| Abstract [eng] |
Dissertation analyzes Catholic missionary initiatives and Jewish conversional tendencies to Catholicism in Lithuania in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. The research inquires how the status of Catholicism affected Church’s willingness and ability to missionize, clergy’s outlook towards the Jews as potential converts, the procedure of conversion itself and the behaviour of Jewish converts. Moreover, it investigates what influence did wider socioeconomic and geopolitical processes and cultural shifts in the territory had on the Jewish conversion: escalating modernization in the second half of the nineteenth century, growing secularization and acculturation, socioeconomic crisis in the Jewish community at the turn of the century. On the one hand, it aims to evaluate how these transformations influenced missionary strategy, theoretic discourse and communication with the local Jewry and the very relevance of the Jewish conversion. On the other hand, the research reveals the preconditions for converting, converts’ cultural orientations and socioeconomic background. This research seeks to demargenalize the history of Jewish conversion in the region that has been held as such due to its moderate numbers in Eastern Europe and associated with the behaviour of a minority within the Jewish community, and to analyze within the context of its relation to the wider sociocultural phenomena and how the later correlated with its dynamics, stages and turning points. . |
