Was Conversion to Christianity an Effective Strategy for Inclusion in European Society? Seminar

Several hundred thousand Jews in Europe and North America converted to Christianity or withdrew formally from the Jewish community between the mid-eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, largely to promote their integration into state and society.  This presentation will assess how successful they and their descendants were in making their ancestral Jewishness irrelevant to their social and civic integration.  It will highlight, in particular, variations in success and failure in different places and at different times.  It will also explore how converted Jews whose integration was incomplete and ambiguous coped with their failure to shed their Jewishness.

Todd M. Endelman is Professor Emeritus of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, where he taught from 1985 to 2012.  A specialist in modern Jewish social history and Anglo-Jewish history, he is the author of The Jews of Georgian England, 1714-1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society; Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History, 1656-1945; The Jews of Britain, 1656-2000; and Broadening Jewish History: Towards a Social History of Ordinary Jews.  He recently completed Leaving the Jewish Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History and is currently working on a biography of the Anglo-Jewish geneticist and communal notable Redcliffe Nathan Salaman.

All welcome.

The chair for is seminar will be Professor Tony Kushner.