There are many Jewish sociologists, fewer sociologists of the Jews, and hardly any historical sociologists of that anomaly among an exceptional people, the Jews of Britain. There is only one Todd Endelman. His specialty is the Jews who â??prefer not toâ? be Jewish: the Tribe of Bartleby. For decades, Endelman, a professor at the University of Michigan, has measured the â??radical assimilationâ? of Jews from Jewishness, first among the genteel Sephardim of Georgian London, and then among British Jews as a whole. In Leaving the Jewish Fold, Endelman pursues his lost sheep across a thousand years of Western history.
Most of them chose to get lost and wanted to cover their tracks. In our enlightened times, it is possible to identify as a person of no fixed principles. But for most of the past millennium, to cease being Jewish meant to start being Christian. Endelman identifies two forms of conversion from Judaism: â??conversions of convictionâ? and â??conversions of convenience.â? The convicts are more spectacular, but the convenient are more numerous. For every sincere conversion on St. Paulâ??s road to Damascus, there have been thousands on the road to jobs in London and Paris, Berlin and Vienna, New York, and Washington. Heine justified this kind of conversion as a â??passport to civilizationâ?: an escape from prejudice, an entry into high culture. Others simply resigned from a club that they never asked to join. Such converts did not need to be threatened with a sword, only with a carrot and stick: economic opportunity and â??conversionary pressures.â?
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