Narratives of Jewish conversion in Germany around 1800.

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the figure of the Jewish convert in politics and literature and the related issue of gender. The study is confined to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the Enlightenment themes of equality, tolerance, rationality, and secularization were called into question by the rise of a national consciousness. In religious, theological, and political texts as well as satires, conversion novels, and letters by converts themselves, the Jewish convert is represented as a subject of public interest. The analysis of the rhetorics of Jewish conversion partakes in the study of the history of anti-Semitism. Around 1800, conversion became a widely contemplated strategy of assimilation for those Jews who felt increasing alienation from the Jewish community. As boundaries seemed to crumble between Jews and Christians, the difference upon which German national identity was based became unstable. While Jewish men or the Jewish community as a whole emerged as subjects in the <italic>political </italic> debate, when entering the <italic>literary sphere</italic>, the convert was predominantly represented as a woman. Women figures lend themselves to support very different textual politics, such as modeling satisfaction with the exclusion from the public sphere (conversion novels), or symbolizing a threatening penetration and disruption of the public sphere (satires). Chapters are organized topically, beginning with the construction and subversion of the good convert as a Christian, parent, citizen, and German. In this context, the study then explores the dynamic which linked the literary sphere and the political debates on conversion. Focusing on the feminization of the Jewish Question in satires and conversion novels contextualizes the Jewish woman convert within the larger discourse on assimilation. The Christian German rhetoric of conversion then provides the framework for a study of converts' letters. This study is unique in emphasizing how literary representations of conversion and the writings of the converts themselves participated in and reacted to a larger political debate on the position of converts and assimilated Jews in German society and ultimately on German identity.