Professional Documents
Culture Documents
by
Judith W. Page
IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES
© Judith W. Page, 2004
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Page, Judith W. 1951–
Imperfect sympathies : British romanticism, Jews, and Judaism /
Judith W. Page.
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Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–312–29570–7 (alk. paper)
1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism.
2. Jews in literature. 3. Judaism and literature—Great Britain—
History—19th century. 4. English literature—Jewish authors—
History and criticism. 5. Jews—Great Britain—Intellectual
life—19th century. 6. Romanticism—Great Britain.
7. Sympathy in literature. 8. Judaism in literature. I. Title.
PR151.J5P27 2004
820.9⬘3529924—dc22 2003064780
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For my parents
and
for Bill, Rebekah, and Hannah
“But for those first affection s . . .”
“And who, Rebecca,” replied the Grand Master, “will lay lance in rest for
a sorceress? Who will be the champion of a Jewess?”
“God will raise me a champion,” said Rebecca. “It cannot be that in
merry England, the hospitable, the generous, the free, where so many are
ready to peril their lives for honour, there will not be found one to fight
for justice.”
—Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (423–24)
“And a stranger shall you not oppress,” says Exodus 23, verse 8, “for you
know the heart of a stranger, seeing you were strangers in the land of
Egypt.” There stands the parable; there stands the sacred metaphor of
belonging, one heart to another. Without the metaphor of memory and
history, we cannot imagine the life of the Other. We cannot imagine what
it is to be someone else. Metaphor is the reciprocal agent, the universal-
izing force: it makes possible the power to envision the stranger’s heart.
—Cynthia Ozick, “Metaphor and Memory” (279)
Illustrations vi
Acknowledgments vii
Preface xi
Notes 207
Bibliography 231
Index 249
Illustrations
2.1 Robert Cruikshank, New Scene from an Old Farce of The Jew
and the Doctor. March 1828. Courtesy of the Library of
the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. 24
2.2 Anon. Devotion in Duke’s Place, or Contractors returning
thanks for a Loan. 1818. Courtesy of the Library of the Jewish
Theological Seminary of America. 32
2.3 Thomas Rowlandson, Family Quarrels or The Jew and The
Gentile. 1803. Courtesy of the Library of the Jewish
Theological Seminary of America. 45
3.1 Sketch of Edmund Kean as Shylock, by George Hayter.
Courtesy of a private collection. 58
5.1 Mount of Olives and Jerusalem, by William Bartlett,
1830s/1840s. 111
5.2 “Lady Montefiore when young, copied from an oil painting
in the Montefiore College, Ramsgate.” Copied from Diaries
of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore. 124
Acknowledgments
I have such a long list of debts that I hardly know where to begin. My
greatest intellectual debt is to the scholars who have written the books
and asked the questions that have made my work possible. I hope that
my argument and my bibliography reflect my gratitude to so many
scholars and critics.
Closer to home, David Leverenz and Elise Smith read and
commented on the entire manuscript, providing me with such expert
editorial advice that I should be embarrassed by the mistakes that
remain. Leah Hochman enriched my knowledge of Judaism and moder-
nity through her own work and her generous conversations with me. As
editor and mentor, Marilyn Gaull has been a continuing source of
advice and support, for which I am most grateful. My student assistant,
Traci Klass, bore with my lapses in word processing and helped bring
order to a wildly formatted manuscript.
As always, my greatest debt is to my family. My husband Bill has
been my first reader and my invaluable supporter for more years than
either of us would care to acknowledge. For this project, he was also my
first source for all questions pertaining to Judaism, and a tireless respon-
dent to my ideas, day or night. I cannot adequately thank him for all
that he is and does, so I will leave it at that. In addition to the life-long
support of my parents, my mother, Mollie Marcus Wallick, read and
commented on the manuscript at various stages. I always benefited from
her acuity, and always welcomed her enthusiasm. I dedicate this book to
my parents, my husband, and my daughters Rebekah and Hannah, with
love and gratitude, knowing full well that they have kept me grounded
and whole.
The following friends and colleagues commented on parts of the
manuscript, or talked with me about the project, or shared their ideas
at some stage of my work: Richard Brantley, Luisa Calé, James
Chandler, Patricia Craddock, Michael Galchinsky, Pamela Gilbert, Bruce
Graver, Anthony Harding, Elizabeth Helsinger, Leah Hochman, Anne
Mellor, Greg Miller, Melvyn New, Meri-Jane Rochelson, Cynthia
viii / acknowledgments
Like many long projects, this one began with a short question: What did
William Wordsworth think of Jews? I first posed this question when I
discovered that Wordsworth’s daughter Dora Wordsworth had written
in her unpublished 1828 travel journal about an encounter with Jews
that inspired Wordsworth to write his poem “A Jewish Family.” My
initial interest centered on the differences between Dora’s vision of this
family and William’s rendition in his poem. My curiosity soon led me
to realize that I knew little about this aspect of Wordsworth’s thinking
and even less about the attitudes of his contemporaries. Nor did my
immediate research yield much insight, for with the exception of some
work on Ivanhoe and some older studies on stereotyping in literature,
there was very little on the subject of Romanticism and Judaism, even
though there were some compelling studies of Judaism and literature in
later and earlier periods.
As I began to think about the representation of Jews in canonical
writers of the period, I discovered the mostly unpublished writings of
Judith Montefiore, an observant Jew, who was the wife of the philan-
thropist Moses Montefiore and the first Anglo-Jewish woman to record
a visit to what is now Israel. So, I began researching the representation
of Jews in Romantic literature and previously neglected or little known
Jewish writers of the period at the same time, modeling my project on
the familiar feminist critique: reinterpretation and discovery. What had
been a blank page for me began to take shape as a book that not only
posed the question about Wordsworth and his contemporaries but also
sought to uncover unconventional and noncanonical Jewish writers.
At the same time, I taught a new course in Romanticism and Judaism
in the spring of 2001. The process of putting together a 450-page course
pack and planning a course for students in English and Jewish Studies
at the University of Florida also moved this project along. My students
in this first class and subsequent ones helped me think through many of
the issues and questions as we worked our way through The Merchant
of Venice and moved forward into the late eighteenth and early
preface / xii
What struck me was how outdated the descriptions were, how unlike
my own experience of visiting that synagogue. The descriptions seem to
preface / xiv
A Note on Terminology
I have used “anti-Semitism” as a general term to refer to hostility toward
Jews, although I am aware that the term itself is an anachronism for the
Romantic period. The Encyclopedia Judaica explains that the term was
“coined in 1879 . . . by the German agitator Wilhelm Marr to designate
the then-current anti-Jewish campaigns in Europe. ‘Anti-Semitism’
soon came into general use as a term denoting all forms of hostility
manifested toward Jews throughout history” (3: 87). I follow this
common practice in referring to derogatory and demeaning attitudes
toward Jews and Jewish culture, even before 1879. When I refer specif-
ically to hostility to the Jewish religion, particularly in relationship to
Christianity, I use the term “anti-Judaism.”
C h ap t e r 1
Introduction: Jews and the
Romantic Culture of Sympathy
His words had a strange effect upon me. I compassionated him, and
sometimes felt a wish to console him: but when I looked upon him, when
I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened, and my
feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred. I tried to stifle these
sensations: I thought, that as I could not sympathize with him, I had no
right to withhold from him the small portion of happiness which was yet
in my power to bestow.
—Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein (2:9, 119)
The other day I was floored by a Jew. He passed me several times, crying
for old clothes, in the most nasal and extraordinary tone that I ever heard.
At last, I was so provoked that I said to him, “Pray, why can’t you say ‘old
clothes’ in a plain way, as I do now?” The Jew stopped and looking very
gravely at me, said in a clear and even fine accent, “Sir, I can say ‘old
clothes’ as well as you can; but if you had to say it ten times a minute, for
an hour together, you would say ogh clo as I do now”; and so he marched
off. I was so confounded with the justice of his retort, that I followed and
gave him a shilling, the only one I had.
—Coleridge, Table Talk, July 7, 18301
Introduction
In these passages, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge stage scenes (one fictional, the other real) that reveal an
outsider eliciting sympathy by appealing to the spectator’s sense of right
or justice. Readers see Shelley’s monster through the eyes of Victor
Frankenstein, who struggles with the conflict between his failed sympa-
thy and his sense of the monster’s right to happiness. As readers of
Shelley’s fable know, Frankenstein’s failure to sympathize with “the filthy
mass” he has created leads to disaster for all involved. Frankenstein
creates a monster in more ways than one. Coleridge’s sympathy leads
him to a trivial act, but also to a more significant awareness about the
2 / imperfect sympathies
The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and
an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought,
action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine
intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of
another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must
become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination;
and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.3
Percy Shelley’s idealized vision of sympathy does not even raise the issue
that Mary Shelley cannot completely resolve: How does one sympathize
with figures viewed as foreign or portrayed as unattractive? What are the
jews and the romantic culture of sympathy / 3
mostly poor but they were also rich, they were foreign-looking but they
also simulated British gentility, they spoke English but not always the
King’s English. Jews were difficult to categorize and to place within
certain boundaries, unlike distant, colonized Others.7 If Romanticism
tended to romanticize the outcast, Jews made the process more difficult
because they were outcasts who were making inroads into the culture.
Jews were also in a strange position in relation to class sympathies.
Since most Jews were poor, one might think that the lower classes would
show sympathy for and solidarity with them. But popular representa-
tions of Jews and religious ideology militated against such sympathetic
bonds, and instead reinforced the suspicions associated with Otherness.
Likewise, the better-educated and more privileged Britons often
resented Jews both for their poverty and for their aspirations. When it
came to Jews, there was no hard and fast rule governing class allegiances.
Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our
ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did,
and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagi-
nation only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations.
Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by represent-
ing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. (9)
with those very eyes with which we, in imagination only, were endeavoring
to view them” (114). In the process of sympathetic identification, the
spectator must imagine himself as the object of another spectator’s gaze.
As James Chandler has explained, “Smith outlines a form of subjectiv-
ity in which we are always at once potential spectators sympathetic with
the positions of others and potential agents aware that we may or may
not gain sympathy from those who observe what we do.”9 Likewise,
Michael Bell has recently described Smith’s impartial spectator as a kind
of “internal monitor” (44) that creates the self as the object of the impar-
tial observation of the other.10 Bell’s insight demonstrates that Smith’s
theory has less to do with “individual feeling” than with “an imagined
arena in which the subjectivities of all human others, and of the self,
are reconstructed in a manner which has to be both emotional and
judgemental [sic]” (44).11
Smith also introduces the aesthetics of sympathy, arguing that it is
easier to sympathize with a beautiful object. He privileges those
moments and situations in which a beautiful or diminutive object easily
wins the sympathy of the more privileged and powerful (male) viewer.
Following this line of thought, Percy Shelley says the sympathetic imag-
ination is based on “an identification of ourselves with the beautiful
which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own” (my emphasis,
517).12 In line with this aesthetic bias, the beautiful Rebecca in Ivanhoe
garners more sympathy than her father Isaac.
Both Smith and Hume distinguish between the more challenging
task of sympathy for the unattractive or alien and what in Hume’s words
(quoted by Nathaniel Brown) is the “easy sympathy” deriving from
“relation, acquaintance, and resemblance” (35). In other words, both
Hume and Smith recognize that it is easiest to sympathize with one’s
own kind or with a situation that one can imagine inhabiting. Jews did
not fit readily into these categories. If it was easy to sympathize with
likeness, it was particularly hard to be moved by the plight of human
objects who inspired disgust, resentment, or consternation. James
Beattie argued in Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783) that “we
sympathize with what we know; and the wider our knowledge and expe-
rience, the wider is the scope of our sympathy and the juster and more
accurate it is in perceiving the character and significance of its object”
(quoted in Bate, 136).13
Some writers who advocate sympathy define the term more broadly
than compassion or fellow feeling. Even Smith, although he is most
interested in sympathy as projection, reflection, and fellow feeling, does
distinguish: “Pity and compassion are words appropriated to signify our
6 / imperfect sympathies
we pay to the dress and the manners of men would dwindle into an
employment as insipid, as examining the varieties of plants and miner-
als, is to one who understands not natural history” (69). For Baillie,
readers or spectators of drama are attracted to the objects before them
both because they identify with their plight and because they are
intrigued or interested in the representation of a person other than
themselves or a passion they themselves have not experienced. Her defi-
nition, like Wordsworth’s, honors the dynamic tension inherent in the
act of sympathetic identification. Ballie’s understanding of dramatic
sympathy also foreshadows Hazlitt’s later argument about Shylock and
the dynamics of sympathy in The Merchant of Venice.
In a letter to John Wilson ( June 7, 1802) regarding “The Idiot Boy,”
Wordsworth articulates the ethics of sympathy. Feeling sympathy
extends and challenges the reader’s capacity to respond to difference:
A Friend of mine, knowing that some persons had a dislike to the poem
such as you have expressed advised me to add a stanza describing the
person of the Boy [so a]s entirely to separate him in the imaginations of
my Readers from [that] class of idiots who are disgusting in their persons,
but the narration [in] the poem is so rapid and impassioned that I could
not find a place [in] which to insert the stanza without checking the
progress of it, and [so lea]ving a deadness upon the feeling. This poem
has, I know, frequently produced [the s]ame effect as it did upon you and
your Friends but there are many [peo]ple also to whom it affords exquis-
ite delight, and who indeed, prefer [it] to any other of my Poems. This
proves that the feelings there delineated [are] such as all men may sympa-
thize with. This is enough for my purpose. [It] is not enough for me as a
poet, to delineate merely such feelings as all men do sympathise [sic] with
but, it is also highly desirable to add to these others, such as all men may
sympathize, and such as there is reason to believe they would be better
and more moral beings if they did sympathize with. (357–58)
Like Mary Shelley’s creature, Jews were “monstrous” and “filthy,” diffi-
cult to integrate into civilized society: “The smell of the Jews, the foetor
judäicus, is the medieval mephitic odor always associated with the
Other” (Self-Hatred, 174). Even when one considers the gendered differ-
ences in the representation of Jews, the outcome is not more positive, or
at least it remains complicated. Jewish men, often associated with bodily
ugliness and excess, as well as unsavory commercial dealings and strange,
imperfect language, appear more negative than Jewish women, who are
more often represented as mysterious, exotic beauties. Instead of inspir-
ing sympathy and fellow feeling, though, they are often erotic objects,
as is Rebecca in Ivanhoe or Berenice in Harrington, as if they come to
embody the danger that Mary Wollstonecraft was aware of in represen-
tations of female beauty. They are more often objects of desire and
conversion than disinterested love: they may enter civilized society only
if they cease to be or to be thought of as Jews.
jews and the romantic culture of sympathy / 11
Our ancestors were not more distinct from us, surely, than Jews are from
Christians; they had “eyes, hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections,
passions”; were “fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons,
subject to the same diseases, warmed and cooled by the same winter and
summer,” as ourselves. The tenor, therefore, of their affections and feel-
ing must have borne the same general proportions to our own. (529)
Templeton uses Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew eyes” speech, not to elaborate
directly on the contextual meaning of the speech, but to draw his own
connections between past and present. But he also implies that he
endorses the logic and justice of the speech in accepting the likeness of
Jews and Christians.
The allusion to the speech prepares the reader for more extensive
connections between Ivanhoe and The Merchant—allusions, parallels,
commentary—as scholars, such as Michael Ragussis and Michael
Galchinsky, have demonstrated.21 But I question just how fully Scott
critiques medieval anti-Semitism in Ivanhoe; in the above passage for
instance, Scott through Templeton implies that the feelings and affec-
tions of “our” ancestors (medieval Britons) are translatable to “our own”
(contemporary Britons). If this is the case, then the anti-Semitism that
Scott presents is not just a distant and outdated set of stories and stereo-
types, but an outlook connected to contemporary “affections.”
Two passages that focus on Isaac bear out this point. Scott’s initial
description of Isaac centers on the question of likeness and of Jewish
ugliness:
His features, keen and regular, with an aquiline nose, and piercing black
eyes; his high and wrinkled forehead, and long grey hair and beard,
would have been considered as handsome, had they not been the marks
of a physiognomy peculiar to a race which, during those dark ages, was
alike detested by the credulous and prejudiced vulgar, and persecuted by
the greedy and rapacious nobility, and who, perhaps owing to that very
hatred and persecution, had adopted a national character in which there
was much, to say the least, mean and unamiable. (50)
12 / imperfect sympathies
The little ready money which was in the country was chiefly in possession
of this persecuted people, and the nobility hesitated not to follow the
example of their sovereign in wringing it from them by every species of
oppression, and even personal torture. Yet the passive courage inspired by
the love of gain induced the Jews to dare the various evils to which they
were subjected, in consideration of the immense profits which they were
enabled to realize in a country naturally so wealthy as England. In spite of
every kind of discouragement, and even of the special court of taxations
already mentioned, called the Jews’ Exchequer, erected for the very
purpose of despoiling and distressing them, the Jews increased, multiplied,
and accumulated huge sums, which they transferred from one hand to
another by means of bills of exchange—an invention for which commerce
is said to be indebted to them, and which enabled them to transfer their
wealth from land to land, that, when threatened with oppression in one
country, their treasure might be secured in another. (70)
all the way to a “natural affection,” which achieves both private and
public good, while it is demoted to an “unnatural affection,” which
achieves neither, when it is indulged to excess. (64, 65)
The only thing that redeems Isaac somewhat from this description is the
way that he responds to the news of Rebecca’s captivity, showing in this
regard that his natural affections revise Shylock’s infamous debate
regarding his daughter or his ducats: “reduce me to ruin and to beggary,
if thou wilt—nay, pierce me with thy poniard, broil me on that furnace;
but spare my daughter, deliver her in safety and honour” (233). Front-
de-Boeuf responds, “I thought your race had loved nothing save their
money-bags” (233).23
Setting aside the issue of Scott’s historical accuracy or his relation to
eighteenth-century philosophers, important subjects but not central here,
the twists and turns of language in the passage from Ivanhoe make it hard
to sympathize with Jewish oppression or torture. The emphasis is on
“passive courage inspired by love of gain”—not active courage that
Rebecca, as a potentially redeemable female, will demonstrate inspired by
the love of her faith. Scott’s word choice even parodies Genesis, with the
Jews fruitfully multiplying “huge sums”—a genealogy of bills of exchange
transferred from land to land, generation to generation. Furthermore, the
paragraph serves as a mini-myth of the medieval wandering Jews giving
birth to the wandering commercial Jews of the early nineteenth century,
and to the very system of capitalism itself. Because Jews are so avaricious
and obstinate (a code word for the Jews’ resistance to Christianity), both
Jews and their system of paper money are suspect. Scott’s personal writ-
ings amply demonstrate that his suspicions about Jews were related to his
own financial woes. A sampling of those comments includes:
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 individual instances. They are money-makers and money
brokers by profession and it is a trade which narrows the mind. (Letters
of Sir Walter Scott to Joanna Baillie, July 24, 1817, 4:478)24
If your London Shylock wants a pound of flesh, it will fall to James
B[allantyne]’s lot to find it, for my proposed noble surety never had an
ounce, and John B[allantyne] as little, and I have dwindled sadly under
the tirrits and frights. (Letters of Sir Walter Scott to Archibald Constable,
August 24, 1813, 3:327)
After all it is hard that the vagabond Stock-jobbing Jews should for their
purposes make such a shake of credit as now exists in London and menace
the credit of men trading on sure funds . . . . It is just like a set of
14 / imperfect sympathies
pickpockets who raise a mob in which honest folks are knocked down
and plundered that they may pillage safely in the midst of the confusion
they have excited. ( Journal 25, November 1815)
Scott’s personal writing, which includes the various code words for
Jewish financial deceit on all levels of society, including London
Shylocks, vagabond Stock-jobbing Jews, and pickpockets, reinforces
the anxiety of the narrative voice in Ivanhoe: honest folks should not
trust these connivers, although there may be decent ones now and then.
This kind of description, oddly enough, plays right into the hands of
Marx and his analysis of “the Jewish question.”25 What Marxist and
other varieties of anti-Semitism do not appreciate is that restrictive
conditions forced Jews into money lending and haggling; then, Jews
became scapegoats for the very thing they were forced to do within
commercial, capitalist society.
In a much more genteel way than Marx, of course, Scott distrusts the
power of Jewish wealth to influence the state and to change the tenor of
the social interchange. Jewish greed and love of money for its own sake
taints the commercial enterprise because it is rapacious and excessive. This
notion of commerce reconnects to the issue of sympathy not in terms of
Marx’s critique but on the other side of the political spectrum. James
Chandler makes the case for commercial society’s interest in sympathy.
Going back to Smith, the author of The Wealth of Nations as well as
Theory of Moral Sentiments, Chandler argues that the eighteenth-century
notion of commerce depends on the “open-hearted intercourse”
(“Moving Accidents,” 141) of sympathy, on a system in which people
sympathize with others because they also have an interest in the
economic success of others. Or, Hirschman argues that the “origin of the
epithet doux [in Montesquieu] is probably found in the ‘noncommer-
cial’ meaning of commerce: besides trade the word long denoted
animated and repeated conversation and other forms of polite social
intercourse and dealings among persons (frequently between persons of
the opposite sex)” (61).
How does this analysis relate to Jews? The success of commercial
society depends on fair and free trade in the marketplace, and the liter-
ature and culture of 1770–1830 are filled with representations of Jews
who do not fit this model of commercial exchange. Jewish merchants
and financiers always appear self-interested, avaricious, and cheating,
still tainted by medieval usury and shady dealing. They are Shylocks
who neither feel nor inspire sympathy. This attitude underpins Scott’s
treatment of Isaac, even though the narrator acknowledges the tyranny
jews and the romantic culture of sympathy / 15
against the Jews and the oppression they suffer and distinguishes Isaac
from Shylock in his relationship with his daughter.
Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey provides an earlier example of the asso-
ciation among Jews, cheating, and the commerce of sympathy. The
narrator-sentimental traveler Yorick arrives in Calais and reports this
exchange with a landlord, Dessein:
It must needs be a hostile kind of a world, when the buyer (if it be but
of a sorry post-chaise) cannot go further with the seller thereof into the
street to terminate the difference betwixt them, but he instantly falls into
the same frame of mind and views his conventionist with the same sort
of eye, as if he was going along with them to Hyde-park corner to fight
a duel. For my own part, being but a poor sword’s man, and no way a
match for Monsieur Dessein, I felt the rotation of all the movements
within me, to which the situation is incident—I looked at Monsieur
Dessein through and through—ey’d him as he walked in profile—then,
en face—he look’d like a Jew—then a Turk—disliked his wig—cursed
him by my gods—wished him at the devil . . . (46).
exceptions, did not know any Jews personally, had never observed
Jewish practice in a Jewish home, did not read seriously Jewish texts
such as the Talmud or Jewish versions of the Hebrew Scriptures, for
them still an Old Testament, and thus did not understand Judaism or
Jewish culture in a deep way. As a result, even in those cases in which
authors set out to present “good Jews” with the feelings and affections
of other Britons, they misrepresent Jewish practice (Edgeworth, Scott),
idealize characters (Wordsworth), use Jewish themes to explore their
own alienation (Byron), or simply reverse stereotypes (Cumberland).
Despite the texts’ attempts to assimilate the Jews they represent, they do
not easily fit. As Michael Galchinsky has argued in The Origin of the
Modern Jewish Woman Writer regarding the Victorian novel, the stranger
or foreigner in the text often alters the forms of the genre. In the litera-
ture I consider, characters represent different attitudes about Jews and
their place in British society, and the presence of “the Jew” in the text or
representation does indeed modify the bounds of the genre. For Hazlitt,
for instance, The Merchant of Venice is the tragedy of Shylock, not the
comedy of the magical world of Belmont triumphing over a Jewish
scoundrel from Venice. Hazlitt, then, reclassifies the play in generic
terms.
Jewish writers faced a different problem, whether writing for a
private audience, as in the case of Judith Montefiore’s journals, or for the
larger British public, including Jewish readers. Although the number of
Jewish writers is limited in this early period, both writers whom I study
strive to present Judaism, Jewish history, and Jewish texts in a way that
elicits sympathetic responses. Even Hurwitz, who presents a strong,
rational refutation of Talmudic critics, includes stories that reinforce the
basis of Judaism in compassion, fellow feeling, and sympathy for all
creatures. In appealing to the fellow feeling of Christian readers,
Hurwitz demonstrates that Jewish teaching is based on acts of loving-
kindness. Hurwitz repeatedly argues that Jewish teaching is compatible
with the values and culture of the British reading public.
In chapter 2, I explore the way that religious, political, and popular
culture often converged in the representation of Jews, using three differ-
ent works to set out a range of responses, arranged chronologically:
Cumberland’s awkward attempt to win sympathy theatrically in the
sentimental comedy The Jew; Lamb’s more honestly revelatory study of
why sympathy is difficult in the essay “Imperfect Sympathies;” and
Hazlitt’s passionate, even heroic, argument for political emancipation,
his last essay, “The Emancipation of the Jews.” In chapter 3, I continue
the emphasis on Hazlitt by arguing that his writings on Edmund Kean’s
jews and the romantic culture of sympathy / 17
reference group, the conservative curse: The more you are like me, the
more I know the true value of my power, which you wish to share, and
the more I am aware that you are but a shoddy counterfeit, an outsider.
(Self-Hatred, 1–2)
texts both metaphorically and literally as writers chart this new territory.
Hence, Montefiore’s journey is literally to Jerusalem, but it is also to a
deeper understanding of Judaism itself, whereas Wordsworth travels to
the Rhineland and finds a Jewish family who reveal more to the reader
than to the poet. In addition, visual metaphors are also crucial because
so much depends on how the agent perceives the object. And, from the
Jewish writer’s perspective, there must be a balance between refusing the
“mirage” of the dominant culture and understanding that fantasy as a
strategy of self-defense—a sort of reversal of Burns’ “O wad some Power
the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us!” from “To a Louse.” It
seems to me that Jews in Britain knew all too well the way others saw
them—witness Coleridge’s old-clothes man—but they were struggling
to construct an image and to find a place for themselves in spite of the
scorn, ambivalence, or “love” of other Britons. My book sets out to tell
a version of that story as it unfolds in literary representation.
C h ap t e r 2
Blessing and Curse: Imaginary
Jews and Romantic Texts
When all these things befall you—the blessing and the curse that I have
set before you—and you take them to heart amidst the various nations to
which the Lord your God has banished you, and you return to the Lord
your God, and you and your children heed His command with all your
heart and soul, just as I enjoin upon you this day, then the Lord your
God will restore your fortunes and take you back in love. He will bring
you together again from all the peoples where the Lord your God has
scattered you.
—Deuteronomy 30: 1–3 (Tanakh)
You can’t recognize a Jew when you see one? It’s part and parcel of his
secretive nature. He’s not easily defined? It’s because he pursues unspeakable
goals. And, “if he is scattered all over the world,” it’s because all the world
must belong to him.
—Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew (165)
Introduction
Recent work on Jewish identity and representation in late-eighteenth
and early-nineteenth-century Britain has emphasized the dominant
culture’s ambivalence, repeatedly manifested in terms of contradictory
images, representations, and sayings about Jews and Judaism. As Bryan
Cheyette and others have argued, part of the difficulty of Jewish repre-
sentation involves the fact that Jews are border figures, the Other within
British culture: they are hard to place and categorize.1 In the culture as a
whole, for instance, anti-Semitic caricatures and philo-Semitic conver-
sionist discourse flourish in an atmosphere of growing religious tolera-
tion. On a more specific level, even writers who consciously set out to
present Jews in a positive light often reveal their own prejudice and
ambivalence about Jews, or the idea of “the Jew.” The ambivalence, so
characteristic of Romantic representations of Jews and Jewishness,
22 / imperfect sympathies
Figure 2.1 Robert Cruikshank, New Scene from an Old Farce of The Jew and
The Doctor. March 1828. Courtesy of the Library of the Jewish Theological
Seminary of America.
graphic satire, the Jews in The Universal Songster are lower class, and
if they speak, they certainly do not speak the King’s English, but rather
they mangle their English with Yiddish pronunciation. Consider,
for instance, an air taken from The Plymouth Jew about a Jewish thief or
“fisherman” who hooks his fish—i.e., cheats sailors—in the port:
Just about all the “Smouches”5 or Jews that one encounters in The
Universal Songster are cheats, or at the very least obsessed with profit.
They are also lascivious, as the air from Betty Martin and My Eye: or
Enoch Moss’ Dissertation on Woman demonstrates:
Just in case the reader doesn’t get what the song is really about, the
editors have added italics to confirm the double entendre. An air from
Mr. Abrahams, the Jew Pedler; or Curing the Simple without Cutting!
seems to be the most far-reaching satire. This tells the story of a “merry
Jew peddler” who “bamboozles” his clients in numerous ways, as he
proudly enumerates: he repairs jewelry on the cheap (“I mends a crack
as [a] quack cures a cancer”); seduces women (“I am a prime jeweler in
de vomen’s vay, vat likes a bit of humbug, or it vo’nt do at arl mit ‘em . . .
I’m a proper vorking jeweler mit de vomens verever I pe; sure to cheat
‘em, von vay or toder”); and sells fake remedies for this and that:
This song plays into several of the rumors about Jews, all of the charges
linked by the common denominator of the Jew as cheat, the deceiver.
Although not all of the images are as sinister as this Abrahams, the more
benign Jews tend toward the ridiculous. “Smouchey Abrahams” in The
Jolly Jew, for instance, recites this refrain:
As if the moral were not clear enough, in a prose explanation of the trade
in old clothes on the next page, the writer explains that Jews were the
chief agents in this trade and that “prejudice, no doubt, exceeds truth in
this instance, as in most others, and it is most probable we should not
meet with more honesty in the Protestant, than is often to be found in
the censured Jew” (18).
Despite this moralizing, satirical images were more common. Even a
Jewish love song of sorts in an air from The Jew (a farce not to be
confused with Cumberland’s play of the same name) dramatizes an old-
clothes man who uses the tricks of his trade to “purchase” favors
“cheaply” from his love:
The satire of this song is all the more effective because the song is a kind
of nursery rhyme, with pastoral imagery reminiscent of Blake’s Songs of
Innocence (“pleasant and clear” morning, “laughter and glee”) incongru-
ously mixed with the debased language of commerce (“The bargain vash
struck”) and the allusion to Duke’s Place. And of course the song
imaginary jews and romantic texts / 27
suggests that Jews are mating and multiplying with “pretty little
smouches.” The song implies that Jews conduct all of their business—
including love and sex—as if it were a commercial transaction that had
better yield a profit. What should be a purely sympathetic exchange
becomes a parody of itself.
Even more far-reaching than the satirical images of Jews in prints and
popular songs is the message that Christians received from the pulpits of
their churches. Although Endelman has recently argued in The Jews of
Britain, 1656–2000, that “The most frequent and widespread expres-
sions of anti-Jewish sentiment were couched in secular rather than reli-
gious language” (70), blaming Jews for “unrestrained, morally
unfettered economic individualism” (71), there is also evidence that reli-
gious language was a powerful force in shaping the image of Jews and
Judaism in literature and culture. Melvyn New states, “From that repet-
itive position of authority [the Sunday pulpit], it was pointed out in the
annual retelling of the life and teachings of Jesus, year after year, that
Christianity’s . . . essence [,] is in its superiority to the Pharisaic religion
of the Jews, the religion of Law which is already and always the great
enemy of the religion of the Spirit that is Christianity” (294–95). New
explains that this attitude pervades the various denominations as the
common, foundational principal—from the Anglicans to various
Dissenters. He argues, “If one wants to understand anti-Semitism in the
eighteenth century, one must read not only weak-minded rabble-
rousing politicians, journalists, and madmen, but the age’s best preach-
ers and theologians—Tillotson and Clarke, South and Law, Butler and
Warburton, Whitefield and Wesley” (295). Furthermore, since, as others
have noted, printed forms of popular sermons were readily available and
freely appropriated (and some of the preachers were itinerant) the voices
of these famous preachers reached well beyond a given location.6
New’s thesis fits in well with Robert Ryan’s recent persuasive argu-
ment in The Romantic Reformation that in the Romantic period there
was a conscious effort to influence the religious life of the time—that
religion mediated between culture and politics (4) and that the move-
ment for religious and hence political emancipation and the Evangelical
revival (18) were pivotal. Ryan does not address the place of the Jews in
the reformation, but commentary about and even by Jews became part
of the debate, as David Ruderman’s work demonstrates.7 And, as Ryan
points out, the scholarly emphasis (such as formulated by M. H. Abrams
in Natural Supernaturalism) on the internal and secular transformation
of biblical myths in Romantic poetry should not obscure the actual
religious debates and assumptions of the period (8).
28 / imperfect sympathies
Crabbe adapts the common view that English Jews are a far cry from
their biblical forebears, excluding them from the secular ways of distin-
guishing themselves as Englishmen. His charges are suspect from
numerous points of view, prominent of which is the exclusion of Jews
from higher education in Britain.8
But Crabbe’s The Borough is a mere footnote in this story. In addition
to the famous Joseph Priestley–David Levi debate of the late eighteenth
century, in which Levi, a self-taught Jew, responded in print to
Priestley’s misrepresentations about Jews and Judaism,9 one could
simply scan Cecil Roth’s Magna Bibliotheca Anglo-Judaica (1937) to see
that the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews
constantly sponsored publications and that Jews and their supporters
responded to these conversionist incursions with publications in defense
of Judaism. Tobias Goodman’s “address to the . . . London Society for
Promoting Christianity among the Jews; in which . . . their attempt to
overturn the Jewish system of worship proved to be unwarrantable
and contrary to divine revelation” (1809; 264) was one of many such
responses. Two of Roth’s entries are most telling. First, Roth states,
“After the establishment of the London Society for Promoting
Christianity amongst [sic] the Jews, 1795–1808, the volume of conver-
sionist propaganda increased to such an extent that it has proved impos-
sible to include a complete bibliography of it here” (287). Second, he
includes an entry under the pseudonym P. P. Paquin: “Jewish conver-
sion: a poetical farce, got up with great effect under the direction of a
Society for making bad Jews worse Christians. Dedicated to His Royal
Highness the Duke of Kent, with whose approbation it has been
recently played, and will be repeated this Friday, May 6th, 1814” (265).
Both of these entries indicate that the conversionist writing, based on the
philo-Semitic belief that Christianity must ultimately supersede Judaism
and that the conversion of the Jews would help bring about millennial
hopes, was pervasive in the religious culture since the seventeenth
imaginary jews and romantic texts / 29
century.10 The second example, furthermore, attests that the genre was
so pervasive and identifiable that it was susceptible to humor and parody
(a Society for making bad Jews worse Christians). Furthermore, the exis-
tence of the debate itself indicates a certain level of intellectual life and
facility with the language among some British Jews, despite the substan-
dard language of satirized Jewish figures.
The primary message regarding Jews, even in the context of a call to
love and devotion, was that the religion of the Jews was of the dead letter
while Christianity was of the spirit: or another way to put it, one was
devoted to Law and the other Love. This interpretation is based on a
misreading of Judaism and the whole concept of Law or Torah, but it
became (and for some still is) a useful distortion of Judaism, which
could then be easily dismissed without being studied. I do not claim
here to offer a study of the sermons of the eighteenth and early nine-
teenth century. Rather, I examine two of the most influential works,
long-read and reprinted, William Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and
Holy Life (1728) and The Spirit of Love (1752–54), to demonstrate the
point. Although neither of these works is an anti-Semitic diatribe,
certain assumptions about Jews pervade the texts. For instance, in
A Serious Call, Law asks,
In this passage, the congruity of Jews and heathens does the trick—guilt
by association. In The Spirit of Love, references to the Jews consistently
reinforce Jewish guilt in the crucifixion (“Jews brought him to the
cross,” 361); Jewish obstinacy (“You do in reality what those Jews did
when they said, ‘We will not have this man to reign over us,’ ” 362); and
Jewish faithlessness (“The unbelieving Jews . . . ,” 378).
It is a very short leap from The Spirit of Love to William Blake’s anti-
Judaism, evident in angry eruptions in his poetry, letters, and annota-
tions, most notoriously in his Annotations to Watson. Blake’s idea of Jews
and Judaism feeds on the false dichotomy between Law and Love, in
Blake’s mythology, Reason and Imagination. Both Karen Shabetai and
Michael Galchinsky argue that Blake’s anti-Jewish sentiment is founded
on religious (theological) reasons rather than racial principles.11 Blake’s
Christian orthodoxy lays the foundation for his anti-Judaic stance.
30 / imperfect sympathies
and Isaac Nathan, the first a convert from Judaism to Christianity, the
second a Jew:
than the fountains of Helicon could afford him: to learn from that
blessed book, not how to write on Jewish topics, but how
“To shame the doctrine of the Sadducees.” (425)
Figure 2.2 Anon. Devotion in Duke’s Place, or Contractors returning thanks for
a Loan. 1818. Courtesy of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of
America.
imaginary jews and romantic texts / 33
practice was strange and undignified.17 Coleridge stands out among his
contemporaries because he devoted much of his intellectual energy to
studying the Bible and ancient Jewish civilization, and yet he also repre-
sents the ambivalence of the period. Despite the depth of his studies, his
interest in biblical criticism, and his personal relationship with Hyman
Hurwitz, Coleridge maintained a dichotomy between biblical Judaism
and the London Jews, perhaps not as brutal as Byron’s but nonetheless
troubling. As one of Coleridge’s modern editors, Anthony Harding,
explained in a personal correspondence (1997),
There are certainly some remarks by Coleridge that reflect common anti-
Semitic prejudice of his day—he tends to contrast the noble words of the
biblical prophets with the poor sellers of old clothes who were the Jew
most often seen in public—but in general he has a much more positive
even pro-Jewish view especially contrasted with Enlightenment writers
like Herder and Eichhorn whom in fact he strongly criticizes for their
patronizing attitude to the history and culture of Israel.
I do most heartily wish they had flattered me with some token, however
small, of which I might have said this is a tribute to my philanthropy, and
delivered it down to my children, as my beloved father did to me his
imaginary jews and romantic texts / 35
badge of favour from the citizens of Dublin; but not a word from the lips,
not a line did I ever receive from the pen of any Jew, though I have found
myself in company with many of their nation; and in this perhaps the
gentlemen are quite right, whilst I had formed expectations, that were
quite wrong; for if I have said of them only what they deserve, why
should I be thanked for it? But if I have said more, much more, than they
deserve, can they do a wiser thing than hold their tongues? (Memoirs,
2:202–03)
Jabal: Why ‘tis the devil himself, in the shape of a Bologna sausage:
Gracious! How my mouth did water, as I saw a string of them
dangling from the penthouse of an oilman’s shop! The fellow
wou’d have persuaded me that were made of ass’s flesh—Oh! If
I cou’d have believ’d him.
Dorcas: Oh! Horrible! You must not touch the unclean beast.
Jabal: No, to be sure; our people have never tasted bacon since they
came out of the land of Ham.
Dorcas: Jabal, Jabal, what an escape you have had!
Jabal: So had the sausages, for my teeth quiver’d to be at them.
(2.2, 27)
I have tried every part of the house, but the front boxes, where I observe
such a line of bullies in the back, that even if I were a Christian, I would
not venture amongst them; but I no sooner put my head into an obscure
corner of the gallery than some fellow roars out to his comrades—Smoke
the Jew!—Smoke the little Isaac!—Throw him over, says another, hand over
the smouch!—Out with Shylock, cries a third, out with the pound of man’s
flesh—Buckles and buttons! Spectacles! bawls out a fourth—and so on
through the whole gallery, till I am forced to retire out of the theatre,
amongst hootings and hissings, with a shower of rotten apples and
chewed oranges vollied at my head, when all the offense I have given is a
humble offer to be a peaceable spectator jointly with them, of the same
common amusement. (247)
This is more vivid than anything in The Jew for showing what it really
might have felt like to be “smoked,” an archaic expression for being
exposed or ostracized as an outsider.26 Cumberland’s language—from
the slang term for a Jew (smouch) to the references to Shylock or the
generic, infantilizing “little Isaac”—evokes sympathy for Abrahams and
his wife, who was also subjected to this harassment. Cumberland seems
to understand that the theater, a public place where national identity
and culture were contested, needed to be open to all, especially to Jews
of some standing. Mr. Abrahams, in fact, goes on to explain that he has
“lodged” his “property” (247) and trusted his safety to England.27
Cumberland comments on the letter by noting the “vulgar fun of
smoking a Jew, which so prevails among us” [in 1785] (249). He believes
that people would not do this “if they were once fairly convinced that a
Jew were their fellow creature, and really had fellow feeling with their
own: satisfy them in this point, and their humanity will do the rest”
(249). Cumberland employs the language of sympathy in his analysis.
Remarkably, Cumberland then advises his correspondent to recite
Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech to the “smoker.” Cumberland
urges that a man who can seriously answer Shylock’s questions and
persist as a persecutor “has the soul of the inquisition” (250). Thirty
years before Hazlitt will endorse sympathy for Kean’s Shylock,
Cumberland suggests a bold rethinking of the play as if it were just the
most basic common sense. He cuts to the heart of the matter by identi-
fying the basic requirements for the sympathetic imagination: fellow
feeling for others, especially for the oppressed.
imaginary jews and romantic texts / 39
In The Jew, written about nine years later, Cumberland lacks the
intensity of this conviction. He does present Sheva as worthy of fellow
feeling, but he ridicules him at the same time. Here, in the Observer
essay, something else happens to compromise the conviction of sympathy.
He speaks as a Christian and casts a shadow on his own insight:
The sin and obduracy of their forefathers are amongst the undoubted
records of our gospel, but I doubt if this can be a sufficient reason,
why we should hold them in such general odium through so many
ages, seeing how naturally the son follows the faith of the father, and
how much too general a thing it is amongst mankind to profess any
particular form of religion, that devolves upon them by inheritance,
rather than by free election and conviction of reason founded upon
examination. (250)
From here on out in this essay Cumberland develops the argument that
the Jews are indeed a sinful and obdurate people from the perspective
of the gospel: they not only rejected the Christian messiah, he implies,
but they participated in his betrayal. The quoted passage, while accept-
ing this claim against the Jews as truth, goes on to say that Christians
should not blame Jews for naturally following their inherited religion—
it is a fault akin to a genetic disease, in other words, that they cannot
help. According to Cumberland’s construction, a Christian can feel
sympathy for the Jewish people and fellow feeling for individual Jews,
but can never forget the superiority of the Christian dispensation. He was
still thinking this way in 1801 when he published an essay entitled, “A
Few Plain Reasons Why We Should Believe in Christ and Adhere to His
Religion: Addrest to the Patrons and Professors of the New Philosophy,”
as he had been when he published an eight-book poem in 1792 entitled,
Calvary, or the Death of Christ, just two years before The Jew opened.
The point is not just that The Jew sends mixed messages in its treat-
ment of Sheva, but that Cumberland’s own Christian ideology leads to
contradiction. In his view, Christians should respect Jews as the chosen
people and should love them, but always with the awareness that their
very existence as Jews consigns them to the “peculiarity” and otherness
of the not Christian. Cumberland may advocate religious toleration and
safe haven for Jews, but he stops there. Sheva cannot escape the fact that
he is an unbeliever, a foreigner, an Other, no matter how nice he is or
how much money he gives away. The same ambivalence about Jews that
Cumberland betrays also motivates Charles Lamb, whose persona in
“Imperfect Sympathies” makes ambivalence open and explicit.
40 / imperfect sympathies
Elia begins the essay by claiming that, unlike the author of Religio
Medici (Sir Thomas Browne), he does not sympathize with all things:
conversation. But the incongruity that Elia feels here and the sense of
oddness he projects remains good natured and admiring. The Quakers
have no qualms, so why should he? Their commercial dealings are
somewhat mysterious but not rapacious.
Sandwiched between the Scots and the Quakers is a short segment
on “the Negro” and a longer one on Jews. Elia briefly comments on
the “benignity” (75) of the black faces that he has seen in London: “But
I should not like to associate with them, to share my meals and my
goodnights with them—because they are black” (73). Elia offers no
explanation—he implies that the striking fact of their physical differ-
ence justifies the absence of sympathy and fellow feeling despite the
“benignity.”
Still, Elia’s much longer paragraph on the Jews covers more ground
and raises even more troubling questions about his imperfect sympathy.
Elia begins by saying that, “I have, in abstract, no disrespect for Jews.
They are a piece of stubborn antiquity, compared with which
Stonehenge is in its nonage” (72). Without saying it explicitly, Elia, who
has already told his readers that he avoids literal-mindedness, implies
much by his use of the word “stubborn.” As cited earlier, the stubborn-
ness of the Jews in not accepting Jesus as their messiah is a major theme
of Christian sermonizing. Although Elia’s tone is light, then, his impli-
cation bears more weight. The same holds for his next allusion:
I confess that I have not the nerve to enter their synagogues. Old preju-
dices cling about me. I cannot shake off the story of Hugh of Lincoln.
Centuries of injury, contempt, and hate, on the one side,—of cloaked
revenge, dissimulation, and hate, on the other, between our and their
fathers, must, and ought to affect the blood of the children. (72)
Elia implies that there is good reason for the Jewish response to
Christian hate, but he diminishes his position by alluding to Hugh of
Lincoln, one of the notorious episodes of the blood libel aimed against
Jews in England and all over Europe and the East for hundreds of
years.29 This reference, so involved with violence and hatred against the
Jews, is particularly jarring here. Simply by bringing up the blood libel
as a story that haunts him, even if he does not endorse the lie, Elia
revives the suspicion that Jews really are a threat.
Although Elia has criticized the Scots for their inability to sit on
the border, he now adopts their posture, for the most troubling practice
for Elia is assimilation, the mingling of Christian and Jew in “affected
civility” (72). Elia seems most bothered by attempts of Jews to reform
imaginary jews and romantic texts / 43
and liberalize their practice so that they fit into British society: “A moder-
ate Jew is a more confounding piece of anomaly than a wet Quaker” (73).
For Elia, the separate ritual and practices (“If they can sit with us at table,
why do they keck at our cookery?” [72]) of Judaism require a distance
from society. Jews seem ungrateful and unsociable in this description,
since their dietary laws require them to reject Christian hospitality.
If accommodation and liberalization perplex Elia, so does conver-
sion. His example of a famous convert from Judaism rehearses the situ-
ation of many converted Jews—including most famously Benjamin
Disraeli—who supposedly maintain telltale signs of Jewishness despite
the rejection of Judaism: mannerisms, speech, “physiognomy.”
Consider the example of “B——,” John Braham, the famous tenor:
B—— would have been more in keeping if he had abided by the spirit of
the faith of his forefathers. There is a fine scorn in his face, which nature
meant to be of ——- Christians. The Hebrew spirit is strong in him in spite
of his proselytism. He cannot conquer the Shibboleth. How it breaks out
when he sings, “The Children of Israel passed through the Red Sea!” The
auditors, for the moment, are as Egyptians to him, and he rides over our
necks in triumph. There is no mistaking him. —- B—- has a strong expres-
sion of sense in his countenance, and it is confirmed by his singing. The
foundation of his vocal excellence is sense. He sings with understanding, as
[Philip] Kemble delivered dialogue. He would sing the Commandments,
and give an appropriate character to each prohibition. (73)
The biblical allusions work to emphasize the point that Elia makes
about Braham: that as a convert he can give up his Judaism but cannot
escape the Shibboleth of his Jewishness, manifested both in his perform-
ing voice and in his “fine scorn.” Paradoxically, Braham’s Christian audi-
tors become the Egyptians, caught in the Red Sea as Braham, the Jew,
“rides over our necks in triumph,” in a contextually useful misreading of
Exodus and perhaps of Handel’s oratorio Israel in Egypt. Furthermore,
Elia’s ungrammatical shift from the third person “the auditors” to
the first person “our necks” draws a strong distinction between the audi-
ence, with whom the Christian Elia identifies, and the “Jewish” singer
who rides roughshod over them with his powerful voice and meaning.30
As if right on key, Elia brings it all back to the supposed Jewish obses-
sion with money. He had already stated that he found Jews least distaste-
ful on the “‘Change—for the mercantile spirit levels all distinctions, as
all are beauties in the dark” (72). After introducing Braham, Elia links
the scorn of his face and the power of his voice to this supposed attribute
of the “ ‘Hebrew spirit’: Gain, and the pursuit of gain, sharpens a man’s
44 / imperfect sympathies
He had wonderful execution as well as force, and his voice could also be
very sweet, though it was too apt to betray something of that nasal tone
which has been observed of Jews, and which is, perhaps, quite as much,
or more, a habit in which they have been brought up than a consequence
of organization. The same thing has been noticed in Americans; and it
might not be difficult to trace it to moral, and even to monied causes;
those, to wit, that induce people to retreat inwardly upon themselves;
into a sense of their shrewdness and resources; and to clap their finger in
self-congratulation upon the organ through which it pleases them occa-
sionally to intimate as much to a bystander, not choosing to trust it
wholly to the mouth. (125–26)
Figure 2.3 Thomas Rowlandson, Family Quarrels or The Jew and The Gentile.
1803. Courtesy of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
form of the informal essay works perfectly with his hinting, gossiping,
allusive style.
To what extent does Lamb’s essay launch a critique of sympathy?
Lamb does imply that certain national and religious prejudices, regarded
by Elia as not necessarily bad, prevent a sympathetic response and
encourage one to stick with one’s own kind. In “Imperfect Sympathies,”
Elia sees the world in terms of stereotypes, and no stereotype, whether
it be of the benignant Negro (noble savage) or the rapacious, nasal Jew,
will inspire perfect sympathy. The stereotype sets up a barrier between
self and Other, thereby preventing the identity or connection necessary
for the working of sympathy. Lamb implies that Elia’s fractured and
unstable self preserves what wholeness is left by resisting Otherness,
retreating inward, and reserving sympathy for a limited group of like-
minded people. Sympathy requires a movement out of the self and iden-
tification with the other, but stereotypes set up a barrier to this process.
open brow” (321). In even more specific terms, Hazlitt goes on to expose
the economic, theological, and psychosocial sources of anti-Semitism,
taking on powerful adversaries as well as evoking like-minded thinkers.
In one of his most effective paragraphs, Hazlitt analyzes the
economic motives for the contempt and isolation with which the Jews
have suffered:
We also object to their trades and modes of life; that is, we shut people
up in close confinement and complain that they do not live in the open
air. The Jews barter and sell commodities, instead of raising and manu-
facturing them. But this is the necessary traditional consequence of their
former persecution and pillage by all nations. They could not set up a
trade when they were hunted every moment from place to place, and
while they could count nothing their own but what they could carry with
them. They could not devote themselves to the pursuit of agriculture,
when they were not allowed to possess a foot of land. You tear a people
up by the roots and trample on them like noxious weeds, and then
make an outcry that they do not take root in the soil like wholesome
plants. You drive them like a pest from city to city, from kingdom to
kingdom, and then call them vagabonds and aliens. (321)34
country, that the Jews do not accept the Christian messiah, and that
Christianity is the law of the land. Hazlitt dismisses the first objection by
arguing, in essence, that even if this restoration were the ultimate goal of
the Jews, it may be many years before this occurred, and Jews could have
many years of successful civic life before that. Furthermore, if Jews were
rooted to the country, they would work for greater prosperity and stabil-
ity. As to the objection regarding the Christian messiah, Hazlitt first
reminds his readers that
The great founder of the Christian religion was himself born among that
people, and if the Jewish nation are still to be branded with his death, it
might be asked on what principle of justice ought we to punish men for
crimes committed by their co-religionists near two thousand years ago?
That the Jews, as a people, persist in their blindness and obstinacy is to
be lamented; but it is at least, under the circumstances, a proof of their
sincerity; and as adherents to a losing cause, they are entitled to respect
and not contempt. (322)
Although Hazlitt argues that Jews deserve respect, this passage does clar-
ify that he does not see Judaism as equal to Christianity on theological
grounds—the refusal of the Christian messiah is a theological error
although not grounds for denial of civil emancipation.35 Of course this
theological error from a Christian point of view is a denial of Judaism
and Jewish faith in the messiah to come. Nor does this acknowledgment
of Jewish “obstinacy” prevent Hazlitt’s sympathy for the Jewish people,
although it was a factor in Cumberland’s ambivalence.
Hazlitt’s allusions in “Emancipation of the Jews” connect his argu-
ment for toleration to the Protestant prophetic tradition, which is in
turn indebted to Hebrew Scriptures. In responding to the objection that
England as a Christian land cannot fully tolerate Jews, Hazlitt argues,
“We in modern Europe derived from them [the Jews] the whole germ of
our civilization, and our ideas on the unity of the Deity, on marriage, on
morals, ‘And pure religion breathing household Laws’ ” (322).
Hazlitt bolsters his acknowledgment that Judaism provides the germ
of civilization with an allusion to the last line of Wordsworth’s sonnet,
“Written in London, September, 1802.” Wordsworth’s speaker laments
the moral state of the country in 1802, as the sestet reveals:
All the wealth of the Jews cannot buy them a single seat there [in the
House of Commons]; but if a certain formal restriction were taken off,
50 / imperfect sympathies
Jewish gold would buy up the fee simple of the consciences, prejudices,
and interests of the country, and turn the kingdom topsy-turvy. Thus the
bedrid imagination of prejudice sees some dreadful catastrophe in every
improvement, and no longer feeling the ground of custom under its feet,
fancies itself on an abyss of ruin and lawless change. (323)
Besides, in those dark ages, they wanted some object of natural antipathy,
as in country places they get a strange dog or an idiot to hunt down and
be the bugbear of the village. But it is the test of reason and refinement
to be able to subsist without bugbears. While it was supposed that “the
Jews eat little children,” it was proper to take precautions against them.
But why keep up ill names and the ill odour of a prejudice when the
prejudice has ceased to exist? (324)
on its head one of the oldest beliefs that the Jews as a scattered people,
as wanderers of the earth, should have no home. Although his essay did
not have an immediate effect on policy, it makes the most direct and
practical argument in Romantic writing for the justice of civil emanci-
pation. Hazlitt clinches his argument by appealing to his reader’s sympa-
thy and fellow feeling for the Jewish people and their plight in history.
He does not, however, draw from direct knowledge of Judaism. Jewish
emancipation fits into Hazlitt’s radical democratic ideology and his
sympathy for the oppressed. If Cumberland’s The Jew represents the
spirit of the 1790s and the valuing of general philanthropy, Hazlitt’s
late-Romantic “Emancipation” looks forward to John Stuart Mill’s
contribution to women’s emancipation and to the necessity of continu-
ing reform in a liberal state. Furthermore, if Lamb questions the very
possibility of sympathy for Others, Hazlitt’s imaginative sympathy
forms the basis of his ethics and politics. In chapter 3, I argue that Hazlitt’s
thinking about Jews begins with the production of The Merchant of
Venice at Drury Lane on January 26, 1814.
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C h ap t e r 3
Reinventing Shylock:
Romanticism and the
R e p re s e n tat io n of
Shakespeare’s Jew
I went to see him the first night of his appearing in Shylock. I remember
it well. The boxes were empty, and the pit not half full: “some quantity
of barren spectators and idle renters were thinly scattered to make up the
show.” The whole presented a dreary, hopeless aspect. I was in consider-
able apprehension for the result. From the first scene in which Mr. Kean
came on, my doubts were at an end. I had been told to give as favourable
an account as I could: I gave a true one. I am not one of those who, when
they see the sun breaking from behind a cloud, stop to ask others whether
it is the moon.
—William Hazlitt, “Preface” to A View of the English Stage, 1818
(Howe, 5:174–75)
Yesterday we dined with a Traveler. We were talking about Kean. He said
he had seen him at Glasgow “in Othello the Jew, I mean, er, er, er, the
Jew in Shylock.” He got bothered completely in vague ideas of the Jew in
Othello, Shylock in the Jew, Shylock in Othello, Othello in Shylock, the
Jew in Othello, etc., etc., etc. He left himself in a mess at the last.
—John Keats, to Tom Keats, July 10, 1818, Selected Letters (160).
There is a brief age of transition when the Enlightenment and
Sentimentalism exist side by side, when it is still possible to pretend that
true reason and true feeling, the urgings of passion and the dictates of
virtue are identical—and that all are alike manifestations of the orthodox
God. But Sentimentalism yields quickly to the full Romantic revolt; in a
matter of months, Don Juan, enemy of Heaven and the family, has been
transformed from villain to hero; and before the process is finished, audi-
ences have learned to weep for Shylock rather than laugh him from the
stage. The legendary rebels and outcasts, Prometheus and Cain, Judas
and the Wandering Jew, Faust and Lucifer himself are one by one
redeemed.
—Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, 1960 (xxx)
54 / imperfect sympathies
Introduction
Edmund Kean, the actor who transformed the role of Shylock in the
Romantic period, also plays an important role in the long performance
history of The Merchant of Venice. Hazlitt’s story about the actor involves
not just Kean’s performance, which for the first time brought a compli-
cated sympathy to Shylock, but also the critical responses of others to
Kean’s rendition of the role. As Hazlitt recognized, Kean’s performance
amounted to a radical interpretation of the role that had a lasting impact
on how the character of Shylock developed on stage—and off.1 Negative
renditions of Shylock have followed Kean, but once the red beard and
fake nose were no longer obligatory, interpretation of the role became an
issue for discussion and debate. Related theatrical and literary readings
of The Merchant of Venice since the Romantic period have primarily
focused on the representation of Shylock (despite his proportionally
small presence on stage) and on his status as a cultural signifier of Jews
and Jewishness.
It is no coincidence, I think, that this reimagination of Shylock came
at the height of the Romantic period, with transformations in politics,
the arts, and religion. In many ways Kean was the Byron of the stage,
overturning hierarchies, displaying intense passion, identifying with the
outcast, and living the life of the Romantic artist who burned out
through his own excesses. But if these excesses led to Kean’s premature
destruction, they are, according to those who most admired him on
stage, also what gave him the capacity to forge a sympathetic identifica-
tion with the character; Hazlitt theorized that in such identification
actors in performance reveal the process of the sympathetic imagination:
“The height of their ambition is to be beside themselves. To-day kings,
to-morrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves, that they are noth-
ing. Made up of mimic laughter and tears, passing from the extremes of
joy or woe at the prompter’s call, they wear the livery of other men’s
fortunes; their very thoughts are not their own” (“On Actors and
Acting,” Howe, 4:153).2 If, as Hazlitt argued, theater is a school for
cultivating sympathy and developing moral sentiments, an actor such as
Kean is a great teacher who instructs the audience in the complexities of
sympathy. This chapter asks how Kean’s instruction in The Merchant of
Venice relates to Shylock’s own vengeful warning to Salarino and
Solanio, after they have mocked and taunted him in his agony: “The
villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better
the instruction” (3.1.68–69). In other words, how does the theoretical
emphasis on cultivating one’s sympathetic imagination work when the
shakespeare’s jew / 55
We read the play because we were in search of a story, and when the critic
tells the story better than the author we are none the poorer for that.
Once we assent to the economy of good stories, there seems nothing
strange about what it implies for our practice of reading. Interpretations
are not true or false, in any sense we can verify by consulting the work;
rather they succeed or they fail; they carry the day, or they leave things
where they were. But when the sentiments at issue are deep enough, the
day may last more than a century. (405)
56 / imperfect sympathies
Let me find a few lines just to hint, that though I think his taste very
frequently vicious, and his judgment often imperfect:—though he has
almost countless vulgarisms in his pronunciation, and a trick, like
[George Frederick] Cooke, of speaking with different voices, and utter-
ing the most discordant tones:—yet his energy is so unfailing, as to bear
down criticism itself in his rage; and even in the gentler scenes of sorrow,
occasional touches of infinite grace and beauty proceed from his
imagination. (569)
At last, however, the play was put in rehearsal; this was not until the
morning of the 26th, the very day on which he was to appear. In obedi-
ence to the call, Kean attended at the theater, to walk through his part.
Mr. Raymond, the stage-manager, and the several actors specified in the
bill of the evening, were there. Every one was very civil, and as cold as the
season. The actors at the side scenes (Kean heard of this afterwards,
though he could not then distinguish anything) were liberal in their
prophecies:—“He will be sure to fail.” However, our hero went through
the speeches of Shylock, or rather he was in the act of repeating them
(giving some of his peculiar effects to each), when Raymond, the
manager, could withhold his advice no longer. “This will never do,
Mr. Kean,” said he, with a superior smile; “it is an innovation, Sir; it is
totally different from anything that has ever been done on these boards.”—
“Sir,” returned our hero (we can imagine something of his tone here,
however repressed it might have been),—“Sir, I wish it to be so.” (30–31)8
transformation of the role (Mahood, 43; Bulman, 25). This second point
especially needs emphasis, because Macklin did not play Shylock as a
comic character and even maintained his fierceness when Kitty Clive
played Portia with high comedy, aping the mannerisms of judges and
lawyers in the trial scene. Macklin withstood this comic counterpoint
and kept his unredeemed monster intact.11 By taking Shylock seriously,
he made Kean’s performance possible.
Kean invested Shylock with sympathy in two ways. First, Kean
seemed instinctively to identify with Shylock as an outcast and to draw
power as an actor from that identification. According to Hazlitt and to
numerous biographers, Kean created Shylock from within himself and
his own experience as a struggling provincial actor. As Hazlitt would
romanticize in “On Actors and Acting” in regard to actors in general:
“Chilled with poverty, steeped in contempt, they sometimes pass into
the sunshine of fortune, and are lifted to the very pinnacle of public
favour; yet even there cannot calculate on the continuance of success . . .”
(Howe, 4: 159). Perhaps this inherent capriciousness of the theater
explains Kean’s insistence in the face of the stagemanager’s harsh objec-
tions: he knew that he was on the brink of possible success in London—
or the end of his career. Kean’s attitude toward Shylock, in other words,
is akin to what numerous readers have seen as Mary Shelley’s attitude
toward the monster in Frankenstein: his project was to show how a
scorned and maligned being such as Shylock becomes a monster.
Antonio, who baits Shylock from the beginning, and promises him only
repeated scorn, effectively shows the audience how a man becomes a dog
in the eyes of his enemy. Kean’s passionate sense of this injustice, which
according to Hazlitt came out so clearly in his rendition of the “Hath
not a Jew eyes?” speech, perhaps finds an echo in the monster’s lament
in Frankenstein: “I am malicious because I am miserable; am I not
shunned and hated by all mankind? . . . I will revenge my injuries: if I
cannot inspire love, I will cause fear; and chiefly towards you my arch-
enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred”
(2:9,117). Compare, again, Shylock’s “The villainy you teach me I will
execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction”
(3.1.55–56). Furthermore, the fact that Mary Shelley records going to see
Kean in The Merchant of Venice on Tuesday, February 11, 1817, as she
was revising Frankenstein, adds weight to the connection.12 This connec-
tion, I contend, is textual as well as political, what Fiedler in the epigraph
sees as part of the mythical revolt of outcasts in the Romantic period.
The second way that Kean demonstrated sympathy for Shylock was
through his style of acting. Kean was a master of contrasting emotion
62 / imperfect sympathies
who could show Shylock raging like a madman one moment and crying
like a baby the next. Several modern commentators (Mahood, 44;
Brown, “The Realisation of Shylock,” 191) allude to G. W. Lewes’
observation that in the lights and shadows of Kean’s performance, in the
transitions and changes, Kean brought a powerful dynamism to
Shylock. In other words, this style of performance allowed Kean to
achieve a carefully modulated sense of Shylock’s character—neither
villain nor hero, but a representation of a flawed and human Jew. Lewes
furthermore noted that Kean was the master of subsiding emotion (18);
in other words, he played a strong emotional outburst for all that it was
worth and did not let go. This observation is important because Kean
did not just dash from one extreme to the other—which would have
evoked more of a sense of caricature than complexity of character. As
Hazlitt notes in regard to Kean’s portrayal of Sir Giles Overreach: “All
strong expression, deprived of its gradations and connecting motives,
unavoidably degenerates into caricature” (quoted in Bromwich, 403).
This quote seems aptly to describe Macklin’s raging Shylock, which was
without the gradations and modulations. But Kean used gaps and
silences by manipulating facial expressions and vanishing traces of
emotion. Neither a comic stage Jew nor Macklin’s fierce Shylock could
achieve the complexity of Kean’s conception and execution.13 Macklin
inspired fear and disgust in his audience, but Kean taught his viewers to
respond with a full spectrum of emotion and thought.
Tracy C. Davis makes the point that opinions were divided about
Kean’s abilities along class lines: nonelite theatergoers in the gallery and
the pit appreciated him because they could see the nuances of his acting
in his facial expressions not obvious to the boxes. Kean thus evoked
sympathy for his iconoclastic performances from his ideological allies in
the gallery and the pit because they presumably would have been more
amenable to his performances on both political and aesthetic grounds.
Furthermore, Davis argues that the technology of theater also contributed
to this divide, especially with the introduction of gas lighting in the early
nineteenth century:
. . . under gaslight it was easier to read the actor’s performance (and partic-
ularly the face) in minute detail but only if viewed directly from the front.
Under the increased illumination afforded by gas the visibility zone included
the gallery but made the boxes—especially the most prestigious ones closest
to the stage but at oblique angles to the actors—poor vantages. Since critics
preferred the pit, professional reaction (by and large) was favorable . . . Kean
was popular with the working classes and the social melting pot of the pit,
yet was frequently dismissed as an overrated gesticulator by precisely that
shakespeare’s jew / 63
sector of Tories who frequented the front boxes. Under gaslight he was,
therefore, a brilliant actor only relative to class and political lines. (935–36)
Davis’ argument is all the more striking because it suggests that the
nonelite portion of the audience, both before and after the innovation
of gas lighting, would have responded most sympathetically to Kean’s
Shylock, although neither they nor the boxes would have been predis-
posed to sympathize with the representation of a Jew per se. Davis’
analysis also gives us a hint at what Jewish playgoers might have thought
about Kean, although I have not found a record of responses to Kean
among them. Nevertheless, the appreciative audience in the gallery and
the pit would have included the majority of Jews who attended a given
production, since they were mostly poor and struggling, and composed
a small part of that larger “melting pot” to which Davis refers.
London’s Jews, participants in the theatricality of everyday London
street scenes, were avid playgoers in the early nineteenth century, but
they were not docile spectators. As Jane Moody remarks of the non-
patent theaters, “East End audiences would have included artisans and
many immigrants (especially the Jews who worked in the old-clothes
trade around Petticoat Lane and Duke’s Place), sailors and other
employed in river and sea trades, as well as those involved in industries
such as brewing and distilling” (166). And not just in the East End, but
in the patent theaters too, Jews were among nonelites who exercised thea-
trical clout. Although the comic stage Jew was a standard in eighteenth
and early-nineteenth-century British theater, Jewish playgoers drew the
line in 1802 on what was acceptable. As David Katz relates, Thomas
Dibdin, who had written plays with sympathetic (albeit comic) Jewish
characters in the past, could not get away with his “‘harmless joke’” (346)
of including a song about three merry Jewish prostitutes in Family
Quarrels: “before the first performance the song was already circulating
in London in the form of a cheap booklet, which led to a large number
of Jews buying tickets with the express purpose of disrupting the
evening” (346). Katz reports that the protesting Jews shouted down the
song and encore opening night and forced Dibdin to alter the play for
the remaining performances, although Dibdin’s account suggests that the
event was misreported in the papers and that the song remained.14
A closer look at Dibdin’s own description of this event reveals more.
He describes the assembled Jews in this way:
Dibdin goes on to say that “Many of the nobility and gentlemen, among
my old patrons, and even some distinguished members of the Royal
Family, encouraged me in the hope the public would see me safe
through” (1:342). Dibdin thus sets up an opposition between the
foreign-sounding and uncouth lower-class Jews (given the same Yiddish-
sounding dialect as their stage representatives, and thus, as Sander
Gilman might argue, marked by their language as Jews) and the cultured
theatergoers of the boxes who support and encourage him. Furthermore,
Dibdin manipulates Jewish expressions (“of blessed memory,” a phrase
used in commemorating the dead, becomes “of noisy memory”), plays
on the idea of the “chosen,” and alludes to Shylock’s “Jewish gaberdine.”
He does this to convey his assurance that his readers will be in on the
“harmless joke” and in perfect agreement with his supporters in the
boxes and the press that the Jews were hypersensitive and irrational in
their protests. Dibdin sets up an opposition between the members of the
audience: the Jews and proper Britons, who presumably are in on the
national joke. The protesting Jews seem to think that this kind of mock-
ery is inappropriate for legitimate theater, although perhaps it would be
more at home in Sadler’s Wells, or to capture Dibdin’s mockery, Sadler’s
“Vells.” Dibdin further demeans the Jews by casting the whole narrative
in a mock-heroic tone and battle imagery (“hostile sharp shooters,”
“general charge”).
Dibdin’s ironic, parodic description reconstructs the environment in
which Kean first played Shylock and highlights the kinds of attitudes
that he would have to overcome. The reviewers who criticized the Jewish
protest seem to have in common an inability to see that mockery of Jews
might be different from the mockery against native Britons because the
Jews were not full citizens in Georgian England. Dibdin quotes one
writer from the Oracle who nicely sums up this stance:
Turning the whole notion of prejudice on its head, the writer argues that
it is the protesters who were prejudiced against the theater and that this
kind of “squeamishness” is unpatriotic and an enemy to British free-
doms and national solidarity against Jews and other upstarts. Hence, the
Jews are doubly alienated: they are foreigners whose views are also offen-
sive to John Bull patriotism, clearly below questionable members of the
British union, the Scots, and even the maligned and ridiculed Irish.
Implicit in this argument: Jews should be seen, laughed at, but not
heard. On January 26, 1814, Edmund Kean gave playgoing Jews
another voice, although it took a critic with the determination of Hazlitt
to interpret the significance of that voice.
is doubtless mere romance; but the fact that such a myth should have
arisen and found any credence shows what influence was commonly
66 / imperfect sympathies
attributed to these articles [that Hazlitt wrote on Kean]. Even after his
great first-night success, some of the Drury Lane Committee were for
shelving Kean, and had he not found powerful support in the press, he
might quite possibly have sunk back again into obscurity. But if Hazlitt
was a godsend to Kean, Kean was scarcely less of a godsend to Hazlitt.
The critic made the actor’s reputation, but the actor made the critic’s
immortality as a theatrical critic. If Hazlitt had not had Kean to write
about, he would certainly have written much less, with far inferior life
and gusto, and would probably never have collected his articles.
(Dramatic Essays, xviii)
This is a play that in spite of the change of manners and prejudices still
holds undisputed possession of the stage. Shakespeare’s malignant [sic]
has outlived Mr. Cumberland’s benevolent Jew. In proportion as Shylock
has ceased to be a popular bugbear, “baited with the rabble’s curse,” he
becomes a half-favourite with the philosophical part of the audience, who
are disposed to think that Jewish revenge is at least as good as Christian
injuries. (320)
Hazlitt implies that free-thinking playgoers, who do not share the common
bugbears about Jews, will respond to Shylock as a “‘man no less sinned
against than sinning,’ ” (320); his imperfect quote compares Shylock to the
tragic King Lear and reaffirms the play as a tragedy, and hence especially
susceptible to the workings of the affective powers of sympathy. Whereas
68 / imperfect sympathies
[Shylock] seems the depository of the vengeance of his race; and though
the long habit of brooding over daily insults and injuries has crusted over
his temper with inveterate misanthropy, and hardened him against the
contempt of mankind, this adds but little to the triumphant pretensions
of his enemies. There is a strong, quick, and deep sense of justice mixed
up with the gall and bitterness of his resentment. The constant appre-
hension of being burnt alive, plundered, banished, reviled, and trampled
on, might be supposed to sour the most forbearing nature, and to take
something from that “milk of human kindness,” with which his persecu-
tors contemplated his indignities. The desire of revenge is almost insepa-
rable from the sense of wrong; and we can hardly help sympathizing with
the proud spirit, beneath his “Jewish gaberdine,” stung to madness by
repeated undeserved provocations, and labouring to throw off the load
of obloquy and oppression heaped upon him and all his tribe by one
desperate act of “lawful” revenge . . . (320)
Hazlitt does not deny the malignancy of Shylock’s words and actions,
but he sees Shylock’s response as a call to justice for an oppressed people.
Hazlitt’s emphasis on justice is crucial because he suggests that a theatri-
cal appeal to justice motivates sympathy. Once again, too, Hazlitt’s allu-
siveness is telling: unlike Lady Macbeth, who willingly forgoes the milk
of human kindness—and scorns it in her husband—in order to carry
out her plan, Hazlitt argues that Shylock’s enemies stifle his potential
humanity. Hazlitt ironically condemns Shylock’s enemies for having no
human kindness themselves, and not just for blighting Shylock.
Hazlitt’s analysis is actually not the first sympathetic analysis of
Shylock’s actions, or the first to connect Shylock’s fate with the question
of justice. Several modern commentators cite Richard Hole’s now hard-
to-find essay on Shylock, printed in Essays by a Society of Gentlemen at
Exeter in 1796, eighteen years before Hazlitt’s first review. I have found
no evidence that Hazlitt read this essay—one can hardly imagine this
pugnacious radical being drawn to such a volume—but there are
some similarities, the most important being that Hole writes to vindi-
cate Shylock. Hole’s focus differs from Hazlitt’s and his essay does not
have the same political argument. Hole acknowledges that he does not
believe that Shakespeare meant to interest us in Shylock, but nonetheless
shakespeare’s jew / 69
In building his case for Shylock, Hazlitt singles out three scenes or
passages: the scene where Antonio asks Shylock for the bond, the “Hath
not a Jew eyes?” speech, and the trial scene, pointing out in each instance
the justice of Shylock’s position. Hazlitt sympathizes with Shylock’s
position vis-à-vis Antonio in the first scene, especially when Antonio
volunteers that he would likely call Shylock a dog again when he saw
him on the Rialto: “‘I am as like to call thee so again,/ To spit on thee
again, to spurn thee too’” (1.3.122–23). As Hazlitt explains, “After this,
the appeal to the Jew’s mercy, as if there were any common principle of
right and wrong between them, is the rankest hypocrisy, or the blindest
prejudice; and the Jew’s answer to one of Anthonio’s [sic] friends, who
asks him what his pound of forfeit flesh is good for, is irresistible” (321).
Hazlitt likewise sees the trial scene as kind of intellectual victory for
Shylock, who “is triumphant on all the general topics that are urged
against him, and only fails through a legal flaw” (321). This view of the
trial scene echoes at least one of the arguments of Richard Hole’s imag-
inary Jewish theater critic.
Here, as in all of his criticism, Hazlitt wants to recreate the atmosphere
of sympathy and humanity that he experienced during performances.
As Thomas Noon Talfourd notes,
Perhaps a bit flowery, but this description seems to jibe with the tone of
Hazlitt’s theater criticism, and it reminds Hazlitt’s readers to put his
comments on Shylock in the larger context of his sympathetic vision of
the theater and its many flawed characters. As Bromwich notes, Hazlitt’s
understanding of Shylock taught readers “a readiness to grant the pres-
ence of justice, in a wicked character, as satisfying something of our
sympathy with the good” (406). Writing in the Examiner (April 7,
1816), Hazlitt sums up his commentary on Shylock in this way: “The
character of Shylock is another instance of Shakespeare’s powers of iden-
tifying himself with the thoughts of men, their prejudices, and almost
shakespeare’s jew / 71
instincts” (Howe, A View of the English Stage, 5:296). For Hazlitt, then,
Shylock is sympathetic in part because Shakespeare presents him that
way, not only because the liberal reader or “philosophical part of the
audience” brings this to the play. Hazlitt initiates a new kind of criticism
by imagining Shakespeare’s intentions and seeing Shakespeare as a great
Romantic precursor who planted the seeds of sympathy that have only
now blossomed in the light of day.
Other Romantic observers made the same claims for Shakespeare in
general—Keats’ “Negative Capability” is perhaps the best known—and
about The Merchant of Venice in particular. In fact, Keats actually frames
his now-famous negative capability letter (December 1817 to George
and Tom Keats) with allusions to Kean:17 to his role as Richard III and
to the rumors about Kean’s “low company,” which Keats would prefer
to that of the fashionable dandies he describes to his brothers (Selected
Letters, 59–60). Keats’ comments suggest that his theory of negative
capability may actually have arisen from his thoughts about and obser-
vations of Kean playing Shakespearean roles. I surmise that Keats may
have felt drawn to Kean, may have felt in sympathy with him, as a fellow
artist struggling from the lower classes. Hence, Keats’ implicit verbal
play in the negative capability letter between high and low company
takes on an additional class and artistic allegiance. Negative capability,
Keats’ notion of imaginative freedom, is a power bounded not by class
but by states of mind and value. Fashionable dandies—or socialites in the
expensive theatrical boxes—do not have access to the imaginative sympa-
thy implicit in Keats’ term. From Keats’ perspective, negative capability is
what allowed an actor like Kean to enter into a character like Shylock with
sympathy. In the course of the letter, Keats dismantles the class hierar-
chies of high and low in favor of a meritocracy of imagination.
Leigh Hunt offers related insights on The Merchant. In his compari-
son of Shylock with Marlowe’s Barabas from The Jew of Malta, Hunt
credits Shakespeare’s humanity with presenting Shylock with sympathy,
although Hunt remarkably finds some mitigating circumstances in
Barabas. “But up rose Shakespeare in the complete wisdom of his
humanity; and rescuing the Jew himself from enormities . . . clothed his
dry bones and his vizard face with flesh and blood, gave him passions
good and bad in common with those on whom he revenged himself and
left only just as much excess in him as was a set-off to the pernicious
mistakes of his persecutors” (May 3, 1818; 197–98). As Hazlitt had done,
Hunt sees the play in terms of the balancing of wrongs, with neither
Shylock nor his Christian persecutors without guilt. But most important,
all three—Hazlitt, Hunt, and Keats—credit Shakespeare’s genius with
72 / imperfect sympathies
from the situation. But his comments also verge on a kind of voyeuristic
eroticism. One wonders if Heine would have been so moved if the lady
had not been such a delicate beauty and her tears so attractive. His
sympathy-as-fellow-feeling, therefore, flows into a less altruistic
passion.18
It has been wished to make these Tales easy reading for very young chil-
dren. To the utmost of their ability the writers have constantly kept this
in mind; but the subjects of most of them made this a very difficult task.
It was no easy matter to give the histories of men and women in terms
familiar to the apprehension of a very young mind. For young ladies too,
it has been the intention chiefly to write; because boys being generally
permitted the use of their fathers’ libraries at a much earlier age than girls
are, they frequently have the best scenes of Shakespeare by heart, before
their sisters are permitted to look into this manly book; and, therefore,
instead of recommending these Tales to the perusal of young gentlemen
who can read them so much better in the originals, their kind assistance
is rather requested in explaining to their sisters such parts as are hardest
for them to understand: and when they have helped them to get over
the difficulties, then perhaps they will read to them (carefully selecting
what is proper for a young sister’s ear) some passage which has pleased
them in one of these stories, in the very words of the scene from which
it is taken. . . . (viii–ix)
The Lambs assume a great deal about class and gender here, to say the
least: that their audience will be young ladies and gentlemen and that
the boys can act as mediators between the text and less equipped girls.
Once the Lambs have set up this scene of instruction, which will
presumably one day lead the girls to the actual plays, they go on to
explain the function of the tales:
What these Tales shall have been to the young readers, that and much
more it is the writers’ wish that the true Plays of Shakespeare may prove
to them in older years—enrichers of the fancy, strengtheners of virtue, a
withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, as lessons of all
sweet and honourable thoughts and actions, to teach courtesy, benignity,
generosity, humanity: for of examples, teaching these virtues, his pages
are full. (ix)
shakespeare’s jew / 75
Although the Lambs allude to the fancy, their rendition of The Merchant
has very little appeal to anything fanciful. In fact, in order to emphasize
the didactic condemnation of Jewish evil and greed, they deemphasize
the Belmont scenes and romance, with no mention at all of the caskets
and only a rendition of parts of Act V at the end. But in their attempt
to highlight the humanity and generosity of the Christians in the play,
they present Shylock as a hateful villain, unredeemed by any human
feeling. They attribute only the basest motives to him. For instance,
when Shylock first offers a loan to Antonio in the play itself, it is not at
all clear that Shylock is deceiving Antonio with feigned kindness. But in
the Tales, the Lambs say that “This seemingly kind offer greatly surprised
Antonio; and then Shylock, still pretending kindness, and that all he did
was to gain Antonio’s love, again said he would lend him the three
thousand ducats” (my emphasis; 101). As a result of this manipulation,
their tale is not only unromantic, but it also strikes a bitter note, just as
frightening to children as Macklin’s Shylock was to adults. The Lambs’
Shylock becomes another scapegoat for the evil and greedy passions of
others.
In the Lambs’ rendition of The Merchant, there is very little nuance
or developed sense of character, and in the case of Shylock, caricature
prevails.19 Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew eyes” speech is omitted and there
is no reference to Jessica by name. In fact Shylock’s entire relationship
with Jessica comes through as: “Antonio knew that the Jew had an only
daughter who had lately married against his consent to a young
Christian, named Lorenzo, a friend of Antonio’s which had so offended
Shylock, that he had disinherited her” (110). There is no attempt to
present Shylock as a father or human being. Once again, the Lambs do
not see moral complexity as a virtue for children, although, as we have
seen, Elia introduces his adult readers to a more complicated moral
landscape of London in “Imperfect Sympathies.”
In Tales, the Lambs seem determined to write a fable of Christian
generosity and mercy, using “the Jew” as the opposite of all such values.
In so doing, they depend on the anti-Judaic perspective of Jews as
devoid of mercy because as Jews they do not accept the teachings of
Christianity—and they overemphasize the law and justice. To emphasize
this point, the Lambs paraphrase Portia’s speech:
The importance of the arduous task Portia had engaged in gave this
tender lady courage, and she boldly proceeded in the duty she had under-
taken to perform: and first of all she addressed herself to Shylock; and
allowing that he had a right by Venetian law to have the forfeit expressed
in the bond, she spoke so sweetly of the noble quality of mercy, as would
76 / imperfect sympathies
have softened any heart but the unfeeling Shylock’s; saying, that it
dropped as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath; and how
mercy was a double blessing, it blessed him that gave, and him that
received it; and how it became monarchs better than their crowns, being
an attribute of God himself; and that earthly power came nearest to
God’s, in proportion as mercy tempered justice; and she bid Shylock
remember that as we all pray for mercy, that same prayer should teach us
to show mercy. (106–07)
“comedy bows to the customs and prejudices of the time” (308). “The
comic character is ‘insocial,’ out of harmony with his social environ-
ment; and the spectator is kept ‘insensible,’ unsympathetic,—there, as
Monsieur Bergson says, are two pre-requisites” (308). According to this
definition, neither Cumberland’s play nor indeed any sentimental work
could be a comedy, nor does a sentimental poem such as Wordsworth’s
“Idiot Boy,” which combines humor and pathos, have a reason for exist-
ing. In his zeal for generic purity, Stoll does not consider the possibility
that others have read The Merchant as the tragedy of Shylock.20
Stoll points to a particular scene in order to refute the Romantic
misreading of Shylock and to demonstrate the working of comic repeti-
tion of a motif. The scene in question follows the daughter–ducats
wordplay after Shylock has learned of Jessica’s betrayal. Shylock talks
with Tubal, the only other Jew in the play:
Tubal: One of them showed me a ring that he had of your daughter for
a monkey.
Shylock: Out upon her. Thou torturest me, Tubal. It was my turquoise;
I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor. I would not have given
it for a wilderness of monkeys.
This, most critics assert . . . is pathos: it is not the ducats behind the
turquoise (“a diamond gone, cost me two thousand ducats in Frankfort!”)
but the thought of Leah that wrings his heart. “What a fine Hebraism is
implied in this expression!” cries Hazlitt. “He has so deep a veneration for
his dead wife,” says Hawkins [Kean’s biographer], with impenetrable
gravity, “that a wilderness of monkeys would not compensate for the loss
of the ring she had given him in youth.” More Elizabethan fun running
to waste! (312)
seem to drive and threaten him cannot be made fully articulate in its
words” (203–04).
If Brown is correct, then, the word “wilderness” works as a kind of
objective correlative for the intense emotion Shylock cannot express well
or expresses in a way that the Christians see as confused passion. The
interpretations recognize a power in Shakespeare’s language and concep-
tion of character that a grid of generic limitations cannot contain.
Admittedly, these interpretations flow from the source that Kean and
Hazlitt identified—a powerful well of sympathy, an emotional and
intellectual fascination with the character of Shylock. Stoll’s question—
“How can we here [at the end of the play] for a moment sympathize
with Shylock unless at the same time we indignantly turn, not only
against Gratiano, but against Portia, the Duke, and all Venice as well?”
(318)—is precisely the point for Kean and Hazlitt: we cannot. Indeed,
in some productions Gratiano has been played as a repugnant oppor-
tunist and Portia as a merciless adversary in the trial scene.
Within the world of the play, Stoll wants to maintain sharp distinc-
tions between good and bad, Christian and Jew, comedy and pathos. He
objects to Romantic readings, both early and late, because he sees them
as promiscuously mixed. He objects to interpretations that result in “a
prodigious ambiguity” (332), because that ambiguity is not “in”
Shakespeare. In short, Stoll rejects the qualities that Kean tried to bring
to his performance and that Hazlitt so admired—and he rejects the
claim that Hazlitt, Hunt, Keats, and Heine all make: that Shakespeare’s
genius for sympathy is the source of their sympathetic interpretations.
Although Harold Bloom expresses more doubt about authorial inten-
tion than does Stoll, Bloom’s insistence that the play is an anti-Semitic
romantic comedy is close to Stoll’s reading.
Yet even Bloom acknowledges that Shylock has had—and continues to
have—a life of his own. What does it mean for a character to have a life of
his own? First of all, it means that he affects readers and viewers so power-
fully that he has broken free from any one interpretation of the play. It also
means that he appears in unlikely places—as an intertextual intruder in
novels, as Michael Ragussis has shown; as the butt of caricatures on Jews
from the Romantic period; or as an equally unflattering allusion to Jewish
loan sharks on The Sopranos—apart from his continuing metamorphosis
on stage and screen.22 As I demonstrate in the chapters that follow, Shylock
haunts the various discourses about and representations of Jews in the
Romantic period, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly, some-
times to promote anti-Semitism and sometimes philo-Semitism, but always
seemingly to evoke Shylock’s power to “better the instruction.”
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C h ap t e r 4
Hyman Hurwitz’s H E B R E W
T A L E S (1826): Redeeming the
Talmudic Garden
Monday, 26th December [1825]: I may class this as one of the happiest
days of my life in the serene and obliging society of my dear
Mon[tefiore], blessed with health and cheerfulness and an unremitting
desire to please for which I cannot sufficiently thank the Almighty . . .
The evening passed delightfully reading Hurwitz’s Hebrew Stories . . . .
—Judith Montefiore1
Introduction
In this chapter and the next, I turn to two Jewish perspectives on
Anglo-Judaism in the Romantic period, Hurwitz’s Hebrew Tales and
Judith Montefiore’s private journals. Neither Hurwitz nor Montefiore
appears to have been deeply influenced by the images of Jews or Jewish
characters such as Shylock, but both were fully engaged with Jewish
82 / imperfect sympathies
attention both from debates about the Law itself (Mishnah) and
commentary on it (Gemara) contained in the Talmud. Appealing to
ancient Jewish popular culture, Hurwitz emphasized the humanity of
the rabbinic narratives. In doing so, he transmitted the narrative tradi-
tions and wit of rabbinic literature without attempting a comprehensive
study of the Talmud, although he did outline his theory for the project
in an appended essay.
In this sense Hurwitz’s project resembles the Lyrical Ballads, particu-
larly in the way that Wordsworth theorized that project in his Preface
and transmitted a literary version of traditional folk narratives in the
poems. Because of Hurwitz’s desire to redeem Judaism from scorn and
to reconcile it with contemporary English culture, his goal was even
more complicated than Wordsworth’s. Like Wordsworth, Hurwitz
thought of his project as a contribution to English readers, whose pref-
erences and tastes were susceptible to influence, but Hurwitz wanted to
engage the sympathies of his readers for Judaism and Jewish intellectual
and imaginative traditions. Hurwitz valued the affective and transfor-
mative potential of literature, always with a Jewish perspective in mind.
men and women and as Jews. Like Wordsworth in the Preface, he writes
with a sense of the urgency of his message and with the hope that
his volume will have a direct effect on a specific cultural problem: he
writes with a purpose. Most important, he seeks to elicit sympathy for
Jews and Jewish tradition by finding common ground in an appeal to an
ideal reader who encompasses both a Christian and Jewish audience:
“the Reader may assure himself that in the little volume here offered to
him, it is the fervent wish, and has been the constant aim of the Writer,
to enforce the religious and moral truths on which the best interests
of all men of all names and persuasions find their common basis
and fulcrum, and with scarcely less anxiety to avoid every invidious
reference to the points on which their opinions are divided” (x). Like
Wordsworth’s idea of “the Poet,” Hurwitz’s role as translator and anthol-
ogist brings together disparate elements. In Wordsworth’s words, “the
Poet is the rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver,
carrying every where with him relationship and love. In spite of differ-
ence of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs,
in spite of things silently gone out of mind and things violently
destroyed, the poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast
empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over
all time” (Preface, 141). Sharing this liberal humanist view of human
potential and the function of art, Hurwitz believes that tales have the
power to bring about change for the good by binding together “men of
all names and persuasions.” He thus sets his project in direct contrast to
previous writers whose Talmudic collections “throw an odium on the
ancient Hebrew works, as well as on their learned authors and their
unfortunate descendants; and thus [to] nourish the worst feelings of
human nature” (Hurwitz, Preface, vi). According to Hurwitz, the editors
of the earlier collections aim to separate rather than bind together, to
propagate scorn rather than sympathy.
Like other Romantic theorists, Hurwitz thinks of writing in organic
terms. He presents his Tales not as specimens from an exotic foreign
garden but as adaptable to an English linguistic and cultural climate. In
his polemical essay, Hurwitz uses organic imagery when he articulates
his intentions:
with narrowness and bigotry not just to the Talmud but to Jews and
Judaism.
Hurwitz implies that rabbinic tales include the marvelous because
they have roots in oral sermons where rabbis had free rein to show their
originality and ingenuity in reaching their audience.11 No doubt many
accomplished this goal. Their use of exaggeration, superstition, and
marvelous events is compatible with folk culture and traditions.12 In
creating and transmitting the tales, the rabbis hoped to reach a broader,
more diverse audience of Jews in a culture that depended on both oral
means as well as more scholarly written commentary. As Robert Bonfil
posits in relation to medieval storytelling and orality, “If we are [now]
prepared to refer to orality not just as to an activity performed orally, but
to the sociocultural setting properly pertaining to what anthropologists
would call oral societies, namely, the commitment of the transmission of
cultural heritage to orality, midrash, however strictly or broadly defined,
would mean the transmission or adjustment of inherited culture within
a framework characterized, at least at one stage, by orality” (245).
Traditional stories transmitted in such a cultural framework inevitably
take on lives of their own, and such transformations often involve exag-
geration, along with certain stylistic features.
The Lyrical Ballads also depend on this framework of folk culture. In
a self-conscious way, Wordsworth and Coleridge based their literary
ballads on folk traditions, contemporary rural legends, and superstitious
tales. In the fiction of the ballads, Wordsworth and Coleridge incorpo-
rate the psychological and cultural effect of hearing a story, as in “The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “The Thorn,” “Goody Blake and Harry
Gill,” and “Lucy Gray,” to name a few.13 For instance, “Goody Blake
and Harry Gill” puts superstition to the service of didacticism.
Wordsworth implies that Goody Blake’s curse works not because she is
a bona fide witch (although who knows?), but rather because in his guilt
and wretchedness Harry Gill thinks that she is. Harry Gill takes her
curse, “may he never more be warm,” (100) in a literal way and makes
it so real that he will never be warm again, as signified by his continu-
ally chattering teeth. Perhaps this chattering is all just a rumor or legend
about Harry, like those tales passed down through the generations.
Whereas Wordsworth incorporates superstition and looks at it psycho-
logically, Hurwitz tries to avoid those tales that deal with marvelous
events altogether, though he does allude to them in his essay.
In his attempt to bring the Hebrew Tales in line with mainstream
thought, Hurwitz compares rabbinic ideas with the ideas of Plato,
Aristotle, Pythagoras, and Aesop. He also alludes to Shakespeare and
hyman hurwitz’s HEBREW TALES / 89
in the Talmud as evidence of its vitality. He reminds his readers that the
authors were “thousands of learned men, of various talents, living in a
long series of ages, in different countries, and under the most diversified
conditions. And how, in the name of truth, can perfect agreement be
expected under such circumstances?” (37). Hurwitz explains that
disagreement on “philosophical and speculative subjects” (i.e., not
on “the essential parts of religion”) is a strength of the Talmud and of
Jewish thought because it leaves the “mind unfettered” (37), in some-
thing akin to a Keatsian state of negative capability. In assessing the
Talmud, readers should consider its history, composition, and status as
a mixed genre. Diversity of opinion also makes for a living text, a posi-
tion in line with later theorists of the Talmud’s anthological, encyclope-
dic qualities and its organic, evolutionary process.
Diversity can contribute to balance. For instance, Hurwitz responds
to the charge that the Talmud is vengeful because it includes passages
cursing “idolatrous heathens” (50). Hurwitz acknowledges that such
passages appear in the Talmud and mean what they say—in this case
literally. But Hurwitz warns his readers before passing judgment to
consider the context:
Hurwitz asks his readers to consider the context in which Jews uttered
these curses and to have sympathy for their suffering under oppression.
He also goes on to note that expressions of charity for the heathen
poor balance the condemnation of heathen oppression in the Talmud.
Furthermore, Hurwitz quotes Rabbi Moshe as distinguishing
between the ancient idolaters who oppressed the Jews and righteous
gentiles who protected them: “the nations amongst whom we live,
whose protection we enjoy, must not be considered in this light; since
they believe in a creation, the divine origin of the law, and many
other fundamental doctrines of religion.”16 Hurwitz implies that
generosity and gratitude balance expressions of harshness, although
bigots will only see the latter. In other words, Hurwitz must depend, like
Wordsworth’s writer of epitaphs, on the moral and intellectual makeup
hyman hurwitz’s HEBREW TALES / 91
of the recipient:
Our wise Instructors relate, that whilst Moses was attending Jethro’s flock
in the wilderness, a lamb strayed from the herd. Moses endeavoured to
overtake it, but it ran much faster than he, till it came near a fountain,
where it suddenly stopped, and took a draught of water. “Thou little dear
innocent creature,” said Moses, “I see now why thou didst run away. Had
I known thy want, on my shoulders would I have carried thee to the
fountain to assuage thy thirst. But come, little innocent, I will make up
for my ignorance. Thou art no doubt fatigued after so long a journey,
thou shalt walk no further.” He immediately took the little creature into
his arms, and carried it back to the flock. (Tales, 4).19
This particular story suggests that God chose Moses as his great prophet
because Moses showed himself to be compassionate in his respect for all
life. The story implies that God valued Moses’ capacity to sympathize
and knew that he would extend this sympathy to “the children of men”
(Tales, 4). Thus, the very first tale in the collection sets the tone for what
follows and emphasizes that a respect for life and a sympathetic heart are
central to the rabbinic conception of God’s purpose in giving the Torah.
Hurwitz begins with this tale, too, in order to counter the Christian
assumption that a Jewish emphasis on law and justice comes at the
expense of love and mercy. Contrary to this common position, which
hyman hurwitz’s HEBREW TALES / 93
This tale may not teach a profound moral, but it does illuminate the
relationship between adults and children, and it implicitly admonishes
94 / imperfect sympathies
Man as a social being has various duties to perform; some relating to his
individual welfare, others to the welfare of society. If he neglect the
former, how can he expect that others, less interested, will perform them
for him. If he neglect the latter, and studies only his own interest, he
becomes a selfish creature, scarcely deserving the name man. A good man
will neglect neither: and this is what the pious Rabbi wished to inculcate.
(Tales, 207n)
Hurwitz implies that this rabbinic wisdom is consistent with the best
moral philosophy in advocating a balance between self-respect and
benevolence, not unlike the morality of Wordsworth’s Pedlar at the end
of The Ruined Cottage, who urges the young poet, distraught over the
fate of Margaret: “ ‘My Friend, enough to sorrow have you given, / The
purposes of wisdom ask no more’ ” (509–10). It is this resignation or
quietism that Lionel Trilling noted in connecting Wordsworth and
rabbinic thought, and that, in the early 1950s, Trilling identified as the
quality of Wordsworth’s poetry least attractive to the contemporary
world: “Nothing could be further from the tendency of our Western
culture, which is committed to an idea of consciousness and activity, of
hyman hurwitz’s HEBREW TALES / 95
motion and force. With us the basis of spiritual prestige is some form of
aggressive action directed outward upon the world, or inward upon
ourselves” (131). In neither Hillel nor Wordsworth did Trilling find
such militancy, the significance of which I will consider in my final
chapter.
Hillel’s injunction balances and to some extent qualifies the call for
sympathy in the tales, best exemplified by the first tale involving Moses.
The narrative framework, therefore, represents a progression of sorts,
from noble but naïve expressions of love for the lamb, and thus for all
of God’s creation, to a more sophisticated statement of how one’s love
and sympathy work in the human community, in the here and now.
This statement coincides with the “ultimate object” of the publication,
“moral improvement” (vii). Whereas Hurwitz claims the later tales and
aphorisms to be more entertaining, he actually encases many of them in
the mechanism of scholarship: lengthy explanatory footnotes that make
sure the reader appreciates the moral of the story. This practice also
demonstrates that the collection works on different levels, as if many of
the footnotes are for the more advanced reader or the teacher.
Hurwitz’s collection is notable for the selections he has made and the
way that he presents the tales in this context of general moral improve-
ment; he is not particularly original or consistent in what he does with
actual tales. Sometimes, he shortens a tale from its source, or more
likely, he selects a portion of the tale to translate, usually the portion
containing the moral itself. Sometimes he adds a biblical aphorism or
quote to precede the tale, but other times he shortens the effect of the
tale by removing biblical allusions and examples that were in the origi-
nal. Hurwitz’s English, his version of Wordsworth’s “real language of
men,” (Preface, 1:119) is rooted in biblical diction, perhaps as a stylistic
marker of its venerable themes. Hurwitz often tries to distill the main
idea or point. It is no doubt true, as some of his contemporaries noted,
that the act of selection for Hurwitz is also an editorial act. Or, to put it
another way, Hurwitz’s selection makes the rabbinic writing palatable to
a mixed audience of Christians and Jews, although Hurwitz’s audience
was primarily Jewish.
Hurwitz also maintains a strict sense of propriety. For instance, the
Talmud is often frank—even gritty—on sexual matters. In one conver-
sation between a rabbi and a philosopher that he translates from Talmud
Avodah Zarah, Hurwitz develops a metaphor derived from the natural
world, at the same time omitting an analogous metaphor from the realm
of human sexuality. Hurwitz translates a portion of the tale that makes
a point about those who act immorally or do wrong. As the rabbi of the
96 / imperfect sympathies
tale explains:
If a man steals grain and sows it, should the seed not shoot up out of
the earth, because it was stolen? O, no! the wise creator lets nature run
her own course; for her course is his own appointment. And what if the
children of folly abuse it to evil? The day of reckoning is not far off, and
men will then learn that human actions likewise re-appear in their conse-
quences by as certain a law as the green blade rises up out of the buried
corn-seed.23
To give you another analogy: Suppose a man had intercourse with his
neighbor’s wife; by rights she should not conceive. But the world runs its
natural course, and the fools who do wrong will be held accountable. In
the same vein R. Shimon b. Lakish said: The Holy One, blessed be He,
declared: Not only do the wicked use My coin promiscuously, but they
force Me to put My stamp in it. [The wicked misuse the God-given
power to procreate and force Him to create the embryo that was
conceived through adultery.] (742–43)
“Rabbi, with thy permission I would fain propose to thee one question.”
“Ask it, then, my love!” he replied. “A few days ago a person entrusted
some jewels to my custody, and now he demands them again: should
I give them back again?” “This is a question,” said Rabbi Meir, “which
my wife should not have thought it necessary to ask. What! Wouldest
thou hesitate or be reluctant to restore to every one his own?” “No,” she
replied, “but yet I thought it best not to restore them without acquaint-
ing thee therewith.” She then led him to their chamber, and stepping to
the bed, took the white covering from their bodies. “Ah, my sons! My
sons!” thus loudly lamented the father: “My sons! The light of mine eyes,
and the light of my understanding; I was your father, but ye were my
teachers in the Law!” The mother turned away, and wept bitterly. At
length she took her husband by the hand, and said, “Rabbi, didst thou
not teach me that we must not be reluctant to restore that which was
entrusted to our keeping? See, the Lord gave, the Lord has taken away,
and blessed be the name of the Lord!” “Blessed be the name of the Lord!”
echoed Rabbi Meir, “and blessed be his name for thy sake too!” (6–7)
Thus, in her own grief, the mother consoles her husband by using the
very methods of figurative thinking and morals based on faith in the
Lord that he had taught her. Not only is the child father of the man in
this tale (“ye were my teachers in the Law”), but women can also partic-
ipate in the creation of a moral universe.25 It is not surprising, therefore,
that when Hurwitz presents the beauties of “the golden age of the
Hebrew language” (17) in his 1828 acceptance address for the Chair in
Hebrew at University College, that he includes a revisionist view of the
role of women in the Bible: “The song of Deborah, and the prayer of
Hannah, show, that even in times of anarchy, the Israelites neither
neglected their language, nor,—and I would particularly draw your atten-
tion to this, as a forcible and demonstrative proof of high cultivation—
the Education of their Daughters” (17).
98 / imperfect sympathies
it must not be imagined that the great rabbinical repository does not
contain better things. In spite of its trifling, and of other objections that
might be urged against it, few works are better worth the attention of the
antiquary, the philologer, the philosophic historian, and the theologian.
It presents the most curious picture of the modes of thinking and acting
of the most singular people that ever existed, under circumstances
altogether unparalleled. (91)
hyman hurwitz’s HEBREW TALES / 99
It is acknowledged on all hands that the Hebrew Records are the oldest
documents we possess, and that they contain information which we can
derive from no other source. They alone give us a rational account of the
origin of things and of the primitive state of mankind. They give us a
statement of the gradual rise of nations. In them, all human beings are
represented to proceed from a common parent. In them alone the dignity
of the human character is asserted and maintained.
But this is not all. No other books whatever have had such an influ-
ence on the minds of men, and on the moral character of nations.
Wherever they have been read, they have awakened a spirit of inquiry
highly favorable to the advancement of science. Wherever they have been
read, they not only made their readers acquainted with their duties, but
102 / imperfect sympathies
also with their rights;—but let it be observed with their rights as conse-
quent on the performance of their duties. And it may safely be asserted,
that no people thoroughly acquainted with the contents of the Bible, can
ever remain enslaved.
To understand these books must therefore be an object of prime
importance to all, but particularly to the spiritual guides and instructors
of the people. And how is this to be done without a knowledge of the
language in which they are written? By Translation, it may be said:—and
true it is that we possess many good Translations. But the Translations are
known to differ on many important points, and how can we possibly
know which of them is correct, unless by an appeal to a Hebrew text?
(21–22)
Pray for the peace of Jerusalem; those who love you will be serene. May
there be peace within your walls, security within your palaces.
—Psalm 122
If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill. Let my
tongue adhere to my palate if I fail to recall you, if I fail to elevate
Jerusalem above my foremost joy.
—Psalm 137
Memory is a source of faith. To have faith is to remember. Jewish faith is
a recollection of that which happened to Israel in the past. The events in
which the spirit of God became a reality stand before our eyes painted
in colors that never fade. Much of what the Bible demands can be
comprised in one word: Remember. “Take heed to thyself, and keep thy
soul diligently lest thou forget the things which thine eyes saw, and lest
they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life; make them known
unto thy children and thy children’s children” (Deuteronomy 4:9).
—Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man is Not Alone: A Philosophy of
Religion (162)
Introduction
In this chapter I focus on one privileged woman’s record of a journey
beyond the relatively safe confines of London to early-nineteenth-century
Jerusalem. Judith Montefiore’s Private Journal of a Visit to Egypt and
Palestine by Way of Italy and the Mediterranean is “the first account in
English by a Jewish woman traveller.”1 Recorded in 1827–28 and privately
printed in 1836 but never published, the Private Journal is not widely avail-
able and has received only passing acknowledgment, mostly in assessments
of the life and career of Moses Montefiore, Judith Montefiore’s husband
and perhaps the most celebrated Jewish philanthropist of the nineteenth
106 / imperfect sympathies
slow and difficult. The Montefiores set off on their journey on May 1,
1827 and did not return to London until February 20, 1828. They trav-
eled by coach across the Alps and into Italy, and then sailed from Malta
to Alexandria on the Leonidas. They arrived in the vicinity of the port of
Alexandria on August 26, 1827, with the hopes of spending the High
Holy Days in Jerusalem, but because of the constant threat of war and
instability on the seas, they did not actually arrive in Jerusalem until
October 18. Given the threat of war between the Ottoman Empire and
the allies as well as the threat of pirates on the seas, the Montefiores had
also hoped to travel with a naval convoy. Instead, they finally engaged
the Henry Williams and its captain to take them to Jaffa. While the most
dramatic moments of the narrative focus on Jerusalem, most of the jour-
nal is concerned with the period of “imprisonment” in Egypt and on the
Leonidas. Although the Montefiores were treated well by the pasha in
Egypt and had consular representation in both Egypt and Palestine, they
were constantly aware of political danger and instability; in fact, they
learned on their return to the Leonidas after visiting Jerusalem that the
Turkish-Egyptian fleet was destroyed off the coast of Greece in the
Battle of Navarino.
Against this backdrop of war and piracy, the Montefiores launched
their journey. Although they were well-to-do travelers, accompanied by
male and female servants as well as friends during various legs of the
journey, the conditions of their travel were not always comfortable.
They paid £400 for the trip on the Leonidas, but this was no luxury ship.
Nor could money buy much ease when traveling by land in either Egypt
or Palestine. As Montefiore notes, the pasha and his daughters had the
only carriages in Egypt; everyone else depended on donkeys or mules.
Travel in Palestine was even more difficult; the Montefiores, for
instance, rode donkeys for ten hours over steep and difficult mountain-
ous paths from Ramala to Jerusalem. Ruth Kark explains:
In the first half of the nineteenth century, there were almost no roads in
Palestine. By then wheeled vehicles, which first appeared in the region in
the days of the Hyksos (seventeenth century B.C.E.), had long been
forgotten, and the fine network of roads of the Roman and Byzantine
periods had fallen into decay. All goods were transported by camel, mule,
donkey and horse. Travelers usually moved in caravans along the ancient
trails. (57)
as one of danger and liberation. For instance, when she and her party
decide to leave Cairo after an excursion to the pyramids, they determine
that they have to get back to Alexandria as soon as possible because of
renewed threats of war at sea. In order to avoid any further detentions,
they leave a flooded Cairo in the middle of the night in a boat: “The
water, at this season, passing through the back streets of the whole city,
persons were enabled to go from their houses by water. We had but two
hours’ sleep after packing up and settling accounts, it having been advis-
able to keep secret the alteration of our intention; and our departure
really seemed like a flight from Egypt” (155). Before they depart from
Egypt, Montefiore describes an illness her husband suffers as “one of the
plagues of Egypt” (183). These allusions, coupled with constant
mention of bugs, heat, and “sands and hot blasts of the sirocco wind”
(167), reinforce the powerful sense of confinement and frustration of
the Montefiores’ detention in Egypt. We find similar allusions in Moses
Montefiores’ diary, as reported by Louis Loewe:
“I think,” he says, “I more ardently desire to leave Egypt than ever our
forefathers did. No one will ever recite the passover service” (which gives
an account of the exodus from Egypt) “with more true devotion than I
shall do, when it pleases Providence to restore me to my own country,
and redeem me and my dear wife from this horrible land of misery and
plague, the hand of God being still upon it.” (39)14
112 / imperfect sympathies
The first view we had of this ancient city [Alexandria], presented us with
a scene of filth and desolateness. Many persons were swimming near the
shore, and pigs and dogs were feeding on the refuse of the town along the
banks; but as we passed through the narrow dirty streets, the novel sight
of loaded camels, and Turks on donkeys, which they honored by the title
of a general and his regiment, attracted our observation, and we at once
felt that we were no longer in Europe, or among Europeans. (130–31)
The distance that marks this passage disappears later in the journal when
Montefiore reaches Jerusalem, which appears to her not as a strange land
but as a long lost home. In the above passage, Montefiore sets up binaries:
filth vs. cleanliness, backwardness vs. civilization, the East vs. Europe.
Montefiore’s perspective here is that of a sophisticated European view-
ing the East. However, a Jewish subtext complicates her position. The
scene projects a confusion of boundaries: humans swimming near the
shore where pigs and dogs feed on refuse. For Montefiore, well versed in
Jewish practice in which the idea of havdalah or separation (the Sabbath
from the rest of the week, milk from meat, wool from linen) is basic to
holiness, this sight brings together much that would be disturbing.
Nevertheless, Montefiore is less interested in belittling or critiquing
modern Egyptian culture as a European than she is in establishing an
elegiac tone and her own sensitivity as an observer: “[Alexandria] is a
city, indeed, where a reflecting mind can scarcely fail of being kept
constantly awake. Almost every quarter of it presents some relic of past
grandeur, some memento of ages when wealth flowed through the hands
of kings in more copious streams, than it has ever since done, and when
human labour was the combined force of thousands” (134). This elegy
for lost grandeur provides a curious contrast to Montefiore’s identifica-
tion with the enslaved Israelites, who were the victims of this system of
wealth and grandeur. Despite this identification, Montefiore is over-
whelmed by the “sea of ages” (147), by the pyramids, which “were old
in days which are remotest in authentic history” (148).
judith montefiore’s PRIVATE JOURNAL / 113
But when once the mind is properly roused to the sentiments which
should thus arise, independent of external objects, every foot of ground
which the traveller passes in Jerusalem, or its neighbourhood, will help to
increase the vividness of his emotions. A vast change has taken place in
the very clothing of nature here since its fall, and her present apparel is
in striking harmony with the later chapters of its history. The olive, the
fig-tree, and the vine, still cover many of her hills, with their richly laden
judith montefiore’s PRIVATE JOURNAL / 115
Not history, as is commonly supposed, but only mythic time repeats itself.
If history is real, the Red Sea can be crossed only once, and Israel cannot
stand twice at Sinai. . . . Yet the covenant is to endure forever . . . . Not the
stone, but the memory transmitted by the fathers, is decisive if the
memory embedded in the stone is to be conjured out of it to live again for
subsequent generations. If there can be no return to Sinai, then what took
place at Sinai must be borne along the conduits of memory to those who
were not there that day. (Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, 10)
But never did city, about to become the prey of a conqueror, offer a
spectacle of such magnificence to the eyes of its enemy as did Jerusalem.
Fitted by its very position, on the summit of hills which seemed to have
a meaning in their frown, and hanging over valleys of which the sterility
and roughness might be easily imagined to have only been overcome by
the special blessing of the God of nature, this city of Zion would have
offered a spectacle sufficiently imposing, had it still consisted but of the
rude dwellings of the ancient Jebusites. It is not difficult, therefore, to
account for the astonishment and even deep emotion with which Titus
contemplated the scene before him while preparing his legions for the
assault. “Peace be within thy walls, and prosperity within thy palaces,”
would have been the natural exclamation, probably, of the general under
any other circumstances but those in which he was placed. (198–99)
In describing Titus in this way, Montefiore makes the historical fall more
personal and human. Like Satan looking into Eden in Book 4 of Paradise
Lost, the conqueror reveals regret for what he is about to do. Montefiore
thus evokes an elegiac tone and focuses on loss rather than on military
exploits. Throughout her description of Jerusalem, Montefiore sympa-
thizes directly and feels past events as if she were there. Her sympathetic
connection is so great that as she humanizes Titus she imagines him awed
by the “city of Zion” and the enormity of his own actions. Perhaps, too,
as a European she understands Titus’ ambition, while as a Jew she
mourns for his action and for the loss of the Temple.
The fall of Jerusalem and the exile of the Jewish people had been the
primary theme of Hebrew Melodies (1815), which Montefiore read.17 In
particular, one of Byron’s lyrics, “On the Day of the Destruction of
Jerusalem by Titus,” dramatizes a Jewish persona observing and
118 / imperfect sympathies
condemning the destruction but also pledging his faith to carry on with
the tradition:
1.
From the last hill that looks on thy once holy dome
I beheld thee, O SION! When rendered to Rome:
‘Twas thy last sun went down, and the flames of thy fall
Flash’d back on the last glance I gave to thy wall.
2.
I look’d for thy temple, I look’d for my home,
And forgot for a moment my bondage to come;
I beheld but the death-fire that fed on thy fane,
And the fast-fettered hands that made vengeance in vain,
3.
On many an eve, the high spot whence I gazed
Had reflected the last beam of day as it blazed;
While I stood on the height, and beheld the decline
Of the rays from the mountain that shone on thy shrine.
4.
And now on that mountain I stood on that day,
But I mark’d not the twilight beam melting away;
Oh! Would that the lightning had glared in its stead,
And the thunderbolt burst on the conqueror’s head!
5.
But the Gods of the Pagan shall never profane
The shrine where Jehovah disdain’d not to reign;
And scattered and scorn’d as thy people may be,
Our worship, oh Father! is only for thee.
the Temple:
“The outward face of the Temple,” says he, “wanted nothing that was
likely to surprise either men’s minds or their eyes; for it was covered all
over with plates of gold, of great weight, and, at the first rising of the sun,
reflected back a very fiery splendour, and made those who forced them-
selves to look upon it avert their eyes, as they would have done at the
sun’s own rays. But this Temple appeared to strangers, when they were
coming to it at a distance, like a mountain covered with snow; for, as to
those parts of it that were not gilt, they were exceeding white.” (199)
This description links the Temple with nature itself, the simile “like a
mountain covered with snow” connecting it to the sacred mountains of
the Bible. Josephus’ imagery of fire and light conveys the spiritual aura that
Montefiore seeks and emphasizes the transcendent power behind this
artifice. Montefiore thus, once again, focuses on the description of
the Temple and unfallen Jerusalem, rather than on the battle itself.
She then hastily sketches the next several hundred years, briefly
noting the Western Wall, which is usually the object of a modern Jewish
pilgrim’s journey: “after dinner we accompanied our party to see the
Greek convent, and then to a large stone, said to be the last relic of the
Temple of Solomon” (204). Montefiore seems most eager to present her
personal prayer: “But to pass from these reflections to my own feelings,
I can never be sufficiently thankful to Almighty God for suffering us to
reach this city in safety” (202). Montefiore then turns to a brief chroni-
cle of Jerusalem’s suffering over subsequent centuries.
Throughout her account of Jerusalem, Montefiore is less interested
in description for its own sake—or for the sake of the picturesque—than
she is in connecting what she sees with her spiritual life and that of the
Jewish people. Nor is she concerned with documenting the authenticity
of the sights she visits. Once again, spiritual feeling takes precedence
over any form of documentation. For example, Montefiore describes her
feelings on visiting what she accepts (without substantiation) as Rachel’s
Tomb:
With the passage from Isaiah, Montefiore closes her narrative of loss and
exile with a prophetic prayer for redemption. She quotes from chapter
thirty-five, a section of the prophetic book that focuses on future
redemption and return to Zion and not on the prophet’s harsh condem-
nations of Israel.20 Once again Montefiore underscores the hopeful spir-
itual theme of the journey to Jerusalem: this hopefulness is what she
commemorates, and this is what both she and Moses Montefiore most
cherish.
him [Moses] to pursue the journey, even when his own ardour had
somewhat abated, and when I had to oppose my counsel to the advice
and wishes of our companions” (202–03). Judith also notes “that only
six European females are said to have visited Palestine in the course of a
century” (83); whether or not this is accurate, it reflects Judith’s
consciousness of her role. Although Judith seemed to be overshadowed
by the nearly mythological status of Moses, she exemplified M. Jeanne
Peterson’s thesis in Family, Love, and Work in the Lives of Victorian
Gentlewomen that in upper-middle-class Victorian marriages—the
Montefiores were not yet a grand couple in 1827, nor, admittedly, were
they yet Victorian—women and men were coworkers and cocreators of
the husband’s career.
But Judith was more than a private partner in Moses’ public
ventures. Her interpretation of Judaism inspired Moses in his commit-
ment to the Jewish people and to more traditional Jewish observance.
When asked to comment on his long and successful life, Moses
Montefiore replied, “ ‘I am no great man . . . the little good I have
accomplished or rather that I intended to accomplish, I am indebted for
it to my never-to-be-forgotten wife, whose enthusiasm for everything
that is noble and whose religiousness sustained me in my career’ ”
(Lipman, “The Making of a Victorian Gentleman,” 12). Although there
seems to be some false modesty here, I cannot overlook Moses’ explicit
reference to Judith’s “religiousness” and its influence on his “career.”
Rather than dismiss this comment as simply expressive of conjugal grat-
itude, I credit Moses for acknowledging Judith’s formative and sustain-
ing role in his public life.
Furthermore, Moses Montefiore has been praised for balancing in his
public life his commitment to Jewish ideals with his English loyalty. As
an early biographer states, “his English patriotism was not exemplified
at the cost of his Judaism” (Goodman, 12). Once again, readers have not
fully recognized Judith’s role in this complex negotiation, and yet Judith
was well prepared to participate in the larger sphere. Judith Montefiore,
as I have claimed, was indeed a well-trained and educated
Englishwoman, and her Englishness was linked to her Jewishness. For
instance, when Sir Sidney Smith and another gentleman visited the
Cohens at their home on Tisha B’av, the holy day commemorating the
destruction of the Temple and hence a day of mourning, the guests were
surprised to find Judith and her sisters sitting on low stools (customary
to periods of mourning). Although the sisters were apparently embar-
rassed, Judith explained that they were remembering the “valour exhib-
ited by our ancestors . . . . But we treasure the memory of it as a bright
judith montefiore’s PRIVATE JOURNAL / 123
On this happy day, the 10th of June, 32 years have passed since the
Almighty God of Israel in His great goodness, blessed me with my dear
Judith, and for ever will I be most grateful in this blessing, the great cause
of my happiness through life. A better and kinder wife never existed, one
whose whole study has been to render her husband good and happy!
(Lipman, “The Making of a Victorian Gentleman,” 12)
Figure 5.2 “Lady Montefiore when young, copied from an oil painting in the
Montefiore College, Ramsgate.” Copied from Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady
Montefiore.
and religion. They were cautious reformers, for instance, worried that
the price for political emancipation of the Jews in Britain would come
at the cost of Jewish observance (Cesarani, 19). Both were concerned
that the Reform movement would lead to unacceptable compromises in
terms of Jewish life and ritual. Both accepted as a given a political and
religious world based on hierarchies, and found a way to reconcile God
and country. This conservatism extended to Judith’s sense of herself as a
judith montefiore’s PRIVATE JOURNAL / 125
writer. She chose not to publish her travel journals, and did not consider
herself an “author.”
And yet, in spite of these facts and of a cautious conservatism, Judith
Montefiore did keep journals and did see fit to have them printed for
family and friends. In the case of the Private Journal of 1827, she did so,
I think, to commemorate her spiritual revelation in her own voice and
to let her small audience of readers know that she and her husband
reached Jerusalem because of her persistence and dedication. In so
doing, she also shared her interpretation of the significance of this event
in their lives. Montefiore, thus, could be strong, authoritative, and
assertive when motivated by conviction, as she often was, especially on
the subject of her religion.
Furthermore, the journal itself bespeaks Judith Montefiore’s desire to
share her work and to influence her readers in their religious faith. As we
have seen, Montefiore framed her story in terms of an essential biblical
pattern and wove her own prayers into the narrative. She also
commented on Jewish history and theological ideas, thereby assuming a
role in the great process of Jewish communal memory. Her incorpora-
tion of extensive passages from Josephus into her own text demonstrates
her rhetorical strategy, for one would presumably not engage in such a
laborious process without an audience in mind. What sustains the whole
project is Montefiore’s conviction that as a Jewish woman she could
interpret and transmit the tradition.
That conviction, strengthened by the visit to Jerusalem, permeated
every detail of her life. At the close of The Jewish Manual, or Practical
Information in Jewish & Modern Cookery with a Collection of Valuable
Recipes & Hints Relating to the Toilette, edited by a Lady (first published
in 1846), Judith Montefiore dishes out refined recipes and beauty tips,
but she concludes with this warning to her (female) readers:
This advice may not be original, but it does point to a constant theme in
Montefiore’s writing: the need to cultivate the higher attributes and to seek
moral and spiritual enlightenment. Montefiore’s domestic philosophy
126 / imperfect sympathies
I will bring Israel again to his habitation, and he shall feed on Carmel and
Bashan, and his soul shall be satisfied upon Mount Ephraim and Gilead.
In those days and in that time, saith the Lord, the iniquity of Israel shall
be sought for, and there shall be none, and the sins of Judah, and they
shall not be found; for I will pardon them whom I reserve. ([Jeremiah
1.19, 20]: 264)
I will strengthen the house of Joseph, and I will bring them again to place
them: for I have mercy upon them: and they shall be as though I had
not cast them out: for I am the Lord their god, and will hear them!
([Zechariah x.6]: 278)
the present, a city that just twenty years later Edward Lear would
describe in this way: “ ‘A bitter, doleful soul-ague comes over you in its
streets, and your memories of its interior are nothing but horrid dreams
of squalor and filth, clamour and uneasiness, hatred and malice and all
uncharitableness’ ” (Searight, 158–59). Montefiore’s picture is not so
grim only because she emphasizes the plans that she and her husband
have to improve the desperate situation. Whereas the Montefiores were
deterred on their first trip by political instabilities, on this trip they also
feared the plague, which was ravaging Jerusalem. Nevertheless, Judith
Montefiore casts herself as a kind of biblical Ruth, who followed her
mother-in-law Naomi in her return to Israel from Moab. When
Montefiore’s husband suggests that she stay in Malta, she responds:
“This I peremptorily resisted, and the expressions of Ruth furnished my
heart at the moment with the language it most desired to use. ‘Entreat
me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee; for whither
thou goest I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge!’ ”(197).
Montefiore does not structure this narrative after any particular book of
the Bible as she does in the first journal, but she frequently alludes to
the Bible in order to provide a religious context for the mission. She
evokes Ruth not because of the precise biblical parallel (Ruth, of course,
pledges her love to her dead husband’s mother), but because Ruth, a
Moabite who chooses Israel and is an ancestor of King David, represents
conscious commitment and devotion. Ruth’s story furnishes her heart
with the language to express her intensity, in a way reminiscent of
Montefiore’s allusion to Rachel as a mother of Israel in the first journal.
In the second journal, Montefiore evokes the Bible in a way that
recreates its presence and superimposes it on her time:
Jacob and Laban come to life on the hills just a short time before
Montefiore settles down to “a nice cup of tea,” the juxtaposition oddly
serving to emphasize the presence of the Bible as well as the present
moment in 1839. Montefiore captures what Eric Auerbach identified in
Mimesis as the hallmark of Biblical style, the melding of the sublime and
judith montefiore’s PRIVATE JOURNAL / 129
the ordinary—Jacob and Laban, a cup of tea. This Ruth has now made
herself quite at home, a genteel Englishwoman camped on the rough
hills of Gilead. Perhaps there is something of Victorian domesticity and
interiority at play here, in contrast to the rougher exteriors of the earlier
journal. Unlike the awe that Judith Montefiore expresses in the first
journal, here she makes herself at home through her narrative of home-
making, even on the rough hillside. Whereas in the first journal
Montefiore celebrates the act of returning to a communal home, in the
second journal she domesticates and settles that home.
Judith Montefiore also structures the second journal in such a way as
to emphasize the practical mission. Appendices include materials from
the Jewish community to Moses Montefiore outlining the needs for
agriculture, “Reports, Letters, & Addresses on Agriculture in the Holy
Land,” including charts listing the kinds of agriculture possible and the
expenses involved. The petitioners repeatedly connect their desire to
revive agriculture in the land with ancient cultivation of “vine and
olive.” One petitioner asks, “Why should our condition be worse than
that of Christians in the Holy Land? For they have no inheritance in the
soil, nor have they absolute possession of any portion of it any more
than we; yet the Christians here derive a sufficient sustenance from the
fruitfulness of the land, and the abundance of the seas” (381).
The Montefiores’ support of agricultural development, then, was
motivated both by a genuine desire to improve the plight of the Jews
living in Palestine and a belief that such labor would fulfill ancient
prophecy. Historians have suggested another motivation: the plan may
also have been an oblique response to the timeworn anti-Semitic notion
that Jews, as homeless wanderers, cannot form an attachment to the
land. Such was the claim of William Cobbett, who wrote, “ ‘The
Israelite is never seen to take spade in his hand but waits like the vora-
cious slug to devour what has been produced by labour in which he has
had no share’ ” (Parfitt, 33). By imagining the revival of cultivation in
eretz Yisrael (the land of Israel), the Montefiores saw Jews as giving the
lie to Cobbett’s slanders. Jews would be attached to their own home-
land, bound to the soil. This refutation also anticipates the Zionist ideal
of making the desert bloom. Some have even suggested that in their
commitment to cultivating the land the founding Zionists actually
sought to refute the negative stereotype.
In England, too, Jews attempted to connect Jews to the land. Grace
Aguilar, a contemporary of the Montefiores at this time in their lives,
consciously uses neat gardens and cultivated land to anchor her Jewish
characters in their adopted homeland. In “The Perez Family,” for
130 / imperfect sympathies
instance, from Home Scenes and Heart Studies (1852), Aguilar introduces
the family and their cottage in a poor section of Liverpool:
The cottage stood apart from the others, with a good piece of ground for a
garden, which stretching from the back led through a narrow lane, to the
banks of the Mersey and thus permitted a fresher current of air. The garden
was carefully and prettily laid out, and planted with the sweetest flowers;
the small parlour and kitchen of the cottage opened into it . . . . (1)
Aguilar goes on to show that the domestic interiors match this neatness
and productivity of the exterior, despite the poverty. The narrator
further explains that Simeon Perez had cultivated the back garden with
his own hands, despite a history that would have discouraged him:
Both local and national disadvantages often unite to debar Jews from
agriculture, and therefore it is a branch in which they are seldom, if ever,
employed. Their scattered state among the nations, the occupations
which misery and persecution compel them to adopt, are alone to blame
for those peculiar characteristics which cause them to herd in the most
miserable alleys of crowded cities, rather than the pure air and cheaper
living in the country. (11)
communities than in the insight that she gives us into Jewish religious
thinking and interior life. Well connected politically despite being
Jewish, Montefiore speaks as a lady who has the time and means to
travel, think, and write. She presents readers with a Jewish voice at a
time when voices about Jews are much easier to find. Instead of rumors
about Jews or comments about the horrors of synagogue worship or
caricatures of Shylocks, old-clothes men, or “smouches,” Montefiore
presents a Jewish-centered world. Perhaps her immediate readers found
inspiration for living their Judaism; looking over their shoulders,
twenty-first-century readers can better understand British Jews in the
period—and critique Jewish representations in canonical texts—from a
perspective that takes Jews and Judaism into account. Whereas many
Christian writers could not reconcile biblical Judaism with real Jews,
Judith Montefiore draws her strength and meaning from this connec-
tion, this channel of memory from a Jewish past and to possibilities for
the future.
C h ap t e r 6
Maria Edgeworth’s H A R R I N G T O N
(1817): Jews, Storytelling, and the
Challenge of Moral Education
The key, indeed, to all that is peculiar in her writings, whether in the way
of excellence or defect,—that which distinguishes her from other writers
of kindred powers of judgment and invention, is, that the duties of Moral
Teacher are always uppermost in her thoughts. It is impossible, we think,
to read ten pages in any of her writings, without feeling, not only that the
whole, but that every part of them was intended to do good;—and that
she has never for an instant allowed herself to forget, that the great end
and aim of her writing was—not to display her own talents, or to court
popularity or brilliant effect—but to make her readers substantially
better and happier;—not only to correct fatal errors of opinion—to
soften dispositions and remove prejudices unfriendly to happiness—but
to display wisdom and goodness at once in their most engaging and
familiar aspects . . . .
—The Edinburgh Review 28 (1817): 391 [Francis Jeffrey]
With respect to what is commonly called the education of the heart, we
have endeavoured to suggest the easiest means of inducing useful and
agreeable habits, well-regulated sympathy and benevolent affections.
—“Preface” to Practical Education, Maria Edgeworth and Richard
Lovell Edgeworth (I: vii)
Introduction
I now turn to Maria Edgeworth, a contemporary of Judith Montefiore
whose career was influenced by another Jewish woman. The well-known
story behind Harrington (1817) reads like one of Edgeworth’s moral
tales. A young Jewish reader in the United States, Rachel Mordecai (later
Lazarus), wrote to Edgeworth in 1815, praising her literary accomplish-
ment but politely pointing out that Edgeworth’s depictions of Jews in
her fiction were always negative and mean: “Relying on the good sense
and candour of Miss Edgeworth I would ask, how it can be that she,
134 / imperfect sympathies
who on all other subjects shows such justice and liberality, should on
one alone appear biased by prejudice: should even instill that prejudice
into the minds of youth! . . . Can it be believed that this race of men are
by nature mean, avaricious, and unprincipled? Forbid it, mercy. Yet this
is more than insinuated by the stigma usually affixed to the name.”1
Edgeworth responded to Mordecai’s letter—and began a lifelong
correspondence—with humility and a pledge to do better. The result
was Harrington, a novel that Michael Ragussis has called the first liter-
ary text in English to inquire self-consciously into the representation of
Jews and Jewishness; Edgeworth, thus, “turned personal self-evaluation
into a cultural critique.”2
This rendition of the origins of Harrington is accurate but partial.
Rachel Mordecai, although polite and gracious, was not completely
satisfied with Edgeworth’s self-proclaimed attempt at “atonement and
reparation” (8). After reading the novel, Mordecai wrote to Edgeworth
that she was disappointed in the ending, which resolved the “Jewish
problem” by having the object of the eponymous Harrington’s affections
turn out to be an English Protestant and not a Jew as presumed all
along. Although Mordecai lets Edgeworth off the hook and offers a
magnanimous interpretation of her motives, she leaves her statement, “I
was disappointed” (16), in place.3 While Mordecai appreciated
Edgeworth’s attempt to write a sympathetic novel about Jews, contem-
porary reviewers were not as kind either regarding her purpose or its
execution. Their responses indicate, once again, that Edgeworth did not
succeed fully in her goal of presenting Jews more justly and liberally in
her fiction. In fact, the various responses and reviews of the novel ques-
tion her project, critiquing the way that she writes about prejudice and
revealing that sympathy has its limitations.
Despite this assessment, I argue that readers can best understand
Edgeworth’s novel in the context of her mission as an educator and
moral teacher because this mission subsumes all others: her relationship
to her audience; her self-conscious representations of Jews and manipu-
lations of literary conventions; and her anatomy of the psychology of
sympathy and its opposite, antipathy. I propose to modify Ragussis’
important insight that Harrington marks the first “meta-representation”
of Jews and Jewishness in English literature by arguing that Edgeworth’s
educational emphasis and her anatomy of sympathy bring us closer to
the center of this novel than does an analysis of the ideology of conver-
sion. In this sense, Harrington fits squarely into Edgeworth’s oeuvre and
her oft-stated insistence that the author is first and foremost a moral
teacher. Harrington is a novel of education in several senses of the word.
maria edgeworth’s HARRINGTON / 135
What sets Harrington apart is that the author begins by looking into her
own heart and educating herself. She even refers to her own errors in the
course of the novel when Harrington laments that Edgeworth’s Moral
Tales for Young People and other such tales “certainly acted most power-
fully and injuriously, strengthening the erroneous association of ideas I
had accidentally formed, and confirming my childish prejudice by what
I then thought the indisputable authority of printed books” (16–17).
In her earlier writings for both children and adults, Edgeworth did
create negative representations of Jews.4 The Absentee, for instance,
which particularly stung Rachel Mordecai, presents a noxious Jewish
coach maker and loan shark, coincidentally named Mr. Mordicai [sic], a
man so vile that he hounds a debtor on his deathbed. But the tales for
younger readers are even more disturbing, in that they combine the
stereotypical image of Jewish avarice with slanderous tales about Jewish
contagion and malice, functioning as Homi Bhabha has shown that
the fetish or stereotype works in colonial discourse, through “a paradox-
ical mode of representation: it connotes rigidity and an unchanging
order as well as disorder, degeneracy, and daemonic repetition” (The
Location of Culture, 66). “The Jew,” in other words, is both a known and
fixed image (a Shylock, say) and an idea that gets repeated obsessively in
slanderous legends and stories, as if the culture could possibly forget. In
“Murad the Unlucky” from Popular Tales, for instance, the Jew know-
ingly sells plague-tainted used clothing, thus causing suffering and death
to innocents. In this story, Edgeworth not only repeats the stereotype of
the Jew as greedy but she also enhances it with the ancient charge that
Jews are carriers of the plague, a daemonic repetition like the blood libel
that resurfaces over time. Furthermore, “Murad the Unlucky” instills
suspicions about the Jewish old-clothes men, and thus brings anxieties
about Jewish degeneracy and immorality into the heart of contemporary
Britain. No wonder Rachel Mordecai, writing from what she regarded
as the relative freedom and tolerance of North Carolina, took offense.
In this chapter, I analyze the “Jewish question” in Harrington from
three different points of view. First, I demonstrate that contemporary
reviews and responses to Harrington focus attention on the difficulty of
Edgeworth’s project to present Jews and Judaism positively in the
volatile context of British nationality and of ingrained prejudice, as
evidenced by the reviewers themselves. Then, I turn my attention to
Edgeworth’s strategies of representation and education. Edgeworth takes
on the stereotype of the rootless Jew by presenting a benign old-clothes
man who is mistaken for the kind of stereotypical character who would
be more at home in a gothic novel. His very incongruity in the context
136 / imperfect sympathies
stories too obtrusively forward,—and led her into repetitions that are
somewhat wearisome, and discussions too elementary, and exaggera-
tions too improbable . . .” (392).6 Jeffrey rightly focuses on the difficulty
of writing a novel with such a definite moral purpose in mind. The
didactic purpose itself can be so overwhelming that it subsumes all other
imaginative possibilities or avenues of development. Criticizing this
singleminded focus, Jeffrey faults Edgeworth for not representing
“tumultuous emotions” or “stronger passions” (394), a defect that Jeffrey
patronizingly attributes to “female Delicacy” (396):
Except in the case of her Irish rustics, she has hardly ever ascribed any
burst of natural passion, or any impulse of reckless generosity to her
characters. The rest of her favourites are well-behaved, considerate,
good-natured people, who are never in any very terrible danger, either
from within or from without, and from whom little more is required
than might be expected from any other well disposed and well educated
persons in the like circumstances. (394)
At the heart of Jeffrey’s critique is his claim that Edgeworth will do noth-
ing to sacrifice her duties as a moral teacher; hence, she shuns descrip-
tive beauty or, for that matter, intricacies of style.
And yet, Jeffrey implies that in Harrington Edgeworth has failed to
provide her pupils with a compelling lesson, or, to adapt her own
metaphor, has overmedicated the patient:
Upon Miss E.’s present system, there are several of her stories which can
be of use, we should think, but to a very small number of patients; and
we really cannot help thinking that is was as little worth her while to
provide a corrective for gentlemen who have an antipathy to Jews, or
ladies who have prejudices against French governesses, as it would be for
138 / imperfect sympathies
This is all admirable, and in Miss Edgeworth’s best manner. But we can
afford no more extracts from this story [Harrington];—which is by no
means a favourite with us, and has more faults than any of her recent
productions. In case she should wish to know their nature, we shall
mention a few of them. The object and design of the Tale, as we have
already said, is narrow and fantastic. Nobody likely to read Miss
Edgeworth’s writings, entertains such an absurd antipathy to Jews as she
here aims at exposing; and the unfavourable opinion that may be enter-
tained, by more reasonable persons, of Jew-pedlars or money lenders, is
not very likely to be corrected by a story professedly fabulous, of a rich
Spanish gentleman who belonged to that persuasion. The scene of
Harrington’s extravagances at the Tower is not only quite out of character,
but it is altogether foolish and puerile in itself. We might possibly tolerate
his kneeling down to the armour of the Black Prince with a speech; but
most certainly, any gentleman who should rant Clarence’s dream from
Shakespeare in passing through the horse armoury, or pour out verses with
a loud voice, and without much apparent connexion, in going over the
Tower with a grave foreigner and a party of strangers, would deserve to be
set down—not indeed for a madman—but for a very silly and
contemptible blockhead. The most revolting part of the story, however, is
that of the deep-laid, and yet most paltry and childish devices of Mowbray
to persuade the Jew and his daughter that his rival was insane. (403)
Whereas Hazlitt had imagined the “more philosophical” part of the audi-
ence in sympathy with Kean’s Shylock, Jeffrey imagines that reasonable
maria edgeworth’s HARRINGTON / 139
The prejudices which are still cherished, we fear, to a great extent against
that unhappy race, may be regarded as the greatest reproach on the liberal-
ity of this enlightened age. A people, so long the special objects of the
Divine dispensations, with whose history our earliest and most sacred asso-
ciations are interwoven, on whose religion our own was ingrafted, whose
country was the scene of all its most interesting events, and who, even in
their dispersion, afford the most striking illustration of that superintending
Providence by which they are to be finally restored—might well be
regarded with a degree of veneration—did they not occur to our memories
as the obstinate and merciless persecutors of Christ and Christians, rather
than as the once favoured and peculiar people of God. Nor is it to be
denied, that the violent persecutions to which throughout Christendom
they have been exposed in their turn, the disabilities under which they
labour, and their spirit of hostility to the professors of the Christian faith,
and engendered habits which may warrant, in some measure, the opinion
generally entertained of their character. Were the representation given of
them by Miss Edgeworth to obtain general credit, that opinion would
speedily be changed. We regret, for the sake of this oppressed and injured
people, that her zeal has in this case rather outrun her judgment; and that,
by representing all her Jewish characters as too uniformly perfect, she has
thrown a degree of suspicion over her whole defence. (520)
As it respects this country the lesson might have been spared, for very few
among us, who are likely to read Miss Edgeworth’s book, can be suspected
of supposing Jews and Christians to be different sorts of beings. We know
of no social or political privations to which our Jews are subject, and
Miss Edgeworth has given us credit for treating them like other people.7
We think the story is calculated to have an effect rather unfavourable to
the Jews of this country, as it tends to single them out as objects of obser-
vation, where as they might otherwise have passed on in the crowd with-
out any national distinction. Their condition is stated, on pretty good
authority, to be the same in Great Britain, so that this tale, to be of any
practical utility, should be translated into Portuguese or Turkish, or some
such other language, where there are prejudices and injustice for it to act
upon. Unless we are mistaken in regard to the sentiments entertained
toward the Jews by English and American Christians, the story labours
under an essential defect of plan by being directed against errours and
wrongs, of which the reader is wholly ignorant. (160–61)
This reviewer tells us more about his own ideology than he does about
Harrington. While he argues that Jews and Christians are not “different
maria edgeworth’s HARRINGTON / 141
“A good man for naughty boys”: Old Clothes and Musty Tales
In Figures of Conversion, Michael Ragussis argues that Edgeworth
founded a “revisionary tradition” in which “the powerful figure of
Shylock” had to be exorcised before more positive representations of Jews
could emerge. While Shakespeare’s Shylock is important to Harrington,
gothic conventions and the “language of panic,”8 which reveal false
representations of Jews in British culture, are also central to her plot.
Edgeworth demonstrates that gothic terror is caused by cultural preju-
dices and psychological manipulation rather than supernatural agency,
in much the same way that Austen does in Northanger Abbey. In
Harrington, Edgeworth investigates the Jew as the alien Other, and in so
doing both employs and parodies the convention of the gothic villain
and the fear he inspires. She demonstrates that the gothic mode taps
into a reserve of cultural and psychological anxiety and therefore
provides a rich context for imagining the place of Jews in Britain. In this
way, Edgeworth undermines both anti-Semitic prejudice and gothic
supernaturalism as based on fantasy and exaggeration; she also calls
attention to the very nature of representation since the gothic villain
does not easily fit in the world of the tale.
Although Harrington is an example of the association of the gothic
with the social and cultural outcast, Edgeworth does not accept the asso-
ciation uncritically. Instead, gothic themes and characters provide a way
to comment on and distance herself from a specific cultural and
religious prejudice. Edgeworth uses gothic conventions to analyze the
relationship of Jews to the larger culture. In the course of Harrington,
she separates the figure of the historical Jewish peddler from the mythi-
cal Wandering Jew, long associated in anti-Semitic literature with the
justified punishment and homelessness of the Jewish people.9 But even
though she critiques anti-Semitism and the gothic variation on the myth
maria edgeworth’s HARRINGTON / 143
of the Wandering Jew, Edgeworth’s plot twist prevents her from bringing
Jews into the center of her fictional world.
The opening chapter of Harrington, so crucial to this argument, illus-
trates Edgeworth’s use of the gothic simultaneously to reveal and to
debunk the source of terror. As narrator, Harrington describes a scene
when he was about six years old, an inquisitive young gentleman who
did not want to go to bed. In order to frighten him to bed the maid-
servant Fowler tells Harrington that the old-clothes man in front of the
house—the Jewish peddler Simon—“shall come up and carry you away
in his great bag” if Harrington does not go to sleep. The child is terri-
fied and the next morning asks more questions, only to have Fowler
respond, “Simon the Jew is a good man for naughty boys” (3). On other
occasions, Fowler repeats a version of the blood libel (that Jews routinely
murder Christian children) to the increasingly terrified child:
some shocking crime.—This picture had been painted in times when the
proportions of the human figure were little attended to, and when fore-
shortening was not at all understood: this added to the horrible effect, for
the executioner’s arm and scourge were of tremendous size; Sir Josseline
stood miraculously tall, and the Jew, crouching, supplicating, sprawling,
was the most distorted squalid figure eyes ever beheld or imagination
could conceive. (54)
implies, when ideas about people rather than people themselves occupy
center stage.
The first revolution in Harrington’s perception of Jews occurs when
he meets the maligned and mistreated young peddler, Jacob:
But now my pleasure in the play was over. I could no longer enjoy
Macklin’s incomparable acting; I was so apprehensive of the pain which
it must give to the young Jewess. At every stroke, characteristic of the
skilful actor, or the master poet, I felt a strange mixture of admiration and
regret. I almost wished that Shakespeare had not written, or Macklin had
not acted, the part so powerfully: my imagination formed such a strong
conception of the pain the Jewess was feeling, and my inverted sympathy,
if I may call it, so overpowered my direct and natural feelings, that at
every fresh development of the Jew’s villainy I shrunk as though I had
myself been a Jew. (75)
In other words, Harrington believes that his direct and natural response
would be to feel contempt for Shylock’s villainy, but his “inverted
sympathy” forces him into the position of the apparently Jewish
observer of a performance hostile to Jews and Jewishness. He identifies
not with Shylock on stage but Berenice trapped in the boxes and forced
to watch:
moment more and more interested and delighted with her, from the
perception that my anticipations were just, and that at last I saw, or
fancied I saw, that she grew so pale, that, as she closed her eyes at the
same instant, I was certain that she was going to faint . . . . (77)
I have never, I believe, written to you since I received a very kind letter
from you about Harrington and Ormond. It came to my hands when I
was so unhappy that I could not write any answer. The feeling that my
Father would have been so much gratified by it and that it came when he
could no longer sympathise with me as he had done for so many happy
years was dreadful. I have since read your letter again lately, after an inter-
val of nearly four years, and feel grateful now for not having thanked you.
I wish you would thank your kindhearted father for the reason he gave
for my making Berenice turn out to be a Christian. It was a better reason
than I own I had ever thought up. I really should be gratified if I could
have any testimony even were it ever so slight from those of your persua-
sion that they were pleased with my attempt to do them justice. But
except from you, my dear Madam, and one or two other individuals in
England, I have never heard that any of the Jewish persuasion received
Harrington as it was intended. A book or merely a print of any celebrated
Jew or Jewess or a note expressing their satisfaction with my endeavors or
with my intentions would have pleased—I will not say my vanity—but
my heart. ( June 21, 1821; MacDonald, 23)
Edgeworth acknowledges that she herself was frustrated with the ending
and could not fully justify it. She does not say why she did not resolve
the novel differently, but I infer from her comments that she could not
imagine how to do so. She does not embrace Mr. Mordecai’s surmise
that she had wanted to show “the liberality and firmness of
Mr. Montenero’s principles” (16). According to this interpretation,
Mr. Montenero was noble in that he married a Christian and was will-
ing to raise his daughter as such to honor his wife’s memory, but he
would not convert from Judaism himself. Given the difficulties that
Edgeworth faced, perhaps the ending may have been her way of
containing the unruly elements of her story within the bounds of a
conventional comic-romance ending.
Edgeworth also identifies the source of her greatest disappointment
about Harrington—not the misunderstanding of some reviews, but the
failure of Jewish readers to appreciate her work. While the reviews indi-
cate that Edgeworth was not wholly successful in teaching Christian read-
ers greater tolerance or even in teaching them to recognize the existence
158 / imperfect sympathies
of anti-Semitism, this personal comment reveals that she was not wholly
successful in reparation with the Jewish community, since only “one or
two individuals in England” acknowledged her offering. Unlike Richard
Cumberland, Edgeworth does not want a medal for her efforts, but she
does wish for more communication.21
What, then, does Edgeworth accomplish? Despite the awkward stag-
ing of some later scenes (such as the tour of Westminster Abbey and the
Tower), Edgeworth traces the origins of prejudice with psychological
realism, especially in the opening chapters. A reader would have to go to
Wordsworth’s Prelude to find as compelling an analysis of the function
of early habits in establishing prejudices, with the difference that
Wordsworth praises the “honorable bigotry” (1800 Preface, 156) that
binds the narrator to his heritage and guides his moral development.
Edgeworth’s study of the progression from fear, to contempt, to hatred
in the early chapters is exceptional in its detailed memory of what fear
looks like from the point of view of a six year old. Her skill reminds me
of the haunted opening of Great Expectations where Magwitch terrifies
Pip into compliance or the image of young David Copperfield standing
before Miss Murdstone’s monstrous, clamping handbag in that novel. In
the early chapters of Harrington the weight of ideas about prejudice does
not overwhelm the power of narrative or the fullness of character as it
sometimes does later in the book.
But I also think that the study of prejudice and the transition to
sympathy are successful because Edgeworth as moral teacher was confi-
dent about this process. The later chapters and the Jewish characters are
less successful because Edgeworth could not fully imagine what to do
with them as Jews. The Jews, once again, were Other but they were also
a part of British culture.22 That is the crucial difference. What perplexed
Edgeworth was the very challenge of modernity and Judaism: what do
good Britons do with Jews when they look and act like genteel people?
The gerryrigged ending testifies to the difficulty that Edgeworth faced
in attempting to bring closure to a novel that she meant to do so much,
both in terms of her own self-vindication and in teaching readers
schooled in her own earlier moral tales that she was wrong about Jews.
Although Edgeworth may have fallen short, she nevertheless had the
honesty and self-awareness to reflect on her attempt.
C h ap t e r 7
“Nor yet redeemed from scorn”:
Wordsworth and the Jews
In far-off Asia a little child walks through the ghetto on his way to school,
singing Alma redemptoris as he goes. The Jews, outraged, hire a homicide
who seizes the child, cuts his throat, and throws the body in a privy. The
child’s distraught mother searches for him throughout the ghetto.
Wondrously the child begins to sing; the provost comes, puts the Jews to
death, and has the child carried to the church. There the child explains
that the Virgin Mary laid a grain upon his tongue and he will sing until
it is removed. When the grain is removed the child gives up the ghost. He
is buried as a martyr.
—L. D. Benson, summary of Chaucer’s The Prioress’s Tale, 20001
The fierce bigotry of the Prioress forms a fine back-ground for her
tender-hearted sympathies with the Mother and Child; and the mode in
which the story is told amply atones for the extravagance of the miracle.
—William Wordsworth, Headnote to his translation of The Prioress’s
Tale, 1827
While it was supposed that “the Jews eat little children,” it was proper to
take precautions against them. But why keep up ill names and the ill
odour of a prejudice when the prejudice has ceased to exist?
—William Hazlitt, “Emancipation of the Jews” (Howe 19:324)
Introduction
As I have argued, Maria Edgeworth’s correspondence with Rachel
Mordecai shaped her representation of Jews and her analysis of the
nature of prejudice in Harrington. Wordsworth’s literary encounters
with Jews and Judaism were also to a certain extent shaped by what
others said about his writing, although the process was less direct than
it was for Edgeworth. In this chapter, I bring together Wordsworth’s “A
Jewish Family” and his translation of Chaucer’s The Prioress’s Tale in
order to uncover a little-known but significant element of his thinking
160 / imperfect sympathies
son, and two older daughters, one of whom is the subject described here):
Addressing her journal entry to her mother Mary Wordsworth and aunt
Dorothy Wordsworth, Dora views the entry as a prelude to her father’s
poem. Although she claims that she does not want to anticipate the
poem, she cannot resist entering into the process by recording
Coleridge’s conversation with the mother, “this Rachel” who paradoxi-
cally becomes a particular Jewish mother concerned for her child’s well-
being in Dora’s note. Whereas Coleridge had commented on the child’s
beauty, the mother brings the observers back to the rags and misery asso-
ciated with the poverty in which they live. Dora takes her cue from the
mother, endorsing, in a sense, the mother’s lament and her practical
concern by focusing her reader’s attention on the thousand patches of
the frock rather than on the physical beauty of the girl. Through her
vivid language, Dora leaves us with an unforgettable image of poverty
and resourcefulness, misery and beauty.
While Dora Wordsworth literally allows the woman to speak and
comments on a particularly striking detail, William Wordsworth employs
a different technique in his poem, which begins with this invocation:
turning this mother into the Madonna of the Rhine. Raphael, the painter
most associated in the nineteenth century with idealized images of the
Madonna and child, serves as the poet’s inspiration as he represents this
family through a romanticized image of poverty, endurance, and faith.11
Whereas Dora’s note has reported on the mother and her daughter,
William’s poem, inspired by Christian Madonna imagery, shifts the focus
to the boy. The two sisters, the woman’s daughters, are conflated and fade
into relative insignificance. Wordsworth inclines his studious forehead
over this family and attempts to perfect in words, as it were, the idealized
portraits of Raphael, much as restorers of the time attempted to get at
their “idea of Raphael” by paradoxically painting things out of his
canvases in order to make them more “Raphaelesque.”12 William accord-
ingly sees the mother and child as types who inspired Christian painters:
It was a fine morning but very windy. When we got nearly through the
town we saw a surly-looking German driving a poor Jew forward with
foul language, and making frequent use of a stick which he had in his
hand. The countenance of the Jew expressed neither anger nor surprise
or agitation; he spoke, but with meekness, and unresisting pursued his
way, followed by his inhuman driver, whose insolence we found was
supported by law: the Jew had no right to reign in the city of Hamburgh,
as a German told us in broken English. The soldiers who are stationed at
the drawbridge looked very surly at him, and the countenances of the by-
standers expressed cold unfeeling cruelty. We pass many gentlemen’s
houses on the road to Blankenese.16
if they were addressed kindly—if they were not required to abandon their
distinctive customs as a nation, but were invited to become Christians of
the seed of Abraham—there would be a Christian Synagogue in a year’s
time. As it is, the Jews are the lowest of mankind; they of the lower orders
have not a principle of honesty in them; to grasp and be getting moneys
for ever is their one occupation. (Table Talk, April 13, 1830, 1:102)
Given the last sentence, it is hard to see how a Christian would address
the mass of Jews “kindly.”
But what of Wordsworth? At least, one might say that “A Jewish
Family” is not a miserable caricature, one of the familiar representations
of Jews and the Jewish family as hideously ugly and spiritually
debased.20 Nor is it an example of a more high-browed anti-Semitism,
such as the attitude with which some members of the British press
received Byron’s Hebrew Melodies. On a less effete level, Charles Lamb’s
Elia admits in “Imperfect Sympathies” that the sight of a Jew on the
street sets him trembling. But unlike Wordsworth, who sees these
ancient Hebrew streams filled with light and inspiration, Elia, as I have
argued, sees the sweep of centuries in a darker way. Whereas
Wordsworth imagines a Hebrew Madonna, a Rachel becoming Mary,
Lamb evokes a woman capable of driving a stake through her enemy’s
head—the Jewish woman on the streets of London or the biblical hero
Yael becomes an archetypal murderess, a femme fatale.
Even considering William Wordsworth’s intention of creating a
sympathetic portrait of the Jewish family, the poet’s literary philo-
Semitism substitutes idealization for caricature. Curiously, in his note to
the poem recorded by Isabella Fenwick in 1843, Wordsworth gets much
wordsworth and the jews / 169
Though exceedingly poor, and in rags, they were not less beautiful than
I have endeavored to make them appear. We had taken a little dinner
with us in a basket, and invited them to partake of it, which the mother
refused to do, both for herself and children, saying it was with them a
fast-day; adding diffidently, that whether such observances were right or
wrong, she felt it her duty to keep them strictly. The Jews, who are
numerous on this part of the Rhine, greatly surpass the German
peasantry in the beauty of their features and in the intelligence of their
countenances. But the lower classes of the German peasantry have, here
at least, the air of people grievously opprest . . . . (PW, 2:525)
When William steps outside of his poem and records this memoir, he
comes closest to Dora’s observation and her less-qualified sympathy.
Now he indirectly gives the mother voice and omits the Christian, artis-
tic, or biblical allusions. Instead, he contrasts the Jews of the region to
the German peasantry (notice that the Jews are not Germans), and
alludes to a specific conflict that the mother felt in refusing the
Englishmen’s food. Although William does not comment on this refusal,
it raises interesting questions about the family. We know from their
refusal that the family was observant, unlike many other Jews who were
attempting to assimilate and who were abandoning observance of
dietary laws and other customs. The woman may have refused the food
because she knew it was not kosher, or she may have been observing the
restriction against eating meat during the Nine Days of Av, the obser-
vance that precedes the solemn holy day Tisha b’Av, which commemo-
rates the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and marks the dispersal
of the Jews through history. This holy day always falls in either or both
of the secular months of July and August; the Jewish calendar shows that
the Wordsworths were in St. Goar during the Nine Days in 1828.21
The mother’s perceived diffidence about accepting food indicates
that while she may have been ambivalent about her observance, she feels
duty-bound to live her Judaism and to instill this in her children—
perhaps because of her awareness that she is a member of a scattered
people, a guest in this German province. Readers do not know with
certainty; nor do readers know anything else about the family, such as
the whereabouts of the father or their means of support. But rather
than a disembodied spirit mysteriously linked to ancient Jerusalem, the
woman identifies herself as a practicing Jew obligated to mourn in
the present for the destruction of the Temple, the historical act that
made her and the Jewish people exiles. In describing more of the
170 / imperfect sympathies
the effects of perpetuating such gruesome rumors about Jews and Jewish
practice.
A critic in the Eclectic Review develops the criticism more pointedly,
and it seems that Wordsworth’s response in the form of the 1827 headnote
refers to this reviewer. The reviewer criticizes the choice of tale, calling the
legend “so exquisitely absurd that it must have been designed as a
burlesque on the lying martyrological wonders of the Romish priest-
hood.”26 Unfortunately, in debunking the prejudices of the tale the
reviewer feels free to lambaste Catholicism, a prejudice that Wordsworth
ironically shared. The reviewer goes on to claim that the “puerility” of such
tales would attract Wordsworth, who “would be even melted into tears by
the affected solemnity of a sly old humorist like Chaucer; and that what
was meant by him for satire might be mistaken by our Author for pathos”
(18). Like some twentieth-century readers, this reviewer cannot accept
the tale as anything other than satire and criticizes Wordsworth as an
unsophisticated reader who cannot detect Chaucer’s irony.
This reviewer’s claim that Wordsworth is an unsophisticated reader
of Chaucer leads us in the right direction but misses the mark.
Wordsworth may deliberately misread The Prioress’s Tale as if it were a
lyrical ballad, an anachronistic—or solipsistic—interpretive move. In
other words, his interest focuses on the way hearing a tale affects the
listener, in this case both the Prioress and her contemporaries. Whereas
Wordsworth focuses on communal legends and gossip, such as the legend
of Lucy Gray or the rumors that have influenced the old sea-captain-
narrator of The Thorn, the sinister legends woven into the “miracles of
the Virgin” tales involve charges of ritual murder, as exemplified by The
Prioress’s Tale itself and the gratuitous allusion to the disappearance of
Hugh of Lincoln, which allegedly occurred more than a hundred years
before Chaucer’s time, within Chaucer’s tale. This reading of Chaucer
would be consistent with Wordsworth’s thinking about narrative as well
as his poetic direction in 1801 when he first translated the work.
Furthermore, Wordsworth’s note in 1827 seems to absolve both
Chaucer and himself of the Prioress’ tendencies.
Wordsworth’s repetition of the tale compounds the problem that
Chaucer’s original presents to a modern reader. To a certain extent, modern
readers can say and have said that The Prioress’s Tale reflects the strong prej-
udices of Chaucer’s age. Now of course there is much to say beyond this
claim, as there is to say about The Merchant of Venice. Nonetheless, some
readers in 1827 (as evidenced by the reviews) were at least capable of ques-
tioning the motivations behind Wordsworth’s twice-told tale. To me, one
of the reasons this pursuit of motivation really matters is that Wordsworth
wordsworth and the jews / 173
understood the power of stories, legends, and rumors. The emotional effect
of stories, their potential for awakening human sympathies, forms the
bedrock of his poetry and poetics. But knowing the power of stories, he,
like Edgeworth, also knew the damage that could be done when a story-
teller (such as Edgeworth’s Fowler) got hold of a narrative. Yet he did not
see this as an obstacle to The Prioress’s Tale; nor did he imagine the need for
a detailed explanatory preface outlining his “purpose” (other than the 1827
headnote), as he had on other notable occasions.
From a Jewish point of view, this absence of explanation is troubling
because strong anti-Jewish feeling finds its roots in ancient stories about
Jews that crop up through the centuries in what Hazlitt would call the
unweeded gardens of prejudice. So powerful is this source of anti-Semitism
that Theodor Adorno simply and devastatingly defined anti-Semitism
as “the rumor about Jews” (quoted in Gilman, The Jew’s Body, 20). And
The Prioress’s Tale perpetuates the most vicious rumor of them all, that Jews
murder Christian children for their blood, a claim taken up, as we have
seen, in various ways by almost all of the writers I have studied.
Anthropologist Claudine Fabre-Vassas quotes the Dictionnaire apologétique
de foi catholique, which in 1916 asked:
As the mother grieves over the child’s body, the narrator describes her as
“this second Rachel,” connecting her to a matriarch of the Jewish people
and to Wordsworth’s own creation of the Jewish mother on the Rhine.
In “A Jewish Family” the image of the grieving Madonna is
supplanted by the loving but concerned mother, the martyred Christian
child for the lively Jewish boy. Nonetheless, the Madonna imagery
predominates in Wordsworth’s poem. Furthermore, the father, absent
from the family, is never mentioned either by Dora in the journal or
William in the poem. The woman may or may not be a widow.
Although the absent father or abandoned woman is a well-worked
theme in Wordsworth’s poetry (and has been widely linked to
Wordsworth’s own abandonment of his illegitimate child), strong
Christian imagery connects Wordsworth’s Jewish family to Chaucer’s.
But whereas Chaucer’s imagery condemns the Jews, Wordsworth’s ideal-
izes them in such a way that they are no longer the family in Dora
Wordsworth’s note. If Wordsworth was attempting to redeem the anti-
Semitism of The Prioress’s Tale, to replace its superstitious extravagance,
he nonetheless adopted the philo-Semite’s methods in the idealizations
of “A Jewish Family.”
Except for the title, there is no explicit mention of the myth of the
Wandering Jew, condemned to walk the earth for eternity for cursing Jesus
on his way to his crucifixion. Wordsworth’s wanderer becomes a symbol
of eternal homelessness and world-weariness, an object of pity rather than
the contempt so well known to other treatments of this theme.29
Wordsworth does not have less poetic sympathy for this wanderer than he
176 / imperfect sympathies
There is also, and shame were it to close this short notice without
mentioning them, a set of Evening Voluntaries, that come over the soul
like the distant sound of a cathedral organ in some lovely and solitary
scene by twilight; and a set also of moral paintings, which will be sure to
find their proper place in the mind’s gallery. We take one of these, as the
only specimen which we need offer of a volume which every reader who
can enjoy it will of course possess.33
contrast, for instance, Anna Barbauld has her future traveler in Eighteen-
Hundred and Eleven look back longingly on the diversity of early-
nineteenth-century London, and its “Streets, where turban’d Moslems,
and bearded Jew, / And woolly Afric, met the brown Hindu” (lines
165–66).
I do not suggest that this urban bewilderment in itself directly relates
to Wordsworth’s attitude toward Jews and Judaism. In none of
Wordsworth’s comments on or references to the dangers of the city does
he associate these dangers with Jews and their commercial dealings. Nor
does such an attitude tinge any of his comments about rural life, which
Cobbett saw as threatened by Jewish monied interests or the Jews’
alleged aversion to working the land. Nor does Wordsworth’s image of
the city prefigure the contempt for Jewish cosmopolitanism that forms
the basis of T. S. Eliot’s anti-Semitism early in the next century, as
evidenced by the well-known lines from “Gerontion”:
Eliot takes his readers beyond mere contempt for old-clothes men or
financiers. Instead, this description dehumanizes “the jew” as a kind of
vermin in the House of European Culture, a conception far from
Wordsworth’s thinking a century earlier.36
Despite the ambivalence and uneasiness that I have presented in
Wordsworth’s attitudes toward Jews and Judaism, there is a strong
current of sympathy, based in part on Wordsworth’s affinity for the
Hebrew Scriptures, not shared by Modernists such as Eliot. This current
of sympathy may have drawn Jewish scholars, such as Geoffrey
Hartman, toward Wordsworth. But his sympathy with the Bible and the
Jewish past may also be what makes Wordsworth ambivalent about
actual Jews—his case, then, would not be that different from that of
Coleridge or Byron. In poetic terms, the “Hebrew fountains” to which
the narrator refers in “A Jewish Family” spring from deep sources from
which Wordsworth draws throughout his career, from its annus mirabilis
through its later orthodoxies. Yet, as I have argued, the greater philo-
Semitism evident in “A Jewish Family” overwhelms its Jewishness and
diminishes those “Hebrew fountains” that it intends to praise. Nor does
“A Jewish Family” fully redeem Wordsworth’s repetition of the Prioress’
“fierce bigotry.”
C h ap t e r 8
“The Historical Moment”: Jewish
Scholars and Romanticism
With David the King we say, “All that is in the heaven and the earth is
thine,” meaning that it is all there for our wonder and our praise. “Be one
of those upon whom nothing is lost”—James’s words, but the impulse
that drives them is the same as the one enjoining the observant Jew
(the word “observant” is exact) to bless the moments of this world at least
one hundred times a day. One hundred times: but Ordinariness is more
frequent than that, Ordinariness crowds the day, we swim in the sense of
our dailiness; and yet there is a blessing for every separate experience of
the Ordinary.
—Cynthia Ozick, “The Riddle of the Ordinary” (204)
Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze . . .
—Wordsworth, The Prelude (opening line)
And I, who tell the story, squat in the north,
a place of lean dreams chilled by that dream,
and brood on sacred word or precious weed
uncertain which is which, and try to keep
the dead word from dying further, and the dream
from wasting the mouth of Akiba’s children.
—Geoffrey H. Hartman, “The Garden,”
Akiba’s Children (lines 48–53)
Narrative Introduction
At 10:30 a.m. on September 11, 2001, I walked into my Wordsworth
seminar at the University of Florida after having spent two hours in
another class, on early British Romanticism. The world had changed
during that time, but those of us secluded in a windowless basement
room discussing Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion did not yet
know. As I entered the Wordsworth seminar, however, students met my
cheerful greetings with stunned silence. We were to have discussed
“Tintern Abbey” on September 11, but instead we lingered for a while
in confusion and disbelief and then dispersed to learn what we could. In
the days and weeks ahead, Wordsworth’s meditations on loss and bless-
ing would speak to us, but not on that day—not yet.
180 / imperfect sympathies
Hartman reveals not only the canonical preference for the Metaphysicals
among the New Critics, but the exclusive Christian bias of his “senior
colleagues.” In an E-mail dated November 17, 2001, Hartman puts it
this way:
ponds, open fields, and lovely old trees. English nature invited the
trespasser: we went berrying or hunting or on long, aimless walks, leap-
ing over hedge and stile. Wordsworth opened himself to my under-
standing as soon as I read him” (16). So, the conditions of his own
life—feeling great loss and in exile—prepare him as a future reader of
Wordsworth, the poet of loss who also holds out the hope of redemp-
tion. Likewise, I see a connection between Hartman’s later reverence for
the land of Israel and the Wordsworthian sense of place and memory: “I
had never been a conscious Zionist and went through none of the schools
or youth movements fostering ahavat Zion [love of Zion]. But already on
my first visit, in 1952, Israel appeared to my feelings as an embodied
dream. The sense of belonging to it, as if the land and not human parents
had begotten me, especially an uncrowded, rural Jerusalem so close to the
sky, intensified sensations that had bound me to the English countryside”
(19)—and to Wordsworth’s poetry, I would add.8
In one of his E-mails to me (November 17, 2001), Professor
Hartman responded to my question regarding “unconscious affinities,”
by saying (not unexpectedly) “you must be the judge.” My judgment,
then, is that Hartman’s experience as a boy and young man—a Jewish
exile—found a sympathetic parallel in Wordsworth and his poetics of
loss. The shadow of the Holocaust has affected other scholars, although
not as directly as Hartman and his generation. Mark Schoenfield, a
younger scholar, responded to my question about affinities in this way:
I was struck by Thomas Pfau’s use of the Holocaust (more from the
German than Jewish perspective) in the opening of his Wordsworth
book, and it got me to thinking how much my own thinking is condi-
tioned by the sense of being a secondary survivor (i.e., having lost only
fairly distant relatives whom I probably would never have known of, but
for their being lost). The interest in loss, not only as historical fact and
psychological condition, but critical paradigm, seems a clear link between
Judaism and Romanticism. . . . As much as I admire them for other
reasons, I don’t feel the same kind of post-Holocaust connection to repre-
sentations of loss in the 18th century—too satirical—or the Victorian
period—too self-assured. ( January 16, 2002)
this critical paradigm, the rhythm of loss, exile, and redemption marks
Jewish history and at least one branch of Romantic poetics.
This sympathy for Wordsworth inspired Hartman’s immensely influ-
ential book, Wordsworth’s Poetry (1964), as well as a continuing interest
in this poet evident in Hartman’s subsequent work, where allusions to
Wordsworth’s poetry seem as natural to Hartman as allusions to Milton
seem in Wordsworth. Hartman does not focus on specifically Jewish
moments in Wordsworth, or on the nature of his engagement with
Judaism. Rather, Hartman writes about Wordsworth as a visionary poet,
but one who has been humanized by loss, as in “Peele Castle”: “A deep
distress hath humanized my Soul” (36). Hartman’s Wordsworth veers
away from apocalypse and instead clings to this green earth and to the
possibility of renewal in time.
In “The Poetics of Prophecy,” Hartman makes more explicit the
connections between his view of Wordsworth and the Hebrew prophets,
proposing that prophecy is “anti-apocalyptic in seeking a ‘future restora-
tion’ or time for thought” (171). In establishing this connection,
Hartman characteristically uses a prominent Jewish thinker to illumi-
nate his point. In this case, it is Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Prophets,
a book in which Heschel argues, “fundamental experience of the
prophet is a fellowship with the feelings of God, a sympathy with the
divine pathos, a communion with the divine consciousness which comes
about through the prophet’s reflection of, or participation in, the divine
pathos” (26). Hartman illuminates Wordsworth’s poetic voice—his
language or timely utterance—by comparing it with prophetic language
and its capacity for sympathetic identification and pathos. But he does
not simply draw a connection. In this essay, as in many other instances,
Hartman proceeds by using multiple analogies that reveal the layers of
textuality and the processes of interpretation. Here, the analysis centers
on the functions of the prophet and the poet, the sacred and the secular
text, the poet and the interpreter:
The act of restitution . . . now includes the reader in a specific and defin-
able way. The poet as reader is shown to have discovered from within
himself, and so recreated, a scripture text. The interpreter as reader has
shown the capacity of a “secular” text to yield a “sacred” intuition by a
literary act of understanding that cannot be divided into those categories.
On the level of interpretation, therefore, we move toward what
Schleiermacher called Verstehen, on the basis of which a hermeneutic is
projected that seeks to transcend the dichotomizing of religious and
nonreligious modes of understanding and of earlier (prophetic) and later
(poetic-visionary) texts. (“Poetics of Prophecy,” 178)
jewish scholars and romanticism / 185
Here Hartman blames de Man for moral failure, once again not merely
or even mostly because of the early writing itself but because he did not
acknowledge and reflect on his past. Hartman implicitly distinguishes
between the moral error de Man committed in these writings and an
offense that someone might commit requiring personal atonement. The
difference is that de Man, like Heidegger and other intellectuals of the
time, implicated himself in an “ideology of genocide” and never
renounced this association. Furthermore, as an intellectual he failed
because he did not reflect on those implications. Although Hartman
does not make the direct connection, this moral critique of de Man
echoes his pedagogical concern to reveal the relationship of “words and
jewish scholars and romanticism / 187
Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom represents a different way of expressing his Jewishness in
the academic world: Bloom is an intellectual system-builder. In his
E-mail to me, Geoffrey Hartman identifies his friend and colleague
Bloom as the more antithetical thinker, who would presumably set
himself up against the status quo and its Christian bias. One of Bloom’s
most significant reflections on the rise of Romanticism in the 1960s
occurs in the revised preface to The Visionary Company.
Here Bloom argues, “the poetry of English Romanticism is a kind of
religious poetry, and the religion is in the Protestant line, though Calvin
or Luther would have been horrified to contemplate it” (xvii). Adhering
to the Blakean idea that drawing strong lines and distinctions is imper-
ative, Bloom draws a clear division between the poetry in this
“displaced” Protestant tradition and that in the High Church or
Anglican line. This distinction forms the basis of his myth of literary
history:
The revised introduction to The Visionary Company, which makes explicit the
cultural stakes for both “New Criticism” and its authoritarian canon versus
Bloom’s version of criticism and its canon, is probably the single most reveal-
ing work of Jewish literary scholarship in the last fifty years. For here, as
perhaps nowhere else, the critic’s religio-cultural identity is so thoroughly
assimilated to the task of reading Romanticism (and reading against
T. S. Eliot and his followers) that it reemerges, somewhat like Freud’s uncanny,
in an otherwise alien body of writing which is suddenly indivisible from—or
unreadable without—the Jewishness of its retrospective admirer. (119)
Although I would not go so far in singling this essay out of all Jewish
literary scholarship of the last fifty years, I agree with Galperin’s sense of
190 / imperfect sympathies
But I want to give Bloom the last word—or at least the last
thought—on his own Jewishness. In the same letter, he also said that “I
haven’t looked at it in years but I suspect my central essay on
Romanticism is ‘The Internalization of the Quest Romance’ in
Romanticism and Consciousness (1970). I’d be happy to think that there
is something implicitly Jewish in or about it.” This assessment fascinated
me because although I can accept this essay as central (as it no doubt had
been for me when I first read it as an undergraduate in Romanticism and
Consciousness), I did not think of it as particularly Jewish. So, I reread it
with Bloom over my shoulder, admittedly straining to see with his eyes.
In “The Internalization of the Quest Romance,” Bloom argues that the
Romantics appropriate the medieval Christian genre of the romance,
structured around the themes of love, desire, and enchantment, so carefully
articulated by Northrop Frye in The Anatomy of Criticism. The
Romantics revised the genre as a psychological form, as in Wordsworth’s
Prelude: the “internalization of quest is the inevitable story of its age”
(19)—a spiritual quest for the self in a godless world. Bloom concludes
the essay with this paragraph:
Whatever else the love that the full Romantic quest aims at may be, it
cannot be a therapy. It must make all things new, and then marry what
it has made. Less urgently, it seeks to define itself through the analogue
of each man’s creative potential. But it learns, through its poets, that it
cannot define what it is, but only what it will be. The man prophesied by
the Romantics is a central man who is always in the process of becoming
his own begetter, and though his major poems perhaps have been writ-
ten, he has not as yet fleshed out his prophecy, nor proved the final form
of his love. (24)
M. H. Abrams
The other major scholar in the early triumvirate of Jewish Romanticists,
M. H. Abrams, bears a different relationship to Jewish tradition. Abrams
was Bloom’s teacher but not Bloom’s model, it seems to me, in his strug-
gle to assimilate. In his career, Abrams is less identified as a Jew than is
either Bloom or Hartman. As Lawrence Lipking commented in an E-mail
dated December 13, 2001, “my old teacher M. H. Abrams never
connected Romantics to Jews in my hearing (Geoffrey Hartman and
Harold Bloom are different).” In Enlarging America, Susanne Klingenstein
posits that Abrams embraced the notion of “imaginative consent” (84) in
order to read the Christian literary canon of the West. Klingenstein argues
that Abrams freed himself from “his father’s orthodoxy” (81) not to
embrace “other gods” (81), but to attain a kind of intellectual freedom. He
developed a mode of reading the Western canon “not as an immediate
appeal to one’s identity, but as a series of metaphors” (81), a mode
he adopts in The Mirror and the Lamp. I would add that Abrams’ embrac-
ing of “Judeo-Christianity” was also motivated by his faith in the human-
ism and universality of the biblical narrative. Furthermore, according to
Jonathan Freedman, Abrams accomplished something else: “The Mirror
and the Lamp (1953) essentially resuscitated Romanticism as a critical
idom and [whose] Natural Supernaturalism (1972) dealt a death-blow to
the anti-Milton model of the dissociation-of-sensibility school by return-
ing Protestantism to the center of Romanticism and even beyond, to
Proust, Eliot, and the moderns as well” (183–84).
Abrams embodies Hartman’s notion that the historical moment may
have been more important than sympathies and affinities between
Romanticism and Judaism. As Michael Galchinsky explains in an
E-mail (May 2002),
Lionel Trilling
Lionel Trilling’s essay, “Wordsworth and the Rabbis,” first published in
The Opposing Self in 1950, provides insight into the American literary
world and Judaism. Like other students of Wordsworth in the 1970s, I
can remember first reading this essay as “Wordsworth and the Iron
Time” in M. H. Abrams’ collection of essays on Wordsworth (1972),
and being surprised by the Jewish content, the references to Pirke Aboth
(or Pirke Avot, the Talmudic sayings of the fathers). Abrams thought
enough of the essay to include it in his collection, but he neutralized its
Jewishness, by reverting to an earlier title of the essay (before it was
changed back to “Wordsworth and the Rabbis” for the 1955 edition of
The Opposing Self ).17 Then, in his “Introduction: Two Roads to
Wordsworth,” Abrams speaks of “Wordsworth’s participation in a persis-
tent strain of Hebrew and Christian culture” (9), thereby conflating the
two as he had done in Natural Supernaturalism by referring to the Judeo-
Christian tradition as if it were a seamless garment. As I have tried to
demonstrate, such linking results most often in Judaism and Jewish
particularity being subsumed into Christianity.
Trilling was drawn to Wordsworth at the time of the centenary of the
poet’s death in the middle of the twentieth century—in the shadow of
World War II and the Holocaust. As it turns out, Trilling is a pivotal
figure in my narrative, and not for the most obvious reasons. Looking
back on this essay in the context of my questions on Romanticism and
Judaism, Harold Bloom commented in a letter that “I’m afraid I never
saw much in Trilling’s essay on ‘W. W. & the Rabbis,’ and still don’t”
(November 27, 2001). I was puzzled by this comment because it seems
to me that Trilling’s attempt to yoke a great Romantic with rabbinic
thought in 1950—surely a radical move (although anticipated by
Hyman Hurwitz in 1826!)—would make Trilling’s essay a model for
Bloom’s later work with the Kabbalah or his early reading of Shelley in
the context of Buber. Jonathan Freedman preempted me in this claim,
which he extends to other works by Trilling:
Indeed, Trilling strikes me as Harold Bloom’s true precursor, all the more
powerful an influence because he is so rarely acknowledged. (This has
been true, I might stress, throughout his career; Trilling’s essay “Freud
and Literature” anticipates Bloom’s tropological reading of Freud by a
generation, just as “Wordsworth and the Rabbis” foreshadowed the ways
jewish scholars and romanticism / 197
Perhaps the reason that Bloom does not sympathize with “Wordsworth
and the Rabbis,” though, is that Trilling’s Judaism is what Bloom would
define as “normative.” Trilling presents a version of Romanticism that
seeks accommodation and reconciliation, whereas Bloom engages in a
more militant struggle. As Susanne Klingenstein suggests, Trilling recog-
nized but chose not to navigate “ ‘the imagination’s more turbulent
waters’” ( Jews in the American Academy, 168).
With regard to “Wordsworth and the Rabbis,” Hartman was more
charitable: “ ‘Wordsworth and the Rabbis’ is surely not one of his most
cogent essays, though interesting, of course, for engaging with the
subject” (November 17, 2001). In a review first published in The New
York Times Book Review in 1973, Hartman sees Trilling as “a man in the
middle, trying to value art’s thrust beyond morality while maintaining a
belief in its humanizing and acculturating virtues.”18 According to these
criteria, Hartman is a man in the middle too—certainly Hartman values
the humanizing and acculturating in Wordsworth. But in “Wordsworth
and the Rabbis,” the dissatisfaction seems to be less with Trilling’s
compromises or his failure to “explore the deeply demonic side of the
psyche” (299)—which may be the source of Bloom’s disappointment—
than with a certain lack of clarity. Trilling lets readers know, for instance,
that he has had some Jewish education, but he never comments directly
on his adult Jewishness or his identity as a Jew and a reader of
Romanticism. I think that this is why such an astute reader as Hartman,
who approaches texts with great sympathy and identification, never
embraced Trilling’s essay.
Trilling himself seems not completely comfortable as a Jewish scholar
in 1950 reading English Romantics, although he aimed to draw out
affinities between Wordsworth and Judaism. He alludes to his Jewishness
in the guise of the narrative of his own boyish development—like
Wordsworth he spent his time pondering the extracurricular:
long ago been thought of as an aid to devotion and included in the prayer
book. It was more attractive to me than psalms, meditations, and suppli-
cations; it seemed more humane, and the Fathers had a curious substan-
tiality. . . . And when I went back to them . . . I could entertain the
notion that my early illicit intimacy with them had had its part in prepar-
ing the way for my responsiveness to Wordsworth, that between the
Rabbis and Wordsworth an affinity existed. (124–25)
the final proclamation of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “For every
thing that lives is Holy” make clear).
To place Trilling’s essay in its most urgent historical context, Emily
Miller Budick argues that “‘Wordsworth and the Rabbis’ is very directly
a commentary on the Holocaust” (138). This is an intriguing claim,
especially since Trilling does not actually comment on the Holocaust in
the essay—it would be years before such explicitness about the
Holocaust would enter critical discourse. But Budick convincingly
demonstrates that Trilling’s ideas about the individual and moral respon-
sibility take shape in the shadow of catastrophe: “For Trilling, the
Holocaust necessitated thinking not simply about social injustice (as
Marxism had undertaken to do) or about undoing ideology (as in
dialectical Hegelianism, as it has been evolved by deconstruction).
Rather, it compelled a redefinition of the human—the person, the
human being, in Trilling’s specific case, the Jew” (140). Trilling responds
to Wordsworth as advocating “natural sympathy” for others—what
Budick refers to as the “courtesy of imagining others” (141)—at the
historical moment when the lack of such an imagination had proved
disastrous. For Trilling, Wordsworth was indeed the poet for this iron
time, not because he dealt directly with his own political crises (he
famously did not) but because his poetry provided a moral vision of
living in respectful relationship to others. Trilling praises the quietism in
“Wordsworth and in the Rabbis” in order to justify his own moral
response to inexplicable evil. In this sense Hartman is both the heir to
and extender of Trilling’s project, because half a century later Hartman
has devoted himself to making the explicit connection between such
imaginative failure and the Holocaust.
non-Jewish texts with a skeptical eye and to bring forward Jewish texts
from the period that have been overlooked or undervalued until now.
The lessons of multiculturalism have also been useful as a way of
recognizing the multiplicity of Others and as a method for critiquing
assumptions and categories. Recent work in Jewish studies adds to these
insights the need to consider the unique Otherness of Jews in Western
cultures, as the collection Insider/Outsider: American Jews and
Multiculturalism (1998) demonstrates. As Sara R. Horowitz argues in
“The Paradox of Jewish Studies in the New Academy,” “Jewish studies
explores the continued presence of the outsider within, a people both a
part of and apart from Western culture” (119–20). In a similar vein, but
more prescriptively, Susannah Heschel argues in “Jewish Studies as
Counterhistory,” that Jewish studies should reclaim the original radical-
ism of the nineteenth-century German movement, when “Jewish
theologians initiated an effort to destroy the image of Judaism in
Christian theology as part of their project of self-definition” (109).
Heschel calls for Jewish Studies scholars to reinvigorate the genre of
“counterhistory” in order to reconstruct the narrative of Jewish experi-
ence as Jews might have told it from the outset. This reconstruction
means moving beyond an inventory of repetitive representations of
either good or bad Jews to imagine a fuller and deeper range of Jewish
experience and discourse in the Romantic period than is dreamt of in
most canonical texts. One of the ways to achieve this depth is through
what Mary Louise Pratt has called an “autoethnographic” approach to
Jewish texts such as Montefiore’s journal or Hurwitz’s Hebrew Tales.21
The picture of the period is just too complicated not to listen both
to canonical and non-canonical voices, words of the dominant culture
and its Others. Jonathan Freedman argues that one does not have to
choose between the more optimistic narratives about Jewish accultura-
tion of David Katz, Howard Weinbrot, and (I would add) Todd
Endelman, on the one hand, and Frank Felsenstein’s more negative
focus on anti-Semitic stereotypes and caricatures, on the other. The
“truth,” which includes both, “would see the dramas of expulsion and
reintegration, and those of anti- and philo-Semitism as essentially
complicated with each other” (45). Attitudes toward Jews were “irre-
trievably mixed” (45) and “the Jew is also that border or boundary figure
that calls into question the viability of any model of racial, national, and
cultural identity” (45). If the culture viewed Jews and Jewishness with
such ambivalence, texts will reveal that ambivalence in various, often
problematic ways, as I have shown. Harrington, intended as reparation,
betrays the author’s uneasiness about accommodating Jews fully in
202 / imperfect sympathies
Postscript
In concluding with a brief reference to Emma Lyon’s poems, I hope to
open the door to another writer who may contribute to reshaping the
jewish scholars and romanticism / 203
From the long and very respectable list of subscribers, we hope that the
laudable attempts of this young lady have met with deserved success; and
we can assure those, who may be desirous of aiding her virtuous endeav-
ors to support her family by purchasing this volume, that they will find
themselves masters of some very pretty little poems. (Monthly Review 70
[February 1813]: 213)
Miss Lyon solicits her readers to remember that her compositions are the
production of a “young female whom necessity, not choice, has forced
thus publicly to appear.” Far be it from us to check by harsh and rigid
criticism the effusions of a mind so amiably employed. (Critical Review 2
[August 1812]: 216)
In neither short piece does the reviewer get beyond the conventions of
reviewing a young “poetess” to comment on anything that might
connect her to an important cause or a distinctive voice.
But one poem stands out in light of my interest in the Romantic
culture of sympathy: the second to last of the volume, identified as
“Stanzas, Sung with great applause at the Anniversary Meeting of the
Society of Friends of Foreigners in Distress, Held at the New London
204 / imperfect sympathies
Tavern, April 27, 1812” (146).23 Since these stanzas will likely not be
familiar to my readers, I quote in full:
15. Jeffrey uses this term in his review of the Poems of 1807. (See Reiman, The
Romantics Reviewed, A.2:432.)
16. Hazlitt actually said that the dialogues in The Excursion “are soliloquies of
the same character” and dramas of a mind that “preys upon itself ” (Reiman,
The Romantics Reviewed, A.2:429–38).
17. Keats introduces the concept of negative capability in his letter to George
and Tom Keats, December, 21, 27 (?), 1817, 60, and the term egotistical
sublime in a letter to Richard Woodhouse on October 27, 1818, 194.
18. Chandler cites this passage to make the point in England in 1819, 484–90,
and in “Moving Accidents,” 138.
19. I develop this idea in Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women.
20. See the work of Cheyette, Galchinsky, Valman, and Freedman, as well as
Spector’s more recent wide-ranging introduction to British Romanticism
and the Jews.
21. See Figures of Conversion and The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman
Writer, respectively.
22. Hirschman’s comments on the history of the bill of exchange parallel the
narrator’s claims. Hirschman points out that in Part Four of Montesquieu’s
Esprit des lois (book XXI) that the author “suddenly formulate[s] a general
principle . . . in a chapter entitled ‘How Commerce Emerged in Europe
from Barbarism.’ Montesquieu describes here first how commerce was
hampered by the prohibition of interest-taking by the church and was
consequently taken up by the Jews; how the Jews suffered violence and
constant extortions at the hands of nobles and kings; and how eventually
they reacted by inventing the bill of exchange (lettre de change). The final
portion of the chapter draws striking conclusions: ‘ . . . and through this
means commerce could elude violence, and maintain itself everywhere; for
the richest trader had only invisible wealth which could be sent everywhere
without leaving any trace . . .’ ” (72).
23. Furthermore, I would note that the epigraph for Scott’s chapter is from the
daughter/ducats speech in Merchant. See chapter 22, 225: My daughter! O
my ducats! O my daughter!/ . . . O my Christian ducats!/Justice—the Law—
my ducats and my daughter.” Nevertheless, I disagree with Galchinsky’s claim
that Scott presents Isaac as a more despicable character than Shakespeare’s
Shylock. Isaac actually shows greater nobility when faced with the threatened
loss of his daughter. Despite the epigraph, his behavior does not parallel
Shylock’s. Perhaps this is the point of Scott’s attempted sympathy.
24. Scott made these comments to Baillie in the context of commenting on
Edgeworth’s Harrington, which he liked despite believing that “Jews will
always be Jews” (478).
25. See Marx’s “On the Jewish Question.” On another note, Scott may have
been influenced by the scandal involving the Jewish financiers and suicides,
Abraham and Benjamin Goldsmid. See Mark L. Schoenfield’s fascinating
article on this subject, “Abraham Goldsmid: Money Magician in the
Popular Press,” in British Romanticism and the Jews.
26. See also Ragussis’ conclusion in his recent essay, “Jews and Other
‘Outlandish Englishmen’: Ethnic Performance and the Invention of British
210 / notes for pp. 19–24
Identity under the Georges”: “modern scholars have overlooked the central
role that Jews played in the commercial definition of England in the
eighteenth century . . . I am now claiming that in the eighteenth century
the Jew was located centrally in the redefinition of England as a commer-
cial nation” (48). Ragussis’ focus on Georgian England extends into the
Romantic period.
27. I am grateful to Cynthia Scheinberg’s application of Pratt’s theory to
Victorian women poets in the introduction to her important new book,
Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: “With such a theory, the
dominant interests of hegemonic Christian culture, Christian male clerics,
critics, and even politicians can be seen in ‘contact’ with the often compet-
ing and ‘asymmetrically’ empowered interests of Christian women, as well
as Jewish communities, clerics, and politicians, and Jewish women
writers—all of whom sought to lay claim to the highest form of literary
identity in Victorian England, the mantle of the poet” (25). I would add
that the autoethnographic act is the Other’s attempt to enter into a more
symmetrical and just relationship—one based on the dynamics of sympa-
thy. On a related note, Pratt’s theory of the autoethnographic seems
compatible with Nancy Fraser’s critique of the Habermasian “public sphere”
in favor of “subaltern counterpublics”: “arenas where members of subordi-
nated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate
oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (123).
14. This is particularly ironic, since in a cancelled passage from his Roman
Catholic Claims Speech (1812), Byron wrote: “if there are eyes which
cannot see the difference between a catholic Chapel & a Synagogue, those
eyes are troubled with a ‘beam which must be plucked out,’ before they are
capable of extracting the mote from their neighbors” (30).
15. Ashton corroborates this, 44–45.
16. One notable exception to this attitude is Francis Hodgson, who writes in the
Monthly Review that “It must, indeed, be objected to these Melodies, or songs
composed for what are called Hebrew Melodies, that they are not in proper
costume,—that they are not clothed in the dress of Judaism, so as to display
the marked features of the Hebrew character” (Romantics Reviewed B.4:1760).
17. There are several examples of Christians visiting a synagogue and reporting
negatively on the service. See, for instance, Joseph Ballard’s comments in
England in 1815 as Seen by a Young Boston Merchant: “It being the Jewish
Sabbath I was induced to visit the Synagogue near Duke Street [sic], the resi-
dence exclusively of these Shylocks. The men sit with their hats on. The
women are in a screened gallery, apart from the men! The service was chanted
in Hebrew, the congregation joining at times in ‘din most horrible.’ I came
away disgusted with the little reverence they seemed to pay to that Being who
pronounced them His chosen people!” (128–29). Compare Southey’s Spanish
persona in Letters from England: “The language was so intolerably harsh, and
the manner in which it was chaunted so abominably discordant, that they
suited each other to a miracle; and the larynx of the Rabbi seemed to have
been made expressly to give both their full effect” (392).
18. I would also add that Coleridge remained a conversionist, apparently
throughout his life. But he believed that the methods of groups like the
London Society were wrong, and argued that instead of requiring that Jews
give up their heritage, Christians should seek to convert them as Jewish
Christians, Jews who kept their Jewish practice and customs but accepted
Jesus as their messiah. From a Jewish point of view, of course, this is
absurd—akin to Jews for Jesus in the twenty-first century. But not for
Coleridge: “There is no hope of converting the Jews in the way and with
the spirit unhappily adopted by our Church and indeed all other modern
Churches” (Table Talk, April 13, 1830, Collected Works, no. 14, 1:101). See
the same volume, 99–104, for Coleridge’s comments on Judaism and Carl
Woodring’s excellent notes.
19. This is not to say that Lessing’s play is not without its problems. In The
Broken Staff, Frank Manuel writes, “Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, so dear to
nineteenth-century German Jews, had presented a figure who bore no recog-
nizable traits of a rabbinic practicing Jew. He was an honest merchant, moved
by benevolence, virtue, the needs of the state—in short, an abstraction, a
schone Seele of the Enlightenment, a disembodied noble spirit” (288).
20. I recommend Ragussis’ “Jews and Other ‘Outlandish Englishmen,’ ” for the
best analyses of the stage Jew. See also Rubens, “Jews and the English Stage,
1667–1850.”
21. See Williams, Richard Cumberland (170–71 and passim) and Dircks (19
and passim).
notes for pp. 35–46 / 213
22. I have found no explicit comments from the Jewish community or Jewish
playgoers in response to The Jew, either positive or negative, although one
scholar quotes the “ ‘scurrilous monthly magazine, The Scourge,’ ” as
commenting on the response to Sherenbeck, a Jewish actor who played
Sheva in 1814: “ ‘the house indeed contained no small proportion of
circumcised auditors who were inordinately clamorous in supporting their
representative’ ” (Rubens, Jews and the English Stage 153).
23. David Levi, for instance, criticized Hebraist Bishop Lowth for ignorant
comments about Jewish ritual and practice, and argued that Lowth actually
knew very little about Judaism. See Ruderman, Jewish Enlightenment, 81.
24. See Claudine Fabre-Vassas’ anthropological analysis in The Singular Beast,
137 and passim. The blood libel is the ancient and still-repeated lie that
Jews murder Christians because they need their blood for Jewish ritual. As
Fabre-Vassas notes, accusers blame Jews for craving the very thing that
Jewish Law prohibits: the consumption of blood and nonkosher meat.
25. On the blood libel, see William H. Page, “Ideology and the Structures of
Legal Narrative,” for a legal and historical analysis. Page’s article is a review
of R. Po-Chia Hsia, Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
26. See Chandler’s analysis of the term in relation to Keats, in England in 1819,
395–402.
27. In Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, Felsenstein reads this episode as an example of
the persistence of anti-Semitic stereotypes in the face of Cumberland’s
liberal pleas (179–80).
28. In an interesting recent essay, “John Scott’s Death and Lamb’s ‘Imperfect
Sympathies,’ ” Duncan Wu places Lamb’s essay in the context of the debate
between members of the “Cockney School” and the literary establishment
of Scotland, which included a duel that resulted in the death of John Scott,
Lamb’s “Cockney” friend. Wu suggests that the anti-Scottish anger of the
piece relates to this tragedy. While I agree that this “most poisonous of liter-
ary quarrels” (50) needs to be considered and may indeed explain the
Scottish passages, I do not think that knowledge of the context negates the
compelling questions about sympathy and its imperfections that Lamb
raises. I thank Felicity James for this reference.
29. I discuss the medieval legend of Hugh of Lincoln at greater length in chapter 7,
but suffice it to say for now that Hugh was a Christian child supposedly
murdered by Jews for ritual purposes. This is a prominent instance of the blood
libel against the Jews, which persists in anti-Semitic ideology to this day.
30. See Susan Levin’s related article, “The Gipsy Is a Jewess: Harriet Abrams
and Theatrical Romanticism.”
31. I am indebted to the commentary of Felsenstein and Mintz, The Jew as
Other, for my reading of this caricature (55).
32. See Gilman’s analysis of Marx’s delineation of bad (Yiddish-speaking
hagglers) and good (Christianized) Jews, based on the dynamics of his own
family in Jewish Self-Hatred, 199–203 and passim.
33. Howe, 19:368. Howe reports that a copy of the pamphlet form of the essay
“is said to have the following (anonymous) marginal annotation: ‘Written
214 / notes for pp. 47–55
15. See Bulman’s final chapter, “Shylock and the Pressures of History,” 143–53
as well as Oz’s “Transformations of Authenticity: The Merchant of Venice in
Israel.”
16. John Gross (Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy, 1992) suggests the possibility
that Hole is ironic, that he is writing a modest proposal (123), but I do not
see evidence of this. There are other instances of sympathy for Shylock
before Kean and Hazlitt. For a Jewish point of view, see Daniel Mendoza’s
Memoirs. Mendoza narrates being persecuted by a Christian creditor,
concluding: “Most of my readers have probably been present at the repre-
sentation of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice: have execrated the hard-
hearted Shylock, and commiserated the unfortunate Antonio: but there the
scene was reversed; the Christian was the unfeeling persecutor—the Jew the
unfortunate debtor” (108).
17. I owe this observation about the negative capability letter to a member of
the audience—would that I knew his name—who mentioned this connec-
tion to me after the program in which I presented a portion of this chapter
at the MLA in New York, 2002.
18. Michael Ragussis made a similar point about this description by Heine in
his MLA paper, “These Weeping Ladies at the Theater: Jewish Performance
and Sympathetic Identification in Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington” (New
York, 2002).
19. In the case of The Merchant of Venice, therefore, I do not agree with Bate’s
claim that the Tales from Shakespeare presents the plays in internal and
novel-like form, which allows them to emphasize character over caricature
(“theater caricatures character,” 131).
20. See Oliver Goldsmith’s neoclassical and class-bound analysis in “An Essay
on the Theater; Or, A Comparison between Laughing and Sentimental
Comedy” (1772). Goldsmith decries the sentimental comedy of the age in
favor of witty or laughing comedy.
21. Mahood cites Richard Foulkes, “Henry Irving and Laurence Olivier as
Shylock,” to support this point.
22. See Bulman and Mahood for the various transformations of Shylock, as well
as Gross’ wide-ranging Shylock. A compelling but little-known work is
Ludwig Lewisohn’s 1931 novel The Last Days of Shylock, in which a humane
and sympathetic Shylock escapes from Venice and becomes an ambassador
for the Jewish people, traveling to Jerusalem and ending his days reunited
with Jessica in Constantinople. Also, Joel Berkowitz’s recent book on
Shakespeare and Yiddish theater has a chapter on The Merchant of Venice, a
favorite of the Yiddish theater.
the term “Uninspired” pejoratively. He means that humans wrote the texts
rather than divine agency.
3. I follow Jacob Neusner’s definition of rabbinic literature: “Rabbinic litera-
ture is the corpus of writing produced in the first seven centuries C. E. by
sages who claimed to stand in the chain of tradition from Sinai and
uniquely to possess the oral part of the Torah, revealed by God to Moses at
Sinai for oral formulation and oral transmission, in addition to the written
part of the Torah possessed by all Israel” (8). For a concise introduction to
the various writings in the Jewish tradition, see is R. C. Musaph-Andriesse,
From Torah to Kabbalah: A Basic Introduction to the Writings of Judaism.
4. The most complete introduction to date on Hurwitz remains Leonard
Hyman, “Hyman Hurwitz: the First Anglo-Jewish Professor.” Ina Lipowitz
includes some interesting comments in relation to Coleridge in “Inspiration
and the Poetic Imagination: Samuel Taylor Coleridge.” Finally, Ruderman
devotes some pages in his final chapter of Jewish Enlightenment in an
English Key to Hurwitz; see “Translation and Transformation: The
Englishing of Jewish Culture,” 261–73.
5. By midrashim [the plural form of midrash] I refer to the classical narrative
aggadic interpretations of biblical passages, particularly Midrash Rabbah.
More broadly, the term also refers to any interpretation of a sacred text.
Barry W. Holtz defines the aggadah (singular form of aggadot) this way:
“Aggadah is a . . . wide-ranging term referring to narrative literature, para-
bles, theological or ethical statements, and homilies. Perhaps the easiest way
to understand aggadah is to think of it as virtually all the nonlegal literature
of rabbinic Judaism” (“Midrash,” 178).
6. See Fraistat, The Poem and the Book: Interpreting Collections of Romantic
Poetry, on the subject of the Romantic anthology.
7. Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1:131. My references are to the “1850” edition
(which incorporates the 1802 changes) except where noted.
8. Holtz points out that the distinctions between aggadah and halakhah are
“rather artificial”: “In fact there is very little in Jewish literature which is
either pure halakhah or pure aggadah; the driest legal texts are often dotted
with aggadic asides; and aggadic stories are often brought to teach a point
about the law” (“Midrash,” 179).
9. See especially 6–12 of the “Essay” for Hurwitz’s discussion of inspired and
uninspired texts.
10. Because of their own prejudices, Talmudic detractors do not understand
that the collection or anthology is central to Jewish literary tradition. As
David Stern explains in attempting to define the significance of the anthol-
ogy, “The definition of the form itself is open to alteration, and in addition
to conventional anthologies, we have included such works as the Talmud—
which may resemble an encyclopedia more than an anthology—precisely
because it was a collaborative project that programmatically preserved and
systematically collated the traditions of earlier generations. In fact, for such
works as the Talmud—which are generically “problematic” precisely
because they do not fit neatly into any of our familiar literary genres—the
category of the anthology provides an extraordinarily useful heuristic tool
218 / notes for pp. 88–97
Judith’s sister Hannah married Nathan Meyer Rothschild. Once again, see
Lipman’s “The Making of a Victorian Gentleman,” as well as her “Judith
Montefiore—First Lady of Anglo Jewry.”
4. In Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian Britain, Cynthia Scheinberg
argues, “women’s exclusion from the canon of theological writing does not
necessarily mean women did not produce theology. Yet, to get at this orig-
inal theological work, feminist theologians will have to break down the
constructed distinction between theology and literature in order to claim
so-called ‘creative texts’ as having theological import for women, just as
feminist literary critics will need to rethink simplistic attitudes toward reli-
gion and the possibilities for women’s creativity within established religious
traditions” (17). Judith had access to this kind of thinking, I believe,
because her education was good (her family valued the education of daugh-
ters) and her family cherished Judaism and Jewish learning. On Judith’s
education, see “Judith Montefiore—First Lady of Anglo Judaism,” 288–89.
5. See Yerushalmi throughout, but particularly 7, 11, and 44. See also
Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, especially 161–65.
6. This is from Bartal’s introduction (1). Also, see Frawley, who does not
include Montefiore, but whose analysis of other women travelers to the
Middle East heightens Montefiore’s differences from other women of her
nation and class.
7. See “Judith Montefiore: First Lady of Anglo-Jewry,” 292–94.
8. Elizabeth Bohls argues that women travel writers often “struggled to appro-
priate the powerful language of aesthetics” (3) into their writing.
9. The Avot is the first blessing of the Amidah, the central prayer of daily and
Sabbath worship in Jewish tradition.
10. Montefiore uses the word “spot” with regard to sacred space throughout the
journal.
11. For my analysis of Jewish perspectives on time and memory, I draw on
Yerushalmi and Heschel.
12. These developments are discussed in Searight, 143–55 and Ahmed, 50–76.
13. See Searight, especially 156–65 and Pemble, especially 55–60. Pemble
states that “among well-to-do Victorians pilgrimage to the East in pursuit
of the biblical became a characteristic feature of Protestant piety” (55).
14. This passage is one of the instances where Loewe’s edition of the Diaries is
most useful because he quotes Moses Montefiore directly. Loewe does not
include many passages by Moses that parallel descriptions in Judith’s jour-
nal, so I could not compare their perspectives throughout.
15. Montefiore notes that she read Clarke in her 1825 journal; see note 20 later.
Clarke’s journey to the Holy Land took place in 1801.
16. See Magen Broshi, “The Credibility of Josephus”; Broshi argues that
Josephus, although not always correct, was in general remarkably accurate
and credible; he bases his facts both on eyewitness accounting and Roman
commentaries.
17. The destruction of the Temple was also to have been the subject of
Coleridge’s unwritten epic, The Fall of Jerusalem. See E. S. Shaffer’s “Kubla
Khan” and The Fall of Jerusalem, especially the first chapter, “The Fall of
notes for pp. 118–134 / 221
13. Endelman quotes the St. James Chronicle (1804) in The Jews of Georgian
England, 107.
14. Purchas is quoted in Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 175.
15. See Mitzi Myers, “ ‘Servants as They are Now Educated’: Women Writers
and Georgian Pedagogy,” 56, and Alan Richardson, Literature, Education,
and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 53–54 and passim.
16. Marilyn Butler develops this point in her biography: “the teacher should fall
in with the child’s natural preference, and tell him a story” (62). Storytelling
forms a backbone of Edgeworth’s educational method.
17. Practical Education, 1: 266.
18. Richardson argues that although the Edgeworths’ educational theory
separates them in some ways from Romantic critics, their insistence that
education combine head and heart actually aligns them more closely with
writers like Wordsworth: see, especially, chapter 2. Myers also makes a
similar argument with regard to the function of the moral tale as embrac-
ing an “ethic [that] united rational restraint and expressive feeling” in
“Romancing the Moral Tale: Maria Edgeworth and the Problematics of
Pedagogy,” 109.
19. Although published in 1817, Harrington was set in the second half of the
previous century; hence, both the Jew Bill, Macklin’s early performances as
Shylock, and the Gordon Riots of 1780 encompass the action. See numer-
ous sources on the Jew Bill: Endelman’s narratives in The Jews of Georgian
England and The Jews of Britain, Ruderman’s Jewish Enlightenment in an
English Key, as well as Adam Sutcliffe’s brief but incisive account in Judaism
and Enlightenment, 229–30.
20. In his paper given at the MLA in December 2002, Michael Ragussis makes
and develops this point.
21. Edgeworth would perhaps have been pleased by Grace Aguilar’s letter
to her American correspondent Miriam Cohen: “You must not my dear
Mrs Cohen, be too severe in your opinion of Miss Edgeworth’s
sentiment towards the Jews—She had no opportunity of either
knowing, associating with, or hearing of us but as the very lowest of the
low, degraded alike in mind and character. In the small village of
Ireland where she principally dwelt—the only Jewish inmate was one of
this cast . . . . It was from an ignorance of our religion, and our families,
which, could she have ever associated with us, I am convinced she would
have regretted, as much as ourselves.—It is to remove this ignorance
concerning us, which even now must exist where no Jews are known, that
is one of my principal aims in writing and I am truly thankful to say, that
in more than one instance—I have been enabled to remove prejudice and
create love—” (September 28, 1845; Galchinsky, “Grace Aguilar’s
Correspondence,” 102).
22. See Michael Galchinsky, “The New Anglo-Jewish Literary Criticism,” 274.
Galchinsky cites Bryan Cheyette’s Constructions of “the Jew” in English
Literature and Society: Racial Representations and Homi Bhabha’s “Of
Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in relation to
this point.
224 / notes for pp. 159–166
27. Not that others had not taken this route. It is possible, in fact, that anti-
Jewish sentiment was never as strong in England as in other parts of Europe
because the English Protestant majority always had the Catholics on whom
to shower their contempt. See Alan H. Singer’s “Great Britain or Judea
Nova? National Identity, Property, and the Jewish Naturalization
Controversy of 1753.”
28. For a discussion of this, see James K. Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A
Study of the Poetry and Politics, especially chapter 3, for Wordsworth’s debt to
Burke in general and his attitude toward prejudice and bigotry in particular.
29. In The Hidden Wordsworth, Johnston comments, “Nothing is known about
the genesis of the ‘Song for the Wandering Jew’ except that it may refer to
the Jews William and Dorothy saw being ill-treated in Hamburg” (735).
30. See Jewish Life in Germany: Memoirs from Three Centuries, ed. Monika
Richarz, for a greater understanding of what daily life was like for German
Jews in the nineteenth century.
31. See the entry on “Wandering Jew” in vol. 16 of Encyclopedia Judaica. A
popular German anti-Semitic chapbook from the seventeenth century first
introduced this connection between Jewish peddlers and the Wandering
Jew (259–61). (See Southey’s Letters from England for the complete refer-
ence.) In addition, see Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, chapter 5,
“Peddlers and Hawkers,” 166–91. Also of interest is Frank Felsenstein,
Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, especially chapter 4, “Wandering Jew, Vagabond
Jews,” 58–89. In Harrington, remember, public school boys taunt the
young Jewish peddler Jacob by calling him the Wandering Jew: “Every
Thursday evening, the moment he appeared in the schoolroom, or on the
playground, our party commenced the attack upon ‘the Wandering Jew,’ as
we called this poor pedler . . .” (24).
32. Encyclopedia Judaica, vol. 13, “Peddling,” 206.
33. The Romantics Reviewed, A. 2, 702–03; the reviewer is possibly W. J. Fox.
34. Quarterly Review (London, 1835), 181.
35. See The Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson with the Wordsworth Circle
for comments throughout. Morley also notes in her introduction that
Robinson was disappointed in Thomas Arnold, Matthew Arnold’s father,
when the senior Arnold refused to support the admission of Jews at the
University of London. And when Arnold resigned from the University in
protest, Robinson thought this act “brought more reproach on him than
any other” (7).
36. See Anthony Julius’ critique of Eliot’s anti-Semitism, to which I am
indebted here. See also Hartman’s “Introduction: Darkness Visible,” for an
astute reading of “Gerontion,” to which I am also indebted (13).
2. See especially chapter 5, “Henry James Among the Jews,” in The Temple of
Culture.
3. I particularly thank Harold Bloom, Morris Dickstein, Michael Galchinsky,
Geoffrey Hartman, Anthony Harding, Lawrence Lipking, and Mark
Schoenfield for responding, and when appropriate, for giving me permis-
sion to quote from their E-mails and letters.
4. I do not equate the evils of September 11 with those of the Holocaust, and
I fully agree with scholars who write of the Holocaust as unique in history.
Nevertheless the events of September 11 did affect the course of my think-
ing here.
5. There is not much available on the life of Emma Lyon, but see Naomi
Cream’s article on Lyon’s father, which contains some information: “She
was far better educated than most young women of the period and was the
first Jewish woman writer to be published in England. She was only twenty-
three when her book of poems, which received favourable reviews,
appeared” (66).
6. Freedman, for instance, in The Temple of Culture makes a strong case. See
also David Kaufmann’s essay on Harold Bloom, “Harold’s Complaint, or,
Assimilation in Full Bloom,” in British Romanticism and the Jews, 249–63.
7. See also Freedman, 177–84.
8. Hartman goes on to explain that his love of Zion is not a “fanatical passion:
We underestimate how important the feeling for place is as a physical
memory. It is important for love, which often fuses person and place. But
as mystique becomes politique, it can also grow into a fanatical passion: a
self-sanctifying, place-bound nationalism that casts a murderous suspicion
on the outsider. The Jew has been its major victim in the Diaspora. He is
seen as an alien, however ancient and settled his claim. Those who cleave to
Zion are not exempt from the dark side of that sacred passion. They must
now confront it in themselves, in their own homeland and refuge” (20).
Compare Wordsworth’s sense of the land as sacred in “Michael” or “The
Brothers,” a topic that I touch on in “A History/Homely and rude: Genre
and Style in Wordsworth’s ‘Michael.’ ”
9. See also Hartman’s own collection of poems, Akiba’s Children, many of
which have biblical subjects.
10. See Ryan’s reading of Cain (135–46), with which I agree. Ryan quotes
Byron: “They have all mistaken my object in writing Cain.”
11. I realize that these distinctions within Christianity are not cut and dried,
and are open to debate. But these are distinctions that Bloom embraces in
his sweeping ideas and mythmaking imagination.
12. On the subject of Gnosticism, Bloom explains: “Gnosticism was always
anti-Jewish, even when it arose among Jews or Jewish Christians, for
its radical dualism of an alien God set against an evil universe is a total
contradiction of the central Jewish tradition, in which a transcendent
god allows Himself to be known by His people as an immediate presence,
when He chooses, and in which His creation is good except as it has
been marred or altered by man’s disobedience or wickedness” (Gershom
Scholem, 4).
228 / notes for pp. 190–202
13. Ozick explains in a footnote, quoting The Rabbis’ Bible (Behrman House,
1966):
According to a midrash, Terach was a maker and seller of idols. One day he
left the boy Abraham to watch the shop. After remonstrating with one
customer after another, Abraham picked up an ax and smashed all the idols
but one—the biggest. When Terach returned, he angrily asked for an
explanation. Abraham replied: “Father, the idols were hungry, and I
brought them food. But the big god seized your ax, killed the other gods,
and ate all the food himself.” “Abram,” said Terach, “you are mocking me.
You know well that idols neither move, nor eat, nor perform any act.”
Abraham said: “Father, let your ears hear what your tongue speaks.” (188n)
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Index
Prelude, The, 9, 144, 158, 177, Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 106, 116,
179, 192, 198, 226n1 117, 220n5, n11
“Prioress’s Tale, The”, 17, 159, Yiddish, 24, 35, 44, 64, 100,
160, 170–75, 177, 178, 187 213n32
“Song for the Wandering Jew”,
175, 226n29 Zionism, 30, 121, 126–32, 183,
Wu, Duncan, 213n28 211n12, 227n8