JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

is, however, worth noting certain speeches in The Merchant
of Venice, especially Shylock’s famous lines beginning, “I am
a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions,
senses, affections, passions?” Here, there is at least
a glimmer of realism. Jews are usually referred to by writers of
the Elizabethan and succeeding periods in derogatory terms,
the very word Jew invariably suggesting extortioner, beggar,
thief, or devil’s accomplice. But the resettlement of the Jews
in England after 1656 and the new undogmatic character of
17th-century Anglicanism led to some change. George Herbert’s
poem “The Jews” (in The Temple, 1633) breathes a strain
of devout love for Israel as the exiled people of God. Herbert
was imitated a few years later by Henry Vaughan who, in an
equally passionate poem of the same title, prays that he “might
live to see the Olive bear her proper branches.” The reference
is to the metaphor of the olive used by the apostle Paul (N.T.
Rom., II), when he speaks of Israel as destined one day to be
restored to flourishing growth. William Hemings based his
drama, The Jewes Tragedy (1662), on the Jewish revolt against
Rome, as described by *Josephus and *Josippon. Milton’s Samson
Agonistes presents a picture which is in part that of the heroic
Jew of the Bible, in part a self-portrait of the poet himself.
This marks a new phenomenon: the subjective projection of
the author into the portrait of the Jew, and it was not to be repeated
until much later, by such 19th-century poets as Byron
and Coleridge, and by James Joyce in the figure of Leopold
Bloom in Ulysses (1922).
LATER DRAMA AND FICTION. In 18th-century drama the
Jew continued to be portrayed as either utterly evil and depraved
or else completely virtuous. One dramatist might often
produce both types, as did Charles Dibdin in The Jew and
the Doctor (1788) and The School for Prejudice (1801). Richard
Brinsley Sheridan introduces an unpleasant Jew, Isaac,
in his comic opera, The Duenna (1775), balanced by a virtuous
Jew, Moses, in The School for Scandal (1777). The hero of
an anonymous play, The Israelites (1785), is a Mr. Israel, who
practices all the virtues that the Christians only profess. The
most sympathetic portrayal of all is that of the Jew Sheva in
Richard *Cumberland’s play, The Jew (1794). A kind of Shylock
in reverse, Sheva is the English counterpart of the hero
of the German dramatist *Lessing’s Nathan der Weise (1779).
In fiction there was a similar tendency to extremes. The vicious
and criminal Jew painted by Daniel Defoe in Roxana
(1724) is balanced in Tobias Smollett’s novel The Adventures
of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), where the benevolent Joshuah
Manasseh insists on lending the hero money without
interest. Yet Smollett himself had a few years earlier (in The
Adventures of Roderick Random, 1748) drawn a no less exaggerated
portrait of the Jewish usurer in Isaac Rapine, whose
name suggests his character. The same duality in the portrait
of the Jew is noticeable in the 19th century. Maria Edgeworth,
having produced a gallery of rascally Jews in her early Moral
Tales (1801), compensated for those in Harrington (1816), a
novel largely devoted to the rehabilitation of the Jews, whom
english literature
she represents as noble, generous, and worthy of respect and
affection. All this was part of the new liberal attitude generated
by the French Revolution and the spread of the belief in
human equality and perfectibility. To entertain anti-Jewish
prejudices was to subscribe to outmoded social and ethical
forms. Thus, “Imperfect Sympathies,” one of the Essays of Elia
(1823–33) by Charles Lamb, expresses mild reservations about
“Jews Christianizing, Christians Judaizing,” Lamb having little
time for Jewish conversion or assimilation. The novel Ivanhoe
(1819) by Sir Walter Scott introduces Isaac of York, the medieval
usurer who, though described as “mean and unamiable,”
is in fact radically humanized in line with the new conceptions.
He has become grey rather than black, and his daughter
Rebecca is entirely white, good, and beautiful. Scott has come
a long way from the earlier stereotypes, and the Jews, far from
being murderers, preach peace and respect for human life to
the murderous Christian knights. In later 19th-century English
novels there are many Jewish portraits. William Makepeace
Thackeray always pictures his Jews as given to deceit and as
suitable objects for social satire. In his Notes of a Journey from
Cornhill to Grand Cairo … (1846), which includes the record of
a visit to the Holy Land, Thackeray indulges in a rather more
emphatic strain of antisemitism. Charles Kingsley and Charles
*Dickens, on the other hand, both have sympathetic as well as
unfavorable portraits. Kingsley’s bad Jews are to be found in
Alton Locke (1850), and his good Jew in Hypatia (1853), while
Dickens introduces Fagin, the corrupter of youth and receiver
of stolen goods, in Oliver Twist (1837–38), and Mr. Riah, the
benefactor of society and ally of the innocent, in Our Mutual
Friend (1864–65). Charles Reade has as the central character of
his novel It is Never too Late to Mend (1856) a Jew, Isaac Levi,
who initially more sinned against than sinning, ends by taking
a terrible revenge on his rascally foe. George Henry Borrow,
an agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society, was obsessed
with Jewish exoticism, but disliked Jews as people. He used a
Hebrew title for Targum (1835), a collection of translations, and
in his most famous work, The Bible in Spain (1843), recorded
his encounter with the alleged leader of Spain’s surviving Marranos
and included his own verse translation of Adon Olam.
In his novel The Way We Live Now (1875), Anthony Trollope
drew the fantastically wicked Jew Augustus Melmotte on a
melodramatic scale and with no real attempt at verisimilitude.
But in the following year, the ultimately noble Jew makes his
appearance in George *Eliot’s Zionist novel, Daniel Deronda
(1876). This shows the Jews not merely as worthy of sympathy,
but as having within them a spiritual energy through
which mankind may one day be saved and made whole. The
19th-century belief in race and nationality as a source of vital
inspiration has here combined with a certain moral idealism
to produce a remarkable vision of the Jewish renaissance, in
some measure prophetic of what was to come after the rise
of Herzlian Zionism. Something similar is to be found in the
novelist and statesman Benjamin *Disraeli, who never tired
of vaunting the superiority of the Jewish race as a storehouse
of energy and vision. In Tancred (1847) and his biography of
ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6 435