Eschatology and Conversion in the Sperling Letters

Abstract

When conversion and eschatology joined forces during Europe’s long Reformation period, it was usually to underscore religiously exclusivist claims. Eschatological expectations heightened the sense that those who adhered to the wrong beliefs, did not follow the correct practices, and did not belong to God’s sole favored religious community, should convert before it was too late. Thus, eschatologies of this period, also known as the Age of Conversion, tended to ground demands for conversion in exclusivist terms.2 This was the case for Christian communities in the Reformation, but it was also characteristic of contemporary Jewish eschatologies, which abandoned older traditions that had allowed for righteous Gentile ‘Sons of Noah’ to find salvation outside the Jewish community. Elisheva Carlebach, among other scholars, portrays early modern eschatologies – Christian as well as Jewish – in these terms: