Introduction: the Jewess question

Valman, Nadia

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511484964.001

Cited by 4 publications

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“…35 Formulaic tales, they stress the Jewess's own "tolerance and compassion" as contrasted with the "tyranny of the Jewish family"-particularly Jewish fathers-that she must rebel against in clinging to her newfound faith. 36 The already intense efforts to convert Jews by such organizations as the London Society for Promoting Christianity (founded in 1809) increased in the 1830s and '40s; "in the 1830s, a slew of Anglican Evangelical conversionist periodicals began publication." 37 And the campaign often succeeded.…”

Section: Jewish Emancipation and National Allegorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…36 The already intense efforts to convert Jews by such organizations as the London Society for Promoting Christianity (founded in 1809) increased in the 1830s and '40s; "in the 1830s, a slew of Anglican Evangelical conversionist periodicals began publication." 37 And the campaign often succeeded. Only as a convert would Benjamin Disraeli be able to enter the House of Commons in 1837.…”

Section: Jewish Emancipation and National Allegorymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Melodrama,Purimspiel, and Jewish Emancipation

Weltman¹

2019

Victorian Literature and Culture

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Long forgotten, Elizabeth Polack (fl. 1835–43) is the earliest known Jewish woman playwright in England. This essay argues that her first play,Esther, the Royal Jewess,or the Death of Haman!(1835), performed at a public playhouse in the Jewish working-class neighborhood of London's East End, radically realigns diverse genres and populations in advocating both Jewish emancipation and a voice for women. By way of a very brief introduction, I first point out the applicability here of Judith Butler'sNotes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Butler explores how group protest, such as Tahir Square or Occupy Wall Street, serves as a kind of communal bodily signification. Of course, her point is not to address how people come together in a public theater, where the cast arrives daily for salaried jobs and the audience plunks down cold cash for a fun night out. Yet something else meaningful can occur in assembly within the theater. Theatrical performances can take on the discursive power of political assembly that Butler defines, signifying “in excess of what is said,” bringing actors and audience together with potentially political valence. Butler helps us understand the stakes of theatrical performance and public assembly and why it is important to examineEsther, the Royal Jewessbeyond recovering a neglected author, though that too is part of my object.

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Section: Jewish Emancipation and National Allegorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Jewish Emancipation and National Allegorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Melodrama,Purimspiel, and Jewish Emancipation

Weltman¹

2019

Victorian Literature and Culture

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“…200 However, as the action of the novel unfolds, she first offers Nina her friendship (at first on condition that they both re nounce Anton, whom they both love), but later provides her with practical and generous help, saves her from suicide (at Anton's behest), and sacrifices her own love for Anton while promising continuing friendship to Nina. As Valman argues, it is Rebecca, the selfsacrificing, "beautiful and magnanimous" Jewess 201 The representation of the male and female Jewish characters is similarly complex in Trollope's 1875 novel, The Way We Live Now. Although Mrs. Melmotte is described as "a Bohemian Jewess," as Paul Delaney observes, the origins of both the financier Augustus Melmotte and his daughter (by another woman) Marie "are left obscure," 202 thus hinting at Melmotte's dubious morality and business practices, but not identifying them specifi cally as Jewish.…”

Section: Gown 195mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, Valman overempha sizes Marie's "repeated insistence on her capacity for suffering" and her "enthusiasm for self-sacrifice." 209 It is true that Marie repeatedly asserts that she will not marry Lord Nid derdale even if her father "chop[s her] to pieces," 210 but her growing sense of indepen dence and self-validation is indicated from a very early point in the novel. In his initial de scription of her, the narrator says that she "began to have an opinion" (about marrying Lord Nidderdale) and that she "was now tempted from time to time to contemplate her own happiness and her own condition."…”

Section: Gown 195mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…222 By contrast, Mirah is both the good daughter, as well as the symbol of "diasporic suffering," as Valman calls her; she is utterly faithful to her religion, does not rebel against her altogether unworthy father, and accepts the secondary place of Jewish women in Judaism. 223 Mirah and her brother Mordecai are idealized images of Jewish belief and culture, as opposed to their father, who is demonized.…”

Section: Gown 195mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Orientalism in the Victorian Era

Kennedy¹

2017

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature

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Orientalism in the Victorian era has origins in three aspects of 18th-century European and British culture: first, the fascination with The Arabian Nights (translated into French by Antoine Galland in 1704), which was one of the first works to have purveyed to Western Europe the image of the Orient as a place of wonders, wealth, mystery, intrigue, romance, and danger; second, the Romantic visions of the Orient as represented in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Gordon, Lord Byron, and other Romantics as well as in Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh; and third, the domestication of opium addiction in Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Victorian Orientalism was all pervasive: it is prominent in fiction by William Thackeray, the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Conrad, and Rudyard Kipling, but is also to be found in works by Benjamin Disraeli, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Robert Louis Stevenson, among others. In poetry Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat is a key text, but many works by Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning also show the influence of Orientalist tropes and ideas. In theater it is one of the constant strands of much popular drama and other forms of popular entertainment like panoramas and pageants, while travel writing from Charles Kingsley to Richard Burton, James Anthony Froude, and Mary Kingsley shows a wide variety of types of Orientalist figures and concepts, as do many works of both popular and children’s literature. Underlying and uniting all these diverse manifestations of Victorian Orientalism is the imperialist philosophy articulated by writers as different as Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx, supported by writings of anthropologists and race theorists such as James Cowles Pritchard and Robert Knox. Toward the end of the Victorian era, the image of the opium addict and the Chinese opium den in the East End of London or in the Orient itself becomes a prominent trope in fiction by Dickens, Wilde, and Kipling, and can be seen to lead to the proliferation of Oriental villains in popular fiction of the early 20th century by such writers as M. P. Shiel, Guy Boothby, and Sax Rohmer, whose Dr. Fu Manchu becomes the archetypal version of such figures.

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"Your Favourite Jewish Girl, Apart From Your Mum": Introducing the Modern Jewess in Image and Text

Hammerschlag¹

2021

Shofar

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From Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, to Sarah Silverman on the cover of Heeb; from Amy Winehouse's voice to Lena Dunham's breasts, Jewish women are a ubiquitous presence in contemporary "high" and popular culture. In the 2015 documentary Amy, Winehouse even goes so far as to describe herself as "Your favourite Jewish girl, apart from your mum," invoking the much loved, derided, satirized, and maligned figure of the Jewish mother. 1 Nonetheless, artistic representations of the "Jewess" remain undertheorized, especially in comparison to her male counterparts. 2 While pioneering feminist Jewish studies scholars (Paula E. Hyman, Deborah Dash Moore, Pamela S. Nadell, Riv-Ellen Prell, and others) have worked hard to salvage the often-forgotten histories of Jewish women, 3 this special issue has a different objective. The Modern Jewess in Image and Text takes as its focus the construction of gender, race, and class through representations of Jewish women across different contexts, periods, and media. 4 This project had its inception as a conference held at Georgetown University in February 2018, sponsored by the Center for Jewish Civilization. The editorial and managerial team at Shofar worked hard to see it to fruition. I am grateful for the support provided by Jacques Berlinerblau,

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Introduction: the Jewess question

Cited by 4 publications

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Melodrama,Purimspiel, and Jewish Emancipation

Melodrama,Purimspiel, and Jewish Emancipation

Orientalism in the Victorian Era

"Your Favourite Jewish Girl, Apart From Your Mum": Introducing the Modern Jewess in Image and Text

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