La Era del Mesias (IBRI Research Report (Spanish) nº 9) (Spanish Edition)

According to the criteria outlined by Robert Chazan in his discussion of medieval missionizing, a serious commitment to proselytizing among the Jews would have been manifested in several ways. Second, techniques for confronting the Jews in a systematic way, such as requiring their attendance at sermons or staging disputations, would have had to be initiated and regularized.

Resources would have had to be devoted to the training and support of converts after their conversions, as the Catholic Church did with the domus conversorum house of catechumens in late sixteenth-century Rome. None of these things were done in sixteenth-century German lands, however.

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Even the isolated instances of disputations in German lands remained mostly private and spontaneous. Although the exchange may have taken place before a distinguished audience of participants in the Reichstag, no other Jews were compelled to appear. No theologians cited religious prooftexts or logical arguments to buttress their religious claims before a polemically vulnerable audience. No protocols of the disputation were preserved, or apparently even written, by any of the participants.

The most dramatic proof of the distinctive aspect of the events at Augsburg lay in its surprising conclusion. Had this been a religious polemic, such an outcome would have been inconceivable. The event at Augsburg was no medieval-style disputation over the correctness of the Jewish faith or the superiority of Christianity, but rather a political debate as to whether the emperor should extend the customary privileges of toleration to Jews as his Imperial forebears had done. One of the rare records of a disputation held under the auspices of a secular authority took place in in the court of Hannover.

As Martin Friedrich has already noted, that disputation is equally striking for the manner in which it differed from the medieval Spanish model. Here, both sides had freedom to dispute as equals, and the dignity of the Jewish disputant remained intact to the end. In their structure and content, they served as models for a long series of successors, which would adopt similar arguments and strategies. He agitated actively for an accelerated program of missionizing designed to bring about the mass conversion of Jews in German lands.

He recommended economic restrictions on Jewish livelihood, the coercion of Jews to attend Christian sermons, and the destruction of Jewish books. In addition to his pioneering competency as a Christian Hebraist, Reuchlin introduced methods of using Kabbalah, Jewish mystical teachings, to support Christian doctrines. While Reuchlin, like every Christian of his time, believed that Christianity had superseded Judaism and that Christian society should seek to convert Jews, he rejected the notion that Christians had a right to use force to achieve this objective.

He argued that Jews had enjoyed the right of practicing their religion within the Empire long before the birth of Christianity. Reaching back to the image of the multi-ethnic and multi-religious Roman Empire that preceded the rise of Christianity, Reuchlin argued that measures such as book burning, the kidnapping and baptism of Jewish children, any resort to religious coercion whatsoever, should be shunned as a violation of Imperial law.

He correctly pointed out that no Christians then living in German lands, himself included, and few Jews could claim any kind of competency in the Talmud. Books such as the Talmud taught Jews to observe their religion correctly, and neither church nor state had a right to interfere in Jewish learning or praxis. Books, tracts, and illustrated broadsides disseminated Reformation ideas, educating the masses to question and sometimes reject their old beliefs and embrace the new.

Many religious movements took advantage of the new technology to convey their ideas. The greater availability of printed texts, for example, fueled the interest in Christian Hebraica. Above all, it became a haven for converts. Antonius Margaritha, the Protestant Reformation, and the Persistence of anti-Judaism The Reformation marked a turning point in the history of the Christian church.

Shattering the hegemony of the papacy in Rome, the Reformation paved the way to denominational choice. Protestant sects now leveled many of the same charges against the Roman church and against one another as the church had for centuries leveled against the Jews.

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While Jews remained conspicuous as non-Christians, Christian rivals replaced the Jews as chief objects of scorn. The response would revolutionize the place of Hebrew in the German university curriculum. Christian Hebraists focused anew on the linguistic and hermeneutic study of the Bible, stimulating great interest in Hebrew and Jewish mystical lore.

While contemporary Jews constituted a living repository of knowledge about the past they shared with Christians, Christians assumed that Jews would be loath to reveal their secrets to Christians. With its centuries-old cathedral, Wasserburg certainly possessed the facilities to handle a routine conversion. Surely, with enough advance notice, a grand ceremony might have been prepared for this occasion, with prominent sponsors to serve as godparents. But no trace of such a ceremony has survived. He may have been following his father southeast when he made up his mind to convert.

This book raised Margaritha to great prominence; it came to the attention of both the emperor and Martin Luther. It charged that Jews posed an inherent, immediate danger to the Empire because the Jewish religion was anti-Christian to the core. They played a vital role in a contest for authority and authenticity against Christian Hebraists. The career of Margaritha adumbrated the life path of future converts in other respects as well. While the conversion of Jews did not merit high priority in the early generations of the Reformation, it carried great symbolic weight.

But in this one century the Catholics have converted many thousands of heathens in the new world. Every year a certain number of Jews are converted and baptized at Rome by Catholics who adhere in loyalty to the bishop of Rome; and there are some Turks who are converted by the Catholics both at Rome and elsewhere. The Lutherans compare themselves [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title. Before the formation of Protestant confessions, the church promoted the majesty of a universal religion to potential converts.

There are so many byways and sidepaths. Then, come back to us. If committed believers needed a diagram to keep track of what each denomination believed, what were the newcomers to the faith to do? Reformation and Conversion Arising out of a profound critique of the Roman church, Protestantism placed new emphasis on the importance of obtaining converts from Judaism. In the earliest phase of his thought, Martin Luther placed high hopes on securing massive conversion of Jews, which he saw as the greatest testimonial for his project of Christian renewal and his rejection of the religious accretions of papistry.

When these Jews saw that Judaism had such strong scriptural basis and that Christianity [Catholicism] was pure nonsense without biblical support, how could they become. If the Jews are treated benignly and are instructed kindly through the Bible, many of them will become real Christians. After a long hiatus in missionizing to the Jews, several waves of reforming clergy, culminating in the Pietist movement in the late seventeenth century, devoted serious attention to proselytizing among the Jews.

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Preaching to the Jews of Rome. They are forced every Friday to listen to the sermons of a Dominican monk concerning their unbelief. The sbirri Roman police go among them with big sticks to wake those who fall asleep; two clerics take the name of the absentees in order to punish them. When the hitter wields his stick, it causes such a tumult, the preacher is interrupted. No one is engaged by the sermon, the people are easily distracted, and it is no wonder that nothing is accomplished. After two years, the political climate in Hesse changed.

When the Catholics decided that Isaac could be useful to them, they asked Johannes Isaac to serve as teacher of Hebrew in the Catholic University of Louvain, in Brabant; he apparently had no qualms about converting again, this time to Catholicism. In , Isaac left Louvain, and went on to serve as professor of Hebrew in Cologne.

But the charge of instability in matters of faith clung to Johannes. In , almost twenty years after he arrived in Cologne, someone tendered a complaint against Johannes Isaac, that he had derided the mass and denigrated the host by turning his back to the altar during communion. Feeling that he would never truly be accepted as a Catholic according to Stephan , Johannes then began to regret his conversion from Protestantism.

They granted him special dispensation to read Protestant works in order to refute them. According to his defensive testimony, reading Protestant theology aroused questions within him. In —83 he delivered sermons against the worship of icons and saints, some of the most vexing issues that separated the denominations. He claimed that he wished to repair the church from within, but, as a result of these sermons, the Catholic hierarchy forbade him to preach and tried to distance him from Cologne.

By the dispute had escalated and become exceedingly bitter. Stephan left his lucrative priestly domain, as well as the Catholic Church, a bitter defeat for his Catholic sponsors. Despite years of preparation for missionary work and his extensive training in Catholicism and polemic, his various opponents attributed his critical stance to a single underlying factor: The chronicler reported with satisfaction that this convert ended his life hanged as a thief.

On the other hand, Christian converters now began to view Jewish converts to one denomination as potential defectors to others, so they could never be regarded as truly converted. The chagrin of watching hard-won converts defect to other Christian denominations produced rhetorical venom as sharp as reversions to Judaism had caused. Sectarianism and Polemic From the onset of the Reformation, Jewish converts to Christianity were aware of the new polemical vulnerability that the schism within Christendom had created.

Stressing the internal dissonance within and between Jewish communities served to negate rabbinic claims to exclusive authority. Converts noted the formal sectarian groups that existed in the past and present. Converts hoped to counter the impression, widespread among Christians, that, compared to the dissension within Christendom, Jews enjoyed unity. He stressed the internal divisiveness of Jewish thought and practice: If they were to come to their land tomorrow, they would not be able to hold it for a year, because of their inner disunity.

Where many of them live together as in Worms, Frankfurt, and Prague, they have parties, factions, and sects. No people treated their beggars as harshly as Jews did, Margaritha complained. He was able to take the letter throughout German lands, wherever Jews lived, perhaps to Frankfurt or Worms. There he showed the letter to the rabbis, parnassim, and gabaim. No matter who the sexton calls up, they all begin to mutter and complain. Some even complain to the Christian ruler. He worried that Christians would reason: They would use this concern as an excuse to expel Jewish communities.

As one Jewish wit joked, he could in good conscience live like a Christian by eating cheese among the Swiss Jews, wine among the French, etc. Augusti traveled widely before his conversion. Matters accepted in Cracow as Glaubenspunkte, fundamentals of the faith, he reported, were regarded by Oriental and Portuguese Jews as secondary.

They were taught that this separation was a divine command and so carried with them a Doppeltmesser, a double knife. Other Jews laughed heartily at this and used the same knife. During many disputations over this, Augusti heard each side refer to the other as verketzern, heretical. He came away convinced more than ever of the tyranny of Jewish scholars and the stupidity of lay people. In the course of his travels, Augusti met people who represented other Jewish alternatives.

The man fostered a reasoned regard and love for the Bible. The meeting with the Karaite was clearly intended to portend his conversion. Aboard the ship he met a Turk who told him that he had converted from Judaism. Missionaries did not hesitate to use the perception that the Jewish community was unraveling, its society in a state of crisis, to foster their argument that Judaism was a dead end. One turns this way, the other that way. I will die a Jew as will my children, but there is no hope for most of the rest. They are no longer Jews. Although they say they are Jews, they are not.

They follow Satan more than they follow God. It has never been this way, only words of dispute. This was but one of the larger historical currents that form the context for understanding Jewish converts in this period. The intense preoccupation of both Jews and Christians with signs of the endtime raised the stakes and lent additional meaning to each Jewish conversion to Christianity. Anonymous, Dissertation, 12 Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews. The conventions of this motif were well known even to those who could not read.

Some believed that all Jews would be converted by the time of the Second Coming; others, that only a small remnant would ultimately convert, and that the salvation of the church was not linked to mass Jewish conversion. Practical political consequences followed from each of these theological positions. The belief in the ultimate conversion of all Jews formed the basis for the traditional Christian maintenance of the status quo with regard to political treatment of Jews.

They could be tolerated within Christendom not only as witnesses to Christian truth but because at the end of time, they would all be converted. Christian magnanimity would ultimately persuade Jews of Christian superiority. Christians contrasted the vain Jewish expectation of the messiah with their own assurance that the redeemer had already come.

In a more sinister vein, Christian writers cast Jewish messianic claimants as predictable precursors of the Antichrist. Like Jesus, the Antichrist was said to be born to Jewish parents, raised as a Jew, hailed by the Jews, but accursed with every demonic trait associated with Jews. For a short time, he would control the world until God revealed his true nature; then he would be destroyed, along with all the Jews. The literature mocked Jews for being deceived by rabbinic tradition with regard to the nature of the messiah. Traditional polemics and literary satires constantly noted the Jewish proclivity to follow false messiahs.

In his eighteenth-century summa of anti-Judaism, Johann Eisenmenger placed two chapters immediately adjacent to one another: The identity of the false Jewish messiah as the arch-enemy of Christ reinforced Christian suspicion that Jews who entered the Christian world also presented a false facade, intending to harm Christians rather than redeem them. Failed Messianic Movements in the Christian Literary Imagination The subject of Jewish false messiahs became a common feature of the early modern German literature written by converts, Christian polemicists, and missionaries. Creative works disseminated the images of Jewish deceit, self-delusion, and ultimate despair, in a way that collapsed messianic and conversionist themes.

Passion plays, Christmas plays, and Shrovetide plays especially the latter presented these subjects to an avid public. Each of these motifs served as a vehicle for further Jewish deceit and their ultimate conversion to Christianity on Judgment Day. Shortly after the apostasy of Jewish messianic pretender Sabbatai Zevi, seventeenth-century German author Hans Grimmelshausen, famous for his Adventures of Simplicissimus, wrote the most elaborate version of the tale that had been developed by Folz and his contemporaries.

The hero, a Gentile, posed as Elijah the prophet to deceive a rich Portuguese Jew. By making the protagonist a Gentile, Grimmelshausen drew upon the older motif of Jews as the deceived. The Jew agreed, and Jewry the world over awaited the child eagerly. Openly alluding to the Sabbatian parallels, Grimmelshausen repeatedly emphasized the depth of Jewish credulousness: His newly acquired Christian faith had wavered when he heard of the imminent arrival of the Jewish messiah.

Many of the Jewish characters embraced Christianity in the end. It went further than its predecessors only in imagining that after the Jews had eagerly awaited the birth of the messiah, their disappointment at the birth of a girl caused them to smash the child against a wall.

Note the anachronistic medieval Jewish hats. Anonymous, Von einer grosse meng Augsburg, Some Christians no longer welcomed them as heralds of the Second Coming but saw them as participants in a larger deception perpetrated by Jews. Jewish conversions to Christianity in early modern German lands must be viewed within the multiple contexts of these powerful cultural currents, subversive Jewish messianism and Jewish deceitfulness. Missionaries to the Jews and polemicists against Judaism exploited messianic crises and cultivated them as points of entry into dialogue with disappointed and dispirited Jews.

Seeking to establish a common ground on the basis of existing Jewish beliefs, Christians and converts elevated messianism and, particularly, failed Jewish messianic movements to new prominence, as a way to bring more Jews into the fold. Christian Hebraists, theologians, and converts from Judaism who wrote about Jewish customs and practices routinely ridiculed Jewish messianic hopes.

He concluded with his most decisive argument: According to most reports, he announced tidings of the messiah. In his Shalshelet ha-kabbalah Chain of Tradition , published in Italy in the late sixteenth century, Gedaliah ibn Yahya reported: Even if these reports exaggerated the numbers of conversions, they prepared the way for polemical exploitation. He had the Christians say: Almost a whole year, young and old, children and women did penance in those days, the like of which had never been seen before. And in spite of it all there appeared neither sign nor vestige, not to speak of the reality itself.

For how did that repentance of help you, when all Jews in their habitations and places in exile. You Jews [too] see and understand that your rabbis are confused and wrong. Margaritha ridiculed one of the biblical passages often cited by medieval Jews as a verse of consolation for the long duration of the exile: It was one of several verses of consolation cited in the medieval Jewish anti-Christian polemical compilation, Nizzahon Yashan.

They explained the long duration of Jewish hope in a future messiah as the result of innate Jewish obstinacy, spiritual blindness, and even as a sign that the devil had vanquished Jewish reason. German folk tradition often represented the devil or the incarnation of evil spirits in the form of an ape—in the early modern imagination, an accursed and inverted image of man.

Converts from Judaism continued to cite and mock this passage well into the eighteenth century. In his Histoire des juifs, for example, Jacques Basnage devoted a substantial section to his strategies for conversion of the Jews. He introduced the Sabbatian movement in that context with an apology: Moreover, this Jewish credulity did not stop with the death of Sabbatai.

Several contemporaneous reports published in German sensationalized the news or fabricated fantastic stories for which there were no credible sources. One German theologian reported the reason why Christian newsmongers invented details on their own: Sabbatai Zevi, false messiah. German-language description of the messianic movement. Sabbatai Zevi, great deceiver and false messiah, king of the Jews, From Die Geschichte von dem grossen Betrieger n.

Buchenroeder cited, and then refuted, messianic news and rumors that had recently arrived from the east. It has made the Jews even more lost and confused. Some do not wish to get married; others do not pursue their business with the same intensity as before; still others proclaim great things; some say that there are Christians who are adopting the Jewish faith. Naive Christians are in doubt concerning the true faith, others hope to bring Jesus Christ as Messiah; Christian Gerson has cited similar examples of Christians turning Jew.

Paul Hirsch later wrote his refutation of the Jewish calendar to console Jews who had converted, to reassure them that no other messiah than Jesus could possibly be expected. You miserable children of Levi! Christian Hebraist Wagenseil asked Ber Perlhefter, in February to respond to his query regarding the meaning of certain messianic midrashim.

For over a year, I wrote to this R. Mordechai to come to Italy, for the Jews there wanted to meet him as well. Mordechai arrived in Italy, all the Jews believed in him, that he was the messiah, and they paid him great homage, and called him messiah. I too went there, but I saw that he was a crazy man; I investigated him and recognized signs of impurity and black magic.

I immediately left him to warn the Jews not to believe him, for he was a fool and a magician. Of all the Christian clerics who used the historical accounts of failed Jewish messianic movements to gain converts for the church, none did so with greater success than Esdras Edzard.

We have not only heard from Jews but also from our Christian correspondents in Smyrna, Aleppo, Constantinople, and other parts of Turkey, very certain reports, that the new Jewish messiah has performed all these wonders, and Jews the world over are assembling around him. What are we to make of the Christian teaching and belief concerning the messiah? The impact of the movement galvanized his own vision of the endtime; in its unfolding Edzard saw the prelude to the long-awaited conversion of the Jews before the Second Coming. Edzard devoted the remainder of his career to this project and achieved a truly remarkable rate of success.

After an initial preparation period, a wave of baptisms of Jews in his church began in ; it did not subside until his death in During those years, Edzard was responsible for the baptism of Jews in his church. To understand this number in context, in the preceding half-century only eleven Jews were baptized in Hamburg. In the same period as Edzard baptized Jews, a total of Jewish baptisms were registered in all German Protestant churches combined.

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He devoted special attention to their continued spiritual development after baptism, holding frequent catechism lessons and counseling sessions to keep them from backsliding. Preference had to be given to local Jews wishing to convert; those who came from other cities Edzard sent elsewhere for the ceremony.

If one man hath been the instrument of so many conversions, what might not a number of men do. The worthy son of this Dr. Edzard now a preacher in London. Friedrich Albrecht Christiani, a disciple of Edzard, credited Sabbatai with showing him the error of the Jews and the truth of Christianity. Christiani expressed astonishment that so many Jews were converting, something he could never have predicted during his youth.

While I had no doubts about this [his Jewish upbringing], God had something else in mind for me. In the year , when I had only been in Bruchsall a short time, a loud cry went forth among the Jewish population concerning a newly arisen messiah. It excited the Jews far and wide, that they had been saved by this delusion. Their so-called and long awaited messiah had now come, who would bring them into the Promised Land, out of their miserable condition. In order to do so, they readied themselves in many places and made arrangements.

They sold their household goods and tried to satisfy their debts at half their value, in order that they might have ample travel funds for the journey. While this false illusion seduced the Jews, it provided me with an opportunity to study the root of the matter, and to investigate more conscientiously the teachings concerning the messiah.

News later emerged from Constantinople that he had been burned. Other fundamental Christian beliefs such as the New Covenant, the Virgin Birth, and the meaning of baptism were dealt with in a brief and perfunctory manner. The Sabbatian movement resonated in the accounts of many other Jews on the brink of conversion. Italian convert Giulio Morosini, among those converted to Christianity just before the movement, wrote that his Christian faith was strengthened by the Jewish messianic failure.

His guide for those who preach to the Jews, Via della Fede, devoted considerable attention to Sabbatai. Lotharius Franz Fried, formerly Joseph Marcus, devoted considerable space to false messiahs in his anti-Jewish tract. When the date passed without event, Moses ben Aaron of Cracow, later known as Johann Kemper of Uppsala, converted, in Did they not empty their homes and sell their possessions? They slaughtered their cattle and bought provisions to travel with the messiah to Jerusalem. For so many have arisen and claimed to be messiahs, ben Kozib [bar Kochba], and several years ago, Sabbatai Zevi, and most recently.

More conversions resulted from the disillusionment following the collapse of another movement led by a pietistic Sabbatian, R. Judah Hasid, in A gifted preacher, R. Judah gathered his followers and left Poland with thirty-one families bound for the Holy Land. To his followers R. Judah preached penitence in preparation for an imminent messianic denouement. Judah did not reveal publicly the identity of the messiah he awaited, but his inner circle knew that it was the revenant Sabbatai.

Franciscus Lotharius Phillipus counted thirty-seven hasidim who left Poland with R. Judah Hasid, deliberately taking a circuitous path to the Holy Land so that they could attract more followers on the way. By the time they reached Venice, their ranks had swollen to four hundred men. Phillipus wrote that the members of the group wanted to acknowledge R. Judah himself as the messiah, although he never claimed that title. The company split in two; only about half of the four hundred actually made it to the Holy Land. When they arrived, R. Judah immediately founded a bet midrash house of study.

After eleven days of this regimen, he became ill and suddenly died. Some went over to the Papists [Catholics], but thirteen of us converted to the pure and elevating Evangelical [Protestant] belief. Together with another follower, Simcha Hasid, he converted in Nordlingen in No missionaries in Christendom appear to have been better prepared to take polemical advantage of this moment than those in German lands.

The Halle Mission As the German Pietist movement revitalized and reshaped the spiritual landscape of German lands in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Pietist founder Jakob Spener revisited the question of mass Jewish conversion. Ultimately, he did little to realize it. Not until Heinrich Callenberg founded a special institute devoted to this objective did the Pietist mission to the Jews begin in earnest. Callenberg took personal interest in Sabbatian material for use in his mission and apparently made contact with a conventicle of Sabbatians in Halle.

He was particularly alert when any mention of Sabbatai allowed him even greater polemical opportunity. Newspapers and journals followed the events and reported on its latest developments to their readers. Carl Anton, a convert who claimed to have studied with R. Eybeschuetz as a youth, followed reports of the Emden—Eybeschuetz controversy closely and remained deeply engaged by it. Anton claimed that he maintained contact with Eybeschuetz even after his conversion and insinuated that, beneath the rabbinic facade, Eybeschuetz supported Kabbalistic teachings that came close to the teachings of Christianity.

The Emden—Eybeschuetz controversy inspired in Megerlin a deep and abiding interest in the use of failed Jewish messianic movements to stimulate Jewish conversion to Christianity. Megerlin argued that since it would be manifestly absurd for a great thinker like R. Eybeschuetz to infuse secret meaning into the disputed Kabbalistic amulets by referring to such an obvious deceiver as Sabbatai Zevi, the real referent could be none other than Jesus. Megerlin characterized the presumed author of the amulets, R. Collective subversive conversions, such as that of the Frankists, and the many cases of Sabbatians who remained Jews but syncretized Christian elements into their belief systems assured the continued existence, and even broadening, of areas of social and intellectual congruence between Jews and Christians.

By linking failed messianic movements to central beliefs, hopes, and practices of Judaism, Christian missionaries contributed new impetus to the individual motivations for conversion. Jewish messianism provides another context for understanding conversion in post-Reformation German lands. The invention of multiple identities by famous failed messiahs such as Reubeni, Zevi, and Frank expanded the possibilities for self-renewal and reinvention which form the core experiences of conversion. As they completed their passage through the rites and rituals of conversion, individual converts encapsulated the entire development of early Christianity in its centuries-long disengagement from its Jewish antecedents.

This process entailed a complex relationship to the Jewish past, nostalgia and reminiscence often mingling with scorn and hatred. Converts from Judaism in early modern German lands produced an extensive corpus of autobiographical material, greater than any other group of converts from Judaism in this period. English Jews just wanted to pass quietly into English society, and most did.

Their characteristic declarations of independence from the shackles of papism provided models for converts who perceived themselves to have become free from the bonds of Judaism. The large number of conversion narratives written in German in the early modern period attests to the fact that these programmatic statements had become de rigueur for the convert, part of the rite of passage out of the old life and a passport to the new. These texts, along with other material written by converts, constitute a unique testimony to this otherwise obscure chapter in Jewish and German history.

A close reading of these narratives remains our only means of touching upon some aspects of this critical juncture in the individual and collective lives. Literary Paradigms Several literary traditions converge in the autobiographical writing of the converts.

Conversion narratives belong, in one sense, to the tradition of confession. In the early sixteenth century, Luther reopened the discussion over the obligation to confess and to whom. Impelled by a heightened awareness of the role of confession in Christianity, early modern converts cast their own past as a secret now revealed, using the process of writing to assert control over the past and expiate for it. While the conversion experience served as the matrix for one of the oldest and strongest traditions of autobiographical writing, it was also one of the most problematic.

The real subject of conversion narratives was the new religion, and the entire genre served a didactic purpose. The process model envisioned the convert on a lifelong journey of coming closer to God; the event model depicted an abrupt, sudden, and complete break from the past, a singular change marked indelibly on the soul.

The emphasis on a radical spiritual break psychologically facilitated the often extreme reversal of identities, from persecuted to persecutor, from apostate to zealous apostle—a change poignantly dramatized in a medieval narrative such as that of the convert Petrus Alfonsi. This expectation accounts for one of the paradoxes that characterize many of the autobiographical reconstructions of early modern converts: Seventeenth-century convert Friedrich Albrecht Christiani asserted that he had no inkling that he would have been amenable to conversion even a short time prior to its occurrence: A neighbor asked him later whether he liked the procession.

He replied that it looked like they were leading a criminal to the place of execution. When he traveled through Poland or Prague, he recalled feeling great antipathy toward any Christians he encountered and thought of himself as their opponent whose mission lay in discrediting their religion. He had owned a manual of antiChristian refutation which his sponsor retained as a reminder of his hostility to Christianity before his conversion. Joachim Christian Franck recalled that long before his Bar Mitzvah he had been taught to hate Christians.

In many cases, attraction to Christianity worked simultaneously with repulsion from Judaism. A chance meeting with a Christian missionary at a vulnerable moment, or a momentous historical event such as the messianic movement of Sabbatai Zevi, brought the convert to the conclusion that Jewish teachers had erred in their interpretation of Scripture and history. Thus, early modern conversion narratives constitute a treasure trove of autobiographical writing which illuminate Jewish lives, unintentionally, as it were.

Their stories introduced the books they wrote on matters of Jewish interest, advertising their background to their Christian readers. Eventually, the autobiographical narrative became such an integral feature of books written by converts, that when the converts did not provide their own narratives, their Christian editors or publishers would compensate by providing a biography of the convert-author to satisfy their readers.

John Felix wrote that he could be brief concerning his autobiography because his spiritual sponsor, Superintendent Kern, had already published the material as a separate treatise. Many printed conversion autobiographies originated in the sermon preached at the baptismal ceremony. Such sermons usually contained brief biographical sketches of the converts, based on information which only they could have provided. Margaritha beseeched his Christian readers not to judge him by his poor writing.

Perhaps the admission of editorial shaping appeared to be less of a compromise of authenticity in the case of a female author, who would not have been expected to produce a literary account. Friedrich Koch interwove the voice of his convert-subject with that of his own conversion sermon, to produce a book in which the two voices intermingled. Lebrecht, claiming that he had taken the narration directly from the lips of the convert before his death. Collectively, then, the narratives constitute a unique layering of material shaped by both the imagination of the convert and the vision of those who played an instrumental role in converting him or her, mirroring two distinct sets of expectations.

The narratives invoke the familiar image of a triptych in which the convert stands at the center, between his Jewish past and his Christian future. Each component contained many layers of ambivalence and ambiguity, mutual attraction and repulsion. By the late eighteenth century, conversion was becoming a more common choice for Jews. Conversion was just such a deep break with the past. Converts found a way to include their past, their Jewish childhood, into a new narrative that they constructed to explain their lives.

While they tried to subvert their Jewish voice, the deepest layer of their identity, to the dominant overlay of Christian narrative, it sometimes erupted, both into their writing and even into their lives. It was not the distinctive personal aspect of their childhood which every convert sought to retrieve and incorporate into his autobiography, but rather the elements that made it a Jewish childhood: Most narratives begin with the moment they were given their Jewish names or circumcised.

One convert who began his life story with his Jewish birthdate, 13 Adar, some twenty-three years earlier c. Some provided more detailed accounts. Seventeenth-century convert Friedrich Albrecht Christiani wrote: Once I had completed the fundamentals at home, they sent me to the Synagoge House of Study of Posen, where I ultimately advanced so far that I not only understood the script of the Old Testament in the Hebrew language, but I could read the rabbinic commentaries completely, and I was very knowledgeable in the books of the Talmud.

He recalled his Bar Mitzvah portion and lecture in detail, and his subsequent pride in being chosen to study far from home in a yeshivah in Frankfurt a. When I was nine years old, the holy book of God was shut up and in its stead the productions of men, as the Mishnah, Gemara etc. He contrasted this depiction with a strong criticism of Christian society for not supporting its scholars in a similar manner.

The course described by Christiani appears to have been standard fare for Jewish boys. That he persisted in the study of Talmud to age sixteen meant that he had shown some promise, since his parents did not force him to end his studies earlier to seek his livelihood. Had he manifested greater abilities, he might have continued his studies at a larger yeshivah. However, this idealization of Jewish education may have arisen out of pragmatic considerations.

How reliable were the testimonies of the converts concerning their own Jewish education? With the exception of Carl Anton, who made much of the fact that he had studied under the celebrated R. Jonathan Eybeschuetz, most do not mention the names of their teachers. Friedrich Albrecht Augusti formerly Joshua ben Abraham Hirschel , who converted in Dessau in , claimed that he had been a rabbi in Sonderhausen.

His critic countered that he had only been a schoolmaster and possibly a shochet, a ritual slaughterer, as well. As soon as the sun or the moon break through and it sees their real light, it throws away the broken branch. This story reminds me of the guilt of my birth as a Jew, but now by the grace of God, I am an enlightened Christian. Indeed, the education of Jewish boys in medieval and early modern German lands contained the roots of some of these defections.

Young children studied either with their fathers or with very junior students. As soon as they came of age, their parents sent them away from home to study in larger cities. The anonymous Jewish author of a seventeenth-century autobiography delivered a scathing critique of the vacuum in the educational system that left him at the mercy of his inept father. Of course, they recognized the signs only once they viewed their lives from a retroactive Christian perspective. Some converts transformed colloquial expressions of disdain for Christianity into signposts of their personal destinies.

What have you said? Do you know what it means? One day, while learning with his partner, an incident occurred in which Gottfried spoke disrespectfully to his teacher. Then and there I decided that I would let myself get baptized. My heart was set, although I did not know it yet. You might well ask, how can a Jew, without knowing the teachings of Christ become convinced of the truth of the messiah from hearing a simple melody? This is how the holy spirit begins its work, it is what theologians call gratia praeveniente grace that precedes.

There is no other way into the Jewish heart, as Jews have seen the scriptures already. This tradition of retrojection existed even in medieval tales. Judah Hasid was able to see Elijah sitting at each circumcision ceremony. Once, at the circumcision of the son of a wealthy Regensburg Jew, as everyone rose, he [R. Judah] remained seated and silent. When everyone wondered why, he answered that he did not see Elijah enter with the child, instead. Rather, one is a Jew in secret. Not only had he come to think badly of the Talmud; he no longer had any use for Jewish worship: Paul Christian read the New Testament in Yiddish, in concealment and secrecy.

No man can believe the pain and ache that assailed my heart. I had no rest day or night. What should I do? To whom should I speak of these things? This state of limbo lasted ten weeks, until arrangements could be made for him to leave the Jewish community. Even then, Guggenheim insisted that his plans be kept secret from his wife and the local Jews of Lengnau. When he traveled to a nearby village and revealed his secret to a farmer to whom he had lent money, the farmer balked. He had many business ties to Jews, and if they suspected that he was involved in a conversion, they would reject his business and label him a seducer.

If they had suspected his plans, they might have tried to prevent him from leaving. Abraham Jacobs became interested in Christianity when a Lutheran pastor who came to study Hebrew with his father, a rabbi in Frankfurt, slipped him a New Testament, along with some surreptitious words of encouragement. One likely motive for his quick conversion, following an instruction period of only four weeks, was the promise that he would be released from military servitude as soon as he was baptized.

He waited in a garden outside the city limits for special permission to enter. The magistrate examined him thoroughly and ordered him to learn a trade if he wished to remain longer than a day. No Jew could be bound apprentice in Germany. They could not know in advance that loneliness would continue to haunt them later as well. After a potential convert had made a private decision to be baptized, his or her sponsors required a public renunciation to the Jewish community.

The theological value of these conversions and the substantial investment of time and resources on the part of the sponsors meant that the converts could not simply be quietly absorbed into society at large. The break had to be made known to both the Jewish and the Christian public, staged, sometimes in the synagogue, in a public and premeditated fashion. John Felix, formerly the esteemed Rabbi Seelig Bunzlau, waited for the occasion of a public disputation, on the subject of Isaiah 53, which was scheduled to take place at the synagogue of Weickersheim on the Sabbath, 25 February , to announce that he was converting.

From this time I must date the commencement of a new period in my life. If they experienced a phase of agnostic drifting or rational skepticism, it could not be expressed anywhere within a traditional community. The converts often had to arrange for themselves formal instruction in Christian principles. In some cases, fearing that a potential convert might experience a change of heart or a change of circumstance, instructors would rush the process.

Even he admitted that this was too short a time in which to unlearn all the ways to deride and blaspheme against the Christian religion and to learn the truth concerning the real messiah. Gottfried woke up the day after his dramatic departure to the announcement that a Jew was waiting to see him. While the relative could not openly make his pitch, he communicated in a code that the imminent convert understood at once. He expressed this sentiment in his initial note to the community as well. When Gottfried showed Jofe the biblical prooftexts that had convinced him to convert and told him that his baptism was scheduled for eight days hence, the relative promised to return shortly, armed with the necessary refutations.

To compound the cool reception he received from the Christians, Gottfried met a recent convert from Judaism who tried to convince him that this recent delay was a divine sign that God wanted him to remain Jewish. This talk from a recent convert who clearly regretted his conversion almost turned Gottfried back to the Jewish fold. The ambivalence that greeted his conversion in Christian quarters, in stark contrast to his own expectations, may speak to a shift in the reception of Jewish converts taking place by the mid-eighteenth century; as the number of converts grew, the social and economic burdens associated with providing for them became more than many municipalities could bear.

The magistrate suggested that he travel to Dr. They would be thrown open while the candidate was immersed in the water and then drawn closed again. The curtain was lifted so that the entire congregation could clearly see and hear the proceedings. The baptizing cleric took Johannes the former Jew in this sixteenth-century account by the head and said loudly: The teaching of contempt for Judaism formed a central theme of the proceedings.

In fact, the church designed the entire ceremony not only to move the heart of the convert, but to strengthen the Christian identity of the entire audience. Young Jews at a baptism ceremony. Note the pomp and elegance. And all his works? And his entire essence? Christ versus the devil at the baptismal font. Depart you unholy Jewish spirit, and make space for the Holy Spirit. Now he is free. No person present at such a ceremony could forget the associations created between the convert, his Jewish past, and the idea of possession by a satanic or demonic force.

Bon remarked that although the entire proceedings lasted for three or four hours, no one seemed impatient or bored. The audience absorbed the performance and its multiple messages in rapt attention. Names signifying the spiritual freedom, grace, and bliss which they were about to enter were also popular among converts. In the conversion sermon for Marcus Moses, the pastor of the church, Matthia Roth, mentioned that although the convert had set his heart on the new name Constantini, his mentor had decided on Friedrich, because the event had brought him such joy.

In the end, a compromise must have been reached, as the new convert was called Christian Friedrich Constantini. While the onlookers witnessed the convert bathed in holy waters, they were instructed to envision that the convert was really being washed in the blood that poured from the wounds of Christ.

During the months of preparation leading up to the baptismal ceremony and throughout the ceremony itself, all parties focused intensely on the convert. Local noblewomen generally sponsored female converts. Fathers and Sons, Mothers and Sons Every early modern conversion from Judaism entailed a breaking away from the past, not only from the religion of the parents, but from all links with the entire family and community. In this respect, the early modern converts provide a striking contrast to those of nineteenth-century Germany, who often waited for the death of a parent or a grandparent before making public the intention or fact of a conversion.

Some nineteenth-century converts baptized their children, but not themselves, in the hope of giving them an easier future. David Veit wrote in to his friend Rahel Varnhagen of his intention to travel immediately after his conversion, so that his family would never be aware of it if he returned to Germany. Their sensibility and strategies form a striking contrast to early modern converts, who often fought bitterly with their parents and even denounced them in public.

In the early modern period, psychological tension between parents and children remained an enduring current within conversion narratives. For some, conversion constituted a form of rebellion against a powerful father. Missionaries often acted as surrogate fathers, and the new parishes compensated for inadequate homes. The conditions of living on the road, detached from the certainties and comforts of home, rendered them vulnerable to enticement by missionary-minded Christians. He later traveled to Constantinople and Salonika to study Kabbalah, all before he turned eighteen.

What has she done to deserve this? You would be killing her, along with father. Malachi served as a rabbi in Posnan, in Poland, but his heart was not in it, and eventually, in , he converted, taking the name Paul Christian. That was about four years ago and I was then called Abraham Brody, but I have since joined the Church and my name is B.

On Sunday I followed the custom of the Talmud students making the rounds of the homes in order to gather some money for living and travel expenses. My father died when I was young and we left our land. Shortly after the death of my father, and approximately in my ninth year, my mother sent me to a rich uncle in London to learn diamond cutting, his metier. He laughed at me, said I was too weak, and sent me back to my mother in Altona.

Because she could not subsist there, she took me with the other children to Eisenstadt in Hungary, not far from Vienna where she had wealthy relatives. I went to study with another uncle, R. Biographies written by such sons form a separate subgroup of convert narratives. They tend to be less informed by particulars of Jewish life, but, one generation later, their identities as children of converts and child converts themselves continued to complicate their lives. The autobiographies of both Stephan Isaac and Friedrich Albrecht Augusti exemplify the complex relationships in such families.

In the Isaac family the mother stood at the center of the family conversion drama along with the father. Women often converted to stay with their children, since the law usually awarded custody to converting fathers. He did not see her subsequently for long periods of time. Later, when Augusti discussed the force of his intention to convert, he recalled that nothing could stop him, not even his mother whom he loved.

From there, he went to Belgrade, where he was captured by the Turks, together with a Protestant Christian whose faith and fortitude inspired him. Although ransomed by the Jewish community in Smyrna, Hertz later acted on his promise to his dying friend and converted. Many converts yearned for the families they had left behind.

In the early eighteenth century, Christian Gottfried Austerlitz wrote a book on the theme of the ultimate conversion of all Jews. Just as Christianity saw the New Testament hidden within the Old, so Christian missionaries saw a new Christian apostle hidden within each Jew. Every Jew was a potential Christian, and the purpose of the mission was to make manifest the Christian within each Jew.

Convert autobiographies mirrored the Christian anticipation that a convert should not be content with his personal salvation but should strive to serve as an apostle of his newfound faith. Even converts who left little other literary material wrote the obligatory autobiography, so that their lives could illuminate the dark path taken by their blind Jewish brothers, to make manifest that which remained hidden. The very act of writing a conversion narrative invited emulation and positioned the convert as an archetype.

Christian mentors encouraged converts to write their own conversion histories and reprinted those that were regarded as particularly compelling, or useful. The story transcended the life. Download Mi examen de conciencia PDF. Download Mi testimonio y como deje de ser gay: Download Preguntas y Respuestas.: Un manual para incrementar su acervo espiritual y cultural. El Santo Grial, los EE. UU y la 2a. Download Rezar en Cuaresma. Download Sobre la Naturaleza de los Dioses: De natura deorum PDF. Download Un futuro posible PDF. Download Un nuevo comienzo: Reflexiones diarias para cuaresma y pascua PDF.

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