“This book began as a doctoral dissertation in cultural history at the University of Turku in Finland and was made possible by funding generously awarded by the Academy of Finland” (v). So begins this first short book by a scholar new to the field, an exploration of “representations of Jews by English men and women who commented on contemporary Jews” (2). Her aim is “to discover the ideas attached to Jews and information that was circulating about them before the Jewish readmission to England in 1656” (2). Holmberg argues that investigations of English ideas about Jews have largely centered on William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta. Her research will be different in that it concentrates on “English travel writings and their depictions of contemporary Jews,” so “Shylock will thus not take centre stage in this study” (2).

One of the most beneficial developments in the division of knowledge in the humanities in the past thirty years or so has been the convergence of historical and literary studies. Many scholars in English departments are more historians than anything else, and many historians are writing about sources that hitherto had been taken out of their hands and declared literature. The globe has become flat, and unexpected combinations of scholars and subjects have become commonplace, like a student of cultural history in Finland writing about Jews in England: talk about “a scattered nation”! But this widening scope comes with a price: the lack of focus and the danger of reinventing the academic wheel. It has been a long time since scholars have examined early modern Anglo-Jewry through the prism of Shakespeare or Marlow, and the reports of English travelers have been overmined for information about how foreign Jews were perceived and conveyed to the reading public. Although there is always more to do on any subject, the challenge is greater when working over a carefully tilled field.

All of this is to say that there is not much that is new in this book, but it is a handy reference volume to travelers’ reports that are already well known. Apart from the introduction and the conclusion, there are three chapters. The first of these looks at how Jews are located in geographical and topographical spaces, which justifies the subtitle of the book, pointing to the Jews as a “scattered nation.” Jews were thought to be a wandering people, so often they were depicted as living in all corners of the world, almost by definition. English travelers sought out Jews in their actual homes, however, in continental ghettoes and other Jewish quarters. They visited synagogues and reported on their interiors.

The next chapter talks about the way the Jews were seen to practice their religion, an odd business to be sure, but visible only outside of England before Jewish readmission in 1656. Holmberg is particularly good about Jewish gestures and how Jewish body language seemed so strange to English visitors, unused to such vociferous prayer in a house of worship. Circumcision was always a favorite Jewish ritual to witness, portrayed by some observers in almost pornographic detail. Jewish marriages and funerals were also of great interest to these travelers.

The last substantial chapter deals with the appearance of Jews, from the color of their skin to their clothing, including supposedly Jewish ailments such as male menstruation. Holmberg cites James Shapiro's bizarre claim that there were fewer writings about the bodies and outward appearance of Jewish women because of “the fact that Jewish men were endowed with male and female traits” (112). Not only is the explanation unconvincing, but there were in fact very many descriptions of Jewish women in contemporary writing. Holmberg has a lot to say about Jewish clothing, and she reminds us that the reality of Jewish sartorial appearance may have been quite different from what we have thought.

There is much to enjoy in this book, and Holmberg is surely right to quote Margaret Jacob about early modern cosmopolitanism, an “ability to experience people of different nations, creeds and colours with pleasure, curiosity and interest” (145). But as Holmberg herself says, as travel narratives “became increasingly popular, the narratives seemed to become more and more uniform . . . due to the popularity of certain manuals that gave detailed advice on what to write, what kinds of things were to be recorded, and to the ample availability and multiplication of earlier texts on the same subjects” (43). This is also true about history books. Although the subject at hand and the material described is endlessly fascinating, we do not stray very far out of the existing evidentiary circle, which leaves us with few surprises.