Being and Becoming: Polish Conversions to Judaism and the Dynamics of Affiliation

Introduction

While conversion, whether voluntarily or by force, sincerely or falsely, has long been recognized as central to the experience of European Jews, conversions to Judaism in pre-modern confessional states were sparse, although they had been far less unusual in antiquity, at least until the last two centuries bce, when the procedure and legal ramifications of conversion to Judaism first emerged in the reforms retroactively attributed to Nehemiah and Ezra. This was a classic example of the social organization of difference or, more specifically, of the situational reorganization of ethnic boundaries in response to the perceived threat of Hellenism and assimilation.¹ Early modern western Europe did produce some accounts of transition to Judaism, but such conversions were generally secret and fairly exceptional, as they ran the risk, at best, of ostracism by the surrounding Christian world, and, at worst, of persecution and severe punishment. These sparse accounts seem to suggest that individuals who became Jewish in that setting were being driven, not by practical necessity and utilitarian motives, but rather by intellectual and theological reasoning, coupled with a profound and genuine attraction to Judaism.² By contrast, the conversions to Judaism I discuss below, although grounded in centuries-old legislation and debates, are the product of modernity—the post-Enlightenment secularization of the nation-state in the European diaspora and the creation of the State of Israel, with its own religious institutions, where conversion plays an important role in extending the boundaries of the body politic.³

In contemporary Poland, the phenomenon of conversion to Judaism is even more recent. The dissolution of rabbinical institutions in post-Holocaust Poland was brought about by, in order of importance, mass Jewish emigration, the policies and practices of the communist state, and the climate of fear and stigmatization which drove many of Poland’s remaining Jews into hiding or at least provisional rejection of their Jewish identity.⁴ All this effectively obliterated the very possibility of conversion to Judaism until, beginning in the early 1980s and in particular after the political shift of 1989, the ‘revival’ projects launched by Polish Jewish activists of the ‘second generation’ (children of Holocaust survivors) and the involvement of international Jewish charities such as the Ronald Lauder Foundation and later the Shavei Israel organization brought new rabbi-emissaries from abroad and thus led to the re-establishment of a Jewish religious institutional infrastructure extending beyond Poland’s borders. It was this that first enabled conversions to Judaism to take place again.

The present chapter is both anthropological and ethnographical inasmuch as I frame my reflections within the analytical and interpretative tradition of the anthropology of conversion, specifically to Judaism, and my reflections are grounded in prolonged and intense encounters with converts, their educators, and supervisors. I attended various formative events and conversion courses and conducted interviews and participant observations of social and religious life in several Jewish communities in Poland, into which the prospective converts were hoping to be admitted or to which they already belonged on account of their partial Jewish ancestry. Since 2007 my ethnographical fieldwork has focused intermittently on the Jewish Community of Wrocław—formally an Orthodox congregation but in reality greatly diverse in terms of the members’ views on Judaism and religious observance. The ideas I present here are also grounded in a short period of intense fieldwork I conducted in Warsaw in early 2015, among the converts, rabbis, and affiliates of three congregations: the Orthodox Nożyk Synagogue, and two Progressive congregations: Ec Chaim and Beit Warszawa. I further draw on the ethnographical interviews I have conducted over the years with various rabbis, educators, converts, and prospective converts at different locations in Poland and abroad.⁵ My views and understanding of conversion have thus emerged from all these interactions and lived experiences.

As John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff argue, researchers should be wary of conflating collective ‘cultural transformation’ with subjective, if socially shared, experience of change, even if and when the two are connected.⁶ With that in mind, one could indeed view the ‘revival’ of Polish Jewish...