The Image of the Jew in American Literature: From Early Republic to Mass Immigration.
by Louis Harap.
Jewish Publication Society. 586 pp. $10.00.
The study of literary stereotypes is an easily abused form. Seeking to isolate condemnable attitudes toward a minority group wherever such attitudes may be found, the sociologist of literature tends to become indiscriminate in what he studies—treating folklore, mass culture, and serious literary work alike—and to assign equal weight to expressions of wildly unequal import. These dangers become magnified when the study of stereotypes is undertaken for overtly polemical reasons by those who have been wounded by them; when the purpose becomes to expose prejudice for the sake of vindication.
The Jewish use of literary surveys to vindicate wrongs—at least, to “set the record straight”—is by now an exhausted, though not very venerable, tradition. In this country interest in the genre began in the 1880’s with the start of mass immigration from Eastern Europe, when the German Jewish community had become sufficiently established to be indignant at the negative stereotypes of Jews found in literature, while simultaneously threatened by the fact that unwashed multitudes of their co-religionists were newly arriving on these shores. In The Jew in English Fiction (1889) Reform Rabbi David Philipson asked: “Because there are some vulgar, uncultured people among the Jews, is this a reason that such are to be specially represented as Jews? Because some Jews have grown suddenly rich, and are loudly ostentatious, is this a cause that the flagrant injustice be done, that they, with these characteristics, be held up by the name of their religion?”
From the beginning most of this critical literature, meant to protect group interest, has been obsessed with the relationship between the fictitious and the real. Louis Harap’s compendium, The Image of the Jew in American Literature, is the latest contribution to this literature; it is also a compendium of all the varieties of willful reading, contentiousness, and ways of mistaking the belabored and the obvious for revelation that such a partisan use of criticism is prone to.
The sad thing is that this book could have been important. Obviously it represents several years’ labor. Consider its scope: Harap claims inclusivity from George Washington’s welcoming letter to the congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, to Abraham Cahan’s 1917 novel, The Rise of David Levinsky—the vital period of Jewish adjustment to America and of America’s adjustment to Jews. The recurrent images of the Jew in popular fiction are here catalogued recurrently: the crafty Jew who sets his business on fire for the insurance money; the Jew with wonderful glittering eyes; the Jew who lives in Oriental splendor behind his shabby ghetto façade. And beside this we are offered not only Emily Dickinson’s line about an orchard at dawn that “sparkled like a Jew,” but the image of Mark Twain’s being swamped by his immigrant audience at a performance of The Prince and the Pauper at the Educational Alliance. Equally chronicled are the patriotic novel written in 1858 which depicts Haym Salomon speaking in dialect; H. Pereira Mendes’s Looking Ahead—a fictional attempt to combine Bellamy and Zionism; and Harold Frederic’s perceptive eyewitness account of the pogroms in Russia published in the New York Times. We are told that in the 1880’s James Russell Lowell was looking for Jews under his bed, while Henry Harland, enthralled with Ethical Culture, was publishing novels about Jews under a “Jewish” pseudonym—and selling.
The documentation, then, is thick, but Harap is unable to analyze or interpret the evidence he has amassed. For one thing, he is oblivious to the need to distinguish among serious novels, adventure stories, vaudeville acts, essays, journal entries, and private correspondence. And, for another, he confounds malicious intent with mere habit or the desire to pander to mass taste. Thus a single remark in Hawthorne’s English notebooks on the “repugnance” he felt toward Jews is read into the entire corpus of his work; Harap concludes that by implicating Miriam in The Marble Faun in sin, and casting her vaguely in the image of the Wandering Jew—“the product of centuries of hostility toward Jews”—Hawthorne was unconsciously showing his true, reprehensible feelings. Loyal to the myth that all major American writers at the turn of the century were virulently anti-Semitic, Harap similarly takes Henry James to task for, among other things, not stating his pro-Dreyfus convictions for the public record. And so it goes.
A measure of Harap’s failure is his inability to incorporate the best critical work already done in the field. Rudolf Glanz, for example, has written extensively and solidly on the Jew in American folklore, including an essay published fourteen years ago on the Wandering Jew that is much more to the point than the chapter in Harap’s book. Yet nowhere does Harap draw on Glanz’s insights or the information from newspapers and popular sources that Glanz has unearthed. Then there is Edgar Rosenberg’s From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction, a book so clear and penetrating that one would have thought it would set the standard for all subsequent work on Jewish “images.” Yet Harap dismisses it in a single page. Harap also seems overanxious to take issue with Leslie Fiedler, whose pamphlet, The Jew in the American Novel, has a suggestive treatment of some of the material in Harap’s purview.
Harap, in sum, identifies literature with historical fact and disallows any complexity to individual feeling that might fall outside the prejudices established by mass sentiment. Rightly approached, he implies, The Golden Bowl is no different from a dime novel: the author’s feelings about Jews, which in turn reflect the Zeitgeist, may be determined without reference to a qualifying literary or dramatic context. This is a Jewish version of the Marxist view of literature. Indeed, in his first book, Social Roots of the Arts, Harap wrote that the function of the critic is “to dispel . . . obscurity by exposing the class [now read “anti-Semitic”] expression of the artist, the social origin, and determination of his work and its function in society.” In the end no one, not literature, not the Jews, is served by this sort of thinking.
