Susan Jacoby - Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion

I come from a family of religious converts, spanning three generations and more than a century on both my mothers and fathers sides. My father was born in 1914 into a nonobservant Jewish family whose ancestors had immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1849 and settled in New York City. My Jacoby grandfather and grandmother did not convert to Christianity, but they did send their children to a Lutheran Sunday school in Brooklyn. Although my father and his siblings were never baptized in childhood and knew that their family was Jewish, they were taught nothing about Judaism as a religion. My fathers uncle, Levi Harold Jacoby, professor of astronomy at Columbia University, and one of the few Jews (religious or nonreligious) on the faculty in the early twentieth century, married an Episcopalian and did convert, dropping his undeniably Jewish first name along the way. As an undergraduate at Columbia, he was listed as Levi Harold in official records, but by the time he became a member of the faculty, he was plain Harold. He was a frequent source for New York newspapers, trying to explain new scientific developments, such as Einsteins theory of relativity, to the reading public. In those articles, too, there was no trace of the Jewish first name his parents had given him.

My father and his elder brother and sister took another path in the middle of the twentieth century by marrying Irish American Catholics and converting to the Roman Catholic Church. My brother and I, as children in the Middle West in the 1950s, were told that my father had converted from the Episcopal Churcha handy falsehood possibly derived from the background of the cousins descended from Levi Harold (always referred to within my branch of the family as the other Jacobys). When I was growing up, I could not possibly have known that in the first half of the twentieth century, mainstream Protestantism was a much more common choice than Catholicism for American Jews wishing to conceal their origins, because Protestants occupied a higher social and economic rung than Catholics in the American class hierarchy.