6
Social Conversion and Group
Definition in Jewish Copenhagen
Andrew Buckser
Studies of religious conversion have often focused on conversion’s experiential
dimensions. Scholars have produced rich analyses of what goes on in
the minds of converts (e.g., James 1929; Lofland and Stark 1965; Rambo
1993; Snow and Phillips 1980), as well as of the social texts and circumstances
that shape the conversion process (e.g., Cohen 1986; Finn 1997;
Hefner 1993;Whitehead 1987).Much less has been said about conversion as
a social event, a phenomenon with meanings and consequences for the social
groups within which they occur. Conversion to a religion is an irreducibly social
act; one does not merely join a faith, but one enters into a set of new relationships
with members of a religious community. Conversion, therefore,
changes not only the individual, but also the groups that must assimilate or
give up the convert. In addition, it raises a set of questions that the communities
must address-how to socialize the new convert, how to establish the
authenticity of conversion, which internal factions the new convert will support
or undermine, and so on. Answers to these questions affect the internal
politics, social organization, and self-understanding of religious groups.
These social dimensions of conversion have not been a focus of anthropological
research (though see Hefner 1993:27-31; Viswanathan 1998).
Some of the most sensitive questions surrounding conversion relate to definitions
of religious community. Conversion suggests ideas about the nature
of group and other, and especially about the boundaries between the two. For
groups assimilating converts, therefore, conversion creates an occasion for
debating and negotiating the contours of community. Even in relatively cohesive
groups, differences exist on such issues, and these oppositions affect
attitudes toward taking in new members. Conversion is not merely a site of
celebration and a reinforcement of group beliefs, but also a site of conflict,
69
I0 Andrew Buckser
a point at which competing notions of group and other directly confront one
another. In groups for which boundaries are highly contested, where factions
have deep and enduring antagonisms over what the group should be and
whom it should include, conversion can become one of the most inflammatory
and divisive moments in community life.The intensity of conflict will be
greater, and the position of the convert more fraught, the more disagreement
and ambivalence attend the definition of the group’s nature and boundaries
(cf. Barth 1969; Cohen 1985).
This chapter looks at these dynamics in a group for which the nature of
community is highly contested and in which conversion is a site of continual
dispute and political tension: the Jewish community of Copenhagen, Denmark,
where I have conducted fieldwork since 1996. Within this group, the
vast majority of conversions are social conversions, stemming in one way or
another from mixed marriages. The experiences of those of who seek to convert
to Judaism become points of conflict over the nature of Jewish community,
authority, and religiosity. This conflict makes conversion one of the most
explosive issues in congregational politics, and it subjects those who have
gone through it to ongoing suspicion and scrutiny.This chapter discusses the
forms these conflicts take, and it suggests some implications for our understanding
of the social aspects of conversion more generally.
BACKGROUND
The Jews of Copenhagen comprise the oldest and best-established minority
group in the small Scandinavian nation of Denmark.’ The community dates
back to the early seventeenth century, when Jewish merchants from Germany
and Holland first began settling in the capital. Isolated and alien in its early
years, the community began to integrate with the larger society around 1800,
and its members achieved full citizenship in 1814. In the years since, Copenhagen’s
Jews have created a substantial institutional and cultural tradition in
the city. Their institutions include a stately synagogue in the center of town,
a large administration building near Christiansborg Palace, an active Jewish
school, and such institutional adjuncts as day care centers, kosher delicatessens,
alternative synagogues, and a museum. Jews also operate a wide
variety of voluntary associations, including cultural societies,journals, social
clubs, Zionist associations, musical societies, and youth groups. The size of
the community has varied over the decades, hovering between 5,000 and
7,000 for much of the twentieth century; membership has fallen in recent
years, but the group still represents one of the most active and engaged religious
groups in contemporary Scandinavia.
Social Conversionand Group Definition in Jewish Copenhagen 71
Most of this activity falls under the authority of a single official organization,
the Jewish Community of Copenhagen (DetMosaiske Troessamfund,or
MT). The MT owns and operates the main synagogue, as well as most of the
other Jewish institutions in the city. It also funds and provides offices for
most of the Jewish voluntary associations. The MT bills itself as an inclusive
organization, a “unity congregation,” and it tries as far as possible to include
all Jews within its borders. Doing so can be difficult; the Jewish community
in Copenhagen is deeply fragmented, and factions built around religious and
social differences have existed since its inception. Some of these differences
derive from the waves of immigration that have brought Jews to Denmark
over the centuries, as newly arriving groups have found themselves at odds
with the established communities. Other differences relate to disagreements
over ritual practice, with an Orthodox minority struggling bitterly with the
more religiously liberal majority. Still others derive from arguments over the
meaning of “Jewishness,” language, the community’s relationship to Israel,
issues in Danish politics, and a host of other issues. Such divisions color almost
all Jewish activity in Copenhagen, including the politics and administration
of the MT itself. The MT has endured nonetheless, in large part due
to its flexible approach to defining Jewish activity and practice. It funds
groups with very different outlooks on Judaism, and it allows any Jewish
resident of Denmark to join or run for office. Likewise, it maintains strictly
Orthodox ritual practice within the synagogue, for the stated purpose of allowing
members of all branches of Judaism to participate. As a result, although
not all Danish Jews belong to the MT, none dispute its centrality to
Jewish life in the city.
One distinctive feature of the Jewish world in Denmark is its deep engagement
with the surrounding culture. Danish Jews encounter very few barriers
to full participation in the larger society; the anti-Semitism so endemic to
much of European culture has never gained a strong foothold in Denmark,
and in recent decades it has disappeared almost entirely. This acceptance
found dramatic expression in 1943, when thousands of resistance members
and ordinary Danes combined to rescue almost the entire Jewish community
from the occupying Nazis? For their part, most Jews have entered deeply and
enthusiastically into Danish culture. They dress, talk, and act entirely like
other Danes. They work in regular Danish occupations and have contributed
important figures to Danish politics, media, and popular culture. Because
they are so few in number, most Jews live their daily lives in non-Jewish settings.
Most Jewish children attend regular Danish schools for much of their
education, most adults have largely non-Jewish social circles, and almost all
Jews work in non-Jewish workplaces. For most members of the MT, therefore,
Danish identity is as central to self-perception as Jewish identity.
12 Andrew Buckser
Bringing these two identities together can be a difficult task (Buckser
2000).Danish Jews tend to think of Jewishness in primordial terms, as something
inscribed in the body and blood as well as in heritage and religion. Most
feel that Jews have a distinctive manner and appearance, even if they cannot
say exactly what those are. At the same time, however, most Jews identify
heavily with Danish culture, a culture that tends to stress homogeneity and
belonging and to stigmatize difference. Danish popular culture defines Danish
commonality through some of the same practices that Jewish culture uses
to define Jewish distinctiveness, including foodways, affective style, humor,
and tradition (see Buckser 1999;Jokinen 1994;Knudsen 1996).Being a Danish
Jew, therefore, requires the combination of two distinctive and often contradictory
identities. Many of my informants describe the process as difficult,
unending, and emotionally painful. Their resolutions vary with their particular
circumstances, and they entail a variety of understandings of what Jewishness
and Danishness consist of. Decisions about what it is to be a Jew, and
by extension what is meant by Jewish community, are not arrived at by community
consensus but through a profoundly individual project of reconciling
two dimensions of self that stand in fundamental conflict.
These circumstances make the precise boundaries of the Jewish community
extremely difficult to establish. Who is a Jew? Who should decide who
counts and does not count? Are some Jews more real, more authentic, closer
to a primordial essence than others? Danish Jews answer these questions in
widely differing ways. Some disagreements run along factional linesliberal
Jews, for example, tend to favor a more inclusive definition of Jewry,
but the more Orthodox favor a narrower one-but others do not. As noted,
the MT has survived by avoiding these questions as much as possible, by
taking a “big tent” approach that allows a variety of different understandings
of Judaism to participate and interact. With its Orthodox ritual and inclusive
membership, the MT allows the meaning of Jewishness to be resolved at an
individual-not a community-level.
CONVERSION IN JEWISHCOPENHAGEN
The flexibility of the MT is tested when it faces the problem of conversion.
Conversion is an unavoidably communal issue; it implies not merely a change
in one person’s self-identification, but also the ratification and recognition of
that change by the wider community. The issue carries a particular importance
in Denmark because it arises so often there. In comparison to other
world religions, Judaism does not generally seek converts, and indeed it tends
to discourage them. For much of Jewish history, conversion to Judaism has
Social Conversionand Group Dejnition in Jewish Copenhagen 73
been relatively rare and has had little social impact. In Denmark, however, the
close engagement of Jews with the surrounding culture has made conversion
a much more important issue. This is not because Danes have been widely attracted
to Judaism-few Danes have any detailed knowledge of Jewish beliefs
or practices-but because Jews have intermarried with non-Jewish
Danes at extremely high rates. Most estimates put the current rate of mixed
marriages in the Jewish community at 75 percent or higher. This pattern is not
new. Although intermarriage rates have risen and fallen repeatedly over the
past 200 years, such unions have made up a significant portion of the total
since the early 1800s (see, for example, Arnheim 1950a; Arnheim 1950b;
Arnheim 1950c; Balslev 1932). For most of its modem history, and increasingly
over the last several decades, intermarriage has constituted a basic feature
of the social world of Danish Jewry.
By some standards, Copenhagen Jews treat intermarriage quite leniently.
Intermarried Jews remain part of their families of origin and the MT. They
are not regarded as having left Judaism except on the very rare occasions
when they explicitly do so.The Orthodox interpretation of Jewish law, however,
imposes constraints on the recognition of mixed marriages. Partners
must have a civil wedding, not a religious one, and they may not conduct it
in the synagogue. A non-Jewish spouse may not be buried in the Jewish
cemetery or participate in certain Jewish social activities. Perhaps most importantly,
traditional Jewish law, known as halakhah, reckons Jewish descent
through the maternal line; accordingly, if a man intermarries, the MT
will not regard his children as Jewish. (Judaism has no particular term for
such children; for convenience, I will call them “patrilineal Jews.”) These
problems make conversion an appealing prospect for many intermarrying
couples,as well as for some children of intermarried Jewish men. Most Jewish
marriages, therefore, raise the issue of conversion, either for their participants
or their offspring, and decisions about conversion touch almost
every Jewish family.
It is possible, of course, to convert out of strictly religious motives, without
Jewish ancestry or plans for a Jewish marriage. But such instances are
rare, and they tend to be regarded with suspicion by members of the community.
In most cases, conversion is not a matter of religious insight, a validation
of a transformation of consciousness, but a means of reckoning with the
consequences of a particular social action.
The question of conversion can raise a variety of questions involving differing
notions of ethnicity, religiosity, and the connection of the Jewish community
to the larger world. Here, I focus on two: the questions of the definition
of community raised by conversions at marriage, and the issues of
authority that attend the conversion of patrilineal Jews.
74 Andrew Buckser
Marriage Conversion and the Meaning of Jewishness
Anna Jensen, now a 28-year-old psychology student in Copenhagen, was a
20-year-old undergraduate when she began dating a Jewish boy named Oskar
Goldschmidt. Anna did not regard herself as religious, having seldom attended
church since her confirmation; Oskar, likewise, seldom attended religious
services, and he regarded himself as an atheist. During a year-long stay
in Israel as a teenager, however, Oskar had become deeply conscious of his
Jewish identity, and at age 20 he was actively involved in Jewish youth and
sports associations. When the couple began discussing future possibilities of
marriage and children, Oskar expressed concern about the difficulties of a
mixed marriage. He was very anxious that his children be Jewish, and he
wanted his sons to identify with the Jewish traditions and social networks that
meant so much to him. He therefore asked Anna if she would consider converting.
The idea struck her as strange at first-she associated conversion
with a kind of religious experience that was utterly foreign to her-but as she
learned more about it, she found the prospect appealing. Converting would
give her and Oskar something in common, an ability to participate together in
Jewish rituals and keeping a Jewish home. It would mean a great deal to Oskar
and to his parents. She didn’t foresee any problem with her own family,
none of whom were religious. Indeed, they, like her, saw something vaguely
exciting in the distinctiveness of a Jewish identity, something temptingly unusual
amidst the bland homogeneity of Danish culture. She found the exotic
and intricate requirements of Jewish ritual practice fascinating, a puzzle of
sorts, to work out in the process of daily life. As their marriage approached,
conversion appeared to her as a straightforward and interesting way of solidifying
her relationship with Oskar and the identities of their children.
For the Jewish community, by contrast, Anna’s conversion and others like
it raised some very difficult questions. Was this kind of motivation a sufficientjustification
for conversion? Could anyone convert to Judaism who fell
in love with a Jew, or did there have to be some sort of independent interest
in being Jewish? Could a convert be accepted who had expressed neither belief
nor interest in the tenets of Jewish theology? If the answer was yes, what
sort of requirements should be expected of such a convert? Surely, she
would have to commit to living as a Jew-but what does living as a Jew involve,
and how could her sincerity be proven? And what would happen if
her marriage to Oskar were to fail, as so many marriages do? Answering
such questions is a subject of serious dispute among the city’s Jews, as it has
been for the past century.
Answers tend to fall into two categories. One position sets high barriers to
conversion. Conversion, it is argued, should be restricted to those who possess
a deep connection to Jewish religion and culture, not to those who find
Social Conversion and Group Dejnition in Jewish Copenhagen 75
it a convenient way to simplify a marriage. People like Anna should be required
to show a spiritual interest in Judaism over a long period of time and
to undergo extensive instruction in Jewish life and ritual before being considered
as candidates for conversion. Intermarriage is, after all, a serious
transgression of Jewish law, and allowing easy conversions amounts to condoning
it. Moreover, a marriage convert like Anna cannot be expected to become
truly Jewish. She may call herself a Jew, and she may observe some of
the rituals, but she will remain at heart a gentile. She will raise her children
with Danish customs and a Danish worldview, not Jewish ones. Though the
conversion will make them halakhic Jews, it will not make them spiritual
Jews, and they are likely to shed their Judaism when they grow up. If she and
Oskar divorce, experience suggests that she will return with the children to
the family and church of her childhood. This view of conversion finds its
strongest support among the deeply religious members of the MT, many of
whom have close connections to Orthodox Jewish communities elsewhere in
Europe. In many cases, they turn to such communities for spouses for their
own children. Better to find a real Jewish spouse in London or Antwerp, they
argue, and maintain the traditions and beliefs of Judaism than to pick a convenient
Danish wife and call her a Jew.
The second position finds its strongest adherents among the less observant,
Danish-identified members of the congregation and argues that the Orthodox
approach is unrealistic. As noted, Danish Jews intermarry at extraordinarily
high rates, and one cannot expect the situation to change; the decision to be
made is not whether intermarriage should occur, but how to deal with it after
it has occurred. In that context, an easier and even routine conversion offers
the best possibility for maintaining Jewish community and culture. Anna’s
ability to pass on Jewish tradition may be limited, but conversion can only increase
her knowledge of Jewish tradition. Surely, she would not raise better
Jews if she were still a Christian. Her conversion also admits her children to
Jewish education and rituals. And if she is not a perfectly observant Jew, how
many Jews are? Most Danish Jews are very lax in synagogue attendance,
kosher housekeeping, and other forms of Jewish religiosity. Converts, who
consciously commit to a Jewish life, arguably practice better Judaism than the
majority of the congregation. If Jews worry that converts are insufficiently
committed, that they will return to Christianity in the event of a divorce, then
they should make converts more welcome. Rather than keeping people like
Anna outside the community, the argument goes, Jews should pull them in.
The differences between these two positions reflect a deeper split in the
constitution of the Danish Jewish community itself. On the one hand,the community
is built upon a structure of law, ritual, and ideology derived from a premodern
tradition (cf. Di Bella, chapter 7); halakhah and much of Orthodox
76 Andrew Buckser
theology were formulated before 1800,when Jews constituted an organic and
largely self-contained community. To be a Jew, according to this body of law,
is to be part of such a working social entity. In daily life, however, Danish
Jews experience Jewishness in the context of late modem ethnicity, a type of
ethnic affiliation Herbert Gans (1979) describes as “symbolic ethnicity.” Today,
Jews are integrated into a number of communities, through occupation,
interests, and family, none of which constitutes more than a small portion of
their world. Ethnicity in such a context is not so much a connection to social
entity as a feature of self, defined individually in the context of a largely Danish
social experience. As Jews work out individual resolutions to the problem
of Jewish identity, they tend to use one or the other of these contexts for defining
the Jewish community to which they belong. The most Orthodox turn to
halakhic model, examining conversion in the light of its effects on an integrated
and distinct Jewish society. Their opponents, on the other hand, turn to
the symbolic model and focus on conversion’s effects on the fragmented social
world of the individual.
Opposition emerges in the ways in which people on the two sides articulate
issues of conversion. When I asked Orthodox members about cases like
Anna’s, they responded in terms of the meaning of Jewishness and the Jewish
community. Jewishness, I was often told, is not something one just puts
on like a suit of clothes; it requires a commitment to be a Jew, to follow Jewish
law, and to regard the Jewish community as one’s home and reference
group. Orthodox members took care to distance themselves from particular
cases-“Mejnar is a nice man,” an ultra-orthodox leader told me about one
case, “I don’t have any problem with him. But one has to think about what
being Jewish means.” Liberals, by contrast, usually focused on the specific
case at hand, emphasizing the hardship or emotional hurt imposed by a stringent
policy toward conversion. Was it fair, they asked, that this or that person
who was willing to contribute to the Jewish community was turned away?
What is, for the Orthodox, a question of community definition is for the liberals
a question of individual pragmatics-how to deal with the given fact of
intermmiage in a world defined by immersion in Danish society.
Fortunately for Anna, her conversion took place during the last years of
Rabbi Bent Melchior’s tenure. This was one of the easier periods in which to
convert in Denmark, and her conversion went very smoothly. Melchior required
her to attend conversion classes for almost a year, together with Oskar.
There she learned the basic information necessary for leading a Jewish life:
the ritual calendar, the logistics of kosher housekeeping, the rules of the Sabbath,
the format of the Jewish service, and so on.Anna then underwent a conversion
ceremony, complete with immersion in a ritual bath. She became
a Jew; in fact, she became quite an observant Jew, considerably more reli-
Social Conversion and Group Definition in Jewish Copenhagen 77
giously active than Oskar, who told me that he finds some of her scrupulous
ritual observance annoying. He’s glad that she’sJewish now and thinks it will
make things easier for their children when they have some,but it’s been hard
giving up roast pork.
Descent Conversion and the Construction of Authority
Conflicts over conversion entail not only definitions of community, but also
constructions of authority. They involve not only concerns about what the
Jewish community should be, but also who should be allowed to make that
decision. These questions emerge with particular force in the other main occasion
for conversion in Denmark, that involving patrilineal Jews. Although
precise statistics are difficult to establish, clearly only a minority of nonJewish
spouses convert. For the majority, the issue of conversion moves into
the next generation, to the children of Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers.
Such individuals face a very different sort of transformation than Anna.
For those who seek conversion, the process represents a formalization of a
Jewish identity, not its creation; they decide to convert because they consider
themselves Jewish, not because they wish to become Jewish. Often, they have
a thorough Jewish education and extensive Jewish social networks, and in
most cases they have a more conscious commitment to the community than
the majority of its members. From a halakhic standpoint, however, they have
no more claim to Jewish identity than any other Dane, and the rabbi often requires
them to undergo a lengthy conversion process. Conversion thus privileges
formal MT institutions over personal experience in establishing Jewish
identity, a distribution of power that raises opposition and resentment from
many of those affected by it.
This dynamic is characterized by Esther Herzog, a 26-year-old bank administrator
who converted in 1996.Esther’s parents divorced when she was
10 years old, and afterward she lived with her non-Jewish mother. Her relationship
with her father was somewhat distant, especially after he moved back
to his native Israel a few years later. Esther grew up with connections to Judaism,
however, and her mother had tried to foster Esther’s Jewish interests
after the divorce. She sent Esther to the Jewish school for several years and
encouraged her to socialize with Jews. On her graduation from gymnasium,
Esther lived with her father in Israel for about six months. She looks back
fondly on that time and says that she often considers moving to Israel permanently.
On her return to Copenhagen, she decided that Jewishness was her
true identity. She went to the rabbi and told him that she wanted to convert.
She expected the rabbi to welcome her immediately and was shocked and
hurt when he did not. Rather, the rabbi suggested that she begin going to
78 Andrew Buckser
services for a while and get involved in Jewish activities, and he would let her
know when he thought she was ready. She followed his advice, throwing herself
headlong into the Jewish world. She attended services, observed holidays,
and joined a youth group and a Zionist organization. She checked in
with the rabbi occasionally, making sure he knew of her involvement, but he
remained noncommittal about admitting her to conversion. He hinted that it
would help matters if she had a Jewish boyfriend, a suggestion that led to several
short and unhappy romances. After almost a year of anxiety, the rabbi finally
decided to admit her to conversion instruction, and within a few months
she was formally converted.
The conversion process brought Esther face-to-face with the dual nature
of Jewish identity in Copenhagen. To be a Jew is both to belong to a particular
community and to hold a particular understanding of self. Like most
Copenhagen Jews, Esther thought of Jewishness primarily in terms of personal
ethnic identification; she regarded herself as a Jew because she felt
Jewish, irrespective of her tenuous ties to Jewish worship or her distance
from Jewish community. The MT, by contrast, regarded such feelings as irrelevant.
Jewish identity, in its view, depended not on the subjective assessments
of individuals but on a common religious and legal framework. For
Esther, conversion represented the primacy of this community law over individual
experience. The rabbi who required it, who set the conditions upon
which Esther could “really” be a Jew, embodied the power of the group to
shape personal identity.
Esther resented this power enormously.Her bitterness over the ordeal, even
several years later, is plainly evident. She was angry at being forced to attend
services, at having to make a show for the rabbi to prove her own identity.
The anxious waiting period and the possibility of rejection struck her as a
cruel means of forcing her to acknowledge the rabbi’s power over her. It felt
arbitrary and archaic, she says, and she says it showed how out of touch the
community was with contemporary Jewish life. Even their criteria seemed
sexist and absurd. Why should she need to go through all this, she asked,just
because her mother, not her father, was a non-Jew? Esther’s ire has led to active
involvement in the MT, where she champions the cause of mixed couples
and women in committee work and community journals.
I met similar reactions to the conversion process not only among patrilineal
converts but also among many other liberal Jews. The notion that a set of
arcane traditional laws should determine who is a Jew, rather than the felt experience
of living people, clashed with liberal understandings of the nature of
Jewish ethnic identity in contemporary Denmark. In cases like Anna’s, these
understandings have led to calls for easier access to conversion; in cases like
Esther’s, they have led to anger at the authority structure of the congregation.
Social Conversion and Group Definition in Jewish Copenhagen 79
POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF CONVERSION
In a fragmented community like that of the Copenhagen Jews, many congregational
disagreements lie simmering for years. The group has survived in
large part by avoiding outright confrontations, letting a variety of viewpoints
on Jewishness and Jewish religiosity coexist alongside one another. Issues of
conversion, however, require clear choices. The community, through its representatives,
must make an unambiguous statement of who does and who
does not belong, and it must apply that statement to specific individuals seeking
entry to the group. Such decisions have concrete and immediate consequences.
Individuals may or may not be allowed to marry in the synagogue,
to circumcise their sons, or to send their children to Jewish institutions. Such
consequences touch not only the individuals but also larger family and social
networks. As a result, conversion presents one of the most politically fraught
moments in the life of the Jewish community-a moment in which the congregation
must declare its position on the nature of Jewishness-and the answer
will have a widespread effect.
This situation imbues conversion with both danger and possibility for a religious
leader. As in most Jewish communities, the Chief Rabbi of Copenhagen
holds final authority over the conduct of ritual in Denmark; since he
alone is able to perform the conversion ceremony, he decides who will be allowed
to convert and the terms under which they can do so.In some cases, his
decisions have unleashed revolts within the congregation. In 1903,for example,
the traditionalist Rabbi Tobias Lewenstein decided to change the conditions
by which patrilineal Jews could enter the community. Earlier rabbis had
routinely converted patrilineal Jews as long as they had been raised as Jews.
Lewenstein tightened requirements sharply, demanding that converts be
raised in kosher homes and attend religious school throughout childhood. His
action provoked an outcry from congregational liberals, who after an extended,
public, and very bitter battle, had him dismissed from office.A reverse
case occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, when the liberal Bent Melchior earned
the enmity of traditionalists through what they saw as his rubber-stamp approach
to conversion. In 1981,by aligning with another disaffected group, the
traditionalists managed to terminate Melchior’s contract. The current rabbi,
Bent Lexner, has pushed his congregation in a more Orthodox direction and
has worked hard to woo liberals to his position. Although many of those I interviewed
liked him very much, his restrictive views on conversion remain a
powerful barrier to their supporting him. The intensity of feelings surrounding
conversion make it a recurring danger to the political tenure of rabbis.
At the same time, conversion policies also can be a source of strength.
Lewenstein’s stance on conversion made him a hero to the congregation’s
80 Andrew Buckser
traditionalist wing. After his dismissal from the MT, supporters established a
second synagogue for him to lead, a synagogue that remains in operation today.
Likewise, although Melchior's conversion policy made him enemies
among the Orthodox, it also made him friends among liberals. After the board
terminated his contract in 1981, an energetic campaign by these supporters
managed to replace the board and reinstate Melchior in 1982.When carefully
managed, conversion policy can provide a source of allies as well as antagonists,
and most rabbis tread a delicate line on the subject.
The political valence of conversion also touches the lives of converts. Intense
feelings surrounding the process have led a number of converts to become
more active in congregational affairs. Converts like Esther, for example,
frequently appear in the leadership of the congregation, especially in its
social clubs and intellectual societies. Tensions surrounding conversion
also shape their perception by other Jews in daily life. A number of converts
told me of a lingering sense of illegitimacy, a feeling-in many cases quite
justified- that other Jews regard them as frauds or interlopers. Esther complained
that she constantly had to prove her Jewishness, and it was never
enough; through a snide reference here or a cryptic comment there, people
in the MT repeatedly cast doubt on whether she was a genuine Jew. As a result,
she says that she has to follow Jewish law with far greater care than
would a born Jew. Most Jews can eat a nonkosher meal, work on Saturday,
or go out with a non-Jewish man, and no one thinks anything of it. But if
Esther does these things, people will question the sincerity of her conversion.
Jewishness is a conscious identity she has deliberately chosen, but it
is one in which she never feels entirely secure.
Conversion, in this sense, does not make one a regular Jew. It makes one a
convert, a distinctive status that carries ongoing symbolic and practical consequences.
Converts exemplify basic conflicts in the construction of Jewish
identity: individual versus group, choice versus obligation, objective law versus
subjective experience. Conversions thus become not merely evanescent
rites of passage but permanent features of the self.
CONCLUSION
The association of religious conversion with theological insight has deep
roots in the Western Christian tradition. It stands at the center of the tradition's
key narratives, including the cathartic transformations of saints like
Paul and Augustine. In such stories, conversion involves a fresh vision of the
truth, a realization that the new religion represents a higher understanding of
Social Conversionand Group Definition in Jewish Copenhagen 81
the world. Such conversions are echoed in Protestant revival movements and
in “born-again” churches, where even longtime members seek to experience
a new consciousness of the meaning of their faith. This notion also informs
much of the social scientific work on conversion, which has focused on the
processes through which radical changes in religious worldviewstake place.
While acknowledgingthe influence of social dynamics on conversion, scholars
have trained their gaze largely where Christianity has trained it: on
changes in belief and experience of the world that Christian conversion demands.
Like born-again Christians,they have tended to overlookconversions
that lack that sort of change; they have regarded them as less than “true” conversions
and classified them as political or social rather than religious phenomena.
Consequently, they have said relatively little about the effects of
suchconversionson eitherthe experienceof convertsor on the religiouscommunities
that they join.
Yet the social and experiential correlates of social conversion are no less
complex or wide-ranging than conversions motivated by belief. In Copenhagen,
conversions lay bare a variety of tensions concerning the nature of
Jewish identity, authority,and religiosity,and they force individualsto come
to terms with their own views on these issues. Converts provide a focus for
community debate as well as symbolsof ambivalenceand tension afterward.
The nature of these conflictsreflects the particular social and culturalposition
of Jews in contemporary Denmark; the organizational stresses surrounding
the incorporationof the community into the modem state, and the stresses involved
in secularization,push the debate over conversion in a specific direction
and place specific actors on either side of the issue. In other groups, conversion
reflects different strains on social organizationor the construction of
identity. But even in groups that value belief-conversionmore than the Danish
Jews, and even in groups that deny the validity of purely social conversion,
the social dimensionof conversionoffers a revealing window into group
ideas about identity and community.
We should not assume, moreover,that social conversionsare somehow less
authentic or less complete than those based on religious inspiration. Membership
in a religious community derives from more than a set of beliefs; it
also involves a set of relationshipswith other members, a set of practices and
habits, and a set of aesthetic orientations and discursive styles (Hefner 1993:
27-28). Converts are able to assimilate such elements without the corresponding
beliefs, and indeed these elements may provide a better index of a person’s
conversion. During the partition of the Indian subcontinent, for example,
social workers often met fierce resistance when they tried to return
women who had been forcibly converted to Islam to their original Hindu
82 Andrew Buckser
homes (Menon and Basin 1993;Viswanathan 1998:xii-xiv). Having married
Muslim men, raised Muslim children, and lived Muslim lives, they had effectively
become Muslims, whatever their religious beliefs or the circumstances
of their conversion. The social and practical dimensions of conversion,
that is, had significance beyond and above that of faith. A similar case
could be made for converts in Jewish Copenhagen. Orthodox Judaism places
greater weight on practice than on belief; although it is good to believe in
God, it is essential to carry out the commandments of halakhah. An atheist
can be a perfectly observant Jew, and indeed many are. To evaluate the completeness
of a conversion on the extent to which it is rooted in faith, therefore,
rather than on the extent to which a convert is immersed in Jewish practice
and social networks, is to impose a false standard of authenticity.
Indeed, it might well reverse the real situation on the ground. I did meet a
religiously inspired convert in Copenhagen, a pleasant young woman who
had fallen in love with Judaism while on a visit to an Israeli kibbutz. She had
studied the Jewish scriptures intensively and could discuss Jewish theology
with considerable sophistication. She was, above all, forthright concerning
her belief in God and the divine foundations of Jewish ritual. Her belief was
obviously a comfort to her, and it justified an impressively stringent regime
of ritual practice. However, her belief did not make her more authentically
Jewish than other converts I met. If anything, it made her less so. Most
Copenhagen Jews do not walk about in a state of theological certitude; like
most other Danes, they have serious doubts about the existence of God and
balance their interest in religious observance against their participation in a
decidedly secularized culture. Their attitude toward religion is ridden with
ambivalence and skepticism, making the observance of halakhah a complicated
decision. Arguably, it is not the true believer but someone like Esther
who is closer to the Jewish experience. Brought into the group by family connections,
conflicted about her own beliefs and identity, unsure of her place in
the community and angry at its leadership, Esther may little resemble the
classic picture of the successful convert- but she certainly exemplifies the
experience of a great many of the Copenhagen Jews.
NOTES
1. For generalhistorical studiesof the DanishJews, see Bamberger (1983),Borchsenius
(1968) and Feigenberg (1984). For a discussion of the contemporarycommunity,
see Buckser(1999a, 1999b, 2000).
2. For studies of this event, see Buckser(2001), Sode-Madsen(1993), Goldberger
(1987), and Yahil(l969).
Social Conversion and Group Dejinition in Jewish Copenhagen 83
REFERENCES
Amheim,A. (1950a). “Joderne i Danmark-Statistisk Set.” J@diskSamfund 24, no. 1:
-. (1950b). “Jfiderne i Danmark-Statistisk Set.” J@diskSamfund 24, no. 2:
-. (1950~).“Jodeme i Danmark-Statistisk Set.” J@diskSamfund 24, no. 3:
Balslev, B. (1932). De danske J@dershistorie. Copenhagen: Lohse.
Bamberger, I. N. (1983). The Viking Jews: A History of the Jews of Denmark. New
Barth, F., ed. (1969). Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of
Borchsenius, P. (1968). Historien om de Danske J@der:Copenhagen: Fremad.
Buckser, A. (1999a). “Keeping Kosher: Eating and Social Identity among the Jews
-. (1999b). “Modem Identities and the Creation of History: Stones of Rescue
-. (2000). “Jewish Identity and the Meaning of Community in Contemporary
-. (2001). “Rescue and Cultural Context during the Holocaust: Grundtvigian
Cohen, A. (1985). The Symbolic Construction of Community. London: Tavistock.
Cohen, C. L. (1986). God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Feigenberg, M., ed. (1984). Indenfor Murene: Jodisk liv i Danmark 1684-1984.
Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel.
Finn, T. M. (1997). From Death to Rebirth: Ritual and Conversion in Antiquity. New
York: Paulist Press.
Goldberger, L., ed. (1987). The Rescue of the Danish Jews: Moral Courage under
Stress. New York: New York University Press.
Hefner, R. W., ed. (1993). Conversion to Christianity: Historical andAnthropologica1
Perspectives on a Great Transformation. Berkeley: University of California Press.
James, W. (1929). The Varietiesof Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature.
New York: Random House.
Jokinen, K. (1994). “Cultural Uniformity, Differentiation, and Small National Cultures.”
Cultural Studies 8, no. 2: 208-19.
Knudsen, A. (1996). Her gdr det godt, sendflere penge. Copenhagen: Gyldendal.
Lofland, J., and R. Stark (1965). “Becoming a World-Saver:ATheory of Conversion
to a Deviant Perspective.” American Sociological Review 30, no. 6: 862-75.
Menon, R., and K. Basin (1993). “Recovery, Rupture, Resistance: Indian State and
Abduction of Women during Partition.” Economic and Political Weekly:2-1 1.
Rambo, L. R. (1993). Understanding Religious Conversion. New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press.
18-19.
20-2 1.
18-19.
York: Shengold.
Culture Difference. London: Allen & Unwin.
of Denmark.” Ethnology 38, no. 3: 191-209.
among the Jews of Denmark.” Anthropological Quarterly 72, no. 1: 1-17.
Denmark.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 23, no. 4: 71-734.
Nationalism and the Rescue of the Danish Jews.” Shofar 19,no. 2: 1-25.
84 Andrew Buckser
Snow,D. A., and C. Phillips (1980). “The Lofland-StarkConversion Model: A Critical
Reassessment.”Social Problems 27, no. 4: 43047.
Sode-Madsen, H. (1993). “F@rerenhar Befalet! ”: J@deaktionen Oktober 1943.
Copenhagen: Samleren.
Viswanathan,G. (1998). Outside the Fold: Conversion, Moderniv, and Beliefi Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Whitehead,H. (1987).Renunciation and Reformulation: A Study of Conversion in an
American Sect. Ithaca, N.Y.:Cornell University Press.
Yahil, L. (1969). The Rescue of Danish Jewry: Test of a Democracy. Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society of America.