Abstract
If Anglo-Jewish history has been marginalized, as Todd Endelman, David Feldman, David Katz, and other historians have protested, Jewish representations and Anglo-Jewish literature have been marginal as well, for many of the same reasons.1 Even the relatively small number of Jews in Britain distracts one from perceiving that around 1800, “London was a major center of urban Jewish life” and that “more Jews lived in London than in any other city” except Amsterdam.2 After the wave of East European immigration in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, London’s Jewish community numbered almost two hundred thousand, where it still remains. The historical experience of Jews in Britain, however, has been instructively meaningful in numerous ways: how the Protestant majority treated one of its minorities from the Jew Bill of 1753 to the Aliens Act of 1905 with a mixture of tolerance and intolerance, in one of the West’s earliest attempts to deal with a multicultural reality; how Protestant millenarianism led to philosemitism’s various constructions of what Jews were and how they should behave; how Jews became part of the British Empire’s involvement in the Middle East; how the Hebrew Bible and the Hebrew language became central in the Protestant attempt to achieve theological coherence in relation to modernity; how Jewish bankers provided essential support to the British state; and how someone like Benjamin Disraeli became one of Britain’s most important prime ministers; and, finally, how from the eighteenth century the mass of ordinary Jews—pedlars, artisans, shopkeepers, factory workers—experienced modernity with its pleasures and perplexities. The historical literature on the British Jews is now too substantial both in terms of its quantity and quality to ignore.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Parts of this chapter appeared in a different form: “Rethinking Margin and Center in Anglo-Jewish Literature”, Romanticism/Judaica: A Convergence of Cultures, ed. Sheila A. Spector (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), 157–68.).
Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2002), 1–13.
David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840–1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994) 142
David Katz, The Jews in the History of England, 1485–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 1–14
James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 85–86.
Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Antisemitism and The Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 391.
Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 583.
Lori Higgins, “Wayne State University Drops Helen Thomas Diversity Award Over Journalist’s Controversial Remarks,” Detroit Free Press (December 4, 2010), on-line.
Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England 1714–1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 198–203.
Michael Ragussis, Theatrical Nation: Jews and Other Outlandish Englishmen in Georgian Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 29.
Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), 15–56.
Michael Galchinsky, The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer: Romance and Reform in Victorian England (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 41–57.
Nadia Valman, The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 51–84.
Heidi Kaufman, English Origins, Jewish Discourse and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel: Reflections on a Nested Nation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 1–11.
Cynthia Scheinberg, “Introduction: Re-mapping Anglo-Jewish Literary History,” Victorian Literature and Culture 27.1 (1999): 115–24.
Eitan Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 1–17, 105–81.
David B. Ruderman attends to the Anglo-Jewish writing of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry’s Construction of Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Sheila A. Spector, ed., British Romanticism and the Jews: History, Culture, Literature (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2002); and The Jews and British Romanticism: Politics, Religion, Culture (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2005).
Ruth R. Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Language and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
Bryan Cheyette, “On Being a Jewish Critic,” Jewish Social Studies 11.1 (2004) 32–51
David Philipson, My Life As An American Jew: An Autobiography (Cincinnati: John G. Kidd & Son, 1941), 18.
Valman, “Semitism and Criticism: Victorian Anglo-Jewish Literary History,” Victorian Literature and Culture 27.1 (1999): 237–38.
Philipson, The Jew in English Fiction, 4th ed. (New York: Bloch Publishing, 1918), 7–8.
Edward N. Calisch, The Jew in English Literature, As Author and As Subject (Richmond, VA: Bell Book and Stationery, 1909), 125–27.
Edgar Rosenberg, From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), 302.
Montagu Frank Modder, The Jew in the Literature of England to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1939), 14.
Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1972).
Harold Fisch, The Dual Image: The Figure of the Jew in English and American Literature (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1971), 51.
M[eyer] J. Landa, The Jew in Drama (New York: William Morrow, 1927), 309.
H[ijman] Michelson, The Jew in Early English Literature (Amsterdam: H. J. Paris, 1926), 1–6.
W. D. Rubinstein, A History of the Jews in the English-Speaking World: Great Britain (Basingstoke, London and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin’s, 1996), 1–35.
See, for example, Claude Lanzmann, “From the Holocaust to The Holocaust,” Telos 42 (1979–80): 137–43; and Barton Byg, “Holocaust and West German ‘Restoration,’” Telos 42 (1979–80): 143–49.
Barton Byg, “Holocaust and West German ‘Restoration,’” Telos 42 (1979–80): 143–49
See Spector, “Glorious incomprehensible”: The Development of Blake’s Kabbalistic Language (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001); “Wonders Divine”: The Development of Blake’s Kabbalistic Myth (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001); Byron and the Jews: A Study in Translation (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010).
Cheyette, Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 206–67
Judith W. Page, Imperfect Sympathies: Jews and Judaism in British Romantic Literature and Culture (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2004), 53–80.
David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry 1780–1840 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), treats this “quid pro quo” phenomenon in great detail.
Bill Williams, “The Anti-Semitism of Tolerance: Middle-Class Manchester and the Jews 1870–1900,”, City, Class and Culture: Studies of Social Policy and Cultural Production in Victorian Manchester, ed. Alan J. Kidd and K. W. Roberts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 74–102.
Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 35–39.
Michael Galchinsky, “Africans, Indians, Arabs, and Scots: Jewish and Other Questions in the Age of Empire,” Jewish Culture and History 6.1 (2003): 46–60.
Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin, Powers of Diaspora: Two Essays on the Relevance of Jewish Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon.
Michael Ragussis, “The ‘Secret’ of English Anti-Semitism: Anglo-Jewish Studies and Victorian Studies.” Victorian Studies 40.2 (1997): 295–307; Rubinstein, A History of the Jews.
Frank Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660–1830 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 252.
Copyright information
© 2011 Michael Scrivener
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Scrivener, M. (2011). Jewish Representations, Literary Criticism and History. In: Jewish Representation in British Literature 1780–1840. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230120020_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230120020_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-28741-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-12002-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)