Depictions Of Jews Research Articles

‘A fine fellow … although rather Semitic’: Jews and antisemitism in Jules Verne’s Le Château des Carpathes and Bram Stoker’s Dracula

ABSTRACT This article examines the dynamics of fin-de-siècle European antisemitism through the lens of two gothic novels, Jules Verne’s Le Château des Carpathes and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The complexities of Verne’s depictions of Jews are placed in the wider context of persecution, integration and exclusion, and economic characterisations of ‘the Jew’ in Western and Eastern Europe. This is compared with the visceral fear of the ‘other’ as expressed in Dracula. The differences between implicit and explicit prejudice in the two texts are considered as components of the wider antisemitic discourse present in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century.

A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History

A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History

Book Review: “The Tragic Couple”: Encounters between Jews and Jesuits. Edited by James Bernauer and Robert A. Maryks

Acknowledgements List of Illustrations List of Contributors Introduction James Bernauer and Robert A. Maryks Part one: JESUITS AND NEW CHRISTIANS 1. The Watershed of Conversion: Antonio Possevino, New Christians, and Jews Emanuele Colombo 2. Negotiating Relationship: Jesuits and Portuguese Conversos-A Reassessment Claude B. Stuczynski Part two: JESUITS, JEWS, AND MODERNITY 3. Polemics of Confessionalization: Depictions of Jews and Jesuits in Early Modern Germany Dean Phillip Bell 4. The Suppression of the Jesuits and the Enlightenment Discourse of Jewish Emancipation: Two Parallel Historical Phenomena Diego Lucci 5. Jesuit Influence on Italian Jewish Culture in the 16th and 17th Centuries Gianfranco Miletto 6. From Kaifeng to Shanghai via Rome and Paris: Jesuits and the History of Judaism in China Jeremy Clarke Part three: HATEFUL VISIONS 7. Visions of Hate: Jews and Jesuits in the European Feuilleton Lou Charnon-Deutsch 8. Jesuits, Jews, and Communists: Portrayals of Jesuits and Other Catholic Religious in Nazi Newspapers during the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39 Beth Griech-Polelle Part four: IN THE SHADOW OF 20TH-CENTURY CATASTROPHE A. French Conflicts 9. French Jesuits and Action Francaise Peter J. Bernardi 10. A Jesuit Spiritual Insurrection: Resistance to Vichy James Bernauer B. Italian Struggles 11. The Anti-Semitism of La Civilta Cattolica Revisited David Lebovitch Dahl 12. Transforming Anti-Semitism: The Civilta Cattolica after the Shoah, 1945-65 Elena Mazzini 13. Vatican Radio and Anti-Semitism during the Second World War Raffaella Perin 14. Pietro Tacchi Venturi, Mussolini, Pius XI, and the Jews David I. Kertzer 15. The Jesuit Pietro Tacchi Venturi and the Rescue of Italian Jews Robert A. Maryks C. American Contrasts 16. Correct and Christian: American Jesuit Support of Father Charles E. Coughlin's Anti-Semitism, 1935-38 Charles Gallagher 17. Accepted and Welcome: The Unlikely Response of the Jesuits at Marquette University to Jewish Applicants during the Interwar Years, 1920-40 Michael J. Burns Epilogue 18. Joseph Bonsirven, SJ: A Pioneer of a Theologian of Judaism before Vatican II Therese Andrevon Index

Sweat: A Memory of Waste

Sweat: A Memory of Waste

‘The Unrest-Cure' and Saki's Uneasy Anti-Semitism

Depictions of Jews in the Edwardian fiction of Saki (Hector Hugh Munro, 1870–1916) have been overlooked or condemned out-of-hand. Yet what is usually stark anti-semitism in Saki's fiction turns, in ‘The Unrest-Cure’, on its purveyor and audience, satirising anti-Jewish feelings in Munro's bourgeois world. Saki exposes a dark lining in the golden idyll of Edwardian rural England while subverting the Jewish cabal stereotype. But as Munro and Saki blur into a strident, jingoistic voice with the approach of war, there is a return to the unironic, overt anti-semitism of earlier stories, culminating in the reactionary, anti-cosmopolitan attacks of When William Came (1913).

Reframing Rembrandt: Jews and the Christian Image in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (review)

Reviewed by: Reframing Rembrandt: Jews and the Christian Image in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam Walter Cahn Michael Zell . Reframing Rembrandt: Jews and the Christian Image in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Pp. xix + 264. The relationship between Rembrandt and the Jews and Judaism has long been the object of interest, indeed of fascination. That the painter's interpretation of biblical themes lavishes a remarkable and, for its time, uncharacteristically sympathetic attention on his Old Testament protagonists is acknowledged in the vast literature that his work has inspired, while his unknown but markedly patriarchal old men, scholars in their studies, or street beggars have often been thought to be depictions of Jews, as the titles given to them in books and museum labels indicate. Such is the case of the much-admired double portrait known as The Jewish Bride (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum), whose subject remains conjectural. Certain facts of the painter's biography do give some substance to what one surmises to have been more than an incidental contact with the Jewry of his time. When, in 1631, he moved from his native Leiden to Amsterdam, he established himself on the main thoroughfare that traverses the Jewish Quarter, the center of an initially modest but thriving Sephardic community, where eight years later he purchased the imposing house that still bears his name. He would thus have been in a good position to observe the people of his surroundings, in whom he perhaps saw an authentic embodiment of biblical Jewry, and to interest prominent members of the community in his services. Evidence of such contacts are the four engraved illustrations he provided for the publication in 1655 of Menasseh ben Israel's messianic tract Piedra gloriosa, an etched portrait of the physician Ephraim Bonus (Bueno), and an earlier etching of a man in half-length sometime thought to represent Rabbi Menasseh. Of his personal religious persuasion, nothing reliable is known. His parents appear to have been affiliated with the established Dutch Reformed Church, but he never seems to have been an active or demonstrative member of that body, while the whole tenor of his art and imagery suggest, as has been generally assumed, that he shared the ideals of a dissenting, more evangelical spirituality. The opening chapter of Michael Zell's book, a revised version of his Harvard Ph.D. dissertation, investigates the role of Amsterdam Sephardi Jews as patrons and collectors of art. This discussion largely duplicates the evidence assembled and considered in the initial pages of Richard I. [End Page 742] Cohen's Jewish Icons (Berkeley, Calif., 1998) and it might be judged to be somewhat tangential to the author's larger theme. But if the topic makes only a small contribution to the project of "reframing Rembrandt," it documents a major shift of attitudes among Jews toward the plastic arts and their entry within the circuits of production and consumption of artistic goods in this cosmopolitan milieu. Wealthy Jews acquired paintings of Old Testament subjects for their homes and commissioned portraits of the eminent and the learned. The magnitude of the change is best measured among the surviving images by the significant number of likenesses of rabbis, which might have aroused the greatest objection. Zell addresses next, and in perspicuous fashion, the attention lavished on Jews and Jewish subjects by Rembrandt and the painters among his contemporaries, evidenced, for example, by images of the Amsterdam Sephardi synagogue and of the Jewish burial grounds at Ouderkerk outside the city. Rembrandt, he notes, was primarily interested in the human figure rather than in architecture, but he and painters of his circle "were attracted to the otherness embodied by the city's Jewish residents and captured features of dress and appearance contemporaries recognized as signs of Jewish difference" (pp. 40–41). Readers with some familiarity with the Rembrandt literature of past generations will be uncomfortably aware of the frequency of its uncritical appeal to essentializing physical traits and gestural habits by which Jews in Rembrandt's paintings might be recognized. In line perhaps with now-prevailing sensitivities concerning racial and ethnic categorization, Zell's Jewish "types" possess no marked physiognomic features or particularities of deportment, and only sartorial marks of...

Rembrandt's Jews (review)

Reviewed by: Rembrandt's Jews Kalman P. Bland Rembrandt's Jews, by Steven Nadler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 250 pp. $25.00. Readers of this exemplary book are in for a series of pleasant surprises. They start at the very beginning, with the book's title. Despite the grandeur suggested by its two terms, the title is restrictive and modest. In choosing it, Steven Nadler, an intellectual historian and celebrated biographer of Spinoza, seems to have been guided by the ancient rabbinic principle of ethically parsimonious speech: emor me'at ve-'aseh harbeh. The book accomplishes far more than its title promises. The book indeed probes deeply into all aspects of Rembrandt's personal, financial, and artistic relationships with Amsterdam's Jews. The book also probes to equal depth and with equally impressive sophistication many other aspects of the seventeenth-century intersection between Dutch Jewry and Dutch culture. Borrowing a term from Salo Baron's monumental social and religious history of the Jews, the book might fairly and more prosaically have been called "The Multiple Visual Dimensions of Dutch Jerusalem." Consider the List of Illustrations. Of the twenty-five handsomely reproduced black and white figures, seven originate with Rembrandt; of the eighteen even more splendidly reproduced color plates, again only seven originate with Rembrandt. Among the black and white figures are five drawings and etchings produced by Romeyn de Hooghe, including Circumcision in an Amsterdam Sephardic Family, View of the Portuguese Synagogue with Bridge, and The Jews' Cemetery. Among the color plates are two paintings by Emanuel De Witte (Interior of a Church and Interior of the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam) and four paintings by Jacob van Ruisdael (Wheatfields, Landscape with Blasted Tree by a Cottage, and two renditions of The Jewish Cemetery). Admirably avoiding [End Page 131] the common pitfall of using illustrations merely to adorn or accompany the text, Nadler subjects all of the figures and plates to well-informed critical scrutiny. He consistently offers persuasive and insightful accounts of their formal traits and iconographic significance. With Ruisdael's paintings of The Jewish Cemetery and its potentially messianic implications firmly fixedin our mind's eye, Nadler cautiously rejects the messianic implications. He summarizes his general conclusions with these words: "Perhaps. Or maybe Jacob van Ruisdael, that most recognizable of Dutch painters, an artist who saw the sublimity in the flat, low-lying land in which he lived, was, once again, simply exploring the dramatic possibilities of a landscape. If so, he unwittingly contributed—like de Witte with his Synagogue, de Hooghe with his prints of Amsterdam's Jews at services, and Rembrandt with his paintings and etchings of his [Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jewish] neighbors—yet another Dutch icon to the history of Jewish art" (p. 221). Nadler conscientiously specifies what he considers to be the salient characteristics of these Dutch icons. On the one hand, they profoundly differ from the medieval stereotypes and traditional portrayals of the despised Jew: "And then we come to seventeenth-century Dutch art, where we find . . . nothing. Utter plainness. There is a uniformity in the depiction of all walks of life. Ugliness and deformity are there, but they represent the common sins and foibles of all mankind. . . .There is no special iconography reserved for the Jews. The depictions of Jews and their activities are generically no different from those of wealthy regents, middle-class merchants, and indigent laborers. The naturalistic renderings, the settings of everyday life, and the easy integration in their dress, architecture, and habits into Dutch culture make the Jews in the art of Holland's golden age perfectly ordinary" (p. 221). Similar conclusions are reached regarding the stark contrast between Albrecht Altdorfer's sixteenth-century negative depiction of the synagogue in Regensburg and "de Witte's respectful portrayals of the Jewish congregation and the architectural achievement of which it was so proud" (p. 180). On the other hand, Dutch images of the "ordinary" Jews, according to Nadler, are also characterized by profound Dutch affinities—ethnic, political, cultural, and religious—with the Jewish nation. Readers will delight in Nadler's discussion of the many reasons for and multi-faceted expressions of these Dutch affinities, perhaps never as intensely and...

Chaucer, Spain, and the Prioress’s Antisemitism

The goal of the present essay is to demonstrate how unlikely it would have been for Chaucer to have subscribed to the antisemitic views depicted in the Prioress’s Tale. The demonstration consists of three sections. The first section takes a fresh look at textual clues in the fictional response to the Prioress’s Tale within the Canterbury Tales. The second section adduces neglected evidence of intersections between Chaucer’s diplomatic and court-related career and the careers of prominent contemporary Jews in Spain, and also in Anglo-Spanish relations, from the 1360s to the 1390s. The third section examines Chaucer’s surprisingly favorable depictions of Jews in two passages, one from the House of Fame and one from the Prologue to the Treatise on the Astrolabe. These two passages are routinely neglected by commentators on Chaucer’s attitude toward Jews, an attitude too often presumed to be the same as that expressed in the Prioress’s Tale.

PHILIP ROTH, FRANZ KAFKA, AND JEWISH WRITING

What does it mean to be a Jewish writer, but to write in the tradition of Franz Kafka rather than that of normative Judaism? This is a question that finally and fully emerges from the work of Philip Roth with the completion of Zuckerman Bound. Early in his career Roth is accused of being a self hating Jewish writer for his less-than-flattering depictions of Jews. In Zuckerman Bound Roth uses Franz Kafka to position himself on an alternate branch of Jewish writing, a branch that cannot simply be judged on whether it is good or bad for the Jews. The young Philip Roth was not able to formulate the question of Jewish writing to his own advantage. Though he took great pains in lecturing his Jewish critics concerning his goals as a writer,1 he implicitly accepted their definition of Jewish writing. This definition states that the Jewish writer begins with a desire to say something about Jews. The writing in turn can then be judged as to whether what is being said is good or bad for the Jewish people. If the writing is good for the Jews, the writer is a noble Jewish writer; if the writing is bad for the Jews, the writer is a self-hating (even antisemitic) Jewish writer. Roth argues that he is concerned with writing about people; if some of these happen to be Jewish, their Jewishness is part of the story and is not to be generalized to concern the entire Jewish people. He thus says of 'Epstein' (one of the stories in Goodbye, Columbus): 'I write a story of a man who is adulterous to reveal the condition of such a man. If the adulterous man is a Jew, then I am revealing the condition of an adulterous man who is a Jew' (RM 152). Roth writes stories not because he is Jewish but because he is an artist who expresses himself in words. Putting the matter bluntly, Roth concludes (in 1963 at age 30): 'I am not a Jewish writer; I am a writer who is a Jew.'2 And yet, as Philip Roth's career progresses, not only does 'Jewish' seem to be an apposite description of his fiction, but Roth demands that he be respected as a Jewish writer. In a review of Zuckerman Bound Harold Bloom can therefore write: