Cases of conversion in the Ullmann family and their social perception

Abstract

In Modern Ages Hungary, the state’s granting of emancipation and reception rights, and the schism that followed the Jewish universal assembly of 1868, resulted in both neologs and orthodox members fighting religious alienation. The final stage of religious alienation was the abandonment of the Jewish faith. Although the change of religion was based on individual choice, it became a communal matter. In this paper, we will try to show why the story of the Ullmann family’s apostasy became a topos in the collective memory of Jewry and how it relates to the shaping of the identity consciousness of Hungarian Jewry in the 19th and 20th centuries.