The first mission journey from the years 1730-31 occupies a special place in the history of 'Institutum Judaicum et Muhammedicum'. Planned as a one-off journey, it started more than 50 years of missionary travel of the Institute's associates. That expedition was organized on the initiative of Johann Georg Widmann, who earlier toured the Jewish communities of Germany, Poland and Hungary for two years, pursuing a private mission among the Jews. During those travels he met the regional rabbi of Greater Poland Jaakow Mordechej ben Naftali ha-Kohen and, having obtain his unofficial approval, went to Halle. Once there he assured Callenberg and his associates that many Jews in Poland were also leaning toward Christianity, or could even be covert Christians. He also argued that it was necessary to persuade the regional rabbi, whom who considered to be a covert Christian, to confess his faith in public and move to the Evangelical Church together with his followers. Callenberg recruited Widmann as his associate and consented to his trip to Poland. Johann Andreas Manitius, a theology student, was to accompany Widmann and verify his story. The expedition ended in a fiasco, the rabbi refused to accede to the Evangelical Church, broke any ties with the envoys of 'Institutum Judaicum' and urged everybody to burn the Institute's publications.
The 1710 apostasy of Samuel ben Jaakow, the Land Rabbi of Lithuania, had no precedent in the history of Polish Jewry. Taking into account the number of Jews in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania at the beginning of the 18th century, he held the most important Jewish office in the federation, if not in the world. The circumstances of his conversion are a mystery. The apostate presented various versions of the events, and any mention of him was removed from Jewish records. Equally puzzling are there his later actions, when he accused Jews of ritual murders, and even confessed having committed them himself when serving as the rabbi. Serafinowicz's testimony made in a Gdansk shelter just before his death shed new light on his apostasy. The former Land Rabbi of Lithuania had no reason to lie on his death bed. He confessed that before his baptism he was imprisoned not by Jews, as he testified earlier, but by his Catholic teachers, who began suspecting him of refusing to convert, contrary to what he declared. It follows from this testimony that the Land Rabbi was forced to convert, and then could not return to the Judaic faith, because apostasy from Christianity was punishable by death in the Republic of Poland and Lithuania.
Aron Margalita was one of the most colourful figures among 18th century Jewish converts. During the tide of Messianic fervour, he accepted baptism in the Reformed Evangelic Church in 1695. However, he could not find himself a place in the Christian world. Apart from a several spell at Viadrina University, he could not find employment at any university, despite the fact that he published several widely known books. 'Oblatio Aaronis', first published in Latin and next in German as 'Malach ha-berit', was the first of the publications written by Jewish converts in the 17th and 18th century that did not condemn the Jews and their tradition but sought a reconciliation between the Christian and the Jews. Margalita was trying to convince Christians and Jews that they shared a common source of their faith. He accepted both the mission of Jesus and the inspired status of the Gospel and the cabalistic Jewish traditions. This is why he did not want to persuade the Jews to join any of the Christian churches, just tried to convince them to accept his own variant of Judaism, which was a certain form of Judeochristianity. He wanted to reconcile them with Christianity as Jews who preserve their identity and only reject the deviations of the 'new' Talmudic Judaism.
Moshe ben Gerson ha-Kohen, who adopted the name Karl Anton upon his baptism, was the only Jewish convert to make an authentic academic career in the 18th century. In a span of just six years of work at the university in Helmstedt (Lower Saxony), he published sixteen books and received the post of full professor. He was also the most outstanding and closest disciple of Jonatan Eibeschütz. Actively and part of the time under his own name, as university professor he joined in the famous dispute over the amulets between Eibeschütz and Jacob Emden, siding naturally with his tutor, with whom he continued to cooperate intensively also after taking his baptism. In 1756, he ran away from his creditors, abandoning his Christian wife, pregnant and with two small children. According to unconfirmed reports, he returned to the Judaic faith.
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