Confronting the “Jewish Type”: Israel Zangwill, Composite and Mirror Photography

Abstract

This article considers Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto through the lens of two late-nineteenth century photographic techniques: hinged-mirror and composite photography. These two techniques, each of which played a role in Zangwill’s personal life, are useful for reframing Zangwill’s personal and literary struggles with representations of Jewish identity that were confined to notions of “types,” or stereotypes of race and ethnicity. The article traces Zangwill’s overall discomfort with what I term the “composite photographic logic of liberalism,” a logic that predicated tolerance on the radical assimilation of Jewish difference and reinforced institutional practices of Anglicization, especially in London’s East End Ghetto.