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C h a p t e r 4 Alchemies of Conversion: Shakespeare, Jonson, Vaughan, and the Science of Jewish Transmutation In February 2007 a memo was circulated by the offices of Georgia state legislator Ben Bridges, calling for the elimination of the teaching of evolution in public schools on the grounds that it was derived from “Rabbinic writings” and other Jewish texts. While it may come as a surprise to some that “taxsupported evolution science” is really a Jewish plot, and that “evolutionism” (not creationism) violates the separation of church and state, all it takes is a perusal of representative Bridges’s source, www.fixedearth.com, to learn something of the depth and breadth of this pernicious conspiracy. According to the website’s author, Marshall Hall, “Contra-scientific, Christ-hating Pharisee Kabbalist Occultists (using theoretical non-science and phony physics) have deceived the whole world into believing that 15 billion years of Big Bang Evolutionism has produced all that exists. Anyone can know that evolution is a lie by just studying the facts. But now anyone can also know that evolution is a double-damned lie. It has never been ‘secular’ science as the world has been led to believe. Rather, it has been a long labor of a Cabal of Pharisee Religionists to destroy the Bible’s credibility from Creation to Jesus to Heaven.”1 A plot this insidious can only have been secretly planned and executed by Jewish conspirators over thousands of years. As incontrovertible proof, Hall’s obsessively cross-referenced and annotated website pulls out all the stops to confirm the Jewish identity of that notorious “Kabbalist physicist Albert Einstein ” and so many other modern day Pharisees who occupy endowed chairs of physics and biology at universities around the country. We may laugh at the absurdity of such an account, but I cite it here as Alchemies 113 a contemporary and admittedly extreme instance in the complex and controversial relationship between science and religion, a late avatar of my topic in this chapter, the inter-animation of discourses of alchemy (as both a scientific and a spiritual technology) and Jewishness in the early modern period . Insofar as alchemy served as a science of transmutation, it offers a rich context in which to explore questions of permanence and change, authenticity and fraudulence—and the anxieties and expectations these questions prompted—at the heart of both material and personal conversion. The striking early modern resurgence of interest in alchemy, almost at the same time as the emergence of the New Science (and often in the work of the progenitors of this new approach to natural philosophy), coincided with the flourishing of a variety of millennial and eschatological writings, many of which posited as one of their primary expectations the conversion, en masse, of Jews who had heretofore adhered stubbornly to their mistaken ways. When alchemy was linked to Jews and Judaism during the early modern period, to the advantage and/or detriment of both, the transformational potentials of alchemy were often conflated with the proselytizing impulses that characterized the early modern English encounter with Jews. The controversy animating much recent scholarship over the relative importance of esoteric, or spiritual, kinds of alchemy versus exoteric, or material, alchemical technologies is a direct corollary to the issues that inform the fraught legacy of alchemy’s Jewish provenance in the early modern period.2 One of the first sustained modern attempts to address the ostensibly Jewish provenance of alchemical lore was Raphael Patai’s The Jewish Alchemists. A collection of primary sources that have, at one time or another, been identified as Jewish in origin, Patai’s book also includes the remarkable claim that the prestige attributed to Jewish alchemy was so great that non-Jewish alchemical writers were occasionally posthumously converted to Judaism, to give them more substantial authority and authenticity.3 What is especially striking about this apparent judaizing of alchemy is that it seems to invert the fantasy of Jewish conversion to Christianity that was so often a concomitant of Christian esoteric and millenarian texts. The present chapter represents, in part, an investigation of Patai’s claim, its background, and its further implications . I suggest that allusions to the supposed Jewish origins of alchemy, for better or for worse, are frequently embedded in eschatological discourses that anxiously raise the possibility of Jewish conversion while rendering such religious change potentially problematic in light of emerging notions of Protestant English identity. My account of alchemy’s fraught Jewish provenance 3] Project...

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