Religious Conversions

The figure of the renegade—a European Christian or Jew who had converted to Islam and was now serving the Ottoman sultan—is omnipresent in all genres produced by those early modern Christian Europeans who wrote about the Ottoman Empire. As few contemporaries failed to remark, converts were disproportionately represented among those who governed, administered, and fought for the sultan. Unsurprisingly, therefore, renegades have attracted considerable attention from historians of Europe as well as students of European literature. Until very recently, however, Ottomanists have been surprisingly silent on the presence of Christian-European converts in the Ottoman military-administrative elite.

'The Sultan’s Renegades' inserts these ‘foreign’ converts into the context of Ottoman elite life to reorient the discussion of these individuals away from the present focus on their exceptionality, towards a qualified appreciation of their place in the Ottoman imperial enterprise and the Empire’s relations with its neighbours in Christian Europe. Drawing heavily on Central European sources, this study highlights the deep political, religious, and cultural entanglements between the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe beyond the Mediterranean Basin as the ‘shared world’ par excellence. The existence of such trans-imperial subjects is not only symptomatic of the Empire’s ability to attract and integrate people of a great diversity of backgrounds, it also illustrates the extent to which the Ottomans participated in processes of religious polarization usually considered typical of Christian Europe in this period. Nevertheless, Christian Europeans remained ambivalent about those they dismissed as apostates and traitors, frequently relying on them for support in the pursuit of familial and political interests.

L iterary practice relates not only to the aesthetic and ideological themes of literature, but also to the production and management of emotional states that have ritual or political consequences in lived experience. One thinks of the way in which certain kinds of nationalist or Zionist literature-Bialik's poem "The City of Slaughter" is a good example-worked to promote and legitimize politically actionable sentiments like outrage against gentile violence, while also marginalizing traditional ritual ("quietistic") expressions of grief and lamentation. 1 One also thinks of the ways in which nineteenth-and early twentiethcentury autobiographers in both Jewish and non-Jewish contexts struggled to articulate new relationships between gender, emotion, and modern individualism. 2 Because of their explicit interest in shaping the way people perceive and respond to the world (and their constant reinforcement through ritual), Jewish mystical texts provide one of the most powerful examples of how literature helps to shape and manage distinctive forms of human subjectivity. My article analyzes an early

Sulla base della documentazione inquisitoriale, il saggio mette in luce un contesto urbano fortemente segnato dalla presenza orientale e il tessuto di relazioni esistente fra cristiani, ebrei e turchi nella città lagunare. Fra gli aspetti più rilevanti, si delineano la labilità dei confini religiosi, attestata da plurimi passaggi di fede all'interno delle tre religioni, e il "sogno turco", ossia la percezione di un mondo ottomano avvertito come migliore e più prodigo di opportunità rispetto all'Occidente cristiano. I fascicoli processuali aprono inoltre una finestra sulla frontiera balcanica e sullo Stato da Mar della Repubblica, mettendo in evidenza una situazione particolarissima di coesistenza e di complementarietà fra musulmani e cristiani, lontana dalla tradizionale turcofobia culturale e religiosa.

This thesis provides the findings of an explanatory case study that utilized elements of ethnographic research to discover effective evangelistic methods being practiced among Palestinian Muslims in the West Bank. With the assistance of gatekeepers, twenty-four former Muslims were asked to explain how they were evangelized, with a particular focus on evangelistic methodology, the barriers to faith the respondents encountered, solutions to those barriers, and motivations to consider conversion.

This qualitative study follows the research model of Thom Rainer (2001) by asking those who have actually converted to describe the things that were helpful in the process of their coming to faith. For a theoretical framework it utilizes a nuance of McKnight’s (2002) theory of conversion with an emphasis on crisis providing an intersection of the natural and supernatural for the purpose of conversion.

This thesis investigates examples of effective evangelism within the context of the West Bank, giving thorough consideration to Palestinian Nationalism and Islam as overarching cultural influences. It considers fruitful practices being practiced globally among Muslims, comparing those with what was found being practiced in the West Bank. The advocates represented in this report were primarily Palestinians born and raised in the West Bank, with the exception of three messianic Jewish Israelis and an American missionary. Additionally, they were evangelicals who generally utilized a contextually sensitive, traditional mission approach rather than an Insider model.

The end result is a knowledge base that can be helpful for future evangelism of Muslims in the West Bank or other similar contexts.

The role of religion during migration processes has been overlooked by
scholars in the past although the relationship between religion and migration
has a long history. Normally, religion is considered as an integrating
agent, but for some Iranian asylum seekers in Turkey, religion and
especially religious conversion is used as a tool for migration. This article
draws on the migration histories of Iranian asylum seekers in Turkey who
initially intended to go further west only to have stayed in Turkey either
because of the long procedures of asylum application in Turkey or because
they were rejected and have become “illegal aliens” who do not want to return
to Iran. Turkey still preserves geographic limitation of the 1951 Geneva
Convention on Refugees. Therefore it does not accept non-European
asylum seekers to settle on Turkish soil. Ironically, however, most asylum
applications were made by people from the Middle East, mainly from Iran.
Based on the extensive fieldwork carried out in various cities in Turkey where
the Iranian migrants are heavily concentrated, this article demonstrates
how conversion from Shi’a Islam to Christianity is used as a migration
strategy and how and to what extent these asylum seekers use religion and
their newly acquired social and religious networks within churches of the
transit country to reach ultimately the West as refugees. As conversion is
sustained through social networks as well as churches and missionaries,
this unique situation can be explained by employing the social capital
theory within the context of an institutional component.

The State of Israel was consolidated in the early twentieth century as the homeland of the Jewish people. While nominally secular, it also acknowledged in law and practice the complex , possibly inextricable relationship between ethnic, religious and national or genealogical forms of imagining what it means to be a Jew in the modern world. In one celebrated Supreme Court case, it was made clear that a "Jew," for purposes of immigration, could not include someone who clearly identified in a religious sense with Christianity. Yet the demography of Israel has been changing through mass immigration (especially from the USSR and Ethiopia) as well as strong foreign missionary efforts. In the Ethiopian case, tens of thousands of individuals immigrated over the last two decades who were considered by the state to be descendants of converts to Orthodox (or Protestant) Christianity: their case was normalized, from the state's point of view, by encouraging them to undergo a state-sponsored "return to Judaism" program that brought ethnic and religious grounds of identification back into synch. Yet this has remained contested and conflictual at both the policy level and the level of everyday, vernacular experience of Ethiopians. Moreover, a smaller but even more challenging group of Ethiopians, from the state's point of view, have begun, with other Jewish Israelis, to embrace various forms of Messianic Judaism and charismatic Christianity in Israel--making a frontal collision with the state's basic imaginary almost inevitable. My paper, grounded in ethnographic fieldwork among both groups of Ethiopian-Israelis,  begins to pry apart the  tortured relationship between Christianity and Jewishness in the Ethiopian case: its corollaries in everyday religion, distinctive practices of aversion or mimesis, and its explosive political implications for Israeli self-understanding.

«Compelle eos intrare» was an evangelising injunction bearing on the conversion work of missionaries in the American theatre in the early modern period. The imperative came, however, to be applied without the object pronoun it includes in St Luke’s gospel: a significant detail which underlines the complexity of the American conversion process (and others) deriving from the differences between the interlocutors – natives and missionaries. This paper engages with that theme and reflects on how St John’s Word (logos), before being identified with God, became the raw material (as much for the Western missionary as for the American native) that shaped and composed both ground of communication and mode of coming together. The indigenous cultures thus became the interlocutors of Western Christianity’s globalisation process via the necessary linguistic mediations. The violent ‘compelle intrare’ imperative had to negotiate with the necessity of communicating (through a hybrid Verbum) that required a minimum degree of confluence and reciprocity in the name of conversion.

This article focuses on how the Bombay Scottish missionary-Orientalists John
Wilson (1804–1875), John Stevenson (1798–1858), and John Murray Mitchell
(1815–1904) understood the concept of religion, Christianity, and the structure,
similarity and dissimilarity of “India’s religions.” It examines the foundational
assumptions and methods through which they and other Bombay-based missionaries
denominated some phenomena as religions and as “genuine” expressions of
the religions and used non-Christian religions as instruments to convert Bombay’s
population to Christianity. Such a religiously heterogeneous locale as Bombay
enables one to elucidate: (1) the formation of a taxonomy of world religions
that, with some modifications, remains regnant to this day; and (2) the ways in
which the presuppositions and structural features of the religion concept, Christianity,
and the interpretation of Roman Catholicism as both a false Christianity
and a distinct non-Christian religion helped to fashion particular formations of
language, texts, and practices into isomorphic species of the religion/dharma
genus: Roman Catholic dharma, Jewish dharma, Muslim dharma, Hindu
dharma, Buddha dharma, Jain dharma, and Parsi dharma. An examination of
the Bombay Scottish missionaries’ writing on the religions and their interaction
with Roman Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Jains, Parsis, and Adivasis
reveals patterns and presuppositions of religious understanding to a greater
degree than if one were to study how an individual religion alone was imagined.

The history of the Jews of the island of Zante (Zakynthos) during the approximately 400 years of Venetian rule of the island suffers from the lack of collaboration between specialists of Jewish history and historians of the Greek lands that were part of the Venetian overseas empire, and from a lack of sources due to the destruction of the local archives of Zakynthos in 1953. In the present study, which focuses on the first two centuries of Venetian rule, new archival materials that have not yet been used for this purpose are integrated into the state of the art in this field. This has enabled a few errors to be corrected regarding the characteristics of Jewish life, and to throw further light on the activities of the Jews on the island, the collaborations between Jewish and Christian entrepreneurs, and particularly on the functions of Jewish consuls on the island during the early modern period. The potential of a confrontation between Hebrew and Venetian sources is demonstrated through the case of the consul/rabbi Jacob of the house of HaLevi.

Nessuna parte di questa pubblicazione può essere memorizzata, fotocopiata o comunque riprodotta senza le dovute autorizzazioni. Coordinamento redazionale CAROLINA MARCONI Collaborazione alla redazione 16 Francesco Sisinni Un sodalizio nel segno della Bellezza 20 Marco Dezzi Bardeschi Quell'ingegnoso (e fecondo) tempo di "Psicon" 28 Italo Tomassoni Un piccolo paragrafo su lucenti passaggi a margine della grande opera di Marcello Fagiolo 32 Vincenzo Cappelletti Europa e Università in dialogo 34 Franco Onorati Il mio sodalizio con Mario dell'Arco 38 Carolina Marconi L'epistolario di Mario dell'Arco: razionalità e sentimento all'insegna della poesia

In a time of low intensity religious wars as the Early Modern Age in the Mediterranean Area was, it was possible to face moment of cultural exchangment between Rome and the Islamic world? Beyond the rethoric speech about the "Holy War", could the historian find something else? As the international historiography investigated in the last years, there were some ways of economic, cultural and religoius dialogue even in that difficoult centuries. The paper focuses on the huge question of this so particular "cultural dialogue" from the very special point of view of the Holy City of Rome, the Pope home where lived toghether (not being friends, of course) Christians, Jews, Muslims and Converts.

‘What else could it be? It is an exotic which, though it may be artificially nurtured like some tropical plant in a hothouse, can never have the vitality it has on its native soil’ (p. 92). Thus did the Liverpool Review dismiss as no more than an audacious cultural experiment the burgeoning community of Victorian Muslim converts that gathered around the iconic and iconoclastic Abdullah William Quilliam in 1890. The subsequent influx of substantial migrant communities into Britain has somewhat complicated matters, and expressions of British Islam today are tightly bound with the imports of foreign culture. Modern incarnations of the Liverpool Review’s verdict abound: a persistent strand of the polyvocal discourse that has exploded around the Muslim presence in Britain insists that a
commitment to Islam—and, by extension, the culture of the Orient it has historically been wedded to—undermines the patriotism expected of British subjects. Put differently, facing Makka to pray five times a day requires one to turn one’s back on Queen and country; or, in the stark dichotomization of the
Poet of Empire, Kipling: ‘East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.’ Identity, allegiance and belonging have thus crystallized into critical buzzwords through which diaspora communities are examined, and the evocative oxymoron captured in the title of this book assails today’s believer just as much as it did yesteryear’s convert.

1 Internationale Tagung Religiöse Kontakte und Konflikte im Spiegel der Übergangsriten: europäische und außereuropäische Perspektiven auf die Frühe Neuzeit [English version see below] 3.-4. Juli 2014 Die Tagung wird durch die Max Weber Stiftung finanziert. Organisation: Dr. Cecilia Cristellon, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. Die Tagung zielt darauf ab, religiöse/konfessionelle Kontakte und Konflikte im Spiegel der Übergangsriten aus der Perspektive der Frühneuzeitforschung zu analysieren. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit soll dabei den konfessionellen/religiösen Grenzen bzw. ihrer Durchlässigkeit in Angesicht von Übergangsriten gewidmet werden. Der Fokus richtet sich auf Geburts-und Aufnahmerituale wie Taufe oder Beschneidung bzw. auf die Mischehen sowie auf Rituale, die mit dem Tod verbundenen sind (es kann hier zum Beispiel nach Begräbnissen von Angehörigen unterschiedlicher Konfession auf gemeinsamen Friedhöfen gefragt werden oder nach der möglichen Austauschbarkeit des Pastors im Sterbefall usw.).

The orthodox Hindu objection to the classical religious freedom legislations instanced in the UN declaration and other charters is with the secular framework's Judeo-Christian origins/bias. It argues that in the application of religious freedom laws, the secular framework erroneously presupposes a similarity between Semitic religions and Hinduism. Consequently, the secular framework applies the Judeo-Christian anthropological assumptions to favour conversionary religions that function against the interests of Asiatic religions.

On 29 March 2018, Brother Rachid introduced his weekly program, " A Daring Question " with these remarks: Every conversion story has a lesson to teach us. There are various explanations as to why and how Muslims are converted to Jesus Christ. When they cross over from Islam to Christianity, their lives are radically changed, especially in the fact that they experience peace with God, a gift that Islam had failed to provide.

RESUMEN: Teniendo en cuenta la acción misericordiosa de Dios en los hombres y la respuesta de éstos a Dios, se pasa revista tanto al don de la conversión (fruto de la misericordia divina) como a las obras de misericordia impulsadas por esa misma conversión. Mencionando a varios conversos famosos, son recordados desde una visión cronológica otros más desconocidos, destacando algunos testimonios recientes y ciertos casos especiales de acción misericordiosa de Dios.  PALABRAS CLAVE: Conversión, misericordia, obras de misericordia, caridad.
ABSTRACT: Using as a point of departure the merciful action of God toward human persons and their response to God, this article examines both the gift of conversión (as a fruit of divine mercy) and the works of mercy undertaken as a result of this conversion. A number of famous converts are mentioned, with emphasis on recent testimonies and certain special instances of the merciful action of God. KEY WORDS: Conversión, mercy, works of mercy, charity.

In 1776, Moses Isaacs died in Berlin. Along with Isaac Daniel Itzig and Veitel Heine Ephraim, Isaacs had made a fortune during the Seven Years' War minting coins and supplying the army. Isaacs left behind an estate of three-quarters of a million talers in gold, most of which was organized into a family trust extending to the life of the grandchildren. The only stipulation Isaacs placed on his will was that should any of his five surviving children convert to Christianity, they would forego their share of the inheritance. The first of Isaacs' s children to convert were his two daughters, Rebecca and Bliimchen, who both proceeded to marry noblemen. In 1780, their two unconverted brothers appealed to King Frederick the Great to uphold their father's will and exclude the two defecting sisters from the inheritance. The king ruled in agreement with the brothers more out of loyalty to the deceased Isaacs than out of an aversion to Jewish conversion to Christianity. Whatever his motives, the sisters felt they had been treated unfairly, and so in 1786 they sued in the civil courts to have the anti-conversion clause of the will declared invalid. The first court's decision was in their favor. This court ruled that the anti-conversion clause was inappropriate in a Christian state, insofar as the clause interfered with the inheritance rights of Christian subjects, in this case the two newly Protestant Isaacs' daughters. But later that year a higher court reversed this decision, judging from the viewpoint of the Jewish parents, not the Christian children. This second court ruled that Jewish as well as Christian parents had the right to determine who could inherit their property. Later that same year, this second decision was overturned by a third court. The anti-conversion clause was thereby declared invalid, which meant that the daughters had won their inheritance. But in an absolutist age, the kings, not the judiciary, had the final say. When Frederick William II came onto the throne later in 1786, he followed his uncle's example and again confirmed Isaacs' s controversial will, depriving the rebellious daughters of their inheritance.

Suite à un bref rappel de la situation des Juifs en Hongrie à l'ère du Vormärz, l'article expose les discours des contemporains -juifs et chrétiens -sur la conversion des juifs, présente les quelques informations statistiques disponibles au sujet du nombre et du profil social des Juifs convertis au cours de cette période, pour finalement dresser le portrait de quatre hommes, deux hommes d'affaires et deux intellectuels, convertis entre 1825 et 1848, en s'efforçant de montrer ce que les données statistiques sur le profil des convertis ne peuvent révéler : la complexité et la multiplicité simultanées des possibles motivations qui conduisirent les juifs de cette époque à abandonner la religion et la communauté juives.

This article presents the inventory of a Portuguese merchant banker, António da Fonseca, a prominent member of the Portuguese community in Rome, where he lived from 1556 to his death in 1586. The objects present in his home reveal a man of exquisite tastes, fully integrated in the life of late sixteenth century Rome yet with lasting ties with his homeland and its overseas possessions in the Orient. As a New Christian intent upon cementing his position in the Eternal City as a bona fide Christian the choice of objects and the tastes they reveal were part of an overall strategy of integration in the life of Rome. Some of the objects also suggest his forrays into international commerce linked to Asia and America, something which was to be expected given his links to Portugal which, at the time was under the domination of the Habsburg monarchy.

Although the spiritual vibration of conversion can be felt (by the curious outsider) through what conversion performers say in their testimonial discourse, what transforms the convert ‘on stage’ into a ‘new being’ and what is ‘the real’ (le réel) in conversion performance remain unclear. An important question in this connection is, What is ‘real’ in a conversion representation, both with respect to the convert’s interaction with the audience and to the construction of social reality? Following Lacan’s tripartite register of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real, in this essay I argue that through testimonial discourse converts construct social reality as an answer to the impossibility of ‘the real’ in their performative discursive practice. In the first part, I question the constructed nature of testimonial representations—as well as some academic knowledge production that has governed conversion research in the last few decades—and how these representations encourage ‘outsiders’ to read the narrative repertoire as a negation or mirroring ‘the real’ of the conversion experience. In the second part, I apply Roland Barthes’ analytic reflections on photography to conversion research, especially the notions of the studium (the common ground of cultural meanings) and the punctum (a personal experience that inspires private meaning). This brings me to a number of theorists (mostly never used in the field of religious conversion)—Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Slavoj Žižek—who are important to the perspective that is developed in this essay.

The recent so called Ghar Vapasi in Agra (10 Dec 2014) and the planned one other cities of UP by affiliates of RSS is a frightening violation of religious freedom in India. Though the word Ghar Vapasi (Return home) is being used for it is forcible conversion all the same. This is being unfolded by the communal organizations towards their agenda of Hindu nation.

The article draws attention to a fascinating narration of the Christian foreign Missionaries' sustained work among the Dalits from 1850-1950. The writer reviews Santa Kumari Varikoti-Jetty's work on 'Christian Missions among colonial Andhra Depressed Classes'. The reviewer, by and large, appreciates the author, Varikoti-Jetty's research efforts. Same time, the reviewer re-visualises the work under the lenses of Hindutva propaganda dynamics against the Christian Missions in India. Thus, while the work is from historical Christian Dalits conversion dynamics, the reviewer re-visualises the work in the light of the Hindutva section's objection to the Christian proselyte process and negates the Hindutva anxieties as against the liberal right to religious conversion. Also, the reviewer presents the current position of a few Christian congregations, i.e. AELC and TBC. Overall, the review continues in discussion and commentary style.

Jesus Christ: You are the reason I embarked on this journey. Thank you for providing strength and encouragement along the way. I long for the day your name is considered great among all peoples. May this work be helpful to that end. Colleen, Grace and Zach: I love you more than you can know. I could not have finished this without your patience and longsuffering. Thank you. What shall we do with all the extra time we'll have now that this project is complete? Gatekeepers: You opened the doors for this research and were indispensible. Thank you. You share in any good that results from this project. Respondents: Your stories made this work possible. Thank you. As Jesus prayed for those who would believe because of his disciples' testimonies (Jn 17:20), I pray for those who will come to faith because of your testimonies. Prof. Attie van Niekerk: Thank you for the gentle pushback and suggestions, which improved my thinking and the quality of this thesis. Ms Rina Roos: Thank you for patiently serving as my cultural go-between. You helped me survive the cultural differences of a South African university. University of Pretoria: Thank you for the bursary that made this work possible. Bill Soper: Thank you for your friendship and tireless research assistance. Dr. Carl Johnson and Dr. Alicia Massingill: Thank you for helping to keep me on task by consistently asking how I was progressing and for helpful comments on my content. Arlington Baptist College Administration: Thank you for the scheduling flexibility that allowed me to work on this project while still teaching a full course load. Arlington Baptist College Colleagues and Students: Thank you for patiently listening to me talk about "my research." Your patience allowed me to talk things out and improved the product. Dr. Greg Baxter and Chris Regas: Thank you both for your many helpful comments and words of encouragement in the process. Dr. J. Scott Bridger, a fellow sojourner in this field: Thank you for enduring countless clarifications on Arabic language issues.

There is just one case I know of where two brilliant young writers published dueling short stories about each other, in which each is the protagonist and his best friend the antagonist. Who were the writers who would do such a thing? One was the young Lionel Trilling, who was to become a professor of English, a leading critic, public intellectual and opinion-shaper in the culture of twentieth-century America and beyond. The other was my father, Henry M. Rosenthal, in his youth a rabbi, later a philosophy professor, of whom Trilling said, "He was the only man I ever knew whom I would call a genius." Trilling described my father as "my closest friend at college." Yet they did not remain friends.