Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660-1830 (review)

Abstract

134 SHOFAR Winter 1997 Vol. 15, No. 2 Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm ofOtherness in English Popular Culture, 1660-1830, by Frank Felsenstein. Baltimore: TheJohns Hopkins University Press, 1995. 350 pp. $39.95. Contrary to the benign image of England as the home of common sense and tolerance, the England portrayed by Frank Felsenstein in his superb book on English antisemitism during the "long" eighteenth century had extensive bigotry that was expressed both in reality and even more in culture. The first country to promote the Wandering Jew legend and the blood libel, the first European country to expel all itsJews (1290), England cultivated an antisemitism without Jews until Cromwell engineered the readmission ofJews in the seventeenth century. Felsenstein vividly shows us in nine chapters with 32 fascinating (if also appalling) illustrations of prints and paintings the full spectrum of English attitudes from the powerful remnants of medieval prejudice to the modern dichotomy between liberal toleration and economic (rather than religious) antisemitism . Making intelligent use of recent work on ethnic stereotyping in general and antisemitism in particular (notably Sander Gilman's work), the. author both describes the stereotypes and provides an explanatory context. This book complements well the recent work on English antisemitism of the modern period byJames Shapiro, John Gross, Michael Ragussis, Bryan Cheyette, and Todd Endelman. The England to which Jews were readmitted had already, before a single Jew stepped on shore, a mass of prejudices whose strength derived from the structural logic of nationalism itself that requires an Other by which its identity is known and from a complete ignorance of actual Judaism and real Jews. The antisemitic imagination, abetted by New Testament proof texts, created an evil Jew who assumed many forms: the biblical Judas was associated with the moneylender, usury, and of course deicide; Jews seduced Christian boys for sexual molestation, castration /circumcision, and murder; Jews had a Jewish smell and male Jews menstruated; at Easter Jews desecrated the host and at Passover required Gentile blood for making- matzah; in countless prints, pantomimes, and plays the Jew was portrayed with his red beard as Satan himself, the antiChrist . Felsenstein shows how these medieval attitudes mutated, even weakened in some ways, but continued to survive in some form even into the nineteenth century. In 1824 the daughter of a rabbi was assaulted and forced to eat pork (p. 133). Casual violence short of actual murder against itinerant Jewish pedlars was apparently commonplace well into the nineteenth century (p. 73). Joseph lancaster (1778-1838), the Quaker educational reformer whose model schools were famous, punished student Book Reviews 135 miscreants by dressing the culprit as a pedlar arid then mocking him with the sounds a Jewish pedlar was supposed to have made (p. 252). And of course there was William Cobbett, the most popular radical politician and journalist in England, who for over three decades in the early nineteenth century produced an unremitting stream of antisemitic bile (p. 238). Although Felsenstein also illustrates important movements toward toleration, one cannot forget the brutality of the antisemitism, even if it stopped short of actual pogroms (however, in 1769 a Jewish pedlar was roasted over a fire as "hot bacon" was forced down his throat-po 133). When Parliament passed the so-called Jew Bill of 1753 that provided means for the very small number of foreign-born Jews to petition government for citizenship, it did not anticipate the outpouring of popular Jewhatred that forced Parliament the very same year to repeal the bill. Where did this hatred come from? The arts seem to have contributed, as Felsenstein traces a line of antisemitic images from William Hogarth's Harlot's Progress (1732) to theatrical representations of the same images which also appear in a popular novel (chapter 3). As we already know from John Gross's study, the portrayal of Shylock by the actor Charles Macklin produced a stereotype ofimmense power. From 1741 until almost the end of the eighteenth century Macklin's evil Shylock reactivated the medieval Jew which was easily blended with the modern, secular antisemitism emphasizing the Jew as economic exploiter (chapter 7). Although there. is more to their writing than its· antisemitism, it is nevertheless true that...