Villains, Saints and Comedians: Jewish Types in English Fiction

There is no scarcity of books about Jews in English literature. Critics feel obliged to attack English literature for having produced Shylock and Fagin or to defend it for the tolerant portrayal of Daniel Deronda. There are encylopedic lists of all the Jews who have appeared on the printed page and detailed, psychoanalytic polemics about whether or not Dickens was really anti semitic. Yet, until the appearance of Edgar Rosenberg's study, From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction, no one had bothered to ask the important questions: why the picture of the villanious Jew has remained constant from the medieval ballads about the murder of Hugh or Lincoln to the novels of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, why the conscious attempts to reject the stereotype have resulted in sub-literary propaganda, and why Jewish characters are now being moved from the periphery of the novel to be placed at its center.

No purely historical explanation, not even the excellent work by Montagu Modder, The Jew in the Literature of England, can answer these questions. The historical evidence must be combined with a detailed examination of the texts, literary insight and an exploration of myth. Mr. Rosenberg succeeds admirably, and From Shylock to Svengali is the most important and valuable study on the subject.

Detailed Studies

Rosenberg does not attempt a catalogue of all the appearances that Jews make in English literature. He concentrates on a few novelists--Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, George Eliot, and George DuMaurier--with extended glances at a few playwrights--Marlowe, Shakespeare and Cumberland. He supplements his close, detailed examination of a sensibly limited number of texts with some attention to medieval plays and ballads, many minor writers, and extra-literary phenomena such as social and political changes.

Rosenberg traces the myth of the Jew to its Biblical origins. "It dates back at least to Herod, the slayer of children and aspiring Christ killer in disguise ('and when you have found him, bring me word, that I may also come and worship him'); to Judas, the original businessman with the contract in the pocket; and to the anonymous vulgar Jewish farceur who, in answer to Christ's 'Eli', eh' forced a reed filled with vinegar between His lips." The twin masks of the Jew-mutilator and usurer thus had Biblical sanction "at a time when literature flourished under clerical auspices and when nine tenths of the corpus poeticum derived from Biblical paraphrases and martyrologies. . ." In ballads and morality plays the two roles were already being joined, and the mere physical presence of the Jews in England between the Norman Conquest and their expulsion under Edward I did nothing to change the myth. In Chaucer's "The Prioress's Tale" the twin roles are set. In Marlow's Jew of Malta and Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice the composite portraits are given their final expression and the final punisments are meted out. "In Chaucer he was torn by wild horses and hanged also. In Gower a lion tears him to death. Marlowe has him burned in a cauldron. Shylock, the fox at bay, loses both daughter and ducats, as well as his religion."

Jews As Saints

Before examining the nineteenth century stereotypes of the Jew, Rosenberg investigates the rise of the counter-myth of the Jew as Saint. He accounts for the flimsiness of the sainted Jews by searching out the motives of their creators. In Cumberland's The Jew Sheva is the antipode to Shylock. He is modest, kindly, generous, and long suffering. Rosenberg quotes extensively from Cumberland's Memoirs and his articles in The Observer to prove Cumberland's didactic motives. Rosenberg concludes, "In view of Cumberland's instructive biases as a playwright generally, we need not, then, be surprised by the papier-mache figure that Sheva is made to cut. He is plainly little more than a pawn--not in the plot, but of the message behind the plot. 'I take credit myself,' Cumberland writes . . ., 'for the character of Abraham Abrahams. I wrote it upon principle, thinking it high time that something should be done for a persecuted race. I seconded my appeal to the charity of mankind by the character of Sheva, which I copied from this of Abrahams.' The phrase upon principle goes a long way toward explaining not only Sheva's general dramatic insufficiencies, but the collapse of subsequent attempts to redeem the Jew for literature."

The process of vilifying the Jews and then guiltily meting them out a kind of justice is exemplified in the novels of Maria Edgeworth. "Having impressed her readers with her ability to manipulate the stereotype of the Jewvillain and having informed them some six times over that Jews were frauds, usurers, poisoners, perjurers, trators, parasites on the national economy, threats to the body politic, and violators of young boys, Edgeworth decided to take it all back and Harrington." (Prominent Jewish matrons seem to have taken an active hand in helping the process along. Miss Edgeworth received a complaint about her illiberality from an American Jewess which may have occasioned the writing of Harrington, just as Dickens' creation of Riah was helped along by the famous letter from Mrs. Davis.) The "pallor" of Miss Edgeworth's good Jews, like that of the other apologies in English literature--Dickens' Riah, DuMaurier's Leah, and Trollope's Trendelssohn--is explained by Rosenberg: "The chief reason . . . is that [the good Jew] has been almost consistently a product of far too obvious and explicit ulterior motives. He bore from the first the pale cast of after-thought. Given the convention, the authors who kept the Jew-villain in circulation created their man with a good deal of spontaneity. The Jew-villain might not be a realistic figure; but within the canons of comedy and melodrama he could give the illusory appearance of being a creature of flesh and blood. The purveyors of the immaculate Jew, on the other hand, produced not so much a character as a formula. Riah and his type will not bleed if you prick them."

Ninteenth Century Stereotypes

Rosenberg's investigation of the stereotypes which the nineteenth century produced is the heart of his book. He discusses the novels of Scott, Dickens, Trollope, Bulwer, and Eliot with wit and insight which manage to alleviate the depressing similarity of the characters he discusses and the dullness of many of the books.

The best chapter in this group is the one on Dickens. Comparing Fagin to all the other Jew-villains in English literature, Rosenberg notes the vital difference: "Marlowe's and Shakespeare's Jews assert themselves actively against their persecution and regard it as a source of terror. The point is that none of them can be sensibly appreciated without an awareness of the restrictions which prevent them from participating fully in the social world. There comes a point at which Barabas, the professional poisoner, ceases to be a satanic figure and can lecture Ferneze on the conditions of injustice without immediately sounding ludicrously hypocritical. Dickens works differently. Fagin enjoys only the barest status as homo Europaenus. . . . Even his Judaism is defective. . . . Fagin, we know, falls completely outside of any religious framework. . . .Dickens, in short, has 'de-historicized' his man and came up with some prehistoric fiend, an aging Lucifer whose depravity explains him wholly. . . . Characters like Fagin who are without grace, who terrify the very young and murder the innocent, exist in two worlds and operate on two levels of reality. They can dance about on the Victorian stage, making the theatrical noises of their forefathers who danced around the cross; or they can be interpreted as distorted dream-figures, the grotesquely magnified bogeys out of a fairy tale. . . . In a piece written for All the Year Around, Dickens asked: 'Are not the sane and insane equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming?'" Rosenberg analyses the grotesque, distorted humor of Oliver Twist and relates it to Dickens' later work.

The Wandering Jew

In the final chapters, Rosenberg discusses a minor myth--that of the Wandering Jew. "The story of Cartaphilus, who struck Christ on His way to the Cross and was condemned to tarry until His second coming, has left far less of an impact on literature than the Shylock story; but it is in many respects a more useful legend. It answers the purpose of literary history more readily; it changes; it adapts itself to the demands of diverse generations and diverse beliefs. It provides a more reliable and more 'readable' barometer than Shylock to the kind of civilization, ideology, and regnant literary convention in which it flourishes, for each age recreates the Wandering Jew in its own image."

Rosenberg excavates two late eighteenth century novels, Lewis' The Monk and Godwin's St. Leon, which portray the isolated Jew as black magician, and traces their lineage from Cartaphilus to DuMaurier's Svengali. In Trilby "the myths of Judas and of Cartaphilus met in the figure of a Victorian bogey-hypnotist."

Modern Trends

In his final chapter, Rosenberg discusses some modern trends and the relationship of the Jewish myth to anti-semitism. "The myth of Shylock has, as it has once before, given rise to the countermyth: the myth of the Jew as artist, as aesthete, as hypersensitive and anxious man; and in this mask he has engaged the attention of the great novelists of our century. For the creators of Swann (but also Bloch), of Leopold Bloom, Joseph K, as well as the recreator of the Biblical Joseph, the Jew has come to reflect increasingly the problems and pressures of Western man. If he is still (or more than ever) the Outsider, he knows that he has been cast in a role that symbolically identifies him with a world of Ishmaels. . . . In the Age of Anxiety, as Leslie Fiedler has reminded us, the Jew as symbol in literature has moved from the periphery to the center--but by remaining, as ever, on the periphery of the active social and moral world."

From Shylock to Svengali is a complete, sensitive, well written and valuable work. The only question which Rosenberg does not take up is why the Shylock myth has managed to persist. What repressed fears is society acting out in its persistent creation of the knife bearing villain? Rosenberg says, "I am aware . . . that literary conventions can tell us only so much about a subject which is, as bottom, impenetrable."

Edgar Rosenberg is Briggs-Copeland Assistant Professor of English at Harvard. Since coming to Harvard from Stanford University, where he did his graduate study, he taught writing courses and courses in nineteenth century English literature.

He has published several short stories in Commentary magazine and his translations of stories by Thomas Mann have appeared in Esquire.