Jewish Culture and History Abstracts

Jewish Culture and History

Abstracts of articles in Issue 6.1

Special Issue: The Image of the Jew in European Liberal Culture, 1789-1914 Editors, Bryan Cheyette and Nadia Valman

Introduction by Bryan Cheyette and Nadia Valman
Towards a Comparative Jewish Literary History: National Literary Canons in Nineteenth-Century Germany and England by Nils Roemer
- In response to emerging nationalism in the early nineteenth century, scholars of Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism) defined Jewish literature not within respective national canons, but rather within the realm of Weltliteratur. It was in this framework that Jewish literary studies took shape. Racial and religious definitions of Judaism were actively employed, refashioned and reinvented by Jewish scholars rather than simply adopted. During the last decades of the century, however, a new emphasis on regional studies generated more narrowly defined accounts. These attempts to reconcile Jewishness with English and German traditions combatted anti-semitic representations of Jewish internationalism with studies that described Jews’ integration in their respective national societies and their influence on those cultures. Defining the history and literature of the Jews within specific national contexts also asserted its exceptional providential and religious character. The collection and creation of a national Jewish heritage and literary canon carried out by nineteenth-century Jewish scholars contributed to the imagining of a Jewish trans-national community and, eventually, to the formation of modern Jewish cultures.
Africans, Indians, Arabs, and Scots: Jewish and Other Questions in the Age of Empire by Michael Galchinsky
- The phenomenon of diaspora did not originate in the post-colonial or post-industrial period but was already a prominent feature of the post-Enlightenment, post-French Revolutionary periods of national consolidation and imperial expansion. The Jewish Question, however, is often discussed by contemporary scholars as though it were the central concern of Europeans’ discourse of marginality. Yet the status of Jews as citizens and subjects was not the only -- and was not at all points the most significant -- question around which non-Jewish Europeans organised their responses to increasingly visible diasporas. This paper argues that Europeans frequently saw the Jewish Question as a subset of a larger set of questions about how Europe’s ‘others’ might be brought into relation with the emerging nation-states and empires. This larger set of questions included debates about the social and political status of freed slaves, of immigrants from the colonies, and of non-conforming religious groups. Taking England as a test-case, I demonstrate the inalienability of British discourses on Indians, Africans, and Arab Muslims from the Anglo-Jewish Question during the Regency and Victorian periods. Analysis of the work of writers like Burke, Carlyle and Macaulay suggests that whether they were liberal, radical, or conservative, these writers used semitic representations in their polemics and literary texts as part of a larger project: the project of disciplining the borders of the nation-state.
The Homeless Nation: The Exclusion of Jews in and from Early Nineteenth-Century Germany Historical Fiction by Jefferson S. Chase
- This essay focuses upon depictions of Jews and Jewishness in the most important genre of the early nineteenth-century German literature: historical fiction. The significance of historical narratives, and the prominence of Jewish figures within them, is the result of the specific political and cultural situation of German- speaking Europe. Jews/Jewishness were not just the object onto which existing concepts of identity were projected, but rather the crux of a proto-national redefinition of identity for authors and audience. The work of Grillparzer, Spindler and Hauff is compared with their source, Scott’s Ivanhoe, revealing how they employed Jewish figures to resolve, symbolically, conflicts of identity within the ‘native’ community. Although these authors all promote, to varying degrees, an ethos of tolerance and Enlightenment toward Jews and Jewishness, their narratives also endorse the exclusion, indeed expulsion of Jews from fictionally represented society. I conclude that a latent anti-semitic impetus conditioned the genre of historical fiction as a whole. The difficulties that Jewish writers of the period encountered when working in the same genre suggest the same conclusion. The artistic impasses and commercial failures suffered by Heine and Auerbach stemmed in part from their desire to revise and depart from the standard tropes of historical fiction. Whereas stock Jewish literary figures could be adapted to proto-nationalist narratives, they resisted incorporation into narratives that truly promoted tolerance and inclusion.
Distinctiveness and Change: The Depiction of Jews in Theodor Fontane and Other Bourgeois Realist Authors by Florian Krobb
- Jewish characters, major and minor, references to Jews or social and political matters pertaining to the image of Jews feature in many of Theodor Fontane’s novels. Fontane’s treatment of Jews illustrates that the portrayal of Jewish characters in the works of non-Jewish authors of German ‘Bourgeois Realism’ is, first and foremost, an acknowledgement of the very presence of Jewish people in the German middle-class universe. Secondly, it is an attempt to define the Jews’ position therein. Many of the conflicts and tensions that form the content of these narratives arise out of the discrepancies between the position in society Jews aspired to and indeed occupied in reality, and the position the Christian authors assigned them to. Jews also function as symbols or even icons for complex social and cultural developments like a perceived decline in public morality, the commercialisation of inter-personal relationships, or various other (often ‘scientific’) aspects of (often undesired) ‘progress’. Even though Fontane’s personal attitude towards Jews was ambivalent, bordering on the anti-semitic, his literary works do not deserve this label.
Building the Body of the Nation: Lombroso’s L’antisemitismo and Fin-de-Siècle Italy’ by David Forgacs
- Cesare Lombroso, notorious exponent of theories of atavism and degeneration, published a pamphlet in 1894 on anti-semitism whose stated aim was to rebut contemporary arguments that Jews too were a degenerate subcategory of humans. The Jews, he wrote, were not a distinct racial group but manifested a great diversity of physical characteristics. His essay, however, not only omitted to mention that he himself was Jewish; it also met the arguments of anti-semitism halfway: ‘the character of the persecuted themselves certainly contributed to the persecution’. This article situates the essay in the context of Lombroso’s work in criminal psychology and legal medicine, his strong identification with a progressive idea of the Italian state and the situation of Jews after emancipation in united Italy.
‘Barbarous and Medieval’: Jewish Marriage in Fin de Siècle English Fiction by Nadia Valman
- This essay examines a number of novels by assimilated Anglo-Jewish writers in the late 1880s and 1890s that satirise contemporary Anglo-Jewry through a focus on the failure of Jewish marriage. Novels and short stories by Amy Levy, Cicely Sidgwick (‘Mrs Andrew Dean’) and Leonard Merrick thematise in particular the subjection of Jewish women, which they attribute to the ‘Oriental’ structure of Jewish society and the operation of modern capitalism in the marriage market. These approaches to interpreting contemporary Jewish life derive, I argue, from broader currents in fin de siècle debate about the Woman Question, which frequently deployed ethnographic terms and evolutionary argument, and drew on the figure of the Eastern woman as a paradigm of the oppressed female in ‘primitive’ societies. In representing idealized heroines as victims of an archaic and patriarchal Jewish masculinity, these novels suggest the contours of liberal discourse on women’s rights and social progress.
Max Nordau and the Generation of Jewish Muscle by Marilyn Reizbaum
- Many scholars have pointed out that Nordau’s theories about manliness helped produce, for better or worse, the ‘new Jew’, but few have considered the interface between these theories and those propounded in the earlier and much more widely renowned Degeneration (1892). In a sense, Nordau’s idea of degeneration underwrote the very anti-semitism that in his view made necessary the new Jewish ‘state’. Nordau’s (unwitting) production of the very type he would wish to dispel—the deviated type—acts as a paradigm of retrogression, its own kind of ironic legacy for the twentieth century, the century of progress and ‘making it new’. This paradigm is particularly manifest in the arenas of racial and national identity. This essay considers that legacy in terms of the relationship between athleticism/militarism and racial/national fitness. It examines three twentieth century works that look back to Nordau, directly or indirectly, in order to revisit and/or revise the paradigm of the retrograde or degeneracy: Pat Barker’s Regeneration, Hugh Hudson’s "Chariots of Fire" and James Joyce’s Ulysses, all set or mind-set in the early part of the century.
Textual and tribal assimilation: Representing Jewishness in A la recherche du temps perdu by Edward J. Hughes
- This paper reflects on Proust’s use of Judeophobic and philosemitic rhetoric, considers the ambiguous nature of much of his reflection on ethnic specificity, and suggests that such ambiguity reflects a strategy designed to create a space of cultural hybridity in which a restrictive and homogenized ethnicity can be resisted and undone. Edouard Drumont, whose La France juive of 1886 attracted a massive readership in late nineteenth-century France, insisted on the Jewish threat to nationhood and to family morality. A la recherche itself incorporates Drumont’s discourse of cultural invasion: it accommodates virulent anti-semitism; it puzzles over Frenchness and flirts with the xenophobic instinct; and it toys with the popular prejudice that calls for vigilance in respect of a Jewish infiltration of society. In addition to figures such as Bloch and Swann, the mother in A la recherche is central to Proust’s representation of Jewishness and there are conscious links with the biblical figure of Esther, who heroically intervenes to protect her people from genocide. Her union with Ahasuerus provides Proust with a model of hybridity and a paradigm of tribal survival through assimilation. The lascivious prostitute ‘Rachel quand du Seigneur’ [‘Rachel when from the Lord’] is as exemplary in her own way as the virtuous mother. The overlapping of moral probity and decadence provocatively stands alongside the regular imbrication of what is Jewish and Christian in A la recherche. From the standpoint of hybridity that he occupies, Proust is keenly aware of the social inclusions and exclusions that these tensions generate and his Narrator is caught in a protracted negotiation with these forces. In this light, ambiguity becomes a strategy with an entirely unambiguous function, which is to resist cultural homogenisation. The figure of the transfuge thus works to establish a form of interstitial identity, ambiguity becoming a way of living and a style of writing in an age of ethnic intolerance.
Péguy, the Jews and the Jewish Question by Nelly Wilson
- Péguy’s legendary philo-semitism, unexpected in a man of peasant and Catholic background, may well have its emotional origins in the anti-Jewish mass hysteria unleashed by the Dreyfus Affair. Influenced by Jewish friends, notably Bernard-Lazare, he came to see the Jewish Question as a battle for survival for all minority cultures threatened by liberal philosophies of progress, suspicious of diversity in the name of equality and order. Against them he fought a long-drawn-out battle, with Israel perceived as exemplary survivor continuing to fulfill its unique prophetic role. After his re-conversion to Catholicism, Péguy’s philo-semitism became more problematic: his devotion to Jewish friends remained unchanged but he perceived their cultural and spiritual heritage in a Christian and increasingly unflattering light.
Liberalism, Anglo-Jewry and the Diasporic Imagination: Herbert Samuel via Israel Zangwill, 1890-1914 by David Glover
- Although Herbert Samuel has often been described as the first practising Jew to be appointed to a British Cabinet, the relationship between his Jewishness and his politics was extremely complex, particularly in the early years of his career. A partial comparison of his political beliefs with those of his contemporary, the novelist and activist Israel Zangwill, reveals some of the tensions between Samuel’s liberal philosophy and his responses to social and political issues centred upon London’s East End, especially the ‘anti-alien’ campaigns against Jewish immigration. A brief coda speculates on Zangwill’s likely influence upon Samuel’s later Zionist sympathies.
The Representation of Jews on Edwardian Postcards by Estelle Pearlman
- This paper discusses the portrayal of Jews on picture postcards in Britain from the early twentieth century until the 1920s, with particular reference to the period around and after the Aliens Act of 1905. Some of the continuities between eighteenth and nineteenth-century popular representations of Jews and Edwardian depictions are examined, as well as postcards produced for the specifically Jewish market. Considering the postcard as an historical resource reveals that throughout the country, and not only in places where Jews settled, the British masses at the beginning of the twentieth century experienced widespread exposure to negative stereotypical images of immigrant Jews.