Semitism and Criticism: Victorian Anglo-Jewish Literary History

Abstract

IN THE JEW IN THE TEXT: Modernity and the Construction of Identity (1995) Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb noted that although questions of race, colonialism, and Eurocentrism were now prominent in cultural studies, the ways in which the "Jew" had been represented in modern culture remained relatively unexplored (6). Over the last few years, however, exploration of this kind has burgeoned, bringing with it important challenges both for Jewish studies and for English literary history. The nineteenth century has proved a particularly rich resource for such research, and the importance of this period for considering the relationship between modernity and the "Jew" is underlined by Nochlin:The modern construction of the Jew and the establishing of a coherent Jewish identity may be said to have begun with the construction of modernity itself, in the nineteenth century. This construction is almost synchronous with, though hardly identical to, the growth of mass communication and the possibility of popular representation on a large scale. This fabric of Jewish identity is interwoven with the complex formation of anti-Semitism as an ideological position. Indeed, one might say that Jewish identity and the Jew of anti-Semitism are brought into being by the same representational trajectory. (10) Nochlin's statement points to several of the most important innovations and problems which have characterized recent critical work on Anglo-Jewish literature and textual representations. In the last few years the Victorian period has become a subject of particular interest for critics who see the beginnings of both modern antisemitism and modern Jewish identity articulated in nineteenth-century print culture. Images of Jews, produced by both Jews and non-Jews, are now frequently analyzed not in terms of their relationship to traditions of literary stereotyping, but in terms of their function within discourses of "nation" emerging with particular force in nineteenth-century Europe. Nochlin also rightly acknowledges that the relationship between antisemitic representations and Jewish literature is both close and complex.Nochlin's formulation, however, does not quite do justice to the full implications of the new work in Jewish cultural studies. First, she suggests that the nineteenth century saw 235