In Leaving the Jewish Fold, the historian Todd Endelman traces the history of apostasy from Judaism—which he terms “radical assimilation”—from the Middle Ages to the present. Dominic Green writes in his review:
In our enlightened times, it is possible to identify as a person of no fixed principles. But for most of the past millennium, to cease being Jewish meant to start being Christian. Endelman identifies two forms of conversion from Judaism: “conversions of conviction” and “conversions of convenience.” The convicts are more spectacular, but the convenient are more numerous. For every sincere conversion on St. Paul’s road to Damascus, there have been thousands on the road to jobs in London and Paris, Berlin and Vienna, New York and Washington. [The poet Heinrich] Heine justified this kind of conversion as a “passport to civilization”: an escape from prejudice, an entry into high culture. Others simply resigned from a club that they never asked to join. Such converts did not need to be threatened with a sword, only with a carrot and stick: economic opportunity and “conversionary pressures.” . . .
There is nothing, [however,] “radical” about modern Western assimilation. The assimilators followed the universalist flow of their times and went out with a whimper, not a bang.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/conviction-and-convenience/