Description
Book SynopsisExamines the embedding of Jewish history and culture in depictions of English racial and national identity in nineteenth-century novels.
Trade Review“Offers an interesting critical lens through which to view nineteenth-century fiction: Jewish discourse.”
—Judith Page,University of Florida
“If you’re English then you’re Jewish. At least, as Heidi Kaufman demonstrates in English Origins, Jewish Discourse, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, that’s what many major Victorian novelists thought. Victorian writers, she argues, incorporated Jewishness into the very heart of English national identity. Writers like Edgeworth, Tonna, Dickens, Disraeli, Bronte, Eliot, and Haggard depicted their Christian characters as metaphorical Jews: as Wandering Jews progressing toward but never quite reaching an English ideal, as crusading prototypes of British imperial ventures in the Holy Land, as transmitters of a Bible-centered culture that had to but couldn’t be transcended, as the ambiguous symbols of English capitalism, as an alien yet ‘nested nation.’ Kaufman argues that Jewish discourse in the Victorian novel unsettled easy distinctions between the Orient and Occident, race and religion, anti- and philo-Semitism, the Old Testament and the New. She calls into question one of the key premises of recent criticism—that Victorians were bent on converting away the Jewish parts in themselves.”
—Michael Galchinsky,Georgia State University
“Heidi Kaufman has written a useful and consistently interesting book. She examines many of the complex ways that ‘Jewish discourse’ is imbricated in nineteenth-century British fiction and culture. In doing so, she critiques Edward Said’s Orientalism for its overly binaristic approach to Western depictions of the East. . . . In her conclusion, Kaufman notes that antisemitism was at least correct in accusing Jews and Judaism of influencing British culture and politics. The novelists she examines give ‘Jewish discourse,’ as she calls it, a major role in their understandings of Christianity and of contemporary English identities. She ably demonstrates that ‘Jewish discourse’ both mediates and problematizes the many religious and racial categories through which Victorian writers and intellectuals made sense of themselves and their world.”
—Patrick Brantlinger Shofar
“If critics typically identify Fagin, Deronda, and Svengali as cultural others in the normalizing worlds of fiction, Heidi Kaufman’s recent book looks beyond the most obvious literal depictions and offers a new perspective that challenges insider/outsider binaries.”
—Emily Steinlight Modern Philology
Table of ContentsContents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Nested Nation
2. England in Blood: Jewish Discourse in Edgeworth’s Harrington and Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge
3. Right of Return: “Zionist” Crusades in Tonna’s Judah’s Lion and Disraeli’s Tancred
4. Becoming English: (Re)Covering “Jewish” Origins in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
5. “This Inherited Blot”: Jewish Identity in Middlemarch’s English Part
6. King Solomon’s Mines? African Jewry, British Imperialism, and H. Rider Haggard’s Diamonds
Conclusion: The Connecting Thread
Notes
Bibliography
Index
