Introduction: the Nation and the Spectral Wandering Jew

Notes Introduction: The Nation and the Spectral Wandering Jew 1. According to legend, Christ was driven from Ahasuerus's doorstep where he stopped to rest. In response to the jew's action of striking him while shouting, 'Walk faster!', Christ replied, 'I go, but you will walk until I come again!' (Anderson, Legend: 11). By way of this curse, Christ figuratively transferred his burdensome cross to the jew. 2. As Hyam Maccoby explains, 'One of the strongest beliefs of medieval Christians was that the Second Coming of Christ could not take place until the Jews were con verted to Christianity. (Marvell's "till the conversion of the jews" means simply "till the millennium".) The Jews, therefore, had to be preserved; otherwise the Second Coming could not take place' (239). According to Michael Ragussis, British conversionist societies justified their activities by claiming to 'aid in this divine plan, and with a kind of reverse logic their establishment was viewed as a sign of the proximity of the Second Coming' (Figures: 5). 3. Roger of Wendover's Flores historiarwn and Matthew Paris's Chrmzica majora from . the early thirteenth century provide all of the details of the legend, but the transgressor in their versions is Pilate's doorkeeper, a Roman named Cartaphilus, and not a Jew (Anderson, Legend 16-21). \Vhile in certain Italian versions of this tale the accursed wanderer is a Jew (19), he is not described as Jewish in the British legend until the early seventeenth century. The conjunction between the entry of this legend and Jews into England is in keeping with N.J. Matar's observation that 'anti-Jewish literature surfaced on the English scene when the Jews physically began entering England' ('The Idea ... Between the Reformation': 31, n. 53). 4. Cheyette traces this ambivalent 'semitic discourse' back to 'received Christological discourse' which positioned Jews as both Christ-killers and redemptive saviours. He cites a few examples of this discourse as follows: 'Jews are represented as both the embodiment of liberal progress and as the vestiges of an outdated medieval ism; as a bastion of empire and one of the main threats to empire; as prefiguring a socialist world state and as a key force preventing its development; as the ideal economic man and the degenerate plutocrat par excellence; as the modern alienated artist and the incarnation of a corrupt worldliness' (Constructions: 9). 5. This shift in attitude toward usury actually commenced during the Renaissance. According toM. Lindsay Kaplan, 'as economic development made it an increasingly necessary transaction, public attitudes toward the charging of interest became more accepting. Hence, merchants and moneylenders, whose moneylending was regularly condemned in the Middle Ages, were viewed in an increasingly positive light. Public opinion changed, however, only through the process of vigorous debate; the older perspectives did not disappear overnight' ('Cultural': 188). Further to this, Benjamin Nelson relates how John Calvin's exegesis of the text of Deuteronomy that 'formed a cornerstone of the blood brotherhood morality of the Hebrew tribesmen' (xix), became 'a Gospel of the modern era' (74). While Jews interpreted that text as proscribing the taking of usury from one's brother and prescribing the taking of usury from foreigners (xix-xx), Calvin reiterpreted it more 166 Notes 167 liberally as permitting both the taking of usury from one's brother and foreigners (73-4). In Calvin's view, Scriptures only forbade 'biting usury (neshek), usury taken from the defenseless poor' (75). 6. E.J. Clery cites Montesquieu as explaining 'that bills of exchange, the first paper money, were the invention of the Jews, who were in constant danger of having their wealth confiscated by the ruling power. In the course of time this ghost money served to transgress national boundaries, shifting the balance of economic power from royal house and the aristocratic caste, with their immobile landed inheritances, to the cosmopolitan trading classes' (133). Susan Manly lends support to this theory in an editorial note about Maria Edgeworth's Harrington and Mr Montenero's claim that banknotes were a Jewish invention (Edgeworth, Harrington 120). According to Manly, 'Paper money was first issued in Europe by the Bank of Stockholm in the seventeenth century, and then by the Bank of Amsterdam. As a result of its stability and convertibility, the bills of the Bank of Amsterdam were exchanged and negotiated more frequently than coins, and often at rates above their face value. Amsterdam was home to a thriving Jewish com mercial community at this time ... The antecedents of bank-notes were the receipts given in exchange for deposits of cash' ('Endnotes': 356, n. 104). 7. Linda Colley argues that the primary 'Other' against which Christian Britain defined itself was Catholic France. With the advent of British imperialist expansion, 'Others' later included a variety of colonized peoples. Colley explains her theory on national identity formation in general and British national identity formation in particular, as follows: 'Time and time again, war with France brought Britons, whether they hailed from Wales or Scotland or England, into confrontation with an obviously hostile Other and encouraged them to define themselves collectively against it. They defined themselves as Protestants struggling for survival against the world's foremost Catholic power. They defined themselves against the French as they imagined them to be, superstitious, militarist, decadent and unfree. And, increasingly as the wars went on, they defined themselves in contrast to he colonial peoples they conquered, peoples who were manifestly alien in terms of culture, reli gion and culture' (Britons: 5). While Colley does not mention the Jewish role in British national identity formation, her description of the process surrounding the forging of national identity would recognize the validity of their inclusion. Furthermore, in the light of the equation established between Jew and Jacobin in 1790s Britain that I chronicle in Chapter 2, the Jewish 'Other' found himself, to some degree, in the traditional 'French' enemy camp that Colley identifies. 8. According to Katharine M. Briggs, that legend was originally 'in almost all its forms, the story of the regeneration of a soul, of penitence and a hard long service rendered to humanity' (137). Hyam Maccoby identifies other variants, however, especially in Germany, 'which lacked the positive hope of reconciliation' with Christ at the Millennium. He characterizes them as follows: 'In those negative ver sions, the sufferings of the Wandering Jew are seen merely as just punishment for his depravity. He is not a convert to Christianity, but an unregenerate Jew, with evil magic powers derived from his long experience of life and his association with the Devil. It was this negative version that gave rise to the nineteenth-century anti Semitic stereotype, taken up with enthusiasm by the Nazis, of the Jew as a "root less cosmopolitan"' (252). In his impressive study of the medieval European conception of the Jews and its relation to modern anti-Semitism, Joshua Trachtenberg argues that this more negative strain of the Wandering Jew legend was formulated to suggest the intransigence of the actual Jewish community. 168 Notes According to Trachtenberg, 'In most of the accounts the Wandering Jew had forsaken his false faith and adopted the true faith of Jesus, in contrast to the obdu racy of his fellow Jews; several versions, however, have him remain a Jew, refusing to acknowledge through baptism the truth to which his own unique career testified, and thus typifying the attitude of all Jews' (17). 9. The Introduction to W.D. Rubinstein's A History of the Jews in the English-Speaking World: Great Britain, provides one such recent excoriating commentary. Like Eugen Weber who suggests that contemporary historians have a tendency to foist current preoccupations onto historical periods (8), Rubinstein accuses contempo rary Anglo-Jewish historians of exaggerating British anti-Semitism. In his words, 'The younger school seem to be engaged in a kind of Dutch auction to determine who can discover the most insidious examples of British anti-semitism, reminis cent of the Four Yorkshiremen in the famous Monty Python skit who outdo one another to depict the exaggerated horrors of their youth' (32). Michael Ragussis provides a measured and intelligent response to Rubinstein when he cautions against 'self-congratulatory nationalism' amongst British historians (297) and suggests that we should not be 'inattentive to the subtle but nonetheless widespread powerful and deeply ingrained forms of anti-Semitism that are an important part of English history and culture' ('Secret': 296). 10. I do not mean to suggest by this list that philo-Semitic thinkers and activists were unheard of until the nineteenth century. John Toland's extremely articulate 1714 publication, Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland, provides a wonderful case in point of a philo-Semitic work that predates the Victorian era. As to the endeavours of the cited nineteenth-century individuals, Owen submitted a petition in 1830 calling for the removal of disabilities from the Jews (Silberner: 30), which O'Connell supported, Hazlitt and Macaulay followed suit in 1831. For Hazlitt's and Macaulay's statements see Appendix VIII and IX in Rosenberg (331-7). Notably, in the course of his essay, Hazlitt deems anti-Semitic prejudice 'absurd and Gothic, because it is contrary to men's reason and feeling' (330; empha sis added). Hetherington, a staunch Chartist and Owenite, denounced the Archbishop of Canterbury in a newspaper article in 1834 for his declaration that the Jews were not fit to be trusted with the rights of citizenship (Silberner 31 ). 11. Linda Colley persuasively argues that a greater national consciousness was in evidence in England after 1750, due to a variety of factors - the development of communications and transportation infrastructure, the more widespread dissem ination of print materials (especially newspapers and periodicals), a more mobile population, and the threats of invasion and war ('Whose': 100-3).

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