On the Resonance of Conversion and Fear of Dissolution in Early Twentieth-Century Jewry

In the second volume of MemoirsWengeroff relates the strange tale of her brother Ephraim, who had converted to Christianity while in the United States (in the mid-1850s) and then reverted to Judaism during a family conclave in Germany under the agonized (and rather manipulative) plea of their aged mother. Subsequently, she writes, ‘he remained in Germany and became a Jew who observed the precepts of his religion faithfully’. After the death of their mother, who had made Ephraim swear not to return to the United States as long as she lived, he returned there, eventually resuming his medical practice in Chicago.

In fact, Ephraim returned to Christianity, too, and more, to proselytizing Jews. Did Wengeroff know this, and if so, when did she find out? The two were in close contact around the time that Memoirs was first published in Berlin, in 1908. Indeed, Ephraim played a large role in its near-publication in America: first, in translating both volumes into English from the predominant German (with some Hebrew and Yiddish, and a few Polish words) in which they had appeared; in helping to identify potential publishers and in shopping the volumes around, and then in sinking Wengeroff ‘s promising prospects of having them published by JPS when its publication board learned the truth about him.

Wengeroff, who was terrified of pogroms, wished very much to come to America; she also tried mightily to have her memoirs published there. She succeeded in neither goal. Yet in a real sense she did come to America because her attempt to get published there set off a remarkable exchange among American Jewry's most prominent leaders about Jewish boundary lines and the ‘right’ story of Jewish modernity for American Jewry. In the United States Memoirs became a sort of Rorschach test of early twentieth-century projections about Jewish memory and the Jewish future, with some reading it (as some still do) as an apologia for Orthodoxy; others, as an apologia for conversion and assimilation. In this chapter I seek to illuminate Ephraim's story—and Wengeroff 's telling of it; to probe how the same narrative could be read as advancing contradictory messages; and to ask what all this says about American Jewish cultural anxiety at the beginning of the twentieth century.