Jews

Abstract

Victorian literature turned with surprising frequency and significance to representations of Jews and Jewishness. Literature was a major source of Victorians’ ideas of and debates about Jews, debates Anglo‐Jewish writers increasingly joined as the century progressed. Depictions of Jews as avaricious Shylocks, influenced by long‐standing anti‐Semitic narratives, appeared in Victorian plays, novels, and comic poems. But Victorian literature also depicted Jews in more complex and positive ways, drawing on ideas about special Judeo‐Christian connections and “Jewish” creativity. Because Victorian Jewishness shifted between religion, race, culture, and nation, it allowed writers to consider the way similar categories shaped Victorian Englishness. Nineteenth‐century novels, with their attention to domestic and psychological interiority, were especially adept at exploring whether Jewishness and Englishness were identities that could be learned, converted to, or only inherited. Fictional Jews thus facilitated the examination of the fiction of the nation and the workings of Victorian novels themselves.