convinced that these mores represented a genuinely superior
cultural system.

Of course, not all Jews eagerly embraced the non-Jewish world
once it became available to them. Many rejected the supposed
advantages of social integration and condemned any form of
ritual laxity so that, in the end, traditional Judaism, or Orthodoxy
as it came to be called in the nineteenth century, survived. But
it persisted only as one form of Judaism, not as an all-embracing,
self-sufficient sociopolitical order. No group of Jews, it should be
noted, emerged from the seventeenth century entirely un-
changed in its faith, practices, and social organization. Even the
ultra-Orthodox Hasidic enclaves of present-day London and
New York have had to make certain accommodations to modern
life.

For most Jews, integration into previously closed arenas of
activity and acculturation to previously rejected or ignored values
and modes of behavior resulted in a reordering of personal pri-
orities rather than in a total rejection of Judaism. In the majority
of cases, Jews ceased to define themselves in exclusively Jewish
terms and began to expand the parameters of their social and
cultural world to include much that was not Jewish. Jewishness
became only a part of their sense of self. They remained Jews, but
at the same time they also became Englishmen, Frenchmen, or
Germans; Londoners, Parisians, or Berliners. In a world that was
becoming increasingly despiritualized and compartmentalized,
in which religion and ethnic identity occupied only one segment
of life, Judaism ceased to be a civilization, a culture, a social
order, and became instead a religion in the contemporary sense
of the term. This redefinition of Jewishness applied as equally to
those who remained attached to a highly ritualistic form of Juda-
ism as it did to those who vehemently shed this ritualism as a
medieval anachronism--with the one exception that the world
had become less desacralized for those who remained attached
to Orthodoxy. Some Jews did embrace the majority culture to
such an extent that they ceased to be Jews altogether and for-
mally embraced Christianity; although this was by no means the
rule, it certainly occurred frequently enough to merit attention.

The transformation of Western European Jewry was a complex
historical movement, and like most historical changes of any
scope, there were enormous variations in the experiences of

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