Jeffrey Shoulson is both a chair of Judaic Studies and a professor of literatures, cultures, and languages. In this insightful book, he brings these two interests together by taking narratives of conversion as a starting point for an “investigation into the dynamics of change during the [early modern] period” (2). In five succinct chapters, Shoulson deftly weaves together different forms of conversion—religious, textual, and alchemical—to make the convincing case that behind these various transformations lies the specter of the Jew, who even when absent looms large in the minds of the English, arousing anxieties about personal identity, deception, and authenticity.

Much has been written about early modern millenarianism in England and the fact that the coming of Jesus was predicated on the previous conversion of the Jews. On the face of it, it would appear that millenarian Christians wanted Jews to convert, but Shoulson demonstrates how ambivalent many Christians were about the desirability and even the possibility of such a conversion. As we have come to learn, identity is formed through opposition. Christians largely defined themselves in opposition to Judaism. As a result, “the successful conversion of the Jew would signal the disruption and destabilization of the organizing differences that gave definition to Christianity in opposition to Judaism” (5).

It is within this larger framework of the instability of the early modern world and early modern identities that Shoulson frames his narrative. In his first chapter, “‘The Jews Perverted and the Gentiles Converted’: Confessions and Conversos,” Shoulson discusses the various models of the conversion experience available to Protestants and how fraught with difficulties were these models. Paul's dramatic and miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus was an obvious model, but the abruptness of Paul's conversion proved the exception rather than the rule for Protestants, many of whom never acquired the certainty they craved. As Shoulson notes, “[T]he conversion preached especially in the Protestant churches required constant vigilance and self-examination, never offering the absolute certainty so many ostensible converts craved” (6). Anxiety about the authenticity of their own conversion led many Protestants to displace this anxiety onto Jewish converts to Christianity and question their sincerity. The Jewish converso become a suspected source of contamination, an infectious fifth column that could destroy Christianity from within.

Augustine's conversion provided another possible model. The stress Augustine placed on conversion as an experience involving creation and renewal was problematic because Protestants did not envision themselves as creating anything new but as returning to the sources of apostolic Christianity. The need Protestants felt to emphasize their continuity with the apostolic tradition only created further problems, however, by bringing up the fraught topic of what exactly their relationship with Jewish tradition was, and this, in turn, exacerbated the need to distinguish themselves clearly from Jews.

An obsession with establishing clear boundaries was an important aspect of early modern thought because of the religious, economic, and cultural changes that had obliterated traditional boundaries as feudal society gave way to a protocapitalist one. The palpable horror of mixing things indiscriminately is a conspicuous theme in early modern literature. For Calvin, mixture was synonymous with “adulteration” and “promiscuity,” and ultimately with the disorder and confusion he saw around him and tried to remedy. Clearly, Descartes was not alone in craving clear and distinct ideas. Scholars have commented on Protestant conversion narratives, seeing them as harbingers of the modern anxious, even neurotic self (22). The distrust of conversos highlighted by Shoulson was therefore an understandable feature of the attempt to create a definitive order in which the identities of Christians and Jews were clearly delineated.

Shoulson follows Lionel Trilling in emphasizing how central the issue of “sincerity” became in the early modern period as a result of the convoluted history of the English Reformation. In the space of twenty-five years, the English were required to change their religious identities three times. People consequently became increasingly aware of the disjunction between an inner and an outer self and the virtual impossibility of being certain that an individual's behavior had any real connection to his innermost thoughts.

A consequence of the forced conversion of the Jews in Spain, the implementation of blood purity laws, and the establishment of the Inquisition, Jewish racial corruption, and religious deviance became associated in Protestant minds; this association undermined the idea that Christians in the early modern period objected to Jews because of their religion and not their race. This is a theme taken up in chapter 2, “‘Thy People Shall Be My People’: Typology, Gender, and Biblical Converts.” In this chapter, Shoulson closely analyzes conversion narratives in the Hebrew bible involving Abraham, Jethro, Naaman, Rahab, and Ruth. He illustrates how problematic these stories were for Protestants looking for clear-cut examples of successful and permanent conversion experiences. One is left with the strong impression that foreign converts did not lose their foreignness and become fully assimilated. Shoulson contends that these biblical stories fostered discussion of nation identity and racial and ethnic differences. He concludes that “[t]he breaking down of boundaries by conversion or any other means—has its limits in early modernity, and these are limits that have crucial implications for the construction and negotiation of ethnicity through the early modern period” (81).

In chapter 3, “‘The Meaning, Not the Name I Call’: Converting the Bible and Homer,” Shoulson shows how the dynamics of conversion were “deeply entangled with the complexities of translation” (82). His contention that translation is a form of conversion allows for some penetrating insights into why the notion of a stable self became an issue in the early modern period. The very idea that translation is possible suggests that cultural differences can be obliterated, but the very act of translating undermines this assumption. The translated text, like the religious convert, becomes suspect precisely because of the fear that the foreignness of the original will introduce “new idioms” leading to heresy and the corruption of Christianity: “As I have already suggested, translation functions as a process of conversion, whereby a text is transformed from its original state and turned into another text which, however well it may capture many aspects of the original, necessarily takes on new and different meanings” (88). The problem of translation becomes acutely apparent in the case of proper names, which because they resist translation, accentuate the essential foreignness as well as the impenetrability of individuals.

Chapter 4, “Alchemies of Conversion: Shakespeare, Jonson, Vaughan, and the Science of Jewish Transmutation,” takes the reader into the realm of science. This underlines the usefulness of Shoulson's broad conception of conversion as a way to understand not only the multifaceted nature of change in the early modern period but also the anxieties caused by change and the way these anxieties were projected onto the figure of the Jew. Shoulson's discussion of alchemy covers two distinct periods, from 1592 to 1624, when the Jewish presence in England was notable by its absence, and from 1649 to 1660, when the readmission of the Jews to Britain was being discussed, which meant that Jews were on everybody's mind. Shoulson argues that Shakespeare's Shylock and Marlowe's Jew of Malta are transformed into Jonson's alchemist. Many Christians believed that alchemy originated with the ancient Hebrews, an association reinforced by a number of pseuduepigraphical alchemical works written in the name of Moses, his sister Miriam, and Abraham. Jonson's alchemist, like Shylock and the Jew of Malta, offered the three playwrights the chance to criticize the emerging, capitalist economies of the early modern world (123). Other similarities led to the conflation of Jews with alchemists. One of these was their supposedly offensive smell, another the linguistic obscurity of alchemical texts, which linked these to the biblical texts and the problem of translation.

The second period of English alchemical writing investigated by Shoulson features the poetry of Henry Vaughan, who accepted the Jewish origin and transmission of alchemy (134). Shoulson sees a split among English alchemists between those who accepted the dualist mysticism associated with Jakob Böhme and the monistic vitalism associated with Paracelsus and J. B. van Helmont. As in earlier chapters, there is the fear that Jews may have contaminated alchemical lore in the course of its transmission. This led to the attempt to separate false alchemy, associated with the Jews, from “true” Christian alchemy. This trend is exemplified by Elias Ashmole's collection of alchemical texts. Ashmole claimed an English origin for alchemy, attesting to its purity and priority (144). Many scholars have commented on the spiritualization of alchemy that occurred in the early modern period. Shoulson points to the irony of this because spiritualized alchemies feature the kinds of monistic vitalism characteristic of Hebraic, rabbinic, and kabbalistic thought. Consequently, “the work of alchemy converts to Christianity precisely at the same moment that it becomes more Jewish” (150).

In the final chapter, “Conversion and Enthusiasm: Radical Religion and the Poetics of Paradise Regained,” Shoulson deals with the problem of “authenticity” head-on. Authentic religious conversions, authentic translations, and authentic alchemical transformation join together with the intractable problem of how to verify “true” from “false” revelatory experiences. Enthusiasm, as Michael Heyd and others have shown, became a hot topic in the early modern period because of the fracturing of the religious landscape and the appearance of innumerable sects, all claiming to represent “true” Christianity. The English were especially interested in the movement started by Sabbatai Sevi, who claimed to be the long-awaited Jewish Messiah. The various reactions to Sabbatai Sevi became a part of the debate between established intellectuals and clergymen and the enthusiasts who challenged them (176). Shoulson sees Milton's Paradise Regained as representative of this debate. In this work Milton tried, though largely unsuccessfully, to distinguish the “true” form of Christian redemption from the “false,” which was Judaic because it called for a Messiah who was both a religious and a political leader.

Jeffrey Shoulson has written an eye-opening book that employs the idea of conversion to investigate the multifaceted forms of change occurring in early modern England and to show how these changes were attributed to the nefarious presence of an imaged Jew. His illuminating analysis will be of great interest to scholars of the early modern period as well as to general readers.