Other countries in Europe had granted full political rights to Jews earlier in the century, but it was often against the background of impassioned popular antisemitism, or, as in Germany, the sophisticated antisemitism of philosophers and intellectuals. Moreover, the emancipation was generally granted under conditions, tacit or overt, that were demeaning to the very Jews who were being emancipated. Revolutionary France is generally credited with being the first European power to emancipate the Jews, but it did so at some cost. In the debate in the National Assembly, Mirabeau, one of the most moderate revolutionaries, declared that a Jew could be a citizen only if he was more un homme than a Jew. On that basis, the Assembly granted “active citizenship” only to the more assimilated Sephardi Jews. After another debate, in which the more observant Ashkenazi Jews were accused of being “a nation within a nation,” they were given citizenship on the understanding that they would disavow their “Jewish corporations” and be admitted not as Jews but as individuals. “Jews as individuals,” the supporter of the motion put it, “deserve everything; Jews as a nation nothing.”28
In England, when Rothschild was admitted to Parliament, he did so as a Jew as well as a “man,” taking the oath to the God of Israel on a Hebrew Bible. This was all the more notable because the issue was not, in fact, “citizenship,” as defined by the franchise. It was more serious than that. Jews in England had long had the right to vote. What they did not have was the right to sit in Parliament. This was especially a problem in a country with an established Church, which presented a serious constitutional obstacle to the seating of Jews in the legislature. Jews were seeking admission not only to a secular society, not only to a Christian society, but to a Christian state as well. That they now achieved that goal was all the more memorable.
Twenty-five years earlier, Thomas Arnold, the master of Rugby, had vigorously opposed the admission of Jews to Parliament for precisely that reason. Protesting against the “low Jacobinical notion of citizenship,” that a man acquires a right to it by the accident of birth or the payment of taxes, he declared England a Christian country where only Christians had a claim to political rights. Thus Catholics and Nonconformists who were Christians might be deemed citizens, but not Jews: “The Jews are strangers in England, and have no more claim to legislate for it than a lodger has to share with the landlord in the management of his house.”29
His son Matthew Arnold surely intended no disrespect to his father (he may not have known of his father’s views on that subject) when he refuted that argument, in effect, thirty-five years later in his memorable essay “Hebraism and Hellenism.” His own preference, at least at that time and place, was for Hellenism, “right thinking,” rather than Hebraism, “right acting.” But both were integral parts of the English heritage and culture, knitting together “the genius and history of us English, and our American descendants across the Atlantic, to the genius and history of the Hebrew people.”30 In the preface to Culture and Anarchy, which included that essay, Arnold went further in distinguishing himself from his father. Jews, more than Nonconformists, were deserving of citizenship, because only within an establishment could the human spirit be cultivated. Nonconformists, lacking any establishment of their own and rejecting the very principle of an establishment, could produce no “men of national mark.” Jews and Catholics, however, could produce such men because both rested on establishments—not national establishments, to be sure, but cosmopolitan ones.31 The preface concludes with a tribute to Hebraism, which alone can give men “the happiness of doing what he knows.” That is “the last word for infirm humanity.” And for that word “our race will, as long as the world lasts, return to Hebraism; and the Hebrew Bible, which preaches this word, will forever remain, as Goethe called it, not only a national book, but the Book of the Nations.”32
A few years earlier, Arnold anticipated some of the theme of “Hebraism and Hellenism” in an essay on Heinrich Heine. He then eulogized a converted Jew who remained, in heart and mind, faithful to the “race” he so brilliantly exemplified.
His race he treated with the same freedom with which he treated everything else, but he derived a great force from it, and no one knew this better than he himself. He has excellently pointed out how in the sixteenth century there was a double renaissance—a Hellenic renaissance and a Hebrew renaissance—and how both have been great powers ever since. He himself had in him both the spirit of Greece and the spirit of Judaea; both these spirits reach the infinite, which is the true goal of all poetry and all art—the Greek spirit by beauty, the Hebrew spirit by sublimity. By his perfection of literary form, by his love of clearness, by his love of beauty, Heine is Greek; by his intensity, by his untam-ableness, by his “longing which cannot be uttered,” he is Hebrew.33
Arnold went on to quote Heine extensively on Jews and Judaism: first, a moving story of a simple man, a Moses Lump, who had all the dignity and self-esteem of a Rothschild; and then long passages from Heine’s poem on Jehuda Halevy. Today that poem, in Heine’s series called Hebrew Melodies, is one of the classic texts in the literature of Zionism. Twenty years later, a verse from another poem in this series, “Princess Sabbath,” which Arnold had quoted in English, appeared in German as an epigraph to one of the chapters in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.34t
From Thomas Arnold to Matthew Arnold—that one generation symbolized the change in the prevailing attitude toward Jews, their acceptance as full citizens with all the rights and privileges of Englishmen, and, at the same time, with all the rights and privileges of Jews. These years also saw the full articulation of the ideas that were often latent or partially expressed in earlier discussions of the “Jewish question.” These ranged from the classic liberal principle of toleration, to the prudent acquiescence in political reality, to the most exuberant expressions of philosemitism. At the very least what they reveal is a strong countervailing force to antisemitism, a conscious, positive recognition of Jews as individuals as well as citizens—and, in fiction especially, of Jews as a people, and, ultimately, as a nation.
IV.
Fictional Heroes and Heroines
“The preeminent authors of the English literary canon, are Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens.... They are also the preeminent authors of the English literary antisemitic canon.” This dictum, by the historian Anthony Julius, is a sobering thought. We may be comforted by his reminder that the literary canon does not necessarily coincide with the social reality, that a nation may have “a rich literary antisemitism and a meager political antisemitism.”1 Yet the literary canon has a reality of its own, as is evident from the fact that two of these preeminent literary antisemites were living in England at a time when there were no Jews there. (In Shakespeare’s day, there were a few Portuguese Marranos who were not publicly identified as Jews, the most notorious being the Queen’s physician Rodrigo Lopez, who was accused of treason and publicly executed.) This is all the more reason to take seriously the fictional stereotypes that may be more dramatic and, in a sense, more real than the actual persons being caricaturized.
It is all the more reason, too, to be impressed by the emergence in the nineteenth century of a counter-canon, a philosemitic literary canon, so to speak, featuring admirable, even heroic Jews. These “counter-myths,” as Lionel Trilling called them2—a new set of stereotypes, a cynic might say—did not dislodge the old, but they did create plausible alternative images which reinforced the philosemitism playing itself out in the political arena. The most striking exemplars of the new genre are novels by three of the best-known novelists of the period, Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, Benjamin Disraeli’s Tancred, and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda—with Disraeli as a prime player in both the literary and political worlds.
Ivanhoe
In 1817, two years before the publication of Ivanhoe, Walter Scott commented on a novel he had just read, Harrington, by the Anglo-Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth.u The novel was delightful, Scott told a friend, but the subject left him with some misgivings.
Jews will always be to me Jews. One does not naturally or easily combine with their habits and pursuits any great liberality of principle although certainly it may and I believe does exist in many individual instances. They are money-makers and money-brokers by profession and it is a trade which narrows the mind. I own I breathed more freely when I found Miss Montenero was not an actual Jewess.3
Miss Montenero, the daughter of a rich Jew of Spanish descent, is the fiancée of Harrington, the hero of the novel. Har-rington had been raised by a nursemaid who terrified him with stories of Jews who steal and slaughter children and use their blood for their rituals. As an adult he met and befriended real Jews, so that he is quite prepared to fall in love with the beautiful Miss Montenero. That love was fated to be unconsummated (his parents would never approve his marriage with a Jew) until her father tells him that she has been brought up as a Protestant in accord with the wishes of her mother, the daughter of an English (and Christian) gentleman. Thus Miss Montenero, “not an actual Jewess,” is happily wedded to Harrington. Edgeworth, like Scott, presumably “breathed more freely” by relieving her heroine from the taint of Judaism. Yet the novel has an unmistakeably philosemitic tone, Mr. Montenero, an actual Jew, being entirely likeable, even admirable, as are other Jewish characters in the novel.v
Ivanhoe, set against a more dramatic historical background—late-twelfth-century England at the time of the Crusades—gives rise to the same potential misalliance. Unlike Edgeworth, however, Scott retained his heroine, Rebecca, as very much an “actual Jewess,” by choice as well as birth. Indeed, she is all the more a heroine for resisting the temptation to convert or even to become the Templar’s “paramour,” which would have saved her from imminent death. This meant, however, that Scott, uneasy with that intermarriage, had to marry off his hero, the Saxon Ivanhoe, to Rowena, a good, if boring, Saxon lady. Scott may have “breathed more freely” with this denouement, but his readers did not, for it clearly violated their expectations as well as the romantic spirit of the novel.
“Jews will always be to me Jews,” Scott had said—and so they were in Ivanhoe. Rebecca’s father, Isaac, is one of those “money-makers and money-brokers” whose profession “narrows the mind.” He is also, however, capable of a “liberality of principle” that makes him a worthy father of Rebecca, willing to sacrifice himself, and his fortune, for her. He is not, to be sure, the hero of the novel—Ivanhoe is that—but he is far more commendable than most of the Saxons and Normans who behave ignobly toward each other and inhumanly toward Jews. It is a Knight Templar, Rebecca’s unsuccessful suitor, who protests: “Will future ages believe that such stupid bigotry ever existed!”4 Isaac makes his first appearance in a chapter introduced by an epigraph that is the classic expression of bigotry and an intimation of its injustice. “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, affections, passions?”5
Where Edgeworth associated that bigotry with the blood-libel myth, Scott focused on the unrelieved history of oppression and persecution suffered by Jews. The facts are so horrendous that the author interrupts his narrative to insist that what he is describing is not fiction but historical fact:w “It is grievous to think that those valiant barons, to whose stand against the crown the liberties of England were indebted for their existence, should themselves have been such dreadful oppressors, and capable of excesses contrary not only to the laws of England, but to those of nature and humanity.” A long quotation from the Saxon Chronicle depicts the torture inflicted by the Saxons upon the poor and the innocent. “They suffocated some in mud, and suspended others by the feet or the head, or the thumbs, kindling the fire below them. They squeezed the heads of some with knotted cords till they pierced their brains, while they threw others into dungeons swarming with serpents, snakes, and toads” . . . and so on, in excrutiating detail.7 Earlier in the novel, Isaac, escorted through the woods by an obliging pilgrim, suspects that he is being ambushed.
His doubts might have been indeed pardoned; for, except perhaps the flying fish, there was no race existing on the earth, in the air, or the waters, who were the object of such an unintermitting, general, and relentless persecution as the Jews of this period. Upon the slightest and most unreasonable pretences, as well as upon accusations the most absurd and groundless, their persons and property were exposed to every turn of popular fury; for Norman, Saxon, Dane, and Briton, however adverse these races were to each other, contended which should look with greatest detestation upon a people, whom it was accounted a part of religion to hate, to revile, to despise, to plunder, and to persecute. The kings of the Norman race, and the independent nobles, who followed their example in all acts of tyranny, maintained against this devoted people a persecution of a more regular, calculated, and self-interested kind.8
It was in response to this unremitting persecution that the Jews developed the character traits they did. Their “obstinacy and avarice” increased in proportion to the “fanaticism and tyranny” to which they were subject. “On these terms they lived; and their character, influenced accordingly, was watchful, suspicious, and timid—yet obstinate, uncomplying, and skilful in evading the dangers to which they were exposed.” It was thus that they not only survived but “increased, multiplied, and accumulated huge sums.”x The Jews are aware of this double-edged nature of their existence. While they are being wronged, plundered, and derided, Isaac complains to his daughter, they have to “smile tamely” rather than “revenge bravely.” Rebecca reassures him: “These Gentiles, cruel and oppressive as they are, are in some sort dependent on the dispersed children of Zion, whom they despise and persecute. Without the aid of our wealth, they could neither furnish forth their hosts in war nor their triumphs in peace; and the gold which we lend them returns with increase to our coffers.”10
That struggle for survival had other fortunate effects. All the trials and tribulations to which Isaac and Rebecca are subject—extortions of wealth, accusations of witchcraft and sorcery, imprisonment, physical torment, and, finally, Rebecca’s decree of death—give evidence of their fortitude and dignity. When Isaac is thrown into the dungeon, he is more composed than another might be: “Above all, he had upon his side the unyielding obstinacy of his nation, and that unbending resolution with which Israelites have been frequently known to submit to the uttermost evils which power and violence can inflict upon them, rather than gratify their oppressors by granting their demands.”11 So, too, when Rebecca and Rowena are imprisoned, with Rebecca in far greater peril than the Saxon lady, she has the advantage of being better prepared, “by habits of thought and by natural strength of mind,” to confront the danger. “Like Damocles at his celebrated banquet,” Rebecca beheld “the sword which was suspended over the heads of her people by a single hair.”12
While persecution is a dominant theme in the book, religion is a relatively minor one. It is not God but the “obstinacy of his nation” that fortifies Isaac in the dungeon. And the “habits of thought” and “strength of mind” that prepare Rebecca for adversity come not from God but from the peril to which “her people” have always been subject. On the few occasions when God is invoked, it is almost as an afterthought. Seeking Rowena’s help, she appeals to a Judaic-Christian God, “the God whom they both worshipped, and . . . that revelation of the Law upon Mount Sinai in which they both believed.”13 Later, finding herself without a defender before the “trial by combat” that will determine her fate, Rebecca is confident that “God will raise me up a champion.” The Templar who has pity on her puts the question she might have asked of herself: “What has the law of Moses done for thee that thou shouldest die for it?” To which she replies: “It was the law of my fathers; it was delivered in thunders and in storms upon the mountain of Sinai, in cloud and in fire.”14 The only memorable act of piety occurs while she is awaiting the duel, when she recites the traditional evening prayer and sings a devotional hymn.15 In the final scene, announcing her departure from England, she explains to Rowena (then married to Ivanhoe) that England is “no
safe abode for the children of my people,” no place where “Israel [can] hope to rest during her wanderings.” Rowena begs her to remain in England where she can be weaned from her “erring law.” No, Rebecca replies, “I may not change the faith of my fathers like a garment unsuited to the climate in which I seek to dwell.... He to whom I dedicate my future life will be my comforter, if I do His will.” Is she going to retire to a convent? Rowena asks. No, Israel has no convents. She will do, as Jewesses always have done, devote “their thoughts to Heaven, and their actions to works of kindness to men.” In parting, she commends Rowena to the God “who made both Jew and Christian.”16
In his 1830 introduction to a new edition of Ivanhoe, Scott acknowledged the great success of the book and confronted some of the questions that had been raised about it. Like his other novels, this had been published anonymously; he now confessed that the author of the much-acclaimed Scottish-centered Waverley novels was also the author of this Anglo-Saxon novel. Addressing the complaints of those “fair readers” who objected to Ivanhoe’s marriage to the “less interesting Rowena” rather than the “fair Jewess,” he explained that “the prejudices of the age rendered such an union almost impossible”—echoing the scene in the novel when Ivanhoe, although attracted to Rebecca, resists her charm because he shares “the universal prejudices of his age and religion.”17 That they do not marry now appears as a point in Rebecca’s favor, confirming her moral superiority not only over the prejudices of the age but also over the debasing instincts of self-gratification.
The People of the Book Page 8