For over a generation, the phenomenon of Jewish apostasy has attracted a steadily growing scholarly interest among historians. Beginning with the pioneering studies of Todd Endelman, the study of Jews abandoning their Jewishness has helped thread the needle between a lachrymose view that saw only persecution and adversity for Jews and a diaspora triumphalism that hailed the last two centuries wholesale as an unmitigated success story for Jews—particularly Jews in North America and Europe west of the Russian Empire. Miklós Konrád’s ambitious and well-documented study enhances this body of scholarship by raising in a Hungarian context the same paradoxical question that Endelman raised several decades ago: How can one explain the fact that Hungarian Jews converted to Christianity at much higher rates in the early decades of the twentieth century than they had a century earlier? In other words, why would Jews abandon their Jewishness and the Jewish community at a point when conditions for Jews were rapidly improving?
Answering this question is a central aim of the book, that is, the author aims to address the “simultaneity of the increase in conversions and the diminution of the disadvantages associated with belonging to the Jewish community” (2–3). The author begins by posing two questions: How best to determine the reliability of quantitative evidence, and how impactful were the conversions? With regard to the reliability of the presumed number of apostates, the author concedes that the relatively sparse data from state and ecclesiastical institutions raises the importance of anecdotal evidence and thus poses the problem of how best to incorporate the perspectives and appraisals of Neolog rabbis; that is, how to balance between their homiletic and often jeremiadic tone when speaking and writing about the problem and prevalence of apostasy. The Neolog intelligentsia, he notes, regarded the speed with which Neolog Jews were abandoning their faith and their communities to be of dramatic proportions. Yet, not least of all because many were historians by avocation in addition to being rabbis and theologians, though biased “they knew more about the Jewish society of their time than we ever will” (4). In this regard, the author’s exhaustive analysis of articles in the Hungarian Jewish press is not only impressive and illuminating but also puts a human face on what might otherwise have been a more arid statistical analysis. To his credit, in light of the limited source material the author consistently draws his conclusions cautiously, distinguishing for his readers when he is on firm evidentiary ground, when he extrapolates from limited available evidence, and when he is speculating.
With regard to the impact of these conversions, the author contrasts quantitative and qualitative assessments. He points out that barely 1 percent of Hungarian Jews converted (9,000+ between the 1860s and 1914 out of a total population that exceeded 900,000 by 1914). Instead, the author argues that the historical significance is more qualitative than quantitative. This comparatively small number of conversions came largely from the Jewish intellectual, commercial, industrial, and cultural elites and were often prominent members and leaders of the Jewish community. This, he notes, is disproportionately impactful for two reasons. First, these were often among the best and the brightest, the most politically well connected, the most affluent, and the most philanthropic Jews in Hungary. Second, the prominence of many of the apostates transformed their conversions into more public and, at times, even controversial occurrences.
All in all, though, the author concedes from the outset that, as elsewhere in Europe, most Jewish apostates in Hungary were upper class Jews seeking entry into a still not easily accessible ranks of the Hungarian upper classes—more specifically, the upper tiers of the Hungarian nobility. As the author notes, for the vast majority Hungarian Jews, conversion to Christianity was not a prerequisite to living where they wanted to live and pursuing the career they wanted to pursue. Most Hungarian Jews rose in the ranks of their commercial and professional worlds with little or no impediment, without having to abandon Judaism. Only for the Jewish elite, who wanted access to top-tier positions and elite society, was apostasy a path to real social advancement. This, the author contends, explains why barely 1 percent of Hungarian Jews abandoned Judaism.
No less important, the author deftly situates the phenomenon of Jewish apostasy in a Hungarian context. He begins with a terse recap of three generally less well-known but crucial aspects of Hungarian and Hungarian Jewish history that are indispensable toward understanding the contours of his subject. First, he explains Hungarian Jewry’s two-stage path to full civic equality and social acceptance, more specifically, the quarter of a century hiatus between emancipation—the extension of civic equality to Hungarian Jews in 1868—and Judaism being redefined in 1895 as a “received religion,” thereby being placed on equal footing for the first time with Catholicism and other Christian denominations. Hitherto the secondary status of Judaism meant that Jews, though equal citizens, were required to convert in order to marry a Christian. Here the author aptly notes the “legal chaos” regulating conversion because of the disjunction between the status of Jews as equal and that of Judaism as a less than equal religion. If nothing else, many readers will undoubtedly learn for the first time about the three different ranks of religious communities in Hungary—tolerated, recognized, received—and how Judaism was tolerated until 1867, recognized from 1867 to 1895, and received thereafter (110–11). The Reception Law of 1895, moreover, introduced civil marriage into Hungary; after 1895, civil marriage, at least theoretically, no longer required Jewish apostasy.
Second, Konrád lays out the complexities of Neolog Judaism and being Magyars of the Jewish persuasion. In particular, he notes the singular efforts by Neolog rabbis to delineate a clear boundary between Neolog affiliation and identity, on the one hand, and full assimilation and disaffection from Judaism, on the other. Each prominent member of the Neolog community who converted further intensified the concerns of Neolog rabbis regarding radical Jewish assimilation and the emboldened the invectives of Orthodox Jews who condemned Neolog as an anemic brand of Judaism that led inevitably, at best, to indifference and, at worst, to apostasy. The author underscores that this concern and these criticisms were far removed to the reality of Neolog Jews but remained at the center of public Jewish debates for decades.
Third, the author underlines the survival of noble privilege and status at the height of liberalism in the Kingdom of Hungary and the tenacious hold of the upper ranks of the Hungarian nobility over Hungarian society and culture. The continued preeminence of the Hungarian nobility altered the social calculus of affluent Jewish families. Social acceptance per se was no longer the endgame; they desired nothing short of full social acceptance into the Hungarian upper class. Here the author distinguishes between the “context of conversion” and the “motivation of conversion.” Conversion became less complicated after 1895, but most Jews had little or need to convert. Moreover, for Jews seeking acceptance into elite clubs and schools, the difficulty and elusiveness of this acceptance sans conversion was a powerful motivation.
The importance of this work notwithstanding, there are questions the author might have addressed more fully. The relationship between intermarriage and apostasy, which the author deals with multiple times in passing, could have been explored more directly in greater depth. Why, for example, did the legal possibility of intermarriage without conversion not translate more often into a willingness of elite noble families to accept unconverted Jewish spouses into their midst, especially fully magyarized Jewish spouses? A more gendered analysis, too, would have added a layer of depth to the book, especially given the centrality of marriage as a motivating factor.
Neither of these questions, however, diminishes much from the broader comprehensiveness of this book. The author lays out early on the broader implications this work: “A more precise understanding of the receptiveness of Christian society and a more nuanced appreciation of the dilemmas Jewish men and women faced in the course of their integration into this society—not just those who abandoned to their faith but those who remained faithful to their religion and community as well” (5). His book accomplishes this goal. More tellingly, perhaps, the conclusions of this book whet reader’s appetite to carry the analysis a step further. How do the radical reshaping of Hungarian society after World War I and the ensuing truncation of Hungary by the Treaty of Trianon and rise of antisemitism alter the dynamics of Jewish apostasy? This would be a worthwhile subject for a sequel to this fine book.
