Jewishness Contested: The 1771 Chelsea Murder, Jewish Masculinity, and Jewish Civil Integration

Notes on Contributors

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Englishness and The Victorians

Reviews and Short Notes

The modern historiography of the origins of British national identities seems riven with contradictions and paradoxes. First there is a major chronological problem. Is the forging of Britishness to be located in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth centuries? Second, there is a difficulty in the compilation of such identities. Are they to be found in negative reactions to the perceived contemporary identities of others or in positive, if mythic, readings of ethnic history? Third, can there be a British identity at all when the cultural identities of what may be called the sub-nationalisms or sub-ethnicities of the United Kingdom seem to be forged at exactly the same time? And fourth, did the formation of the British Empire and the vast expansion of British imperialism in the nineteenth century tend towards the confirmation of the identity of Greater Britain or of the Welsh, Irish, English and Scottish elements that made it up?

Religion and religious discourse contributed meaningfully to the formation and definition of British national identity in the nineteenth century. “The center of Victorian discourse, in which all questions were implicated and to which all road led, was religion.”1 Important to that ideology of Englishness was the cultivation of “Distrust, even hatred, of papist and the papacy,” according to Richard Helmstadter. “In the nineteenth-century, anti-Catholicism was closely bound up with the Irish question, as well as with the tendency of Protestant Britons of all political parties and all denominations to identify their anti-Catholic venom with a self-satisfied celebration of British liberty.”2 England’s sense of itself—England’s Englishness—involved the way religion, and especially Protestantism, factored into nationness. “Protestantism was,” Linda Colley writes, “the foundation that made the invention of Great Britain possible,” forging “an unquestioned equation,” according to Gauri Viswanathan, “of Englishness with mainstream Anglicanism.”3 Not surprisingly, Colley commences her seminal study Britons with Protestantism, noticing that what cemented the nation was neither geography nor racial identity but religion, essentially Protestantism: “it was this shared religious allegiance … that permitted a sense of British national identity. … English Francophobia,” for example, had much to do with the sense that France was a Catholic country.4

Sir Orfeo and English Identity Dominique Battles Scholars have long noted how the abduction of Queen Heurodis in the Middle English Sir Orfeo is as much, if not more, a political crime as a personal one, and how the loss of Heurodis very quickly turns into the loss of a kingdom.1 The nature of the crime attests to this. Rather than taking her outright, the Fairy King approaches Heurodis in the orchard, takes her against her will on a tour of his kingdom, then returns her to the orchard, only to then steal her again the next day. The intervening time turns what would have been a private act (i.e. an abduction/rape) into a public and political act, as Heurodis reports to King Orfeo on the extent of the Fairy King's holdings, his "palays … castels & tours, / Riuers, forestes … / & his riche stedes ichon" (lines 157–61), and as Orfeo assembles an army into a defensive maneuver.2 Orfeo's failure the next day to protect the queen becomes, therefore, not simply a personal loss but a military defeat of sorts, witnessed by hundreds of fighting men, to a foe whose land holdings, as far as we can tell, outclass Orfeo's own. The invasion of Orfeo's realm, the failure of his forces, and the subsequent exile of the king himself clearly mirror the storyline of political conquest. In this article, I explore how the land holdings, castles, and military strategies surrounding this crime, among other aspects of the poem, to some extent cast the central conflict between Orfeo and the Fairy King in cultural terms that suggest an [End Page 179] awareness of racial difference between Anglo-Saxon and Norman long after the Conquest. In order to explore the Anglo-Saxon aspect of Sir Orfeo, it is necessary to establish that as late as the early fourteenth century, when Sir Orfeo was written, an awareness of ethnic difference between the Normans and the Anglo-Saxons prevailed. While the French influence on English society and literature in the post-Conquest period remains indisputable, recent studies have argued for the persistence of Anglo-Saxon cultural identity well beyond the Conquest. Nick Webber, for instance, explores how the inescapable cultural conflict that resulted from the Conquest served to solidify and polarize English and Norman identities, from both perspectives, throughout the colonial period.3 Hugh M. Thomas explores several important texts that uphold English honor against the backdrop of rampant prejudice against the English as rustic, militarily inept, and incompetent.4 (Of course, the Normans more or less created this model of Englishman by killing off most of the native English aristocracy.) The subject of ongoing English resistance to Norman dominance is a growing area of study, chiefly among historians, and one that holds important implications for literary scholarship of the Middle English period. A select body of scholarship has begun to explore the survival and expression of this "Englishness" in post-Conquest English literature. Thorlac Turville-Petre has written extensively on the survival and assertion of an English (i.e. Anglo-Saxon) national identity in opposition to the Norman, and earlier Danish, invaders in a host of literary, as well as historical, texts and manuscripts.5 His study of the famous Auchinleck manuscript, which preserves the earliest and best version of Sir Orfeo, demonstrates just how pervasive native English identity could still be, even as late as the early fourteenth century.6 Mark Amodio's recent study argues that Anglo-Saxon poetry did not, in fact, die with the Norman Conquest. Instead, it went underground, from which it resurfaces [End Page 180] in the Middle English period in the form of themes (e.g. exile) and story patterns (e.g. the return song) that appear in Sir Orfeo.7 Most recently, Robert Allen Rouse explores the survival and proliferation of the memory of Anglo-Saxon England in the romances of the fourteenth century. Examining the Matter of England romances, among other texts, Rouse explores how English identity is negotiated, revised, but nevertheless preserved well beyond the Conquest. He argues that "the Anglo-Saxon past, far from being marginal to post-conquest English culture, occupied an important role within the...

Reviewed by: Jewishness and Masculinity from the Modern to the Postmodern by Neil R. Davison Debra Shostak (bio) Jewishness and Masculinity from the Modern to the Postmodern, by Neil R. Davison. New York and London: Routledge Publishers, 2010. xi + 262 pp. $113.00 cloth. “‘What is a Jew in the first place?’” the protagonist of Philip Roth’s The Counterlife ponders: “the sound ‘Jew’ was not made like a rock in the world—some human voice once said ‘Djoo,’ pointed to somebody, and that was the beginning.”1 Roth’s Joycean “Djoo” suggests the questions that Neil R. Davison raises in his perceptive and stimulating Jewishness and Masculinity from the Modern to the Postmodern. Taking the “Djoo” as the male Jew, Davison asks: who is the Jew as a historically constituted, objectified, and racialized subject making the transition into modernity? How does the hint of mockery in Roth’s phonetic spelling translate into a gendering of the Jew, whose internalized position departs from the hyper-masculine Euro-American ideal? Davison pursues these questions through the confluence of racial, gendered, and religious constructions of Jewish masculinity appearing in the work of male writers, both Jewish and gentile, from the modern to the postmodern eras. Chapters focused on George Du Maurier, Theodor Herzl, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Roth probe how the discourses of the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have feminized the male Jew, and, in turn, how this construction of the Jew’s racial and gendered subjectivity affects his encounter with the modern world in each writer’s political and ethical imaginations. Drawing on an impressive array of materials—from cultural history, psychoanalysis, Judaic sources, philosophy, journalism, and letters, and citing such scholars as Sander Gilman, Daniel Boyarin, David Biale, and Emmanuel Lévinas, as well as influential turn-of-the-century work by Sigmund Freud and Otto Weininger—Davison paints a complex portrait of fin de siècle, modern, and postmodern Jewish masculinity.2 To do so, he explores intersecting binaries—Rabbinic/Reform (Halachic/Haskalah) Judaism, as well as “authentic/inauthentic, racial difference/humanity, hyper-male/feminized-male, colonial/postcolonial, and Diaspora/Zionist” oppositions (2). Indeed, each chapter is built around a dense interweaving of sources and conceptions of Jewishness, so that my summaries below can scarcely capture the nuances of Davison’s analyses. On balance, however, he argues that “gentile and Jewish male writers renegotiated masculinity by engaging the feminized Jew in their [End Page 379] works” and finds that the culturally assimilated Jewish writers forged their identities “through a hybrid Jewish masculinity combining the essence of Rabbinic edelkayt [the gentle, bookish, Talmudic masculine ideal] with strains of the politically active, liberal or leftist Western male” (14, 19). Davison’s thesis is illuminating and affords some fascinating stories. Chapter 1 reads George Du Maurier’s bestselling novel of 1894, Trilby, alongside the Dreyfus Affair, which began the same year.3 The cultural anxieties stoked by the rhetoric of race and gender link Trilby’s depiction of the sinister Jew, Svengali, with the threat the French perceived in Captain Alfred Dreyfus, wrongfully convicted of spying for Germany. Davison names a new category for the Jew, the “homme/femme fatale,” who is “malignantly feminine in [his] perverse sexual powers and creative genius for disguise and imitation” (27). He attributes Svengali’s dirty, money-grubbing, sexually ambiguous, predatory depiction, like the Dreyfus Affair, to the developing hysterical belief that “degenerate” Jews were fostering a world conspiracy to feminize European culture. As a complementary narrative of fin de siècle Europe, chapter 2 explores the work of Herzl, who is credited with founding Zionism. Herzl, known largely for his nonliterary writing, enables Davison to stake out the polar terms of male Jewish representation. Although Herzl struggled with an internalized image of his own Jewish racial effeminacy, Davison finds that he also engaged with the role of the Judaic religious tradition in his vision for a re-masculinized Jew and a nationalist cause. Davison argues that Herzl’s messianic vision, derived from the Judaic doctrine guiding Jews to “help other nations toward a spiritual enlightenment” and a “rational reconciliation of humanity,” forecast a Jewish state to “replace racial, gendered, and other...

Michelet, Fabienne. 2006. Creation, Migration, and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. $99.00 hc. xiv + 297 pp.Lavezzo, Kathy, 2006. Angels on the Age of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000-1534. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. $65.00 hc./$29.95 sc. xiv + 191 pp.As is well known, in his influential 1983 book Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson placed the emergence of the concept of nationalism at the end of the eighteenth century. While generally accepting the conclusions of Anderson with respect to modern manifestations of nationalism, researchers in various disciplines have increasingly sought in the decades since Imagined Communities came out to broaden and complicate the notion of nationalism, or at least of national identity, and to identify versions of it in other historical and cultural contexts. In doing so, they have amply demonstrated that there are other perspectives on the idea of nation than those associated with modern Europe. Fabienne Michelet, in one of the books under consideration here, goes so far as to contend that hegemonic processes and attempts at delineating a national community are of all times (2006, 12). The two books reviewed in this article relate to the issue of perceptions of national identity in England. They take their place among important contributions in recent years that identify moments and processes associated with an emergent sense of English identity prior to the late-eighteenth-century, and, eschewing modern myths of origin, seek to disentangle such moments and processes from their ideological appropriation and annexation in the period of the development of 'Andersonian' nationalism, particularly in the nineteenth century. In exploring the theme of identity they both make innovative use of constructions of geography evident in the periods studied.Among such earlier moments and processes, particular attention has been paid to the early modern period (notably by Bernhard Klein), the later Middle Ages (as in the volume Imagining a Medieval English Nation, edited by Kathy Lavezzo), the thirteenth and early fourteenth century (by Thorlac Turville-Petre), and, above all, Anglo-Saxon England (with seminal contributions from Nicholas Howe, Sarah Foot and Kathleen Davis). Within Anglo-Saxon England, scholars studying constructions of national identity have focused particularly on the period of King Alfred (the late ninth century) and that of AElfric (the late tenth to early eleventh century), and have built too on earlier work by Patrick Wormald, who had identified Bede, writer of the 'foundational' Ecclesiastical History of the English People in the early eighth century, as a key inventor of the English. The book by Kathy Lavezzo reviewed in this essay sweeps from Anglo-Saxon England through to the later Middle Ages, as does Catherine Clarke's recent Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700-1400. Another notable recent contribution to the debate about emerging English identity has come in a perceptive essay from Nicole Guenther Discenza, A Map of the Universe: Geography and Cosmology in the Program of Alfred the Great, attending, as do the books under review here, to notions of center and margin.Apprehension of the concern for national identity in the medieval period has been distracted by too unreflective an acceptance of Anderson's particular definition of nationalism and also, as studied notably by Patrick Geary and Alien Frantzen, by the muddying effect of romantic constructions of early national history, which achieved their high point in the era of 'nation forging' in the nineteenth century, mythologizing what were seen as originary periods in the early medieval past. Through the application of cultural theory and careful analysis of texts from the medieval period itself, the books under review get us beyond such limitations and provide ways of seeing how medieval communities might have imagined themselves. …

Canton in China was an important port for trading during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and became home to ships from all over the globe, as well as to export agencies, commercial and domestic residences, and embassies. This chapter discusses the ships and architecture of Canton port during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through an examination of select paintings. Using detailed visual analysis of paintings, the chapter identifies the buildings constructed along the coastline by referring to documentary and archived sources that describe the city structure. Finally, the chapter considers the archaeological artefacts found at shipwrecks which provide specific insights into to the forms and types of ships built at that time.

Cunning and Disorderly: Early Nineteenth-Century Witch Trials of Joseph Smith

Cunning Distortions: Folk Christianity and Witchcraft Allegations in Early Mormon History

Wakefield's Offspring

Reviews: Historical Theory, a Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature, Malory's Morte D'Arthur: Re-Making Arthurian Tradition, Writing the Reformation: Actes and Monuments and the Jacobean History Play, Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court, 1590–1619, Who Killed Shakespeare? What's Happened to English since the Radical Sixties, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700, the

Reviewed by: Empire and Imperial Ambition: Liberty, Englishness and Anti-Imperialism in Late-Victorian Britain by Mira Matikkala A. Martin Wainwright (bio) Empire and Imperial Ambition: Liberty, Englishness and Anti-Imperialism in Late-Victorian Britain, by Mira Matikkala ; pp. viii + 288. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2011, £59.50, $100.00. For nearly a generation, historians have backed up Linda Colley’s central assertion in her seminal article, “Britishness and Otherness: An Argument” (Journal of British Studies 31.4 [1992]), that wars and imperialism played a crucial role in uniting the regional identities of the British Isles in contrast to the Other that British soldiers and merchants encountered abroad. Mira Matikkala complicates this narrative of the construction of British identity by focusing on opposition to imperialism during its height in the late nineteenth century. In contrast to Colley, she argues that late nineteenth-century England had two identities, one imperial and the other constitutional. Matikkala builds on Miles Taylor’s “Imperium et Libertas? Rethinking the Radical Critique of Imperialism during the Nineteenth Century” (The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 19.1 [1991]), which argues that late nineteenth-century British radical opinion was concerned with the detrimental effects that British imperialism—and the authoritarianism and militarism associated with it—were having on the constitutional structure of British government and domestic society. In doing so, however, Matikkala distinguishes between the anti-imperialist sentiments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The former, she argues, was culturally chauvinist in its assumption of the superiority of British culture and institutions: “the sole fact that anti-imperialists were against imperialism because it was ‘un-English’ implies a sense of cultural superiority.” The latter, on the other hand, emphasized the injustice of “the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised” (5). Since Matikkala’s emphasis is on the public debate over imperialism, she focuses on published sources, such as books, pamphlets, and articles from the period, rather than private correspondence. She divides her treatment of the subject into three parts. The first focuses on the economic debate, in which she identifies two major strains of thought opposing imperialism. One, beginning with Adam Smith and extending through Richard Cobden and John Bright, argued pragmatically that the costs of empire outweighed the benefits. The other, including William Digby and the Indian-born member of parliament, Dadabhai Naoroji, argued morally that Britain was draining the Empire, particularly India, of its resources. Ironically, therefore, although both arguments opposed empire they arrived at opposite conclusions regarding [End Page 503] its financial effects. The second part, focusing on the intellectual debate, distinguishes between old liberals, such as Herbert Spencer and John Morley, and new ones, such as William Clarke and John Atkinson Hobson. Both groups opposed international intervention, but the former did so in the context of supporting small government both at home and abroad. The latter, however, saw government intervention as necessary for providing justice at home. Some in this group were indistinguishable from socialists in their attitude toward empire. The final part explores the practical political aspects of anti-imperialism. Both pro- and anti-imperialists claimed to be the true English patriots, the former defending Britain’s interests abroad, and the latter its constitution at home. Matikkala highlights the limits of late nineteenth-century anti-imperialism, which often paradoxically supported emigration to the settler colonies but opposed the extension of empire in tropical Africa and Asia. Anti-imperialists regarded the dominions as pioneering extensions of British kinship networks which bore English characteristics of legal justice and liberal government. By contrast these same critics regarded the tropical Empire as largely militaristic imposition of authoritarian rule, a rule which threatened to subvert Britain’s liberal constitution much as Julius Caesar had used his conquests in Gaul to subvert the Roman Republic. Matikkala’s conclusion is rather short and leaves a significant question unanswered: were there really two types of English identity during this period or was the older constitutional one an English identity, and the newer imperial one a British identity? If the latter was the case, then Matikkala’s book does not challenge the Othering aspects of Colley’s thesis as much as may first appear. Moreover...

Government House in Calcutta, today known as the Raj Bhavan of West Bengal, was built between 1799 and 1803 as the official residence for the Governor-General of Fort William, then the 1st Marquess Wellesley. It is well-established that Government House is modelled after Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, England, known for the involvement of Robert Adam in its design. A significant fact linking Adam, and therefore Kedleston, with Government House is the previously unacknowledged presence of Adam’s great-nephew, the statesman John Adam, in Calcutta at the time Government House was designed and built. In the exploration of Scottish architectural and familial networks within the British empire, this article seeks to locate the identities of Robert Adam and John Adam within a series of exchanges: between Government House and Kedleston Hall; between public buildings and private houses; between India and Britain; and finally between Scottish, English and British identities. In the context of these exchanges, the study of Government House allows us to connect Robert Adam and John Adam, explore concealments of Scottish identity, and ultimately map previously unknown familial, professional and architectural networks.