Marginality without Benefits: Converting Jewish Women in Lithuanian Guberniyas

Abstract

This article analyzes female conversion from Judaism to Catholicism in the Russian Empire and its increasing popularity in the late Imperial period. Research presented here focuses on the so-called Lithuanian guberniyas and the upsurge of female conversions to Catholicism in 1870–1915. It seeks to embed this phenomenon within broader and multifaceted changes and ruptures in the Jewish community, conditioned by the ongoing social, economic, and cultural shifts in the region. Drawing on scarce, but nonetheless fascinating, conversional documentation, the article suggests that religious conversion to Catholicism at the turn of the twentieth century had become one of the pathways taken by Jewish women who were confronting modernity and were, like many Jews at the time regardless of their gender, seeking a way out of the increasingly intolerable situation in the empire. As other Jews, and men especially, took alternative paths of advancement, such as reimagining Jewish existence within the country or outside it (Socialism, Zionism, emigration), Jewish women in Lithuanian guberniyas added conversion to Catholicism to the spectrum of means to redefine their existence as young Jews in the Russian Empire.