The subject of the Jew in fiction has been treated many times before, but the approach has always been much the same. It is typified—perhaps extravagantly—by Rabbi David Philipson’s well-known book, The Jew in English Fiction. For Rabbi Philipson the problem resolves itself into this question: is it permissible to deal with Jews in fiction at all and, if so, to what extent? And Rabbi Philipson comes to the conclusion that it is permissible to this extent: Jews may be written about if they are treated as Scott treated his Covenanters, George Eliot her Dissenters, or Hawthorne his Puritans. That is, Jews may be treated in fiction with some mention of their humorous foibles and vagaries but always with deep respect.
Though other writers have not always had Rabbi Philipson’s professional cause for techiness, nevertheless they, too, have too often made their (sometimes very scholarly) works the vehicle of indignation against the misrepresentation of the Jew, of correction of slander, of contempt for the slanderous authors. Books so intelligent and thorough as Mr. M. J. Landa’s The Jew in Drama, as Dr. Joshua Kunitz’s Russian Literature and the Jew, Dr. Suzanne Howe’s The Jew in 19th-century English Fiction1 are all more or less engaged in vindicating the Jew. These writers have all worked on one fundamental assumption, unfortunately incorrect. They seem to suppose that it was the intention of those who wrote about the Jew to treat the Jew realistically, either as an individual or as a race, and that this attempt had failed because of ignorance and hatred. But it is very doubtful if, apart from such small touches of realism as were absolutely necessary for verisimilitude, there was any attempt made at “truth.” The Jew was never treated in a way that demanded realism or truth—he was never treated as more than a type. The Jew in fiction was always an abstraction, a symbol, a racial stereotype created by men whose chief concern was obviously much less to tell the truth about the character of the Jew than it was to serve their own political and economic interests and their own emotional needs.
In short, the Jew in English fiction is a myth. A myth, not in the newspaper sense of a lie or fabrication, but in the scientific sense of a popular fable, a story “not exactly invented but combined and embellished at will, the actors of which cannot be submitted to the test of real history.” And as with all myths, it tells more of the hopes and fears of the people that needed it and created it than of the Jews that figure in it.
The Jew in English fiction took many shapes, but fundamentally he remained the same. The Jew was a foreigner, the repository and embodiment of all that was outside the established order of good. He fulfilled the mystical social function of scapegoat, on which was bound the sins of the community.
When this is realized it becomes relatively unimportant to discuss the truth or untruth of the portraits of Jews in literature. As well discuss what particular breed of goat was used to carry the wool fillets into the wilderness. The important thing to understand is that, under whatever wool fillets, the goat is a goat—and why it is that men found it important to drive him into the wilderness.
The Jew in fiction, then, fundamentally remains the same—a myth. But he takes many shapes; that is, the myth changes. It will be the purpose of this essay to describe the mutations of the Jewish myth in English literature. This myth is, of course, not gratuitous; almost always it serves some purpose of explanation or protection for its makers. And the particular shape it takes is not accidental. It is a political safety valve, as with the Hitlerites today. It is a bolster to social pride, as with Thackeray. It is a security of righteousness or piety, as in the myth of the Jew as radical or sensualist.
But this essay will not attempt to discover the political or social motive or use of each myth of the Jew. Often enough these will be apparent; to elucidate fully the cause and use of each myth requires another essay. All that will be undertaken here will be the statement of the myths themselves. And even within this restriction this essay will not be complete. Daniel Deronda has been made the farthest boundary of the essay, though certainly there have been plenty of new myths since. But it is believed that a description of the Jew in fiction from Chaucer to George Eliot should amply show how the myth-making faculty works.
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I
The myth of the Jew is discovered in the beginning of English literature, introduced into one of the most charming of the Canterbury Tales, “The Prioresse’s Tale.” A little “clergeon,” son of a poor widow, out of devotion to the Virgin, sets himself to learn the Alma Redemptoris, and this he sings on his way to school through the Jewish quarter. Satan, who has “in Jewes heart his waspes nest,” eggs on the Jews to angry notice of the child; they hire “an homycide” who cuts the child’s throat and casts him in a pit. But by the Virgin’s power he sings the Alma Redemptoris, whereby he is discovered. The guilty Jews are torn to pieces by wild horses and hanged. The story ends with a prayer to St. Hugh of Lincoln
slayn also
With cursed Jewes as it is notable
For it is but a litel while ago.
That the story of Hugh of Lincoln was popular is testified by the existence of twenty-one versions of the ballad, “The Jew’s Daughter.” In the ballad the story is substantially that of “The Prioresse’s Tale” save that, although the dead boy speaks by supernatural agency, the religious note is lacking. By the strength of his kick, little Sir Hugh sends his football through the Jew’s window. He walks about the Jew’s “castell” (a reference to the stone houses which the Jews, especially of Lincoln, built for their defense and which at the time were rare among English dwellings) and sees the Jew’s daughter at the window. She invites him in for the ball, but he replies:
How will I come up? How can I come up,
How can I come to thee,
For as ye did to my auld father
The same you’ll do to me.
This reference to a past murder does not, however, occur in all versions. When once the child is enticed within (by the offer of an apple), the girl lays him on the meat-dressing table and (in most versions) sticks him “like a swine” with a penknife, the orthodox instrument of ballad child-murders. The murderess then wraps him in lead and drops him into a well. But the dead child calls to his distracted mother. In one of the versions, the Jewess takes staff and mantle and prays Heaven to be her guide “unto some uncouth land.”
These two stories of child-murder give us the simplest and most enduring myth of the Jew—the Jew as active anti-Christ, singling out for his villainies the object of Christ’s great solicitude. The ballad story owes its origin to an account in the Annals of Waverly for the year 1255, which tells us that a boy named Hugh was crucified by the Jews in parody of Christ. Matthew Paris, who wrote contemporaneously, also probably got his account from the Annals of Waverly; his version has it that all the Jews of England were invited to the crucifixion; that after the murder they disemboweled the body for magic uses and attempted to bury it, but the earth refused to keep it. They then threw it into a pit, where it was found by the child’s mother. Paris recounts that a Jew named Copyn confessed, and that according to his confession the Jews tried every year to get a Christian child for the paschal lamb. Copyn and eighteen of the richest Jews, says Paris, were drawn to the gallows at the tails of mares and hanged; later the same punishment was visited on twenty-three other Jews. Other accounts accuse the Jew of practicing sacrilege on the Host. In short, the Jew is the active enemy of the Christian and of Christ, and his heart is the dwelling place of Satan.
Several things, however, lift both Chaucer’s tale and the ballad above the simplicity of their sources. Chaucer, always a realistic psychologist, is careful to give his Jews a kind of credibility. For example, they do not act until Satan urges them on; again, they do not crudely commit the murder themselves but employ “an homycide.” The details of the assemblage of the English Jews and of the crucifixion and disembowelment are omitted. And finally, Chaucer, though a topical writer interested in the local events and personalities of his time, goes out of his way to set the story in a foreign land—in “Asye.”
But while the dark instinct of the race mind that lies behind the ballads rejects even more of the chronicle than Chaucer does, it hints at worse. The verse from Version A (quoted above), which refers to the death of Sir Hugh’s father, implies a complication of events and motive of which the chronicles give no trace, a suggestion of more subtle and personal motives than that of crude religious hate. The crime is committed by the Jew’s daughter; the Jew-and-daughter myth is one that develops very strongly, though generally the young Jewess abhors the practices of her father.2
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II
For the writers of miracle plays of the 14th and 15th centuries there were two kinds of Jew—the Jews of the Old and of the New Testament. The former—especially the patriarchs and the kings—were treated with orthodox respect and admiration; the latter with hatred and contempt: Judas was the type of the Gospel Jew. Whether or not red hair was ever a common Hebraic feature, Judas’s legendary red hair was early considered a racial characteristic. Perhaps it served to indicate the diabolic connection. As for the thirty pieces of silver, they became the symbol of the infamy of the medieval Jewish trade in money.
As the world passes from the theological universe of the Middle Ages to the commercial universe of Elizabeth’s time, the myth of the Jew likewise changes from the theological to the commercial. No longer, as in Chaucer and the ballads, is he the anti-Christ acting from unfathomable motives of pure evil. Now he is the wily merchant and moneylender, acting for gain. Stephen Gosson, that dull and violent Puritan of the 16th century who called forth Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poetry, mentions the Jew in his School of Abuse with much violence against the bloody usurer. (The Puritans, of course, were the rising bourgeoisie.) Gerontus, the Jewish moneylender in Robert Wilson’s Three Ladies of London (1584), proves the rule of Jewish depravity by his exceptional good temper. He is pointed out as a decent person among wicked Christians—“Jewes seek to excel in Christianity and Christians in Jewishness.”
The Elizabethan interest in villainy was, however, not satisfied with Judas. The figure which perhaps interested the English Renaissance more than any other was Machiavelli. For the Elizabethans, the unscrupulous, diabolic energy of the Italian historian, as they conceived it (largely at second hand), both truly indicated the general temper of their own politicians and fulfilled a peculiar emotional need. Machiavelli becomes the archetype not only for the political schemer but for every plotting villain, the utmost of what a man might do in devilry; and his legend gives rise to a distinct type of drama which Professor Tucker-Brooke calls Machiavellian tragedy.
With this myth the two previous myths of the Jew amalgamated. The Jew had been Judas, functioning out of pure hate of Christianity, he had been Judas, functioning out of love for money. He remained both these things, but his methods changed. To the malevolence of Judas is added the craft of Machiavelli. He becomes a creature of plots and wits. Before him all virtuous Christian men are helpless, and he can be foiled only by accident or betrayal—or by the shrewdness of a woman.
Barrabas, the protagonist of Marlowe’s Jew of Malta (1590), is, of course, completely representative. Like all of Marlowe’s characters, a person lusting for infinite supremacy, his desire for riches is tempered a little by his love for his daughter and much more by his passion for pure villainy. Having been deprived of the great part of his fortune, he engages on a career of revenge, using his daughter as a pawn. When her lover is killed by her father’s machinations, she retires to a nunnery and the father, to punish her, poisons her and the whole convent. His lust for destruction grows madder and outweighs even his love of wealth; his craft grows with his madness into a maze of evasions, plots, and cross plots until he is betrayed to the awful death he had prepared for others.
Professor Tucker-Brooke conjectures that the figure of Barrabas was perhaps suggested by that of the 16th-century Portuguese Jew, Juan Miques (Michesius). Having been persecuted in Portugal, in Antwerp, and in Venice, Miques settled in Constantinople. Enormously wealthy, he gained great influence over the Sultan and was made Duke of Naxos and the Cyclades. It was he who instigated the attack on Cyprus in 1590. But the career of Miques was not isolated; there were enough rich and powerful Jews to foster a belief that they were concerting their power and energies into a plan for a Jewish world control. Barrabas says:
They say we are a scatter’d nation!
I cannot tell, but we have scrambled up
More wealth by far than those that brag of faith.
There’s Kirriah Iairim, the great Jew of Greece,
Obed in Bairseth, Nones in Portugall
Myself in Malta, some in Italy,
Many in France, and wealthy ever one:
Ay, wealthier far than any Christian. . . .
The author can find no fitter person to speak the prologue to this representation of the Jew than Machiavelli himself who, after explaining his philosophy, begs grace for the Jew:
And let him not be entertained the worse
Because he favors me.
The prologue by Machiavelli contains the indication of a new element in the myth of the Jew—the element of knowledge.
The popular mind has always felt that knowledge and sin were closely related, if not identical. The fall from Eden and the destruction of the overwise Oedipus embody the feeling, and the medieval Church, with its condemnation of the pride of worldly intellect, expressed it. Machiavelli declares:
I count religion but a childish toy
And hold there is no sin but Ignorance
and Barrabas, in his famous brag of all his past gratuitous wickedness, tells us that he has practiced two learned professions. As a physician, he “enrich’d the priests with burials,” and as a military engineer, he slew friend and enemy with his stratagems. This suspicion of the learning of the Jew is one that grows to considerable proportions and still exists. In our own day, Mr. G. K. Chesterton and the Commonweal of New York feel that the works of Freud and Einstein are diabolic Judaic attack, on the good order of the universe.
The Merchant of Venice developed the Elizabethan myth of the Jew very little further. The Machiavellian superman disappears and the Jew becomes “more human.” But the elements of the myth remain intact—the influence of Marlowe on Shakespeare is obvious. We have the father-daughter situation; the father’s confusion of his daughter and his treasure (compare Barrabas’s “Oh girle, oh gold, oh beauty, oh my blisse!” with Shy-lock’s rather vaudevillian paraphrase, “My daughter, oh my ducats”); the sexual desirability of the daughter; and the betrayal of the father by the daughter. We have the same racial arrogance and hatred of Christians. Shakespeare does, however, develop an apology and justification motif, for it must be noted that however much the Jew is contemned and whatever servile manners he assumes, he is endowed with the proud position of aggressor (“Hath not a Jew eyes,” etc.), which Malowe but crudely suggests.
In The Merchant of Venice, the identification of “Jew” with “physician” (it is generally supposed that the play was suggested by the execution of the Spanish Jew, Lopez, Elizabeth’s physician, for a plot to murder the queen) reintroduces the flesh-and-blood theme. This fear of vivisection had already been given expression in Thomas Nashe’s novel, The Unfortunate Traveler; or, Jack Wilton (1594), in which the hero lodges with a Jewish physician.
But the tendencies of the Elizabethan age toward fantasy and extravagance, the high-flown writing of Spencer, Sidney, Marlowe, were curbed by the rising power of Puritanism. The myth of the Jew as malevolence incarnate wears out with other Elizabethan myths. By the end of the 16th century, the Jew has disappeared entirely as a major figure in literature. His appearance had never been frequent, for he had, after all, been forbidden the country in 1290, not to return until the time of Cromwell, 1655, when his numbers remained small and his lot hard. For many years now we get him chiefly in reference, and there is even an attempt to treat him “realistically.” That is to say, if he is still vengeful and greedy after the old myth, yet he he is no longer heroic in size; now he is become merely a petty usurer, a broker, a mercenary poisoner, a pimp.
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III
It is not until the romantic period that the Jew emerges again as a definite myth. Romanticism is a word already so vague that no definition can save it, but we may accept the fact that there was a concerted change in European literature in the latter part of the 18th century and that the manifestations of the new literature were in some way related to each other and consequent on much the same social and political changes. We are also safe in saying that romanticism usually involved, on the one hand, a return to a past supposedly dark and glamorous, an interest in the unusual and strange, in the supernatural and horrifying; on the other hand, an interest in the simple and the good. The myth of the Jew paralleled this dichotomy. The Jew was useful material for both tendencies. For the first, he was exotic and, even better, “Oriental”—that is, a person of strange rites and dark mysteries. He was anti-Christian and therefore demonic. He was learned in the Kabbalah, and his knowledge of the half-magic art of the physician was legendary. For the second tendency, he was appropriately miserable, wretched, and outcast.
The deep interest which the exotic tendency manifested in the demonic did not imply a love of the devil—though in Byron and in many other writers it went even to this length. But it did imply a certain frightened tolerance of him, and it was, on the whole, with much this attitude that the exotic romantic writers undertook the Jew, when, as was inevitable, they did take him up.
Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) started the interest in bleeding statues, talking portraits, clanking chains, and all the familiar mummery of terror-romanticism, and then the English romanticists came under the influence of the Germans, who, for their part, were turning more and more to folklore to get the materials of horror. Following their example, the English turned to their own past and “primitive” literature—to literature of the 16th and 17th centuries, the weird scenes of Shakespeare, the mortuary scenes of Webster, the devils and villainies of Marlowe, the demonic scenes of Milton. And with the return to the Elizabethans and to the ballads, they naturally rediscovered the possibilities of terror that lurked in the Jew. Terror-romanticism was not content with merely the materials of the old literature. It wanted also to recapture the tone. It sought to create figures as impressively huge as those of Elizabethan literature. In this it had a certain success; indeed, its characters are huger than those of its models, but only as the Brockenspecter is huger than the traveler who casts it. With this desire for grandiosity, it is scarcely surprising that terror-romanticism, using the Jew, should use him in his most striking manifestation—his survival through all the centuries of Western history, his “eternality.”
Thus it is that the Wandering Jew became for terror-romanticism the type of the mythical Jew, just as Machiavelli had been the Jewish type for the Elizabethans. The Machiavellian Jew and the Wandering Jew are at many points similar—in their power, their knowledge, their rhetoric—but they are different in this: that the Machiavellian Jew is purely a villain and the Wandering Jew, though he has committed a great and inexplicable crime, is repentant and even benevolent.
The figure of the Wandering Jew is a legendary one, dating back to the year 1228.3 Roger of Wendover, in his universal history, Flores Historiarum, tells us that in that year there came to England a certain Armenian bishop who told that Cartaphilus, the guardian of Pilate’s gate, was still alive and that he had had converse with him, The story that Cartaphilus related was that when Jesus was being brought back from judgment, he had struck him, saying, “Go faster, Jesus, go faster. Why dost thou linger?” Jesus had looked at him severo oculo and replied, “I am certainly going, but thou shalt tarry till I come.” Doomed by this to live until the Second Coming, Cartaphilus goes every hundred years into a sickness and trance, from which he emerges again as a man of thirty. He is a most pious and grave person.
This legend, which has analogues in the mythology of many religions, is probably based on a literal and popular interpretation of Matthew 16:28: “Verily I say unto you, there be some of them that stand here which shall in no wise taste of death till they see the Son of man coming to his kingdom.” The fate of eternal life in witness of his master was also accorded by some to St. John. (The confusion of Joseph with St. John, the beloved disciple, may be seen in the name Cartaphilus, which means “greatly beloved.”) There are also elements in the legend of the story of Cain’s punishment.
The legend of the Wandering Jew, flourishing chiefly in Spain and Italy, did not come to Germany until 1602 with the work Kurtze Beschreibung und Erzehlung von Einem Juden mit Namen Ahasverus. This book tells of a meeting between a certain bishop and a strange-looking man, who declared himself to be the shoemaker Ahasverus of Jerusalem who had forbidden Jesus, on his way to Golgotha, to rest before his house.
For a long time the legend remained merely a source of comedy. About 1770 Goethe contemplated, but did not write, a poem in which the eternal Ahasverus was to be the instrument of a history of religion and the church. He imagined a meeting of Ahasverus and Spinoza which was to be the means of extolling Spinoza’s philosophy. However, a German poet, Schubart, did write a poem (1787) in which he claims the Wandering Jew for romanticism, identifying him with every turmoil and wildness of nature, as he seeks his death by the angry elements. In Schiller’s unfinished Geisterseher (1789), there is a person who has most of the eerie and imposing characteristics of the Wandering Jew as we know him. He also appears in a number of other works of the time.
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The conception of the Wandering Jew as a serious character came into English literature with Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk, published in 1795. On a visit to Germany, Lewis had absorbed all the refinement of terror that romantic German medievalists had made on the crude shocks of The Castle of Otranto, and it was the greatly imitated success of his farrago of romance, anti-clericalism, faint obscenity, and horror that gave this new Jewish myth currency.
Lewis’s Wandering Jew is an amalgam of all the legends about him. He is a man who speaks seldom and smiles never; he moves gravely and nobly. He is not permitted any personal belongings; nevertheless, he is generous and from a well-filled purse bestows many rich gifts. Dark, powerful, and majestic, his eyes flash black and somber from under heavy brows. Across his forehead, he wears a band of black velvet to hide the fiery cross set as a mark upon it. He has seen every country, he talks familiarly of races long dead. His knowledge is only less vast than his misery:
No one is adequate to comprehend the misery of my lot. . . . Fate obliges me to be constantly in movement; I am not permitted to pass more than a fortnight in the same place. I have no friend in the world and from the restlessness of my destiny I never can acquire one. Fain would I lay down my miserable life, for I envy those who enjoy the quiet of the grave; but death eludes me and flies from my embrace. In vain do I throw myself in the way of danger. I plunge into the ocean, the waves throw me back with abhorrence upon the shore; I rush into fire; the flames recoil at my approach; I oppose myself to the fury of the banditti; their swords become blunted and break upon my breast. The hungry tiger shudders at my approach, and the alligator flies from a monster more horrible than itself. God has set his seal upon me and all His creatures respect this fatal mark.
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And so terrible is the power of his glance, that even the supernatural creatures quail before it; one look is sufficient to scare off the specter of the Bleeding Nun when it attempts to prevent the elopement of the lovers, Raymond and Agnes.
C. R. Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) uses the high terror of The Monk, but more effectively, creating a mad, fanatic, half-lit world of great impressiveness. Melmoth, though a Gentile, is a combined Wandering Jew and Faust. He has sold his soul for eternal youth that he may acquire infinite learning. In time he becomes also a kind of Mephistopheles, tempting others to change places with him and elect his fate, for only if he succeeds in doing this can he attain to his wished-for-death. But this modification of the Wandering Jew is not so important for us as the novel’s two portraits of Jews with whom Monçada, a young Gentile fleeing the Inquisition, comes in contact. Monçada stumbles into a house whose master he finds to be a secret Jew. By the threat of exposure he forces the Jew to hide him. The Jew, forced into defending his Judaizing, expresses himself in these terms: “I am one of that unhappy race everywhere stigmatized and spoken against, yet on whose industry and talent the ungrateful country that anathematizes us depends for half the source of its national prosperity.” Monçada, however, reflects of him, “he was a Jew innate, an impostor, a wretch who, drawing sustenance from the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church, had turned her nutriment to poison and had attempted to infuse that poison into the lips of his son.”
A little later Monçada must take refuge with another Jew, Adonijah, who hides him in a subterranean cavern. This Jew, a cross between physician and magician, exemplifies again the learned-villain type. He has made a pact with the devil and suffers for it; but despite this wickedness, and despite his collection of skeletons of his relatives, the young Monçada finds impressive “the hoary majesty of his patriarchal figure” and his “stern simplicity.” It is shameful to Monçada to have to become “the amanuensis of a Jew for hire,” but affliction makes him more tolerant: “. . . at this moment I half believed that a Jew might find entrance and adoption amid the family and fold of the blessed.”
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The second quarter of the 19th century saw the decline of the novel of horror and the ripening of the historical novel. Into this form the Wandering Jew—or modifications of him—fitted with entire ease. The dissident religious movements of the 18th and 19th centuries—themselves part of the romantic movement—had spread knowledge of the Bible, and the Wandering Jew is treated in closer connection with his historical Judaic background.
Heroic and powerful, but stripped of the super-naturalism that had hitherto characterized him, he appears as the hero of the Reverend George Croly’s Salathiel the Immortal; or, Tarry Thou Till I Come. There is much that is ridiculous in this book, as there always is when romanticism exploits biblical lore, but it is full of a rather fine grandiose rhetoric. First published in 1827, it appeared again in 1905 in an edition by Funk and Wagnalls—an edition of no little interest to lovers of Jewish curiosa, for it is fitted out with an appendix in which are tabulated the sullen or eager responsa of Jewish rabbis and scholars to the question: What do you think of Christ?
The plot of Croly’s book is simple and its details reasonably terrifying. Salathiel, servant in the house of Pilate, strikes Christ as he passes with the Cross. Bidden “Tarry thou till I come,” he assumes immortality and a career of heroism and bombast. The 19th century is well under way and this new Wanderer expresses his tragic fate in terms of Byronic nationalism—the passing of great kingdoms and the suppression of once proud races are his concern and sorrow:
The name of Jew is now but another title for humiliation. Who that sees that fallen thing with his countenance bent to the ground and his form withered of its comeliness tottering through the proud streets of Europe in some degrading occupation and clothed in the robes of the beggared and the despised could imagine the bold figures and gallant bearing of the lion-hunters with whom . . . I spurred my barb up the mountain paths of Galilee.
So similar to Croly’s book in its mad adventures, piracies, escapes, and “wild” prophecies as to necessitate a delay in its publication, Horatio Smith’s Zillah: A Tale of the Holy City (1828) substitutes for the dignified grandiosity of Salathiel a rather unsuccessful facetiousness. The book is chiefly interesting for its depiction of what has come to be thought of as an important Jewish trait—moral arrogance. The High Priest, father of the heroine, is the exponent of this quality. He is ambassador to Mark Anthony, a position which gives him the opportunity of being in a constant froth of anathema and fulmination against Roman luxury. Matthew Arnold, one feels sure, read the volume in his youth and constructed his definition of Hebraism with it in mind. How consistently this myth has maintained itself may be seen in Mr. Edgar Johnson’s recent fantastic novel, Unweave a Rainbow, where the Jew, Mordecai, avowedly a formalized, even mythical, figure, continues the mystical puritanism of Smith’s High Priest.
As an antidote to this arrogance and fanaticism, we have the converted Roman, Felix, lover of Zillah, who turns up with an Orthodox beard. This tempering of Jew with pagan (again see Matthew Arnold) gives us the author’s ideal Judaic type, the Jew dedicated to the practice of an all-embracing philanthropy and the maintenance of a universal toleration. “Let me not imagine . . .” says the new-bearded Felix,” that I am adoring the Deity, when I am only falling prostrate before my own opinion, enshrined in pride, conceit, and obstinacy.”
In Bulwer-Lytton’s Leila; or, The Siege of Granada (1838), the myth develops into the Jewish villain-hero already foreshadowed by the Elizabethans, and one of the most persistent and curious myths of the Jew. This anomaly, in its simplest form, was implicit in the Wandering Jew myth: the sin of the Wanderer was heinous, but his punishment is so dreadful that he becomes by means of it a virtuous person. The existence of good and evil, of heroism and villainy, in the same person, was an easy concept in a time that made Satan the hero of Paradise Lost, a time that glorified Cain and declared the devil to be a gentleman. The conception was perhaps always implicit in the character of Shylock; certainly since the actor Macklin’s new—i.e., pathetic, heroic-villainous—interpretation in 1741 (which Landa bewails because it gave a credibility that makes it effective slander), it had become the accepted one.
The Jew Alamen, father of the Leila of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, is counselor to Boabdil, the weak Moorish king who was forced out of Granada at the time of Torquemada. He is a sorcerer and a maker of phosphorescent skeletons. A “Machiavel” indeed, but like the real Machiavelli, a devoted patriot, he is deeply race-conscious and well aware of the debasement of his people. He seeks not merely to gain toleration for the race but to raise it and perfect it. He attacks a subordinate for the “Leprosy of avarice that gnaws away from our whole race the heart, the soul—nay, the very form of man.” “A Jew,” he cries to one who has taunted him, “A despised and despising Jew! Ask you more? I am the son of a race of Kings!” Thus far the hero. But as he is treacherously Machiavellian, dickering with both Christian and Moor; as he opposes the course of true love between Leila and Muza, the Moorish prince; as he murders Muza and Leila, married after the girl’s conversion (it is easy for her to become a Christian for her Judaism is not “of the mundane and material sort”); and finally, as he bursts into satanic laughter, he is definitely the villain.
However, even this development of the myth fostered by the school of romantic history does not alter its essential character. The Jew remains throughout an eternal wanderer, a menacing, grandiose figure, darkly impressive, heroic in stature, proud but an outcast.
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IV
The forces that were disrupting Europe were beginning to push the Jew into the stream of common existence. Slowly he was being forced, or was forcing himself, into the social structure of England. With more and more actual Jews to be seen on the streets of London, the myth which gave to the Jew a sort of sublime villainy became more and more vulnerable. However useful the heroic myth might still be for historical fiction, for those professing to write in terms of the everyday present it simply would not do. It was necessary to create a new Jewish myth that would have at least some semblance of reality.
We find, not surprisingly, that this attempt to refurbish the Jewish myth is first made in comedy. The nature of the attempt can easily be understood from a few of the titles: Jewish Courtship, Mordecai’s Beard, The Contrast; or, The Jew and the Married Courtesan. In these pastiches a curious jargon was used to indicate Judaized English; the jargon grew more and more specialized, less and less real, the longer it was used. And now the Jew becomes a very different person from what he had been before in English drama. He remained nasty enough but no longer was he Machiavellian or mysteriously heroic; rather he became the dupe. Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Duenna (1775), a dull, stupid opera, has the character of Isaac Mendoz who, desiring the hand of the heroine, has the duenna palmed off on him. His person is comic, he is little, ugly, and monkey-like; and it was a palpable hit when the duenna, trying to persuade her charge to favor him, said that he looked “so little like a Jew and so much like a gentleman.” It is notable that the girl’s father wants her to marry the Jew. This circumstance together with the duenna’s remark show how the emphasis is changing at this time; the opprobrium is no longer moral or religious, but social.
The new myth comes to be based on the fact that the Jew is not a gentleman, on the assertion of a natural antithesis between the concept Jew and the concept Gentleman. Here, perhaps for the first time, we are encountering what we have come to call anti-Semitism in its present-day sense. The point of the new myth is apparent: by reason of his nature, the Jew is held to be outside the pale of society. Which conception is used of his nature, whether that of a dark superiority or that of a degraded inferiority, depends largely upon whether he is considered as a historical character or as living in the immediate present.
In the 19th century, as today, the Jewish myth was a useful instrumentality in the hands of conservative, chauvinistic, anti-democratic powers. Under its cover, they could fight the forces of democracy, the forces working for extended franchise, emancipation of the lower orders, liberation of oppressed minorities, the middle-class liberals. In consequence, the democratic forces found it often necessary, as part of their own struggle, to beat down the Jewish myth. Motivated in some such way as this, rather than by an unselfish, altruistic impulse to help an oppressed, outcast race, there arose those new pictures of the Jew which Rabbi Philipson and his school of rabbinical critics gratefully hail as noble defenses of the Jew, as the emergence after centuries of slander of the “true” character of the Jew at last. As a matter of fact, of course, these new portraits of the Jew are hardly more “true” than earlier ones. Commonly characterized as humanitarian efforts to defend the Jew against his maligners, to place him in a realistic human light, they are actually no more than reinterpretations of the common Jewish myths to suit new social purposes. Symbolic counterfoils too calculatedly apologetic to be real, they are but new counter-myths to set up against the old traditional myths.
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Naturally these new counter-myths largely paralleled the lines of the two most popular mythical conceptions of the Jew. To the myth of the Jew as a degraded inferior they answered with an assertion of his natural goodness—the natural goodness of the humble and the oppressed: the Jew more sinned against than sinning. To the other myth, the fantastic notion of the Jew as powerful and all-knowing, they answered with a denial of the evil use of this power and omniscience. Of course, not all the writing about Jews of the period can be made to fit within these molds. Often, in the works of a single writer, as in Sir Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth, various and often contradictory myths appear, as the writer is torn between one conception of the Jew and another. Often enough, too, vestigial remnants of early myths, which the age had seemed to have discarded, reappear. Personal factors too—the personal isolation of the writer, his personal experiences with Jews—intrude.
The defense of the Jew as a good and humble creature appears in its purest and almost lachrymose form in the works of George Cumberland, greatly beloved of Reform-rabbinical belles lettres. Rabbi Louis I. Newman has written a volume on him and Rabbi Philipson has panegyrized him.
Born in 1732 and dying in 1811, Cumberland lived in the era when sentimentality, humanitarianism, and the comédie larmoyante were coming into their own. Evidently a Man of Feeling, Cumberland was perhaps attracted to the Jews by the notorious conversion of the mad Lord George (“No Popery”) Gordon to Judaism. Though Cumberland had himself done a little conventional Jew-teasing in his play, The Fashionable Lover, he created the character Abraham Abrahams who, in 1785, began to write in Cumberland’s paper, the Observer, in defense of the Jews. Abraham Abrahams reprobated the custom of always representing the Jew as a rogue, usurer, and buffoon and suggested that some dramatist “give us poor Jews a kind of lift in a new comedy.” In accordance with this suggestion to himself, Cumberland wrote and, in 1793, produced The Jew.
The play was undoubtedly influenced by Lessing’s Nathan der Weise. It is entirely artless and crude, but it was successful enough, was frequently revived, and Sheva, the old Jewish hero, was, we are told, considered one of the “fat” parts of the time. The simple plot is constructed to show how Sheva, outwardly a miser and usurer, is at heart a person of generosity and gratitude. How different is this Jew from the Machiavellian Jew! Far from acting for the evil of anyone, he is the poor lost lamb of the world. He has been saved by the heroine’s brother from a London mob and by the heroine’s father from the Inquisition in Cadiz and he is very grateful. He does not rend the sky with cries against injustice; all he wants is his little crust of peace. “We have no abiding place on earth,” he says,
—no country, no home. Everybody rails at us, everybody points us out for their May-game and their mockery. If your playwriters want a butt, or a buffoon, or a knave to make sport of, out comes a Jew to be baited and buffeted through five long acts, for the amusement of all good Christians. Cruel sport!—merciless amusement! Hard dealings for the poor stray sheep of the scattered flock of Abraham! How can you expect us to show kindness, when we receive none?
Oddly enough, the name of Sir Walter Scott is usually linked with Cumberland’s, as one of the new order which, for altruistic reasons, was determined (or so the theory ran) that the Jew be dealt with justly in literature. The truth is that Scott belonged definitely to the historic-romantic school and accepted its traditional patterns. The common Jewish belief is that in Ivanhoe, Scott (influenced by Washington Irving’s description of his fiance’s friend, Rebecca Gratz) created new characters which for the first time dealt truthfully and fairly with Jews. The obvious fact is that the Jewish characters, Rebecca and Isaac, show little development from the early “father-daughter” pattern of the early myths. Isaac, for all the geniality with which he is treated, is closely akin to Shylock; nor is Rebecca remote from Jessica. In Kenilworth, the Jewish character, Zacharias YogIan, a fawning, cheating chemist, is merely an old stereotype. Scott’s best claim to “defend the Jew” rests on his creation in Surgeon’s Daughter of Middlemass, an obvious counter-myth to the no-gentleman social myth of the Jew. Middlemass is a young Jew, handsome, dashing, hot-headed, and elegant—in almost all things the romantic hero. (A sign perhaps of the penetration of wealthier Jews into English society.) But Scott was being pressed for money by his Jewish creditors, Abud and Company, and in consequence, perhaps, he makes Middlemass also avaricious and a villain and ends his wicked career in India where he is stepped on by an elephant.
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In Maria Edgeworth’s novel, Harrington, written in 1817 at the request of a young Jewess of Richmond, Virginia, may be found practically all of the myths and counter-myths of the period, artlessly confused. The story tells of the struggle of young Harrington to rid himself of his fear and hate of Jews. He had been frightened by an “ol’ clo’” man, Simon, and all the stories his nurse told him about Jews were of wicked ones. But at school he makes friends with Jacob the Jew Boy, who is marked by the new Jewish traits of patience, gratitude, and humility. Jacob the Jew Boy (so called by the author), who refers to himself as Poor Jacob, in large part breaks down Harrington’s Judeophobia. At Cambridge, Harrington meets Israel Lyons, Hebrew scholar, rabbi, and man of the world, purposely prodigal to counteract the reputation for meanness which his race had incurred. Harrington sees Macklin give his sympathetic and serious interpretation of Shylock and is much impressed. Finally, he meets the aristocratic Spanish Jew, Montenero, and his beautiful daughter, Berenice. Love and aristocracy complete his capitulation to the harmlessness and impressiveness of Judaism. Harrington’s father is the conventional 18th-century parent; he hates Jews until Montenero’s generosity saves his fortune. Then he relents, consents to the marriage, and is rewarded by learning that Berenice’s mother was an English Protestant. The book did not sell well and Miss Edgeworth was a little disgruntled by her championship.
Dickens’s contribution to the new counter-mythology of the Jew—Riah in Our Mutual Friend—is by no means his happiest creation. Curiously enough, it was an answer to an extremely popular revival of an old Jewish myth for which he himself was responsible—the character of Fagin in Oliver Twist, the ghetto thief and spawner of thieves. The 1830’s and ’40’s had brought the Jew into politics and business and the universities, and it was not pleasant for the newly-emancipated to have themselves identified before the English public with the submerged Jewish population, economically and socially unassimilated. Their chagrin was not that such a class existed, wretchedly poor, subsisting by various servile and often illegal occupations, but that Dickens, choosing his villain from this class, referred to him as “the Jew” and thereby stigmatized the whole race, including themselves. Dickens was, of course, innocent of such intent. His was a simple mind, and looking for a myth convenient to his simple purpose, which was to present a picture of unalloyed wickedness, he quite simply returned to the Jew of the ballad, an abstract and mythical villain. His use of the phrase “the Jew,” obviously suggested by usage of the ballad, had no slander in it. Indeed, when Eliza David took him to task for maligning her race, he was genuinely contrite and strove to make amends with the character of Riah, a creature as impossibly good as Fagin was impossibly bad, but, unfortunately, unable to cope with the myth of Fagin, which has persisted, to the annoyance of respectable Jews and for the help of their opponents, down to this day.
With Charles Reade’s It’s Never Too Late to Mend (1856), another myth, having slumbered for a while, awakens with 19th-century adaptations. Isaac Levi, the benevolent old moneylender, is a simple and prosaic enough character, but he is a true descendant of the Wandering Jew. Like his forebear, he appears when and where one least expects him—in the Berkshire village, in the Australian camp. Always he is agile, crafty, and on the watch to revenge his wrongs, to show gratitude for kindness. Reade keeps us aware of his fineness and exotic color; in contrast to the vulgar natives of the village, he was as though “a striped jaspar had crept in among the paving stones.” He is definitely Oriental and he looks to return to the East to die.
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The life and works of Disraeli set the problem in a slightly new form—for here for the first time we see the Jew himself working on the Jewish myth. Paul Valéry says somewhere that it is every man’s right to create for himself whatever character he wants, consciously and deliberately. We all do so to a certain extent; and many of us still find formalized racial patterns useful. Certainly Disraeli did; for his purposes he created a new myth composed of all that was glamorous and astonishing in the old myths, a myth which he not only used in his fiction but which he himself often acted in his life, with what political success we all remember.
This amazing Jewish myth we see first in the fresh sharpness of its conception in Coningsby (1834). The titular hero of this novel was drawn from Lionel de Rothschild, chief of the English Rothschild bank and always Disraeli’s good friend. The ideal and mentor of this youth (in the novel he is not Jewish) is Sidonia—Disraeli himself. This young man, strikingly handsome with flashing dark eyes, is the descendant of a noble Spanish line reconverted to Judaism. Like the Wandering Jew, he knows every land. He is learned in all the wisdoms including those of the East, nor is he unacquainted with the medical art. Machiavelli-like, he has his fingers on the pulse of nations, and he nourishes in himself a vaulting ambition. Alone and lonely, he is kindly to many and sought after by all. He appears suddenly and as suddenly leaves, very likely on an Arab courser. The nation depends on him to lend it the interest on the national debt, but he is denied the occupations of a citizen. Yet he is loyal to England, though he nourishes a deep pride in his race and finds in it all the finest Tory qualities. Ambition and benevolent heroism are for him the breath of life.
Tancred (1847) is the working out of the pride of race which in Coningsby Sidonia expresses so passionately. Beginning with the thesis that the Northern Gentiles are of inferior stock, sprung from barbaric Baltic pirates, and that regeneration must come from the East, Sidonia sends Tancred, a young English nobleman, to come into contact with Eastern spirituality and faith so that he may bring them back to Europe. In Tancred’s romantic and extravagant adventures, all the Jews who cling to their Jewishness receive the author’s sanction, all who Europeanize or who compromise their racial heritage are scorned.
For Thackeray, the conservative English clubman, all this is very naturally nonsense and he takes a fall out of Sldonia and his pan-Judaism in his parody, Codlingsby. On the whole, the parody—with its jeweled jews-harps, its narghiles lit with banknotes of large denominations, its climax in Sidonia’s remark, “Even the Pope at Rome is one of us”—is apt. Behind it, of course, was the simple-minded, confident class snobbery always characteristic of Thackeray. Jews were merely no gentlemen; indeed, they were the very essence of the No-gentleman, of the Anti-gentleman. Sometimes they are credited with a certain crude generosity, as in The Newcomes, but more often they are the comic foils of the gentlemanly tradition. If they are wealthy they are ridiculous, like little Miss Swartz in Vanity Fair. Contrast this with Bulwer-Lytton who, in My Novel, sees the newly-arrived Jew as a vicious and grasping being, and gives voice to the simple class hatred which comes to be the dominant feeling about the Jew of the modern Gentile monied classes, jealous of the aliens who sought to share in their power and their social prestige.
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George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, the last though certainly not the best novel of a novelist who in some ways stands very close to our own time, enshrined the Jew in what has become the most satisfactory (to Jews) Jewish counter-myth. Deronda is the foster-child of Sir Hugo Mallinger. Of exceptional beauty—“seraphic” indeed—and of great intellectual aptness and considerable knowledge, he is something of a dilettante, uncertain of his life, searching for an ideal. But for all his dilettantism, he has great moral force and it is this perhaps, even more than his beauty and charm, that makes him attractive to women. Many adore him, and Gwendolen, the heroine of the other side of the book (which is composed of two intersecting stories), makes him her conscience. As the boy grows, he develops all the burning nostalgic passion which, in place of blood or money lust, now so often comes to characterize the Jew in fiction. He becomes, too, not quite a person of this world; the implication is that the prophetic touch is on him—“fancy finding that he had a tailor’s bill and used boothooks like our brothers.”
The career of Daniel toward the discovery and fulfillment of his Judaism leads him to confront many aspects of it. His old (and rather admirably drawn) mother, who had tried to keep him from knowledge of his heritage, sits bitterly in her darkened foreign apartment and cries out against the unfeeling restraint which Judaism puts upon its women. She had become famous as a singer, but only after a fierce and sorrowful struggle against Jewish mores. “How could I know,” she cries
that you would love what I hated,—love to be a Jew! . . . My father only thought of fettering me into obedience. . . . I was to feel awe for the bit of parchment in the mezuzah over the door; to dread lest a bit of butter should touch meat; to think it beautiful that men should bind tephillin on them and women not . . . to love the long prayers in the ugly synagogue, and the howling and the gabbling, and the dreadful fasts, and my father’s endless discoursing about our People. . . . I cared for the wide world and all I could represent in it. I hated living under the shadow of my father’s strictness. Teaching, teaching for everlasting—“this you must be”—“that you must be”. . . . I wanted to live a large life, with freedom to do what everyone else did, and be carried along in the current, not obliged to care. . . .
Daniel meets the Cohens, vulgar, money-grubbing, but warm-hearted and unaffected; Mordecai, the consumptive watchmaker, Spinozistic in his sweet asceticism, learned in Jewish lore, burning with nationalistic zeal; and Mirah, the perfect Jewish woman, whom Daniel marries. These people are, it is clear, largely mythical. That is, they are, on the whole, embodied abstract traits rather than individuals; moreover, the traits are not pure but exaggerated. But chiefly they are mythical because they are made to represent the Jewish people, and the Jewish people, even in the England of Eliot’s day, were more diverse and less unanimously noble than Eliot pictured them. But undeniably George Eliot’s Jews have a certain credibility too; it does not too much strain the imagination to say, “Jews are like that,” and Jews as well as Gentiles have found some reality in them. This is because they have at least this much truth, that there are certainly some Jews who have similar traits in some degree. Also it may be because for the first time in English literature Jews are visualized not merely in the aspects in which they come in contact with Gentiles and the Gentile world, but in terms of their own life and their own problems. There is a genuine, inner, intimate quality about much of Daniel Deronda, which almost as much as its flattery makes it acceptable to the Jews themselves, and a model for later Jewish writers.
Indeed, George Eliot hit on a pattern which seems almost inescapable in doctrinaire writing about Jews. She is the first to deal with the problem of assimilation, and she wrote about Zionism at a time when it was still scarcely thought of in England, even as a chimerical notion.
When Daniel dedicates his life to Zionism, one has almost exactly the plot and machinery of Ludwig Lewisohn’s The Island Within or of Milton Waldman’s The Disinherited. From these novels, one sees how decidedly George Eliot is the originator of the modern myths which the Jews have constructed to present themselves, best foot foremost, to the world; she gave them their direction, a direction which Amy Levy, in her Reuben Sachs (1888), was probably the first to follow.
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It is, therefore, with Daniel Deronda that this essay will conclude. It must remain for the reader to trace the Jewish myths to their further developments, through Meredith’s portrait, in The Tragic Comedians, of the romantic Jewish radical—Lasalle, model for the modern myth of the Jewish radical, but wrapped close in the mantle of Sidonia and Deronda—through James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom or Marcel Proust’s Swann, to see how in our own day the Jew remains a myth, changing with the changing times, persisting always as a type and a symbol, useful to Jew or to Gentile, to one social force or another.
The question may be asked: What importance has an account of material which is confessedly merely mythological? The importance to the historian, the psychologist, the sociologist, the political thinker is obvious. But to one interested chiefly in literature, the answer is not so plain. However, one answer may be found in almost any modern Jewish novel by a Jew. When the Jew, at the Emancipation, entered into the life of the Western world, he found the myths awaiting him. Sometimes he fought them, sometimes he accepted them to his own advantage, often he went off and contemplated them in great confusion of mind. When he came to write of himself he was not able to free himself from them. Some one of them had become a Doppelgänger of his, moving by the side of the real person we suppose he must be. And the task which every Jewish novel presents to the critical reader—and the serious writer—is that of disentangling what is mythical from what is actual. And that task is difficult, for in the mythical there is usually, of course, a little of what is true.
1 An unpublished essay for the Master of Arts degree, Columbia University Library. It has been of great help to me.
2 F. J. Child has one version (H) of the ballad which is particularly interesting. It was discovered in New York (where, it seems, vestiges of several ballads are to be found in children's game-chants). In this version, the Jew's daughter becomes the Duke's daughter; also Sir Hugh becomes “little Harry Hughes,” and the lead in which the child is wrapped becomes tin. The causes of these changes are uncertain. Perhaps the change from Jew to Duke voices the feeling in Ireland against noble landlords; perhaps, together with the Sir Hugh-Harry Hughes change, it is the result of American democratic feeling.
3 For almost all my material on the Wandering Jew, I am indebted to Professor Eino Railo's book on terror-romanticism, The Haunted Castle.
