In this deeply insightful and elegantly written book, Todd Endelman explores why some Jews who sought integration and acceptance by the societies in which they lived tried to sever all ties with their Jewish origins through conversion to Christianity or other forms of radical assimilation, including intermarriage, “passing,” crafting new universalistic religions, or embracing secular ideologies that promised a better world. Endelman is interested both in the social, cultural, and political contexts that prompted Jews to convert or otherwise leave the Jewish community and in the impact of continued stigmatization of the Jews and Judaism that made conversion or other forms of radical assimilation not as successful as the converts would have liked. He casts his net widely: from Great Britain and western Europe, to central and eastern Europe, and to America from the early eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. Based on a wide range of sources in many languages, Leaving the Jewish Fold provides a profoundly interesting, sensitive, nuanced, somewhat pessimistic, and well-argued analysis of conversion and radical assimilation, filled with rich detail and illuminating examples of the dilemmas faced by Jewish converts.

Endelman's central argument is that in the modern period virtually all Jews who converted to Christianity did so largely for strategic reasons: to improve or enhance their career options, to enter fields closed to Jews, to integrate fully into their societies, to become part of the elite strata of society, and to marry non-Jews. Unlike the premodern period, in which most converts were poor and desperate, in the modern period most Jews who chose to be baptized were already highly acculturated, distant from Jewish religious practice and belief, and at least middle class. Converts sought to escape from the stigma of Jewishness both in societies that had not yet emancipated the Jews and in societies that had emancipated them either partially or fully but continued to harbor anti-Jewish hostility in varying measures. Moreover, while conversion was more common in countries like Germany, Austria, and Hungary, in which acculturated Jews faced greater obstacles than in France or England in pursuing certain careers and gaining full social acceptance, it was also in central Europe that many converts failed to gain entry into societies that continued to stigmatize them because of their Jewish origins.

Much of Endelman's book focuses on conversion because it was the dominant form of radical assimilation until the twentieth century. Indeed, only in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, where Communism rendered religious conversion irrelevant, and in the United States since the 1960s, with its greater tolerance for diversity, could Jews assimilate totally without converting to Christianity. The fact that Jews seeking full integration needed to join the hegemonic religion is the source of Endelman's negative evaluation of the project of emancipation and integration. The inability of most Western societies to grant Jews fully equal status as Jews; the very fact that the societies that extended rights and the promise of integration to Jews assumed that they would disappear as a recognizable group; that in order to integrate fully Jews had to abandon any trace of continued Jewish group identity and to embrace, however cynically, the Christian religion—all of these factors expose the basic intolerance for diversity that typified European and American society before the late twentieth century. Moreover, even before the advent of racial anti-Semitism, many Europeans and Americans thought that Jewishness was somehow indelible, impervious even to the efficacy of baptism to efface it. Thus, ironically, conversion as a solution often did not work, especially in the places where Jews encountered resistance and where the largest numbers of Jews converted in the hope of finding full acceptance.

Leaving the Jewish Fold contains many important insights. For example, in an interesting chapter on converts of conviction—that is, converts who genuinely believed that Jesus was the son of God and savior, and who became devoted, practicing Christians—Endelman reminds his readers that even such converts, including the Christian clergy among them, were mindful of the material benefits of conversion. They too converted in a context in which Jewish origins were problematic and Christianity would ease the way to true acceptance. Moreover, some of them had imbibed anti-Jewish views widespread in European culture and sought to distance themselves from their origins. If they were seeking spirituality, they did not look for it in Judaism because the larger culture had taught them that Judaism was arid, legalistic, and unspiritual. In another interesting insight, Endelman notes that the greater intolerance for Jewish integration in nineteenth-century Germany than in France or Great Britain is proof that Germany did experience a Sonderweg, did enter the modern era burdened by an illiberal worldview, and experienced continued domination by antimodern elites. Many historians have refuted the Sonderweg hypothesis, insisting that many aspects of German society were liberal and that England and France were not as liberal as earlier historians claimed. Endelman is right to argue that intolerance for Jews was a sign of illiberal views in Germany, although it is misleading to label Germany and Austria-Hungary as illiberal states. Germany and Austria-Hungary, in fact, were liberal, constitutional states that accorded Jews emancipation and equality before the law. As elsewhere, liberalism and illiberalism coexisted in these societies before the First World War.

As in any book that tries to understand a large, diverse phenomenon, Leaving the Jewish Fold contains some errors. For example, Endelman notes that in central Europe, parents did not have to register change of religion for children under fourteen, but in Habsburg Austria, at least, children between the ages of seven and fourteen could not convert at all. Similarly, he says that unconverted Jews were never ennobled in Germany and Austria-Hungary, but the latter contained a sizeable number of unconverted Jewish nobles. Most Hungarian Jews did not live in Budapest in the interwar period, although a very large number did. There was no official numerus clausus in Polish universities in the 1920s and 1930s, although the universities did discriminate against Jewish students, relegating them to “Jew benches.” There were many immigrant Jews in interwar France. Vienna was not the only place in which baptized Jews converted back to Judaism.

In addition to these minor errors, Endelman's book might have benefitted from further attention to the social lives of baptized Jews, many of whom socialized largely with other baptized Jews, especially in central Europe, and perhaps not only because of exclusion. Moreover, Endelman implies that men converted for career advancement while women converted for love, but I wonder what role romantic attachment played in explaining some male conversions to Christianity, especially in places that did not allow civil intermarriage, like Austria. Finally, while Leaving the Fold acknowledges that many poor Jews converted out of desperation, especially in the premodern period, it assumes that by the middle of the nineteenth century poverty was no longer an incentive, at least in central and western Europe. However, Germany and Austria-Hungary still contained large numbers of impoverished Jews. In Posen, Silesia, Galicia, and Hungary, many of them lived in traditional Jewish communities that inoculated them from baptism, but Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest did contain large numbers of poor Jews, some of whom might have chosen baptism out of the same desperation that had prevailed in earlier times.

These criticisms, in fact, only reflect my wish that Endelman had accomplished even more than he does in this large and significant book. Endelman has done an extraordinary job analyzing both defection and drift from the Jewish community across the Western world over three centuries. He has done so with skill and verve, reminding us that radical assimilation is a very important part of the modernization of the Jews. Paying attention to this phenomenon tells us much both about the Jews and the societies they aspired to join.