UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title "Upon the Threshold": Anglo-American Jewish Women Writers' Counterhistories of Liberal Citizenship and Jewish Nationalism in England and the United States, 1880-1923 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9bj757k6 Author Sharick, Amanda Kaye Publication Date 2017 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE “Upon the Threshold”: Anglo-American Jewish Women Writers’ Counterhistories of Liberal Citizenship and Jewish Nationalism in England and the United States, 1880-1923 A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Amanda Kaye Sharick June 2017 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Susan Zieger, Chairperson Dr. Joseph Childers Dr. Michael Alexander Copyright by Amanda Kaye Sharick 2017 The Dissertation of Amanda Kaye Sharick is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As the first person in my family to graduate from college and now from graduate school, I am privileged and honored to complete this dissertation and have many people to thank for their support along the way. I remain deeply grateful to my dissertation committee for their academic and moral support over the last nine years. To my dissertation chair, Susan Zieger: thank you for your guidance and feedback on this expansive project—it is infinitely better because of you. Your generous mentorship was exactly what I needed and provided invaluable opportunities to develop as a scholar. To Joseph Childers: our conversations over the last twelve years have shaped and encouraged my intellectual and professional development, and I am grateful for your time and patience, especially on all topics Daniel Deronda . To Michael Alexander: thank you for guiding me in my pursuit of Jewish Studies at UCR, where there was no such department. I appreciate the opportunity to have worked with you and to have had your support and trust throughout this process. I would also like to thank members of the UCR English department. To Tina Feldman, our administrator-saint extraordinaire: I am ever grateful for your guidance throughout graduate school—you saved me from so many rookie mistakes! To Jim Tobias and George Haggerty: thank you for encouraging me to apply to the Ph.D. program and giving of your time to help me succeed. To Traise Yamamoto: your lecture “Why We Need the Humanities” has been and will continue to be a source of inspiration. Thank you, as well, to UCR’s Graduate Research Mentorship Program and Dissertation Year Fellowship Program for providing funding for the completion of this project. iv To my colleagues, Laura Westengard, Katherine D. Johnston, Giulia Hoffmann, Kimberly Hall, and Anne Sullivan: thank you for being such generous mentors, teachers and friends. To my UC Santa Cruz team, Professor Murray Baumgarten and Katharine G. Trostel: I am very grateful to have collaborated with such visionary scholars. Working with you has been a highlight of my career, taken me all over the world, and opened so many professional opportunities, including a publication in the journal Partial Answers . Parts of chapter three first appeared as an article, “Confronting the ‘Jewish type’: Israel Zangwill, Composite and Mirror Photography,” in Partial Answers Vol.13, Issue 1, January 2015. I also want to express gratitude to the directors of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, Drs. Shulamit Rheinharz and Sylvia Barack Fishman, for funding my research for chapter four, providing travel grants to overseas conferences, and granting me a summer fellowship to work with historian Joyce Antler, who I thank for generous comments and feedback on chapter four of my dissertation. A special thanks must go to the coterie of Anglo-American Jewish literary scholars whose work and advice on various pieces of this project have influenced its final form: Meri-Jane Rochelson, Sarah Gracombe, Karen Weisman, Esther Schor, Richa Dwor, Heidi Kaufman, Bryan Cheyette, Sara Imhoff, and Sunny Yudkoff. Many thanks, as well, to my Hebrew teacher, Sigalit Davis, for her invaluable help and patience. To my Harvard team, Professor Jonathan L. Walton and Cecily Walton, Lisa Valela, Professors Davíd Carrasco and María-Luisa Parra, and Lucy Forster-Smith: thank v you for supporting me with your words of wisdom and helping me balance working full- time with the completion of this project. To my family and friends: thank you for all the contributions and sacrifices you have made to help me reach this goal. To my mother, Sandie: thank you for encouraging me to find joy throughout this process and for believing in my project. To my father, José: thank you for inspiring my love of learning and teaching me how to work hard for the things that matter. To my step-mother, Liz: thank you for encouraging me to have ambitions and then showing me how to plan to achieve them. To my step-father, Mark: thank you for supporting and encouraging me to do my best work. To my in-laws, Debbie & Brent: your faith in me has meant more than I can express. To my grandparents: I know—I am finally finished! Many thanks to my Grandma Kay who encouraged me from a young age to go to college, and to my Grandpa Fred who has suggested I leave it someday. To my Grandma D, Grandma Sandefer, and Nama: thank you for always supporting me. To my wonderful siblings (& their children): you have helped me feel connected to the wider world during this process. Thank you for cheering me on! And most importantly, to my partner and spouse, Jorden Sharick: you have been by my side from the beginning and supplied endless encouragement, cups of coffee, comic relief, patience, and selflessness, all while in your own graduate program. Thank you for going on this journey with me, for being my generous interlocutor, copy editor, and advocate. Your love and support has made all the difference. vi To the women across time and place whose work has made this project possible vii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION “Upon the Threshold”: Anglo-American Jewish Women Writers’ Counterhistories of Liberal Citizenship and Jewish Nationalism in England and the United States, 1880-1923 by Amanda Kaye Sharick Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, June 2017 Dr. Susan Zieger, Chairperson This project illuminates Anglo-American Jewish women writers’ (AAJWW) critical appropriation of counter-history—which David Biale argues is a Jewish hermeneutic for transvaluing historical records to expose the ethical structures of the present—in their writings to critique and expand definitions of citizenship and emerging Jewish nationalisms in England and the United States between 1880 and 1923. In chapter one, “Contingent Sympathies: Politics and Poetics of Pseudepigrapha,” I examine Amy Levy and Emma Lazarus’s use of counter-history and pseudepigraphic dramatic personation to challenge the gender and racial biases of authorship and citizenship with their poetry. In chapter two, “Exposing the ‘Secret History’: Translation and Biblical Midrash,” I utilize translation theories put forward by AAJWW to expose how each relied on a counter-history hermeneutic to expand the role of women within and beyond their Jewish communities. In chapter three, “Novel Counter-histories: Contesting the ‘Jewish Type’ in the works of Amy Levy and Israel Zangwill,” I examine Levy and viii Zangwill’s novels as counter-histories to Joseph Jacobs and Francis Galton’s composite photographs of the “Jewish type” and expose how imperialist narratives mobilize the gender and racial bias of liberal subjectivity. In chapter four, “Counter-Photography: History as Identity in Early Alternative Zionist Discourses,” I trace the legacy of Jacobs’s “Jewish type” in early political Zionist “fauxtographic” histories—which aimed to rewrite the discourse of modern Jewish identity—and then contrast these histories with AAJWW’s historical works to expose what was being left out of this discourse of identity, namely Jewish women and indigent Jewish refugees. In chapter five, “From Plotzk to Boston : Mary Antin’s Human Document: Immigration, Genre, and Citizenship,” I situate Russian-Jewish author Mary Antin’s memoir within the transatlantic contexts of British and American fin-de-siècle immigration policies and the burgeoning literary sub-genre of invasion fiction to claim her work as a counter-history of the “invasion of America” by Jewish immigrants. In the coda, “On the Edge of Empire: Hannah Barnett Trager & Citizenship in Pre-Mandatory Palestine,” I foreground Trager’s 1923 memoir, Pioneers in Palestine , as a counter-history of pre-mandate Palestine that challenges the gender, class and racial biases of political Zionism’s vision of Jewish nationalism. ix Table of Contents INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE Contingent Sympathies: Politics and Poetics of Pseudepigrapha 28 CHAPTER TWO Exposing the “Secret History”: Translation and Biblical Midrash 70 CHAPTER THREE Novel Counter-histories: Contesting the “Jewish Type” in the works of Amy Levy and Israel Zangwill 109 CHAPTER FOUR Counter-Photography: History as Identity in Early Alternative Zionist Discourses 184 CHAPTER FIVE From Plotzk to Boston : Mary Antin’s “Human Document”: Immigration, Genre, and Citizenship 233 CODA On the Edge of Empire: Hannah Barnett Trager & Citizenship in Pre-Mandatory Palestine 317 Bibliography 331 x LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: From “Heinrich Heine and Woman.” The American Jewess, Vol. 2, Issue 7, April 1896, p. 338. Public Domain . 66 Figure 2: (Partial) Galton’s composites of the Jewish type (Jacobs 1885: 269). Reprinted with permission from Cambridge University and University College, London. 109 Figure 3: Galton’s composites of the Jewish type (Jacobs 1885: 269). Reprinted with permission from Cambridge University and University College, London. 116 Figure 4: Galton 1878: 97. Public Domain . 128 Figure 5: Israel Zangwill, hinged-mirror photograph, late 1890s. Courtesy of the Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem.