Jews and Moors at the Crossroads: Female Conversion in Don Quixote and The Merchant of Venice

In an insightful essay on the representation of racial and religious difference in early modern English drama, Ania Loomba has pointed out the crucial significance of gender in this respect. More often than not, she observes, ‘a fair maid of an alien faith and ethnicity [is] romanced by a European, married to him, and converted to Christianity. Her story, unlike those of converted men, does not usually end in tragedy, nor does it focus on the tensions of cultural crossings’. The best known example in English drama of this ideologeme (to use Fredric Jameson’s useful term) of female romantic conversion, is surely the story of Jessica’s intermarriage and conversion in The Merchant of Venice (1596-7), a rewriting in some respects of Abigail’s less fortunate trajectory in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (1590). The most famous example of an opposite situation – the impossible cultural integration of a converted male – would probably be the tragic fate of Othello (1605). Loomba discusses Jessica’s case alongside other examples of successful female conversion, and unsuccessful male conversion, in later English plays about the Orient. But perhaps the most striking analogy with Jessica’s case is to be found not in English drama, but in Spanish literature: the story of the conversion from Islam of Zoraida, the beautiful young daughter of a rich Algerian Moor named Agi Morato.