Conversion, Freedom, and British Tolerance

There's a lot to talk about in the Michael Ragussis excerpt on the often paradoxical logic that drives the 'culture of conversion' in late 18th and 19th century Britain. I wanted to try to link this text both to the other texts we've read on Jewishness (Gilman and Cheyette) and to larger questions about race and identity that we've been discussing.

1) How did you interpret the contradictory/various ways in which conversion was represented in British culture? How do we make sense of the way in which the Jew is at once represented as unconvertible (a 'permanent' type) and a kind of 'natural' Christian (whereby becoming a Christian is the perfection of the Jew)? Is this just a split between a racial and a religious reading of the Jew or something more complicated?

2) What did you make of Ragussis's discussion of gender---of the use of the Jewish woman as ripe for conversion but also a figure that must exit the novel (preferably by dying)?

3) Finally, what did you make of the link between British tolerance of difference and conversion? This gets at BIG questions we've been discussing about identity politics. What does it mean to tie citizenship (Britishness) to assimilation? Does thinking of this in terms of assimilation clarify the idea that in order to be a 'free' British person, a citizen of a tolerant country, one must convert?

Comment on any or all of these questions.