Jeffrey Shoulson's smart, original book leads us to see hitherto unsuspected connections between early modern English concerns with “conversion” (both narrowly and broadly defined) and “the figure of Jew,” encouraging others to follow the paths he has charted here. The subtitle (Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change) suggests the ambitious breadth and the challenge of defining the relations among the various topics Shoulson considers.

Shoulson adds to the growing body of scholarship on Christian/Jewish relations and exchanges that includes books by David Katz, James Shapiro, Jason Rosenblatt, Chanita Goodblatt, Janet Adelman, myself, and, of course, Shoulson's earlier Milton and the Rabbis. But now Shoulson moves beyond rabbinic Judaism and Milton to claim the field more broadly as he considers how the figure of the Jew was at the hidden center of various instances of early modern preoccupation with conversion/change. He traces the origins of this preoccupation to confessional transitions and shifts that happened with some frequency over the “fitful course of England's Long Reformation” (23). Conversions may have been desired but they threatened stability, for they were in always in process (hence laden with the prospect of perilous relapse or fragility). Shoulson argues that conversion contains within itself the double sense of continuity with the past (or previous identity) and rupture, and thus involves “anxieties about permanence and change, authenticity and pretense” (5). This seems to me always true, but Shoulson suggests it was a particular concern in early modern England. And it was not just actual Jewish-Christian conversions that mattered. Shoulson argues that well before Cromwell's 1655 Whitehall conference considered the readmission of the Jews, Jews had “already found their way into the English imaginary within an elaborate and self-contradictory network of fictions of conversion” (3).

A brilliant Introduction introduces five succinct chapters focused (successively) on conversos, biblical stories of conversion, translation of the Bible and Homer, alchemy, and enthusiasm—all bound together by a notion of “conversion.” The Introduction observes the “intense ambivalence with which Jews and Jewish conversions were regarded,” how “the figure of the converso” would have been “an uncannily familiar religious chameleon” for English people whose own “economic, social, and political circumstances required a religious conversion, conformity or counterfeiting” (5). I found particularly fascinating Shoulson's discussion of John Donne. Who better than Donne, who was raised a Roman Catholic and ended up a priest in the Church of England, to turn to for a sense of the complexity of the issues of conversion? A fresh reading of Donne's “Satire III” surprisingly discovers the figure of the Jew, the Spanish converso, at its center. Donne's “ambivalent identification with Jews” defines early modern English culture—“the figure” of the converted Jew becomes “the embodiment of both the promise and the peril of change” (10). Donne makes a crucial but brief entrance. Yet Donne merits even more attention, given not only his complicated status as having “converted” (or, as Dennis Flynn would say, “conformed”), but also because of the ways Donne continued to use (and convert) “Catholic” things in poems like “The Canonization” or “The Relique.” What would Shoulson make of the Spanish motto on his 1591 Marshall portrait (painted when Donne was not yet 20), Antes muerto que mudado––“sooner dead than changed”?

Chapter 1 begins with Paul and Augustine as early models of Christian conversion, then moves to Luther and Calvin who define conversion, not as instantaneous like Paul, but as ongoing and incomplete—something that would both define and trouble the Reformation. Shoulson then turns to writings about conversion by John Foxe and others who describe religious transformation with language taken from discourse about Jews and marranos. We find Crypto-Judaism linked with Crypto-Catholicism, the suspicion that the conversions of Catholics and Jews were unreliable. If Jewish conversion to Christianity mirrored Christian conversion within Christianity, then fears about the impermanence of Jewish conversion could express fears about Christian conversion. Hence “Jews functioned as cyphers for Christian concerns about conversion” (38). Chapter 2 considers four examples of conversion in the Old Testament—Jethro, Rahab, Ruth, and Naaman—to whom early modern Protestant clergy turned, finding in them complicated precedents for conversion that could be used typologically to establish the distinctions between Jew and Gentile but also the boundaries of English identity. That Jewish sources were used “in the Christian discourse of conversion” shows that conversion discourse depended on “an underlying transformation of Jewishness” even when Jews were not the specific subject (41). Shoulson's superb reading of these biblical figures—two men and two women—also shows how the early modern interpretation of conversion was gendered: Rahab and Ruth become the physical means, as maternal ancestors of Jesus, for making Christ and salvation available to Christians, while the (male) biblical converts to Judaism become models for Jewish conversion to Christianity.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 shift to “other fictions of conversion.” Chapter 3 is on translation of texts from their ancient languages to early modern English. Linguistic translation turns out to be like religious change, a conversion where there remains “erasure of difference” and “persistent …otherness” (83). Translations are always an “encounter with otherness,” but the translation of Homer and of the Hebrew Bible raised questions of continuity and discontinuity between early modern England and these other antiquities. Sometimes the line of argument in this chapter is hard the follow, and the connection with the figure of the Jew is not sustained (it disappears in the discussion of Chapman). The thread is clearer in chapter 4. Here Shoulson brilliantly argues for “the inter-animation of discourses of alchemy . . . and Jewishness in the early modern period” (113). Alchemy, understood as a “Jewish science,” had a resurgence at a time of increased millenarian writings and preoccupation with Jews. Shoulson's tracing of the “Jewish, kabbalistic provenance of alchemical knowledge” (119) prepares the way for his wonderful analysis of the connection between Jonson's The Alchemist and the representations of Jewish commerce in Marlowe's Jew of Malta and Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. “The Jew who had been ostensibly converted at the end of Shakespeare's play [i.e., Shylock] returns to haunt Jonson's stage in the guise of the alchemist” (126), for “Subtle and his co-conspirators serve virtually the identical cultural function as the Jew, combining the same threatening, contaminating characteristic” (127). What could be better evidence of how anxieties about English society were projected onto the Jew than this play where there is no Jew? (Here again, I think about Donne, and wonder what Shoulson would make of Donne's complex use of alchemical tropes in his poetry.)

Milton takes pride of place in the fifth and final chapter, which links the phenomenon of religious enthusiasm (seen as a kind of conversion) with Paradise Regained, which converts Jewish messianism (and millenarian expectations of Jewish conversions) into Milton's distinctive Christian vision. Here Shoulson focuses on mid-seventeenth-century England and the Restoration, finding “anxious uncertainty about the authenticity of religious transformation” as he examines the phenomenon of enthusiasm, the religious radicalism of Quakers and Ranters, and messianism, including the appearance in the 1660s of the Jewish “false messiah,” Sabbatai Sevi. Shoulson's discussion of the idea of enthusiasm is both deep and wide-ranging, juxtaposing pathology and divine inspiration, moving from Luther and Robert Burton, to Interregnum texts of Isaac Casaubon and Henry More, and to Quakers. He also brings in Hobbes and the Quaker James Nayler in considering the problem of distinguishing authentic divine inspiration from false claims. Breaking with those critics who link the later Milton with the Quakers, Shoulson rightly argues that Milton's idea of messianism remains “historical, time-bound” and not simply spiritual and inward. Paradise Regained is Milton's “ambivalent response to the [messianic/millenarian] expectations of many of his contemporaries” (177). While I do not find this reading as new as the rest of the chapter (having published on this aspect of the poem myself), Paradise Regained is indeed the necessary conclusion to this book, and Shoulson's explanation of how and why the style of Paradise Regained rejects “the poetics of enthusiasm” (188) seen in Paradise Lost is superb.

Shoulson's sweep is broad. He moves gracefully between many kinds of texts, some literary, some not, between Spain and Amsterdam and England, between Homer and the Bible, between John Foxe and Shakespeare and Vaughan and Milton, from the sixteenth (and even farther back) to the end of the seventeenth century. He gives us so much to think about and makes dazzling connections. His points are powerfully argued, his learning everywhere evident. Still, sometimes I want more grounding. The reader is asked to travel quickly, shifting between many different topics within only a few pages. And given the importance and complexity of the claims Shoulson makes and issues he considers, it is surprising that the text of the book is less than 200 pages, though perhaps the press imposed restrictions.

“Fictions of Conversion” – both the title but also a phrase that runs through the book—means different things at different times: something constructed, imagined; something made up, or pretended; something figured metaphorically. Shoulson's reluctance to define too closely also might be seen, paradoxically, in the bold claim at the heart of the book, that “the specter of false Jewish conversion . . . haunts the English fictions of conversion I examine” (3). By focusing on some specific instances, some kinds of conversion (e.g., translation, alchemy), Shoulson implies these examples are representative of the widespread English preoccupation with cultural change. Does that mean that that the specter of the Jew and false Jewish conversion haunts all the preoccupations with change in seventeenth-century England? Political, scientific, and so on? Is “the Jew,” thus, always at the heart of English Christian culture, even as he is alien? That would seem the most radical implication of this powerful, important book, though Shoulson leaves this reader wondering how far he would extend his claim.