Convert Or Die

Salomone da Sesso was a virtuoso goldsmith in Renaissance Italy. Brought down by a sex scandal, he saved his skin by converting to Catholicism. Tamar Herzig explores Salamone’s world—his Jewish upbringing, his craft and patrons, and homosexuality. In his struggle for rehabilitation, we see how precarious and contested was the meaning of conversion.

The Deafening Cadence of Biblical Defection is more than a revelation of personal encounter. It is a written observation of the world, not as I see it, but as it truly is. Each chapter is a true-to-life account surrounding some of the most troublesome historicity of the Christian Church, all the way up to the more menacing tentacles of the anti-Christian movement in America. Of particular mention are the biased leftist media, inaccurate political propaganda from the film industry, the selling of militant humanism in our schools, political correctness, and a liberal court system that finds it appropriate to assist and legitimize Scriptural abominations into law. Showing little regard for the Word of God, these anti-Christian agencies have become a menacing, parasitic force tearing at the very fabric of Christian ideology and the moral stability of America. The question is, what kind of world will we assign to the next generation if mans self-serving, immoral inequities are the measuring tool that represents final authority? Important to this work is the presentation of the one true God as delineated throughout the Old and New Testament. It is by this method understanding and resolutions for conceptual issues in this book emerge. In the end, the book answers one of the most reigning questions corroborated throughout each chapter, and that is, can Christianity as we know it survive in a society that vilifies anything that represents Christian symbolic ideology?

Reprint of the original, first published in 1856.

The definitive history of conversion and assimilation of Jews in Europe and America from the eighteenth century to the present Between the French Revolution and World War II, hundreds of thousands of Jews left the Jewish fold—by becoming Christians or, in liberal states, by intermarrying. Telling the stories of both famous and obscure individuals, Leaving the Jewish Fold explores the nature of this drift and defection from Judaism in Europe and America from the eighteenth century to today. Arguing that religious conviction was rarely a motive for Jews who became Christians, Todd Endelman shows that those who severed their Jewish ties were driven above all by pragmatic concerns—especially the desire to escape the stigma of Jewishness and its social, occupational, and emotional burdens. Through a detailed and colorful narrative, Endelman considers the social settings, national contexts, and historical circumstances that encouraged Jews to abandon Judaism, and factors that worked to the opposite effect. Demonstrating that anti-Jewish prejudice weighed more heavily on the Jews of Germany and Austria than those living in France and other liberal states as early as the first half of the nineteenth century, he reexamines how Germany's political and social development deviated from other European states. Endelman also reveals that liberal societies such as Great Britain and the United States, which tolerated Jewish integration, promoted radical assimilation and the dissolution of Jewish ties as often as hostile, illiberal societies such as Germany and Poland. Bringing together extensive research across several languages, Leaving the Jewish Fold will be the essential work on conversion and assimilation in modern Jewish history for years to come.