ABSTRACT
The literature on religious conversion is vast, affording a multitude of perspectives from which to view Karl Stern's transformation from a Jew wavering on margins of orthodoxy, Zionism and Marxism into a committed "Hebrew Catholic." For the average Christian, pivotal events in the Hebrew Bible merely prepare the way for Jesus' ministry, and the passages that are most pertinent to the Christian's faith are the predictions or premonitions of Jesus' birth, the events surrounding Jesus' birth, his ministry, his trial, his crucifixion and resurrection, and so on. The Hebrew Bible reflects at length on the yetzer ha'ra, or the evil inclination, which is deemed to be present in everyone. When it came to social issues, Stern generally led with his activist, social justice agenda, and only retreated to the more otherworldly sensibility indigenous to Catholic piety as a kind of default position.
