James Baden

Reflections on Giur

[German]

Several books on conversion to Judaism have been published in recent years - that is, the final decades of the 20th century - and much has been written in the Jewish press on specific cases of conversion.  Increasingly, the focus tends to be on questions of process, identity and Rabbinic authority. For some while we have witnessed the unfolding of a protracted debate about the degree to which conversions carried out by specific movements or Rabbinic bodies are "recognised" by other movements and Rabbinic bodies. Thus attention is concentrated on the process of conversion itself and the role of the Rabbi; and at the same time, anxious hopes are directed towards the goal of finding some sort of universal agreement on conversion which would be binding on all branches of Judaism

This focus has the effect of obscuring other dimensions, such as time, in the form of history, and space - i.e. geography - which need to be taken into account when looking at conversion to Judaism. Historically, the development of Jewish attitudes towards conversion is notably varied and, I would suggest, discontinuous. There have been times when conversion was more of a common feature in the in the Jewish landscape; and times when it was all but unheard of, mysterious and extraordinary. It may be the case that in the 50 or 60 years, we have been a precipitate shift from one era to another. In the middle of the 20th century, for instance, conversion was still something relatively remarkable, and associated with risk. Now it is part of the life of Jewish society almost everywhere. More and more Jews are either the offspring/descedants of converts - or are converts themselves. This now applies to many in my own profession, the Rabbinate: itself a sign of the radical changes which have taken place.

So it is that when controversies erupt about conversion in our day, what is lost is a recognition of the fact that a major change has happened in Jewish society around the world in recent decades. Once Jews liked to take for granted that they were in some general way "all related", all descended from common forebears. True, this was something of an illusion:  Indian, Polish and Ethiopian Jews, for instance, knew nothing of each other and thus were not obliged to  acknowledge their obvious diversity. Yet within each of these communities, there existed a certain fundamental assumption that all its members were linked by kinship and descent. These common assumptions are now being forced to give way in all Jewish communities to new understandings of the nature of Jewish affinity - and this is not an easy process.

The other dimension - geographical space - leaps at me when I compare the two countries I know best: Britain and Germany. In Britain, the vast majority of people who convert are persons whose formative encounter with Judaism has been through a relationship with an individual Jew - usually a life-partner. Thus it is through personal relationships that people come from "outside" into the body of the Jewish people. The overall context remains the family, kinship.

Although my views are entirely impressionistic, I sense that the situation is somewhat different in Germany.  First of all, there is a totally different historical and social setting. As is eloquently illustrated by Jael Geis in her excellent survey of the surviving German-Jewish remnant in the years immediately after the Shoah, almost every story of survival involved complicated and ambiguous issues of identity and status: it was due to these very complications and ambiguities that people survived. This group was then joined by an entirely different group of survivors, the DPs, in whose Eastern European communities both intermarriage and conversion (whether to Judaism or out of it) were all but unknown. Such was the make-up of the Jewish population in Germany up until around 1990. And since then, tens of thousands of people have arrived from the former Soviet Union - most of them with "complicated" identities reminiscent of the German-Jewish survivor remnant in 1945, in fact. Which prompts the thought: so often the high level of intermarriage in the Soviet Jewish population is cited as a problem which the rest of the Jewish world now has to "cope with" - but perhaps it should be recognised as well as part of the very mechanism of survival and continuity?

Another fascinating aspect of conversion which I've noticed in Germany is what may be called pure "conviction" conversion: people who choose Judaism because it is the religion which appeals to them, and not because of any connection with a Jewish person. Indeed, some people have told me that at the time they reached their decision in favour of Judaism they didn't know a single Jew. Additionally, quite a few seem to have made their choice not from a background of active involvement in and identification with Christianity: more than a few have even studied Christian theology. Accordingly, they have not only chosen something - they have also rejected something.

At the same time, I notice that these individuals are viewed with some suspicion or unease by other Jews in Germany, and as a consequence, they then feel themselves to be the victims of disadvantage, prejudice and discrimination. Nonetheless, by taking a couple of steps back and considering the circumstances from a slightly longer-range perspective, it becomes clear that the who situation is, quite frankly, extraordinary - and peculiar to Germany.

All the same, it's not all THAT bizarre... As I say, the huge majority of British people who convert are people in relationships with Jews, but "conviction" conversions take place here as well.  Moreover, there are many historical examples to cite:  whether slaves and Roman matrons in antiquity, or the villagers of San Nicandro in Italy - who abandoned Roman Catholicism and chose Judaism after one of them had a number of spiritual visions of Abraham in the 1920s! Unusual, yes, and perhaps even odd, but the route of "pure individual conviction" has an honourable place in the history of conversion to Judaism. One could also point out that such converts have paid with their lives on many occasions: here in England, we have the example of the Dominican monk Robert of Reading, put to death in 1275 after he had converted. At the same time, as such an example indicates, we are dealing here with a phenomenon which is not only unusual in Jewish history, but which involves explicitly religious passions as well - and the worries of "born Jews" who feel uneasy accordingly need to be accepted as understandable. Their suspicious responses aren't evidence of prejudice or discrimination, but simply of a struggle to make sense of a new and unfamiliar phenomenon in Jewish society. And with the backdrop of the German-Jewish experience of the 20th century behind them, they are entitled to experience this as a struggle.

Rabbi James Baaden, South London Liberal Synagogue.