Jews and the English Nation: An Intertextual Approach to Evolving Representations of Jews in British Fiction, 1701-1876

Abstract

Recent scholarship on the representations of Jews in British Romantic fiction has explored the relationship between the radical changes in Jewish characterization of the period and shifting cultural values. Judith Page, for example, considers the effect of Romantic notions of sentiment, detailing especially how Jews test the limits of sympathetic feeling, and Michael Ragussis has linked the surge of interest in Jews to their value as rhetorically useful subjects in relation to debates surrounding English and British identity. Such studies at times draw attention to the impact of older characterizations of Jews on the new, typically to reinforce claims that relate changing Jewish portrayals to particular cultural and historical developments. Yet, the impact of literary precedent itself has not been fully considered as a leading factor in inspiring new ideas about Jewish characterization. This study takes as its centrepiece the development of the sympathetic or benevolent Jew in the Romantic period, best characterized by Richard Cumberland’s sentimental comedy The Jew (1794), and the historical novels Harrington (1814), and Ivanhoe (1819) by Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott respectively. These works draw heavily on pre-existing Jewish-themed texts, notably Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1598). While the play’s Jewish villain Shylock exerts a powerful and well-documented influence on later Jewish characters, the relevance of these Shylockian imitators merits more minute investigation in terms of their impact on the gradual transformation of ideas about Jews in fiction. For this reason, this dissertation takes a long period of history as its subject in order to emphasize that innovation in Jewish portrayal results not from ongoing social change alone, but equally from the interplay of past literary influences and developments in style and genre.