'The Jew' in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa by Eitan Bar-Yosef, Nadia Valman

Abstract

MLR, 105.1, 2010 229 upon by the author. A detailed index concludes this splendidly informative,well designed, and well-bound monograph that includes five revealing photographic illustrations. Northern Illinois University William Baker 'TheJew' inLate-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: Between theEast End and East Africa. Ed. by Eitan Bar-Yosef and Nadia Valman. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2009. xii+241 pp. ?50. ISBN 978-1-4039-9702-9. The volume edited by Eitan Bar-Yosef and Nadia Valman comprises eleven contri butions revolving around the theme of Tate-Victorian and Edwardian representa tions of "The Jew"' (p. 24), and the Jewishpresence inmining activities in southern Africa at the end of the century, coinciding with the second Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. The editors' introduction lays down in a prolix fashion the framework for the subsequent discussions. Adrienne Munich's 'Jewsand Jewels:A Symbolic Economy on the South African Diamond Fields' is noteworthy for its all too brief citations from J.R. Couper's neglected and interesting novelMixed Humanity (1892). Munich interestingly con trasts Couper's conventional racial taxonomies' (p. 30) with Anthony Trollope's accounts in his South Africa (1878) and other writing (pp. 30-35), especially that relating to the assumed Jewish traitof hoarding jewellery. An important omission fromMunich's and other essays in the volume is anymention or discussion of the short stories or fiction of Leonard Merrick (1864-1939). Merrick was influenced by Couper, whom hemet in theKimberley mining area, and movingly uses Kimberley and its surroundings as the setting of, for instance, his short story 'The Laurels and the Lady' (1896), portions of his firstnovel Mr. Bazalgette's Agent (1888), and his seventh novel The Worldlings (1900). The same locale is examined inNadia Valman's 'Little JewBoys Made Good: Im migration, the South African War, and Anglo-Jewish Fiction'. Valman draws upon work by J. A. Hobson on the South African War, B. J.Farjeon, Samuel Gordon, and others in order to 'explore the competing meanings attached to the Jewish entrepreneur inpublic discourse at the time of the South African War, the political assumptions that they encoded and the different rhetorical forms inwhich they were articulated' (pp. 45-46). Lara Trubowitz's focus is on 'debates surrounding the passage of anti-immigra tion legislation in 1904 and 1905, laws thatwere known collectively as the "Aliens Acts'" (pp. 46-65). She pinpoints 'the techniques by which civil antisemitism is constituted within the debates' (p. 65) in an elaborately entitled essay 'ActingLike an Alien: "Civil" Antisemitism, theRhetoricized Jew,and Early Twentieth-Century British Immigration Law'. Nicholas J.Evans's 'Commerce, State and Anti-Alienism: Balancing Britain's Interests in the Late-Victorian Period' is concerned to demonstrate that 'com merce was as crucial to late-Victorian as anti-alienism', interestingly pinpointing 230 Reviews the 'interplay between [. . .] three elements?state, commerce and anti-alienism' (pp. 80-81). Ben Gidley's 'The Ghosts of Kishinev in the East End: Responses to a Pogrom in the Jewish London of 1903' utilizes responses in the JewishChronicle and other contemporary sources to the brutal Kishinev massacre that took place during theRussian Orthodox Easter of 1903. Simon Rabinovitch's 'Jews,Englishmen and Folklorists: The Scholarship of Jo seph Jacobs and Moses Gaster' is concerned with the folklore work of these two writers. Rabinovitch's account demonstrates how Gaster 'was confident enough to be not only an English folkloristwho was Jewish like Jacobs, but also an English folklorist of the Jews' (p. 126). Perceptive analysis of Israel Zangwill's non-fiction prose and complex response to Zionism is evident inDavid Glover's 'Imperial Zion: Israel Zangwill and the Origins of Territorialism', and inMeri-Jane Rochelson's 'Zionism, Territorialism, Race, and Nation in the Thought and Politics of Israel Zangwill' (Rochelson is the author of the fineA Jew in thePublic Arena: The Career of Israel Zangwill (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008)). The final three contributions are as illuminating as the restof thevolume. Jasmine Donahaye minimizes Welsh anti-Semitism in '"By Whom Shall She Arise? For She is Small": TheWales-Israel Tradition in the Edwardian Period'. Attempts to locate a Zionist homeland on theAfrican continent preoccupy Eitan Bar-Yosef's 'Spying Out the Land: The Zionist...