Beyond Deronda?: Victorian Studies and Jewish Chronicles

Abstract

AbstractWhat accounts for the surprising fact that fictional Jews fill the pages of Victorian literature but actual Jews constituted only a sliver of England's population? This article introduces readers to recent scholarship that attempts to answer this question, charting the diverse ways in which Jews were portrayed in the Victorian cultural imaginary. Much of this scholarship pivots around one fundamental contention: that the most significant thing about representations of nineteenth‐century Jewishness is what they have to teach us about nineteenth‐century Englishness. Depicting Jews became a crucial method for Victorians to test some of their guiding assumptions and underlying anxieties about their nationality and its relationship to the categories of race, religion, culture, and territory—categories contested then as now.After a brief survey of Jewishness's rise in literary studies, I discuss current trends in research treating Jewishness and Englishness; such research is now occurring within the fields of both Victorian Studies and Jewish Studies, productively contesting the disciplinary and geographic borders of each. Particular attention is paid to the engagement of new scholarship with issues of gender, principally representations of and by Jewish women, and genre, including the novel's fraught relationship to liberalism. I then explore the way analyses of Victorian Jewishness are increasingly going global, looking to British imperial and cultural involvement in America, Europe, and the Middle East. These moves have in turn provoked a reassessment of both Orientalism and Englishness as a cultural identity. Above all, this article argues for the value recent scholarship offers by continuing to inform and challenge our understanding not only of Jewishness but the many facets of Victorian culture with which it intersected.