This collection of essays explores one of the most sensitive areas of the history of the Jewish-Christian relations—the story of Christian missions to the Jews and the phenomenon of Jewish conversion to Christianity. Although historians and religious thinkers—both Jewish and Christian—have taken up this theme previously, they have usually done so in a polemical spirit, their work generating, as a consequence, more heat than light. This is the first work to consider Christian missionizing and Jewish apostasy dispassionately and objectively as important themes in social and religious history.

The contributors offer new perspectives on the study of Christian theology, European social history, intergoroup relations in America, Jewish assimilation, and the intellectual and psychological dynamics of conversion.