Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christianity and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England by Jeffrey S. Shoulson (review)

The religious turbulence during England’s Long Reformation focuses the social and historical context of Jeffrey Shoulson’s consideration of conversion. Much has been written about the twenty-five years in English history during which the country’s religion changed three times, and Shoulson’s study adds nuanced, thought-provoking, and apposite illustrations of how the changes in religious identity induced anxiety about other facets of what it means to be a nation. The study uses the notion of conversion as a cipher for broader cultural anxieties about a spectrum of changes in English society. Charting a century-long period (roughly 1575–1675), Shoulson considers a wide range of types of conversion, with the most compelling sections being those specifically regarding religious conversions which draw upon examples from both the Old and New Testaments.

The study examines the permanence, authenticity, and reception of the various conversions. Their impermanent nature is staged against the backdrop of the rapid and often reversible ways in which England’s religious identity changed so dramatically. There was only a thirteen-year difference between Henry VIII being acclaimed as “Defender of the Faith” by Pope Leo X in 1521 to his instituting the Act of Supremacy (1534) that made the King the Head of the Church and led England from Catholicism to Protestantism. Nineteen years later Mary Tudor overturned the will of her father by reinstating Papal dominion over the country, only for Protestantism to be reintroduced by her half-sister Elizabeth shortly after her accession to the throne in 1559. Religion and politics were intertwined, along with clashing notions about ethnic and national identity. Much of the book focuses on the way this impermanence led to a multitude of anxieties about identity and the potential ramifications of converting on both the individual and the national level. As these conversions did not just remain in the realm of religious debate, their significance extended to all aspects of English life.

Against this tempestuous background, Shoulson argues, the Jew stands as a particularly pertinent nexus of identity anxieties. So destabilizing were these changes that the cultural fears had to be projected onto an alien. As with many studies of “the Jew,” Shoulson foregrounds the ambivalent nature of this figure in order to accentuate the felt promise and peril of conversion: promise in that the mass conversion of the Jews was a specifically English version of Christianity and one of the final steps preceding Christ’s Second Coming; peril in the sense of unease about the Jews converting for social advancement. As Shoulson mainly focuses on the English Jews, most of whom were descendants of the Iberian Jews who had been forced to convert to Catholicism (the conversos), there is a further intriguing layer to the argument. As Jews had been exiled from England almost 300 years earlier and it was only towards the end of the timeframe of this study that Oliver Cromwell convened The Whitehall Conference (1655) to discuss the legal readmission of Jews into England, Jews were simultaneously distant from England and at the heart of English politics. Occupying an identity which made the Jew both an alien who could never be fully English and, seemingly, a religious chameleon whose identity could fluctuate in accordance with social and economic circumstances, Shoulson engagingly and articulately reads Jewish conversion as more broadly reflective of the path, both uncertain and impermanent, of reformation in England.

Beginning with the Old Testament, Shoulson discusses the proto-conversion of Abram to Abraham — a name change intrinsic to change in identity. He moves on to consider Christian conversions beginning with Paul and Augustine before negotiating early Reformation discussions of the processes and effects of conversion. The section about Paul is especially revealing of some of the ambiguities of conversion. Paul, who converted from a Pharisaic persecutor of Jesus and his followers to apostle to the Gentiles, is widely regarded as showing a complete and permanent change...