Conversion to Christianity exceeded mixed marriage as assimilation’s dominant path.

Evidence

A remarkable, though little-known, fact is that assimilation as a program led much more frequently to conversion than to mixed marriage. Unfortunately statistics cover up rather than reveal this fact because they consider all unions between converted and nonconverted Jewish partners to be mixed marriages. We know, however, that there were quite a number of families in Germany who had been baptized for generations and yet remained purely Jewish. That the converted Jew only rarely left his family and even more rarely left his Jewish surroundings altogether, accounts for this. The Jewish family, at any rate, proved to be a more conserving force than Jewish religion. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2045

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the economics-topic reading of assimilation as identity transformation; the family outlasting religion as a conserving force parallels arguments about identity persistence under pressure in the Islamophobia literature. — connects to: Islamic marriage freedom drew Christian converts, not just religious conviction