The number of post-Mendelssohnian Jews who abandoned their ancestral faith is very large. According to Heman in Herzog-Hauck, "Real-Encyc." (x. 114), the number of converts during the 19th century exceeded 100,000;
Salmon, in his Handbuch der Mission (1893, p. 48), claims 130,000;
others ("Divre Emeth," 1880, p. 47; 1883, p. 187) claim as many as 250,000.
For Russia alone 40,000 are claimed as having been converted from 1836 to 1875 ("Missionsblatt des Rheinisch-Westphälischen Vereins für Israel," 1878, p. 122);
while for England, up to 1875, the estimate is 50,000 (Johannes Friedrich Alexander de le Roi, "Die Evangelische Christenheit und die Juden," iii. 60).
Modern conversions mainly occurred en masse and at critical periods. In England there was a large secession when the chief Sephardic families, the Bernals, Furtados, Ricardos, Disraelis, Ximenes, Lopez's, Uzziellis, and others, joined the Church (see Picciotto, "Sketches of Anglo-Jewish History").
Germany had three of these periods. The Mendelssohnian era was marked by numerous conversions. In 1811, David Friedlander handed Prussian State Chancellor Hardenberg a list of 32 Jewish families and 18 unmarried Jews who had recently abandoned their ancestral faith (Rabbi Abraham Geiger, "Vor Hundert Jahren," Brunswick, 1899). In the reign of Frederick William III., about 2,200 Jews were baptized (1822–1840), most of these being residents of the larger cities. The 3rd and longest period of secession was the anti-Semitic, beginning with the year 1880. During this time the other German states, besides Austria and France, had an equal share in the number of those who obtained high stations and large revenues as the price for renouncing Judaism.
The following is a list of the more prominent modern converts, the rarity of French names in which is probably because conversion was not necessary to a public career in that country.
(Text) CC BY-SA
