I was a bit disappointed with this. Jacoby focuses on the conversion of the Jews, which she says is what people are historically interested in. It also, as she tells us several times, the history of one branch of her family. I'm not marking her down for this, since I don't fault people for books they didn't write, but I already know about this in general, although certainly not in the detail, she is giving us. I think that the title suggests a broader scope -- since she basically stays within the Abrahamic religions, the deities in question were neither all that strange nor plural.

I'm also interested in the conversion of the pagans, both in antiquity and later, such as the Northern Crusades. The Jews might not have been under as much pressure if the Christians hadn't been able convert the pagans, whether voluntarily or by force. The Duke of Lithuania and later King of Poland, Władysław II Jagiełło apparently converted in 1387 partly to end the attacks of the Teutonic Knights, who were determined to force the northern European pagans to convert. While the conversion mainly involved the nobility, and he did not crack down on the commoners' religious practices at first, I imagine that the Catholic hierarchy knew that once they got their foot in the door, they could crack down.

The book had a lot of interesting material, and being a secularist, she was quite detailed about forced conversions, whereas the Medieval period is so often cast as of happy time of shared faith. There wouldn't have been punishments for heresy if there weren't dissenters. Jacoby talks about the Albigensian Crusade, when the Catholic set out to exterminate the practitioners of an alternate form of Christianity that was very popular in southern France. The Massacre at Béziers is where the phrase translated as, "Kill them all, for the Lord knoweth them that are His" is supposed to have been spoken. Getting rid of the heretics was too important to bother separating out the good Catholics.

I found the book a bit wordy. There were times when Jacoby seemed to be going off on tangents that didn't exactly relate to conversion. Jacoby talks movingly about Mohammed Ali's conversion to Islam, and his stand against the war in Vietnam, but I don't think we really needed an accounting of his fights after he was able to return to his career (the Thrilla in Manila). Small things, but over the course of the book they added up to a fair amount of padding.

As a rare secular view of conversion, it is well worth reading, especially people like to focus on the sufferings of their ancestors, not the sufferings they inflicted on others. ( )

The author traces the history of religious conversion throughout the ages. She discusses various famous converts, and their fates, including discussions of what she terms "conversion of convenience". She makes the case that many conversions throughout history have been for convenience, because of intermarriage, political or economic advantage, or just plain under duress. The author writes in lucid, accessible prose; however, she lost a half star for the excessive use of long parenthetical commentary that could, and should, have been either in a footnote, or, in most cases, simply part of the main text and not a parentheses. Some of the parenthetical "asides" took up the bulk of the paragraph in which they were found, and this led to frustration in the reading, as I had often forgotten what I was reading was, in fact, parenthetical. Other than that, a very well done work by an author I have been pleased to read frequently. The final chapter is refreshing in its bold discussion of difficult issues without pandering to the vagaries of "religious sensitivities". ( )

This insightful book shows how the religious beliefs of almost everybody is determined by those of their parents, their spouse, and their community. Reason plays a role in only an extremely small fraction, despite pretenses to the contrary. ( )