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BASTARDS AND BELIEVERS Jewish Converts and Conversion from the Bible to the Present
Theodor Dunkelgrün and Paweł Maciejko
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Contents
Introduction Theodor Dunkelgrün and Paweł Maciejko
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Chapter 1. The Term Ger and the Concept of Conversion in the Hebrew Bible Sara Japhet
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Chapter 2. Ex-Jews and Early Christians: Conversion and the Allure of the Other Andrew S. Jacobs
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Chapter 3. Conversion to Judaism as Reflected in the Rabbinic Writings and Culture of Medieval Ashkenaz: Between Germany and Northern France Ephraim Kanarfogel
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Chapter 4. “Cleanse Me from My Sin”: The Social and Cultural Vicissitudes of a Converso Family in Fifteenth-Century Castile Javier Castaño
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Chapter 5. Of Purity, Piety, and Plunder: Jewish Apostates and Poverty in Medieval Europe Paola Tartakoff
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Chapter 6. Converso Paulinism and Residual Jewishness: Conversion from Judaism to Christianity as a Theologico-political Problem Claude B. Stuczynski
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Chapter 7. Return by Any Other Name: Religious Change Among Amsterdam’s New Jews Anne Oravetz Albert
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Chapter 8. The Persuasive Path: Giulio Morosini’s Derekh Emunah as a Conversion Narrative Michela Andreatta
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Chapter 9. “Precious Books”: Conversion, Nationality, and the Novel, 1810–2010 Sarah Gracombe
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Chapter 10. Between European Judaism and British Protestantism in the Early Nineteenth Century Elliott Horowitz
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Chapter 11. When Life Imitates Art: Shtetl Sociability and Conversion in Imperial Russia Ellie Schainker
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Chapter 12. Opposition, Integration, and Ambiguity: Toward a History of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate’s Policies on Conversion to Judaism Netanel Fisher
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Notes
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Contributors
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Index
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Introduction T h e o d o r Du n k e l g rü n a n d Paw e ł M ac i e j ko
In The Merchant of Venice (act 3, scene 5), the clown Launcelot Gobbo briefly becomes a theologian, explaining to Shylock’s daughter, Jessica, that she is damned beyond salvation: Clown Yes, truly, for look you, the sins of the father are to be laid upon the children therefore, I promise you, I fear you. I was always plain with you, and so now I speak my agitation of the matter. Therefore be of good cheer, for, truly, I think you are damned. There is but one hope in it that can do you any good, and that is but a kind of bastard hope neither. Jessica And what hope is that, I pray thee? Clown Marry, you may partly hope that your f ather got you not, that you are not the Jew’s daughter. Jessica That were a kind of bastard hope indeed, so the sins of my mother should be visited upon me. Clown Truly, then, I fear you are damned both by father and mother: thus, when I shun Scylla your father, I fall into Charybdis your m other; well, you are gone both ways. As David Nirenberg has written, The Merchant of Venice is “a drama of chronic conversion whose every participant—including playwright and viewer—moves suspended like a compass needle trembling between Judaism and Christianity.”1 It is only through conversion that Jessica escapes the collective guilt that Christian doctrine had attributed to Jews for centuries
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and would continue to attribute to them for centuries to come. Without conversion, her hopes to escape her Jewish heritage would be illegitimate “bastard hopes.” Yet no sooner has Jessica declared her salvation by marrying a Christian than Gobbo the theologian turns back into Gobbo the clown: Jessica I shall be saved by my husband; he hath made me a Christian! Clown Truly, the more to blame he; we were Christians enow before, e’en as many as could well live on by another. This making of Christians will raise the price of hogs if we grow all to be pork eaters, we shall not shortly have a rasher on the coals for money.
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Gobbo’s (that is, Shakespeare’s) joke is on the Christians: even beyond conversion, the Jew continues to affect their lives for the worse—and indeed, remains somehow essentially Jewish. Or, in this case, it is Jessica who becomes the true Christian, while the clown exchanges his economy of salvation for the supply and demand of the Venetian market. In terms of the play, Gobbo (whose name alludes to the Italian form of Job) becomes more Jewish than Jessica. Nirenberg speaks of the play’s “systematically staged confusion of Christian and Jew,” arguing that “it is through this more general—indeed all-pervasive—confusion that Shakespeare achieves his dramatization of a crucial question: How can a society built on ‘Jewish’ foundations of commerce, contract, property, and law consider itself Christian?”2 The questions spring forth: Can a Jew become a legitimate Christian? Is Christianity a legitimate offspring of Judaism? How do answers to these questions change when the terms of that legitimacy change? Is it possible to leave Judaism entirely? Is it possible to become a Jew? Are all Christians somehow Jewish? Are all Jews potentially Christian? Is a convert a Jew, a Christian, or perhaps a category unto itself? Does he or she become an illegitimate child of the old tradition? A legitimate child of the new one? Is such an individual a bastard or a believer? Or both? The term conversion is profoundly polysemous. We use it to speak of a change of religion: Jews who turn to religions other than Judaism and non- Jews who tie their fates to that of the Jewish people. We use it when talking about Christians becoming Muslim (or vice versa), Christians becoming “born again” or moving from one Christian church or confession to another, or efforts to Christianize or Islamize indigenous populations of Asia, Africa,
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and the Americas. And we use it to speak about modern, secular people discovering spiritual creeds and joining religious communities. Once a meta phor drawn from astronomy and alchemy to describe religious change, we now use it as a metaphor drawn from religion to describe various changes of mind, such as “conversions” to political ideologies, philosophies of life, and all manner of vocation. Converts themselves use the term for a plurality of experiences, too: forced and voluntary, sudden and extended, public and private, social and metaphysical. This vast historical, cultural, and contextual variety implies, as the medievalist Karl F. Morrison puts it, that “it would be a confusion of categories to use the word conversion as though it were an instrument of critical analysis, equally appropriate to any culture or religion. . . . The word is more properly a subject, rather than a tool, of analy sis.”3 At the same time, to label something “conversion” is not to describe but to interpret. Thus, conversion can certainly be an analytical instrument in the hands of both the convert and her historian, just not an objective one. The history of conversion, in this sense, is a history of such subjective interpretations—that is, a history of what it meant for people to have been called, or to call themselves, converts. It is a central premise of this volume that, while we do take Jewish conversion to be a particular version of a universal phenomenon (“conversion”) in a religiously diverse world, we also consider it a specific phenomenon, quite unlike any other act we use that term to describe. Our sphere of interest, then, encompasses conversions of non-Jews to Judaism but especially conversions of Jews to Christianity. The importance of conversion to Judaism for understanding what a “Jewish conversion” is seems self-explanatory; restricting conversion from Judaism to cases of conversion to Christianity is not. The decision, then, warrants a word of explanation. We believe that Jewish conversion to Christianity offers a unique lens through which one can see Jewish conversion. To be sure, conversions of Jews to Islam were numerically as important and shaped the histories of entire branches of world Jewry over hundreds of years. Yet—we posit—the understanding or concept of Jewish conversion that prevailed among Jews and non- Jews alike was shaped by conversions to Christianity more than anything else. We can account for this in several ways. First, Christianity’s relation to Judaism differs from its relation to any other religion. Christianity teaches that it is the set of prophecies of the Hebrew Bible that Jesus Christ fulfills; it is that fulfillment which turns the Tanakh into the Old Testament, incomplete without the New. In this supersessionist sense, Christianity is
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Judaism’s fulfillment and replacement, rendering the latter itself obsolete and Judaism in the Christian era historically anomalous. Jewish converts to Christianity, in this view, are more than simply saved souls: they are living proof of the truth of Christianity. In his or her individual life, the Jewish convert reenacts the world-historical transition that the collective has already made. The life of the Jewish convert corroborates the Christian structure of the history of salvation and mirrors it in nuce. Without taking into account the significance of this perceived exemplarity, one is liable to misunderstand the rhetoric and representations of Jewish converts in much Christian writing and art. Until recently, Christian teaching and self- understanding across the confessions widely considered Judaism in the Christian era to have ceased to be verus Israel. Jews might remain Israel according to the flesh, but the church is the True Israel—that is, Israel according to faith. It was only with the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), and its declaration Nostra Aetate (proclaimed by Pope Paul VI on October 28, 1965), that the Roman Catholic Church abandoned the doctrine of collective Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus Christ—the responsibility for deicide that Shakespeare has Gobbo put to Jessica with apparent self-evidence (“the sins of the father are to be laid upon the children”). Until that council, moreover, converts from Judaism to Roman Catholic Christianity were required to profess an additional formula not required of any other converts: to forswear the errors of the Jews. Second, Christianity’s unique relationship to Judaism is in many ways reciprocal. Both Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus were Jewish. Recent scholarship on late antiquity has largely rejected the “parting of the ways” paradigm in which Christianity “branched out” from Judaism as a daughter religion that emancipated herself from her parent.4 Yet—historically inaccurate as we might consider it today—this very paradigm defined mutual perceptions of Jews and Christians for almost two millennia. Jesus’ Jewish origins have posed challenges to Christians throughout the Christian era. One of our contributors, Andrew Jacobs, has explored late antique and early medieval Christian debates about Jesus’ circumcision (commemorated on January 1, eight days after the Nativity), which paradoxically confounded both the Old Law and the New, the corporeal and the spiritual, the Jewish and the Christian.5 Martin Luther wrote an early treatise, “That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew” (1523), in the hope of encouraging Jewish conversion to Reformed Christianity.6 In the sixteenth century, Jesus’ Jewishness became a topos in historical scholarship, too. Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609) did as much
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as any early modern scholar to persuade the world of European learning that Jewish texts and contexts were indispensable to understanding the world of the Gospels. At Leiden, where he studied the Talmud with a Polish Jewish convert, Scaliger told his students about the knowledgeable Jewish woman he had met as a young man in Avignon who reminded him that Jesus was Jewish and must have been circumcised.7 Yet unease about Jesus’ Jewishness appears time and again among Christian theologians and scholars of history alike, in ways that have persisted into the modern search for the “historical Jesus”: Ernest Renan famously set a “northern” Galilean Jesus against the “eastern” Pharisaic Judaism of Jerusalem, and Christian theologians in Nazi Germany built an entire corpus of scholarship around an “Aryan Jesus.”8 Jews, for their part, have also long been ambivalent about Jesus’ belonging-not- belonging to Judaism. Even the most critical medieval writings about Jesus— Maimonides’ uncensored Code, for instance, or the satiric Toledot Yeshu—deny Jesus’ divinity but not his Judaism. In the nineteenth century, Abraham Geiger turned to the historical Jesus and Paul to show Christianity not as Judaism’s replacement but as Judaism’s creation. In an age when Christian historians wrote immensely popular histories of the Jews that all culminated with Jesus—maintaining therewith a salvific structure according to which Judaism has no history after Christ—Geiger appropriated Jesus for Jewish history while polemicizing against its Christian rewriting. In so doing, he wrote a critical contribution to the debates about the historical Jesus and helped to forge modern Jewish historiography.9 This Hassliebe relationship between Jews and Jesus extended to believers in Jesus and, especially, Jewish believers in Jesus. Into modern times, the phenomenon of Jews becoming Christian—whether voluntarily or under coercion—has carried an emotional, theological, and cultural load unlike any other form of leaving the Jewish fold. The Christian became Judaism’s ultimate Other. Indeed, a fundamental tenet of rabbinic theology, the distinction between Jew and gentile (goy), is historically entangled with the emergence of the notion of the gentile (ethnê) in Pauline Christianity.10 However responsible the historical Paul may have been for this entanglement, as the self-proclaimed Apostle to the Gentiles, the author of the Epistle to the Romans made the distinction central to Christianity’s self-conception.11 As the student of Gamaliel (i.e., Rabban Gamliel the Elder; see Acts 22:3), Paul also inscribed his education in Jewish law into the story of his own conversion. As the following pages will show, Paul’s conversion would become exemplary for countless subsequent Jewish converts to Christianity
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who sought to conceptualize their Jewish heritage in positive, Christian terms (an exemplarity that will become the foundation for what Claude Stuczynski calls, in his contribution to this volume, “converso-Paulinism”). The Pauline adoption and adaptation of the notion of the gentile and Paul’s own self-confessed identity as a nongentile Christian might originally have mirrored an ancient Mediterranean reality in which the Christ believers were either Jewish or not; over time, however, it came to mean that the category of the Jew, both theologically and historically, persisted beyond conversion. In many medieval, early modern, and modern eyes, a Jewish convert to Chris tianity was essentially different from other converts for this reason, too: he or she remained a Jew in the Pauline sense. As one such convert told a British traveler to the Levant in 1839, “We shall always be a distinct people. We may become Christians, but we cannot become Gentiles.”12 The history of Jewish conversion to Christianity may be told as an unending set of variations on the persistence of Judaism within Christianity, beyond conversion: on the impossibility of Jews becoming gentiles. From the point of view of rabbinic Judaism, there are strikingly parallel reasons why Jewishness persists beyond conversion. By the time Shakespeare sat down to write The Merchant at the end of the sixteenth century, the ongoing confessionalization of European societies had made religious identity a question of personal choice to an extent never seen before. By that same time, the belief that it was impossible for a Jew to leave the community of Israel entirely had grown deep roots in Jewish thought and law. In the wake of the First Crusade, as Jacob Katz famously showed, the Franco-Jewish exegete Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac (Rashi) determined that in certain cases the Talmudic saying “A Jew, even though he has sinned, remains a Jew” (bT Sanhedrin 44a) applies to converts as well.13 Moses Maimonides, writing in Egypt a century after Rashi, condoned outward conversion to Islam in circumstances of duress and forced conversion such as those he and his family experienced under the Almohads in Andalusia and the Maghrib. For these towering figures of Jewish legal authority in the Christian and Muslim worlds, conversion did not break the halakhic bond with the community. Rashi’s opinion contributed to the emergence of groups whose Judaism was questioned by Jews just as their Christianity was questioned by Christians. Socially, converts had left the community into which they were born: in the eyes of many of their former coreligionists, they were no longer Jewish. Yet in Rashi’s reading, baptism had no decisive purchase on halakhic belonging.
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Conversion was a sin that called for repentance and return; it was not a complete rupture. A Jew, even a converted Jew, simply could not become a goy. This complex of dilemmas became acute in late medieval Iberia. The mass conversion of Jews to Christianity in 1391 led to what Nirenberg has called a “crisis of classification,” as old bounda ries and markers of difference vital to Christian self-definition disappeared (Christian prostitutes, which Nirenberg highlights as an extreme case, could no longer identify whether their clients were Christians, Jews, or Muslims on the basis of circumcision). From the 1430s on, the mass conversions went from being miraculous to being catastrophic in the eyes of many Spanish Christians. Jewish converts and their descendants were still suspected of secretly practicing Judaism, but they came to be seen as guilty of a different kind of crime. Theological damnation by adherence to Judaism as a creed, escapable hitherto through conversion to Christianity, turned into damnation by Judaism as an infection of the blood, from which baptism offered no escape. Nirenberg notes how this “re-Judaization” of the conversos in the mid-fifteenth century amounted to a Christian denial of the efficacy of baptism itself, reflecting a profound change of Christian religiosity to one “carved by nature rather than by grace.”14 This change found expression in the introduction of the so-called statutes of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood), a vast mechanism of legal restrictions against anyone with Jewish ancestors. Throughout the Iberian world, descendants of Jewish converts were stigmatized and oppressed for generations after the conversion of their ancestors. As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi once pithily put it, “The statutes of limpieza . . . originated as an attempt, ultimately successful, to find new juridical means to impose legal restrictions against the converso, now that the old laws which had been formulated against professing Jews no longer applied. Thus they mark the ironic retaliation of Iberian society against the intrusion of the Jew through a conversion toward which that same society had labored so assiduously.”15 Numerous historians have argued that one of the most significant consequences of this late medieval Iberian perception of the conversion of Jews (and Muslims) was the reconceptualization of cultural difference as a product of nature—that is, the creation of the modern notion of race.16 The statutes of limpieza represent, in the specific Iberian context, a kind of mirror image of Rashi’s earlier confirmation of the indestructability of the covenantal bond.17 Nonetheless, one cannot juxtapose Rashi’s reading of the Talmudic passage on sin and the statutes of the purity of blood without
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introducing both anachronism (there is a centuries-long gap between them) and confusion (Rashi’s authority spread across the Jewish world, while the Iberian context is incomparable in essential ways). The distinction between law and culture, however, bears relevance here. While, from a halakhic point of view, a Jew is a Jew after baptism and beyond, culturally, conversion is an act of high treason. Although halakhically a Jew can never leave Judaism, the community condemns a Jew precisely for doing so, to the point of mourning converts to Christianity as though they were dead (with an additional parallel: that which is a rebirth in Christian eyes amounts to a death in Jewish ones). One can also observe a complex parallelism negatively. Rashi’s reading of the Halakhah is not only a positive claim of continuity: his intention is also driven by the desire to wrest religious significance from the baptism of Jews (mirroring the refusal of substantial parts of Iberian Catholic society to acknowledge the efficacy of baptism in Jewish cases). The case of a Jewish Holocaust survivor from Poland, Oswald Rufeisen (Brother Daniel), who had converted to Catholicism and applied for immigration to Israel based on his Jewish identity according to the Halakhah, demonstrates the endurance of this dynamic. Following a protracted legal battle, the state turned him down.18 The case highlights the yawning gap between the letter of the ancient rabbinic law and the attempts of modern legislators to take into account prevailing Jewish sensibilities. Or take the case of Rufeisen’s near contemporary, Aaron Lustiger (1926–2007). Born in Paris to Polish- born Jewish parents, he converted to Catholicism in 1940. As Jean-Marie Lustiger, he eventually became archbishop of Paris, and a cardinal in 1983. A major French public intellectual, Lustiger believed all his life that, while a Catholic, he nonetheless remained a Jew no less than his murdered family members. His visit to Israel prompted bitter protests, with the Ashkenazi chief rabbi at the time, himself a survivor of Buchenwald, accusing him of having betrayed his people in their hour of direst need. The Orthodox Jewish philosopher Michael Wyschogrod, however, agreed with Lustiger, while insisting, in a letter that remained unanswered, that according to the cardinal’s own halakhic logic, he remained obligated to live his life in observance of the Torah’s commandments.19 If we take this volume’s title from the Merchant, it is in no small part because Shakespeare’s play continues to speak to the interrelation of these abiding issues.20 This volume appears at a moment when a complex set of circumstances has brought converts and conversion to the forefront of con temporary scholarly concerns. Across the humanistic disciplines—history,
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art history, literature, religious studies, and anthropology but also sociology and psychology—scholars are devoting ever more attention to converts and conversion. We are studying cases and narratives of conversion; discovering or revisiting legal, theological, literary, and visual artistic sources; and asking new questions about the history of belief at the level of society, the city, the community, the family, and the solitary. Scholarship on conversion between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam has been particularly prolific of late. Recent studies of conversion have ranged widely not only across the disciplines but also across historical periods and sources. Once a marginal phenomenon, conversion has become an increasingly central concern for scholars of many stripes. Some of these studies focus on epochal individuals who embody pivotal moments in the history of religion or empire—witness the recent proliferation of historical, theological, philosophical, psychological, and literary studies of Paul. Scholars of late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and (early) modernity have studied individual converts, persuasively arguing that some previously marginal or obscure figures had major historical significance.21 Others have probed written narratives of conversion as a spiritual and literary genre in their own right, reading these in novel and profound ways.22 Alone and in collaboration, social and cultural historians are scrutinizing ever more cases of individual and collective conversions, from antiquity to the present. Working with dramatically diverse textual and visual material, they aim to think critically with, through, and beyond existing theoretical frameworks (theological, sociological, psychological) that developed out of the pathbreaking work of William James, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, and A. D. Nock.23 In one telling sign that this wave of scholarship is reaching a point of some maturity, Oxford University Press has included conversion among its panoramic handbooks.24 Conversion features prominently not only in studies explicitly devoted to it but also in broader studies of the interrelation between religions or the perception of religious groups by each other. Indeed, in many ways, the barrage of studies on conversion is part of a general return of religion as a primary concern of the humanities and social sciences in the early twenty-first century, far beyond the walls of faculties of divinity, theology, or departments of religious studies. This volume seeks to contribute to this ongoing surge in scholarship on conversion (indeed, many of its authors have already written books or articles on the topic), but also to reflect on it. While, in these introductory reflections, we conceptualize conversion from Judaism to Christianity as distinct
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from other forms of conversion, it is clear to us that the transformations in the historical study of Jewish converts and conversion are an aspect of this wider historiographical trend. And so we hope that the book enhances the discourse on different levels. Each of the essays collected in this book is important in its own right. At the same time, the general historiographical trend might teach us as much about ourselves as about the subjects of our inquiries. Benedetto Croce once wrote that every true history is contemporary history. The flourishing of global history in our age of unprecedented globalization is one welcome way in which historians are trying to make sense of the present. 25 As conversion was often a major motivation, and effect, of cross-cultural encounter from antiquity onward, the present preoccupation with converts and conversion—and the closely related proliferation of studies of missionaries across the world—may be understood as a corollary of the writing of global histories. This extends into the present, too, as questions of both conversion and globalization are critical, for instance, to understanding the rapid rise of varieties of religious fundamentalism in our day. But a phenomenon of such breadth must have deeper underpinnings. It might well be the case that in a hyperindividualized age preoccupied with questions of identity—and the dynamics of identity as choice and identity as unchosen fate—questions of conversion take on increasing interest, urgency, and pertinence. From this point of view, religious conversion is one of a range of identity changes that are the focus of increasing historical investigation and that can be studied in relation to one another.26 One patent consequence of decolonization and globalization has been the movement of large populations, both voluntary and involuntary; movement from the Global South to Europe and North America has resulted in more religiously diverse Western societies and universities. Conversion history, then, can be a mode of global history. Yet while the history of converts and conversion illuminates con temporary historiographical practice, we should not make it sit too neatly within it. As in the study of other historical subjects, there is a chasm between the lived experience and its historical record. We study the latter in an attempt to understand the former. But in the case of the conversion narrative, this is an especially difficult task. Conversion narratives represent a particular kind of historical source, often constructed long after the events they claim to record, self-consciously modeled on earlier conversion narratives in intricate and intertextual ways, and superimposing a logic of hindsight onto what might have appeared at the time as chaos, torment, or rapture.
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Conversion narratives, moreover, often make claims on different classes of anticipated readers: new coreligionists and former coreligionists. Like other historical records, a conversion narrative is itself a subjective interpretation, reconstruction, or representation of an experience. Unlike other kinds of sources, many conversion narratives are designed to break through the fourth wall, so to speak, inviting the reader to follow the very path it describes, sometimes even providing a formal guide for doing so. And later writers can transform such manuals of conversion and put them to use for conversions of radically different kinds from those for which they were originally intended.27 The history of conversion narratives must therefore also be a history of their manifold readers, and of the demand for the stories converts tell. And that history, in turn, includes historical fiction about converts, as Sarah Gracombe shows for Victorian conversion novels and Andrew Jacobs demonstrates in his discussion of Victorian historical novels about early Christianity.28 While most contributions to this volume consider individual conversion cases, it is vital to note that the history of Jewish conversion is also marked by mass conversions in the medieval, early modern, and modern periods (such as in 1391, the 1490s, 1666, 1759, and the 1930s). Individual conversion and group conversion become entangled in critical ways. The mass conversion of the 1390s created the conditions for the emergence of the class of conversos, several members of which are studied in three of the following essays; conversely, the conversion of Sabbatai Tsevi to Islam occasioned mass conversions among his followers. This dynamic between individual and mass conversions prompts us to ask whether our mental image of conversion is shaped by narratives of individual experience or by that of groups. Several of the chapters that follow discuss individual conversos, yet the very use of the term implies the group to which they belong. The different forms of conversion come with different kinds of primary material: individual converts write narratives, and conversion narratives figure strongly in the coming pages. Groups do not write first-person accounts, and so the histories of mass conversions are based on rather different kinds of sources, which often lend themselves more to sociological than literary investigation. While we have not yet fully tested this hypothesis, it seems to us that, in the heyday of social history in the 1950s–1980s, there was much more interest in group conversion. Future investigation might bear out a correlation between the turn away from studying mass conversion and the turn away from an Annales- inspired form of historiography.
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The studies in this volume cover a longue durée, from the Hebrew Bible to the modern State of Israel. The opening and closing chapters stand apart, both in that they examine the adoption of Judaism by non-Jews rather than Jews’ conversion to Christianity and in that they question whether “conversion” is the best way to understand their objects of study. But whether one studies converts to Judaism or from Judaism, their histories have often been regarded as a mere footnote to Jewish history. The concept of conversion has played a marginal role in the development of Jewish law and culture, and it has long been questioned whether Jewish converts to Christianity even properly belong to Jewish history at all.29 The famous linguist, novelist, and historian of atheism (and scion of a Frankist family from Prague) Fritz Mauthner quipped that while he did not rule out the theoretical possibility of an adult Jew becoming a Christian out of honest conviction, he had never personally encountered such a person among the hundreds of converted Jews he knew.30 Mauthner’s bon mot, formulated in the early twentieth century, has encapsulated, at least until very recently, the attitude to conversion characteristic of Jewish historians. Yet one may argue that “sincerity” is a historically valued, specifically modern concept that Mauthner (and others) projected onto the past. From the assumption of fundamental insincerity followed the notion that the study of conversion has only a very limited value for the study of Judaism. Converts, it has been argued, were either victims of coercion or opportunistic turncoats; conversion either was forced or was a “strategic” or “pragmatic” choice: it might have been discussed within the limited contexts of the history of anti-Semitism on the one hand and assimilation on the other, but it shed no light on the inner workings of Judaism and Jewish history. A growing number of scholars, however, have been turning toward the inner lives of Jewish “converts of conviction,” attempting to understand both their motivations for changes of faith and the mani fold ways in which questions of Judaism and Jewishness persist in the lives of these new Christians. And those scholars are writing these stories into Jewish history more generally.31 We agree with David B. Ruderman, Yaël Hirsch, and others that Jewish converts to Christianity, including those who converted out of “conviction” (however unverifiable that may be), have a place at the table of Jewish history. At the same time, we question the strict dichotomy of “sincere” and “false” conversion. The rhetoric of sincerity and falsehood, it seems to us, says more about t hose judging converts than converts themselves. It also occludes the fact that insofar as conversions between Judaism and Christianity
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are inner changes, they are essentially unverifiable, and that unverifiability is itself a major actor in the history of conversion. Few real-life conversions (and few real-life choices) are fully sincere, if by that word we mean entirely free from material or social considerations. Many “strategic” conversions contained an element of genuine belief that the adopted religion was the true one. More important, regardless of its being “honest” or “strategic,” conversion is an indispensable category for the understanding of wider phenomena in ancient, medieval, early modern, and modern Judaism. Our aim in this volume, then, is not so much to explore the history of conversions to and from Judaism as to explore Jewish history from the perspective of Jewish conversion. Such an approach presupposes a broad chronological and conceptual frame indeed. Some of the more original work on our topic has been comparative across periods. But inquiries that range widely across historical periods, the present volume included, assume the validity of using “conversion” as a helpful heuristic category. As historians, we are acutely aware that words themselves have histories. A collection like the current one challenges us to do justice to an exceptionally protracted phenomenon without losing sight of the unending shifts in language, in naming and describing, that occur over time. To complicate matters further, there is no neutral, objective vocabulary for our phenomena. We noted earlier that conversion itself is not a descriptive term but already an interpretive one. There is no neutral term in the Hebrew language for a Jew who has converted to Christianity. The available words (mumar, meshumad) are essentially slurs of such impact that they have been adopted as terms of abuse in contexts that have nothing to do with a switch in religious adherence. Likewise, Hebrew does not treat conversion to Judaism (giyyur) as a subspecies of a wider category of “conversion” but as a phenomenon in and of itself. Indeed, the use of convert as an ostensibly descriptive term, a general phenomenon to be studied across religions, is, like the very terms religion and Judaism in this descriptive sense, in many ways a modern invention, and, scholars of (late) antiquity have argued, a Christianocentric invention at that.32 Thus, while we are tackling a phenomenon across more than a score of centuries, we have our sights set on the pitfalls of anachronism and strive to circumvent them. A further conceptual obstacle concerns the fact that the meanings of conversion remain multiple. From a Christian perspective, for example, conversion to Christianity need not be from another religion. For many Christians, conversion is finding a way home; in Hebrew, it is impossible to
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conceptualize “conversion” in that sense as a conversion. A culturally Christian unbeliever who “finds Christ” may be called a convert; the move from secular to religious—or, to put it in a certain contemporary parlance, from “nothing” to “spiritual”—would not be conceptualized as conversion in Judaism, whereas the process by which a “cultural” Christian unbeliever “finds Christ” would be. In Hebrew, that move is called teshuvah, a term that, like conversion, contains a notion of a turning back, but that also includes the idea of introspective self-reckoning. Indeed, its traditional and liturgical translation is “repentance.” When nonreligious Jews becomes observant, it is called hazara bi-teshuvah: in a Christian context, by contrast, one could legitimately describe this move as conversion. If its chronological scope makes our volume stand apart from the flood of recent studies, we must address the historicity of our vocabulary even as we employ it. The chain of studies collected in this volume highlights how the concepts of the convert and of conversion have histories of their own. It is a rich set of case studies that together form, among other t hings, a Begriffsgeschichte of these central concepts. Our hope is that this volume will speak to several scholarly conversations in the study of Jewish history from biblical antiquity to the troubled present, at our moment in contemporary academic culture and in society at large. The volume is framed by Sara Japhet’s study on conversion in the Hebrew Bible (in a sense, all Jews were once converts) and Netanel Fisher’s piece on conversion to Judaism in contemporary Israel (all non-Jews are Jews in potentia). Japhet’s essay opens with a discussion of the relationship between the meaning of the Hebrew term ger and other biblical conceptualizations of religious conversion. Ger is a term of biblical origin that became a standard designation for a convert to Judaism in rabbinic writings of later ages; scholars have long debated whether it had this meaning already in the original context. Japhet argues that in none of its biblical occurrences does the term denote a convert: in the Bible, it has purely social (as opposed to religious) meaning and signifies, roughly, an “immigrant” or perhaps “resident alien.” The Hebrew Bible does know, says Japhet, the concept of religious conversion, a spontaneous recognition that the God of Israel is the true God and voluntary accession to the people of Israel understood as a religious community. Conversion thus understood is first and foremost a change of heart; it does not have to (and indeed it does not) involve any formal rites or procedures. The Hebrew Bible expresses such a concept of conversion by the word nilveh, describing “a person who joins,” who becomes attached to Israel
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and its God. Japhet therefore sees conversion as a thoroughly spiritual phenomenon: the acceptance of the true God is not only a necessary but also a sufficient condition for a conversion to occur. In this sense, perhaps, the Hebrew biblical concept of conversion is closer to the Greek metanoia of the New Testament or to Lutheran Bekehrung than to any notion of conversion typical of later Judaism. By arguing for a “purely religious” notion of conversion in the Hebrew Bible, Japhet’s piece lays the foundation for one of the main conceptual axes of this volume, posing questions that will be asked, answered, and reframed in the essays that follow. The first line of inquiry relates to the relationship between private conscience and societal expectations. Should conversion be understood as an individual act of will or heart, or as a fulfillment of certain criteria set by a community? Is acceptance by a community into which one converts automatic or does it require performative, ritualized procedures that have little to do with the interiority of conversion itself? Is Judaism a faith or a system of laws? Does it resemble other religions in its attitude to converts and the way it draws a boundary between converts and other Jews? Must a conversion be “sincere” in order to be genuine? We can also rephrase this last question as one about the “internal” and “external” aspects of conversion. Can the convert’s self be entirely transformed in an act of conversion? If not, what necessarily remains of his or her former self after the conversion? Can a convert (and especially an “honest” convert, Japhet’s prime example of which is the biblical Na’aman, the Aramean military commander from the book of Kings) continue to adhere “externally” to practices of a religion that he or she “internally” abandoned? What is the relationship between conversion and its post factum descriptions and ideologizations? Andrew Jacobs’s essay takes up precisely this last question. He examines the real or alleged Jewish background of three early Christian writers: Epiphanius of Salamina, Romanos the Melodist, and Ambrosiaster. In none of these cases do we find contemporary witnesses attesting that these prominent Christians converted from Judaism; accounts of their Jewish upbringing and later conversion to Christianity began to circulate only after their deaths. Rather than taking up the veracity of t hese testimonies, Jacobs attempts to tease out the logic underlying them. What is the appeal of a converted Jew? What might be gained by attributing Jewish origins to an important Christian writer? Jacobs’s point of departure is the idea, popular in recent scholarship, that, at least until the fifth century, the categories of “Jew” and “Christian” existed as ideological frames rather than as clear social
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realities. There was no clear delineation between Judaism and Christianity in late antiquity, nor any distinct moment when the two religions separated. The evolutionary paradigm in which Christianity grew out of Judaism was an ideological construction imposed on the past, and a relatively late ideological construction at that. But—and this is the thrust of Jacobs’s argument— once such a paradigm began to develop, there arose a need for providing a “missing link” in this evolution. Jewish Christians and, by extension, Christians of Jewish origins demonstrated the legitimacy of the uninterrupted transition from Judaism to Christianity. Ascribing a Jewish background to prominent Christian writers (or bringing to light such a background in cases in which it was authentic but suppressed from earlier accounts) served the twofold purpose of providing demonstrable examples of the triumph of Christianity over Judaism and of furnishing Christianity with historical (and ultimately soteriological) depth. Furthermore, biographies of Christian authors emphasizing their alleged or real Jewish past surveyed the epistemological boundary between knowing and being. Once Christianity positioned itself as a “daughter religion” of Judaism, it became necessary to define the limits of family resemblance. In some cases, some Christian writers, whose biographies were not well documented, were posthumously provided with Jewish origins simply because they were—or seemed to be—more knowledgeable about Judaism than some of their contemporaries or later readers. This, according to Jacobs, reveals a deeper Christian anxiety: Can Christians come to know Judaism without rebecoming Jews or unbecoming Christians? By inventing a Jewish background for prominent writers and church leaders, one might say that Christianity in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages domesticated Judaism, showing that it can be known and experienced without impairing one’s orthodoxy. The two chapters after Jacobs’s focus on the social history of conversion in the Middle Ages. Ephraim Kanarfogel’s essay deals with conversions to Judaism and continues the thread of the ideologizations of conversions and the question of what remains of the convert’s former identity. Kanarfogel discusses different approaches to converts and conversion espoused by German and northern French Tosafists. While German rabbis tended to rehash the classical Talmudic material, French rabbis proposed innovative solutions to both the general halakhic issues pertaining to conversions and specific cases of individuals undergoing the conversion process. These rabbinic accounts display a hiatus between the acceptance of or even praise for individual converts and the resistance to or even rejection of the idea of the encouragement
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of conversion or the acceptance of large groups of converts. Going beyond simply treating people who voluntarily accepted Judaism as Jews, medieval French rabbis devised a special legal category for converts who became “equal to but separate from” other Jews. Ultimately, the halakhic arguments were used as legal devices for achieving the effect most desirable from the cultural perspective: the true reason for the rabbis’ stringency and inflexibility regarding the converts and conversion were considerations of family lineage. Paola Tartakoff’s essay delves into the connection between conversion and the material well-being of converts. In contemporary accounts, and often in academic scholarship as well, it is commonplace to claim that apostasies to Christianity were motivated by a search for social advancement and that apostates tended to be opportunistic seekers of material gain. Tartakoff counters this view, arguing that such a negative stereot ype of the converts might have been linked not to their attempts to “sell their souls” but to their status as irredeemable paupers. Although many converts to Christianity did come from the poorest sectors of Jewish society, generally speaking, their material situation did not improve in the wake of their conversion. Indeed, some became poorer following their apostasy: both the church and the rabbinate, each for its own reasons, pushed for the dispossession of converts. For the former, voluntary poverty was a high moral and religious virtue. In being divested of their worldly goods, converts to Christianity attested to the strength of their belief and the purity of their motives. For the latter, dispossessing converts separated them from the Jewish community, allowing it to step into the breach to care for the converts’ Jewish kin. Even if some wealthy converts found ways to protect their possessions after their conversion and the poorest had literally nothing to lose, people in the middle of the economic spectrum had no financial inducement (and many possible disincentives) to approach the baptismal font. The next three chapters move to the transition from the late Middle Ages to early modernity and discuss one of the most heatedly debated topics in scholarship on Jewish conversions and in early modern Jewish history more broadly: the issue of Iberian conversos. Javier Castaño’s essay focuses on conversos in fifteenth-century Castile. Castaño elaborates on the notion that a religious conversion is not a single act but a process that takes place over time. Regardless of whether the change of religion was “sincere” or “forced” (and, as noted, both these terms are highly problematic in the context of conversions), converts could not simply switch their patterns of behavior or modes of thought overnight. By homing in on the history of a particular
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f amily, Castaño shows that, in some cases, the process of conversion might have extended beyond the life of the convert. Not only did conversions typically affect families rather than single individuals, children born to these families were often seen—in both their own eyes and those of outsiders—as “born converts.” Iberian conversos w ere not merely descendants of converts: behaviorally, psychologically, and sociologically, they were converts, even if it had been their forefathers who had undergone the act of conversion. Thus, conversos’ self-conception was a particular “genealogical mentality.” Castaño is particularly interested in converso families that clung to Jewish practices not in an attempt to preserve some form of Judaism or out of a hope to reunite with Jews in the f uture but out of a genuine conviction that Judaism— understood anachronistically as a “culture”—was an important component, perhaps even the nucleus, of their new Christian identity. Thus, Castaño’s essay is a powerf ul counterweight to the paradigm of reading the faith of the conversos as a “crypto-Judaism” in which the fixed and immutable “essence” of the Jewish religion was concealed beneath an external Christian “facade.” It shows how conversos might have striven to preserve a form of Judaism and simultaneously considered themselves true Christians. In their view, modified Judaism enriched their Christian identity. Claude Stuczynski’s essay takes up two main themes that guide Castaño’s contribution. First is the question concerning the residue of conversion. Stuczynski develops the notion of the “Paulinist” attitude to Christianity among the conversos. Conversion is seen here as a fundamentally positive phenomenon—that is, not as an apostasy from Judaism but as an affirmative embrace of Christianity. Stuczynski’s “Paulinist” conversos utterly subverted Christian supersessionist theology. In this theological line of thinking, God did not reject Jews and Judaism by sending the Messiah to gentiles; God confirmed the value of Judaism by having his son be born a Jew. Accordingly, conversion was, for those conversos, a cause of pride and power: not only were they not inferior to “native” Christians; in some sense, they were elevated over them thanks to their Jewish “residue.” It is important to note that this residue—individual traits that remain unchanged after the conversion— was defined in both mental and physical categories. Thus, religious conversion would not simply erase one’s former identity: “Jewish character” and “Jewish physique” were carried over throughout the convert’s Christian life. This nucleus of Jewish spiritual, cultural, and physical identity was cultivated within the adopted faith and shaped the way in which it was experienced by the convert. This last element leads to Stuczynski’s second main
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theme: the idea that conversion should not be seen as a discrete moment in time typified by the ritual of baptism but as a process that generally begins before the baptism and, in all cases, continues thereafter. For the conversos discussed by Stuczynski—as for those discussed by Castaño—religious conversion was a lifelong process that entailed the gradual shaping of a new identity while preserving elements of the old one. The third essay considering the conversos is Anne Oravetz Albert’s work on the descendants of Iberian converts in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Just as Castaño challenges the traditional scholarly paradigm of the conversos’ Judaism as a clandestine faith hidden beneath merely accidental Chris tianity, Albert confronts the now common characterization of their reintegration into Judaism as a “return.” Surveying several generations of scholarship on early modern Iberian conversos who became practicing Jews, Albert observes a turn away from descriptions of that process as conversion in favor of such terms as re-Judaization, reeducation, reintegration, reversion, and above all, return. The re-in this vocabulary speaks to modern historians’ reluctance to deny conversos their Jewishness, however latent or vestigial, and the “emotional stakes of declaring them in or out of the Jewish people.” Many are also reluctant to use a term (conversion) widely considered inherently Christian, as implied in the very notion of the converso. Albert then explores the numerous rhetorical models, theological and literary but also cosmological and medical, that conversos who became practicing Jews employed to interpret their change. “Conversos and ex-conversos called Judaization ‘return.’ But they also called it ‘medicine,’ ‘health,’ ‘restoration,’ and reorientation or ‘turning’ of the soul,” Albert notes. Further, the conversos did not conceive “being Jewish” as a binary notion. In their view, the question was not whether an individual or a group was Jewish but rather the extent to which people were Jewish. Whereas some halakhists may have debated the conversos’ belonging to Judaism and the Jewish people, their own question was not whether they were Jewish but how Jewish they were. According to Albert, every convert in some sense creates a religion to which he or she converts. In the end, Albert’s essay explains and exemplifies how conversion works as a term to describe and interpret her subject. The conversos did not convert from Christianity but from “converso Christianity,” and not simply to Judaism but to “converso Judaism.” Neither their point of departure nor their destination was “pure”; indeed, both were hybrid, new. Michela Andreatta begins her chapter with the keen observation that the true subject of the historian’s study is not the event or experience called
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conversion but conversion narratives. Jewish apostates’ written accounts of their own conversion to Christianity form a literary genre in its own right. In fact, given the late emergence of autobiographic modes of writing in Hebrew and Yiddish literatures, the majority of premodern Jewish autobiographies were written by converts. Conversion narratives offer a singular window onto the everyday lives of premodern Jews and the daily functioning of Jewish families and communities. This kind of window cannot be opened by rabbinic literature or any other writings of “normative” Jews. Andreatta proposes a close reading of one such narrative, Giulio Morosini’s Derekh Emunah (1683). She places the work within the context of contemporary concepts of selfhood and subjectivity, developing a nuanced interpretation centering on the baroque question of the relationship between appearance and reality, the real face and the assumed mask. Thus, Morosini’s narrative is an account of his conversion as constructed for the eyes of others. Recounting his story, Morosini provided an inkling of the spiritual world of a seventeenth-century Italian Jew and the customs of his contemporary community. Yet his aim was not merely to depict a personal “transformative journey” leading him from Judaism to Christianity; he strove to construct an “exemplum” for others. Thus, in Morosini’s and numerous other cases, the conversion narrative functions simultaneously as a conversionary manual: it is meant to convey the vicissitudes of a particular convert but also to serve as a guide for f uture converts. Moreover, Morosini’s text aims not only to assist Jews’ entry into an undifferentiated “Christian society” (a theoretical construct that, as such, never existed): he intended it to serve as a guide into polite society. Not merely obsolete and superseded by Christian notions, Jewish rites were coarse and unrefined. For Morosini, in addition to being a superior religion to Judaism, Christianity was also a superior civilization. Conversion was a passport to a world that was perceived as nobler, higher, and more sophisticated. In the final analysis, a conversion narrative was a “symbolic construct” that depicted and performed self-refashioning and provided guidance for self- representation that enabled a convert to enter a particular stratum of Christian society and to navigate its waters. Alongside being a religious trope, conversion turned into an exercise in manners and rhetoric. Morosini at once denied his former Jewish identity and mobilized it to maneuver himself into a special, elevated place among his new Christian coreligionists. The remaining chapters in our volume discuss conversions in the modern world. Sarah Gracombe’s essay revisits Andreatta’s observation that scholars never really study conversions but only conversion narratives. While
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Andreatta analyzes narratives that purport to be “authentic” descriptions of conversionary experiences, Gracombe focuses on fictional conversion narratives: English novels from the early nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. While conversion narratives written by modern English Jews who converted to Christianity are scarce, fictional Jewish conversions abound in Victorian novels. One can trace their authors’ fascination with conversion to at least two points: First, as Gracombe puts it, “conversion aligns with the novel because they are premised on the same fundamental question: Can people change?” Second, as the novel is the modern literary genre par excellence, converts are paradigmatically modern people: they choose and shape their own identities rather than inhabiting their given selves. T hese fictional or fictionalized accounts posed two underlying questions: the question of the possibility of eradicating one’s original Jewish identity and the question of a “national conversion”—that is, an adoption of a cultural or national (and not only religious) English identity. In asking these questions, Gracombe argues that the conversion of Jews to Anglicanism served as a test balloon for the wider possibilities of absorbing different ethnic and religious groups into the texture of the British Empire. Thus, the focus is on cultural elements of identity, posing “a causal connection between habits of consumption and habits of mind.” Conversion here is not merely the taking on of a new religion; it also implies the taking on of new tastes, opinions, and manners. Identities are not only chosen; they need to be learned. In a gesture similar to that of Horowitz, Gracombe links conversion with texts and reading habits: just as many conversion narratives depict the encounter with the unmediated text of the Bible as a trigger for the change of religion and propose the reading of biblical narratives as equivalents (or prefigurations) of the convert’s personal story, so Victorian novels both describe and aim to prompt conversions. Reading, they assume, can transform interiority. A lesson from the novels read by Gracombe is this: if by conversion we mean full abandonment of the old self and complete absorption into a new religion or culture, no conversion is ever complete or ever successful. Jewish converts (fictional and other wise) may have desired to become Christians or to become English. In the final analysis they became . . . converts. Elliott Horowitz’s case study of Benjamin Nehemiah Solomon, a Lemberg Jew who converted to Anglicanism in the early nineteenth century, shows that Jewish conversions cannot be conceptualized simply as conversions “to Christianity”: in search of the true religion, the converts chose between different Christian churches and denominations. Solomon’s rejection
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of Roman Catholicism was as strong as—and in many senses stronger than— his rejection of normative Judaism. From the sixteenth century but arguably even e arlier, converts inhabited a polyvalent world of multiple creeds competing for the title of truest embodiment of the original Mosaic revelation. In this competition, different Christianities might have seemed more remote from each other than “Christianity” was from Judaism. Furthermore, while in the eyes of observers converts were crossing over from their “original” religion to a “new” faith, in their own eyes, they may have been returning home. Thus, from converts’ perspective, conversion was sometimes less a radical transformation than a discovery of their true identity. Solomon perceived his choice of Anglicanism as reflecting an existential grasp of the true meaning of Jewishness, a meaning to which he had always adhered but which he could not fully develop within the confines of rabbinic Judaism. In this process, it was an independent reading of the scriptures, unassisted by any religious guidance or commentary, that opened his eyes to this truth. It was in their interaction with Christianity—and especially with Protestant Christianity—that many converts had their first encounter with the Hebrew Bible as a complete material object, a single-volume whole. And for many, it was their first encounter with the text of the Bible read existentially, as the text speaking personally to them. Still, if the choice of religion was an existential one, Solomon, like many other converts, faced conflicting existential decisions. Ultimately, he was forced to choose between his powerf ul commitment to his chosen faith and his equally powerf ul commitment to his family. Horow itz offers a gripping testimony of a convert pulled between the opposite attractions of Judaism and Christianity, the demands of God and the demands of family. Ellie Schainker’s essay on conversions to Christianity in tsarist Russia challenges the oft-proposed iunctim between conversion and assimilation. Whereas the conversion of an individual may be explained with reference to inner conviction or other purely spiritual, theological, or psychological factors, a convincing historical analysis of large groups of people demands that historians take into account social, cultural, and economic stimuli. In Jewish historiography, conversions to Christianity have typically been situated somewhere between the twin poles of coercion, on the one hand, and emancipation and social advancement, on the other: mass conversions were seen as either results of external pressures or career choices. Tartakoff’s essay provides a nuanced understanding of the second part of this stereot ypical picture. Schainker moves the question further: How should we understand
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conversions of sizable groups of Jews who were neither forced to abandon Judaism nor presented with any obvious benefits for professing Christianity? They faced no stick and were offered no carrot. In taking up the neglected subject of Jewish acceptance of—mainly Greek Orthodox—Christianity among the Jewish population of the provinces of the Russian Empire, Schainker pinpoints the practicalities of conversion among the clichéd “shtetl Jews.” The shtetl was mythologized—both in works of literature and, albeit to a lesser extent, in academic writings—as a stronghold of traditional Judaism, and shtetl conversions w ere portrayed as a marginal phenomenon. Not only does Schainker’s chapter revise this picture by showing that the numbers of converts were much higher than usually assumed; it also proposes a different paradigm for thinking about conversion. In discussing his conversion, the polymath Daniel Chwolson (1819–1911) said he had preferred to be a professor in Saint Petersburg rather than a melamed in Eyshishok. Schainker is interested in Jewish converts to Orthodox Christianity who never became professors and never left their Eyshishoks—either physically or metaphorically. Most essays collected in this volume present conversion as a “life-transforming” event that “changes everything,” from the converts’ psyches to the most minute aspects of their existences. Schainker’s cases of conversion, by contrast, exhibit no major spiritual, social, or cultural transformation. She presents examples of apostates who remained members of the Jewish community in a wider sense, converts who did not change their place of residence, language, social and economic position, appearance, or habits. Thus, Schainker provides yet another perspective on conversion: conversion as a matter of routine. The volume closes with Netanel Fisher’s essay, which grapples with the problem of conversion to Judaism in the modern State of Israel. While, according to Fisher, the Hebrew concept of giyyur always encompassed the twin elements of accepting Judaism as the true religion and identifying with or joining the Jewish people, the modern Jewish state was confronted with converts who were eager to join the Jewish people but less eager to accept the commandments of Mosaic Law. In the face of this reality, Israeli state- appointed rabbis came up with a number of creative responses. Israel knows no separation between “church” and state, and at least in the case of the so- called Law of Return, the state operates with a different definition of Judaism from that of Jewish law. In the 1950s the main aim of the state’s rabbis was to prevent those who were “culturally Jewish” or Jewish de facto but not de jure from mingling with halakhic Jews. In a predominantly Jewish society,
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non-Jews naturally blend in and adopt many Jewish customs and values. The true danger in such a society would be if these non-Jews became externally indistinguishable from Jews (and therefore possibly intermarried and produced offspring with them) without any change in their halakhic status. In order to avoid such situations, during the first decades of the state, Israeli rabbis encouraged conversions and made relatively few demands on potential converts. This trend culminated in the policies advocated during the tenure of Rabbi Shlomo Goren (1972–83) as Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel, who viewed religious transformation as an important prerequisite for conversion but not as conversion itself. In his view, if non-Jews were willing to tie their fate with the fate of the Jewish people in the State of Israel, rabbis should assume noble intentions. In later years, this lax policy underwent a radical—if gradual—change. First, Israeli secularism ceased to be the paragon of Israeliness; religion came to occupy a much more important place in Israeli culture and society. Second, the halakhic pluralism typical of Jewish life across the world, where each rabbi or rabbinic court determined policy in its own jurisdiction, gave way to a much more centralized model. For the first time in centuries, in the State of Israel, Judaism developed a centralized institutional religious authority. As voices calling for stricter halakhic demands on converts grew louder, the rabbinate tried to navigate between the Scylla of rejecting converts en masse (on the grounds that most had no real intention of observing all the commandments of Judaism) and the Charybdis of indiscriminate acceptance (on the basis of the idea that any policy leading to higher numbers of Jews in Israel was good for the state). Fisher provides a riveting account of a real-life, contemporary policy with insoluble dilemmas and h orse trading. This policy attempts to satisfy conflicting aims and interests, and fundamental changes to Jewish life are effected by seemingly insignificant decisions of second-rank bureaucrats. For all the deep differences between periods, contexts, and source material studied in the following pages, two fundamental and mutually exclusive notions of human life tie them together: the conviction that one can choose one’s destiny and the conviction that one cannot escape one’s past. The history of converts speaks to nothing less than the possibility—or impossibility—of changing one’s life. It is perhaps for this reason that we find so compelling ancient, medieval, and modern converts, as well as the stories they tell about themselves and that their new and former coreligionists tell about them. As questions of identity, both given and chosen, have come to occupy a central place in our culture, medieval rabbinic debates can
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take on a white-hot urgency. Conservatism upholds the unchangeability of human nature, positing that our relationships to the historical conditions of our native language and culture represent a Schicksalsverwantschaft, a fateful determination of our being, unchosen and inescapable. Modern liberalism, by contrast, endorses the view that our origin does not determine our destiny, and that while we cannot choose the former, our individuality and freedom are defined in large part by our agency concerning the latter. The ability (true, at least subjectively) to choose and therefore to change who we are turns the Schicksalsverwantschaft into a Wahlverwantschaft, an elective affinity, to our religion or community. We might suggest that the successes and failures of premodern and modern converts to choose their destinies speak to the breadth of our own anthropologies. In their testing of the possibilities and limitations of human freedom, the converts stand for us.
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