"I knew a Man, who having nothing but a summary Notion of Religion
himself, and being wicked and profligate to the last Degree in his
Life, made a thorough Reformation in himself, by labouring to
convert a Jew." -Daniel Defoe, The Farther Adventures of Robinson
Crusoe (1719)When the hero of Defoe's novel listens skeptically to
this anecdote related by a French Roman Catholic priest, he little
suspects that in less than a century the conversion of the Jews
would become nothing short of a national project-not in France but
in England. In this book, Michael Ragussis explores the phenomenon
of Jewish conversion-the subject of popular enthusiasm, public
scandal, national debate, and dubbed "the English madness" by its
critics-in Protestant England from the 1790s through the 1870s.
Moving beyond the familiar catalog of anti-Semitic stereotypes,
Ragussis analyzes the rhetoric of conversion as it was reinvented
by the English in sermons, stories for the young, histories of the
Jews, memoirs by Jewish converts, and popular novels. Alongside
these texts and the countertexts produced by English Jews, he
situates such writers as Edgeworth, Scott, Disraeli, Arnold,
Trollope, and Eliot within the debate over conversion and related
issues of race, gender, and nation-formation. His work reveals how
a powerful group of emergent cultural projects-including a
revisionist tradition of the novel, the new science of ethnology,
and the rewriting of European history-redefined English national
identity in response to the ideology of conversion, the history of
the Jews, and "the Jewish question." Figures of Conversion offers
an entirely new way of regarding Jewish identity in
nineteenth-century British culture and will be of importance not
only to literary scholars but also to scholars of Judaic and
religious studies, history, and cultural studies.
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