IN 1861 AMY LEVY was born into a middle-class Anglo-Jewish family with deep roots in England, and was part of the ~rst generation of women at Cambridge University. Her life was marked by the opportunities and predicaments of Anglo-Jews at a pivotal moment in their history. Receiving full political rights in 1858, two years before Levy was born, England's Jews attained positions of status in the late-Victorian period and became integrated into the fabric of British society. Todd Endelman, however, like other commentators on Anglo-Jewry in this period, gives the British a mixed evaluation on their treatment of the Jews. Tolerant in many ways, England was "hostile to the notion of cultural diversity. Circles and institutions quite willing to tolerate Jews as intimate associates were not willing to endorse the perpetuation of a separate Jewish culture or to see any value in the customs or beliefs of the Jewish religion" (209).Moreover, the new "science" of ethnology gained adherents as the century went on (reifying racial differences and ranking racial groups, e.g., the superiority of the IndoEuropean over the Semitic) so that anti-Semitism was on the rise in the 1870s. Then the 1880s brought a _ood of Jewish refugees from the pogroms of Eastern Europe, introducing a "foreign" kind of Jew into British life; these immigrants arrived at a moment when the de~nition of English identity was reaching a crisis as a result of the new theories of racial difference and the expansion of Empire, which created a heightened awareness of non-Western people. Bryan Cheyette and Michael Ragussis explain that concern over English identity engendered anxiety about Anglo-Jewry (an outsider group within England's own gates). These historical upheavals and shifts in attitude created the climate in which Levy lived, wrote, and developed an identity as an artist.After publishing three volumes of poetry, three novels, a number of essays, and many short stories, Levy committed suicide in 1889 when she was not quite twenty-eight. She avoided Jewish topics in her published~ction until, in 1888, she produced Reuben Sachs, a novel about Jewish life. It was perceived as an attack on the Jewish community largely because of the materialism and ruthless ambition of some of its characters and the social world they inhabit. While many Victorian novels indict British society for the same 185
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