Jewish Representation in British Literature 1780-1840: After Shylock. Michael Scrivener.

Abstract

Michael Scrivener, Jewish Representation in British Literature 1780-1840: After Shylock (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) vii + 270 $85. Michael Scrivener's Jewish Representation in British Literature is most encyclopedic study to date depicting Jews and Judaism during Romantic period. Although it was once routine (12) to overlook representations of Jews and works by Jewish writers in literary studies, scholarship on this subject in last twenty years has created a much different critical terrain. Yet, as Scrivener demonstrates, much work remains to be done. The sheer volume of primary texts discussed here that have been little explored, or entirely overlooked, is remarkable. In this way, Jewish Representation in British Literature will be an invaluable sourcebook for further research. Following Freudian psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory, Scrivener's principle analytic rubric revolves around notion of ambivalence. The loci for this ambivalence in this context are stereotypes about Jews; most influential example of this phenomenon, Shakespeare's Shylock, thus expresses Europe's conflicted views on commerce, banking, trade, usury, and capitalism (3). Accordingly, Scrivener devotes much of his argument to discussions of common Jewish character types, with separate chapters on the Pedlar, the Moneylender, and the Jew's Daughter as these types are explored by writers of both genders across a spectrum of religious and political affiliation. Hoe these figures are deployed and interrogated during Romantic period ultimately reflects British anxieties about fact that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are era of Jewish emancipation (208), a development which in turn necessitates far-reaching changes in understanding of Britishness itself. The focus on stereotypes here looks back to earlier work such as Frank Felsenstein's Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 16601830 (1995) and Michael Ragussis's more recent Theatrical Nation: Jews and Other Outlandish Englishmen in Georgian Britain (2010). Scrivener takes this emphasis in new directions by underscoring inevitably conflicted nature of such representations, whether they are produced by Jewish or non Jewish writers. The dates indicated in title, 1780-1840, are somewhat misleading insofar as, after a summary of recent criticism in first chapter, chapter 2 reviews 17th century debates over readmission of Jews to England during Cromwell's commonwealth. This starting point helpfully allows Scrivener to outline three responses to these debates--support for readmission by a Jewish author and by a Christian one, and open hostility to readmission by another Christian --that set up analytical parameters at work through chapters that follow. The view that Menasseh ben Isreal is the first Anglo-Jewish is, as Scrivener himself observes, debatable, predicated as it is on Menasseh's two-year stay in London and fact that three publications on readmission in English--two of uncertain provenance--bear his name. Menasseh spells out his reasons for seeking English residence in practical as well as spiritual terms; as Scrivener summarizes, writer seeks To worship freely in synagogue; (2) to advance messianic agenda by inserting Jews where there were none; (3) to pursue commerce; (4) to join as biblical Stranger already existing learned and pious community of (31). But even as he counters historic slanders against Jews such as practice of ritual murder, Menasseh ambivalently depends on other aspects of Jewish stereotype in order to argue for readmission. Christian assumptions about predatory Jewish lending are reshaped into a useful knowledge about business; fears of Jewish violence against Christians are recast into a desire for Christian camaraderie. Unfortunately, as Scrivener's analysis demonstrates, this approach did not preclude rhetorical violence in return by anti-readmission pamphleteer William Prynne, whose A Short Demurrer to Jewes Long Discontinued Remitter into England (1655) buttresses virulent Anti-Semitism with meticulous, supposedly historical detail as to specific Jewish crimes. …