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 Europes
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, Scotts 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 Fontanes novels. Fontanes 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 Fontanes 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: Lombrosos Lantisemitismo 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 Lombrosos 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 womens rights and social progress.
- Max Nordau and the Generation of Jewish Muscle by Marilyn
Reizbaum
- Many scholars have pointed out that Nordaus 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,
Nordaus idea of degeneration underwrote the very anti-semitism that in
his view made necessary the new Jewish state. Nordaus
(unwitting) production of the very type he would wish to dispelthe
deviated typeacts 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 Barkers Regeneration, Hugh Hudsons "Chariots of
Fire" and James Joyces 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 Prousts 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 Drumonts 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
Prousts 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
- Péguys 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, Péguys 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 Samuels liberal philosophy and his responses
to social and political issues centred upon Londons East End, especially
the anti-alien campaigns against Jewish immigration. A brief coda
speculates on Zangwills likely influence upon Samuels 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.