Studying Religious Conversions through Digital Methods: The Case of Jewish Baptisms in the 18th Century

The object of this master’s thesis is the religious conversions in the Russian Empire of the 18th century, exemplified by the baptism of Jews into Orthodoxy, and the subject is the application of digital methods in studying these conversions. The aim of the thesis is to develop and adapt digital tools and methods for studying confessional transitions, using the example of the baptism of Jews in the Russian Empire of the 18th century. The objectives of the master's research are: • To determine the main directions in the study of the conversion of Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe as a whole. • To identify the features of the historical context: the Jewish presence in the Russian Empire in the 18th century. • To develop a relational database model for a prosopographic study of baptized Jews. • To create a database and develop the main types of queries to implement a prosopographic study of baptized Jews as a distinct social group in the Russian Empire in the second half of the 18th century. • To construct networks of connections among actors-neophytes who converted to Orthodoxy, and to test the hypothesis of the existence of centers for conversion to Orthodoxy and the dynamics of temporal changes in these centers. • To build a migration network of neophytes to the Russian Empire, identify the most important migration centers, and possible Jewish communal groups. • To interpret the obtained results and assess the prospects of applying digital methods in studying religious conversion among Jews in the Russian Empire. Chronological Framework: The lower boundary is set at 1742, as it was from the decree of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna, issued in 1742, that the process of official recording of cases of Jewish conversion to Orthodoxy in the Russian Empire began. The upper boundary is more conditional, set at 1800. Source Base: The research will be based on personal files of Jewish conversions to Orthodoxy in the second half of the 18th century, stored in the collections of consistories and provincial offices of the Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Kyiv, the Central State Historical Archive in St. Petersburg, as well as the Synod collections from the Russian State Historical Archive and the Moscow Synodal Office from the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts. The source corpus consists of official imperial administrative documents: correspondence between departments (typically offices and consistories) about various stages of the conversion process of specific individuals. Structure of the Work: The work consists of three chapters, an introduction, a conclusion, a list of sources and literature, as well as two appendices. The first chapter is dedicated to introducing the historical context: the features of the Jewish presence in the Russian Empire and the regulation of the legal and bureaucratic field of conversions from Judaism to Orthodoxy in the second half of the 18th century. The second chapter details the process of designing and implementing the database, preparing the dataset, and performing various types of operations, along with the main advantages and disadvantages of applying database technology to the study of Jewish conversions in the Russian imperial context. The third chapter is dedicated to studying confessional transitions using social network analysis methods. It focuses on the specifics of dataset formation, examines options for studying migration processes among neophytes, and the possibilities of testing the research hypothesis using QAP-correlation, assessing the advantages and limitations of the method. The appendices include a complete database schema in the form of an ER-diagram and a visualization of the migration network of Jews before their conversion to Orthodoxy in the Russian Empire.