Search Results

This chapter considers the radical assimilation of entire Jewish families as a common occurrence in western and central Europe between the Enlightenment and the Second World War. It analyses drift and defection that removed the names of thousands of families from communal rosters, although immigration often masked the demographic consequences of their departure. It also reviews the case of liberal states like England and France, where no government or church agency gathered data on conversion and intermarriage in which historians must reconstruct the course of radical assimilation on anecdotal evidence. The chapter explains how Jews understood and represented their transformation into Christians and how they regarded their Jewish background in later years. It explores the strategy to overcome the limitations of quantitative data by following the transformation of Jewish practice, affiliation, and self-reflection in a single family over three or more generations.

This chapter cites the London Jewish Chronicle, which noted in January 1880 that the number of Sephardim in England had decreased in the previous 100 years as immigration from eastern Europe mounted. The chapter points out the conversions to Christianity, defections to the Reform congregation where Sephardi distinctiveness was diluted or lost, and disappearance of 'recruiting grounds' for Sephardi immigration to England as the reasons for the reduction of Sephardim. It also analyses the demographic stagnation of Sephardim in all western European states that had far-reaching consequences for the history of the Western Sephardim. The chapter examines the demographic decline of the Sephardim in England as the outcome of the same currents of radical assimilation that depleted the ranks of acculturated Jews throughout Europe in the modern period. It discusses the historical experience of Sephardim's ancestors as Conversos, which was an experience that the Ashkenazi majority did not share.

This chapter focuses on the fracturing of the Anglo-Jewry during the period from 1945 to 2000. It explains that after the war Jews were able to enter the professions and the new service industries and some of them were appointed high-profile positions in government, in universities, and in public life. However, this development was accompanied by indifference to ritual and worship, ignorance of Jewish learning and lore and radical assimilation which threatened the demographic health of the Jewish community. By the end of the twentieth century, the religious life of Anglo-Jewry was more diverse, fractured, and contentious than in any previous period.

The epilogue summarizes how the phenomenon of Russian Jewish conversion, though marginal in number, left an outsized imprint on the cultural map of East European Jews who grappled with questions of Jewish identity and the role of religion in the increasingly powerful Jewish secular nationalist ideologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The epilogue explores evolving Jewish attitudes towards baptism, interfaith sociability, and cultural mobility in the late-imperial period, and it puts conversions from Judaism in imperial Russia in conversation with conversions from Judaism in the modern period more broadly. Finally, the epilogue looks ahead to the inter-revolutionary period (1906-1917) and the Soviet period when conversions from Judaism accelerated, accompanied by a growing ethnic conception of Jewish identity whereby national Jewishness found explicit harmony with Christian religious adherence.