg semiticist Daniel Khvolson (1819–­1911), who became a legend among Russian Jews for denouncing the libel that Jewish ritual required Christian blood. With their invented dialogue, these tales were also meant to instruct. They recounted ironic twists and tragic ends in the lives of their subjects and linked these to their origins, usually in the shtetlakh of the Pale of Settlement. Their message was clear: Baptism failed to wash away the Jewishness of the Jew. Again and again they described how converts were unable to escape their past and shake themselves free of old associations and memories. Like East European Jewish jokes about converts, these stories implied that the ties that bound Jews were racial and/or national, as well as religious. Once a Jew, always a Jew, they suggested. Still, despite their disapproval of conversion, these accounts were not unsympathetic to the converts whose lives they recounted. They praised those who defended their people and took pride in the accomplishments of those who rose to positions of influence under the czars, claiming, in a sense, their successes as Jewish successes, as triumphs that rebounded to the credit of the Jewish people. It is not my aim to either praise or damn those who left the Jewish fold. My disinterest in criticism stems not from indifference to the fate of the Jewish people but from the conviction that the writing of Jewish history is not well served by those who assign grades, however subtly, to the objects of their research, designating in this instance some as “good” Jews and others as “bad” Jews. Writing Jewish history—­indeed, any kind of history—­in this way obscures rather than illuminates the past,

10 • Introduction

turning complex, flesh-­and-­blood human beings into one-­dimensional stick figures. Indignation and self-­righteousness have their place in politics, but in historical scholarship they are a liability. Of course, most Jews who broke with Judaism were not “heroic” figures nor were their lives “inspiring”—­but all of this is beside the point. They were persons forced to make decisions about their future that, in all likelihood, they would have preferred to avoid in the first place. They faced these decisions because they lived in imperfect societies that, even in the best of circumstances, were hostile or indifferent to the cultivation of Jewish difference. That some Jews believed that shedding their Jewishness would enhance their chances for success and happiness strikes me as more tragic than treasonous, as more an indictment of the societies in which they lived than of their own lack of moral backbone. The task of the historian of radical assimilation is to understand why some Jews converted and others did not and what circumstances shaped their decisions. His or her task is to ask how national context, social status, and gender encouraged or restrained radical assimilation and why it flourished in some periods and not in others. This is not to say that personality or character was irrelevant to the matter of who left and who remained within the Jewish fold. While social and political forces, economic status, and gender determined those groups within the Jewish population in which conversion was most common, they did not determine which persons within those groups actually left the community. In other words, all persons within a well-­defined subset of the Jewish population (bankers, journalists, cattle traders, etc.) did not respond to the same external conditions in the same way. Internal features—­emotional needs and drives, personality traits, and mental habits—­determined which members of those groups that were at risk in the first place actually left the tribal fold. Although this may seem obvious, it is worth stating because it is relevant to the question of what this study can explain and what it cannot. This account seeks to explain only the external, not internal, determinants of radical assimilation. Why two persons from the same background reacted in different ways to the same challenge is a psychological, not a historical, question. To begin to suggest answers about what kinds of personalities were most responsive to the attractions of conversion would be irresponsible, given how little is known about the emotional makeup of the several hundred thousand Jews who left Judaism in the modern period. Even the large body of work on the psychology of conversion is irrelevant to this account, since it concerns converts who were sincere, that is, who believed in the faith

Introduction • 11

to which they were converting. Most Jews who became Christians in the modern period, on the other hand, were insincere, by which I mean that they did not believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God and the Redeemer and that salvation came through faith in him alone. For them conversion was a strategic or practical move, much like changing a name or altering a nose. Instead of being indifferent Jews who did not attend synagogue, they became indifferent Christians who did not attend church. Still, there were exceptions—­individuals for whom conversion was a religious experience and who became pious, churchgoing Christians. Some of them merged into their newly adopted communities, attracting no further attention, while others became missionaries, controversialists, theologians, and church dignitaries and, by virtue of their Jewish background, attracted a disproportionate amount of attention. The Carmelite nun Edith Stein (1891–­1942), who died in a German death camp during World War II, and the archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Jean-­Marie Lustiger (1926–­2007), are twentieth-­century representatives of this phenomenon. While there is no dearth of writing about Jews like these who distinguished themselves as Christian thinkers and workers, much of it is hagiographic or conversionist in intent. Little of it seeks to understand the historical context that shaped their path from Judaism to Christianity. Moreover, by stressing the spiritual character of their journey, this literature disconnects the experiences of these “exceptions to the rule” from the majority who left Judaism for nonspiritual reasons. Given that most human behavior is over­ determined, it is difficult to believe that the “true believers” were ignorant of the social and emotional advantages of abandoning Judaism. I do not want to argue that their conversions were inauthentic but, rather, that they were driven by a complex of motives, needs, and perceptions. The fact that some Jews saw Judaism in a negative light and Christianity in a positive light was the outcome of historical circumstances, not spiritual yearning and speculation alone. Moreover, even if it were true that these conversions were spiritual transformations pure and simple, exceptional events removed from the common run of human experience, the language the converts used to describe their journey toward Christianity was rooted in the time-­bound attitudes of the period. The invidious way in which they contrasted Judaism and Christianity, and the terms they used to disparage the one and exalt the other, emerged from the same negation of Jews and Judaism that motivated strategic conversions. Thus, conversions of “convenience” and conversions of “conviction” were not altogether dissimilar.

12 • Introduction

This account of radical assimilation does not end with the severing of Jewish ties. While converts and secessionists assumed that their formal break with Jewry ended its relevance to their lives and that henceforth they would be free agents, making their way in the world unencumbered by their past, their hopes were often disappointed. For just as the practice of emancipation fell short of the theory of emancipation, so too radical assimilation often failed to provide the relief it, in theory, promised. As Benjamin Disraeli (1804–­81), Heinrich Heine (1797–­1856), and thousands of less well-­known converts discovered, the world continued to regard them as Jews long after they became Christians. The notion that converts retained remnants of their past was an old one, appearing long before the diffusion of racial thinking in the nineteenth century. Spanish and Portuguese Jews who became Catholics in the late-­medieval period (conversos or New Christians) were never able to shake the suspicion that they remained attached to their old faith. This accusation was leveled indiscriminately at all conversos, both those about whom it was true and those who were sincere in their new faith. Even their descendants several generations later continued to be regarded with suspicion. Converts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often suffered a similar fate. The notion of Jewish difference was too well established in Western thought and sentiment to be washed away at the moment of baptism. When racial thinking became respectable in the nineteenth century, it reinforced notions that were far older, lending them intellectual stature. The fate of converts was not similar everywhere, however. In some circumstances, radical assimilation was an effective escape from Jewishness, allowing those who pursued it to make their way in the world without hindrance. Indeed, in these cases its success is an obstacle to historical research, since the more effective it was the fewer traces it left in the historical record. The goal of radical assimilationists, after all, was to obscure or erase their origins. Why they succeeded in some periods and places and not in others is another central concern of this book, for the conditions that encouraged defection in the first place were the same as those that later frustrated the hopes of those who chose this path. Ironically, then, in those settings where conversion was most “needed,” it tended to work less effectively than in those where it was less “needed” and thus less common. Radical assimilationists who failed to overcome their Jewishness devised diverse and often creative ways to deal with the problem. Some, like the German industrialist and statesman Walther Rathenau (1867–­1922), ­continued to struggle to distance themselves from the despised minority with

Introduction • 13

which they were identified and, as proof of their distance from the group, mouthed commonplace anti-­Jewish views. Others, like the American art critic and connoisseur Bernard Berenson (1865–­1959), embraced the traditions and symbols of the elite that served as their reference group with grotesque enthusiasm. A very few, like Benjamin Disraeli, realizing the futility of making their origins disappear, embraced their Jewishness with a vengeance, transforming it into a badge of honor and status. Although no taboo on writing about conversion operates in Jewish historical circles, there is one prominent historiographical current that works unintentionally to impede an understanding of its scope and impact. This current, which I have referred to elsewhere as “the legitimization of the diaspora experience,”10 evolved in response to accusations about Jewish behavior in World War II and Jewish political leadership in the half century or so before the war. In the mid-­1960s, in the wake of attacks on the putative absence of Jewish resistance during the war and political ineptitude beforehand, historians began to reevaluate diaspora political behavior. One school concluded that the leaders of diaspora communities in the West responded with wisdom and honor to the rise of political antisemitism, displaying, as one historian wrote in regard to the liberal defense campaign in Imperial Germany, “the qualities of courage, self-­confidence, sound political judgment, and political militancy.”11 This reevaluation initiated, in turn, a far-­reaching reassessment of how diaspora Jewish communities fared between emancipation and World War II. While in no sense hostile to the State of Israel, the historians who undertook this work believed that Zionist historiography, whose influence was at its zenith then, distorted the record of diaspora life, exaggerating its dissolution and decay and the cravenness and ineptitude of its leaders. In reaction, they celebrated the tenacity of Western Jews in preserving their Jewishness in the face of countervailing assimilatory forces. They emphasized the creativity of Western Jews in meeting the challenges of living in open societies by developing new forms of Jewish identity and new institutions to preserve and express them. They noted that, despite the decline of religious practice and knowledge, Western Jews remained a distinctive, cohesive group with patterns of behavior that set them off from the rest of the population. They stressed transformation rather than decline, continuity rather than disjuncture, cohesion rather than dissolution, change rather than crisis. In their work, emancipation, acculturation, and integration were serious challenges, rather than fatal blows, to the perpetuation of Jewish identity in the West.

14 • Introduction

This interpretation was a welcome correction to the imbalance of Zionist historiography. However, as is more often the case than not, in undermining the one-­sidedness of the then regnant view, it erected a view that was equally one-­sided. Historians who highlighted the vitality of diaspora Jewish life tended to ignore or minimize evidence regarding the weakening of Jewish ties and the toll that radical assimilation took. They accentuated the positive and, like those about whom they wrote, took little notice of trends that were moving in the opposite direction and that, in the long run, worked against the maintenance of ethnic cohesion. In particular, they showed little interest in the fate of the children and grandchildren of those Jews whose accomplishments they celebrated, neglecting to ask whether they remained in the fold or not. I do not intend in this account of radical assimilation to deny the accomplishments of European and American Jewish communities in meeting new challenges, but, rather, to suggest that their history was more complex than often acknowledged. If some Jews forged new ways of being Jewish, others drifted into indifference or formally cut their communal ties. No single unidirectional trend held sway; transformation and dissolution were at work concurrently. However, the cumulative impact of the latter becomes visible only when drift and defection are seen in multigenerational perspective, that is, when the fate of Jewish attachments is studied over succeeding generations. This book seeks to redress the imbalance of much recent writing about modern Jewish communities by highlighting the limitations of emancipation and integration, specifically the tenacity of reservations about Jews and the emotional hardship this imposed on Jews who yearned for acceptance and inclusion. Even in the most liberal states, the persistent stigmatization of Jewishness took a toll—­a toll, I argue, that historians have not yet fully acknowledged. A word about the evidence on which this account is based. Although this book is comparative in its approach, highlighting how different circumstances encouraged different behaviors, the evidence it uses is not consistently comparable. In general, while statistical data regarding conversion and secession exist for Central and, to a lesser extent, Eastern Europe, there is no equivalent body of quantitative evidence for Western Europe and the United States. The reason for this is simple. In Central and Eastern Europe, church and state were linked, as were religious and civil status. The state monitored the movement of its citizens/subjects from one religion to another and, for the most part, required them to belong to a recognized confession. In Western

Introduction • 15

Europe and the United States, on the other hand, the state took little interest in the religious affiliation of its citizens. It did not require them to affiliate with a religious community or register when they left one and joined another. The only statistics on conversion in the liberal states of the West come from missionary sources, and they are unsatisfactory for several reasons. First, missionaries were responsible for only a minority of conversions wherever they operated. Second, missionaries worked largely among the Jewish poor, and thus the converts they made were unrepresentative in terms of their social background. And third, mission-­made converts were often unreliable Christians. Some returned to Judaism when they were on their feet again, while others were “professional” converts—­persons who converted multiple times (usually in different towns) for material ends. In the absence of conversion statistics for liberal states, the historian must turn to nonquantitative evidence, drawing information about the scope and character of radical assimilation from “anecdotal” or “literary” sources: memoirs, diaries, correspondence, newspapers, journals, sermons, tracts, and novels. Obviously, the picture that can be drawn on the basis of this material will lack the sharpness of one resting on statistical data. But, in the absence of statistical data, there is no alternative, other than giving up the project altogether. This also means that, in comparing conversion in liberal and illiberal states, the evidence on each side of the comparison will not be similar in character. I do not believe this is an insurmountable obstacle. The nonquantitative evidence is abundant and, in general, unambiguous. Jews who did not want to be Jews left an impressive paper trail. Readers of this book will notice that its scope, while broad, is not comprehensive. I have little or nothing to say about the phenomena of conversion and radical assimilation in states with small Jewish populations, such as Switzerland, Italy, and the Scandinavian countries, or in French and British enclaves outside Europe, such as Algeria, South Africa, and Australia. Similarly, I have not extended my research to include Jewish communities in Canada and Latin America. My reason for this is pragmatic. This book is long enough as it is. There is also a methodological reason for excluding colonial settings. The relations among Jews, Europeans, and the indigenous populations were fundamentally different from those between Jews and Christians in Europe and the United States. Similarly, I have not touched on the not-­unknown phenomenon of Jews becoming Muslims in the lands of Islam. This is a topic worth exploring but it requires a historian with training and expertise that are different from mine.

16 • Introduction

One final point: The paths out of Judaism and Jewishness were several, and not all were uniformly and consistently available, and not all ended with the same results. Understanding why one path was available in Victorian London and unavailable in Habsburg Vienna, for example, is critical to this account. Thus, I have carefully chosen the words I use in discussing how and why Jews cut their ties to their religion and community. Radical assimilation is an umbrella term, referring to all the routes Jews traveled to lose their Jewishness, whether that was their intention or not. Conversion refers to the religious act of formally embracing Christianity. Secession, on the other hand, refers to the act of legally withdrawing from the Jewish community—­whether or not conversion to Christianity followed. This form of radical assimilation was available only in Central Europe and only from the late nineteenth century on. Intermarriage refers to the union between a Christian and Jew. The marriage between a baptized Jew and a Christian or between a Jew and a former Christian is not an instance of intermarriage. Legally and religiously, these are endogamous unions. In general, intermarriage was possible only where civil marriage was available, as in France, Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Passing refers to the attempt to flee the Jewish community by assuming a non-­Jewish identity and hiding evidence of a Jewish birth and upbringing. In most cases, Jews who attempted passing never bothered to convert, since conversion would have acknowledged that they had once been Jews. Why these distinctions matter will become clear in the chapters that follow.

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 conversionof 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

18 • Chapter One

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,

Conversion in Premodern Europe  •  19

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,

20 • Chapter One

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,1 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

Conversion in Premodern Europe  •  21

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 inter­related 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,

22 • Chapter One

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.”2 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.3 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

Conversion in Premodern Europe  •  23

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.4 One notable exception to this generalization was the forced conversion of the Jews of Visigothic Spain.5 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

24 • Chapter One

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. Beginning in the eleventh century, conversion, both coerced and voluntary, became a more central feature of European Jewish history. The background to this development was a slow shift in emphasis in Christian theological ambivalence regarding the Jews. As Christianity developed its own “antiquity,” its concern with the role of exilic Jews as witnesses to its truth, while not disappearing, lost ground to anxiety about Jews’ sinfulness and malevolence and the threat they posed to Christian purity. Churchmen and princes increasingly doubted whether there was any place for Jews in a Christian society and began to introduce measures to eliminate them from their midst. Symptomatic of this new emphasis was a radically negative turn in the construction of Jews in the Christian imagination. Theologians and storytellers alike portrayed Jews as less-­than-­human mythological beings, as allies of Satan, the Antichrist, and other demonic powers. This mental shift encouraged, in turn, new libels about Jewish malevolence, like the blood libel and the accusations of host desecration and well poisoning, which began to circulate in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, respectively. The creation of the mythic, demonic Jew and, more generally, the shift in Christian ambivalence about the place of Jews in Christendom belongs, in turn, to a broader development: the reawakening and quickening of Western Christianity that began in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Secular rulers increasingly felt a sense of Christian duty to expand the borders of Christendom internally, by combating heresy, and externally, by repelling the Muslim advance into southern Europe and re-­conquering the Holy Land. During these centuries, persecution, not just of Jews but of others who threatened Christian purity as well (heretics and lepers in the main), became a hallmark of European society. By the thirteenth century, the medieval Western church was at the height of its powers. It was self-­ confident and expansionist, keen to combat a Jewish enemy that was by and large a product of its own imagination. Even before the First Crusade (1095–­ 99), there is evidence of heightened Christian willingness to employ force in converting Jews. In 1010–­12, following a rumor about the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, there was a series of attacks on the Jewish communities of Limoges, Orléans, Rouen, and Mainz. In these and later persecutions, Jews were usually allowed to save themselves, from death or expulsion, by accepting baptism. (Although the papacy

Conversion in Premodern Europe  •  25

formally opposed coerced conversions, it prohibited their annulment, in effect, by stipulating that they were invalid only if converts declared their refusal before, during, and after the act. Medieval secular rulers were more lenient, however, and often allowed involuntary converts to return to Judaism.) The increase in involuntary converts before the First Crusade is reflected in rabbinic rulings. The preeminent halakhic authority of the period, Gershom ben Yehudah (c. 960–­1028) of Mainz, known as Rabbenu Gershom Meor Ha-­Golah, whose own son was an involuntary convert who could not return to Judaism, issued sympathetic rulings to ease their reintegration into the community, preeminently a prohibition on reminding involuntary converts about their past. Rashi and his students reiterated this ban.6 From the end of the eleventh century, the number of forced converts multiplied. In 1096, radical, undisciplined crusading bands in the Rhineland assaulted and destroyed the Jewish communities of Worms, Mainz, and Cologne. Most Jews in these communities chose not to convert. They either died while defending themselves or slew themselves and their families, preferring to die as martyrs—­sacrificing themselves to God and sanctifying his name (dying al kiddush ha-­ shem)—­than to live as Christians. Still, significant numbers chose baptism. (But, according to one Hebrew account, they only feigned belief in Christianity, attending church occasionally while secretly adhering to Judaism.) In any case, local rulers quickly permitted their return to Judaism. During the Second Crusade (1145–­47), when the monk Ralph preached apocalyptic violence against Jews in the same Rhineland cities where massacres occurred in 1096, Bernard of Clairvaux, spiritual leader of the Crusade, opposed him, warning that the Jews were not to be killed or expelled because they were witnesses to the truth of Christianity and were to remain as such until their eventual conversion and salvation at the Second Coming.7 Still, mobs and even princes repeatedly offered besieged or imprisoned Jews the alternative of baptism or death. Thus, in 1190, when the majority of the Jews in York took refuge from heavily indebted local barons in an isolated keep (later known as Clifford’s Tower), the few Jews who remained in the city were ordered to submit to conversion or die. Most of those in the tower killed themselves. The besiegers promised the remaining survivors clemency if they agreed to baptism but then massacred them anyway when they left the tower. The Augustinian doctrine of witness, which still carried weight in 1146, mattered less in the centuries that followed the Crusades. Secular and church authorities ceased to assign the Jewish people a

26 • Chapter One

positive function in the Christian economy of salvation and for this, as well as secular reasons, such as the Jews’ declining fiscal utility, were increasingly unlikely to tolerate their presence. Over the next three centuries, beginning in 1182 and culminating in 1492, pious princes issued edicts of expulsion that eventually denuded Western Europe of its Jews. In 1182, Philip Augustus expelled the Jews of Île-­de-­France and surrounding areas; in 1223, Louis VIII expelled the Jews of Normandy; in 1253, Louis IX expelled the Jews of the French royal domains; in 1288, Edward I expelled the Jews of Gascony, and in 1290 the Jews of England; in 1289, Charles II expelled the Jews of Naples, Sicily, and the counties of Anjou and Maine. In 1306 Philip the Fair again expelled the Jews from the French royal domains (they had earlier been allowed to return), and in 1322 Philip VI expelled them once again. In 1492, at the very end of the medieval period, Isabella and Ferdinand expelled the Jews of Castile and Aragon, as well as the Jews of Aragonese-­controlled territories in the Italian peninsula. Faced with expulsion, Jews who were unwilling to start their lives anew, endure the hazards of long-­distance travel, or sacrifice their fortunes became Christians and were thus exempted from the expulsion order, but, in every case but Spain (the exception to which I will return), they were the minority. From the Crusades on, most Ashkenazim chose martyrdom (or exile, if it was an option) over conversion when faced with the choice. In their spiritual universe, martyrdom, including death by their own hands, was the highest form of worship and the only legitimate choice when baptism was the alternative. Conversion was akin to spiritual pollution and annihilation. It represented, in Elisheva Carlebach’s words, “a betrayal of communal values, a rejection of Jewish destiny, a submission to the illusory verdict of history.”8 Indeed, the Hebrew word for convert in premodern Ashkenazi usage—­meshumad—­reflects the loathing with which conversion was regarded, for its root (sh-­m-­d) means utter destruction. In time, the zeal of some converts to proselytize their former coreligionists and the readiness of some to slander them intensified this loathing. Ironically, the widespread use of coercion to obtain conversions was counterproductive over the long run. As awareness of the involuntary nature of these conversions sank in, doubts about their authenticity took hold. Although the church upheld their validity, they were nonetheless problematic to most Christians. Conversion, after all, was supposed to be an act of divine grace and mercy. It was difficult to believe that those who accepted baptism under extreme duress experienced

Conversion in Premodern Europe  •  27

it that way. While it is well known that the conversos of Spain and Portugal were widely suspected of being insincere Christians, in fact, similar doubts arose centuries earlier. For example, in England, the baptisms obtained by baronial attacks on the Jewries of London, Canter­bury, Winchester, and Northampton in 1263–­65 and by Edward I’s executions of coin-­clippers in 1278–­79 started rumors about Jewish insincerity and apostasy (from the faith to which they had been converted) that lasted until 1290 and may have contributed to the expulsion decision. During this same time, Pope Clement IV, having become concerned about the loyalty of Jewish converts, issued a bull (Turbato corde, 1267) placing converts suspected of relapsing under the authority of the Inquisition. It was reissued in 1274, 1281, 1288, and 1290.9 In later centuries, doubts about the sincerity of Jewish converts were voiced routinely—­even the sincerity of willing, heartfelt converts. In the late medieval period, the notion of the insincere convert was nurtured by the increasing bitterness of anti-­Jewish polemic and by the mass conversions in Spain and Portugal, including the forced baptism of the Jews of Portugal in 1497. In the thirteenth century, the church’s hardening attitude toward Jews led to its first systematic missionizing efforts.10 With the help of converts who were familiar with rabbinic texts, it developed conversionist arguments that took account of postbiblical Jewish exegetical traditions and institutionalized means of confronting Jews with these claims. At its urging, secular authorities sponsored public religious disputations, like that between Rabbi Moses ben Nahman (1194–­ 1270) and the former Jew Pablo Christiani at Barcelona in 1263, and compelled Jews to attend conversionist sermons in churches or in their own synagogues. Churchmen wrote conversionist manuals that drew on postbiblical Hebrew and Aramaic texts, the best known of which was Raimon Martini’s Pugio Fidei (1278). Indicative of the new conversionist zeal was Henry III’s foundation of a house or shelter for converts in London in 1253, the domus conversorum in Chancery Lane. The house provided potential and recent converts with room, board, and a living allowance; sheltered them from the entreaties (or threats) of family and friends; and instructed them in their new faith. At the same time, secular authorities introduced new measures to harass, stigmatize, and heighten the “otherness” of Jews, with the hope, in part, of encouraging their conversion. English and French kings despoiled Jewish moneylenders. Authorities in Italy and France confiscated and burned the Talmud. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) required Jews to wear a distinguishing badge. Finally, between 1290

28 • Chapter One

and 1492, monarchs expelled Jews from most of Western Europe, allowing only those who converted to Christianity to remain. This late medieval mix of coercive and persuasive measures bore fruit. While it failed to effect the collective or national conversion of the Jews, it did achieve modest results and, in the case of Spain and Portugal, quite spectacular results. In England, due largely to Henry III’s enthusiasm and support, Jewish converts in the 1240s and 1250s numbered as many as three hundred—­at a time when the total Jewish population numbered between three thousand and five thousand. In fifteenth-­century Umbria, more than one hundred Jews converted between 1466 and 1485 while the total Jewish population in the region dropped from about seven hundred at midcentury to about four hundred by the 1480s (not the entire drop, of course, was due to conversion). The spike in conversions in Umbria followed the introduction and spread of the monte di pieta (church-­backed, low-­interest credit banks), which drove Jews from moneylending, and the intensification of conversionary preaching. So common was conversion at this time that itinerant swindlers posed as Jews seeking baptism in order to defraud naïve, charitable Christians. Foreshadowing a practice of Jewish vagabonds in later periods, they traveled from town to town, undergoing multiple baptisms, each time collecting Christian alms.11 The one region where conversion reached epidemic proportions was Spain, home to the most populous Jewish community in late medieval Europe. Here church and secular authorities wielded coercive and persuasive measures to great effect. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, bans and restrictions circumscribed the place of Jews in Castile and Aragon, while Dominican friars chipped away at Jewish self-­confidence and self-­understanding in forced sermons and other forums. Until 1391, there was a constant trickle of converts, but that year the trickle turned into a flood, when a wave of violence, beginning in Seville and eventually embracing much of Spain, swept Jews by the thousands to the baptismal font. Attacks on Jewish quarters, new restrictions, rigorous enforcement of old restrictions, and zealous preaching (most notably by Vincent Ferrer) continued to exert pressure on Spain’s Jews in the aftermath of the pogroms. The forced attendance of thousands at the sessions of the disputation of Tortosa in 1413 and 1414 produced further converts. When Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews from their territories in 1492, perhaps half of the total population, estimated to be between seventy thousand and one hundred thousand, chose to convert and avoid exile. Those who found refuge in Portugal were then forcibly baptized in 1497.

Conversion in Premodern Europe  •  29

Historians speculate about and debate the reason that Iberian Jews converted in greater numbers than Jews elsewhere, especially those in the Rhineland at the time of the Crusades, who tended to choose martyrdom over apostasy. Some blame the devotion of Spanish Jews to rationalism, philosophy, and science, which allegedly bred skepticism and weakened Jewish loyalties; others cite the riches and honors they enjoyed and their unwillingness to relinquish them; still others stress the intensive social and cultural relations between them and their Catholic neighbors. And some question even the historiographical reputation of medieval Ashkenazim as eager martyrs, thus throwing into doubt the alleged opposition between the two communities in their response to persecution.12 Whatever the case, the debate about the internal collapse of Spanish Jewry in the face of external pressure need not detain us. What is relevant to this review of premodern conversion is its mass character and, because of this, in part, its failure to eradicate the presence of “Jews” in Iberian society. Elsewhere, as we have seen, converts who changed their religion under duress were often viewed as insincere and deceitful. If this was true when the number of converts was small, it was even truer when tens of thousands and whole communities converted. The rapid transformation of masses of Jews into Christians failed to erase their collective character. They remained a visible, socially and eventually legally stigmatized community, continuing to live in the same houses and quarters, in close proximity to unconverted Jews (before 1492), with whom they maintained intensive social and economic contacts. Doubting the sincerity of their conversions, Old Christians viewed them as a ruse to dominate Christian men and sexually exploit Christian women. Some claimed that the Jewishness of the New Christians was a product of nature, a matter of blood and heredity, impervious to the sacramental power of baptism. Church and lay authorities accordingly erected barriers to their full integration, barriers that remained in place and bedeviled their existence for centuries and that often worked to strengthen their group solidarity and visibility. To be sure, the New Christian population included families (historians argue about how many) who continued to observe Judaism in a clandestine and increasingly fragmentary way, but in the eyes of Old Christians the entire group bore the taint of Jewish descent. From the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, New Christians, by virtue of their origins, were objects of suspicion, subject to inquisitorial interrogation. Indifference to or ignorance of Judaism was no bar to being arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and worse. In short,

30 • Chapter One

mass conversion in Spain and Portugal was a failure for New and Old Christians alike—­as it frequently was for Jews in the modern period, especially in the age of heightened racial thinking, between the 1870s and the 1940s. The historiographical debate about late medieval conversions in Spain confronts us with an issue—­the task of understanding why Jews changed their religion and community—­that transcends the ­specifics of Iberian events. The issue is knotty, in part because the whys of human decision-­making are often complex and obscure. To start, it will not do to make a sharp distinction between conversions that were coerced and those that were voluntary. Given the character of Jewish status in medieval and early modern societies, this distinction is not meaningful in most cases. The hegemony of Christianity, its alliance with and inseparability from premodern sources of power, meant that no conversion ever took place that did not reflect in some way this fundamental fact. Jews who embraced Christianity in the absence of any immediate threat of violence could not have been insensitive to the improvements that would occur in their legal and (in some cases) material status, even when they couched their motives in doctrinal and spiritual terms. This imbalance in power relations between Judaism and Christianity shaped, even determined, convert perceptions of Christian theological claims. Similarly, the military triumph of Christendom, including the defeat of the last Muslim forces on Iberian soil in 1492, and the simultaneous fall in Jewish status seemed to some converts to prove the truth of the church’s claim that God had abandoned the Jews and consigned them to endless exile and punishment. In those cases in which Jews were forced to choose between conversion and exile, the inappropriateness of labeling these conversions “voluntary” is even clearer, although strictly speaking these conversions did not take place in the midst of mob violence or at the point of a drawn sword. Similarly, it will not do to insist on too sharp a distinction between conversions that were religious, the result of theological reflection or spiritual illumination, and those that were pragmatic, driven by material and emotional needs. Much of the historical literature on medieval Jewish converts is written from what might be called a religious-­studies perspective and leaves the impression that medieval conversions were largely doctrinal or spiritual in character. This literature focuses on a small number of well-­educated converts—­Peter Alfonsi (1062–­ ca. 1121), Herman/Judah of Cologne (ca. 1107–­81), Pablo Christiani (ca. 1210–­74), Abner of Burgos (ca. 1270–­1340), and Joshua Ha-­Lorki

Conversion in Premodern Europe  •  31

(fourteenth century), for example—­who left accounts of their conversions and their new convictions. For them and probably for others who never put pen to paper, the truth of Christian doctrine was uppermost. Some medieval historians, without denying the religious character of these conversions, complicate the question of motives and causes by incorporating a discussion of the converts’ emotional states and needs and how these underpinned or drove new theological insights. Jeremy Cohen, for example, invokes William James’s description of a typical convert—­“a man living on the ragged edge of his consciousness, pent in to his own sin and want and incompleteness, and consequently inconsolable”—­in seeking to explain what induced the motherless, late-­ adolescent Herman to convert, while William Chester Jordan, noting that most voluntary converts in the middle ages were adolescents and young men, foregrounds “the emotional roller coaster of adolescence” in his taxonomy of plausible reasons for conversion.13 Of course, in the case of most medieval converts, we simply know too little about their inner lives to correlate them with the decision to leave Judaism. Whether—­and in what ways—­the conversion of Herman of Cologne or any of the other well-­known converts of medieval Europe is representative is also unknowable. We should also remember that medieval and early modern converts who wrote about their change of faith inevitably used theological concepts, since they were the only terms of reference, the sole vocabulary, available to them. This does not mean, however, that emotional and material motives were absent. Theological reflection, spiritual longing, material desire, and emotional craving swirled together, each reinforcing the other. A more expansive look at medieval conversions, one that does not focus on spiritual narratives alone, reveals a multiplicity of motives and circumstances.14 In addition to those whose motives were otherworldly, there were others who chose conversion to escape intolerable conditions in this world. These included battered women who were trapped in abusive marriages; convicted criminals who were sentenced to die and wanted to save themselves; and vagabonds, beggars, and low-­lifes who made a living by converting repeatedly in different locales. Persons who ran afoul of communal norms and faced sanctions or even imprisonment, as well as those who failed to get their way in one matter or another, often threatened to convert and some even went through with it. Sefer Hasidim (late twelfth-­through early thirteenth century) mentions a Jew who threatened to convert unless his request for charity was granted and another who threatened to do so if he was not allowed to marry the woman whom he loved.15

32 • Chapter One

Erotic motives also were not absent. In 1481 Clemenza, the daughter of the wealthy Yehiel of Pisa (d. 1490), divorced her Jewish husband, converted, and married an impoverished nobleman. Rabbi Meir of Rothenberg (ca. 1220–­93) recorded the case of a married woman who committed adultery and gave birth to a child while her husband was away and, when her father asked a rabbinic court whether he was permitted to drown her, threatened to convert—­a threat she made every time her father threatened her. In fourteenth-­century Saragossa, a son who was in love with the same Muslim slave as his father threatened to convert if his father did not stop having sex with her. (The father was accused of resolving their dispute by poisoning the son.) Material need also drove the poor and the desperate to the baptismal font. Henry III’s ruinous taxation of the English Jewish community between 1240 and 1260, for example, broke its financial back and destroyed its ability to care for its widows, orphans, and other needy. Among the converts whom Henry sent in 1255 for maintenance in monastic houses throughout the kingdom were striking numbers of single parents with children and siblings without parents.16

THREE

After the expulsions from England, France, and Spain, few Jewish communities remained in Western Europe. The center of gravity in European Jewry shifted southward to Northern and Central Italy and, more importantly, eastward to the Polish-­Lithuanian commonwealth and the German states, whose variety and multiplicity provided ­pockets of refuge for those driven from one principality or another. In the centuries before the democratic and industrial revolutions, the Jews in these lands were subject to pressures and temptations similar to those that encouraged conversion in the medieval period. Intolerance, poverty, family strife, ambition, and romance continued to uproot Jews from their communities. At the same time, the splintering of Christian unity in the sixteenth century and the reaction from Rome that followed in its wake strengthened conversionist currents and pressures, but the techniques employed and the results obtained in Protestant and Catholic lands were markedly dissimilar. The Reformation changed little in the Christian evaluation of Judaism. No less than the Church of Rome, the Protestant churches of early modern Europe denied Judaism any moral worth or salvific power. Its adherents, in their eyes, remained a stiff-­necked lot,

Conversion in Premodern Europe  •  33

spitefully denying the messiahship of Jesus, whose life and death their own scriptures foretold. However, because the Protestant churches saw themselves as the bearers of a pristine Christianity stripped of corrupt Roman practices, they brought a new optimism and a renewed energy to the missionary project. Having cleansed Christianity of centuries of accretions, they reasoned that they would succeed where Rome, with its dependence on violence, expulsions, confiscations, disputations, and inquisitions, had failed. Martin Luther was initially quite hopeful that unadorned, reformed Christianity would bring about mass conversions, but when Jews failed to respond positively to his message he turned on them with a vengeance, as his late anti-­Jewish writings—­most famously, On the Jews and Their Lies (1543)—­testify. Nonetheless, the notion remained alive that Protestantism would be more effective than Catholicism in converting Jews, and later did much to shape Christian attitudes in the Netherlands, Britain, and North America. Protestant emphasis on conversion as the outcome of intensive self-­ reflection, scriptural exploration, and reasonable argument also weakened the role of intimidation. The reformed churches repudiated the use of overtly coercive state intervention to save Jewish souls and, in those states where the missionary impulse was strong, developed new, noncoercive techniques. They sought to make converts with sympathy and goodwill, through gentle persuasion and with assurances of brotherly love, rather than with fiery polemics and ominous threats. It also should be remembered, as Elisheva Carlebach notes, that “in the conflict ridden and politically atomized conditions of Reformation-­ era German lands . . . no German state had the political resources or the will to throw its weight behind a uniform missionary campaign of the kind undertaken by the Iberian monarchs.”17 At the same time, the beginnings of religious tolerance more generally, which was rooted in part in the splintering of Christian unity and the inability of any one denomination to monopolize power, strengthened the move away from coercion. In addition, in those Protestant lands where millenarian thinking took hold in the seventeenth century—­Britain and the Netherlands above all—­this approach to the conversion of the Jews moved to the forefront of religious consciousness. The acute sense that the Second Coming was imminent and the conviction that human activity could accelerate the process focused attention on the conversion of the Jews, whose fate was linked to the realization of the Christian end time. While some believed that the conversion of the Jews would follow Jesus’s reappearance, others claimed that their

34 • Chapter One

prior conversion would spark his coming and that the Protestant task was to hasten that event by converting Jews. Convinced that great events were at hand, Puritan divines in seventeenth-­century England, for example, proposed readmitting Jews (they had been expelled in 1290) so they would experience at first hand reformed Christianity in its most pristine form. A century later this kind of conversionist “philosemitism” generated support for the Jewish Naturalization Bill of 1753 and, in the following century, for an expanded British role in the Land of Israel. Protestant interest in converting Jews led to the formation of the first institutions devoted exclusively to their proselytization. The earliest appeared in Germany, fueled by Christian Hebraism and pietist activism and underwritten by the invention of printing and the distribution of books.18 In 1667, Esdras Edzard, a disciple of the Christian Hebraist Johannes Buxtorf, established an institute in Hamburg to instruct and materially support proselytes. More an updated domus conversorum than a mission proper—­it did not dispatch agents—­it instructed Protestant clergy from Germany and elsewhere in Central and Northern Europe in postbiblical Judaism and conversionist techniques. Edzard’s institute also pioneered the provision of employment and job training to converts, who, cut off from work in the Jewish community, faced certain poverty. The existence of the institute would seem to have contributed to the number of Jews (at least 152) who were baptized in Hamburg between 1656 and 1708.19 The first mission in the full sense of the term was the Institutum Judaicum in Halle, established by the orientalist Johannes Heinrich Callenberg.20 The institute published and distributed Christian texts in Hebrew and Yiddish, offered board and religious instruction to candidates for baptism and to the recently converted, and employed missionaries (as many as twenty at a time, usually theology students who spoke Yiddish and knew the Hebrew text of the Bible) to carry the Gospel to the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. The strategies that Callenberg pioneered became standard practice in Protestant missions throughout Europe and remained so well into the twentieth century. Material issues complicated the task of Callenberg and his supporters. As was true earlier, baptism alone failed to accomplish the integration of many former Jews into Christian society. While it removed them from Jewish society, it did not provide them with the tools and skills they needed to support themselves as Christians. Most converts in early modern Protestant lands were not successful merchants, craftsmen, or brokers but persons of very humble background

Conversion in Premodern Europe  •  35

with neither artisanal training nor agricultural experience.21 The typical convert was an itinerant trader, servant, vagabond, thief, luftmensh, or low-­status religious functionary, such as a melammed or shohet. Once Jews like these made their decision to convert, they were cut off from any possibility of employment in Jewish society (in which, in many cases, their economic standing was already precarious); following their baptism, they were often unwelcome among their new co-­religionists, even if they had received some training. A few learned converts found employment teaching privately or in universities. As a result, many converts, some of whom returned to or took up wandering and begging, were not much better off than before their change of faith. A missionary who worked for the Halle institute in the 1730s suggested that all its converts should be gathered together so that everyone would see their poverty and exclaim, “I am astonished that one Jew has chosen to become a Christian.”22 No wonder the Hamburg and Halle institutions, as well as most Protestant missions in the centuries to come, were forced to provide some manner of material aid to both inquiring and newly converted Jews. The provision of material aid, however, brought with it its own problem, for it once again raised the question of authenticity. How were Christians to believe in the sincerity of converts who were rewarded materially when they changed their religion? How were they to assess the relative weight of spiritual and material motives? Just as coercion tainted medieval conversions, so new clothes, a purse of coins, and the like—­the Taufgeschenk—­tainted early modern conversion. Even before the establishment of missionary institutions, there was a widespread perception that many, if not most, converts were swindlers and hypocrites. The sixteenth-­century orientalist Joseph Justus Scalinger thought that most Jewish converts were contemptible: “Rarement un juif converti au Christianisme est homme de bien; les convertis sont généralement mauvaises gens.” In his early eighteenth-­century compendium of Judaic lore, Johann Jacob Schudt quipped that “Jews who remain sincerely within the Christian religion are rarer than citrons in Muskovy.” At midcentury a Jew told one of Callenberg’s missionaries: “Out of ninety-­nine Jews who become Christians, not one does so out of faith. They all do it after they have committed some crime or in order to obtain money and fame.”23 The spread of intentionally fraudulent multiple baptisms in the early modern period, which was linked to the increase in Jewish vagabondage, confirmed this perception.24 To detect ruses, the Edzard institute in Hamburg, beginning in 1773, required candidates for baptism to present a letter confirming their

36 • Chapter One

good behavior in places where they had lived previously.25 Similarly, the common (but not universal) practice of allowing Jewish criminals who faced execution to save themselves by baptism also fed Christian doubts about the opportunism of Jewish conversions. Recall that the only conversion mentioned in the memoir of Glückel of Hameln (1646–­1724) was that of a Jew in Norway who was sentenced to hang for stealing a parcel of diamonds and who accepted Christianity to escape the gallows.26 So pervasive was the mistrust of converts’ motives that even those whose motives were apparently sincere encountered suspicion and contempt. Victor von Carben (ca. 1423–­1515), a “rabbi” turned priest who wrote mocking accounts of Jewish life and customs, complained bitterly about how he was treated. He accused Christians of using offensive expressions about converts, refusing to help those who were needy, and failing to befriend them or teach them a trade so they could support themselves. If Christians wanted converts to live good Christian lives, then they needed to show them more sympathy, for in becoming Christians they had given up everything—­family, friends, community. He claimed, moreover, that Jews knew what to expect if they converted and that this prevented many of them from doing so, citing what he said was a Jewish saying: “A new coat is beautiful and lovely to look at, but after it has been worn several days it is dirty, and no one pay[s] attention to it.” The convert and anti-­Jewish controversialist Johannes Pfefferkorn (1469–­1524) wrote that some Jews requested to be baptized in secret because they did not want to be identified as converts and face Christian contempt. In the dispute that erupted between Pfefferkorn and Johannes Reuchlin, the latter always referred to Pfefferkorn as “the baptized Jew”—­a common practice at the time.27 Converted Jews who failed to leave the place of their baptism were generally not allowed to forget their origins. The presence of rogues and rascals among the converted fueled the suspicion that all converts were dubious persons. Drawing conclusions from the behavior of the few about the behavior of the many is a common human failing. But in this case, as earlier in the case of the conversos of Spain and Portugal, something else was at work as well. The Christian churches represented conversion as a dramatic, even cataclysmic transformation of the individual, as an absolute remaking and realignment of his or her very essence. The problem was that the idea of conversion was often not as powerful as the negative sentiments about Jews that had accumulated over the centuries and become embedded in Western ways of feeling and thinking. Theology,

Conversion in Premodern Europe  •  37

like reason and science in later centuries, was powerless to dissolve the well-­established cultural construction of the Jew as the quintessential Other. As in Spain and Portugal, the Jewishness of the early modern Ashkenazi convert was viewed as more than a set of practices and beliefs. It was a state of mind, firmly implanted in his or her very being, uncannily immutable, and thus impervious to the sacramental power of baptismal water. This was not the systematic, deterministic, science-­inflected racial thinking of the Nazis, but in its essentialism and its belief in the inheritability of Jewishness it was not dissimilar.

FOUR

Protestantism breathed new life into the old doctrine of grafting the Jewish branches onto the original olive tree from which they had been torn, but its missionary project counted less than material distress and socioeconomic marginalization in converting Jews in early modern Europe. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, occupational and residential restrictions embittered the lives of the Ashkenazim of the German states and the Habsburg lands. Charters and statutes forced Jews to the margins of economic life, where they struggled to survive, making small consumer loans, buying and selling secondhand goods, trading with peasants and villagers. Some cities and states banned Jewish residence altogether while others expelled existing communities, (as in Baden in 1614 and Vienna in 1670). Urban Jewish communities, moreover, kept a tight rein on newcomers gaining the right of settlement, since, above and beyond state-­imposed limits, they wished to restrict economic competition within their communities and minimize the number of families requiring charity. Thousands of Jews were forced to uproot themselves from their communities and seek their livelihoods elsewhere. Many took to the roads permanently, moving in bands from place to place, begging, seeking charity, resorting to thievery and brigandage at times. The Betteljuden, as they were known, along with the mass of Jews who struggled to make a living on society’s margins, were far more representative of early modern Jewry than the relatively few court factors, Hofjuden, who first rose to conspicuous wealth during the Thirty Years War (1618–­1648) and continued to serve the absolutist princes of Central Europe until the early nineteenth century. The typical Jewish convert in early modern Germany was a young man—­without a fixed residence, a regular source of income, and a

38 • Chapter One

network of family and friends—­someone rendered both materially and emotionally vulnerable by virtue of his poverty and transiency. In Teschen (Cieszyn), Silesia, for example, in the first half of the eighteenth century, most converts were newcomers, born outside the region, or servants in the homes of local families. Of the twenty-­one Jews whom the Capuchins in Cologne baptized between 1756 and 1761, only half came from German lands, the rest, most likely, from Poland. The memoirs of converts in this period, of which there are dozens, frequently begin with scenes of young men leaving the comforts and certainties of home—­to pursue a trade elsewhere, to study in a far-­away yeshivah, to live with relatives following the death of parents, or to seek a teaching post in another community.28 The ranks of indigent converts also included Jews who, driven as much by cunning as by hopelessness and desperation, supported themselves by serial or multiple conversions, each time reaping the reward of the Taufgeschenk. On the other hand, prosperity (with the exception of great wealth) tended to keep conversion at bay. Persons from moderately wealthy families, those belonging to the stratum to which Glückel of Hameln belonged, were unlikely prospects for baptism. It is no coincidence that, in narrating her years in Hamburg, when Esdras Edzard was busy converting Jews, she failed to say a word about his activity—­ which, it stands to reason, she would have if those he baptized included persons from her circle of acquaintances. Similarly, converts rarely came from the spiritual and scholarly elite of the community, as had been true in late medieval Spain.29 However, minor religious functionaries were well represented among those who converted, or, more exactly, among those who wrote accounts of their conversions. Yeshivah students, ritual slaughterers, teachers, cantors, and other klei kodesh figure disproportionately in conversion narratives. Typical is the story of Nathan of Altona (later Johann Adam Gottfried), born in 1726, the child of wealthy parents. His father lost everything when Nathan was a young child and died soon thereafter. Nathan’s mother sent him, at age nine, to an uncle in London to learn diamond cutting, but he showed little aptitude for it and returned to Altona. Unable to support the family, she moved with them to Eisenstadt in Hungary, where she had relatives. Nathan then went to study with an uncle in Fürth, after which he became, at age seventeen, a melammed in Roth, near Anspach, and later in Sulzbürg. He was baptized in Erlangen on Ascension Day in 1750.30 In their narratives, converts like Nathan stressed their command of Jewish law and lore, no matter how limited,

Conversion in Premodern Europe  •  39

and often described themselves as rabbis, a claim that enhanced the value of their conversion. However, only a few were able to parlay their knowledge of Hebrew texts into successful careers as teachers, tutors, clergy, and polemicists.31 In fact, it seems that many of the conversion narratives that were published under their names were the work of Christian clergymen. The collapse of the Sabbatean messianic movement, along with its tremors and aftershocks in the following century, also contributed to the decision of some Jews to become Christians.32 While the extent to which Sabbateanism penetrated the Jewish communities of early modern Germany is a matter of dispute, those persons who fell under its spell likely experienced dismay and even despair when Shabbetai Tsevi (1626–­76) converted to Islam in 1666. Convert narratives from the period include references to the discomfiting impact of the movement’s failure and cite it as a motive for abandoning Judaism. Among Christians, the extraordinary events excited interest as well, and preachers and polemicists exploited them to underscore Jewish incredulity and the falsity of Jewish messianic hopes. “The Jews were so blind to truth, thundered Protestant and Catholic clergy alike, that they could be led hopelessly astray by a ridiculous imposter while all the while they spurned the true redeemer, Christ, who stood before them.”33 In Hamburg, where Sabbatean enthusiasm reached fever pitch, especially among the Sephardim, Esdras Edzard was stirred to launch his mission to the Jews. Faith in Shabbetai Tsevi survived his conversion and death. In the eighteenth century, small circles of believers in Germany, Poland, and the Balkans anticipated his return or acknowledged new prophets and messiahs as his reincarnation or successor. When their expectations inevitably met with disappointment, some of the believers found their way to Christianity, most notably the followers of Jacob Frank (1726–­91). The number of Jewish converts in early modern Central Europe is not known and is likely unknowable. One historian, using printed sources (conversion narratives, mission reports, and the like), counted 516 conversions in Protestant areas of Germany between 1590 and 1710—­not an impressive figure considering the tens of thousands of Jews who lived there in those years.34 But, clearly, the real number of conversions was higher, for not every Jew who became a Protestant at the time left a paper trail. In addition, an unknown number of Jews became Catholics. Extracting these baptisms from the surviving registers of Catholic parishes and monasteries in Central Europe would be a daunting task. This means that it is also impossible to speak with any

40 • Chapter One

certainty of rises and falls in the rate of conversion in early modern Germany. What can be said with assurance is that conversion was not a matter that troubled communal leaders or sparked controversy and debate. Christian observers as well (aside from fervent m ­ illenarians) were not impressed with the number of Jews who were changing their religion. Local studies of towns and regions without institutional missions like those in Halle and Hamburg reinforce the impression that conversion was a marginal phenomenon, at least demographically, before the age of enlightenment and emancipation. Research on Thuringia, for example, uncovered only twelve conversions, all to the Lutheran church, between 1530 and 1652. In Nuremberg, only eighteen Jews were baptized between 1710 and 1748. 35 These and similar figures, moreover, include Jews who became Christians multiple times as well as Jews who later returned to Judaism, either quietly in a locale in which they were not known, or openly in Amsterdam or London, where reversion to Judaism was not a crime.

FIVE

In Catholic lands—­Poland and the Italian states, specifically—­there was greater continuity between medieval and early modern patterns of conversion. In the absence of a theology that framed conversion as the outcome of intensive self-­reflection, exposure to scripture, and reasonable argument, churchmen continued to use coercive measures and, in the Italian states, even created new measures to turn Jews into Christians. In the Italian states, in particular, their efforts, backed by the power and authority of the state, were remarkably effective. Moreover, they continued to employ coercion well into the nineteenth century since it was only then that Italian nationalism and liberalism successfully checked the power of the Church. In the papal states and, to a lesser degree, in nearby states where papal influence was strong, the Counter-­Reformation inspired the introduction of new instruments of coercion, including above all the involuntary ghetto.36 In the debate that erupted in the church at the time of the Protestant challenge, those calling for internal reforms labeled the toleration of Jews in Christian states a concession to earthly concern about wealth and power. Seeking to put their own house in order, reformers of the Church in the second half of the sixteenth century, beginning with Paul IV in 1555, pursued a vigorous conversionist strategy. Some, including Paul, were also driven by the eschatological

Conversion in Premodern Europe  •  41

hope that the end of the world and the advent of the Kingdom of God were near, their enthusiasm fueled by the portentous events of the time—­Protestant heresies and schism and Turkish military advances in Europe (having overrun Hungary, the Ottoman army was at the gates of Vienna in 1529). Amidst such convulsions and tremors, Paul IV took steps to precipitate the end of days by ridding his territories of the infidels in their midst, not by expelling or murdering them, but by driving them to convert from despair, misery, and fear. He herded Rome’s 3,500 to 4,000 Jews into a seven-­acre low-­ lying quarter on the left bank of the Tiber in 1555, walled it off, and urged other Italian rulers to copy his example. Within one hundred years, the model of the Roman ghetto spread throughout the states of Northern and Central Italy. (In cities in which papal influence was weak—­Florence and Venice most notably—­local, nonconversionary motives were dominant.)37 Other harsh measures to break the back of Jewish faith accompanied involuntary confinement within ghetto walls. Church and state authorities burned the Talmud (and other Hebrew books as well) in great public bonfires in 1553, increased the fiscal burden on Jewish communities, further restricted Jewish trade, and compelled attendance at proselytizing sermons. To encourage wavering Jews, proselytizers opened houses of catechumens—­in Rome (1543), Bologna (1568), Venice (1557), Ferrara (1584), Reggio Emilia (1630), Modena (1631), Florence (1636), and Turin (1653). In addition to providing shelter and instruction, the houses also functioned in effect as prisons in which the church isolated emotionally vulnerable Jews (children in particular), while pressuring them to convert. On occasion authorities removed a Jewish minor from his home by force and locked him away in a house of catechumens, claiming that a Christian servant or acquaintance had sprinkled baptismal water on him or had him baptized in a church without the knowledge or consent of his parents. The most notorious case of this kind occurred as late as 1858, when the Vatican imprisoned six-­year-­old Edgardo Mortara of Bologna in the Roman house of catechumens, claiming that a Catholic serving girl, whom the family employed when Edgardo was an infant, secretly baptized the child when he fell ill.38 The majority of Jews who entered the houses, however, were neither children nor, strictly speaking, victims of Vatican coercion, but, rather, impoverished young men for whom conversion was a solution to their material plight. In Rome, the Jewish adults who voluntarily entered the house of catechumens were overwhelmingly men, by a

42 • Chapter One

ratio of four to one, and were mostly in their twenties. They also came from the poorest stratum of Jewish society. Francesco Rovira Bonet, rector of the house for thirty-­seven years in the late eighteenth century, lamented the quality of those who converted: “Those who come to the House of the Catechumens to embrace the holy faith come there wearing filthy rags . . . and are so disgusting that it gives one chills to see them.”39 In Turin, the makeup of converts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was similar. The number of men was almost double the number of women and both men and women were overwhelmingly in their twenties.40 The imbalance between male and female converts may have reflected, in part, the unattractive future that awaited unmarried women who entered a house of catechumens: Following their baptism, they were either given in marriage to strangers or they were immured in a nunnery. However, a small number of women in unhappy marriages, some of whom had been married in their early teens to uncles who were much older than they, also entered the houses, in the hope of finding more age-­appropriate Christian husbands.41 In addition to converts fleeing poverty, there were those who became Christians to escape legal, personal, and financial entanglements. They were frequently persons who lived by their wits on the margins of society, eking out a living with odd jobs, petty frauds, and occasional crimes. The two times that the Venetian rabbi Leon Modena (1571–­1648) refers to converts in his autobiography he describes converts like these. In the first instance, he notes that the gang of Jewish criminals who murdered his son Zebulon included some who later, after being expelled from Venetian territory, became Christians. In the second, he mentions a dealer in stolen goods who died in prison as a Christian while serving time for offering a bribe to the authorities.42 Cardinal Carlo Borromeo, archbishop of Milan, expressed his disenchantment with converts like these in 1584: “I have little faith in such people, and have been deceived by them several times . . . for I have found that on the pretext of coming to our faith many of them sought and had other purposes, and with fraud and trickery were pursuing worldly gain.”43 Ironically, the rewards offered to new converts at the time of their baptism—­a new suit of clothes and a small amount of money, usually—­encouraged multiple baptisms. The value of conversion was also enhanced by a patent given to destitute converts, usually by a bishop or an abbot, testifying to their status as former Jews and warmly commending them to the charity of true Christians. Equipped with these licenses to beg, along with a good story

Conversion in Premodern Europe  •  43

to exploit the credulity of the pious, alms-­seeking converts (known as Iucchi), were conspicuous in the ranks of the professional beggars who swarmed early modern Italy. The conversion patents themselves were valuable—­they were often lent or sold—­and some who exploited them were not even former Jews.44 While most converts came from the lowest strata of Jewish society, a handful were prosperous or learned Jews whose work (banking, medicine, teaching) brought them into close contact with Christian clients, associates, patients, and pupils, for whom an introduction to Christianity was “the greatest favour they had to bestow,” in Brian Pullan’s phrase. For such converts, spiritual, material, and emotional motives were intertwined. The case of the Genoese physician Ludovico Carreto (né Todros ben Yehoshua Ha-­Kohen), brother of the Hebrew chronicler Joseph Ha-­Kohen (1496–­1578), illustrates how such contacts encouraged an interest in and eventual adhesion to Christianity. The descendant of exiles from Spain, Carreto received an extensive secular education. In August 1529, while treating Giovanni d’Urbina, the wounded commander of the imperial army besieging Florence, he began to take an interest in the Christian religion. At the time, Jews were banned from settling in Genoa, the only exceptions being physicians whose services the city needed. In 1533, Carreto, who had maintained contact with leaders in the imperial camp, including the pope, Clement VII, received permission from the latter to settle in Genoa. Despite choosing to live outside a normative Jewish community, he did not convert to Christianity immediately. However, much later, in 1550, a dispute with his brother Joseph over whose son was to marry the daughter of their sister, Clara, pushed him to abandon Judaism and at age fifty he formally entered the Church.45 Dozens of learned Jews as well became Christians in this period. The network of censors employed by the Church from the 1550s to monitor and expurgate Hebrew books was almost entirely Jewish by birth. Among them were the brothers Vittorio Eliano and Giovanni Battista Eliano, grandsons of Elijah Levita (1468/69–­1549), grammarian, lexicographer, and teacher of Christian Hebraists. Converts also found employment as Hebrew proofreaders and editors in Christian printing houses, as Hebrew language tutors, as librarians and catalogers, and as polemicists and preachers. In some cases, it was contact with Christian Hebraist circles that facilitated their interest in Christianity and their Christian students who led them to the baptismal font. For example, Giovanni Paolo Eustachio (né Elia ben Menahem di Nola) (ca. 1540–­ca. 1600) earned a living in Rome tutoring and

44 • Chapter One

copying Hebrew manuscripts for Christian Hebraists. About ten years after the establishment of the Roman ghetto, when it was clear that the papacy’s new anti-­Jewish measures were permanent, Eustachio, who was economically dependent on Christian book collectors, converted.46 Christian kabbalah, an uncritical synthesis of hermetic texts of various “ancient” traditions that encouraged Jews to read the Torah in a highly spiritualized way, also served as a bridge to baptism. Converts were the most prominent teachers and exponents of kabbalah to Christians, most famously the circle surrounding Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in late-­fifteenth-­century Florence.47 In Northern Italy, Jews remained subject to the ghetto system until the very end of the eighteenth century, when Napoleon and his troops invaded the Peninsula, while in the papal states they gained their freedom only in 1870, when the papacy’s secular power collapsed. As an instrument of coercion, the ghetto, with its restrictions, humiliations, and demands, was a moderate success. While it did not meet the expectations of Paul IV, who envisioned mass desertions, it produced a steady flow of converts over the centuries. In Rome, between 1542 and 1870, almost 2,700 Jews converted—­almost 1,200 in the first sixty years. The house of catechumens in Rome, which the Jewish community was required to support, itself became a long-­term fiscal burden. Almost one-­third of all taxes and payments made by the Roman community to the Apostolic Camera and the Roman Civic Camera between 1558 and 1778 was devoted to the upkeep of the house and its associated institutions. Rather than impoverish themselves in paying their taxes, some wealthy Jews chose baptism, while others chose emigration—­to England, France, Holland, and the Ottoman Empire—­leaving behind those who were least able to shoulder the fiscal burden.48 In time, conversion, in tandem with emigration, contributed to the demographic and cultural stagnation of Italian Jewry on the eve of the modern era. In the Polish-­Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Church lacked the temporal authority it enjoyed in Italy and thus, as in the Catholic states of Central Europe, was handicapped when it came to bringing Jews to Christianity. It was handicapped as well by a shortage of priests relative to other Catholic lands and by the need to combat Protestantism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Islam on its own turf. The geographical dispersion of Poland’s Jews and their cultural isolation (their knowledge of Polish was limited; Catholic knowledge of Jewish languages and customs almost nonexistent) also contributed to the difficulty of spreading Catholicism. At the same time, the material circumstances of Jewish life, while not rosy, were not as desperate as in the Italian

Conversion in Premodern Europe  •  45

states. As a result, Polish Jews were far less exposed to the pressures and temptations that led Italian Jews of the time to convert. With two exceptions, to be discussed below, conversion in pre-­partition Poland was a demographic trickle. The Church in Poland began to take an interest in converting Jews only in the first half of the eighteenth century when, having grown stronger, more confident, and more militant, it looked with alarm at the increase in the Jewish population. Religious orders—­Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits, in particular—­took the lead, while pastoral letters and synodal legislation supported their efforts. In the first half of the eighteenth century, for example, Jesuits were converting between twenty and thirty Jews annually in Poland and between twenty and thirty-­five annually in Lithuania. In the latter territory, in 1737, the priest Stefan Turczynowicz founded a female religious order, Congregatio Mariae Vitae, devoted to the conversion of Jewish girls. The order operated seventeen small nunneries, in which Jewish girls, both those taking instruction and those already baptized, were housed. In its first thirty years it converted about four hundred girls, and by 1820, so it claimed, two thousand.49 The other innovator in missionary work was Franciszek Antoni Kobielski, bishop of Łuck and Brzesć, who, in the 1740s, challenged the magnate-­aristocrats, who generally intervened to protect Jews on their estates, and ordered Jews within his dioceses to attend conversionist sermons four times a year, even supplying his priests with the texts of the sermons they were to deliver. He also organized medieval-­style disputations in Brody and Ostrog. Lutheran missionaries, some from Callenberg’s institute in Halle, were also active in pre-­partition Poland. Although better prepared than their Catholic counterparts—­they spoke Yiddish and knew Hebrew—­there is no evidence that they were any more successful. The most coercive measure employed by the Polish Church was the kidnapping of Jewish children. Forcibly seized and then detained in a Catholic institution, the children were subject to both the carrot and the stick, including flogging and starvation. Once their children submitted to baptism, parents were powerless to obtain their return. Turczynowicz’s Mariavites were so implicated in the forced baptism of juveniles that the bishop of Vilna temporarily closed the order in 1774 following the death of the founder. Among Jews, the fear of kidnapping led to the inclusion of guarantees in communal charters protecting their children from this kind of coercion. However, in 1747, a bull of Benedict XIV giving children the right to change their religion at the end of their seventh year rendered these guarantees almost worthless.

46 • Chapter One

In these and most other conversions, religious conviction was hardly a motive. Even when violence and coercion were absent, it is unlikely that spiritual or doctrinal motives were uppermost. This can be said with some confidence, largely because Polish Jews knew little about Christianity before deciding to convert, given the linguistic and cultural gap between them and their neighbors. The typical convert was a young man who was hungry and out of work, a lessee who was in close and frequent contact with Polish nobles, a person who had transgressed communal norms and been placed in herem, an abandoned wife (agunah) who was desperate to remarry and start life anew, or a convicted criminal who faced death or prison. Among the latter were innocent persons who were victims of the blood libel, which the Church actively fomented in the eighteenth century, and who converted to save their lives or avoid a grisly, drawn-­out execution. In Zhitomir in 1753, for example, thirteen Jews were sentenced to death for murdering a three-­and-­a-­half-­year-­old Christian boy. Eight were quartered alive, their skin flayed and ripped to pieces; three who agreed to be baptized were spared quartering and were beheaded (a painless death by comparison); another Jew who chose baptism was allowed to live; one managed to escape. Following the executions, the bishop baptized thirteen other Jewish men and women who had been imprisoned as well in connection with the case.50 Poverty, however, overshadowed all other reasons for conversion in pre-­partition Poland. Recognizing this—­and the fact that baptism severed the newly converted from their prior environment and made the task of earning a living even more difficult—­a wealthy convert, Kazimierz Woliński, left an endowment (five thousand zlotys) at his death in 1731 to the most important church in Krakow, St. Mary’s, to support converts. The largest sums went to purchase clothing for former Jews, many of whom never freed themselves from poverty, their names appearing repeatedly as recipients of the fund’s charity.51 Twice in pre-­partition Poland, conversion became more than a trickle. The first occasion, a replay in one sense of involuntary conversions in early medieval Ashkenaz, occurred during the bloody revolt against Polish rule in the Ukraine led by Bogdan Chemielnicki in 1648. When the rebels—­Ukrainian peasants, Crimean Tartars, and Cossacks—­attacked, they targeted Jews (in part, because they were allied with the Poles) but spared those who were willing to convert. While most Jews who fell into rebel hands chose martyrdom or were enslaved and sold in Turkey, at least one thousand entered the Orthodox Church.52 The second occasion was a unique, even bizarre, episode

Conversion in Premodern Europe  •  47

in the convoluted history of Sabbatean enthusiasm in the century after Shabbetai Tsevi’s conversion to Islam in 1666. In Poland, as elsewhere in the Jewish world, there were individuals and groups who remained loyal to Sabbatean beliefs in the late seventeenth-­and eighteenth centuries, spinning paradox-­filled doctrines to explain the conversion and then death of Shabbetai Tsevi and later their own departure from Judaism. In the mid-­1750s, the extremists among them, especially in Podolia and Volhynia, rallied to the banner of Jacob Frank (1726–­ 91), the Podolia-­born prophet who in 1755 proclaimed himself the reincarnation of Shabbetai Tsevi. Frank’s messianism took a radical antinomian turn, sanctioning sexual promiscuity and the consumption of forbidden foods, which led to the excommunication of the sect in 1756. Churchmen, hoping to exploit Frankist opposition to the Talmud, staged two disputations between the Frankists and their rabbinic opponents, in 1757 and 1759. Meanwhile, Frank, who had left Poland in 1756 for the Ottoman Empire, where he had converted to Islam, returned in December 1758 and expressed his readiness to become a Christian. During the second disputation, in 1759, the Frankists invoked the libel that Jews used Christian blood, thus cutting their ties entirely from the Jewish community. Frank and hundreds of his followers in Poland then were received into the Church. However, they continued to nourish a sectarian identity through much of the nineteenth century, marrying only among themselves in the first three generations while rising socially and economically. Even after they began to intermarry, suspicions of Jewish sectarianism clung to them and their descendants. Once again, baptism failed to erase the stigma of Jewishness.

SIX

From this brief survey of patterns of conversion in medieval and early modern Europe, it emerges that the oft-­remarked distinction between conversions of conviction, the outcome of theological inquiry and spiritual experience, and conversions of convenience, driven by ambition and need, was not hard-­and-­fast. Physical needs and desires, including the wish to avoid annihilation, were as decisive as religious beliefs and convictions in medieval and early modern times. On a case-­by-­case basis, they were probably more critical. The Church itself recognized this implicitly by its repeated willingness to employ coercive measures to effect a change of faith. Even in Protestant lands, where outright

48 • Chapter One

coercion was uncommon, conversion brought with it immediate (but not necessarily long-­term) material advantages. Medieval and early modern churchmen, Protestant and Catholic alike, were well aware that many (most?) Jewish converts were submitting to baptism for the wrong reasons. As we have seen, they complained frequently about the poor character of newly made Christians and doubted their sincerity. Still, there was nothing to be done about it. As long as Jews loomed large in the Christian theological imagination and Christianity was seen as the only possible avenue to salvation, converting Jews was to be ardently desired. To be sure, the minuscule number of former Jews who wrote about their conversions, often years after the fact, described their experience in terms that harmonized with Christian expectations and norms. It is hard to imagine that they could have done otherwise. No amount of self-­awareness could have dislodged the religious framework that shaped then current understandings of human behavior, especially in the area of religion. It would be a mistake, however, to privilege the few (relative to the number of converts overall) written accounts that survive, and to draw from them conclusions about the character of conversion before the modern era. These accounts are useful to the extent that they allow us to understand how neophytes later thought about their change of religion, how they represented this change to a Christian audience, and how the terms of representation changed over the centuries. They tell us little about the circumstances and motives of conversion at the time and they are in no sense representative of the majority of conversions, in which spiritual and theological concerns seem to have been absent. Moreover, as long as Jews lived in Christian societies that legally and socially marginalized them, even the most spiritual of conversions bore the impress of that disparity of power and the hegemony of the Christian critique of Judaism. In this sense, premodern conversions of conviction to Christianity, untainted by extrareligious concerns, took place only in antiquity, before the alliance of church and state, or in non-­Christian lands like China, India, North Africa, and the like.

2 Conversion in the Age of Enlightenment and Emancipation My becoming a Christian is the fault of those Saxons who suddenly changed saddles at Leipzig, or of Napoleon, who really did not have to go Russia, or of his teacher of geography at Brienne, who did not tell him that Moscow winters are very cold. —Heinrich Heine

ONE

In premodern Europe, the linesbetween Christians and Jews were clearly drawn (with the exception of conversos, of course). Jews constituted a well-­defined collective unit. They differed from their neighbors by virtue of their religion, nationality/ethnicity, legal status, and, in most cases, language, costume, employment, and social and cultural habits. Most lived in quasi-­autonomous, self-­regulating corporations (kehillot), chartered bodies with well-­defined privileges and obligations. With the exception of those in small or isolated communities, their contacts with Christians were more instrumental than affective. Religious traditions (Jewish and Christian alike), social structures, and legal categories defined the borders of the Jewish world. There was no “neutral” or “semi-­neutral” society, no common ground or civil society, in which individuals from both groups interacted voluntarily, freely, and spontaneously. Jews were Jews and Christians were Christians. Period. Conversion was the only escape from Jewish status for those who wished to shed its liabilities and burdens.

50 • Chapter Two

Beginning in the eighteenth century, the structures of state and society that fixed the place of Jews in the Christian West, clearly demarcating them from their neighbors, weakened and then dissolved. The democratic and industrial revolutions, along with the spread of capitalism, liberal individualism, and religious toleration and voluntarism, revolutionized Jewish status and self-­understanding. The ancien régime gave way—­in some cases, like France, in a revolutionary moment; in other cases, like Germany, slowly and only after agonizingly protracted debate. States ceased to be constituted as clusters of legally structured corporate ranks and orders, and Jews, like others whose civil status previously derived from the collective unit to which they belonged, were incorporated into the emerging liberal order as individuals. This transformation, this movement “out of the ghetto,” entailed the acquisition of citizenship and the rights it bestowed (emancipation); the adoption of new social and cultural values and new modes of deportment, dress, and speech (acculturation); the rejection or neglect of time-­honored religious beliefs and practices, including both those sanctioned by custom and those by law (secularization); and the struggle for social acceptance in non-­Jewish circles (integration). This transformation also prompted far-­reaching changes in self-­ perception, for as Jews moved from exclusion to inclusion, from periphery to mainstream, they found themselves reconsidering and redefining how they saw themselves—­and how they wanted others to see them. Formerly, they had viewed themselves as a discrete people, different in kind from other peoples. In the words of the liturgy, God had made them different from the other nations of the world and assigned to them a distinct fate. Moreover, they were a people whose national and religious identities were indissolubly linked. Religion and ethnicity/nationality were omnipresent and inseparable, filling the whole of their existence. The integration of Jews into states increasingly built around individual rather than collective rights made the survival of this undifferentiated sense of self-­identification difficult if not impossible. The states that took shape in the West in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries eliminated or weakened the estates, corporations, chapters, guilds, chartered bodies, and other intermediate units that previously determined the legal status of their members. They also abandoned, wholly or in part, the once unquestioned identification of national identity with ecclesiastical community, replacing it with categories of universal citizenship and individual rights. Religion, in theory, ceased to be a criterion for membership in the nation and became little more than “one feature among others in the diversity of

Conversion in the Age of Emancipation  •  51

people, neither more nor less than having different jobs or coming from this or that region.” It was reduced to “no more than one of the numerous variables that distinguished between subjects or citizens.”1 Religious tests for office-­holding, voting, and military service faded away. This process of civil leveling and homogenizing aimed at imposing order, coherence, rationality, and uniformity. Even if Jews had wanted to remain a people apart, with their own distinctive legal niche, the states in which they lived would have been unwilling to tolerate such separatism. There was no room for the anomaly of a legally privileged Jewish corporation exercising authority over its members. As Salo Baron recognized decades ago, “emancipation was an even greater necessity for the modern state than it was for the Jew.” Once corporate distinctions were abolished, it would have been “an outright anachronism” to allow the Jews to remain a separate body, with privileges and obligations that were different from those of other citizens.2 In theory, the dissolution of the ancien régime and the entry of the Jews into the modern nation-­state rendered pragmatic conversions from Judaism to Christianity unnecessary. In a world in which religion was compartmentalized and theoretically irrelevant to social and civil status, the sole motive for leaving Judaism for Christianity should have been doctrinal and spiritual conviction. In practice, matters did not work out this way. Jews continued to leave the fold for strategic reasons, but now they did so more frequently. They did so because the pace of emancipation in Central and Eastern Europe was protracted or belated and because elsewhere in Europe and in North America legal equality failed to translate into unambiguous social acceptance and full integration. Enlightenment and liberal notions about the fundamental humanity of the Jews were unable to dislodge centuries-­old feelings of contempt and fear. The stigmatization of Jews was too much a habit, and their otherness too deeply rooted in Western culture and imagination, to disappear even when their legal marginalization ended. Old habits and ways of thinking died slowly and sometimes not at all. Discrimination, exclusion, and stigmatization continued to embitter Jewish lives, even in the most liberal states (the United States, Great Britain, and France). Moreover, in Central Europe, the completion of legal emancipation in the late 1860s and early 1870s was followed almost immediately by the rise of the new political antisemitism, whose chief goal was to reverse integration and revoke emancipation. In these states, civil servants and governmental officials subverted constitutional guarantees of legal equality by consciously and systematically discriminating against Jewish citizens, in

52 • Chapter Two

some cases even Christian citizens of Jewish origin. Legal equality and social acceptance remained elusive.

TWO

The winds of change blew first in London and Amsterdam in the seven­ teenth and early eighteenth centuries and were felt first by Spanish and Portuguese Jews who pioneered Jewish resettlement in the Protestant north. By virtue of their converso background, these Jews were well positioned culturally and socially to mix in Christian circles, for they had lived as Christians in Catholic lands—­France and the ­Iberian and Italian peninsulas—­before their migration northward. They were, in Yosef Yerushalmi’s oft-­quoted words, “the first considerable group of European Jews to have had their most extensive and direct personal experiences completely outside the organic Jewish community and the spiritual universe of normative Jewish tradition.”3 (Even before the expulsion of 1492, Iberian Jews did not live in cultural isolation.) In matters of language, costume, deportment, and taste, the Sephardim of early modern Europe were thus not markedly dissimilar from their neighbors. The social and cultural separatism of Ashkenaz was foreign to them. When they migrated to more tolerant lands, they—­or their children—­were able to profit from new opportunities for social contact that the commercial dynamism, religious pluralism, intellectual experimentation, and urban restlessness of London and Amsterdam allowed. (At the end of the seventeenth century, the population of London was over half a million; that of Amsterdam almost two hundred thousand). Sephardi brokers and merchants met and mixed with their counterparts not only at the exchange but also in theaters, coffee houses, drawing rooms, taverns, brothels, gaming houses, and literary, scientific, and philosophical societies. Their level of integration far outstripped that which the wealthy, enlightened Jews of Berlin achieved a half century or more later, at the end of the eighteenth century. Mixing, of course, need not end in drift and defection, but it often did in the modern period in the absence of comprehensive toleration and acceptance. Acculturated, materially comfortable, secular-­minded Jews whose emancipation and integration were partial but not complete were prime candidates for baptism. While the Jews of Britain and the Netherlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were more secure than other European Jews, they still constituted a stigmatized minority whose legal status and social acceptance were often

Conversion in the Age of Emancipation  •  53

ambiguous. Beginning in the second half of the seventeenth century, individuals and families removed themselves from the Sephardi community, usually but not always by way of baptism, for thoroughly modern, strategic reasons. Religious indifference, emotional need, and social ambition powered their decisions, as was the rule in later centuries. In this sense, they were the first modern converts—­for their entry into Christianity was not the result of persecution, exclusion, and immiseration but, rather, of prior but incomplete and ambiguous acceptance. However, it would be misleading to push this comparison too far, for the specifics of their very unique historical experience as conversos also contributed to their failure to remain Jews. At the point at which conversos, newly arrived in Protestant lands, returned openly to Judaism, they knew little about contemporary rabbinic Judaism—­its norms, codes, institutions, and the like. They and their ancestors had lived for one or two centuries as nominal Christians in Catholic territories. In the absence of synagogues, academies, study houses, schools, texts, rabbis, and other religious functionaries, their “Judaism” had become increasingly truncated and fragmented, more a state of mind than a body of practice and knowledge handed down unimpaired from generation to generation. They were not altogether ignorant of basic beliefs and practices, for they were able to obtain bits of information in indirect ways—­by reading the work of anti-­Jewish polemicists and Christian Hebraists, listening to sermons at autos-­da-­fé, and talking to practicing Jews while traveling abroad. Still, what they knew of Judaism was, in Yerushalmi’s words, “a pastiche of fragments inherited from parents, gleaned haphazardly from books, disorganized, with significant gaps, sometimes distorted.”4 For newly arrived refugees from Catholic lands, the reclamation of rabbinic Judaism was a challenge. It encompassed more than the acquisition of new information. It also entailed “a transformation of religious experience—­an understanding of the experiential characteristics of Jewish worship and practice, a conditioning to the rhythms of the synagogue and the Jewish year, a grasp of how halakhah (Jewish law), in all its minutiae, was integrated into everyday activity.”5 Not all of the émigrés were successful in making this transition. Some, on first encountering the reality of a full, open, lived Judaism, were shocked or bewildered and unable to accept its discipline and the authority of its spokesmen. The well-­known rebellions of Uriel da Costa (ca. 1584–­ 1640), Juan de Prado (ca. 1612–­ca. 1670), and Barukh Spinoza (1632–­ 77) against the Amsterdam authorities are the best-­known examples of this phenomenon.

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Unlike rebels and critics who challenged rabbinic authority in previous centuries, Spinoza and other outspoken dissidents did not become Christians. They broke with Judaism but did not seek a home in Christianity, which for them was no less unpalatable than Judaism—­both religious traditions, after all, rested on a foundation of supernatural revelation. Exposure to Erasmian humanism in Spain, as well as their existential situation (pretending to be one thing while living surreptitiously as another), prepared them to seek pure religion outside the framework of revelation and tradition and to rank the experiences of the heart above the requirements of ritual. While this became a common strategy for radical assimilation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was unusual in the seventeenth century, when religiously neutral space was scarce, even in Dutch and English cities. To try living formally outside any religious community was a daring, even foolhardy act. Spinoza succeeded in doing so, but da Costa failed, killing himself when he was no longer able to bear his ostracism and humiliation. More commonly, former conversos who held heterodox views refrained from disseminating them, thus avoiding confrontation and controversy (at least most of the time). Because they did not trumpet their views, their very existence is difficult to recover, but occasionally one gains a glimpse of them. For example, an informer told the Inquisition in the Canary Islands in 1665 of a member of the Francia family in London who rose to his feet one day in the synagogue, announced, “Gentlemen, all this is suited to either very great fools or very wise men,” removed his tallit, threw down his prayerbook, and walked out. Members of the same family also clashed with Rabbi Jacob Sasportas (1610–­98) in 1664–­65 when he tried, unsuccessfully, to impose halakhic norms for membership in the community and participation in synagogue life. The Francias, it seems, refused to be circumcised—­ whether on principle or not is unknown. They also were undoubtedly among those émigrés whom Sasportas attacked for mocking rabbinic traditions more generally when he attempted to raise the standards of observance in London.6 Even more common were former conversos who accepted rabbinic Judaism in theory but were indifferent to its discipline in practice. These former conversos attached themselves to the community for social and economic reasons primarily. They wanted to live among, do business with, and marry their children to persons like themselves, regardless of their religious views. For them, social and ethnic concerns trumped theological rigor and logic (to the extent to which they thought about these matters). In some cases, their sense of what their ancestral religion

Conversion in the Age of Emancipation  •  55

required was different than that of the authorities striving to rejudaize them, for when they had lived as New Christians in Catholic lands their Jewishness had been more a state of mind and ethnic identification than a set of practices. Once resettled, they continued to view Judaism in similar terms—­without, however, publicly challenging the formal norms of the community. These less-­than-­orthodox, somewhat secularized Jews lived nominal Jewish lives, paying their communal taxes, occasionally visiting the synagogue, celebrating life-­cycle events according to Jewish tradition, mixing socially with Jews and non-­Jews alike. They were the Jews, denounced by the London mahamad in 1678, who “in gross desire for wealth and in great wantonness” delivered and received letters at the post office on the Sabbath, causing “even the hair on the heads of gentiles [to] stand on end.”7 More marginal were émigrés who stood apart from the community altogether. In Amsterdam, London, and elsewhere in the Western Se­ phardi diaspora, there were émigrés who had escaped the Inquisition but, once safe, were content to live alongside the Jewish community without actually enrolling in it and taking part in its activities. Notarial documents in the Amsterdam city archives, for example, include Spanish and Portuguese names of persons, doubtless former New Christians, who lived there and were business partners of members of the community, but whose names appear nowhere in community membership lists. They and their counterparts in London were linked to the community through family and ethnic bonds rather than religious doctrine and practice, and often intermarried with members of the community. They were not intellectuals or reformers, seeking to create a nonhalakhic alternative to rabbinic Judaism, and thus, unlike Spinoza, they did not justify systematically the choices they made and the way they lived their lives. These “Jews without Judaism,” to use Yosef Kaplan’s apt term, were numerous in London and Amsterdam. Of the former New Christian adults who died in London between 1657 and 1684—­about 140 persons—­46 percent were not buried in the Jewish cemetery. In Amsterdam, Kaplan found that more than half of the ninety-­seven men against whom the herem was pronounced for traveling to the Lands of Idolatry (chiefly Spain and Portugal) between 1645 and 1747 were never full members of the community (that is, paid the finta tax). Almost thirty of them never made any financial contribution to the community while more than twenty cannot be found on any list of communal members.8 The New Christian experience of marginality also bred confusion about religious certainties and identities. Some émigrés—­not only in

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northern Europe but also in Venice and southwestern France as well—­ moved uneasily between Jewish and Christian communities, alighting awhile in one and then moving on to the other, unable to settle comfortably into either. The social and religious marginality they had experienced as New Christians remained with them even after their flight to new lands. Confused, vacillating, hesitant, in Brian Pullan’s words, “they faced both ways, neither conforming fully nor vowing themselves permanently to either creed.”9 For some, economic need dictated their allegiance. In 1666, Abraham Herreira, a messenger boy in Amsterdam, declared that “he had been a Jew from his youth, had then become a Christian and was still a Christian in his heart but pretended to be a Jew in order to be able to make a living among the Jews.”10 But the vacillation of others was rooted in heartfelt confusion. Dozens of inept, indecisive conversos fell afoul of the Inquisition in Venice in the seventeenth century. Converso traders who traveled back and forth on foot between Spain and New Christian settlements in southwestern France (Bordeaux, Peyrehorade, and St.-­Esprit-­lès-­ Bayonne especially) were prone to move between religions as well. A significant minority of them, David Graizbord discovered, betrayed fellow conversos to the Inquisition when they returned to Spain and reembraced Catholicism. In London, several former conversos who were active in the community in the 1660s and 1670s later returned to Christianity but this time to the Church of England. Augustin Coronel Chacon (ca. 1600–­65), financial agent of the Portuguese government, was baptized on the eve of receiving a knighthood for his role in negotiating the marriage of Charles II to Catherine of Braganza.11 These examples of incomplete or failed adjustment to rabbinic Judaism were not discrete categories of behavior. They overlapped considerably, shading into one another and forming a spectrum or continuum of dissident attitudes and acts. At one end of the spectrum were those émigrés who broke unambiguously and formally with the Jewish community, whether for reasons of convenience or conscience. At the other end were those whose embrace of Judaism was nominal, whose acceptance of the yoke of the law was halfhearted and unenthusiastic. The impact of the former was immediate and often dramatic. This should not be allowed to obscure, however, the long-­term consequences of even moderate forms of incomplete adjustment. The New Christian experience took a toll on Jewish allegiances in England, Holland, and France in the generations that followed the émigrés who pioneered resettlement in these countries. Among their descendants, laxity and indifference grew apace, encouraged by the freedom

Conversion in the Age of Emancipation  •  57

and bustle of daily life and the weakness of communal discipline. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this led eventually to formal defection from Judaism, usually through pragmatically motivated conversion to the dominant religion and then intermarriage. The long-­term demographic history of these Sephardi communities reveals the extent to which they were subject to this kind of erosion from within. (Former conversos who settled in Muslim lands—­the Balkans, Turkey, and North Africa—­however, lived in social and political circumstances that discouraged intimacy between Jews and their neighbors and reinforced collective solidarity.) In the case of London, the demographic decline of the Sephardim is startlingly clear. In 1695, there were 499 Sephardim, immigrants from Holland, English and Dutch colonies in the Caribbean, the Canary Islands, the Iberian Peninsula, and France. In the course of the eighteenth century, approximately three thousand additional New Christians arrived directly from the Peninsula. Nonetheless, despite this wave, as well as a trickle of immigrants from North Africa, Italy, and the Netherlands, which continued into the first decades of the nineteenth century, the community barely grew after 1750. At midcentury, the community numbered about two thousand; at the end of the century it remained the same. In 1830, it was scarcely larger—­2,150 persons, according to the estimate of the emancipation campaigner Francis Henry Goldsmid. In other words, the community grew little between 1750 and 1830, despite an influx of newcomers.12 The failure of the London community to grow was due, above all, to the cumulative impact of high levels of acculturation and integration, as well as increasing secularization, behavior that led in time to full immersion in the non-­Jewish population. Emigration to the New World, primarily to the Caribbean and North America, and the marriage of Sephardi women to Ashkenazi men, which removed the former from the ranks of the Sephardim, were insignificant in their demographic consequences. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, contemporaries were noting the impact of drift and defection. In 1813, when Isaac D’Israeli (1766–­1848), father of the future prime minister, first quarreled with the authorities of Bevis Marks—­he had been elected to the mahamad and had refused either to serve or to pay the forty pound fine for not serving—­he reminded them that “the larger part of your society bears a close resemblance to the tribe of Ephraim,” whom the prophet Hosea described as “a cake not turned” (7:8), that is, “a cake upon the hearth, baked on one side, and raw on the other, partly Jew, and partly Gentile!” Having

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mixed with the people of the land, “many of your members are already lost; many you are losing!” In 1841 the families that had left Bevis Marks the previous year to establish the first Reform synagogue in Britain explained that “substantial improvements to public worship” were essential to the preservation of Judaism—­“to arrest and prevent secession from Judaism—­an overwhelming evil, which has at various times so widely spread among many of the most respectable families of our communities.” Reforming Judaism would restrain “the youth of either sex” from “traversing in their faith, or contemplating even for a moment the fearful step of forsaking their religion.”13 The Sephardi community in eighteenth-­century Amsterdam experienced the same demographic stagnation. In 1700, it peaked at 3,000 persons; a half century later, the number fell to 2,800; in 1795, it again rose to 3,000; in 1809, it fell again, to 2,534. In the middle of the nineteenth century, it fluctuated but never increased substantially—­ falling from 3,214 in 1849 and to 3,040 in 1859 and then rising to 3,525 in 1869.14 In the much smaller communities of southwestern France, where the practice of Judaism was banned and the means of re-­Judaization were restricted, the majority of conversos who settled there from the end of the fifteenth century to the start of the seventeenth century remained Catholics. Even when it became possible, from the late seventeenth century on, for those who wished to identify as Jews to do so openly, without risk, both new arrivals and the descendants of veteran families continued to move into the Christian world. Zosa Szajkowski found approximately three hundred characteristically converso family names in seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century sources that do not appear in censuses of Sephardim from 1806 to 1810. While some of the bearers of these names undoubtedly left France, this would not account for the disappearance of the majority. In all, between 1723 and 1939, the Sephardi population of France, including those who migrated to Paris after emancipation (1790), failed to grow, never rising above 3,500.15

THREE

The Sephardim of Western Europe were few in number, and, after the revolutionary era, their influence on the course of Jewish history was negligible. Their converso past, moreover, was sui generis, in no way representative of the historical experience of the mass of European Jews. But they were the first Jews to live in close, even intimate

Conversion in the Age of Emancipation  •  59

contact with non-­Jews and to have the wherewithal (linguistic and otherwise) to participate fully in non-­Jewish social and cultural life. They tended to live, moreover, in states that tolerated Jewish settlement, economic activity, and social integration in ways that were foreign to the rest of Europe at the time. In the Ashkenazi world, similar circumstances, that is, conditions that made possible noncoerced conversions of convenience, arose only in the eighteenth century in Northern and Central Europe. In towns and cities, the quickening pace of economic life and the state-­building activities of absolutist princes helped bring into being an elite of Jewish court factors and army purveyors. While the Ashkenazim of Central Europe were not strangers to commercial and financial activity, the possibilities for accumulating wealth—­by financing and provisioning armies; supplying jewels, precious metals, luxury furnishings, rarities, and exotica; farming tolls and taxes; leasing state monopolies (salt, tobacco, lotteries, and the mint); and making personal consumption loans—­multiplied from the second half of the seventeenth century. The military and dynastic ambitions of scores of Central European princes enriched their Jewish factors and agents (Hofjuden), lifting at the same time the fortunes of Jews further down the economic ladder, a middle stratum of traders and dealers who combed European towns and villages for the metals, livestock, grain, and so forth, that the Hofjuden in turn supplied to the princes. Brought into close contact with the baroque courts of Central and Northern Europe, the Court Jews and their families began to pattern their comportment, mode of living, and appearance on those of the families whom they served and observed at close range. With fortunes whose size was hitherto unknown in Ashkenazi society, they built elegantly furnished palatial residences with costly gardens. In the eyes of Glückel of Hameln, the house of Elias Gomperz (d. 1689) of Cleves, with its great hall with gilded leather walls, was “really like a king’s palace, handsomely furnished in every way, like the mansion of a noble.” The Berlin garden of Daniel Itzig (1713–­99) was in the French style, with thousands of fruit trees, pavilions, arbors, greenhouses, bowling greens, labyrinths, statues, and an open-­ air theater. The Hofjuden dressed according to the fashion of the time, replacing long, unadorned sober garments and skullcaps with silk and velvet frock coats, lace, and stylish wigs. Their beards shrank or vanished completely. They commissioned portraits of themselves and their wives and collected paintings, manuscripts, objets d’art, and books. Joseph Oppenheimer (1698/99–­1738), known widely as Jud Süss, court factor

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to Duke Karl of Württemberg, owned over four thousand engravings of different subjects, in addition to collections of porcelain, paintings, and books. He and his fellow Hofjuden rode in horse-­drawn carriages, attended by liveried servants, and appeared in the streets with walking sticks, swords, and pistols.16 Before the mid-­eighteenth century, this kind of acculturation was largely cosmetic. It was decorative, not deep. The first generation or two of Court Jews remained firmly within the Jewish fold, their Jewish consciousness and loyalties intact. They married their children to the offspring of other Court Jews, creating dense familial networks that were an adjunct to their economic activities. They defended Jewish interests, supported Jewish scholarship, founded new communities, and generally respected traditional pieties. They were not integrated in any sense into the social fabric of Christian society. However, the wealth they accumulated and the ways in which they spent it, as well as their proximity to courtly, aristocratic society, ultimately corroded the Jewish pieties and loyalties of their descendants. Over time, great wealth and the style of life it permitted subverted tradition and promoted secularization. The second and third generations of the elite were less pious, less learned, and less inward-­looking in their aspirations. The more they came to resemble in external ways Christian courtiers, nobles, and patricians, the more their stigmatization, otherness, and low political status weighed on them. For however great their wealth, however central to the functioning of the state their activities, at the end of the day they remained outsiders and aliens. They could be expelled or worse and their fortunes confiscated at the whim of the princes they served. The willingness of German princes to tolerate Jewish factors and agents for raisons d’état was not matched by an equivalent widespread shift in the way they and their subjects thought about Jews. From the early eighteenth century—­and even more from mid­ century—young men and women from the wealthiest stratum of German Jewry began to break their ties with the Jewish community. In 1706, a granddaughter of Moses Jacobson de Jonge of Memel, who served both the Great Elector and Frederick I of Prussia, was baptized. In 1713 a nephew of Leffmann Behrens (1634–­1714), court factor to two electors of Hanover (including the future George I of England), converted and took the name Ludwig Friedrich Gottholte. Nine conversions hit the family of Moses Heynemann of Weissenfels, Saxony, in the first decades of the century. Philipp, Moses’s only son and later the author of a conversionist autobiography, was baptized in 1738 and

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took the name Gottfried Selig. An uncle, aunt, two first cousins, and a household servant preceded him, and his three sisters, inspired by his example, followed him. Two daughters of Moses Kossmann Gomperz of Cleves converted in 1744 and 1745. Sibylle, the elder, who was sixteen when she was baptized, demanded that her father, who opposed the conversion, support her as long as she was a minor while he, in turn, demanded the restitution of the money and goods with which she absconded. In 1753, David Günsburger of Freiburg converted. Two grandsons of Behrend Lehmann (1661–­1730) of Halberstadt converted and became Christian Gottlieb Lehmann and Christian Lebrecht, respectively. The three spendthrift sons of Alexander David (1687–­1765) of Braunschweig (by his second marriage) stood on the threshold of conversion but in the end withdrew.17 By the turn of the century—­at which time new disintegrative forces were also at work—­baptism among the descendants of Court Jews assumed floodlike proportions. A dramatic example of this is the fate of the families of Daniel Itzig (1723–­99), Moses Isaac-­Fliess (ca. 1707–­ 76), and Veitel Heine Ephraim (1703–­75), the Berlin Münzjuden who amassed staggering wealth during the Seven Years War (1756–­63), debasing the currency of Prussia and other states for Frederick the Great. Four of Isaac-­Fliess’s five children converted, beginning with his two daughters Rebecca and Blümchen in 1780—­despite a stipulation in his will disinheriting any child who became a Christian. The children of the one son who remained a Jew converted in the next century. Dozens of Itzig’s and Ephraim’s grandchildren and great-­ grandchildren converted as well.18 In Vienna, the banker Karl Abraham Wetzlar converted with his ten children in 1777 and was raised to the nobility; his wife, however, refused to follow him. The next year, Joseph, the youngest son of the banker Adam Arnsteiner, was baptized with his infant daughter Caroline. His wife having died beforehand, the newly minted Catholic then married the well-­born baroness Barbara von Albrechtsburg. Five years later he purchased a country estate and was made a knight (Ritter). His parents disowned him and repeatedly rejected his overtures to reconcile. (In good Enlightenment fashion, Joseph told them that what one believed was less important than how one behaved and that banishing him because he did not share their “theoretical principles” was contrary to the tolerant spirit of the age.)19 Over time most of the descendants of the leading Court Jews became Christians.20 These conversions were a novel phenomenon. Most Central European Jews who became Christians before the nineteenth century were

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from the lowest social strata. They were servants and Betteljuden, the itinerant and the wretched, the flotsam and jetsam of the Jewish world who were desperate to change their luck and, in the case of criminals, save their necks. In church circles, the “poor” quality of converts was axiomatic. Their motives were always open to suspicion—­so much so that in 1766, one desperate (but persistent) convert was refused baptism in twelve places before finding a willing clergyman in the thirteenth.21 Converts from Court Jew circles, however, were clearly not desperate to improve their economic status. When the daughters of Moses Isaac-­Fliess converted in 1780 to marry noblemen, they risked losing eighty thousand talers each. (They attempted to change the stipulation in the will and finally settled with their then unconverted brothers for seventy-­five thousand talers each.) Indeed, their wealth was what underpinned their marriage to Christian noblemen in the first place. Writing in 1799, the liberal Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, a habitué of Berlin’s Jewish salons, commented on the new breed of converts. Twenty or thirty years earlier, he noted, almost all converts, with the exception of some “lovebirds,” had been “bad individuals”—­“ruined human beings, close to desperation, who had only a momentary advantage in view”—­persons whose departure was no loss to the Jewish community. The new converts were “quite different human beings”—­educated, wealthy, worldly, and keen to become citizens.22 Need was not absent in these cases, but it was emotional not material. In becoming Christians, converts from these circles hoped to escape the burden of belonging to a low status, widely reviled group, to move from the periphery of society to its very center. Their feelings of stigmatization and marginalization, the emotional hurt that motivated them, were themselves novel, products of the age, for they derived from a sense of identification with and admiration for the larger society and at the same time alienation from and distaste for Jewish tradition. Members of minority groups do not experience the wounds of stigmatization unless they have lost faith in the value and even superiority of their own customs and have embraced those of the majority. In the case of the Jewish financial elite of Central Europe in the eighteenth century, intensive acculturation, as well as a measure of secularization, underwrote the conversions that eventually thinned its ranks. For those at the top, baptism was meant to erase the last marker of difference separating them from their Christian counterparts. It did little, if anything, to improve their material situation.

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FOUR

The engine driving conversions in the families of Court Jews was the buildup of wealth that began in the mid-­seventeenth century. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, new ways of thinking about the contours of Judaism and the nature of Jewishness also came into play, in both the German states and Western Europe. The Enlightenment and its specifically Jewish form, the Haskalah, introduced novel doctrines and emphases that, in the view of some socially ambitious Jews, endorsed or underwrote withdrawal from the Jewish community. It privileged the universal over the particular, reason over revelation, ethics over rituals. These emphases suggested to some Jews that true religion was a universally available creed that required, above all, living an ethical life in accordance with the dictates of reason and that the mitzvot, at least the particularistic ceremonial ones, were not in harmony with this natural religion. Substituting reason for revelation, they rejected the notion, fundamental to all previous forms of Judaism, that God had “chosen” the Jews, giving them their own law and assigning them a distinctive fate. Having rejected revelation, chosen­ness, and the yoke of the Torah, some Jews asked themselves why they should remain Jews, especially when doing so meant exclusion and worse. Christianity, of course, was as much a myth-­rich revealed religion as Judaism, so it was not an alternative to Judaism, at least in theory. At the same time, there was no legally authorized neutral religious status in the German states. One had to be either a Jew or a Christian. Spinoza’s solution and that of other Sepahrdim in ­England and Holland was unavailable. But remaining Jewish entailed considerable emotional suffering, social exclusion, and occupational discrimination. Fortunately for those German Jews in this position, there were liberal Protestant thinkers who claimed to have reconciled traditional Christianity with the new Enlightenment thinking. Deistic Jews imagined, incorrectly, that these advanced circles were much less Christian than they really were and that they represented the wave of the future. In their eyes, the new enlightened Protestantism was not the same as the supernatural, dogma-­laden revealed religion of old. The classic example of Enlightenment-­driven conversion is that of the Berlin banker Abraham Mendelssohn (1776–­1835), one of Moses Mendelssohn’s six surviving children (four of whom eventually converted). A deist and rationalist by conviction, Mendelssohn and his wife, Lea Salomon, secretly raised their children as Protestants because they did not wish to hurt the feelings of the Salomon family, who

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had disowned Lea’s brother Jacob (1779–­1825) when he converted in 1805 (he then took the name Bartholdy). Concerned that the decision dishonored the memory of his father, Abraham discussed it with his brother-­in-­law Jacob. The latter replied that since he, Abraham, no longer believed in Judaism it was barbaric to saddle his children with the prospect of “lifelong martyrdom.” Furthermore, Jacob told his brother-­in-­law, raising his children as Protestants was consistent with his father’s efforts “to promote true light and knowledge,” thus, in effect, casting the Lutheran religion as a species of ethical monotheism and ignoring its mythic and salvific dimensions. Abraham, in turn, said much the same thing in letters to his daughter Fanny (1805–­47). Writing from Amsterdam in 1819, he told her: “There are in all religions only one God, one virtue, one truth, one happiness. You will find all this, if you follow the voice of your heart; live so that it ever be in harmony with the voice of your reason.” A year later, on the occasion of Fanny’s confirmation, he explained to her his own credo. While he confessed that he did not know whether God existed, he was sure of what he did know and what he considered his religion: “[T]here exists in me and in you and in all human beings an everlasting inclination towards all that is good, true, and right, and a conscience which warns and guides us when we go astray.” At one time the Jewish form of religion had been the regnant one; now the Christian form was. He explained that he had raised Fanny and her siblings in the Christian faith “because it is the creed of most civilized people, and contains nothing that can lead you away from what is good, and much that guides you to love, obedience, tolerance, and resignation.” In short, Christianity was the default form of religion. In 1825, Abraham and Lea also converted, adding Bartholdy to their family name.23 The same reduction of religion to ethical abstractions permeated the notorious “dry baptism” proposal of Mendelssohn’s disciple the silk manufacturer David Friedländer (1750–­1834). In 1799 Friedländer published an open letter to Abraham William Teller, the head of the Protestant consistory in Berlin, offering to convert to Christianity—­if certain conditions were met. Claiming to speak for a number of like-­minded family heads, Friedländer expressed a willingness to embrace a Christianity shorn of the dogma of the Trinity. He agreed to baptism—­but as a “mere form  .  .  . necessary for the admission of a member into a society” rather than as a sign of acceptance of the dogmas of the church. The religion he imagined he was joining was a universal religion of reason whose core was a belief in one God, divine providence, and the immortality of the soul—­a bland

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deism with a Christian veneer. His proposal rested on the mistaken assumption, made explicit in his letter, that the great Protestant thinkers of the day not only acknowledged but publicly taught that the spirit, core, and essence of all religions were those truths that led to the greatest happiness of humankind, enlightenment, and the fulfillment and development of the human faculties. Not surprisingly, Teller rejected the proposal, and that was the end of the matter. While willing to compromise on some points of dogma, he insisted that converts submit to baptism and acknowledge the superiority of Christianity and the divine mission of Jesus. Friedländer’s proposal brings to the fore the question of the motives of those who entered Christianity under the banner of the Enlightenment. Was the deployment of Enlightenment rhetoric a subterfuge to mask opportunism? In the case of Friedländer, it does not appear so.24 If his uppermost aim had been to improve his social and civil standing, he would have converted without a fuss, as dozens of other wealthy Berlin Jews were doing. Still, at the same time, there was more to his proposal than devotion to the Enlightenment. He admitted in his letter to Teller that he was also concerned about the political status of Jewry and the harm that the mitzvot inflicted on social relations between Jews and non-­Jews. He also characterized the Judaism of his time in terms that revealed his internalization, by way of the Haskalah, of non-­Jewish perspectives. Like other Maskilim, who looked askance at and were embarrassed by the “degradation” of the Jews, non-­Jewish public opinion mattered to him. The date of the letter’s publication—­ 1799—­also illuminates the complex of motives behind it. Between 1786 and 1793, Friedländer spearheaded the campaign of Prussian Jewry to improve its civil status. While the government was willing to naturalize a few privileged families, it did not approve a more general emancipation. During this period, Friedländer’s own critique of Jewish tradition became harsher and more radical. The more resistance he met from Prussian authorities, the further he moved from the conservative reformism of his master Mendelssohn and the more he insisted that the integration of the Jews required their radical transformation. From 1795 to 1798, the community mounted a petition campaign for minor changes (abolition of mutual responsibility for thefts and false bankruptcies), but this time Friedländer took no part in it. Steven Loewenstein has suggested that his absence was an indication of “his despair at the possibility of complete emancipation.”25 The timing of the letter was also linked to the death that year of his father-­in-­law Daniel Itzig, none of whose children or grandchildren

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dared to convert while he was alive but many of whom hastened to do so once he was in his grave. Friedländer’s “despair” is central to understanding the spread of conversion in well-­to-­do German Jewish families at this time and later as well. Conversions at this level of society were nourished by an acute awareness of a gap between their low civil status and standing in the popular imagination, on the one hand, and their wealth and cultural accomplishments, on the other. This awareness, in turn, created feelings of bitterness, frustration, humiliation, and disappointment and eventually drove highly acculturated Jews to the baptismal font—­in much the same way that hopelessness and poverty drove the very poorest. Their hopes were high. The Enlightenment had schooled them to believe that a new day had dawned. Salon society in Berlin, with its indiscriminate mixing of well-­read, culturally sophisticated Jews and seemingly tolerant high-­born Christians, had seemed a foretaste of a tolerant society—­even if the number and background of its habitués were limited and reciprocity (invitations to Jews to visit Christian homes) was lacking. Finally, the French Revolution, which made the Jews of France full citizens in 1790 and 1791, had placed the question of Jewish civil equality on the European political agenda and had made real new possibilities for inclusion and integration. It is no coincidence that Berlin families who rallied to the Haskalah and were stirred by the optimism of the age later experienced high rates of conversion. Of the 92 Jewish men in Berlin who subscribed to Mendelssohn’s Bible translation (1778–­83) and who can be traced, 30 (32 percent) had children who converted to Christianity. Of the 166 subscribers’ children who married Jews in Berlin—­the second generation­—­­24 (15 percent) themselves converted and 49 (29 percent) had children who converted. Of the 99 young Jewish men who joined the Gesellschaft der Freunde, a Berlin society for supporters of the Aufklärung, in its first year, 1792, seventeen eventually left Judaism. Of the 24 members who married Jews in Berlin before 1813, seven later converted and seven had children who converted. And finally, of the 40 Berlin subscribers to the Haskalah journal Ha-­Meassef (The Gatherer) who can be traced, 4 became Christians and 18 others had children who did likewise.26 Napoleon’s conquest of Prussia in the fall of 1806 strengthened the temptation to abandon Judaism. While earlier French victories, annexations, and reorganizations of German territory extended the influence of French law, thus revolutionizing Jewish status, Prussia’s humiliation accomplished the opposite. The French occupation

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discredited Enlightenment ideas, which were associated with the French Revolution, while boosting the appeal of new romantic ways of thinking that were hostile to the legal incorporation and social acceptance of Jews. It fed patriotic enthusiasm for organic or essentialist notions of Germanness that celebrated national difference, biological descent, and Christian tradition. Christianity—­its symbols, myths, doctrines, and traditions, not just its ethics—­became an integral part of German nationalism, and conversion a sign of Jewish identification with the laws of the state and the manners of society. Enlightenment rationalism, humanism, and cosmopolitanism, however, were now associated with a lack of German sentiment. Writing about Jewish claims to civil rights in 1816, the Berlin historian Friedrich Rühs declared: “A people cannot become a single whole except through the internal coalescence of all the traits of its character, by a uniform manner of their manifestation: by thought, language, faith, by devotion to its constitution.” It thus followed that Jews who wanted to become members of the German nation needed to accept its faith. The Berlin salonière Rahel Levin (1771–­1833), who did not convert until her marriage to the diplomat Karl August Varnhagen von Ense in 1814 but considered converting earlier, registered the change in mood in a letter to her brother Ludwig Robert (1778–­1832) in July 1806, telling him that he was fortunate to be elsewhere: “I shall not forget the humiliation for one second. I drink it in the water, I drink it in the wine, I drink it with the air: therefore with every breath. . . . The Jew within us must be extirpated, this is the holy truth.”27 When emancipation came to Prussian Jewry in March 1812, it failed to halt the stream of conversions because it did not address the needs that drove Jews to the baptismal font.28 First, it neither marked an improvement in public sentiment about Jews nor sparked a move in that direction (laws rarely do). It was, rather, a bureaucratic measure, imposed from on high, an essential element of a broad administrative program of reform in the wake of Prussia’s military defeat. Convinced that Prussia’s estate system was unresponsive and clumsy, progressive bureaucrats introduced a broad array of military, economic, municipal, administrative, and agricultural reforms, including the reform of Jewish civil status, hoping thus to strengthen and ensure the survival of the Prussian monarchy. In the wake of the edict, popular sentiment about Jews remained unchanged. There was no reduction in the publication of anti-­Jewish materials or relaxation in social discrimination. (If anything, the opposite occurred: Hostility to Jewish integration hardened.) The minister of the interior, Wilhelm von Humboldt, earlier an

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advocate of unconditional civil equality for Prussia’s Jews, remained unsympathetic to their social integration. “Actually I only like the Jews en masse, en détail I avoid them,” he wrote to his wife Caroline.29 For Jews who looked to German society for self-­validation and social acceptance, it was no easier to be Jewish after 1812 than before. Second, the edict did not address the restriction that weighed most heavily on socially ambitious, university-­educated young Jewish men: access to state offices. Appointments to administrative, juridical, and academic positions in Prussia, as well as in other German states, remained closed to unconverted Jews. Young men seeking to distance themselves from the stigmatized world of commerce and finance were forced to convert if they wanted to make high-­status careers in the service of the state. The historian Isaac Marcus Jost (1793–­1860) lamented in 1822: “University graduates find no careers and only baptism saves them for humanity.”30 The list of those who saw “no reason to sacrifice their existence to be called Jews” (Jost’s words) when they no longer believed in Judaism is long. The Hegelian philosopher of law Eduard Gans (1798–­1839), one of the founders of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden, applied to the Prussian ministry of education for an appointment in Berlin‘s law faculty in December 1819. The ministry rejected his application on the ground that whatever his academic qualifications, no professing Jew was spiritually qualified to serve as a custodian of the German-­Christian heritage. He repeatedly appealed the decision. Finally, in August 1822, the Prussian cabinet amended the emancipation edict of 1812, explicitly banning Jews from teaching positions. Gans then traveled to Belgium, England, and France in search of an appointment and when he met with no success converted, in Paris, in December 1825, whereupon he returned to Berlin and was immediately appointed to the position earlier denied him. Gans was cynical about the matter, telling a friend that, if the state was so stupid as to bar him from devoting his talents to it unless he confessed to believing something that he did not believe, it would have its wish. The physician and writer David Koreff (1783–­1851), who practiced medicine in Paris during the war years, was appointed a professor in the Berlin medical faculty in 1816. After the announcement had been made, Hardenburg, his patron, reportedly asked him if he was still Jewish. Since he was, he converted immediately—­and discreetly—­in a small town near Dresden. When the mathematician David Unger (b. 1801) applied for a teaching position at the Prussian Building Academy in 1824, the king advised him that his application would be considered

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after his conversion to the Evangelical Church. In 1826, the Berlin philosophy faculty wanted to appoint Marcus Lee Franken­heim to the unsalaried rank of Privatdozent to teach physics and mathematics but was told by the Ministry of Education that the ban on Jews in the universities extended to the very lowest rank. Franken­heim converted and eventually became Professor Extraordinarius at Breslau.31 In territories that the French had occupied, French law was declared null and void, and Jews who held civil service and other public positions were required to convert or were removed. In Trier, Heinrich Marx (1777–­1838), who practiced as an Advokat during the French occupation, faced the choice of giving up the law or accepting baptism. Even though he believed in no religious creed, he did not want to cause a family rift. His father, Marx Levi (1743–­1804), had been rabbi of Trier and his wife (Heinrich’s mother) was still alive, while Heinrich’s brother Samuel (1775–­1827) was the current rabbi. Heinrich hoped that, given the esteem in which he was held in Trier, that the minister of justice in Berlin would make an exception in his case. (Prussia incorporated Trier after the defeat of France.) However, even the intervention of the president of the provincial supreme court was to no avail. In May 1816, the minister declared that the 1812 edict excluded Jews from the practice of law and refused to make an exception for Marx—­as well as for other Jewish lawyers who appealed. Within a year, following the death of his mother, Marx (but not his wife and infant daughter) was baptized. The Marx children—­seven eventually—­were not baptized until 1824 and his wife the following year.32 As it became clear that baptism was a prerequisite for a public career, young men frequently made the decision to convert before seeking employment. Heinrich Heine’s conversion was typical in this regard (even if his later reflections on it were not). While finishing his legal studies at Göttingen in spring 1825, Heine secretly took instruction in Lutheranism in nearby Heilegenstadt, where he was baptized at the end of June. His motive was less lofty than his well-­known aphorism—­“the baptismal certificate is the ticket of admission to European culture”—­suggests. Heine already was immersed in European culture. No Jew in Western or Central Europe needed a baptismal certificate to master European learning and even contribute to its corpus, as the career of Moses Mendelssohn demonstrated. Heine’s motive was more prosaic: He needed a way to make a living and hoped to find an academic post. Almost two years earlier he had told Moses Moser (1796–­1838), whom he knew from their membership in the Berlin Culturverein, that his family in Hamburg was pressing

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him to convert to advance his career. Six months after his baptism he wrote Moser that “if the law permitted the stealing of silver spoons,” he would not have been baptized. That is, if he could have made a living in another fashion, he would not have become a Christian. In the very next sentence, he added, tellingly, that he had attended the Hamburg Temple the previous Sabbath and that the preacher had excoriated baptized Jews for “being seduced to faithlessness to the religion of their fathers by the mere hope of obtaining a position.”33 His remark that he would not have become a Christian if Napoleon’s army had not been defeated—­the epigraph to this chapter—­makes the same point: The withdrawal of the French and the political reaction that followed deprived university-­educated Jewish men of careers for which their education had prepared them. Heine referred, once again, to the careerism that drove so many conversions at this time when he wrote to Ferdinand Lassalle in 1846 that he could not understand why a man of independent means like Felix Mendelssohn-­Bartholdy became a Christian. He resented the composer’s “Christianizing” and was unable to forgive him for devoting his talent to the service of the “pietists”: “If I had the good fortune to be the grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, I would never employ my talents to set the urine of the Lamb to music.”34 More generally, young men who desired “a higher sphere of action than that of a merchant” (Lea Salomon’s words)35 chose baptism even before they found their way blocked, or, in some cases, their parents made the decision for them when they were still children. In Königsberg, the parents of the future novelist Fanny Lewald (1811–­89) baptized her two brothers when they were thirteen and fifteen to avoid the awkwardness of a last-­minute conversion when they completed their education and to deflect the charge of insincerity. Her parents remained Jews, at least nominally, because her father did not want to complicate his relations with Polish Jews with whom he did business. They chose not to baptize their daughters—­first, because they assumed they would not have careers that their Jewishness would impede, and, second, because making them Christians would foreclose the possibility of their marrying unconverted Jews, thus restricting their future. When Fanny asked her father why she too could not become a Christian, he replied, “because baptism binds you but frees your brothers.”36 Three discrete sets of statistical data support the conclusion that the emancipation edict of 1812 failed to slow the conversion movement. One set, first published by Abraham Menes in 1929, is based

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on data from the archives of the Prussian statistical office, which received annual reports from the consistories concerning conversions. These figures show an increase in conversions from the edict of emancipation to the 1840s, both in Brandenberg (which included Berlin) and the Prussian territories as a whole. In Brandenberg, the number of converts rose from 323 (in 1812–­21), to 441 (1822–­31), and then to 442 (1832–­41). In the last five years for which data are available (1842–­1846), the number of conversions was 228, which indicates that there was no slowdown before 1846. The numbers for all of Prussia show a trajectory that was similar but not identical: they first rose, from 763 (1812–­21) to 1,274 (1822–­31), but then dipped slightly to 1,153 (1832–­41) and then 581 (1842–­46). In neither case was there a substantial drop. Because the Jewish population of Prussia increased from about 124,000 to 206,000 during the period 1816–­47, the conversion wave never posed a demographic threat. However, baptisms of Jews were not distributed equally throughout Prussia but were highly concentrated—­in Brandenberg (Berlin), East Prussia (Königsberg), and Silesia (Breslau). These three provinces were home to 22 percent of Prussian Jewry but 61 percent of its converts.37 The concentration of converts in a few large population centers—­as well as their overrepresentation in wealthy circles—­magnified their visibility, suggesting to observers that their numbers were greater than they actually were. Joel Abraham List (1780–­ca. 1848), one of the founders of the Berlin Culturverein and director of a private Jewish elementary school in Berlin, remarked in a lecture in 1819 that Jews were detaching themselves from the community “one after another” and that Jewry was “on the verge of complete disintegration.” The Prussian official Friedrich von Schrötter estimated that if the conversion rate in 1800 were to continue there would be no Jews left by 1820. Most famously, Heinrich Graetz, on the basis of a misreading of a letter of Rahel Varn­hagen to her brother in 1819, twice stated in the eleventh volume of his history of the Jews that by the 1820s half of Berlin Jewry had become Christians.38 The second data set, collected and analyzed by Deborah Hertz, is based on the so-­called Judenkartei in the central Evangelical Church archive in Berlin, information on conversions that the church extracted from parish registers in the Nazi era in order to identify Germans of Jewish “racial” descent. Hertz’s work, which is limited to Berlin, shows that there was a steady increase in conversion in the first half of the nineteenth century. From under forty converts a year at the start of the century, the number converting rose to over sixty in 1805

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and almost a hundred in 1815. While the number fell in some years, the long-­term trend was upward, the number never dropping below forty in any year after 1820.39 Hertz introduced into the discussion a new dimension by measuring the growth of conversion relative to the size of the Berlin Jewish population, the group at risk. (Because of restrictions on Jewish residence, the population between 1770 and 1817 was fairly stable, around 3,300 persons.) Hertz’s graphing of the Judenkartei figures in this way reveals sharp upward spikes in the conversion rate beginning in the mid-­1790s and continuing through the 1830s. The conversion curve, relative to the group at risk, only begins to move downward in the 1830s and the 1840s, when the size of the Jewish community increased dramatically. Hertz also noted that calculating the group at risk, whether in Berlin or elsewhere, is not as straightforward as it might seem. For the group at risk is larger than the Jewish community of the locale in question because rural and small-­town Jews frequently traveled to large cities to be baptized or, in the case of those in the care of missionaries, were sent there.40 At the same time, she might also have noted, some urban Jews, at least before the late nineteenth century, chose to be baptized in the provinces, out of sight of family and friends. While these reservations suggest that even relative numbers do not perfectly capture the pace of conversion, they are not so serious that they render these numbers meaningless. After all, the pace and timing of conversion in Berlin that Hertz discovered in her analysis of the Judenkartei are in accord with other evidence, both anecdotal and quantitative. The final set of data, published in 1994 by Steven Lowenstein, incorporates the Judenkartei numbers into a statistical biography of Berlin Jewry based on communal and government records, including a list of Jews residing in Berlin in 1812, with notes indicating those who later converted. (The list includes wealthy Jews who converted outside Berlin and whose names are missing from the Judenkartei.) Lowenstein’s data reveal the same trends: a first wave of conversions—­ 252—­between 1770 and 1799; a second, more intense wave—­637—­ between 1800 and 1820, when entire families converted and contemporaries began to perceive a Taufepidemie; and an even more concentrated wave—­615—­in one decade alone, the 1820s, in which one-­half to two-­thirds of the converts were newcomers to Berlin.41 In sum, the evidence is overwhelming that the edict of emancipation failed to slow the pace of conversion. To be sure, it is possible that in the absence of any improvement in the legal status of Prussian Jews, the number of converts would have been even higher. In the nature

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of things, there is no way to confirm—­or disconfirm—­this. The other problem with this objection is that it assumes legal barriers, rather than social discrimination or popular contempt, were what most troubled converts, an assumption for which there is little support.

FIVE

The waves of conversion that swept urban Prussian Jewry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were largely absent in other Western Jewish communities at the time. This does not mean that wealthy Jewish merchants and bankers in London, Paris, and Amsterdam never converted to improve their standing. This was hardly the case. Rather, in these states, in which Jewish status in almost every sense of the term was better than in the German states, the highly visible conversions of the wealthy and well-­educated that made such an impact on contemporaries in Germany were conspicuously absent. It is impossible to speak of “waves” of conversion, let alone a ­Taufepidemie, or to describe conversion as a “social movement” in Western (as opposed to Central) Europe. Théodore Ratisbonne (1802–­ 84), son of a Strasbourg banker and cofounder of the missionary order Notre Dame de Sion, recalled in his memoirs that when he became a Christian in 1827—­from conviction rather than for convenience—­the conversion of a Jew was “a rare, almost unheard-­of thing.” During the Restoration and July Monarchy (1814–­48), no more than 160 conversions took place in Paris (4.7 per annum). By comparison, in Berlin, there were 65 conversions every year between 1820 and 1840.42 (The Jewish population of Berlin in 1840 was about 100,000; that of Paris in 1860 was about 25,000, but the annual number of conversions in the former city was more than twelve times higher than in the latter.) One reason that conversion was less common in Western Europe is the relative disappearance of discriminatory measures by the turn of the century. In France, the emancipation acts of 1790 and 1791 ­leveled the legal playing field for Jews, freeing them from the restraints of the old regime. Napoleon reintroduced restrictions on Jewish commerce and moneylending in 1808, but these laws did not inconvenience wealthy Jews and were temporary in any case. Most importantly, French Jews were not compelled to become Catholics to enter public service. In 1816, for example, there were eleven Jewish army officers in Paris who were graduates of the prestigious École Polytechnique.43 In the Netherlands, even before the revolutionary period, the legal

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position of Jews was superior to that of Jews in the German states. The arrival of the French army in January 1795 set in motion events that led to the passage of a Jewish emancipation bill by the National Assembly in September 1796. The withdrawal of the French in 1813 did not bring in its wake the revocation of newly granted rights, as in German lands. In England, the legal status of Jews was similar to that of other non-­Anglican religious minorities. Native-­born Jews were citizens (this had been true since the Resettlement of the seventeenth century). They were subject to no discriminatory legislation and barred only from holding public offices that required the taking of oaths (which were introduced originally to exclude Roman Catholics and non-­Anglican Protestants). These barriers to full integration were removed piecemeal in the mid-­nineteenth century. The enhanced legal status of Jews in Western Europe, however, is an insufficient explanation for the absence of a “conversion movement” there. As we have seen, enhanced legal status is not the same as enhanced social status. A more fruitful way to understand the absence is to broaden the basis of comparison and examine a web of attitudes, practices, and structures in Western Europe that promoted Jewish integration. By the end of the eighteenth century, Dutch, French, and English societies were less burdened more generally with old-­regime restrictions. Their economies were more dynamic and less encumbered and their ruling elites more capitalist-­minded. In England and Holland, in particular, the commercial and financial bourgeoisie was broader and more respected and empowered. Within limits, inherited status counted for less, and wealth and ability for more. Social intercourse, especially in Paris, London, and Amsterdam, was more indiscriminate and random. One indicator of the relative weakness of pressure to obscure Jewish origins in France was the rarity of name changes. A law of 1803 required government approval and registration of changes of family name. Between 1803 and 1870, a little more than two thousand persons obtained legal permission to take new names—­of them, thirty-­ three (1.5 percent) bore obviously Jewish names.44 The manner in which civil equality was achieved also highlights the gap between the experiences of Western and Central European Jews. In France and the Netherlands, emancipation was an integral part of the revolutionary dismantling of old-­regime corporate privilege. In both cases, majorities in elected national assemblies, stirred by revolutionary logic and rhetoric, voted to incorporate Jews into the political nation. In England, there were no anti-­Jewish statutes to be repealed; native-­born Jews were already citizens. The so-­called emancipation

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struggle of the early Victorian period (1828–­58) concerned only the right of Jews who had been elected to Parliament to take their seat without swearing a Christian oath. In stark contrast, emancipation in Prussia was a bureaucratic measure, imposed from above, and in no sense a reflection of broad currents of public sentiment. The virulent anti-­Jewish pamphlet campaign of the 1810s—­a move to halt and then roll back previous gains, especially when the Congress of Vienna was debating Jewish status in the newly liberated territories—­was a German not a European-­wide phenomenon. By the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Jewish experience in Germany already deviated from that in more liberal states, contrary to what the critique of the Sonderweg thesis suggests. 45 While conversion was less common in early nineteenth-­century Western Europe, the circumstances and motives were similar to those in Central Europe. Among the Jewish poor, who constituted the majority of Jews everywhere in the West until the second half of the nineteenth century, desperation drove some to become Christians in hope of bettering their miserable lot. As a Prussian official noted in recording the baptism of thirty-­eight-­year-­old Helen Israel, a petty trader, in 1837: “Her desire to become a Christian arose from an inner urge and [my emphasis] also because of mistreatment by her husband. As far as her personal situation is concerned it is known that she is very poor.” There was nothing novel about this—­poor Jews at the end of their rope were always vulnerable Jews. The majority of Jews who converted in Vienna between the late eighteenth century and emancipation in 1867 were poor Jews—­servants, unskilled workers, apprentices, journeymen, and their illegitimate children, often the fruit of extramarital sex with lower-­class Christians. Many of them converted to gain the right of residence, since Vienna allowed only wealthy Jews to live there before 1848.46 Migration, which became a more common response to poverty in the age of emancipation, enhanced the vulnerability of the poor, since migrants were overwhelmingly young, unmarried men and women (to a lesser extent) who were on their own. As residence restrictions fell, Jews in Prussia’s Polish provinces moved westward, those in Alsace and Lorraine spread to towns and cities in central France, and German and Dutch Jews crossed the Channel and flocked to London. Like the young male converts of early modern Germany in Elisheva Carlebach’s Divided Souls, they were isolated and uprooted, far from home, without money or friends, unable to find their bearings in an inhospitable and foreign environment. Emotional fragility and material need worked in tandem to make them receptive

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to Christian charity and Christian belief, which were unfailingly bundled together in a single package. In Protestant lands, the impulse to convert Jews strengthened in the first half of the century and sparked the organization of well-­funded, dynamic missionary societies that of necessity targeted Jews like these. (Missionaries lacked entrée to middle-­class Jewish households.) The necessity of the conversion of the Jews, as we have seen, was embedded in Christian doctrine from very early. Changes in the fortunes of Christianity made it a more pressing matter in some ­periods than in others. As we saw in the previous chapter, beginning in the seven­ teenth century, Protestant millenarianism gave new prominence to the project, one result of which was the establishment of the first Protestant missions devoted exclusively to winning Jewish souls—­ Esdras Edzard’s in Hamburg in 1667 and Johann Heinrich Callenberg’s in Halle in 1728. In Britain and Germany, the quickening of Protestant piety in the decades after the French Revolution reinvigorated the conversion idea. In Britain, the overthrow of the old order in France; the spread of French authority to Germany, Holland, and Italy; Napoleon’s advances in the Near East and his convening of the Parisian Sanhedrin all contributed to reawakening millenarian speculation and fueling hopes that a momentous change in the condition of the Jews was imminent. These hopes intersected in the first decade of the century with a widespread evangelical revival to revitalize English religious life in general and bring the message of Christianity to persons and places without knowledge of it. This impulse gave birth to a number of voluntary societies, including the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews (LSPCJ) in 1810, which over the century expanded its activities to Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East.47 In Prussia, the events in France and then the military collapse of 1806 reawakened pietist sentiments and enhanced the appeal of anti-­enlightenment religious fundamentalism. The awakening launched a crusade, promoted by both the state and voluntary societies, against unbelief in general and Jewish obstinacy in particular. German activists, inspired by the work of the LSPCJ, established a mission in Frankfurt am Main in 1821. The following year conservative aristocrats, army officers, and high civil servants in Berlin created the Gesellschaft zur Beförderung des Christentums unter des Juden, which soon became the center of a network of similar local societies throughout Central and Eastern Prussia. In Catholic France, Protestants in Toulouse organized a short-­lived missionary group, the Société des Amis d’Israël, in 1831.48

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The creation of Protestant missions multiplied opportunities for impoverished, uprooted Jews to become Christians. The societies sent missionaries and itinerant preachers (many converted Jews themselves) into public spaces—­country roads, city streets and squares, inns, taverns, coffee houses, and marketplaces—­to engage Jews in conversation on religious matters. They also established schools and vocational programs to prepare potential converts for living productive, useful lives as artisans and manual workers rather than traders. Well-­ funded, centrally organized missionary work thus replaced the ad hoc proselytizing and charity-­giving of individual enthusiasts. All of this undoubtedly multiplied the number of converts, but, as both Jewish and Christian critics of the missions noted repeatedly, the social, cultural, and even moral level of the ex-­Jews was low. Swindlers, thieves, drunkards, whores, schlemiels, schlemazels, nudniks, and no-­goodniks abounded, as the records of the societies make clear. Even if they were not the majority, their antics, backsliding, and rocky integration into Christian society attracted unwanted attention, exposing the societies to the sensitive charge that they were “buying” converts (and not very high-­quality ones at that). Moreover, the gap between the amount of money the societies spent and the number of converts they actually made was shockingly large. Werner von der Recke, brother of the founder of the proselyte colony at Düsselthal, recalled that “the harvest yield was very small and the effort, work, and costs very great.”49 The story of Abraham Joseph Levi (b. 1817) captures how the experiences of migration and poverty worked to the advantage of the societies. Levi left his home in Wiesbaden at age twenty-­five when his parents attempted to marry him to someone of their choosing rather than his. He settled in Paris, but after failing to make a living he moved to London in 1844 to try his luck there. He was no more successful than before and returned to Paris, where another venture failed when a person who pretended to be his best friend duped him. In 1848 he again tried his luck in London and again suffered disappointment. One day he accepted a tract from a missionary and, after reading it, was moved to contact agents of the LSPCJ, who arranged employment for him and eventually effected his conversion. Isaac Edward Salkinson (1820–­1883), later famous as a translator of Milton and Shakespeare into Hebrew, came to Christianity in similar circumstances. Salkinson grew up in Shklov, in Belorussia, in an atmosphere of traditional piety, abject poverty, and family tension. He left home at age seventeen and wandered for several years in the Pale of Settlement, living hand to mouth, avoiding conscription into the czarist

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army, and gaining a Haskalah education along the way. In 1849 he arrived in London, without possessions, friends, or means of earning a living. Missionaries from the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Jews (BSPGJ), the Nonconformist counterpart to the Church of England-­affiliated LSPCJ, fed and sheltered him and arranged English lessons and other secular instruction for him, without revealing at first their identity. He tried several times to escape his benefactors and make it on his own, but he could not find work and had no friends to whom he could turn for advice or help; in the end, overcome by hunger and despair, he returned to them. Eventually he was baptized, sent to study at a Presbyterian seminary in Edinburgh, ordained a minister, and dispatched to British Society stations in Pressburg (Bratislava) and later Vienna.50 Conversions in banking and mercantile families in Western Europe, while less common than in Central Europe, were similar in other respects. The same mix of ingredients—­indifference to Judaism, intensive acculturation but incomplete integration, and sensitivity to exclusion and stigmatization—­moved wealthy Jews to become Christians. What was different was the level of exclusion and stigmatization. It was easier for wealthy Jews in Western Europe to find a place for themselves close to (though not in the very center of) elite social circles and institutions. In Paris, for example, the membership of the haut bourgeois Ancien Cercle (known also as the Cercle de la rue de Grammont), one of the fashionable clubs founded at the outset of the Restoration, included a dozen Jews around 1840. (The legitimist Cercle Agricole and the aristocratic Jockey Club were more selective. James de Rothschild [1792–­1868] was the rare non-­aristocrat in the former, and the banker and minister of finance Achille Fould [1800–­ 67] in the latter.) In England, upper-­class, landowning families not only enjoyed the hospitality of Jewish bankers and brokers, at both their town and country houses, but also reciprocated with invitations to their own homes. Integration, however, was not absolute and unambiguous. Even in the most tolerant circumstances, acceptance was hedged with reservations and doubts. A whiff of the alien and the exotic clung to Jews, no matter how acculturated or wealthy they were. The essayist and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, who actively promoted the full legal integration of Jews, wrote to his sister Hannah in 1831 that a costume ball at the home of the financier Isaac Lyon Goldsmid (1778–­1859) had “a little too much of St. Mary Axe [a Jewish district in the City] about it,—­Jewesses by dozens, and Jews by scores.” He explained to her that after the ball he could not fall

Conversion in the Age of Emancipation  •  79

asleep right away, as “the sound of fiddles was in mine ears, and gaudy dresses, and black hair, and Jewish noses were fluctuating up and down before mine eyes.”51 Ambitious Jews whom even this level of contempt unsettled were candidates for conversion. In England, notable families—­Harts, Frankses, Goldsmids, Gompertzes, Montefiores—­ saw their ranks thinned or even decimated by conversion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The availability of intermarriage also reduced the number of converts in Western Europe. In the German states and the Habsburg Empire, where civil marriage was introduced only late in the century, Jews who were indifferent to Judaism and wished to marry Christians were required to change their religion beforehand. (The reverse was possible but rare, not surprisingly, given the low status of Jews.) Rahel Levin converted in 1814, at age forty-­three (which was unusually old), four days before her marriage to Varnhagen. Her favorite brother, the writer Ludwig Robert, converted in 1819, also preparatory to marriage. In a sample of forty-­two Jewish women who converted and then married in Berlin between 1770 and 1826, twenty married within three months of their baptism.52 This suggests that baptism was not only a long-­term strategy of parents to make their daughters eligible for eventual intermarriage, but also very often an immediate precondition, even being accomplished just days before the wedding ceremony. In France, while the introduction of civil marriage in 1792 lowered the number of prenuptial conversions, its impact was limited, at least before the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, largely because social intimacy between Jews and Gentiles in France was less intense. Before 1870, France’s Jews were concentrated in small, conservative communities in Alsace, in which, as the writer Alexandre Weill (1811–­ 99) recalled, “going out with a shikse  .  .  . cast opprobrium on one’s entire family.”53 Social self-­sufficiency forestalled the growth of intimacy between Christians and Jews. In a sample of 607 marriages involving Jews in Alsace from the 1820s to the 1860s, Paula Hyman found only three cases of intermarriage, all from Strasbourg. In Bordeaux, whose Jews were almost entirely Sephardim and thus already Gallicized before the Revolution, intermarriage was more common. In the period 1793–­1820, there were 390 marriages between two Jewish partners and 36 marriages in which only one partner was Jewish. Moreover, of the thirty-­six, twelve were not strictly speaking intermarriages because the spouse of Jewish origin was no longer Jewish; that is, he or she was a child of a mixed marriage or was a convert.54 In Britain, marriage without a religious ceremony became legal in 1837,

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but long before this there were Church of England clergymen who did not balk at officiating at marriages between unconverted Jews and professing Christians. Most famously, in 1839, Hannah de Rothschild (1815–­64), daughter of the founder of the English branch of the banking clan, married Henry FitzRoy, younger son of the second Lord Southampton, at St. George’s, Hanover Square, without first becoming a Christian.55 In Britain’s North American colonies and then in the United States, social relations between Jews and Christians were closer than elsewhere in the West, a reflection in part of the small number of Jews there and their relative isolation from one another. At the start of the revolution, there were no more than two hundred Jewish families in the thirteen colonies and, at the time of the first federal census in 1790, no more than fifteen hundred Jewish individuals. Thirty years later, at the time of the fourth census, there were only about twenty-­seven hundred Jews. In these circumstances, instances of intermarriage, with or without prior conversion of one of the partners, were relatively high. Malcolm Stern identified 942 marriages involving Jews in America prior to 1840; 150 of them—­almost 16 percent—­were marriages between Jews and Christians. The unavailability of appropriate partners certainly contributed to this, as did “the unrestricted intercourse open to us with all classes of citizens,” in the words of the Occident.56 Scattered over wide expanses of territory, many American Jews lacked the companionship of other Jews, the structure of institutions, and the guidance of trained religious leaders—­while enjoying the friendship of Christians in an unprecedented way. Rebecca Samuel, wife of a silversmith and watchmaker in Petersburg, Virginia, captured the atmosphere of unfettered individualism and liberalism on the frontier and in small towns in a letter to her parents in Hamburg in 1791. She wrote that there was “no galut [exile] here.” Jews made a good living and lived in harmony with their Christian neighbors. “Anyone can do what he wants. There is no rabbi in all of America to excommunicate anyone. This is a blessing here; Jew and Gentile are as one.” Outside of a few cities, ignorance of and indifference to Judaism were the rule, and intermarriage was common. Samuel soon recognized this. She wrote to her parents a few years later that they were leaving Petersburg and moving to Charleston because they did not want to raise their children like Gentiles. “Here they cannot become anything else. Jewishness is pushed aside here.” Men who intermarried frequently did so without converting; women, though, were more likely to accept their husband’s religion. Peddlers and traders in frontier areas

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frequently evaded the issue by living in a common-­law relationships with non-­Jewish partners. In the interior of the country, the Occident wrote in 1845, there were “hundreds who have sprung from some emigrant Jews who settled singly in some distant settlements, where they had no intercourse with any of their co-­religionists.” The children of intermarriages, whether formally raised as Christians or not, were inevitably absorbed into the larger society—­which led the Occident to equate intermarriage with “an apostasy in most instances.”57 The biography of the physician Solomon Mordecai (1792–­1869) highlights the dominant pattern of radical assimilation—­drift rather than defection—­in early American Jewry.58 Born and raised in Warrenton, North Carolina, where his was the only Jewish family in town, he was given an erratic Jewish education by his father Jacob (1762–­ 1838). While a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania, Solomon fell in love with a Christian woman and considered converting in order to marry her. When his family expressed alarm, he replied that he was “an Israelite by name rather than by principle”—­ that his Jewishness was a mere circumstance of birth. He attributed his willingness to convert to the tolerant liberalism of his parents and the Christian tone of Warrenton society. He had been taught, he explained, to value and imitate “the good man, what creed soever he may have been led to adopt,” and “brought up exclusively in the society of Christians,” among whom his “early attachments” were formed. In any case, his lover’s parents refused to allow her to marry him and so he remained nominally a Jew. In 1823 he moved to Mobile, Alabama, which also lacked a congregation, to practice medicine, and moved easily into the professional and civic life of the town. The following year he married a Methodist, informing his father by letter only afterward, but he did not convert at the time. (He became a Christian only toward the end of his life, in 1859.) He and his wife raised their nine children as Christians, and he took no part in Jewish life after other Jews moved to Mobile in the 1830s and 1840s. While intermarriage weakened early American Jewry, its sources were not the same as those of out-­and-­out defection, whether in Europe or America. What distinguished it was the absence of a strong motive to flee Jewish disabilities. In a minority of cases—­12 of the 150 mixed marriages in Malcolm Stern’s study—­the Christian partners converted to Judaism, an outcome of intermarriage that was absent where hostility to Jews was high. (Since conversion requires examination of the candidate by a court of three ordained rabbis, and such a court was unavailable in the United States until 1846, these

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conversions were not valid in Jewish law.) More frequently, when intermarried couples lived in an urban area, the Jewish husbands retained their synagogue membership; a few even had their sons circumcised. The five children of the Philadelphia merchant and land promoter David Franks (1720–­94) and his Christian wife were baptized in what was then the Church of England. Nonetheless, Franks continued to contribute to his father’s New York synagogue, Shearith Israel, occasionally attending services there. In the 1840s, the Occident railed against the willingness of synagogues to allow intermarried men to purchase or hire a seat, to be called to the Torah, and to be counted in a minyan. It urged Jews to shun intermarried friends and to disinherit intermarried children.59 Intermarriage was a product of social situations in which young Jews and Christians, especially those with weak or liberal religious views, mixed with fewer social constraints than in earlier periods. In Western and Central Europe, this mixing was more limited than in North America, confined to social niches here and there, for, even with the weakening of old-­regime societies, constraints on Jewish-­ Christian interaction remained strong. Density of Jewish settlement obviated the need to seek companionship in Christian society while traditional allegiances discouraged it. On the Christian side, even in circles that tolerated marriage with Jews, old notions of Jewish otherness continued to influence attitudes and behavior toward Jews. Once married, the mixed couple usually followed the path of least resistance, moving into the social world of the Christian partner. Even if they still included Jews in their circle of friends, they—­and even more decisively their children—­were gradually absorbed into the non-­Jewish world. Ironically, then, the demographic impact of toleration-­driven intermarriage in Europe, as in America, was the same as the demographic impact of intolerance-­driven conversion—­a diminution in the number of Jews. This only began to change in the late twentieth century, when intermarriage ceased to result in the sundering of Jewish ties as a matter of course.

SIX

While the frequency of conversion was different in Western Europe and Central Europe, its characteristics were similar. First and foremost, conversion everywhere, both in the age of emancipation and later, was an act of the young. The overwhelming majority of converts

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fell into two groups: either young men and women on the threshold of marriage and careers, or dependent children whose parents elected to convert them even before they reached an age at which being Christian mattered. Of the 1,429 converts in the Berlin Judenkartei between 1770 and 1830 whose age at baptism is known, 548 were under a year old at baptism, 121 between one and fifteen, 114 between fifteen and twenty, 407 in their twenties, 140 in their thirties, and 63 in their forties or older.60 For most adult converts in Berlin, the decision to become a Christian was a strategic move, a choice that was made at the same time as decisions about marriage and career. The same pattern was present in Vienna. Between 1782 and 1868, 26 percent of the converts were age thirteen and under, 42 percent between fourteen and twenty-­nine, 23 percent between thirty and forty-­four, and 3 percent over forty-­five. (No information is available for the remaining 6 percent.)61 In England, Benjamin Disraeli’s baptism at age twelve was typical. His father, Isaac, a successful but minor man of letters who moved comfortably in bookish, non-­Jewish circles, quit the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue in 1817 over a dispute that had been brewing since 1813, when he was elected parnas (warden) and had refused either to serve or to pay the usual fine for declining to do so. An old-­ fashioned deist whose synagogue membership was an expression of ethnic solidarity, Isaac was receptive to the suggestion of his friend the historian Sharon Turner that he make his children Christians to ease their way in life. None of his children (three boys and one girl) was then, in summer 1817, old enough to have encountered career or marriage obstacles. Baptism, in their case, was a form of insurance. Because Isaac’s decision regarding his children was strategic—­he did not have a religious bone in his body—­he and his wife chose not to follow them and become Christians. Like Spinoza, they were content to occupy an undefined middle ground that was neither explicitly Jewish nor Christian in religious terms.62 In some instances, parents converted their children but did not themselves become Christians until much later, often waiting until the deaths of their own parents. In general, when the baptism of parents occurred ten to fifteen years after the baptism of their children—­a common pattern, especially in Central Europe63—­the reason very likely was, in the absence of other evidence, that the parents wished to avoid offending their own, still living parents. This, too, is further evidence of the largely instrumental character of baptism in the modern period. For Jewish men, the choice of career was also decisive. Jews who ventured beyond the traditional Jewish spheres of commerce and

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finance were more likely to convert than those who followed in their fathers’ occupational footsteps. This was true not only in the German states, where conversion was a requirement for holding public office, but in Western Europe as well. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Jews everywhere who wished to devote themselves to art, literature, or science lived and worked, of necessity, in non-­Jewish and often explicitly Christian surroundings. Patrons and audiences were overwhelmingly Gentile. The temptation to be absorbed in the environment in which they worked and socialized was strong, especially among those whose attachment to Jewish belief and practice was weak or nonexistent. For example, with few exceptions, the major Jewish musical figures of the first half of the nineteenth century—­the composers and conductors Ignaz Moscheles (1794–­1870), Ferdinand Hiller (1811–­85), Ferdinand David (1810–­73), and Jacques Offenbach (1819–­80); the music critic Adolph Marx (1795–­1866); and the violinist and composer Joseph Joachim (1831–­1907)—­converted toward the start of their careers. The most prominent figure, Felix Mendelssohn, was a Christian from childhood, of course.64 The case of the historian and antiquarian Sir Francis Palgrave (1788–­1861) is illustrative of the impact of vocation and avocation. Palgrave’s father was Meyer Cohen (d. 1831), a wealthy London stockbroker, who educated his intellectually precocious son at home. Francis’s life of comfort was shattered when war with France and the threat of invasion caused the stock market to fall sharply, ruining his father. At age sixteen, he was articled to a firm of solicitors and worked there for several years, becoming his parents’ chief financial support until their deaths. Despite the extra responsibility, he continued to pursue his interest in medieval literature and history (it would be difficult to think of a more Christian field of study). In 1814 he began writing scholarly articles and eventually became a regular contributor to the Quarterly Review and the Edinburgh Review and a habitué of a circle of writers that included Sir Walter Scott. In 1821, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in recognition of his publications, especially a collection of medieval chansons that appeared in 1818. The activities he pursued and the circles he frequented gradually drew him away from his family and the Jewish community, and sometime between 1815 and 1821, he was baptized in the Church of England. Preparatory to marrying the daughter of a Christian banker and fellow antiquarian, he changed his name to Palgrave, his wife’s mother’s maiden name.65 Even Jews from humble backgrounds who took up trades that were not historically associated with Jews were at greater risk to convert.

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Jewish artisans in states where guilds remained powerful often found it difficult to practice their craft. Faced with the choice of reverting to peddling or converting, some chose the latter. Prussian government lists of converts from the first half of the nineteenth century include tailors, bakers, carpenters, shoemakers, butchers, watch­makers, hatters, bookbinders, lithographers, wigmakers, silk weavers, and tinsmiths.66 Because middle-­class Jewish women did not pursue careers or participate in public life, they faced fewer temptations than their male counterparts to become Christians. Most urban, bourgeois Jewish women spent their lives in domestic surroundings, among family and friends, and were neither expected nor encouraged to make their mark outside the home. The cultivated Jewish salonières of Berlin and ­Vienna were exceptional in this regard. The intimate gatherings they hosted assembled a novel mix of aristocrats, intellectuals, and civil servants, Jews and Christians, and men and women. Their visitors socialized, talked of matters serious and light, and cultivated sexual liaisons. At least two-­thirds of the hosts became Christians. But the salonières were few (twenty at the most) and their novel gatherings impermanent, most ending with the French occupation in 1806, except in ­Vienna where the Berlin-­born sisters Fanny von Arnstein (1758–­ 1818) and Cäcilie von Eskeles (1760–­1836) hosted glittering salons during the Congress of Vienna.67 More common was the experience of less cultivated women from wealthy families who fancied a well-­ born, title-­bearing husband. For them, conversion was a necessary prelude to marriage, which their wealth (in the form of a handsome dowry) enabled in the first place. This was an attractive and especially efficacious mode of social integration because, once married, formerly Jewish women bore their husband’s Christian family name and spent most of their time in the company of his, rather than her, family and friends. In the late eighteenth century, at the start of radical assimilation, women were as likely or more likely to leave the Jewish community as men. In the Berlin Judenkartei, women outnumbered men among converts in their twenties by a ratio of three-­to-­one in the period 1770–­99. In the first decade of the new century, women outnumbered men among Berlin converts who married Christians by a ratio of more than two-­to-­one. 68 These differences, early in the history of radical assimilation, were due in the main to different social roles and expectations. Young women, who received little or no formal religious instruction, were often better positioned to acquire European culture

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than their brothers. While the latter, whether schooled in Jewish learning or not, were put to work in the family business at an early age, the former were free to acquire knowledge and cultivate skills that allowed them to mix in Christian circles and later marry into Christian families. Once Jewish men reached the same cultural level as Jewish women, once their occupational horizons broadened as well, and once, in the German case, they entered the university, they too were exposed to the seductions and contempt of Christian society, as well as to obstacles to successful careers. At that point, men overtook women in the ranks of those leaving the community. In the Berlin Judenkartei, female converts (192) still outnumbered male converts (165) in the first decade of the century; in the second decade, the number of male converts (237) inched ahead of the number of female converts (225), but then, in the 1820s and 1830s, the former dramatically outstripped the latter—­860 males to 573 females. In Vienna, a similar but not identical pattern developed. In 1785 the number of male and female converts was almost the same. But every year thereafter, until the 1860s, male converts outstripped female converts. In 1825, for example, 50 percent more men than women left Judaism in Vienna.69

SEVEN

The transformation of European thought and society in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries allowed Jews to enter spheres of activity in which they were previously strangers and multiplied their interaction with Christians. The falling away of barriers to their participation in economic life and the accelerating tempo of economic growth simultaneously initiated their movement upward into the ranks of the middle class. These currents of change—­enlightenment, emancipation, acculturation, and embourgeoisement—­in turn nourished Jewish optimism about the future, lifting expectations of what was possible. Not surprisingly, given the checkered decline of old-­ regime structures and sensibilities, Jews everywhere in Western and Central Europe discovered that inclusion was never absolute and unconditional. While the degree of resistance to accepting Jews varied from country to country, nowhere, even in the most liberal states, were emancipation and enlightenment able to satisfy the multitude of hopes they had aroused. The stigmatization of Jews, while less powerful certainly than in earlier centuries, failed to dissolve in the light of reason. For secular-­minded ambitious Jews with little or no

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attachment to tradition, conversion remained an option, an escape route from the liabilities of being Jewish. In the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth century, new obstacles to Jewish integration into Western societies arose, erected by political and social groups who repudiated liberal notions of modernity. Increasingly harsh attitudes toward the incorporation of Jews accelerated the pace of conversion, the subject of the following chapter. At the same time, small numbers of Jews in Eastern Europe began to envision the possibilities of inclusion and thus found themselves in roughly the same position as their counter­ parts in Western Europe a century earlier. However, in the czarist empire, liberalization, such as it was, was truncated and episodic. For Jews in both East and West, the late 1870s initiate an age in which illiberal forces worked to halt and even reverse earlier progress toward integration.

3 Conversion in the Age of Illiberalism The well-­known pianist Moritz Moszkowski was asked why he had not followed in the footsteps of his family, all of whom had converted, while he had remained Jewish. He replied: “Convert? No, that would be too Jewish.” A very Jewish-­looking Assessor with a monocle and a lieutenant’s pronunciation became friendly with a hunchbacked professor at a spa. Before he departed, he said to the professor: “You will not believe this, Professor, but I wish to confide in you. I am of Jewish origin.” “One ­confidence deserves another,” whispered the professor, “I am a hunchback.”1

ONE

The acculturation and integrationof European Jews and American Jews accelerated in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Western lands, Jews increasingly resembled their neighbors and mixed with them at school, in the workplace, and in public life. The establishment of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-­Hungary in 1867 and the founding of the German Empire in 1871 led to the emancipation of Jews in the two empires, bringing their legal status into line with that of Jews in the United States and Western Europe. Everywhere in the West, Jews enjoyed unprecedented levels of material prosperity. Native-­born Jews (as opposed to recent immigrants) were becoming overwhelmingly middle-­class—­in terms of their economic profile, their aspirations, and their tastes—­having been replaced in petty trade by newcomers from Eastern Europe. Relative to their position a century earlier and relative to the position of Jews in the Russian and Ottoman

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Empires, the Jews of the West were materially and legally secure. They embraced with enthusiasm the new currents that were transforming Europe—­capitalism, political liberalization, urbanization, science, and technology—­and looked forward to the future with optimism. Further eastward, in the Russian Empire, where more than four-­ fifths of Europe’s Jews lived in the second half of the nineteenth century, the conditions of Jewish life were very different. Most East European Jews lived in poverty; most thought of themselves as Jews not Russians or Poles (let alone Lithuanians or Ukrainians); most faced restrictions on where they could live, how they could earn their living, and, toward the end of the century, how they could educate their children. While the majority remained faithful to traditional practice and belief until the end of the czarist regime, they were not immune to forces of change. Political liberalization was not on the horizon, but the foundations of economic and social life were slowly being transformed while new ideas, imported from the West, were changing old attitudes, giving birth to ideological movements—­enlightenment and its offspring: Russification, liberal assimilationism, nationalism, and revolutionary socialism. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, a dynamic minority of Russian Jews spoke Russian, belonged to the professional and commercial middle strata, identified with Russian culture, and dreamed of inclusion in state and society without having to relinquish their Jewishness. Acculturation and secularization, while much less widespread than in the West, were broadening the horizons and fueling the aspirations of East European Jews as well. Here too optimism was not absent. As the Maskil Yehudah Leib Gordon (1830–­92) announced in his most famous poem, “Awake, My People!” (1863): “The night has passed, the sun shines through . . . Remarkable changes have taken place / A different world engulfs us today.”2 In both East and West, Jewish expectations outstripped realities. In Central Europe, systematic bureaucratic discrimination subverted legal guarantees, denying Jews equal access to high-­status posts in government service and the academy. In Eastern Europe, Alexander II’s flirtation with reform ended with his assassination in 1881, ushering in three-­and-­a-­half decades of reactionary measures. In both Europe and the United States, social discrimination became more pervasive. Social and recreational clubs, some of which previously included Jewish members, now relentlessly excluded them. In the United States, where intercourse between Jews and Christians before the 1870s was

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famously unencumbered, up-­market hotels, resorts, city and country clubs, and elite social circles kept Jews at arm’s length. These exclusionary moves were underwritten ideologically by the rise of new doctrines about Jewish character. Ideological antisemitism became a fixture of the conservative political agenda in most states (Britain was an exception), as conservatives, who feared and railed against the consequences of an open society, worked to reverse Jewish emancipation and block further Jewish integration. Racial ways of thinking about Jews, which assumed the eternality of Jewish character and its impermeability to external influences, became commonplace, even in liberal states. In the West, Jews who believed that emancipation had resolved their status felt once again that they were on trial and were required to prove themselves worthy of acceptance. The degree of hostility to Jews from the 1870s was not necessarily greater than it was a century before. In the 1770s, except in Britain and its North American colonies, Jews were not citizens of the states in which they lived. So, in legal terms, the position of Jews in Western and Central Europe was better in 1870 than in 1770. However, Jewish expectations were much higher at the end of the nineteenth century. What was bearable for Jews living in old-­regime states was not acceptable to their legally emancipated, economically successful, highly acculturated descendants. The latter looked outward, to non-­ Jewish circles and institutions, as much as inward, to the Jewish community, for the satisfaction of their social, cultural, and emotional needs. Their measure of what was worthwhile, desirable, and admirable was similar to that of their neighbors. Far more than their ancestors, they cared what Gentiles thought and said about them. Moreover, the number of Jews who judged themselves by their standing in Gentile eyes was by the late nineteenth century many times greater than it had been earlier. Economic prosperity, immersion in Western culture, familiarity with non-­Jewish society, and indifference to religious tradition were no longer the experience of the few. By the end of the century, Jews who were “candidates” for conversion—­that is, who were susceptible to the attractions of shedding their Judaism by virtue of their social and economic position—­numbered in the hundreds of thousands. As one Zionist writer in Vienna quipped in 1902, when a Viennese Jew reached his first hundred thousand Kronen, conversion became de rigueur.3 More generally, with illiberalism in the ascendant, unprecedented numbers of Jews looked to radical strategies—­revolutionary socialism, Zionism, and conversion to Christianity—­for salvation.

Conversion in the Age of Illiberalism  •  91

TWO

As a result of the partitions of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century, Russia acquired the largest Jewish community in Europe, a community whose numbers mushroomed in the nineteenth century from one million to five million persons. Until the very end, Jews in the Russian Empire, like members of other national and social groups, were subjects of the czar rather than citizens of the state; their legal status was collective, that is, fixed by statutes specific to their group. In these circumstances, in the absence of notions of citizenship and rights (as opposed to privileges), emancipation in the Western sense was impossible, since it assumed the existence of a body of more or less free citizens into which Jews could be emancipated. Their liberation required the prior or simultaneous transformation of all the empire’s subjects into citizens with rights and responsibilities. The status of Jews in the empire was thus structurally similar to that of Jews in prerevolutionary Europe. Initially, their cultural outlook and social behavior echoed their legal status. The czar’s Jews were culturally self-­sufficient, looking inward to their own traditions for wisdom and solace, at least at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They were very much a people apart. This did not begin to change until the middle to late decades of the century, and when change came, the number of Jews who embraced Russian culture was a minority, albeit an articulate, dynamic minority. For all of these reasons, the voluntary, opportunistic conversions that characterized Western Jewish communities in the age of enlightenment and emancipation were rare in Eastern Europe at the time. In the absence of intensive acculturation, improving economic status, and declining social isolation, few East European Jews were in a position to envision themselves as participants in any world other than their own. The ambitions and hopes that underwrote the conversions of Western Jews were largely absent (with a few exceptions here and there). Thus, when conversions occurred, they more closely resembled, in terms of their circumstances and motives, medieval and early modern conversions than modern conversions of convenience. Coerced or driven by desperation, converts in Eastern Europe frequently knew little about Christianity or Christian society when they made the decision to become Christians. The measures that the Prussian state took to encourage conversion—­ barring Jews from public office, closing the Berlin Reform synagogue, sponsoring missionaries, and offering christening gifts—­were feeble

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by comparison with those pursued by czarist officials. Having inadvertently acquired a Jewish population at the time of the partitions, the czarist regime never developed a consistent policy about how to accommodate it. Its policy vacillated, moving between two irreconcilable aims: integration and segregation. At times, it encouraged the removal of barriers that separated Jews from other subjects in order to promote their Russification and absorption (including their absorption as converts). However, at other times and often at the same time, fearing that Jewish commercial rapacity endangered unsophisticated peasants and workers, the regime took steps to halt the transformation and incorporation of Jews and strengthened measures to keep them at arm’s length. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the emphasis was on incorporation (on czarist rather than Jewish terms). For example, no decrees barred or limited Jewish admissions to Russian schools and universities. (Hostile or indifferent to Gentile learning and fearful of conversion, very few Jewish parents took advantage of the liberal admissions policy to enroll their children.)4 With a similar aim in mind—­the rapprochement of the Jews with the Christian population—­the regime sponsored, beginning in the 1840s, a network of Russian-­language schools for Jewish boys, offering instruction in secular subjects. For czarist officialdom, closing the gap between Jews and Christians also included efforts to promote the transformation of the former into the latter. Like Frederick William III in Prussia, the religiously preoccupied Alexander I (1801–­25) supported missionary work.5 In 1817 he established the Society of Israelite Christians, a support organization for converted and “inquiring” Jews who were unable to support themselves. The society offered them free land for agricultural colonization in the south and remission of state taxes for twenty years. It also forbade them from becoming tavern keepers, an aim consistent with the larger policy of normalizing Jewish occupational structure. The society was not successful, and in 1824, Prince Alexander Golitsyn, who was involved in its administration, urged that it be wound up, but as the czar’s prestige was at stake, it was allowed to limp along until 1833, when Nicholas I disbanded it. The same year that Alexander created the society, he agreed to the request of the English evangelical Lewis Way to allow Protestant missionaries to operate in Russia. The next year, in 1818, he awarded the LSPCJ’s recently arrived representative in Russia, the convert Benjamin Nehemiah Solomon, a letter of protection, instructing local authorities to provide him with help, including protection from angry Jews. Nicholas I, who did not share

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Alexander’s religious mysticism, limited the activity of the English missionaries to Congress Poland, where they created a station in Warsaw after a rocky start. Subject to harassment from Jews—­and Polish officials in receipt of Jewish bribes—­the missionaries frequently turned for help to the Grand Duke Constantine, Nicholas’s brother and commander of Russian troops in Poland. But even with government support, the LSPCJ was no more successful in Poland than it was in Britain: In the period 1821 to 1854, it converted 361 persons—­ about 11 persons per annum.6 Far more productive in converting Jews into Christians were the cantonist regiments—­ military units for underage Jewish boys—­ introduced by Nicholas I in 1827.7 (Hitherto Jews were exempt from military service, on payment of a tax, since they were thought to make poor soldiers.) The statute did not mandate the recruitment of underage boys (ages twelve to seventeen) but, rather, permitted communal authorities to substitute them for adults (age eighteen and over)—­which they frequently did in order to protect married men, yeshivah students, and the well connected in general from military service. Contrary to law, they also drafted boys under the age of twelve, some as young as seven or eight, in order to fill their quotas. As a result, those who entered military service under Nicholas I were overwhelmingly poor and very young. According to Michael Stanislawski’s estimate, fifty thousand of the seventy thousand Jews drafted between 1827 and 1854 were minors. Historians of Russian Jewry disagree about whether Nicholas’s aim was conversionary from the start or whether he realized the effectiveness of the battalions in making converts at a later date. But they agree that the czar, a firm believer in the superiority of military life, saw the measure as a way to discipline and reform a population he considered weak, devious, parasitic, and backward. Whatever the case, by the mid-­1840s the regime was actively exploiting the situation. Young Jewish recruits were sent to camps, often far from home and, from their arrival, subject to constant pressure, often reinforced by physical torture, to embrace Christianity. At the same time, obstacles to their observance of Jewish rituals and rites were erected. Before 1843, these methods were applied unsystematically. In some battalions, all the Jews were converted; in others, only a few. Between fall 1827 and winter 1840, 38.5 percent of the 15,050 Jews conscripted into the cantonist battalions converted to the Orthodox religion. Disappointed with the results, Nicholas ordered a more concerted campaign, with more brutal, punishing methods. In the end, Stanislawski estimates, at least one-­half

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of the cantonists—­about twenty-­five thousand—­were coerced into becoming Christians before Alexander II abolished the battalions in 1856.8 A substantial but unknown number of adult soldiers converted as well. Russia’s use of brute force to obtain conversions was unique in the modern period and echoed its use in much earlier centuries when, as in Russia, the distance between Jews and Christians was great and coercion was the only effective way to transform Jews into Christians. Less numerous but more typical of the modern period were the converts who came from the ranks of the wealthy and the enlightened. While secular learning and acculturation to Western habits were not widespread in East European Jewry in the first half of the century, they were not completely absent either. Jewish merchants in the westernmost regions of the Russian empire who traded with Central Europe (along with their counterparts in Habsburg-­controlled Galicia) were exposed to new cultural and social trends and in turn served as a conduit for their transmission eastward. The few who embraced them found themselves in a difficult position, for in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there was no cultural or social niche in Poland and Russia for adherents of the Haskalah. With traditionalSolomon Maimon ism solidly entrenched, many early Maskilim—­ (1754–­1800), Solomon Dubno (1738–­1813), and Zalkind Hourwitz (ca. 1740–­1812), for example—­chose to migrate to the West and make careers there. Those who remained were often culturally and socially isolated from other Jews but, at the same time, unable to enter Christian circles without becoming Christians. This was an option that only a few in the first generation of Maskilim chose. For example, in the 1780s, a circle of merchants and intellectuals who combined allegiance to Mendelssohnian enlightenment and rabbinic learning emerged in Shklov, in Belorussia. At the center of the c­oterie was Joshua Zeitlin (1724–­1822), a wealthy government contractor who hosted a group of scholars and scientists at his country estate. Zeitlin married his younger daughter to a Galician-­born scholar, Abraham Perets (1771–­1833), a nephew of the chief rabbi of Berlin and a resident of the Prussian capital at the time. Perets moved to Shklov, joined his father-­in-­law in business, and then, with special permission, settled in St. Petersburg, from which Jews were barred as a rule. When Perets moved, he took with him his friend and protégé Judah Leib Nevakhovich (1776–­1831), who launched a career in the capital as a Russian writer. When Alexander I’s first Jewish Committee was considering measures to reform the Jews, it consulted Perets and Nevakhovich, who produced an apology for the Jews in Russian and Hebrew (The

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Lament of the Daughter of Judaea), and another government contractor originally from Shklov, Nota Haimovich Notkin (d. 1804). Perets and Nevakhovich were deeply disappointed when the Jewish statute of 1804 failed to improve the position of Jews, even enlightened, productive Jews like themselves, and around 1813, they converted to Lutheranism. (As late as 1809, both were subscribers to the revived Haskalah journal Ha-­Measef.) In Perets’s case, the death of his wife and his decision to marry his German mistress were also precipitants.9 For second-­generation Maskilim and well-­off Jews in touch with Western currents, conversion remained an option, a way out of the uncomfortable isolation in which their embrace of enlightenment and Western habits placed them. The extended family of the pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein (1829–­94)—­about thirty-­five persons in all—­converted in Berdichev in 1831. This came about as a result of an agreement between Anton’s grandfather, a wealthy merchant and lessee who faced prison and bankruptcy on possibly trumped-­up charges, and officials in St. Petersburg. In 1834 Anton’s immediate family moved to Moscow, where his father established a pencil factory and Anton and his brother Nikolai (1835–­81), also a pianist, received their musical education and launched their careers. The Maskil Zvi Hirsch Grinboym (1814–­78?) converted in 1843, changing his name to Vladimir Feodorov, when his education failed to gain him employment. Born in a small town in Volhynia, he spent his youth as an impoverished yeshivah student in Dubno. There the Maskil Wolf Adelson exposed him and other students to the new thinking. When the townspeople discovered that Adelson was secretly leading the young astray, they drove him and his acolytes from the town. Grinboym continued his education at a gymnasium in Kremenets, while corresponding with leading Maskilim like Isaac Baer Levinsohn (1788–­1860) and Abraham Baer Gottlober (1810–­99). When he finished school in 1842, he applied to Max Lilienthal (1815–­82), the Bavarian-­born Reform rabbi whom czarist officials recruited to transform the Jewish educational system, for a position in the new schools. Receiving no reply, sick to death of poverty, embittered and despondent, he converted. Shortly afterward, he explained to Gottlober that after he received no reply and when he considered the bitter fate of Gottlober and other Maskilim, he felt he had no choice: “[W]hen I saw that all hope was lost, that help would be forthcoming only if I was baptized, I said so be it.” Despised by the mass of Jews for his enlightenment, he felt that there was nothing to lose in becoming a Christian, especially since his parents and siblings were dead. He then entered the University of Kiev and, after taking

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his degree in 1847, taught Greek in a Kiev gymnasium. In 1852 he was appointed censor of Hebrew and Yiddish books in Kiev. His marriage to a Russian woman helped ease the absorption of their children into Russian society.10 In Congress Poland, especially in Warsaw, Western Jewish habits of thought and behavior penetrated earlier than in the Pale of Settlement.11 Although Russian rule arrested the development of a modern political system in Poland, the Polish capital became, nonetheless, a dynamic commercial-­industrial center, attracting Jewish migration to a city that earlier was of little importance in Jewish life. Already by midcentury, Warsaw Jewry, which numbered forty-­one thousand in 1856, was the largest Jewish community in the world. From the late eighteenth century to the withdrawal of the French in 1814, in the absence of a native haute bourgeoisie, successive regimes courted foreign financiers and entrepreneurs—­among them, a handful of Jews, largely but not exclusively from Prussia, Silesia, and Moravia. They brought with them capital and experience and grew rich, first in banking, army contracting (a million soldiers passed through Warsaw between 1790 and 1815), wholesale commerce, and leasing taxes and other state monopolies, and then later in industry and railroads. The founders of most of the great nineteenth-­century Warsaw Jewish fortunes arrived in this wave of migration: Kronenbergs, Rosens, Epsteins, Fraenkels, Natansons, Rotwands, Bersohns. Because of their wealth, they were exempt from the residence laws that burdened other Jews. By virtue of their economic success, these Jews were subject to influences and pressures that weakened their attachment to Judaism. Those who came from German lands (a majority in the early nineteenth century) had been exposed to efforts to modernize Jewish life before their migration to Poland, even if they themselves cannot be described as Maskilim or patrons of the Haskalah. Through their contacts with foreign banking and merchant houses, they remained in touch with events in the West. They wore European dress (the men were clean-­shaven), gave their children a secular education, often educating their sons in Germany, and discarded or attenuated old customs. In their petitions to obtain municipal citizenship and civil rights (for themselves and their families, not for the community as a whole), they disassociated themselves from the mass of traditional Jews, emphasizing their own sartorial and linguistic acculturation, enlightenment, and services to the state. The ambitious among them established salons—­they were not welcome in aristocratic homes in

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the early nineteenth century—­and some, with permission of the czar, bought and worked landed estates. Some became active members of Masonic lodges, starting in the first decades of the nineteenth century and continuing until 1821, when the government closed them. Driving this assimilatory behavior was the need to feel comfortable when mixing—­in offices, salons, and drawing rooms—­with government officials, the dispensers of civic privileges and economic monopolies. In the end, however, there were limits to what wealth alone could buy, and, when ambitious Jews found their social or economic progress blocked, they often chose to convert, as did their Western counter­parts. One of the first was Samuel Fraenkel (1773–­1833), who came to Warsaw as a representative of a Berlin Jewish banking house after the third partition of Poland in 1795. His marriage in 1798 to a daughter of the army contractor and leather merchant Samuel Zbytkower (d. 1801) raised him to the front rank of Jewish factors and financiers. But in 1806, when France defeated Prussia, he converted to Catholicism (along with his wife and two daughters) rather than, as a subject of Prussia, be forced to leave the city. In 1822, when the army contractor Ignacy Neumark failed to obtain civil rights for his family and the right to purchase freehold land, they were baptized; the same day he acquired an estate in the Sandomeriz region. The path of Leopold Kronenberg (1812–­78) to the baptismal font was equally straightforward. Youngest son of a banker and court factor who had come to Warsaw from Prussia in the late eighteenth century, Kronenberg received a broad secular education in a Catholic school and some Jewish instruction at home. His conversion occurred in 1845, just as the lucrative tobacco monopoly opened. Having become a Christian, he was then awarded the monopoly. In general, in the first half of the century, the only Jews to become officials in the tobacco monopoly were those who had been baptized. In the second generation, conversion was more common. The daughters from the second and third marriages of Samuel Zbytkower, founder of the first Jewish cemetery and synagogue in Warsaw since 1527, became Christians. The youngest of the five sons of Jacob Epstein (1771–­1843), who headed the Warsaw kehillah several times, converted in 1830 to marry a German Christian. Three other sons remained active in Jewish affairs, especially in the defense of Jewish rights, but they and their sisters ceased to maintain Jewish traditions in their homes, and all of their children, the third generation, became Christians. Well-­to-­do converts, however, were not typical. The majority of Warsaw converts before 1860 came from the opposite end of the

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social spectrum. In the 1830s, 67 percent of all converts came from the two lowest socioeconomic strata in the Warsaw community: the lower middle class (artisans and shopkeepers) and the lower class (unskilled laborers, peddlers, and servants). In the 1840s, the figure grew to 75 percent. The state was not interested in encouraging the settlement of Jews like these, and successive governments introduced measures to halt or slow their increase—­burdensome taxes, temporary residential permits, bans on registering new Jewish residents, roundups of Jews without proper documents. In 1809 the government banned Jews from living in the town center, thus encouraging the formation of a Jewish quarter in the western districts of the city, and in 1824 forced Jews living elsewhere in the city to move there. This “ghetto without walls” existed until 1862, when czarist officials removed all restrictions on Jewish residence, along with many other disabilities. Before then most Jewish newcomers to Warsaw struggled both to make a living and to circumvent laws intended to prevent their permanent residence. For some for whom the struggle was too overwhelming, the solution was conversion. The evidence for the centrality of hardship in fueling the change of religion is the decline in conversion that followed the removal of disabilities in 1862. Of the approximately eighteen hundred conversions in Warsaw between 1800 and 1903, 48 percent occurred in the first half of the century and 52 percent in the second half, despite the four-­or fivefold growth of the city’s Jewish population in the second half (from less than fifty thousand to over two hundred thousand). Indeed, almost as many Jews became Christians in the 1830s and 1840s (536), when residence and other restrictions were in effect, as did in the 1880s and 1890s (562), when there were no restrictions but the Jewish population was larger. In the two decades following the removal of disabilities, the decline was dramatic. In the 1850s, 164 Jews converted, but in the 1860s the number dropped to 60 and in the 1870s even further to 48. Evidence from the archives of the Lithuanian consistory of the Orthodox Church reinforces the centrality of poverty, hardship, and despair in Jewish conversions in the Russian Empire. Of the eighty-­ three Jews who entered the Orthodox Church between 1825 and 1855 (many more likely became Roman Catholics, the dominant faith in Lithuania), most were not steadily employed. They were overwhelmingly, in Michael Stanislawski’s words, “the destitute and the desperate, a segment of the massive flotsam of Russian Jewry that failed to find secure moorings in that rocky society: young people, just at the point at which normal adult life begins, who could find no

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partner, no profession, no stable place in society.” Some were convicted criminals, who were allowed, until 1862, to escape punishment or reduce their sentence if they were baptized. Conversion also functioned as a solution to the predicament of women trapped in abusive marriages, and sons and daughters estranged from family and friends. Such were the circumstances surrounding the conversion of Moshe (ca. 1774–­ca. 1853), the youngest son of the founder of the Lubavitch Hasidic dynasty, Shneur Zalman of Lyady, in 1820. At odds with his two older brothers, perhaps over the succession to their father’s position, the emotionally unstable Moshe joined the Orthodox Church and settled in St. Petersburg, where he was in the service of the state before being committed to an asylum where he died.12 These conversions, like those of the cantonists, looked backward rather than forward. They were not the outcome of prior acculturation, incomplete integration, and extensive identification with another national group. For the destitute and the desperate, conversion bridged a large rather than a small gap.

THREE

Before the end of the nineteenth century, by which time antisemitism was a fixture of politics in illiberal states and a social irritant elsewhere, there was a brief period—­a matter of decades—­in which many Jews, even in the Russian Empire, believed that toleration was in the ascendant. In Central Europe, the period extended from midcentury to the 1870s. In Eastern Europe, it coincided roughly with the reign of Alexander II, from 1855 to 1881. In the case of the former, while the gains of the revolutions of 1848 were short-­lived and the legal status of the Jews was still unsatisfactory in the 1850s, their economic and cultural success made their second-­class legal status increasingly anachronistic. The liberal economic policies of the period, which dismantled mercantilist restraints on trade, highlighted this anachronism while at the same time accelerating Jewish economic mobility. In the early 1860s, a number of small southern German states granted legal equality to their Jewish subjects, and in 1867, the establishment of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-­Hungary and the North German Confederation completed the emancipation of most Central European Jews. In the Russian Empire, the accession of Alexander II inaugurated a period of internal reforms, the most far-­reaching of which was the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Although the absolutism

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of the regime continued, the government “periodically displayed an extraordinary zeal for radically reshaping society,”13 including Jews. Political emancipation was not in the cards (except in a limited way in Congress Poland from 1861), but piecemeal improvement—­what Benjamin Nathans calls “selective integration”—­was. Beginning in 1859, select groups within Russian Jewry—­merchants of the first guild, university graduates, retired soldiers, and artisans—­were permitted to live permanently in the interior of the country, outside the Pale of Settlement. Other measures allowed limited access to state employment. While these steps did little to improve the lot of the Jewish masses, they stimulated among secularly educated Jews, whose numbers were rising, a sense of optimism. Yehudah Leib Gordon’s poem “Awake, My People,” quoted earlier, distills this sense of hope and progress among Russified, non–­Orthodox Jews. Similarly, in assessing the rule of Alexander II, a Russian Jewish newspaper wrote in 1881 that during his reign, “the rays of citizenship and a freer life began to stream upon us like shafts of life,” and Jews “moved forward by an entire century.”14 Whether this optimism was justified is beside the point. What matters is that Jews who saw their future in integrationist terms, wherever they lived, were relatively confident that there was a place for them, as Jews, in non-­Jewish society. This sense of optimism, in combination with concrete improvements in Jewish status, caused the conversion rate to decline in these decades. In Russia, the average annual number of conversions to the Orthodox Church dropped from 2,290 at the height of the cantonist system in 1851–­55 to 798 in 1856–­60 and then to 441 in 1861–­1870, before beginning to rise in the 1870s. In Warsaw, the absolute number of converts fell dramatically in the 1860s and 1870s—­from 500 in the previous two decades to 108. In Vienna, the Jewish population skyrocketed in the 1850s and 1860s—­ from about four thousand (both legal and illegal residents) in 1847 to forty thousand in 1869—­while the annual number of conversions did not grow even in absolute terms. In Berlin, the annual conversion rate, calculated relative to the size of the community, began to drop in the 1840s and continued to do so through the 1860s, after which it began to rise slowly. In the case of the German states, migration to the United States from the 1840s through the 1860s also contributed to some extent to the decline in the conversion rate. The tens of thousands of Central European Jews who chose to improve their lot, not by converting but by crossing the Atlantic in the middle decades of the century, reduced the pool of potential converts.15

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FOUR

Beginning in the 1870s, hostility to Jewish integration increased everywhere. Its intensity and impact varied from country to country and from class to class, but nowhere were Jews able to escape it altogether. Most histories of antisemitism in the decades before World War I examine its political dimension—­the way in which ideological antisemitism became central to conservative, anti-­liberal discourse and policy. They chronicle efforts to impose new restrictions on the participation of Jews in state and society, thus effectively reversing emancipation, and to stigmatize them as the embodiment of “otherness”—­as the carriers of values that undermined the well-­being and health of the nation (and, later, the race). In evaluating fin-­de-­siècle antisemitism, historians debate its virulence from country to country, weighing its strength in France during the Dreyfus Affair (1894 to 1906), for example, or in Britain during the agitation that led to passage of the Aliens Act of 1905, or in Germany during the brief electoral heyday of the antisemitic political parties in the 1890s. Beneath the surface of this debate, however, is another, more high-­stakes debate: was the course of nineteenth-­century German history “peculiar”? That is, did it deviate from that of other Western countries before the rise of Nazism because it failed to pass through a liberal bourgeois revolution, thereby allowing premodern, undemocratic values to survive and flourish? Historians who question the Sonderweg thesis argue that antisemitism in German-­speaking Europe was no more menacing before World War I than elsewhere in the West, contrasting it, in particular, with the verbal and physical violence of the Dreyfus Affair in France.16 A failing of both sides in this debate is the narrow way in which antisemitism and its impact are envisioned. With few exceptions, historians limit their discussion to public, politically inspired manifestations of fear and hatred: resolutions, elections, manifestoes, petitions, tracts, editorials, speeches, and the like. Understanding the impact of antisemitism on Jewish self-­confidence and optimism, however, requires a more comprehensive view, one that incorporates the totality of settings in which sentiments about Jews were expressed, only some of which derived from or were inspired by ideological doctrines and political events. Jews experienced hostility in countless ways, large and small, in public and private life. At the workplace, in schools and universities, on the street, in cafés and theaters, and in voluntary associations, Jews came face-­to-­face with slights and slurs, exclusions

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and rejections. In the novels and newspapers they read, they met with malicious representations of Jewishness, reminding them that they belonged to a troublesome, flawed minority. Literature on the “Jewish Question” poured forth in an unprecedented stream, especially in Central Europe. The mystic philosopher Constantin Brunner (1862–­ 1937), grandson of a rabbi and champion of radical assimilation, wrote in 1918 that only a Hercules could read all the books for and against the Jews.17 Encounters with this literature, along with mundane social experiences, were as powerful in their way in shaping Jewish behavior as politically expressed hostility, for they were embedded in the routines of daily living and were thus experienced repeatedly and at firsthand. The decision to leave the Jewish fold was intimately tied to these encounters and experiences. The history of political antisemitism from the 1870s to World War I is well known and there is no need to cover the same ground once again. What needs emphasis is that almost everywhere in the West political antisemitism was a legislative failure. Formal legal equality remained untouched. The Dreyfus Affair ended with the legal rehabilitation of its central figure and the ascendancy of the Republic’s supporters. The antisemitic political parties in Germany, with all the noise they made, were inept and failed to pass a single law. Even the municipal electoral success of Karl Lueger in Vienna in 1897 resulted in no anti-­Jewish measures. Ironically, the only state in which antisemitism contributed to the passage of legislation was Great Britain, where the Aliens Act of 1905 cut the flow of immigrants from Eastern Europe. In the United States, similar legislation to regulate immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe did not pass Congress until 1924. However, if political antisemitism failed to reverse emancipation legally, it was wildly successful in casting the Jews—­their character and their assimilability—­as a problem and making them a focus of public inquiry and debate. Few Jews were unaware of this. The newspapers they read reminded them constantly that “Jew consciousness” was on the rise. Their awareness of this inevitably affected how they thought about themselves and how they behaved, especially vis-­à-­vis non-­Jews. In this sense, damage was done whether or not emancipation was restricted. In the Russian Empire, where emancipation was only a dream, the government imposed new legal restrictions on Jewish activity in the wake of Alexander II’s assassination in 1881 and amidst mounting fears of revolutionary unrest. Earlier czarist officials had seen secular education as a means to weaken Jewish tradition and dissolve Jewish

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particularism; now they wished to reduce contact between Jews and their neighbors and, in particular, to remove Jews from positions in which they exercised power over Christians. The result was the introduction of crippling quotas in gymnasia and institutions of higher learning. Given the increasing number of Jews in the late imperial period who saw secular education as the key to mobility and progress, “to be denied its benefits was tantamount to being shut out from modernity itself.” For several cohorts of students, educational quotas were, in Benjamin Nathans’ phrase, “a silent pogrom.”18 Those who succeeded in obtaining a degree in turn faced obstacles to pursuing a profession. In 1889, the government introduced restrictions on the admission of non-­Christians to the bar, while even earlier it was nearly impossible for an unconverted Jew to secure a post in the academy or government service. At the same time, in the interest of protecting the peasantry from Jewish “exploitation,” the government introduced new restrictions on where Jews could live within the Pale of Settlement and how they could earn their living. The May Laws of 1882 prohibited Jewish settlement in rural areas, hobbled Jewish tavern keepers, and banned Jewish trading on Sundays and Orthodox feast days. Permission to reside outside the Pale became more difficult to obtain and in 1891 officials expelled twenty thousand Jews from Moscow almost overnight. In Russia alone, hostility to Jews was enshrined in law. Hungary, bureaucratic discrimination In Germany and Austria-­ ­undermined the legal guarantees embedded in emancipation. State officials openly and unapologetically treated unconverted Jews as second-­class citizens, barring them from most public appointments. While this in no way affected economic mobility—­the financial rewards of business were always greater than those of state service—­it did deny educated Jews access to a broad range of high-­status, much coveted occupations. Rising in or even entering the civil service, the academy, the military, and the diplomatic corps was nearly impossible. Discrimination in judicial appointments was particularly resented. Jewish men were strongly “overrepresented” in the legal ­profession—­27 percent of lawyers in Prussia in 1904 were Jews; 51 percent in Hungary in 1920; 86 percent in Bukovina in 1914. But advancement in the judicial system was difficult. In the German Empire, very few unbaptized Jews became high court judges and none public prosecutors. Between the mid-­1870s and the mid-­1890s, when the number of Prussian judicial posts increased almost 50 percent, the number of Jewish judges dropped by almost half: from 46 out of 680 to 29 out of 1,004. Jewish lawyers also faced discrimination in being

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appointed public notaries and in being awarded the title Justizrat. In a debate in the Prussian Chamber of Deputies in 1901, a Jewish member complained that the average Christian lawyer waited eight years to become a notary; the average Jewish lawyer eighteen years.19 In academic life, the prospects for career advancement were even more dismal. In the German Empire, about twenty unbaptized Jews were full professors (Ordinarien) at the end of the 1870s, most in technical and scientific fields rather than in ones of cultural and political significance, like history, philosophy, and law. As higher education expanded in the Imperial period, fewer Jews were appointed to this rank: there were twenty-­two in 1889, twenty-­five in 1909, and thirteen in 1917. Most Jews remained Privatdozenten, unsalaried instructors. In 1889, 16 percent of Jewish academics were Ordinarien, as compared to 48 percent of Christians; in 1911, the respective figures were 11 percent and 39 percent. At the most prestigious university, Berlin, there was not a single Jewish full professor in 1909. Obtaining a teaching position in elementary and secondary state schools was just as hard. In most German states, Jewish teachers were rarely found outside Jewish schools. When teaching became an employment option for Jewish women toward the end of the century, they too faced near insurmountable barriers. A school inspector concluded his remarks to graduates at a Frankfurt women’s teachers college in the 1890s with the pointed declaration: “Jewish ladies know that they cannot count on employment.”20 Military careers were impossible for Jews in the German Empire. In multicultural Austria-­Hungary, unconverted Jews obtained commissions in the army but were less likely to be promoted. Thus, in 1911, 58 percent of the Jews in the army’s four highest ranks were converts while only 25 percent in the next four ranks (Major to Leutnant); among army doctors, the figures were 19 percent for the first four ranks and 8 percent for the next four lower ranks.21 In general, while public service was more open to Jews in the Habsburg Empire than in the German Empire, the pace at which unconverted Jews were promoted was slow while the heights to which they could aspire were limited. In the prestige ministries, Jewish civil servants were not promoted to Hofrat (privy councilor) unless converted. Ludwig Klaar (1849–­1922), paternal grandfather of the memoirist George Clare (1920–­2009) was a talented Viennese medical diagnostician who was advised that he would be appointed a court physician if he became a Catholic, an offer he declined. Employed by the medical service of the Vienna municipality, discrimination hindered his career here as well.

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In 1907 a Catholic physician, junior to him in age and experience, was appointed one of the three senior medical officers of the city. Klaar was promoted to the rank only in 1912, having been passed over for seventeen years because he was Jewish. Medical professorships were subject to the same unofficial rules as the rest of the Habsburg bureaucracy. In 1894 the Vienna medical faculty included two Jewish Ordinarien, fourteen Extraordinarien, and thirty-­seven Privatdozenten.22 The slow climb of Sigmund Freud (1856–­1939) up the academic medical ladder was typical. Appointed a Privatdozent in 1885, Freud was proposed for a professorship for the first time in 1897 but was promoted only in 1902, when he became Professor Extraordinarius. In Western Europe and North America, this kind of systematic bureaucratic discrimination was largely absent. In the first place, in English-­speaking countries, especially in the United States, few Jews pursued careers outside the worlds of commerce and finance. The naked pursuit of wealth was not as culturally tainted as in Central Europe. British and American Jews who were eager to make their mark experienced little or no pressure to disassociate themselves from capitalism and choose careers in public service, cultural life, or the academy. For the few Jews who chose this path, their background was not a fatal impediment. In England, for example, there were 77 Jewish officers in the army, navy, militia, and other military units in 1896, and 179 in 1913. A handful of English Jews also rose into the upper ranks of the civil service before World War I, especially in the colonies. Matthew Nathan (1862–­1939), one of four brothers who entered government service (all of whom received knighthoods), was spectacularly successful, serving, inter alia, as governor of the Gold Coast, Hong Kong, Natal, and Queensland, as chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue and undersecretary to the lord-­lieutenant of Ireland. But only in France, among western states, was state employment the choice of noticeable numbers of talented young Jewish men. Graduates of the universities and grandes écoles, they rose into the highest administrative and judicial ranks in the Third Republic (except in certain grands corps, like the Inspection des Finances, the Cour des Comptes, and the Quai d’Orsay), without abandoning their ties to Jewish institutions, serving as prefects and subprefects and as members of the Conseil d’ État, the Cour de cassation, and the cours d’appel. Even when the Dreyfus Affair roiled national life, Jews continued to serve in and enter the highest ranks of state administration. Careers in the army, a very conservative, Catholic institution, were open as well to Jews. More than twenty became generals under the Third Republic (four during the Affair itself),

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while hundreds became colonels and captains—­including the unfortunate Alfred Dreyfus, whose initial rise and ultimate rehabilitation subvert the conventional view that the Affair marked the collapse of emancipation and the triumph of antisemitism. (Here we should recall that there was no German Dreyfus; there could not have been because there were no Jewish officers in Imperial Germany.) In the Third Republic, conversion, as well as exogamy, was rare among senior military officers and civil servants from Jewish backgrounds (it was somewhat more common earlier during the July Monarchy and the Empire). Most remained embedded in the social and family networks from which they came. As Pierre Birnbaum concluded in his meticulous study of what he called les Juifs d’état, the Third Republic successfully created a boundary between public and private space, thus allowing the maintenance of Jewish values, traditions, ways of life, and modes of sociability. Integration and participation did not require total ­homogenization.23 While state-­sponsored bias blocked Jewish mobility in illiberal states, exclusion from voluntary organizations, private clubs, and social circles, along with exposure to slurs and slights, touched the lives of Jews most everywhere. It is easy to dismiss these forms of hostility as mere irritants—­they occurred in private rather than public life and their impact was emotional rather than material or political. The number of Jews who suffered by exclusion from the most elite clubs—­ the Jockey Club in Paris, the Union Club in Hamburg, the Casino Club in Berlin, the National Casino in Budapest, the Knickerbocker Club and the Union Club in New York City—­was, of course, small. Few were in a position to even think of applying. Social exclusion in this period, however, reached much farther down the social ladder, especially in Central Europe and the United States, touching the lives of tens of thousands of Jews of modest means. By the turn of the century, middle-­class societies in Germany—­choirs, gymnastic associations, cycling clubs, student corporations—­that did not exclude Jews earlier were doing so.24 In the United States, upper-­middle-­class social institutions began rejecting Jewish applicants in the last decades of the century. Men’s city clubs that previously accepted Jews, including some that even counted Jews among their founding members, asked their Jewish members to resign or essentially left them with no other alternative when they refused to admit family members and friends. When H. G. Wells visited the United States soon after the turn of the century, he remarked on the exclusiveness of club life: that there were not Jewish members as there were in London clubs. Social life at

Conversion in the Age of Illiberalism  •  107

the Ivy League universities, which freely admitted Jews before World War I, was shot through with antipathy to Jews. Raised and educated among wealthy German Jews in New York City, the young Walter Lippmann (1889–­1974) was unprepared for the exclusion he faced when he entered Harvard in 1906. He was not invited to join the Crimson or the elite “waiting” and “finals” clubs and dropped out of social life altogether, focusing instead on his coursework. Later he was a token Jew at such fashionable clubs as the Metropolitan in Washington, D.C., and the River in New York City. The radical journalist John Reed befriended a Jewish classmate and childhood friend of Lipp­ mann’s, the future psychiatrist Carl Binger (1889–­1976), in his freshman year at Harvard. Both were outsiders—­Reed because he was from Portland, Oregon, and was not educated at an Eastern prep school. At the beginning of his sophomore year, Reed told Binger bluntly that they could not room together since it would hurt his chance of being admitted to one of the “waiting” clubs. Even at non-­elite Eastern colleges, discrimination was common. At the City College of New York 1965), handsome, charming, in the 1880s, Bernard Baruch (1870–­ athletic—­natural fraternity material—­was repeatedly turned down by Greek letter societies. This kind of social bias permeated the institutions of American social life, especially in the East and the Midwest, in the years before World War I.25 While institutional integration and social mixing in public forums were more advanced than earlier in the century, Jews everywhere remained a people apart in terms of their most intimate social ties. They formed their closest friendships with other Jews and felt most comfortable in the homes of Jewish friends and relatives, both because they were excluded from Gentile homes and because they preferred the company of their fellow Jews. (It is impossible to know which was more important.) In recalling his upper-­middle-­class youth in late-­ Imperial Berlin, the fashion photographer Erwin Blumenfeld (1897–­ 1969) noted that his freethinking, atheist parents contentedly lived within “invisible walls,” associating exclusively with other Jews, and “were probably not even aware of it themselves.” Very rarely “a stray goy happened to finds his way into our house,” and when one did, “we had no idea how to behave.” The absence of Gentile visitors also characterized the Berlin home of Gershom Scholem (1897–­1982). Despite his father’s allegiance to liberal integrationism, “no Christian ever set foot in our home,” not even Christians who were members of organizations in which his father was active (with the one telling exception of a formal fiftieth-­birthday visit). The oft-­cited autobiographies

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of famous Jewish musicians, writers, scientists, and the like, Scholem warned in another context, present a misleading picture. In an “ordinary middle-­class bourgeois home, neither rich nor poor” like his, there was no social mixing between Jews and Christians. Female sociability was governed by the same unwritten rules. In turn-­of-­the-­ century Kiel, Käte Frankenthal (1889–­1976), later a Berlin physician and municipal councilor, was excluded from the birthday party of her best friend, a Christian, because the birthday girl’s mother, having invited the mothers of the girls as well, was averse to hosting a Jewish woman in her home. Reciprocal home visits, Marion Kaplan aptly comments, “raised the stakes, announcing an intimacy with which most did not feel comfortable.”26 Put differently, Germans and Jews were more likely to be acquaintances than friends. This distinction illuminates the character of social relations between the Jewish financial and industrial elite and aristocratic and court circles in Imperial Germany. Government ministers, upper civil servants, army officers, and diplomats accepted invitations to entertainments in wealthy Jewish homes but rarely reciprocated. In no sense did they view their attendance as a mark of acceptance and intimacy. As a Berlin dowager told a French visitor, those who visited Jewish salons made excuses to themselves, saying “It’s very sad, it’s a bad sign of the times.” Bismarck’s banker Gerson von Bleichröder (1822–­ 93), the only hoffähig (presentable at court) Jew in Berlin, entertained titled society even before his ennoblement in 1872. His feasts were lavish, his banqueting hall “very vast and very lofty” and his picture galleries and saloons “splendid” (so Benjamin Disraeli wrote Queen Victoria during the Congress of Berlin in 1878). But if anything, his extravagance fed aristocratic ridicule and contempt for parvenu Jews. As an observer of high society quipped in 1884, “Berlin society is divided into two camps—­those who go to Bleichröder while mocking and those who mock him but do not go.” Wilhelm II was friendly with a number of Jewish financial and industrial titans but, as one biographer notes, they were, unlike their counterparts in Great Britain, “merely royal favorites and not fixtures of the aristocratic establishment.” They socialized with the emperor during the day, at luncheons and hunting parties, in masculine rather than mixed company, but very rarely received invitations to formal court events. The shipping magnate Albert Ballin (1857–­1918), the only Jew whom Wilhelm saw regularly, had almost no social relations with the Junkers who composed the emperor’s entourage. Those aristocrats with whom Ballin was friendly were virtually all non-­Prussians.27

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In liberal societies, social intimacy between Jews and Gentiles was possible. But even in those circumstances, where social exclusion was not the rule, Jews whose work, ambition, or taste took them into non-­ Jewish circles always risked rebuffs and insults. The stigmatization of Jews was too widespread at the time to disappear entirely even in circles and institutions that were relatively tolerant. For example, at British public schools, Jewish boys were reminded that they were not the same as everyone else. Jawaharlal Nehru, who entered Harrow in 1905, recalled that, although the Jews there “got on fairly well—­ there was always a background of anti-­Semitic feeling.” They were “the damned Jews.” Charles de Rothschild (1877–­1923), who was at Harrow a decade earlier, suffered more than verbal hurt. As he later told a friend, “If I ever have a son he will be instructed in boxing and jiu-­jitsu before he enters school, as Jew hunts such as I experienced are a very one-­sided amusement, and there is apt to be a lack of sympathy between the hunters and hunted.” Even if Jewish students did not experience outright hostility, they were made conscious that they were different. Ivy Litvinov (1889–­1977), daughter of a non-­observant Jewish father and a Christian mother, had a difficult time at a private boarding school (although nothing overtly antisemitic occurred), and after she later transferred to Maida Vale High School in West London, the presence of so many Jewish girls there caused her to wonder whether “it had been something mysteriously Jewish in my own face, and in myself, that had set me apart from school friends [at her previous school].” Her mother agreed with her that being Jewish handicapped a girl from the start if she intended to live outside Jewish society: “A man might not notice a girl being dark, with striking features, unless the address [in a quarter where Jews concentrated] put ideas into his head. After all a pretty girl who’s not Jewish does start with an advantage. Other things being equal.”28 English Jews who moved in non-­Jewish social circles encountered subtle expressions of prejudice that suggested to them that their Jewishness was, if not an impediment, at least something of a liability. A young journalist in the novel Violet Moses (1891) by Leonard Merrick (1864–­1939) confesses he is reluctant to admit he is a Jew because “one is always afraid the genial faces will harden, and the cheery smiles grow chilly, and fade away—­we have seen it so often.” Leonard Woolf (1880–­1969), whose integration into the Bloomsbury set was unambiguous, was nonetheless uncomfortably reminded of his Jewishness when he proposed to Virginia Stephen. She told him directly, after his proposal of marriage, that she hesitated to accept because he

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was a Jew and seemed so foreign. (His family had been in England for several generations; and he had been educated at St. Paul’s School and Trinity College, Cambridge.) This was not the last time that his Jewishness, which he preferred to ignore, was brought to his attention. Casual, snobbish antisemitism was rife in Virginia’s coterie. Quentin Bell recalled a visit to the Woolfs when, in the midst of conversation, a question was posed and Virginia exclaimed, “Let the Jew answer.” Obviously offended, Leonard replied, “I won’t answer until you ask me properly.”29 Collectively, the various forms of anti-­Jewish hostility, from subtle snobbery to overt persecution, created a situation in which Jews who mixed (or aspired to) with non-­Jews were made acutely self-­conscious about their origins. While the intensity of self-­consciousness varied dramatically from person to person, it was the common lot of most acculturated Jews in Europe and America in the decades before World War I and beyond. Walther Rathenau (1867–­1922) wrote in 1911: “In the years of his youth there is a painful moment for every German Jew that he remembers for the whole of his life: when he is struck for the first time by the consciousness that he has entered the world as a second-­class citizen and that no ability and no merit can liberate him from this situation.” In surveying the Jewish situation in Germany in 1911, the industrialist Friedrich Blach (1884–­1969) observed that social exclusion led Jews to suspect every new acquaintance, eventually making them unsure of themselves. However impeccable their appearance and self-­presentation, inwardly they were always nervously on the alert. The physicist Rudolf Peierls (1907–­95), who grew up in Berlin, made the same point. While he considered being Jewish “a bearable handicap,” nonetheless, “one learned to be on one’s guard in social encounters,” for “any new acquaintance might be an anti-­ Semite, and if one’s name and appearance were not too obviously Jewish, one always had to gauge the point at which it would be wise to explain the position, to forestall embarrassment.” Even for ordinary German Jews with no ambition to cut a figure in titled society or play a role in public life, awareness of the strength of “Jew-­consciousness” in society was sufficient to evoke strong feelings. The political scientist Hans Morgenthau (1904–­80) recalled that when he and his father, the son of a rabbi, walked to the synagogue in Coburg on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, wearing high hats, they “walked on side streets so nobody would notice that we were Jewish” even though everyone in the small town knew they were—­“a grotesque, completely irrational practice.” Paul Mühsam (1876–­1960), son of a small shopkeeper

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in Zittau, remembered that the “mere impossibility” of becoming an army officer, a high official, or a judge had a negative impact on his self-­esteem.30 Awareness of “Jew-­consciousness” was equally acute in Austria. Recalling his youth in Vienna, Arthur Schnitzler (1862–­1931) wrote that it was impossible, especially for a Jew in the public eye, to ignore the fact that he was a Jew; “nobody else was doing so, not the Gentiles and even less the Jews.” Even Jews who were not overly sensitive could not remain completely untouched, just as a “a person cannot remain unconcerned whose skin has been anaesthetized but who has to watch, with his eyes open, how it is scratched by unclean knives, even cut into until the blood flows.” In Schnitzler’s novel The Road into the Open (1908), Heinrich Berman, the fictional voice of the author, declares that all Jews have been systematically raised to be sensitive to the failings of other Jews: [W]hen a Jew behaves crudely or comically in my presence, sometimes such a painful feeling seizes me that I want to die, to sink into the earth. . . . It’s exasperating that one is continually made responsible for the mistakes of others, that one must atone for every offense, for every crudity, for every thoughtless act that any Jew in the world makes himself guilty of. The Viennese novelist and satirist Robert Neumann (1897–­1975) wrote of his mother’s extreme sensitivity to the very mention of things Jewish. For her, “to be a Jew was one thing, but to discuss it was as much bad form as it was to swear, and almost as bad as mentioning anything connected with the functioning of the digestive or sexual organs.” One day when she had to introduce a guest with the name Cohen to other visitors to her home, “she pronounced his name again and again so unrecognizably and so much as if it were some painful infirmity from which he suffered, that in the end he withdrew, red-­faced.” Robert Weltsch (1891–­1982) recalled that in his youth in Prague it was thought tactless or even hostile for someone to say that he was a “Jew” and that “naturally every Jew of good bourgeois standing avoided doing so.” This reluctance was not simply opportunism, he explained, but “stemmed from genuine embarrassment, engendered by a lack of clarity about what Judaism really meant.” The word “Jew” had been emptied of positive content and “had shriveled up into a mere name of derision”—­thus, “it seemed only proper not to use it.”31

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Acculturated Jews who were hypersensitive to the derisive ring of the very word “Jew” employed code words to use in its place. The parents of Ernst Lissauer (1882–­1937), author of the notorious World War I song “Hassgesang gegen England,” did not permit the word “Jew” to be used in their house in the presence of young girls and spoke instead of “Armenians” and “Abyssinians.” In the Russified ­milieu in Minsk in which the Bundist leader Vladimir Medem (1880–­ 1923) was raised, the very word “Jew” was treyf and its use strictly forbidden lest the servant girl—­heaven forbid—­should hear it. A type of Aesopian language evolved, with its particular expressions which could be understood only by the initiated: instead of “Jews” the word “Italians” was used, or iz nashikh (one of ours). These terms would be accompanied by a knowing smile as if it were all a kind of joke, but the background of the joke was something quite serious.32 Recalling the interwar years, the Amsterdam physician Seiko Hertzberger (b. 1913) noted that if a non-­Jewish maid entered a room where family members were discussing Jewish matters they would immediately substitute the word “Mexicans.” In their view, the word “Jews” was ugly and not to be used in the presence of non-­Jews.33 Again, in states where the Jewish Question was less acute, this kind of sensitivity was less common—­but it was not absent. When the philosopher George Santayana was an undergraduate at Harvard in the 1880s, the first time he met the aesthete Charles Loeser (1864–­1928), the latter at once told him he was a Jew, “a rare and blessed frankness that cleared away a thousand pitfalls and insincerities.” The Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham, whose father was Eugene Meyer (1875–­1959), a Wall Street titan, remembered that while sensitive subjects were rarely mentioned in her childhood home, three in particular were taboo: money, sex, and her father’s being Jewish. During summers, which they spent at their large country house in Mt. Kisco, the family was socially isolated. Visitors came at weekends, but the ­Meyers were never invited to their neighbors’ houses and were excluded from the local country club. The English poet and critic Humbert Wolfe (1886–­1940) was acutely sensitive about his background, which set him apart from his fellow students at school (Bradford Grammar) and university (Wadham College, Oxford). Although rarely subject to overt attacks, he later realized that a myriad of small signs, not always conscious, reminding him that he belonged to a minority, “edged on

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the one side, excluded, different,” eroded his self-­confidence. That the English were too “easy-­going and good-­humoured” to carry their antisemitism to extremes only made matters worse, for “when the taint of Jewry means only exclusion from garden-­parties, refusal of certain cherished intimacies, and occasional light-­hearted sneers, it is difficult to maintain an attitude of racial pride.” An American rabbi captured the impact of subtle forms of antisemitism in relatively tolerant societies with this distinction: “Contempt is worse than hatred; social discrimination attacks a man’s personality, where legal discrimination only robs him of his civic rights.”34

FIVE

From the 1870s, ideological antisemitism, occupational discrimination, and social exclusion and stigmatization combined to create an atmosphere in which increasing numbers of Jews in Europe and America experienced their Jewishness as an unbearable burden. Everywhere the number who chose to abandon Judaism or hide their background rose, in some cases to dramatic heights, in others only moderately. Most Jews, of course, endured the mounting hostility without repudiating their origins—­some because they were secure in their faith and, like their ancestors, indifferent to Gentile opinion, others because they were contentedly embedded in Jewish society and not driven to cultivate Gentile company; still others because the hostility they encountered was insufficient to block all hope of success. Those who rejected their Jewishness and chose the path of radical assimilation came overwhelmingly from segments of the population that were both vulnerable to antisemitism and detached from traditional society and its values. Occupation, social rank, gender, and levels of acculturation, integration, and secularization made some Jews more likely than others to leave the communal fold. The most dramatic increases occurred in Germany, Austria, Russia, and Poland, where, not surprisingly, antisemitism weighed more heavily on Jews than elsewhere. In Prussia, where the bulk (70 to 80 percent) of German conversions was concentrated, the number of Jews who entered the Evangelical Church rose steadily in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, from an annual average of 145 in the five-­year period 1880–­84, to 262 in the period 1885–­89, to 314 in the period 1890–­94, and to 349 in the period 1895–­99. In the first four years of the new century, the annual average was 380. For

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Berlin alone, the respective annual averages, beginning in the five-­year period 1875–­79, were 25, 50, 113, 138, and 128. The annual average for the next four years jumped to 153.35 During this time, of course, the Jewish population of Berlin was increasing as well, largely through migration from smaller German communities and, to a lesser extent, from Eastern Europe. However, even when the rate of conversion is calculated relative to the size of the community, it rose. In the period 1872–­81, there was one conversion each year for every 1,500 Jews; in 1882–­91, one for every 650 Jews; in 1892–­1901, one for every 600 Jews; and in 1902–­08, one for every 640 Jews.36 But this may be a less accurate reflection of the true situation than the absolute numbers, since the migrants who were swelling the size of the community were not, in general, candidates for conversion since they came from traditional and/or small-­town backgrounds. They may have been as ambitious as native-­born Berlin Jews, but they were less secularized, less educated, less wealthy, and less connected with (or eager to connect with) Christian circles. In Vienna—­few Jews in Austria lived elsewhere—­the rate of conversion, however calculated, was higher than in Berlin, largely because of the absence of civil marriage. The annual average for five-­year ­periods was as follows:37 1870–­1874 1875–­1879 1880–­1884 1885–­1889 1890–­1894 1895–­1899 1900–­1904

48 79 186 291 353 476 622

Relative to the size of the community, which was growing rapidly, the number of those who officially withdrew from the Gemeinde (both converts and those who declared themselves konfessionslos) increased as well. In 1880, there were 1.50 defections per one thousand Jews in Vienna; in 1890, 3.02; in 1895, 2.95; in 1900, 4.17; and in 1905, 4.02. In Berlin, however, there were 0.10 in 1880; 0.49 in 1890; 0.36 in 1895; 1.04 in 1900; and 1.28 in 1905.38 Elsewhere in the Habsburg territories, where traditional religious and national allegiances were firmer, the numbers of converts, while rising in this period, were of a different magnitude altogether. In Austrian Galicia and Bukovina, the rate of conversion at the turn of the century was one to every ten thousand Jews. In Brünn, Moravia, only

Conversion in the Age of Illiberalism  •  115

19 Jews converted in 1890. In Serbia, which abutted the Habsburg Balkan lands, only 40 Jews joined the Greek Orthodox Church in the ten years between 1892 and 1901 (its Jewish population numbered about 5,800 in 1900). In Lemberg, Galicia, there were 157 conversions in the six years between 1897 and 1902. (In Vienna, there were 3,344 during the same period, although its Jewish population was only three times greater than that of Lemberg [about 44,000 in 1900].) In Krakow, with a Jewish population of about 25,000 in 1900, there were 444 converts in the sixteen years between 1887 and 1902, but only ten percent of them were natives or inhabitants of the city, the rest being from the countryside, Russia, Poland, or other countries. In all of Galicia, there were no more than 70 conversions a year before 1900 and perhaps 100 a year after that—­at a time when the Jewish population was in excess of 800,000.39 In Prague, where most conversions in Bohemia took place, the absolute number of withdrawals from the community (both conversions to Christianity and declarations of Konfessionslosigkeit) rose steadily from the 1870s to the end of the century and then leveled out until World War I, as the following numbers, in five-­year increments, show: 1868–­1872 1873–­1877 1878–­1882 1883–­1887 1888–­1892 1893–­1897 1898–­1902 1903–­1907 1908–­1912 1913–­1917

41 44 66 73 145 134 221 230 206 215

However, on a per capita basis, secession in Prague was modest in contrast to Vienna. In the ten-­year period 1898–­1907, withdrawals in Vienna were equal to 4 percent of the community while in Prague they were equal to 2.25 percent of the community.40 The only Habsburg city, other than Vienna, where conversion was substantial was Budapest, whose Jewish community was the second largest in Europe (after Warsaw), numbering 186,000 in 1906, 24 percent of the city’s population. The number of conversions rose from an average of 135 per year in the period 1896–­1898 to 170 per year in the period 1899–­1901 and then to 208 per year in the period 1902–­ 04.41 These figures are lower than those in Vienna, whose Jewish

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community was smaller. However, in Hungary, after 1895, it was no longer impossible for an unconverted Jew to marry a Christian, as it was in Austria. This means that the pace of conversion, the flight from Jewishness, was more similar in the two capitals than it seems, since the Vienna numbers include persons who, had they married in Budapest, would not have been required to convert beforehand. Farther eastward, in the Russian Empire, the same upward trend repeated itself. In Russia, the number of conversions per year was steady in the 1860s and 1870s, rarely rising to over five hundred. Then, in the wake of the pogroms and the May Laws, it began to rise. In 1893, 1,469 Jews became Christians (Russian Orthodox and Protestant). Considering only conversions to the Orthodox Church (about which there is better evidence), there were 1,178 in 1891 and 1,254 in 1894. The numbers declined in the years 1905 to 1907, due probably to optimism generated by the October Manifesto of 1905 promising a constitution and a legislature. In 1905 there were 685 and, in 1907, 579. However, the dip was short-­lived. As conditions worsened in the last years of the regime, the numbers of conversions again rose—­to 1,128 in 1909, to 1,299 in 1910, to 1,198 in 1913, and to 1,387 in 1914. Of course, relative to the size of the Jewish population—­five million persons at the end of the century—­the rate of conversion, while ­tripling in this period, was far less than that in Central European states. In Warsaw, the absolute number of conversions followed the same ­trajectory—­48 in the 1870s, 232 in the 1880s, 330 in the 1890s, and 103 in the years 1900–­03 alone.42 In the liberal states of the West, where civil status and religious identity were not linked, there is no statistical trail for the most part and it is hard to chart rises and falls in radical assimilation with exactitude. One exception is a study, drawing on the archives of the archbishop of Paris and the congregation of Notre Dame de Sion, which counted 877 cases of conversion between 1807 and 1914. The total number was not high, largely because conversion was not a prerequisite for entry into French public life and Jewish status was not a burning question after the Revolution (with the exception of the Dreyfus years). While there was a small per annum increase over time, it was very modest—­unlike the increases in Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, and Warsaw. During the Restoration and the July Monarchy, there were less than 160 cases while during the shorter period of the Second Empire there were 222; during the forty-­four years of the Third Republic, the number rose to 496, not much of a per annum increase at all.43 In regard to Great Britain and the United States, the only evidence of an increase is anecdotal—­for example, the laments of communal

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leaders about conversion or, more commonly, informal withdrawal from the community (via intermarriage). In a sermon at the New West End Synagogue in London in 1905, for example, Simeon Singer (1848–­1906) condemned Jews “who measure their success in life by the distance to which they are able to withdraw themselves from all Jewish associations, and by the force with which they can attach themselves to those who are not of their own people.” In 1908, Hermann Gollancz (1852–­1930) told his Bayswater congregation that wealthy Jews who achieved prominence in English society were deliberately withdrawing from the community in order to rise even higher “by throwing off what they regard as the weight of their former surroundings that keeps them down.”44 In northern Italy, where Jewish acculturation and integration were as striking as in English-­speaking lands, similar complaints were heard. Writing in 1908, Giuseppe Cammeo (1854–­1934), rabbi of Modena, lamented Jews who were ashamed of being Jewish and displayed ostentatious detachment from the community and indifference toward their religion: “They contribute nothing to religious instruction, Hebrew education, the welfare of the community; on the contrary, they carefully keep their children away from other Jews, and, in the street, on the promenade, in social life, in the cafes, in the theaters, they always manage to be seen in the company of persons who belong to another religion.”45 Sweeping statements like these, needless to say, cannot be accepted uncritically. While they undoubtedly reflect an increase in radical assimilation, they also signal heightened concern about patterns of behavior that were not entirely novel. The difficulty in measuring radical assimilation in Western Europe and North America is that it usually took forms other than formal conversion to Christianity (a one-­time discrete act) and often unfolded over several generations. Even if it usually included, at some point, intermarriage, the liberal state took no more notice of this than it did of conversion.

SIX

With few exceptions conversion was a secular rather than a spiritual act. Those who converted were not drawn randomly from every segment of the Jewish population but came overwhelmingly from those sectors that were most exposed to the liabilities and inconveniences of Jewishness and least firmly attached to Jewish practice or rooted in Jewish social networks. Put differently, Jews with little to gain—­ materially, socially, emotionally—­from becoming Christians were not

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candidates for conversion. In the words of the Berlin theater critic and philosopher of language Fritz Mauthner (1849–­1923), writing in 1912: “It is indeed not impossible that an adult and educated Jew would become a Christian out of conviction. It is only that in my life I have not seen such a case. In the vast majority of cases, the adult convert is brought to profess a creed in which he does not believe out of higher or lower reasons of expedience.” That year the poet Ernst Lissauer made the same point: Baptism, required by bureaucratic rules that viewed the Jewish religion as an obstacle to promotion, was “merely joining the state church”; it was “an official, not a confessional, act.” The yearbook of the Magyar Israelite Literary Society offered the same assessment in 1908: “We can state boldly that today no Jew converts out of conviction any more.” Emancipation was incomplete. “Anyone who seems perfectly unacceptable for a given office simply because he is a Jew is perfectly acceptable if he converts.”46 Prewar East European Jewish humor was equally hardheaded about the motives of converts. The most famous quip is that of the Semitics scholar Daniel Khvolson (1819–­1911), who, when asked if he had converted from conviction, allegedly responded, yes, he was convinced that it was better to be a professor in St. Petersburg than a melammed in Eyshishok. Another story suggested both that Jewish motives were not high-­minded and that Christians who believed otherwise were hopelessly naive. In this story, four converts walk into a tavern. They have several drinks and, under the impact of the alcohol, reveal to one another the real reasons they converted. The first admits he did it for wealth, to have a better life. The second explains that, having studied philosophy, he believed in nothing and saw no reason to continue suffering for something in which he no longer believed. The third confessed he had converted out of love for a Russian woman. The fourth remained quiet and, when challenged by the first, stood up straight and replied: “I did not do it for your reasons. I believed with all my heart.” On hearing this, the first retorted: “Friend, go tell that to the goyim.” A further story foregrounded widespread contempt for converts: A Jew went to a priest to be baptized and the priest asked him why he wanted to convert—­to which the Jew retorted that he hated his family and wanted to disgrace them.47 A close look at who converted confirms the essential truth of these stories and the generalizations of Mauthner and Lissauer. To begin, conversion everywhere was a practice of the young, of persons on the threshold of choosing careers and spouses and making their way in the world. In Berlin, in the period 1873–­1906, 3.7 percent of converts

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were in their teens (fourteen to nineteen), 38.7 percent in their twenties, and 31.3 percent in their thirties. In Vienna in 1910, 10.6 percent of converts were in their teens (fourteen to nineteen), 51.7 percent in their twenties, and 23.6 percent in their thirties. (The absence of children age thirteen and under in these numbers will be explained below.) In nineteenth-­century Warsaw, 14.8 percent of converts were twelve and under; 23 percent in their teens, 36.2 percent in their twenties, and 16.2 percent in their thirties. The most common ages at which Warsaw Jews converted were eighteen, twenty, and twenty-­two; these three ages alone represented 16.9 percent of all converts. In Krakow, 89 percent of converts between 1887 and 1902 were under thirty years of age. This concentration was even more marked among converts in the Vilna consistory of the Russian Orthodox church between 1819 and 1911: 94 percent of those whose age was recorded were between age sixteen and thirty. Of these, 43 percent were between age sixteen and twenty-­one. The median age for women was eighteen; for men, twenty-­one.48 Young men converted before entering university, and, in the case of Russia, they converted in order to gain entry in the first place. The essayist and editor Hayim Greenberg (1889–­1953) recalled that in prerevolutionary Russia “hundreds of young Jews” converted in order to be admitted to university. Their embrace of Christianity was made easy by non-­Orthodox clergymen who, for a fee, performed baptisms without fuss or delay. In St. Petersburg, a Protestant clergyman, the Reverend Pier, baptized candidates after only two days of probation, while applicants in Odessa flocked to the town of Ackerman on the Black Sea where an Armenian priest issued certificates testifying to their membership in the church of Gregory the Light Bringer. The historian Simon Dubnov (1860–­1941) was so troubled by the annual exodus of recent gymnasium graduates before the start of the academic year that he issued an appeal to the Jewish public in 1913 to oppose opportunistic conversions like these.49 Young men also converted during their university years, once they settled on a career—­and after receiving their degrees, when they met obstacles. The legal philosopher Hans Kelsen (1881–­1973), who was thoroughly indifferent to religion, was baptized in 1905, one year before he took his doctorate at the University of Vienna, because he believed (correctly) that there was no possibility of making an academic career without taking this step. The philosopher Franz Brentano advised his Jewish students in Vienna to accept Protestantism, which he half-­jokingly called “the religion of those lacking religion,” knowing

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that without baptism they would never find university positions. He saw it as a small sacrifice, relative to the opportunities of serving philosophy, much like donning a uniform for a job. Among those who took his advice were Edmund Husserl (1859–­1938) and Oskar Kraus (1872–­1943). Other budding academics rejected similar advice, including the Nobel laureate chemist Richard Willstätter (1872–­1942). Willstätter’s mentor at the University of Berlin, the organic chemist Adolf von Baeyer (1835–­1917), a Nobel laureate himself and the child of baptized Jews, twice urged him to convert—­the first time, a year after his Habilitation, and then two years later. For Willstätter, conversion without religious conviction seemed “improper,” especially “if it was combined with personal advantage.” When he was appointed to a professorship at Munich in 1915 (the year he won the Nobel Prize), Ludwig III of Bavaria, in signing the appointment document, told his minister of education, “This is the last time, though, that I will approve a Jew for you.”50 In 1903 the converted lawyer Berthold Klemperer (1872–­1931) proposed to his scholarly younger brother Victor (1881–­1960), whose secret diaries of the Nazi years were a publishing sensation in the 1990s, that he convert as well. (Their father, Wilhelm [1839–­1912], was the second preacher of the Reform community in Berlin at the time.) The younger Klemperer, who was about to report for his year of military service, initially balked, protesting that he was an atheist, believing neither in the Christian or Jewish god. Berthold, who was married to the daughter of a general and who “desperately wanted to be someone else to her, to himself, and not who he really was” (as Victor described him in 1944) convinced him with the argument that they were Germans and nothing else and that Christianity was part of Germanness, merely an article of apparel that he needed to put on. When Victor objected that he could not assent to the belief in the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, his brother assured him that he would not have to believe anything that a well-­educated young German did not believe. The conversion itself was a sham. Pastor Nessler, the minister to whom they turned, first proposed that Victor undertake two to three hours of religious instruction, but Berthold broke in, saying there was no time for that, that his brother already knew everything he had to know, and that he earnestly wanted to become a Protestant. Nessler told them to come to his apartment the next morning at ten with two witnesses. That morning Victor asked his brother who the witnesses were, to which Berthold replied that he was one, and their cousin Adele Franke (presumably also a convert), who “at the last

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minute was hindered from attending,” was the other. Nessler, he explained, knew that it was a mere formality. At the apartment, the ceremony took place before a small table with a bowl of water on it. The minister told Victor that he must agree, verbally and with a handshake, that he would remain true to the church. Victor managed “a barely audible ‘yes’ ” and the minister touched his forehead with water, accepted him into the church, handed him his conversion certificate, and was paid for his work—­fourteen marks, seventy-­five cents. Later regretting his decision, Victor called the transaction “pure careerism” and, when he married in 1906, listed his religion as “Mosaic” on the wedding certificate. Six years later, he himself realized that his career depended on his repudiation of Judaism and he converted once again.51 Men approaching middle age with careers already launched converted to ensure their further rise. This was the case with Gustave Mahler (1860–­1911), who was well aware that his Jewishness blocked his appointment to major conducting positions. In early 1894, he wrote to a close friend: “The fact that I am Jewish bars my access to all the court theaters. Neither Vienna, Berlin nor Dresden is open to me—­the same wind blows everywhere.” In late 1896, unhappy in his position at the Hamburg Opera, he sought an appointment at the Vienna Court Opera. When the negotiations entered a critical stage, he was baptized in Hamburg, in February 1897. Soon after he wrote to the music critic Ludwig Karpath that he had converted in order “to escape from Pollini’s inferno” (his relationship with Pollini, director of the Hamburg Opera, was strained), adding, “I do not hide the truth from you when I say that this action, which I took from an instinct of self-­preservation and which I was fully disposed to take, cost me a great deal.” Bruno Walter (1876–­1962), Mahler’s second-­in-­command in Vienna, transformed himself twice to further his career. He reluctantly changed his family name, Schlesinger, when he became conductor of the Breslau Stadttheater in 1896. Two years later, when offered the post of chief conductor of the Riga Opera, he was told he would first need to convert. In 1901 Mahler hesitated at first about bringing the talented, now Christian, Walter, to Vienna because he feared that two Jews, even baptized Jews, at the Vienna Court Opera would be “impossible.” According to Karpath, he overcame his reluctance only after he (Karpath) sounded out the lord chamberlain. The same forces were at work in the secession of the conductor Otto Klemperer (1885–­1973). In 1910, he accepted a conducting position in Hamburg. On his way there from Prague, he stopped in Berlin to visit his cousin

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Georg Klemperer (1865–­1946), the eldest of the Klemperer brothers, a well-­known surgeon with a Christian wife who was determined to keep his Jewish origins a secret—­so much so that he did not tell their children that their grandfather, who was still alive, was a rabbi. (In the biographical preface to his doctoral dissertation, he wrote that he was the son of “a country cleric”—­which was not entirely untrue, since his father served earlier as a rabbi in a small provincial town.) Georg convinced Otto that he should leave Judaism since he was launching his career in Germany. In July Otto withdrew from the Gemeinde, without, however, becoming a Christian.52 For young women, whose career choices were few before World War I, erotic entanglement, leavened with social ambition in some cases, was much more likely to lead to conversion. In Prague, 80 percent of women who left the community between 1867 and 1917 were single—­ which suggests that marriage to a Christian was the motive. This is confirmed by church records showing that Jewish women converting to Catholicism most often gave as their reason their intention to marry a Catholic. In Vienna between 1870 and 1910, female converts were younger on average—­48 percent were in their twenties—­than male converts, 40 percent of whom were in their twenties, a difference that is consistent with the earlier age of women at marriage. Female converts in Vienna also came overwhelmingly from the lowest social strata of the community. Of those whose occupations were registered, 64 percent worked as artisans (especially seamstresses, dressmakers, and milliners), unskilled workers, and servants. Marsha Rozenblit inferred from this that these were women who intended to marry Christians whom they had met at work. Of course, young women from wealthy families also converted prior to marriage. The union of the well-­dowered daughter and the impecunious Junker attracted much attention in Imperial Germany. In a survey of domestic life in Germany, the Edwardian novelist Cecily Sidgwick, whose father was a German Jew, claimed that “the Jewish heiress constantly allies herself and her money with a title or a uniform,” adding, in reference to the businesslike character of the nuptials, that the German noble “gets the gold he lacks, and the rich Jewess gets social prestige or the nearest approach to it possible in a Jew-­baiting land.” In fact, unions like these were less common than the more humble ones that Rozenblit described. Frequently, the time between conversion or secession and marriage was a matter of days—­ which suggests the motive that was at work. Mathilde Zemlinsky, sister of the composer Alexander Zemlinsky (1871–­1942), resigned from the Vienna Gemeinde in 1901 one week before her marriage to Arnold

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Schoenberg (1874–­ 1951). (He had been a Lutheran since 1898.) Church archives in Paris include examples of young women being baptized the day before or even the day of their wedding.53 In Eastern Europe as well, romance led to conversion. While not common, erotic relations between young Jewish women and young Christian men were not unknown either, especially in the countryside.54 (Contrary to popular myth, East European Jews did not live in isolation from the Slavic peoples surrounding them.) On occasion, the daughters of tavern keepers and livestock dealers fell in love with young Christian men and fled home, converted, and married. In Hakhnasat kallah (The Bridal Canopy) (1937), S. Y. Agnon (1888–­1970) told the story of a young Jewish girl from a Galician village whose parents discover her romance with a Polish lad and hastily arrange her marriage to an unworldly yeshivah student. The student visits them at Passover, meeting his fiancée for the first time, but he is so socially awkward that he has no idea how to talk to her. Late that evening, following the seder, she elopes with her Polish lover. The plot was not an invention of Agnon’s imagination, but a literary reworking of incidents that occurred in his native Galicia before World War I. In Krakow, 302 women, two-­thirds of them from other places in Galicia, converted in the fifteen-­year-­period 1887–­1902. Rachel Manekin’s analysis of archival records of their conversions found that most were between ages fifteen and twenty and came from towns and villages in western Galicia in the neighborhood of Krakow. Many of these young women were in flight from marriage engagements—­hastily arranged after the discovery of their romantic involvement with young Poles—­to Jewish men with little experience of the broader world. In Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Odessa, Russian-­speaking daughters of the Jewish intelligentsia and haute bourgeoisie also fell in love with Christians and converted. Simon Dubnov’s younger daughter Olga, swept up in the revolutionary events of 1905, fell in love with a Ukrainian worker, the son of peasants. She bore him twin sons and then converted in order to marry him. While studying law at the University of Rome, Rachel Ginsberg, the daughter of Ahad Ha-­Am (1856–­1927), became the lover of a fellow émigré, the already married Michael Osorgin, correspondent for a liberal Russian newspaper. She moved in with him before he obtained a divorce. Later they married, but in a civil ceremony (legal in Italy since 1866), thus obviating the need to convert beforehand.55 In addition to those in their teens and twenties who left Judaism of their own volition, there were children whose parents made the

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decision for them, often at the time of their own baptism. When the future psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1882–­1960) and her husband moved from Vienna to Budapest in 1910, they and their children were baptized, becoming Unitarians. In numerous instances, however, parents chose to have their children baptized while they remained, at least formally, members of the Jewish community. The mother of Hedwig Wachenheim (1891–­1969), later a Social Democratic welfare activist in the Weimar period, had her and her sisters baptized after their father, a banker in Mannheim, died in 1898. Her decision was not motivated by religious sentiment or by a desire to hide their Jewishness, since everyone in Mannheim knew they were Jews. She reasoned, rather, that baptism would facilitate the marriage of her daughters to Christians, thus completing the assimilation process. Herself a freethinker, she remained, legally, a Jew, which allowed her to be buried next to her husband in the Jewish cemetery. The Berlin banker Hermann Wallich (1833–­1928) and his wife Anna made their young son and daughter members of the Evangelical Church but did not change their own affiliation. In memoirs intended for his children, he explained that, not wanting to be a victim of antisemitism, he would have preferred to emigrate but that his wife would not leave Germany. Baptizing their children was a compromise, for while he chose not to convert out of respect for his ancestors, he also believed it wrong to raise his children with no faith at all. In his view, Judaism was archaic and it would be foolish to make his children martyrs to a religion in which he no longer believed. He preferred that they become good Christians rather than remain bad Jews. He also denied that his motives were opportunistic; in his view, conformity to the beliefs of the majority was a disinterested act.56 For a handful of Central European intellectuals, child baptism was a collective solution to the Jewish Question, not merely a family strategy. In 1893, before arriving at political sovereignty as the solution to the Jewish Question, Theodor Herzl (1860–­1904) toyed with other radical solutions—­among them mass conversion. Ever the showman, he imagined the conversions unfolding theatrically “in broad daylight, Sundays at noon, in Saint Stephen’s Cathedral [in the historic center of Vienna], with festive processions and amidst the pealing of bells,” and fathers proudly escorting their young sons (those who had not yet reached the age of independence, “after which conversion looks like an act of cowardice or careerism”) to the threshold of the church but themselves staying outside. In an article in the Preussische Jahrbücher in 1900, the jurist Adolf Weissler (1855–­1919) implored German Jews to

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baptize their children. For Weissler this was more honorable than the parents’ becoming Christians themselves, for while they accepted the superiority of Christian ethics, the dogmas of Christianity remained outmoded and it would be dishonorable to pretend to accept them. In a practical vein, he also pointed out that child baptism would obviate the need later on to withdraw from the community. In 1917 the Hungarian man of letters Lajos Hatvany (1880–­1961), himself a convert, offered another reason for parents to baptize their children: Those who suffered for their race half a lifetime can’t help it; they must bear the cross, the “cross of the Jews.” But! Every enlightened father must raise Christian children. “My dear Jews, you must put on frock coats if you want to go to the ball.” More than enough hardship awaits your children; at least they should be relieved of the burden of Jewishness. . . . Getting rid of Jewish characteristics must be the main goal of the new Jewish generation.57 Both Herzl and Hatvany assumed that the solution to the Jewish Question was a male matter and that the baptism of boys alone would address it. Gendering the issue in this way ignored the fact that Jewish identity is transmitted matrilineally (except in American Reform Judaism) and that one half of the Jewish population would remain unconverted. Child baptism was common in Germany and Austria-­Hungary but how common is unknown due to a specific feature of the law: Children under age fourteen were not viewed as citizens. If their parents baptized them, they were not required to register the change of religion, since no change had occurred in the eyes of the law. This means that conversion rates in Central Europe were higher, in fact, than the statistical record indicates, probably much higher.

SEVEN

Career choice and economic status, as much as age, determined who within the Jewish population converted. As a rule, Jews who remained in the world of commerce, buying and selling in one way or another, were much less likely to convert than Jews who chose to enter new spheres of activity—­the civil service, law, science, the arts, the academy, and the media. For brokers, wholesalers, shopkeepers, craftsmen, stall holders, dealers in secondhand merchandise, and itinerant sellers,

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as well as clerks and salesmen in Jewish-­owned enterprises, there were no benefits, financial or social, in turning Christian (except in Russia, where it gained them the right to live outside the Pale of Settlement). They satisfied their social needs within Jewish circles, institutions, and voluntary organizations. But, for Jews who moved in new directions, baptism was either a prerequisite for admission or advancement or an emotionally and socially prudent adjustment to new circumstances. The mathematician Abraham Fraenkel (1891–­1965) noted this distinction in his memoirs, recalling that in many families in fin-­de-­siècle Berlin the son interested in a university career or the daughter preparing to marry a Christian became a Christian while the son entering business or industry remained a Jew.58 Conversion data from Central Europe confirm the powerful impact of occupation on the decision whether to remain Jewish or not. In a sample of 370 male converts in Vienna in the period 1870–­1910, 10.8 percent were civil servants, 28.6 percent were professionals, and 12.4 percent were students (who were likely preparing to become civil servants and professionals)—­in all, 51.8 percent, at a time when most Jews still earned their living in commerce. Most of these male apostates were themselves from upper-­middle-­class homes: 16.7 percent of the fathers were civil servants, 18.3 percent were professionals, and 47.6 percent were merchants. Moreover, the proportion of professionals and civil servants in the convert population increased over time, probably due to increasing antisemitism and shifting Jewish aspirations. In a sample from 1910, 14.3 percent of male converts were civil servants and 31.1 percent were professionals. In Prague, converts came disproportionately from the same groups—­44 percent were professionals, public servants, and students. Only 18 percent came from banking, insurance, commerce, and trade. Hardly any were self-­employed businessmen. Even in Warsaw, where lower-­class Jews swamped middle-­ class Jews, the haute bourgeoisie, the professions, the intelligentsia, and the noncommercial middle class produced wildly disproportionate numbers of converts—­46.7 percent in the 1880s and 55.2 percent in the 1890s.59 In Russia and Poland, university-­ educated Jews who wanted to be seen as Russian or Polish writers (rather than as Jews writing in a Slavic language) were prime candidates for conversion, especially when attitudes toward Jews hardened from the late-­1870s on. Many of the young writers associated with the Russian-­language, St. Peters­ burg Jewish weekly Razsvet [Dawn] (1879–­ 83) became Christians, including the novelist Grigory Bogrov (1825–­ 88), the lawyer and

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publicist Leonid Slonimski (1849–­1918), his brother-­in-­law the liter­ emyon Vengerov (1855–­1920), the poet Nikolai Minsky ary historian S (1855–­1937), the mathematician Saul Woytinsky (d. 1919), and Isaac Orshanski (1851–­ca. 1893), brother of the historian and lawyer Ilia Orshanski. Influenced by the Haskalah and Russian critiques of Jewish life, they were critical of traditional Judaism, the cultural and social isolation of Jews, their use of Yiddish, and their “unhealthy” occupations. Collectively, they shared an unwavering commitment to comprehensive Russification, which, in tandem with their eagerness to become members of the Russian intelligentsia, led them to become Christians. The history of the Slonimski and Vengerov families highlights the affinity between conversion and membership in the Russian cultural and intellectual elite.60 The first to embrace the new world of secular learning was the Maskil Haim Selig Slonimski (1810–­1904), popularizer of science in Hebrew books and periodicals, inventor (a calculating machine, a chemical process for coating iron cooking ware with enamel, and an electrochemical process for transmitting and receiving two telegrams simultaneously over one wire), and founding editor of the Warsaw Hebrew weekly Ha-­Tsefirah (The Epoch) (1862, 1874–­ 1904). In 1862 the government appointed Slonimski inspector of the Zhitomir rabbinical seminary, as well as censor of Hebrew books, a post he held until the seminary closed in 1873. His son Leonid moved in a more radical direction, replacing a commitment to Hebrew as a vehicle for enlightenment with immersion in and identification with Russian culture. After studying at the University of Kiev, Leonid settled in St. Petersburg and, in 1881, converted, along with his wife, to the Orthodox faith, although they were agnostics, without loyalty to any religion. He contributed articles on law and sociology to journals in Russia and abroad, and served on the editorial board of the liberal monthly Vestnik Yevropy (The Herald of Europe) from 1882. Despite his baptism, he remained concerned—­and continued to write—­about Jewish legal status in Russia. However, the atmosphere in which his children were raised was hostile to the cultivation of Jewish consciousness of any kind. His younger son, the music lexicographer Nicolas Slonimsky (1894–­1995), remembered that the family was “plus Russe que les Russes” in its passion to be part of the intelligentsia. His mother, Faina (1857–­1944), in particular, was ashamed of their background and tried to keep it hidden from the children. Indeed, Nicolas recalled, two subjects were taboo in the family: sexuality and Jewishness. (His mother accounted for their “obviously Jewish physiognomies” by referring to their “noble Roman heritage.”)

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Both Leonid and Faina pursued radical assimilation, Faina with exceptional ardor. Her zeal, it seems, was the result of her own family’s experience, in which acculturation and secularization came a generation earlier than in her husband’s family. Her father, Hanan Afanasii Vengerov (d. 1892), grew up in a Hasidic family, but experienced a loss of faith when he traveled to visit his rebbe in Lubavitch soon after marrying. For a while he continued to live as an Orthodox Jew, studying Talmud and observing the mitzvot (even if perfunctorily), but eventually he abandoned them altogether. The story of how he coerced his wife, Pauline Epstein Vengerov (1833–­1916), to give up her sheitel, kosher kitchen, and other traditions figures prominently in her celebrated Memoiren einer Grossmutter (1913, 1919). They gave their children an “enlightened” European education and raised them effectively with no religion. When the climate toward Jews worsened in the 1880s and 1890s, and the children faced the choice either of abandoning their careers for the sake of a tradition that they did not know or of pursuing happiness, honor, and fame, they chose the latter and became Christians. In the case of Semyon, the eldest son and the first to convert, there was a temporary return to Jewish consciousness between Russification and conversion. In the late 1870s, with the rise of Slavophile sentiment and the deterioration of Jewish status, a small number of St. Petersburg Jewish youth, their hopes for the triumph of liberalism crushed, affirmed a national Jewish identity, ­Semyon among them. He participated in several nationalist gatherings and associated with the Russified university students around Razsvet. His experiment with Jewish nationalism, a radical departure from the assimilationism of his family, was short-­lived, however. He quit the Razsvet group and became a bitter opponent of Jewish nationalism. Not long after writing in favor of radical assimilation as the solution to the Jewish Question, he was baptized himself.61 In her memoir, his mother implied that he was forced to convert in order to remain in St. Petersburg, but this is not correct, for he had already completed his university degree and there was no question of his right of settlement in the capital. His two future brothers-­in-­law, Minsky and Slonimski, converted at the same time. The other Vengerov children followed suit and in time made brilliant careers for themselves. Isabelle Vengerova became a world-­class pianist, emigrated to the United States, and taught at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia.62 Another daughter, Zinaida Vengerova (1867–­1941), became an important literary critic and the wife of the poet Nikolai Minsky.

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The Warsaw branch of the Slonimski family also pursued radical assimilation. Two sons of Haim Selig Slonimski remained in Warsaw. Stanislaw, a physician, converted when he married a deeply religious Catholic. His son the poet and critic Antoni Slonimski (1895–­1976) was a leading figure in Polish literary life in the interwar years. Baptized at birth, Antoni was a sharp critic of Polish Jewry in the twenties and thirties, his vicious attacks echoing those of the Jew-­baiting nationalist right. For example, in a 1924 article, “On Jewish Sensitivity,” he berated Jews with a lack of respect for everything precious: they mutilated language, worshiped money, and scorned physical labor, producing nothing. “Everything, absolutely everything—­the whole world, the stars, oceans, continents and peoples—­disappears and becomes unimportant in the face of their overwhelming greed for money.” (In the late 1930s, with Nazi terror mounting, he ceased his harsh criticism, and after the war, having survived in London, he memorialized and identified with prewar Polish Jewry, to which, of course, his ties were tenuous.) Selig’s other son, Josef, was a language teacher. Anticipating the work of the better-­known Ludwig Zamenhof (1859–­1917), Josef invented a new language—­the Universal Romanic Language, which was etymologically derived from Latin, Spanish, and Italian and was intended to unify humankind, a fantasy that appealed powerfully to Jews who wished to escape their Jewishness.63 In general, Jews who felt themselves to be Poles and aspired to participate in Polish cultural life were attracted to the Roman Catholic Church. Take, for example, the lawyer and historian Alexander Kraushar (1843–­1931). The young Kraushar, like his father (a successful stockbroker who collected Polish antiquities and supported Polish writers), remained attached to Judaism while identifying with the suffering Polish nation. He was deeply involved in the insurrectionary movement of 1863 and, while still a law student, published a two-­ volume history of Polish Jewry in 1865–­66. As a lawyer, he became the legal consultant to several noble Polish families, which ensured his financial independence and allowed him time for scholarly work. His marriage in 1871 to a daughter of the sugar manufacturer and art collector Mathias Bersohn (1823–­1908) gave him the means to host his own literary salon, where the leading lights of Polish intellectual life assembled. His Jewishness was confined mostly to attending services with his father at the modern synagogue on Tlomackie Street on the high holidays. In the 1880s, in the wake of the Warsaw pogrom of 1881, newspapers frequently questioned the Polishness of polonized

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Jews, both converted and unconverted—­to the extent that even the descendants of Frankists, many of them prominent in Warsaw society, were suspected of dissimulation. If their Polishness was suspect, what hope was there for Kraushar? In response, he wrote a two-­volume history of the Frankists, published in 1895, defending the genuineness of their Catholicism. That same year he and his family quietly became Roman Catholics. When, in the midst of the anti-­Jewish boycott of 1912, his wife Jadwiga died, he gave her one of the most elaborate Catholic funerals Warsaw had ever seen, with more than one hundred priests, headed by the bishop, taking part in the funeral procession. The link between immersion in Polish culture and conversion in the Warsaw Jewish bourgeoisie also reveals itself in the striking number of graduates of the Rabbinical School (a Maskilic, Polish-­language secondary school, established in 1826, not a rabbinical seminary) who later became Christians. Of 185 graduates of the school as of 1841, 20 (11 percent) converted.64 An additional spur to conversion in Russia was the ban on Jewish residence outside the Pale of Settlement. While “exceptional” Jews—­ well-­to-­do merchants, holders of academic degrees, and some army veterans—­were allowed to live in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other cities in the interior, most Russian Jews were unable to reside there legally. Artisans, merchants, university students, journalists, musicians, and artists chose baptism in order to reside in cities that offered opportunities unavailable in the Pale. The number was sufficiently large that by the late nineteenth century both czarist officials and Jewish leaders were alarmed (for different reasons, of course). The Ministry of the Interior appealed to Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the procurator of the Holy Synod, in 1890 to limit such conversions. “We are aware,” the ministry wrote, “of numerous cases of Jews acquiring residence rights beyond the Pale of Settlement by converting to Christianity.”65 Thirty years later, the Department of Spiritual Affairs of Foreign Confessions reported: “In the last few years an extraordinary number of Jews have transferred to rationalistic [Protestant] sects and are now officially registered as Christians. As local authorities have reported, the transfers are not as motivated by religious convictions as they are calculated efforts to escape residence restrictions.”66 That same year (1910), Evreiskaia nedelia (Jewish Week) also reported that “masses of Jews” were becoming Lutherans to obtain residence rights outside the Pale.67 In liberal states, the career patterns of bourgeois sons were different. The academy, the civil service, and the military were open to unconverted Jews, although only in France were more than a few

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attracted to these areas. British and American Jews were content for the most part to make their living in old-­fashioned ways, following their fathers into commerce and finance. The very few with higher cultural aspirations either converted or, more commonly, informally left Judaism behind, not because they faced obstacles to success, but because Jewishness seemed to them incompatible with the pursuit of beauty and truth or with life in fashionable society. Very frequently they cemented their break with the community by marrying a non-­ Jew, a step that was almost foreordained given the circles in which they mixed. The art critic Bernard Berenson (1865–­ 1959) exemplifies this kind of convert in pre–­World War I America.68 Born in a tiny village in Lithuania, Berenson was brought to Boston in 1875. His free-­ thinking father did not continue Bernard’s Jewish education in America. A graduate of Boston Latin School, Berenson enrolled at Harvard in 1884. Chapel attendance was then mandatory, and he fell under the spell of the preacher Phillips Brooks, rector of the Episcopalian Trinity Church in Copley Square, where he became a Christian in November 1885. Berenson never wrote or spoke directly about his motives, but they are not difficult to infer. Berenson was a brilliant and ambitious young aesthete at an Ivy League college rife with snobbery and antisemitism. Christianity thus appealed to him for both aesthetic and social reasons. In a short story in the Harvard Monthly, he attributed to the central figure, the aptly named Robert Christie, what was undoubtedly his own attitude toward Christianity: Mr. Christie  .  .  . had no religious feelings or belief. But he had the profoundest admiration for Christianity, not only as a historic fact and still living force, but for its successful symbolization of human life. . . . His regard for Christianity was, on the whole, much more because it inspired artists than for any other reason. And he thought an appreciation of Christianity necessary now to enable us to appreciate the arts.69 Conversion also offered him, at the same time, an escape from what he experienced as the emotional and cultural suffocation of Jewishness. In another story in the Harvard Monthly, his protagonist, Israel Koppel, a young shtetl prodigy who yearns for European culture, falls into a coma and then, by mistake, is buried alive. Berenson did not want to be “buried alive”—­to remain an outsider and an outcast—­and so became an Episcopalian.70 Later, in February 1891, after moving to

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Italy, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. His second baptism brought him temporarily into “direct contact with otherness” and left him feeling as if he had “emerged into the light after long groping in the darkness”: “every outline, every edge, and every surface was in a living relation to me and not as hitherto, in a merely cognitive one.” The transcendent feelings, however, soon faded. Berenson was an innate skeptic. Charles Loeser, who was with him when he became a Catholic, viewed the episode as a passing enthusiasm, remarking that Berenson had “lost his sense of humor.” Within a year or two, he ceased to practice his new religion.71 A less transient benefit of the switch was that it bridged the gap between him and his Italian Catholic surroundings. A few months before his baptism, he wrote from Venice to Mary Costelloe, his future wife, that it was “so easy” to feel Catholic there: “I dare say what makes me love Catholicism so much is the fact that it is so essentially Italian. It is only in Italy where I feel that nothing can be thought of without it.” Soon after the ceremony, he wrote her: “Today I felt so at one with everybody. I even felt reconciled to the brass band. . . . Why not walk in step with it sweetly and gladly, instead of paralyzing my legs by trying to march in another step?” 72 To the very end of his long life, what remained of his Christianity was its aesthetic dimension. For him, aesthetic experience was the ultimate reality, and since Western art, at whose altar he worshiped, was Christian, he too was a Christian. Before World War I, American and English Jews like Berenson who penetrated the overlapping worlds of inherited wealth and high culture found themselves in overwhelmingly Gentile company. Jewish participation in art and literature in English-­speaking lands—­whether as creators, patrons, or brokers—­was then modest, certainly in comparison to Central Europe. In the Anglo-­Saxon world, sons regularly followed fathers into business. The very few with strong interests in the arts and the life of the mind were tempted to smooth their entry by erasing their Jewishness. When Leonard Woolf graduated from Cambridge in 1904 and was deciding on his future, the question of conversion arose. He had not scored well on the examination that would have secured him a Treasury position, and, in his view, he had to choose between entering the colonial civil service and teaching in a public school. Schoolmastering paid poorly and it was not clear if he, as a Jew, would be able to find a job. As he wrote to Lytton Strachey, “You see I have to decide so soon & the question of Jew or Christian is now the absorbing topic, & I have to rush about trying to find out whether people will allow their sons to be taught by Jews & Atheists.” In the end, he chose the colonial service, largely for financial reasons, even though he was

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not enthusiastic about going abroad. When Humbert Wolfe, a budding man of letters who was concerned about his soul and his career, entered Oxford, he was unsure about what religion he was committed to. He had no doubt that Judaism was unsatisfactory but still could not take the plunge into Christianity—­“a step which a desire to be like other men tempted him to take” (he wrote of himself in the third person)—­for he was concerned about what his mother would think (his father was dead) and restrained by “something stubborn in his blood, which remembered Zion.”73 Both men married Gentiles (which was almost inevitable given the company they kept) while Wolfe entered the Church of England to satisfy his father-­in-­law. The decision that Humbert Wolfe and Leonard Woolf faced—­to remain Jewish or not—­was routine, not just for Oxbridge men who turned their back on business, but more generally for young men from non-­observant bourgeois backgrounds in both liberal and illiberal societies. Recall the example of Richard Willstätter, for whom the question of baptism was not fanciful or farfetched, even though he remained Jewish in the end. In prerevolutionary Russia as well, the number of university-­educated men who were tempted to convert was greater than those who took the step. Shaul Ginsburg, in telling the stories of famous and infamous Russian converts, mentioned that many from the St. Petersburg intelligentsia “heard, more than once, that they should convert for the sake of their careers but proudly refused.”74 For every Jew who became a Christian for career-­related reasons in fin-­de-­siècle Europe and America, there were one or two others who considered doing so but chose not to. Some held back because they did not want to offend their parents; others, because the opportunism and insincerity of the transaction troubled them; and still others because they saw conversion as a treacherous, cowardly act. The sociologist Arthur Ruppin observed early in the twentieth century, “If numbers of men and women cannot decide to be baptized, it is not so much because of their love of Judaism as of their unwillingness to face the reproach of cowardice and treachery by deserting a minority which is in danger and is being attacked on all sides.”75

EIGHT

Gender as well structured patterns of conversion. However, it did so in tandem with other forces rather than in the straightforward way that observers at the time imagined it did. A common complaint in the European and American Jewish press, beginning in the mid-­nineteenth

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century, was that women were responsible for the decline in Jewish cohesion and consciousness. On the assumption that women were constitutionally weaker than men, writers claimed that women were less able to resist the attractions of the non-­Jewish world. In particular, they stressed the failure of women to meet their obligations as guardians of morality and religion, especially at home. Echoing male bourgeois thinking about the essential character of women—­their tenderness, warmth, compassion, and spirituality—­they assigned to mothers responsibility for the religious upbringing of their children and, thus, the future of the Jewish people. A German newspaper writer, for example, described women as domestic priestesses, as “­giants who carry the world on their shoulders by caring for the home,” while a prominent American Reform rabbi called the ideal Jewish woman the “savior of her race.” Having assigned women the role of preserving the Jewish people, male observers then faulted them for their performance. The London Jewish Chronicle noted with alarm in 1875 that there was “no feature of the age more dangerous or more distressing than the growing irreligion of women.” The Archives israélites lamented in 1889 that Jewish mothers were pursuing “all the general qualities of the modern woman” and failing to cultivate “the particular qualities of the Jew,” thus leaving their children “in absolute ignorance of their faith.” In Imperial Germany, Marion Kaplan writes, Jewish newspapers “depicted women as pushing their families to move to the cities, where they could enjoy a more luxurious life; showed women marrying out of the faith and converting for frivolous reasons; and described them as interested in all sorts of secular activities, but not in their own Jewish community.”76 In fact, women were no more likely than men to leave the fold when their levels of acculturation and integration were similar. However, since notions of gender structured female education, work, and social interaction, Jewish women frequently converted at different rates than their male counterparts. For example, in settings in which Jewish women experienced acculturation earlier than Jewish men, usually because they received little religious schooling and their exposure to secular culture was not considered a threat to their faith, they were better positioned to mix in Christian society. This explains the preponderance of female converts—­64 percent of all those age sixteen and above—­in Berlin in the period 1770–­1805. As Jewish men caught up culturally with Jewish women and then surpassed them as they left commerce and finance for professional and public careers, they overtook women in the ranks of converts. In Berlin, the preponderance of

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women among converts age sixteen and above disappeared early in the nineteenth century. In the period 1806–­19, women were 43 percent of the total; in the period 1820–­30, 29 percent.77 The same forces were at work in some East European communities a century later. In Krakow, women were 68 percent of the 444 Jews who left Judaism in the period 1887–­1902. They were overwhelmingly young—­52 percent were less than twenty years old and 37 percent between twenty and thirty—­and largely from small towns and villages in western Galicia. Paula Hyman speculated that the preponderance of young women was due to their earlier secularization and acclimatization to Polish culture. Because “they chafed under the gender divisions and the consequent educational restrictions of traditional Jewish society,” they often took the lead in experimenting with secular culture. But, having been denied the rigorous Jewish education their brothers received, they were more vulnerable to its seductions. Rachel Manekin’s research in state archives in Krakow confirms this hypothesis.78 Most of the converts were women from lower-­middle-­ and middle-­class homes in the Galician countryside. Their fathers were typically tavern keepers or grain merchants or livestock traders or landlords. Educated in Polish primary schools, the women were able to read and write Polish and were familiar with Polish culture and the Catholic religion. They were accustomed to frequent, casual, unstructured contact with Poles, including Polish boys with whom they occasionally fell in love and ran away, because they lived in areas where there were few other Jewish families. As Manekin remarks, in a village, where Jewish life was confined to one or two families, when a daughter walked out of her house, she left Jewish space. In contrast, in Krakow, with a Jewish population of ninety-­one thousand (28 percent of the total population in 1900), there were Jewish streets, markets, shops, schools, cafés, and the like, whose existence informally discouraged the establishment of intimate ties between Jews and other residents of the city. In some rural areas of Ukraine, as well, female converts outnumbered male converts. The St. Vladimir Brotherhood in Kiev baptized twenty-­eight men and forty-­four women in the period 1879–­82. (Between 1870 and 1889, the order converted more than six hundred Jews, but it issued reports, with names and other details, infrequently.) The majority of female converts were from villages in Kiev province; they were in their late teens or early twenties and, in the words of the report for 1881, were “simple people, illiterate and poor”—­ unlike their counterparts in Galicia, who had received an elementary

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education, in Polish, in Habsburg schools. Many converted in order to marry Ukrainian peasants whom they knew from daily contact and, “being already accustomed to physical work and the peasants’ way of life, returned to their husbands’ homes immediately after baptism.”79 In urban areas, wherever Jewish women worked or socialized with Christians, they converted at more or less the same rate as men. In Vienna, for example, in the period 1880–­1908, males age fourteen and above withdrew from the Gemeinde more commonly than females, but never overwhelmingly so. The male contribution to the total number of annual secessions in this period fluctuated within a narrow range—­from 52 to 60 percent. This pattern reflected the social and economic profile of the Viennese community, the majority of whose members were relatively recent lower-­class and lower-­middle-­ class migrants from the provinces of the Dual Monarchy (Galicia, Hungary, Bohemia, and Moravia, primarily). Jewish women in Vienna were more likely to work outside the home than Jewish women in German communities, which were more middle-­class and native-­born in composition, and thus faced assimilatory temptations and pressures outside the home. Most female converts in Vienna came from the lower classes and probably accepted baptism in order to marry Gentiles whom they met in the workplace.80 In their case, social propinquity, driven by economic need (rather than social ambition), nourished radical assimilation. In predominantly middle-­class Jewish communities, women were less likely to work and socialize outside the home (or the homes of family and close friends) and thus were much less likely than men to convert. In Germany, for example, bourgeois daughters were not expected to have careers and thus did not face the obstacles blocking the paths of their brothers. In well-­to-­do families, moreover, standards of respectability strictly regulated female sociability. Men spent much of their time outside the home, working with or among non-­Jews, whose favor or respect they wanted. Women, however, lived more socially confined lives—­at home, in the private sphere, among family and Jewish friends. In her study of the middle-­class Jewish family in Imperial Germany, Marion Kaplan emphasized the narrow space to which women were confined: “Ensconced in—­and restricted to—­the family, Jewish women had far less access to non-­Jewish environments, less opportunity to meet non-­Jews, and less occasion to experience anti-­Semitism. When they did come face to face with it, they could withdraw further into the family.” Not surprisingly, then, in the ten-­ year period 1873–­82, women were only 7 percent of those leaving the

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Berlin Gemeinde; in the period 1883–­1902, the figure jumped to 21 percent; and then to 25 percent in the period 1893–­1902.81 The increase in female secession in this period was the result of women from the lowest economic strata entering into paid employment outside Jewish homes and businesses. In late-­nineteenth-­century Germany, as in other Western countries, new employment opportumiddle-­ class women emerged—­ as teachers, office nities for lower-­ workers, and retail clerks. While young women from prosperous families remained at home until they married, their less prosperous sisters did not enjoy this luxury. To be sure, Jewish women from the lower and middle levels of the bourgeoisie were not strangers to the marketplace, but their work often had been unpaid and restricted to family businesses. Wives and daughters worked behind the scenes as bookkeepers and secretaries, served customers, and even took on managerial tasks when the men in the family lacked business acumen. Whatever the form of their labor, their contact with non-­Jews was limited and structured. When they took up work in retail shops and government and business offices in the late nineteenth century, they were subject to the same influences as men. The Centralverein monthly Im Deutschen Reich, for example, frequently published stories of Jewish women who received teaching appointments as soon as they were baptized.82 The most compelling evidence that the entry of women into paid employment triggered the increase in their share of conversions is the economic status of those who converted. In Berlin, between 1873 and 1906, 84 percent of female converts belonged to the four lowest income categories—­in comparison to 44 percent of male converts. Data on intermarriage (marriage without the prior conversion of either the Jewish or Christian partner—­legal in Germany since 1875) reveal a similar picture. In Berlin, in 1910, 63 percent of Jewish women marrying Jewish men did not work for a living, while the equivalent figure for Jewish women marrying non-­Jewish men was 31 percent. In Breslau, between 1874 and 1894, 73 percent of the fathers of Jewish women who married Jews were bourgeois (mainly merchants) while only 36 percent of the fathers of women who intermarried were bourgeois. In other words, high economic status better insulated women from intermarriage than low economic status, at least in this period. Instances of well-­dowered Jewish daughters marrying impecunious but titled Junker sons caught the public’s attention but were, in fact, much less common than the out-­marriages of Jewish clerks and typists. In turn-­of-­the-­century Hamburg, the typical intermarriage was that of the Jewish cook and the Christian policeman.83

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The practice of the dowry also contributed to the difference in intermarriage rates among women from higher and lower economic strata. In propertied circles, the dowry enabled parents to control their daughters’ choice of partner, even when marriages were no longer strictly arranged. Working women, however, were much more on their own. Without a dowry, they were at a disadvantage in finding a mate in Jewish circles and were compelled to look elsewhere. In 1911 Felix Theilhaber claimed in his controversial study of the viability of German Jewry Der Untergang der deutschen Juden that “poor Jewish women, who experience difficulty in finding desirable husbands in Jewish circles without a dowry, attach themselves willy-­nilly to a Christian.” In the burst of debate following publication of the book, four women wrote to the Israelitischen Familienblatt that “most young Jewish women do not have a 30 Mille dowry and no young Jewish man will marry for a sum less than this.” Quantitative evidence supports these claims. In Breslau, for example, between 1874 and 1884, 70 percent of Jewish women marrying within the fold lived with their parents—­in contrast to 25 percent of Jewish women who intermarried; similarly, while less than 9 percent of Jewish brides of Jewish husbands worked, the figure was 43 percent for Jewish brides of non-­Jewish husbands. This pattern was found elsewhere in pre–­World War I Europe. For example, the president of the Verona Jewish community noted in 1914 that at the bottom of the social scale, women—­far more than men—­married out. Having reached a certain age, without money, in fear of living alone the rest of their lives, and often burdened with a difficult family situation, they married whoever came along.84

NINE

In the very wealthiest Jewish families in Central Europe (in contrast to the merely prosperous), status, rather than career, concerns drove conversion. At this rarefied level, inherited wealth obviated the need for sons to pursue professional and government careers. Wealth, however, made those who possessed it acutely sensitive to the marginalization and stigmatization that flowed from their Jewishness. Materially, the Jewish banking and industrial elite lived to the manner born. Recall that the sumptuousness of Bleichröder’s Berlin mansion impressed even Disraeli, a habitué of the best houses in England. However, precisely because their wealth allowed them to live like lords (in fact, much better) but failed to gain them respect and acceptance, their

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Jewishness, however diminished, weighed ever more heavily on them. It was an unmovable obstacle, for example, to moving upward through marriage into an aristocratic family. Moreover, the closer they drew to the aristocratic world, the more they valued its ways and craved its approval. For them, conversion was the last step in their social apotheosis. It was intended to close a gap that was small behaviorally but wide perceptually. This explains why unconverted Jews whose material possessions and social conquests were already impressive took that final step. In the words of the Hamburg shipping magnate Albert Ballin, “They are so amply blessed with material goods, now they want honor, which they think to achieve through contact with the nobility.” 85 In the case of Imperial Germany, baptism, often in preparation for intermarriage, was the rule among second-­and third-­generation members of the banking and industrial elite, those who were born with silver spoons in their mouths. The wealthiest families—­for example, Wallichs, Schwabachs, Mertons, Fürstenbergs, Mendelssohns, withdrew Oppenheims, Warschauers, Simsons, and Friedländers—­ from the Jewish community in the nineteenth century. The one exception was the male line of the Rothschilds, whose wealth, social position, and notoriety would have been unaffected, in any case, if they had become Christians. In Hungary the Magyar nobility (about 5 percent of the population) was as self-­confident and self-­important as its Prussian counterpart, its status unchallenged in the absence of a powerful Magyar commercial and industrial class. The anthropologist Raphael Patai (1910–­96), who spent his childhood and youth in Budapest, wrote that the Magyar nobility were “the unchallenged lords of creation, a very special race of human beings, enveloped in a mystique of their own” that elicited widespread deference. The wealthiest Hungarian Jewish families yearned for acceptance, which was impossible, of course, without conversion. Between 1874 and 1918, most of the twenty-­six Jewish families who received noble titles (about fifty persons, since in Hungary, as in Austria, all the sons and daughters of a noble possessed a title) converted to Christianity and in time intermarried with the old Christian nobility.86 By contrast, in France and England the wealthiest Jewish families were much less likely to cut their ties to the community for status reasons, primarily because the Jewish Question was less acute there. While Jewishness was stigmatized in high and low culture, it was not an insurmountable obstacle to social mixing, barring wealthy Jews from drawing rooms and ballrooms. A Berlin dowager told the Paris

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journalist Jules Huret that London society had “defended itself” less well than Berlin society against the intrusion of Jews. By her count, a dozen Jewish families in Berlin had taken a position by virtue of their wealth whereas in London the number was about forty and in Paris even higher. In England, titles, honors, and offices were bestowed on unconverted Jews, which was rarely the case in Germany and Austria-­ Hungary. By the turn of the century, four Jews had been made peers and more than a dozen baronets or knights. For almost forty years, the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) included a high proportion of Jews in his circle, most prominently three Rothschilds, two Sassoons, and the German-­born Baron Maurice de Hirsch (1831–­96) and Sir Ernest Cassel (1852–­1921). In the West End, the journalist T.H.S. Escott reported in 1904, Jewish millionaires consorted with “the elect, who are at once patrician and smart.”87 With society relatively open to new wealth, especially financial wealth made in the City rather than industrial wealth made in the Midlands or the North, the richest Jews in London remained Jewish. Even heiresses who married out, a natural outcome of consorting with Christians, rarely converted. Some even remained attached to the Jewish community, most famously Hannah de Rothschild (1851–­90), wife of the future prime minister the Earl of Roseberry, and the two daughters of the Amsterdam-­born banker Henry Bischoffsheim (1829–­1908). The latter married into landed society while remaining members of the Reform congregation in London. Ellen (1857–­1933) married the Earl of Desart, an Irish peer, in 1881, and though she lived much of the year at the family seat in Kilkenny, she still devoted considerable time to Jewish charity work. Her sister Amelia (1858–­1947) married Sir Maurice FitzGerald, Bt., in 1882. She later became an active supporter of the Jewish National Fund, the land-­purchase and development agency of the World Zionist Organization.88 In France, conversion was uncommon at all levels of Jewish society. Moneyed Jews were more likely to embrace a socially sanctioned indifference, “an avowed transcendence of formal religious beliefs” (to use Michael Marrus’s phrase) and, even when intermarrying, rarely were baptized. In À la recherche du temps perdu, Marcel Proust (1871–­ 1922) brilliantly captures the place of wealthy Jews in Parisian society before, during, and after the Dreyfus Affair. Charles Swann, one of the novel’s two protagonists, is the son of a converted Jewish stockbroker. He is also, despite his descent, “one of the most distinguished members of the Jockey Club, a particular friend of the Comte de Paris and of the Prince of Wales, and one of the men most sought after in

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the aristocratic world of the Faubourg Saint-­Germain.” He frequents salons “on whose like no stockbroker or associate of stockbrokers had ever set eyes.” Swann’s aunt, the unconverted Lady Israels, also has “an admirable position socially.” Her husband’s Rothschild-­like family has for several generations managed the finances of the Orléans princes and she exercises sufficient influence to “ensure that no one whom she knew would be ‘at home’ to Odette,” the courtesan whom Swann marries. Still, in the eyes of the Guermantes, who occupy the highest rung in Proustian society, Sir Rufus Israels is “a foreign upstart, tolerated in society, on whose friendship nobody would ever have dreamed of priding himself—­far from it.” The point, nonetheless, is that the Israels are tolerated, at least before Dreyfus. The affair, of course, introduces a discordant note. “Everything Jewish, even the elegant lady herself [Lady Israels], went down.” Madame de Marsantes, a Guermantes by birth, decides that she will no longer know Lady Israels and blames herself for having been too trusting and too hospitable in the past: “I shall never go near anyone of that race again. While we closed our doors to old country cousins, people of our own flesh and blood, we threw them open to Jews. And now we see what thanks we get from them.” The exclusion of Jews from aristocratic circles, however, was temporary, both in Proust’s text and in the real world. Hippolyte Prague (1856–­1935), editor of the Archives Israélites, observed in 1902 that the “the cycle of mixed marriages” had resumed “even more forcefully” and that “flight among the Jews, which the danger had frozen,” had recommenced. In the novel, the readmittance of Jews to society is encapsulated in the marriage of Swann’s daughter Gilberte to a Guermantes and in the even more remarkable acceptance of Albert Bloch into society. As the narrator remarks, “He is at home now in drawing rooms into which twenty years ago he would never have been able to penetrate.”89

TEN

Driving—­or, better, making possible—­instrumental conversions in this period was the spread of a secular outlook among broad swaths of the Jewish population, especially in the West. For Jews who converted for strategic reasons, alienation from Jewish rites and rituals predated their decision to convert, often by a generation or more. They came from homes in which Jewish observance was absent or superficial, often a mere nod to the sentiments of parents and grandparents.

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When they converted, they ceased to be Jews who did not attend synagogue and became instead Christians who did not attend church. Their secularism, however, was not the ideological, self-­conscious secularism of the Bund or Labor Zionism in Eastern Europe but rather an unarticulated indifference to ritual and spiritual obligations that flowed from belief in a transcendent, commanding God. This kind of religious laxity was the rule in all Western Jewish communities at the start of the twentieth century (as well as in Westernized Jewish circles in Eastern Europe). Observance of the Sabbath, the festivals, and the dietary laws, along with regular synagogue attendance, was confined to a small minority, perhaps no more than 10 percent of the population. To be sure, Western Jews continued to circumcise their sons, celebrate the rite of bar mitzvah, and marry in synagogues, even appearing there perhaps on Yom Kippur, but not because they believed God commanded them to do so. Habit, custom, family sentiment, and, in smaller communities, concern for what others thought accounted for what remained of observance, rather than conviction. Even in the East European immigrant neighborhoods of Western Europe and North America, observance was neither universal nor consistently rigorous, contrary to myth. The immigrants were unable or disinclined to re­ create what Charles Liebman called the “milieu piety” of the Pale of Settlement in their new homes in the West. Indifference and ignorance were prerequisites rather than motives for strategic, instrumental conversions. In the absence of external pressure, unobservant Jews without spiritual interests remained Jews; they did not bother to become Christians. Nonetheless, some converts in Central and Eastern Europe justified their action in cultural terms. For these Jews, becoming Christian was a high-­minded act of union with European culture. Indifferent, if not hostile, to the practice of religion, they viewed Judaism as decayed and worn out while stressing the Christian foundations of European art, literature, and historical memories. The poet and dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–­1929) described the conversion of his grandfather, a Viennese silk manufacturer, as being “in accord with a perfectly natural trend, perhaps the only possible one at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to step out of an isolation that no longer made any sense, and to enter what was generally considered the cultivated sphere.” The Nobel laureate chemist Fritz Haber (1868–­1934), who converted in 1892, claimed that he and others were decisively influenced by the historian Theodor Mommsen’s response in 1880 to Heinrich Treitschke’s anti-­Jewish attacks. Mommsen was hostile to the new antisemitism but equally

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unsympathetic to the maintenance of Jewish cultural and social distinctiveness in the absence of religious faith. In his 1880 article, he exhorted Jews without Judaism to convert to Christianity, which he defined as a cultural community rather than a religion. For Haber and his friends, who thought of themselves as fully German and no longer felt any ties to the Jewish religion, conversion was an act of cultural harmonization. In Poland, Catholicism was so linked with national identity by the end of the nineteenth century that some converts represented baptism as a way of completing their Polishness. In their view, wrote the poet and literary critic Antoni Lange (1861–­1929) in 1911: “To be a Pole is tied so closely to Catholicism that the two things seem to be inseparable. If you are not a Catholic, you are not a Pole.”90 Converts who explained themselves in this way were no doubt sincere. Their sincerity, however, does not exclude the possibility that other motives were at work as well. It is human nature to cast one’s motives as idealistic and disinterested rather than opportunistic and self-­serving. For those who were sensitive to the accusation that converts were traitors (in Jewish eyes) and charlatans (in Gentile eyes), it was reassuring to view their change of religion as a high-­minded act that was in harmony with, if not required by, the march of history and the evolution of civilization. In any case, those who invoked “higher” motives could not have been insensitive to the concrete social and material benefits of becoming Christians, even if they failed to cite them. The decision to convert, like other noteworthy life choices, was overdetermined, the outcome of acknowledged and unacknowledged desires. The case of Fritz Haber well illustrates the necessity of taking claims about disinterested motives with a grain of salt. Haber’s account of what motivated him comes from a conversation with a close friend in 1926—­thirty-­four years after the event. Moreover, the Mommsen essay, to which he attributed such importance, appeared when he was only twelve! Whatever the role of the essay, mundane reasons were equally important, even if he did not acknowledge them. In the years before his conversion, his Jewishness twice blocked his way into German society: In 1888, his application for election to an officer’s commission in a field artillery regiment was rejected, as was his application in 1891 to join a leading physical chemistry laboratory in Leipzig. Conversion also functioned in his case as a way to break once and for all with his father, with whom he had clashed repeatedly. He chose to convert only after he had fled his father and the family business and had resolved to pursue an academic career.91 In this sense, Haber’s was very much a pragmatic conversion.

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The decision of substantial numbers of converts in Poland, Russia, and Austria to become Protestants, rather than members of the Roman Catholic or Russian Orthodox Churches, also casts doubt on the cultural identification argument. In nineteenth-­century Warsaw, for example, more Jews converted to Calvinism (39 percent) and Lutheranism (22 percent) than to Roman Catholicism (39 percent). Even more surprisingly, relative to the previous decades, in the last two decades of the century the percentage of those who became Roman Catholics fell—­16 percent in the 1880s and 24 percent in the 1890s—­ at a time when the identification between Catholicism and Polishness was becoming firmer than it had ever been. Even converts from the highest socioeconomic strata, those in theory most eager to become exemplary Poles, chose Protestantism over Catholicism. The Warsaw agent of the LSPCJ alone baptized five hundred Jews between 1877 and 1909. In Vienna, while most Jews who left Judaism embraced Catholicism, very substantial numbers chose to identify with one or another Christian minority. In 1903 and 1904, for example, 559 Jews were baptized in the Roman Catholic Church while 162 joined other Christian groups and 257 declared themselves konfessionslos. In Russia, Protestant clergymen had a field day when Jews turned to baptism to escape professional and educational quotas from the 1880s on. The Jewish World (London) reported in 1911 that it was “well known” in Russia that “any Jew who does not feel equal to the task of professing Christianity by regular baptism obtains the necessary certificate of having been duly baptised from some obliging Protestant clergyman or missionary”. It went on to tell of a Protestant minister who, on arriving in Irkutsk, Siberia, was “so much troubled by clamouring Jewish youths that he admitted them all together into the Protestant Church without any formalities whatever.” When news of this spread, “he was invited to a number of other towns in order to transact the same profitable business.” A story told in Moscow in the 1890s specifically associated converted Jews with Protestantism. At the Lutheran Church there, the story went, all the officers, beadles, and ushers were named Blumenthal, Rosenberg, Morgenstern, and the like. One Sunday a Russian wag strolled in with his hat on. “The ‘baptised’ dignataries, scandalised, hurried toward him with indignant gestures. ‘Oh, I beg pardon,’ he said, looking blandly from one Semitic face to another, ‘I thought I was in a synagogue.’ ”92 The willingness of Jews to become Protestants in non-­Protestant lands suggests that, at least for those who made this choice, the desire to merge fully with the majority was not paramount. Their primary

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concern, rather, was to escape the disadvantages of being Jewish. Protestantism was also attractive precisely because it was not hegemonic in the Russian and Austro-­Hungarian Empires and thus not associated with oppression and reaction. An English official in Warsaw who asked converts why they were not baptized in the Orthodox faith was commonly told, “It is against my principles.” Protestant clergymen also demanded less of converts than Catholic and Orthodox priests. When a Warsaw Jew needed a baptismal certificate on short notice in order to obtain a government contract or post, he went to a Protestant minister, not a Catholic priest, since the latter required several weeks of preparation. Vladimir Medem remembered that most Jews in Minsk who converted, including his own family, became Lutherans because it involved fewer ceremonials and fewer external difficulties.93 In Vienna, when Jewish civil servants in prestigious ministries were promoted to the rank of Hofrat, they were either baptized as Catholics without publicity, before daybreak, by one of the imperial chaplains, or quietly visited in their homes by the pastor of the main Lutheran church, with his son, also a pastor, and his wife as the sole discreet witnesses. During World War I, the Viennese novelist Siegfried Trebitsch (1869–­1956) was summoned by his colonel, who, having discovered that the once-­Jewish Trebitsch was registered as konfessionslos, told him that he had fourteen days to find a religion—­any religion—­except Judaism. It was impossible to become a Catholic in that time, so Trebitsch became a Protestant.94 Prosperous Jews in St. Petersburg seeking a quick, uncomplicated conversion often traveled to Finland, then part of the Russian Empire, where German Lutheran parishes, from at least the 1870s, were prepared to welcome them. In his memoirs, the Hebrew journalist Ben-­Zion Katz (1875–­1958) wrote of a minister in Finland who sold Jews false Protestant documents to present to Russian officials. This allowed them to tell other Jews that they had not really converted because they had never been baptized. In fact, more than one Protestant clergyman in Finland trafficked in quick conversions in the years before World War I. One enterprising Lutheran priest in Helsinki issued conversion certificates, for a fee, to 755 Russian Jews in the three years 1911–­13. The number of conversions attracted the attention of both czarist officials in St. Petersburg and church authorities in Helsinki, who were deservedly suspicious of his motives. Receiving a fee was forbidden, as was performing the ritual at home with only his wife and daughter as witnesses. In a suburb of Vyborg, another Lutheran pastor converted fifty Russian Jews between the end of August

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1909 and the end of September 1910, while a Methodist clergyman in Vyborg converted 322 Jews between September 1910 and November 1913—­among them, the poet Osip Mandelstam (1891–­1937 or 1938), who needed a baptismal certificate to enter the University of St. Petersburg in 1911, for with his poor marks at school, Mandelstam would not have otherwise been admitted.95

ELEVEN

On the eve of the First World War, conversion was a well-­established Jewish strategy for navigating intolerance and exclusion. Formal emancipation in the West (it did not come to the East until 1917) never satisfied the hopes that Jews had pinned on it. It was more successful in societies that celebrated rather than condemned liberal individualism, social mobility, and economic innovation, welcoming rather than resisting modernity. In the illiberal societies of Central Europe, conservative officials and bureaucrats systematically subverted the law, while farther eastward the law itself embittered Jewish lives. In short, it was easier to be a Jew in London and Paris than it was in Berlin and Vienna, let alone in Warsaw and St. Petersburg—­which is why so few Jews in London and Paris became Christians. But everywhere, even in the most tolerant states, old attitudes about Jews failed to keep pace with laws mandating equality. The gap between legal status and social practice, yawning in some places and narrow in others, was particularly vexing to Jews who aspired to more than the acquisition of wealth, which formal emancipation made possible in any case. Those who yearned for honor and respect from non-­Jews of similar economic rank were likely to be disappointed. While not all of those who were disappointed or frustrated chose to become Christians, unprecedented numbers, especially among those who were otherwise indifferent to religion, did make that choice. As we will see in the following chapters, it was only in the second half of the twentieth century that conversion ceased to be a strategy for Jews who wanted to make their mark outside the tribal fold.

4 Defection and Drift Early-­and Mid-­Twentieth Century Mixed marriages constitute the final and decisive step in the process of assimilation of Jews to their non-­Jewish environment. So long as there exists between the Jews and the rest of the population commercium but not connubium, the Jews can remain a separate community. As soon as inter-­marriage on a large scale becomes customary, the last barrier that divides the Jews from their neighbours has fallen, and therewith their fate as a community is ultimately sealed. —Arthur Ruppin, 19401

ONE

The First World War, the revolutions it sparked, and the new states it ushered into being reshaped the status of European Jewry as profoundly as the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars a century before. In the aftermath of war and revolution, the fears and hopes that regulated assimilatory behavior, that made Jews more or less eager to remain Jewish, intensified. Initially, at the start of the war, acculturated Jews in Western and Central Europe were as swept up in the patriotic frenzy of the hour as their fellow citizens. Ignorant of the horrors ahead and anticipating a short war, fathers and sons eagerly took up arms, seeing in military service the opportunity to demonstrate their patriotism, courage, heroism, masculinity, and, above all, profound sense of identification with the countries of their birth. French Jews enthusiastically embraced the spirit of the union sacrée, the sacred union of patriotism, harmony, and sacrifice among all classes, ranks, and religions. In Vienna, Sigmund Freud yielded to the patriotic frenzy, declaring that

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for the first time in thirty years he felt himself to be Austrian: “All my libido is given to Austria-­Hungary.”2 But as the war dragged on, and the death toll mounted, old hatreds reasserted themselves, replacing the warm feelings of national solidarity, inclusion, and purpose that earlier intoxicated so many Jews. At the war’s end, the new states that the victorious powers carved out of the old empires were seedbeds of ethnic intolerance. Political turmoil and economic distress provided fertile ground for the flourishing of authoritarianism, nationalism, revanchism, and antisemitism. In the end, it was no easier to be a Jew in Europe in the twenties and thirties than it had been at the turn of the century, with the one exception of the Soviet Union, where Jewishness briefly ceased to be an obstacle to integration and success. Even in Great Britain and the United States, the atmosphere worsened, throwing obstacles in the path of the upwardly mobile children of the East European immigrants.

TWO

The emergence of new states in East Central and Eastern Europe as a result of the breakup of the Russian and Austro-­Hungarian Empires was a mixed blessing for their Jewish citizens. The newly created Soviet Union swept away the system of exclusions and restrictions—­above all, confinement to the Pale of Settlement—­that had blighted Jewish life for over a century. While the Bolsheviks actively persecuted the practice and study of Judaism and outlawed independent cultural and political activity, including Zionism and Bundism, they placed no obstacles in the way of Jews who accepted the rules and ethos of the new order or, at a minimum, raised no objection to them. The result was a massive transformation of the cultural and economic profile of Russia’s Jews. Ambitious young Jews fled what had been the Pale of Settlement for new opportunities in the Russian heartland. The state and the party opened wide their ranks and the children of cobblers and stall keepers transformed themselves into scientists, engineers, managers, journalists, apparatchiks, army officers, and security police. The mobility of Soviet Jews in the interwar years, before the Great Terror, was unprecedented; its only rival in modern Jewish history was the equally far-­reaching transformation of North American Jewry that occurred at the same time. In the Soviet case, for the first time in European history, conversion to Christianity was irrelevant to Jewish integration and success. Everywhere in Europe, from the start of the modern period, the Christian

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character of the societies in which Jews hoped to find acceptance influenced their efforts, even when adherence to Christianity was not a formal requirement for inclusion. Elite institutions and elite social circles were Christian by virtue of their personnel and, in some cases, their ideological orientation (with only a few exceptions). Centuries of Christian polemic against Jews hovered over and determined the terms of their acceptance into European society, even after Christian belief started to weaken. In one revolutionary moment, the establishment of the Soviet Union made the historical and conceptual dichotomy between Jew and Christian formally irrelevant. To be sure, there was an entry ticket to Soviet society whose price Jews were required to pay. They had to forswear the practice and beliefs of their ancestral religion and accept the tenets of Communism. But, for increasingly secular Jews, this was not an onerous price, and many eagerly and willingly paid it. Moreover, this kind of conversion was not emotionally charged in the way conversion to Christianity was. Becoming a Soviet man or woman, unlike becoming a Christian, was not seen as an act of betrayal or unfaithfulness, of seeking refuge in the enemy camp. For many young Jews, the opposite was true. The Soviets were their liberators, having protected them from counterrevolutionary violence and swept away the discriminatory measures of czarist autocracy. Moreover, there was no tension between Soviet citizenship and Jewish ethnicity, at least before the late 1930s. Jewish nationality was a legally recognized collective identity. Even after the Soviet Union became overtly hostile to Jewish integration and secular Jewish culture, conversion to Christianity remained irrelevant, for obvious reasons. In East Central Europe, the fate of the Jews in the interwar years was less benign. The triumph of chauvinist nationalism and the weakness of notions of democracy and liberalism pushed the successor states, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, in an increasingly exclusionary direction. While the new states had signed treaties guaranteeing equal treatment and individual and collective rights for ethnic minorities as part of the peace settlements of 1919–­20, they did so under duress, coerced by the victorious allies, and quickly ignored or revoked the obligations to which they had agreed. In short, Western-­style emancipation never took root. Few Hungarians, Poles, Lithuanians, or Rumanians saw Jews (even modern Jews) as fellow citizens, as members of the same organic community. Long before the Nazis took control of the German state in 1933, the states of East Central Europe had revoked (if they had ever implemented) the promise of legal equality embedded in the Minority Treaties. In some cases, especially where

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native fascist groups actively challenged the moderate right, violence against Jews accompanied the revocation of legal rights. The result was that Jewish integration into state and society became impossible, and, as in the past, Jews for whom Judaism was no longer important turned to the age-­old (but now increasingly ineffective) strategy of baptism. The most dramatic examples of Jews turning to conversion to escape persecution took place in Hungary. Before the war, strategic conversions were not unusual, especially in Budapest. Intellectuals and professionals seeking to advance their careers, and ennobled bankers and industrialists seeking admission to the Magyar nation frequently chose to become Christians. The dissolution of the Hapsburg Empire at the end of the war and the establishment of a moderate left-­wing government and then, in 1919, a revolutionary Soviet state for four and a half months set the stage for a tidal wave of baptisms, unprecedented in scope since those that occurred in late medieval Iberia. The short-­ lived Communist government, headed by Béla Kun (1886–­1939), was viewed by much of the Hungarian public as “Jewish.” Twenty of the twenty-­six ministers and vice ministers, including Kun himself, were of Jewish origin, which is not surprising given the overrepresentation of intellectuals in Hungarian Marxism and “the conspicuous presence of precocious and brilliant children of the Jewish bourgeoisie” in prewar student radicalism and socialism.3 The counterrevolution that overthrew the Kun government in late summer 1919 unleashed a wave of violence against Jews that lasted until spring 1921. The officers of Miklós Horthy’s anti-­communist National Army organized pogroms in towns and the countryside that left scores of Jews dead. When the National Army entered Budapest, anti-­Jewish violence spread to the capital as well. The antisemitic Union of Awakening Hungarians assaulted Jews in the city night after night—­in streets, cafés, clubs, and universities. The violence shocked Magyarized Jews, who were accustomed to the prosperity and security of the Habsburg years. While not strangers to antisemitism, they were not prepared for the brutality of the White Terror. Communal leaders responded by intensifying their avowals of Magyar loyalty—­for example, by denouncing the peace treaty that stripped the country of 70 percent of its former territory and 60 percent of its former population. They also sought, unsuccessfully, to revive their prewar alliance with the ruling elite, now no longer inclined to protect them. Meanwhile, thousands of Jews turned to the age-­old remedy of baptism. In 1919, 7,146 conversions were recorded; in 1920, 1,925; and in 1921, 821. Only in 1922 did the

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number—­499—­fall to prewar levels, but since the number of Jews living in Hungary after the Trianon Treaty of 1920 was half of what it had been before the war, the relative number of converts remained high. In all likelihood, the number of converts in this period was even higher than these figures indicate, since in the chaotic conditions of the counterrevolution not all conversions were properly carried out and recorded. (The law required a potential convert to make an official declaration of his or her intention in the community office in the presence of two witnesses and then to return in two to four weeks to obtain official authorization of withdrawal. Without this document, he or she could not be baptized.) The Protestant churches (Lutheran, Calvinist, and Unitarian) were particularly willing to accommodate converts without proper documentation and expedite their baptism. In the period 1919–­21, there may have been half as many irregular, unregistered conversions as there were properly recorded ones.4 In 1920, before the violence even abated, the parliament passed legislation limiting the admission of Jews to institutions of higher learning, thus legally reversing the course of emancipation. The numerus clausus law and, more generally, the escalation in political antisemitism in the 1920s and 1930s further unsettled Jewish confidence in a Jewish future in Hungary. Jews without faith, either in Judaism or radical political solutions like Communism or Zionism, continued to seek security in conversion. (Another 28,500 Jews demonstrated their loss of confidence by leaving the country in the 1920s.)5 Those who converted were not so much aiming to gain social acceptance as trying to circumvent the law of 1920 or more generally to insure themselves against future, not yet known disasters. The Hungarian-­born Oxford historian of Second Temple Judaism Geza Vermes (1924–­2013) recalled that his unobservant journalist father, who chose baptism for himself, his wife, and only child in 1931 in order to give Geza a better chance in life, continued to move in Jewish circles after becoming a Roman Catholic and carried on as before. While mother and son took their new faith seriously—­Geza Vermes entered a Roman Catholic seminary in 1942 and was ordained a priest after the war—­his father was “no more interested in Christianity than he was in Judaism” and only attended church when his wife or son insisted.6 Because the legal status of Hungarian Jewry stabilized after 1920, there was no dramatic change in the pace of conversion in the 1920s and early 1930s. Between 1922 and 1932, about four hundred Jews converted each year. Then, in 1932, the aristocratic right-­wing elite yielded power to the radical, pro-­German, racist right. While the

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latter did not introduce anti-­Jewish measures immediately—­Gyula Gömbös, prime minister from 1932 to 1936, cultivated the Jewish industrial and financial elite, despite his racial antisemitism and admiration for Hitler—­there was a sense among Hungarian Jews that the future looked bleak. In Budapest, the number of conversions began to rise: 607 in 1933; 732 in 1934; 890 in 1935; 1,141 in 1936; and 1,058 in 1937.7 In 1938 the government launched a major anti-­Jewish campaign, which continued unabated until the end of the war. New legislation reduced the number of Jews in commerce, industry, finance, entertainment, journalism, and the professions, all areas in which Hungarian Jews were “disproportionately” active. While the laws defined some converts and the children of some converts as Jews, the implications of this racial definition did not halt the flow of Jews to the baptismal font. In Hungary as a whole, over 14,000 Jews converted in 1938 and 1939. In Budapest, where most Hungarian Jews lived, there was a surge of conversions in 1938—­6,127—­and a more modest number in 1939—­3,558. By 1941, over 17 percent of Budapest’s Jews (as defined by law) belonged to Christian denominations. The number of converts was so great and the influence of some of them so weighty that the Catholic episcopate created an association for their legal and social protection—­the Holy Cross Society—­in October 1938. It battled officials over enforcement of the racial laws, campaigned against further legislation, and, later, tried to help converts who were drafted into labor battalions. In the first four years of the war, when Hungary was allied to but not occupied by Germany, the pace slowed—­to 1,866 in 1940; 1,607 in 1941; 2,052 in 1942; and 1,601 in 1943. Among those in 1943 was the great poet Miklós Radnóti (1909–­1944), who, along with his wife, converted to Catholicism in May, while he was on leave from the labor battalion in which he had served since 1940. Depressed, despondent, exhausted, and brutalized, Radnóti was at the end of his rope when he converted. When Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944 and introduced ghettoization and deportation, the number of conversions again skyrocketed—­to at least 5,500 in Budapest alone that year—­as word spread that “your life could be saved if you converted to Christianity.”8 In retrospect, baptism was an inapt response to the blows that struck Hungary’s Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. The legislation of 1938 that restricted Jewish participation in economic and cultural life defined Jewishness in racial terms, even if inconsistently. (Some converts—­for example, Olympic medalists and decorated veterans—­and children of

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converts were exempt.) When the Germans occupied the country, of course, they employed a rigorously consistent racial definition, allowing no exceptions. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935, moreover, unambiguously stated that Nazism made no distinction between baptized and unbaptized Jews. More broadly, it could be argued that essentialist antisemitism, with its repudiation of the transformative power of baptism, dominated thinking about Jews everywhere in Europe from at least the turn of the century. If so, why did Hungarian Jews continue to seek protection in baptism when evidence of its inefficacy was everywhere? The answer, surely, is that they were desperate. What other options were there? Baptism was a choice hallowed by time. For centuries, the only alternative to being a Jew was being a Christian. In choosing to change their religion when their backs were to the wall, Hungarian Jews were following a well-­worn path. Old habits die hard. In addition, in the chaos of the war years, when accurate information was scarce, there was a widespread rumor that the Hungarian army did not send converts drafted for labor service to the front line in Ukraine but kept them within the country, where their chances of survival were higher.9 Hungarian Jews were not alone in clinging to the outworn remedy of conversion in the face of Nazism. In the Third Reich, where racial doctrine was a pillar of Nazi rule, Jews continued to convert after Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933. While in 1932, only 241 German Jews joined the Evangelical Church, in 1933, 993 did—­a fourfold increase. Even the Berlin Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews, long unsuccessful in its missionizing, converted record numbers of Jews. In 1932, it made only 5 converts, but with Hitler in power, the numbers rose—­to 29 in 1933, 92 in 1934, and 50 in 1935. During the first four months alone of 1936, it baptized 46 Jews. The decision to convert or withdraw from the Berlin Gemeinde was acutely sensitive to changes in the intensity of persecution. A month-­by-­month breakdown of withdrawals in 1933 shows that 53 percent occurred in three months—­March, April, and May—­when Jews first felt the full brunt of Nazi persecution (the boycott of Jewish businesses and the removal of Jews from the civil service, the legal profession, and cultural life). Similarly, in 1938, 66 percent of the withdrawals occurred in only two months—­November and December—­in the immediate wake of Kristallnacht. (Some percentage of those withdrawing from Judaism did so in the realistic hope that a baptismal certificate would increase their chances of obtaining a visa and finding refuge abroad.)10 When Germany invaded and annexed Austria in March 1938, there

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too Jews hurried to leave the Jewish community, desperately seeking to protect themselves. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the number of Jews leaving the Gemeinde in Vienna fluctuated between 500 and 1,500 per annum and in the years immediately before the Anschluss the number was about 600 per annum. Then, in 1938, the number of withdrawals shot to 4,800—­52 percent of which took place in three months—­March, April, and May. Another 2,500 Jews withdrew between 1939 and 1944. The upper-­middle-­class parents of Heinrich Böhm, who hoped to find refuge in England (they had not yet received visas), took the family to be baptized at the Anglican church in Vienna, reasoning that it would help them “feel comfortable” there. Nine-­year-­old Heinrich, later a professor of physics at Wayne State University, recalled asking his mother afterward whether he could now join the Hitler Youth.11 In Fascist Italy, the introduction of anti-­Jewish legislation, beginning in September 1938, also sparked a surge in withdrawals from the Jewish community. In the period 1921–­30, about 370 persons formally withdrew from the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, which enrolled about 44,000 Jews at the time; in the period 1931–­37, about 800 to 900 persons withdrew. Then, in 1938 and 1939, 3,910 persons withdrew, while another 5,000 emigrated. Between 1938 and 1941, it is estimated that 4,500 to 5,400 Jews formally disassociated themselves from the Jewish communities—­more than 10 percent of Italian Jewry. While the introduction of Jewish laws in 1938 sparked the exodus, long-­term assimilatory trends prepared the way. Already at the end of the nineteenth century, Jewish practice was in decline and Jewish social integration on the rise. This manifested itself in the 1920s and 1930s in startlingly high rates of intermarriage. In the 1930s, before the introduction of antisemitic laws in the fall of 1938, one Jew out of three chose a spouse of a different religion. While the intermarriage rate, calculated in this way, never rose above 10 percent in Rome, it was already 42 percent in Trieste in the mid-­1920s.12 In Romania, which lacked a tradition of strategic conversions—­ unlike Germany, Hungary, and Austria—­the deterioration of Jewish status in the 1930s and then active persecution during the war style, also pushed Jews, especially in Bucharest, with its Western-­ Romanian-­speaking community, to seek protection in the arms of the Christian churches. As in Hungary, the struggle between the old-­ school right-­wing establishment and the radical, fascist right (the Iron Guard, most prominently) was a disaster for Jews. In 1935, while the old-­school right was still in power, many Jews lost their jobs as

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employers responded to pressure to reduce the number of “minority personnel.” The following year Jewish-­owned newspapers in Bucharest were closed and virtually all Jewish lawyers eliminated from the Bucharest bar. In 1938, further measures reduced the Jewish presence in all sectors of the economy, and, in 1939, more than 270,000 Jews were stripped of their citizenship. Jewish status continued to deteriorate and violence to mount until 1944, when the dictator Marshall Ion Antonescu, once a loyal ally of Hitler, switched sides. The wave of conversions, most of them in Bucharest, began in 1936, when antisemitic agitation exploded. In early 1937 two hundred Bucharest Jews submitted requests for baptism to the Catholic and Evangelical Churches. Between 1936 and 1939, 676 Romanian Jews were baptized—­257 in Bucharest, 187 in other cities in prewar Romania, 129 in Bukovina and Transylvania, 34 in Bessarabia, and 69 living abroad. In Cernăuţi (Czernowitz), about 1,500 Jews converted in 1940 to avoid expulsion to Transnistria, which was under German control. In March 1941, Antonescu prohibited Jews from converting and threatened those who defied the ban with deportation, but the conversion trend continued, nonetheless, peaking in 1942. Catholic and evangelical clergymen, defying the ban, accelerated the process, leading the Romanian government to protest to the Vatican and demand that that it stop accepting Jews until the end of the war. In April and May 1942, three government ministries again banned all conversions, but as before, they continued. In his diary, the Romanian novelist and dramatist Mihail Sebastian (né Iosif Hechter) (1907–­45) left a record of the desperation among Jewish intellectuals and professionals in Bucharest that inspired the conversion trend. Following Antonescu’s replacement of the Bucharest kehillah with a Judenrat-­like organization in December 1941, Sebastian wrote that he repeatedly heard the refrain: “Go over to Catholicism! Convert as quickly as you can! The Pope will defend you! He’s the only one who can still save you.” On 4 April 1942, he reported a rumor that a Jewish statute was being prepared and that baptized Jews would be protected from deportation. He then noted that the theater where he had spent the evening watching a play in rehearsal was filled with Jews, all but two or three of whom were Catholics, Protestants, or Orthodox Christians. For him, it was “an absurd, grotesque comedy.”13 (Never occupied by Germany, Romania retained control of the persecution of its Jews until the end of the war and thus, thanks to the old-­fashioned, unsystematic antisemitism of Antonescu, baptism often worked to shield Jews from deportation—­unlike elsewhere.)

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In countries that fell quickly to the advancing German army—­ France and Poland, for example—­hundreds of desperate Jews flocked to become Christians. From 1939 to 1945, the Paris house of Notre Dame de Sion recorded 981 baptisms. Whereas the average in the 1930s was about ten baptisms annually, the number for 1939 alone was 116. Another 162 baptisms took place in the order’s other houses during the war years. When the Vichy regime introduced anti-­Jewish laws in 1941 and 1942, the number of converts at Notre Dame de Sion’s Paris house swelled—­to 297 and 235, respectively. The Russian-­ born journalist and art critic Jacques Biélinky (1881–­1945) noted in his diary on 27 May 1941, “People are talking about numerous conversions among the Jews of Paris,” adding that the entire family of the lawyer, feminist, and Zionist activist Yvonne Netter (1889–­1985) had been “suddenly won over by the grace of the Church and in an ‘idealistic’ and ‘disinterested’ way of course.” (She was received into the church on Christmas eve 1940).14 Other prominent French Jewish women who converted at this time included the Radical-­party politician Suzanne Crémieux (1895–­1976), who became a Catholic in October 1940; the lawyer and women’s rights activist Marcelle Kraemer-­ Bach (1896–­1990), who was baptized by the Abbé Alterman (widely known for his conversions of Jewish artists and intellectuals) following the death of her only son in the battle of the Ardennes; the journalist and critic Nathalie Huttner (1909–­91), who converted after war was declared and took the less foreign-­sounding name Dominique Arban; and the Russian-­born novelist Irène Némirovsky (1903–­42), who, along with her Russian-­born husband and two daughters, was baptized in February 1939, having petitioned fruitlessly for French citizenship since 1935.15 There were, moreover, thousands of Jewish children whose parents, like those of the historian Saul Friedländer (b. 1932), placed them in convents and schools for protection, knowing that baptism was the price they were paying to save their lives. In occupied Warsaw, even after the establishment of the ghetto in late 1940, there were Jews who continued to believe that baptism would protect them from the worst. The Hebrew diarist Chaim Kap­ lan (1880–­1942 or 1943) wrote on 7 March 1941, before the deportations to Treblinka began, “Since the time of the defeat [September 1939] there have been many apostates among the Jews.” He assumed, probably correctly, that they came from the most polonized circles, calling them “people educated in a foreign [non-­Jewish] culture,” and that they saw no reason “to risk their lives for something that is strange to them.” He also claimed that even though they knew full well that

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“race would be a handicap for them” in the immediate future, they believed that eventually their origins would be forgotten. Earlier, in March 1940, the historian Emanuel Ringelblum (1900–­44) estimated that more than two hundred conversions had taken place in Warsaw since November of the previous year, mentioning, in particular, the baptism of the actor and director Mark Arnshteyn (ca. 1879–­1943). Later, in October 1941, Ringelblum reported “a great many changes of faith,” including more than fifty on Hoshana Rabbah, the seventh day of the festival of Sukkot. The distinguished serologist Ludwik Hirszfeld (1884–­1954), who converted before the war, reported in his autobiography, written in hiding after he had escaped from the ghetto, that there were “many people who were baptized in the quarter—­old and young, sometimes whole families,” including students of his.16 A report from Ringelblum’s Oneg Shabbat archive, by the historian Marian Malowist (d. 1988), profiled a Warsaw lawyer and his wife who converted in mid-­1940 (that is, before the creation of the ghetto). The lawyer was the son of prominent Judaica scholar who raised his children in a religious home while also giving them a good secular education. As an adult, the lawyer had almost no contact with Jewish communal life. His clients were mostly Poles; his acquaintances and friends mostly Poles and former Jews. His wife, who came from Lodz, was raised in a home in which “a warm Jewish spirit and a sentiment for Jewish aspirations had prevailed” and had received a Hebrew education, but her Jewish concerns “had faded long ago.” Malowist, who lived in the same building as the couple, noticed that in mid-­1940 she began talking about and justifying Jews who converted, maintaining “with ridiculous assurance” that “in those countries where the attitude to Jews was most tolerant conversions were most frequent.” By this time, the lawyer was no longer able to practice law, having been struck from the roster of lawyers for being a Jew. “He had been deluding himself in his hopes that conversion [he was not yet baptized] would enable him to stay on the roster; and his horror and panic were boundless when he learned that lawyers baptized tens of years ago had been struck as well.” Nevertheless, hoping against hope, he went to be baptized.17 In retrospect, of course, conversion was a futile response. However, at the time, this was not immediately clear. When the ghetto was established, some prominent converts remained outside it, on the Aryan side, in the hope that they were exempt from the decree. (A few months later, in February 1941, they were rounded up and thrown into the ghetto.) Moreover, in the ghetto itself, in the absence of information

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about German intentions, rumors circulated wildly—­among them rumors that converts would be allowed to leave the ghetto or that they would be settled in a ghetto of their own in Zoliborz, a leafy northern district of Warsaw, notable for its modernist architecture. There was also an immediate material advantage to embracing Christianity. The Catholic charity Caritas aided the five thousand or so Christians in the ghetto, at least initially. It ran its own soup kitchens, where, according to one memoirist, “the meals were better and cheaper than those in other kitchens in the ghetto.” A few privileged converts, like Hirszfeld, lived in apartments in a large church-­owned building, an oasis of relative calm, which housed the rectory and hall of All Saints Church, one of two Catholic parishes that served the ghetto’s converts. Baptism was not without its short-­term rewards, even if, in the end, it was a futile strategy for survival. As one convert told Adam Czerniaków, head of the Judenrat, his baptism was “only temporary; that is, just like a comfortable seat in a streetcar.”18

THREE

Conversions in Warsaw, Budapest, Bucharest, Vienna, and Paris during the Nazi era were not conventional conversions of convenience. They were acts of desperation. That said, it would be wrong to view them in isolation, as unique events, unconnected to what came before. For it was historical precedent that inspired and conditioned the decision to convert, even when the logic of Nazi racial doctrine undermined baptism’s utility. After all, baptism had been a conventional response to persecution and violence over the centuries and, in more recent times, a way of opening doors to professional and social advancement and even occasionally relieving the emotional hardship of belonging to a stigmatized group. That small numbers of Polish Jews and large numbers of Hungarian Jews converted in the face of new forms of terror is a testimony to the tenacity of historical memory, in which Jewish difference—­and escape from that difference—­was cast in religious rather than racial terms. During more stable stretches in the interwar years, Jews in Central and East Central Europe continued to convert in ways similar to those before World War I. While the establishment of republican governments in Germany and Austria eased Jewish access to the civil service, the judiciary, the academy, and the like, most other forms of exclusion and denigration remained as noxious as before the war. For German

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and Austrian Jews whose self-­esteem was linked to what non-­Jews thought about Jews and whose knowledge and experience of Jewish tradition was minimal, secession and conversion remained options. In Vienna, the average annual number of persons seceding, relative to the size of the community, was greater in the 1920s than it was at the turn of the century and only a little lower in the first half of the 1930s. Thus, in the period 1901–­05, the average annual conversion rate was 3.6 per 1,000 Jews; in 1921–­24, it was 4.9 per 1,000; in 1927–­30, 4.2 per 1,000; and in 1931–­35, 3.1 per 1,000.19 In Berlin, the secession rate also rose in the pre-­Nazi years. In 1919, the rate skyrocketed—­to more than 40 per 10,000 community members. By comparison, the annual rate in the first decade of the century never rose above 20 per 10,000. The sudden rise that year was undoubtedly a response to postwar unrest and the explosion of antisemitism fueled by defeat and revolution, including the abortive Spartacist revolution of January and the subsequent assassination of leading revolutionaries of Jewish origin (Rosa Luxemburg, Kurt Eisner, Gustav Landauer, and Eugen Leviné). With the return of “normalcy” in the 1920s, the rate fell but never returned to prewar levels, which is not surprising, given the climate of the time. In many cases parents baptized their children when they were young “to make life easier” for them later. This was less a tactic to escape the company of Jews and more a vote of no confidence in the future of Jews in Germany.20 It is probably no coincidence that German Jews committed suicide, the ultimate expression of hopelessness, in record numbers in the Weimar period. In Prussia, there were 4.6 suicides per 100,000 Jews in the years 1849–­55, a rate lower than that of Protestants and Catholics. By 1925, the Jewish rate, which had mounted steadily from the mid-­ nineteenth century, had soared to 53.2 per 100,000, almost double that of Protestants (27.9) and quadruple that of Catholics (13.5). In Berlin in 1925, it was even higher: 67.8 per 100,000.21 In Poland, newly independent and fiercely chauvinistic, baptism remained a de facto requirement for a public career and social acceptance. The occupational and cultural profile of the converts in the Warsaw Ghetto, especially those who lived in Sienna Street and formed the convert community of All Saints’ Church in Gryzbowska Steet, testifies to this. Ringelblum noted the presence in the ghetto of “many” physicians who held leading positions before the war in the medical services. The residents in the parish hall included lawyers, physicians (in addition to Hirszfeld), and engineers. Antoni Czarnecki, a young priest who served in the ghetto until July 1942, remembered

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that the great majority of his parishioners were members of the prewar intelligentsia—­scientists, doctors, lawyers, and engineers. The social composition of the other ghetto parish, the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, was more mixed, however, a reminder that not only the educated or the well-­to-­do in Warsaw became Christians.22 For example, Jews who were baptized by Protestant missionaries in interwar Warsaw were from humble, undistinguished backgrounds, if the autobiographical statements that survive in the mission’s archives are representative.23 Overall, though, converts of the interwar years were disproportionately Polish speaking, well educated, and middle-­ to upper-­middle-­class. Even in industry, finance, and commerce, there was pressure on large, Jewish-­owned enterprises to limit the number of Jews they employed in order to win lucrative government contracts.24 For young Jews from this stratum of the community, more than career motives fueled the decision to leave Judaism. The shrill exclusivity of Polish nationalism in the interwar period, in general, and the electoral success of the Camp of National Unity (OZON) in 1936, in particular, undermined the assimilationist assumption of acculturated Jews that they could be both Polish and Jewish simultaneously. While revolutionaries and radicals from Jewish backgrounds were able to find a home in the underground Communist party, in which their ethnicity was irrelevant (in theory), bourgeois Jews who saw themselves as Poles did not have a liberal, capitalist alternative. Marion Malowist noted in a report for Ringelblum’s ghetto archive that “when OZON ruled the Polish spirit, there was a strong tendency among the assimilationists to submit to baptism.” Among the “assimilationists” he included those who used to worship in the Westernized Great Synagogue on Tłomackie and take an active part in communal life. Even before 1936, the assimilationist position was under threat. In the early 1930s, the radicalization of antisemitism, the introduction of the numerus clausus in the universities, and the outbreak of violence on campuses at the start of the academic year 1931–­32 fatally weakened the assimilationist organization Zjednoczenie (Unity), whose members were mostly students and recent graduates. In its waning years, some members voiced the opinion, in its journal and at its national convention, that conversion was a logical step toward surmounting the difficulties of being a Jew in Poland and that the organization should admit converts who were “non-­opportunistic,” that is, who did not estrange themselves from their Jewish origins. By the late 1930s, assimilationist circles, whether converted or not, had no links to the Jewish community.25

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The exact number of Jews who converted in the interwar decades in either Warsaw or Poland as a whole is not known. Writing in 1935, the sociologist Arieh Tartakower estimated that the annual number of conversions in Poland in the late 1920s and early 1930s was 2,000 to 2,500.26 Even if the rate were double that, it would be very low relative to the size of the total Jewish population (about 3.5 million on the eve of World War II). This is not surprising, of course: Most Polish Jews still saw themselves (and were seen by Poles) as Jews, not Poles; most were not integrated into Polish social or cultural life; and most were strongly or moderately attached to Jewish observance. Jewish communities with this kind of profile produced few converts, even in fiercely antisemitic times.

FOUR

Paradoxically, despite the vigor of political antisemitism in the interwar years, young Jews in Western and Central Europe mixed more freely in non-­Jewish company than before. More men and women attended university, worked in Gentile-­ owned-­ and-­ operated businesses, took part in political and cultural life, visited museums and concert halls, and danced, bicycled, skied, and hiked with non-­Jews. This increase in social mixing was the result of changes on both sides of the Jewish/Christian divide, especially the relaxation of social conventions in the aftermath of the war. It was strongest among young, well-­educated, liberal or radical, middle-­class men and women who reached maturity during or after the war years. Their parents, by and large, continued to live according to the rules of the prewar period, keeping their own company. Post-­Holocaust interviews with German Jews revealed the intensification of social contacts among young Jews and Germans between the end of World War I and the start of Nazi rule. Marion Berghahn asked first-­and second-­generation refugees in England (those born before 1920 and those born in the 1920s and 1930s, respectively) about the proportion of Jews and non-­Jews in their circle of friends and that of their parents. Among the 36 persons in the first generation who remembered their parents’ friends, 24 described them as mixed (11 half-­and-­half, 11 mainly Jewish, and 2 mainly non-­Jewish). In contrast, 46 of the 57 first-­and second-­generation respondents themselves had a mixed circle of friends. Of these 46 circles, 26 were completely mixed, 16 mainly Jewish, and 4 mainly non-­Jewish. In addition,

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4 had only non-­Jewish friends, a level of social integration completely absent among the parental generation. Stefanie Schüler-­Spingorum’s interviews with former Jewish residents of Königsberg revealed the same shift from one generation to the next. Among the interviewees, 54 percent said their parents’ friends were mostly Jews while only 35 percent said this was true in regard to their own friends. Only 1.6 percent claimed that their parents had more Christian than Jewish friends while 7.4 percent made the same claim about themselves.27 Unsurprisingly, the increase in social mixing in Germany led to an increase in intermarriage. Boy met girl; they fell in love and married, without either of them changing his or her religion. In the Imperial period, this was not the pattern. When a Jew and a Christian wished to marry, one of them converted, usually the Jew. (However, in those cases when a Christian woman married “up,” usually from the working class or the lower middle class into the middle class, she was the partner who was likely to convert.) Strictly speaking, these were not intermarriages at all, since the persons marrying were now of the same religion. In the interwar period, not only was social mixing, the matrix from which these unions grew, more common, but religious indifference was as well. Secularization, like toleration, favored the growth of intermarriage, making once unbridgeable religious rifts seem less critical. Parents, Christian and Jewish alike, often objected to these unions, but few were willing to take steps to prevent them. In her autobiography, the writer and translator Ruth Michaelis-­Jena (1905–­89) recalled a rare instance when parental opposition was effective. Raised in a prosperous, unobservant home, she met and fell in love with a non-­Jewish man around 1925. Her family warmly accepted him and began planning for their marriage. Then the blow came: He wrote her that the idea of marriage to someone of “non-­Aryan blood” was so deeply shocking to his widowed father that he, an only child, was unable to go through with it.28 This kind of reaction, however, was not common. The intermarriage rate in Germany was rising before the war. In the period 1901–­05, there were 18 mixed marriages for every 100 Jewish marriages; in 1906–­10, 23.7; in 1911–­15, 38; and in 1916–­20, 38.6. From another perspective (there are several ways of calculating intermarriage), 22 percent of Jewish men and 13 percent of Jewish women who married in the period 1911–­15 chose non-­Jewish partners.29 (The gender difference was undoubtedly due to the greater freedom men enjoyed in deciding where, when, and with whom they socialized.) In the 1920s and early 1930s, the proportion of mixed marriages swelled. In Germany as a whole, 21 percent of Jews who married in 1928

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married out; in 1932, 23 percent; and in 1933, when some may have feared that intermarriage would be banned in the future (as it was in 1935), 28 percent. However, these numbers are in one sense misleading, for in this period, the absolute number of marriages between two Jews dropped precipitously and steadily. In the German Empire between 1901 and 1913, the annual number of Jewishly homogeneous marriages ranged from a high of 4,080 in 1906 to a low of 3,621 in 1913. During the war years, the number of homogeneous marriages sharply decreased, as did the number of Germans marrying more generally, but in the Jewish case, the drop was even sharper. Then, after a very short postwar marriage boom, the number of homogeneously Jewish marriages continued to fall steadily (while the overall German rate rose and fell with shifting economic conditions)—­to 2,656 in 1926 and then to a new low of 2,174 in 1933.30 In other words, the pace of intermarriage was steadier than it might seem, since the number of homogeneously Jewish marriages was declining. This reluctance among young Weimar Jews to start a family suggests a lack of optimism about the Jewish future in Germany, in much the same way that the rising suicide rate among Jews also testifies to growing feelings of despair and hopelessness. Throughout the Weimar period, more men than women contracted marriages with non-­Jews—­in 1933, almost twice the number. This was due, in part, to social conventions that still constrained female behavior. It may also have been a result of the devastating impact of the hyperinflation of 1923 and the subsequent deflation on middle-­ class Jewish savings—­in particular, savings set aside for dowries. As Jewish dowries shrank or disappeared, there was one less incentive for Jewish men to marry within their own group. Not surprisingly, the intermarriage rate, however calculated, was highest in large cities, where fewer social inhibitions operated, and in rural areas where Jews were few and far between and of relatively recent arrival, such as Prussian Saxony and Schleswig-­Holstein. In Berlin, 29 percent of Jews who married in 1933 took non-­Jewish partners; in Hamburg, 33 percent; in Königsberg, 35 percent.31 The weakness of Jewish social and religious bonds was a precondition for both conversion and intermarriage in the Weimar period. Different circumstances, however, constituted the background against which each took place. The decision to convert was an acknowledgment of the persistence of intolerance and an admission of the failure of emancipation, integration, and liberalism more generally. It originated in the desire to overcome exclusion and stigmatization by

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exiting the Jewish community. Intermarriage, however, reflected the very opposite—­the formation of intimate social ties between Jews and Germans. In the absence of social intimacy, intermarriage was and is impossible. The coexistence of the two trends, as I suggested above, mirrored the coexistence of tolerance with intolerance in Weimar society. The pioneer sociologist Arthur Ruppin made the same point when he asked why mixed marriages did not decrease in Germany at this time, when antisemitism was so strong. His answer was that antisemitism was “confined to particular classes of the population” and that the working class and part of the middle class were “little affected by it.”32 When tolerance eventually outstripped intolerance—­not in prewar Germany but in postwar America—­intermarriage (drift) replaced conversion (defection) as the dominant mode of exiting Judaism. However, decades before this, religious indifference and social intimacy (however restricted in scope) were already at work in some European Jewish communities eroding old allegiances. Although dissimilar circumstances fueled conversion and intermarriage, their demographic consequences were usually similar—­ withdrawal from the Jewish community, either sooner or later. In the case of intermarriage, the Jewish spouse remained, nominally, a member of the community but chose not to raise his or her children as Jews. In late Imperial and Weimar Germany, less than one-­quarter of the children of mixed marriages were brought up as Jews.33 The reason for this is clear: Jews who intermarried were weakly attached to the Jewish religion to begin with, and Jewishness, in their view, was an emotional and social liability with which they did not wish to saddle their children. In other words, the toleration that encouraged social intimacy and interfaith romance was too localized and insufficiently capacious to promote the cultivation of Jewish pride as well. Moreover, among the minority who were enrolled in the Jewish community as children, some (many?) undoubtedly withdrew and converted as young adults. During the Nazi years, the introduction of the category Mischlinge (mixed breed) to brand and often exclude the children and grandchildren of former Jews revealed the extent and long-­term demographic outcome of intermarriage and conversion since 1870. The most thorough calculation of the number of Mischlinge in the Third Reich (including Austria, where conversion and intermarriage were also common) is somewhere between 500,000 and 750,000. To put this in perspective, it should be remembered that the Jewish population of Germany on the eve of the Nazi takeover was only about 500,000 and that of Austria about 190,000. (Nazi statistics compiled in

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1939 significantly underestimated the number of Mischlinge for two reasons: One, marriages in which one or both partners were formerly Jewish were registered as solely Protestant or Catholic, and two, Germans were asked to classify themselves—­some lied and some did not know they had a Jewish grandparent or two.)34 Elsewhere in Western and Central Europe, intermarriage was also increasingly common in the interwar years. In Budapest, among those Jews who married, the percentage of those intermarrying rose from 7 percent in the period 1896–19­00 to 17 percent in 1925 and 19 percent in 1932. In Vienna, the rate was 12 percent in 1926, 13 percent in 1929, 14 percent in 1932, and 10 percent in 1935, a decline due perhaps to greater reluctance to marry Jews after the rise of Nazism. In practice, moreover, the intermarriage rate in Vienna, as well as in other cities with large, East European–­born immigrant communities (like Paris, London, and New York, for example), was higher than these statistics indicate. Newcomers to Vienna from the shtetlach of Galicia and Bukovina, many of whom were in flight from fighting and pogroms during World War I and the turbulence that followed, were in no position to mix with and marry non-­Jews. Were it possible to calculate the intermarriage rate using the native-­born, acculturated Jewish population of Vienna as the base for comparison, the rate would be much higher.35 In societies where Jewish integration was less problematic than in Central Europe, where social mixing was less inhibited and the number of East European immigrants inconsequential, intermarriage rates, calculated in the same way as above, were even higher. In ­Trieste, the rate was already 14 percent in the period 1887–­90; it rose to 18 percent in 1900–­03; and then shot up to 56 percent in 1927. In Copenhagen, where 90 percent of Denmark’s Jews lived, radical assimilation by way of intermarriage took root earlier than elsewhere in Europe. In 1880–­89, the rate was already 22 percent; in 1900–­05, 32 percent. Almost all of the children of these mixed marriages were raised as Lutherans. In Sweden in 1920, 52 percent of native-­born Jews who were married had non-­Jewish partners.36 In these places, the small size of the community and the relative ease of social integration made intensive ethnic interaction and cohesion difficult to sustain. As Arthur Ruppin noted at the time: “Jews intermarry most frequently in countries where they have been settled for several generations, and have achieved prosperity, but where their numbers are so small that their appearance in high Christian circles is not resented and gives rise to no Anti-­Semitism.”37

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In Amsterdam, the rate rose steadily from 6 percent at the turn of the century to 17 percent in the mid-­1930s. A census conducted in 1941 on behalf of the German occupation authorities found that 14 percent of Dutch Jews (as defined in racial terms) were married to non-­Jews. The concentration of Jews in Amsterdam—­they constituted 10 percent of the total population, the highest proportion in a West European capital—­strengthened intracommunal social ties and thus encouraged endogamy. For example, in the Plantage, the middle-­class neighborhood east of the old Jewish quarter, about half of the population was Jewish in the interwar years, and the public schools, most of whose students were Jewish, were closed on Saturday mornings. In the provinces, by contrast, Jews lived in small, scattered communities, and the company they kept, of necessity, was more mixed. The daughter of a rabbi who moved to Amsterdam in 1931 from Den Bosch recalled that before moving, it was necessary to have non-­Jewish friends—­“or else you’d be living in complete isolation.” But once she was living in Amsterdam she associated only with Jews. According to the 1941 census, 18 percent of Jewish children in the provinces were the offspring of mixed marriages while this was true of only 7 percent of Jewish children in Amsterdam. As one would expect in a society in which the Jewish Question was less inflammatory than in Central Europe, the number of Jews who formally converted to Christianity was small. The 1941 census counted almost 15,000 Jews who were not affiliated with the Jewish community, but, of these, only 1,200 were Protestants and 700 Roman Catholics. Moreover, in light of the strength of socialism among Amsterdam’s Jews, it is likely that many of those who were disaffiliated were not so much fleeing Jewishness as expressing ideological anti-­clericalism. Again, as with intermarriage, the contrast between Amsterdam, with its large, socially cohesive community, and the provinces was marked. While more than half of Dutch Jews lived in Amsterdam, the number of converts there in 1941 was less than half the number in the provinces—­568 versus 1,377.38 In Great Britain, as in the United States, since the state took no interest in the religion of those who married, we cannot compare intermarriage rates between British and other Western-­style communities in the first half of the twentieth century. (Quantitative sociological research on intermarriage in Britain dates from late in the century.) In addition, the majority of Britain’s Jews before World War II, again like those in the United States, were relative newcomers or the children of newcomers. Linked by memory, religion, culture, and family to Eastern Europe, their closest social ties were with one another.

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Their integration into non-­Jewish company was too limited to allow the kind of social contacts that ended in intermarriage. Thus, even if statistical data were available, comparison with communities in which immigrants were a minority, like those in Germany, France, Hungary, or the Netherlands, would not be meaningful. That said, there is abundant, so-­called anecdotal evidence that intermarriage within the native, largely middle-­class Jewish community—­the descendants of those whose arrival dated from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries—­was on the rise from the end of the nineteenth century.39 Evidence of increasing intermarriage within native Anglo-­Jewry emerges in sermons, newspapers, novels, and, above all, in accounts of families who had once been pillars of the community. In a sermon at the Bayswater Synagogue in 1895, Hermann Gollancz deplored the fact that mixed marriages “occur much too frequently in our own times.” In 1890 a debate on the causes of intermarriage erupted in the pages of the short-­lived London weekly Jewish Society. The exchange was initiated when the newspaper commented that parents were so terrified about their daughters marrying out that they were offering enormous dowries to prospective Jewish bridegrooms. In Leonard Merrick’s novel Violet Moses (1891), the stockbroker Leopold Moses falls in love with the daughter of a Christian business acquaintance and proposes marriage. “Religious scruples did not weigh with him an atom, nor social ones,” Merrick observes. “Maida Vale [a middle-­class quarter of West London popular with newly rich Jews] was growing used to mixed marriages.” When Violet initially refuses his offer, her father urges her to reconsider, arguing that her husband’s Jewishness is no obstacle: “The Jews are everywhere to-­day, and we and they are intermarrying more every year.” Intermarriage also figures prominently in Julia Frankau’s novel Dr. Phillips (1887), where it represents the triumph of love over “the spirit of separation” (endogamy, social cohesion, and ritual observance), of which the author was a bitter critic.40 By the time Leonard Woolf published The Wise Virgins (1914), a thinly disguised fictional account of his courtship of Virginia Stephen, the intermarriage theme had become a staple of Anglo-­Jewish writing. It, as well as interfaith romance and sex more broadly, remained so until the very end of the century. Among the notability, the network of wealthy London families who directed communal affairs in the nineteenth century, intermarriage, hitherto rare, left few families untouched, as the children and grandchildren of the pillars of Anglo-­Jewry increasingly looked outside the

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tribal pond to satisfy cultural and social needs.41 Writing at midcentury, the geneticist Redcliffe Nathan Salaman (1874–­1955) recalled that when a cousin married a non-­Jew in the 1880s, the first time such a break occurred in his own large family, it was “regarded as a very serious and unprecedented break with tradition.” Yet by the 1940s, there were “at least as many marriages with Gentiles as with Jews in the rising generation” among his numerous relatives and acquaintances. In a sure sign of growing concern about intermarriage in the years before World War I, well-­to-­do Jews with strong communal commitments threatened to disinherit children who married out. When Samuel Montagu (Lord Swaythling) died in 1911, a disinheritance clause in his will provoked unfavorable comment in the national press. Nonetheless, it forced his son Edwin (1879–­1924), a rising star in Liberal politics, to insist that the woman he loved, Venetia Stanley, daughter of the fourth Lord Sheffield, convert to Judaism in a Reform ceremony before they married.42 The cynical nature of the conversion—­ Venetia told Edwin that she went through with it “because I think one is happier rich than poor”—­may explain parental refusal in other cases to accept the validity of Reform conversions. The investment banker Arthur Ellis Franklin (1859–­1938) disinherited his son Hugh (1889–­ 1962), a militant suffragette famous for striking Winston Churchill with a whip, when he married a Gentile woman, also a radical activist, even though she underwent a Reform conversion and they were married in the West London Synagogue. When Hugh’s brother Jacob (1884–­1948) also married out, in 1931, he disinherited him as well, and although he could not refuse to see him ever again (as earlier in the case of Hugh) since Jacob was a partner in the family firm, he never met his wife and never saw him outside the City.43 Not all late-­Victorian notables went to these extremes in registering their disapproval of intermarriage. Samuel Montagu and Arthur Franklin were pillars of Anglo-­Jewish orthodoxy and unbending patriarchs, accustomed to having their way both at home and at work. Others of their generation, while not pleased with their children’s decision, accepted it, but frequently with visible reluctance and regret. When Redcliffe Salaman’s brother Clement (1868–­1935) became engaged to a non-­Jew in 1901, their widowed mother was sufficiently distressed that Redclife’s fiancée, the Hebraist Nina Davis (1877–­ 1925), questioned whether she should even send her a congratulatory note—­even though Clement’s fiancée was to be converted (in a Reform ceremony) and they were to have a Jewish wedding. The wedding itself was “quite quiet & unconventional”—­no invitations

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were issued and no reception followed the ceremony. In a letter to her fiancé, Davis wondered why London Jews objected so much to “voluntary proselytes” and then answered her own question: “Perhaps it is that lately the conversion has become a farce—­the man only caring to get through the form & go back to no religion at all, & the wife, finding none & perhaps going back to the old one & bringing up the children as Christians since she knows nothing of Judaism.” On hearing of another mixed marriage, she noted that Judaism played no role in the lives of intermarried couples and that their children were always lost to Judaism. Davis’s father, Arthur, a retired engineer who devoted his life to Hebrew studies, concretized his opposition by forbidding her to ask home a friend who was engaged to a non-­Jew. He also forbade her to invite the friend to her own wedding.44 In the interwar period, intermarriage, once rare, became common in families whose settlement in Britain predated the East European immigrant wave—­largely as a result of their successful social integration. Children whose families lived in the country much of the year, who were sent to boarding schools, and whose friends were more likely to be Christians than Jews, often fell in love with and married Christians—­which is not surprising. When The Times took note of a dinner dance given by a prominent Jewish couple in honor of their two daughters in 1924 (for the unstated purpose of finding them husbands), a columnist in the Jewish Chronicle pointed out that the names of only four Jews appeared on the guest list and then asked rhetorically: “What chance have the two young ladies in question of becoming the wives of Jews if they are thus thrust into social intercourse with non-­Jews?” Two years later, when the engagement of a daughter of the communal notable Albert H. Jessel (1864–­1917) to a non-­Jew was announced, the newspaper lamented that this was “a story that now grows old and day by day is becoming more general.” The lesson, in its view, was that parentage and upbringing were unable to ensure “a resistance to the tendency to drift, through marriage, that today is everywhere rife and rampant in Jewry.”45 In the immigrant community (in which I include the generation that came of age in the twenties and thirties), intermarriage was far less common—­for obvious reasons. By necessity, habit, and choice, Yiddish-­speaking immigrants and their British-­educated children socialized largely with each other. Still, among the minority who ventured outside immigrant neighborhoods—­whether in pursuit of education, employment, or housing, or in flight from Old World kith and kin—­were some who left the fold through intermarriage.46 Their

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numbers included those who spent their Saturday nights in dance halls, cinemas, and cafés in the West End and its provincial equivalents, those who drifted into unsavory or criminal ways of living (gambling, bookmaking, and prostitution), those who made careers outside the usual “ghetto” trades—­in accountancy, law, medicine, engineering, dentistry, retail sales, teaching, and entertainment, for example—­ and those who, having prospered, dispersed to leafy suburbs beyond areas of Jewish settlement. As a writer in The Times remarked in 1924, “Whatever the strength of his Judaism the middle-­class Jew who settles outside the largely Jewish areas is bound to see more of the Gentile, and I think it would be rather an exception to find a Jewish family established for more than a few years in London outside the Jewish areas of East London and a few smaller settlements who had not Gentile friends as well as acquaintances.”47 Leakage from the Anglo-­Jewish community before World War II was too limited to sow real alarm in the ranks of lay and rabbinic leaders. Its impact, moreover, was masked by the continuing growth of the East European segment of the community—­by immigration before the war and by natural increase in the interwar period. In late Imperial and Weimar Germany, by contrast, the exodus from Judaism sparked a heated communal debate, in part, because it was more visible. The East European immigrant community in Germany before and after World War I was small relative to its counterparts in Britain, the United States, and France. In 1910, it numbered about seventy thousand persons, while another seventy thousand East European Jews moved there between 1916 and 1920.48 (German Jewry in the early 1930s totaled more than half a million persons.) In Berlin, for example, immigrants constituted only one-­quarter of the community in the interwar period; in New York, London, and Paris, they were the overwhelming majority. At the same time, the birth rate of German Jews, who began to limit family size before other Germans of the same class and region, was falling. Over time this combination of demographic trends—­low birth rate, high intermarriage and conversion rates, relatively few immigrants—­would cause the community to shrink. Alarm at this prospect sparked the earliest sociological and demographic studies of contemporary Jewish communities, not just in Germany but in the West more generally. Those who pioneered this work were overwhelmingly but not exclusively Zionists, for whom the erosion of Jewish ties in the diaspora was an article of faith. In their case, ideological commitment and demographic reality mutually reinforced each other.

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The seminal text was Arthur Ruppin’s Die Juden der Gegenwart (The Jews of Today), the first edition of which appeared in 1904, the second in 1911. While debate about conversion predated its appearance (the Centralverein mounted a campaign against opportunistic conversion in the 1890s, believing it morally degraded the community as a whole and harmed the prospects of the unconverted), Ruppin’s study was the first to employ statistics and disavow moralizing. As he noted in his autobiography, the book was a new departure in literature on the Jewish Question. “People were used to books pleading for or against the Jews, but they did not know what to do with a book which did not take sides but confined itself to marshalling the facts as objectively as possible.” Not surprisingly, its reception was mixed: “the assimilationists tended to disapprove of it, the Zionists to approve.”49 That same year the sculptor, writer, musician, and Zionist activist Alfred Nossig (1864–­1943) established the Bureau für jüdische Statistik in Berlin and hired Ruppin as its general secretary. From its founding to its closure in 1931, the Bureau generated a stream of work on the demography and sociology of contemporary Jewish communities (including data on the erosion of Jewish ties), which remains, to this day, a treasure trove of quantitative material for the social history of Central European Jewry.50 The most sensational account of radical assimilation to appear at this time was Der Untergang der deutschen Juden (The Downfall of German Jewry) (first edition, 1911; second edition, 1921) by the pioneer sexologist and Zionist Felix Theilhaber (1884–­1956). Forgoing the sober tone of Ruppin, he argued that German Jewry was in irreversible demographic decline as a result of conversion, intermarriage, low fertility, and modernity more generally, estimating that one thousand persons were lost to the community each year. The message of the book—­that German Jewry was committing suicide, in effect—­was not well-­received.51 Criticism and condemnation from every camp in German Jewry, including some Zionists, greeted its publication, but most of its detractors failed to address its statistical foundation, despite its weakness in places. For example, the alarming nature of Theilhaber’s statistics on mixed marriage resulted in part from how he calculated them—­as a percentage of marriages in which both partners were Jewish. (The alternative is to calculate the percentage of all marrying Jews who take non-­Jewish spouses. This recognizes statistically that endogamous marriages involve two Jews, while exogamous marriages involve only one.) Still, leaving aside the ideological framework in which Theilhaber couched his analysis, the thrust of his argument

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was correct, even if the details were not. In the years before the Nazi takeover, the Jewish population of Germany declined. Between 1925, when immigration from Eastern Europe dropped off, and 1933, when the first Nazi census was carried out, the number of Jews, excluding the fifteen thousand who fled the country between 30 January and 16 June (the date of the census), declined by 8.7 percent.52 No other Western Jewish community experienced a similar decline in these decades, largely because elsewhere intermarriage and conversion rates were lower and fertility rates higher (due to earlier East European immigration).

FIVE

Intermarriage flourished in communities (or subcommittees) in which Jewish tradition was weak and social intercourse with Gentiles was intimate, frequent, and widespread. In the United States, where geographic dispersion heightened the impact of these conditions, intermarriage was a hallmark of Jewish life from the nineteenth century on. However, the demographic impact of this became apparent only in the late twentieth century when immigration from Central and Eastern Europe was long past and no longer able to compensate for leakage from families; now the overwhelming majority were descendants of those who had arrived in the country three for four generations earlier. In this sense, conditions were similar to those in Britain. As we saw in chapter 2, the Jewish population in the newly established United States was small, widely dispersed, and lacking religious resources. Immigration from Central Europe in the middle decades of the nineteenth century changed this, in part, creating more favorable conditions in the short run for the maintenance of Jewish cohesion. Between 1820 and 1880, approximately 250,000 Jews from Central Europe, Alsace-­Lorraine, and the Polish provinces of Prussia (Silesia and Posen) arrived in America. While most of them settled in cities in the East and the Midwest (Chicago, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, for example), significant numbers pushed into less settled regions—­ the Deep South, the rural Midwest, the Rocky Mountains, and the Far West—­where they started as peddlers, selling to farmers, miners, loggers, and railway men in remote areas, and finished as shopkeepers and occasionally as wholesalers, brokers, and even bankers. The overwhelming majority of the newcomers were economic immigrants from humble homes, pushed to seek a better life in the United States

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by statutes in their countries of birth restricting the ways in which Jews could earn a living. Their exposure to high German culture, in which prosperous Jewish circles in Berlin and other cities so delighted, was minimal. Neither especially pious nor learned, they continued to associate largely with one another, taking business partners and spouses from the ranks of fellow immigrants and in time founding congregations, charities, clubs, and lodges. There were, however, exceptions, even in the first generation. Among the immigrants were a small number of better-­educated and more prosperous persons whose attachment to Judaism was weak at the very start and who used the relative openness of American society, where membership in a religious community was not a legal requirement, of course, to shed their Jewishness without formally converting to a Christian denomination. The banker and socialite August Belmont (1813–­90), who arrived in New York in 1837 as an agent for the Frankfurt Rothschilds, was typical of this group. From the beginning, he had little contact with the city’s Jewish community (about two thousands persons in 1836). He rapidly amassed a personal fortune, was welcomed into the best drawing rooms and clubs, and in 1849 married Caroline Perry, daughter of Matthew Perry, commander of the American fleet in the Gulf of Mexico during the Mexican War, in an Episcopalian ceremony—­without, however, converting. As he wrote to his sister Babette in Germany, the same “liberal” views that had led him to reject Judaism also prevented him from becoming a renegade and being baptized. Caroline, he added, was “completely content to let me keep my views and beliefs.” They raised their children as Episcopalians, and while he never denied he was Jewish, he never advertised it either. (When he went into politics, his opponents saw to it that his origins were known.)53 When Salomon de Rothschild (1835–­64) from the Paris branch of the banking family visited New Orleans just before the Civil War, he was struck by “the high position occupied by our coreligionists [e.g., Judah Benjamin, U.S. senator; Henry Hyams, lieutenant governor of Louisiana; and Dr. Edwin Moise, speaker of the state legislature], or rather by those who were born into the faith and who, having married Christian women, and without converting, have forgotten the practices of their fathers.” Intermarriage was so widespread in antebellum New Orleans—­over one half of Jews who married chose Gentile mates—­ that the city’s first synagogue, Shaarei Chesed (1828), allowed both intermarried Jews and their non-­Jewish spouses to be buried in its cemetery.54

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In the Midwest, Jewish immigrants whose links to Judaism were already weak were able to merge into non-­Jewish German-­language communities by way of membership in Turnvereine, lodges, choral societies, charities, and the like. Those who were ideologically committed to atheism or deism joined German freethinking societies and congregations, which first appeared in the 1840s. An Orthodox Jew in Wisconsin complained in 1856 about the number of Jews who “became a prey to the Atheists.” The few who were political refugees from the abortive revolutions of 1848 were, by virtue of their politics, especially likely to use their exile as an opportunity to merge into non-­Jewish society, behaving ethnically only as Germans or German-­ speaking Hungarians.55 More than anything, dispersion and isolation in the American heartland encouraged the incorporation of Central European immigrants into Christian society. To begin, the very act of emigration was itself evidence of a willingness to break with routine and to face the unknown. Young men who settled in places where communal life was weak or nonexistent (the situation in the Midwest and West outside big cities) expressed, by their actions, priorities that conflicted with traditional notions of cohesion and continuity. While they were not necessarily in conscious flight from Judaism, it is clear that their central concern was not the practice and preservation of Judaism but, rather, surviving and getting ahead.56 Furthermore, peddling, which the majority of Central European newcomers took up on arrival, was not conducive to the observance of religious practices. Abraham Kohn (1819–­71), who arrived in the United States from Bavaria in 1842 and peddled in New England, complained in his diary about the impossibility of living like a Jew while peddling: [N]one of us is able to observe the smallest commandment.Thousands of peddlers wander about America, young strong men, they waste their strength by carrying heavy loads in the summer’s heat, they lose their health in the icy cold of winter. And thus they forget completely their Creator. They no longer put on the phylacteries, they pray neither on working day nor on the Sabbath. In truth, they have given up their religion for the pack which is on their back.57 Traveling from village to village and farm to farm, moving into new territory in pursuit of customers, peddlers followed a way of life that kept fellow Jews at a distance (except when they returned to cities

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and towns to replenish their stock). Even when they accumulated the capital to settle in a town or village and open a dry goods store, they were not likely to choose a place where they would face stiff competition from other Jewish shopkeepers. When they were ready to marry, they imported wives from the Old World or found brides, with the help of family and friends, among immigrant Jews in towns and cities. On occasion, however, with the pool of potential Jewish partners so limited outside urban areas, they married local non-­Jewish women. Bernhard Schlesinger, father of the Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. (1888–­1965), migrated to Newark from a small town in East Prussia in 1860 and five years later settled in Xenia, Ohio, a town of seven to eight thousand persons. He married a local woman in a German Reformed church, and though she was not a regular churchgoer, their son regularly attended its Sunday school. She felt, Arthur Sr. wrote, that “in a community so strongly devout, her children should do as their playmates did.” His father, an agnostic, “maintained a hands-­off attitude.”58 With few exceptions, Jewish men who married Christian women in small-­town America did not themselves become Christians. Their children, however, were usually raised in their mother’s religion. Whomever they married, Central European Jews in rural and small-­ town America lived and worked in a non-­Jewish milieu and, most critically, raised their children in isolation from Jewish society and institutions. Bavarian-­born Lazarus Straus (1809–­98), whose sons were instrumental in the growth of the Macy’s, and Abraham and Straus department stores, settled in 1852 in Talbotton, Georgia, a town of eight or nine hundred inhabitants, where he and his family were the only Jews in town. Two of his children attended the Methodist Sunday school, and the other two the Baptist school. When the family moved to New York City in 1865, it then joined a synagogue. (Most of his descendants, however, became Episcopalians.)59 Other families living in towns and village remained where they were, with few other Jews as neighbors. Even in small-­town communities with several score Jewish families, Jewish schooling was weak.60 While the immigrants brought with them a modicum of knowledge, their children grew up knowing very little. If services were held, usually at the New Year, the children were ignorant of the Hebrew liturgy, and, if it awakened any sentiment at all, a Reform rabbi claimed in 1893, it was not of reverence but of “repulsion, forcibly reminding them that it is a voice of another age—­a message not for them.” Isaac Leeser (1806–­68), editor of The Occident, described in 1866 the slow, assimilatory drift of families in these

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circumstances. The foreign-­born parents, whose own knowledge of Judaism was limited to “what they gather[ed] up from beholding the acts of their simple and piously minded parents” [when they were children, prior to their emigration], “almost instantly [lost] a sense of their religious obligations.” So caught up were they in the struggle to make a living, “they [saw] no reason for maintaining even a show of conformity” to Judaism. Some began attending church services, “often with a view of not appearing singular.” They may not have joined a church but their children would, either because they would marry Christians, or because, even prior to marriage, they would have been exposed to subtle pressures. For the children imbibed the Christian religion in school and through contact with other children, while everyone they knew worshiped at some church. “So the children approach[ed], daily, more and more the confines of gentile opinion, having nothing Jewish within to restrain them.”61 Rural America was not the only site of radical assimilation for Central European immigrants. While urban life encouraged endogamy among recent arrivals, it did not guarantee it. Social ambition, reticence about identification with a group that even in America could be a target of contempt and derision, religious indifference, and romantic love worked against the ethnic cohesion that urban concentration made possible. With little or no exposure to Jewish practice and worship, the Americanized children of Central European immigrants were especially likely to drift away from the community through intermarriage. Take the maternal grandmother of the novelist Mary McCarthy, the daughter of a Jewish forty-­niner. After her father’s death in San Francisco, Augusta Morganstern moved to S ­ eattle, then to a frontier town, where she met and married a respected lawyer of New England antecedents. She had had Jewish suitors as well but religion had played no role in her choice. Her husband, by birth a Presbyterian, almost never attended church, while she practiced no religion, believing simply that there was “a kind God Who understood and Who watched over everything.” Interestingly, her two sisters, who also moved to Seattle, married Jews and belonged to Temple de Hirsch. Her marriage to a Presbyterian seems to have in no way disturbed her close ties with her sisters. As McCarthy recalled, “whenever my grandmother gave a tea, it always appeared in the paper that Mrs. M. A. Gottstein and Mrs. S. A. Aronson poured.” Social patterns in the cities of the Far West, like Seattle, strongly encouraged the formation of Jewish-­Gentile unions because these cities lacked a well-­established social hierarchy and privileged wealth, almost always newly acquired, over birth and breeding. The relative absence of single Jewish women

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and the distance between the West Coast and the Jewish population centers of the Midwest and East Coast contributed to this trend as well. Thus, both sons of Polish-­born Michael Goldwater (1821–­1903), the pioneer Arizona merchant, married Christian women (but only after their mother died in 1905). Baron, father of the future senator and unsuccessful 1964 presidential candidate, married an Episcopalian, a nurse from Nebraska who had come to Arizona for her health. He never converted but she raised their children as Episcopalians.62 (When Barry Goldwater was chosen as the Republican candidate, the humorist Harry Golden quipped that he always knew the first Jewish president would be an Episcopalian.) In East Coast cities, where there was no shortage of potential mates of similar background, the intermarriage of children and grand­ children of Central European immigrants was more often the result of a mixture of parental indifference or hostility toward Judaism and naked social ambition. The Jewish attachments of the wealthiest German-­Jewish families in New York City, for example, rarely lasted more than a generation or two. Donald Straus (1916–­ 2007), great-­grandson of Lazarus Straus, recalled the aversion of his parents to things Jewish: Jewishness was like sex. It was absolutely taboo as a subject for discussion with either of my parents. By example rather than by word, they raised the three of us to be anti-­Semitic. One did not go to a Jewish school or country club or summer resort. As a matter of duty and tradition only, one might serve as a director of a Jewish charity, but the goal was to get on the boards of directors of non-­Jewish charities, museums, and businesses. It was just as clearly preferable to meet and take out Christian girls and of course we [he and his siblings] all married Christians.63 Recalling his childhood in the 1920s on Manhattan’s West Side, Henry Morgenthau III (b. 1917) echoed Straus’s words: “Being Jewish was something that was never discussed in front of the children. But unlike sex, which of course was also unmentionable, it promised no secret delights or dark pleasures.” It was, rather, a kind of “birth defect.” Once, as a five-­year-­old child on an outing in Central Park with his nanny, another child innocently asked him what his religion was. When he returned home, he asked his mother the same question. She hesitated, not answering immediately. When he repeated the question, she told him: “If anyone ever asks you that again, just tell them you’re an American.” That was the end of the conversation.64

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In the Morgenthau family, the erasure of Jewishness began before the exodus from Germany. The founder of the family fortune was a Bavarian cigar manufacturer, Lazarus Morgenthau (1815–­97), who abandoned the orthodoxy of his youth (his father was an itinerant religious functionary) as he became more prosperous. Although a freethinker, he remained a member of the Mannheim Gemeinde. When the North imposed a high tariff on cigars during the Civil War, his business was wrecked and he moved, in 1866, to New York, where he was never able to duplicate his earlier success. His son Henry Sr. (1856–­1946) attended the Sunday school of the Reform congregation headed by Rabbi David Einhorn, but as an adult he was briefly attracted to several religious movements—­Ethical Culture, Christian Science, and Stephen Wise’s Free Synagogue. Although he and his son Henry Jr. married within the German-­Jewish tribal fold, half of his twelve grandchildren intermarried, which, according to Henry III, “neither surprised nor dismayed him.” The religious indifference and ethnic ambivalence of the older Morgenthaus ill prepared the generation that came of age in the interwar years to face the hostility they encountered as adolescents and young adults. In his childhood, Henry III wrote, “all significant vestiges of ethnicity” in his family were gone or “thoroughly camouflaged.” His parents even avoided the ultra-­Reform Temple Emanu-­El on Fifth Avenue and the network of parallel German-­Jewish social institutions like the Harmonie Club and the Century Country Club. When Henry III entered Princeton in fall 1935, his Jewishness had little positive meaning for him. When his classmates reminded him of it, often by excluding him, he was vulnerable, having “nothing to fall back on.” His failure to be chosen by an upper-­class eating club (70 to 80 percent of sophomores were chosen) was “more than I could take.” It was “an emasculating experience that left me feeling that I was something less than a Princeton man” and that filled him with self-­hatred. At about the same time, when Eleanor Roosevelt proposed his mother for membership in New York’s restricted Colony Club, Elinor Morgenthau was blackballed.65 In the case of German immigrants who arrived in the late nineteenth century, it is clear that for many their Jewish attachments were already attenuated and that America offered an opportunity not only to better themselves economically but to remake themselves in other ways as well. Berthold Hochschild (1860–­1928), who grew up in a farming village near Frankfurt, was sent to the United States in 1886 by a German metal-­trading firm to set up a New York office. As his journalist grandson Adam (b. 1942) recalled, the gulf between him and most American Jews was “enormous” and “he preferred to keep it

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that way.” With his blessing, his son Harold (1892–­1981) took steps to distance himself even more from other Jews, whatever their origins. At college and later in life, almost all his friends were Gentiles. Again, quoting Adam, “In Father’s cosmopolitan taste in friendships . . . [Jews were] the only significant exception.” When Adam attended Harvard, Harold was concerned that too many of his college friends were Jewish, accusing him of being unconsciously prejudiced against non-­Jews. Earlier he had moved his residence from the Jewish Upper West Side to the more Gentile Park Avenue and then in the 1950s to the very WASP Princeton. Interestingly, his wife, who was from a wealthy Episcopalian family with Mayflower ancestors but was not herself a churchgoer, repeatedly told Adam that he should be proud of his Jewish heritage, a matter to which his father seldom alluded.66 Like Berthold Hochschild, the banker and patron of the arts Otto Kahn (1867–­1934), who settled in New York in 1893, was already alienated from Jewish practice before crossing the Atlantic. Born into a banking family, he received little or no religious training or education growing up in Mannheim. He and his wife, the daughter of a partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Co., were nonpracticing, nonaffiliated Jews who “practiced at being non-­Jews.” Although they never became Christians, they made their children Episcopalians. Their efforts to distance themselves from their origins were well-­known, providing fodder for humorists. The aristocratic character Roscoe W. Chand­ ler in the Broadway musical comedy Animal Crackers (1928), written by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind for the Marx Brothers, was supposedly based on Kahn. In the play the Marx Brothers uncover Chandler’s origins, revealing him to be a rabbi or cantor from Czechoslovakia. (Hollywood, which regularly de-­Judaizes Jewish material, changed this to a fish peddler in the film version.) In a widely circulated story, which echoes the epigraph to chapter 3, Kahn and the humorist Marshall P. Wilder, a hunchback, are strolling along Fifth Avenue. Kahn points to a church and says, “Marshall, that’s the church I belong to. Did you know that once I was a Jew? To this, Wilder responds, “Yes, Otto, and once I was a hunchback.”67

SIX

Immigrants from Central Europe who arrived in the United States in the middle decades of the nineteenth century encountered few obstacles to their integration. This was even truer for those who settled in the South, the Midwest, and the Far West, where Jews were

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scarcer and, in the case of frontier regions, where old habits and notions counted for less. The startlingly large number of unconverted Jews who were elected to political office in these regions, beginning before the Civil War, is emblematic of Christian receptivity to Jewish integration. However, as we have seen, the children and grandchildren of these immigrants, especially those in eastern metropolitan areas, as well as those who arrived late in the century, found the going more difficult. Elite institutions, toward which ambition and prosperity propelled the second and third generations, were riddled with exclusionary antisemitism from the end of the nineteenth century. By the interwar period, American Jews were more likely to be denied entry to exclusive clubs, colleges, resorts, residences, and the like than their counterparts in France, Britain, and the Netherlands. While there was no political threat to the security of American Jewry, there was a Jewish Question in the first half of the twentieth century in the sense that public debate about the character of Jews, their suitability as citizens, and their assimilability into American society was widespread. This debate was fueled by but is not reducible to the xenophobia and racism that targeted all non-­WASP groups in these years. What set hostility to Jews apart from hostility to other immigrant populations was the accumulated weight of centuries of Christian contempt and the unsettling social and economic mobility of the newcomers, whose children were not content to remain shopkeepers and tailors. Initially, the wave of antisemitism that accompanied mass migration had little impact on the immigrants themselves, most of whom settled in immigrant quarters, worked for or traded with fellow Yiddish-­ speaking Jews, sent their children to local public schools whose classes were filled with children like theirs, and spent whatever leisure time they had within their own community. Before World War I, Ivy League, Park Avenue discrimination, political xenophobia, and literary antisemitism embittered the lives of well-­off, thoroughly Americanized Central European Jews—­Morganthaus, Baruchs, Hochschilds, and Kahns—­ rather than recent arrivals from Russia and Poland. (Bernard Berenson at Harvard was the exception.) In the twenties, thirties, and forties, however, as the children of the immigrants penetrated the respectable precincts of WASP society—­elite universities, large corporations, the professions, leafy neighborhoods, and country clubs—­the number of Jews who felt the full weight of anti-­Jewish prejudice expanded. The second generation struggled with quotas, slights, and exclusions in several ways. The majority sidestepped the most onerous aspects of interwar antisemitism by joining the ranks

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of the self-­employed (wholesale and retail trade, medicine, law, accountancy), by finding employment in Jewish-­owned businesses, or by entering, by way of the new examination system, the ranks of public-­ school teachers and the civil service. Above all, they avoided exclusion by living and socializing among themselves, knowing full well—­and perhaps not even minding—­that their Christian peers were reluctant to welcome them. A writer in the Jewish Daily Forward in 1926 noted that four-­fifths of the city’s Jews had “no social contact with Gentiles.” He explained that they “attended American public schools and universities, read American papers and books, patronize[d] the same theatres and subways and buses,” but kept themselves “at arm’s length from the bulk of the American population.” The majority chose acculturation, giving up Old World habits, but not integration, instead preserving ethnic boundaries and allegiances. Some—­white-­collar workers in particular—­changed their names to make them sound less foreign, hoping for social or economic advantages or thinking to better their children’s future, a practice that continued even after the war and may actually have increased in the 1950s.68 But name-­changing is not in itself evidence of a flight from Jewishness. A small number of second-­generation American Jews did take concrete steps to erase their roots. Wishing to be free of the shame (in their eyes) of Jewishness and keen to succeed outside their community of birth, they worked to mask their background and pass into American society in Gentile dress. I say “Gentile” rather than “Christian” since formal conversion was not a requirement. The state did not monitor the religion of its citizens and thus it was possible for Jews to evolve into non-­Jews without bureaucratic or ecclesiastical fuss. Remaking oneself and flying under false colors were long-­established American social strategies. The country’s size, the anonymity of life in its largest cities, and the geographic mobility of its population helped to make passing possible. The whiteness of American Jews worked in their favor, of course, as did whatever skills at mimicry with which they were endowed. But if their facial features matched those of the Jewish stereotype, the challenge was much more difficult. How many passed successfully into the ranks of Gentile America is unknown, since those who were most successful left no tracks for the historian to follow. Many Jews believed that those who passed inevitably revealed their secret in ways that were visible only to other Jews. There may be some truth in this, but whatever the case, passing was sufficiently successful that it remained a strategy for ambitious Jews for decades and ceased to be so only when there was no longer a need for it, that

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is, when barriers to Jewish integration disappeared in the last third of the twentieth century. Observers of the American Jewish scene from the 1920s through the 1950s commented repeatedly on passing, usually to condemn it as cowardly and treasonous or to lament the exclusionary practices that encouraged it. The preface to the first edition of Who’s Who in American Jewry (1926) noted that “some persons preferred to be omitted rather than associate their names with those of their racial colleagues” and that “a few even rejected with indignation the proposal of being included in a volume where their Jewish identity would become a matter of public knowledge.” In their 1931 study of anti-­Jewish discrimination, Heywood Broun and George Britt cited a letter from a New York businessman that “thousands” of Jewish job seekers daily committed perjury in order to find jobs. “Knowing in advance that a Jewish name or an admission that they are Jews will bar them from employment, they change their names and masquerade as members of other religions, running all the way from Catholic to Christian Scientist. Many of those who succeed by such a subterfuge work under the constant fear that they will be found out and consequently discharged.” In his 1948 study of American antisemitism, Carey Mc­ Williams wondered about the emotional toll of passing, asking how the Jew who opted for “total assimilation” would react when Gentile friends made antisemitic remarks: “[C]an he under all circumstances conceal his Jewish origin or forget, without a twinge of conscience, a feeling of remorse, a sense of shame?” 69 A few non-­Jewish Jews wrote in defense of passing. Writing pseudonymously in the Atlantic Monthly, an “ex-­Jew” touted his ingenuity and determination in managing to pass completely. His success, he believed, was proof that it could be done—­he claimed that no one knew his secret—­and that those Jews who complained that the Christian world would not allow them to assimilate were simply not trying hard enough to overcome their clannish habits.70 Ironically, success in passing was inversely related to success in making it (however defined). The more a person of Jewish descent who did not want to be known as a Jew rose in the world and attracted attention, the more likely his or her descent would become a matter of speculation and investigation. A good illustration of this is the case of the “patrician” investment banker C. Douglas Dillon (1909–­ 2003), ambassador to France in the 1950s, secretary of the Treasury in the 1960s, and president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1970s. Dillon’s paternal grandfather, Polish-­born Sam Lapowski (ca.

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1848–­1912), was a Jewish shopkeeper in San Angelo and later El Paso in West Texas. His son Clarence (1882–­1979) went away to Worcester Academy and then to Harvard College (class of 1905). At Harvard, Clarence changed his name to Dillon—­his family in Texas remained Lapowski—­and cut his ties to Judaism, but failed, nonetheless, to be chosen by one of the exclusive social clubs. (He did make Hasty Pudding in his senior year.) Three years after graduating, he married Anne McElden Douglas, daughter of a wealthy Presbyterian coal dealer in Milwaukee and sister of a Harvard roommate. Later, having built Dillon, Read & Co. into one of the nation’s largest investment firms, he gave his father’s name as Dillon in biographical accounts, claiming, when necessary, that he had changed it from Lapowski. This did not prevent, however, those who had known the family in West Texas from offering their version of his story: J. Krakauer from San Francisco wrote to Time magazine in November 1933 that Sam Lapowski remained Lapowski until his dying day. When Clarence’s son Douglas Dillon went to Groton, he replaced his mother’s Presbyterianism with the school’s Episcopalianism, while at Harvard he went farther than his father, making Spree (better than Hasty Pudding but not the best). He and other family members changed the family story somewhat, now claiming that Sam Lapowski’s wife was French and bore the family name Dillon. (It was, in fact, Sternbach.) During his tenure as secretary of the Treasury, when Dillon was put up for membership in the restrictive Chevy Chase Club, he solemnly—­and incorrectly—­ assured “disturbed traditionalists [in the club] that his percentage of origin in this group was a maximum of 25.”71 Perhaps by then he really believed it. The first half of the twentieth century was the heyday of passing in American Jewish history. While in the previous century, indifference, ignorance, inertia, and isolation expedited Jewish immersion in the mainstream, in the twentieth, the same end required more concentrated effort, for there were more Jews, more obstacles to their inclusion, and more talk about Jews in the press and on the street. Passing, unlike the acculturation of the previous century, was intensely self-­ conscious; it was a strategy demanding discipline and diligence. Those who tried to pass changed their names and neighborhoods and the way they ate, dressed, laughed, talked, and walked, constantly monitoring their own behavior. Their primary goal was not to become Christians but rather to become generic Americans whose background was, perhaps, vaguely Jewish—­to distance themselves from the mass of Jews, whom they, like Gentile America, thought of as pushy, loud,

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and overdressed. This did not require a onetime trip to the baptismal font but, rather, the more taxing task of constantly monitoring their behavior. Myron S. Kaufmann’s 1957 novel Remember Me to God, which draws on the author’s years at Harvard in the early 1940s, captures the constant attention to detail that passing demanded. When the novel’s protagonist, Boston-­born Richard Amsterdam, enters Harvard, he labors to distance himself from two kinds of Jewish students whom he finds there—­New York Jewish “types” and “the mob of unattractive Jewish students who commuted to Harvard every day from run-­down neighborhoods at the other end of the Boston subway,” where he had lived as a very small child before his parents moved to suburban Newton. The only Jew on the Lampoon, the undergraduate humor magazine, Richard begins monitoring “his own manners, his voice, and his clothing more carefully,” learning “the finer, newer points” by watching, in particular, a Brahmin colleague on the Lampoon “in order that he might be above reproach.” Some of these “finer, newer points” he writes down in a notebook “in order to clarify his thinking and to keep them for review.” For example, he notes his hesitation in inviting a Yankee friend for dinner because he knows his mother “will make a whole operation out of it, and spend two days cleaning and cooking too much stuff and worrying and making all kinds of complicated jello molds with whip cream.” When another Jew, a scholarship student from New York with “objectionable mannerisms,” stands for election to the Lampoon, Richard blackballs him because his presence would wreck what he has so carefully built up. The well-­born club men on the Lampoon “had accepted him as one of themselves so that he had had no cause to feel apart there,” while he, in turn, “had had no mannerisms to attract attention.” Now he fears that the arrival of an “objectionable” Jew will “remind the young blue bloods of half-­forgotten prejudices” and “make them conscious of the alien element that had sneaked into their midst,” thus frustrating his cherished hope of being elected to the Hasty Pudding Club. His motive is transparent to his non-­Jewish classmates. “What’s he running around like crazy trying to keep every Jew except himself off the Lampoon for, then? . . . I’ll tell you why—­because he thinks if he can get into something that the other Jews can’t get into, it proves he isn’t a Jew, that’s why. If another Yid got in it would spoil his illusion.”72 Passing could also be emotionally draining. The poet Adrienne Rich (1929–­2012), who grew up in Baltimore, child of a Johns Hopkins pathologist, captured the inner toll that passing imposed on her

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father in a 1982 essay on her own “split” identity. Her father, Arnold, was the son of a successful, Central European immigrant shopkeeper in Birmingham, Alabama. Arnold Rich, who “looked recognizably Jewish,” was sent by his father and American-­born Jewish mother to a North Carolina military school for training white southern gentlemen. He married a southern Protestant (without converting) and they raised their children as Episcopalians, although neither he nor she was a churchgoer. He constantly urged his daughters and wife “to speak quietly in public, to dress without ostentation, to repress all vividness or spontaneity, to assimilate with a world which might see us as too flamboyant.” His mother, who lived with them half the year, was “a model of circumspect behavior, dressed in dark blue or lavender, retiring in company, ladylike to an extreme, wearing no jewelry except a good gold chain, a narrow brooch, or a string of pearls.” Her father believed that, by virtue of his brilliance and refinement, he could make his Jewishness cease to matter. It did matter, however: His appointment to the chair in pathology at the medical school was delayed for years, and in the prime of his life, “he lived in an increasingly withdrawn world, in his house up on a hill in a neighborhood where Jews were not supposed to be able to buy property, depending almost exclusively on interactions with his wife and daughters to provide emotional connectedness,” suffering the loneliness of “the only, the token.” In 1953, when Adrienne married a Brooklyn-­born, Harvard-­educated Jew with an Americanized name, her parents refused to attend the wedding, since he was the “wrong” kind of Jew, and for several years after barely communicated with her.73 Passing also required imagination and inventiveness, even bravado. The Gatsbyesque, confidence-­man father of the writers Geoffrey (b. 1937) and Tobias Wolff (b. 1945)—­Arthur Samuels Wolff (1907–­70), son of a Hartford physician—­decided as a young man that it was not “a good idea” to be a Jew and so resolved “to disassemble his history, begin at zero, and recreate himself.” In his late teens and twenties, he mixed easily with well-­to-­do Gentiles in Hartford and as an adult, renaming himself Arthur Saunders Wolff III, created impeccable WASP credentials for himself, claiming to be a graduate of Groton and Yale, as well as a member of its exclusive secret society Skull and Bones, a decorated war hero, and a graduate of the Sorbonne, where he had studied aeronautics (which is not taught there). He never admitted he was a Jew, even to his sons—­whom he had baptized and confirmed as Episcopalians—­even when they confronted him. When Geoffrey was at Choate, his nose “thickening and curving,” his lips becoming

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bigger and his hair growing darker, he asked him point blank whether he was a Jew, but his father insisted that he was “a confirmed Anglican” of Dutch, German, and English descent. As a graduate student at Cambridge, Geoffrey continued to believe his father’s story. When George Steiner, his tutor, told him that he most certainly was a Jew, regardless of what his father told him—­“Anyone can see it. Don’t be silly, Of course you’re a Jew”—­Geoffrey at last pulled the truth from his mother when he went home.74 In extreme cases, American Jews seeking to refashion themselves relocated to Europe in the hope that there, in new surroundings, they could more easily bury their background. Hortense Holzmann Conn, the widowed mother of the entertainer Kitty Carlisle Hart (1910–­ 2007), was eager to advance her daughter and herself in New Orleans society. She sent Catherine (as she then was) to the most fashionable girls’ school in the city, where the other girls largely ignored her, the only Jewish girl in the school. Realizing the obstacles they faced, Hortense sold her house and took her daughter to Europe, with the intention of finding her a well-­born, well-­to-­do husband. For years they lived a peripatetic existence, roaming the Continent, taking the worst rooms in the best hotels, keeping the true state of their finances and ethnicity under wraps. Catherine became Kitty when she enrolled at a Swiss boarding school and Conn became Carlisle, a name picked from the New York telephone book, when, unmarried, she returned to the United States to pursue a career on Broadway. Kitty married the playwright Moss Hart in 1946 and, by the end of her life, had come to accept her Jewishness with greater equanimity. Not so her mother, a point Hart illustrated by telling the following story. A taxi in which she was riding with her mother dropped her off. The driver turned around and asked her mother, “That’s Kitty Carlisle, right?” Her mother said, “Yes,” and then he asked, “Is she Jewish?”—­to which her mother responded, “She may be but I’m not.”75 At a later date, the biographer Stanley Olson (1947–­89), whose wealthy Akron family (the name had been Olshanitsky) owned a chain of electronics stories, moved to London in 1968 and, at age twenty-­ two, reinvented himself as an English bon vivant or what the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography called “a Henry James Englishman.” A recent graduate of Boston University, he went to London to write a doctoral dissertation at Royal Holloway College on the Hogarth Press. In the course of his research, he met surviving members of the Bloomsbury group and found his way into literary circles. He made his reputation as a writer with biographies of the poet Elinor Wylie

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and the painter John Singer Sargent, but he was equally well known as an aesthete, gourmet, gourmand, and dandy. Supported by a trust fund, he wore beautifully tailored, made-­to-­order suits, lined in red silk, and expensive, handmade shoes, lined in red leather. He never wore—­did not even own—­casual clothes or ever removed his jacket in public, even on hot summer days (in part, because he was acutely ashamed of his overweight body). He spoke with an English accent and mastered correct English manners, turning himself into a self-­ assured, impeccably dressed, emotionally private, English gentleman. He never talked about his origins, even to other Jews, of whom there were few in the circles in which he moved. Most of his English friends did not know he was Jewish; new acquaintances rarely guessed he was an American, let alone a Midwesterner.76 The refashioning of the self, the belief that it is open to manipulation and construction rather than fixed by history, is a persistent theme in American social and cultural life. For most Americans, the opportunities and prospects for success were more mythic than real, but this is beside the point. For many Jews, America seemed to promise that they could be whatever they wanted to be, that they could reinvent themselves in any way they chose, that they could shed their old clothes and don new ones. In this sense, the myths of American life endorsed and promoted passing. In Europe, identities, personae, and fates were less malleable because Old World societies (before the Bolshevik experiment) were not busily building something radically and uniquely new. This is not to say that passing was absent there, but that it lacked mythic sanction. It also usually required baptism—­in which case it was not really passing in the same sense as in the United States. The fit between the myth of endless possibilities and the dynamics of passing is one of the central themes in Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain (2000). Although the protagonist is not a Jew passing as a Gentile but a black professor of classics, Coleman Silk, passing as a white, the substitution changes little in terms of the chemistry of passing. Roth’s theme here, as in much of his work, is the struggle to protect individual selfhood against the demands of group identity and membership.77 In the novel, Silk discovers as a college freshman during the Second World War that he can pass for white. The discovery is intoxicating, liberating, and empowering. Now he is the architect of his own fate, “free to be whatever he wants, free to pursue the hugest aim, the confidence right in his bones to be his particular I.” In an extended riff on this theme, Roth continues:

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Free on a scale unimaginable to his father. As free as his father had been unfree. Free not only of his father but of all that his father had ever had to endure. The impositions. The humiliations. The obstructions. The wound and the pain and the posturing and the shame—­all the inward agonies of failure and defeat. Free instead on the big stage. Free to go ahead and be stupendous. Free to enact the boundless, self-­defining drama of the pronouns we, they, and I. In his belief that he can escape his fate—­“the tyranny of the we and its we-­talk and everything that the we wants to pile on your head”—­ Coleman Silk embodies the longings of midcentury American Jews who opted to pass. “All he’d ever wanted, from earliest childhood on, was to be free: not black, not even white—­just on his own and free.”78

SEVEN

American Jews who joined Christian congregations, at least before the late twentieth century, tended to choose high-­status denominations, like Episcopaliansim or Prebyterianism (in the same way that Jewish converts in Britain became Anglicans). The reason for this is obvious: Having chosen Christianity for social reasons, they wanted the maximum social benefit. As a rule, American Jews who wished to discard their Jewishness did not become Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals, or Roman Catholics, unless, of course, their attraction to Christianity was a matter of conviction or their spouses belonged to one of these denominations. There were two broad exceptions to this generalization. From the late nineteenth century to the 1950s or 1960s, two very different varieties of Protestantism—­Unitarianism and Christian Science—­attracted thousands of American Jews. They were attractive precisely because they departed, each in its own way, from more conventional forms of Christianity. It is likely that many Jews who became Christian Scientists and Unitarians in this period did not see themselves as converts to Christianity in the usual sense of the term. Jews who became Unitarians were attracted to its humanistic, ethical creed, akin to Ethical Culture, and it is in that context, as a new religion beyond both Christianity and Judaism, that we will discuss, in a later chapter, Jewish Unitarians. Jews who became Christian Scientists, however, were looking for something different—­relief from physical suffering and mental distress. Belief—­in the sect’s healing

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message, not necessarily in its Christology—­was fundamental to its attraction. In this sense, Jewish Christian Scientists were converts of conviction, not convenience, and as such, we will treat them later in discussing “authentic” or “sincere” conversions, a category that requires extended discussion.

5 Integration and Intermarriage Midcentury to the Present But our new Secretary of State [Madeleine Albright], as existentially American as she has become, seems not to understand that in our country very little onus attaches to Jews and to Jewishness. Her spinning of her past was, therefore, pointless. Why could she not have simply said, when asked, “yes, although I am not a Jew myself, I descend from Jews.” Like Barry Goldwater and Michael ­Blumenthal and Caspar Weinberger and James ­Schlesinger and Robert Mossbacher and God only knows how many other good Christians. The Jews would not have claimed her, as we did not claim Caspar Weinberger. And the gentiles would not have disdained her. No one would have cared much at all. —Martin Peretz1

ONE

During the Second World War, the Germans murdered most of Europe’s Jews. While Jewish life did not disappear on the Continent in the second half of the twentieth century, it was a shadow of its former self, except in France, where the community grew after the war when it became a refuge for Jews forced from their homes in Muslim lands. In most European states, resistance to Jewish integration ceased to be a pressing problem, if for no other reason that few Jews remained alive. By the 1950s, the bulk of world Jewry lived outside Europe—­primarily in the United States and the new State of Israel. In France and Hungary—­where substantial populations remained after

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genocide and postwar emigration—­conversion, after a brief revival, ceased to be a common response to exclusion and stigmatization. In the Soviet-­bloc countries, it was also irrelevant, as it had been in the Soviet Union since 1917. However, since antisemitism persisted, most frequently when exploited for political ends, there was pressure on Jews, especially in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, to obscure their background and to forgo identification with Jewish culture. In this way, “passing” became an assimilationist strategy in Eastern and East Central Europe as it had been earlier and continued to be in the English-­speaking world. In Great Britain and the United States, life for Jews qua Jews improved in the second half of the century. Discrimination in all its forms, along with the public stigmatization of Jewishness, lessened. This occurred gradually over several decades, mainly in the 1960s and 1970s, largely without fanfare. But it was not apparent in the 1940s and 1950s that unprecedented access to elite circles and institutions was in the cards. So British and American Jews who wanted immediate, unimpeded access to society’s glittering prizes continued to labor at obscuring their background. Passing remained an option, especially among those whose sensibility and outlook had been shaped by the virulent antisemitism of the twenties, thirties, and forties. However, the children of those who came of age in these decades—­the so-­called baby boomers—­encountered more benign circumstances. Discriminatory practices rarely blocked their mobility or embittered their careers. From the 1960s, social intimacy between Jews and Gentiles and access to bastions of privilege accelerated. Indifference to Jewish concerns, rather than eagerness to escape the taint of a stigmatized identity, became the chief engine of radical assimilation at this time. Toleration, intermarriage, ignorance, and indifference came together to loosen and erode Jewish ties. Increasingly, Jews drifted or fell away from their Jewishness without premeditation, in a casual, ad hoc way. The absence of calculation and consciousness in the radical assimilation of the late twentieth century in no way lessened its demographic impact. In fact, the ease of simply moving on, of needing to do very little to make one’s Jewishness insignificant, may have accelerated the losses to the Jewish community. In any case, by the last decades of the century, Western Jewish communities were gripped by fears about the future. Many communal leaders and social scientists voiced alarm that rising intermarriage rates, along with the disengagement and absorption of the children of these unions, threatened the very existence of diaspora Jewry. The notion that the diaspora communities were

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committing demographic suicide, that kindness, toleration, and prosperity were reducing the number of Jews in the world as relentlessly as brutality earlier in the century, became widespread. Just as Felix Theilhaber’s Der Untergang der Deutschen Juden sparked debate in the 1910s and 1920s, so too did population studies of Western Jewish communities in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2010s. However, unlike German Jewry, which was as a whole reluctant to acknowledge the demographic trends that social science research uncovered, and powerless to reverse them (even if it wanted to), the American community became deeply concerned with the crisis of continuity, as it was known, redirecting resources, eventually, to outreach and other programs to stem demographic decline.

TWO

Baptism spared few Jews from death during World War II. At the time, however, when information about the scope and aim of German persecution was scarce in Nazi-­occupied Europe and rumors spread like wildflowers, thousands of Jews became Christians in the hope of saving themselves, as their ancestors had done in the past. Surprisingly, in the aftermath of the war, several thousand more who survived the war in hiding, in camps, or as refugees in Britain and America again looked to baptism to protect themselves and their children. In most cases, they faced no immediate, concrete threat. Rather, they wished to rid themselves once and for all of a marker that, in the war years, almost ended their lives and certainly ended those of family and friends. The choice of baptism was an emotion-­driven response to trauma, an effort to bury the past and at the same time to insure against unknown, future terrors. On the face of it, of course, the decision made little sense in light of baptism’s failure to save Jews during the war. This interpretation, however, fails to recognize the strength of the desire to begin anew, unencumbered by the past, and the absence of other historically sanctioned ways of doing this. In addition, among those who survived as refugees in English-­speaking lands were persons who were already pursuing radical assimilation in Central Europe before Nazism and would have converted in time had they not been forced into exile. Restarting life in a foreign country offered them the chance to make a clean break with their Jewish past and the suffering and turmoil associated with it. In France, a wave of conversions and changes of name followed the end of the war. The number of Jews who formally changed their

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religion is unknown, but contemporaries believed that French Jewry was suffering unprecedented losses. Citing “interested Catholic quarters,” the French essayist and novelist Arnold Mandel (1913–­87) wrote of “tens of thousands” of converts, a large proportion of them children and adolescents. He contrasted the conscious choice of conversion following the war with the “natural and spontaneous kind of assimilation, almost never the result of deliberate resolution” that characterized secularized French Jews before the war, attributing the change to the trauma of the Nazi years. The transformation of the aircraft manufacturer Marcel Bloch (1892–­1986), a non-­observant Jew, into Marcel Dassault, a non-­observant Catholic, was typical. Rich and successful before the war, he was imprisoned several times by the Vichy regime, continually attacked in the fascist press, and then arrested by the Gestapo in March 1944. Deported to Buchenwald in August 1944, he assumed the name Dassault (the resistance name of his brother) there and wore a red triangle—­supplied by fellow prisoners—­surviving as a Frenchman rather than as a Jew. He was liberated in May 1945 and the following year legally changed his name to Bloch-­Dassault and then in 1949 to Dassault alone—­to be done with an identity that was synonymous in his mind with despoliation, deportation, and death. He considered converting at this time—­no religion really mattered to him—­but was concerned that his conversion would be used to attack him as opportunistic. Only in the late 1950s were he and his wife baptized. To his great displeasure, his children chose to remain Jews, although they allowed their own children to become Catholics. He never talked of his origins, which had caused him so much pain, and could not stomach the sound of his prewar name (Bloch in France was as quintessentially Jewish as Goldberg in the United States).2 The number of converts during and after the war was sufficiently large that the French rabbinate launched a public campaign to prevent further defections and to urge those who had converted in desperation to return to Judaism. To encourage the return of wartime converts, Jacob Kaplan (1895–­1994), interim chief rabbi of France, announced that Judaism did not assign any spiritual value to their baptisms and that making a declaration of penitence before a rabbi or rabbinic court would render them void. Kaplan also denounced missionary efforts to exploit the moral and spiritual disarray into which the war had plunged so many French Jews, especially the claim that their suffering was God’s punishment.3 Particularly distressing to French Jewish leaders was the fate of the fifteen to twenty thousand Jewish orphans who had survived the war in hiding in French homes

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or institutions. Their wartime protectors, having become emotionally attached to them, were frequently reluctant to turn them over to Jewish relatives or institutions, whether they had been baptized or not. At the same time, many of the children, especially the youngest ones, felt at home in their new families and remembered their biological parents only vaguely, even at times blaming them for having “abandoned” them. Those who found refuge in Catholic boarding schools were baptized usually—­from both Catholic zeal and concern for their safety. Cut off from family, friends, and familiar surroundings, these children, eager to feel safe, secure, and at home, usually took to their new faith with alacrity, especially the youngest of them. The experience of the novelist and essayist Georges Perec (1936–­82) was typical. His Polish-­born father volunteered to fight with the French army in 1939 and died the following year from wounds he had received. Having remained in Paris, his Polish-­born mother was caught in a roundup and deported to Auschwitz. Georges survived the war in the southern zone in the care of an aunt and an uncle, who placed him in a Catholic boarding school, where he was baptized (he was six or seven years old at the time). He recalled years later that after his baptism my piety and faith remained exemplary and Father David [a converted Jewish monk] made me religious prefect of my dormitory and entrusted me with giving the signal for evening prayers and with making sure they were properly executed. On some days I received permission to rise before the others and to attend the mass which Father David, assisted by a single altar-­boy, said for himself and the two headmistresses in the little chapel with its stylized Stations of the Cross. . . . My dearest wish would have been to be that altar-­boy, but this was not possible: before that I had to make my First Communion, then my solemn Communion, and even to be confirmed.4 The Polish-­born, Bundist parents of the future cardinal and archMarie Lustiger (1926–­ 2007) acted similarly bishop of Paris Jean-­ following the outbreak of the war. In late 1939, they sent him and his sister to Orléans, where a fervently Catholic teacher took charge of them. In August 1940, the adolescent Aaron was baptized, taking the name Jean-­Marie. When the parents of the Israeli historian Saul Friedländer, refugees from Prague, grew desperate in 1942, as the roundup of foreign Jews in both zones of France began, they placed ten-­year-­old Pavel (as he then was) in a Catholic boarding school in

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the Berry countryside and consented to his baptism, even agreeing to continue his Catholic education when life returned to normal. The young Paul-­Henri Ferland (his new name) eventually adapted to life there. He “passed over to Catholicism, body and soul,” finding great comfort in devotion to the Virgin Mary, who became a substitute for his deported mother: “Kneeling before the plaster statue with the sweet face, clad in a long white robe and a sky-­blue girdle, her head crowned with tin stars, I rediscovered something of the presence of a mother.” An exemplary, devoted student, he loved “the austere simplicity” of the early mass and “the pomp of church holidays.” He was “intoxicated by the splendor of the chasubles and the ciboria, the heady odor of the incense, the softness or the majesty of the music” and confessed, decades later, that he never again felt the emotion that gripped him during a solemn high mass.5 After the liberation of France, when told of the fate of his murdered parents, Friedländer, now in his early teens, reclaimed his Jewishness, lost his Catholic faith (in that order), and eventually sailed to Israel in 1948 to fight for the newly created state. Children who were younger than he when they were put into Catholic institutions or who did not lose their faith or experience a Jewish reawakening after the war tended to remain Catholics. In numerous cases, disputes arose between Jewish organizations, which wanted to reclaim orphaned Jewish children, and French public opinion and the Church, which wanted to absorb them into Catholic society, whether they had been baptized or not. This conflict escalated into a national scandal in the long-­running Finaly case. The children of deported Austrian refugees, the Finaly brothers survived in an orphanage in the Grenoble region, whose Catholic director refused to surrender them to relatives after the war, and in 1948 had them baptized. The relatives took the director to court, the case dragged on for five years, and when, finally, in 1953, the director was ordered to produce the boys, they were hidden by the sisters of Notre Dame de Sion and then smuggled across the border to Basque monks in Spain. Only the intervention of France’s highest court restored the brothers to their family.6 Among survivors who migrated to Great Britain and the United States after the war, as well as among refugees who reached their shores earlier, there were some who chose to leave their Judaism well behind them and to restart their lives as Christians or Gentiles. The historian Cecil Roth wrote to the Jewish Chronicle in alarm in November 1941 about the conversions of more than a dozen German Jewish refugees that had taken place in Oxford that year alone, some

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of whom, he thought, were “carrying to its logical conclusion the process interrupted at home.” A clear example of this is the baptism of Kurt Hahn (1886–­1974), founder of Gordonstoun in Scotland, the public school where Prince Charles was educated, and creator of the Outward Bound courses in Britain and the United States. Hahn, a repressed homosexual, established a boarding school in 1920 whose educational philosophy was shot through with right-­wing volkisch ­values. At first he supported Hitler, but when SA men killed a man in the presence of his mother, he spoke up and was jailed. Thanks to the intervention of the British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald, he was able to leave Germany in July 1933. Safe in England, he converted to the Church of England and embarked on what the Labour MP Leo Abse called a “a life of inauthenticity and sly renunciation,” working to erase his Jewishness and repress his homosexuality.7 Charles Hannam (né Kurt Hartland in Essen) came to England on a Kindertransport in May 1939, age fourteen. He did not want to associate with other refugees or to be viewed as a refugee. He detested “their bad English,” “their mixture of German, Yiddish and English,” their talking with their hands, and their “continental clothes.” Like most adolescents, he wanted to be like his friends at school, whose manners and views he admired and tried to copy. Most of all, he wanted to be accepted, “to become an Englishman, to disappear for ever into a new identity, a new language, and clothes that in no way distinguished him from other boys.” If the price for acceptance was “the rejection of the people to whom he had once belonged,” it seemed worth paying. He did not convert, but after attending a minor public school, he enlisted in the army, at the time changing his name and declining to list his religion as Jewish. By then he had managed to lose his accent and was able to lie about where he was from, saying Sussex, where he had attended school.8 Better known is the transformation of the parents of Madeleine Albright (b. 1937), ambassador to the United Nations and secretary of state during the Clinton administration. Josef Korbel (1909–­77), an official in the Czech foreign service, and his family managed to flee Prague before the Germans were able to seal the border. They made their way to London by way of Belgrade, where he had served as press attaché previously. While in London (probably in 1939), he and his family became Roman Catholics. As his wife explained to one of her husband’s oldest friends after the war: “To be a Jew is to be constantly threatened by some kind of danger. That is our history.” When the Communists seized power in 1948, the family again fled, this time

Integration and Intermarriage  •  197

settling in the United States, where Korbel taught international relations at the University of Denver. He and his wife said nothing to their children or anyone else about their background. In his book The Communist Subversion of Czechoslovakia, 1938–­1948 (1959), he deplored the German conquest and despoliation of Czechoslovakia and the murder of patriotic citizens but said nothing about the destruction of Czech and Slovak Jewry. He dedicated the book to his murdered parents, without indicating anything about the circumstances of their deaths. Similarly, in a memoir about the war years that his wife wrote for the family, she made no mention of their background. They told their children that three of their grandparents had “died during the course of the war”—­and left it at that. When Albright was asked why she thought her parents did not tell her the truth, she speculated that they were trying to protect their children. True, discrimination against Jews was pervasive at the time when they moved to the United States and were raising their children, but surely there were other motives as well. Josef Korbel was a fervent Czech patriot, with no interest in or much knowledge of Judaism, and arrived in the United States with the emotional baggage of having grown up and worked in a society where his origins were a liability. Why talk about them? He also must have known that he would fare better in the American academy, where Jews were not welcome until the 1960s, as a Czech who fled Communism than as a Jew who fled Nazism.9 When confronted, survivors who hid their Jewishness after the war usually explained that they did so to protect their children. Tunis-­born Henriette Lombroso, the mother of Senator George Allen (b. 1952) of Virginia and the wife of the professional football coach George Allen Sr., began concealing her background in the early 1950s, after she met her future husband, then coaching at a small college in Sioux City, Iowa. (She was visiting an army officer and his wife whom she had met in North Africa during the war.) She was afraid that his Catholic parents would not accept her and that her Jewishness would harm his budding coaching career. Because she would not promise to raise their children as Catholics, they were married in a civil ceremony by a justice of the peace. However, she never told her children, who were given no religion, that she was Jewish. When Allen’s background became an issue in the 2006 senatorial campaign, she told the Washington Post that she and her husband had wanted to protect their children from living with the fear that she had experienced during the German conquest and occupation of Tunis, when her home was bombed and her father imprisoned. Or, as Allen’s campaign manager explained, she

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never discussed her background “because she was so seared by what she had experienced with her own father.”10 In middle age the journalist Peter Godwin (b. 1957) discovered that his father George—­an English engineer long resident in Zimbabwe, with “his safari suit and desert boots [and] clipped British accent”—­ was born and raised a Polish Jew, Kazimierz Goldfarb (1924–­2004). Goldfarb’s upper-­middle-­class, Polish-­speaking, religiously indifferent parents sent him in June 1939 to study English in Britain, thus saving his life. In 1940 he joined the Church of England, was confirmed by the Bishop of Salisbury, and, very much a Polish patriot, volunteered for General Sikorski’s army. After the war, he began calling himself George, married the daughter of an Anglican clergyman, and, on becoming a naturalized citizen in 1947, took her third Christian name, Godwin, as his surname. At the end of his life, when his son asked him why he had concealed “the Jewish stuff,” his father answered: Why? For my children. For you. So that you could be safe. So that what happened to them [nodding toward a photograph of his mother and sister] would never happen to you. Because it will never really go away, this thing. It goes underground for a generation for two, but always reemerges.11 Survivors and refugees who buried their Jewishness resembled Jews who tried to pass as Gentiles in the postwar decades, but their task was twice as difficult, for they needed not only to monitor what they said but also to keep silent about the trauma they had experienced. The price they and their children paid for their silence was often heavy. Charles Hannam, mentioned above, who lied about his past to colleagues at a school where he taught, recalled another teacher, who had just left the notoriously antisemitic Palestine Police, ranting about Jews: “I want to kick them in—­yids. I tell you, Charles, Hitler had the right idea, should have gassed the lot, then they couldn’t have killed my mates. Yes, gassed the lot.” Hannam wanted to confront him, telling him that he was a Jew, but realized it was too late, having concealed his origins. Now he had no choice and was left feeling utterly depressed.12 Prague-­born William Trost came to New York in 1941, age four, to join his parents, who had escaped Europe the year before and left him in a children’s home in Zurich. They raised him as a Catholic, sending him to Catholic schools, where he absorbed what the Church then taught about Jews. When he was a college junior and about to sail to England for a year of study abroad, his mother told

Integration and Intermarriage  •  199

him that the family was Jewish because the cousins in England who were to meet him at the dock, while not observant, did not hide their Jewishness. The news shook him to his core: The next morning I got into a cab with my mother and my stepfather. That’s when I had the first massive anxiety attack of my life. It started a period of gruesome agoraphobia for twenty years, which only lessened when I began to face my anger about my withheld identity. Even though I was a lapsed Catholic, I was imbued with Catholic values, including anti-­Semitism, so to find out I was Jewish was traumatic. It meant I was going to Hell. I knew I was in big trouble.13 Galician-­born Maria and Kovik Bocard, who survived the war, respectively, in Rome, living as an Italian Catholic, and in Stalin’s Siberian Gulag, married as Catholics in Rome in 1946 (neither was baptized)—­ largely to keep secret the Jewish origins of Maria’s older sister, who had married a Roman count and Fascist official in 1936. When they sailed to the United States in 1950, they left behind their Jewishness, raising their two daughters as Polish Catholics in a small Midwestern city, never breathing a word to them about their past. The silence they maintained for four decades took a toll on the emotional health of the entire family. In 1965, one of their daughters later recalled, the family entered therapy, “a brawling, breathless free-­for-­all” in her words. “We all knew there was something very wrong, but none of us knew exactly what it was.” Exhibiting “a flair for dysfunction,” her parents and sister “fought and cried, raved and sobbed, launching a spectacle for the doctor each week.” But neither parent said a word about the past.14 In Eastern Europe—­Hungary, in particular—­there were survivors as well who at the end of the war tried to escape their Jewish past. In Budapest, where barely one-­third of the prewar Jewish population survived, the number of Jews who became Christians was, relative to the size of the surviving community, higher than it had been in 1933. In 1945, 388 Jews converted; in 1946, 326; in 1947, 247. Only in 1948, the year in which the Communists secured full control of the ­country—­in theory, rendering religion irrelevant—­did the number of conversions start to plummet. (Small numbers of Jews chose to convert throughout the 1950s). When an estimate of the number of Jews who withdrew from the community without entering another religion is added to the number of those who formally converted, it emerges that Hungarian Jews were leaving Judaism with greater

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frequency in 1945–­48 than in 1939–­43. Significantly, more than half of those who became Christians chose Protestant denominations—­ Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Unitarianism—­over Catholicism in the years following liberation. The sociologist Viktor Karády attributes this to “the logic of lesser evil.” Protestantism was spiritually more liberal, more tightly attached to the Hebrew Bible, and less tainted by an anti­semitic past in Hungary. Catholicism’s rapid loss of political power with the increase in Communist anticlericalism may also have diminished its appeal.15 Converting after liberation was more emotionally charged than converting in wartime. Between 1939 and 1944, deserting the Jewish community to save one’s life was not automatically seen as dishonorable. However, with the defeat of Germany, conversion ceased to be an emergency measure, made necessary by extraordinary circumstances, to escape deportation. Hungarian Jewry, moreover, was a battered, depleted community. Leaving it at this time could be seen as unheroic or cowardly. As a result, many of those who converted failed to register their departure with the community, as required by law. While eager to shed the burden of Jewishness, they also wanted, at the same time, to avoid scandal. Moreover, by remaining on the register of the Jewish community, they stayed eligible to receive aid from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which was helping to feed survivors throughout East Central Europe. In addition, very few who converted between 1939 and 1944 returned to Judaism after liberation, even though it was then possible.16 In the four decades following the Communist consolidation of power, being Jewish remained a liability in the eyes of many, if not most, Hungarian Jews. A minority embraced Communism, some because they believed it would erase their Jewishness and create a just society in which antisemitism would have no place (a theme to be discussed in a later chapter), and some because they did not want to be left behind. Many more labored to conceal their Jewish origins completely—­by changing their first and last names and “passing”—­or worked to minimize the Jewish dimensions of their family history. In interviews with 117 persons about how they and their parents coped with their Jewish origins in postwar Hungary, the sociologist András Kovács discovered that concealment, either total or situational denial, was more common than not. Only forty families forswore such behavior. All but thirty-­six of the families had taken Hungarian surnames; in twenty-­five cases, the change occurred after the war; in four cases the interviewees themselves, not their parents, had changed their

Integration and Intermarriage  •  201

surnames. It also emerged that parents frequently tried to withhold from their children knowledge of their family background. Thus, thirty-­one interviewees discovered they were Jewish when strangers, rather than relatives, revealed it to them or when they inferred it from various clues. Even larger numbers knew nothing whatsoever (fifty-­six persons) or very little (forty-­two persons) about the history of their families before the war.17

THREE

The conversions of survivors and refugees were atypical of radical assimilation in the second half of the twentieth century. With every decade, turning Christian became an increasingly anachronistic form of assimilatory behavior, one that looked backward to the illiberal decades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To be sure, Jews continued to move away from the community of their birth in the half century after the war, but increasingly they were drifting rather than defecting. This was a novel moment, a true watershed, in modern Jewish history. While the demographic outcome of the two processes, drift and defection, was similar, the changes that drove them were dissimilar. The forces of exclusion that historically encouraged Jews to become Christians or pass as Gentiles were weaker in Western countries in the second half of the twentieth century than earlier, as were the religious sentiments that sustained Judaism from within. In the liberal states of Europe and America, the political mobilization of antisemitism, the exclusion of Jews from elite circles and institutions, and the stigmatization of Jewishness in high and low culture slowly became marginal phenomena. They did not disappear by any means, but they ceased to embitter the lives of most Jews. It is a popular assumption that Gentile awareness of the Holocaust was responsible for the marginalization of antisemitism in the United States in the half century after the war. While no doubt true to some degree, the growing irrelevance of a Jew’s Jewishness to his or her success (socially, professionally, and in every other way) was rooted in more fundamental changes in the way Western societies evaluated the fitness, value, and merit of all their citizens, including Jews. Put briefly, an individual’s “essence”—­his or her religion, ethnicity, race, gender, and sexual orientation—­became less important in determining his or her life chances than it had been earlier. The weakening of antisemitism was part of a larger transformation that included the

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weakening of homophobia, misogyny, and racism. Slowly (but in no sense inevitably), Western societies became more willing to admit into elite circles and institutions “outsiders” and “others” of various stripes who previously were excluded. Talent, skill, ability, and intelligence did not completely trump ancestry, making it irrelevant, but birth alone ceased to be an unmovable obstacle to integration, mobility, and success by the end of the century. In other words, fewer people cared one way or the other whether Madeleine Albright was Jewish (or a woman, for that matter) than would have a century earlier. Survey research exploring American attitudes toward Jews recorded a massive drop in expressions of hostility in the postwar period that mirrored the decline in exclusionary practices. While poll data may not fully reveal the hold of sentiments with great emotional depth and historical longevity like antisemitism, the evidence of a decline, whatever its extent, is overwhelming. Reviewing data from over one hundred surveys between 1937 and 1962, the sociologist Charles Stember concluded that American feelings about Jews underwent a profound change within one generation. By the mid-­ 1960s, Americans were significantly less likely than before the war to believe that Jews were unscrupulous, clannish, and too powerful in business and finance. Whereas in 1950 almost 60 percent stated they would not marry a Jew, by 1962 less than 40 percent said they would refuse. At the same time, less than 5 percent indicated that they thought colleges and universities should limit the number of Jews they admitted—­about the same percentage as thought Jewish neighbors were undesirable.18 The relaxation of obstacles to mobility and the waning of expressions of hostility made conversion and passing obsolete, at least in the long term, for with Jewishness no longer a liability, Jews no longer needed to flee or hide their origins. However, in the short term, there was a time lag between the weakening of antisemitism and the decline in the flight from Jewishness. In part, this was due to the fact that exclusion and stigmatization subsided gradually, over two or three decades. Elite universities, for example, eliminated Jewish quotas only in the mid-­to late 1960s. It was thus possible before the 1970s to view the proverbial glass as half empty rather than half full, to focus on the exclusionary practices that remained in place while ignoring those that no longer existed or were weakened. Moreover, Jews who came of age in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s often experienced difficulty in shaking ways of thinking and behaving that were formed in their youth and reflected the hostility of those decades.

Integration and Intermarriage  •  203

Just as some survivors and refugees converted or hid their origins after the war because their wartime experiences still haunted them, so too some American Jews who grew up before or during the war years, when antisemitism was an inescapable presence, behaved afterward as if it were still a formidable threat. Growing consciousness of the Holocaust, as well as persistent Arab and Muslim hostility, may also have strengthened the perception that the Jews were a perpetually besieged people. Whatever the case, passing was probably as common in the 1950s and perhaps even the 1960s as it had been earlier, certainly for those already set in their ways. The biography of the liberal activist Allard Lowenstein (1929–­80) illustrates how antisemitism continued to shape Jewish behavior even after it was beginning to wane. Lowenstein, the child of a Lithuanian-­ born father with a successful restaurant business, was raised on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and later in overwhelmingly WASP Harrison in Westchester County. Physically weak, bespectacled, with a large nose, he was ridiculed and attacked as a youngster. Even though he could have been admitted to an Ivy League university, he chose to attend the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill because it was so un-­Jewish (this was 1945), so distant from New York and his family. There he went out of his way to keep his Jewishness in the background. He attended church (Presbyterian), tried to join a fraternity that excluded Jews, cultivated Gentile friends, and refused to date Jewish women. His undergraduate years coincided with the struggle to establish the State of Israel, and already active in politics, he campaigned against Zionism, which he labeled “unwise, undesirable, and evil.” He equated Jewish nationalism with ghettoization, with the antisemitic idea that Jews were so inherently different from others that they could never become part of normal humanity. The best answer to Zionism, he felt, was assimilation and specifically intermarriage. Although he associated largely with Gentiles, he could not escape the Jewish label. Antisemitism was very much alive at UNC in the late-­1940s and early 1950s. His friends thought he lost almost every student election in which he ran because he was Jewish. As a law student at Yale and afterward, most of the women he dated were well-­born WASPs and when he married in his late thirties (he was a closet homosexual), he chose a Boston Brahmin from Beacon Hill. In the 1960s, Lowenstein was in the thick of the civil rights and antiwar movements, attracting national attention as a liberal activist, but when it came to things Jewish he continued to behave as if nothing had changed since his youth.19

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While the decline in hostility in the postwar era weakened the temptation to shed one’s Jewishness, it also created, in tandem with changes in the structure of American Jewry, new opportunities for social integration that eventually accelerated demographic decline even more dramatically. Until the 1960s, the overwhelming majority of American Jews (immigrants from Eastern Europe and their children) were poorly integrated into the non-­Jewish world in social terms. They found friendship and sociability primarily among other Jews, even when they belonged to civic or charitable organizations with mixed memberships. Even postwar suburbanization did not fundamentally change this pattern. Like urban Jews, suburban Jews before the 1960s seldom mixed in the evenings or on weekends with Gentiles. As one suburban Jewish housewife told an interviewer in the 1950s: The ghetto gates, real or imagined, close at 5 P.M. “Five o’clock shadow” sets in at sundown. Jews and Christians do not meet socially even in suburbia. If we do, you bet that it is to help promote some cause or organization where they think we Jews may be helpful. But after five o’clock there is no social contact, no parties, no home visits, no golf clubs—­no nothing!20 This pattern was a result of both self-­segregation and nonacceptance. Jews were accustomed to mixing largely with one another. Common interests, similar cultural traits, mutual ties of acquaintance, and in-­ group sentiments continued to encourage the formation and maintenance of all-­Jewish social circles even after Jews were no longer living in ethnically homogeneous urban neighborhoods. As the philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen (1880–­1947) told the National Council of Jewish Women in 1936, “It takes a long time for a people who have lived together as a group with common traditions and common suffering to dissolve such ties, especially when others are not willing to absorb them.” He then pointed to himself as a prime illustration. He was not a synagogue-­going Jew or a Zionist, but the majority of his friends and intimate associates were Jews, nearly all of whom, like his children and himself, were married to other Jews—­“not because of [religious or nationalist] conviction, but because of natural association and attraction.”21 What was “natural” in the interwar years, however, was not “natural” in the decades that followed the war. The economic status, social aspirations, and historical memories of the next generation of American Jews (roughly, those born in the 1940s and on) were different

Integration and Intermarriage  •  205

from those of the preceding two generations and more likely to result in intensive social integration. In great part, this was because their coming of age coincided with the destigmatization of Jewishness and the weakening of discrimination. Whether their upbringing was urban or suburban, they aspired to live differently from their parents. They attended college in greater numbers (about two-­thirds of Jewish high school graduates did so in the early 1960s), and were more likely to live away from home when they did. They moved into traditionally non-­Jewish areas of the economy, becoming engineers, architects, professors, corporate executives, and salaried professionals, and slowly left behind retail and wholesale commerce, the economic backbone of American Jewry from its origins. Over half a century removed from the Yiddishkeit of the Old World and the urban “ghetto,” they pursued new leisure-­time activities, moved to newly built or once restricted neighborhoods, and joined social and civic organizations that would not have welcomed their parents.22 The cumulative result of these changes was that, beginning in the 1960s, Jews (young Jews at first) mixed more frequently and in more settings with Gentiles than before. A further, unsurprising consequence was the acceleration of the intermarriage rate. Before the 1960s, intermarriage was most often found among the descendants of Central European Jews who arrived in the United States in the nineteenth century. Among East Europeans, who swamped the earlier arrivals demographically, it was not common, and thus the overall rate of intermarriage was low for the first half of the century. Before the First World War, the sociologist Julius Drachsler sampled over one hundred thousand marriage licenses from Manhattan and the Bronx in the five-­year period 1908–­12 and found that, among all ethnic and racial groups, Jews and Negroes had the lowest rates of intermarriage. Among Jews, there were 1.17 out-­marriages for every one hundred in-­marriages, but in the largest subcommunities—­ Jews from Rumania, the Russian Empire, Turkey, and the Austrian Empire—­the ratio was less than one for every one hundred. By the mid-­1950s, the rate was higher, but not so high that it attracted much attention. For example, in Washington, D.C., in 1956, just over 13 percent of all marriages in which at least one partner was Jewish were intermarriages. Breaking down the overall rate by generations revealed that the intermarriage rate among native-­born Jews of native parentage (the third generation) was substantially higher (17.9 percent) than among the first two generations (1.4 percent and 10.2 percent, respectively). In smaller communities in the South and the

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Midwest, where the Jewish marriage pool was limited, the rate was even higher. In Iowa, for example, between 1953 and 1959, there were on the average 42.2 new intermarriages each year for every 100 marriages in which at least one partner was Jewish.23 Still, it is significant that no contributor to the landmark collection of essays that the sociologist Marshall Sklare published in 1958, The Jews: Social Patterns of an American Group, wrote on intermarriage.24 Communal anxiety about intermarriage emerged in the next decade. In February 1960, the Theodore Herzl Institute convened a two-­day conference in New York City on “Intermarriage and Jewish Life,” to which it invited educators, rabbis, and social scientists. The proceedings were published three years later. When Sklare published his study of the Jewish community of Highland Park, Illinois, in 1967, he devoted fifteen pages to “The Threat of Intermarriage.” The focus of his discussion was not the extent of intermarriage, which the study was not designed to measure, but, rather, attitudes (especially parental attitudes) toward it. A majority of those interviewed (the interviews were conducted in 1957 and 1958 and thus reflect the climate at that time) expressed some doubt that their children would marry other Jews. When asked whether they thought their child would marry a non-­Jew, only 36 percent answered “no.” The others stated that they did not know, thought it was possible, or said simply “yes” (5 percent of the interviewees).25 What these numbers captured was a shift in expectations of what was possible among middle-­to upper-­middle-­class Jews: the exceptional was no longer unimaginable. In 1936 Morris Raphael Cohen saw endogamy as something that “naturally” happened; two decades later many Highland Park parents were less sure that this was true. The parents of Highland Park were prophets. From the 1960s, marrying out became an ever more familiar feature of American Jewish life. In an article in Commentary in 1964, Sklare decried “Jewish complacency about the rate of intermarriage,” warning that it posed a threat to the Jewish future and urging communal agencies to sponsor or conduct research in the area.26 That same year the popular weekly Look brought the topic to a broader readership in a much-­discussed article, “The Vanishing American Jew,” in which it predicted the disappearance of the Jewish community in North America by the end of the century. At this point, what was known about the extent of intermarriage came from local studies, which, consonant with the diverse character of the communities, offered no comprehensive picture. Intermarriage was high in Iowa and moderately low in Washington, D.C., as we saw, while in Providence, Rhode Island, it was even lower.27 (And, of course,

Integration and Intermarriage  •  207

what is “high” and what is “low” are in the mind of the beholder.) More global information on the extent of exogamous marriage emerged in three National Jewish Population Studies (NJPS)—­in 1970–­71, 1990, and 2000–­01. Leaving to the side for now questions about interpreting their findings (a matter of some controversy), the three surveys trace a steady rise in the number of Jews who married Gentiles in the last decades of the century. The first NJPS reported that 31.7 percent of Jews who married in the period 1965–­71 married someone who was not born Jewish. However, by including within the definition of intermarriage unions in which one of the partners was a convert to Judaism, the NJPS researchers inflated the figure. When demographers at the Hebrew University recalculated the rate, using the same data but excluding those who married converted Gentiles (the usual research practice), it dropped to 22.5 percent.28 The 1990 NJPS revealed that intermarriage became common in the 1980s. An early analysis of the data reported that 52 percent of Jews who married in the period 1985–­90 married non-­Jews, a number that became pivotal to communal discourse about Jewish continuity in the 1990s. However, as with the previous NJPS, there were methodological weaknesses with the way in which this figure was obtained. A careful recalculation by the sociologist Steven Cohen yielded a figure closer to 41 percent, which, while less alarming, was still unprecedented.29 The results of the third NJPS confirmed that the trend toward intermarriage was long term (and that Cohen’s recalculation of the data from the previous NJPS was more or less correct), as the following table shows:

Intermarriage by Year Marriage Began30 Year marriage began

Percent intermarried

Before 1970

13

1970–­1979

28

1980–­1984

38

1985–­1990

43

1991–­1995

43

1996–­2001

47

In total, among all Jews who were married at the time of the study, 31 percent were intermarried. While the 2000–­01 study was even more

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roundly criticized on methodological grounds than its predecessor, especially for the roadblocks it erected to comparing data from the two studies, no one doubted that intermarriage was becoming increasingly commonplace.31 One result was that the percentage of American Jews with two Jewish parents declined sharply from the first and second generations, when it was over 90 percent, to the fourth generation, when it was less than 40 percent.32 The Pew Research Center’s survey of American Jewry in 2013 confirmed this trend: 48 percent of Jewish “Millennials” (those born after 1980) had intermarried parents.33

FOUR

The rate of intermarriage in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries was testimony to the success of Jewish integration into the social fabric of the United States. Before the 1960s, critics and observers frequently linked out-­marriage to social disabilities. Jews who married Gentiles, they asserted, were socially ambitious, upwardly mobile nouveaux riches, seeking to distance themselves from their origins. While this may have been true at times in earlier decades, when the choice to mix in Gentile circles was deliberate, it was no longer accurate in regard to the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries. Those who married out then were hardly seeking to improve their social status or gain entry to restricted circles. While hostility to Jews remained alive in pockets of the American population, it was too weak to block Jewish mobility. Sklare forecast in 1964 that as “traditional social distinctions” were swept away, as “the old-­time social arbiters” lost their influence, and as “hospital boards, country clubs, suburbs, and corporations that were once the exclusive preserve of the Protestant upper class” became “more democratic in their admission policies,” the social status motive would become increasingly insignificant. Data on intermarriage from eight community studies in the 1980s confirmed Sklare’s conjecture: Higher socioeconomic status was associated with lower rates of intermarriage while lower socioeconomic status was associated with higher rates.34 Assimilatory motives no longer drove intermarriage at the end of the twentieth century. Jews mixed with and then married Gentiles largely because the latter no longer viewed them as “different” or “other” in essential ways (and because the former were distant from Jewish observance). The irony is that the social conditions that accelerated the formation of close social ties between Jews and other Americans were those

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that communal leaders had viewed hitherto as eminently desirable. Most American Jewish organizations were historically integrationist in their aims. They sponsored programs to reduce prejudice, break down barriers, and encourage social mixing. While their programs were not responsible for the postwar decline in discrimination, the harmonious social relations they envisioned—­Jews and Gentiles living, working, and playing together in harmony—­were realized nonetheless. The social and cultural contacts that were their goal from the very start smoothed the way, unintentionally, to increasing intimacy and, in the end, increasing intermarriage. The narrowing gap between the marital choices of men and women highlights the primacy of changing social patterns in the explosive growth of intermarriage in the United States. At midcentury, as in Europe earlier, men were more likely than women to marry out. For example, in the 1981 Greater New York Jewish Population Study, 5 percent of the men who married in the 1950s, and 9 percent who married in the 1960s, wed Gentile women. The respective figures for women in the two decades were 3 and 8 percent. For those who wed in the years 1970–­81, however, the rate—­11 percent—­was the same for men and women. In smaller Jewish communities, where intermarriage rates were higher—­largely because the Jewish marriage pool was smaller—­the gap between men and women was even greater in the first decades after the war. In Washington, D.C., in 1956, the number of intermarried men was twice that of intermarried women. Of the 285 intermarriages in Iowa in the period 1953–­59, Jewish men accounted for 76 percent and Jewish women for 24 percent. By the end of the century, the differences between men and women were less marked. In the 2000–­2001 NJPS, 33 percent of men were wed to Gentiles and 29 percent of women.35 As in Germany, the more freedom Jewish women in the United States enjoyed—­attending college, pursuing careers, and taking control of their lives more generally—­ the more they married out. Further evidence of the decisive role of structure and environment in the rise of intermarriage emerges in the statistical disparity between older communities on the East Coast and newer ones in the Rocky Mountains and the Far West. In the latter, where the Jewish population was less concentrated, Jewish institutions less numerous and less-­well-­funded, and ethnic boundaries more porous and blurred, the intermarriage rate was higher. The 2000–­01 NJPS revealed that in the Northeast 25 percent of Jews who were married were married to Gentiles, and in the West (the Pacific Coast, the

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Southwest, and the Rocky Mountains) 41 percent. Significantly, Jews who were born and living in the West at the time of the survey were twice as likely to have intermarried (61 percent) than Jews born in the Northeast who had moved to the West (29 percent). Jews who were born in the Midwest and migrated to the West also intermarried less (33 percent), like those from the Northeast. It seems that when Jewish migrants relocated, they carried with them prophylactic habits and outlooks from their childhood and youth. A further measure of the extent to which intermarriage became common in the West at this time: When the sociologist Bruce Phillips surveyed the Jews of San Francisco, the Peninsula, and Marin and Sonoma counties in 2004, he found that 41 percent of Jewish children were being raised by two Jewish parents and 42 percent in a household with one non-­Jewish parent. (The remainder was being raised in single-­parent Jewish households.)36 Compounding the impact of extensive integration in the second half of the century and beyond were growing indifference to Judaism as a system of beliefs, practices, and obligations, and increasing remoteness from the immigration experience. In the United States, as in Western and Central Europe in the previous century, legal equality, material prosperity, immersion in Western culture, and the association of traditional Judaism with the Old World contributed to the erosion of religious commitments. To be sure, among the synagogue-­affiliated minority, there was a trend toward greater traditionalism, one that crossed denominational lines and attracted both media and academic attention. But this was a qualitative phenomenon, not an indication of a global rise in observance and affiliation among the majority, who increasingly lived their lives outside the orbit of communal institutions. Survey research on the religious habits and beliefs of American Jewry indicate a drop in most (but not all) measures of religious commitment from one generation to the next. For example, in the 1981 Greater New York Jewish Population Survey, respondents were asked about their parents’ and their own observance of six traditional commandments: carrying no money on the Sabbath (27 percent versus 12 percent), using separate dishes for meat and milk (56 percent versus 30 percent), lighting candles on Friday night (67 percent versus 37 percent), fasting on Yom Kippur (82 percent versus 67 percent), lighting Hanukkah candles (84 percent versus 76 percent), and attending a Passover seder (89 percent for both generations). On a set of questions measuring observance by the generation of the respondents, 53 percent of the first generation were synagogue members, 44 percent

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of the second, 31 percent of the third, and 29 percent of the fourth. However, since congregational membership is linked to life stages (young couples are more likely to affiliate after becoming parents), the small drop from the third to the fourth generation may not be significant. More telling than the decline in membership is the decline in attendance. Among the first generation, 78 percent attended synagogue on the high holidays and 35 percent once a month or more; among the second, the respective numbers were 71 percent and 18 percent; among the third, 63 percent and 13 percent; and among the fourth, 54 percent and 9 percent.37 Religious commitments, with their potential for countering the consequences of social integration by discouraging interfaith intimacy, were instead in decline. Jews in the West, for example, in the 2000–­01 NJPS Survey, were not only more likely to intermarry than Jews elsewhere, they were also less likely to observe common rituals (lighting Hanukkah and Sabbath candles, participating in a seder, fasting on Yom Kippur, and attending synagogue once a month or more) and to affiliate with and volunteer for Jewish organizations. Jews in the West also donated less frequently to their local federations and other Jewish causes and were less likely to have visited Israel. Conversely—­and hardly surprisingly—­in countless surveys, endogamy correlated strongly with religious upbringing. In the 1981 Greater New York Jewish Population Study, for marriages contracted after 1965, men and women raised in the least observant homes were about eight times as likely as those raised in the most observant homes to marry someone who was not born Jewish. The director of the study commented: “The more observant are more deeply embedded in Jewish friendship, residential, or occupational networks where they are more likely to meet potential Jewish marriage partners.” And, he added, “they are more deeply committed to sharing their lives with a born-­Jewish spouse.” Higher levels of Jewish education (not necessarily Orthodox schooling) also correlated with lower rates of intermarriage. Using data from the 1990 NJPS and two follow-­up studies in 1993 and 1995 that focused on the intermarried, Bruce Phillips found that both the intensity (either of Jewish day school or two to three days a week of supplemental Jewish education) and the duration (number of years) of such education reduced the likelihood of intermarriage. Similarly, he found that informal Jewish educational programs—­overnight camps, youth groups, and trips to Israel during the teenage years—­were also associated with reductions in mixed marriages. A survey of graduates of the well-­known, modern

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Orthodox day school Ramaz in New York City reported that only 6 percent were married to persons from non-­Jewish homes, half of whom had converted to Judaism.38 While there was little that was programmatic in the motives of Jews who intermarried, there were cultural currents in educated, liberal, middle-­class society, of which most American Jews were a part, that supported and encouraged out-­marriage. One of the hallmarks of middle-­class American culture in the twentieth century was its profound individualism, the belief that the pursuit of individual happiness was a paramount good, trumping other, collective concerns. A corollary of this was the celebration of the ideal of romantic love, which subordinated the claims of race, religion, class, and family. In the last four decades of the century, cultural upheaval (sex, drugs, and rock and roll, in shorthand) and the undermining of hierarchies further legitimized and radicalized the idea that individuals were entitled (even obligated) to seek salvation, fulfillment, perfection, and love in whatever way or form satisfied them. These changes sanctioned self-­liberation and self-­fulfillment, narcissism and hedonism, the triumph of the “I” over the “we” (recall Coleman Silk’s musings in Phillip Roth’s The Human Stain), and the “new” over the “old” while devaluing collective obligations and allegiances and the demands of tradition. The political scientist Richard Merelman referred to these changes as “the decline of group belongingness and the rise of individualization.” By this he did not mean that collective identities withered away, but rather that individuals recalculated their valence, coming to view them as “matters of individual choice” that could be changed. Group membership and its meaning became “voluntary, contingent, fluid, not ‘given,’ fixed and rigid.” For American Jews, this sanctioned “the segmentation of Jewish ethnicity” (political scientist Peter Medding’s phrase).39 Ethnic allegiances, memories, and sentiments continued to exercise their hold on members of the group, becoming powerfully compelling at times, but other commitments rose to the fore as well, occasionally trumping the former. As circumstances changed, first one segment and then another took precedence. Belief in the sovereignty of the self was not “the cause” of the radical jump in intermarriage in the last decades of the century. Secularization, integration, dispersion, and tolerance were the chief determinants, as I have argued. But this ethos did sanction or legitimize intermarriage, allowing Jews who wed Gentiles to view their action in a positive rather than negative light (to the extent that they reflected on what they were doing) and to align themselves with the temper of

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the time and its ideals. This ethos also made it difficult, almost impossibly so, for parents to object when their children announced that they were marrying a Gentile—­unless they wanted to appear hypocritical, narrow-­minded, and intolerant. Having encouraged their children to pursue their dreams, to value individuals for their qualities rather than their origins, to think for themselves and make their own decisions, and to view happiness and compatibility as the ends of marriage, there was little they could say in opposition. As Marshall Sklare asked, how could they demand that their children renounce what they themselves believed in? Their commitment to egalitarianism, universalism, individualism, and inclusiveness undercut their “sense of moral rectitude in opposing intermarriage.”40 In choosing a non-­Jewish mate, their children were not rebelling against their values but acting in a way that harmonized with them. Rarely was the tension between endogamy and the liberal emphasis on individual worth and fulfillment acknowledged, let alone explored.

FIVE

Intermarriage in postwar America was notable not only by virtue of its ubiquity. It was also notable because its consequences were less predictable, at least in the short run, than in the past. Historically, in Europe and the United States, the demographic consequences of mixed marriages were almost always the same. From the French Revolution on, most children of intermarried couples were registered or raised as Christians and subsequently married Christians (or, in a few cases, converted Jews). For example, in the early twentieth century, less than one-­fourth of children in mixed marriages in Prussia, Saxony, and Hungary were raised as Jews.41 Even when the children were raised without any formal religion, like the children of Israel Zangwill and countless other writers and intellectuals, they were unlikely to marry within or later identify with the Jewish community. Intermarriage thus almost always entailed demographic losses. Summarizing the evidence, the sociologist Calvin Goldscheider wrote that intermarriage before the 1960s was devastating to the Jewishness of those who intermarried and to the Jewish community. People who intermarried repudiated their religion, their families, and their communities. And their religion, families, and communities abandoned them. Although the numbers

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were small, those lost to the Jewish community were not only the intermarried themselves but also their children and subsequent generations.42 The reason for this is clear. Everywhere, even in liberal societies like Britain and America, Jewishness was stigmatized, Judaism scorned, and Jewish culture devalued. Notions of multiculturalism and cultural relativism, so critical in making space for ethnic and religious minorities in the late twentieth century, were in the future. Homogeneity, not heterogeneity, uniformity, not diversity, was the order of the day. Most offspring of the intermarried took the path of least resistance, mixing and merging with the high-­status, dominant majority. But postwar America was different. Many intermarried Jews felt neither shame nor embarrassment about their origins. Some were indifferent; some were proud; few were eager to forget or deny them. This extraordinary shift in sentiment was made possible by the destigmatization of Jewishness, itself one part of a broader turn toward the toleration of difference, and the emergence and validation of segmented forms of identity. Intermarried Jews were able to “feel” Jewish and express such feelings in various ways while being wed to Christians. Dual-­faith families raised their children in both religions or in one of the religions. (What “raising the children as Jews” meant varied dramatically.) In some families, the boys were raised in the religion of the father and the girls in the religion of the mother. Children in intermarried homes celebrated Easter and Passover in the spring, and Christmas and Hanukkah in the winter. Some worshiped in churches, some in synagogues, and some in both. Couples who raised their children in two religions ignored the theological conundrum of how they could be Jews and Christians simultaneously, often stating that their children would choose between the two faiths when they were older. Usually, the Jewish partner neither expected nor pressured his or her spouse to convert to Judaism and vice versa. All of these possibilities and permutations, of which there were doubtless more, were historically unprecedented. Their novelty and eclecticism reflected two widespread beliefs in upper-­middle-­class American society in the postwar half century. The first was the conviction that identities, the ways in which persons thought of and presented themselves, were fluid and flexible and that they could be assembled from even historically antagonistic sources. The second was the belief that the ethical core of religion (the universal) was more important than its theological and ritual content (the particular). Thus, with selfhood autonomous and

Integration and Intermarriage  •  215

sovereign, and personal identity flexible and fluid, Jews who married Christians were able to determine for themselves what being Jewish meant, assembling eclectic, idiosyncratic packages of beliefs and practices, with no concern for their historical authenticity.43 In these novel circumstances, unlike earlier, it was possible that some offspring would remain connected, in one way or another, with the Jewish community, whether or not they were Jewish according to halakhah, which does not recognize the unconverted children of Jewish men and non-­Jewish women as Jews. This possibility—­that persons who were biologically “half-­Jewish” would value, assert, and cultivate their Jewishness at times, even marrying within the fold—­ made the interpretation of the intermarriage data published in the 1980s and 1990s a matter of fierce controversy. While demographers and sociologists clashed about the ways in which the population surveys were structured and conducted, this was not the heart of the dispute. For whatever their methodological differences, they agreed that the intermarriage rate skyrocketed from the 1960s (how much was disputed) and that American Jewry was moving into uncharted waters. Intense debate arose, rather, when they probed the meanings of this increase—­specifically, what did it mean for Jewish self-­definition and collective identity and for the demographic and religious future of the community? At the risk of caricaturing often complex work, it can be said that two schools of interpretation emerged: the pessimistic school and the optimistic (or transformationist) school. Briefly, the pessimists viewed rising intermarriage as a marker of erosion and decline, as a consequence of unprecedented toleration, intensive integration, rampant secularization, and unbridled individualism, and ultimately as a threat to the stability of the community. They predicted that the cumulative demographic losses, the result of both intermarriage and low fertility, would result in a shrunken, enfeebled Jewish community, one less able to flex its political muscle, educate its children, and care for its elderly. They foresaw, at best, the long-­term survival of only the Orthodox wing in American Jewry. Their argument recapitulated that of prewar European Jewish social scientists, who were equally pessimistic about the future of Jews in the West. Their outlook also echoed that of the nationalist historians of the Jerusalem school, who believed that emancipation was a failure, toleration an illusion, and the diaspora an aberration, fated to wither away. However, unlike earlier prophets of decline, the demographers and sociologists of the pessimistic school worked in the long shadow of the Holocaust. They were haunted

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by the knowledge that the demographic reservoir—­East European Jewry—­whose emigrants sustained the Jewish communities of the West for a century and a half before the war, more than compensating for their low fertility and losses through conversion and intermarriage, was gone. This awareness heightened their sense of concern and, more generally, lent an alarmist tone to public debate. Editorialists and preachers referred to intermarriage as a second Holocaust, this time self-­inflicted, and accused those who intermarried of handing Hitler a posthumous victory. Using the same data, the optimists constructed a different reality and envisioned a different future. They too acknowledged that the intermarriage rate, however calculated, was historically unprecedented, but they split with the pessimists over its consequences, emphasizing the potential for demographic gain rather than loss. The key to their argument was the observation that the tolerant circumstances in which intermarriage now occurred were as unprecedented as its frequency. Intermarried Jews were not indifferent to Jewish concerns, survey research showed; some belonged to synagogues and, with the cooperation of their spouses, raised their children as Jews. In these cases, the outcome was demographic gain, compensating for other cases in which there were losses. Moreover, even in those cases in which the intermarried failed to affiliate with Jewish institutions, they were usually not consciously in flight from their Jewishness, working to hide their origins. Their households were not bereft of Jewish memories, symbols, objects, concerns, even rites (like lighting Hanukkah candles). The fate of children growing up in these households, the argument went, was not uniformly predictable. Similarly, the nonconversion of the Gentile spouse at the time of marriage did not rule out his or her conversion later. It certainly did not foreclose the possibility that he or she would develop formal and informal attachments to Jewish institutions and circles. Given these circumstances and possibilities, the optimists argued that American Jewry was experiencing transformation, not disintegration, and that new forms of Jewish identity, affiliation, and family life, whose contours were not yet fully visible, were emerging. At the policy level, those who viewed the data in this way urged communal institutions to reach out and welcome the intermarried in the hope of strengthening their ties to Jewish life. Which interpretation was correct? The transformationists were correct that the meaning of intermarriage was not what it had been historically and that studies recording increases in the number of Jews intermarrying did not tell the whole story. As Goldscheider cautioned,

Integration and Intermarriage  •  217

“researchers who take snapshots of the community at the moment of a single survey, and not dynamic moving pictures, obtain distorted images of ethnic identity and community.”44 The critical question was the ethno-­religious fate of the children and grandchildren of the intermarried. Critical as well was how their Jewishness was assessed. If in terms of halakhah or, less stringently, in terms of institutional affiliation, then it seems that the pessimists were correct that the Jewish community would shrink. (Shrinkage, of course, is not the same as disappearance and decay. Numbers alone are not the only or even most meaningful measure of communal health.) But if Jewishness was defined in terms of consciousness, of a sense of “feeling” Jewish or “identifying” with the Jewish people and their fate, then the number of persons to be counted as Jews would be greater. Much depends on the criteria used to define the Jewishness or Jewish connections of persons who were not Jewish, either by halakhah or formal institutional affiliation. That sociologists and demographers must address this issue when they count Jews reflects the social and cultural upheavals of the second half of the century. Historically, the social boundaries between Jews and Christians were unmistakably “bright” (socially salient)—­and crossing them, moving from one group to the other, was the outcome of conscious activity (conversion, secession, or passing). However, population studies at the end of the twentieth century uncovered hundreds of thousands of persons in the United States whose position in regard to the Jewish/Gentile boundary was ambiguous—­that is, “blurred.”45 For them, there was no rupture, no boundary crossing, because they never made a choice between their origins and integration into the mainstream. To the extent that they thought about it at all, they saw themselves as both Jews and non-­ Jews, with these and other segments of their identity coming to the fore both simultaneously and serially. Some evidence about the identification patterns of those raised in mixed households became available at the very start of the twenty-­ first century. While not abundant, it tended to support the pessimistic rather than the optimistic interpretation. The 2001 UCLA-­Hillel study of Jewish college freshmen, for example, found that among entering freshmen with two Jewish parents, 92 percent declared themselves to be Jews while among those who were the offspring of mixed marriages the rate was markedly lower: only 37 percent of those with Jewish mothers and only 15 percent of those with Jewish fathers. From data in the 2000–­01 NJPS, Bruce Phillips concluded that the grown children and grandchildren of the intermarried, although willing to

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acknowledge their Jewish background, were unlikely to practice Judaism. Among adults who were identified as Christian Jews in the survey (a term that its designers coined to refer to the offspring of mixed marriages, not to converts to Christianity), only 23.3 percent of those with one Jewish parent responded that Judaism was their current religion, while 25.5 percent described themselves as secular Jews and 8.5 percent as Jews practicing an Eastern religion. The remainder—­42.7 percent—­were practicing or nominal Christians. Adults in the next generation of descendants (persons with one Jewish grandparent) were even less likely to practice Judaism—­only 4.5 percent. The great bulk of adults in this generation—­65.9 percent—­described themselves as Christians.46 In response, the transformationists cited data from local studies (there were dozens by the end of the century) about the percentage of intermarried families in which the children were being raised as Jews, wholly or in part. The results they cited were not conclusive—­in fact, they ranged widely—­in part, because of differences in the wording of the question used to elicit information about religious upbringing. (Some surveys did not distinguish between children being raised exclusively as Jews and children being raised as Jews and something else—­ that is, whose upbringing included elements of Judaism and Christianity.) In Baltimore, for example, the rate of children being raised as Jews was 82 percent; Bergen County, N.J., 67 percent; Cleveland, 66 percent; Boston, 60 percent; New York, 30 percent. Nationally, in both Canada and the United States, about one-­third of the children in intermarried homes were being raised exclusively as Jewish. The Pew Research Center survey of 2013 also asked Jewish respondents with non-­Jewish spouses how they were raising their children: 20 percent answered that they were raising their children as “Jewish by religion,” 25 percent as “partly Jewish by religion,” 16 percent as “Jewish not by religion” (a category that sparked both confusion and contention), and 37 percent as “not Jewish.” 47 These numbers, however, were not as illuminating as those who cited them implied, for they testified only to the intent of the Jewish partner at the time of the survey and revealed nothing about the identity of his or her children later on, when, as adults, they married and started families themselves. Being raised in a religion was one thing; practicing that religion as an adult was another. Phillips found that while 45 percent of respondents with one Jewish parent in the 2000–­01 NJPS survey were raised in one of the four American Jewish

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denominations (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist), only 15 percent identified with a denomination at the time of the study.48 If the pessimists were correct, then the demographic outcome of intermarriage in the last half of the twentieth century in the United States was similar to that earlier in Western and Central Europe. The difference was that in the European case the fate of the children of the intermarried was more or less decided from their infancy or childhood. The social boundary between Jews and Christians there was “bright,” not “blurred,” while being Jewish was potentially a material, social, and emotional disadvantage. In these circumstances, parents in mixed marriages did not hesitate to enroll their children in the ranks of Christianity. In the United States, for very different reasons, most of the children and grandchildren of the intermarried also lost their ties to Judaism and eventually became part of the Christian majority, but the process was drawn out and not predictable in every case. Still, over time, different circumstances yielded similar results. However diverse the United States was in terms of its ethnic makeup, its upper ranks were still overwhelmingly Christian and White. Those Jews who melted into the American mainstream through intermarriage behaved in much the same way in the postwar decades as other upwardly mobile groups, like Japanese Americans and Armenian Americans (both of whose intermarriage rates were even higher).49 The integrative capacity of American society was powerful, making the transmission of ethnic distinctiveness progressively harder in each generation. In the case white, acculturated, and prosperous—­ ethnicity of America’s Jews—­ was increasingly linked to the observance of distinctive religious rites. Doing things that other Americans did not do was what set them apart; consciousness of being different was insufficient. Observance, however, weakened in the second half of the twentieth century. As American Jews grew closer to other white middle-­class Americans, the forces of secularization undermined their most distinctive traits—­their religious customs. Most of the children and grandchildren of the intermarried eventually became Gentiles because there was little that marked them off, visibly and concretely, from Gentiles of similar rank and education. The only Western society in which a secular Jewishness was successfully transmitted over several generations was that which emerged in the twentieth century in the Land of Israel—­because there alone Jews were no longer a minority and there alone the default identity for persons with little or no religion was Jewish ethnicity.

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SIX

Whatever the impact of notions of toleration, inclusiveness, and individualism in the United States, their relative absence in other societies with large Jewish communities in the postwar period—­Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—­was no barrier to the growth of intermarriage there as well. Political and social conditions in these countries varied, both in relation to each other and to the United States, but in each case there was sufficient secularization and integration on the Jewish side of the equation, and toleration or indifference on the other to allow social intimacy between Jews and Christians to flourish. In Great Britain, where conditions more closely approximated those in the United States than in France and the Soviet Union, intermarriage in the postwar decades, in tandem with falling fertility, eroded the absolute number of persons who identified as Jewish. In the 1950s and 1960s, demographers and community leaders routinely estimated the number of Jews in Britain to be in excess of 400,000. The American Jewish Year Book for 1963, for example, set the number at 450,000, which undoubtedly was inflated. But even if these numbers were too high by 20 to 30 percent, there was still substantial population loss by the end of the century. In 1995 the Board of Deputies estimated there were 285,000 Jews in the United Kingdom. The 2001 government census counted 267,000 Jews, but since the question about religion was voluntary, some Jews, including some who thought of themselves as secular Jews, chose not to tick the Jewish box on the census form. The result was an undercount. Estimates of the total number of Jews that tried to account for those whom the census missed ranged from 300,000 to 330,000. What kept the overall number from tumbling further was the growth of the strictly Orthodox (haredi), birth-­control-­rejecting segment of the community. In 2005, strictly Orthodox marriages represented more than 25 percent of all Jewish marriages—­compared with less than 10 percent in the early 1980s. The increase in the percentage of strictly Orthodox marriages resulted in an increase in the percentage of strictly Orthodox births, estimated at 33 to 39 percent of the total number of Jewish births in 2005. Overall, there was an increase in the number of Jewish births between 2001 and 2005—­from 2,623 to 3,205—­an indication, perhaps, that population decline was slowing or even reversing. At the same time, there were still tens of thousands of British Jews who grew up in secular, Reform, or centrist Orthodox homes who were married to or cohabiting with Gentiles. Using data from the 2001 census, the

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Institute for Jewish Policy Research estimated that three in ten Jews were living with persons of another faith, of no faith, or of unknown faith (some of whom may have been secular Jews).50 In France, the settlement of North African Jews in the 1950s and 1960s revived and transformed a much weakened community. Persecuted and harassed, knowing there was no future for them in independent Muslim states, about 75,000 Jews, mainly from Morocco and Tunisia, immigrated in the 1950s; in the next decade, another 145,000 Jews, mainly from Algeria (which became independent in 1962), arrived. Together they roughly doubled the size of French Jewry. Among Ashkenazim, whether their ancestors were from Eastern Europe, Central Europe, or Alsace-­Lorraine, the intermarriage rate was already higher than it was in the United States at the time. Among French-­born Jews (overwhelmingly Ashkenazim) who married between 1966 and 1975, 62 percent took non-­Jewish spouses. The rate reflected not only the high degree of secularization and social integration that was characteristic of native-­born French Jews in the twentieth century but also memories of the Vichy period, when Jewishness was a source of misery, despoliation, and death. The reduced number of potential partners in the postwar marriage pool contributed as well to the rise. Among Jews who were born in other European communities (refugees, survivors, interwar East European immigrants), the rate was slightly higher, 64 percent. Among North African immigrants, whose economic status and exposure to secular Western culture were lower and whose religious observance was “traditional,” however, the rate was much lower—­only 25 percent. And because they now constituted almost a majority of the community, their low intermarriage rate lowered the overall intermarriage rate, partly masking the rise among native-­born Jews, just as the low rate among East European immigrants in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century masked the high rate among Jews of Central European background. Overall, 29 percent of all Jews in France who were married at this time were in mixed marriages.51 Before long, the intermarriage rate among North African Jews also rose. Algerian Jews, who received French citizenship and began to imbibe French culture a century before their departure, led the way. In the period 1966 to 1975, 48 percent of Algerian Jews who married in Paris wed non-­Jews, whereas the rate for Tunisian and Moroccan Jews, on the whole more religiously observant, was only 5 percent. Indeed, it was estimated that more than 20 percent of the Jews who married in Algeria between 1955 and leaving for France married non-­Jews

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(French men and women, not Muslims). If correct, the intermarriage rate in Algeria at this time was similar to that in the United States. By the end of the century, when the majority of Jews in France were French born for the first time and those of North African background constituted a clear majority (70 percent—­in contrast to 50 percent in 1988), the overall intermarriage rate hit a new high. Of French Jews who were married or cohabiting, 30 percent had spouses or partners who were not Jewish. Among those eighteen to twenty-­nine years old, the rate was 40 percent.52 While unprecedented, this rate was nonetheless lower than its rough equivalent in the United States, where the NJPS survey of 2000–­01 found that that among those who married in the period 1996–­2001, 47 percent wed non-­Jews. (Pollsters in the United States did not ask about cohabitation while those in France, naturellement, did.) North African Jewish traditions and habits, especially those centered on family gatherings, still exerted an impact on behavior, even if they were weaker than they once were. In addition, Muslim and leftist antisemitism, which surged at the start of the twenty-­first century, created an atmosphere in which close social ties with non-­Jews became problematic in some milieus. Among the major postwar communities in Europe, intermarriage was most common in the Soviet Union (and later its successor states—­ Russia, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine), where it took root not long after the revolution. Under the czars, in the absence of civil marriage, intermarriage was impossible. Jews who wished to marry Christians converted beforehand. The overthrow of the old regime created not only the legal basis for intermarriage (which in the Soviet period meant a marriage between a Jew by nationality and a member of another national group) but also encouraged conditions and policies that allowed it to flourish: urbanization, industrialization, secularization, access to higher education and professional careers, and the suppression of religious and nationalist institutions that cultivated alternative, non-­Soviet loyalties. In addition, and uniquely in the modern period, the government publicly championed interethnic marriage—­ as a mark of socialist progress and harmony and of liberation from outdated views.53 In those regions to which Jews migrated from the former Pale of Settlement, regions where the traditions and habits of the Pale’s shtetlakh were weak, and young men and women more independent, intermarriage was already common before World War II. In the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR), 17 percent of Jewish women and 25 percent of Jewish men who wed in 1926 chose

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non-­Jewish partners. In 1936 the respective rates in the RSFSR leaped to 37 percent and 42 percent. In Belorussia and Ukraine (roughly the former Pale of Settlement), the rates were lower but still higher than in most Western countries: In 1936, for example, 11 percent of Jewish women and 13 percent of Jewish men who married in Belorussia took non-­Jewish spouses. In Ukraine, the rate that year was the same for both men and women—­15 percent. In the Soviet Union as a whole, on the eve of the regime’s collapse and the start of the mass migration to Israel and the West, intermarriage was the norm. Among all marriages with at least one Jewish partner in 1988–­89, 58 percent of those with Jewish men and 47 percent of those with Jewish women were mixed. Mass emigration then caused a collapse in the Jewish marriage market and sent the intermarriage rate even higher.54 The cumulative demographic impact of decades of intermarriage was the creation of a large population of partial Jewish descent (persons who qualified for aliyah according to Israel’s Law of Return) alongside a smaller core Jewish population (persons who identified themselves or their children as Jewish). Thus, in the late 1980s, the ratio of “core” Jews to “partial” or “peripheral” Jews was about 1 to 1.6 in Russia and about 1 to 1.4 in Ukraine and Belorussia. Using data from the 1994 Russian micro-­census, the demographer Mark Tolts estimated that the full-­partial ratio for Russia was then 1 to 1.8. Curiously, despite their radical differences, the Soviet system and the American system both created conditions conducive to the emergence of large numbers of persons of partial Jewish descent. The critical difference was that from birth the offspring of mixed unions in the USSR were lost to the Jewish group, while the fate of those in the United States was more ambiguous, at least in the postwar period, for Soviet parents in mixed marriage almost always enrolled their children in the ranks of the non-­Jewish parent’s nationality. In the 1994 Russian mini-­ census, only 11 percent of mixed-­marriage children under age sixteen were registered as Jewish, regardless of the sex of the Jewish parent. Among offspring sixteen and older, the percentage was 6.2 percent in those cases where the husband was Jewish and 4.1 percent where the wife was Jewish.55 The preference for non-­Jewish ethnicity was due to the continuing vitality of antisemitism in Russia and Eastern Europe, where no wholesale transformation in popular thinking about Jews took place after the war, as it had in the United States and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere in the West. Comparing intermarriage in America to intermarriage in other large diaspora communities raises, once again, the question of how

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important cultural values were in its spread in the second half of the century. As noted earlier, both social scientists and communal leaders frequently cited the heightened individualism of American culture, the pursuit of the individual’s satisfaction at the expense of the collective’s needs, as a source of the mixed-­marriage explosion from the 1960s on. However, if exogamy spread everywhere in the diaspora at the same time (though not at the same pace), it was unlikely that an ethos usually identified as peculiarly American and linked to unbridled capitalism was the culprit in the United States. Very different value systems informed behavior in the Soviet Union, France, Great Britain, and the United States. This is not to say that culture was irrelevant to the decisions Jews made. Soviet ideology clearly influenced the willingness of its Jewish citizens to intermarry, but it did not cause them to do so. A comparative perspective suggests that much broader transformations in the way Jews lived—­secularization and integration, in particular, transformations that were not specific to the United States in the second half of the twentieth century—­were more decisive.

6 Conversions of Conviction I knew not where I was; I knew not if I were the same Alphonse or another, so total a change did I experience. The most ardent joy was diffused in my soul; I could not speak. . . . [A]t that moment, the mist vanished from my eyes. . . . I had arisen from a tomb, from an abyss of darkness, and I was living, perfectly living—­and yet I wept! I beheld the depth of misery and wretchedness from which I was rescued by an infinite mercy. —Alphonse Ratisbonne, Conversion de Marie Alphonse Ratisbonne, 1842

ONE

Among the many Jews whobecame Christians in the modern period were a few who were, by their own testimony and the testimony of others, sincere converts. Unlike the majority, who changed their religion to escape the disabilities of Jewishness, these converts viewed their change of religion as the outcome of spiritual illumination, philosophical reflection, scriptural study, or some combination thereof. Unlike the majority, these converts took their new faith seriously. They believed that Jesus was the Son of God and the Messiah; that his death atoned for the sins of humankind; that the Christian reading of the Hebrew Bible was correct and the Jewish reading willfully incorrect; and that God’s covenant with the Jewish people was void, having been reassigned to the New Israel, that is, Christendom. They worshiped regularly and often testified publicly to the truth of their new faith. For them, Christianity was more than a new cloak in which they enveloped themselves for worldly advantage.

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While atypical, conversions of conviction often attract more attention at a later date than conversions of convenience. In part, this is because those who converted for spiritual reasons often wrote about why they left Judaism and embraced Christianity. Some wrote because they needed to reassure themselves of the correctness of their decision; others because their status as ex-­Jews underwrote how they made their livelihood (as clergymen, missionaries, and Hebraists); and still others because society refused to forget that they had once been Jews and they thus wished to establish their Christian bona fides. Whatever the reason, they left behind an extensive paper trail, to which missionary groups, who published accounts of their conquests, added. The very bulk of this material inevitably raised the profile of these converts in the eyes of later generations. Moreover, because their memoirs, testimonies, diaries, and letters register their innermost thoughts and feelings, the experiences of these converts seem to promise more as objects of study than those of Jews who switched religions for uninspired reasons. Similarly, missionary efforts to convert Jews loom larger in historical writing than the results of those efforts would seem to warrant. To be sure, the history of Christian evangelization of the Jews is a fruitful topic, but it reveals more about the history of Christianity than of Judaism. Here too historiographical attention is linked to the survival of evidence and the ease of accessing it. Missions to the Jews published a stream of testimonies and reports, some to convince Jews of their errors and some to confirm the beliefs of Christians and attract their financial support. Many meticulously recorded their dealings with “inquiring” Jews and later with those whom they baptized. Often these records survive intact and undisturbed in well-­maintained archives. The problem, again, is that their importance for the study of radical assimilation is inversely related to their accessibility. Jews who became Christians due to the efforts of missionaries were not typical. Among other things, they were overwhelmingly from the poorest, most desperate stratum of Jewry. Their testimony, moreover, was often the product of their sponsors’ outlook and powers of expression. Nonetheless, despite their atypicality, sincere converts and mission-­ made converts merit a place in this account. The reason is that their experiences and motives were not totally dissimilar to those of Jews who became Christians for worldly reasons. The frequently invoked binary distinction between conversions of conviction and conversions of convenience can be misleading at times. It suggests that conversion was an either/or affair—­either it was spiritually motivated or materially motivated, religious in character or secular in character, high-­minded

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or self-­serving. The problem is that human behavior is complex and overdetermined, the outcome of conscious and unconscious motives. Binary categories schematize and flatten the complexity of decision-­ making. As the Harvard historian of philosophy Harry Wolfson observed, conversion “is not always the result of an intellectual quest for truth, but rather of a spiritual quest for a new God, which is only a vague and illusive term to dissemble so many of our real wishes and desires.”1 Converts whose piety was exemplary were not immune to the emotional and social disabilities of Jewishness, even if they did not acknowledge their role when they embraced Christianity. How could it be otherwise? Christian representations of Judaism and Jewishness were inseparable. The ways in which converts viewed their old and new faiths were not the outcome of a speculative process that took place in a vacuum. High-­minded converts internalized and employed the negative evaluations of Judaism of the day. While they saw their choice of Christianity as a religious decision, the outcome of spiritual illumination or theological speculation, the comparisons they drew between the two faiths mimicked currents of hostility that transcended the limits of religious faith and doctrine. In short, Christian antipathy underwrote the conversions of both the insincere Heinrich Heine and the sincere Edith Stein. Conversions in which conviction was a prominent feature present special problems for the historian. To begin, the spiritual needs that drove these conversions remain elusive, for the world of the spirit is, by definition, intangible and shadowy. Even if one were to treat these conversions reductively, viewing them psychoanalytically as the resolution of internal conflicts, one could not explain why some Jews turned to Christianity to satisfy what were, in theory, universally shared needs. The historian cannot explain why, in any given time and place, one indifferent Jew became a pious Christian and another became an indifferent Christian. Conversely, if one were to accept the irreducibility of spiritual needs, the same interpretive problem would remain. Most acculturated Jews in the modern era were not seeking spiritual answers to the mysteries of life and their own existential crises. Why this or that Jew felt the need to seek spiritual salvation is not a historical question. In every age, there were a few Jews, driven spiritually and emotionally in ways that complicate historical analysis, who turned to Christianity to supply something missing in their lives. However, there is a historical dimension to their experience. The ways in which they expressed their needs and embraced their new faith were subject to the imprint of historical circumstances, of time and place, as

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was their need to testify in public about their decision. The historian can explain how their declarations and how the circumstances of their baptisms were historically embedded. To be sure, many conversions of conviction were random events, occurring here and there, their timing and distribution subject to the randomness of life more generally. Of these, the historian can say little. Still, whatever the meaning of a conversion, few, if any, took place in isolation, outside larger cultural contexts. More often they came in clusters, bearing the hallmark of external events and forces. This chapter seeks to provide a historical framework for understanding these clusters.

TWO

Acculturation and integration exposed European Jews to the same currents of religious thought and sentiment that swept through Christian societies. In the first half of the nineteenth century, following the upheavals of the French Revolution and the wars to which it gave birth, movements of Christian pietism and renewal blossomed in states across Europe, usually in tandem with political reaction and romantic thought. Conservative churchmen, statesmen, intellectuals, and landowners—­Catholics and Protestants alike—­mourned the destruction of the old order and worked to restore it, hoping to repair the damage done by the Revolution and the Enlightenment. In reaction to what they saw as the narrow, dangerous rationalism of the previous age, they championed elements of the human experience that transcended rational formulation: instinct, sentiment, emotion, faith, tradition, obedience, inner consciousness. They viewed civilization not as a universal, mechanical system of atomistic individuals but as a historical organic body, the product of hoary traditions and institutions, in which the Christian church was central. They wanted to rebuild their societies on Christian principles, restoring the stability, harmony, and order that they imagined were characteristic of them in the past. Their Christianity stressed the immediate quality of religious experience—­ conversion moments, devotional meetings, spiritual intimacies—­rather than “arid” theological speculation. In France and the German states, the linkage between these movements of religious renewal and political reaction was particularly close. In France, from the mid-­1820s through the mid-­1850s, several dozen young Jews, many from prominent families, became zealous Catholics from religious conviction. The first of these well-­publicized

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conversions was that of David Drach (1791–­1868). Drach came from a poor, pious family in Alsace, where he prepared for the rabbinate and then, while waiting for a post to open, tutored in wealthy homes. In 1813, despite his father’s opposition, he left for Paris, where he served as secretary to the Central Consistory and continued as a private tutor. Having acquired Latin and Greek in Alsace, he obtained a diploma from the Faculté des Lettres and the École normale and taught classical languages at the Institut des langues étrangères. In 1817 he married Sara Deutz (b. 1794), daughter of a future chief rabbi of France, and in 1819 became director of the consistorial school in Paris. He shocked the Jewish community of Paris when he renounced Judaism on Maundy Thursday 1823 in the presence of the archbishop of Paris. On Holy Saturday he was baptized and on Easter Sunday received his first communion and was confirmed. Drach’s conversion was not sudden. Later, in autobiographical accounts, Drach claimed that his attraction to Christianity was long-­standing, dating back to his youth in Alsace. Whether true or not—­the claim was a convention in conversion narratives—­Drach was moving toward Christianity in the years immediately before he announced his change of faith. For example, in research on the Septuagint, he came to the conclusion that the Hebrew text of the Pentateuch had been falsified (which implied that the original text supported the Christian claim that the Pentateuch foreshadowed the events of the New Testament). He then reconstructed what he believed to be the authentic version by translating the Aramaic text of Onkelos into Hebrew, which led the chief rabbi, Abraham de Cologna (1755–­1832), to rebuke him and demand that he renounce his heretical ideas.2 At the time that Drach became a Catholic in Paris, three Jewish law students from well-­to-­do families in Strasbourg came under the influence of the young Catholic philosopher Louis-­Eugène-­Marie Bautain. In May 1823 Bautain began teaching a private course in moral philosophy for a small number of students, among them Théodore Ratisbonne (1802–­84), son of the president of the departmental consistory of Bas-­Rhin, and grandson of Cerf Berr (1726–­93), chief spokesman for Alsatian Jewry during the Revolution; Jules Lewel (d. 1870); and Isidore Goschler (1804–­66). Bautain slowly won the confidence of the students, first affirming the value of the Hebrew Bible and honoring their religious background and then slowly introducing them to the supercessionist view that Christianity was the fulfillment of Judaism. This left them with a sense that their ancestral religion was incomplete. Initially, he urged the students, whose links to Judaism

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were weak, to return to the synagogue, follow Jewish customs, and work for the régénération of the community, confident that if they became “good Israelites,” the “truth” would do the rest. To the surprise of family and friends, they began attending synagogue. Echoing the spirit of Romantic religiosity, which privileged feeling over thinking, Ratisbonne recalled “passing long hours in prayer, conversing in my heart with the God of my fathers, and calling to my aid the promised redeemer.” Goschler and Ratisbonne also took leading roles in managing the Société d’encouragement pour le travail parmi les Israélites, a charity that apprenticed poor Jewish children to skilled artisans.3 By 1826, the three students saw themselves as Catholics, even though they continued to live outwardly as Jews, but the tension between their inner and outer lives became too burdensome, and in the early months of 1827 they formally converted. Goschler made public his baptism and his decision to become a priest; Ratisbonne was reluctant to do so. For several months he tried to lead a double life, hoping to continue working for communal renewal, but his surreptitious attendance at daily mass gave him away and forced a showdown. At a stormy meeting of the departmental consistory, he was told he could remain at the head of the Société only if he remained a Jew. “At these words,” he later wrote, “without staying one minute longer than my duties required, I got up and, shaking the dust off my feet, I bade an eternal farewell to the Synagogue.” In the years to come, Théodore’s brother Alphonse (1812–­84), two nieces, a nephew, and a cousin also became Catholics.4 Following their conversions, both Drach and Ratisbonne (now resident in Paris) set to work evangelizing other young Alsatian Jews who had come to the capital. Drach’s converts included Ignace Xavier Morel (né Levy Gumpel), a childhood friend of his brother-­in-­law Simon Deutz (1802–­52); Mathias Mayer-­Dalmbert (1786–­1843), a brother of the Central Consistory member Simon Mayer-­Dalmbert (1776–­1840); and Julien Javal, in whose house Drach was a tutor before moving to Paris. He also contributed to the conversion of his in-­ law Simon in Rome in 1828. Deutz, who had threatbrother-­ ened his brother-­in-­law with violence at the time of his baptism in 1823, was spiritually fickle, however, and eventually returned to Judaism. By 1832, when he became notorious for betraying the legitimist cause—­he revealed to the government the whereabouts of the Duchesse de Berry, mother of the Bourbon pretender to the French throne—­he was no longer a Catholic.5 Drach’s conversion also had a profound impact on a close childhood friend and fellow yeshivah student, Samson Libermann (b. 1790),

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eldest son of the rabbi of Saverne. In 1809 Libermann moved to Mainz to continue his rabbinical studies; Drach was by this time working as a tutor. In Mainz, Libermann was exposed to the bracing winds of the Haskalah. He became acquainted there with the mathematician Olry Terquem (1782–­1862), who in the 1820s and 1830s, after moving to Paris, championed the radical reform of French Judaism. Terquem urged him to learn Greek and Latin, lent him the works of Rousseau and Voltaire, and encouraged him to question the foundations of traditional Judaism. In time, Libermann put aside the Talmud and any intention of entering the rabbinate and, like Drach, supported himself as a tutor. He studied medicine from 1814 to 1820 and then practiced in Strasbourg. Despite his indifference to religion, he remained committed to communal regeneration and was active in educational work. In 1821, at the urging of his friend Drach, with whom he had remained in touch after the latter’s move to Paris, he published a religious and moral guide for Jewish youth, arguing for the usefulness of secular studies while omitting any mention of the study of the Talmud. The conversion of his friend in 1823 made a great impression. Encouraged by Canon Léopold Liebermann, vicar-­general of Strasbourg, he began reading the work of the seventeenth-­century theologian Jacques Boussuet and soon was completely estranged from the Jewish religion, although he continued to act as secretary of the Jewish primary school in Mainz. In March 1824, he and his wife took the final step and were baptized, Samson taking the name François-­Xavier.6 Like the conversion of Théodore Ratisbonne, that of Samson Libermann was a catalyst: over the next ten years, four of his five brothers followed his example. In the cases of Félix (b. 1798) and Jacob (1804–­52), both of whom moved to Paris prior to their baptism, Drach took the lead role in their conversion. Jacob’s path to Christianity was similar to that of his brother Samson. While a student at the rabbinical school in Metz, he came into contact for the first time with new currents of thought. He learned French and Latin, read the work of the philosophes, and became estranged from traditional Judaism. His converted brothers in Paris pressed him to abandon Metz and the Talmud and to join them in the capital, which he did in November 1826. He lodged with his brother Félix and was visited frequently by Drach. The latter found him a room at the College Stanislas, where he spent six weeks in solitude, reading the work of the eighteenth-­ century theologian Charles François Lhomond and praying for illumination regarding the true religion. God, he later wrote, heard his prayer—­“faith penetrated my mind and heart”—­and he was baptized

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in December. He took the name François and began to study for the priesthood in 1827.7 Among the conversions of this period, none left a greater impression than that of Alphone Ratisbonne (1814–­44), Théodore’s younger brother. It was sudden, unexpected, and wrenching, reminding contemporaries of Paul’s experience centuries earlier. The Roman Catholic Church trumpeted it as miracle, and William James dissected it in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), while Ratisbonne’s own account (1842) went through multiple editions. When his older brother became a Christian in 1827, Alphonse, then eleven years old, was furious with him, regarding the conversion as “an inexplicable folly” and a symbol of Catholic “fanaticism.” His relations with his brother became distant and strained. In 1840, when Théodore tried to convert a ten-­year-­old nephew on his deathbed, Alphonse wrote him an invective-­filled letter accusing him of cowardice and vowed never to see him again. At the time, Alphonse was a hedonist, dandy, and freethinker whose attachment to Judaism was vestigial and nominal. “I was a Jew in name, that was all; for I did not even believe in God. I never so much as opened a religious book, and the practices of Judaism were alike neglected at my uncle’s house [an uncle raised him after he was orphaned at age sixteen] and in that [sic] of my brothers and sisters.” His one attachment to communal life was his support for the same vocational-­education charity for which his brother worked in the mid-­1820s.8 The event that precipitated Alphonse’s conversion was his engagement to his sixteen-­year-­old niece Flore Ratisbonne (1824–­1915), the daughter of his eldest brother, Adolphe (1801–­61). Although an arranged marriage—­they had been intended for each other since they were children—­he was, it seemed, genuinely happy about it. With the wedding set for mid-­August 1842, he chose to winter in Malta beforehand. In his account of his conversion, he linked his betrothal to the start of his religious awakening, noting that the sight of his bride stirred within him “an indefinable sentiment of the dignity of human nature” and a belief in the immortality of the soul. However, he later recalled, when he set out from Strasbourg, he was in a state of nervous turmoil “agitated with many fears and oppressed with a thousand strange presentiments.” While such language is conventional in conversion narratives, he also mentioned that he was suffering from several physical ailments: shortness of breath, chest pains, heart palpitations, and general malaise. A modern would say that he was suffering from deep depression and acute anxiety, triggered by the emotional

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conflicts his impending marriage aroused. Whatever the case, he started his journey in November 1841, traveling to Marseilles, whence he sailed to Naples. He spent a month there sightseeing. Inexplicably, on New Year’s Eve, he found himself outside a church and entered while mass was being said. The experience buoyed him emotionally. His depression lifted, “as a dark cloud dispersed and was chased afar by the wind,” and he felt “an inexpressible calm.” He changed his itinerary and traveled to Rome in early January 1842, unable to explain why. While sightseeing, he met an Alsatian friend, himself a convert from Protestantism to Catholicism, who gave him a holy medal, with the image of Mary on one side and the cross on the other. In the middle of the night of 19/20 January, he awoke suddenly and saw a large black cross. He tried to drive the image from his mind and eventually succeeded, falling back to sleep.9 The next morning, he accompanied his friend on an errand to the Church of S. Andrea della Fratte. Alphonse was alone in the church for a few minutes, and, according to his account, the entire church suddenly vanished and he beheld the Virgin Mary standing on the altar, bathed in divine light—­a vision in tune with the flourishing Marian piety of the time. (There were other notable apparitions at Paris in 1830, at La Salette in 1846, and at Lourdes in 1858.) When his friend returned, he found Alphone prostrate, bathed in tears, unaware of where he was, and unable to speak. At that moment, he wrote, “the mist vanished from my eyes. . . . I had arisen from a tomb, from an abyss of darkness, and I was living, perfectly living—­and yet I wept! I beheld the depth of misery and wretchedness from which I was rescued by an infinite mercy.” His conversion was instantaneous and complete, the result of a wrenching emotional experience. In a typi­ atholicism cally romantic gesture, he claimed that he felt the truth of C at that moment. “I felt, more than saw them [the teachings of the church]; I felt them by the indefinable effects they produced in me; and these impressions, more rapid than thought, more profound than reflection, not only penetrated my soul but rectified and directed it towards another object and another life.” He was baptized on 30 January in Rome. To his now eighteen-­year-­old fiancée in Strasbourg, ­awaiting his return from the Mediterranean, the news was a shock. He explained that she would have to convert for the marriage to take place and, furthermore, that he would need to obtain a papal indulgence for them to marry since she was his niece, but Flore would have none of it. She accused him of making her suffer, of breaking her father’s heart, and of siding with the arrogant and the powerful.

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She called his baptism “an incomprehensible, inexplicable act,” asking, “What made you make such a sudden, hare-­brained decision? Were you not happy in the religion of your ancestors?” While Flore’s commitment to Jewish practice was slight, leaving the ancestral fold (and her, as well, since she refused to follow him into the Church) was an act of treachery and cowardice in her eyes. The intensity of his new faith, moreover, was baffling to someone as secular as she. In March she broke their engagement, telling him, “The Alphonse of yesterday has disappeared; I cannot follow the Alphonse of today.”10 Among the conversions of conviction in this period, Alphonse Ratisbonne’s was exceptional—­by virtue of its suddenness, its wrenching emotionality, and the heavenly vision that accompanied it. Yet, in other important ways, his transformation was similar to those of other French Jews who embraced Catholicism at this time. For them, becoming a Christian was an intensely personal, transformative experience. When Jacob Libermann, thanks to Drach, found himself “shut up in a little cell” in Paris, he experienced “extreme pain”: “My complete loneliness, the gloom of the cell with its one sky-­light, the thought of being so far from my family, my acquaintances, my country [Alsace], all this plunged me into the deepest sadness and weighed down my heart with oppressive melancholy.” Then, imploring God to enlighten him, he saw the truth and was at once converted. He believed everything, even the mystery of the eucharist, “without difficulty.” When the baptismal water flowed over his head, he became “a new man” and all his uncertainties and fears suddenly fell away. In the memoirs they published as a preface to Bautain’s Philosophie du christianisme (1835), Isidore Goschler, Théodore Ratisbonne, and Jules Lewel “describe themselves as introspective young men inclined to philosophical reflection, struggling against spiritual despair, and prone to frequent bouts of tears.”11 Common to their experience as well was ignorance of or alienation from Judaism prior to their conversion. Those from upper-­middle-­ class families candidly acknowledged their lack of Jewish education and unfamiliarity with its texts and rites. They came from an already secularized generation that, according to Théodore Ratisbonne, “thought only of enjoying life in this world and did not concern itself with the conditions for its future happiness.” 12 Those with an intensive Jewish education—­Drach and the Liebermann brothers, for example—­were disenchanted with Jewish tradition and saw themselves as freethinkers or deists. They had ceased to be Jews, in terms of practice and belief, before their transformation into believing Christians. In retrospect,

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they claimed to have experienced beforehand feelings of malaise and incompleteness and to have longed for something to make them feel whole and give meaning and structure to their lives. This was not an uncommon experience in the wake of the turbulent revolutionary and Napoleonic years. For seekers and searchers, a revived, resurgent ­Catholicism was a beacon of certitude and a rock of stability to which they could cling. Why, one might ask, were these young men unable to find solace in Judaism? (In the late twentieth century, “lost souls” of Jewish birth in Western Europe and the United States were as likely to find their bearings in the bosom of Orthodox Judaism as they were in Christianity.) One reason was that they viewed Judaism in a negative light long before they received instruction in Catholic doctrine. While the Enlightenment, in whose spirit they were educated, repudiated Christian spirituality and theology, it did not abandon the negative terms, inspired initially by theological doctrine, in which Christians commonly thought of Jews. Educated as Frenchmen, having imbibed French habits of thought, they saw Judaism and Jews through Christian eyes. Goschler admitted that, before he found religion, he wanted to be seen as a Christian “to avoid the disfavour with which the term ‘Jew’ was habitually regarded.”13 The enthusiasm for schemes to regenerate French Jewry that a number of the converts shared reflected a non-­Jewish critique of the corrupting influence of petty commerce on Jewish morality. When they immersed themselves in Christian texts, in their search for meaning, they were primed to absorb the adversos Judaeos tradition. Allied to this was their reluctant conclusion that France was a Catholic society and that, despite emancipation and régénération, integration and acceptance were unobtainable—­which was the view of devoutly Catholic, counterrevolutionary circles as well. As Drach saw it, “there has always been a wall [un mur d’arain] between Jews and Christian society, which regards them literally as a race of pariahs.”14 In this sense, their aversion to Judaism was similar to that of Jews who converted for pragmatic or strategic reasons. A further reason that French Judaism was unable to attract those seeking spiritual wholeness was that it lacked a language, both literally and conceptually, with which to speak to Gallicized, secularly educated young Jews. The religious leaders of Alsatian Jewry were overwhelmingly old-­ school traditionalists in their upbringing and outlook. French was not their native language; nor were the terms and idioms of French intellectual life their own. They lacked the ability to make Judaism available to searchers and seekers who, by virtue

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of their Gallicization, were predisposed to see Judaism in a negative light. This is not to argue that a modernized Judaism, had it taken root in France at the time, would have been a bulwark against such conversions. In Germany, where the Reform movement was born, similar conversions of conviction occurred, largely, as in France, because Judaism and Jewishness were widely and deeply stigmatized. Nonetheless, it was also true that in Restoration France the cultural gap between Jewish traditionalists and the young, worldly Jews was enormous and most likely unbridgeable. Also common to these sincere converts was a merciless hostility to Judaism and, frequently, to Jews who did not see the world in the way they did. While this is not the place to discuss the dynamics of this phenomenon, suffice it to say that these Jews were unable to embrace their new faith with tranquility and grace, without a backward glance. They were constitutionally unable to move forward and luxuriate in their Catholic present and instead became relentless crusaders, often breaking the law and offending common decency to save the souls of other Jews. Drach, Goschler, Lewel, Libermann, and the Ratisbonne brothers, among others, became priests. In 1841 Libermann founded and led the Congregation of the Holy Heart of Mary, an order that sent missionaries to West Africa. In 1843 Théodore Ratisbonne, inspired by the miracle of his brother’s conversion, established a home in Paris to prepare Jewish girls for baptism, which later grew into the missionary order Notre Dame de Sion. Alphonse worked with his brother, expanding the order’s activities to Jerusalem in 1855. Drach and the Ratisbonnes were fierce polemicists, borrowing freely from medieval and modern Jew-­baiting traditions. Drach, for example, attacked the Talmud as a blasphemous, nonsensical, and indecent work that encouraged Jews to hate Christians and in 1840 expressed his belief in the Damascus blood libel.15 Théodore Ratisbonne’s devotion to converting Jews was so consuming that it entangled him in several widely publicized scandals. His attempted deathbed conversion of a nephew in 1840 was noted above. In 1845 he baptized the well-­known Jewish physician Lazare Terquem (1791–­1845) as he lay comatose in his Paris apartment. At the time Ratisbonne was already well known for his aggressive missionary tactics. The orphanage and school he had established in 1842 took in the daughters of destitute Jews who were unable or unwilling to care for them. In 1843 he staged a dramatic public baptism of seven of the girls before an audience of Catholic aristocrats and Jewish converts, including Drach. A decade and a half after the Terquem case,

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Ratisbonne figured in the even more notorious Bluth-­Mallet scandal. The Bluths were German Jewish immigrants living in Paris. Ratisbonne converted the eldest daughter, Anna, and, with her support, the father and a brother as well. Over the objections of the mother, the father placed the younger children (two boys and three girls) in Catholic schools (the girls in Ratisbonne’s Notre Dame de Sion). Meanwhile, Anna, now a teacher in Cambrai, became the mistress of a canon of the cathedral whose name was Mallet. The naturally distressed father and the brother renounced their new faith and tried to recover the children. The boys were sent home but the three girls, having been baptized, were spirited away by Mallet, with Ratisbonne’s help, and hidden under false names in convents in France, Belgium, and England. When Canon Mallet stood trial in 1861 for kidnapping, Ratisbonne was called as a witness and struck out at the Jewish community, claiming that its growing power threatened the French state and that it was persecuting him because of his successful missionizing.16

THREE

For these French Jews, becoming Christian was a transformative experience. At its core was what Arthur Darby Nock called in his classic study Conversion “the reorientation of the soul”–­“a deliberate turning away from indifference or from an earlier form of piety to another, a turning which implies a consciousness that a great change is involved, that the old was wrong and the new is right.”17 Multiple, interactive factors—­both personal and contextual—­brought them to a new understanding of themselves, including their exposure to currents of Christian revival during the Restoration and the July Monarchy. Protestant Germany also witnessed a post-­Napoleonic religious awakening, driven, as in France, by romantic, counterrevolutionary longings for a social and political order that was disappearing. Opposition to Jewish integration drove thousands of German Jews to the baptismal font in the first half of the century. However, in contrast to French Jews, very few German Jews were drawn to the religious revivalism and reawakening of the period. Ratisbonne-­style, noncerebral conversions of conviction were almost unknown, which is especially remarkable given that there were about five times more Jews in the German states than in France in the early decades of the century. Among the thousands of German Jews who converted in the first half of the nineteenth century there were a few who took their new

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faith seriously and whose sincerity was acknowledged even then. However, unlike their French counterparts, their acceptance of Christianity was no Sturm und Drang experience, no doubt because the Protestantism they embraced did not cultivate over-­the-­top emotionality. They came to their new faith calmly and deliberately, having studied and weighed its claims in their youth—­through the filter, of course, of Christian notions of supercessionism and awareness of the disadvantages of being Jewish. (In this sense, their conversions were not the outcome of a religious quest. No Jewish convert in Germany, even the most saintly, was ignorant of the social and legal benefits of baptism.) Moreover, once baptized, they showed less of the evangelizing militancy of their French counterparts. The tawdry tactics that caused scandal in France—­converting the dying, the incarcerated, the hospitalized, and the orphaned—­were absent in Germany. This is not to say that heartfelt converts in Germany were completely indifferent to the religious fate of the unbaptized. They were not, but they were not obsessed with it either. In this sense, their stance toward making converts mirrored that of German Protestants more generally. As a Berlin preacher of Jewish birth told visiting representatives of the LSPCJ in 1886, German pastors had no interest in missions to the Jews. While willing to preach in their favor, they were unwilling to do much more than that. A few years later a visiting English physician reported to the LSPCJ that Germans as a whole hardly took “a warm interest” in the conversion of the Jews. Their view, he wrote, was that the churches were open to inquiring Jews and that they had no further responsibility in the matter.18 Two converts who were well-­known proponents of the conservative notion of the Christian state—­Friedrich Julius Stahl (1802–­55) and Johann August Neander (1789–­1850)—­were indifferent to saving Jewish souls. Born in Würzberg and educated in Munich, Stahl (né Joel/Julius Golson/Jolson) became a Lutheran in Erlangen in 1819, at age eighteen, just as he entered university. His choice of Lutheranism was curious, since Bavaria was overwhelmingly Catholic—­his father and the rest of family became Catholics five years later—­leading some historians to see this as evidence of his sincerity. Perhaps, but it is equally possible that he chose Protestantism, as many Jews in Warsaw and Vienna later did, because it was less ritualistic and less demanding. Or maybe he was aware that Lutheranism was a better passport to integration in Germany than Catholicism. Whatever the case, he was very much a sincere Protestant by the time he was in his twenties. He taught law in several universities and became known in

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the 1830s and 1840s for his conservative views linking church and state, for which he was rewarded with a chair of law at the University of Berlin in 1840 and a lifetime seat in the Prussian upper chamber in 1849, where he led the conservatives until his resignation in 1858. (The historian Heinrich von Treitschke described him as “the only great political mind among all thinkers of Jewish blood.”)19 Although allied with well-­born evangelicals and pietists, Stahl himself was not an “awakened” religious enthusiast. He opposed full Jewish emancipation, of course, and saw conversion alone as the solution to Jewish marginalization—­even serving as a director of the Berlin Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews—­but most of the time he showed little interest in the fate of the Jews.20 The church historian Johann August Neander (né David Mendel) was as cerebral as Stahl in his attachment to Christianity. Although from a poor family, he obtained a gymnasium education in Hamburg, distinguishing himself as a Latin scholar. In 1805 he delivered a public address in Latin, calling for the bestowal of equal right on Jews and the abrogation of “outdated” Jewish rites. The following year, at age seventeen, he converted to Protestantism before leaving for Halle to begin his university studies, at the same time changing his name to Neander (“new man”). He quickly made a reputation as a historian of the early church, which led to appointments at Heidelberg (1812) and then Berlin (1813), where he remained until his death. Considered one of the greatest ecclesiastical historians, his work was translated into many languages. As a professor at the University of Berlin, he opposed the admission of Jewish students, whom he identified with left-­wing Hegelianism, but in general he was little concerned with flesh-­and-­blood contemporary Jews. Even more revealing of the character of his Christianity was his response to the Damascus blood libel: Unlike David Drach in Paris, he publicly denounced its veracity.21 Neander’s scholarship and Stahl’s politics allied them with the Prussian Protestant establishment. Their standing, however, was not linked to their (former) Jewishness and Hebraic learning, as was often the case in earlier centuries, when ex-­Jews made use of their Hebrew learning to earn their daily bread. (Neither Stahl nor Neander received a traditional Jewish education.) More akin to earlier converts who traded on their ex-­Jewishness was the missionary Paulus Stephanus (Selig) Cassel (1821–­92), brother of the Jewish educator and scholar David Cassel (1818–­93). Cassel received a traditional Jewish education in his native Silesia, as well as a rigorous secular education at the gymnasium in Schweidnitz and at the University of Berlin. As

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a student and later a newspaper editor, he remained within the Jewish fold, demonstrating his Hebrew learning in a series of publications on Jewish history. He was baptized in 1855—­it is not clear why—­but the following year he became librarian of the royal library in Erfurt and secretary of the academy there. In 1867 he was appointed preacher at the new Christuskirche in western Berlin, which the LSPCJ funded. He remained there until 1890, when relations between the English and German societies soured and the former closed and sold the building.22 The end of Cassel’s career coincided with the start of modern politically inspired, race-­based antisemitism in Germany. He understood, perhaps better than the average Protestant divine, that the new antisemitism was an assault on the doctrinal foundations of Christianity, defining the defect of the Jew as biological rather than spiritual, thus denying the efficacy of baptism. In response to the explosion of antisemitic debate in Berlin in 1879–­80, he published attacks on the historian Heinrich von Treitschke, the court preacher Adolf Stoecker, and the composer Richard Wagner. He branded the new Jew baiters enemies of the missionary project and of Christianity itself. His writing included, moreover, warm words for the contributions of emancipated Jews, like Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer, to German cultural life. His robust philosemitism irritated colleagues in the missionary movement and may have contributed to their failure to support his mission when the LSPCJ withdrew its financial support in 1890.23 Converts like Cassel, who made a success of their Jewishness, turning a liability into an asset, were not common in Central Europe but were plentiful in Britain and its overseas outposts. London was the command center of Protestant missions to the Jews, wherever they lived, from the start of the nineteenth century to the mid-­twentieth century. Evangelicalism, especially the impulse to revitalize religious life and bring Protestantism to persons and places where it was unknown, sunk deeper roots in Britain than elsewhere in Europe. British evangelicals spread the Gospel with unflagging energy at home and abroad, a task that their country’s wealth and imperial reach underwrote. The LSPCJ, as we have seen, bankrolled missionary activity in Prussia and Poland, as well as in North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. The labors of British-­trained and British-­sponsored missionaries in the Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe were largely in vain, yielding few converts relative to the resources expended. Although most of their converts were destitute or troubled, there were among

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them a few men of talent, who hitched their star to the missionary societies. With their aid, they traveled to Britain to further their education, on the basis of which they made their mark as Semiticists, historians, born English translators, missionaries, and ethnographers. (Native-­ Jews were conspicuously absent among these British-­made converts, largely due to their lack of Jewish learning.)24 The exact circumstances of how they became Christians—­that is, how they initially met and fell under the sway of British missionaries—­are murky. As a rule, they were in desperate straits and far from family and friends. Nonetheless, even if material and emotional vulnerability—­rather than disenchantment with Judaism—­paved the way for their change of faith, their Christianity became at some point central to who they were, shaping their lives and bringing them recognition and status. The careers of five converts, all contemporaries, all from similar backgrounds—­the Canadian bishop Isaac Hellmuth (1817–­1901); the historian, traveler, and clergyman Moses Margoliouth (1818–­81); the Hebrew translator Isaac Edward Salkinson (1820–­83); the missionary Henry Aaron Stern (1820–­85); and the Masoretic scholar Christian David Ginsburg (1821–­1914)—­illustrate this phenomenon: the foreign-­born convert whose Jewish learning or Jewishness became a passport to success. All were born in Central or East Central Europe and raised and educated in traditional Jewish homes. All in late adolescence responded to the overtures of British or British-­funded missionaries. After his family moved to Berlin in 1836, the Polish-­born Hellmuth, for example, studied classical and Near Eastern literatures at the University of Breslau, where an agent of the London Society converted him. In 1841 he left Germany for England, where the Institute for Enquiring Jews in Liverpool supported him, and at some point, he changed his name from Hirsch to Hellmuth. From Liverpool he moved to London, where the newly established Nonconformist-­ sponsored BSPGJ provided him with support. He sailed to Canada in 1844, intending to do missionary work among the Jews there, but after a short, presumably unproductive stay in Montreal took up a teaching position at Bishop’s College in Lennoxville. In 1846 he was ordained deacon and then priest, and in 1847 married the daughter of Major-­General Thomas Evans of Montreal, a match that brought him wealth and status and underwrote his future social mobility. About the same time, he was made professor of Hebrew and rabbinical literature at Bishop’s College. In 1863 he became the first principal of the newly established, evangelical-­sponsored Huron College in London,

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Ontario (the forerunner of the University of Western Ontario), and, in 1872, the second bishop of Huron.25 Margoliouth, a native of Suwalki, Poland, having studied at yeshivot in Grodno and Gora Kalwaria (Ger), traveled alone to England in 1837, leaving behind his wife and daughter. (He never explained why he left Poland.) He arrived at Hull in August, and after two months in the country, feeling isolated and “very miserable,” excluded from the company of English Jews (“semi-­infidels” in his view) and wishing himself back in Poland, he traveled to Liverpool to write to his parents for money to return home. On his first day there, he met a converted Jew in the employ of the Institute for Inquiring Jews who befriended him, offering him lodging, employment, and a Hebrew translation of the New Testament. Unable to counter its claims, his mind “became filled with objections against modern [that is, postbiblical] Judaism.” He was baptized in the Church of England on Good Friday the following year. The mission, recognizing his talent, enabled him to learn English, Latin, and Greek. Then, with the aid of an anonymous benefactor, he studied at Trinity College, Dublin, from 1840 to 1843. That same year he published The Fundamental Principles of Modern Judaism Investigated, in which he characterized rabbinic traditions as “complete popery,” unconnected to the inspired teaching of Moses and the prophets. Leaving Dublin, Margoliouth returned to Liverpool, where his wife and child joined him (presumably they too became Christians) and where he was ordained a minister of the Church of England in 1844. The Anglican Bishop of Kildare provided him with a rural rectorate outside Dublin, a comfortable, undemanding position that allowed him abundant time for scholarly activity. But Margoliouth was too restless and ambitious to remain long in the Irish countryside. After a journey to Palestine in 1848, an experience he described in A Pilgrimage to the Land of My Fathers (1850), he held various curacies in England, several of which were in London. In 1851 he published a three-­volume history of the Jews in Britain, the first to be written, and in later years worked on a new edition of the Hebrew Bible, a project that was unfinished at his death.26 Margoliouth’s Jewishness and the learning he acquired in Polish yeshivot made possible his career as an Anglican clergyman and under­wrote the authenticity of his presentation of Judaism and Jewish history. Without them, he would have been a failure as a churchman, for he lacked the education and upbringing of a gentleman and the connections they bestowed, which were a requirement for preferment. (Pace Hellmuth’s more impressive rise, birth counted for less in the

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wilds of colonial Canada, where Hebrew learning was at a premium.) In comparison to French Jews who became Roman Catholic priests at this time, Margoliouth’s attitude to unconverted Jews was remarkably positive. Instead of writing as the renegade who reveals Jewish secrets, he often lauded and championed Jews, without conceding, of course, their doctrinal errors. Thus, in his history of British Jewry, he remarked that there was no period in history when Jews lacked first-­ rate geniuses and no science in which Jews were not eminent practitioners, a distinction he attributed to their profound love for learning and their “uncontrollable energy” in the pursuit of knowledge. Moreover, unlike the “philosemitic” evangelicals of the London Society, he supported Jewish emancipation. Both in his history of Anglo-­Jewry and in an anonymously published, 120-­page pamphlet in 1856, he detailed and condemned the mistreatment of Jews in medieval England and contended that contemporary British Jews were entitled to both an acknowledgment of the wrongs done them and reparations for their sufferings and losses. He also enumerated at length their contributions to the health and strength of the modern British state.27 Even more sympathetic toward Jews was the reluctant missionary Isaac Edward Salkinson. A native of Shklov, in Belorussia, Salkinson grew up in an atmosphere of traditional piety, abject poverty, and family tension. He left home at age seventeen and wandered for several years in the Pale of Settlement, living hand to mouth and avoiding conscription while acquiring a Haskalah education. In 1849 he arrived in London, without possessions, friends, or means of earning a living. He was befriended by missionaries of the BSPGJ who fed and sheltered him and provided him with English lessons and further schooling. He tried several times to escape his benefactors and survive on his own, but he could not find work and had no friends to whom he could turn for help; in the end, overcome by hunger and despair, he returned to them. Following his baptism, he was sent to a Presbyterian seminary in Edinburgh, where he was ordained. He served a Glasgow congregation until 1862, when he was appointed head teacher at a school for missionaries in London. The managers of the BSPGJ were greatly impressed by his learning and, expecting great things from him, dispatched him in the mid-­1870s to a mission station in Pressburg and then, in 1876, to Vienna, where he remained until his death in 1883. Salkinson was not much of a missionary. In Vienna, he preferred to spend his time in the National café, playing chess, smoking his pipe, and discussing literary matters with East European Hebraists like Peretz Smolenskin (1842–­85), rather than on the streets, bringing

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the Gospel to poor Galician immigrants. He was a regular visitor to the homes of the communal rabbis Adolf Jellinek (1820/21–­93) and Moritz Güdemann (1845–­1918) and welcomed to his home Hebrew writers who were passing through Vienna. He produced some of the finest translations into Hebrew of the Haskalah period—­most notably Paradise Lost, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet. To keep his sponsors in London at bay, he also undertook a Hebrew translation of the New Testament, which was published posthumously in 1886.28 When Salkinson died, his translation unfinished, the Masoretic scholar Christian David Ginsburg stepped forward to complete the work. Ginsburg, a native of Warsaw, was baptized in 1846, along with his wife, at the Warsaw mission of the London Society. With its support, he traveled to London and applied, unsuccessfully, to their missionary school. He was then accepted at the school of the Nonconformist BSPGJ, where he forged a lifelong friendship with Salkinson, then a student there. When he completed the course in 1853, he was employed as a missionary by the BSPGJ in London and then, in 1857, in Liverpool. He married well—­the daughter of a Liverpool sugar refiner, who was an active supporter of the society—­and was able from 1863 to devote all his time to Hebrew scholarship. His most important work, still valued a century later, was his four-­volume The Massorah (1880–­85, 1905), a collection of orthographical notes on the text of the Hebrew Bible that Jewish scholars introduced before the tenth century to ensure its accurate transmission. The printing of the work, which required careful editorial supervision to prevent inaccuracies, was done in Vienna, at a shop where Smolenskin was the Hebrew supervisor. Salkinson also contributed, reading proofs at the beginning, but was forced to withdraw by the BSPGJ’s managers in London, who resented the time he was spending on the project.29 Ginsburg became a public figure for a time when the Shapira affair captured the attention of the British public in summer 1883. Moses Wilhelm Shapira (ca. 1830–­84), a Russian-­born antiquities dealer in Jerusalem and, like Ginsburg, a convert, claimed to have found ancient fragments of Deuteronomy in Moab, the area east of the Dead Sea. In June 1883 he sailed to Europe hoping to sell them. (Ten years earlier he had sold forgeries—­pottery vessels inscribed with Moabite characters—­to the German government.) After visiting Berlin, he ­traveled to London in July and negotiated with the British Museum for their purchase. Museum officials called in Ginsburg to authenticate the fragments, which he declared forgeries. The press, which followed the affair closely, hailed Ginsburg for having saved the nation

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from financial loss and public humiliation. A cartoon in Punch in September showed a vigilant Ginsburg seizing a criminal Shapira, who is marked with a stereotypically Jewish nose. The following March, Shapira, despondent and depressed, fatally shot himself in a Rotterdam hotel.30 The last of this group of five clergymen of Jewish origin was the least educated and owed his success more to stamina than to learning. Henry Aaron Stern (1820–­85) grew up in a village in Hesse and moved when he was twelve to Frankfurt. While serving a commercial apprenticeship in Hamburg, an agent of the LSPCJ made contact with him. Soon after, he was offered a post in London, but when he arrived there he discovered that the firm had failed. In a move by now familiar, he turned to the society for help and was baptized in March 1840. He then entered the society’s trade school to learn a craft to support himself, but, having shown intellectual promise, he went on to the society’s missionary school. When he completed his studies, he was sent to work in Asia Minor and the Middle East. In the next fifteen years, he visited Jewish communities in Iraq, Persia, Arabia, Kurdistan, Turkey, the Crimea, and the Land of Israel, publishing two popular accounts of his travels. Fame came to him inadvertently when the LSPCJ dispatched him to evangelize the Jews of Ethiopia in 1859. During his second trip there, in 1863, the Ethiopian emperor, incensed at the British government’s snub of his offer to send an embassy to London (Britain did not want to anger the Ottomans), imprisoned Stern and a fellow missionary in Gondar. The emperor, whom Stern had offended in one of his travel accounts, treated Stern particularly harshly. Relations between Britain and Ethiopia deteriorated, the two missionaries—­along with two more politically important hostages—­remained imprisoned, and finally Britain dispatched troops from Bombay in spring 1868. The British military overwhelmed the Ethiopians, and the emperor freed the hostages. When Stern returned to England, he published and lectured widely (and profitably) about his adventure. His years of captivity in Ethiopia, however, cured his wanderlust, and he spent the remainder of his life working among the Jews of London.31 This brief review does not exhaust the names of Central and East European converts, who, with the support of British missionary societies at home and abroad, built careers on the basis of their origins. Some led respectable but otherwise unremarkable lives—­as country vicars, missionary agents, private tutors, and the like—­while others achieved a modicum of fame: such as Polish-­born Ridley

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Haim Herschell (1807–­64), who helped to found the BSPGJ in 1842, and the eccentric Joseph Wolff (1795–­1862), son of a Franconian rabbi, who traveled extensively in the Near East and Central Asia for the London Society and published accounts of his harrowing adventures.32 In all, the number of Jews who became clergymen in Victorian Britain is striking. In 1851 Moses Margoliouth estimated that there were more than forty Church of England clergymen of Jewish origin. Two years later a Nonconformist minister estimated that there were fifty ex-­Jewish Anglican clergymen and another twenty ex-­Jewish dissenting ministers. In the 1870s the Reverend Albert Augustus Isaacs (1826–­1903), who was himself a convert, thought there were about one hundred former Jews among the clergy of the established church. Another estimate set the number of Jewish-­born clergymen, regardless of denomination, at about two hundred in the 1890s. The prominence of the Reverend Joseph Emilius, “the fashionable foreign ci-­devant Jew preacher” in Anthony Trollope’s novels The Eustace Diamonds (1873) and Phineas Redux (1874) suggests that such clergymen were not unfamiliar in Victorian pulpits. Although Emilius is, in Trollope’s eyes, “a greasy, fawning, pawing, creeping, black-­browed rascal”—­as well as a bigamist and, in all likelihood, a murderer—­he is also an eloquent preacher in fashionable, upper-­class Mayfair who charms and marries the wealthy Lady Eustace.33 Clergymen of Jewish birth in Britain were not only notable by their numbers. Equally distinctive was their attitude toward their former co-­religionists. Unlike their French counterparts, they rarely became Jew-­baiters. Indeed, Anglican and Nonconformist clergymen of Jewish birth were more likely to protest persecution than encourage it. For example, when news of the Damascus blood libel reached London in 1840, Michael Solomon Alexander (1799–­1845), the future Anglican bishop of Jerusalem, and the Reverend Alexander McCaul, author of the anti-­rabbinic polemic The Old Paths (1836), organized a meeting of Jewish converts to protest the arrest and torture of Jews in Damascus. Led by Alexander, fifty-­seven of them signed a statement declaring that they had never heard of Jews using Christian blood for ritual purposes. Even earlier, when rumors first reached Jewish communities in the Levant, the head of the London Society’s Jerusalem station dispatched the convert George W. Pieritz (1809–­84) to Damascus to determine what was happening. Pieritz, who was critical of the conduct of the British consul in Damascus, then traveled to Alexandria to seek help from the British consul there.34

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FOUR

The work of missionary societies poses the question of whether the persons whom they converted were sincere in their profession of Christianity. For the minority who became clergymen there is no question that their Christianity was heartfelt—­certainly by the time they entered the ministry. It is hard to see how it could have been otherwise. This is not to say, however, that doctrinal or spiritual concerns led to their initial contact with missionaries. As with most Jews who came to Christianity under missionary auspices, a mix of material need and emotional vulnerability paved the way to their new faith—­ even if this is not how they later represented their journey. (In narrating their change of religion, converts often projected backward a sense of conviction that only emerged later.) In this sense, there was little difference between the Victorian clergymen discussed above and the thousands of Jews who became Christians under missionary auspices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in English-­speaking Protestant lands, where missions to the Jews flourished. While the activities of these missions are well documented,35 what is often insufficiently emphasized in this literature is the social status of the Jews whom they evangelized. Of necessity, missionaries worked in the streets, in marketplaces and courtyards, and in other public spaces where they were free to engage Jews in conversation. They did not work door-­to-­door in bourgeois quarters, to whose houses and apartments they were unlikely to be admitted. Nor were they usually able to penetrate Jewish shops, factories, offices, warehouses, and other places of business. Because they lacked access to middle-­class Jews, they focused almost exclusively on poor Jews, those most down on their luck and in need of support and comfort. They thus opened their schools, lecture halls, nurseries, and dispensaries in or near areas where the Jewish poor congregated—­in the East End of London or the Lower East Side of New York, for example. Surveying the work of missions in England in the 1880s, an anonymous writer in the German journal Nathanael noted that they never reached wealthy and middle-­class Jews—­or even poor Jews who had been settled in England for many years.36 From the founding of the LSPCJ in 1809 to the cessation of mass migration to the United States in the 1920s, Christian and Jewish critics repeatedly claimed that the missions “bought” or “bribed” converts with material relief and that the latter were disreputable and dishonest. B. R. Goakman, who headed the printing office of the

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LSPCJ in the early 1810s and afterward wrote a stinging attack on its conduct, recalled that one potential convert placed under his direction said “he cared nothing about Jesus Christ so long as he could get a good belly-­full of victuals, and that he believed all the boys [in the printing shop] were of his opinion!” At midcentury, a Hebrew teacher and jewelry dealer in Bedford claimed in a burst of hyperbole: “We all know that there is not a Jew baptized, either in this country or in any other, but he makes some profit out of it. Either they are actually paid for it, or they are made missionaries, or they marry rich ladies, or they receive some other kind of support from the Christians.” At the end of the century, the Reverend Marcus Wolkenberg (1834–­1900), a convert who supervised the work of the London Society in the North of England, wrote to the head office in London that “very rarely, if ever, is a Jew baptized who has not been previously fed, lodged, clothed, and provided with pocket money, ostensibly to enable him to enquire into the truth of Christianity, but in reality spending his time in idleness.”37 It was not poverty alone, however, that made Jews vulnerable to missionary activity. If this had been the case, the agents of the societies would have had much more to show for the time, money, and effort they expended. Rather, it was a combination of poverty and uprootedness. From the eighteenth century, European Jews, especially the young, were in almost constant motion, migrating and wandering in search of a better life. In every large city where Jews lived in both the New and Old World, a substantial number, sometimes a majority, of the Jewish community were recent arrivals, migrants from somewhere another region, another country, another continent. Among else—­ them were those who were unable to find their bearings—­those who failed to obtain work, who lacked friends and family, who experienced loneliness, desperation, and hopelessness. Of course, charities to relieve the Jewish poor existed everywhere, but their resources were inadequate to cope with the magnitude of material and emotional distress connected to migration. Christian missions offered what Jewish communal bodies were unable or disinclined to provide to every Jew in need: a helping hand, a sympathetic ear, a welcoming embrace. It is not surprising that the overwhelming majority of mission-­made converts everywhere were migrants. In London, in the period 1831–­80 (that is, before the onset of mass migration from Eastern Europe), 77 to 93 percent of the men converted at the LSPCJ’s Episcopal Jews’ Chapel (depending on the decade) were immigrants—­from the German states, the Habsburg Empire, and Congress Poland.38

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The experience of Jewish-­born clergymen in Victorian England, whether they were baptized before or after their arrival in Britain, was remarkably similar to that of other mission-­made converts. Salkinson, Ginsburg, Stern, Margoliouth et alia were all, at the time when they first took an interest in Christianity, young men far from home with few or no resources—­other than their Jewish learning. In studying the stories of converts in early modern Germany who became Hebrew teachers, polemicists, and interpreters of Judaism, Elisheva Carlebach found the same pattern: Most began with young men leaving home. “Some went to study in a distant yeshivah, others to embark on their first apprenticeship or business venture; yet others went to live with distant relatives because death had robbed them of parents who could provide for them. The conditions of living on the road, detached from the certainties and comforts of home, rendered them vulnerable to enticement by missionary-­minded Christians.”39 However, to assert that they, like so many converts, were emotionally vulnerable to the missionary message when they began to investigate Christianity in no sense impugns the authenticity of their faith at the time of their baptism or later in life. It only explains the circumstances in which missionaries initiated contact in the first place. For understandable reasons, Jewish spokesmen were reluctant to acknowledge the nonmaterial dimension of such conversions. They focused, rather, on instances of calculation and chicanery—­which were also common—­and blamed Christians for encouraging them, for, as in the medieval and early modern period, there were Jews who exploited Christian missionary zeal. A convert in Britain who wrote to Chief Rabbi Adler in 1893 asking to be readmitted to Judaism claimed there was “a legion” of poor Jews who presented themselves repeatedly for baptism and told of a Wesleyan clergyman in Eastbourne “who had the fortune of baptizing one of these imposters his seventh or eighth time.”40 Reinforcing the Jewish perception that converts were hypocritical and mendacious was the willingness of even the pious poor to use the services that missions provided in the age of mass immigration—­ schools, libraries, dispensaries, and the like. Simeon Singer explained to his congregants at the New West End Synagogue in London in 1903 that “the foreign poor” resorted to the medical missions because they were not kept waiting “for many dreary hours,” because the Yiddish-­speaking doctors readily understood them, and because the consultation and medicine were free. Singer was confident that few of those who received medical treatment or used the free library would

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desert Judaism. What worried him was the demoralizing influence on their character of accepting help under a false pretense. More likely they viewed the attempts to proselytize them as the price they had to pay to receive free medical care. The journalist Ralph Finn (1912–­ 99) recalled devout Jewish women coming to the Catholic medical mission in the East End in the 1920s and 1930s. They “sang—­or pretended to sing, or mouthed Yiddish words to—­religious hymns; they looked at the forbidden pictures and images all around and they bore the illuminated texts, the figurines, the oil paintings and the prayers with fortitude.” They left, he noted, with no greater interest in changing their religion than when they arrived.41

FIVE

Early in the twentieth century a religious revival swept through young intellectual circles in France. This was not a widespread religious reawakening but a surge of spirituality among “sensitive and discrimcentury inating spirits”42 who were disenchanted with nineteenth-­ positivism (which they identified with materialism, mechanism, and naturalism). It was, in turn, one chapter in a broader, European-­wide intellectual rediscovery of the weight of the illogical, the primitive, and the inexplicable in human affairs. In France, one widely remarked manifestation of this reorientation in thought and sentiment was a flurry of conversions to Roman Catholicism in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s by once secular writers, artists, students, and intellectuals. One of the first and most celebrated was that of the twenty-­three-­year-­old Jacques Maritain—­and his Russian-­born Jewish wife Raïssa Ouman­ çoff (1883–­1960)—­in 1908. 43 Her conversion was emblematic of how nonpracticing Jews who were integrated into French intellectual and cultural life were swept up as well by the neoromantic, antipositivism of the period. Oumançoff grew up in a bourgeois, non-­observant home in Paris, where her family settled in 1893. Rapidly mastering French, she received a lycée education and then entered the Sorbonne at age seventeen, where she met Jacques Maritain, a fellow student. Like him and most of her classmates, she was an atheist, having decided as an adolescent that God did not exist. However, she, like her future husband, was not content to leave the matter at that. She was, for want of a better term, a “seeker” of absolute truth, wracked with spiritual disquiet and driven to probe the secrets of the universe. When she entered

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the Sorbonne, she studied the natural sciences at first, thinking that they were the key to ultimate knowledge but soon decided otherwise. Maritain shared her anguish and despair, and the two of them, while walking through the Jardin des Plantes one day, made a pact that, if they could not find meaning in the universe, an immutable truth that commanded their adherence, they would kill themselves. In search of this truth, they began attending the lectures of the philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–­1941) at the Collège de France. Bergson, who opposed intuition to conceptual intelligence as a means to access the real and the absolute, relieved some of their existential anguish and set them on the path that led eventually to Catholicism. (Bergson was Jewish by birth and late in life flirted with conversion, but pulled back because he did not want to disavow his fellow Jews when they were in peril.) In 1905 the Maritains (they married in 1904) came under the influence of Léon Bloy, mystic, ascetic, and born-­again Catholic. In 1892 Bloy had published Le Salut par les Juifs (Salvation through the Jews), an eccentric reworking of Augustinian doctrine on Jews, which, while condemning both the Jewish religion and the Jewish people, nonetheless hailed them for their role in the Christian scheme of salvation, looking forward to their eventual conversion. The Maritains spent much of the summer of 1905 reading and studying Le Salut par les Juifs. It revealed to them, Raïssa recalled, Paul’s message of the bonds between the Old and the New Israel (Romans 9–­11) and the unity of the Hebrew and Greek scriptures. In Bloy’s presence, they came “face to face with the question of God, both in all its power and in all its agency.” Whether, at the time, Raïssa was troubled by Bloy’s hostility to Jews is unclear. Later, in her memoirs, she acknowledged that at times Bloy reduced Jews “to the level of the most repugnant vermin” but claimed in his defense that his exaltation of them at other times more than compensated for this. “We pardoned him his dross by virtue of the grandeur of his intentions and the magnificence of his language.”44 In April 1906 they told Bloy of their wish to become Catholics and in June were baptized. Significantly, at the time of their decision, they knew little about the faith they chose to embrace, for Jacques’s upbringing was even more secular than hers. Their “naïve” enthusiasm for a religion whose liturgical and spiritual traditions were not well known to them highlights the extent to which emotional and spiritual distress drove their conversion. The Catholicism that the young Maritains accepted was, like the Catholicism of the Ratisbonnes, a reactionary creed, in this case, in revolt against the Third Republic and the values it represented:

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liberalism, capitalism, toleration, secularism, and modernity more generally. From the end of 1908 until November 1914, they were decisively influenced by the Dominican monk Humbert Clérissac, a monarchist, antisemite, integral nationalist, and supporter of Charles Maurras and Action française, which was ferociously hostile to Jews and the republican system. Thus, as Jacques and Raïssa moved from disbelief to belief, they moved as well from left to right on the political spectrum. They became associated with Action française in 1911, and in 1920 Jacques collaborated with Maurras in founding the Revue Universelle, a journal that served as an intellectual forum for Action française and Catholicism, for which he continued to work until 1927. In retrospect, writing after the fall of France in 1940, Raïssa blamed their dalliance with Maurras on the influence of Clérissac. Jacques, she explained, was only interested in metaphysics and theology and delayed too long examining the anti-­liberalism of the movement. Moreover, they had convinced themselves that Maurras was moving toward Catholicism just as many young men and women in his movement were.45 When Raïssa wrote her memoirs, she and Jacques no longer traveled in right-­wing, anti-­democratic circles, and she conveniently ignored what her husband wrote two decades earlier. In an essay on the Jewish Question in 1921, for example, he had explained that, by virtue of history and providence, the Jews had no “real attachment to the common good of Western and Christian civilization” and that they were subversives, “at the origin of most of the great revolutionary movements of the modern period.” Given the threat posed by secret Judeo-­Masonic societies and the cosmopolitan financial interests allied to them, he had felt that “a certain number of general defense measures” were needed. Still, he had urged his readers to forswear hatred of the Jewish “race” and Judaism, reminding them that however “degenerate” carnal Jews might be, “the race of the prophets, of the Virgin and the apostles, the race of Jesus is the trunk on which we are grafted.” Like Bloy, Jacques always believed in the power of baptism to redeem even Jews.46 At the emotional center of the Maritains’ Catholicism was the compulsion to bring others (Jews and Gentiles alike) into the church. They were not missionaries in the English mold, for whom the making of converts was their occupation. But the way they went about the task was equally robust, if not more so, and their success in converting intellectuals and artists was legendary. Their zeal was such that at times it blinded them to the impropriety of their methods and the suitability

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of their converts. Prominent among the objects of their attention was Raïssa’s family. Her only sibling, her sister, Véra, was baptized at the time they were and lived with them her entire life, keeping house and nursing the sickly, often bedridden Raïssa. They also worked “subtly” (Raïssa’s word) to convert their parents, who initially were crushed by what they saw as their daughters’ betrayal of the Jewish people. Raïssa interpreted, for example, her father’s interest in organ music, which she encouraged, and his willingness to enter churches to hear it as a sign that he was moving toward Christianity. “Now for a Jew like him to go willingly into a church was in itself a sign that he had ceased to reject Christianity in principle.”47 In 1912, when he was on his deathbed, unable to speak or move, Jacques baptized him, over the objection of Raïssa’s mother. After his death, Raïssa enlisted another new Catholic, the Romanian prince Vladimir Ghika, a regular visitor to their home in Meudon, in a campaign to convince her mother to convert. Her mother finally agreed and was baptized in 1925. It was Jacques’s conversion of Jean Cocteau that same year (technically, it was not a conversion but a return to the faith in which he had been born) that led to their connection with the notorious Maurice Sachs (1906–­45).48 Sachs came from a once wealthy, wildly dysfunctional family. His ne’er-­do-­well father abandoned the family when Maurice was five years old while his frivolous, self-­centered mother showed little affection for him and bundled him off to boarding schools or parked him in the homes of wealthy friends or her mother. As an adolescent, he experienced his Jewish background as a defect. At school he felt no connection with the other Jewish students and knew nothing about Judaism—­or Catholicism, for that matter. His family was freethinking and “fanatically” republican. “No one ever mentioned religion. I had never even been informed that there were different beliefs to be found throughout the world. Mad as it may seem, I did not know that Christ had come and that the Synagogue of my race had produced a New Church.” Neither Catholic nor Jew (at least subjectively), he felt he “belonged nowhere.”49 Compounding his sense of difference and isolation was his growing awareness of his homosexuality. In the 1920s, Sachs moved in avant-­garde literary and artistic circles in Paris. In 1924, then in his late teens, he succeeded in meeting Jean Cocteau, then at the epicenter of bohemian Paris, and joined his entourage of young men. At the time, Cocteau was grieving for a young protégé who had died in December 1923. A friend took Cocteau to meet Jacques at Meudon, hoping Jacques would be able to

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comfort him in his distress. The result of their meeting was Cocteau’s return to the faith, the literary sensation of the summer of 1925. At first, Sachs, who was under Cocteau’s spell, did not understand what had happened to the man he venerated, formerly a critic of Catholicism. Once again he felt abandoned. Desperate to avoid separation from Cocteau, Sachs traveled to Meudon to see the Maritains, at Cocteau’s suggestion, at the end of July 1925. Jacques’s impact on the emotionally vulnerable Sachs was transformative. “His effect on me was immediate, absolute and complete. This first contact with virtue  .  .  . enthralled my soul. The dreadful solitude in which I languished, sometimes longing for nothing but the strength to kill myself, suddenly no longer existed.” On the train back to Paris, he cried tears of joy and relief. “I had come alone, I left with a friend.” At Meudon—­and in its Catholicism—­Sachs found the warmth, order, and security that were so glaringly missing in his background. On subsequent visits, the childless Raïssa lavished maternal affection on him (he was only eighteen at the time), relieving his sense of guilt about his sexuality and dissolution. As he asked rhetorically in his memoirs, “Who, after a sin, has not flung himself weeping into the arms of his mother to rediscover there the calm of forgiveness and the delights of joy that are like a breath of fresh air?” In a matter of days, Catholicism became for him “the oasis after the desert, the warm inn after the blasted heath”—­although he was then largely ignorant of its doctrines and rituals. “It was the hearth I had never known, the eternal father, the virgin mother and the brother who had sacrificed himself for me.”50 At the end of August 1925, a month after his initial visit, he was baptized. Ardent in his new faith, he longed to make his commitment absolute by becoming a priest, and, with the backing of the Maritains, who settled his debts, he entered a Carmelite seminary in Paris in January 1926. He remained there for only six months, however. At first he was euphoric. With Jacques’s intervention, he received permission to wear the cassock almost immediately (seminarians ordinarily began wearing it in their fourth year). Wearing this dresslike garment gave him physical pleasure, a “frisson délicieux.” But soon the enforced solitude, discipline, and chastity of seminary life wore him down. In July his maternal grandmother asked him to accompany her for a few weeks of vacation in Juan-­les-­Pins, where the Parisian cultural avant-­ garde, including Cocteau, gathered in the summer. Once there Sachs fell madly in love with an American adolescent, who borrowed his cassock and paraded up and down the beach wearing it as a bathrobe.

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Unbuttoned, it flew open in the breeze, offering a vivid contrast to his pink bathing suit, scandalizing some and amusing others. Cocteau ordered Sachs to return to the seminary, but he soon left, bringing to an end his brief flirtation with Catholic piety. Few would doubt that the conversion of Sachs was linked to his instability. In this, though, there was nothing remarkable, however unconventional his behavior as a seminarian. As we have seen, there was an emotional dimension to most conversions of conviction; young men and women who were content with their lives and at peace with themselves did not (and do not), as a rule, change their religion suddenly and unexpectedly. For the historian, it is noteworthy that in interwar France, Catholicism was an option for artists and intellectuals, including secular Jews, who were in emotional and spiritual distress. Whereas at the turn of the century, it was unfashionable to be a practicing Catholic, this was no longer true in the interwar years. The enrollment of leading thinkers in the ranks of Catholicism had become an accepted feature of literary life.51 In another time and in another place, young persons who were “lost” and in search of “meaning” might have turned to psychoanalysis, Eastern spirituality, alcohol and drugs, or radical politics—­Sachs himself later became a heroin addict—­but in the twenties and thirties, Catholicism was the answer for many. It promised stability, certainty, warmth, and affection. Also noteworthy in the case of Sachs was the blinkered willingness of the Maritains to believe in and support someone who was notorious for his dissolution and promiscuity. Even after the debacle at Juan les Pins and his departure from the seminary, they stood by him, continuing to correspond until 1939. Their naïveté or blindness was puzzling to those who did not share their outlook: “One wants to know by what bizarre twist of fate Catholics became infatuated with this boy who never bothered to hide his perverse instinct, of which he was rather proud.”52 Their infatuation with Sachs was not an expression of their failure to take the measure of the man, however. It was, rather, an expression of their conversionary zeal for which any Jew—­whether dissolute or on death’s door—­was fair game. Indeed, Sachs’s dissolution, along with his Jewishness, raised the stakes. What better way to flaunt the power and mercy of the Christian God than to engineer the spiritual transformation of a dissolute Jew! Their eagerness and haste in making Sachs a Catholic, after less than one month of instruction, flowed from the same commitment that fueled their unseemly behavior when Raïssa’s father was dying. For them, and especially for her, every conversion of a Jew was a confirmation of their own faith.

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Also in the Maritains’ orbit were a flock of young cosmopolitan Egyptian Jews.53 Instrumental in introducing them to the Maritains were the liberal Catholic writer Stanislas Fumet and his wife Aniouta (neé Rosenblum), like Raïssa, a Russian-­born convert.54 Foremost were members of the wealthy and well-­connected Menasce and Cattaui families. The first to convert, in 1925, was Jean-­Marie Cattaui de Menasce (1904–­87), a cultivated but unintellectual free spirit, whose interest in street urchins led him to a Catholic youth club and, via the vicar of Fumet’s parish, to the baptismal font. He was ordained a priest a few years later and spent the remainder of his life in Rome. His cousin Jean de Menasce (1902–­73), then in Paris as well, was flummoxed by the conversion. He had thought his cousin was an immature person with whom it was impossible to have a serious conversation. Jean de Menasce was the opposite: precociously intellectual and serious (although equally charming and vivacious). He had been educated at the French school of law in Cairo and at Balliol College, Oxford (1920–­24), where he mingled with the talented and the well born who frequented Lady Ottoline Morrell’s nearby country home Garsington Manor. The following year he served in the Geneva bureau of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), whose head, Chaim Weizmann (1874–­1952), a friend of his father, recruited him. He collaborated with the novelist Albert Cohen (1895–­1981) in publishing the short-­ lived Zionist journal La Revue juive and traveled to Jerusalem for the opening of the Hebrew University in April 1925, where he wrote, in a moment of exaltation, to another cousin, the future literary and art critic Georges Cattaui (1896–­1974): “I am dead to Jewry. I am a Hebrew and a Judean now. One must come here: everywhere else there is only death and emptiness.”55 Yet a few months later, in July 1925, he resigned his post, telling Weizmann that he could do more for Zionism outside the WZO and that he did not want to compromise himself.56 Back in Paris, in 1926, he went to see his newly baptized cousin. The encounter sparked or resonated with a spiritual and emotional crisis (the details are unknown), which was resolved instantly in a conversionary moment. “It happened one day while I was shaving,” he later quipped to a friend.57 He met Fumet for the first time on 23 April and was baptized a little more than three weeks later, on 19 May. The following month, when his father learned of the conversion, which Jean tried to keep secret, he recalled him to Alexandria. His father hoped to send him to Palestine, where he owned orange groves, thinking that immersion in a Zionist milieu would bring him to his senses. But this was not to be. Jean de Menasce remained in

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Alexandria for the next two years, where he became the center of a circle of young Jewish “seekers” from his own wealthy milieu, many of whom became Catholics under his influence. He also wrote frequently to his cousin Georges, then a Zionist activist and contributor to French Jewish journals, celebrating and defending his choice. His effort was rewarded in 1928, when Cattaui was secretly baptized in the Spanish Church in Bayswater, London. Two years later, Jean de Menasce entered a Dominican seminary in Amiens and in 1935 was ordained a priest. An exceptional linguist, he devoted the rest of his life to scholarship on ancient Persian religions and missiology. Two other conversions of conviction in Paris, neither of which owed anything to missionizing, merit attention by virtue of their notoriety. The first, that of the poet Max Jacob (1876–­1944), began with a visionary experience before the First World War.58 Jacob came from a modest mercantile family in Quimper, Brittany, the only Jewish family in the town. His childhood was unhappy and tormented. His parents were insensitive to his artistic aspirations while his Jewishness and homosexuality strengthened his sense of difference in what was a very Catholic region of France. He left home in 1897 for the literary bohemia of Paris. In September 1909, he saw an apparition of Jesus on the wall of the Montmartre room where he lodged. He did not convert at the time—­the artistic and literary milieu in which he moved was not religious—­but began studying the Gospels, often through the lens of esoteric, Gnostic traditions, to discover the meaning of his vision. Jacob later said he delayed becoming a Catholic because the priest at the church of Saint-­Jean-­L’Évangéliste, to whom he turned immediately after the apparition, refused to baptize him, knowing of the poet’s stormy, dissolute life. Whether true or not, there were other, equally compelling reasons for his hesitation. First, the idea of cutting ties to his family milieu was a powerful brake. When he told his cousin the novelist Jean-­Richard Bloch (1884–­1947) of his conversion (in 1915), he implored him: “Do not treat me like an apostate! I have repudiated nothing: I had no religion, I have chosen one.”59 Many years later, in 1925, he told Cocteau that he had been unable to convert as long as his mother was alive. Second, his homosexuality distressed him, as his correspondence, rich with self-­flagellation, attests. While Catholicism offered a discipline to address it—­confession, mortification, punishment—­it also required him to confront and fight it, however uncomfortable that was. Third, in literary and artistic circles in Paris, Jacob’s reputation was that of a clown, a fantasist, and a self-­mocking wit, and it seems he feared that no one would take his conversion seriously.

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Then, in December 1914, he experienced a second apparition. At a cinema, the image of Jesus, sheltering the four children of his concierge under his coat, appeared to him on the movie screen. Convinced this was a message from God, he was baptized in February 1915 at the convent of Notre Dame de Sion. He was almost forty at the time, unusually old for Jewish converts, who tended to change their religion as young adults. It has been suggested that the timing of his conversion was linked to his heightened sense of exclusion during the Great War.60 All the men in his family, as well as most of his friends, were on active duty, while he had been invalided out of military service in 1897. Unable to participate in the Union sacrée, yet keen to identify with France in her hour of need, the argument goes, he embraced C ­ atholicism, as much for patriotic as spiritual reasons. It is certainly true that a few Jews during and immediately after the war saw conversion as a means to patriotic communion, to full, definitive national integration and union. Viewing Catholicism as an overarching, all-­embracing civilization that had shaped them morally and intellectually, they concluded that being French meant being Catholic. The art scholar Marc Boasson (1886–­1918), for example, who became a Christian before the war, wrote to his wife in 1915 that “after the war, after having paid the tax of blood, the French Jew has a great task to perform: he must break with his Jewish past unhesitatingly” and cease to be Jewish.61 It is doubtful, however, that sentiments like these led to Jacob’s decision. He was a hedonist and a bohemian, not a status-­anxious bourgeois. Nor was he a longtime seeker of the absolute, like Raïssa Maritain. In the end, the apparitions he experienced, the triggers of his conversion, remain inexplicable. The most one can say is that Catholicism offered him a disciplined way, however imperfect, of coping with his sexuality. The other convert whose path to Christianity owed nothing to the influence of the Maritain group was the religious and political writer Simone Weil (1909–­43). 62 (Weil did not, strictly, become a Catholic since she never formally entered the church.) Her parents were not observant Jews, but they were not as deracinated as she later made them out to be and as most of her biographers claimed. One oft repeated anecdote is that they failed to tell Simone and her brother, André (1906–­98), later an important mathematician, that they were Jews until years after their birth and that André discovered he was Jewish only when, at age ten, a schoolmate called him a Jew and he asked his teacher what that meant. According to a friend, Simone only knew about Jews through her reading of the novels of Balzac and

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consequently thought the word Jew was another name for a usurer. Even if untrue, these stories say something about how Weil wanted others to understand her relationship to Judaism. In any case, her parents’ faith in reason and science was unable to satisfy or console her, and from late adolescence, she looked elsewhere. She later claimed she had been a Christian from birth, or, more precisely, that she had been born, raised, and educated “within the Christian inspiration” (that is, presumably, within a social and cultural milieu that was “Christian” in tone and character). Although “the very name of God had no great part” in her thoughts then, she recalled, she nonetheless shared “the Christian conception” regarding the problems of the world.63 Whatever these ambiguous phrases mean, the truth was different: She found in Catholic ritual and sentiment a system that spoke to her deepest feelings only when she was in her late twenties. Weil described three experiences in particular that brought her to Christianity and the threshold of the church. The first occurred in 1935, when her parents took her to Portugal to recuperate after a year of mentally and physically exhausting factory work (she had vowed to kill herself if she were unable to withstand the ordeal). She was, she later recalled, “in pieces, soul and body” when she visited on her own a wretched little seaside village on the festival day of its patron saint. In the evening, she watched a procession of the women, carrying candles and “singing what must certainly be very ancient hymns of a heart-­rending sadness.” She had never heard anything like it. Then and there “the conviction was suddenly borne in upon me that Christianity is pre-­eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others.” The second occurred in 1937, on a trip to Italy, when she visited the twelfth-­century chapel in Assisi where Saint Francis prayed. “There something stronger than I was compelled me for the first time in my life to go down on my knees.” The third experience was connected to a ten-­day visit with her mother to the Benedictine abbey of Saint Solesmes (just south of Le Mans) at Easter time in 1938. She was then suffering, as she had for several years, from excruciating headaches, every sound hurting her “like a blow.” In her own words: [B]y an extreme effort of concentration I was able to rise above this wretched flesh, to leave it to suffer by itself, heaped up in a corner, and to find a pure and perfect joy in the unimaginable beauty of the [Gregorian] chanting and the words. This experience enabled me by analogy to get a better understanding of the possibility of loving

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divine love in the midst of affliction. It goes without saying that in the course of these services the thought of the Passion of Christ entered into my being once and for all. The definitive moment came when, at the culminating point of a violent headache, she was reading and rereading a poem (“Love bade me welcome”) by the seventeenth-­century English metaphysical poet George Herbert. “It was during one of these recitations that . . . Christ himself came down and took possession of me.” She had never read Christian mystical literature before, but she felt, in the midst of her sufferings, “the presence of a love, like that which one can read in the smile on a beloved face.” She did not consider the possibility of baptism then or later, however, believing that her views regarding Judaism’s relationship to Christianity were an obstacle. (Despite this, she advised her brother to baptize his daughter Sylvie so that she might enjoy the advantages of being a Christian.)64 While Weil’s embrace of Christianity was more gradual than sudden, it was, like the experiences of other French Jewish converts in the interwar period, soaked in wrenching emotion. For her, as for Raïssa Maritain, emotional and physical pain was central to her sense of being a Christian. From their early twenties, both suffered from illnesses, some psychogenetic and psychosomatic in origin, and both took pleasure in their suffering, dwelling on and cultivating it for spiritual ends. Thus, while Weil’s decision to take a leave of absence from teaching to take up factory work for a year was an effort to learn about the conditions of the proletariat, it was also an exercise in self-­punishment. During the war, she repeatedly offered to undertake desperate, physically challenging missions for which she was unqualified and which would have surely resulted in her death if she had been allowed to take them on. While in exile in England, from November 1942 to August 1943, she essentially starved herself to death, by limiting what she ate, even after being hospitalized with tuberculosis. After her marriage, Maritain was always sickly and frequently bedridden. She identified her fragile, stricken body with the Passion, viewing the painful ebbing of her physical substance as an act of worship. A sympathetic biographer thought that she neither enjoyed nor wished to attain good health, that for her, losing it, “especially to relinquish it voluntarily, was to approach God.”65 Both women also were uncomfortable with, indeed, repulsed by, their sexuality. Weil, who regretted having been born a woman, as well as a Jew, wore clothes with a masculine cut and apparently took no sexual interest in either men or women. Maritain

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was just as repelled by the flesh. In her memoir, she recalled with abhorrence the few times she and her mother visited a communal bath in Russia, remarking specifically on the full nudity of the bathers. Even though those who went into the steam rooms came out “all crimson and wonderfully content,” she wrote that she would not have entered one “for anything in the world.”66 Her relationship with her husband was chaste, at least from 1912, when they took vows of celibacy and dedicated their lives to the practice of contemplation in the world. If they enjoyed sexual relations in the previous eight years of their marriage (which seems hard to imagine), she never conceived and never bore a child. For both Weil and Maritain, corporeal and carnal appetites were a problem. Their admirers view their revulsion as an emblem of their spirituality; their detractors, as a sign of their instability. Whatever one’s view, it was a marker of their alienation from Judaism, with its more positive attitude toward food and sex. One might even speculate whether the ideal of celibacy and freedom from desire in Catholic tradition contributed to its appeal to them. The stories of Maritain, Jacob, and other sincere converts were well known at the time. They touted and reveled in them, hoping to encourage others to follow their example. There were a few Jewish artists and intellectuals, however, who converted secretly because they did not wish to shock or shame their parents. The preeminent example is the expressionist sculptor and painter Marek Szwarc (1892–­1958), whose father headed the Jewish community in Zgierz, Poland.67 ­Szwarc moved to Paris in 1910 to study sculpture in the École des Beaux Arts. In 1912 he moved into La Ruche (The Beehive), a communal residence in Montparnasse for artists, many of them East European Jews. He and other émigré artists who emphasized Jewish subjects and worked to synthesize aesthetic modernism and Jewish tradition, a group known as the Mahmaddim (Precious Ones), published a short-­ lived, textless Jewish art journal with the same name.68 According to Szwarc’s daughter, it was at this time, while visiting cathedrals to study their sculpture, that he first started thinking about Christianity. The outbreak of war in 1914 trapped him in Poland, where he was vacationing, forcing him to postpone his return to Paris. In 1919 he fell in love with and quickly married seventeen-­year-­old Eugenia (Guina) Markowa, daughter of a well-­to-­do, freethinking Jewish furrier in Lodz. After the wedding, they rented a small house on the edge of a Polish village where he could paint undisturbed. Sometime before late 1920, the couple was baptized, without telling family or friends. According to their daughter, her mother told

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her that the conversion was “an accident,” the consequence of a bureaucratic error. A clerk who had issued them new passports had listed their religion as Roman Catholic, without any consultation, because, Marek thought, they spoke “a perfect Polish.” One day the mayor of the village came around and asked to see their passports. He then asked to see their baptismal certificates. Without much thought, Marek replied, “I’ll get them for you in three weeks.” Three weeks later, after a few lessons, they were baptized. Desirous of pleasing her husband, Guina agreed. Marek, though, welcomed (or at least took seriously) the consequences of the “accident.” His wife later remembered that at their baptism, he sobbed, the first time she had seen him cry. Returning home, she asked him why he had cried. He answered: The prophets and the patriarchs burst into the chapel above me, their long beards and flowing robes stirred by a violent wind. With their palms they struck the pages of large books, the sound echoing underneath the vault. I sobbed. Then, suddenly, a great silence settled and a wave of peace spread over me. The baptismal water ran down my forehead.69 In late 1920, they moved to Paris, hoping to keep their conversion a secret, which would have been impossible in Poland. For Szwarc, conversion was in no sense a flight from Jewishness or a betrayal of Judaism. He remained, in his view, a Jew, but a Jew who believed that Jesus of Nazareth was the messiah. Moreover, unlike other converts in the Maritain circle, he was no stranger to Jewish tradition. He knew Judaism and Jewish society intimately, from the inside, passing on, for example, his love of Hasidic tales about wonder-­ working rabbis to his daughter. While in Poland, he was active in the avant-­garde artistic group Yung Yidish in Lodz, contributing illustrations to their short-­lived journal. After his conversion, he continued to contribute to similar projects. A friend of the poet Uri Zevi Greenberg (1896–­1981), whom he knew from his time in Lodz, he provided a number of illustrations for Greenberg’s modernist Warsaw journal Albatros (1921–­23). All this time he kept his conversion a secret. He told his daughter Tereska (1920–­2012) only on the eve of her seventh birthday, when he made arrangements for her first communion. Rumors circulated in the city’s artist colony in the late 1920s about their conversion; some even reached their families in Poland, but nothing definite was known.

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The secret was revealed around 1931, when a Yiddish writer visiting from New York, Joseph Opatoshu (1886–­1954), chanced on Szwarc taking communion at Notre Dame. Szwarc had come to the cathedral early in the morning to study the carvings, statues, and stained glass, as he frequently did, and had decided to stay for mass. Later, in a café, as the sculptor told him the story of his conversion, Opatoshu swore he would not breathe a word. Within days every Jewish newspaper in Europe carried the story. The response was exactly what Szwarc had feared it would be. His family in Poland treated him as if he was dead, and most of the Jewish artist colony in Paris shunned him as well.70

SIX

Elsewhere in interwar Western and Central Europe, conversions of conviction like these—­in which the convert instantly experienced a sense of radical self-­transformation—­were less common but not altogether absent. The closest parallel to the Catholic revival in France was in Britain, where Catholicism, despite its historical association with political disloyalty and low social status, and Anglo-­Catholicism (its Church of England variant) enjoyed a certain vogue. Writers like G. K. Chesterton, Ronald Knox, Maurice Baring, and Evelyn Waugh embraced the old faith, while, within the established church, Anglo-­ Catholicism experienced a revival, attracting luminaries like Dorothy L. Sayers, C. S. Lewis, and T. S. Elliot. However, the number of Jewish writers and intellectuals in Britain, relative to other Western countries, was small, and those few were unlikely to gravitate toward conservative Catholic or Anglo-­Catholic circles. The only Jews who responded to this kind of Christian spirituality were, in fact, not Jews in any cultural or religious sense of the term but the children of intermarried or baptized Jews, who, having been raised as nominal Anglicans, were searching for a less tepid Christian experience. This group included the poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886–­1967), the art historian and longtime director of the Tate Museum John Rothenstein (1901–­ 92), and the novelists Pamela Frankau (1908–­67) and G. B. Stern (1890–­1973). All of them (except Stern) were baptized in the Church of England in infancy and all of them (except Rothenstein) came to Catholicism late in life. Their paths to Catholicism were slow and placid, by French standards, bereft, on the whole, of sudden moments of mystical illumination.71

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The one conversion in England that was similar in its intensity to those in France was that of Hugh Sebag-­Montefiore (1920–­2005), a great-­great-­grand-­nephew of the Victorian worthy Sir Moses Montefiore.72 Sebag-­Montefiore grew up in palatial surroundings—­his childhood home in Palace Green, Kensington, is now the Israeli embassy—­loved but largely ignored by his parents and older ­brothers. The family was observant in the relaxed fashion of Anglo-­Jewish Orthodoxy at the time. For example, they avoided biblically forbidden foods, such as pork, rabbit, and shellfish, but failed to purchase kosher meat or keep meat and milk separate. Similarly, they worshiped almost every Sabbath at the Sephardi synagogue in Lauderdale Road, Maida Vale—­his father in top hat and morning coat—­but, because of its distance from the house, drove there and parked a few hundred yards away. He received some private tutoring in Hebrew and Judaism while at home and later at Rugby, where he was excused from attending chapel and religious education classes. Instead, his father hired a tutor who spent Saturday night in a Rugby hotel and gave Hugh and another boy a lesson on Sunday morning while the rest of the school was at chapel. Sebag-­Montefiore later recalled that he “took it all quite seriously” and even thought of becoming a rabbi when he grew up. However, when he realized how much rabbis were at the beck and call of their congregation and how little pastoral work they did, he abandoned the idea. Then, at age sixteen, he experienced what he himself called “a sudden conversion.” One day, while sitting alone in his study at Rugby, during a period when he was “indulging in bouts of adolescent gloom,” feeling “deeply dissatisfied” with himself and with life, he suddenly saw a distant figure in white, whom he instinctively knew was Jesus, beckoning him with the words “Follow me.” Much later, he recalled: “In the morning I was a Jew and by the evening I had become a Christian as well. I knew with absolute certitude that God had taken hold of my life, that Jesus was my Lord and that I must follow in His Way.” At the time of his vision, this was “almost all” he knew about Christianity, having never read the Gospels or attended Christian worship.73 After he told his housemaster about the vision, he was sent to the rector of Rugby for instruction and subsequently baptized in the parish church. Later, after service in World War II, he read theology at Oxford, was ordained, and eventually appointed bishop of Kingston-­upon-­Thames and then bishop of Birmingham. However, unlike Jews in the Maritain circle, Montefiore was a progressive Christian, content to leave unconverted Jews alone.

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In Germany, wartime despair and postwar disillusionment fueled a religious renewal movement as well, especially within Catholicism. As in France, some unobservant Jews who encountered Catholic intellectual culture after the war responded positively to it. In comparison to the number of deracinated German Jews who converted to Protestantism for pragmatic ends, or who formally declared themselves “without religion,” or who embraced Communism, the number for whom conversion was a spiritual experience was tiny. The best known among them was the philosopher Edith Stein (1891–­1942), whose canonization by the Vatican in 1998 scandalized Jewish religious and communal leaders.74 A look at her career and her contacts with other converts will clarify the appeal of Catholicism to secular Jews in the Weimar period.75 Accounts of Stein’s life often note that she grew up in an observant Jewish milieu. While true in one sense—­her widowed mother kept a kosher home, for example, and attended synagogue—­there is more to the story than this. Jewish practice in the Stein home in Breslau was attenuated and residual, largely a matter of habit. Edith’s mother followed customs that she had learned from her parents—­but, critically, failed to transmit them to her children. Edith neither received a religious education nor learned Hebrew. In 1906–­07, when Edith was spending ten months in Hamburg with her eldest sister, Else, and Else’s husband, both of whom “were totally without belief,” she too ceased to believe and “deliberately and consciously” gave up praying.76 Gifted and self-­confident, untroubled by spiritual concerns, Stein entered the University of Breslau in 1911. She threw herself into her work and after two years decided to move to Göttingen to study philosophy with Edmund Husserl who was known to welcome female students. (Prussian universities began admitting women only in 1908. The experience was heady but trying. There, for the first time, she encountered the “hitherto unknown world” of Catholic ideas in the unlikely person of the sexually profligate philosopher Max Scheler (1874–­1928), a Jewish convert to Catholicism, by then nonpracticing, who was barred from teaching in German universities in the wake of a scandal and trial in Munich in 1910.77 Stein later recalled that Scheler’s influence, on her and other students, extended “far beyond the sphere of philosophy.” His brilliance and eloquence forced her to reflect seriously on religious “phenomena.” “The barriers of rationalistic prejudices with which I had unwittingly grown up fell, and the world of faith unfolded before me. Persons with whom I associated daily, whom I esteemed and admired, lived in it.” The encounter did

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not spark any “systematic investigation of the question of faith”—­she was far too busy for that, she claimed—­but it marked what was to her, in retrospect, the start of an inner transformation. In Göttingen, in addition to Scheler, she met other Jews who were moving toward Christianity. Husserl himself had converted to Protestantism in 1886, at the start of his academic career, having heeded the advice of his teacher Franz Brentano. But Husserl, whose conversion was pragmatic, never became a churchgoing Christian and remained “a son of the Enlightenment” all his life.78 More crucial were her contacts with Jewish disciples and students of Husserl—­Alexander Koyré (1892–­ 1964), Adolf Reinach (1883–­1917), Hedwig Conrad-­Martius (1888–­ 1966), and Siegfried Hamburger (dates unavailable)79—­who were also seeking firmer spiritual ground. Later, recalling this period in her life, she wrote that at Göttingen she “learned to respect questions of faith and persons who had faith,” adding that with some of her women friends she “even went to one of the Protestant churches at times.” But she “had not yet found a way back to God.”80 The war interrupted Stein’s philosophical work. She volunteered as a nurse with the German Red Cross at a military hospital near the Carpathian front and there confronted the reality of suffering and death in an immediate way. Although she served for less than six months, the experience shook her to the core, as did the front-­line deaths of cousins, friends, and teachers, including Adolf Reinach, whom she had revered. In the words of one biographer: “Like countless Europeans, she underwent a spiritual crisis” and was “desperate to find a shred of cosmic meaning in relentless physical pain and the wholesale slaughter of millions.”81 She wrote to her sister Erna in July 1918 that materialism and naturalism were “outmoded” and becoming obsolete in the circles in which she moved, that life was “much too complex for anyone to impose on it even the most clever plan for bettering the world,” and that they were at “a turning point in the evolution of the intellectual life of humankind,” with everything “spinning madly so no can tell when some calm and clarity will set in again.”82 Critical to her spiritual journey was the loss of Reinach, whose search for meaning paralleled her own and whose front-­line service before his death in Flanders in November 1917 was transformative. After the war, his widow asked Stein to organize his papers, among them the notes head written in France in 1916, reflecting on the power of prayer, the divinity of Jesus, and the experiences that led to his conversion. Their impact on Stein was profound, as were the courage and acceptance of Reinach’s widow, whose faith seemed to sustain her in her bereavement. “It was the moment,” Stein

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later wrote, “in which my unbelief was shattered; Judaism paled, and Christ streamed out upon me: Christ on the Cross.”83 (Reinach’s wife, his sister [a close friend of Stein’s], and his brother and sister-­in-­law were all received into the Catholic Church within the next few years.) In the immediate postwar years, Stein’s life was destabilized in other ways as well. In 1917 she completed her dissertation with Husserl but in the years that followed was unable to secure Habilitation and a university lectureship. Despite her brilliance, the German professoriate was unprepared to welcome a female philosopher into its ranks. At the same time, she suffered two crushing disappointments in love. By 1921, at the latest, it was clear to Stein that she had no future as a wife or an academic. Amidst the breakdown of her personal and professional hopes, Stein’s faith strengthened. In July 1918, in the above-­mentioned letter to her sister Erna, she wrote that she wanted to instill in Erna “some of what, after every new blow, gives me fresh strength.” Four months later, she wrote that she had “forced” her way to “a thoroughly positive Christianity” and that this had liberated her “from the life that had overcome me and has also given me the strength to resume my life in a new and thankful way.”84 She delayed converting, however, because she knew the news would be a blow to her mother. The catalyst for her baptism was an experience in summer 1921, during a visit to a friend in Bad Bergzabern, when she stayed up all night reading the life of Teresa of Avila. When she finished the last page, she declared: “This is the truth.” What exactly happened that night is not clear. She never spoke or wrote about it. The next day she bought a catechism and missal and began attending mass regularly. She was baptized on New Year’s Day in 1922 and soon was living a quasi-­monastic life in the Dominican high school for girls in Speyer, where she taught from 1922 to 1932, sleeping in a room next to the nuns’ quarters. From the time of her baptism, she intended to enter the order of Discalced Carmelite nuns, but, as with her decision to enter the Church, she delayed doing so for years because she knew, correctly, that it would be a blow from which her mother would not recover. In this case, the catalyst to her finally entering the convent was her dismissal, as a “non-­Aryan,” from her post at the Catholic Pedagogical Institute in Münster in 1933. Stein’s embrace of Christianity was not dramatic. No single visionary or revelatory moment of instantaneous and irreversible transformation characterizes the story of her conversion, as was often the case with conversions in France. In other ways, however, her conversion was remarkably similar to other early twentieth-­century conversions

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of conviction. It was made possible by her embeddeness in a network of intellectuals, which exposed her, as a matter of course, to the same currents and moods that drove other young men and women at the time to seek new meanings. It was sanctioned—­perhaps even triggered—­by the examples of mentors and friends who had taken or were then taking the same step. In this sense, conversions of conviction resemble copycat suicides, the phenomenon in which the suicide of a well-­known individual “inspires” a cluster of suicides. It was also hopelessly enmeshed with the stresses and strains of her emotional life—­trampled hopes, unresolved tensions, unconscious fears. It is not irrelevant that Stein suffered at times from crushing suicidal depression and chronic insomnia. She later told a friend that she had been in “a pitiable state” in 1919 and that her condition then “began even earlier and, through many changes, lasted for years longer” until she “found the place where there is rest and peace for all restless hearts.”85 It would be foolish, of course, to attribute her conversion to her emotional state alone. At the same time, the common threads that run through conversions of conviction—­their occurrence in clusters, their embodiment of larger currents and moods, and their coincidence with emotional distress—­suggest that they cannot be understood simply as phenomena that are immune to the impress of time, place, and personality.

SEVEN

Two waves of nonstrategic conversions swept the American Jewish community in the twentieth century. Each was so unique that conversion, as conventionally understood, may not be the best term to describe what happened. The first was the affiliation of thousands of Jews with the Christian Science Church in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The second was the attraction of tens of thousands of young American Jews to marginal religious movements and sects, including fundamentalist forms of both Christianity and Judaism, in the last third of the century. Neither resembled earlier waves of conversion in Jewish history, for these were conversions in which material and social considerations were absent and the new religion was outside the Christian mainstream. The very novelty of the two waves highlights the ways in which American Jewish history diverged from European patterns and, in the second case, how the character of conversion changed in the last decades of the twentieth century.

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Mary Baker Eddy created Christian Science, a mind-­cure movement, in the late 1870s, but it attracted widespread attention only in the last decade of the century. The new religion incorporated bits of Christian doctrine while rejecting Christian teaching about resignation to suffering in this life in the expectation of bliss in the next. Its founder believed that illness and disease were not the result of a divine scheme, implanted in Creation from the start or deployed to test or punish humanity. God was loving, good, and compassionate; suffering was an illusion, a consequence of alienation from God and incorrect understanding of reality. Healing, the bedrock of Christian Science’s appeal, was the outcome of seeing through the seemingly material appearance of reality to its true, spiritual character and embracing God as “All-­in-­All,” as all-­pervasive, all-­encompassing spirit. The new religion offered comfort to Americans who suffered from illnesses that conventional treatments were unable to relieve, especially those of psychogenetic and psychosomatic origin. It was an alternative to the cornucopia of over-­the-­counter medical products—­pills, syrups, creams, ointments, emulsions, extracts, trusses, corsets, belts, pads, cereals, breads, and teas—­that doctors, quacks, and entrepreneurs promoted to relieve debilitating diseases. Urban, middle-­class Jews were as eager to seek freedom from pain as their Christian neighbors. During the first decades of the twentieth century, thousands (but probably not tens of thousands) of them formally joined or took an active interest in the Christian Science movement.86 According to Stephen Wise, it was the Jew’s “interest in health, his tremendous will to stay alive, his almost morbid disrelish of disease, [and] his nervousness and timidity touching pain and suffering” that made Christian Science attractive.87 While even the approximate number of Jews who joined the movement in the early twentieth century is unknown, it was sufficiently large to create a sense of alarm, especially within Reform Judaism, whose prosperous, Americanized adherents were more likely to join the new movement than recent immigrants. Beginning in the 1910s, the Reform movement took up the challenge. Its rabbinical association, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, devoted a session to the problem at its annual meeting in 1912, and scores of rabbis, like Stephen Wise, addressed it in sermons from their pulpits through the 1920s. To staunch the flow, Alfred Geiger Moses (1878–­1956), a Reform rabbi in Mobile, Alabama, created a Jewish version of Christian Science in 1916—­he called it Jewish Science—­claiming that the Baal Shem Tov, who was known as a healer, was Judaism’s Mary Baker Eddy and that Christian Science

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was simply Judaism with a Christological overlay. While Moses never created a new sect, two other Reform rabbis, Morris Lichtenstein (1889–­1938) and Clifton Harby Levy (1867–­1962), inspired by his ideas, did, establishing rival movements in New York in the 1920s.88 The Reform rabbis who countered Christian Science with Jewish alternatives understood its appeal to Jews. It spoke, literally, to what ailed them, physically and emotionally, in a way that the despiritualized Reform Judaism of the time, with its emphasis on formal worship, ethical monotheism, and the primacy of reason, did not. In addition, it lacked features of conventional Christianity that were problematic for Jews. It was not burdened with a record of antisemitic hostility and persecution; it did not deify Jesus; there was no ordained clergy, no sacraments, and little in the way of ritual. In that sense, it was not very demanding. According to contemporary observers, many Jews who joined the movement believed they could be both Jews and Christian Scientists, receiving “the healing benefits of the cult without at the same time subscribing to its theological claims.”89 This widespread belief, which Reform rabbis strove to undermine, suggests that Jews who were attracted to Christian Science were less interested in its theology than in its healing spirituality. There was a more cynical explanation as well. The Minneapolis Reform rabbi Samuel Deinard (1872–­1921) wrote in 1919 that Jews joined “the new cult” because “they wish to get away from Jews and Judaism” and they saw it as “an easy and convenient way,” one that was “not so offensive to their relatives, friends and former Jewish associates because of the deceptive argument often heard that one can be a Jew and a Christian Scientist at the same time.”90 While Deinard was correct that Jewishness in 1919 was still “an obstacle in the path of one’s ambition to succeed in the world,” his assertion that Jews turned to Christian Scientist for social advantage is not credible. Jews in early twentieth-­century America who wanted to escape from Judaism (or other Jews) had better options. They could join mainline Protestant congregations, Unitarian churches, or Ethical Culture societies. Christian Science was too marginal to be a passport to social mobility. Those who turned to it were not seeking first and foremost entrée into Gentile society but, like Christians who turned to it, were seeking peace of mind and physical well-­being. Some Jews saw no contradiction in belonging to both groups. Visiting a Wednesday-­ evening Christian Science meeting in 1910, a writer for the Cincinnati-­ based American Israelite reported that, to his surprise, thirty of the forty Jews at the meeting were sitting together in one corner of the church. Chicago mail-­order magnate Modie Spiegel (1871–­1943), along with

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his wife and two youngest children, became Christian Scientists in 1910, after moving from Hyde Park to an exclusive northern suburb. Yet he remained a benefactor of Jewish charities and Temple Sinai in Hyde Park and took part in founding the all-­Jewish Lake Shore Country Club. According to his grandson Paul Cowan, he and his wife believed “that the act of accepting the inner discipline of Christian Science—­which meant using prayer and meditation to arrive at the faith that a divine power, not doctors, could heal the sick—­made them stronger people and better Jews.”91 Sidney Soss (1907–­87), wife of a Detroit automobile-­parts manufacturer, turned to Christian Science in the late 1940s when conventional medicine proved unable to cure an autoimmune skin disease (pemphigus) from which she suffered. When she gradually improved, she credited Christian Science and remained a devoted follower, attending their services regularly. She and her husband, however, also remained members of Temple Beth El, a Reform congregation, and the all-­Jewish Franklin Hills Country Club, contributed to Jewish charities, and mixed exclusively with other Jews. The only other Christian Scientists whom they saw socially were also Jews. One further indicator that Christian Science’s appeal was not social is that most Jews who joined (somewhere between one-­half and two-­ thirds) were women. At a time when a woman’s status was linked to that of her husband or father, joining a Christian Science congregation would not have enhanced her social standing. American Jews who became Christian Scientists were as sincere in their pursuit of spiritual healing as French Jews who became Catholics in their quest for communion with the absolute. Both were seekers, chasing a spirituality they believed was alien to Judaism. In both cases, suffering and doubt led them, like their Gentile friends and associates, to seek consolation and comfort in Christian spirituality. They never asked whether there were Jewish answers to their questions, for Judaism, the scorned religion of a marginalized minority, lacked cachet in their and Christian eyes. Its representatives, in the main, did not speak their language—­in some cases literally, in most cases figuratively. In short, Judaism was not in the running. Although a few Jewish intellectuals, like Martin Buber (1878–­1965) and Jiři Langer (1894–­1943), were beginning to introduce Hasidism to Western readers, their work was unable to establish Judaism as a source of spiritual wisdom for those seeking realms and dimensions beyond the everyday. In the United States, Judaism became an option for seekers only when, from the 1960s and 1970s, its status—­and that of Jews as well—­ was transformed. The cultural and political turbulence of those decades

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stimulated a search for meaning in the ranks of white middle-­class youth, Jewish and Christian alike.92 Seeking to repudiate the ways of their parents (their conformism, materialism, and lack of spirituality) and to forge their own identities and destinies, American youth under the influence of countercultural currents turned to esoteric sects, Eastern religions, and fundamentalist versions of Western religions. These included the Unification Church (Moonies), Krishna Consciousness (Hare Krishnas), Scientology, the Divine Light Mission (followers of Maharaj-­ ji), Transcendental Meditation (followers of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi), Zen Buddhism, the Jesus People, Hebrew Christianity, Messianic Judaism, Lubavitch Hasidism, as well as other varieties of Eastern spirituality. Jews who joined these groups were unlike the bulk of Jewish converts in earlier periods. They were idealistic, sincere, open to spiritual experimentation, and often more than a little befuddled and naïve. Those with some religious upbringing were critical of synagogues and religious schools for their lack of spirituality, and of parents and teachers for their failure or inability to speak to personal spiritual needs. They wanted to “feel” God intimately and subjectively. They were not pragmatists or compromisers. Becoming a Jew for Jesus or a Moonie was not a strategic move, intended to bolster their career, status, or marriage prospects. Messianic Jews, moreover, paraded their Jewishness (much to the distress of many Jews), claiming that they remained loyal to the Jewish community and to the State of Israel. While the practices and beliefs of these groups differed wildly, their appeal to late adolescents and young adults, who comprised the bulk of their followers, was similar. They attracted Jews who were disappointed with or alienated from their families and their backgrounds, a common enough mood at the time. They offered answers to those who felt uncomfortable with themselves and craved new realms and dimensions of experience. They met the affective needs of seekers, offering them a surrogate family, intense friendships, emotional support, a comprehensive ideology, and, ironically, discipline and regulation, from which, in theory, they were in revolt. (It was possible to justify acceptance of the yoke of the new movement on the ground that it was not parentally imposed but self-­chosen.) A sociologist who studied a messianic congregation in Southern California in the 1990s reported that every congregant whom she interviewed was “in search of a personal identity” and had been “looking for something” before their born-­again experience.93 The doctrinal stance of a group was not what attracted new converts, but rather its welcoming ethos of community and spirituality.

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One sign of this is that seekers often moved from one group to another and from one spiritual way to another with relative ease. Their commitments were fluid, flexible, and, in some cases, syncretistic. A medical anthropologist who studied a small community of Jews for Jesus in San Francisco in the early 1970s uncovered a multiplicity of stops on the spiritual odysseys of the converts. One young woman from Seattle, before joining the group, had been successively a civil rights activist, a member of a women’s liberation group, a member of Students for a Democratic Society and then the Weathermen, a consumer of marijuana and LSD, a practitioner of yoga and meditation, and a Hebrew Christian. The Southern California congregation referred to in the previous paragraph included Jews who “picked their way through the New Age, yogic philosophy, meditation, Alcoholics Anonymous, and Eastern religions before arriving at Messianic Judaism as their answer.” A clinical psychologist who studied Jews from religious and secular homes who were involved with some form of Eastern religion in the early 1980s found that practicing both Judaism and Zen Buddhism was not uncommon.94 For young Jewish seekers, there was a profusion of groups promising redemption (in this world or the next) from which to choose. Some, looking outward, chose to remake the world while others, looking inward, chose to explore new states of consciousness. Still others, the subjects of this discussion, turned to religion, often after having tried both politics and drugs. The abundance of available choices was emblematic of the personalization and privatization of religion (and experience more generally) from the sixties on. Baby boomers, wrote one student of American religion, grew up in a culture that emphasized “choice, knowing and understanding one’s self, the importance of personal autonomy, and fulfilling one’s potential” (often outside established institutional frameworks). The ethic of self-­fulfillment replaced the old ethic of self-­denial, noted the pollster Daniel Yankelo­ vich. By the mid-­1970s, he wrote, Americans “from every walk of life” were eager “to give more meaning to their lives, to find fuller self-­ expression, and to add a touch of adventure and grace to their lives and those of others.” Where once norms were strict and choices were few, “now all was pluralism and freedom of choice.”95 The self was to be satisfied and fulfilled, and the ways of doing so were many. In the bustling American marketplace of religions and sects, some Jewish seekers, in a historic break with the past, found what they were searching for within the Jewish fold. I am referring here to the baal teshuvah or hozer be-­teshuvah phenomenon, the “return” of

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non-­observant Jews to strict observance. Most, but not all, of these baalei-­teshuvah were recruited by the Habad, or Lubavitch, Hasidic sect, whose “outreach” activities on college campuses and elsewhere that the young gathered were a ubiquitous feature of the American Jewish landscape in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries. While Jews who became Lubavitcher Hasidim remained unambiguously Jewish, and easily recognizable as such, the nature of their adherence to the sect was similar to that of Jews who joined non-­Jewish sects. In San Francisco, the historian Yaakov Ariel observed, there was much that was similar between converts to Jews for Jesus and frequenters of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach’s House of Love and Prayer (both took root in the Bay Area in the early 1970s). Each responded to seekers questing for “meaning and community in their lives,” offering an ethos and style that differed radically from those the seekers had known while growing up. Each was messianic, presenting their teachings “as the true fulfillment of the religion of Israel.”96 In theology and ritual, of course, they were radically dissimilar. And in social terms, the baalei-­teshuvah remained within the Jewish community, as did their children, while Jews for Jesus and other Hebrew Christians did not, even though they claimed otherwise. Why one Jewish seeker went in one direction and another in a very different direction was often a matter of chance, a case of which group was the first to recruit the seeker or which group was the first into which the seeker stumbled.97 Nowhere in the social science literature is there any indication that one kind of sect appealed to those from a Reform background and another to those from a more observant background or one to those from broken homes and another to those from intact homes. Indeed the consensus is that the circumstances of the recruitment, especially the personality of the recruiter, were more decisive than the doctrines and practices of the group. In a psychological study of forty white, well-­educated, middle-­class converts to different religions in the 1980s, Chana Ullman concluded that the typical convert was transformed by “a person” and not by the new religion and its doctrines. “The discovery of a new truth was indistinguishable from a discovery of a new relationship, which relieved, at least temporarily, the upheaval of the previous life.” Contrary to what she initially expected, conversion was not primarily “a change of ideology” but much more “akin to falling in love.”98 Becoming Christian at the end of the twentieth century meant something very different from what it meant at midcentury and earlier, both in the United States and Europe. It was no longer a bid for status or an escape from poverty.

7 Neither Jew nor Christian New Religions, New Creeds Before the war there was held a great International Esperanto Convention. It met in Geneva. Esperanto scholars, doctors of letters, learned men, came from all over the world to deliver papers on the genesis, syntax, and functionalism of Esperanto. Some spoke of the social value of an international language, others of its beauty. Every nation on earth was represented among the lecturers. All the papers were given in Esperanto. Finally the meeting was concluded, and the tired great men wandered companionably along the corridors, where at last they began to converse casually among themselves in their international language: “Nu, vos macht a yid?” —Cynthia Ozick, “Envy; or Yiddish in America,” 1969

ONE

Repudiating Judaism was one thing;repudiating it and becoming a Christian was another. In ancien régime Europe, it was impossible to do one without the other. This changed in the nineteenth century when secularizing currents began to create space for persons who were skeptical of or indifferent to the claims of faith, including Jews who no longer found meaning in their ancestral religion but who were unable to embrace, even nominally, Christianity. In liberal states like France, Britain, and the United States, such Jews were able to drift into a state of religious nothingness or indeterminacy, while in Germany and Austria they were able eventually to register as persons without any

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religion. Even in Eastern Europe, where the formal rejection of Judaism was linked to the formal acceptance of Christianity, there were secular, universalist creeds—­socialism, nationalism, aestheticism, and the worship of science—­in which such Jews were able to find shelter, whether they continued to identify with collective Jewish concerns or not. There were, in addition, an even smaller number of Jews, who, while rejecting both Judaism and Christianity, nonetheless believed that religion qua religion was both spiritually and ethically necessary, and socially and politically desirable. To resolve the quandary in which they found themselves—­Jews in a Christian world who were not content to be either Jews or Christians—­some dreamed of new, universalistic religions that would transcend the limitations of existing monotheistic faiths. Among them were a few who took active steps to bring them into being. Of those new religions that saw the light of day, few lasted for long. The one success story, as we will see, was the Ethical Culture movement of Felix Adler (1851–­1933) in the United States, and even it was barely alive at the start of the twenty-­first century. Most of these proposals for new religions remained just that—­visionary blueprints. Moreover, those who created them tended to be, not surprisingly, unconventional, even eccentric individuals—­which alone is no reason to forget or dismiss them. However outlandish and ultimately inconsequential, these proposals for new religions merit our attention. They vividly testify to the pervasive power of the integrationist impulse within European and American Jews in the century and a half between the French Revolution and World War II and, in particular, to the dilemma facing deracinated Jews who were not atheists but were in pursuit of social acceptance on a non-­Christian, or religiously neutral, basis. (Recall that thoroughly secular Jews, those who viewed any system of religion as unnecessary or distasteful, were able to pursue integration in nonreligious ways, such as worshiping at the altars of art, literature, and science, or proclaiming their faith in revolutionary socialism.)

TWO

The radical Enlightenment’s rejection of divine revelation underwrote the creation of religious systems that were independent of the historical narratives related in the Hebrew and Greek Bibles. In this light, Barukh Spinoza (1632–­77) would be an appropriate choice with

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which to begin this chapter. Spinoza, after all, was a Jew whose radical critique of Judaism led to his expulsion at age twenty-­four from the Amsterdam community but whose rejection of revelation more broadly kept him from embracing Christianity. He was the first Jew by birth and education who claimed to be neither a Jew nor a Christian and who lived without affiliation to a religious community. But Spinoza was a philosopher, not a religious reformer, and did not envision the triumphal emergence of a new universal religion or seek to remake state and society on a religiously neutral basis. Like other critics of rabbinic Judaism in seventeenth-­century Amsterdam, his object was to effect a revolution in thinking, not in social and political relations between Jews and Christians. He and his fellow critics, unlike the founders of Reform Judaism in the nineteenth century, were not convinced that they were living in a new, emancipatory age in which the bases of Jewish existence were being transformed. The first Jewish proposal for a new religion came a good century later, at the end of the eighteenth century, at a time when the foundations of the ancien régime were beginning to crumble. Only then were some Jews able to imagine a syncretistic or universal religion beyond Judaism and Christianity. The first was Joseph Hayyim Sumbal (or Sumbel) (1762–­1804), an eccentric Moroccan Jew who in 1788 proclaimed a new world religion of virtue and tolerance in Copenhagen.1 Sumbal was the son of the wealthy Moroccan merchant and court Jew Samuel Sumbal (d. 1782). Following his death, his sons quarreled over the division of his estate and traveled to Europe to pursue their claims to property there. While Joseph was in Copenhagen in 1788 for this purpose, he wrote a pamphlet, published in French and Danish, announcing that he would proclaim a new religion and answer questions about it in Frederiksberg, a small town west of Copenhagen, site of a royal palace, on 11 June (which was, he pointed out, Shavuot, the day when God gave the Torah to the Israelites at Mount Sinai). That morning a crowd streamed into the palace garden to hear the new revelation. Sumbal arrived in the afternoon, dressed in Turkish garb, a turban on his head and a gold sword at his side, accompanied by soldiers and servants, the latter also in Turkish dress. When the crowd became unruly, he took refuge behind a fence on the palace grounds and from there preached his new religion. He declared that he was not a Jew, Christian, Turk, or heathen, but rather a worshiper of virtue and that he had previously lived a debauched life but now was abstemious. The crowd peppered him with questions about what he really was, since he confessed no religion that they knew, and eventually made it

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impossible for him to continue. He sneaked off and never again publicly touted his new faith—­although he continued to attract notoriety, but for other reasons. In 1794 he settled in London as Moroccan ambassador to the English court, but was arrested and thrown into the Fleet prison at the instigation of one of his brothers. In 1797, after his imprisonment, he met and married (following her conversion to Judaism) the actress Mary Wells. In 1811, long after his death in Altona, she recounted the lurid details of their short-­lived marriage in her autobiography. David Friedländer’s “dry baptism” proposal of 1799 expressed the same universalistic impulse. Recall that the “Christianity” he imagined enlightened Jews like himself would join was Christian only in name with few external rites. It was a deistic creed that eliminated the dogma of the Holy Trinity and taught only the oneness of God, his providence, and the immortality of the soul. Teller and other Protestant theologians immediately saw that there was little that was Christian in Friedländer’s Protestantism. In their view, it remained deeply Jewish (a view that few contemporary Jews would have shared) precisely because it rejected Christian dogma. For Friedrich Schleiermacher, it was a “Judaizing Christianity” and thus a threat. It is noteworthy that Friedländer needed to dress his deism in Christian garb, unlike Sumbal and the other visionaries in this chapter. In ancien régime Prussia—­where church and state were tightly linked, and Jews, by virtue of their faith, were excluded from membership in the state—­ envisioning a universal religion without Christian trappings was a difficult, perhaps impossible, task. As we will see, German-­speaking Europe was not fertile ground for Jewish proposals for new religions. By contrast, in the wilds of North America, the Jewish imagination was more untrammeled. Moses Hart (1768–­1852), son of a London-­ born military purveyor and fur trader with vast landholdings in Trois Riviéres in Lower Canada, proposed a deistic cult in 1815 in a fifty-­ eight-­page treatise printed in New York.2 Hart’s new religion was theologically unchallenging and took only four pages to present. Most of the work was devoted to explicating its ceremonies and prayers. He envisioned a system of temples (this was before Reform Judaism popularized the term) staffed by priests and ministers, with public ceremonies on a day of rest (Friday, Saturday, or Sunday) and three major holy days (the Spring Festival in April or May, the Harvest Festival in August or September, and the Winter Festival in December). He supplied a new ethical decalogue and created prayers for a variety of situations, such as the birth of a child, the start of a sea voyage, the

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launch of a business enterprise, and the consumption of food, including moments of distress (in a storm, while at war, during illness, for example). Jacob Rader Marcus speculated that the chief inspiration for Hart’s new religion was news from Paris in the 1790s of the radical Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being. (He came to this conclusion solely on the basis of similarities between the two French cults and Hart’s proposal.) It is doubtful, however, that Hart took his lead from Robespierre, for even if he was aware of events in France, he was not a learned man and possessed few books and subscribed to few journals. It is sufficient to note, as one critic of Marcus’s interpretation did, that Hart breathed “the air of his time” and that his cult incorporated ideas that were commonplace—­especially in North America. More to the point is the link between Hart’s proposal and his awareness of being a Jew. While he never identified his universal religious system with anything Jewish, in the preface to his treatise, he indirectly linked it to his background when he explained what motivated him: Because “many millions of people” had been victims of “religious intolerance, bigotry, and tyranny,” he wished to harmonize rival religions and thus “heal the wounds” flowing from intolerance, persecution, fanaticism, and so forth. Hart never masked his origins, but neither did he affiliate with or support Jewish institutions, with one exception: In 1844, then already an old man, he donated five pounds to Montreal’s congregation to help engage a hazan and shohet. But he gave none of his children, whether the offspring of his Jewish wife or of the succession of Christian women with whom he lived after his ill-­treated Jewish wife had fled to her father’s home, any Jewish education. Hart’s, like Sumbal’s, was a lonely voice. His proposal came to nothing. Nonetheless, it, along with Sumbal’s and Friedländer’s proposals, marks the start of a long line of Jewish schemes for new religions transcending both Judaism and Christianity. The first concentrated burst of this creativity came in France in the 1820s and was part of a larger movement of utopian system-­building in the wake of the social upheaval and intellectual confusion that followed the Revolution. The extent and pace of change in the quarter century between the fall of the Bastille and the Battle of Waterloo had fed a desire for stability, assurance, and wholeness among young men and women, including acculturated middle-­class Jews, who felt adrift. Some, like the Ratisbonnes, found an anchor in the certainties of Catholicism. Others, whose confidence in conventional institutions was shaken, helped to forge utopian movements heralding the emergence of a new world and

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proffering universal cures for the irretrievably damaged old order and the isolation, fragmentation, and alienation that followed its collapse. “No period before or after,” Jacob Talmon observed, “has experienced so luxurious a flowering of Utopian schemes purporting to offer a coherent, complete, and final solution to the problem of social evil.”3 The utopianism of Comte Claude-­Henri de Saint-­Simon (1760–­ 1825), with its promise of a universal epoch of harmony in which class, religious, and national differences would disappear, attracted a handful of Jews in France, largely Sephardim, with little attachment to Jewish practice and belief, who were in search of new moorings.4 Although part of the first generation of French Jews to enjoy the fruits of emancipation, they also experienced the persistence of anti-­Jewish hostility during the Bourbon Restoration and were often frustrated in their efforts to make careers in new fields. In the case of the young men who helped to create the Saint-­Simonian movement, Catholic control of higher education during the Restoration was a keenly felt setback. The mathematician Olinde Rodrigues (1795–­1851), a graduate of the Lycée Napoléon (1812), received a doctorate from the newly established Université de Paris in 1815 but, unable to find an academic post, was forced to earn a living in banking and insurance.5 The universalistic vision of Saint-­ Simon appealed to Jews like Olinde Rodrigues because it promoted a new order in which their Jewishness would cease to have significance. Although their participation in the short-­lived, almost cultish movement that arose after Saint-­Simon’s death in 1825 was not a gateway to integration and thus failed to cure their marginality, it did offer them immediate immersion in a religiously neutral fellowship that was the new society in embryo. Saint-­Simon’s bequest to his disciples was a blueprint for the future in which the values of religion would penetrate all spheres of life, thereby creating a harmonious synthesis of opposing forces. He envisioned the next, and what he thought of as the final, stage in ­history—­in theory, an age of universalism—­in a way that nonetheless bore the stamp of his Christian upbringing, for he called it the Nouveau Christianisme. But it was a much diluted Christianity, a Christianity reduced to a moral essence (“the Golden Rule”) lacking dogmas and rituals. The Jewish Saint-­Simonians took this in an even more universalistic direction, casting the religion of the future as neither Christian nor Jewish in character. Olinde Rodrigues’s young brother Eugène (1807–­30) described this new religion in 1829 in his Lettres sur la religion et la politique. Humanity was advancing, he asserted, toward an immense unity—­la société universelle—­in which nations would

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disappear and the spiritual and temporal realms of life merge. Church and state would become identical, for religion would absorb all of society within its bosom. The reign of Caesar would cease, the reign of God commence.6 With a confidence equaled only by their naïveté, the Jewish Saint-­ Simonians attempted to make converts among the Jews of Paris. One of the movement’s financial backers, Gustave d’Eichthal (1804–­83), son of a merchant banker, believed that just as the Jews of antiquity had opened the doors of their synagogue to Jesus’s disciples, so now they would welcome the Saint-­Simonian apostles bearing the new gospel. D’Eichthal called on the chief rabbi of Paris and other communal leaders, visited the Paris synagogue on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in 1832, and addressed special appeals to the Jews in the Simonian journal—­ with no apparent success, however. The Saint-­ movement fell apart in November 1832 when the government broke up its retreat at Ménilmontant and tried its leaders for embezzlement and outrages against public morals. D’Eichthal, whose emotional investment in the movement was intense, suffered a nervous breakdown when it collapsed but never repudiated its utopianism and messianism. A seeker and dreamer whose search for a faith was unquenchable, he had been, before his Saint-­Simonian phase, a fervent Catholic (his parents had him baptized in 1817), Auguste Comte’s first disciple, and a Freemason. Afterward, he continued projecting universalistic schemes to reconcile oppositions, banish antagonisms, and usher in a messianic era of harmony and peace. He remained faithful to the religious synthesis developed by Rodrigues, dreaming of a union between the Orient and the Occident and assigning the Jews a key role in forging it. He reasoned that Judaism, having given birth to the two universal religions of the middle ages, Christianity and Islam, and having preserved the principles of pure monotheism, was the only force able to reconcile East and West and fuse the three great faiths.7 In the years following his Saint-­Simonian period, d’Eichthal was much influenced by the writing of Joseph Salvador (1796–­1873), a scholar of ancient Judaism whose sense of Jewishness was largely negative. (His father was an unobservant Jew and his mother a lapsed Catholic.) Although not a Saint-­Simonian, Salvador worked out a similar scheme of religious development, culminating in an imminent messianic era in which Mosaism (i.e., ethical monotheism), preserved by the Jews over the centuries, would provide a foundation for universal organization. With its achievement, the Jews would lose their collective identity, as Judaism was absorbed into the new common

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religion, a purified Mosaism. The well-­publicized conversions of the first half of the century delighted him, confirming his messianic optimism, for he saw the entry of Jews into Catholicism as a way of infusing it with Mosaic ideas. Like Rodrigues and d’Eichthal, Salvador was unable to imagine the survival of the Jews as a distinct group. While his work was sympathetic to ancient Judaism and reflected pride in its universalistic ethical core, the religious future he sketched was homogeneous and neutral, a future in which Jews qua Jews ceased to exist, however key their earlier role in its realization.8

THREE

After publication of Salvador’s last work in 1859 (Paris, Rome, et Jérusalem), France ceased to provide fertile ground for the genesis of universalistic religions, perhaps because, as middle-­class French society became more secular, Jewish integration became easier. Whatever the cause, in the second half of the century the mantle of prophecy passed to the New World, where the radical wing of American Reform Judaism gave birth to several attempts to create (not just imagine) new religions. That the Reform movement in the United States, rather than in Germany, was fertile soil for new religions was due to the more radical course it took there and the voluntarism of American religious life. Classical Reform Judaism, as it is known, modified or abandoned Jewish traditions that unduly distinguished Jews from other Americans. It went much further than Reform in Germany because it did not have to compromise its principles in order to maintain communal harmony. The state-­backed Gemeinden everywhere in Central Europe were “big tent” institutions; they included Jews of all religious stripes, from the observant to the indifferent. Of necessity, they were cautious in introducing sweeping changes in synagogue practice, for they had to serve a diverse mix of Jews. While the theology of German Reform was radical (and in theory endorsed more sweeping changes than were in fact introduced), its departures from liturgical tradition were moderate by comparison. In the United States, in contrast, this kind of institutional damper on innovation was absent. When congregations differed over what path to follow, they often split in two, each side pursuing its own vision of how to observe Judaism. The madcap, free-­for-­all American religious scene, with its experimentation and entrepreneurship, encouraged this trend. When Reform rabbis in the United States thought about how far the universalization of Judaism

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was to go, their imaginations soared. A handful, swept away by the momentum and logic of Reform, intoxicated by the opportunities for civic and social inclusion in the United States, and encouraged by what radical Protestantism (especially Unitarianism) had accomplished, moved in ever more universalistic and utopian directions. Felix Adler (1851–­1933), son of the rabbi of Temple Emanu-­El in New York City and himself a onetime student at the Reform seminary in Berlin, launched, as mentioned earlier, the first of these new religions—­the Society for Ethical Culture—­in Manhattan in 1876.9 Adler’s “religion” was a progressive, nontheistic ethical humanism; its motto, “deed without creed.” He hoped it would attract Jews and Christians alike, but its appeal, at least in New York, was limited to Jews. His initial backers and the first trustees were Central European Jews, as were the vast majority of those who joined the society. In the early 1880s, when Abraham Cahan (1860–­1951) went to hear Adler—­he visited various Sunday services to improve his English—­he noticed that “many wealthy persons, mostly Jews” were drawn to Adler’s “sermons.” Writing in 1919, the novelist and critic Waldo Frank (1899–­ 1967), whose father was a trustee of the society, thought its “main adherence” was “among the prosperous Jews who had shown themselves most apt to run the American race.”10 In contrast, in the movement’s societies outside New York—­in Philadelphia, Chicago, and St. Louis—­ Christians, largely of German origin, outnumbered Jews.11 The motives of Jews who joined the movement mixed self-­interest and idealism. Ethical Culture allowed its followers to express, by their attendance at its Sunday meetings, their dissent from Jewish particularism and their support for high-­minded universalism. Some observers saw this attraction to Ethical Culture as opportunistic. For example, James Waterman Wise (1902–­83), son of Rabbi Stephen Wise and a friend of Adler’s, wrote that what was for Felix Adler “ethical emancipation” was for his followers “an escape, a flight from Jewish life.” Frank characterized the movement as “a semblance of creed,” an undemanding moral code, free of “the odium of the Jewish name,” which fit its adherents “the more aptly and the more politely for the life of respectable material dominion which America afforded.” In his view, these Jews were so captive to social convention that they feared breaking openly with religion and found Ethical Culture a workable substitute. Others offered a more sympathetic interpretation, stressing that Adler’s followers were genuinely dissatisfied with the state of Judaism and found even classical Reform overly ritualistic and particularistic and insufficiently responsive to contemporary issues. In

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this more charitable interpretation, Ethical Culture was an outlet for the moral idealism and intellectual curiosity of urban, upper-­middle-­ class Jews. The lawyer and real estate investor Henry Morgenthau Sr. (1856–­1946) wrote that those who followed Adler “were honestly striving for education, for refinement, for community and public service, for devotion to art, music, and culture.”12 While some members of the New York Society for Ethical Culture remained members of Reform synagogues, at least initially, Adler’s break with Judaism was definitive. He believed that Judaism was destined to disappear, as were all revealed religions. With Trinitarian Christianity fast crumbling (or so he thought), the Jews, whose very existence historically was a protest against Trinitarianism, no longer needed to exist.13 Adler’s departure from Judaism was not unique: Several Reform rabbis on the extreme anti-­ritualistic wing of the movement followed a similar path from radical Reform to universal religion. Jacob Mayer (d. 1890), who ministered to Glasgow Jewry in the late 1850s and then served Reform congregations in Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Baltimore in the 1860s and 1870s, was one such fervid reformer.14 The Prussian-­born Mayer was appointed minister (hazan and shohet) to the traditional Glasgow Hebrew Congregation in 1858. (Although he styled himself “rabbi” in the United States, it is unlikely that he was ordained.) He remained in his Glasgow post only until June 1859, when he was dismissed because he was quarrelsome and his moral character “indifferent.”15 His religious views, whatever they were at the time, do not seem to have been a factor. Following his dismissal, he struggled to find employment, or so it seems, for he, along with his wife, converted to Christianity in Liverpool, and he became a missionary—­a change of religion and career that other desperate Jews with Hebrew skills often made.16 He migrated to the United States in 1866, and, having shed his Christianity, found work as a cantor in the new Plum Street Synagogue in Cincinnati, where Isaac Mayer Wise, one of the founding fathers of Reform Judaism in America, was rabbi. On Wise’s recommendation, he was hired as rabbi of Tifereth Israel in Cleveland, where by all accounts he was a success. His increasingly radical understanding of Judaism and anti-­ritualism suited his upwardly mobile, mostly German-­born congregants. He preached on broad religious, ethical, and philosophical themes and scientific subjects, including the work of Charles Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt, and frequently pronounced the Bible a repository of beauty and art rather than the word of God. In 1870 the congregation was sufficiently pleased with him that it reengaged him for ten years, although his current term did not end until 1872.17

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In 1874, amidst “nasty rumors of intimacy with a Jewish woman,”18 Mayer resigned to become rabbi of the Reform congregation, Har Sinai, in Baltimore. There his Christian past caught up with him. Rabbis Benjamin Szold (1829–­1902) and Henry Hochheimer (1815–­ 1912), who both served traditional congregations in the city, learned of Mayer’s conversion from Har Sinai’s first rabbi, David Einhorn (1809–­79), and from Herman Baar (1826–­1904), minister of the Seel Street Synagogue in Liverpool at the time of Mayer’s conversion, who was passing through Baltimore on his way from New Orleans to New York City to take up a new position. Rumors spread; accusations and countercharges flew. His congregants rallied to his defense, blaming and attacking the two Orthodox rabbis for unjustly persecuting him. Henrietta Szold, then sixteen, recalled that his defenders even threw rocks at her sister and herself. At a Sabbath-­morning service, cradling the Torah in his arms, Mayer swore, on the life of his wife and himself, that he was innocent of the charge. He even fabricated a story to explain away the origins of the allegation: He had an identical twin in Germany, with the same initials, who had converted and become a missionary (events in his brother’s life that he had hitherto never revealed to anyone). He also orchestrated the dispatch from Europe of forged letters, written by himself, confirming his explanation—­to no avail, however. His position became untenable and he resigned in August 1876. In accepting his resignation, the congregation declared him innocent of the charge of apostasy and voted to present him with five hundred dollars. This, however, was not the end of his career. Once again he left Judaism and the rabbinate, this time reinventing himself as leader of a congregation of German freethinkers in Philadelphia, Die Freie Gemeinde. (Freien Gemeinden [societies of freethinkers] were found in most American cities where German immigrants settled; while their members were overwhelmingly from Christian backgrounds, a handful were German-­born Jews.)19 Mayer’s story is a very American story—­rich in self-­invention, enterprise, and mobility. The pluralism of religious life in the United States and its freewheeling voluntary character, unlike conditions in England and Scotland, encouraged both his personal drive and his theological radicalism. Whether his final departure from Judaism in Philadelphia was due to his troubles in Baltimore or whether it was a maturation of his earlier rejection of traditional Judaism, we cannot know. It was probably the interplay of both that led him after his departure from Baltimore to minister to German-­speaking nonbelievers in Philadelphia. His story is not paradigmatically American, however,

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in that it does not end happily: he died a pauper in Schenectady, New York, in 1890. The rabbinic career of Mayer’s contemporary, Hungarian-­ born Solomon Sonneschein (1839–­1908), was equally tumultuous, leading him to flirt with Unitarianism at one point because he imagined it represented the universal religion of the future in embryo.20 “A radical of the radicals in Judaism” (as one obituary described him),21 Sonnerschein arrived in St. Louis in 1869 to serve Shaare Emeth, the first Reform synagogue west of the Mississippi. The congregation was receptive to the liturgical reforms he introduced, and its membership grew—­as did his reputation in St. Louis more generally as a religious progressive. But Sonneschein was not content to streamline and denationalize Judaism. His goal was more far-­reaching—­to uproot customs and beliefs that set Jews apart from their neighbors, including “the preposterous idea that the chosen people must forever remain a peculiar people.”22 In time he became convinced that “rational Christianity” and “purified Judaism” would soon blend into “one sunbeam of Eternal Truth.”23 In the 1880s, his radicalism, as well as his intolerance of those who failed to share his views, created friction between him and the congregation, friction that was intensified by knowledge of his excessive drinking and marital infidelities. His public statements and actions became increasingly provocative. In a sermon in December 1883, he suggested that “there may come a time when the 25th of Kisslev and the 25th of December will be celebrated by the really naturalized Israelites of this country as the identical national and religious holiday common to both the American and the Jew.”24 In 1885 he caused offense when he conducted Sunday services at a German Protestant church, whose minister was on vacation, and when he invited a Christian clergyman to preach from his synagogue’s pulpit. In March 1886, his provocative behavior led to a fistfight and his departure from the congregation. He arrived late—­and inebriated—­to conduct a funeral at the home of the deceased and went into a rage when he saw that relatives had covered the mirror on the entrance hall’s hat rack with crepe. He tore the crepe from the mirror and shouted in German, which the family, Sephardim, could not understand, “Have I been so many years here and have I no friends who will tell these people that I will have no superstition where I am serving?”25 When he ended his remarks with the wish that “the God of Truth and Justice in His mercy never visit this house,” he was attacked physically, and the congregation’s president, no admirer of Sonneschein, intervened to prevent a free-­for-­all.26

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Believing that his relations with the congregation were beyond repair, Sonneschein sent in his resignation on 1 April 1886, and then a few days later traveled to Boston to confer with the leaders of the American Unitarian Association about becoming a Unitarian ­preacher—­on the condition that he did not have to renounce Judaism or undergo baptism. Nothing came of the negotiations, for while he believed it was possible for him to join the Unitarians and still retain “the integrity and identity of my Hebrew affiliations by birth and conviction,” they did not.27 Sonneschein returned to St. Louis and with his supporters from Shaare Emeth founded a new Reform congregation, Temple Israel. Sonneschein’s flirtation with Unitarianism was a replay of David Friedländer’s “dry baptism” proposal of 1799. Like Friedländer, Sonneschein misjudged the liberal Christianity of his day. His close ties to progressive Christian clergy, their distance and his distance from their respective traditions, and his creedal need to see the future through rose-­colored spectacles—­to believe that ultimately unification and harmony would trump fragmentation and discord—­blinded him to the unwillingness of his Christian interlocutors to renounce their Christianity in the way that he was prepared to renounce his Judaism. Their vision of a nonsectarian, nondenominational future was not a future in which Christianity disappeared without a trace but one in which it evolved and then triumphed. Kaufmann Kohler (1853–­1926), rabbi of Temple Beth-­El in New York City and later president of the Hebrew Union College, strongly condemned Sonneschein for failing to recognize the Christian character of Unitarianism. “The erroneous impression prevails among many people,” he wrote, “that Unitarianism and Reform Judaism in their radical wings may or will some day merge into each other, they being so much akin.”28 The triumphalism of the Unitarians was the mirror image of the triumphalism of contemporary Reform rabbis who forecasted the reconciliation of the highest forms of Christianity and Judaism under the auspices of the prophetic, ethical monotheism of Judaism, stripped of its “oriental” ceremonies and “tribal” attachments. Adolph Moses (1840–­1902), for example, rabbi of Adas Israel in Louisville, called this unifying religion Yahvism—­the name Judaism being too closely associated, he believed, with one “race” and its system of rituals. He imagined that the climate in the United States was uniquely ripe for pure Yahvism “to unfold its universal nature, to accomplish its mission as a religion of many races and nations, to gather into its folds those Gentiles, whose reason can not accept the

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peculiar tenets of Christianity, who are separated from us only by a name.” In Moses’s thinking, American exceptionalism and Reform Judaism’s mission theory reinforced each other. “Israel’s new light of salvation”—­Yahvism—­would “start on a new career of spiritual and moral conquest in the New World” as Israel and Yahvism evolved into the church of humanity.29 Reform rabbis who foresaw the blurring of religious lines in the future may have been mistaken about the trajectory of American Protestantism, but they were not delusional. In late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century America, interfaith border crossing and comingling were common enough to suggest, at least to religious radicals, that amalgamation was the way of the future. Liberal ministers and liberal rabbis in large cities exchanged pulpits, mingled at meetings of civic associations and the Free Religious Association, and worked together for progressive causes. Christians joined Ethical Culture, and Jews attended Unitarian services and joined Unitarian congregations. Felix Adler’s future wife, Helen Goldmark, regularly attended John M. Chadwick’s liberal Unitarian Church in Brooklyn (where, ironically, she first met Adler when he spoke there in 1879).30 In Boston the pursuit of religious universalism cost one Reform congregation two rabbis in succession. The first was Solomon ­Schindler (1842–­1915), a political refugee from Prussia who spent two years at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau before pursuing a teaching career.31 After arriving penniless in the United States in 1871, he took a position ministering to a small Orthodox congregation, Adas Emuno, in Hoboken, New Jersey. In 1874 Temple Israel in Boston hired him as rabbi with a mandate to modernize its ritual. In little more than a decade he brought the congregation into the radical camp of the Reform movement, introducing family pews, a choir and an organ, and English-­language prayers, moving the main Sabbath service to Sunday, and abolishing the second day of festivals. His religious radicalism, however, went beyond matters of decorum and accessibility. Having embraced the study of comparative religion, biblical criticism, and evolutionary theory, he replaced the traditional notion of a personal God who watches over his people Israel with the Enlightenment notion of God as First Cause and Clockmaker of the Universe and condemned the belief in messianic redemption as incompatible with the ideals of democracy and assimilation. The religion of the future, he prophesied, would be neither specifically Jewish nor Christian nor Muslim, but “an entirely new system, in which the immortal parts of all the present religions will be represented,

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but at the same time so equally balanced that none will dare to claim superiority.” His religious universalism and political radicalism—­he championed Edward Bellamy’s state socialism—­ earned him the friendship and admiration of like-­minded clergy and reformers in Boston and Cambridge. By the mid-­1880s, non-­Jews were as numerous as Jews at his services. At the dedication of a new building in 1885, the speakers included the Reverends Phillips Brooke, Brooke Herford, Edward ­Everett Hale, and Minot J. Savage, all luminaries of liberal Christianity. In 1893, having outraged his congregation one too many times, he agreed to resign. The American Hebrew editorialized that S ­ chind­ler would be “more at home on the platform of an Ethical Culture Society or similar organization . . . than he was in the Jewish pulpit” and speculated that similar “nominally Jewish” rabbis would follow his example, “doubtless carrying large numbers of their congregants with them.” 32 Schindler, however, was no Felix Adler. Instead of creating a new religious forum, he found employment as the first executive of the United Hebrew Benevolent Association of Boston, a forerunner of the Federation of Jewish Charities, and later as superintendent of a Jewish old-­age home and orphanage. Then, in 1911, he reversed himself and repented his former radicalism. In a sermon at Temple Israel, he confessed that he had erred in privileging reason over emotion, in denigrating the appeal of rituals and ceremonies to the senses, and in working to make Jews like Gentiles. He also regretted having promoted the idea of a single universal religion for all peoples.33 Schindler’s successor at Temple Israel, Charles Fleischer (1871–­ 1942), followed a route out of Judaism similar to Felix Adler’s in that he created a public forum to propagate his views.34 Fleischer, a native of Breslau, was educated in the United States and ordained at the Hebrew Union College. A familiar figure in progressive intellectual circles in Boston, he made Temple Israel a civic forum for the advocacy of the Social Gospel. From its pulpit, fellow social reformers preached world peace, municipal socialism, women’s rights, free thought, planned parenthood, settlement houses, city planning, and the like. In turn, he was a frequent guest speaker in liberal Christian churches and in progressive civic forums. In 1905 a journalist wrote that there was “no man in Boston . . . with a greater following among the young intellectuals.”35 His views on Judaism were equally advanced. As a rabbinical student, he had flirted with the agnostic ideas of the freethinker and popular orator Robert Ingersoll. Later, in Boston, the transcendentalism of Theodore Parker and Ralph

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Waldo Emerson eroded what remained of his Judaism. Even Solomon Schind­ler’s notion of God as Clockmaker and First Cause was too theistic for him. While at first he did not preach views outside the limits of radical Reform, he became less reticent with time. In 1905 he declared that churches and synagogues were outmoded and destined to be replaced by a new church preaching faith in democracy. Borrowing from Emerson, he envisioned America as a melting pot, forging a new nation from its diverse peoples, and predicted that it would create a new universal faith that would spread throughout the world. In 1908 he told his congregation that Jews must contribute to building this new nation in America by intermarrying with Christians. That same year he announced at Christmastime that while Jesus was not the son of God, he was the greatest of all Jewish prophets. Jews and Christians, he preached, would be “reconciled and reunited, largely though Jesus, in love of God and service by man.” By 1908 Fleischer was ready to terminate his contract with Temple Israel. The congregation, however, was reluctant to lose him, for however radical his views, he was a much admired preacher whose standing outside the Jewish community was thought to redound to its credit. It gave him carte blanche to preach what he wanted, and he remained in its employ, even as the religious gap between him and his congregants widened. Two years later, in 1910, he decided he was no longer able to continue in his post. He felt he had become “a general too far ahead of his army” and was unable to wait for it to catch up. He stood for “complete universalism,” while Temple Israel stood for “partial universalism.”36 He left the congregation—­and, in effect, Judaism—­the following year after his predecessor, Solomon Schind­ ler, denounced his own earlier radicalism, especially his faith in erasing the differences between Jews and Christians and in promoting their fusion in the American melting pot. After his departure, Fleischer founded the Sunday Commons, a nonsectarian religious movement to promote the betterment of society and the amalgamation of America’s diverse stocks into a new people. He inaugurated the Sunday-­afternoon religious gatherings of his new enterprise on 7 January 1912 at Boston’s Majestic Theatre. According to the Boston Herald, the orchestra and balcony were filled with a “cosmopolitan” audience. In his address, he blended American exceptionalism, religious universalism, and faith in material and social progress, telling his audience that they lived in a new age and in a new country and that they needed a new religion that expressed the exceptional spirit of their time and place. “The turning loose of the human

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race upon this continent, with its vast and yet untouched resources, has been responsible for the development of more creative imagination, creative energy and creative power—­of all the really spiritual forces—­ than the human race has ever experienced.”37 Fleischer’s faith in America was boundless and his optimism limitless, but the Sunday Commons failed to outlive the end of World War I. In 1919, practicing what he preached, he married Mabel R. Leslie, a Vermonter of Scottish descent and Presbyterian upbringing, in an egalitarian ceremony that he wrote. In 1922 they moved to New York City, where she practiced law and he edited the editorial page of William Randolph Hearst’s Journal American and later became a radio commentator, the first on CBS.38 After World War I, American Jewish initiatives to create nonsectarian universalistic creeds dried up. In the interwar period, upwardly mobile Jews in search of a non-­Christian church increasingly found their way to Unitarianism, by then more theistic and less Christian than it had been in Sonnenschein’s day, or to Ethical Culture. One exception, perhaps, was the attempt by I. W. Bernheim (1848–­1945), a wealthy Kentucky liquor distiller (bottler of the well-­known I. W. Harper premium bourbon) and lay leader in the Reform movement, to create a form of Reform Judaism so radical in its beliefs and practices as to constitute, in the eyes of some, a new religion entirely.39 Bernheim, an immigrant from Baden, was a self-­made man whose desire to minimize Jewish particularism stopped just short of conversion. (He claimed that he would have changed his name to Burnham when he was a young man had this not been the name of the local whorehouse madam.) As a member of Louisville’s Reform congregation, Adas Israel, he was influenced by its rabbi, Adolph Moses, whose Yahvism he took in an even more radical direction. As early as 1904, he drew on notions of American exceptionalism and Reform triumphalism to envision an “American Reformed Jewish Church.” In America, “our sun-­kissed land of liberty,” Reform Judaism would “show its best fruitage” and would “produce the highest type of the modern Jew” and thus attract “elements from other sects.”40 In 1918 he argued similarly in a letter to the Central Conference of American Rabbis, declaring that the formation of the “Reform Church of American Israelites” (as he now called it) was “an absolute and irrevocable and pressing necessity” and that its membership should be limited to “100 per cent Americans”41—­that is, those Jews who were as radical in their rejection of Jewish particularism as he. After World War I, with antisemitism and xenophobia strengthening, he became more insistent that American Jews free themselves

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from “archaic” forms and emancipate “the true spirit” of Judaism. In a public address to the council of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC) in Buffalo in May 1921, he urged the movement to declare Sunday the official Jewish Sabbath and to abandon the use of terms linking the Israelites of the day to a Judean tribe. Like his teacher Adolph Moses, he condemned the use of the words “Jew” and “Judaism,” but went further, including as well the words “Jewry,” “synagogue,” and “temple.” Troubled not only by their Near Eastern origin but also by the degeneration of the word “Jew” into a term of reproach meaning “craftiness, greed, usury, cheat, and a most despicable form of low cunning,” he preferred the term “Israelite” and urged the UAHC to rename itself the Reform Church of American Israelites. It is also clear that he felt that Zionism, recently invigorated by the issuance of the Balfour Declaration and the establishment of the British Mandate, threatened his status as an American citizen. Insisting that the United States was his “Palestine,” he protested the imputation that American Jews were anything but “100 per cent Americans.”42 The response to Bernheim’s UAHC address illustrates how far his views were from the Reform mainstream. As one editorialist noted, “Out of the hundreds who heard Mr. Bernheim, perhaps not half a dozen had any sympathy with his theory.”43 Rabbi Stephen Wise in New York and Rabbi Edgar Magnin (1890–­1984) in Los Angeles—­ neither a traditionalist—­lambasted Bernheim in widely circulated articles in the Jewish press. Wise’s response was intemperate, motivated no doubt by his own passionate attachment to Zionism. He berated the UAHC for even giving Bernheim a platform, intimating that it did so because Bernheim was a major contributor to the Reform rabbinical seminary in Cincinnati. Magnin’s response was more thoughtful. He cast Bernheim as a representative of hard-­working, self-­made Jews who cannot understand why, despite their success, “they are regarded by their neighbors as something set apart, as something different from other Americans,” and who “fret under this discomfort” and turn against themselves “in the belief that he and his are at fault” and that Jewish vices create antisemitism, a linkage Magnin rejected.44 Bernheim was not deterred. In August 1928 he addressed the World Conference of Progressive Judaism in Berlin to promote the detribalization of Reform Judaism and to urge a greater role for the laity in its councils, which, he believed, were controlled by “reactionaries.” When their religion was “popularized and democratized,” “a new access of energy,” he predicted, would stream into their ranks. His remarks were even less well received than they had been in Buffalo in

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1921. The “powers in control” called him to order and prevented him from finishing his speech.45 Bernheim persisted, however. In 1933, while spending the winter in Southern California, he met a seemingly like-­minded Reform rabbi, H. Cerf Strauss, who was then serving Congregation Beth Israel in San Diego. Straus convinced Bernheim that he shared his views, and the following year, after leaving his San Diego pulpit, he established the First Reform Congregation of American Israelites in Los Angeles, presumably with Bernheim’s financial support. The venture was not a success and lasted only a few years. Strauss continued to serve as a Reform rabbi, however, first, as a chaplain in the U.S. Navy, where he ministered to both traditional and progressive Jews, and then as a congregational rabbi in Helena, Arkansas. By the late 1940s, little remained of his sympathy for Bern­ heim’s views (his initial enthusiasm was likely opportunistic), for he was by then employed to deliver fund-­raising speeches for the United Jewish Appeal, which supported, inter alia, the Yishuv in Mandate Palestine and then the State of Israel.46 Bernheim, however, remained a radical assimilationist until the end. By the mid-­1930s, he was counseling Jews to join Unitarian and other liberal churches that could serve, in his words, “as bridges over which our people could pass into the body of the mass of Americans” among whom they lived and urging the young to intermarry in order to become “part and parcel of the social fabric.” Perhaps, he mused, the historic destiny of the Jews was completed and now they would live on “only in the immortality of the human race.”47

FOUR

The flowering of schemes for universal religions within Reform Judaism in the United States contrasts sharply with the virtual absence of such proposals in Germany, where Reform was even more firmly established. Jews in Wilhelmine Germany were certainly as eager as their North American counterparts to erase the stigma of Jewishness, perhaps even more so, given the intensity of the hostility and exclusion they faced. And, as we saw, the rate of conversion to Christianity was certainly higher in Germany. Still, German Jews did not exercise their considerable intellectual ingenuity to create neutral, synthetic religions. During the 1840s, a handful of Jews in cities like Hamburg, Mannheim, and Königsberg attended the services of freireligiöse congregations, but these churches, however liberal their beliefs by

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comparison with the state churches, were unambiguously Christian gatherings, not neutral ethical societies.48 One explanation for the absence of proposals for new religions in German Jewry is the conservative character of the state churches and their clergy. Germany’s Protestant churches, unlike those in the United States, were state-­supervised bodies, allied with the forces of political reaction and overtly hostile to Jewish integration. Progressive clergymen were a weak minority, at times directly attacked by church authorities. As a result, Reform rabbis rarely formed close social or intellectual ties with their Christian counterparts—­the gap was simply too great for such intimacy to flourish—­and thus they did not suffer from the illusion that the liberal wings of Judaism and Christianity were rapidly converging and soon to merge. Moreover, even if German rabbis had been inclined to think along these lines, there were formidable institutional and legal obstacles to experimentation in religious life, for German congregations were not voluntary associations that could be reconfigured at will. State supervision of religious bodies inhibited religious entrepreneurship and adventurism. In Britain as well, Jews expressed no interest in creating synthetic religions. Reform Judaism, which in the United States was a breeding ground for such proposals, made few inroads there before the arrival of refugees from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. External pressures to denationalize Judaism were weak, and most Victorian Jews were content with the genteel conservatism of synagogues under the supervision of the chief rabbi. Often they opposed tampering with religious traditions simply because they were traditions—­venerable and authoritative, sanctioned and tested by time. Similarly, their own preoccupation with social respectability precluded their participation in the various ethical societies and universalistic churches that formed in the nineteenth century, for these groups were popularly associated with working-­class political agitation and radical social causes. The only exceptions to this generalization came from the ranks of Victorian-­era Central European immigrants, whose upbringing differed from that of native-­born Jews. A small number of them chose to affiliate with a universalist ethical society or church. Hungarian-­born Maximilian Loewe (1830–­1905), a follower of Lajos Kossuth, settled in London following the collapse of the 1848 revolution. Loewe was a close friend and enthusiastic supporter of Charles Annesley Voysey, the heretical Anglican clergyman who established his own congregation, the Theistic Church, in London in 1871. Loewe (or Low, as he became) and his wife, the daughter of an Austrian rabbi, discarded all

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Jewish practices soon after their marriage. At some point they were attracted to Voysey’s antisupernatural theism, which rejected fundamental Christian beliefs like the divinity of Jesus and the revealed character of scripture. When Voysey launched his own church, Low was one of the wealthy Londoners who backed him financially.49 The publisher William Swan Sonnenschein (1855–­1931) and his wife, a descendant of a Huguenot family, were members of the London Ethical Society, the first to be established in England, and Sonnenschein’s firm issued its literature, mostly at a financial loss. His father, Albert, a native of Moravia, had emigrated to England at midcentury, opened a school in Highbury, and married the daughter of the Reverend Edward Stallybrass, a missionary for many years in Siberia.50 The educator Samuel Sigmund Fechheimer (1867–­1916) joined an ethical society at age sixteen and helped to found the Ethical Church in Queen’s Road, Bayswater, in 1909. To honor his memory as a founder, his ashes were kept in a funeral urn in a niche in the wall of the church.51 Of the various ethical societies and churches in London, the Hampstead Ethical Institute, which was established at the turn of the century, drew the largest group of Central European Jews. In time it attracted Jews from other backgrounds as well and after World War II became predominantly Jewish in its makeup. One sociologist suggested that its largely Jewish membership in the twentieth century endowed it with longer life and greater cohesion than other ethical societies.52 But it was anomalous. As a rule, English-­born Jews, especially those who were upper-­middle-­class, neither promoted nor supported universal religions. Felix Adler discovered how little enthusiasm there was for his views there when he toured the country in 1892. He wrote to his wife from Oxford: “The atmosphere is charged with conservatism. Even the scientific men are more or less pledged to conventionalism, and are constrained to all sorts of subtle compromises.”53 Appropriately, the sole Jewish proposal for a new religion to emerge in Britain was the handiwork of a transplanted American-­born Jew of southern German background—­the Cambridge archaeologist and art historian Sir Charles Waldstein (1856–­1927), or Walston, as he became during World War I. Waldstein was appointed university lecturer in classical archaeology at Cambridge in 1880 at age twenty-­ four (an academic post in classics in the United States would have been impossible at the time) and enjoyed a remarkable career there. He was not a practicing Jew and took little interest in the affairs of Anglo-­Jewry,54 but in the 1890s he became alarmed by the increase in antisemitism in England and elsewhere and wrote in response The

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Jewish Question and the Mission of the Jews, which he first published anonymously in 1894 and then republished under his own name in 1899.55 Most of the book was devoted to refuting popular stereotypes about Jews and to celebrating the Jewish people as the chief bearers of what he called “spirituality.” In this sense, it was similar to other apologetic books and pamphlets of the period. What set it apart was the author’s concern about the fate of secular, unaffiliated Jews like himself. Waldstein feared that Jews who were otherwise liberated from Jewish ritual would re-­identify themselves with a tribal, nationalistic Judaism, as a matter of pride rather than belief, in reaction to the upswing in anti-­Jewish hostility. A radical assimilationist (though he married within the fold—­a wealthy New York widow, Florence Einstein Seligman [1873–­1953]—­in 1909) and an enemy of any form of Jewish separatism, whether Orthodox or Zionist, Waldstein felt that it was hypocritical for modern Jews in Western countries who did not believe in the racial character of the Jews and the revealed character of the written and oral law to join Jewish religious communities or, for that matter, to even call themselves Jews. Those who did so, he believed, were “living a lie.”56 Realizing, however, that such persons wanted to belong to some religious group, he proposed as a solution the Neo-­Mosaic Church, a creed based on pure Mosaic monotheism, which would draw on the best ethical literature of medieval and modern civilization, including the New Testament. In his words: “The teaching will thus be the nearest to that of a large portion of the Unitarian Church and of advanced sections of other Churches. But it will add to these the historical background of a continuous development of monotheistic beliefs for several thousand years.”57 Waldstein’s proposal did not spark the creation of a new religion, although in the United States, according to the American Hebrew, the book excited “much interest” and bred “much discussion” (at least in Reform Jewish circles). The newspaper reprinted a lecture by Kaufmann Kohler (1843–­1926), then rabbi of Temple Beth-­El in New York City, attacking the idea of the Neo-­Mosaic Church as a recipe for collective euthanasia. A week later it commented editorially on the proposal, noting the current fascination with schemes for the unification of Judaism and Christianity. Sometimes, it noted, abstract theological reasoning gave birth to the idea, and sometimes “a mere fancy that such a union would solve the vexed Jewish question.” What most disturbed the newspaper was that the proposers of these schemes always insisted on the Jews making all the concessions, doing all “the receding and conceding.” Like Kohler, it equated the schemes with

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calls for “the dissolution of Judaism.” Moreover, it added, there was a flaw in their logic. If their purpose was to promote the Jewish mission (the dissemination of ethics, spirituality, universal peace, etc.), the affiliation of Jews with Unitarians and other liberal Christians would accomplish nothing. Only if Jews were to spread themselves across the spectrum of Christian denominations would they be able to advance Judaism’s mission.58

FIVE

In the Russian Empire, increasing immiseration and the pogroms and May Laws of 1881, along with the sense of crisis they generated, were a catalyst for Jewish proposals for new religions. The context in which these proposals emerged was not that of a religious progressivism common to both Jews and Christians, as was the case in the United States. Neither Reform Judaism nor liberal Christianity took root in the czar’s territories. Rather, these projects were part of a widespread ideological reassessment by East European Jewish intellectuals of the foundations of and prospects for Jewish life in the Russian Empire. The extremity of the Jewish predicament bred postliberal solutions—­ mass emigration, revolutionary socialism, Jewish nationalism. The first of these, mass emigration, was a non-­ideological response to the absence of opportunity and the harshness of life: Over two million Jewish subjects of the czar voted with their feet before World War I and settled in Western Europe and North and South America. Revolutionary socialism and Jewish nationalism, in contrast, were secular, ideologically driven movements that wished to transform the foundations of Jewish life as then constituted. However, while Bundists and Zionists envisioned radically transformed futures—­the Bundists in Eastern Europe and the Zionists in the Land of Israel—­neither imagined futures in which their Jewishness, however transformed, would become irrelevant. Both believed in the existential irreducibility of the Jewish nation. What divided them was where and how the future they desired was to be realized. Not so those Marxists of Jewish birth whose revolutionary creed was unbendingly universalistic. They envisioned an internationalist future in which national and religious divisions were erased. speaking Jewish intellectuals, students, and activists Russian-­ were attracted to this version of Marxism in disproportionate numbers.59 Whether they were attracted because they were fleeing their

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Jewishness and craved the dissolution of the Jews as a collectivity, which would, of course, solve the Jewish Question for them personally, or whether they accepted, without much concern one way or the other, the disappearance of the Jews as an inevitable consequence of the unfolding of history is a matter of contention. Robert Wistrich, for example, attributes decisive importance to “Jewish self-­hatred,” describing it as a galvanizing, motivating stimulus for Jewish participation in radical movements.60 While some Jewish Marxists no doubt nurtured what he calls “an ethnic death wish,” the explanatory value of this kind of sweeping approach is limited. What is certain is that Jewish Marxists, regardless of what motivated their initial recruitment into the movement, universally believed that revolutionary socialism would create a harmonious society in which antisemitism, along with other varieties of national and religious divisiveness, would disappear. Introducing Marxism into this discussion does not mean that it was a secular religion, even though some scholars describe it this way. Yuri Slezkine, for example, in his much acclaimed The Jewish Century, calls both Marxism and Freudianism “organized religions, with their own churches and sacred texts,” and Marx and Freud “true messiahs insofar as they stood outside time and could not be justified in terms of their own teachings.”61 While Marxism, like Christianity, did offer a path to salvation—­and in this sense resembled a religion—­the salvation it offered was this-­worldly. A religion without a divinity or otherworldly concerns is not, in the end, much of a religion (even if its followers think it is). In any case, it is hard to know what is gained analytically by casting Marxism as a religion. My point in introducing Marxism in the context of Jewish-­generated new religions is to stress that its universalism functioned, vis-­à-­vis Jews, in the same way it did in Ethical Culture, the Sunday Commons, Neo-­Mosaism, the First Reform Congregation of American Israelites, and Saint-­Simonianism. It offered a solution to the Jewish Question, an escape from marginalization and stigmatization, and a blueprint for the inevitable, inescapable future development of society. The hostility of Jewish Marxists to the collective interests of Jews and their frequent willingness to employ anti-­Jewish slogans in attacking capitalism suggest the extent to which their Jewish background troubled them and to which Marxist universalism allowed them to (theoretically) avoid it. Marx’s own recourse to anti-­Jewish language and his identification of Jewry and Judaism with capitalism, egoism, and materialism in his essays “On the Jewish Question” (1844) is well known. But it was the Polish-­born activist and theoretician Rosa

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Luxemburg (1871–­1919) who classically articulated the alleged tension between the universalism of Marxism and the particularism of Jewishness. In a letter to a Jewish friend from prison in 1917, she asked why her friend bothered about “the special suffering of the Jews”: I am just as much as concerned with the poor victims on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, the blacks in Africa, with whose corpses the Europeans play catch. . . . Oh that “sublime stillness of eternity,” in which so many cries of anguish have faded away unheard, they resound within me so strongly that I have no special place in my heart for the ghetto. I feel at home in the entire world, where there are clouds and birds and human tears.62 Not all Jewish Marxists were as blithe as she about “the special sufferings of the Jews.” All were aware, however, that Marxism offered a vision of the future in which these sufferings would be relieved. In the end, of course, more Jews found their way to Marxism than to all the new universalist religions taken together. The first Jew in Eastern Europe to see the salvation of his people in the creation of an alternative religion was Jacob Gordin (1853–­1909), the future Yiddish playwright but at the time a Russian-­speaking Maskil teaching at a modern Jewish school in Elizavetgrad.63 In 1877 Gordin invited progressive Jews in the city to establish the Spiritual Biblical Brotherhood, a society that would unite all who rejected dogmas and ceremonies and would acknowledge only the moral doctrines of the Bible. Echoing a cherished goal of the Haskalah, the program of the society envisioned the transformation of Russian Jews from petty traders to sturdy agriculturalists living on the land. Gordin also reached out to Ukrainian Stundists (evangelical, bibliocentric Protestants), whose expectation of the Millennium and the Second Coming inclined them, like evangelicals in the United States and Great Britain, to view Jews in a more favorable light than did members of the Orthodox Church. (Stundist peasants, for example, were not active in the waves of pogroms that began in 1881.) Tolstoyan populism and pacifism also influenced Gordin’s outlook. Thus, when Jewish members of the People’s Will, a group that endorsed the use of violence to topple the czarist regime, tried to recruit Stundists and members of the Brotherhood in the late 1870s, Gordin opposed them. Notoriety came to Gordin in the wake of the Elizavetgrad pogrom of 15–­17 April 1881, the first in the Ukraine following the assassination of Alexander II. In early June, Gordin published a manifesto in

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the name of the Brotherhood in a Russian-­language Kharkhov newspaper that echoed anti-­Jewish views about Jewish responsibility for the pogroms. Gordin claimed that the “bad habits” of the Jews inspired both the hostility of the peasants and the lack of sympathy of other strata of Russian society. “Our greed, insatiability, covetousness, cupidity, our persistence, pushiness, our extreme willingness to flaunt, our extravagance, our slavish and stupid imitation of proud and unbridled Russian haughtiness, our usury, tavern-­keeping, huckstering, and similar shortcomings provoke the Russian people, stirring up the envy of the merchant and the contempt of the noble.”64 He urged his fellow Jews to embrace the religious and economic ideas of the Brotherhood, which, he assured them, was ready to welcome them warmly into its midst even as it confronted them with unsettling truths. There was nothing novel in Gordin’s diatribe—­from its origins in the late eighteenth century, the Haskalah attributed Christian hostility to Jewish habits and customs—­but his timing was atrocious. The Hebrew-­and Russian-­Jewish press roundly attacked him, as did some liberal Russian newspapers. The criticism did not derail the stubborn and uncompromising Gordin. He continued to recruit followers in nearby towns and cities and tried to establish contacts with Stundist peasants in the countryside. The local administration allowed the society to establish its own place of worship, and in 1888, the Ministry of the Interior allowed it to maintain its own register of births and marriages, separate from that of the Elizavetgrad Jewish community, which was critical, since the sect rejected circumcision and endorsed intermarriage. In the mid-­1880s, the Elizavetgrad group, which numbered between forty and fifty persons (teachers, students, physicians, lawyers, and a sprinkling of merchants and artisans) met on Wednesdays and Saturdays to hear Gordin read a passage from the Bible and deliver a sermonlike lecture on a new book or magazine article. Smaller groups formed in Odessa, Nikolayev, and Uman. In 1889 a band of Brotherhood disciples, under the leadership of Isaac Feinerman, a convert to Christianity and a follower of Tolstoy, established a communal colony in a nearby village, Glados, that was a center of Stundist activity. It lasted only three months. Meanwhile, government officials, who had monitored the activities of the group almost from the start, became increasingly alarmed at the connections, both real and imagined, that it saw among the Brother­ hood, revolutionary socialism, and Stundism. In October 1891 the authorities closed the Spiritual Biblical Brotherhood and, in January

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1892, issued a warrant for Gordin’s arrest. By this time, however, Gordin and some of his followers, perhaps forewarned, were already in New York City. There he tried, unsuccessfully, to obtain the support of the Baron de Hirsch Fund to establish a communal agricultural colony on American soil. He then turned full-­time to writing for the Yiddish press and then later for the Yiddish stage. His connection with the Brotherhood continued to haunt him, however. Although he claimed, once in America, that the Brotherhood’s religious program was a cover to hide its true identity as a political organization from czarist officials, opponents denounced him as a missionary for Christianity, an accusation that owed something to the conversion of an Odessa Maskil and onetime associate of Gordin’s, Jacob Prelooker (or Priluker) (1860–­1935).65 Prelooker, a native of Pinsk, was exposed to the Haskalah while studying at the Slonim yeshivah and became a critic of the strict orthodoxy in which he had been raised. In 1877 he entered the college in Zhitomir that trained teachers for state Jewish schools. In his autobiography, written after his conversion to Protestantism, he claimed that there he first encountered the Gospels, which he read in a Russian translation. In December 1880 he was appointed assistant master at a state Jewish school in Odessa, whose Jewish community was well known for its lack of piety and receptivity to new ideas. There he began to dream of creating a religion that would close the gap between Judaism and Christianity. Toward the end of 1881, he established, with the support of fifty or so like-­minded families, the New Israel movement, whose object was to heal the cleavage between Judaism and Christianity. He hoped to attract dissatisfied Jews and Christians who dissented from the Orthodox Church as well, but realized it was possible to agitate openly only among Jews due to government opposition. He publicized the new movement in a Russian-­language Odessa daily at the end of January 1882, offering a program of specific religious and social reforms, whose aim, it would seem, was to obtain both government support for the movement and full civil rights for its adherents. In the article, he repudiated the authority of the Talmud and made the Bible alone the source of religious guidance and inspiration. He abolished circumcision and the dietary laws, transferred the Sabbath to Sunday, endorsed intermarriage, and signaled his intention to reform the prayer book. He obliged his members to learn and use Russian, to obey all the laws of the state, including military service, and to forswear usury and brothel-­keeping. In return, he expected the state to recognize the movement officially, to permit intermarriages

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under its auspices, and to grant its members full civil rights. In gratitude to the czar, he explained, all members would be obliged to name their firstborn sons Alexander and their firstborn daughters Alexandria. He also added that members of the New Israel movement would wear a distinguishing mark to set them apart from other Jews. Needless to say, the reaction of the Jewish public was hostile. He was suspended from his teaching position for a time and almost dismissed permanently. Many supporters lost courage and deserted him. At the same time, it became difficult for him to make new converts since so many homes were closed to him. The government, however, was initially sympathetic to Prelooker’s activity and put few obstacles in his way, in part because he, like Gordin, blamed the Jews for their own misfortunes, attributing their persecution to the barriers they erected to their reconciliation with the Christian world, and, in part, because his reforms might end with the conversion of his followers to the Orthodox faith. Although the government permitted Prelooker to continue his work, the New Israel movement failed to grow. Lacking the funds to hire a hall, Prelooker assembled his few followers in his own room or in the house of a friend. When, of necessity, he expanded his propaganda activity to Christians, especially Stundists and other sectarians, he ran afoul of the authorities, who looked askance at meetings between Jewish dissidents and Protestant evangelicals. They realized they had erred in fostering a movement directed against the interests of the Orthodox faith. The police and the bureaucracy harassed Prelooker, making life increasingly unbearable, and he left Russia in June 1891 and settled in England the following month. There, as a Protestant, he earned a living as a writer and lecturer on Russian affairs, religions, and the women’s question. The sense of crisis in the early 1880s also led a Bessarabian Maskil, Joseph Rabinowitz (1837–­99), to attempt a similar kind of religious reconciliation as well, but in his case what in all likelihood started as a synthesis soon came to resemble what is today known as Hebrew Christianity or Messianic Judaism.66 The son of a wealthy Belzer Hasid, Rabinowitz became a Maskil and then a fierce opponent of hasidut.67 Much concerned with the fate of Russian Jewry, he was a frequent contributor to the Hebrew press in the 1870s, when he was living in Kishinev and working as a notary. As Steven Zipperstein notes, his thinking at this time was marked by an unusual concern (unusual for Maskilim) with the Bible as a source of spiritual inspiration, a concern that, Zipperstein suggests, was due to the influence of his brother-­in-­law, Yehiel Zevi Hirschensohn-­Lichtenstein, a secret but

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nonbaptized Christian since 1855.68 When the crisis of 1881 shook his confidence in the panacea of cultural enlightenment and social improvement, he joined a newly formed circle of Hovevei Tsiyyon (Lovers of Zion) in Kishinev. In 1882 the group decided to explore the purchase of land for settlement in Palestine and sent Rabinowitch on a fact-­finding mission. Rabinowitch’s journey to the Land of Israel was transformative, although not exactly in the way that he and his evangelical supporters later described it. In the 1890s, after he had become a Christian, he wrote that Jesus revealed himself as the Messiah while he was standing on the Mount of Olives and gazing at the Temple Mount. If so, Rabinowitch failed to tell anyone at the time. The truth of the matter is more complex. During his visit, which lasted several weeks, Rabinowitz ceased to believe that a return to Zion offered a rapid or comprehensive solution to the crisis of Russian Jewry; the political and economic obstacles seemed to him too overwhelming. He was particularly disappointed in the failure of the much heralded English diplomat, traveler, and mystic Laurence Oliphant to obtain a concession for settlement from the Turkish government. Equally important, he was savaged in the Hebrew press, which earlier acclaimed him, for his pessimism and was accused of weakening Jewish resolve. With his faith in Haskalah and proto-­Zionism weakened and his reputation destroyed, Rabinowitch eventually came to believe, some time before late 1883, that the Jewish rejection of Jesus was the cause of Jewish suffering. In fall 1883 Rabinowitch drafted thirteen theses, in Hebrew, registering his rethinking of what ailed the Jews in Russia.69 Rejecting the proposals that were then on the table—­traditionalist resignation, Haskalah, proto-­Zionism, Russification and integration, and the intercession of the rich (shtadlanut)—­he declared that the moral and spiritual depravity of Russian Jews must be addressed before its material condition could be improved. This would require a deep spiritual renewal, which would, in turn, require “a leader of firm character,” whom Rabinowitch identified as Jesus of Nazareth. In the theses, Rabinowitch did not describe Jesus as the Messiah or the Son of God but, rather, as a religious reformer who counseled the Jews of his time to observe the Torah’s ethical laws and minimize its ritual laws. If Jews everywhere were to follow his counsel, then non-­Jews would change their attitude toward them, and toleration and emancipation would follow. (Christian critics of Rabinowitch commented that Jesus did not come into the world to emancipate the Jews but to atone for their and everyone else’s sins.)70

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Rabinowitch intended, at first, to create a Jewish-­Christian sect integrating elements from both religious traditions. On Christmas Day 1884 he inaugurated prayer services in Kishinev. Meanwhile, he came increasingly under the influence of the pastor of the Lutheran Church, Rudolf Faltin, who was active in missionary work among Kishinev’s Jews, and of German, British, and Scandanavian missionaries, whose enthusiasm for Rabinowitch reflected their own millenarian hopes. By the time Rabinowitch opened a prayer house, Bet Lehem, in mid-­1885, his views were more conventionally Christian. His followers were called New Israelites. Believing that Jews who accepted Jesus need not relinquish their collective, national identity, he created a worship service and religious regimen that were more or less Christian in content and Jewish in form. Congregants prayed in Hebrew and listened to sermons in Yiddish. They retained their Jewish national identity, continued to observe the Sabbath and festivals, as well as such distinctive customs as circumcision, and on their death were buried in the Jewish cemetery. At the start, Rabinowitch undoubtedly thought he was creating a true synthesis, not one with utopian overtones—­like Gordin’s, which transcended both Judaism and Christianity, but retained fundamental elements from both. The interest and intervention of foreign missionaries, however, made it increasingly difficult for him to continue walking a tightrope between the two religions. At the urging of his evangelical friends, who supported him financially, he traveled to Berlin in March 1885 and was baptized. He then returned to Kishinev, where he continued to preach until his death in 1889, but he was not a success and attracted few followers outside his own family. Rabinowitch’s New Israel was not a universalistic religion of brotherhood, like those of Adler, Sonnenschein, Schindler, Fleischer, Bern­ heim, Gordin, and the St. Simonians. He was not a progressive, a humanist, a rationalist, or a universalist but a man of old-­fashioned faith. Nor was he aiming to marginalize or transcend his Jewishness. Instead, he sought to highlight and build on it—­a dimension of his religious outlook that troubled many of his Christian backers, for whom his insistence on the maintenance of Jewish rites clashed with the conventional Christian belief that the death of Jesus made them irrelevant. This explains the pressure they placed on him to accept baptism and abandon his heterodox views. Thus, by virtue of his desire to be both Christian and Jew, rather than neither Christian nor Jew, he does not resemble other Jewish proposers of new religions in the nineteenth century. However, he does merit inclusion in the group by

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virtue of his spiritual eclecticism (his propensity to pick and choose in creating a new creed) and by virtue of his motivation (his desire to relieve the suffering of the Jews in the here and now). For, as in the cases of Prelooker and Gordin, what drove Rabinowitch to religious experimentation was the immiseration and oppression of East European Jewry. Similar circumstances sparked the creation of the universal language Esperanto and the universal religion, known as Hillelism and later as Homaranismo, that was its companion.71 Their creator, Ludwig Zamenhof, testified in 1905, “If I had not been a Jew from the ghetto, the idea of uniting humanity either would never have entered my head or it never would have gripped me so tenaciously throughout my entire life. . . . My Jewishness is the main reason why, from my earliest childhood, I gave myself wholly to one overarching idea and dream, that of bringing together in brotherhood all of humanity.”72 Zamenhof, the son and grandson of Maskilim, grew up in Bialystok, where he learned the languages of its diverse population—­Yiddish, Polish, German, and Russian. When the family moved to Warsaw in 1873, he added Greek, Latin, French, and English at the Second Philological Gymnasium. While still a student in Warsaw, he came to the conclusion that the world needed a neutral international language in order to promote harmony among the nations. He thought at first that a “dead” language, like Greek, Latin, or Hebrew, might be revived but concluded that their lack of modern vocabulary and their difficulty were serious obstacles. A friend of the family tried to discourage him, telling him that Jews should not dissipate their energies on projects for the sake of humanity at a time when they were under attack, but this did not deter him. By 1878, when he was in his final year at school, he had worked out the rudiments of a coherent language. In 1879 he entered the University of Moscow to study medicine and temporarily set aside the project, his father having warned him that it would mark him as a crank and hurt his career. His time in Moscow coincided with the pogroms of 1881 and the ideological ferment in Jewish student circles they provoked. Like many other Jewish students, he abandoned, at least for a time, his cosmopolitan ideals and explored emigrationist and nationalist schemes to solve the plight of Russia’s Jews. He familiarized himself with the literature of the Hibbat Tsiyyon movement and brought together fifteen other students to plan the founding of a Jewish settlement, on as yet undetermined territory, that would develop eventually into an independent Jewish state. Later that year, when his father’s finances worsened, he returned

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to Warsaw to continue his medical studies. The anti-­Jewish riots there at Christmastime kept alive the debate about the future of East European Jewry. Zamenhof published a long article in several issues of the St. Petersburg Jewish weekly Raszvet in early 1882 weighing the options. He rejected radical assimilation, asserting that no nation should voluntarily liquidate itself. He criticized Hibbat Tsiyyon because it seemed unworkable, though he did not rule out the Land of Israel option altogether. But he argued that the best solution would be to direct immigration to unpopulated territory in the United States, where, when the number of Jews reached sixty thousand, they could apply for statehood within the American federal system. When the Hibbat Tsiyyon solution gained the upper hand in the debate, he backed it because he thought unity of purpose and action was critical. He founded a student group to promote settlement and raise funds for the early colonies. When the group merged with the adult Hibbat Tsiyyon group in Warsaw in 1883, he became a member of its executive committee. But by the end of the year, he was no longer optimistic about Zionism. In a letter in November 1883, he recalled that, when representatives of the Biluim (youth who emigrated to the Land of Israel in the immediate aftermath of the pogroms) visited Warsaw in early 1882, he was so excited that he decided to follow their example. Now he felt that their talk had come to nothing and that they had lost all credibility. “Lost, lost is that blaze of youthful resolution that appeared to be the first ray of salvation! Our name is tarnished, for the world has seen that our youth is not like the youth of other peoples.”73 After his brief flirtation with Jewish nationalism, Zamenhof returned to his international language project. In 1887, now an ophthalmologist in Warsaw, he launched his new language with a forty-­ two-­page textbook for Russian speakers, using the pseudonym Dr. Esperanto (Dr. Hope). For Zamenhof, the creation of Esperanto, as the language became known, was linked to a broader spiritual and political vision of world harmony and, within that context, resolution of the Jewish Question. (His extra-­linguistic concerns frequently embarrassed other Esperantists.) In 1901 he published anonymously, in Russian, a proposal for a radical reformation of Judaism, to be known as Hillelism, which would permit Jews to shed their alienness.74 He told the London Jewish Chronicle in 1907 that Hillelism’s most fundamental belief was “the idea of philosophically pure monotheism and the somewhat modified principle of Hillel that the one law of our religion is the love of our neighbour.” Hillelism would preserve Judaism and eradicate enmity toward Jews by stripping their faith of the

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“pseudo-­national Palestinian” characteristics that historically marked the Jews as foreigners. Zamenhof envisioned the sect absorbing the totality of the Jewish people over the next century or century and a half and then, in time, the nations of the world as well. As he told the Jewish Chronicle, “Instead of being absorbed by the Christian world, we shall absorb them, for that is our mission, to spread among humanity the truth of monotheism and the principles of justice and fraternity.”75 Like Adolph Moses’s Yahvism in the United States, Zamenhof’s Hillelism was radical universalism in a Jewish triumphalist mold. There was a pragmatic dimension as well to Zamenhof’s proposal. In private, he expressed the belief that Esperanto needed a stable social basis to survive and that only an ethnically homogeneous group of Esperanto-­ speaking Hillelists (Jews, in other words) could serve this function.76 Zamenhof addressed his Hillelism proposal of 1901 to Russian-­ reading Jewish intellectuals, but they showed little interest in it. As he admitted in his 1907 interview with the Jewish Chronicle, he was unable to find a single person willing to help him organize the sect. His own enthusiasm for a universal religion did not weaken, however, for it was central to his quasi-­messianic vision of reconciliation and harmony. It was, he wrote in 1905, the most important of all the work he had done or would ever do, while Esperanto was only “a part of this common idea.”77 At the first international Esperanto congress in Boulogne in August 1905, he intended to include a paragraph in his presentation calling for the unity of all religions but was pressured to drop it by the congress’s French organizers, secularists who preferred to view Esperanto as a language and nothing more, and who, in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, feared the public response to the messianic sentiments of a Jewish prophet. Indeed, the French took care to conceal the fact that Zamenhof was Jewish. In the year following the Boulogne congress, Zamenhof re-­envisioned the future ethnic composition of Hillelism to include all Esperantists. In January 1906 he presented his more expansive Hillelism in an anonymous Esperantist article. The responses were hostile: Non-­Jews balked at its Jewish name; secularists objected to its religious character; socialists thought it was politically naïve. In response to the objection that it was “too Jewish,” Zamenhof renamed his new creed Homaranismo (literally, humanity-­ism) and relaunched his proposal, with appropriate changes, in a pamphlet published in St. Petersburg in March 1906. He intended to promote it at the second Esperanto congress in Geneva at the end of the summer, but again the French Esperantists pressured him not to include religion in his presentation.78

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Zamenhof never wavered in his advocacy of a universal religion. He produced two further editions of his Homaranismo booklet, in 1913 and 1917, the latter just months before his death in April 1917. In 1913 he began to organize a congress for a “neutrally human religion,” to be held in conjunction with the Esperantist congress in Paris in early fall 1914, but the outbreak of war intervened. While Esperanto remains a living language—­even if only for 0.03 percent of the world’s population (according to the Universal Esperanto Association’s generous estimate of almost two million speakers)79—­the universal religion that it was to serve did not survive the death of its creator. When Zamenhof’s daughter Lidia (1904–­42), an Esperantist and fervent universalist like him, found a spiritual home in the 1920s, it was in the Bahá’í religion, which, like Hillelism/Homaranismo, emphasizes the unity of all humankind. But she, like her father and her siblings, never withdrew from the Jewish community and during World War II shared the same fate as other Warsaw Jews.

SIX

With the exception of Ethical Culture, Jewish proposals for new, universalistic religions attracted few Jews and even fewer Christians. This is not surprising. Jews who wished to mute their difference were unlikely to be drawn to novel, unconventional creeds, even if their doctrines were inoffensive and their rites undemanding, for the new religions were themselves marginal and thus imperfect solutions to Jewish marginalization. Moreover, while these new creeds repudiated supernaturalism, they were still religious solutions. In the nature of things, they were unlikely to appeal to Jews whose predicament who were fleeing Jewishness more than was social and cultural—­ Judaism—­and whose interest in religion qua religion was tepid. There were more effective, less taxing ways to leave Judaism behind without becoming a Christian, especially in liberal societies, where religious affiliation was voluntary and divorced from civil status. In France, the United States, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, as secularization created ever larger religiously neutral spaces, living without religion became increasingly possible. As for Jews who dreamed that revolutionary socialism would eradicate intolerance and thus resolve the Jewish Question, a universalistic religion was beside the point. For them, salvation was this-­worldly, the inevitable consequence of the working out of materially determined historical forces.

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Why, then, was Ethical Culture a relative success? Why was it able to attract thousands of upper-­middle-­class American Jews over many decades? The probable explanation is that it was less novel in the American context than its counterparts elsewhere were in their contexts. Untrammeled religious ferment, which allowed new religions, denominations, and sects to sprout like weeds, was a fundamental characteristic of American religious life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. New religions, while unconventional, were less unconventional than in Europe. In addition, religious liberalism within both American Christianity and American Judaism sank deeper roots and took a more radical direction. Reform or unaffiliated Jews in the United States may have seen Ethical Culture as an evolved form of Reform Judaism, not as a radical departure. The great pains that Reform rabbis took, from the pulpit and in the press, to distinguish their faith from Ethical Culture indicate how close classical Reform—­with its anti-­ritualism and anti-­supernaturalism—­and Ethical Culture were, at least in the eyes of some American Jews. Any explanation of its success must also acknowledge the role of Felix Adler, who towered over the movement until his death and was, by all accounts, an unusually dynamic and captivating orator in an age of flourishing pulpit oratory. But whether successful or not, all of these schemes, even the most outlandish, warrant inclusion in any accounting of how Jews who found their Jewishness unbearable or irrelevant worked to transcend or erase it. With their passionate universalism and unquenchable optimism (or naïveté), they testify to the pervasiveness of the integrationist impulse in modern Jewish history and to the desperation of those who wanted to find security and acceptance while avoiding the moral hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty of converting without conviction. The irony is that all of these efforts to escape the narrowness of ethnicity bear the impress of the very origins from which their creators were in flight. As Cynthia Ozick remarked, universalism of this sort is “the ultimate Jewish parochialism.”80

8 In Baptism’s Wake How does it benefit our Lord and King to pour holy water on the Jews and call them Pedro or Pablo? For they keep their faith like Akiva and Tarfon! There is nothing to be gained from converting them. . . . Know, Sir, that Judaism is one of the diseases for which there is no cure. —Solomon ibn Verga, Shevet yehudah1 Two yeshivah students who had studied haskalah literature together in secret went their separate ways: one became a famous Hebrew writer; the other converted and rose in the world. One day, by chance, the two met. The one who had converted wanted to mollify his former friend and said to him: Even though I converted and became a goy, I remain completely Jewish inside. The writer looked skeptically at the convert’s hooked nose and replied: I can’t see what’s inside you, but I can see what’s on the outside.2

ONE

Radical assimilation—­whatever form it took—­was neither an unambiguous success nor failure, even before the introduction of racial laws in Nazi-­controlled Europe formally erased the distinction between baptized and unbaptized Jews. While Christian doctrine endowed baptism with the sacramental power to transform the essence of

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the Jew, washing away the stain of Jewishness and creating a new man or woman, it did not decisively shape how flesh-­and-­blood Christians thought about and responded to baptized Jews. In medieval and early modern Europe, long before the rise of systematic racial thinking, the Jewishness of former Jews often clung to them in one way or another in Christian eyes. Often this took the benign form of remembering and referencing the Jew’s former Jewishness. In extreme cases, as in the Iberian world, the consequences were tragic. What united these cases was the belief that Jewishness was a stable, enduring, and essential characteristic of the Jew and hence impervious to baptismal transformation. However heretical and subversive this notion was theologically, it was nonetheless deeply ingrained in the ways that Europeans thought about Jews before the nineteenth century. In this sense, racial notions of Jewishness were not entirely novel. Their widespread diffusion from the middle of the nineteenth century strengthened habits of thought that were already in place, sharpening them and lending them the authority of the natural sciences. Nonetheless, in some circumstances conversion was successful—­ successful in the sense that it enhanced to a greater or lesser degree the lives of baptized Jews and their descendants. The key questions are when and where and under what circumstances it was successful. For the efficacy of conversion in the modern period fluctuated over time and from place to place. Just as conversion rates were linked to shifts in the political and social status of Jews, their aspirations, and their outlook on the future, so too the power of conversion to improve their lot was tied to the specific circumstances in which it occurred. As a rule, conversion was more successful as an integrationist strategy in settings where the Jewish Question was muted, and less successful in settings where it was clamorous. In societies where “Jew-­ consciousness” was acute, radical assimilation “worked” patchily. It often provided short-­term benefits, like access to higher civil-­service and professional ranks, but much less frequently erased fully the Jewishness of converts—­and even of their children—­in Christian eyes. In such societies, knowledge of the origins of converts long survived their baptism and, more importantly, continued to count in social and cultural life. Radical assimilation “worked” best, providing both immediate and long-­term gains, in societies where it was less in demand, that is, in societies where Jews were less likely to cut their ties to Judaism for strategic reasons. Of course, some Jews who chose baptism for themselves or their children never saw withdrawal from the Jewish community as the royal road to total absorption. Many of them

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continued to move long afterward in circles that included intermarried Jews, converted Jews, “half Jews,” and professing Jews, content with whatever gains changing their legal status brought and hopeful about whatever benefits their descendants would derive. Assessing the efficacy of conversion in various historical settings is complicated by the fragmentary nature of the evidence about it. For obvious reasons, converts and their descendants did not publicize or dwell on their Jewish background, unless it became grist for their creative mill, as was the case with Benjamin Disraeli and Heinrich Heine, or an obsession, as was the case with Karl Kraus and Walther Rathenau. We learn about the fate of baptized Jews when they encountered obstacles to their integration—­when political opponents, professional rivals, and Jew baiters threw their Jewishness in their face. But what about those who succeeded in keeping their origins hidden—­those who changed their names (which was legally impossible in some states) along with their religion, who moved to new cities or neighborhoods where they were not known, who inherited physical characteristics that were not typically seen as “Jewish,” and who made few waves in economic, social, and cultural life and remained outside the public limelight? Converts like these did not leave a paper trail. Their invisibility to the historian is a hallmark of their success. Often it took several generations, a change of name and residence, and intermarriage (in the ethnic sense) in each generation for the Jewish past of a convert to fade from memory. Prince Hohenlohe, chancellor of Germany from 1894 to 1900, thought that if the father or the grandfather had been baptized “and if the son had refurbished the tarnished glory of some noble family with his inherited wealth by marrying one of the daughters, then people were prepared to disregard his race so long as this was not all-­too-­obvious in his facial features.”3 When this worked, the historian Adolph Leschnitzer (1899–­ 1980) recalled, even the grandchildren and great-­grandchildren of the convert were ignorant of their Jewish past.4 In such cases, the origins of the convert became visible only if his or her descendants attracted public notice and their background was uncovered. Whether innocent or malicious in intent, this unmasking in no way invalidated the earlier success of their ancestors in keeping a low profile. Many descendants of intermarried or converted Jews in Germany discovered their Jewish ancestry only after Hitler came to power and the state classified them as Mischlinge.5 As we examine the fate of converts and their descendants, we need to keep in mind that the most successful cases of radical assimilation often remain hidden from the historian’s view.

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TWO

Jews who became Christians in the eighteenth century fared better than those who chose the same path in later centuries. The number of converts was relatively small (with the exception of the large-­scale conversion of Frankists in Poland, a unique episode in every respect)—­so small that their integration was not unsettling to the Christian majority. While their background was not forgotten, it did not become a matter of public interest, attracting the attention of statesmen, writers, and churchmen. A convert here and a convert there aroused little reaction. Women who converted in order to marry into Christian families of status and rank were particularly successful in leaving their Jewishness behind because they took their husband’s name and joined his circle of family and friends. Jews in Georgian England who prospered in overseas trade, brokerage, and government loan contracting were often able to marry their children into gentry and aristocratic families, usually to younger sons, whom the law of primogeniture compelled to make their own way in the world. In 1735 Catherine da Costa Villareal (1709–­47), whose first husband died when she was twenty-­two (he was almost old enough to be her grandfather), married William Mellish of Blyth, Nottinghamshire, the younger son of a country squire whose fortune came initially from the Turkish and Portuguese trade. Her money allowed Mellish to enter Parliament in 1741. She was baptized one month after the wedding. When she obtained custody of her two children from her first marriage, after a struggle with her father, they too were baptized. Both of them made marriages that attached them securely to upper-­class society. William Villa Real (1729–­59) (as the name was spelled after his baptism) married a sister of the bishop of Gloucester in 1755, and Villa Real’s sister, Elizabeth (1728–­92), married William Monckton, eldest son of the first Viscount Galway (in the Irish peerage) in 1747.6 The wealthy widow Judith Levy (1706–­1803), who inherited the fortunes of both her father, the communal notable Moses Hart, and her husband, the diamond merchant Elias Levy, married her only child Isabella to the Honorable Lockhart Gordon, third son of the Earl of Aboyne in 1753.7 Four years later Samson Gideon (1699–­1762), the most prominent stockjobber and loan contractor of the mid-­eighteenth century, married his daughter Elizabeth (1739–­83) to the second Viscount Gage (also in the Irish peerage)—­with a dowry of £40,000.8 These were not brilliant marriages—­the viscountcies of Galway and Gage were Irish not English peerages—­but they were respectable

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and then some, and their offspring belonged, by birth and upbringing, to the upper-­class elite, even if not to its uppermost tier. Tellingly, when Samson Gideon, whose own wife was not Jewish, tried to find an aristocratic bride for his baptized son, Sampson Gideon, Bt. (1745–­ 1821), he discovered that his Jewish origins were “an insurmountable impediment, and the New Christian [the son] was repeatedly rejected for no other reason than because the father was an Old Jew.” Setting his sights lower, he then “found a learned law lord [Sir John Eardley Wilmot, Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas] who, not possessing the same prejudices which had influenced the lay tribe of patricians, consented to a matrimonial connection between his daughter and our hero.” 9 In 1789 Sir Sampson took his wife’s family name, Eardley, and was made a baron in the Irish peerage. This level of integration, however, was not always accompanied by amnesia about the origins of the Jewish or half-­Jewish partner. The memoirist Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, in commenting favorably on the generosity of Sir Sampson Gideon, wrote that he might have furnished the prototype of the virtuous Jew in an essay by the dramatist Richard Cumberland. The Annual Register of 1806 referred to Sir Manasseh Masseh Lopes (1755–­1831), a convert and the first person of Jewish origin to sit in the House of Commons, as “a Jew baronet.” When the distinguished lawyer John Adolphus (1768–­1845), whose father was a Jew and mother a Christian and who was raised as a Christian, defended the Life Guard officers accused of murdering two men in a riot at the funeral of Queen Caroline in 1821, a caricaturist depicted him with a brief inscribed “Jew v. Jury.”10 These examples, however, do not register outright resistance to the integration of persons of Jewish descent. Gideon, Lopes, and Adolphus were each successful in his own way. What they suggest is that even in societies that were open to moneyed newcomers, as Georgian England was, the Jewishness of persons of Jewish descent lingered. Whether it became a matter of public interest or outrage depended on the extent to which the individual was in the limelight. The experience of Benjamin Disraeli is a prime illustration of this, as we will see. In late eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­century Berlin, converted daughters from prosperous families were also able to contract marriages with lesser nobles. The two daughters of Moses Isaac-­Fliess, who made his fortune helping Frederick the Great debase the Prussian coinage during the Seven Years War, converted in 1780. In 1789 Rebecca married Lieutenant von Runkel, and Blümchen married Kammerassessor von Bose.11 The sisters Marianne and Sara Meyer,

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whose father Aaron Moses Meyer (d. 1797) was one of the wealthiest men in Berlin, converted in 1788 but were forced by family pressure to return to Judaism. After the death of their father, they converted once again. Sara married Baron Grotthus. Her younger sister Mari­ anne was courted in the 1780s by Christian von Bernstoff, son of the Danish ambassador in Berlin, but his father refused to consent to the marriage. The Saxon ambassador next announced that he would marry her but then reneged. In the end, she married the Austrian ambassador, Prince von Reuss. However, despite her title as Princess von Reuss, she was not considered hoffähig in Vienna and could not socialize in court circles with him. When he died in 1799, her deceased husband’s relatives refused to allow her to continue using his name and title, and only by petitioning the emperor was she allowed to style herself Frau von Eybenburg.12 The experience of Marianne Meyer illustrates the barriers that existed in Central Europe even in the late eighteenth century, when conversions were much less common than they would become a century later. Further evidence that conversion failed to disarm anti-­Jewish sentiment was the practice of converts from wealthy families marrying converts from the same milieu, a practice not found in England (where there were too few converts in any case to make this possible). In Berlin between 1770 and 1830, about one-­third of all converts who married took other converts as partners. Converts from wealthy families were even more likely to marry other converts, a pattern that continued even in the next generation in some cases.13 In addition to circumventing social prejudice, marriages between converts also served the strategic function of protecting and enhancing the wealth of already wealthy families. In the nineteenth century, there were multiple marriage alliances among the members of the formally Christian Warschauer, Oppenheimer, von Simson, and Mendelssohn banking families, for example.14 The unwillingness of German elites, both aristocratic and mercantile, to embrace converts unequivocally contributed to the emergence of a novel phenomenon in the Ashkenazi world: the creation of family and social networks that were ethnically Jewish but religiously mixed.15 Excluded frequently but not consistently from polite society, some converted Jews continued to socialize and do business with unconverted Jews. Exclusion alone, however, did not create these new social arrangements. They were as much the outcome of a shift in how some Jews regarded conversion. Historically Jews had viewed and treated converts as traitors who had betrayed their people and its most cherished beliefs.16 The newly baptized had ceased to make their

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home among Jews and had severed familial, social, and economic ties with them (with some exceptions in the case of business ties). The distance—­perceptual, social, theological, and physical—­between Jews and Christians had left no middle ground or neutral space in which Jews, former Jews, and Christians mixed freely and spontaneously. Premodern attitudes toward conversion began to weaken in some circles during the age of enlightenment and emancipation. One sign of the change was that after 1800, persons from prominent Berlin families who wished to convert no longer traveled to out-­of-­the way small towns to undergo baptism, far from the gaze of family and friends.17 Still, there were at this time many Jews, even unobservant, acculturated Jews, who continued to view conversion in a negative light. Some among the older generation were prepared to disown children who left the community. The Berlin Münzjude Moses Isaac-­Fliess, who died in 1776, disinherited any of his children who converted. Ashkenazi Jews in England included similar provisions in their wills through the early nineteenth century. When Joseph Arnsteiner (ca. 1756–­1811), son of the Vienna Court Jew Adam Arnsteiner (1721–­85), converted in 1778, his father literally drove him from the house and the family banking business. Although Joseph received a lump-­sum payment in compensation for losing his inheritance, he tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to reconcile with his father.18 In the early nineteenth century, tolerance of converts became more common. Parents who believed that one religion was as good as another, as well as parents who believed and observed little, were now willing to tolerate a change of faith. They did so because religious concerns were no longer paramount for them and because the meaning and substance of conversion was changing, not in a formal sense but in a practical one. Conversion was becoming a social practice rather than a rite of religious passage. Not only did converted Jews and unconverted Jews mix increasingly in the same circles, but even within the same family, as was the case in the Lewald family. The relations between converted and unconverted Jews replicated in many ways those that were found in converso communities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in which Jews (by religion), Christians (by religion), and persons who were neither fully one nor the other lived and worked together because ethnic and family ties took precedence over religious belief and practice. Still, it would be misleading to suggest that there was a wholesale transformation of attitudes among Ashkenazim in the West in the early and mid-­nineteenth century. There were Jews, for example, who,

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while willing to entertain and work with converts, were unwilling to tolerate conversion within their own family. When Karl Rothschild (1788–­1855) was looking for a wife, he ruled out women with converted relatives. He wrote to his brothers James and Amschel (1773–­ 1855) in 1816: “I could marry the most beautiful and richest girl in Berlin, which I would not do for all the treasures in the world, because here in Berlin, if she herself has not been converted, then a brother or sister-­in-­law has. . . . We ourselves have made our fortune as Jews, and we want nothing to do with such people.” Family pride, as much as religious conviction, dictated his choice. When Nathan’s daughter Hannah married a Christian in 1839, James was furious, largely, it would seem, because the marriage was an affront to the family and a challenge to his authority. “This marriage makes me quite ill. . . . She has robbed our whole family of its pride. . . . We shall have to forget her and banish her from our memory.”19 The classicist Jacob Bernays (1824–­81), who refused to be baptized to obtain an academic post, broke off all contact with his brother Michael (1834–­97), a historian of German literature, and forbade their mutual friends to speak of him in his presence, when the latter converted in 1856 to advance his academic career.20 Jacob Bernays’s attitude toward converts lived on in Eastern Europe until much later and in some places never waned. In the towns and villages of the Pale of Settlement, friends and relatives abandoned converts, driving them from their homes and jobs. When the brother of Chaim Abramov, who converted in 1897 to marry a Russian Orthodox girl, discovered, prior to the baptism, that Chaim was in love with the girl, he immediately forbade him to work in his shop and his sister evicted him from their dwelling.21 In interwar Poland, converts were excluded from almost all Jewish circles, except those of the deracinated, Polish-­speaking elite, to whom they were connected by family, social, and business ties. In 1931 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that “large numbers” of Polish Jews who converted to obtain government contracts or civil service positions were not notifying the Jewish communal authorities and were continuing to pay their communal taxes because, aware of the opprobrium attached to baptism, they wished to remain within Jewish social circles.22 In interwar Lithuania, where conversion was rare, converts risked social exclusion and physical and verbal abuse. In a suburb of Kaunas in 1930, a mob of Jews attacked the home of a recently settled convert and his wife and two children, smashing windows and ripping off the wife’s devotional scapular. In the village of Goriŝkė in 1933, Jews hounded and harassed

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a nineteen-­year-­old Jew who intended to convert and marry a Roman Catholic from another village. On one occasion, they beat him and locked him in a cellar and, on another, kidnapped him and carted him to another town. In 1935 a Jewish girl in the village of Krekenava fled local Jews crowding into her house to prevent her baptism and then eluded them by hiding in a hayshed during the night, eventually escaping to a distant estate.23 It is difficult to imagine incidents of such high drama occurring at the time in Western and Central Europe or in North America. In Eastern Europe, secular nationalists also voiced objections to the toleration of converts in Jewish social circles. Hayim Greenberg (1889–­1953) recalled that as a young man in prewar Odessa, Vladimir Jabotinsky “aroused in me anew the hatred for apostates” and that under his influences he took a vow “to persecute them to destruction, to cut off relations with them, to persuade others to cut off ties with them, and not to employ them.”24 When Rachel Ginsberg (d. 1957), youngest daughter of Ahad Ha-­Am (1856–­1927), married a non-­Jewish, radical Russian journalist in 1912, he broke off all relations with her, even though she did not convert when she married him (in a civil ceremony in Rome) and even though her husband later was nominally converted by a Reform rabbi in Paris. Chaim Tcherno­ witz (1871–­1949) spoke to Ahad Ha-­Am, at his wife’s urging, about reconciling with Rachel, proposing that Rachel’s husband undergo an Orthodox conversion and that they remarry in a traditional ceremony, but Ahad Ha-­Am replied, “In religious terms, a goy who converts says he is a Jew. But in my view, which is nationalist, even a goy who converts a hundred times remains a goy.”25 After Simon Dubnov (1860–­1941) learned that his youngest daughter, Olga, had converted in order to marry a poor, uneducated Ukrainian worker and fellow revolutionary, by whom she was pregnant, he did not speak to her for several years, although eventually he corresponded with her. They did not meet until 1921. Only the financial support of the journalist Ben-­ Zion Katz, as well as a little money from her mother, kept her from starving before then.26 Ahad Ha-­am and Dubnov were secular nationalists for whom intermarriage and conversion were both ideological and personal betrayals. The defections of their daughters, however wrenching personally, also undermined their life’s work, their advocacy of secular Jewish culture as the foundation of national creativity and continuity. It is not clear, however, that most middle-­class urban Jews followed their unbending ideological lead. In 1910 the Zionist newspaper Ha-­olam reported

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that East European Jews did not despise or persecute young converts, the majority of whom continued to live at home. It also noted that in Odessa converted children even accompanied their parents to Zionist meetings.27 When Ben-­Zion Katz told a St. Petersburg Jewish physician that he was upset by the number of conversions in the capital, the latter replied: “I well understand how you feel. It also pains me. But in St. Petersburg it is impossible to get worked up about converts as in a village.”28 Some activists and intellectuals in the immediate circles of Dubnov and Ahad Ha-­am also thought their ideological masters were too unbendingly intolerant in their rejection of their wayward daughters and urged them to relent—­as did their wives. Emblematic of the unwillingness even in nationalist circles to banish converts completely was Dubnov’s failure to gain backing for a public statement condemning converts.29 Since the failed revolution of 1905, there had been a rash of conversions every year of gymnasium graduates seeking admission to universities and technical institutes, a phenomenon to which the social milieu from which they came was becoming accustomed. A group of nationalist activists approached Dubnov to write a public appeal, censuring the converts and urging their social isolation. In the statement he prepared, Dubnov called on the Jewish public to take an unambiguous stance regarding converts: “He who rejects his people—­it is only correct that his people reject him!” And he warned those who were contemplating baptism: “You are standing on the threshold of treason. Halt! You may gain civil rights and personal benefits, but you will lose forever the great historical merit of belonging to a people of heroes of the spirit and saints!”30 When the appeal was presented at a public meeting of nationalists, it aroused opposition, for in the audience were persons who had friends and relatives who were converts, with whom they were unwilling to break. Their attitudes were similar to those of most middle-­class urban Jews in Western and Central Europe To return to Germany: As the number and visibility of converts mounted in the first decades of the nineteenth century, they experienced more difficulty in leaving their Jewishness behind and blending smoothly into the fabric of Christian society. Young, university-­ educated male converts making careers in the civil service, the academy, and the professions repeatedly voiced their dismay about the persistence of their Jewishness in Christian eyes. The cleverest expressions of this are found in the correspondence and prose of Heinrich Heine. While his aphorism about baptism as the entrance ticket to European society suggests that his attitude toward conversion was

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cynical, the totality of his remarks points in a different direction. Six months after his conversion he expressed regret to his friend Moses Moser: “I am now hated by Christian and Jew. I am very sorry that I was baptized. I do not see that I have prospered better; on the contrary, I have had nothing but bad luck since.” The strength of his regret found expression in the scorn he heaped upon Eduard Gans, whose conversion took place after Heine’s. In a letter to Moser in December 1825, the same letter in which he wrote that he would not have become a Christian “if the laws permitted the stealing of silver spoons,” he wrote that he had heard that Gans was “preaching Christianity and trying to convert the children of Israel.” He continued: “If he is doing so out of conviction, he is a fool; if out of hypocrisy, he is a scoundrel. I will not cease to love Gans, but I confess I would much rather have heard that Gans had been stealing silver spoons.” Better a criminal, he lamented, than a convert. In light of his previous comment about “the stealing of silver spoons” in regard to his own conversion, it is reasonable to speculate that he was talking as much about himself as about Gans.31 Heine’s distress was not religious. He was much too indifferent to Jewish ritual and worship to feel bad on that score. What he regretted was the weakness of character that baptism represented—­the kowtowing, the hypocrisy, the loss of self-­respect. In The Hartz Journey (1826), Heine excused his weakness, claiming that he embraced Christianity to save himself physically. He told how he climbed the Ilsenstein, a peak crowned with an iron cross. Reaching the top and looking down, he felt light-­headed and dizzy: “Overcome by giddiness I would surely have plunged in the abyss if I had not, in my soul’s dire need, clung fast to the iron cross. For doing this in the awkward position in which I found myself [a university-­educated Jewish male with no prospects] no one, surely, will blame me.” 32 But of course Heine did blame himself. Asked in 1827 by a visiting cousin about his well-­being, the poet replied, “Allen Meschumodim soll zu Mute sein wie mir”—­all apostates should feel as wretched as he did.33 If his treatment of converts in his writing in those years is an indication, his decision continued to preoccupy him. In the travel narrative The Baths of Lucca (1829), the poet targeted social-­climbing converts who conspicuously flaunted their Christianity. The corpulent marquis Christophoro di Gumpelino, formerly the Hamburg banker Gumpel, is visiting Lucca. A convert, he observes “with utmost strictness all the ceremonies of that Church which alone confers happiness.” When in Rome, “he keeps his own chaplain, on the same

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principle which induces him to keep in England the fastest horse, and in Paris the prettiest dancing girl.” Even when walking, which the overweight Gumpelino does with difficulty, he flaunts his new religion. At every rise he stops to recover his breath and sighs “O Jesu!”34 Gumpelino imagines himself a connoisseur of the arts and would like his manservant Hyacinth, the former Hamburg lottery agent and corn cutter Hirsch, to become a Catholic as well, so he too can become a cultivated man. But Hyacinth refuses, even though he also rejects Judaism, which he describes as a “misfortune” not a religion and which he would not wish on his worst enemy. “It brings nothing but abuse and disgrace,” Hyacinth declares. But, having judged Judaism harshly, Heine, whose attitude toward his Jewishness was ambivalent, immediately reverses himself. Hyacinth glowingly describes the Judaism of a simple Hamburg peddler, Moses Lump, who tramps the streets of the city six days of the week, struggling to earn a few marks. “Well, when Friday evening comes round, he goes home, and finds the seven-­branched lamp all lighted, a clean white cloth on the table, and he puts off his pack, and all his sorrows, and sits down at the table with his crooked wife and crookeder daughter, and eats with them fish which have been cooked in nice white garlic sauce, and sings the finest songs of King David, and rejoices with all his heart the Exodus of the children from Egypt.” Lump takes comfort in the knowledge that all the historic enemies of Israel (Haman, Antiochus, Titus, etc.) are dead while he, Lump, is still alive, eating fish with his wife and child. Hyacinth then stresses that the fish is delicate and the man happy and that he does not torment himself about being refined and accomplished. Heine envies him his simplicity, his happiness, his lack of sophistication and ambition (the very qualities that brought him, Heine, to the baptismal font). Two years later, in The Town of Lucca (1831), Heine mercilessly lampooned converts who zealously championed their new faith: “The Jews have thrown themselves into Christianity with such a will that they have begun lamenting the decay of faith in modern times, defending the doctrine of the Trinity to the death, even believing in the Trinity when the weather gets hot. They rage against rationalists, creep about the country as missionaries and religious spies handing out edifying tracts, show great talent in turning up their eyes in church, [and] pull the most sanctimonious faces”—­so much so that old Christians had started to complain that “Christianity has fallen altogether into the hands of the Jews.”35 While Heine never championed Christianity, the outrageousness of the passage suggests that he was displacing his own

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sense of acute discomfort. No doubt other converts, less gifted than Heine, experienced similar feelings of regret and remorse. In any case, becoming a Christian in the early nineteenth century was not, as it would become at the end of the century, a simple matter of changing one’s clothes to fit the occasion. Because his baptism failed to relieve his suffering, Heine came to think of his Jewishness as ineradicable. As he wrote bitterly in his poem “The New Jewish Hospital in Hamburg,” Jewishness was the worst of the three maladies (the other two were poverty and physical pain) from which Jews suffered because it was resistant to healing: Incurable deep-­seated hurt! No treatment By vapor bath or douche can help to heal it, Nor surgery, nor all the medications This hospital can offer to its patients.36 Water, in short, failed to cure what ailed the Jew. Ludwig Börne also marveled about how his baptism had failed to change how others saw him: It is like a miracle! I have experienced it a thousand times, and yet it remains eternally new. Some people criticize me for being a Jew; others forgive me for being one; a third even praises me for it; but all are thinking about it. They are as if caught in this magic Jewish circle from which no one can escape.37 Moses Hess also declared baptism ineffective in his Rome and Jerusalem (1862), but unlike Heine and Börne several decades earlier, he invoked an explicitly racial explanation. Neither radical religious reforms nor baptism, he wrote, saved Jews from “the nightmare of German Jew-­ hatred” because the Germans hated the religion of the Jews less than they hated “their race” and “their peculiar noses.” In this context, he cited an anecdote from the Dutch physiologist Jacob Moleschott’s Physiologisches Skizzen (1861) about the son of a converted Jew who spent several hours every morning in front of his mirror, comb in hand, trying to straighten his curly hair to give it a more “Teutonic” appearance. Hess’s conclusion was that Jewish noses could not be reformed and that black, frizzy Jewish hair could not be made blond through baptism or smooth through combing.38 Heine, Börne, and Hess wrote about their frustration with baptism’s efficacy with hyperbolic flourish, but beneath the rhetoric was

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a profound awareness of the failure of baptism to transform the lives of young Jewish men. (Jewish women faced fewer obstacles, in part because they were not pursuing professional and academic careers and not seeking public approbation.) However, recognition that baptism did not erase the Jewishness of the newly coined Christian did not mean that it was a futile move. Acknowledging or foregrounding the Jewishness of former Jews or their children did not translate inevitably into across-­the-­board discrimination and exclusion. Baptism was selectively effective (or ineffective). While it did not erase the origins of converts, it did allow them to marry Christians and advance their careers. If it had been as useless as Heine, Börne, and Hess suggested it was, fewer Jews would have made their way to the baptismal font. That said, their testimony captures the disappointment—­often bitter disappointment—­that converted Jews in Germany experienced when baptism was less transformative than they hoped it would be. In nineteenth-­century England, where fewer Jews chose to become Christians, the rewards of baptism were more easily enjoyed. The Jewishness of former Jews, while not obliterated, tended to count for less in public and private life. Take, for example, the public careers of the converted Jews who served in Parliament in the first half of the century: Sir Manasseh Masseh Lopes, David Ricardo (1772–­1823), and Sir Ralph Franco Lopes (1788–­1854). Their wealth obtained for them a seat in Parliament (this was before the Reform Act of 1832 disenfranchised corrupt boroughs), and, since they avoided grueling electoral contests, their birth generally remained in the background. The only occasion on which it may have mattered was in 1819 when Sir Manasseh was convicted of bribing voters (a common practice), fined one thousand pounds, and jailed for two years. It would seem that parliamentary reformers looking for a high-­profile case to boost their campaign chose Sir Manasseh, in part, because he was both foreign-­born (in the West Indies) and a former Jew. Even the career of Benjamin Disraeli, whose background loomed large in public and private conversation, reinforces the conclusion that in Britain, on balance, baptism paved the way to worldly success in a way it did not in Germany.39 Before launching himself into politics in 1832, when he unsuccessfully campaigned for a seat in Parliament, Disraeli, a Christian since age twelve, made a name for himself in fashionable circles in Regency London as a novelist, wit, dandy, and lover, especially of older, well-­connected married women. His charm, good looks, and talent trumped whatever uneasiness his origins, which were never in question, generated. However, after he entered politics,

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his Jewishness figured in his career in a way that it had not earlier. He was heckled on the hustings and caricatured in the press as a peddler, an old-­clothes man, and a Shylock. In the rough-­and-­tumble of election battles, his opponents exploited popular anti-­Jewish sentiment to harass and demean him. Later, when as prime minister he aroused the ire of Liberals, he was caricatured as a magician and charlatan and his policies denounced as “Jewish” and “un-­English.” His response to the abuse was extraordinary and unconventional. Instead of emphasizing his Protestant and English credentials, he embraced his Jewishness with exaggerated pride, touting the racial superiority of the Jewish people (especially the Sephardim) and insisting on their centrality to British Christianity. He crafted a definition of Jewishness, which he propagated with alacrity inside and outside Parliament, that allowed him to be simultaneously Jewish (racially) and Christian (religiously). At the same time he elaborated the myth of Sephardi superiority, which he had absorbed from his father, to establish his descent as aristocratic as that of the Tory grandees whom he aspired to lead and whom he eventually did succeed in leading. Some of his Tory friends and allies dismissed his racial braggadocio as an eccentricity while others took it seriously. Whatever the case, it was no obstacle to gaining high office and winning the favor of the monarch. It was Disraeli’s choice of career, above all, that thrust his Jewishness into the public limelight. Converted Jews who hoped to make their mark in England in other spheres of activity did not face such abuse, which was rife in politics. Disraeli’s first cousin the architect George Basevi (1794–­1845), whose father quit the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue at the same time as his brother-­in-­law Isaac did, won numerous high-­profile commissions: the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the Conservative and Carlton clubs in St. James’s (in association with Sydney Smirke), many Regency crescents in South Kensington, Belgrave Square, and seven churches, both Gothic and classical. Significantly, he was hired early in his career to add a set of twelve rooms to Balliol College, Oxford, the master of Balliol having previously rejected A.W.N. Pugin because he was a Catholic. Even Basevi’s manner of death witnessed his success in integration: He fell from scaffolding at Ely Cathedral while inspecting repairs to the west tower.40 The postbaptismal career of Sir Francis Palgrave, whose path to conversion I described in an earlier chapter, was equally successful. In 1827 he was called to the bar by the Inner Temple, and eventually developed a successful practice specializing in peerage cases. He entered public life, serving on commissions investigating the state

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of England’s archives and the reform of municipal corporations. In 1832 he was knighted for his service to reform and for his literary and antiquarian activity. In 1834 he was appointed Keeper of Records at the Chapter House, Westminster Abbey. And in 1838 he was made the first Deputy Keeper of the Public Records (that is, archivist of what became the Public Record Office), a post he held until his death. Still, Palgrave’s origins were never completely obscured. When Sir Anthony Panizzi prepared a catalog of the British Museum’s books, he listed all of Palgrave’s writings under his original name, Cohen, in order to annoy him—­which it surely must have, for Palgrave remained sensitive about his background, which he never discussed even with his family until very late in his life.41 Palgrave’s reluctance to acknowledge his origins reveals a dimension of the convert experience that was not always visible: the gap between professional and social achievement, on the one hand, and insecurity and fear about being exposed and humiliated, on the other. As often happened, Palgrave magnified the importance of his origins in the eyes of others. The Conservative politician and diplomat Sir Henry Drummond-­Wolff (1830–­1908), son of the eccentric, German-­ born missionary Joseph Wolff, and a Christian from birth, also worried about the exposure of his Jewishness and thus insisted that his father not mention him in his two-­volume autobiography (1861). Wolff explained to Disraeli, to whom he had sent a copy, that his son wished that “the public should forget altogether that he was of Jewish descent” and had opposed its publication even with the omission of his name. (Drummond-­Wolff had earlier tried to distance himself from his father, whose adventures in Central Asia and the Middle East were well known, by combining his middle name and his last name to create a new double-­barreled family name redolent of high-­born origins.) Disraeli, who, like Wolff senior, boasted of his Jewishness, lamented that Drummond-­Wolff was “so weakminded as to be ashamed of his race,” adding that everyone knew who his father was, in any case.42 Palgrave and Drummond-­ Wolff were successful public figures. Baptism made their Jewish descent irrelevant, even if they remained uneasy about the impact of its disclosure and dissemination. It could be argued, however, that if there had been more converted Jews like Francis Cohen and Henry Wolff seeking to make careers outside the world of commerce—­that is, if their numbers had been closer to their numbers in the German states at this time—­opposition to them would have been stronger. While there may be some truth in this, to emphasize this point to the exclusion of others would be to ignore critical

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differences between England and the German states in regard to political culture, economic development, and social structure. Numbers alone do not explain why Jewish integration, even the integration of converted Jews, was more problematic in the German states in the early and mid-­nineteenth century. The passage of time and a change in residence also aided converts and their descendants in obscuring their background and blending into English society. Converts from Central Europe who settled in Britain in the Victorian period thrived both socially and economically. A prominent example is the Hambro banking family, which came from Hamburg but made its fortune in Copenhagen before settling in England in the late 1830s.43 Other newcomers who were able to leave their Jewish origins behind include Cassel-­born Paul Julius Reuter (1816–­99) (né Israel Beer Josafat), founder of the financial news agency bearing his name, and Hamburg-­born Gustav Wilhelm Wolff (1834–­1913), founder of the Belfast shipbuilding firm Harland & Wolff, which built the ill-­fated Titanic. Wolff’s obituary in The Times, describing him as the son of “a Hamburg merchant,” did not mention his Jewish background.44 If the Jewishness of well-­known entrepreneurs like Reuter and Wolff failed to provoke public interest, how much the more so was this true in the case of converts from Germany whose economic success and public profile were less conspicuous. Their social absorption went forward more or less unimpeded. This was even more true in the case of their descendants. In 2014, for example, three pillars of the British establishment—­Boris Johnson, the mayor of London; David Cameron, the prime minister; and Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury—­counted Jewish immigrants among their ancestors. The paleographer Elias Avery Loew (Lowe, after 1918) (1879–­1969), son of a Russian Jewish immigrant to New York in 1892, was the great-­ grandfather of the mayor; Emile Levita (ca. 1829–­1909), a German Jewish banker who settled in Manchester in the 1850s, was the great-­ great-­grandfather of the prime minister; Bernard Weiler (Welby from World War I) (ca. 1867–­1930), one of four German-­born brothers who settled in London in the 1880s and prospered in the ostrich feather trade, was the maternal grandfather of the archbishop.

THREE

The spread of racial thinking from the last decades of the nineteenth century to the mid-­twentieth century limited even more the integrative power of baptism in Central Europe. While inchoate notions of

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an essential Jewishness predated the ascent of full-­blown, biologically derived notions of racial difference—­by centuries, in the case of Iberia—­the ubiquity of racial categories both in high and low culture, as well as the insertion of the Jewish Question into national politics, complicated even further the flight from Jewishness. As was the case earlier, resistance to welcoming converts was most pronounced in social life, but it was not absent in other areas either. While conversion continued to provide access to positions otherwise closed to Jews in Germany and the Habsburg territories, it was not as effective as it had once been. “Jew-­consciousness” was more pervasive, and more converts and their children were pressing for acceptance. Growing secularization may also have weakened confidence in the transformative power of Christian rites, encouraging more non-­Jews to view Jewish conversions in a cynical but realistic light—­as steps to improve lives in this world rather than in the world to come. One measure of the increase in suspicion of former Jews and their children from the late nineteenth century on was resistance to their occupational mobility. The sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–­1918), the baptized son of a Jewish father who had converted to Roman ­Catholicism and a Lutheran mother from a once Jewish family, was denied a full professorship in Germany until he was fifty-­six, in part because of his alleged Jewishness. He began teaching as a Privat­ dozent, an unsalaried position, at Berlin in 1885 and was promoted fifteen years later to ausserordentlicher Professor (“a halfway house of semi-­recognition,” in Peter Gay’s phrase), remaining there until he received a full professorship in 1914 at Strasbourg, which was intellectually and geographically on the periphery of German intellectual life. When he applied for a post at Heidelberg in 1908, the historian Dietrich Schäfer supplied the Bavarian authorities with a damning evaluation. He did not know, he wrote, whether Simmel was baptized, but it was irrelevant: “He is surely an Israelite through and through, in his outward appearance, in his bearing, and in his mental style.”45 The lawyer Paul Kayser (1845–­98) scaled the heights of the imperial bureaucratic ladder but was dogged by antisemitic-­fueled intrigue much of the way to the top. He studied law at university, became a judge, and was appointed a lecturer in law at Strasbourg in the 1870s, where he also tutored well-­born students on the side, including Herbert and Wilhelm Bismarck, sons of the German chancellor, whose patronage he later enjoyed. In 1875 he left Strasbourg for Berlin, where he became first a municipal judge and then a privy councilor for the Imperial Justice Office. In 1882 he converted and joined the Reich Chancellery. In 1885 he was appointed a jurist in the Foreign

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Office and became involved in drafting legislation for Germany’s new colonies. In 1890 he was appointed chief administrator of the colonial division of the Foreign Office, in part because conservatives in the emperor’s circle, who disliked Kayser for both his Jewishness and his views on the workers’ question, feared his possible appointment as Chief of the Civil Cabinet—­and the access to the emperor the post conferred—­and hoped to sideline him with colonial affairs. He served until 1896, when, unwilling to endure antisemitic attacks any longer, he resigned. While his devotion to German colonialism, a nationalist project dear to political antisemites, muted their criticism of him, it never compensated in their view for his Jewish origins.46 Other former Jews and descendants of former Jews who served the colonial movement in one way or another—­as explorers, administrators, and publicists—­faced similar challenges to varying degrees. The career of the Austrian civil servant Rudolf Sieghart (1866–­ 1934) illustrates the limitations to full integration for former Jews in fin-­de-­siècle Vienna. Born Singer in a small town near the Silesian-­ Galician border, he went to Vienna at age seventeen to study law. He changed his name, converted, and rose meteorically to become a power­ful technocrat in the office of successive prime ministers. However, he became unpopular with the heir to the throne, Franz Ferdinand, who was convinced that Sieghart was running “a Jewish conspiracy” against him, and he was demoted in 1910. He then was appointed head of the Bodencreditanstalt, a government bank, but was forced out here too after the death of Franz Josef in 1916, when antisemites persuaded the new emperor to drop him altogether.47 Gustav Mahler, whose appointment at the Court Opera in Vienna in 1897 required him to change his religion, recognized that his success did not mean baptism guaranteed acceptance more generally. When he asked the composer Engelbert Humperdinck to recommend a talented young conductor to him and Humperdinck recommended one of his pupils, Leo Blech, Mahler said, “Blech! Blech! Probably a Jew?” Humperdinck confirmed that Blech was Jewish and Mahler responded, “It won’t work, unfortunately, even if he has been baptized as you say. For the anti-­Semites, I still count as a Jew despite my baptism, and more than one Jew is more than the Vienna Court Opera can bear.”48 The rise and fall of Theodor Kohn (1845–­1915), archbishop of Olmütz, Moravia, is an even more vivid instance of how Jewish origins usually trumped Christian credentials at the turn of the century in the Habsburg lands.49 Kohn was not himself a convert, but the paternal grandson of Jews who became Catholics in 1826 (though

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they retained their emblematic name). Kohn, a professor of theology at the University of Olmütz, was unexpectedly elected archbishop by the canons of the Olmütz cathedral when they were unable to agree on a candidate from a noble family. Despite the antiquity of Kohn’s Christianity, the antisemitic press in the Habsburg Empire saw his elevation as evidence of the creeping “Judaization” of Christian Europe; later, when the Czech-­German conflict became more explosive, the Czech-­language press referred to his Jewish background repeatedly when denouncing what it saw as his pro-­German sympathies, linking his failings to deeply rooted racial characteristics. Opposition to him mounted, and in 1904 he was forced to resign. Like Archbishop Kohn, converts who had left Judaism earlier in the century but retained typically Jewish names, as well as their descendants, experienced anew the stigma of Jewishness as anti-­Jewish sentiment became more poisonous in the decades before World War I. A district court judge in Posen, who bore the name Friedländer and whose father had converted, petitioned the Prussian ministry of the interior in 1913 to change the family name. He explained that he had not been made a reserve officer after his military service, a blow from which he had never recovered, and that he wished to spare his two sons the denial of respect that had been his misfortune. The ministry rejected his request, as it did most petitions like his. Before 1900, Jewish converts in Prussia wishing to change their names encountered few obstacles, but in that year the minister of the interior decreed that the ministry had to approve all requests, thus, in effect, incorporating a racial definition of Jewishness into administrative practice. Applicants who had not been Christians for a long time, who had relatives who were not Christians, or who continued to socialize with unconverted Jews were likely to have their requests rejected. Thus, when the converted brothers Oskar Levy, a physician, and Alfred Levy, a lawyer, petitioned to change their name in 1903, the ministry turned down their request. Their mother, another brother, and two sisters remained Jews, and Alfred lived in the same house as his mother and unbaptized brother—­circumstances, that in the eyes of the ministry, prevented “a real fusion with Christianity for a long time to come.”50 In Russia as well, converts encountered bureaucratic opposition to effacing their origins. Alarmed by the increase in strategic conversions at the end of the nineteenth century, czarist officials introduced laws to distinguish converted Jews from the Orthodox Christian population. On the official documents of converts, such as internal passports and service records, they mandated the addition of the descriptive phrase

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“of Jewish origin” or, in some cases, “apostate from the Jews.” (The law did not apply to converts to Protestantism and Catholicism—­which may help explain why many Russian Jews chose to become Protestants.) When Pavel Eizenberg, who converted to Russian Orthodoxy in 1890 and married a Russian Orthodox woman in 1895, received a new passport in 1904 listing him as “Russian Orthodox, apostate from the Jews,” he petitioned the Ministry of the Interior to have the offensive words removed. He wrote that if he had known at the time of his baptism that he would have had to be burdened with this ambiguous identity, he would have thought twice about converting to Russian Orthodoxy. At the same time, state officials repeatedly rejected petitions from converted Jews to change their Jewish-­sounding names. This had been state policy since the mid-­nineteenth century, but by the end of the century, the number of requests from converted Jews was far greater. In 1893 Nicholas II personally instructed the Chancellery of Petitions to approve requests from converts only in the most exceptional cases. In practice, this meant officials usually only approved requests when the petitioners were first-­generation converts who could demonstrate that their surname was a burden in their new lives, that they had broken all their ties with Jewish relatives, that they had married Christians (by birth), that they were raising their children in the Orthodox faith, and that they were politically reliable and socially useful. Requests from second-­and third-­generation converts received a more sympathetic hearing.51 By the close of the nineteenth century, the rewards of baptism in illiberal European states were thus more circumscribed than they had been earlier. Conversion continued to overcome entry-­level discrimination in employment in the academy, the civil service, and the military, and, in Russia, restrictions on where Jews might live—­immediate, not inconsiderable, tangible benefits. However, conversion did not consistently neutralize objections to unhampered social integration and career advancement. Deep-­seated reservations about Jews, now reinforced by the widespread acceptance of racial thinking, had rendered baptism an imperfect solution to exclusion and discrimination in these states. In France, where conversion was much less common, the Jewishness of converts also lingered in the consciousness of neighbors and acquaintances but rarely hindered their entry into non-­Jewish circles. Proust, the baptized son of a Jewish mother and a Catholic father, foregrounds this theme in À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–­27). Although Charles Swann is the grandson of converts, the narrator, like

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others in the novel, regards him as a Jew even before the Dreyfus affair erupts and heightens their “Jew-­consciousness.” In addition to referring to him as a Jew, they attribute his politics, appearance (red hair and large nose), and ailments (eczema and constipation) to his Jewish extraction.52 Even Swann begins to identity himself as a Jew toward the end of his life. Mortally ill and under attack for his Drey­fusard views, he tells the narrator Marcel that “at heart all these people [the salonnards of the Faubourg Saint-­German] are anti-­Semites” and that “when all is said and done these people belong to a different race” than the Jews, among whom he now counts himself.53 Marcel observes that Swann has returned to “the paths which his forebears had trodden and from which he had been deflected by his aristocratic associations.”54 However, Swann’s “return”—­that is, his embrace of the Dreyfusard cause—­does not prevent the eventual social triumph of his daughter Gilberte, who marries the ultra-­aristocratic Robert de Saint-­Loup. As Marcel’s mother remarks, “Just imagine, poor Swann, who so longed for Gilberte to be received by the Guermantes, how happy he would be if he could see his daughter become a Guermantes!” But Marcel reminds her that Gilberte took the name of her mother’s new husband, after Swann’s death, and that she “was led to the altar as Mlle de Forcheville”—­which would not have made Swann happy.55 The willingness of French nobles and professionals to marry Jewish women, converted and unconverted, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries highlights the relative success of radical assimilation in the French context. (I use the term radical assimilation here, rather than conversion, since Jews and Christians often married in France without the conversion of the Jewish partner.) The marriage of Proust’s mother, Jeanne Weil (1849–­1905), was typical. The daughter of a religiously indifferent stockbroker, she was married at age twenty-­one to an epidemiologist fifteen years her senior whom she barely knew. His professional standing was high and his income considerable, but he had no personal fortune. She, however, brought to the match a dowry of two hundred thousand francs. He came from a devout provincial family—­none of whom was present at the wedding ceremony in the town hall of the tenth arrondissement—­but he was an atheist and a materialist, as befit a man of science in the Third Republic, and in any case, they lived in Paris, not the provinces, where intermarriages were not remarkable. Jeanne’s, for example, was not the first in her family. She had cousins on both sides who had been married in church. According to her son Marcel, writing many years later, she did not convert at the time of her marriage out of respect for her parents.56

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Well-­dowered Jewish women, and women of Jewish descent encountered little difficulty in finding wellborn Christian husbands during the Third Republic. Rothschild, Fould, Bischoffsheim, and Avigdor daughters married into old noble families.57 Expediency underwrote these unions, as it did the equally numerous unions between aristocrats and the well-­dowered daughters of nouveau riche bankers and industrialists from the United States. In the Jewish case, the Christian groom received a financial shot in the arm; the bride, an aristocratic name to obscure her former Jewishness. The ability of wealth to render the French Jew’s Jewishness irrelevant in these cases stands in contrast to the situation in Germany, where wealth rarely overcame Jewish descent in the marriage market. The fruitless search of the second-­generation Berlin banker Paul Wallich (1882–­1938) for a Christian wife of high birth highlights the resistance of the “Old Christian” upper class. A Christian from birth, Wallich worked assiduously to better his social status. In his youth this led him to pursue three goals: membership in a nationalist student corps at university, at which he failed; appointment as a reserve officer following military service, at which he succeeded; and marriage to a woman von Familie. As the converted son of a Jewish banker, the majority of the eligible young women he knew, women who were part of the Wallich family circle, were themselves Jews or of Jewish extraction. His overtures to non-­Jewish women from his own stratum met with rejection. Some former Jews in his position solved their marriage problem by taking wives from abroad, but Wallich was too uncosmopolitan to take such a step. In the end, out of necessity, he married down, taking as his wife a woman whose father was an academic instructor in a military school.58 Even the banker Gerson von Bleichröder, the richest man in Berlin and a (newly created) baron to boot, was unable to secure well-­born spouses for his baptized children. His only daughter, Else (1865–­ 1936), married the otherwise unknown Baron Bernhard von Uechritz (b. ca. 1862) in 1887, but the marriage was terminated almost at once, amidst much gossip about the baron. She retained his aristocratic name, however, and in 1889 married a converted Viennese Jew, Rudolf Biedermann von Tourony (1854–­1938), whose banker father Franz Josef ennobled in 1860. As we have seen, this strategy—­a union between converts—­was common among baptized German banking and industrial families; it not only circumvented the opposition of noble “Old Christian” families to contracting marriage alliances with them but also preserved their capital, which dissolute (but noble) in-­laws

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might otherwise squander. Bleichröder’s three sons, who, by virtue of their well-­known name, were at a greater disadvantage than their sister, fared worse in the marriage market. In 1888 his youngest son, James (1859–­1937), married the daughter of a prominent Hamburg Kommerzienrat; the marriage was scandal-­ridden, they divorced, and he then married Flora de Saint Riquier, a courtesan with a long history who was neither French nor aristocratic but, in fact, the daughter of a Berlin Jewish horse dealer. In 1904 Gerson’s eldest son, Hans (1853–­ 1917), married one of his mistresses, the daughter of a Christian launderer, who had already born him two children out of wedlock. Georg (1854–­1902), an avid sportsman and automobilist, did not marry.59

FOUR

For most converts (at least before 1933), the failure of baptism to erase completely and irrevocably Jewish difference was not a disaster. Its ability to advance careers and, less frequently, promote social mixing was sufficient. Most were not interested in forsaking friends and relatives who remained Jewish and seeking the company of Christians exclusively. For their part, friends and relatives were usually indifferent to religious traditions that made social relations with converts problematic. As I noted earlier, one hallmark of conversion in the modern period was that it did not inevitably result in the sundering of social and familial ties, at least in Western and Central Europe. Converts continued to find intimate companionship in “mixed” circles. Jews who disapproved of this indiscriminate intermingling were either few in number or silent. Most converts seem to have been content with this situation, satisfied to have obtained the advantages conversion conferred and perhaps hopeful that their children and grandchildren would benefit even further in the future from their decision to become Christians. A minority of converts, however, were more ambitious, restless, and sensitive to slights and exclusions. These converts and radical assimilationists were unable to resign themselves to the failure of radical assimilation to erase their Jewishness in the eyes of others. Bitter about their inability to escape their origins, despite having repudiated the Jewish religion, they worked even harder to keep the taint of Jewishness at bay, chiefly by allying themselves in print and in speech with enemies and critics of the Jews. They thus repeated antisemitic canards in public forums and private conversations to demonstrate

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how distant they were from their origins and to leave no doubt in the minds of others where their loyalties lay. Finding fault with Jews was for them a way of performing and exhibiting their non-­Jewishness. Closely allied to this behavior was an exaggerated enthusiasm for ­values, habits, and tastes that were seen to embody the opposite of Jewishness. In Imperial Germany, for example, this included uncritical worship of blond hair, dueling scars, military bearing, and a “Nordic” physique. Former Jews who were frustrated with the insufficiency of their radical assimilation included persons who returned obsessively to the topic of Jews and the dangers they posed, as well as persons who mouthed anti-­Jewish sentiments occasionally and whose feelings about Jews were ambivalent rather than unrelievedly hostile. A classic example of an ex-­Jew who remained preoccupied with Jewish behavior and influence after leaving the Jewish community was the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus (1874–­1936).60 In 1899 Kraus withdrew from the Gemeinde, declaring himself konfessionslos. (In 1911 he was baptized a Catholic—­the circumstances remain unknown—­but in 1923 he left the Church and publicly attacked it for its misdeeds.) In November 1899, one month after seceding from the Gemeinde, he published an article in his new journal, Die Fackel, urging Jews to abandon their collective identity. “Only by courageous cleaning up in one’s own ranks, only by the shedding of the peculiarities of a race that in its many years of dispersion has long ceased being a nation, can the torture be ended.” Through dissolution [Auflösung]—­conversion and intermarriage—­the Jews would find salvation [Erlösung].61 The Jewish Question was a fixation for Kraus for most of his life. Almost every issue of Die Fackel contained references to the malignant impact of Jews, especially Jewish journalists, on German-­language culture. He reproduced in his work the conventional antisemitic tropes of the day about Jewish greed, power, ambition, corruption, and solidarity (which, Kraus believed, was the cause of antisemitism). While Kraus was more moderate in his use of anti-­Jewish rhetoric after World War I, he never repudiated his faith that the disappearance of the Jews would be their salvation. The industrialist and statesman Walther Rathenau also remained obsessed with his Jewish origins after he withdrew from the Berlin Gemeinde in 1896. In an early essay, “Höre, Israel!,” published under a pseudonym in Maximilian Harden’s Die Zufunft in 1897, when he was thirty, he decried the behavior of Berlin Jews, describing them, in terms borrowed from racial antisemitism, as an alien, self-­segregating, malevolent Asiatic tribe. He instructed his readers to

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walk through the Thiergartenstrasse at noon on Sunday or spend an evening in the lobby of a Berlin theater. What a strange sight! At the very heart of German life, a distinct tribe of foreigners, resplendently and showily dressed, hot-­blooded in their deportment. An Asiatic horde on the sands of Mark Brandenburg. The affected contentment of these people does not reveal how many old, unsatisfied hates rest on their shoulders. . . . Mixing intimately with each other, cut off from the world without, they live in a voluntary, invisible ghetto—­a foreign organism in the body of the Volk rather than a living part of it.62 Rathenau was clear about who was responsible for the problems of the Jews. The state had made them equal citizens, allowing them to become Germans, but they had chosen to remain strangers. Blaming the victim, he unsparingly criticized their behavior. He told them to stop walking about in a loose and lethargic way that made them the laughingstock of a race raised in a strict military fashion. He ordered them to remake their bodies—­their underdeveloped chests, narrow shoulders, awkward feet, and effeminate plumpness. To regain their natural beauty, he urged Jewish women to cease smothering themselves in “bales of satin, clouds of lace, and nests of diamonds.”63 German Jews also needed to learn to speak correctly, to purge their speech of Yiddishisms, hyperbole, and vocal distortions. They needed to curb their unruly ambition, abandon their pursuit of honors and decorations, content themselves with social ties within their own milieu, repress their cleverness and irony, and cease bragging of their charitableness.64 Unlike Kraus, Rathenau did not envision the dissolution of the Jews by conversion. While still a university student, he recognized the futility of baptism. In a letter to his mother, he wrote that conversions of convenience were both undignified and ineffective: “a baptized Jew is never the same as a baptized Christian,” noting that a convert could not find a proper marriage partner, since he could marry neither a Jewish girl with an adequate dowry nor a Christian girl of the appropriate rank.65 In “Höre, Israel!,” he added another objection to baptism. Were large numbers of Jews to become Christians, the hatred that had been directed toward them as Jews would be transmuted into hatred of them as converts. If the answer was not baptism, then what was it? His response was as vague as most assimilationist proposals: conscious self-­cultivation and absorption of German ways, shedding of tribal attributes rather than superficial mimicry. The goal was to produce “not imitation Germans but

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Germanly conditioned and educated Jews”—­that is, Jews like Rathe­ nau’s idealized image of himself.66 Rathenau republished “Höre, Israel!” under his own name in 1902, but in the years immediately before World War I he repudiated the racial thinking that underpinned it and did not allow it to be reprinted.67 Perhaps he also regretted its intemperate tone. At the same time, he published three additional essays on the Jewish Question in early 1911, collected in Staat und Judentum: Eine Polemik, in which, while reiterating the futility and unseemliness of baptism, denounced public policy that demanded baptism as an entry ticket as outdated and unjust. However, if he no longer exhibited his Germanness by censuring Jews, he continued to behave in ways displaying uncritical reverence for that which was seen as authentically German (and hence not Jewish). From late 1913 until his death, he cultivated and sustained a close, even intimate, friendship with Wilhelm Schwaner, an outspoken antisemite and volkisch writer, even subsidizing his work financially.68 Albert Einstein, who fruitlessly solicited Rathenau’s support for Zionism, noted that Rathenau “was in love with Prussianism, its Junker class, and its militarism.” While, like Karl Kraus, he reveled in aristocratic connections, he also struck up friendships with “very inconsequential people” whose sole distinction was their blond hair, blue eyes, and “Nordic” racial features, according to his friend Count Harry Kessler. Einstein also recognized that Rathenau was “a person inwardly dependent on the recognition of men much inferior to him in their human qualities.”69 Throughout his life Rathenau was obsessed by consciousness of his origins. In Staat und Judentum, he recalled, “In the years of his youth there is a painful moment for every German Jew that he remembers for the whole of his life—­when he is struck for the first time by the consciousness that he has entered the world as a second-­class citizen and that no ability and no merit can liberate him from this situation.”70 Emblematic of his failure to “liberate” himself was his confession when first introduced to Bernhard von Bulow, German chancellor from 1900 to 1908: “Your Highness, before I am worthy of the favor of being received by you, I must make an explanation that is also a confession. Your Highness, I am a Jew.”71 The “confession” was entirely unnecessary since the chancellor, like everyone else in public life, already knew Rathenau was Jewish. This kind of behavior led some of his friends to conclude that Rathenau used his obsession to his emotional advantage, wielding it to dominate conversation. ­Kessler, for example, noted in his diary that at a lunch with Rathenau,

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he and the other guests sat for three hours under Rathenau’s “spell” as they talked about the Jewish Question. In 1911 the playwright Carl Sternheim told Kessler that he admired the way Rathenau paraded his Jewishness and used it as “a battering ram” to carve out a unique position in a society that despised Jews. It’s perfectly genial, the gesture with which he enters before society as he-­who-­cannot-­become-­minister-­because-­of-­his-­Jewishness. This way he appears as much greater than the average minister, namely as a symbol, whom one wants to invite over, who always attracts attention to himself. Out of this weakness he has made a strength, out of failed ministerial candidate the most regarded man in Berlin.72 Kessler agreed with Sternheim’s characterization, declaring Rathenau “a great dandy, the dandy of Judaism,” much like Benjamin Disraeli, who also paraded his Jewishness, but without Disraeli’s “devilish spirit.” 73 Whether Sternheim and Kessler were correct about the strategic use to which Rathenau put his sense of being Jewish is not the point. What counts is their awareness of how much Rathenau’s consciousness of being Jewish weighed on him. The Berlin critic and editor Maximilian Harden, a friend of Rathe­ nau until World War I, also labored to distance himself from popular, especially anti-­liberal, constructions of Jewishness.74 Born Felix Ernst Witkowski, he converted and changed his name at age sixteen. According to Theodor Lessing, who first met Harden in Berlin in 1890, he experienced his Jewish origins as “a strain, a burden, and a liability.”75 As editor of Die Zukunft (1892–­1923), Harden vigorously criticized the prominent role of Jews in the economy and the press. When called an antisemite, he defended himself by claiming that “the fight against Semitism, when conducted with conviction, is no more contemptible than the fight against Catholicism, capitalism, socialism, and Junkerdom.”76 Addressing his Jewish readers in Der Zufunft, he asked them, “What do you really want? Make clear whose affairs really concern you—­Germany’s or Zion’s?”77 Provocations like these, unsurprisingly, did not erase the popular view that he was a Jew. This may explain why he was particularly sensitive to the charge that he converted for opportunistic reasons. He disingenuously told a Berlin audience in 1925 that he had had no ulterior motive and that he had changed his religion because “the myths and ethos of Christianity intoxicated and enthused” him while he was a student at the fashionable

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Franzöische Gymnasium. To concede that the spur to his conversion had been convenience, not conviction, would have been to acknowledge that he had acted in a characteristically “Jewish” way—­that his behavior had been devious, opportunistic, and unprincipled (charges, not coincidentally, that he leveled regularly at the Berlin press).78 Rathenau, Harden, and Kraus were acute cases of radical assimilationists who were unable to leave their origins in the past. In one sense, this is unremarkable. In Central Europe most ex-­Jews in public life were not allowed to forget their Jewishness and blend into their surroundings. Non-­Jews, friends and enemies alike, continually reminded them of it. Nonetheless, it is one thing to be reminded of one’s background and another to think, speak, and write about it obsessively. This is a critical distinction. Philip Roth captured it in his novel I Married a Communist (1998), when Murray Ringold, the ­novel’s chief narrative voice, derides his former sister-­in-­law, Eve Frame (Brooklyn-­born Chava Frumkin), an actress who hides her Jewish origins, for not being content with passing but for spouting antisemitism as well: You’re an American who doesn’t want to be your parents’ child? Fine. You don’t want to be associated with Jews? Fine. You don’t want anybody to know you were born Jewish, you want to disguise your passage into the world? You want to drop the problem and pretend you’re somebody else? Fine. You’ve come to the right country. But you don’t have to hate Jews into the bargain. You don’t have to punch your way out of something by punching somebody else in the face.79 Roth understands that radical assimilation and bad-­mouthing Jews, while linked, are not inevitably and inextricably so. Passing is one thing; obsessing about Jews another. While passing was not an option for Rathenau, Harden, and Kraus, as it was for Roth’s fictional actress in twentieth-­century America, their obsession with the Jewish Question, their inability to relegate it to the sidelines of their lives, was not an unavoidable consequence of their repudiation of Judaism. The Jewish Question weighed on them, possessing and consuming them, in a way that it did not most high-­profile radical assimilationists. By virtue of their emotional development, they were unable to stop picking at the scab of their Jewishness, a festering sore they could not leave alone. This testifies not only to the turmoil of their emotional lives but also to the potency of “Jew-­consciousness” in Central European

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society more generally. The conjunction of the two—­inner turbulence and public preoccupation—­was for them unrelentingly burdensome. High-­strung intellectuals were not the only German and Austrian converts to parade their negation of Jewishness in public. The Berlin-­ born refugee historian Henry Pachter (1907–­80) recalled that the converted Jewish boys in his class overcompensated for their background “by voicing their patriotism strongly.”80 In his memoirs, Arthur Schnitzler wrote of a baptized medical student during his own years at the University of Vienna (1879–­85) who agitated to prevent Jews from receiving financial aid from a club that loaned money to needy medical students. (Jewish students from Hungary, Bohemia, and Moravia were the greatest beneficiaries of the assistance, which was provided largely by Jewish donors.) When the convert spoke at the club, “with the false objectivity of the renegade” cleverly knowing how to defend “the viewpoint of his wretched but in all probability sincerely convinced, fellow members, whose favor he was trying to curry,” he became the butt of a popular slogan at the time: “Anti-­Semitism did not succeed until the Jews began to sponsor it.” Schnitzler also told of a strikingly handsome, impeccably dressed, athletically trim friend, Louis Friedmann, a fencer, ice skater, and Alpine climber of repute, with a Jewish father and a Christian mother, who “was determined to remain single, or at least have no children, so that the hated Jewish blood flowing in his veins from his father’s side might not be propagated.”81 In the 1920s and 1930s a handful of converts in Germany overcompensated for their background by expressing sympathy for and identifying with Nazism. One example was Sir Nicholas Pevsner (1902–­ 83), the most influential architectural historian in twentieth-­century Britain.82 The son of a successful Russian-­born fur trader who had settled in Leipzig, Pevsner was from his youth acutely aware of feeling different from his gymnasium schoolmates—­by virtue of his physical awkwardness (gangling and unathletic), emotional self-­consciousness, and “Jewish” appearance (he described his nose as “big, crooked, Jewish”)83. At age sixteen, he confided to his diary that what he loved in people was everything he was not. “He yearned to be ordinary, simple, disciplined, Prussian, and respectable.”84 Unlike his cosmopolitan mother and dissolute older brother, he was an uncritical nationalist—­ and self-­admitted antisemite. He noted in his diary: “I am . . . a strong anti-­Semite and can only get over this by becoming a christened non-­ Jew, amongst other non-­Jewish Jews. Once I can ignore the solidarity that is being forced on me, then perhaps this anti-­Semitism will become less raw and aggressive.”85 He became a Lutheran in Potsdam

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in April 1921, a few weeks before beginning his university studies in Munich. Two years later he married into one of Leipzig’s best families. (Ironically, his wife’s mother was Jewish by birth.) When Hitler came to power, Pevsner did not feel threatened. His conservative patriotism, as well as his scholarly work on the links between architecture and “national character,” made him receptive to Hitler’s nationalism, while his aversion to his background left him indifferent to and uncomprehending of the movement’s antisemitism, from which, in any case, he felt his Lutheranism shielded him. Even after he lost his post as Privatdozent at the University of Göttingen in April 1933, Pevsner remained a supporter of the new order. He told a visiting Englishwoman that he wanted this movement to succeed. There is no alternative but chaos, and I cannot want my country to be plunged into civil war. There are things worse than Hitlerism; I think your press in England does not realize that. And there is much idealism in the movement. There are many things in it which I greet with enthusiasm, and which I myself have preached in my writings.86 He also published articles in the German press defending Joseph Goebbels in his controversy with Wilhelm Fürtwangler, principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, who questioned the regime’s ban on employing Jewish musicians. Pevsner argued that art must serve the higher interests of the state and that individualistic artists who weakened the state did not deserve its support. When he moved to England in October 1933 to seek employment, he did not immediately discard his sympathy for Nazism. He also remained blind to the threat that Nazism posed to persons with Jewish “blood.” Despite the warnings of English friends, he and his wife sent their children in August 1939 to visit his parents in Leipzig and her father at his summer home near Naumburg. His daughter Uta was stranded there and was forced to spend the war in Germany living under a false identity, narrowly escaping arrest several times. Later, as a well-­known authority on British architecture, Pevsner continued to hide his true identity, claiming on BBC radio in 1954, for example, that “my origins are in a part of Germany which is Protestant and in this country I would certainly be called very low church indeed.”87 Converted and disaffiliated Jews at war with their origins were also common figures in German-­language fiction in the late nineteenth-­ and early twentieth centuries. While literary representations cannot

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reveal the extent of a historical phenomenon, they do offer imperfect evidence of public familiarity with it. They also convey, in the way that only fiction can, the emotional intensity of the discomfort that Jewish origins continued to provoke after their ostensible repudiation. Thomas Mann’s novella The Blood of the Walsungs (1905) offers a devastating and disturbing portrait of the nouveau-­riche, deracinated Aarenhold family. (Mann drew on his own in-­laws, the wealthy Jewish Pringsheim family of Munich, for inspiration.) The children despise their father “for his origins” and “for the blood which flowed in his veins and through him in theirs.” The nineteen-­year-­old twins Siegmund and Sieglinde, whose incestuous union climaxes the novella, are precious and pampered. Despite the luxury surrounding them—­Mann describes their exquisite dress in sensuous detail—­they are unable to distance themselves from their Jewish bodies. Siegmund’s beard, for example, is “so strong that when he went out in the evening he was obliged to shave a second time.” Studying himself in a full-­length mirror in his bedroom, he notes each mark of his racial inheritance: “the slightly drooping nose, the full lips that rested so softly on each other; the high cheek-­bones, the thick black, curling hair that grew far down on the temples and parted so decidedly on one side; finally the eyes under the knit brows, those large black eyes that glowed like fire and had an expression of weary sufferance.”88 Thomas Mann’s older brother, Heinrich, also drew a portrait of a convert whose Jewishness remains a disruptive, unwelcome element in his life. In his Man of Straw (1914), the lawyer Jadassohn works in the public prosecutor’s office in a small town. He has pronounced “Jewish” features and, perhaps in compensation, anti-­liberal political views. The other characters refer repeatedly to his Jewishness, focusing, in particular, on his pushiness. Jadassohn, in turn, expresses contempt for Jews, mimicking their speech and deportment. He suffers, however, from a physical trait that others see as a mark of his Jewishness: prominent ears. When he appears in an amateur theatrical performance, they become a focus of attention and derision. At the close of the novel, Jadassohn sets off by train for Paris, where he is to have cosmetic surgery to reduce the size of his ears. As he tells the novel’s protagonist, “I am about to adapt my outward appearance more appropriately to my patriotic convictions.”89 While outsized ears were not a common marker of Jewishness in German literature, the procedure to which Jadassohn is submitting himself recalls the pioneering work in cosmetic rhinoplasty by the Berlin Jewish surgeon Jacques Joseph (1865–­1934).

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FIVE

Given the level of resistance to unqualified integration in Germany and Austria—­even for the children of baptized Jews, in some cases—­it is not surprising that Central Europe is the locus classicus for accounts of Jews who abandoned Judaism but continued to wrestle with their Jewishness long afterward. However, while more widespread in German-­speaking lands than elsewhere, this phenomenon was not unique to Central Europe. Wherever the stigmatization of Jewishness was present in high and low culture to one degree or another (which was pretty much everywhere before the late twentieth century), converts, the descendants of converts, and the intermarried who moved in non-­Jewish circles experienced it. Most were able to ignore or dismiss it, probably because they saw it as an intermittent irritant rather than a persistent sore. But everywhere there were persons who, by virtue of their ambition and constitution, were unable to do so. In societies where Jewish integration was advanced, like Great Britain, the United States, and France, they were exceptional figures, but they were, nonetheless, as vocal as their Central European counterparts in their efforts to distance themselves from their background, which was for them a curse, at worst, and an ambiguous inheritance, at best. In England, the best-­ selling but now largely forgotten novelist Gilbert Frankau (1884–­1952) well illustrates the phenomenon.90 Frankau’s parents, the London cigar merchant Arthur Frankau (1849–­ 1904) and the novelist Julia Frankau (1859–­1916), raised Gilbert and his three siblings as nominal Anglicans. Gilbert married three times, each time to a Christian, and was well integrated into English society. Despite this, his Jewishness continued to haunt him his entire life. In the novels he wrote in the late 1910s and 1920s, he introduced minor Jewish characters, with exaggerated and often crude stereotypical features, whose presence, as Jews, is incidental or irrelevant to the narrative. In his best-­selling Peter Jackson (1919), the Jewish cigarette manufacturer Marcus Bramson is stout, voluble, wheedling, and gesticulating, wears shabby, greasy clothes, and, although worth a quarter of a million pounds, spends nothing and is content to live “in an eighty-­pound villa at Maida Vale.” His cousin Sam “Pretty” Bramson, who panics at the outbreak of war, fearing conscription, and is later discharged from the army for health reasons, is associated with cowardice and effeminacy. Roddy Marks, a swarthy, olive-­skinned, dark-­haired entertainment mogul in Life—­and Erica (1925), is linked to sexual danger and corruption. Although the innocent Erica, who is

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shocked to discover that an old school chum has become his mistress, admits that Marks’s face is handsome, she also thinks it too “swarthy” and “oriental.”91 Frankau continued to use crude stereotypes like these throughout his writing career. In addition, he incorporated elements of racial thinking into his fiction, insisting on the persistence of racial traits in the descendants of former Jews. In embracing notions that challenged the efficacy of social and cultural self-­transformation, he was, of course, echoing views that were common at the time. But there was more to his “racism” than this. His repeated insistence on the indestructability of racial traits and their power to assert themselves even in the most deracinated representatives of Jewry was an autobiographical confession, an admission of his own psychological inability to set aside his Jewishness. Racial thinking allowed him to understand his powerlessness to free himself from his ancestral past. In the mid-­1920s, Frankau began employing another literary strategy to distance himself from un-­English “Jewish” behavior. He began to distinguish between “good” and “bad” Jews, a technique that his mother employed in her work. In Masterton (1925), a political novel inspired in part by Italian fascism, Adrian Rose is a model of the right kind of Jew. He is an Eton-­educated (like Frankau) successful playwright, a decorated war hero, “a forceful rock of a man,” with “only slightly Hebraic nostrils” and “an even less Hebraic mouth,” who looks “more like an old-­time prize-­fighter than a modern playwright.” What makes Rose a “good” Jew is his politics: He is a right-­wing patriot—­ anti-­union, anti-­communist, anti-­socialist, and pro-­imperial—­and the founder of the fictional right-­wing Fellowship of Loyal Citizens. Left-­ wing Jews are, of course, “bad” Jews. As Rose explains to the politician Masterton, “these Bolshevik Jews are the dregs of my race” and they are “just as much anti-­Gentile as the dregs of yours are anti-­Semite.”92 Given the prominence of the Jew-­as-­Bolshevik theme in English antisemitism in the 1920s, Frankau’s willingness to exploit this association reveals his eagerness to distinguish between “good” and “bad” Jews. The Nazi takeover in 1933 and the regime’s early measures to evict Jews from German life did nothing to temper his enthusiasm for fascism. In May 1933 he published a defense of Nazism in the Daily Express with the provocative title “As a Jew I Am Not against Hitler.” Here he argued that Hitler’s attempts to rid Germany of Jews who were not “good” Germans were justified. Writing as an Englishman “of Jewish blood, though not of Jewish faith,” he maintained that there was “a substratum of truth” to the Nazi charge that Jews were not Germans. “Many German Jews are entirely out of sympathy with

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the aspirations of the Nordic tribes among whom they have made their homes.” As evidence, he cited the Communist movement, which he believed was fomented largely by Jews. Such Jews imperiled every country they inhabited, he wrote, and Hitler was certainly justified in kicking them out.93 While Gilbert Frankau’s enthusiasm for Hitler did not last, he never abandoned his right-­wing views. For him, conservative patriotism was integral to the persona he constructed, polished, and presented to the world. He was always faultlessly groomed and impeccably dressed, his demeanor suave and controlled. He wished to be seen as a sophisticated man-­about-­town, energetic, arrogant, dashing, and tough, like the protagonists in his novel. He hunted, fished, fenced, and motored, as if he were a born aristocrat. But much of this was a pose, overcompensation for fears and doubts about who he really was. As a result of shell shock, he suffered a nervous breakdown while serving in the First World War and was invalided out of the army in 1918. He confessed to his closest friends that he was terrified of riding and was haunted by the fear that at bottom he was really a coward.94 And if his fiction is a guide, he was also tormented by the knowledge that he was a Jew by descent. A generation later the columnist Michael Wharton (1913–­2006), whose reactionary satire appeared for more than forty years in the Daily Telegraph under the name Peter Simple, exhibited the same symptoms of discomfort and unease as Frankau.95 Wharton’s German-­ Jewish paternal grandparents settled in in Bradford in the 1860s and, according to Wharton, were actively hostile to all things Jewish—­so much so, that his grandmother ensured that none of her five children married persons of Jewish descent. Wharton himself believed that his father’s surname, Nathan, contributed to his lack of social success at Oxford and changed it in the late 1930s to escape identification as a Jew—­to remove a label, as he put it, that had “immense potency” in the eyes of others (Wharton was his Christian mother’s maiden name). To cement his escape from Jewishness, he frequently indulged in antisemitic and racist comments in his columns. In 1989, for example, he attacked “the fanaticism and unappeasable thirst for vengeance” of Jews who were campaigning for the removal of a Carmelite monastery from Auschwitz and lashed out at “the thirst for revenge of international Nazi-­hunters and their assorted sympathizers” who were calling for new war crimes trials. Their thirst was so great, he wrote, that it could not be satisfied—­at most, only slaked. In 2002 he claimed that Ariel Sharon had “ended the Jews’ virtual immunity from hostility”

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since the defeat of the Nazis. Antisemitism was stirring, and, Sharon aside, “the immense influence the Jews have in the world,” which he speculated was not “always, everywhere and in every way an influence for the good,” was to blame.96 In 1967, following the Six-­Day War, his son Nicholas, who taught philosophy at the University of Liverpool, reverted to the family’s original name, Nathan, declaring that since he looked Jewish he might as well be Jewish. Wharton’s initial impulse was to disinherit him but in time he became reconciled to his decision. When his son later announced that he intended to marry a half-­Jewish girl, Wharton “strongly advised him against thus reinforcing the Jewish element in his prospective offspring.”97 In twentieth-­century France, where resistance to Jewish integration was weaker than in Central Europe, some (but not many) ostensibly deracinated Jewish writers and intellectuals also found themselves unable to transcend their Jewish pasts. The popular Russian-­born writer Irène Némiriovsky, who became a Catholic only in 1939 but was always indifferent to Jewish religious and political concerns, repeatedly deployed anti-­Jewish stereotypes in her interwar fiction.98 Her first major success, David Golder (1929), features swarthy, grasping Jewish men, often with vicious faces and hooked noses, obsessed with buying and selling, in whom greed trumps all other sentiments. Their pampered, self-­absorbed, vapid Jewish wives are weighed down with furs, gowns, jewels, and furnishings. Némirovsky continued to employ anti-­Jewish tropes and caricatures in work that followed David Golder, especially in The Ball (1930) and The Wine of Solitude (1935), although with less viciousness than earlier. At the same time her closest literary friends were right-­wing antisemites in whose journals she published much of her work. For them, she was what one literary scholar called an “acceptable” Jew—­“one who could be frequented by people who normally refused to tolerate Jews in politics and who shunned them in society,” by antisemites who “could flatter their consciences with the notion that they had a Jewish friend who even shared some of their suspicions” about Jews.99 Despite her lifelong political naïveté, which ultimately prevented her from taking steps to save her life, she was aware, at least by 1935, that her portraits of Jews were offensive, for she told a Paris Jewish newspaper that year that if Hitler had been in power at the time she wrote David Golder, she would have been less caustic. Four years later she wondered, “How could I write such a thing? If I were to write David Golder now, I would do it quite differently. . . . The climate is quite changed.”100 Still, in one of her last ­novels, The Dogs and the Wolves (1940), she returns once again

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to Jewish themes—­the persistence of Jewishness and the struggle for survival in a hostile world—­but now with more sympathy than hostility. She still foregrounds Jewish restlessness, materialism, and ambition, but she undermines the logic and coherence of antisemitism as well. What is remarkable about this late novel is not her rejection of the crude stereotyping that marked her earlier novels but her preoccupation with the meanings of Jewishness—­at a point when she was no longer formally a Jew and her political status was precarious. Like Frankau, but in a much more intense way, she could not relax the hold that Jewish associations exerted on her. Only in her masterpiece, Suite Française, which she wrote between summer 1941 and her arrest and deportation the following summer (it was not published until 2003), were Jews no longer present. But even here, their absence—­surprising in a novel by a Jewish writer about the debacle of June 1940 and the German occupation—­is surely meaningful. Perhaps it took the catastrophe of the German occupation to free her finally from her earlier preoccupations. A more complex example of a radical assimilationist in France who turned on her Jewishness with a vengeance in the interwar years is the moralist Simone Weil, whose path toward Catholicism I traced in an earlier chapter. Weil’s unqualified antipathy toward Judaism and the survival of the Jewish people took two forms. It expressed itself theologically in the heterodox, Marcionite view that the God of the Hebrew Bible and the God of the Gospels were not the same being: The former was jealous, cruel, and vengeful; the latter loving, merciful, and compassionate. The Hebrew scriptures, consequently, were tales of violence, pollution, bloodshed, brutality, lust, incest, drunkenness, deceit, theft, and fraud (a reading that owed more to Voltaire than to the Church). Indeed, the violence of her anti-­Judaism and the denial of any continuity between Judaism and Christianity that went with it were the chief theological obstacle to her acceptance of baptism, even on her deathbed in an English hospital in 1943.101 Hostility to Judaism, however, did not drive the spiritual and emotional quest that led her to Christianity in the first place. Rather, it came to fruition, finding expression in the notebooks she kept in the 1930s and early 1940s, only after the position of Jews in Central and Western Europe had deteriorated.102 The genesis of her vitriol toward Judaism went hand in hand with the second way in which her antipathy toward Jews expressed itself. At no time in the decade before her death did she ever express interest in (let alone sympathy for) the plight of the Jews. Given their persecution

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under Vichy, this took some resolve. For example, between the fall of 1940 and the spring of 1942, while living mainly in Marseilles (along with thousands of other Jewish refugees), she reached out religiously to a Dominican monk, J. M. Perrin, who became her spiritual confidant. Perrin later recalled how little she understood the Hebrew Bible and how, when he tried to show her its beauty, spirituality, and connection to Christian scripture, she refused to reconsider her position. Indeed, she tried to convince him of the need to attack the Hebrew tradition and to purge Christianity of its Jewish elements. She even told him that if the Jews became powerful they would act like the Nazis, citing in support biblical passages on the destruction of Israel’s enemies. He also recalled that in conversations in 1941 she never mentioned the persecution of French Jews, expressing concern only for the conditions of French agricultural laborers. In 1943, while working for the Free French in London, she not only ignored the slaughter of Jews in Eastern Europe, news of which had by then reached London, but became irritated when her coworkers raised the topic.103 The most unambiguous expression of her hostility towards Jews emerged in the context of her work in London. One of her tasks was to read proposals from members of the French resistance and to comment on them. In evaluating a proposal for a statute, once France was liberated, regulating non-­Christian minorities of foreign origin—­ that is, Jews—­she responded that the existence of a minority lacking the bond of the Christian heritage was not “a good thing” and that its disappearance was desirable. She did not urge that the state should recognize, by statute, the minority’s existence since this would simply promote the crystallization of a distinctive identity. Rather, it would be better if it disappeared by melting into the nation as a whole through mixed marriages and the Christian education of future Jewish generations. Echoing a central Vichy theme, she concluded that “if a genuinely Christian inspiration . . . really impregnated the training, education, and upbringing of the youth in France, and even more the entire life of the country, neither the so-­called Jewish religion nor the atheism typical of Jews emancipated from their religion would be strong enough to prevent contagion.”104 One biographer called this shocking prescription Weil’s nonbloody Final Solution of the Jewish Question.105 But Anna Freud, in discussing Weil’s case with the American psychiatrist Robert Coles, offered a more illuminating comment. In Freud’s view, Weil’s experiences during the war strengthened her awareness of being a Jew (her claims to the contrary). Christian friends in the south of France considered her a Jew. Photographs of her from

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the period show a person with pronounced “Jewish” looks. The Free French officials in London whom she asked to send her into occupied France refused in part because she looked so obviously “Jewish” and would be a liability in undercover work. Freud linked Weil’s endorsement of the disappearance of the Jews to Freud’s sense that Jewishness and what was happening to Jews were increasingly defining Weil, a fate from which Weil was desperate to escape. Freud’s observation reminds us of the inescapable presence of the Jewish Question in the 1930s and 1940s and the challenges this posed to Jews who did not want to be Jews. In a handful of cases, converts took extreme measures to separate themselves from their origins. Some became outspoken antisemites and nationalists, earning their living from exposing and denouncing the Jewish threat to Christendom and the nation. In czarist Russia, the most notorious were Jacob Brafman (1824–­79), missionary, censor of Jewish books in Vilna, and author of The Book of the Kahal (1869), the most successful antisemitic text in Russian history and incubator of the libel that clandestine communal bodies exercised absolute control over Russia’s Jews; Aleksander Alekseev (Wolf Nakhlas) (b. 1820), a onetime missionary to Jewish cantonists and a crude publicist, whose hatred of Jews was said to be so fanatic that later in life he never looked a Jew in the face or permitted one to enter his house; and Semen Efron-­Litvinov (b. 1836), a writer for the right-­wing St. Petersburg daily Novoe Vremia, whose specialty was uncovering skullduggery in rabbinic literature.106 In each of these cases, converts were able to use their status as former Jews and their knowledge of Jewish rites and texts to establish their credentials as experts on the Jewish Question. Like well-­known medieval converts who wrote and preached against Judaism—­Peter Alfonsi (1062–­1140), Pablo Christiani (ca. 1210–­74), Gerónimo de Santa Fe (fl. 1400–­30), and Nicholas Donin (fl. 1230s–­ 40s), they turned a liability—­their Jewishness—­into an asset, using it to secure a place for themselves in Christian society. In late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century Warsaw, a number of middle-­class converts were notorious Jew baiters. In his account of Warsaw society in the late 1880s, Antoni Zaleski noted, “It often happens that the main matadors of antisemitism are those meches [converts] who pretend not to know that they too are called ‘Jews’ by the world and with their antisemitism naively seek to obliterate their own Semitic blood.” Among them was Susanna Rabska, a polemicist for the National Democratic party—­the Endecja—­and daughter of Aleksander Kraushar, the historian of Frankism. When reminded of

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their background, these converts naturally suffered acute distress, as they did, in an extreme manner, when the Nazis later forced them into the Warsaw Ghetto. Stefan Ernst, the pseudonym of an otherwise unknown acculturated Jew who escaped the ghetto, recalled that they “encountered many difficulties in adapting psychologically” to the ghetto and “suffered the most.”107 Mary Berg (Miriam Wattenberg) (b. 1924), an American citizen who left the ghetto in January 1943 in an exchange for Germans held by the Americans, took a particular interest in the converts there. She recalled that among them were those who had left the Jewish community decades earlier and who had raised their children as pious Christians. These children were accustomed to attending church every Sunday and “their souls were even poisoned with anti-­Semitism taught them by their own parents, who thus tried to eradicate every trace of their Jewish origin.” Feeling “entirely lost,” some committed suicide, unlike those youth who had always thought of themselves as Jews.108 Converts whose repudiation of Jewishness ended in this way were atypical. Their unapologetic Jew baiting and, in the case of Russia, their complicity in government persecution, were a world apart from the deployment of anti-­Jewish tropes in the work of novelists like Gilbert Frankau and Irène Némirovsky, who were not, in any sense, fire-­ breathing antisemites, consumed by hatred and fear of Jews. Those at the extreme end of the spectrum, however, were often troubled persons whose behavior was erratic and unstable. Among this group, it is often difficult, if not impossible, to separate the question of their emotional health from the question of their flight from a culturally and socially stigmatized background. One was the outcome of innate emotional traits and the other of external historical forces. Each fed and reinforced the other. In extreme cases, the combination was lethal, ending in suicide. The classic example is the well-­known case of the young Viennese writer and Protestant convert Otto Weininger (1880–­1903), author of the misogynistic and antisemitic Sex and Character (1903), who shot himself a few months after its publication in the house in which Beethoven had died.109 However, the phenomenon was not exclusively a product of fin-­de-­siècle Vienna’s hot-­house culture. In imperial Germany, Robert Jaffé 1870–­1911), author of the novel Ahasver (1900), which records the despair of a German Jew who longs for inclusion but is cruelly rebuffed, was a dedicated Zionist in his early years who suddenly converted to Christianity and became a vocal antisemite, writing for Theodor Fritsch’s Der Hammer. Unable to shake his Jewishness, ashamed of a physical deformity, and overwhelmed by

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depression, he committed suicide in 1911.110 And at a different time and in different circumstances, Daniel Burros (1937–­65), grandchild of East European immigrants and Ku Klux Klan leader for New York in the early 1960s, killed himself when the New York Times exposed his Jewish ancestry and upbringing.111

SIX

At the other end of the spectrum—­but no more typical—­were converts who responded to the persistence of antisemitism by opposing it. These “philosemitic” converts—­one historian called them “good bad Jews”112—­fell into two broad categories. The first were clergymen of Jewish birth who stressed the continuity between Judaism and Christianity and saw their conversion as a natural and logical extension of the Judaism they inherited. Before the mid-­twentieth century, they were exclusively Protestant and mostly British and American, living and working in bibliocentric, “philosemitic” environments that encouraged them to celebrate rather than denigrate Jewish elements in Christianity. The cases of Michael Solomon Alexander, who denounced the Damascus blood libel, and Moses Margoliouth, who championed Jewish emancipation, were discussed in an earlier chapter. Their defense of Jewish interests stands in stark contrast to the ferocious Jew baiting of Catholic clergymen of Jewish origins in France at this time. In German-­speaking Europe, though, Christian clergymen from Jewish backgrounds kept a low profile in debates on the Jewish Question. One exception was Selig Paulus Cassel, whose missionary work in Berlin was funded by the LSPCJ. During the great antisemitic agitation of 1879–­80, Cassel wrote a dozen pamphlets in opposition to it, including attacks on Richard Wagner, whose Das Judenthum in der Musik (1850) was republished at the time, and attacks on the historian Heinrich Treitschke, whose slogan “Die Juden sind unser Unglück” he answered with a citation from the Gospel of John, “Salvation comes from the Jews” (4:22).113 In light of the relentless hostility in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of Roman Catholicism and Russian Orthodoxy to Judaism and Jews (as enemies of Christianity and as bearers of modernity), it should be no surprise that there were no counterparts to Cassel and Margoliouth in non-­Protestant areas of Europe. However, when Nazism and the Holocaust finally compelled Catholic thinkers to reformulate traditional teaching on the Jews, those who took the

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lead, both intellectually and organizationally, were mostly converts from Judaism: Waldemar Gurian (1902–­54), Leo Rudloff (1902–­82), Johannes Oesterreicher (1904–­93), Bruno Hussar (1911–­96), Geza Vermes, Gregory Baum (b. 1923), Paul Démann (dates unavailable), and Renée Bloch (1924–­55). Their work culminated in 1965 when the bishops at the Second Vatican Council approved Nostra Aetate (In Our Time), the declaration on non-­Christian religions. Drawing on chapter 11 of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Nostra Aetate declared that the Jews were not the enemies of God or Christianity and recognized their continued holiness. In tracing the revolution in Catholic teaching about Jews in the years after World War II, John Connelly concludes that without these and a number of Protestant converts, “the Catholic Church would never have ‘thought its way’ out of the challenges of racist anti-­Judaism.”114 He also concludes that their experience as converts underwrote their activism. Repairing the breach between Judaism and Christianity helped them resolve the tension in their own lives between their Jewish past and Christian present. At the same time, it confirmed for them the catholicity of Catholicism—­its openness and hospitality to “others” like themselves. Unlike Jews who became Christians for worldly reasons, these converts took Christian doctrine seriously and were moved, even driven, to return its teaching about Jews to Pauline roots.115 The second category of “pro-­Jewish” converts was comprised of East European Jews who, having converted for opportunistic reasons in their youth, regretted the decision later in life and used their influence or wealth, which they owed in part to their conversion, to ease the plight of unconverted Jews. The archetype of this sort of ex-­ Jew was the Semitics scholar Daniel Khvolson, who became a legend in Russian Jewry for defending Judaism against the blood libel. He also helped to found the Society for the Diffusion of Enlightenment among the Jews in 1863 and served on its executive committee for a decade. He remained close to the St. Petersburg Jewish notables throughout his life and was even praised by some, but not all, of the eminent rabbis of the time, who eulogized him as a great Jew at his death.116 Khvolson was not the only convert to oppose the blood libel. In 1883 the St. Petersburg contractor Joseph Nikolaevich Sorkin translated Isaac Baer Levinsohn’s Hebrew tract Efes damim (No Blood), a refutation of the blood libel, into Russian and wrote a bitter, no-­ holds-­barred introduction to it in which he did not spare even the government for its support of antisemitism. He then used his own

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money to distribute the translation widely among provincial officials and St. Petersburg ministers and bureaucrats. The following year he published a Russian translation of a German-­language anthology of anti-­blood-­libel testimonies from prominent Europeans; this, too, he distributed freely in Russian officialdom. Eventually, he withdrew completely from business and devoted all his time and energy to Jewish matters.117 Other converts also supported the work of the Society for the Diffusion of Enlightenment, whose progressive, integrationist goals dovetailed with their own personal aspirations. The baptized physician Joseph Bartenson, who spent most of his life in government service in the field of public health and rose to the post of court physician, served alongside Khvolson on the society’s executive committee.118 The St. Petersburg censor of Jewish books Nikander Vaselevich Susman, who had been, in succession, a yeshivah student, a Maskil, and a freethinker before his conversion to the Orthodox Church in the mid-­1870s, used his position and friendship with the minister of education, Court Delianov, to improve conditions for Jews. He wrote reports defending Jewish legal literature, helped Jewish students gain admission to the university in St. Petersburg, and passed information about impending anti-­Jewish measures to the capital’s Jewish notables. All the time, in order to remain in favor with high bureaucratic figures, he kept up Russian Orthodox observances, attending church daily and celebrating its holy days.119 In Warsaw, as well, there were influential ex-­Jews who came from traditional homes and continued to feel the pull of Jewish attachments long after becoming Christians. The two best-­known nineteenth-­ century figures were Leopold Kronenberg (1812–­78) and Jan Bloch (1836–­1902). The banker and industrialist Kronenberg, who became a Protestant in 1845, intervened on behalf of the Jewish community with government officials, to whom he had access by virtue of his economic activities; supported Jewish charities with anonymous contributions; donated six thousand rubles toward the erection of the Great Synagogue, Warsaw’s first modern, architect-­designed, Western-­style synagogue, which opened in 1878; and financially supported the Polish-­language, integrationist Jewish weekly Jutrzenka. It was said that Kronenberg used to visit the Jewish cemetery on the Sabbath and festivals, when Jews would not be there, and kneel at the grave of his parents. Bloch, a railway contractor, banker, and economist, who converted to Protestantism in 1851 and Catholicism in 1856, was even more active in Jewish affairs. He supported the productivization schemes of Baron de Hirsch, including Jewish agricultural settlements

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in Poland and Argentina; founded a private statistical bureau to conduct research on the economic conditions of the Jews in Poland; befriended Theodor Herzl; and, like Khvolson and others, labored to counter the blood libel. In 1886 he helped prepare a memorandum on behalf of the Warsaw Stock Exchange arguing against the extension of the May Laws of 1882 to the Kingdom of Poland. In his personal life, he surrounded himself with Jewish clerks and assistants (some of whom were baptized) and supported the only one of his brothers who did not convert, asking him specifically to remain Jewish. His will began with the words, “All my life I have been a Jew and as a Jew I die.” His children, however, married into the Polish aristocracy and were in no way connected to the Jewish community.120 Despite dissimilarities, both East European converts who defamed Jews, and those who assisted them, resembled each other in one critical sense: Both were unable to escape their Jewish past. Long after having changed their religion, their origins and upbringing continued to weigh heavily on them, shaping their feelings and behavior. Powerful, highly charged memories tied them to a collective identity from which baptism was supposed to have severed them. There was, moreover, an intensity to these memories and the feelings that accompanied them that was absent or more muted in Western-­style Jewish communities. When Jews in Berlin or Paris or London left the communal fold, their departure marked the end of a process of disengagement from Jewish life that usually stretched over several generations. Most came from homes in which Jewish knowledge, observance, and attachments were already weak and vestigial, in which markers of Jewish distinctiveness (however defined) were disappearing. In contrast, converts in Russia and Poland tended to come from far more traditional backgrounds. Most had grown up in Yiddish-­speaking, religiously observant homes, had attended heder and, in some cases, yeshivah, and had spent their formative years living entirely in the company of other traditional Jews. For them, the gap between being a Jew and being a Christian was enormous, the distance almost as great as it had been in the medieval and early modern periods. Because these converts were so close to the world of Jewish tradition, because they had known and absorbed its habits and outlook from their earliest days, it remained “alive” within them even after conversion. Their need either to rid themselves of it or—­alternatively—­to remain in touch with it was stronger than that of most Western and Central European converts, whose memories of Jewish ritual, language, learning, worship, and social distinctiveness were, by comparison, fragmented and weak.

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Even East European converts who went to neither of these two extremes were more likely than their Western European counterparts to experience feelings of remorse and regret about having betrayed parents, family, and friends. When the German Reform rabbi Max Lilienthal (1815–­82) visited Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1840, he met converts who, while enthusiastic about their freedom from discriminatory laws and their children’s prospects for advancement, suffered “inexpressible pangs and tortures of conscience.” On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, he noted, “remorse pursues them like an evil specter, and thus their life is one of uneasiness, repentance, luxury, and apprehension.”121 In St. Petersburg, Russian-­speaking former Jewish nationalists who had converted after the pogroms of 1881 gathered on Passover to celebrate the seder and visited the synagogue on Yom Kippur to hear Kol Nidrei.122 In his memoirs Rabbi Isaac Nissenbaum (1868–­1942), an early supporter of religious Zionism, recalled receiving twenty-­five rubles from a merchant living near Samara, accompanied by a letter, written in beautiful Hebrew, asking him to accept the donation even though the merchant had converted to Christianity fourteen years earlier.123 The Hebrew journalist and editor Ben-­Zion Katz met converts in St. Petersburg who concealed their Christianity (from other Jews). The first time occurred in synagogue on Yom Kippur, when the man next to him, who was praying assiduously, told him during a break that he had visited the first Zionist congress the year before and went on to speak enthusiastically about Herzl and Zionism. Later Katz learned that the man worked for a large Russian daily newspaper and that he had converted to gain the right of residence in St. Petersburg. Katz also recalled a convert named Segal with a Protestant baptismal certificate from Finland. When Jews rebuked him for being an apostate, he claimed that he had not really been baptized, having only purchased a document to that effect. While Segal gave money to Christian charities and institutions, he also attended synagogue on Yom Kippur and purchased the costly privilege of opening the ark for the concluding service.124 One indication of the extent of remorse among converts in Russia is that in the eight years after the issuance of the ukase of 17 April 1905 permitting converts to the Orthodox Church to return to their original faith, 684 Jews returned to Judaism. In the petitions they submitted to the Ministry of the Interior, they often indicated that baptism had failed to improve their lot and that Jews and Christians alike shunned them. Some wished to return to Judaism because the Christian lovers whom they had expected to marry changed their minds and jilted them.125 In 1917, after

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the fall of the czarist regime, more than two hundred baptized Jews in St. Petersburg formally converted back to Judaism at the Choral Synagogue.126 Behavior like this was rare in Western and Central Europe and North America. Few converts returned to Judaism (despite the absence of legal obstacles almost everywhere) and few took part, surreptitiously or otherwise, in Jewish rituals or championed Jewish causes. The one exception was Vienna: Between 1868 and 1909, about 850 Jews there returned to Judaism (about 13,000 left the community in the same period).127 Their motives for returning are unknown. Perhaps some wished to marry unconverted Jews; perhaps others regretted their earlier “apostasy”; perhaps others realized that baptism failed to erase their Jewishness. In any case, there was no parallel to this return to Judaism elsewhere in German-­speaking Europe at this time. Later in the twentieth century a handful of well-­known converts in the West formally reclaimed their Jewishness. Again, as with those who left the Jewish fold at this time, the chief precipitants were antisemitism and genocide. These hozrim be-­teshuvah (repentant returnees), it seems, wanted to express solidarity with the persecuted and the oppressed. For example, the biographer and journalist Emil Ludwig (1881–­1948), whose childhood home in Breslau was devoid of Jewish symbols and rites and who became a Christian in 1902 while a university student, formally withdrew from Protestantism a few days after the assassination of Walther Rathenau in 1922. He wrote in his autobiography that he wished to identify with his persecuted “race”—­even though its faith remained “as alien to me as that of the Christians.”128 The composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–­1951), who became a Protestant in Vienna at age twenty-­four, experienced antisemitic rebuffs in the 1920s that convinced him his change of religion was meaningless. Notable among them was a traumatic experience in 1921 at an Austrian lakeside resort near Salzburg where he intended to spend the summer composing. A deputation from the town council called on him to tell him that Jews were not welcome, adding, however, that he would be permitted to stay if he produced a certificate of baptism.129 He left. He wrote to the painter Wassily Kandinsky in 1923 that he had finally learned a lesson that he would never forget: “It is that I am not a German, not a European, indeed perhaps scarcely a human being (at least the Europeans prefer the worst of their race to me), but I am a Jew.”130 Two years later his appointment to the Prussian Academy of Arts to teach composition was accompanied by months of antisemitic protests. When he fled Germany in 1933, he went to Paris,

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where in July he returned to Judaism. The Oxford scholar of Christian origins Geza Vermes, who survived World War II in hiding and on the run in Hungary, became a priest in 1950, joining the Congregation of Our Lady of Zion, the missionary order founded by the Ratisbonne brothers a century earlier. After moving to Paris, he campaigned with two other converts, Father Paul Démann and Renée Bloch, to change church doctrine about Judaism and the Jewish people. His wartime travails, including the deportation and death of his parents, his confrontation with the church’s teaching of contempt for Jews, and his encounter with the married woman who later became his first wife combined to erode his faith. By the time he left Paris to take up a post teaching Hebrew Bible at the University of Newcastle in 1957, he was no longer a Christian. (Paul Démann also left the church at about this time.) As Vermes told an interviewer in 1994, “Once I ceased to be formally a Christian, I knew that I was a Jew. In fact, I never was anything but a Jew with a temporary sort of outer vestment. I realized I sought to recognize my genuine identity. It happened straightaway, although it was only formalized later [when he joined the Liberal Synagogue in London].”131 Zionism could also provide an ideological and emotional home for the descendants of deracinated Jews who wished to assert their Jewishness. The remarkable story of the British industrialist Alfred Mond (1868–­1930), first Lord Melchett, and his children Eva (1895–­1973) and Henry (1898–­1949), illustrates, in an extreme fashion, how Zionism could awaken feelings of Jewishness in persons who hitherto took no interest in the collective fate of the Jewish people.132 Alfred Mond’s father, Ludwig (1830–­1909), was a nonpracticing Jewish immigrant from Germany whose firm evolved into the industrial giant Imperial Chemical Industries. He and his wife provided their two sons, Alfred and Robert (1868–­1930), with no religious training. The family never occupied the pews in the Cheshire church that were reserved for the owners of Winnington Hall, where they lived, and they were socially ostracized by the local gentry, who saw them as foreign interlopers. Both boys received a public school education (Cheltenham) and married Christians, although Robert’s wife, Edith Levis, was nominally Jewish by birth. Alfred, whose wife was a devout Christian, entered Parliament as a Liberal in 1906. During his parliamentary career, he frequently was the butt of anti-­Jewish attacks, especially during the Marconi scandal of 1912–­13 and World War I, when he was attacked as a German-­Jewish traitor. These unpleasant experiences made him receptive to the overtures of Chaim Weizmann, who persuaded him to

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visit the Land of Israel for several weeks in 1921. The visit converted him to Zionism and made him a passionate Jew. His contact with the young halutzim (pioneers) whom he met was transformative. When a group of twenty young men rode out on white horses to meet him, he leaned forward in his car and shouted, “This is something new. . . . I understand them. See! Jews riding, look at their faces!”133 From a letter he wrote to his wife on returning to England, it is clear that his trip aided him in resolving the ambiguity of his position in England, where he was regarded as neither fully Jewish nor fully Christian. He wrote: “Many questions that seem difficult in Europe simplify themselves on the spot. In Palestine, you are either a Jew, a Mohammedan or a Christian. . . . I have never lived so intensely as a Jew before.”134 From this point on, Alfred was a dedicated Zionist. He was one of the founders of the enlarged Jewish Agency in 1929, serving as chairman of its council, was a tireless fund-­raiser for the cause, and invested more than £250,000 in the development of the pre-­state Jewish community. He also purchased fifty acres near Migdal, which he farmed and where he built a house overlooking the Sea of Galilee. Alfred’s wife, Violet, did not share his enthusiasm. She raised their four children as Christians, but two of them, Eva and Henry, each independently, converted to Judaism after having embraced their ­father’s Zionism. Eva’s transformation began in 1928, when she accompanied her father on one of his many trips to the Land of Israel. Her visits to Christian holy places disappointed her, and, in retrospect, she dated the beginning of the struggle between her Christian upbringing and her growing Jewish consciousness to this trip. On her return to London, she became an active Zionist. After the death of her father in 1930, she traveled to the Land of Israel with Chaim and Vera Weizmann and stayed at the home her father had built. Her brother Henry made his first trip there at the time and became as passionate about Jewish resettlement as she. In 1933, spurred by the start of Nazi persecution of German Jewry, both of them converted to Liberal Judaism in London. As Henry explained to Randolph Churchill, “Until now I have always felt more English than Jewish; but now that the Jewish race is in greater danger of annihilation than ever before in its history, I cannot help throwing in my lot with them.” A North American counterpart to the Monds was the now little-­ read novelist and translator Ludwig Lewisohn (1882–­1955), whose embrace of Jewishness was, like theirs, a case of ethnic reorientation rather than spiritual illumination.135 Born in Berlin, Lewisohn came to the United States with his parents at the age of eight. Raised in the

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village of St. Matthews, South Carolina, where there were no public schools, he was sent by his religiously indifferent parents to the school built by the local Baptist congregation. He then began attending the Baptist Sunday school and, soon, the church’s morning services, which transformed him into a believing Christian. In 1902 he entered the Ph.D. program in English literature at Columbia University, where the chair of the department informed him that, as a Jew, he would be unlikely to find a teaching position—­an accurate forecast by and large. Lewisohn’s encounter with academic antisemitism and nativist xenophobia caused him to reassess his connection to his Jewish origins, and in the 1920s, he emerged as an outspoken literary opponent of assimilationism and a leading Zionist polemicist. His masterpiece, The Island Within (1928), unflatteringly portrays Jews who are ashamed of being Jews, suggests that Jews and non-­Jews are erotically, spiritually, and culturally incompatible, and celebrates Jewish (or ethnic) pride as a foundation of mental health and personal growth. Again, like the other converts in this section, Lewisohn’s response to the failure of radical assimilation was a shift in consciousness and self-­identification rather than a return to traditional practice and belief.

SEVEN

Most Jews who left Judaism in the modern period adjusted to their new status as Christians quietly, without fanfare or spectacle. They had ceased to observe the Jewish religion long before their departure and in many cases had never accepted its discipline. Their formal change of religion, at least in Western Europe and to some extent in Eastern Europe, did not result in the disruption of their former social relations. Life went on as before, more or less, while fewer obstacles blocked their way. For converts in Eastern Europe, especially those raised and educated in a traditional milieu, the transformation from Jew to Christian was more dramatic and the demands of adjusting to their new life greater. For them, moreover, returning to Judaism was not a legal option (until the early twentieth century). Yet most Jews who left the community of their birth, regardless of where they lived, were sufficiently satisfied with the choice they made and the advantages conversion conferred to enjoy their new status without obvious discomfort. Most converts did not become Jew baiters, ultra-­nationalists, or fervently demonstrative Christians in order to parade the authenticity and depth of their transformation. Even

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fewer experienced remorse and returned, formally or otherwise, to their Jewish beginnings. No doubt most of them knew that non-­Jews still saw them as Jews and that there were limits to their acceptance. But they were willing to tolerate these limitations and get on with their lives. Unambiguous evidence of their satisfaction is the ongoing appeal of conversion and other forms of radical assimilation from the eighteenth through much of the twentieth century. Had it been a fruitless, ill-­fated strategy, tens of thousands of Jews would not have continued to believe that their lives would be better—­more rewarding, less constricted, freer from abuse—­if they ceased to be Jews.

Conclusion

The history of conversionand radical assimilation in modern Jewish history is a dispiriting tale. It is a story of the failure of enlightenment and emancipation to bestow the toleration and respect that they were once thought to have heralded. Contrary to their expectations at the time of emancipation, Jews soon discovered that acceptance was still elusive. Jewish difference continued to loom large in the non-­Jewish imagination, and homogeneity continued to trump heterogeneity in social and cultural life. For Jews who wished to shine in the public arena, enter new spheres of activity, and mix socially outside their own community, their origins were still a burden, their Jewishness a source of discomfort and anxiety, especially in illiberal societies. Even where integration-­minded Jews met with a modicum of toleration, as in Western Europe and the United States, Jewishness continued to be stigmatized—­as a blemish or a shortcoming, but above all as a marker of essential difference. Had the outcome of emancipation been less ambiguous, fewer Jews would have opted to leave the Jewish fold, for there would have been little or no incentive to do so. This history is also dispiriting in another sense, for it highlights human behavior in an unheroic key. Jews who left Judaism did so for understandable reasons: They hoped to improve their lives or the lives of their children. Their motives were down-­to-­earth, not lofty, and self-­interested, not altruistic. They were indifferent or even hostile to Jewish beliefs and practices, which, in any case, figured little in their lives, and thus, they reasoned, to the extent that they did so, it would be easier—­more convenient, rewarding, and pleasant—­to leave the liabilities of their origins behind them. These liabilities were both material and emotional, ranging from social ostracism and occupational discrimination, on the one hand, to starvation, unemployment, and physical abuse (as in the case of conscripts to the Russian army), on the other.

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Earlier generations of Jews—­intellectuals, rabbinic and lay leaders, and the common folk alike—­tended to view converts like these through a moral lens. For them, the story of radical assimilation was a highly charged story of betrayal and perfidy. In their view, converts were “weak” and “flawed,” lacking character and backbone, unable to resist the temptations of the non-­Jewish world. Ambitious and cowardly, it was thought, they abandoned ship to save themselves when the sea turned rough. This kind of sanctimoniousness is now increasingly out of fashion in the writing of history. In addition, irrespective of one’s attitude toward Jewish peoplehood and continuity, writing about conversion in this way is historiographically unproductive. It avoids asking critical questions that the history of conversion throws into relief, questions about why some societies were more likely to accommodate Jewish integration without demanding the renunciation of Jewishness and why some were less likely to. It also fails to explore links between gender, status, and occupation, on the one hand, and the willingness to leave the Jewish community, on the other. And, more broadly, it avoids asking difficult questions about the transmission of dissenting identities in nominally tolerant modern societies. Although I value Jewish tradition and continuity, I have labored to avoid presenting the history of drift and defection as a morality tale. Most of those who chose the path of radical assimilation were ordinary men and women, neither heroes nor villains (with the exception of a handful who, like Jacob Brafman, took up antisemitism as a career). They found themselves in circumstances that were not of their making, overwhelmed by superior forces that frustrated their acceptance and success. They repudiated Judaism because it was no longer meaningful to them and because the powerful demanded such repudiation as the price of admission to their company. They did not rage against their fate but chose what they saw as an opportune escape, a path of less resistance, as most human beings in difficult circumstances do. Unlike classical tragic figures, their lives did not necessarily end in misfortune. Their fates were mixed. Few ended in disaster (before the Nazi years). Most were sufficiently successful that the appeal of conversion never dimmed, even after racial thinking triumphed during the Holocaust. Recall the instances of conversion among Holocaust survivors in France and Hungary and refugees in Great Britain and the United States. I find it more difficult to write with empathy about those who demanded that Jews transform themselves into Christians in order to integrate into society. Even after emancipation and the decline of the

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ancien régime, few Christians anywhere in Europe or America showed appreciation for or enthusiasm about diversity in any sense of the term. Hegemonic elites everywhere saw one, and only one, acceptable way to be German, Hungarian, Polish, French, and so forth. Codes of behavior and belief were exclusive. The criteria for what was valuable were narrowly drawn, unimaginative, and hostile to social and cultural heterogeneity. Outsiders became potential insiders only if they were willing to become something other than what they were, that is, only if they, in effect, renounced their past and their paternity. While it is ahistorical to expect men and women in past centuries to share values that are celebrated today, it is not inappropriate to point out that the demand that Jews experience their ancestry as shameful and defective and that they repudiate it categorically was existentially aggressive. It was different in kind from the demand that Jews speak the language of the land, adopt Western dress, and provide their children with a secular education. While conversion was an extreme form of acculturation, it was also a profound and usually irreversible repudiation of one’s past. In that sense, it was unlike other forms of adaptive behavior. In retrospect, it is ironic that conversion to Christianity was the most definitive form of full Jewish identification with the societies in which they lived. Historically, in Christian eyes, conversion was a spiritually transformative act, a religious rite that reoriented the inner and outer self, rendering the convert a new man or woman. That this rarely happened in the case of Jewish converts in the modern period was patently clear to everyone, with the possible exception of missionaries, whose naïve optimism was boundless. For most Jewish converts, baptism was a desacralized rite de passage and often no more than a bureaucratic formality. It was formulaic, not transformative. The irony is that it was a mode of identification that was becoming anachronistic, for it was in tension with the increasingly secular tone of Western societies in the modern era. Although secularization advanced more rapidly among Jews than among Christians, Christian faith and practice were also in decline and were certainly not what they had been in the medieval and early modern periods. Why, then, did both the pious and the not-­so-­pious continue to insist that Jews become Christians if they wished to be unreservedly accepted? The answer, surely, is the conviction, often unarticulated, that Jews became worthy of incorporation only when they ceased to be Jews and that there was only one widely acknowledged, time-­sanctioned way to accomplish this—­by making them Christians. There was no secular ritual, equivalent to baptism, to transform Jews into Germans,

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Hungarians, or whatever. Most Jews, however, believed there was a way—­by compartmentalizing their Jewishness and redefining it as a religious identity alone and by embracing the habits, tastes, mores, and values of the majority. Some also imagined that by fashioning universalist identities—­as socialists, communists, aesthetes, artists, scientists, and adherents of new, nonrevealed humanistic religions—­they could transcend the particularism of both Judaism and Christianity and find a place for themselves. The toleration and acceptance of Jews was linked to their social and cultural transformation. Both progressive Jews and progressive Christians agreed that emancipation and integration required the overhaul of Jewish behavior and identity. In liberal states, it was assumed that emancipation would allow Jews already on the path to transformation to continue down that path. In less liberal states, it was assumed and often made explicit that Jews would be welcome only when they had proven themselves worthy of emancipation, that is, only when they had already transformed themselves. Not discussed at the time was the scope of the transformation that was expected. What did statesmen and reformers ask of Jews when they called for their régéneration, assimilation, rapprochement, fusion sociale, bürgerliche Verbesserung, Veredelung, or Reformezirung? Specifically, did they imagine that Jews would in time come to resemble their fellow citizens so much that they would cease to constitute a readily identifiable social subgroup? Did they imagine, in other words, that Jews qua Jews would disappear? This is a difficult question to answer, largely because debates about the terms of Jewish integration lacked specificity. If the persistence, strength, and ubiquity of notions of Jewish “clannishness” are a guide, then it would seem that what was being demanded most of the time was in effect the erasure of collective Jewish identity and social life. Yet, as we have seen, even scrupulous adherence to the ways of the majority rarely weakened the belief that Jews were different in some essential way from their neighbors and that their transformation, however thoroughgoing, was incomplete and did not go far enough. For the churches, this was certainly true. Neither Protestantism nor ­Catholicism recognized the legitimacy of postbiblical Judaism until the second half of the twentieth century, that is, until after the Holocaust (and even then many believers still refused to relinquish the view that Christianity superseded Judaism, rendering it void and worthless). In Wilhelmine Germany, for example, liberal Protestantism could not envision a Germanness that encompassed unconverted Jews.1

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The study of conversion and radical assimilation thus reveals the limitations of emancipation, both in liberal and illiberal societies. Extending legal equality to Jews, however contested by conservatives, occurred more or less everywhere in North America and Western and Central Europe by the last third of the nineteenth century (Eastern Europe was a different story); accepting them as social intimates and valued coworkers—­while also endorsing their right to maintain a collective social life and identity and validating their Jewishness—­ occurred nowhere. Material and cultural success were attainable, but unambiguous acceptance and the sense of security and ease that it made possible were not. As a result, Jews whose talent and ambition led them to seek recognition outside their own community met with rebuffs and rejections, derailing their careers in some cases and undermining their self-­respect and spoiling their peace of mind in others. Whatever the case—­whether the suffering was material or emotional—­some Jews were unwilling to endure it, especially those for whom Judaism no longer mattered spiritually or culturally. Their experiences testify to the failure of emancipation to create the kind of toleration and acceptance that Jews hoped it would. Their experiences also suggest the extent to which snubs, slurs, and slights unsettled acculturated Jews more broadly. The shortcomings of emancipation weighed heavily on far more Jews than those who chose to escape them by leaving the Jewish fold. In this sense, studying drift and defection is similar to studying neuroses: It reveals practices and processes that transcend the behavior of those who most strongly and visibly embody them. It moves beyond the tribulations of Jews who suffered physical assaults and overt discrimination to encompass the emotional lives of everyday Jews who were pointedly reminded in a myriad of small ways, often barely perceptible, that they belonged to a stigmatized minority, “edged on the one side, excluded, different,” as the poet Humbert Wolfe wrote. “Exclusion from garden parties, refusal of certain cherished intimacies, and occasional light-­hearted sneers” (Wolfe’s words) did not foster ethnic pride or emotional equipoise.2 Contempt, by assaulting the personality of acculturated Jews, took as great a toll on their well-­being as discrimination, whether they left the fold or not. Historians have ignored the corrosive impact of this less visible hostility in the day-­to-­day lives of ordinary Jews for far too long. This reading of drift and defection challenges a major current in the writing of modern Jewish history in the American academy—­the celebration or legitimization of the diaspora experience. As I noted at

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the start of this study, in the wake of the unbalanced attack by Hannah Arendt and others on Jewish behavior during the Holocaust, historians began to examine the record of Jewish resistance and accommodation in Nazi-­occupied Europe. Since Arendt also had indicted Jewish political behavior more generally in various articles in American journals in the 1940s and in the first volume of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), arguing that Western Jewish leaders failed to develop realistic political concerns and perceptions that would allow them to see their true position, the debate expanded to include the decades before the war (1870–­1939). Historians began for the first time to examine the question of how assimilationist leaders responded to the growth of antisemitism before the Holocaust. Many concluded that Jewish communal leaders acted reasonably, intelligently, and honorably, given their own previous experience and the political and social assumptions of the time. This reevaluation of diaspora political leader­ship set the stage for a long-­term, far-­ranging assessment of Jewish fate in Western and Central Europe and North America in the wake of emancipation. The inclination to defend rather than disparage diaspora Jewry spilled over into accounts of other areas of Jewish behavior in emancipated communities. A new, more positive image of Western Jewry emerged, independent of the initial debate about the adequacy of Jewish responses to antisemitism. Historians who pursued this reevaluation celebrated the tenacity of Western Jews in preserving their Jewishness in the face of overwhelming pressures to dissolve it. They emphasized the creativity of Western Jews in meeting the challenges of living in open societies by developing new, frequently secular, forms of Jewish identity and creating new institutional forms in which to express and preserve their Jewishness. They stressed transformation rather than decline, continuity rather than disjuncture, cohesion rather than dissolution, change rather than crisis. In their work, emancipation, acculturation, and integration were serious challenges rather than fatal blows to the perpetuation of Jewish identity in the West. In framing modern Jewish history in this way, they also challenged, whether intentionally or not, the conventional Zionist historiographical assumption that Jewish life outside the Land of Israel was unnatural and fated to decay. The strength of this perspective, which took hold in the 1980s and 1990s, has never weakened, even though the debate that first initiated it no longer burns fiercely. In recent decades, it has been sustained and reinvigorated by two broad currents of sentiment and thought in American academic life more generally. The first is the stress on the

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agency of the dispossessed and the downtrodden, the belief that those who in the past who were viewed as powerless were in fact able to resist their oppression in one way or another. This current has encouraged Jewish historians to emphasize the resourcefulness of diaspora Jews in responding to new challenges and in shaping their fate. The second is the conviction that nationalism is a destructive but also increasingly anachronistic force in history and that Jewish territorial nationalism is particularly so. While most Jewish historians have repudiated efforts to demonize and delegitimate the State of Israel, they have not been immune to influences that encourage them to stress the possibilities for Jewish continuity and creativity outside the Land of Israel. One expression of this is the emphasis on the resilience of European and American Jews in meeting the challenges of m ­ odernity—­by crafting new forms of Judaism, Jewish identity, and Jewish community. Those who cast the course of modern Jewish history in positive terms like these do not, in doing so, join the ranks of those who attack the legitimacy of the State of Israel. To link them in this way would be misleading and malicious. Their emphasis on the health of diaspora communities, however, does mesh with the critique of nationalism that thrives in academic circles. Focusing on radical assimilation offers an alternative interpretation to the now regnant view celebrating Jewish political sagacity, religious innovation, and cultural resourcefulness in the diaspora. It brings into focus losses and defections whose cumulative impact on Jewish life was, in retrospect, substantial, leaching talent, genius, and capital. At a minimum, it suggests that the presentation of modern Jewish history must comprehend both the inspiring and the dispiriting, that it must accentuate both the positive and the negative, and that in speaking of both successes and failures, it must probe the connections between them. Taken to an extreme, it resurrects a now wildly unpopular view, associated with classical Zionism, that Jewish life in the diaspora is doomed, threatened either by antisemitism or by secularization, indifference, and radical assimilation. Many of the pioneers of Jewish social science a century ago, some of whose work I have cited, were of this view.3 Arthur Ruppin and Felix Theil­ haber, for example, prophesied demographic doom for Central European Jewry, pointing to falling fertility and increasing conversion and intermarriage. While the racial assumptions that pervaded their work have been discredited, many of their sociological insights, as well as the long-­term demographic trends they spotlighted, cannot be dismissed so easily. They were certainly correct in highlighting

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the erosion of Jewish ties that was taking place in their own time. For this alone they merit rereading. Whether their predictions about the future of German-­speaking Jews were accurate we will never know since their history ended abruptly in a way that no one anticipated. In any case, prophecy is best left to pundits—­or fools and children.4 Understanding the past is difficult enough.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. Arthur Ruppin, Die Juden der Gegenwart: Eine socialwissenschaftliche Studie (Cologne: Jüdischer Verlag, 1911), 28. 2. Ezra Mendelsohn, “Should We Take Notice of Berthe Weill?: Reflections on the Domain of Jewish History,” JSS, n.s., 1:1 (1994): 34. 3. Christian Wilhelm Dohm, Concerning the Amelioration of the Civil Status of the Jews, trans. Helen Lederer (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, 1957), 19. 4. In regard to France, Arthur Hertzberg notes that while those who championed Jewish emancipation demanded that the Jews become “new men,” they failed to specify what kind of new men. While agreeing that Jews make changes in their religion, they never indicated what changes were necessary. “Did the Jews need to prove to the most left-­wing of revolutionaries that they were the quickest to abandon all their ancient traditions and adopt the cult of civic virtue? Was it enough to be decently inconspicuous in public by removing all marks of Jewish ritual distinctiveness outside the home? Who, for that matter, was to be the judge as to whether the Jews had, indeed, made adequate changes in their religion, economic conduct, and communal cohesion?” The French Enlightenment and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 365. 5. Some exceptions include Jacob Goldberg, Ha-­mumarim be-­mamlekhet polin-­ lita [Converts in the Polish-­Lithuanian Commonwealth] (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1985); Peter Honigmann, Die Austritte aus der Jüdischen Gemeinde Berlin, 1873–­1941 (Frankfurt a. Main: Peter Lang, 1988); Todd M. Endelman, Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History, 1656–­1945 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990); Christopher M. Clark, The Politics of Conversion: Missionary Protestantism and the Jews in Prussia, 1728–­1941 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500–­ 1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); Deborah Hertz, How Jews Became Germans: The History of Conversion and Assimilation in Berlin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); and the essays in Jewish Apostasy in the Modern World, ed. Todd M. Endelman (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1987). 6. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). 7. Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, 6 vols. (Philadelphia, PA: JPS, 1941), 5: 422, 423, 425. The reference to the Midianites is to Numbers 25, an incident at Shittin in which sexual intercourse with non-­Israelite women leads to the worship of their gods. 8. Solomon Liptzin, Germany’s Stepchildren (Philadelphia, PA: JPS, 1944), 26. In the accounts of both Graetz and Liptzin, a streak of misogyny is also discernible.

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9. Samuel Leib Tsitron, Me-­ahorei ha-­pargod: Mumarim, bogdim, mitkahashim [Behind the Curtain: Converts, Traitors, Deniers], 2 vols. (Vilna: Zvi Matz, 1923–­25); Azriel Nathan Frenk, Meshumodim in poyln in-­19tn yohrhuyndert [Apostates in Poland in the Nineteenth Century], 2 vols. (Warsaw: Freyd, 1923–­24); Saul Ginsburg, Meshumodim in tsarishn rusland [Converts in Tsarist Russia] (New York: Cyco Bucher Verlag, 1946); Matthias Mieses, Zrodu zydowskiego: Zaslozone rodziny polskie krwi niegdys zydowskiej (1938; reprint, Warsaw: WEMA, 1991). Written in a similar vein but at a later date was Isaac Remba, Banim akhlu boser [The Children Ate Sour Grapes] (n.p. [Tel Aviv?]: Public Committee for the Publication of the Writings of Isaac Remba, 1973). 10. Todd M. Endelman, Broadening Jewish History: Towards a Social History of Ordinary Jews (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2011), chap. 2. 11. Marjorie Lamberti, Jewish Activism in Imperial Germany: The Struggle for Civil Equality (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), ix–­x. CHAPTER ONE 1. Alan F. Segal, Rebecca’s Children: Judaism and Christianity in the Roman World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 95, 143. 2. Robert Chazan, Daggers of Faith: Thirteenth-­Century Christian Missionizing and Jewish Response (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 14–­15. 3. Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), chap. 1. 4. Bernhard Blumenkranz, Juifs et chrétiens dans le monde occidental, 430–­1096 (Paris: Mouton, 1960), 138–­48. 5. Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), 3: 36–­46; Kenneth R. Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 47–­50. 6. Avraham Grossman, Hokhmei tsarefat ha-­rishonim: Koroteihem, darkam be-­ hanhagat ha-­tsibbur, yetsiratam ha-­ruhanit [The Early Sages of France: Their Deeds, Their Communal Leadership, Their Spiritual Creativity] (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1995), 152, 154. 7. Robert Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 100–­101,175–­76. 8. Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500–­ 1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 12. 9. Robert C. Stacey, “The Conversion of Jews to Christianity in Thirteenth-­ Century England,” Speculum 67 (1992): 281–­82; Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews: History (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies), 345–­46. The reasons for Christian reluctance to forget the Jewishness of former Jews are discussed in Jonathan M. Elukin, “From Jew to Christian? Conversion and Immutability in Medieval Europe,” in Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages, ed. James Muldoon (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), 171–­89. In a more speculative vein, Steven F. Kruger argues that medieval Christian ideas of Jewishness, which gendered and sexualized Jewish bodies, problematized the efficacy of conversion by introducing what was, in effect, a racial dimension. If conversion was understood as “a complete reorganization of the self”—­and not just “a religious

Notes to Chapter One  •  371

realignment”—­then it also required “a loss of ‘abnormal’ gender and sexual features” and “a regendering and resexualizing” of the Jew’s body. He asks whether Christianity saw such “embodied” traits as susceptible to transformation by baptism. The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 96–­100, 103–­109. 10. David Berger, “Mission to the Jews and Jewish-­Christian Contacts in the Polemical Literature of the High Middle Ages,” American Historical Review 91:3 (June 1986): 576–­91; Chazan, Daggers of Faith; Stacey, “The Conversion of Jews,” 263–­83; Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, chap. 8. 11. Stacey, “Conversion of Jews,” 269; Ariel Toaff, Love, Work, and Death: Jewish Life in Medieval Umbria, trans. Judith Landry (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998), 146–­49. 12. See, for example, David Malkiel, “Jews and Apostates in Medieval Europe—­ Boundaries Real and Imagined,” Past and Present, no. 194 (February 2007): 3–­34. 13. Jeremy Cohen, “The Mentality of the Medieval Jewish Apostate: Peter Alfonsi, Hermann of Cologne, and Pablo Christiani,” in Endelman, Jewish Apostasy in the Modern World, 20–­47; William Chester Jordan, “Adolescence and Conversion in the Middle Ages: A Research Agenda,” in Jews and Christians in Twelfth-­Century Europe, eds. Michael A. Signer and John Van Engen (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 77–­93. 14. Joseph Shatzmiller, “Jewish Converts to Christianity in Medieval Europe, 1200–­1500,” in Cross Cultural Convergences in the Crusader Period: Essays Presented to Aryeh Grabois on His Sixty-­Fifth Birthday, ed. Michael Goodrich, Sophia Menache, and Sylvia Schein (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 297–­318. Shatzmiller offers a typology of conversions “based on personal motivation and resulting from private circumstances.” See also Carlebach, Divided Souls, 30–­31, and Paola Tartakoff, Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and the Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250–­1391 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 65–­75. 15. Malkiel, “Jews and Apostates in Medieval Europe,” 29–­30. 16. Shatzmiller, “Jewish Converts,” 309; Irving Agus, Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg: His Life and His Works as Sources for the Religious, Legal, and Social History of the Jews of Germany in the Thirteenth Century, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Dropsie College, 1947), 1:283–­84, no. 246; David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 184; Stacey, “Conversion of Jews,” 270–­71. 17. Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: The Convert Critique and the Culture of Ashkenaz, 1750–­1800, Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture 46 (New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 2003), 5. 18. Clark, The Politics of Conversion, chap. 1; Anke Költsch, “Foundations, Institutes, Charities, and Proselytes in the Early Modern Holy Roman Empire,” Jewish History 24 (2010): 87–­104. 19. Martin Friedrich, Zwischen Abwehr und Bekehrung: Die Stellung der deutschen evangelischen Theologie zum Judentum im 17. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1988), 110; Joachim Whaley, Religious Toleration and Social Change in Hamburg, 1529–­1819 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 84–­88. 20. Clark, Politics of Conversion, 47–­82. 21. Azriel Shohet, Im hilufei tekufot: Reishit ha-­haskalah be-­yahadut germanyah [Beginnings of the Haskalah among German Jewry] (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik,

372  •  Notes to Chapter One

1960), chap. 9; Benjamin Zev Kedar, “Hemshekhiyyut ve-­hidush be-­hamrah ha-­ yehudit be germanyah shel ha-­meah ha-­shemoneh esreh” [Continuity and Novelty in Jewish Conversion in Eighteenth-­Century Germany], in Perakim be-­toldot ha-­ hevrah ha-­yehudit bi-­yemei ha-­beinayyim u-­ve-­eit ha-­hadashah [Studies in the History of Jewish Society in the Middle Ages and the Modern Period], eds. E. Etkes and Y. Salmon (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1980), 154–­70; Clark, Politics of Conversion, 57–­61. 22. Quoted in Clark, Politics of Conversion, 59. 23. Jonathan Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–­1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 55; Carlebach, Divided Souls (2001), 42; Shohet, Im hilufei tekufot, 192. 24. For examples of Tauftrug, see Rudolf Glanz, Geschichte des niederen jüdischen Volkes in Deutschland: Eine Studie über historisches Gaunertum, Bettelwesen und Vagantentum (New York: privately published, 1968), 50, 66–­67, 69–­74. 25. Költsch, “Foundations, Institutes,” 99. 26. Beth Zion Abrahams, ed. and trans., The Life of Glückel of Hameln, 1646–­1724 (London: East and West Library, 1962), 75–­76. See also Otto Ulbricht, “Criminality and Punishment of the Jews in the Early Modern Period,” in In and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish-­Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany, ed. R. Po-­Chia Hsia and Hartmut Lehmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 49–­70. 27. Hava Frankel-­Goldschmidt, “Be-­shulei ha-­hevrah ha-­yehudit—­mumarim yehudim be germanyah be-­tekufat ha-­reformatsiyah” [On the Margins of Jewish Society—­Jewish Converts in Germany during the Reformation], in Tarbut ve-­hevrah be-­toldot yisrael bi-­yemei ha-­beinayyim: Kovets maamarim le-­zikhro shel Hayyim Hillel Ben-­Sasson, eds. Menahem Ben-­Sasson et al. (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1989), 636–­37. 28. Janusz Spyra, “Conversion of Jews in Cieszyn, Silesia, in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Jews in Silesia, eds. Marcin Wodziński and Janusz Spyra (Cracow: University of Wrocław, Research Centre for the Culture and Languages of Polish Jews, 2002), 38–­39; Shohet, Im hilufei tekufot, 176; Carlebach, Divided Souls, 112. 29. Kedar, “Hemshekhiyyut ve-­hiddush,” 161. 30. Carlebach, Divided Souls (2001), 113; Shohet, Im hilufei tekufot, 188. 31. Carlebach, Divided Souls (2001), chap. 6; Shlomo Eidelberg, “Bein mumarim le-­vein notsrim be-­ashkenaz be-­shilhei yemei ha-­beinayyim” [Converts and Christians in Ashkenaz at the End of the Middle Ages], in Be-­orah mada: Mehkarim be-­ tarbut yisrael mugashim le-­Aharon Mirsky [In the Path of Science: Studies in Jewish Culture Presented to Aaron Mirsky] Lod: Mekhon Haberman, 1986), 25–­29. 32. On the connection between Sabbateanism and conversion to Christianity, see Carlebach, Divided Souls (2001), 76–­87; Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, The Mystical Messiah, 1626–­1676 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 757–­58; idem, “Redemption through Sin,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1971); Pawel Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755–­1816 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 33. Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 213.

Notes to Chapter One  •  373

34. Martin Friedrich, Zwischen Abwehr und Bekehrung: Die Stellung der deutschen evangelischen Theologie zum Judentum im 17. Jahhundert (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1988), 151. 35. Stefan Litt, “Conversions to Christianity and Jewish Family Life in Thuringia: Case Studies in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” LBIYB 47 (2002): 84; Shohet, Im hilufei tekufot, 175. 36. Kenneth R. Stow, Catholic Thought and Papal Jewish Policy, 1555–­1593 (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1977). 37. Stefanie B. Siegmund, The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 61–­66, 81–­87. 38. David I. Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997). Kertzer discusses earlier cases of kidnappings in The Popes against the Jews: The Vatician’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-­Semitism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 44–­58. In the three and a half years from mid-­1814 through 1818, Church authorities sent the police into the Roman ghetto twenty-­two different times to imprison Jews in the house of catechumens; they took seventeen married women, three fiancés, and twenty-­seven children. In Venice, where the government was hostile to papal claims of jurisdiction, the charters that regulated Jewish settlement contained safeguards to protect the Jewish community from the forced baptism of young children. See Benjamin Ravid, “The Forced Baptism of Jewish Minors in Early-­Modern Venice,” Italia 13–­15 (2001): 259–­301. 39. Quoted in Luigi Fiorani, “Verso la nuova cittá: Conversione e conversionismo a Roma nel Cinque-­Seicento,” Richerche per la storia religiosa di Roma 10 (1999): 185n. Of the 894 Jews, age twenty-­one and over, who were baptized in the Roman house between 1614 and 1798, 702 were men. Even among older children and adolescents, there was a marked difference between the number of male and female converts. Of the 488 converts between ages of eleven and twenty in this same period, 314 (64 percent) were male. Wipertus Rudt de Collenberg, “Le baptême des juifs á Rome de 1614 á 1798 selon les registres de la ‘Casa dei Catecumini,” part 3, Archivium Historiae Pontificiae 26 (1988): 144. 40. Luciano Allegra, Identità in bilico: Il ghetto ebraico di Torino nel Settecento (Turin: S. Zamorani, 1996), 64, table 3; 71, table 7. 41. Samuela Marconcini, “The Conversion of Jewish Women in Florence (1599–­1799),” in Zeitsprunge: Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit 14 (2010): 547. 42. Mark R. Cohen, trans. and ed., The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-­Century Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modena’s Life of Judah (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 120–­22, 144. 43. Quoted in Brian Pullan, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice, 1550–­ 1670 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 245. 44. Pullan, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice, 252–­54. 45. Ibid., 307; Robert Bonfil, “Mi hayah ha-­mumar Ludovico Carreto?” [Who Was the Convert Ludovico Carreto?], in Galut ahar golah: Mehkarim be-­toldot am Yisrael musagim le-­profesor Haim Beinart li-­meleiut lo shivim shanah [Exile and Diaspora: Studies in Jewish History Presented to Professor Haim Beinart on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday], eds. Aharon Mirsky et al. (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute, 1988), 437–­42.

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46. Barbara Leber, “A Jewish Convert in Counter-­Reformation Rome: Giovanni Paolo Eustachio” (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 2000), 41–­51. 47. Amnon Raz-­Krakotzkin, The Censor, the Editor, and the Text, trans. Jackie Feldman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 85–­94, 105–­12; David B. Ruderman, The World of a Renaissance Jew: The Life and Thought of Abraham ben Mordecai Farissol (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1981), 44–­47; Robert Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, trans. Anthony Oldcorn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 172–­75. 48. Attilio Milano, “Battesimi di Ebrei a Roma dal Cinquecento all‘Ottocento,” in Scritti in Memoria di Enzo Sereni, eds. Daniel Carpi et al. (Jerusalem: Fondazione Sally Mayer, 1970), 143–­44. 49. Magdalena Teter, “Jewish Conversions to Catholicism in the Polish-­ Lithuanian Commonwealth of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Jewish History 17 (2003): 260–­61; Goldberg, Mumarim, 37–­38; Sławomir Kościelak, “Conversions of Jews in Gdańsk during the First Half of the 18th Century on the Basis of Selected Source Material,” Kwartalnik Historii Żydów 4 (2006): 597; Gershon D. Hundert, Jews in Poland-­Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 67. 50. Zenon Guldon and Jacek Wijaczka, “The Accusation of Ritual Murder in Poland, 1500–­1800,” Polin 10 (1997): 132–­33; Goldberg, Mumarim, 21. 51. Adam Kaźmierczyk, “Kazimierz Woliński and His Assistance Foundation for Converts at St. Mary’s Church in Krakówó,” Kwartalnik Historii Żydów 4 (2006): 576–­85. 52. Shaul Stampfer, “What Actually Happened to the Jews of Ukraine in 1648?” Jewish History 17:2 (2003): 217–­18. CHAPTER TWO 1. René Rémond, Religion and Society in Modern Europe, trans. Antonia Nevell (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 119. 2. Salo W. Baron, “The Modern Age,” in Great Ages and Ideas of the Jewish People, ed. Leo W. Schwartz (New York: The Modern Library, 1956), 317. Baron first advanced this view in the interwar period. See his “Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revise the Traditional View?,” Menorah Journal 14 (1928): 515–­26. 3. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto—­Isaac Cardoso: A Study in Seventeenth-­Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 44. 4. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, The Re-­education of Marranos in the Seventeenth Century, The Third Annual Rabbi Louis Feinberg Memorial Lecture in Judaic Studies (Cincinnati: Judaic Studies Program, University of Cincinnati, 1980), 7. 5. Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 103. 6. Lucien Wolf, ed. and trans., Jews in the Canary Islands, Being a Calendar of Jewish Cases Extracted from the Records of the Canariote Inquisition in the Collection of the Marquess of Bute (London: JHSE, 1926), 205; Yosef Kaplan, “The Jewish Profile of the Spanish-­Portuguese Community of London during the Seventeenth Century,” Judaism 41 (1992): 229–­40; Matt Goldish, “Jews, Christians and Conversos: Rabbi

Notes to Chapter Two  •  375

Solomon Aailion’s Struggles in the Portuguese Community of London,” Journal of Jewish Studies 45: 2 (Fall 1994): 227–­57. 7. Quoted in Goldish, “Jews, Christians and Conversos,” 237. 8. Yosef Kaplan, An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000), 18–­19, 112–­114; A. S. Diamond, “The Cemetery of the Resettlement,” TJHSE 19 (1960): 185. 9. Pullan, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice, xiv. 10. Quoted in Daniel M. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-­Century Amsterdam (London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2000), 228. 11. David L. Graizbord, Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora, 1580–­1700 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); A. S. Diamond, “The Community of the Resettlement, 1656–­1684: A Social Survey,” TJHSE 24 (1975): 142–­43. 12. Robert Cohen, “ ‘Lavo im mishpehoteihem . . . u-­le-­hityashev kan’: Yahadut London ha-­ sefardit ba-­ mahastit ha-­ sheniyah shel has-­ mea ha-­ 17” [“To Come with Their Families . . . and to Settle Here”: The Sephardi Jews of London in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century], in Geyrush ve-­shivah: Yehudei angliyah be-­hilufei ha-­zemanim [Expulsion and Return: The Jews of England], eds. David S. Katz and Yosef Kaplan (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1993), 150; Richard D. Barnett, “Dr. Samuel Nunes Ribeiro and the Settlement of Georgia,” in Migration and Settlement: Proceedings of the Anglo-­American Jewish Historical Conference . . . July 1970, ed. Aubrey Newman (London: JHSE, 1971), 78–­ 81, and appendix 1; Vivian D. Lipman, “Sephardi and Other Jewish Immigrants in England in the Eighteenth Century,” in Newman, Migration and Settlement, 40–­41; Francis Henry Goldsmid, Remarks on the Civil Disabilities of British Jews (London, 1830), 69–­70. 13. Isaac D’Israeli to the Mahamad, 3 December 1813, quoted in James Picciotto, Sketches of Anglo-­Jewish History, ed. Israel Finestein (London: Soncino Press, 1956), 289; “The Seceding Members of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue to the Elders,” 24 August 1841, in Anglo-­Jewish Letters (1158–­1917), ed. Cecil Roth (London: Soncino Press, 1938), 285. 14. See tables 3:1, 5:1, and 6:1 in The History of the Jews in the Netherlands, eds. J. C. H. Blom et al., trans. Arnold J. Pomerans and Erica Pomerans (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002), 100, 171, 214. 15. Zosa Szajkowski, Jews and the French Revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848 (New York: Ktav, 1970), 19–­21, 30–­31, 33–­39. 16. Abrahams, Glückel of Hameln, 78–­79; Richard I. Cohen and Vivian B. Mann, “Melding Worlds: Court Jews and the Arts of the Baroque,” in From Court Jews to the Rothschilds: Art, Patronage, and Power, 1600–­1800, eds. Vivian B. Mann and Richard I. Cohen (Munich: Prestel, 1996), 109; Selma Stern, The Court Jew: A Contribution to the History of the Period of Absolutism in Central Europe, trans. Ralph Weiman (Philadelphia: JPS, 1950), 228–­32; Steven M. Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community: Enlightenment, Family and Crisis, 1770–­1830 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 27–­28. 17. Kedar, “Hemshekhiyyut ve-­hiddush,” 163–­64; Deborah Hertz, “Women at the Edge of Judaism: Female Converts in Germany, 1600–­1750,” in Jewish Assimilation, Acculturation and Accomodation, ed. Menachem Mor (Lanham, MD: University

376  •  Notes to Chapter Two

Press of America, 1992), 98–­99; David Kaufmann and Max Freudenthal, Die Familie Gomperz (Frankfurt am Main: J. Kaufmann, 1907), 76–­77; Shohet, Im hilufei tekufot, 177, 186–­87. 18. Deborah Hertz, “Intermarriage in the Berlin Salons,” Central European History 16 (1984): 303–­304; Lowenstein, Berlin Jewish Community, 153, 261, n. 6, 262, n. 7. 19. Hilde Spiel, Fanny von Arnstein: Daughter of the Enlightenment, 1758–­1818, trans. Christine Shuttleworth (New York: Berg, 1991), 52–­56. 20. Heinrich Schnee, Die Hoffinanz und der moderne Staat, 6 vols. (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1952–­67), 3: 217. 21. Kedar, “Hemshekhiyyut ve-­hiddush,” 165. 22. Alfred D. Low, Jews in the Eyes of the Germans: From the Enlightenment to Imperial Germany (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1979), 179–­80. 23. The letters appear in Sebastian Hensel, The Mendelssohn Family (1729–­1847): From Letters and Journals, trans. C. Klingemann, 2 vols. (New York: Harper, 1882), 1: 75, 77, 79–­80. 24. The musicologist Jeffrey Sposato argues that in the case of Abraham Mendelssohn, opportunism was foremost, that he acted from “a carefully orchestrated plan to create and sustain an existence that was independent of the Jewish community.” The Prize of Assimilation: Felix Mendelssohn and the Nineteenth-­Century Anti-­ Semitic Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 14–­23. 25. Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community, 83. 26. Ibid., 156, n. 16, n. 17, and n. 18. 27. Friedrich Rühs, Über die Ansprüche der Juden an das deutsche Bürgerrecht, quoted in Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-­ Semitism, 1700–­ 1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 77; Heidi Thomann Tewarson, “German-­Jewish Identity in the Correspondence between Rachel Levin Varnhagen and Her Brother Ludwig Robert: Hopes and Realities of Emancipation, 1780–­ 1830,” LBIYB 39 (1994): 16. 28. Historians once believed that the Prussian emancipation edict of 1812 slowed the rate of conversion. Raphael Mahler described the conversions of the late eighteenth­and early nineteenth centuries as the last step in a process of deliberate assimilation on the part of bourgeois Jews who swapped their feelings of solidarity with other Jews for a newly developed sense of class solidarity. Granting emancipation “greatly weakened” this movement, both in Berlin and the other Prussian communities, by satisfying “the desire of the Jewish bourgeoisie for civil equality.” Divrei yemei yisrael: Dorot ahronim [The History of the Jews: The Modern Period], 6 vols. (Merhavyah: Sifriat Poalim, 1952–­76), 1: 160. Jacob Katz claimed that the first wave broke with the granting of citizenship in most of the German states toward the end of the Napoleonic era “when one of the strongest motives for conversion, that of belonging to a legally inferior and socially deprived group, if it had not disappeared entirely, at least had lost much of its weight.” Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770–­1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 121–­22. 29. Quoted in Heidi Thomann Tewarson, Rahel Levin Varnhagen: The Life and Work of a German Jewish Intellectual (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 153. On the failure of the 1812 emancipation edict to resolve what troubled young,

Notes to Chapter Two  •  377

well-­educated Jewish men and women in Berlin, see Hertz, How Jews Became Germans, chaps. 5 and 6. 30. Quoted in Richarz, Der Eintritt der Juden in die Akademischen Berufe, 161. 31. Clark, Politics of Conversion, 99; Ismar Schorsch, “The Religious Parameters of Wissenschaft: Jewish Academics at Prussian Universities,” LBIYB 25 (1980): 4–­5; H. G. Reissner, Eduard Gans: Ein Leben im Vormärz (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1965), 36. 32. Saul K. Padover, “The Baptism of Karl Marx’s Family,” Midstream 24:6 (1978): 37, 39. 33. Heinrich Heine to Moses Moser, 4 December 1825, Heinrich Heine: A Biographical Anthology, ed. Hugo Bieber, trans. Moses Hadas (Philadelphia: JPS, 1956), 203. Details on Heine’s baptism are in Jeffrey L. Sammons, Heinrich Heine: A Modern Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 107–­10. 34. Heinrich Heine to Ferdinand Lasalle, 11 February 1846, quoted in S. S. Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy: A Study of His Portraits of Jews and Judaism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 523. 35. Quoted in Hensel, The Mendelssohn Family, 1: 68. 36. Fanny Lewald, The Education of Fanny Lewald: An Autobiography, trans. Hanna Lewis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 113. See also Deborah Hertz, “The Lives, Loves, and Novels of August and Fanny Lewald, the Converted Cousins from Königsberg,” LBIYB 46 (2001): 95–­112. 37. A. Menes, “The Conversion Movement in Prussia during the First Half of the 19th Century,” YIVO Annual 6 (1951): 194–­95. 38. List’s lecture was first published in the Zeitschrift fur Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 5 (1934): 10–­12. It was republished in Paul R. Mendes-­Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 186. Carl Cohen, “The Road to Conversion,” LBIYB 6 (1961): 264; Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden von ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart, 2nd ed., 11 vols. (Leipzig: Oskar Leiner,1896–­1909), 11: 160, 444. 39. Deborah Hertz, “The Troubling Dialectic between Reform and Conversion in Biedermeier Berlin,” in Towards Normality? Acculturation and Modern German Jewry, eds. Rainer Liedtke and David Rechter (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 116–­17. 40. Deborah Hertz, “Seductive Conversion in Berlin, 1770–­1809,” in Endelman, Jewish Apostasy, 54–­58. 41. Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community, 122–­26, 246 n. 17, 247–­48, n. 30. 42. Théodore Ratisbonne, Mes souvenirs (Paris: Notre Dame de Sion, 1966), 143; Philippe-­E. Landau, “Se convertir á Paris au XIXe siècle,” Archives juives 35:1 (2002): 29. Landau’s figures derive from records of the archbishopric of Paris and the congregation of Notre Dame de Sion. Honigmann, “Jewish Conversions,” 7. 43. Christine Piette, Les Juifs de Paris (1808–­1840): La Marche vers l’assimilation (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université de Laval, 1983), 75. Discrimination, if rare, was not entirely absent. The future Saint-­Simonian Olinde Rodrigues was denied admission early in the century to the École Normale Supérieure because of his origins. 44. Paul Lévy, Les Noms de Israélites en France: Histoire et dictionnaire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960), 74–­75. 45. The most important critique of the Sonderweg thesis fails to incorporate the history of German Jewry in its discussion of the idea of German historical ­aberration.

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See David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-­Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). From the perspective of Jewish history (especially the history of emancipation and integration), the course of German history is “peculiar” when compared to that of other Western states, even before World War I and the rise of Nazism. 46. Menes, “Conversion Movement,” 201; Anna L. Staudacher, Jüdische Konvertiten in Wien, 1782–­1868, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2002). 47. For the early history of the London Society, see Endelman, Radical Assimilation, 146–­58. 48. Clark, Politics of Conversion, chaps. 3 and 4; Elie Szapiro, “Le Prosélytisme Chrétien et les Juifs à Toulouse au XIXe siècle,” Archives juives 15 (1979): 55. 49. Quoted in Clark, Politics of Conversion, 117. 50. Ridley Herschell, Conversion of Mr. and Mrs. Levi (New York, 1852), 12–­ 16; Yisrael Cohen, Yitshak Eduard Zalkinson: Hayyav u-­mifalo ha-­sifruti [Isaac Edward Salkinsohn: His Life and Literary Activity] (Tel Aviv: Mesilah, 1942); Tsitron, ­Mei-­ahorei ha-­pargod, vol. 2, chap. 2. 51. Piette, Juifs de Paris, 72; Thomas Babington Macaulay, The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, ed. Thomas Pinney, 6 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974–­81), 2: 36. 52. Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community, 166. 53. Quoted in Patrick Girard, Les Juifs de France de 1789 à 1860: De l’émancipation à l’égalité (Paris: Calmann-­Lévy, 1976), 104. 54. Paula E. Hyman, The Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace: Acculturation and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 53; Jean Cavignac, Les Israélites bordelaise de 1780 à 1850: Autour de l’émancipation (Paris: Publisud, 1991), 89, 96. 55. See the dozens of examples in Endelman, Radical Assimilation, chaps. 1–­3. 56. Robert Cohen, “Jewish Demography in the Eighteenth Century: A Study of London, the West Indies, and Early America” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1976), 67; Malcolm H. Stern, “The Function of Genealogy in American Jewish History,” in Essays in American Jewish History to Commemorate the Tenth Anniversary of the Founding of the American Jewish Archives (Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1958), 79; Occident 2 (January 1845): 464–­65. In his study of 498 Jewish families who lived in early America before 1820, Cohen discovered that large numbers of men and women chose not to marry rather than to marry Christians. Only 45.7 percent of sons and 58.5 percent of daughters married. Cohen, “Jewish Demography,” 107. 57. Jacob Rader Marcus, ed., American Jewry: Documents—­Eighteenth Century (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1959), 52–­53; Occident 2 (January 1845): 461–­62. See also Hyman B. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 1654–­1860 (Philadelphia, PA: JPS, 1945), chap. 18; and Anne C. Rose, Beloved Strangers: Interfaith Families in Nineteenth-­Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 58. Myron Berman, Richmond’s Jewry, 1769–­1976: Shabbat in Shockoe (Charlottes­ ville: University Press of Virginia, 1979), 111–­17; Bertram W. Korn, “The Jews of Mobile Alabama, Prior to the Organization of the First Congregation 1841,” HUCA 40–­41 (1969–­70): 477–­78; Rose, Beloved Strangers, 19–­20, 37–­38. Rose notes that interfaith marriages in early nineteenth-­century America, while not uncommon, were still considered embarrassing and almost never took place at home, in the Jewish family circle.

Notes to Chapter Three  •  379

59. Stern, “Function of Genealogy,” 84, 94; Occident 2 (January 1845): 462, 465; 2 (March 1845): 586; 3 (April 1845): 15. 60. Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community, 244, n. 10. 61. Staudacher, Jüdische Konvertiten in Wien, 1: 192. 62. Todd M. Endelman, Broadening Jewish History: Towards a Social History of Ordinary Jews (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2011), 201–­204; Stanley Weintraub, Disraeli: A Biography (New York: Truman Talley Books/Dutton, 1993), 30–­32. 63. See the examples in Menes, “Conversion Movement in Prussia,” 197. 64. A good guide is Lewis Stevens, Composers of Classical Music of Jewish Descent (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003). 65. Endelman, Radical Assimilation, 50–­51. 66. Menes, “Conversion Movement.” 197–­203. 67. Deborah Hertz, Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988); Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community, chap. 9. 68. Deborah Hertz, “Seductive Conversion in Berlin, 1770–­1809,” in Endelman, Jewish Apostasy, 61, fig. 5, 65, fig. 8. 69. Hertz, “Troubling Dialectic,” 119, fig. 3; Staudacher, Jüdische Konvertiten, 1: 193. CHAPTER THREE 1. Abraham Alter Druyanov, Sefer ha-­bedihah ve-­ha-­hiddud [Book of the Joke and the Wit], 3 vols.(Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1980), 2:145; Salcia Landmann, Der Jüdische Witz: Soziologie und Sammlung (Olten and Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter Verlag, 1960), 430. 2. The translation is Michael Stanislawski’s in his For Whom Do I Toil? Judah Leib Gordon and the Crisis of Russian Jewry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 49. 3. Marsha L. Rozenblit, The Jews of Vienna, 1867–­1914: Assimilation and Identity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 135. 4. Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 206–­207. 5. Raphael Mahler, “Ha-­mediniut kelapei ha-­misyonarim be-­folin ha-­kongresit be-­tekufat ha-­brit ha-­kedushah” [Policy toward Missionaries in Congress Poland during the Holy Alliance], in Sefer Shiloh: Kovets maamarim le-­zikhro, ed. Michael Hendel (Tel Aviv: priv. pub., 1960), 169–­81; John D. Klier, “State Policies and the Conversion of Jews in Imperial Russia,” in Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia, eds. Robert P. Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 92–­112. 6. Mahler, “Ha-­misyonarim be-­folin ha-­kongresit,” 181, n. 39. 7. Klier, “State Politics and the Conversion of Jews,” 97–­104; Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825–­1855 (Philadelphia, PA: JPS, 1983), chap. 1; Yohanan Petrovsky-­Shtern, Jews in the Russian Army, 1827–­1914: Drafted into Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), chap. 3. 8. Petrovsky-­Shtern, Jews in the Russian Army, 97, table 5; Stanislawski, Nicholas I and the Jews, 25. Olga Litvak suggests a lower estimate—­between 30 and 40 ­percent—­of the fifty thousand Jewish cantonists. Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 214–­15, n. 52.

380  •  Notes to Chapter Three

9. Joseph Klausner, Historiyah shel ha-­sifrut ha-­ivrit ha-­hadashah [History of Modern Hebrew Literature], 2nd ed., 6 vols. (Jerusalem: Ahiasaf, 1952), 3: 21–­23; John Doyle Klier, Russia Gathers Her Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Question” in Russia, 1772–­1825 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 125, 127; David E. Fishman, Russia’s First Modern Jews: The Jews of Shklov (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 52–­59, 84–­100. 10. Catherine Drinker Bowen, “Free Artist”: The Story of Anton and Nicholas Rubinstein (New York: Random House, 1939), 3–­10; James Loeffler, The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 18–­22; Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, trans. and ed. Bernard Martin, 12 vols. (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1972–­78) 12: 133–­35; Stanislawski, Nicholas I and the Jews, 144–­46. 11. The following account of conversion in Warsaw draws on my article “Jewish Converts in Nineteenth-­Century Warsaw: A Quantitative Analysis,” JSS, n.s., 4:1 (Fall 1997): 28–­59. 12. Stanislawski, Nicholas I and the Jews, 141–­42; idem, “Jewish Apostasy in Russia: A Tentative Typology,” in Endelman, Jewish Apostasy, 197, 202; David Assaf, “Mumar o kadosh? Masa be-­ikvot Mosheh beno shel R. Shneur Zalman mi-­Lyady” [Convert or Saint? In Search of Moses, the Son of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Lyady], Zion 65: 4 (2000): 453–­515; JC, 29 July 2005. 13. Nathans, Beyond the Pale, 20. 14. Russkii Evrei, 11 March 1881, quoted in Nathans, Beyond the Pale, 81. 15. Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, s.v., “Obraschenie v khristianstvo”; Endelman, “Jewish Converts in Warsaw,” 37, table 1; Rozenblit, The Jews of Vienna, 17, table 2:1; Staudacher, Jüdische Konvertiten in Wien, 1: 22; Honigmann, “Jewish Conversions,” 21, fig. 3. 16. See, for example, George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism, Harper Colophon Books ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 168; Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1866–­1918, vol. 2, Machstaat vor der Demokratie (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1992), 289; Geoff Eley, “What Are the Contexts for German Antisemitism?,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 13 (1997): 122. 17. Constantin Brunner, Der Judenhass und die Juden (Berlin: Oesterheld & Co., 1918), 4. 18. Nathans, Beyond the Pale, 268. 19. Peter G. J. Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-­Semitism in Germany and Austria (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1964), 13; idem, Jews and the German State: The Political History of a Minority, 1848–­1933 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 45–­46, 52, 91. 20. Pulzer, Jews and the German State, 92–­93, 111, 113; Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–­1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 136; Harriet Pass Freidenreich, Female, Jewish, and Educated: The Lives of Central European University Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 12. 21. Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867–­1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 189, n. 12. 22. Peter F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 33; George Clare, Last Waltz in Vienna: The Rise and Destruction of a Family, 1842–­ 1942 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), 21–­23; Hans Tietze, Die Juden Wiens: Geschichte, Wirtschaft, Kultur (Leipzig and Vienna: E. P. Tal, 1933), 232.

Notes to Chapter Three  •  381

23. Asher Tropp, Jews in the Professions in Great Britain, 1891–­1991 (London: The Maccabaeans, 1991), chap. 3; Pierre Birnbaum, Les Fous de la République: Histoire politique des Juifs d’État de Gambetta à Vichy (Paris: Fayard, 1992), 93, 244, 251, 431, 488. 24. Preussische Jahrbücher 102 (October 1900): 132. 25. E. Digby Baltzell, The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America (New York: Random House, 1964), 139; Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1980), 9, 14, 29; Robert A. Rosenstone, Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), 40–­41; Margaret L. Cort, Mr. Baruch (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1957), 50. 26. Erwin Blumenthal, Eye to I: The Autobiography of a Photographer, trans. Mike Mitchell and Brian Murdoch (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 52; Gershom Scholem, “With Gershom Scholem: An Interview,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 4–­6; idem, “On the Social Psychology of the Jews in Germany, 1900–­1933,” in Jews and Germans from 1860 to 1933: The Problematic Symbiosis, ed. David Bronsen (Heidelberg: Winter, 1979), 18–­19; Marion A. Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); idem, “Friendship on the Margins: Jewish Social Relations in Imperial Germany,” Central European History 34: 4 (December 2001), 481. 27. Jules Huret, En Allemagne: Berlin (Paris: Bibliothèque Carpentier, 1910), 347–­48; Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 475–­78; Lamar Cecil, Albert Ballin: Business and Politics in Imperial Germany, 1881–­1918 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 99, 101, 110; idem, “Jew and Junker in Imperial Berlin,” LBIYB 20 (1975): 48–­50, 53. 28. Jawaharlal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru: An Autobiography (London: John Lane, Bodley Head, 1936), 18; Charles de Rothschild to Hugh Birrell, quoted in Miriam Rothschild, Dear Lord Rothschild: Birds, Butterflies and History (Philadelphia: Balaban Publishers, 1983), 90; John Carswell, The Exile: A Life of Ivy Litvinov (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), 35. 29. Virginia Stephen to Leonard Woolf, 1 May 1912, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, 1888–­1912, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 496; Frederic Spotts, ed., Letters of Leonard Woolf (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), 470. 30. Walther Rathenau, “Staat und Judentum: Eine Polemik,” Gesammelte Schriften, 6 vols. (Berlin, 1925–­29), 1: 189; Friedrich Blach, Die Juden in Deutschland von einem jüdischen Deutschen (Berlin: K. Curtius, 1911), 73; Rudolf Ernst Peierls, Bird of Passage: Recollections of a Physicist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 6; Bernard Rosenberg and Ernest Goldstein, eds., Creators and Disturbers: Reminiscences by Jewish Intellectuals of New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 76; Monika Richarz, Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland, vol. 2, Selbstzeugnisse zur Socialgeschichte im Kaiserreich (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-­Anstalt 1979), 358. 31. Arthur Schnitzler, My Youth in Vienna, trans. Catherine Hutter (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 6–­7; idem, The Road into the Open, trans. Roger Byers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 114; Robert Neumann, The Plague House Papers (London: Hutchinson, 1959), 85–­86; Robert Weltsch, quoted in ­ iving Paul Mendes-­Flohr, “Martin Buber and the Metaphysicians of Contempt,” in L

382  •  Notes to Chapter Three

with Antisemitism: Modern Jewish Responses, ed. Jehuda Reinharz (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987), 137. 32. Elizabeth Albanis, “Ostracised for Loyalty: Ernest Lissauer’s Propaganda Writing and Its Reception,” LBIYB 43 (1998): 198; Vladimir Medem, Vladimir Medem, The Life and Soul of a Legendary Jewish Socialist, ed. and trans. Samuel A. Portnoy (New York: Ktav, 1979), 3. 33. Philo Bregstein and Salvador Bloemgarten, eds., Remembering Jewish Amsterdam, trans. Wanda Boecke (New York: Holmes & Meier, 2004), 135. 34. George Santayana, Persons and Places (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944), 224–­25; Katharine Graham, Personal History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 37, 51; Humbert Wolfe, Now a Stranger (London: Cassell and Co., 1933), 125–­26; Maurice Fishberg, The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment (London: Walter Scott Publishing, 1911), 447. 35. N. Samter, Judentaufen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Berlin: M. Poppelauer, 1906), 145–­47. 36. Jacob Lestschinsky, “Ha-­shemad be-­aratsot shonot” [Apostasy in Different Lands], Ha-­olam 5: 10 (1911): 6. 37. Samter, Judentaufen, 148. Samter’s numbers came from the office of the chief rabbi of Vienna, Mortiz Güdemann. They are slightly higher than the numbers in Jakob Thon, Die Juden in Oesterreich (Berlin: Louis Lamm, 1908), 70, and in the annual Statistiches Jahrbuch der Stadt Wien, which Rozenblit cites in The Jews of Vienna, 132. 38. “Die statistischen Ziffern für Austritte aus dem Judentum und Mischehen,” ZDSJ 10 (1914): 117. For another comparison of the conversion rate relative to the population, calculated differently but with similar results, see Lestschinsky, “Shemad,” 5: 10 (1911): 6. 39. Rozenblit, The Jews of Vienna, 132; ZDSJ 1: 2 (February 1905), 13; Lestschinsky, “Shemad.” 5: 5 (1911): 4. 40. Michael Anthony Riff, “Assimilation and Conversion in Bohemia: Secession from the Jewish Community in Prague, 1868–­1917,” LBIYB 26 (1981): 76, 78. 41. Lestschinsky, “Shemad,” 5: 6 (1911): 6. 42. Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, s.v., “Obraschenie v khristianstvo”; Eugene M. Avrutin, “Returning to Judaism after the 1905 Law on Religious Freedom in Tsarist Russia,” Slavic Review 65: 1 (Spring 2006): 108; Endelman, “Jewish Converts in Warsaw,” 42. 43. Landau, “Se convertir à Paris,” 29. 44. Simeon Singer, The Literary Remains of the Rev. Simeon Singer, ed. Israel Abrahams, 3 vols. (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1908), 1: 254–­55; Hermann Gollancz, Sermons and Addresses, 1st ser. (London: Unwin Brothers, 1909), 190–­91. 45. Quoted in Monica Miniati, Les “Émancipées”: Les femmes juives italiennes aux XIXe et XXe siècles (1848–­1924), trans. Nicole Thirion (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003), 171. 46. Fritz Mauthner, quoted in Schorsh, Jewish Reactions, 139; Ernst Lissauer, “Deutschtum und Judentum,” Kunstwart 25 (1912): 8; Janet Kerekes, Masked Ball at the White Cross Café: The Failure of Jewish Assimilation (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005), 206. 47. Druyanov, Ha-­bedihah, 2: 130, 134–­35. 48. Lestschinsky, “Shemad,” 5: 11 (1911): 7; “Austriite aus dem Judentum und Uebertritte zum Judentum in Wien im Jahre 1910 mit Rückblicken,” ZDSJ 8

Notes to Chapter Three  •  383

(1912): 132; Fishberg, The Jews, 458; Stanislawski, “Jewish Apostasy in Russia,” 199–­ 200. The age breakdown for Warsaw converts was drawn from the same data used in Endelman, “Jewish Converts in Warsaw.” 49. Hayim Greenberg, “Apostates,” Jewish Frontier 8: 3 (March 1941): 11–­12; David Knaani, Ha-­aliyyah ha-­sheniyyah ha-­ovedet ve-­yahasah le-­dat u-­le-­masoret [The Second Labor Immigration and Its Relationship to Religion and Tradition] (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1976), 73, n. 8; Sophie Dubnov-­Erlich, The Life and Work of S. M. Dubnov: Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish History, trans. Judith Vowles, ed. Jeff­ rey Shandler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 159–­60. 50. Rudolf Aladár Métall, Hans Kelsen: Leben und Werk (Vienna: Franz Deuticke, 1969), 11; Samuel Hugo Bergmann, “Emil Utitz: Darko ha-­tragit shel melumad yehudi” [Emil Utitz: The Tragic Path of a Jewish Scholar] Molad 15 (1957): 626; Jacob Thon, “Korot hayyav ve-­divrei haarakhah” [Biography and Appreciation], in Sefer varburg: Korot hayyav, divrei haarakhah, mikhtavim, neumim, u-­maamarim [The Warburg Book: Biography, Appreciation, Letters, Speeches, and Articles] (Jerusalem: Massada, 1948), 17; Richard Willstätter, From My Life: The Memoirs of Richard Willstätter, trans. Lilli S. Hornig, ed. Arthur Stoll (New York: W. A. Benjamin, 1965), 83–­84, 249. 51. Victor Klemperer, Curriculum Vitae: Jugend um 1900, 2 vols. (Berlin: Siedler, 1989), 1: 350–­52, 405; 2: 15–­16; idem, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, trans. Martin Chalmers, 2 vols. (New York: Random House, 1998), 2: 382. 52. Henry-­Louis de la Grange, Mahler, vol. 1 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1973), 291, 356, 411–­12, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 106–­ 107; Erik Ryding and Rebecca Pechefsky, Bruno Walter: A World Elsewhere (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 21, 29; Norman Lebrecht, Mahler Remembered (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 105–­106, 380; Peter Heyworth, Otto Klemperer: His Life and Times, vol. 1, 1885–­1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 47; Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness, viii. 53. Riff, “Conversion in Bohemia,” 81; Rozenblit, The Jews of Vienna, 137, 139; Cecily Sidgwick, Home Life in Germany (London: Methuen & Co., 1908), 80; ­Antony Beaumont, Zemlinsky (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), 65; Landau, “Se convertir á Paris,” 30. 54. Ellie R. Schainker, “Imperial Hybrids: Russian Jewish Converts in the Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2010), 69, 78–­79. 55. S. Y. Agnon, Hakhnasat kallah [The Wedding Canopy] (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1968), 67–­72; Rachel Manekin, “The Lost Generation: Education and Female Conversion in Fin-­de-­Siècle Kraków,” Polin 18 (2005): 191–­92; Remba, Banim akhlu boser, 126, 128; Joseph Goldstein, “Fathers and Daughters: Dubnov and Ahad Ha-­Am,” in A Missionary for History: Essays in Honor of Simon Dubnov, eds. Kristi Groberg and Avraham Greenbaum (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998), 35–­40. The classic account in Yiddish literature of a daughter leaving home to convert and marry a non-­Jew is the Chava section in Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye The Dairyman. 56. Phyllis Grosskurth, Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work (New York: Knopf, 1986), 83; Hedwig Wachenheim, Vom Grossbürgertum zur Socialdemokratie: Memoiren einer Reformisten (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1973), 11; Werner E. Mosse, “Problems and Limits of Assimilation: Hermann and Pual Wallich, 1833–­1938,” LBIYB 33 (1988), 49–­50. 57. Theodor Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, ed. Raphael Patai, trans. Harry Zohn, 5 vols. (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1960), 1: 7; Alan Levenson,

384  •  Notes to Chapter Three

“The Conversionary Impulse in Fin-­de-­Siècle Germany,” LBIYB 40 (1995): 112; Hatvany, quoted in Kerekes, Masked Ball, 182. 58. Abraham A. Fraenkle, Lebenskreise: Aus des Errinnerungen eines jüdischen Mathe­matikers (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-­Anstalt, 1967), 97. 59. Rozenblit, The Jews of Vienna, 137–­38; Riff, “Conversion in Bohemia,” 84–­85. 60. Isaac Goldberg, “Chaim Selig Slonimski: 19th Century Popularizer of Science,” in Samuel K. Mirsky Memorial Volume, ed. Gersion Appel (Jerusalem: Sura Institute for Research, 1970), 247–­61; Ira Robinson, “Hayyim Selig Slonimski and the Diffusion of Science among Russian Jewry in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Interaction of Scientific and Jewish Cultures in Modern Times, eds. Yakov Rabkin and Ira Robinson (Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995), 49–­65; Lawrence Wechsler, “Nicolas Slonimsky,” The New Yorker, 17 and 24 November 1986; Nicolas Slonimsky, Perfect Pitch: A Life Story (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 61. Tsitron, Mei-­ahorei ha-­pargod, 165–­173; Pauline Wengeroff, Rememberings: The World of a Russian-­Jewish Woman in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Henny Wenkart (College Park: University Press of Maryland, 2000), 217–­26. 62. Apropos Jews in Russian musical circles trying to pass as ethnic Russians, Isaiah Berlin wrote to his parents after visiting Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony in Lenox, Massachusetts: “I heard 4 wonderful Mozart concerts under Sergey Koussevitzky—­a pseudo-­aristocrat who looks & is a 120% Russian zhidok [little Yid] surrounded by such other Russian nobility as the composer Lourié, M. Paul Gunzbourg, and his secretary Mme Hirschmann, sister of Vladimir Poliakov (‘Augur’) of London.” Isaiah Berlin to Mendel and Marie Berlin, 9 August 1944, Letters-­1928–­1946, ed. Henry Hardy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 495–­96. 63. Marci Shore, Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–­1968 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 130–­35; Antoni Slonimski, “On Jewish Sensitivity,” trans. Mariusz Wesolowski, http://www .zabludow.com/aslonimskiarticle.html (28 March 2006). 64. Jacob Shatzky, “Alexander Kraushar and His Road to Total Assimilation,” YIVO Annual 7 (1952): 146–­74; François Guesnet, Polinische Juden im 19. Jahrhundert: Lebensbedingungen, Rechtsnormen und Organisation im Wandel (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 1998), 293. 65. Quoted in Eugene M. Avrutin, Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 119. 66. Ibid., 125–­26. 67. Ibid., 126. 68. Michael Fixler, “Bernard Berenson of Butremanz,” Commentary 36 (1963): 134–­43; Meryle Secrest, Being Bernard Berenson: A Biograpy (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979); Ernest Samuels, Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); Todd M. Endelman, “Aestheticism and the Flight from Jewishness,” Jewish History and Culture 12 (2010): 426–­38; Rachel Cohen, Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). 69. Quoted in Samuels, Berenson, 46. 70. Quoted in Fixler, “Berenson,” 135. 71. Fixler, “Berenson,” 139; Samuels, Berenson, 136, 140. 72. Bernard Berenson to Mary Costelloe, 10 November 1890, in The Bernard Berenson Treasury, ed. Hanna Kiel (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962), 47–­48;

Notes to Chapter Three  •  385

Bernard Berenson to Mary Costelloe, 1 February 1891, to Mally Dienemann, 1950, quoted in Fixler, “Berenson,” 139, 140. 73. Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 29 September 1904, Letters of Leonard Woolf, 45; Humbert Wolfe, The Upward Anguish (London: Cassell and Co., 1938), 62–­63. 74. Ginsburg, Meshumodim, 148–­49. 75. Ruppin, Jews of To-­Day, 194. 76. Die Laubhütte (Regensburg), 18 July 1895, quoted in Kaplan, Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 64; Kaufman Kohler, quoted in Carla Goldman, “The Ambivalence of Reform Judaism: Kaufman Kohler and the Ideal Jewish Woman,” American Jewish History 79 (1990): 480; JC, 12 March 1875; Archives israélites, 50 (1889): 399–­ 400; Kaplan, Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 64. 77. Lowenstein, Berlin Jewish Community, 267, n. 16. 78. Thon, Juden in Oesterreich, 77–­78; Paula E. Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representations of Women (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 53–­54, 73–­75; Manekin, “The Lost Generation,” 189–­ 219. Writing in 2002, I questioned Hyman’s interpretation of the Krakow statistics, but Manekin’s archival work leaves no doubt that I was in error and that she was correct. “Gender and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History,” in Gendering the Jewish Past, ed. Marc Lee Raphael (Williamsburg, VA: Department of Religion, College of William and Mary, 2002), 25–­40. 79. Mikhail Agursky, “Ukrainian-­Jewish Intermarriages in Rural Areas of the Ukraine in the Nineteenth Century,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 9: 1–­2 (1985): 139–­ 44; idem, “Conversions of Jews to Christianity in Russia,” Soviet Jewish Affairs 20: 2–­3 (1990): 69–­84. 80. Horator [pseud.], “Die statistischen Ziffern aus dem Judentum and Mischehen,” ZDSJ 10 (1914): 117; Rozenblit, The Jews of Vienna, 139. 81. Kaplan, Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 184; Lestschinsky, “Shemad,” 5: 11 (1911): 6. 82. Kaplan, Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 293, n. 202. 83. Bruno Blau, “Berlin,” ZDSJ 4 (1908): 13; Felix A. Theilhaber, Die Schädigung der Rasse durch sociales and wirtschaftlichen Aufsteingen bewiesen an der Berliner Juden (Berlin: L. Lamm, 1914), 87, tables 11a and 11b; Till van Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer: Die Beziehungen zwischen Juden, Protestanten und Katholiken in einer deutschen Grossstadt von 1860 bis 1925 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 149–­51; Max Marcuse, Über die Fruchtbarkeit der Christlich-­Jüdischen Mischehe (Bonn: Marcus & Weber, 1920), 16. 84. Felix A. Theilhaber, Der Untergang der deutschen Juden: Eine volkswirtschaftliche Studie (Munich: Ernst Reinhardt Verlag, 1911), 106; Kerstin Meiring, Die Christlich-­ Jüdische Mischehe in Deutschland, 1840–­ 1933 (Hamburg: Dölling und ­Galitz Verlag, 1998), 55; Miniati, Les “Émancipiées”, 214–­15; Van Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer, 162. 85. Albert Ballin to Maximilian Harden, 15 March 1910, quoted in W. E. Mosse, The German-­ Jewish Economic Élite, 1820–­ 1935: A Socio-­ Cultural Profile (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 135. 86. Raphael Patai, The Jews of Hungary: History, Culture, Psychology (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 372, 373, 377, 385. 87. Huret, En Allemagne, 347; Todd M. Endelman, “Communal Solidarity among the Jewish Elite of Victorian London,” Victorian Studies 28: 3 (Spring 1985):

386  •  Notes to Chapter Four

514–­15; T.H.S. Escott, Society in the New Reign (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1904), 191, 228. 88. Endelman, Radical Assimilation, 92. 89. Michael R. Marrus, The Politics of Assimilation: A Study of the French Jewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 61; Archives Israélites, 23 January 1902. 90. Frederic V. Grunfeld, Prophets without Honor: A Background to Freud, Kafka, Einstein and Their World (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979), 2; Rudolf A. Stern, “Fritz Haber: Personal Recollections,” LBIYB 8 (1963): 88; Joseph Lichten, “Notes on the Assimilation and Acculturation of Jews in Poland, 1863–­1943,” in The Jews in Poland, eds. Chimen Abramsky, Maciej Jachimczyk, and Antony Polonsky (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 113. 91. Daniel Charles, Master Mind: The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber, the Nobel Laureate who Launched the Age of Chemical Warfare (New York: Ecco, 2005), 18, 20, 26–­29. 92. Endelman, “Jewish Converts in Warsaw,” 47; Frederick Smith to W. T. Gidney, 27 January 1909, Dep. CMJ d. 51/2, Church Mission to the Jews Collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford; Thon, Juden in Oesterreich, 74, table 47; Jewish World, 6 October 1911; Harold Frederic, The New Exodus: A Study of Israel in Russia (London: W. Heinemann, 1892), 177–­78. Earlier in the nineteenth century, Jewish converts in predominantly Catholic Cologne demonstrated a similar preference for Protestantism. Of the twenty converts in the period 1830–­50, fifteen joined the Evangelical Church. Shulamit S. Magnus, Jewish Emancipation in a German City: Cologne, 1798–­ 1871 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 176. 93. Bishop Wilkinson, speech, Anglican Church Conference, Zurich, 1–­2 June 1904, dep. CMJ d. 51/8, Church Mission to the Jews Collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford; Teodor Jeske-­Choinski, Neofici polscy: Materialy historyszne (Warsaw: Druk P. Laskauera, 1904), 176. 94. Peter F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 33; Siegfried Trebitsch, Chronicle of a Life, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (London: William Heinemann, 1953), 242–­43; Medem, Vladimir Medem, 5. In his memoir, which was published after World War II, Trebitsch omitted any mention of his Jewish origins. 95. André Swanström, From Failed Mission to Apocalyptic Admiration: Perspectives on Finnish Christian Zionism (Åbo: Åbo Akademis Tryckeri, 2007), 35–­37, 39, 47–­73; Ben-­Zion Katz, Zikhronot: Hamishim shanah be-­historiyyah shel yehudei rusiyyah [Memoirs: Fifty Years in the History of Russian Jewry] (Tel Aviv: N. Twersky, 1963), 58; Clarence Brown, Mandelstam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 46. CHAPTER FOUR 1. Arthur Ruppin, The Jewish Fate and Future, trans. E. W. Dickes (London: Macmillan, 1940), 114. 2. Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols. (London: 1953–­57), 1: 192. 3. Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 96.

Notes to Chapter Four  •  387

4. Ernő László, “Hungary’s Jewry: A Demographic Overview, 1918–­1945,” in Hungarian Jewish Studies, vol. 2, ed. Randolph L. Braham (New York: World Federation of Hungarian Jews, 1968), 154–­55; Zeev Rotics, “Be-­shulei ha-­netunim ha-­ statistiyim al hamarot ha-­dat be-­kerev yehudei hungaryah, 1900–­1941 [Statistical Data on Conversion among the Jews of Hungary, 1900–­1941],” Studies on the Holocaust Period 1 (Tel Aviv: Ha-­Kibbutz Ha-­Meuchad Publishing House, 1978), 224–­25. 5. Gergely Egressy, “A Statistical Overview of the Hungarian Numerus C ­ lausus Law of 1920—­A Historical Necessity or the First Step toward the Holocaust?,” East European Quarterly 34 (Winter 2000): 447–­64. 6. Geza Vermes, Providential Accidents: An Autobiography (London: SCM Press, 1997), 15–­16. 7. Rotics, “Ha-­netunim ha-­statistiyim al hamarot ha-­dat,” 225; Victor Karady, “Patterns of Apostasy among Surviving Jewry in Post-­1945 Hungary,” Central European University History Department Yearbook (1993), 232, table 1. 8. Karady, “Patterns of Apostasy,” 232, table 1; idem, “Identity Strategies under Duress Before and After the Shoah,” in The Holocaust in Hungary: Fifty Years Later, eds. Randolph L. Braham and Attila Pók (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 1997), 159; Paul A. Hanebrink, In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, 1890–­1944 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 174–­75: Zsuzsanna Ovsváth, In the Footsteps of Orpheus: The Life and Times of Miklós Radnóti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 169–­80; Gábor Vermes, “A Personal Account,” in In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century, eds. Omer Batov and Phyllis Mack (New York: Berghahn, 2001), 260. 9. Rita Horváth, “Exposed: Jewish Converts to the Christian Faith in Nagyvárad, 1941–­1944,” in Previously Unexplored Sources on the Holocaust in Hungary: A Selection from Jewish Periodicals, 1930–­1944, eds. Anna Szalai et al. (Jerusalem: Yad Va-­Shem, 2007), 113. 10. Ruppin, The Jewish Fate and Future, 285; Clark, Politics of Conversion, 297; Honigmann, Austritte aus der jüdischen Gemeinde Berlin, 49, table 2. 11. Peter Honigmann, “Die Austritte aus dem Judentum in Wien, 1868–­1944,” Zeitgeschichte 15 (1998): 454; Jonny Moser, Demographie der jüdischen Bevölkerung Österreichs, 1938–­1945 (Vienna: Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Wider­ standes, 1999), 26; Henry V. Bohm, “Vignettes from My Early Life,” typed manuscript, ME 1349, 85, Leo Baeck Institute, New York. 12. Daniel Carpi, “The Origins and Development of Fascist Anti-­Semitism in Italy (1922–­1945),” in The Catastrophe of European Jewry: Antecedents, History, Reflections, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Livia Rothkirchen (Jerusalem: Yad Va-­Shem, 1976): 290; Michele Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy: From Equality to Persecution, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 29–­30, 163. Trieste, in particular, was a center of radical assimilation. As early as 1887, the Corriere Israelitico, which was published there, wrote that the city’s Jews were following in the footsteps of the Jews of Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and London, moving from “irreligion” to “baptism”: “Trieste is aping the capitals of Europe, and in Trieste, more than anywhere else, everyone is talking about conversion.” Quoted in Elizabeth Schächter, “The Enigma of Svevo’s Jewishness: Trieste and the Jewish Cultural Tradition,” Italian Studies 1 (1995): 36. 13. Y. Geller, “Apostasy among the Romanian Jews, Seventeenth to Twentieth Centuries,” Shvut: Studies in Russian and East European Jewish History and Culture 8

388  •  Notes to Chapter Four

(1999): 208–­12; Mihail Sebastian, Journal, 1935–­1944, trans. Patrick Camiller (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 452, 485. 14. Frédéric Gugelot, “Conversions du Judaisme au Christianisme en temps de persécutions, 1940–­1950,” in Juifs et Chrétiens entre ignorance, hostilité, et rapprochement (1898–­1998), eds. Annette Becker et al. (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Université Charles de Gaulle Lille 3, 2002), 140–­41, 146–­47; Catherine Nicault, “Yvonne Netter,” Archives juives 30: 1 (1997): 120; Nadia Malinovich, French and Jewish: Culture and the Politics of Identity in Early Twentieth-­Century France (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008), 159–­60. 15. Michèle Bitton, Présences féminines juives en France, XIX–­XX siècles (Paris: 2M éditions, 2002), 75, 82, 86, 241; Olivier Philipponnat and Partrick Lienhardt, The Life of Irène Némirovsky, trans. Euan Cameron (New York: Knopf, 2010), 283. There is no evidence to support the suggestion of Philipponnat and Lienhardt that there was a spiritual element in Némirovsky’s decision. Their suggestion is consistent with their effort to cast her motives in the best possible light and to answer those critics and historians who view her as a politically naïve opportunist. 16. Abraham I. Katsh, trans. and ed., The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, rev. ed. (New York: Collier Books, 1973), 249–­50; Peter F. Dembowski, Christians in the Warsaw Ghetto: An Epitaph for the Unremembered (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 73, 76; Ludwik Hirszfeld, Historia jednego życia (Krakow: Czytelnik, 1946), 255. 17. Marian Malowist, “Assimilationists and Neophytes at the Time of War Operations and in the Closed Jewish Quarter,” in To Live with Honor and Die with Honor! Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives, ed. Joseph Kermish (Jerusalem: Yad Va-­Shem, 1986), 624–­25. 18. Dembowski, Christians in the Warsaw Ghetto, 48, 76, 109–­10, 125; Mary Berg, Warsaw Ghetto: A Diary, ed. S. L. Schneiderman (New York: L. B. Fischer, 1945), 130; Hirszfeld, Historia jednego życia, 253; Adam Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow: Prelude to Doom, eds. Raul Hilberg et al., trans. Stanislaw Staron (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 1999), 149. 19. Ruppin, Jewish Fate and Future, 287. 20. Honigmann, Austritte aus der Jüdischen Gemeinde Berlin, 46; Irene Matt­ hews, Out of Nazi Germany and Trying to Find My Way (London: Minerva Press, 2000), 7, 28. 21. Konrad Kwiet, “The Ultimate Refuge: Suicide in the Jewish Community under the Nazis,” in LBIYB 29 (1984): 140, table 1, and 142, table 6. This is not to claim, of course, that all Jews who killed themselves in Weimar Germany did so because they felt stigmatized and besieged. This said, the stunning rise in the number of Jewish suicides relative to the population as a whole does indicate that growing numbers of Germans Jews were pessimistic or depressed about the future. At a minimum, growing hostility towards Jews in public and private life contributed to the feelings of hopelessness that led them to end their lives. 22. Dembowski, Christians in the Warsaw Ghetto, 74, 115. 23. See the short autobiographies from the early 1920s in Dep. CMJ d. 51/4. 24. Malowist, “Assimilationists and Neophytes,” 621. 25. Ibid., 620–­21; Miri Freilich, “Irgun ha-­mitbollelim Zyednoczenie be-­folin, 1915–­1933, biri pisumayv” [The Assimilationist Organization Zyedoczenie in Poland, 1915–­33, in the Mirror of Its Publications], Gal-­ed 14 (1995): 104, 106.

Notes to Chapter Four  •  389

26. Arieh Tartakower, “Stan Liczebny I Rozwój Naturalny Ludności Żidowskeij w Polsce,” in Ignacy Schiper et al., Żydi w Polsce Ordrodzonej (Warsaw: Nakl. Wydawn. “Zydzi w Polsce Odrodzonej,” 1932–­33): 2: 222. 27. Marion Berghahn, German-­Jewish Refugees in England: The Ambiguities of Assimilation (London: Macmillan Press, 1984), 59–­60; Stefanie Schüler-­Springorum, Das jüdische Minderheit in Königsberg/Preussen, 1871–­1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 381, table 5.5. 28. Ruth Michaelis-­Jena, Heritage of the Kaiser’s Children: An Autobiography (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1983), 82–­83. 29. Richarz, Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland, 2: 16–­17. 30. Steven M. Lowenstein, “Jewish Intermarriage and Conversion in Germany and Austria,” Modern Judaism 25: 1 (2005): 25–­28. 31. Lowenstein, “Intermarriage and Conversion,” 29, 36; Ruppin, Jewish Fate and Future, 108, table 14; Schüler-­Spingorum, Jüdische Minderheit in Königsberg, 370, table 1.9. 32. Ruppin, Jewish Fate and Future, 109–­10. 33. Ibid., 112–­13. 34. Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 54–­61. 35. Ruppin, Jewish Fate and Future, 108. 36. Ibid.; idem, The Jews in the Modern World (London: Macmillan and Co., 1934), 318–­19; Lestschinsky, “Shemad,” 12 (1911): 5. 37. Ruppin, Jews of To-­day, 161. 38. Emanuel Boekman, Demografie van de Jooden in Nederland (Amsterdam: M. Hertzberger & Co., 1936), 59; Jozeph Michman, “The Jewish Essence of Dutch Jewry,” Dutch Jewish History 2 (1989): 4–­5; Bregstein and Bloemgarten, Remembering Jewish Amsterdam, 59, 139. 39. For details, see Endelman, Radical Assimilation, 104–­11, 179–­87. 40. Hermann Gollancz, Sermons and Addresses, 2nd ser. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1916), 96–­97; Jewish Society, 31 January 1890; Leonard Merrick, Violet Moses, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1891), 2: 79; Julia Frankau [Frank Danby], Dr. Phillips: A Maida Vale Idyll (London: Vizetelly & Co., 1887), 112–­13; Todd M. Endelman, “The Frankaus of London: A Study in Radical Assimilation, 1837–­1967,” Jewish History 8: 1–­2 (Winter 1994): 117–­54. 41. Endelman, “Communal Solidarity”; idem, “The Decline of the Anglo-­Jewish Notable,” The European Legacy—­Toward New Paradigms 4: 6 (December 1999): 58–­71. 42. Redcliffe Nathan Salaman, “The Jews—­Race, Nation, Religion,” typescript, lecture to the Anglo-­Jewish Assocation, 19 December 1950, MS 8171/11, RNS CUL; Endelman, Radical Assimilation, 105–­107; Naomi B. Levine, Politics, Religion, and Love: The Story of H. H. Asquith, Venetia Stanley and Edwin Montagu (New York: New York University Press, 1991), chap. 17. 43. Endelman, Radical Assimilation, 110–­11. 44. Nina Davis to Redcliffe Nathan Salaman, 4, 14, and 16 July 1901, 10 and 22 September 1901, MS 8171/98, RNS CUL. 45. JC, 11 July 1924 and 28 May 1926. 46. For a fuller treatment, see Endelman, Radical Assimilation, 179–­87. 47. The Times, 8 December 1924.

390  •  Notes to Chapter Four

48. Jack Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 79; Trude Maurer, Ostjuden in Deutschland, 1918–­1933 (Hamburg: Hans Christians, 1986), 95. 49. Arthur Ruppin, Memoirs, Diaries, Letters, ed. Alex Bein, trans. Karen Gershon (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 74. 50. On the cultural forces that shaped the work of the Bureau, see Mitchell B. Hart, Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), chap. 1. 51. John M. Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-­de-­ Siècle Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 141–­47; for other examples of books and articles written in this alarmist vein, see Steven M. Lowenstein, “Reflections on Statistics: Hopes and Fears about Changes in the German Jewish Family, 1815–­1939,” LBIYB 51 (2006): 57. 52. Ruth Louise Pierson, “German Jewish Identity in the Weimar Republic” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1970), 9. 53. David Black, The King of Fifth Avenue: The Fortunes of August Belmont (New York: Dial Press, 1981), 60, 66–­67, 76. 54. Eli M. Evans, The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South (New York: Atheneum, 1976), 64; Jeffrey S. Gurock, “The Orthodox Synagogue,” in The American Synagogue: A Sanctuary Transformed, ed. Jack Wertheimer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 40. 55. Carl Wittke, Refugees of Revolution: The German Forty-­Eighters in America (Westpoint, CT: Greenwood Press, 123, 128–­29; Naomi W. Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation: The German Jews in the United States, 1830–­1914 (Philadelphia, PA: JPS, 1984), 60–­61; Rudolf Glanz, Studies in Judaica Americana (New York: Ktav, 1970), 100, 132, 174–­75. 56. Bertram Korn, “Factors Bearing upon the Survival of Judaism in the Ante-­ Bellum Period,” AJHQ 53 (1963–­64): 343–­45. 57. Jacob Rader Marcus, ed., Memoirs of American Jews, 1773–­1865, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, PA: JPS, 1955–­56), 2: 7. 58. Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., In Retrospect: The History of a Historian (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), 6–­7, 12. For further examples, see Lee Shai Weissbach, Jewish Life in Small-­Town America: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 39, 143–­46, 228, 245, 247. 59. Marcus, Memoirs of American Jews, 2: 294. 60. Weissbach, Jewish Life in Small-­Town America, 283–­85. 61. M. H. Harris, “The Dangers of Emancipation,” CCAR Yearbook 4 (1893): 59; The Occident, 16 (January 1859): 468; 24 (September 1866): 242–­47. On the conditions of small-­town Jewish life in the late nineteenth-­and early twentieth centuries more generally, see Weissbach, Jewish Life in Small-­Town America. The difficulty of perpetuating Jewish continuity in small-­town America is the theme of Lee J. Levinger, “The Disappearing Small-­Town Jew: Report on a Dwindling Tribe,” Commentary 14 (1952): 147–­63; Benjamin Kaplan, The Eternal Stranger: A Study of Jewish Life in the Small Community (New York: Bookman Associates, 1957). 62. Mary McCarthy, Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957), 204–­12; Leon Harris, Merchant Princes: An Intimate History of Jewish Families Who Built Great Department Stores (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 229–­30.

Notes to Chapter Four  •  391

63. Harris, Merchant Princes, 61. 64. Henry Morgenthau III, “The Ways We Were: Two Memoirs—­Central Park West,” Moment 7: 4 (April 1982): 19, 24. 65. Henry Morgenthau III, Mostly Morgenthaus: A Family History (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1991), xvi, 63–­64, 274, 278–­80. 66. Adam Hochschild, Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son (New York: Viking, 1986), 15, 24, 66–­67, 103. 67. Theresa M. Collins, Otto Kahn: Art, Money, and Modern Times (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 25, 35, 85, 261; George S. Kaufman and Morrie Riskind, Animal Crackers, in Kaufman & Co.: Broadway Comedies, ed. Laurence Maslon (New York: Library of America, 2004), 133–­35, 885; Theodor Reik, Jewish Wit (New York: Gamut Press, 1962), 92. 68. Nathaniel Zalowitz, Jewish Daily Forward, 4 July 1926, quoted in Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 85–­86; J. Alvin Kugelmass, “Name-­Changing—­And What It Gets You,” Commentary 14 (1952): 145–­50. In the early 1950s, about fifty thousand Americans applied annually to state courts to change their names. About 80 percent of these were Jews. 69. Who’s Who in American Jewry (New York: The Jewish Biographical Bureau, 1926), 3; Heywood Broun and George Britt, Christians Only: A Study in Prejudice (New York: Vanguard Press, 1931), 198; Carey McWilliams, A Mask for Privilege: Anti-­Semitism in America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1948), 85. 70. Commenting on the article, Maurice Samuel pointed out that if all the Jews in the United States tried to disappear by passing, few would succeed. The strategy would backfire: The Jews would be accused of going underground to carry out their sinister plans. In fact, this is what more or less happened when masses of Jews in Spain and Portugal became Christians at the end of the fifteenth century. Maurice Samuel, Little Did I Know: Recollections and Reflections (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 302–­303. 71. Harris, Merchant Princes, 67; El Paso Herald Post, 9 January 1961; Time, 13 November 1933; Elleanor K. Lapowski to Jacob R. Marcus, 3 March 1975, Lapowski Family, Miscellaneous File, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati; The National Cyclopedia of American Biography, 62: 243–­44; Thomas B. Ross, “Rich Boy Makes Good—­Douglas Dillon,” in The Kennedy Circle, ed. Lester Tanzer (Washington, DC: Luce, 1961), 143; New York Times, 16 January 1962. 72. Myron S. Kaufmann, Remember Me to God (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1957), 83, 85, 112, 113, 118, 164–­65. 73. Adrienne Rich, “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity,” in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979–­1985 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 100–­ 23. The crippling emotional burden of passing is a central theme in Jo Sinclair’s postwar novel Wasteland (1946; reprint, Philadelphia, PA: JPS, 1987). 74. Geoffrey Wolff, The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 9, 193, 257–­58. 75. Kitty Carlisle Hart, Kitty: An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, 1988); Marie Brenner, “The Art of Mrs. Hart,” The New Yorker, 5 July 1993, 39–­51; Abigail Pogrebin, “Remembrance: Kitty Carlisle,” Forward, 27 April 2007. 76. Phyllis Hatfield, Pencil Me In: A Memoir of Stanley Olson (London: André Deutsch, 1994); Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s. v. “Olson, Stanley Bernard.”

392  •  Notes to Chapter Five

77. Some believe that the life of the light-­skinned literary critic Anatole Broyard (1920–­90) was the novel’s inspiration. On Broyard, see Henry Louis Gates Jr., “White Like Me,” The New Yorker, 17 June 1996, 66–­81. 78. Philip Roth, The Human Stain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 108, 109, 120. CHAPTER FIVE 1. Martin Peretz, “Human Condition,” The New Republic, 10 March 1997, 29. 2. Arnold Mandel, “French Jewry in a Time of Decision: Vestigial Remnant or Living Community?” Commentary 18 (1954): 539–­40; Pierre Assouline, Monsieur Dassault (Paris: Balland, 1983), 186, 216–­18, 349–­52. The psychoanalyst Philippe Grimbert describes in his autobiographical novel, Memory, trans. Polly McLean (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), how his father, who lost his first wife and son in the war, afterward changed his name from Grinberg to Grimbert and had him (Phillipe, whose mother had been his father’s sister-­in-­law previously) baptized. Neither father nor mother ever told Phillipe about what happened to them during the war, and he learned of it from a close family friend only when he was fifteen. The baptism of the chief rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli (1881–­1956), in February 1945 might seem to belong to this wave of postwar conversions but it was sui generis and not easily categorized. See Wallace P. Sillanpoa and Robert G. Weisbrod, “The Baptized Rabbi of Rome: The Zolli Case,” Judaism 38: 1 (1989): 74–­91. 3. Annette Wieviorka, Déportation et genocide: Entre la mémoire et l’oubli (Paris: Plon, 1992), 362–­63. 4. Georges Perec, W, or, The Memory of Childhood, trans. David Bellos (London: Collins Harvill, 1988), 95–­96. 5. Pierre Assouline, Les nouveaux convertis: Enquête sur des chrétiens, des juifs et des musulmans pas commes les autres (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 55–­57; Saul Friedländer, When Memory Comes, trans. Helen R. Lane (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1979), 120–­22. An even larger proportion of Jewish children who were hidden in convents and schools in Poland remained Catholic afterward. See Nahum Bogner, “The Convent Children: The Rescue of Jewish Children in Polish Convents during the Holocaust,” Yad Vashem Studies 27 (1999): 235–­85. 6. Samuel René Kapel, Au lendemain de la Shoa: Témoignage sur la renaissance du Judaïsme de France et d’Afrique Nord (1945–­1954) (Jerusalem: S. Kapel, 1991), 23. On the Finaly Affair, see Joyce Block Lazarus, In the Shadow of Vichy: The Finaly Affair (New York: Peter Lang, 2008). 7. JC, 28 November 1941; Leo Abse, Wotan, My Enemy: Can Britain Live with the Germans in the European Union? (London: Robson Books, 1994), 45–­46, 51; Lola Landau-­Wegner, “Family and Tradition,” in Kurt Hahn, eds. Hermann Röhis and H. Tunstall-­Behrens (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 14–­21. 8. Charles Hannam, A Boy in That Situation: An Autobiography (New York: Harper & Row, 1978); idem, Almost an Englishman (London: André Deutsch, 1979), 10, 21, 206. 9. Michael Dobbs, “Remembrance of Things Past: Secretary of State Albright’s Tragic Family History,” Washington Post Magazine, 9 February 1997, 8–­13, 18, 20–­ 25; Roger Cohen, “Memo from Prague,” New York Times, 12 February 1997; Lally Weymouth, interview with Madeleine Albright, Newsweek, 24 February 1997, 30–­31.

Notes to Chapter Five  •  393

10. E. J. Kessler, “Alleged Slur Casts Spotlight on Senator’s (Jewish?) Roots,” Forward, 25 August 2006; Michael D. Shear, “Allen’s Mother Revealed Jewish Heritage to Him Last Month,” Washington Post, 21 September 2006; Ami Eden, “Pride or Prejudice: Va. Pol Admits His Jewish Roots,” Forward, 22 September 2006; Jennifer Allen, Fifth Quarter: The Scrimmage of a Football Coach’s Daughter (New York: Random House, 2000). 11. Peter Godwin, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2007), 116, 175. 12. Hannam, Almost an Englishman, 206. 13. Barbara Kessel, Suddenly Jewish: Jews Raised as Gentiles Discover Their Jewish Roots (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000), 47. 14. Helen Fremont, After Long Silence: A Memoir (New York: Delacorte Press, 1999), 147–­48. 15. Karády, “Patterns of Apostasy,” 231–­33, 237–­38. 16. Ibid., 239–­42. 17. András Kovács, “Changes in Jewish Identity in Modern Hungary,” in Jewish Identities in the New Europe, ed. Jonathan Webber (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1994), 156–­58. 18. Charles Herbert Stember, “The Recent History of Public Attitudes,” in Jews in the Mind of America, ed. George Salomon (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 31–­234. See especially Stember’s “Summary and Conclusions,” 208–­18, and fig. 123, “Long-­ Term Decreases in Anti-­Semitism According to 12 Measures (1938–­1962),” 209. 19. William H. Chafe, Never Stop Running: Allard Lowenstein and the Struggle to Save American Liberalism (New York: Basic Books, 1993). 20. Quoted in Albert I. Gordon, Jews in Suburbia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), 170. A study of Minneapolis Jews in the 1950s noted: “Mixed relationships remain peripheral to the third generation’s social life, although they are growing in number and desirability.” Even among those who moved to non-­Jewish suburbs, joined mixed organizations, and cultivated social relations with Gentiles, “the intimate core of their social lives” remained Jewish. Judith R. Kramer and Seymour Leventman, Children of the Gilded Ghetto: Conflict Resolutions of Three Generations of American Jews (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961), 180–­81, 195. 21. Morris Raphael Cohen, “Roads for American Jewry,” in Reflections of a Wondering Jew (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950), 17. 22. In their study of the Jews of Minneapolis in the 1950s, Kramer and Leventman stressed that career choice was a large determinant of social access to non-­Jews. “The craftsman or small retailer meets gentiles only across a counter that serves as both guard and symbol of the social distance between them. A professional or business executive is more likely to conduct his business at luncheon meetings, dinner parties, conventions, or the golf course. These settings contrast sharply with the impersonality of the market place and sometimes lead to meetings for purposes other than business.” Children of the Gilded Ghetto, 105. They also noted that among the third generation, those in “non-­Jewish” occupations were in every way less affiliated with the Jewish community than those in traditional “Jewish” occupations (201–­203). 23. Julius Drachsler, Democracy and Assimilation: The Blending of Immigrant Heritages in America (New York: Macmillan Co., 1920), 121–­22, 124, 242–­44; Erich Rosenthal, “Studies of Jewish Intermarriage in the United States,” AJYB 64 (1963): 16–­19, 37. An amateur effort in 1953 to estimate the national intermarriage rate, on

394  •  Notes to Chapter Five

the basis of local studies, concluded that between 2.6 and 5.5 American Jews were intermarried. Hershel Shanks, “Jewish-­Gentile Intermarriage: Facts and Trends,” Commentary 16 (1953): 370. 24. Some sociologists and rabbis did register their awareness in the 1950s that greater social and cultural contacts led to more marriages between Jews and Christians. See the examples in Lila Corwin Berman, Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 157–­58. 25. Werner J. Cahnman, ed., Intermarriage and Jewish Life: A Symposium (New York: Herzl Press and Jewish Reconstructionist Press, 1963); Marshall Sklare and Joseph Greenblum, Jewish Identity on the Suburban Frontier: A Study of Group Survival in the Open Society (New York: Basic Books, 1967), 306. For a review of intermarriage data available before 1970, see Israel Ellman, “Jewish Intermarriage in the United States of America,” in The Jewish Family: A Survey and Annotated Bibliography, ed. Benjamin Schlesinger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 25–­61. 26. Marshall Sklare, “Intermarriage and the Jewish Future,” Commentary 37: 4 (April 1964): 46–­52. 27. Thomas B. Morgan, “The Vanishing American Jew,” Look, 5 May 1964, 42–­ 43, 45–­46; Sidney Goldstein and Calvin Goldscheider, Jewish Americans: Three Generations in a Jewish Community (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968), 155. 28. Fred Massarik and Alvin Chenkin, “United States National Jewish Population Study,” AJYB 74 (1973): 292; U. O. Schmelz and Sergio DellaPergola, “The Demographic Consequences of U.S. Jewish Population Trends,” AJYB 84 (1983): 162. 29. Barry Kosmin and Sidney Goldstein, Highlights of the CJF 1990 National Jewish Population Survey (New York: Council of Jewish Federations, 1991); Steven M. Cohen, “Why Intermarriage May Not Threaten Jewish Continuity,” Moment, 31 December 1994, 54. 30. National Jewish Population Study 2000–­2001, table 14, available at www.ujc .org/njps. 31. On the controversy, see Charles Kadushin, Benjamin T. Phillips, and Leonard Saxe, “National Jewish Population Survey 2000–­01: A Guide for the Perplexed,” Contemporary Jewry 25 (2005): 1–­32. 32. Bruce A. Phillips, Re-­examining Intermarriage: Trends, Textures, Strategies (New York: American Jewish Committee; Los Angeles: Susan and David Wilstein Institute of Jewish Policy Studies, 1993), figs. 1.3, 7. 33. NYT, 1 October 2013. The full report, A Portrait of Jewish Americans, is available at http://www.pewforum.org/2013/10/01/jewish-american-beliefs-attitudes -culture-survey/. 34. Sklare, “Intermarriage & the Jewish Future,” 48; Peter Y. Medding et al., Jewish Identity in Conversionary and Mixed Marriages (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1992), 10–­11. Why Jews of lower socioeconomic status were more likely to intermarry is not clear. One possible explanation is that high achievers in the Jewish population were overrepresented in graduate and professional schools and thus more likely to marry one another. Another is that low achievers were considered undesirable mates within a community in which high achievement was normative.

Notes to Chapter Five  •  395

35. Steven M. Cohen, American Assimilation or Jewish Revival? (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), table 2.1, 29; Rosenthal, “Jewish Intermarriage in the United States,” table 1, 16, 37; National Jewish Population Study 2000–­2001, table 15. 36. United Jewish Communities Research Department, National Jewish Population Survey 2000–­01: The Jews in the West—­A United Jewish Communities Presentation of Findings, available at www.jewishdatabank.org; Bruce Phillips, “Intermarriage among American Jews: Findings from the NJPS 2000,” unpublished paper commissioned by the United Jewish Communities, 11; Joe Eskenazi, “And the Survey Says: Population Spike Makes Bay Area the 3rd Most Jewish in U.S.,” J Weekly, 10 June 2005. 37. Cohen, American Assimilation or Jewish Revival?, 44, table 3.1; 46, table 3.2. 38. Ibid., 32–­33; Phillips, Re-­examining Intermarriage, 14–­21; Nathalie Friedman, “The Graduates of Ramaz: Fifty Years of Day School Education,” in Ramaz: School, Community, Scholarship, and Orthodoxy, ed. Jeffrey Gurock (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1989), 102. 39. Richard M. Merelman, Making Something of Ourselves: On Culture and Politics in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 30; Peter Y. Medding, “Segmented Ethnicity and the New Jewish Politics,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 3 (1987): 26–­31. 40. Sklare, “Intermarriage & the Jewish Future,” 52. Also see idem, Jewish Identity on the Suburban Frontier, 306–­20. 41. Arthur Ruppin, The Jews in the Modern World (London: Macmillan, 1934), 324. 42. Calvin Goldscheider, Studying the Jewish Future (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 21. 43. On dual-­faith homes at the turn of the century, see Sylvia Barack Fishman, Jewish and Something Else: A Study of Mixed-­Married Families (New York: American Jewish Committee, 2001). On the sovereign self and “pick-­and-­choose” Judaism, see Steven M. Cohen and Arnold M. Eisen, The Jew Within: Self, Family, and Community in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 7, 36–­38, 75, 132–­33, 184–­85, 192–­93. 44. Goldscheider, Studying the Jewish Future, 133–­34. 45. The terms come from Richard Alba, “Bright vs. Blurred Boundaries: Second Generation Assimilation and Exclusion in France, Germany, and the United States,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 28 (January 2005): 20–­49. 46. Steven Bayme, “Inreach or Outreach?,” United Synagogue Review 56: 1 (Fall 2003): 15; Bruce Phillips, “American Judaism in the Twenty-­First Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Judaism, ed. Dana Kaplan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), table 2, 399. 47. Steven M. Cohen, Jack Ukeles, and Ron Miller, “Read Boston Study on Intermarriage with Caution,” Forward, 8 December 2006; A Portrait of Jewish Americans. 48. Phillips, “American Judaism in the Twenty-­First Century,” 402. 49. Among third-­generation Japanese Americans who married, 30 to 45 percent married exogamously, depending on gender, region, and social class. Paul R. Spickard, Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-­Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 59–­61, 344. 50. AJYB 64 (1963): 428; Simon Rocker, “Census Data Suggests [sic] More Jews in UK,” JC, 21 February 2003; idem, “Birth Rate Rocketing among British Jews,”

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JC, 9 February 2007; idem, “The New ‘Jewish’ Family: Intermarried or Cohabiting,” JC, 18 May 2007; Marlena Schmool, letter to the editor, JC, 17 August 2007. On the possible impact of the haredi baby boom, see Simon Rocker, “The Birth of a New Era for UK Jews,” JC, 10 August 2007. 51. Doris Bensimon and Sergio DellaPergola, La population juive de France: Socio-­ démographie et identité (Jerusalem: Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University, 1984), 132, table 5.17. 52. Ibid., 131; Erik H. Cohen, “Les Résultats de la grande enquête sur les Juifs français.” L’Arche, no. 538 (December 2002), 67. 53. Zvi Gitelman, Jewish Identities in Postcommunist Russia and Ukraine: An Uncertain Ethnicity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 277–­79. 54. Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust: A Social and Demographic Profile (Jerusalem: Centre for Research on East European Jewry, Hebrew University, and Yad Vashem, 1998), 74, table 4.2; Mark Tolts, “Demography of the Jews in the Former Soviet Union: Yesterday and Today,” in Jewish Life after the USSR, ed. Zvi Gitelman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 184. 55. Tolts, “Demography of the Jews in the Former Soviet Union,” 174, 187. CHAPTER SIX 1. Harry Austryn Wolfson, Escaping Judaism, Menorah Pamphlets No. 2 (New York: Menorah Press, 1923), 26. 2. Paul Klein, “Mauvais juif, mauvais chrétien,” Revue de la pensée juive, no. 7 (April 1951): 88–­90; Julie Kalman, “The Unyielding Wall: Jews and Catholics in Restoration and July Monarchy France,” French Historical Studies 26:4 (Fall 2003): 668–­69. 3. Thomas Kselman, “Social Reform and Religious Conversion in French Judaism,” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 28 (2000): 10–­18; idem, “The Bautain Circle and Catholic-­Jewish Relations in Modern France,” Catholic Historical Review 92: 3 (July 2006): 177–­96. 4. Théodore Ratisbonne, Memoirs, quoted in Kselman, “Social Reform and Religious Conversion,” 13; Antoine Compagnon, Connaissez-­vous Brunetière? Enquête sur un anti-­dreyfusard et ses amis (Paris: Éditions du seiul, 1997), 63. 5. Zosa Szajkowski, “Simon Deutz: Traitor or French Patriot? The Jewish Aspect of the Arrest of the Duchesse de Berry,” in Jews and the French Revolutions, 1043–­ 57; Jonathan I. Helfand, “Passports and Piety: Apostasy in Nineteenth-­ Century France,” Jewish History 3:2 (Fall 1988): 64; Kalman, “The Unyielding Wall,” 676–­83. 6. Philippe-­E. Landau, “Les Libermann de Saverne: Une famille éprouvée par les conversions,” L’Almanach du KKL-­Strasbourg 51 (2003/5763). 7. George Lee, The Life of the Venerable Francis Libermann: A Pioneer of the African Missions (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1937), 1–­10; Henry J. Koren, “The Legacy of François Libermann,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 28: 4 (October 2004): 174–­75. 8. Marie Alphonse Ratisbonne, An Account of the Recent Conversion, at Rome, of Alphonse Ratisbonne, ed. and trans. M. J. Quin (London: M. J. Quin, 1842), 9–­13, 16; Compagnon, Connaissez-­vous Brunetière?, 53, 57–­58, 62.

Notes to Chapter Six  •  397

9. Ratisbonne, Conversion, 14, 18–­19, 21–­22, 27–­28; Compagnon, Connaissez-­ vous Brunetière?, 53, 56–­57. For a psychoanalytic interpretation, see Natalie Isser and Lita Linzer Schwartz, “Sudden Conversion: The Case of Alphonse Ratisbonne,” JSS 45 (1983): 17–­30. 10. Ratisbonne, Conversion, 54–­55, 57, 59; Compagnon, Connaissez-­vous Brunetière?, 58–­60. 11. Lee, Francis Libermann, 9–­10; Kselman, “The Bautain Circle,” 184. 12. Théodore Ratisbonne, La Question juive (Paris: Dentou et Douniol, 1868), 8. 13. Isidore Goschler, The Conversion of Isidore Goschler (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1919), 1. 14. Paul Louis Bernard Drach, De l’harmonie entre l’église et la synagogue, 2 vols. (Paris: P. Meller, 1844), 1: 36. 15. Kalman, “The Unyielding Wall,” 673; Helfand, “Passports and Piety,” 65. The order eventually abandoned its missionary activities. See Charlotte Klein, “From Conversion to Dialogue—­The Sisters of Sion and the Jews: A Paradigm of Catholic-­Jewish Relations?,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 18 (1981): 388–­400. 16. Thomas Kselman, “Turbulent Souls in Modern France: Jewish Conversion and the Terquem Affair,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 32: 1 (2006): 83–­ 86; Natalie Isser, “The Mallet Affair: A Case Study in Scandal,” REJ 138 (Fall 1979): 291–­305. 17. Arthur Darby Nock, Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 7. 18. W. Ord-­Mackenzie and Thomas Chaplin, Report of Visit to Continental Missions, August & September 1886 (London: Alexander and Shepherd, n.d.), 13, CMJ, Dep. CMJ d. 49/1; Thomas Chaplin, memorandum with reference to German societies for promoting Christianity among the Jews, 23 January 1891, CMJ, Dep. CMJ d. 45. 19. Quoted in Michael A. Meyer, Judaism within Modernity: Essays on Jewish History and Religion (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 67. 20. Robert A. Kann, “Friedrich Julius Stahl: A Re-­examination of His Conservativism,” LBIYB 12 (1967): 55–­74; Ernest Hamburger, Juden im öffentlichen Leben Deutschlands (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1968), 197–­206; Edgar Feuchtwanger, “The Jewishness of Conservative Politicians: Disraeli and Stahl,” in Two Nations: British and German Jews in Comparative Perspective, ed. Michael Brenner et al. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), 223–­39. 21. Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 268. 22. Clark, The Politics of Conversion, 141–­42, 240–­41, 244, 249, 274, 275; Alan Levenson, “The Apostate as Philosemite: Selig Paulus Cassel (1821–­92) and Edith Stein (1891–­1942),” in Transforming the Center, Eroding the Margins: Essays on Ethnic and Cultural Boundaries in German-­Speaking Countries, eds. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz and Renate S. Posthofen (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1998), 132–­45; Paulus Cassel, The Martyrdom of Christ Church in Berlin by the London Society (Berlin: H. S. Hermann, 1891), 11. 23. Levenson, “The Apostate as Philo-­Semite,” 134; Clark, The Politics of Conversion, 248–­49. 24. One Anglo-­Jewish critic of missions remarked on this at the time. See M. Lissack, Jewish Perseverance, or, The Jew at Home and Abroad: An Autobiography (London: Hamilton, Adams, & Co., 1851), 214–­15.

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25. Monda Halpern, “ ‘This ambitious Polish Jew’: Rethinking the Conversion and Career of Bishop Isaac Hellmuth,” Ontario History 99: 2 (Fall 2007): 221–­47. 26. DNB, s.v. “Margoliouth, Moses”; Moses Margoliouth, The Fundamental Principles of Modern Judaism Investigated (London: B. Wertheim, 1843), i–­vi, 22, 80–­82. 27. Moses Margoliouth, The History of the Jews in Great Britain, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1851), vol. 2, chaps. 16–­17; vol. 3, chaps. 1–­2; idem, The Anglo-­ Hebrews: Their Past Wrongs and Present Grievances—­Two Epistles (London: L. Booth, 1856), 35. Margoliouth also attacked the London Society in this pamphlet, not only for their opposition to emancipation but for their shabby treatment of converts who became missionaries. (Was he speaking from firsthand knowledge?) He quoted a Church of Scotland minister, a Jew by birth and a former LSPCJ missionary, that the society was “the most gigantic humbug I have ever read of or heard of; it out-­ Barnums Barnum” (p. 73). 28. Yisrael Cohen, Yitshak Eduard Zalkinson: Hayyav u-­mifalo ha-­sifruti [Isaac Edward Salkinson: His Life and Literary Work] (Tel Aviv: Mesilah, 1942); Tsitron, Mei-­ahorei ha-­pargod, vol. 2, chap. 2; Hanna Scolnikov, “The Hebrew Who Turned Christian: The First Translator of Shakespeare into the Holy Tongue,” Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001): 182–­90. 29. DNB, s.v., “Ginsburg, Christian David”; Fred N. Reiner, “Christian David Ginsburg’s Hebrew Bible: Publication Background and Controversy,” and “Ginsburg, Salkinson, and Smolenskin and the Publication of Ginsburg’s Massorah,” unpublished essays. 30. Fred N. Reiner, “C. D. Ginsburg and the Shapira Affair,” British Library Journal 21: 1 (Spring 1995): 109–­27; John Marco Allegro, The Shapira Affair (London: W. H. Allen, 1965). Allegro, a maverick scholar of Christian origins, believed that Shapira’s fragments were authentic, the work of a Jewish sect of the Second Temple period, akin to the group that produced or collected the Dead Sea scrolls. Shapira’s daughter Myriam Harry thinly fictionalized his life in La petite fille de Jérusalem (1914). 31. A. A. Isaacs, Biography of the Rev. Henry Aaron Stern, D.D. (London: J. Nisbet, 1886); DNB, s.v. “Stern, Henry Aaron.” 32. For more information, see their entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Also helpful is Gerald H. Anderson, ed., Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1998). 33. Margoliouth, Jews in Great Britain, 2: 229; John Dunlop, ed., Memories of Gospel Triumphs among the Jews during the Victorian Era (London: S. W. Partridge & Co.; John Snow & Co., 1894), 226; Isaacs, Henry Aaron Stern, 433; La Chrétienté évangélique (Berlin, 1891), 3: 356, quoted in L. Caze, “Ce que sont devenus les Israélites convertis aux XIXe siècle,” La revue des revues 18 (1896): 435; Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds, chap. 66. 34. Muriel W. Corey, From Rabbi to Bishop: The Biography of the Right Reverend Michael Solomon Alexander, Bishop in Jerusalem (London: Church Missions to Jews [1956]), 43; Frankel, The Damascus Affair, 82; U.R.Q. Henriques, “Who Killed Father Thomas?,” in Sir Moses Montefiore: A Symposium, ed. V. D. Lipman (Oxford: Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies and the Jewish Historical Society of England, 1982), 63. 35. See, for example, Yaakov Ariel, Evangelizing the Chosen People: Missions to the Jews in America, 1880–­2000 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000);

Notes to Chapter Six  •  399

Eliezer Bashan, Ha-­yehudim be-­maroko be-­meah ha-­19 ve-­ha-­misyon ha-­anglikani [The Jews in Morocco in the Nineteenth Century and the Anglican Mission] (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1999); Sherman Lieber, Mystics and Missionaries: The Jews in Palestine, 1799–­1840 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992), chaps. 7 and 13; Paul Gerhard Aring, Christliche Judenmission: Ihre Geschichte und Problematik dargestellt und untersucht am Beispiel des evangelishen Rheinlandes (Neukirchen-­Vluyn: Neukirchen Verlag, 1980); Clark, The Politics of Conversion; Robert Michael Smith, “The London Jews’ Society and Patterns of Jewish Conversion in England, 1801–­ 1959,” JSS 43 (1981): 275–­87. 36. Ein judenchristlichen Beobachter, “Das Evangelium unter den Juden in England,” Nathanael 4 (1888): 107. 37. B. R. Goakman, The London Society Examined and the Pretensions of the Converted Jew Investigated (London, 1816), 25; Lissack, Jewish Perseverance, 197–­98; M. Wolkenberg to Rev. Fleming, 14 August 1897, Frederick Temple Papers, vol. 4, ff. 105–­107, Lambeth Palace Library, London. 38. Susan Edith Ruskin, “The Making of London’s East End Jewish Community: The Convergence of the Immigrant, the Missionary, and the Anglo-­Jewish Elite” (B.A. honors thesis, Department of History, Harvard University, 1979), tables 2.4 and 2.5, 52–­53. According to Lissack, Jewish Perseverance, 213, less than a dozen of the London Society’s converts were native-­born English Jews. 39. Carlebach, Divided Souls, 112. 40. JC, 22 September 1893. 41. Simeon Singer, Conversionist Activity and Its Perils (London: Jewish Chronicle, 1903), 5; Ralph L. Finn, Spring in Aldgate (London: Robert Hale, 1968), 78. 42. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–­1930, Vintage Books ed. (New York: Random House, 1961), 342. 43. The literature on the Maritains is enormous and often hagiographic. See, among others, Henriette Psichari, Les convertis de la belle-­époque (Paris: Éditions Rationalistes, 1971); Judith D. Suther, Raïssa Maritain: Pilgrim, Poet, Exile (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990); Michael Stanislawski, “Simone Weil et Raïssa Maritain, Cahiers du Judaïsme 11 (2001–­2002): 97–­107; Jean-­Luc Barré, Jacques and Raïssa Maritain: Beggars for Heaven, trans. Bernard E. Doering (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005); Stephen Schloesser, Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–­1933 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), part 2. Raïssa’s two volumes of memoirs are also illuminating, even if not in the way she intended: We Have Been Friends Together and Adventures in Grace, both translated by Julie Kerman and published by Longmans, Green, in New York in 1945. 44. Maritain, We Have Been Friends Together, 120, 122, 125. 45. Ibid., Adventures in Grace, 161, 163. 46. John Hellman, “The Jews in the ‘New Middle Ages’: Jacques Maritain’s Anti-­Semitism in Its Times,” in Jacques Maritain and the Jews, ed. Robert Royal (Mishawaka, IN: American Maritain Association, 1994), 89–­103. 47. Maritain, Adventures in Grace, 81–­82. 48. On Sachs, see Edouard Roditi, “Portrait of Alias, or, The Real Life of Maurice Sachs,” Prose 9 (1974): 135–­57; Henri Racyzmow, Maurice Sachs, ou, Les Traveaux forcés de la frivolité (Paris: Gallimard, 1988); David J. Jacobson, “Jews for Genius: The Unholy Disorder of Maurice Sachs,” in Discourses of Jewish Identity in Twentieth-­ Century France, ed. Alan Astro (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 181–­ 200; Maurice Sachs and Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, Correspondance (1925–­1939),

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eds. Michel Bressolette and René Mougel (Paris: Gallimard, 2003). Two posthumously published memoirs by Sachs, while self-­serving, are still useful: Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Stein and Day, 1964), and The Hunt, trans. Richard Howard (London: Calder and Boyars, 1967). 49. Sachs, Witches’ Sabbath, 28. 50. Ibid., 102–­104. 51. Hughes, Consciousness and Society, 342; idem, The Obstructed Path: French Social Thought in the Years of Desperation, 1930–­1960 (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 65. 52. Psichari, Les convertis, 119. 53. Stanislas Fumet, Histoire de Dieu dans ma vie: Souvenirs choisis (Paris: Fayard Mame, 1978), 304–­309; Michel Dousse and Jean-­Michel Roessli, eds., Jean de ­Menasce (1902–­1973) (Fribourg: Bibliothèque Cantonale et Universitaire, 1998); Philippe Chenaux, “Du Judaïsme au Catholicisme: Réseaux de conversion dans l’entre-­deux-­guerres,” in La conversion aux XIXe et XXe siècles, eds. N. J. Chaline and J.-­D. Durand (Arras: Artois presses université, 1996), 95–­106; Adrian Hastings, “The Legacy of Pierre Jean de Menasce,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 21: 4 (October 1997): 168–­72. In her memoir, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (New York: Ecco, 2007), 24–­ 25, 50–­54, Lucette Lagnado tells the story of a paternal uncle in Cairo, Salomon Lagnado, who converted to Catholicism while a student at the Collège des Frères, joined the Benedictine order, and eventually settled in Jerusalem, living in the massive stone Ratisbonne monastery. 54. The Fumets were as zealous in their evangelization of Jews as the Maritains. They had a mass “for the conversion of Israel” celebrated each month at the church of the convent of the Fathers of the Holy Spirit in the rue Lhomond. Chenaux, “Du Judaïsme au Catholicisme,” 98. 55. Jean de Menasce to Georges Cattaui, 4 April 1925, quoted in Dousse and Roessli, Jean de Menasce, 71. 56. Chaim Weizmann to Vera Weizmann, 22 July 1925, Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, vol. 12, ed. J. Freundlich (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), 385. It is not clear what he meant when he told Weizmann that he did not want to compromise himself. Weizmann told him he was a snob. He blamed ­Menasce’s resignation on Lucy Zimmern (“a terrible witch”), the wife of the political scientist Alfred Zimmern (1879–­1957), at whose School of International Studies in Geneva Menasce taught in summer 1925. Weizmann knew Lucy Zimmern from Manchester, where her first husband, André Barbier, was a colleague of his at the university. 57. Chenaux, “Du Judaïsme au Catholicisme,” 103. 58. On Jacob, see Judith Morganroth Schneider, “Max Jacob Juif,” French Review 63: 1 (October 1989): 78–­87; Catherine Fhima, “Max Jacob ou la symbiose des identités paradoxales,” Archives juives 35: 1 (2002): 77–­101. 59. Quoted in Fhima, “Max Jacob,” 77. 60. Ibid., 85–­86. 61. Marc Boasson, Au soir d’un monde: Lettres de guerre (Paris: Plon, 1926), 35. 62. The literature on Weil, as on the Maritains, is enormous and equally tendentious. I found the following, at times contradictory, accounts useful: Hans Meyer­hoff, “Contra Simone Weil,” Commentary 24 (September 1957): 240–­49; Paul Giniewski, Simone Weil ou la haine de soi (Paris: Berg International, 1978); Thomas R. Nevin, Simone Weil: Portait of a Self-­Exiled Jew (Chapel Hill: University of North

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Carolina Press, 1991); Sylvine Courtine-­Denamy, Three Women in Dark Times: Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, or Amor Fati, Amor Mundi, trans G. M. Goshgarian (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). 63. Simone Weil to J.-­M. Perrin, 15 May 1942, in The Simone Weil Reader, ed. George A. Panichas (New York: David McKay, 1977), 11. 64. Sylvie Weil, At Home with André and Simone Weil, trans. Benjamin Ivry (Evans­ton, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 38–­39. 65. Suther, Raïssa Maritain, 125–­26. 66. Maritain, We Have Been Friends Together, 13–­14. 67. Louis Vauxcelles, Marek Szwarc (Paris: Éditions Le Triangle, n.d.); Tereska Torrès, The Converts (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970); idem, Le choix: Mémoires à trios voix (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2002); Marek Bartelik, Early Polish Modern Art: Unity in Multiplicity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), chap. 6. 68. Seth L. Wolitz, “The Jewish National Art Renaissance in Russia,” in Tradition and Revolution: The Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-­Garde Art, 1912–­1928, ed. Ruth Apter-­Gabriel (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1987), 26–­28. 69. Torrès, Le Choix, 59–­60. 70. Ibid., The Converts, 80. In his memoir, the liberal Catholic critic Stanislaw Fumet tells of a Polish Jewish woman in Paris who kept her conversion secret for the same reason as had Marek Szwarc. Histoire de Dieu dans ma vie, 187–­88. 71. For more on this group, see Endelman, Radical Assimilation. 72. Hugh Montefiore, “In Via,” in Journeys in Belief, ed. B. Dixon (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1968), 179–­89; idem, On Being a Jewish Christian: Its Blessings and Its Problems (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1998); John S. Peart-­Binns, Bishop Hugh Montefiore (London: Quartet Books, 1990); The Guardian, 14 May 2005. 73. Montefiore, On Being a Jewish Christian, 13; idem, “In Via,” 180. 74. Mary Gordon, “Saint Edith?,” Tikkun, March–­April 1999, 17–­20; James Carroll, “The Saint and the Holocaust,” The New Yorker, 7 June 1999, 52–­57; Harry J. Cargas, ed., The Unnecessary Problem of Edith Stein (Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 1994). 75. The literature on Stein’s life, as one would expect in the case of a saint, tends toward the hagiographical. The following accounts, while not free of saintly admiration, are more sober than most: Susanne M. Batzdorff, Aunt Edith: The Jewish Heritage of a Catholic Saint (Springfield, IL: Templegate Publishers, 1998); Courtine-­Denamy, Three Women in Dark Times; Joyce Avrech Berkman, Contemplating Edith Stein (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006); Alasdair MacIntyre, Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913–­1922 (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). Stein’s own account of her life before her conversion, which she began to write in 1933, is indispensable, both for what it says and what it does not say. Edith Stein, Life in a Jewish Family: Her Unfinished Autobiographical Account, eds. L. Geller and Romaeus Leuven, trans. Josephine Koeppel (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1986). 76. Stein, Life in a Jewish Family, 148. 77. Alice von Hildebrand, The Soul of a Lion: Dietrich von Hildebrand (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 88–­109. 78. John M. Oesterreicher, Walls Are Crumbling: Seven Jewish Philosophers Discover Christ (New York: Devin-­Adair, 1952), 57. One sign of the pragmatic character of Husserl’s conversion was his reluctance to acknowledge his origins. The Catholic

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philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand recalled a meeting at Husserl’s house with Reinach, Scheler, and himself in 1911. “During the meeting, Scheler, who had a touch of sadism in him, enjoyed making Husserl nervous.  .  .  . [H]e kept turning the pages of a book by Theodor Lessing in which the latter related how, during a visit he had paid to Husserl some years before, Husserl had tried to deny his Jewish origins. Scheler knew about the passage and relished Husserl’s embarrassment at the thought that he might find it.” Hildebrandt, The Soul of a Lion, 111. 79. Hamburger converted after enlisting in the German army in 1914. For an amusing description of the problems he encountered in formally renouncing his membership in the Jewish community, see Hildebrandt, The Soul of a Lion, 154–­55. 80. Stein, Life in a Jewish Family, 316. 81. Joyce Avrech Berkman, “The Intellectual Passion of Edith Stein: A Biographical Profile,” in Berkman, ed. Contemplating Edith Stein, 29. 82. Edith Stein to Erna Stein, 6 July 1918, Self-­Portrait in Letters, 1916–­1942, eds. L. Gelber and Romaeus Leuven, trans. Jospehine Koeppel (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1993), 27. 83. Quoted in Courtine-­Denamy, Three Women in Dark Times, 41. 84. Quoted in Angelika von Renteln “Moments in Edith Stein’s Years of Crisis, 1918–­1922,” in Berkman, Contemplating Edith Stein, 139–­40. 85. Edith Stein to Fritz Kaufmann, 13 September 1925, Self-­Portrait in Letters, 47. 86. It is impossible to be more precise about the number of Jews who were attracted to the movement. See the discussion of the problem of estimating the number in Ellen M. Umansky, From Christian Science to Jewish Science: Spiritual Healing and American Jews (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 21–­23. The first chapter in her book is the only recent account of the attraction of Christian Science to Jews. See also John J. Appel, “Christian Science and the Jews,” JSS 31 (1969): 100–­21. 87. Stephen S. Wise, Free Synagogue Pulpit: Sermons and Addresses, vol. 6, 1920–­21 (New York: Bloch, 1921), 147. 88. The growth and near demise of Jewish Science is the main subject of Umansky, From Christian Science to Jewish Science. 89. American Israelite, 30 March 1911. Wise made the same point in the sermon cited above. 90. Samuel N. Deinard, Jews and Christian Science (Minneapolis, MN: priv. pub., 1919), 60. 91. American Israelite, 29 December 1910; Paul Cowan, An Orphan in History: Retrieving a Jewish Legacy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982), 64. 92. Allen S. Maller, “Jews, Cults and Apostates,” Judaism, 306–­11; Chana Ullman, The Transformed Self: The Psychology of Religious Conversion (New York: Plenum Press, 1989); Charles Selengut, “The Search for the Sacred: Jewish Youth and Contemporary Religious Movements,” Dialogue & Alliance 3: 3 (Fall 1989): 29–­38; Juliene G. Lipson, Jews for Jesus: An Anthropological Study (New York: AMS Press, 1990); Wade Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993); Judith Linzer, Torah and Dharma: Jewish Seekers in Eastern Religions (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996); Shoshanah Feher, Passing Over Easter: Constructing the Boundaries of Messianic Judaism (Walnut Creek, CA: AtlaMira Press, 1998); Carol Harris-­Shapiro, Messianic

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Judaism: A Rabbi’s Journey through Religious Change in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999); Jeffrey S. Wasserman, Messianic Jewish Congregations: Who Sold This Buisness to the Gentiles? (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000); Ariel, Evangelizing the Chosen People, part 3. 93. Feher, Passing Over Easter, 140. 94. Lipson, Jews for Jesus, 48–­49; Feher, Passing Over Easter, 140; Linzer, Torah and Dharma, chap. 4. Marion S. Goldman, Passionate Journeys: Why Successful Women Joined a Cult (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), describes how women converts to the cult of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh passed through and sampled a bewildering number of traditional and New Age therapies and radical political ideologies before finding a spiritual home. 95. Roof, A Generation of Seekers, 30; Daniel Yankelovich, New Rules: Searching for Self-­Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down (New York: Random House, 1981), 4–­5. 96. Ariel, Evangelizing the Chosen People, 209–­10. 97. See, for example, the biographies reported in Lipson, Jews for Jesus. One convert, a sexually adventurous New York woman, became involved with Hebrew Christianity after she picked up “a blond California Jesus Freak” (35). 98. Ullman, The Transformed Self, xvi. Feher notes that the ethnic Jews in the messianic congregation she studied in the 1990s found their way to the group when “influential Believers entered their lives at a time of personal crisis or during a window of vulnerability.” Passing Over Easter, 65. CHAPTER SEVEN 1. Louis Bobé, “Familien Sumbel fra Marokko or dens Forbindelser med Danmark,” Tidsskrift for jodisk Historie or Literatur 1 (1917–­19): 37–­50; Daniel J. Schroe­ ter, The Sultan’s Jew: Morocco and the Sephardi World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 23–­24, 57–­59; Leah Wells Sumbel, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Sumbel, Late Wells, 3 vols. (London: C. Chapple, 1811); Cecil Roth, “The Unrespectable Proselyte: The Fortunes of Becky Wells,” Commentary 10 (1950): 569–­76. 2. Moses Hart, Modern Religion (New York: n.p., 1818). I consulted what was in effect the second edition of the work. The first, from which the second differed little, was published, also in New York, under the title General Universal Religion in 1815. The essay was reprinted in 1824 with its 1818 title. Jacob Rader Marcus, “The Modern Religion of Moses Hart,” in Studies in American Jewish History: Studies and Addresses by Jacob R. Marcus (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1969), 121–­53; David Rome, “On the Early Harts,” part 2, Canadian Jewish Archives, n.s., 16 (1980): 176–­78. 3. Jacob L. Talmon, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase (New York: Praeger, 1960), 15. 4. On the Jewish Saint-­Simonians, see Perrine Simon Nahum, La Cité Investie: La “Science du judaïsme” français et la République (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1991), 25–­ 39; Michael Graetz, Ha-­perferyah haytah la-­merkaz: Perakim be-­toldot yahadut tsarfat be-­meah ha-­19 [The Periphery Became the Center: Chapters in the History of French Jewry in the Nineteenth Century] (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1982), chap. 4; as well as the articles of Barrie M. Ratcliffe cited below.

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5. Simon Altmann, David Siminovitch, and Barrie M. Ratcliffe, “Olinde Rod­ rigues and His Times,” in Mathematics and Social Utopias in France: Olinde Rodrigues and His Times, eds. Simon Altmann and Eduardo L. Ortiz (Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society, 2005), 12–­13. 6. Eugène Rodrigues, Lettres sur la religion et la politique (Paris: Au Bureau de l’Organisateur, 1832). 7. Barrie M. Ratcliffe, “Crisis and Identity: Gustave d’Eichthal and Judaism in the Emancipation Period,” JSS 37 (1975): 122–­41; idem, “Saint-­Simonianism and Messianism: The Case of Gustave d’Eichthal,” French Historical Studies 10 (1975): 484–­502; Michael Graetz, “Une Initiative saint-­simonienne pour l’émancipation des Juifs,” REJ 129 (1970): 67–­84. 8. Paula E. Hyman, “Joseph Salvador: Proto-­Zionist or Apologist for Assimilation?,” JSS 34 (1972): 1–­22. 9. Benny Kraut, From Reform Judaism to Ethical Culture: The Religious Evolution of Felix Adler (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1979). Kraut’s study is a history of the development of Adler’s ideas rather than a sociology of the movement. A brief but richer treatment is Michael A. Meyer, “Beyond Particularism: On Ethical Culture and the Reconstructionists,” Commentary, March 1971, 71–­76. 10. Abraham Cahan, The Education of Abraham Cahan, trans. Leon Stein et al. (Philadelphia, PA: JPS, 1969), 249; Waldo Frank, Our America (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919), 87. 11. Encyclopaedia Judaica, s.v., “Ethical Culture.” 12. James Waterman Wise, Jews Are Like That (New York: Brentano’s Publishing, 1928), 136; Frank, Our America, 87; Henry Morgenthau, All in a Lifetime (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, & Co., 1922), 96. 13. Kraut, From Reform Judaism to Ethical Culture, 205–­206. 14. The best source for Mayer’s career is the collection of clippings and correspondence in the Jacob Mayer Biographies File, AJA, and a letter from Henrietta Szold to Max Malina, 10 November 1931, in her papers at the national office of Hadassah in New York City. I am grateful to Jonathan Sarna for providing me with a copy of this letter. See also David Philpson, My Life as an American Jew: An Autobiography (Cincinnati, OH: John G. Kids & Son, 1941), 40–­41. 15. The Jewish Times (New York), 29 October 1875; Kenneth E. Collins, Second City Jewry: The Jews of Glasgow in the Age of Expansion, 1790–­1919 (Glasgow: Scottish Jewish Archives, 1990), 28–­29. 16. Herman Baar, The Jewish Times (New York), 8 October 1875. 17. Lloyd P. Gartner, History of the Jews of Cleveland (Cleveland: Western Reserve Historical Society; New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1978), 48–­49. Gartner writes that his sermons lacked “accuracy and substance” but possessed “a flashy brilliance,” which dazzled his uneducated listeners, whose roots were in the German countryside. Ibid., 49–­50. Henrietta Szold, who as a sixteen-­year-­old heard Mayer, considered him “a man of brilliant parts” and “a magnetic speaker.” See the letter cited in note 16. 18. Tobias Schanfarber to Max Malina, 18 December 1931, Jacob Mayer Biographies File, AJA. 19. Katja Rampelmann, Im Licht der Vernunft: Die Geschichte des deutsch-­ amerikanischen Freidenker-­Almanachs von 1878 bis 1901 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner

Notes to Chapter Seven  •  405

Verlag, 2003). See, for example, the biographical register of contributors to the German-­language freethinking press in Rampelmann, 242–­75. 20. Benny Kraut, “A Unitarian Rabbi? The Case of Solomon H. Sonneschein,” in Endelman, Jewish Apostasy, 272–­308. 21. St. Louis Post-­Dispatch, 4 October 1908. In 1876, when a failed London-­born jeweler in the American Midwest wrote a begging letter to Nathan Mayer de Rothschild (1840–­1915) asking for financial assistance to return to England, he stressed how difficult it was “to bring up a family in this country in our dear sacred religion, for there is very little Orthodox Judaism,” most congregations being Reform—­ indeed, not only Reform but “such extreme Reform they almost ignore the Jewish language and make a laughing stock if you are an Orthodox Jew.” To prove his point, “to show you what Judaism is thought of in this country,” he enclosed a copy of a lecture by Sonneschein! Henry Hart Jacobs to Nathan Mayer de Rothschild, 19 June 1876, Sundry Partners Correspondence, April–­June 1876, RAL XI/109/122, N. M. Rothschild Archives, London. 22. “The Rabbi Speaks for Himself,” St. Louis Post-­Despatch, 29 June 1886. 23. Solomon Sonneschein to James Freeman Clarke, 19 February 1886, Solomon Sonneschein Letterbook, 1885–­88. Box X 132, AJA. 24. Sonneschein, “The Rabbi Speaks for Himself.” 25. American Hebrew, 19 March 1886. 26. Quoted in Kraut, “A Unitarian Rabbi?,” 277. 27. Solomon Sonneschein to Brooke Herford, 20 June 1886, Solomon Sonneschein Letterbook, 1885–­88, Box X 132, AJA. 28. Kaufmann Kohler, “Unitarianism and Reform Judaism,” The American Hebrew, 9 July 1886. 29. Adolph Moses, “Yahvism” (1894) and “The Religion We Offer to the Gentiles” (1896), in Yahvism and Other Discourses, ed. H. G. Enelow (Louisville, KY: Louisville Section of the Council of Jewish Women, 1903), 9, 29. 30. Horace L. Friess, Felix Adler and Ethical Culture: Memories and Studies, ed. Fannia Weingartner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 78. 31. Arthur Mann, Growth and Achievement: Temple Israel, 1854–­1954 (Cambridge, MA: Board of Trustees of Temple Adath Israel, 1954), chap. 4; idem, Yankee Reformers in an Urban Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1954), 46–­61. 32. The American Hebrew, 17 November 1893. 33. The Jewish Advocate (Boston), 31 March 1911. 34. Mann, Yankee Reformers, 66–­82. 35. Quoted in ibid., 63. 36. The American Hebrew, 17 June and 14 October 1910. 37. Boston Herald, 8 January 1912. 38. NYT, 3 July 1942. 39. Isaac Wolfe Bernheim, The Story of the Bernheim Family (Louisville, KY: John P. Morton & Co., 1910); idem, The Closing Chapters of a Busy Life (Denver: priv. printed, 1929). 40. The American Israelite, 22 September 1904. 41. Ibid., 18 July 1918. 42. Bernheim published his speech as an eleven-­page pamphlet, The Reform Church of American Israelites.

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43. The Jewish Voice (St. Louis), 23 June 1922. 44. Jewish Review & Observer (Cleveland), 11 November 1921. 45. Bernheim, Closing Chapters, 36–­37. 46. On Straus’s later career, see the newspaper clippings in the H. Cerf Strauss Biographies File, AJA. 47. These quotations appear in typescripts of two speeches he delivered to campus Hillels. The first, “Israel—­Awake!,” is dated 30 September 1935 and was delivered in Denver. The second bears neither date nor place. Both are in the I. W. Bernheim Papers, University Archives and Records Center, Ekstrom Library, University of Louisville. His Episcopalian grandson, I. W. Burnham II, was one of the founders of the brokerage firm Drexel, Burnham, Lambert. 48. On the Mannheim group and its minister, Carl Scholl, see Dagmar Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Pre-­Revolutionary Baden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 116–­24. 49. John Carswell, The Exile: A Life of Ivy Litvinov (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), 21–­23. 50. DNB, 1922–­30, s.v. “Sonnenschein, Edward Adolf”; F. A. Mumby and Frances H. S. Stallybrass, From Swan Sonnenschein to George Allen & Unwin Ltd. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1955), 13–­15. 51. The Ethical Message, special number, A Souvenir of the Ethical Church, 2: 7–­8 (1917): 30–­31. 52. Susan Budd, Varieties of Unbelief: Atheists and Agnostics in English Society, 1850–­1960 (London: Heinemann, 1977), 205. 53. Quoted in Friess, Felix Adler and Ethical Culture, 114. 54. In a biographical sketch of his brother Louis, which accompanied a new edition of Louis’s The Subconscious Self and Its Relation to Education and Health (London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926), Charles did not mention that their family was Jewish. 55. Charles Waldstein, The Jewish Question and the Mission of the Jews, 2nd ed. (London: Gay and Bird, 1899). 56. Ibid., liv–­lvi. 57. Ibid., 46. 58. Kaufmann Kohler, “The Jewish Question, or, Neo-­Mosaism, Unitarianism, and Judaism,” American Hebrew, 13 April 1894, 719–­21; “Dissolution,” American Hebrew, 20 April 1894. 59. See, for example, the figures quoted in Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 151–­52. 60. Robert W. Wistrich, Revolutionary Jews from Marx to Trotsky (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1976), 7–­8. 61. Slezkine, The Jewish Century, 81. 62. The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, eds. Georg Adler, Peter Hudis, and Annelies Lachitza, trans. George Shriver (London: Verso, 2011), 375–­76. 63. Ezekiel Lifschutz, “Jacob Gordin’s Proposal to Establish an Agricultural Colony,” AJHQ 56 (1966–­67): 151–­62; John Klier, “From Elizavetgrad to Broadway: The Strange Odyssey of Iakov Gordin,” in Extending the Borders of Russian History: Essays in Honor of Alfred Rieber, ed. Marsha Siefert (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2003), 113–­25; Ruth Gay, “Jacob Gordin’s Life,” in Jacob Gordin, The Jewish King Lear: A Comedy in America, trans. Ruth Gay (New Haven, CT: Yale

Notes to Chapter Seven  •  407

University Press, 2007), 107–­38; Beth Kaplan, Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: The Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007); Sergei Zhuk, “The Ukranian Stundists and Russian Jews: A Collaboration of Evangelical Peasants with Jewish Intellectuals in late Imperial Russia,” in Four Empires and an Enlargement, eds. Daniel Brett, Claire Jarvis, and Irina Marin (London: School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College, London, 2008), 17–­32. 64. Quoted in Klier, “From Elizavetsgrad to Broadway,” 115. 65. Jacob Prelooker, Under the Czar and Queen Victoria: The Experiences of a Russian Reformer (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1896); Simon M. Dubnov, History of the Jewsin Russia and Poland from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, trans. Israel Friedlander, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: JPS, 1916–­20), 2: 334–­35; Klier, “From Elizavetgrad to Broadway,” 116–­17. 66. Tsitron, Mei-­ahorei ha-­pargod, 116–­29; Steven J. Zipperstein, “Heresy, Apostasy, and the Transformation of Joseph Rabinovich,” in Endelman, Jewish Apostasy, 206–­31; Kai Kjær-­Hansen, Joseph Rabinowitz and the Messianic Movement, trans. David Stoner (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1995). 67. Tsitron, Mei-­ahorei ha-­pargod, 117–­19. 68. Zipperstein, “Joseph Rabinowitch,” 212–­13. 69. The thirteen theses are reprinted in Kjær-­Hansen, Joseph Rabinowitz, 47–­49. 70. Ibid., 50. 71. Edmond Privat, The Life of Zamenhof, trans. Ralph Eliott (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1931); Marjorie Boulton, Zamenhof: Creator of Esperanto (London: Routledge and Paul, 1960); Israel Klausner, “Ha-­doktor Zamenhof, yotser ha-­esperanto, ve-­ha-­tsiyonut” [Dr. Zamenhof, Creator of Esperanto, and Zionism], in Be-­darkhei tsiyon: Perakim be-­toldot ha-­tsiyonut ve-­tehiyyat ha-­dibbur ha-­ivri [In the Paths of Zionism: Chapters in the History of Zionism and the Revival of Spoken Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Rubin Mass, 1978), 152–­67. Peter G. Forster, The Esperanto Movement (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1982); Aleksander Korzhenkov, Zamenhof: The Life, Works and Ideas of the Author of Esperanto, trans. Ian M. Richmond, ed. Humphrey Tonkin (New York: Mondial, 2010); Andreas Künzli, L. L. Zamenhof (1859–­1917): Esperanto, Hillelismus (Homaranismus) und die “jüdische Frage” in Ost-­und Westeuropa (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010). 72. Quoted in Korzhenkov, Zamenhof, 5. 73. Quoted in Laskov, “Zamenhof’s Letter to the Biluim,” 155. On Zamenhof’s Zionist phase, see Klausner, “Ha-­doktor Zamenhof,” and Künzli, L. L. Zamenhof, 107–­13. 74. A French translation was published almost a century later. Lazare Louis Zamenhof, Le Hillélisme: Projet de solution de la question juive, trans. Pierre Janton (Clermont-­Ferrand: Faculté des Lettres et Sciences humaine de l’Université Blaise-­ Pascal, 1995). A German translation is in Künzli, L. L. Zamenhof, 422–­80. The nucleus of the ideas in the book appear in an unpublished Russian manuscript of 1894, now preserved in the library of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Boulton, Zamenhof, 98; Klausner, “Ha-­doktor Zamenhof,” 160. 75. JC, 6 September 1907. 76. Korzhenkov, The Life of Zamenhof, 67. 77. Quoted in Korzhenkov, The Life of Zamenhof, 68. 78. Korzhenkov, The Life of Zamenhof, 72–­73; Forster, The Esperanto Movement, 87–­88; Pierre Janton, Esperanto: Language, Literature, and Community, ed. Humphrey

408  •  Notes to Chapter Eight

Tonkin, trans. Humphrey Tonkin, Jane Edwards, and Karen Johnson-­Weiner (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 33–­38. 79. Esther Schor, “Crocodiling in Esperanto on the Streets of Hanoi,” Forward, 24 August 2007. 80. Cynthia Ozick, Art & Ardor: Essays (New York: Knopf, 1983), 153. CHAPTER EIGHT 1. Solomon ibn Verga, Sefer shevet yehudah [The Scepter of Judah], eds. Yitshak Baer and Azriel Shohet (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1947), 129. 2. Druyanov, Sefer ha-­bedihah, 2: 136. 3. Quoted in Röhl, “Higher Civil Servants in Germany,” 111. 4. Adolf Leschnitzer, The Magic Background of Modern Anti-­Semitism: An Analysis of the German-­Jewish Relationship (New York: International Universities Press, 1956), 58. 5. Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 24, 36, 60. 6. Paul H. Emden, Jews of Britain: A Series of Biographies (London: Sampson Law, Marston & Co., [1943]), 18–­21. 7. Rachel Daiches-­Dubens, “Eighteenth-­Century Anglo-­Jewry in and around Richmond, Surrey,” TJHSE 18 (1958): 154. 8. Endelman, Jews of Georgian England, 266. 9. Town and Country Magazine, April 1786, in Sir Thomas Colyer-­Fergusson Collection, Society of Genealogists, London. 10. Nathaniel Wraxall, The Historical and the Posthumous Memoirs of Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, 1772–­1784, ed. Henry B. Wheatley, 5 vols. (London: Bickers & Son, 1884), 5: 121; The Annual Register for 1806 (London,1807), 458; Cecil Roth, The Great Synagogue, London, 1690–­1940 (London: Edward Golston & Son, 1950), 162–­63. 11. Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community, 246–­47, n. 22. 12. Hertz, Jewish High Society, 108–­109. 13. Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community, 131–­32. 14. Mosse, Jews in the German Economy, 37, n. 8. 15. See the examples in Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community, 129–­31. 16. See Carlebach’s discussion in Divided Souls, chap. 1 17. Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community, 123–­24. 18. Ibid., 129–­30; Endelman, Radical Assimilation, 52; Hilda Spiel, Fanny von Arnstein: A Daughter of the Enlightenment, 1758–­1818, trans. Christine Shuttleworth (New York: Berg, 1991), 54–­55. 19. Quoted in Muhlstein, Baron James, 75, 157. 20. Hans I. Bach, Jacob Bernays: Ein Beitrag zur Emanzipationsgeschichte der Juden und zur Geschichte der deutschen Geistes im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1974), 116, 146–­47. 21. Avrutin, “Returning to Judaism,” 91. 22. Jewish Telegraphic Agency Daily News Bulletin, 1 January 1931. 23. Saulius Kobrys, “Jewish Converts in Independent Lithuania, 1918–­1940,” Polin 25 (2013): 233, 235, 236. 24. Quoted in Knaani, Ha-­aliyyah ha-­sheniyyah ha-­ovedet, 73, n. 8. 25. Chaim Tchernowitz, Masekhet zikhronot: Partsufim ve-­haarakhot [Book of Memoirs: Portraits and Appraisals] (New York: Jubilee Committee, 1945), 100. See

Notes to Chapter Eight  •  409

also Steven J. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 288–­92, and Goldstein, “Fathers and Daughters,” 37–­39. 26. Goldstein, “Fathers and Daughters,” 35–­ 40; Remba, Banim akhlu boser, 124–­41. 27. Ha-­olam, 11 Elul 5670 [15 September 1910], quoted in Knaani, Ha-­aliyyah ha-­sheniyah ha-­ovedet, 73–­74. 28. Katz, Zikhronot, 36. 29. Remba, Banim akhlu boser, 136–­37; Sophie Dubnov-­Ehrlich, The Life and Works of S. M. Dubnov: Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish History, trans. Judith Vowles, ed. Jeffrey Shandler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 159–­60. 30. Quoted in Remba, Banim akhlu boser, 136. 31. Heinrich Heine to Moses Moser, 14 December 1825 and 9 January 1826, in Bieber and Hadas, Heinrich Heine, 203, 205. 32. The Hartz Journey, quoted in Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy, 110. 33. Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy, 206. 34. Heinrich Heine, Pictures of Travel, trans. Charles Godfrey Leland (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1904), 272, 298. 35. Quoted in Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy, 159. 36. Heinrich Heine, The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine: A Modern English Version, trans. Hal Draper (Boston: Suhrkamp/Insel, 1982), 398–­99. 37. Ludwig Börne, Briefe aus Paris, ed. Alfred Estermann (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1986), 449–­50. 38. Moses Hess, Rom under Jerusalem, die letzte Nationalitätsfrage (Leipzig: Wengler, 1862), 14; Jacob Moleschott, Physiologisches Skizzenbuch (Giessen: Ferber, 1861), 257. 39. On the impact of Disraeli’s origins on his career, see Adam Kirsch, Benjamin Disraeli (New York: Nextbook and Schocken, 2008), and Endelman, Broadening Jewish History, chap. 9. 40. Edward Jamilly, “Anglo-­Jewish Architects and Architecture in the 18th and 19th Centuries,” TJHSE 18 (1958): 133–­34. 41. Endelman, Radical Assimilation, 50–­51, 100. 42. Joseph Wolff to Benjamin Disraeli, 26 January 1861; Benjamin Disraeli to Joseph Wolff, 30 January 1861; Benjamin Disraeli Letters, vol. 8, 1860–­1864, ed. M. G. Wiebe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 96. 43. Bo Bramsen and Kathleen Wain, The Hambros, 1779–­1979 (London: Michael Joseph, 1979). 44. The Times, 18 April 1913. 45. Quoted in Peter Gay, Freud, Jews, and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 121. 46. Christian S. Davis, Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 163–­74; J.C.G. Röhl, Wilhelm II, The Kaiser’s Personal Monarchy, 1888–­1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 408. 47. William O. McCagg Jr., “The Assimilation of Jews in Austria,” in Jewish Assimilation in Modern Times, ed. Bela Vago (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1981), 130–­32. 48. Quoted in Norman Lebrecht, Mahler Remembered (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 106–­107.

410  •  Notes to Chapter Eight

49. Michael L. Miller, “The Rise and Fall of Archbishop Kohn: Czechs, Germans, and Jews in Turn-­of-­the-­Century Moravia,” Slavic Review 65 (2006): 446–­74. 50. Dietz Bering, The Stigma of Names: Antisemitism in German Daily Life, 1812–­ 1933, trans. Neville Plaice (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 106, 210–­11, 262. 51. Avrutin, Jews and the Imperial State, 120–­21, 153–­59. 52. Proust, In Search of Lost Time, 1: 571. 53. Ibid., 3: 796, 797–­98. 54. Ibid., 3: 798. 55. Ibid., 5: 917. 56. Evelyne Bloch-­Dano, Madame Proust: A Biography, trans. Alice Kaplan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 5–­8, 12, 47; Jean Recanati, Profiles juifs de Marcel Proust (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1979), 14. 57. Béatrice Philippe, Les Juifs à Paris à la belle époque (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992), 70–­73. 58. Mosse, “Problems and Limits of Assimilation,” 43–­65. 59. Stern, Gold and Iron, 492–­93, 545–­46. 60. The literature on Kraus is enormous. The most recent account is Paul Reitter, The Anti-­Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-­Fashioning in Fin-­de-­Siècle Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), a suggestive but overwrought effort to defend Kraus from the accusation of antisemitism. While acknowledging that Kraus repeatedly invoked “grotesque stereotypes” about Jews, he argues that Kraus “appropriated antisemitic rhetoric in a willfully contradictory process of self-­ fashioning” and that he used antisemitic language “ironically and strategically” and played with antisemitic tropes “hyperbolically” in order to create “the spectacular paradoxes through which he bolstered his aura of critical idiosyncrasy and independence” (p. 26). Even if Reitter were correct, the fact remains that Kraus continued to be obsessed with Jews long after he left Judaism behind. 61. Quoted in Wilma Iggers, Karl Kraus: A Viennese Cultural Critic of the Twentieth Century (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967), 181. 62. Walther Rathenau, “Höre, Israel!,” Die Zukunft 18 (1897): 454. 63. Ibid., 458. 64. Ibid., 459–­60. 65. Shulamit Volkov, Walther Rathenau: Weimar’s Fallen Statesman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 20. 66. Rathenau, “Höre, Israel!,” 456–­57. 67. Peter Loewenberg, “Walther Rathenau and German Society” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1966), 215–­16. 68. On his ties to Schwaner, see Peter Loewenberg, “Antisemitismus und jüdischer Selbsthass,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 5 (1979), 457–­64. 69. Albert Einstein, On Peace, eds. Otto Nathan and Heinz Norden (New York: Schocken, 1960), 52; Harry Kessler, Walther Rathenau: His Life and Work, trans. W. D. Robson Scott and Lawrence Hyde (London: G. Howe, 1929), 72. 70. Walther Rathenau, “Staat und Judentum: Eine Polemik,” in Gesammelte Schriften, 5 vols. (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1925), 1: 188–­89. 71. Quoted in James Joll, Intellectuals in Politics: Three Biographical Essays (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1960), 67. 72. Lloyd M. Easton, ed. and trans., Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880–­1918 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 569.

Notes to Chapter Eight  •  411

73. Ibid. 74. Theodor Lessing, Der jüdische Selbsthass (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1930), 167–­207; Harry F. Young, Maximilian Harden: Censor Germaniae—­The Critic in Opposition from Bismarck to the Rise of Nazism (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1959); Alexander Prescott Moulton, “The Insider as Outsider: The Networks of Maximilian Harden in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2005). 75. Lessing, Der jüdische Selbsthass, 168–­69. 76. Quoted in ibid., 190. 77. Ibid. 78. Quoted in Moulton, “The Insider as Outsider,” 74–­75. 79. Philip Roth, I Married a Communist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 157. 80. Rosenberg and Goldstein, Creators and Disturbers, 115. 81. Schnitzler, My Youth in Vienna, 129–­30, 171, 174, 82. There are two recent biographies of Pevsner: Stephen Games, Pevsner: The Early Life—­Germany and Art (London: Continuum, 2010), and Susie Harries, Niko­ laus Pevsner: The Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 2011). See also Games’s introduction to Nikolaus Pevsner, Pevsner on Art and Architecure: The BBC Radio Talks (London: Methuen, 2002). Harries, unlike Games, had access to the diaries that Pevsner kept from age fourteen. 83. Quoted in Harries, Nikolaus Pevsner, 25. 84. Ibid., 4. 85. Quoted in ibid., 40. 86. Quoted in Games, Pevsner, 187. 87. Quoted in Games, ed., Pevsner on Art and Architecture, xxv. 88. Thomas Mann, Stories of Three Decades, trans. H. T. Lowe-­Porter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), 300, 305, 317–­18. 89. Heinrich Mann, Man of Straw, trans. Ernest Boyd (London: Hutchinson International Authors, 1947), 255. 90. Endelman, Broadening Jewish History, 248–­85. 91. Gilbert Frankau, Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant: A Romance of Married Life, 26th ed. (London: Hutchinson, 1922), 103–­106; idem, Life—­and Erica, The Definitive Edition of Gilbert Frankau’s Novels and Short Stories (London: MacDonald, n.d.), 87. 92. Gilbert Frankau, Masterton: A Story of an English Gentleman (London: Hutchinson, [1925]), 85, 202. 93. Daily Express, 9 May 1933. 94. Dictionary of National Biography, 1951–­1960, s.v. “Frankau, Gilbert.” 95. Michael Wharton, The Missing Will (London: Hogarth Press, 1984); idem, A Dubious Codicil (London: Chatto & Windus, 1991); The Times, 25 January 2006. 96. Daily Telegraph, 28 July 1989, 26 and 30 October 1989, 19 April 2002. 97. Wharton, A Dubious Codicil, 192. Interestingly, Frankau’s daughter, the novelist Pamela Frankau (1908–­67), also revolted against her father’s antipathy toward Jews. Endelman, Broadening Jewish History, 280–­82. 98. Jonathan Weiss, Irène Némirovsky: Her Life and Works (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt, The Life of Irène Némirovsky, trans. Euan Cameron (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010); Angela Kershaw, Before Auschwitz: Irène Némirovsky and the Cultural Landscape of Interwar France (New York: Routledge, 2010). 99. Weiss, Irène Némirovsky, 72.

412  •  Notes to Chapter Eight

100. Quoted in ibid., 57. 101. Meyerhoff, “Contra Simone Weil,” 241–­43. 102. Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, trans. Arthur Wills (London: Routledge, 2004), esp. 564–­76. 103. Giniewski, Simone Weil, 38–­40, 48–­49. 104. Her comments are quoted in Robert Coles, Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimmage (Reading, MA: Addiston-­Wesley, 1987), 48–­49. 105. Giniewski, Simone Weil, 48. 106. For biographical details and anecdotes about these figures, see Tsitron, Me-­ ahorei ha-­pargod. The most recent account of Brafman is John Doyle Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855–­1881 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 263–­83. 107. Quoted in Peter F. Dembowski, Christians in the Warsaw Ghetto, 77. 108. Berg, Warsaw Ghetto, 119. 109. David Abrahamsen, The Mind and Death of a Genius (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946). 110. C. C. Aronsfeld, Wanderer from My Birth (London: Janus, 1997), 51–­52. 111. NYT, 31 October and 1 November 1965. The story of Burros inspired Henry Bean’s fictional film The Believer (2001). The screenplay, along with essays by Bean, Sander Gilman, and David Kraemer, is published in Henry Bean, The Believer: Confronting Jewish Self-­Hatred (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, [2002]). 112. Shulamit S. Magnus, “Good Bad Jews: Converts, Conversion, and Boundary Redrawing in Modern Russian Jewry—­Notes toward a New Category,” in Boundaries of Jewish Identity, eds. Susan A. Glenn and Naomi B. Sokoloff (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010), 132–­60. 113. Levenson, “The Apostate as Philosemite,” 132–­45. 114. John Connelly, From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–­1965 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 287. 115. Ibid., 287–­88. 116. Tsitron, Me-­ahorei ha-­pargod, vol. 1, chap. 1; Magnus, “Good Bad Jews,” 142–­ 46, 150–­53. 117. Tsitron, Me-­ahorei ha-­pargod, 1:58–­61. 118. Louis Greenberg, The Jews in Russia: The Struggle for Emancipation, 2 vols. in 1 (New York: Schocken, 1976), 1: 176–­77; Stephen M. Berk, Year of Crisis, Year of Hope: Russian Jewry and the Pogroms of 1881–­1882 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 31. 119. Tsitron, Me-­ahorei ha-­pargod, 1: 77–­79. See also the remarkable story of the St. Petersburg photographer Constantine Shapira that the Zionist activist Meir Jacob Fine recounted in his memoirs, Yamim ve-­shanim: Zikhronot ve-­tsiyyurim mi-­tekufah shel hamishim shanah [Days and Years: Memories and Pictures of Fifty Years], 2 vols., trans. Avraham Zamir (Tel Aviv: Hotsaat Zikhronot al yad Devir, 1938–­39), 2: 206–­19. 120. Abraham Levinson, Toldot yehudei varshah [History of the Jews of Warsaw] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1953), 139; Aleksander Guterman, “The Origins of the Great Synagogue in Warsaw on Tlomackie Street,” in The Jews in Warsaw: A History, eds. Wladyslaw T. Bartoszewski and Antony Polonsky (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 200; idem, “Yahasam shel mitbolelei varshah le-­hamrat ha-­dat,” 63. 121. Max Lilienthal, Max Lilienthal: American Rabbi—­Life and Writings, ed. David Philipson (New York: Bloch, 1915), 175.

Notes to Conclusion  •  413

122. Tsitron, Me-­ahorei ha-­pargod, 1: 235, 2: 174. 123. Isaac Nissenbaum, Alei heldi [Regarding My Lifetime], 2nd ed. (Jerusalem: Reuben Maas, 1969), 176. 124. Katz, Zikhronot, 57–­58. 125. Avrutin, “Returning to Judaism,” 102–­103. 126. Mikhail Beizer, The Jews of St. Petersburg: Excursions through a Noble Past, trans. Michael Sherbourne, ed. Martin Gilbert (Philadelphia, PA: JPS, 1989), 185. 127. Jacob Toury, “Giyyur ve-­nisuin ezrahiim be-­vinah be-­shanim 1868–­1910,” in Etkes and Salmon, Perakim be-­toldot ha-­hevrah ha-­yehudit, 271. 128. Emil Ludwig, Gifts of Life: A Retrospect, ed. Ethel Colburn Mayne, trans. M. I. Robertson (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1931), 72, 322. 129. Lewis Stevens, Composers of Classical Music of Jewish Descent, 316–­17. 130. Quoted in Alexander L. Ringer, Arnold Schoenberg: The Composer as Jew (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 119. 131. “Escape and Rescue: An Interview with Geza Vermes,” Bible Review, 10: 3 (June 1994): 32–­33. 132. Hector Bolitho, Alfred Mond: First Lord Melchett (London: Secker, 1933); Eva Mond Isaacs, For the Record: The Memoirs of Eva, Marchioness of Reading (London: Hutchinson, 1973); Jean Goodman, The Mond Legacy: A Family Saga (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982). 133. Quoted in Bolitho, Alfred Mond, 361. 134. Quoted in ibid., 365. 135. Ludwig Lewisohn, Up Stream: An American Chronicle (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922); Ralph Melnick, The Life and Work of Ludwig Lewisohn, 2 vols. (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998). CONCLUSION 1. Christian Wiese, Challenging Colonial Discourse: Jewish Studies and Protestant Theology in Wilhelmine Germany, trans. Barbara Harshav and Christian Wiese (Leiden: Brill, 2005), chap. 6. 2. Wolfe, Now A Stranger, 125–­26. 3. Hart, Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity. 4. Baba Batra 12b.

Index

Abner of Burgos, 30 Abramov, Chaim, 317 Abse, Leo, 196 acculturation, Jewish: among conversos, 52; among Court Jews, 59–­60; extent of, 3; and the reshaping of Jewish identity, 50, 361–­63; in Russia, 89; in the Soviet Union, 148–­49; in the United States, 181–­88; among Warsaw haute bourgeoisie, 96–­97; of women, compared to men, 134–­35 Action française, 252 Adler, Felix, 276, 283–­84, 288, 295 Adolphus, John, 314 Agnon, S. Y., 123 Ahad Ha-­Am, 123, 318, 319 Albright, Madeleine, 190, 196–­97 Alekseev, Aleksander (Wolf Nakhlas), 348 Alexander, Michael Solomon, 246, 350 Alfonsi, Peter, 30 Allen, George, Jr., 197–­98 Allen, George, Sr., 197–­98 Allen, Henriette, 197–­98 American Reformed Jewish Church, 291 antisemitism: Catholic repudiation of, 350–­51; Christian roots of, 20–­21, 24; decline of after World War II, 191, 201–­02, 350–­51; emotional burden of, 90, 101–­02, 109–­13, 138–­39, 292, 360, 364; in interwar Europe, 148, 149–­51; Jewish responses to (other than baptism), 5, 296, 350–­52; in social life, 106–­13; strength of in various countries, 8–­9, 101–­02; in the United States, 180, 201–­03 Arendt, Hannah, 365 Ariel, Yaakov, 274 army, Jews in: in Austria-­Hungary, 104; in England, 105; in France, 73, 105–­ 06; in Germany, 104 Arnshteyn, Mark, 157 Arnstein, Fanny von, 85

Arnsteiner, Adam, 61, 316 Arnsteiner, Joseph, 61, 316 assimilation. See acculturation; baptism; conversion to Christianity; integration, Jewish; radical assimilation; secession from the Jewish commmunity Augustine of Hippo, 19, 22–­23 baalei-­teshuvah, 273–­74 Baar, Herman, 285 Baeyer, Adolf von, 120 Ballin, Albert, 108, 139 baptism: of children, 123–­25, 193–­95; as escape from execution or imprisonment, 36, 99; as precondition for intermarriage, 79; as price for inclusion, 2, 143, 361–­62 Baron, Salo, 51 Bartenson, Joseph, 352 Bartholdy, Jacob, 64 Baruch, Bernard, 107 Basevi, George, 324 Baum, Gregory, 351 Bautain, Louis-­Eugène-­Marie, 229 Behrens, Leffmann, 60 Belmont, August, 173 Benjamin, Judah, 173 Berenson, Bernard, 13, 131–­32 Berg, Mary (Miriam Wattenberg), 349 Berghahn, Marion, 161 Bergson, Henri, 251 Berlin, Isaiah, 384n62 Bernard of Clairvaux, 25 Bernays, Jacob, 317 Bernays, Michael, 317 Bernheim, I. W., 291–­93 Bersohn, Mathias, 129 Betteljuden, 37 Biedermann von Tourony, Rudolf, 332 Biélinky, Jacques, 156 Biluim, 306 Binger, Carl, 107 Birnbaum, Pierre, 106

416 • Index

Bischoffsheim, Amelia (Lady Fitz­ gerald), 140 Bischoffsheim, Ellen (Countess of Desart), 140 Blach, Friedrich, 110 Blech, Leo, 328 Bleichröder, Else von, 332 Bleichröder, Georg, 333 Bleichröder, Gerson von, 108, 332 Bleichröder, Hans von, 333 Bleichröder, James von, 333 Bloch, Jan, 352–­53 Bloch, Renée, 351, 356 Bloch (Dassault), Marcel, 193 Bloy, Léon, 251 Blumenfeld, Erwin, 107 Bluth-­Mallet scandal, 237 Boasson, Marc, 258 Bocard, Kovik, 199 Bocard, Maria, 199 Bogrov, Grigory, 126 Böhm, Heinrich, 154 Bonet, Francesca Rovira, 42 Börne, Ludwig, 322, 323 Borromeo, Carlo, 42 Brafman, Jacob, 9, 348 Brentano, Franz, 119–­20 British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Jews, 78, 243, 244, 246 Britt, George, 182 Broun, Heywood, 182 Brunner, Constantine, 102 Bulow, Bernhard von, 336 Bureau für jüdische Statistik, 171 Burros, Daniel, 350 Cahan, Abraham, 293 Callenberg, Johannes Heinrich, 34, 45, 76 Cameron, David, 326 Cammeo, Giuseppi, 117 cantonist regiments, 93–­94 Carlebach, Elisheva, 26, 33, 75, 249 Carlebach, Shlomo, 274 Carreto, Ludovico (Todros ben ­Yehoshua Ha-­Kohen), 43 Cassel, Ernest, 140

Cassel, Selig (Paulus Stephanus), 239–­ 40, 350 Cattaui, Georges, 256–­57 Central Conference of American ­Rabbis, 269, 291 Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens, 5 Chemielnicki massacres, 46 Christian Hebraism, 43 Christian kabbalah, 44 Christian Science, 178, 188–­89, 268–­71 Christiani, Pablo, 27, 30 Christianity: and anti-­Judaism, 5, 18–­ 19, 21; interest of in conversion of the Jews, 17–­21 Church Fathers, 21 civil service, Jews in: in Austria-­Hungary, 103, 104–­05, 328; in Britain, 105; in France, 73, 105; in Germany, 68–­70, 103, 327–­28 clergymen, Jews as, 232, 236–­37, 239–­ 46, 247, 256–­57, 264, 328–­29, 350–­ 51, 398n27, 400n53 Clérissac, Humbert, 252 Cocteau, Jean, 253–­54 Cohen, Albert, 256 Cohen, Jeremy, 31 Cohen, Morris Raphael, 204, 206 Cohen, Robert, 378n56 Cohen, Steven, 207 Coles, Robert, 347–­48 Communism. See Marxism, Jewish attraction to Congregatio Mariae Vitae, 45 Conn, Hortense Holzmann, 186 Connelly, John, 351 Conrad-­Martius, Hedwig, 266 Constantine, 21 “continuity,” Jewish: fears about in Germany, 171–­72; fears about in the United States, 191–­92, 206–­08; and the writing of modern Jewish history, 366–­67 conversion or return to Judaism, 81–­82, 168–­69, 249, 273–­74, 354–­58 conversion to Christianity: in ­Bohemia, 115, 122, 126; in ­Bukovina, 114; and career choice, 68–­70, 84, 118–­22,

Index • 417

125–­26; coerced, 24–­29, 30, 40–­42, 45–­46, 93–­94, 373n38; in Counter-­ Reformation and early modern Italy, 40–­44, 373n39; in early modern Germany, 37–­40, 60–­62; in early modern Poland, 44–­47; efficacy of, 9, 12–­13, 26–­27, 29–­30, 35–­36, 153–­54, 157–­58, 311–­15, 319–­33, 335–­36, 370n9; in Galicia, 114, 115, 123, 135; Jewish attitudes toward, 25, 26, 118, 144, 315–­19, 361; in medieval ­England, 28, 29, 32; in medieval Spain and Portugal, 23–­24, 27, 28–­30; in medieval Umbria, 28; in modern Austria, 75, 83, 85–­86, 100, 114, 115, 119, 121–­22, 136, 144, 153–­54, 159, 355–­56; in modern England, 79, 83, 263–­64; in modern France, 73–­74, 116, 140–­41, 156, 193–­95, 228–­37, 250–­63, 392n2; in modern Germany, 63–­73, 79, 83, 85–­86, 113–­14, 118–­19, 120–­21, 124–­25, 134–­35, 136–­37, 153; 159, 237–­40, 265–­68, 376n28, 386n92; in modern Hungary, 115–­116, 118, 139, 150–­53, 199–­201; in ­modern Italy, 154, 373n39, 387n12; in modern Lithuania, 98, 119; in modern Poland, 97–­98, 100, 115, 116, 119, 126, 129–­30, 144–­45, 156–­57 159–­ 60, 161, 352–­53, 385n78, 392n5; in modern Romania, 154–­55; in modern Russia, 91, 93–­96, 100, 116, 119, 123, 126–­28, 130, 144–­46, 351–­52, 353–­55; in Moravia, 114–­15; in the Netherlands, 166; in Serbia, 115; statistics on, 14–­15, 23, 39–­40, 70–­73, 100, 113–­16, 125, 150–­56, 159, 161, 166; in Ukraine, 135–­36; in the United States, 272–­74. See also baptism; clergymen, Jews as conversos, 12, 29–­30, 43, 52–­59, 311 Coronel Chacon, Augustin, 56 Counter Reformation, 40–­41 Court Jews, 37, 59–­62 Crémieux, Suzanne, 156 Crusades, 25, 29 cults, Jews in, 271–­73

Da Costa, Uriel, 53–­54 Damascus blood libel, 239, 246, 350 David, Alexander, 61 David, Ferdinand, 84 Davis, Arthur, 169 De Cologna, Abraham, 229 De Hirsch, Maurice, 140 D’Eichthal, Gustave, 281 Deinard, Samuel, 270 De Jonge, Moses Jacobson, 60 Démann, Paul, 351, 356 demographic decline: of American Jewry, 205–­19; of British Jewry, 220–­21; of German Jewry, 170–­72; of Soviet Jewry, 222–­23 De Prado, Juan, 53–­54 Deutz, Simon, 230 Dillon, C. Douglas, 182–­83 Dillon, Clarence, 183 disputation of Barcelona, 27 disputation of Tortosa, 29 Disraeli, Benjamin, 12, 13, 83, 108, 312, 323–­24, 337 D’Israeli, Isaac, 57–­58, 83 Divine Light Mission, 272 Dohm, Christian Wilhelm, 3 domus conversorum, 27, 41–­42, 44 Drach, David, 229, 230, 231, 234, 235, 236 Drachsler, Julius, 205 Drummond-­Wolff, Henry, 325 “dry baptism” proposal, 64–­65, 278, 287 Dubno, Solomon, 94 Dubnov, Olga, 123, 318 Dubnov, Simon, 119, 123, 318, 319 Edzard, Esdras, 34, 35–­36, 38, 39, 76 Efron-­Litvinov, Semen, 348 Einhorn, David, 285 Einstein, Albert, 336 Eizenberg, Pavel, 330 Eliano, Giovanni Battista, 43 Eliano, Vittorio, 43 emancipation, Jewish: in Austria-­ Hungary, 88, 99, 102, 103–­05; in East Central Europe, 149–­50; in Eastern Europe, 51; in England, 74–­75, 102; in France, 50, 66, 73, 102, 369n4; in

418 • Index

emancipation, Jewish (continued) Germany, 50, 67–­68, 70–­73, 75, 88, 99, 376n28; limits of, 14, 51, 86–­87, 90, 146; in the Netherlands, 73–­74; in Poland, 100; in Russia, 89, 91, 99–­ 100, 102–­03; terms of, 2–­4, 363–­64, 369n4 emigration. See migration enlightenment, European, 5, 63–­64, 66–­67, 228, 276; Jewish (see haskalah) Ephraim, Veitel Heine, 61 Epstein, Jacob, 97 Eskeles, Cäcilie von, 85 Esperanto, 275, 305–­08 Ethical Church, 295 Ethical Culture, 6, 178, 188, 270, 276, 283–­84, 288, 289, 291, 309 Eustachio, Giovanni Paolo (Elia ben Menahem di Nola), 43–­44 evangelicalism, 240 expulsions, 26, 28, 32, 37 Fechheimer, Samuel Sigmund, 295 Feinerman, Isaac, 300 Finaly affair, 195 Finn, Ralph, 250 Fleischer, Charles, 289–­91 Fould, Achille, 78 Fraenkel, Samuel, 97 Francia family, 54 Frank, Jacob, and Frankism, 39, 47–­48, 130 Frank, Waldo, 283 Frankau, Arthur, 342 Frankau, Gilbert, 342–­44 Frankau, Julia, 167, 342 Frankau, Pamela, 263 Frankenheim, Marcus Lee, 69 Frankenthal, Käte, 108 Franklin, Arthur Ellis, 168 Franklin, Hugh, 168 Franklin, Jacob, 168 Franks, David, 82 Free Religious Association, 288 Frenk, A. N., 9 Freud, Anna, 347–­48 Freud, Sigmund, 105, 147–­48 Friedländer, David, 64–­66, 278, 287

Friedländer, Saul, 156, 194–­95 Friedmann, Louis, 339 Fumet, Aniouta Rosenblum, 256 Fumet, Stanislas, 256 Fürtwangler, Wilhelm, 340 Gans, Eduard, 68, 320 Gay, Peter, 327 gender: and conversion, 8, 41–­42, 70, 85–­86, 122–­23, 133–­38, 271, 373n39, 385n78; and intermarriage, 137–­38, 162–­63, 209 Gershom ben Yehudah (Rabbenu ­Gershom Meor Ha-­Golah), 25 Gesellschaft der Freunde, 66 Gesellschaft zur Beförderung des Christentums unter des Juden, 76 Gideon, Elizabeth, 313 Gideon, Sampson, 314 Gideon, Samson, 313–­14 Ginsberg, Rachel, 123, 318 Ginsburg, Christian David, 241, 244–­45 Ginsburg, Saul, 9, 133 Glückel of Hameln, 36, 38, 59 Godwin, George, 198 Godwin, Peter, 198 Goldhagen, Daniel, 8 Goldmark, Helen, 288 Goldscheider, Calvin, 213–­14, 216–­17 Goldsmid, Francis Henry, 57 Goldsmid, Isaac Lyon, 78 Goldwater, Baron, 177 Goldwater, Barry, 177 Goldwater, Michael, 177 Gollancz, Hermann, 117, 167 Gomperz, Elias, 59 Gomperz, Moses Kossmann, 61 Gordin, Jacob, 299–­301 Gordon, Yehudah Leib, 89, 100 Goschler, Isidore, 229–­30, 234, 235 Gottlober, Abraham Baer, 95 Graetz, Heinrich, 8, 71 Graham, Katherine, 112 Graizbord, David, 56 Greater New York Jewish Population Survey, 209, 210–­11 Greenberg, Hayim, 119, 318 Greenberg, Uri Zvi, 262

Index • 419

Grimbert, Philippe, 392n1 Grinboym, Zvi Hirsch, 95–­96 Güdemann, Moritz, 244 Günsburger, David, 61 Gurian, Waldemar, 351 Haber, Fritz, 142–­43 Hahn, Kurt, 196 Hambro family, 326 Hamburger, Siegfried, 266 Ha-­Meassef, 66 Hampstead Ethical Institute, 295 Hannam, Charles, 196, 198 Harden, Maximilian, 337–­38 Hart, Kitty Carlisle, 186 Hart, Moses, 278–­79 haskalah, 4, 63–­66, 89, 94–­96, 127, 244, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303 Hatvany, Lajos, 125 Hebrew Christianity, 272, 273, 274, 302 Heine, Heinrich, 12, 49, 69–­70, 312, 319–­22, 323 Hellmuth, Isaac, 241–­42, 242–­43 Herman of Cologne, 30, 31 Herreira, Abraham, 56 Herschell, Ridley Haim, 245–­46 Hertz, Deborah, 71–­72 Hertzberg, Arthur, 369n4 Hertzberger, Seiko, 112 Herzl, Theodor, 124 Hess, Moses, 322, 323 Heynemann, Moses, 60 Hibbat Tsiyyon, 303, 305–­06 Hildebrand, Dietrich von, 401n78 Hillelism (Homaranismo), 306–­08 Hiller, Ferdinand, 84 Hirschensohn-­Lichtenstein, Yehiel Zvi, 302–­03 Hirszfeld, Ludwik, 157, 158, 159 historiography, Jewish: on the Holocaust, 365; on radical assimilation, 1, 6–­9, 13–­14, 215, 226–­28, 361; on resilience of diaspora communities, 364–­66 Hochheimer, Henry, 285 Hochschild, Adam, 178–­79 Hochschild, Berthold, 178–­79 Hochschild, Harold, 179

Hofmannsthall, Hugo von, 142 Hohenlohe, Prince of, 312 Holocaust: conversion in aftermath of, 192–­201, 392n2; conversion during, 151–­58, 193–­95, 196, 198, 392n2; historiography of, 365 Holy Cross Society, 152 Hourwitz, Zalkind, 94 house of catechumens. See domus conversorum Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 67–­68 Humperdinck, Engelbert, 328 Hussar, Bruno, 351 Husserl, Edmund, 120, 265, 266, 401n78 Huttner, Nathalie, 156 Hyams, Henry, 173 Hyman, Paula, 79, 135, 385n78 Ibn Verga, Solomon, 310 immigration. See migration Inquisition, 29, 56 Institutum Judaicum, Halle, 34 integration, Jewish: and career choice, 84, 205, 393n22; demographic impact of, 56–­58, 191–­92, 213–­24, 220; in England, 52–­58, 78–­79, 109–­ 10, 139–­40, 166–­67, 170, 323–­25; in France, 78, 79, 106, 330–­32; in Germany, 107–­08, 137, 161–­62, 164, 329; in Italy, 117; in the Netherlands, 52–­58, 166; opposition to, 4–­5, 86–­ 87, 89–­90, 92, 97, 102–­03, 106–­13; the price to be paid for, 1–­2; and the reshaping of Jewish identity, 50–­51; in Russia, 92, 102–­03; in the Soviet Union, 148–­49, 224; in the United States, 80–­82, 173–­79, 191, 204–­05, 208–­12, 393nn20 and 22 intermarriage between Jews and ­Christians: in Algeria, 221–­22; in Austria, 165; calls for, 4, 203, 290, 293, 301–­02, 334, 347; children of, 81, 173, 176, 177, 213–­19, 223; definitions of, 16; in England, 79–­ 80, 117, 131, 133, 166–­70, 220–­21; in France, 79, 140–­41, 221–­22; in ­Germany, 137–­38, 162–­65, 171; in

420 • Index

intermarriage between Jews and ­Christians (continued) Hungary, 165; in Italy, 123, 138; in the Netherlands, 166; in Scandinavia, 165; in the Soviet Union, 222–­23; in the United States, 80–­82, 131, 172–­ 77, 205–­20, 378n56, 394nn24 and 34 Isaac-­Fliess, Blümchen, 314 Isaac-­Fliess, Moses, 61, 62, 316 Isaac-­Fliess, Rebecca, 314 Isaacs, Albert Augustus, 246 Israel, Helen, 75 Itzig, Daniel, 59, 61, 65–­66 Jabotinsky, Vladimir, 318 Jacob, Max, 257–­58 Jaffé, Robert, 349–­50 James, William, 232 Javal, Julien, 230 Jellinek, Adolf, 244 Jessel, Albert H., 169 Jesus People, 272 Jewish Science, 269–­70 Jews for Jesus, 273, 274 Joachim, Joseph, 84 John Chrysostom, 21 Johnson, Boris, 326 Jordan, William Chester, 31 Joshua Ha-­Lorki, 30 Jost, Isaac Marcus, 68 Kahn, Otto, 179 Kaplan, Chaim, 156 Kaplan, Jacob, 193 Kaplan, Marion, 108, 134, 136 Kaplan, Yosef, 55 Karády, Victor, 200 Karpath, Ludwig, 121 Katz, Ben-­Zion, 145, 318, 319, 354 Katz, Jacob, 376n28 Kaufmann, Myron S., 184 Kayser, Paul, 327–­28 Kelsen, Hans, 119 Kessler, Harry, 336, 337 Khvolson, Daniel, 9, 118, 351 Klaar, Ludwig, 104–­05 Klein, Melanie, 124 Klemperer, Berthold, 120–­21

Klemperer, Georg, 122 Klemperer, Otto, 121–­22 Klemperer, Victor, 120–­21 Kobielski, Franciszek Antoni, 45 Kohler, Kaufmann, 287, 296 Kohn, Abraham, 174 Kohn, Theodor, 328–­29 Konfessionslosigkeit. See secession from the Jewish community Korbel, Josef, 196–­97 Koreff, David, 68 Koussevitzky, Serge, 384n62 Kovács, András, 200–­01 Koyré, Alexander, 266 Kraemer-­Bach, Marcelle, 156 Kraus, Karl, 312, 334, 400n60 Kraus, Oscar, 120 Kraushar, Alexander, 129–­30, 348 Krishna Consciousness (Hare Krishnas), 272 Kronenberg, Leopold, 97, 352 Kruger, Steven F., 370n9 Kun, Béla, 150 Lagnado, Lucette, 400n53 Lagnado, Salomon, 400n53 Lange, Antoni, 143 Lapowski, Sam, 182–­83 Lebrecht, Christian, 61 Leeser, Isaac, 175–­76 Lehmann, Behrend, 61 Lehmann, Christian Gottlieb, 61 Leschnitzer, Adolph, 312 Levi, Abraham Joseph, 77 Levi, Marx, 69 Levin, Rahel. See Varnhagen von Ense, Rahel Levinsohn, Isaac Baer, 95, 351 Levis, Edith, 356 Levita, Emile, 326 Levy, Alfred, 329 Levy, Clifton Harby, 270 Levy, Isabella, 313 Levy, Judith, 313 Levy, Oscar, 329 Lewald, Fanny, 70 Lewel, Jules, 229–­30, 234 Lewisohn, Ludwig, 367–­68

Index • 421

Libermann, Félix, 231 Libermann, Jacob, 231–­32, 234 Libermann, Samson, 230–­31, 236 Lichtenstein, Morris, 270 Liebman, Charles, 142 Lilienthal, Max, 95, 354 Lippmann, Walter, 107 Liptzin, Solomon, 8 Lissauer, Ernst, 112, 118 List, Joel Abraham, 71 Litvinov, Ivy, 109 Loesser, Charles, 112, 132 Loew (Lowe), Elias Avery, 326 Loewe (Low), Maximilian, 294–­95 Loewenstein, Steven, 65, 72–­73 London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews, 76–­77, 144, 238, 240, 241, 244, 245, 246, 248, 350, 398n27 Lopes, Manassah Masseh, 314, 323 Lopes, Ralph Franco, 323 Lourié, Arthur, 384n62 Lowenstein, Allard, 203 Lubavitch (Habad) Hassidism, 272, 274 Ludwig, Emil, 355 Lustiger, Jean-­Marie, 11, 194 Luther, Martin, 33 Luxemburg, Rosa, 298–­99 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 78–­79 MacWilliams, Carey, 182 Magnin, Edgar, 292 Magyar Israelite Literary Society, 118 Mahler, Gustave, 121, 328 Mahler, Raphael, 376n28 Mahmaddim, 261 Maimon, Solomon, 94 Mainz, 25 Malowist, Marian, 157, 160 Mandel, Arnold, 193 Mandelstam, Osip, 146 Manekin, Rachel, 123, 135 Mann, Heinrich, 341 Mann, Thomas, 341 Marcus, Jacob Rader, 279 Margoliouth, Moses, 241, 242–­43, 246, 350, 398n27 Maritain, Jacques, 250–­56

Maritain, Raïssa Oumançoff, 250–­56, 260–­61 martyrdom, 25, 26 Marx, Adolph, 84 Marx, Heinrich, 69 Marx, Karl, 298 Marx, Samuel, 69 Marxism, Jewish attraction to, 160, 297–­99, 344 Marx Brothers, 179 Maurras, Charles, 252 Mauthner, Fritz, 118 Mayer, Jacob, 284–­86, 404n17 Mayer-­Dalmbert, Mathias, 230 McCarthy, Mary, 176 McCaul, Alexander, 246 Medding, Peter, 212 Medem, Vladimir, 145 Mellish, William, 313 Menasce, Jean de, 256–­57, 400n56 Menasce, Jean-­Marie Cattaui de, 256 Mendelsohn, Ezra, 1 Mendelssohn, Abraham, 63–­64 Mendelssohn, Fanny, 64 Mendelssohn, Lea Salomon, 63–­64 Mendelssohn-­Bartholdy, Felix, 70, 84 Menes, Abraham, 70–­71 Merelman, Richard, 212 Merrick, Leonard, 109, 167 messianic Judaism, 272, 273, 302 Meyer, Aaron Moses, 315 Meyer, Eugene, 112 Meyer, Marianne, 314–­15 Meyer, Sara, 314–­15 Michaelis-­Jena, Ruth, 162 Mieses, Matthias, 9 migration: as background for conversion, 75–­78, 241, 248–­49; from Germany to Britain, 294, 326; from Germany to the United States, 100, 172; from Hungary, 151; from North Africa to France, 221 Minorities Treaties, 149 Minsky, Nikolai, 127–­28 Mischlinge, 164–­65, 312 missionizing: in antiquity, 15, 20, 22; in early modern Germany, 34–­36; in early modern Poland, 45;

422 • Index

missionizing (continued) effectiveness of, 77, 247–­48; historical records of, 226; in the medieval period, 23; in modern England, 76–­78, 247–­50; in modern France, 76, 236–­37; in modern Germany, 76, 238, 240; in modern Russia, 92–­93; in the United States, 247. See also clergymen, Jews as Modena, Leon, 42 modernization: of European society, 2, 50–­52; of Jewish society, 4, 50–­52, 88–­89 Moise, Edwin, 173 Moleschott, Jacob, 322 Mommsen, Theodor, 142–­43 Monckton, William, 313 Mond, Alfred (Lord Melchett), 356–­57 Mond, Eva, 356–­57 Mond, Henry, 356–­57 Mond, Robert, 356 Mond, Violet, 357 Montagu, Edwin, 168 Montagu, Samuel (Lord Swaythling), 168 Mordecai, Solomon, 81 Morel, Ignace Xavier, 230 Morganstern, Augusta, 176 Morgenthau, Elinor, 178 Morgenthau, Hans, 110 Morgenthau, Henry, Sr., 178, 284 Morgenthau, Henry, III, 177–­78 Morgenthau, Lazarus, 178 Mortara, Edgardo, 41 Moscheles, Ignaz, 84 Moser, Moses, 69–­70, 320 Moses, Adolf, 287–­88, 291 Moses, Alfred Geiger, 269–­70 Moses ben Nahman (Ramban), 27 Mosheh, son of Shneur Zalman of Lyady, 99 Mühsam, Paul, 110–­11 multiculturalism, 1–­2, 214 name-­changing, 74, 181, 182, 192, 196, 198, 200, 241, 312, 314, 329, 330, 333, 344, 345, 392n2 Nathan of Altona (Johann Adam Gottfried), 38

Nathan, Matthew, 105 Nathans, Benjamin, 100, 103 National Jewish Population Studies, 207–­08, 209–­10, 211, 217–­19 Néander, Johann August, 238–­39 Némirovsky, Irène, 156, 345–­46, 388n15 Neo-­Mosaic Church, 296 Netter, Yvonne, 156 Neumann, Robert, 111 Neumark, Ignacy, 97 Nevakhovich, Judah Leib, 94–­95 New Christians. See conversos New Israel (of Jacob Prelooker), 301–­02 New Israel (of Joseph Rabinowitch), 304 Nissenbaum, Isaac, 354 Nock, Arthur Darby, 237 Nossig, Alfred, 171 Notkin, Nota Haimovich, 94–­95 Notre Dame de Sion, 116, 156, 195, 236, 237, 258, 356 Oesterreicher, Johannes, 351 Offenbach, Jacques, 84 Oliphant, Laurence, 303 Olson, Stanley, 186–­87 Opatoshu, Joseph, 263 Oppenheimer, Joseph (Jud Süss), 59–­60 Orshanski, Isaac, 127 Ozick, Cynthia, 275, 309 Pachter, Henry, 339 Palgrave, Francis, 84, 324–­25 Panizzi, Anthony, 325 Parliament, Jews in, 323–­24 passing, 16, 181–­88, 193, 200, 203, 338, 391n70 Patai, Raphael, 139 Paul (Saul of Tarsus), 17–­19, 20, 22, 251 Peierls, Rudolf, 110 Perec, Georges, 194 Perets, Abraham, 94–­95 Peretz, Martin, 190 Perrin, J. M., 347 Pevsner, Nicholas, 339–­40 Pevsner, Uta, 340 Pew Research Center survey of American Jewry, 208, 218 Phillips, Bruce, 210, 217–­19

Index • 423

Pieritz, George W., 246 Prague, Hippolyte, 141 Prelooker (Priluker), Jacob, 301–­02 Protestantism: and conversion of Jews, 33–­34, 76, 240; in Germany, 63, 294; and “philosemitism” in England, 34; as preference of converts in non-­ Protestant lands, 144–­46, 151, 200, 238, 330, 386n92 Proust, Marcel, 140–­41, 330–­31 Pullan, Brian, 43, 56 Rabinowitz, Joseph, 302–­05 Rabska, Susanna, 348 race science and racial thinking, 37, 90, 240, 311, 326–­27, 334–­35, 343, 370n9 radical assimilation: contexts for, 7–­8; definition of, 5, 16; efficacy of, 9, 12–­13; moral evaluations of, 9–­10; psychology of, 10–­11; in the Soviet Union, 148; in the United States, 173–­79; varieties of 5–­6. See also baptism; conversion to Christianity; intermarriage between Jews and Christians; passing; secession from the Jewish community Radnóti, Miklós, 152 Rathenau, Walther, 12–­13, 110, 312, 334–­37 Ratisbonne, Alphonse, 225, 230, 232–­37 Ratisbonne, Flore, 232–­34 Ratisbonne, Théodore, 73, 229–­30, 232, 234, 236–­37 Reed, John, 107 Reform Church of American Israelites, 292 Reform Judaism, 4, 58, 236, 269–­70, 282–­93, 294, 309, 405n21 Reformation, 32–­33 Reinach, Adolf, 266–­67, 402n78 Reiter, Paul, 410n60 Reuter, Paul Julius, 326 Ricardo, David, 323 Rich, Adrienne, 184–­85 Rich, Arnold, 185 Ringelblum, Emanuel, 157, 159, 160 Robert, Ludwig, 67, 79 Rodrigues, Eugène, 280–­81

Rodrigues, Olinde, 280 Roth, Cecil, 195–­96 Roth, Philip, 187–­88, 212, 338 Rothenstein, John, 263 Rothschild, Amschel, 317 Rothschild, Charles de, 109 Rothschild, Hannah de, 80, 317 Rothschild, Hannah de (Countess of Rosebery), 140 Rothschild, James de, 78, 317 Rothschild, Karl, 317 Rothschild, Salomon de, 173 Rozenblit, Marsha, 122 Rubinstein, Anton, 95 Rubinstein, Nikolai, 95 Rudloff, Leo, 351 Rühs, Friedrich, 67 Ruppin, Arthur, 1, 133, 147, 164, 165, 171, 366–­67 Sabbateanism, 39, 47–­48 Sachs, Maurice, 253–­55 Saint-­Simon, Claude Henri de, 280 Saint-­Simonians, Jewish, 280–­82 St. Vladimir Brotherhood, 135–­36 Salaman, Clement, 168 Salaman, Nina Davis, 168–­69 Salaman, Redcliffe Nathan, 168 Salkinson, Isaac Edward, 77–­78, 241, 243–­44 salon Jewesses, 8, 66, 67, 85 Salvador, Joseph, 281–­82 Samuel, Rebecca, 80 Sasportas, Jacob, 54 Sassoon, Siegfried, 263 Scalinger, Joseph Justus, 35 Schäfer, Dietrich, 327 Scheler, Max, 265, 402n78 Schindler, Solomon, 288–­89 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 62, 278 Schlessinger, Bernhard, 175 Schnitzler, Arthur, 111, 339 Schoenberg, Arnold, 123, 355–­56 Scholem, Gershom, 107–­08 Schrötter, Friedrich von, 71 Schudt, Johann Jacob, 35 Schüler-­Spingorum, Stefanie, 162 Schwaner, Wilhelm, 336 Scientology, 272

424 • Index

Sebag-­Montefiore, Hugh, 264 Sebastian, Mihail, 155 secession from the Jewish community, 6, 16, 122, 275–­76 secularization, 50, 141–­42, 174, 210–­11, 219, 224, 234, 275–­76, 308, 327, 360, 362 “self-­hatred,” Jewish, 12–­13, 129, 177, 236, 298–­99, 333–­50, 358, 410n60 Selig, Gottfried (Philipp Heynemann), 60–­61 Seligman, Florence Einstein, 296 Sephardim. See conversos Shapira, Moses Wilhelm, 244–­45, 398n30 Sidgwick, Cecily, 122 Sieghart, Rudolf, 328 Simmel, Georg, 327 Singer, Simeon, 117, 249–­50 Sklare, Marshall, 206, 208, 213 Slezkine, Yuri, 298 Slonimski, Antoni, 129 Slonimski, Faina, 127–­28 Slonimski, Haim Selig, 127 Slonimski, Josef, 129 Slonimski, Leonid, 127–­28 Slonimski, Stanislaw, 129 Slonimsky, Nicolas, 127 Smolenskin, Peretz, 243 Société des Amis d’Israël, 76 Society of Israelite Christians, Solomon, Benjamin Nehemiah, 92 Sonderweg thesis, 75, 101, 377n45 Sonnenschein, Albert, 295 Sonnenschein, William, 295 Sonneschein, Solomon, 286–­87, 405n21 Sorkin, Joseph Nikolaevich, 351–­52 Soss, Sidney, 271 Spanish and Portuguese Jews. See conversos Spiegel, Modie, 270–­71 Spinoza, Barukh, 53–­54, 276–­77 Spiritual Biblical Brotherhood, 299–­301 Stahl, Friedrich Julius, 238–­39 Stanislawski, Michael, 93–­94, 98 Stanley, Venetia, 168

Stein, Edith, 11, 265–­68 Stember, Charles, 202 Stern, G. B., 263 Stern, Henry Aaron, 241, 245 Stern, Malcolm, 80, 81 Sternheim, Carl, 337 Stoecker, Adolf, 240 Straus, Donald, 177 Straus, Lazarus, 175 Strauss, H. Cerf, 293 Stundists, 299–­300, 302 suicide, 159, 349–­50, 388n21 Sumbal, Joseph Hayyim, 277–­78 Sunday Commons, 290–­91 Susman, Nikander Vaselevich, 352 Szajkowski, Zosa, 58 Szold, Benjamin, 285 Szold, Henrietta, 285 Szwarc, Eugenia Markowa, 261–­62 Szwarc, Marek, 261–­63 Talmon, Jacob, 280 Tartakower, Arieh, 161 Taufgeschenk, 35, 42 Tchernowitz, Chaim, 318 Teller, Abraham William, 64–­65, 278 Terquem, Lazare, 236 Terquem, Olry, 231 Theilhaber, Felix, 138, 171, 192, 366–­67 Theistic Church, 294–­95 Theodosius, 21 Tolts, Mark, 223 Torres, Tereska Szwarc, 261, 262 Transcendental Meditation, 272 Trebitsch, Siegfried, 145 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 239, 240, 350 Trollope, Anthony, 246 Trost, William, 198 Tsitron, S. L., 9 Turczynowicz, Stefan, 45 UCLA-­Hillel study of Jewish freshmen, 217 Ullman, Chana, 274 Unger, David, 68–­69 Unification Church (Moonies), 272 Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 292

Index • 425

Unitarianism, 188, 270, 283, 286–­88, 291, 293, 296 universities, Jews in: in Austria-­ Hungary, 105, 119–­20; in Germany, 68–­69, 104, 265–­66, 267, 327; in Russia, 119, 319; in the United States, 107, 131, 178, 179, 183, 184, 202, 203, 358 utopian movements, 279–­81 Varnhagen von Ense, Karl August, 67, 79 Varnhagen von Ense, Rahel, 67, 71, 79 Vengerov, Hanan Afanasii, 128 Vengerov, Pauline Epstein, 128 Vengerov, Semyon, 127–­28 Vengerova, Isabelle, 128 Vengerova, Zinaida, 128 Vermes, Geza, 151, 351, 356 Villa Real, Elizabeth, 313 Villa Real, William, 313 Villareal, Catherine da Costa, 313 Von Carben, Victor, 36 Voysey, Charles Annesley, 294–­95 Wachenheim, Hedwig, 124 Wagner, Richard, 240, 350 Waldstein (Walston), Charles, 295–­97 Wallich, Hermann, 124 Wallich, Paul, 332 Walter, Bruno, 121 Way, Lewis, 93 Weil, André, 258, 260 Weil, Jeanne, 331 Weil, Simone, 258–­61, 346–­48 Weiler, Bernard, 326 Weill, Alexandre, 79 Weininger, Otto, 349 Weissler, Adolf, 124–­25 Weizmann, Chaim, 256, 356–­57, 400n56

Welby, Justin, 326 Wells, Mary, 278 Weltsch, Robert, 111 Wetzlar, Karl Abraham, 61 Wharton, Michael, 344–­45 Willstätter, Richard, 120 Wise, Isaac Mayer, 284 Wise, James Waterman, 283 Wise, Stephen, 269, 292 Wissenschaft des Judentums, 4 Wistrich, Robert, 298 Wolfe, Humbert, 112–­13, 133, 364 Wolff, Arthur Samuels, 185–­86 Wolff, Geoffrey, 185–­86 Wolff, Gustav Wilhelm, 326 Wolff, Joseph, 246, 325 Wolff, Tobias, 185 Wolfson, Harry, 227 Wolin´ski, Kazimierz, 46 Wolkenberg, Marcus, 248 Woolf, Leonard, 109–­10, 132–­33, 167 Woolf, Virginia, 109–­10 Woytinsky, Saul, 127 Wraxall, Nathaniel, 314 Yankelovich, Daniel, 272 Yehiel of Pisa, 32 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 52, 53 Yung Yidish, 262 Zaleski, Antoni, 348 Zamenhof, Ludwig, 129, 305–­08 Zamenhof, Lydia, 308 Zbytkower, Samuel, 97 Zeitlin, Joshua, 94 Zemlinsky, Mathilde, 122 Zen Buddhism, 272, 273 Zimmern, Lucy, 400n56 Zipperstein, Steven, 302 Zolli, Israel, 392n2