An Intertextual Approach to Evolving Representations of Jews in British Fiction, 1701-1876
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Jews and the English Nation: an Intertextual Approach to Evolving Representations of Jews in British Fiction, 1701-1876 Aaron Samuel Kaiserman Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in partial fulfilment of the requirements for a doctoral degree in English Department of English Faculty of Arts University of Ottawa © Aaron Samuel Kaiserman, Ottawa, Canada, 2016 ii Contents Abstract iv Acknowledgements v Introduction 1 Chapter One The Precedent of Shylock 12 The Jew of Venice and the Jews of England 20 The “Jew Bill” Controversy and its Effects 29 Benevolent Jews on the Stage 44 Chapter Two Defining Jewishness in the Late Eighteenth Century 56 Jews and anti-Jacobinism 61 William Godwin’s Appropriation of Jewishness 70 Universalized Jewishness in George Walker’s Theodore Cyphon 79 Chapter Three Gothic Fiction and the Wandering Jew 86 Wandering Jews and Benevolent Jews: Melmoth the Wanderer 92 Sympathy for the Rebel Apostate in Romantic Poetry 101 Chapter Four “What is a Jew” 112 The Roots of Prejudice: Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington 118 The Debts of History: Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe 144 Chapter Five Anglo-Jews, or Jews in England? 168 Jewish Self-Fashioning in the Imperial Context: Scott’s The Surgeon’s Daughter 174 Jewish Independence: Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Leila 182 iii Hebraism, Hellenism, and the Hebrews: Benjamin Disraeli’s Theories of Race 192 Jewish Nationalism: George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda 210 Conclusion The Shifting Ground of Jewish Representation 220 Appendix William Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress (plate 2) and Election (plate 4) 230 Percy Shelley’s Transcription of Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart’s Der Ewige Jude 231 Bibliography 235 iv Abstract Recent scholarship on the representations of Jews in British Romantic fiction has explored the relationship between the radical changes in Jewish characterization of the period and shifting cultural values. Judith Page, for example, considers the effect of Romantic notions of sentiment, detailing especially how Jews test the limits of sympathetic feeling, and Michael Ragussis has linked the surge of interest in Jews to their value as rhetorically useful subjects in relation to debates surrounding English and British identity. Such studies at times draw attention to the impact of older characterizations of Jews on the new, typically to reinforce claims that relate changing Jewish portrayals to particular cultural and historical developments. Yet, the impact of literary precedent itself has not been fully considered as a leading factor in inspiring new ideas about Jewish characterization. This study takes as its centrepiece the development of the sympathetic or benevolent Jew in the Romantic period, best characterized by Richard Cumberland’s sentimental comedy The Jew (1794), and the historical novels Harrington (1814), and Ivanhoe (1819) by Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott respectively. These works draw heavily on pre-existing Jewish-themed texts, notably Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1598). While the play’s Jewish villain Shylock exerts a powerful and well-documented influence on later Jewish characters, the relevance of these Shylockian imitators merits more minute investigation in terms of their impact on the gradual transformation of ideas about Jews in fiction. For this reason, this dissertation takes a long period of history as its subject in order to emphasize that innovation in Jewish portrayal results not from ongoing social change alone, but equally from the interplay of past literary influences and developments in style and genre. v Acknowledgements The germ of this study originates with several seminars and lectures that introduced me to some of the issues here discussed, and so I thank the professors at Carleton University who subtly and perhaps unknowingly helped shape this project: Arnd Bohm, Sarah Casteel, Julie Murray, and Pat Whiting. I wish to thank especially my supervisors, April London and Ian Dennis, for their support, patience, advice, and guidance throughout this project. As well, I thank the University of Ottawa and the department of English for granting me the opportunity and resources to pursue this research. 1 Formerly the Israelite in novels was as accurate a representative of his race, as was the frog-eating French dancing master or the howling wild Irishman of ancient farces. He was a coiner, a buyer of stolen goods, a trainer of young thieves, a pettifogging attorney, a sheriff’s officer, a money-lender, a swindling financier. He was a Jew, a man with no other thought than greed for money, no other sense of honour than that which is said to exist among the class to which he was compared, and with scarcely a soul to save. If young, he was red-lipped, with greasy ringlets, the embodiment of covetousness and rapacity, with seldom one ennobling trait to redeem the repulsive picture. The delineation was as truthful as if a Whitechapel costermonger had been held out as the type of British merchants. To make a Jew the hero of a story, or even to endeavour to enlist the sympathies of the reader in his favour, was contrary to the canons of fiction. (James Picciotto, Review of Daniel Deronda in Gentleman’s Magazine 1876) Introduction In his exhaustive study of the history of anti-Semitism, Anthony Julius identifies England as a “continuously innovative” leader in anti-Semitic expression (xlii). 1 England may, as Julius argues, be the originator of some of Europe’s most influential anti-Jewish tropes, but, it may also have been the first European nation to attempt to confront such prejudices in its literature. There was no widespread persecution of Jews in England after the edict of expulsion in 1290, but English culture maintained a strong civic and literary antipathy to Jews well into the Romantic era. The return of Jews to England after the Civil War (1642) could have prompted re-evaluation of this customary anti-Jewish attitude, but the Jews’ presence only became a matter of public interest with the widespread controversy surrounding the passage and repeal of the Jewish Naturalization Act in 1753-1754, which polarized public opinion and inflamed anti-Jewish expression. The history and aftermath of the Jewish Naturalisation Act demonstrates that, while 1 Henceforth, this study avoids the term “anti-Semitism” as anachronistic in describing casual stereotypes about Jews that inform the texts discussed below. This decision follows from Bryan Cheyette’s dismissal of the term because of “the inherent moralizing attached” to it. Anthony Julius likewise assesses the term, coined at the end of the nineteenth-century, as “problematical. It implies a Jewish racial identity, and it dignifies vicious and degraded sentiments with the status of an ideology. It was invented, indeed, to serve precisely these objects” (xlii). “Anti- Semitic” also carries connotations of malicious intent that would unjustly be ascribed to many of the authors discussed in this dissertation. Instead, the phrase “anti-Jewish” is used to describe negative depictions of Jews in order to deemphasize the influence of a specific ideological motivation. 2 Jews did enjoy respectability in some circles, the popular voice was against Jewish integration into English society. Opponents of the act drew on a large corpus of commonplace anti-Jewish tropes to defeat the Bill, despite the fact that the Jew Bill only benefitted “a few wealthy merchants, at most”, while the public outcry it produced demonstrated a deeply felt anxiety over the place of Jews in British society (Endelman, Georgian 76). While the Jew Bill immediately increased hostility toward Jews, the long-term consequences were quite different. Jewish representations in the second half of the eighteenth century may have been largely derogatory, but the stereotypes became worn through frequent repetition, and this enabled writers to think more creatively and more critically about Jewish subjects. Stereotypes persisted into the nineteenth century and beyond, but they became mixed with more sympathetic impulses. As well, a number of other social and literary developments during the Romantic period contribute to the rapid growth in the variety of contexts and rhetorical positions in which Jews could be placed. Through analysis of the trajectory of changing representations of Jews from the eighteenth into the nineteenth century, this study examines how and why these changes occured and the impact they have on the development of British fiction. In addition, this dissertation considers how new trends in Jewish portrayal intersect with developing ideas about nationalism and the Jews’ ambiguous relationship to host nations. Edgar Rosenberg’s and Abba Rubin’s early studies of Jews in British fiction note the emergence of positive Jewish characters at the turn of the nineteenth century and demonstrate how such figures exert an influence on later portrayals. More recent work on Romantic portrayals of Jews has attempted to situate such Jewish characters more clearly in the context of authorial oeuvres and cultural developments. Michael Scrivener expands Rosenberg’s and 3 Rubin’s arguments by demonstrating how stock Jewish figures are reinvented with more complexity in Romantic literature and relates these transformations more closely to their fictional antecedents and to contemporary real-life inspirations. Judith Page considers Jewish characterization as an effect of Romantic notions of sentiment and the literary imagination, detailing especially how Jews test the limits of sympathetic feeling. In several works, Michael Ragussis links the surge of interest in Jews as rhetorically useful subjects in the Romantic period to a long-term development in the concept of English and British identities. Sheila Spector’s three edited collections of essays about Jews and Judaism in relation to Romantic culture complement these longer studies. Such works demonstrate an increasing interest in and relevance of the study of Jews in relation to British Romanticism. Building upon these and other scholars’ work, this study broadens the discussion by considering the long-term developments in British fiction that affect how Jews are portrayed.