The stakes are different, but the same fundamental choice in the face of precariousness remains the same: Does safety come from contorting ourselves to look more like everyone else? Or does it come from drilling down into the wellspring of what made us special to begin with?

The first line of argument insists that safety for Jews comes by accommodating ourselves to the demands of our surrounding society. If we can just show we are perfect Greeks, patriotic Germans, and so on, then they’d love us. (Or at least not kill us.) I think here of the Yevsektsiya, the Jewish section of the Bolshevik Party, who did Lenin’s bidding with particular zeal to prove they were loyal Communists. Until, of course, the regime rounded them up, too.

To the opposing side, this political and cultural strategy was only a recipe for delayed humiliation and pain. Lasting security for Jews, this counterargument goes, was always saved by leaders and movements, from the Maccabees to the Zionists, that urged us to be our fullest, freest selves — even if doing so made us deeply unpopular or despised.

This divide has run through Jewish history, and through Jewish individuals. Both impulses were embodied in perhaps the unlikeliest Jew of all: Theodor Herzl.

Anyone today familiar with that name associates it with the creation of the state of Israel. But Zionism — the marriage of the ancient Jewish yearning to return to the Holy Land told with the dream of modern self-determination — was not Herzl’s initial solution to Europe’s endless anti-Semitic riddle.

In 1893, just three years before he proposed the idea of the Jewish state in “Der Judenstaat,” his groundbreaking pamphlet laying out the precepts of Zionism, he argued that the Jews of the Austro-Hungarian empire should instead become Christians. Herzl imagined “a procession in broad daylight to St. Stephen’s Cathedral,” writes Simon Schama in “The Story of the Jews,” where the Jews would undergo a “mass baptism” to Catholicism. Only such an unequivocal act would finally render them acceptable to their neighbors.

How and why did he change his mind? Scholars debate the mystery of his radical change of heart. But change he did. Conversion out of Judaism could never be the answer to anti-Semitism. That was merely self-mutilation born out of fear and despair. The only answer was for the Jews to choose life: whole lives, not partial ones.