SOURCE: "Speculating Upon Human Feeling: Evangelical Writing and Anglo-Jewish Women's Autobiography," in The Uses of Autobiography, edited by Julia Swindells, Taylor & Francis, 1995, pp. 98-109.

In the essay below, Valman considers the Evangelical Revival and argues that the publication of alleged autobiographies by Jewish women who had converted to Christianity was a means the Evangelicals used to attempt to convert Jews.

The two starting points for this paper are the Evangelical Revival of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the publication of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe in 1819. Following the enormous success of Scott's novel, and in particular his Jewish heroine Rebecca, there was a striking proliferation of fictive Jewesses in popular literature, and my particular interest here will be its conjunction in the mid nineteenth century with texts produced as a result of the Evangelical Revival. After the tradition of Shakespeare's Jessica and Marlowe's Abigail, the figure...