Assimilation התבוללות

Formerly, to leave the people meant baptism: a clear, visible step, taken under pressure or for gain. Emancipation changed the terms. The state said: be citizens, your faith is your private affair. And it turned out one could leave without signing anything: stop keeping, stop teaching the children, marry outside—and in two generations nothing of Jewishness remains but a surname.

What it looked like in numbers. In Berlin, Vienna and Budapest by the beginning of the twentieth century the share of mixed marriages reached a third and more; whole families that had given rabbis ceased in one generation to be Jewish. And no one was driving them out—on the contrary, these were the years of the fullest freedom the Jews of Europe had known.

What was thought about it. Mendelssohn wanted to join the two, Torah and education, and his children were baptised. The Chatam Sofer answered harshly: the new is forbidden by the Torah. Hirsch looked for a third way—Torah im derech eretz. The Zionists saw in assimilation an answer wrong not only religiously but practically: Dreyfus was an officer of the French army, and it did not save him.

A caution about the word. "Assimilation" easily becomes an insult, and then people stop thinking with it. In this reference it is the name of a phenomenon, not a verdict on people: those who left were mostly betraying nothing—they were accepting an invitation that had at last been made to them.