Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-68ccn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-12T21:34:18.360Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - Bad Jew/Good Jewess

Gender and Semitic Discourse in Nineteenth-Century England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Nadia Valman
Affiliation:
University of London
Jonathan Karp
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Binghamton
Adam Sutcliffe
Affiliation:
King's College London
Get access

Summary

Nineteenth-century literary culture has, in recent years, proved a rich resource for antisemitism studies. From the satanic imagery with which Dickens surrounds his Jewish archcriminal Fagin to Trollope's suspicion of assimilated arrivistes to the racial terror invoked by Bram Stoker's Dracula at the fin de siècle, research has uncovered the persistent threads of hostility to Jews that found expression in novels. And thanks to the work of Sander Gilman, we also know how widely discourses of the diseased and degenerate Jewish body were disseminated through medical and sociological as well as literary texts in the period. What is equally striking about this scholarship, however, is its almost universal assumption that “the Jew” in the text is male. When Todd Endelman writes, for example, that the intellectual arsenal of European antisemitism can be reduced to “a handful of accusations about Jewish character and behavior: Jews are malevolent, aggressive, sinister, self-seeking, avaricious, destructive, socially clannish, spiritually retrograde, physically disagreeable, and sexually overcharged,” the Jew in such descriptions is implicitly masculine. Perceptions of Jews, indeed, are frequently seen as projections of anxieties about masculinity. As Gilman writes in The Jew's Body, his focus is on “an image crucial to the very understanding of the Western image of the Jew at least since the advent of Christianity”: “the male Jew, the body with the circumcised penis.” Where the Jewish woman has been the object of study, masculinity has still been the focus.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Cheyette, Bryan, Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ragussis, Michael, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995Google Scholar
Halberstam, Judith, “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker's Dracula,” in Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken, eds., Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)Google Scholar
Malchow, H. L., “Vampire Gothic and Late-Victorian Identity,” in Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar
Freedman, Jonathan, “The Temple of Culture and the Market for Letters: The Jew and the Way We Write Now,” in The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar
Davison, Carol Margaret, “Britain, Vampire Empire: Fin-de-Siècle Fears and Bram Stoker's Dracula,” in Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoeveler, Diane Long, “Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya: The Gothic Demonization of the Jew,” in Sheila A. Spector, ed., The Jews and British Romanticism: Politics, Religion, Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)Google Scholar
Pick, Daniel, Svengali's Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2000Google Scholar
Felsenstein, Frank, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660–1830 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995Google Scholar
Garber, Marjorie, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (London: Penguin, 1993Google Scholar
Pellegrini, Ann, Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (New York: Routledge, 1997Google Scholar
Prell, Riv-Ellen, Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender, and the Anxiety of Assimilation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999Google Scholar
Antler, Joyce, You Never Call! You Never Write! A History of the Jewish Mother (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007Google Scholar
Chase, Jefferson, “The Wandering Court Jew and the Hand of God: Wilhelm Hauff's Jud Süss as Historical Fiction,” Modern Language Review 93, no. 3 (July 1998): 724–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ockman, Carole, “‘Two Eyebrows à l'Orientale’: Ethnic Stereotyping in Ingres's Baronne de Rothschild,” Art History 14, no. 4 (1991): 521–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Valman, Nadia, The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ephraim, Michelle, Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008Google Scholar
Scult, Mel, Millennial Expectations and Jewish Liberties: A Study of the Efforts to Convert the Jews in Britain, up to the Mid Nineteenth Century (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978Google Scholar
Ragussis, Michael, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1995Google Scholar
Rendall, Jane, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States 1780–1860 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1985CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brendlah, Madame, Tales of a Jewess: Illustrating the Domestic Manners and Customs of the Jews: Interspersed with Original Anecdotes of Napoleon (London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co., 1838Google Scholar
Feldman, David, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture 1840–1914 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994Google Scholar
Eliot, George, Daniel Deronda (1876; repr., London: Penguin, 1995Google Scholar
Arnold, Matthew, Culture and Anarchy (1868; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935Google Scholar
Franklin, Jeffrey, “The Victorian Discourse of Gambling: Speculations on Middlemarch and The Duke's Children,” ELH 61 (1994): 899–921CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reed, John R., “A Friend to Mammon: Speculation in Victorian Literature,” Victorian Studies 42 (1999): 227–55Google Scholar
Rosenberg, Edgar, From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction (London: Peter Owen, 1961)Google Scholar
Tracy, Robert, Trollope's Later Novels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978Google Scholar
Linehan, Katherine Bailey, “Mixed Politics: The Critique of Imperialism in Daniel Deronda,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 34, no. 3 (1992), 323–46 (325)Google Scholar
Wohlfarth, Marc E., “Daniel Deronda and the Politics of Nationalism,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 53, no. 2 (1998): 188–210CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lesjak, Carolyn, “Labours of a Modern Storyteller: George Eliot and the Cultural Project of ‘Nationhood’ in Daniel Deronda,” in Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys, eds., Victorian Identities: Social and Cultural Formations in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1996)Google Scholar
Valman, Nadia, “‘A Fresh-Made Garment of Citizenship’: Representing Jewish Identities in Victorian Britain,” Nineteeth Century Studies 17 (2003): 35–45Google Scholar
Gallagher, Catherine, “George Eliot and Daniel Deronda: The Prostitute and the Jewish Question,” in Ruth Bernard Yeazell, ed., Sex, Politics and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986)Google Scholar
Marshall, Gail, “George Eliot, Daniel Deronda and the Sculptural Aesthetic,” in Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar
Litvak, Joseph, “Poetry and Theatricality in Daniel Deronda,” in Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)Google Scholar
Semmel, Bernard, George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×