JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

english literature
Lord George Bentinck (1852) he maintained his belief that the
Jews were “the aristocrats of mankind.” George du Maurier
propagated a Jewish caricature nourished by the new Nietzschean
philosophy of race. Svengali, the evil Jew in his novel
Trilby (1894), is the eternal alien, mysterious and sinister, a
sorcerer whose occult powers give the novel the character of
a Gothic thriller. Svengali belongs, of course, to an “inferior
race,” and his exploits are ultimately designed to corrupt the
“pure white race” personified in the novel’s heroine, Trilby. On
the other hand, George Meredith, in The Tragic Comedians
(1880), presents a romantically attractive Jew, Alvan, who is
actually a portrait of the German-Jewish socialist Ferdinand
*Lassalle. Sir Thomas Henry Hall Caine also showed unstinted
sympathy and admiration for the Jew in his novel of Jewish
life in Morocco, The Scapegoat (1891), although his account is
not without some inner contradictions. The non-Jewish Anglo-American
Henry Harland, using the pen name Sidney
Luska, published three novels – As It Was Written (1885), Mrs.
Peixada (1886), and The Yoke of Thorah (1887) – in the guise of
an immigrant of Jewish background describing the life of the
German Jews of New York. The poets Wordsworth and Byron
were drawn to the romantic glamour of the Jewish past,
the former in a touching descriptive lyric, “A Jewish Family”
(1828), the latter in the more famous Hebrew Melodies. Like
Blake, Shelley was repelled by the Old Testament’s stress on the
Law and the Commandments – his instinct being toward free
love and anarchism – but was drawn to the figure of the Wandering
Jew. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, too, in his “Rime of the
Ancient Mariner” (in Lyrical Ballads, 1798) shows an interest
in the same theme evidently derived from his reading of M.G.
Lewis’ gruesome novel The Monk (1796). Coleridge translated
Kinat Jeshurun, a Hebrew dirge on the death of Queen Charlotte
by his friend Hyman *Hurwitz, calling it Israel’s Lament
(1817). The warmest and most detailed accounts of Jews are
to be found in the poetry of Robert *Browning, who seemed
determined to show that even post-biblical Jews, such as the
medieval Rabbi Ben Ezra and the Jews of the Roman ghetto,
could be given sympathetic, even noble, treatment. Browning
tried to do in poetry what *Rembrandt had done in paint –
suggest the mixture of everyday realism and sublimity in the
lives of Jews. Matthew Arnold, the most “Hebraic” of 19thcentury
English writers, paid tribute to Hebrew culture in his
elegy “On Heine’s Grave” (New Poems, 1867), while Algernon
Charles Swinburne gave expression to great indignation in his
poem “On the Russian Persecution of the Jews” (1882).
THE 20 TH CENTURY. English poets of the 20th century have
shown less interest in Jews. T.S. Eliot makes a return to the
medieval stereotype of avaricious extortioner in his phrase:
“My house is a decayed house,/and the jew squats on the
window sill, the owner/spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp/…”
(Gerontion and other references), although elsewhere
he speaks with veneration of Nehemiah, the prophet
who “grieved for the broken city Jerusalem.” In Catholic writers
such as Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, and Graham
Greene, there is a similar rendering of the dark image of the
Jew. Belloc, an anti-capitalist, held that the Jews and Protestants
were the arch-enemies of civilization and evolved a belief
in a “Jewish conspiracy” (The Jews, 1922). Greene revived
the medieval connection between Judas and the Devil in A
Gun for Sale (1936) and Orient Express (1933), and in Brighton
Rock (1938), where the Jewish gang-leader Colleoni – one of
the most sinister villains in English literature – leads the hero,
Pinkie, to damnation. Frankly antisemitic portraits can also
be found in the writings of D.H. Lawrence and Wyndham
Lewis. A more mild and benevolent portraiture emerges from
the biblical dramas of James Bridie, Laurence Housman, and
Christopher Fry. George Bernard Shaw brought back the Jew-
Devil stage tradition in burlesque form in Man and Superman
(1903); and various characters in Major Barbara (1905), Saint
Joan (1923), and The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906) express Shaw’s
not unkindly view of the Jew in modern society. An important
development in the 20th century was the attempt to abandon
the old stereotype and depict Jews in natural, human terms.
John Galsworthy took the lead in his novels and more particularly
in his play Loyalties (1922). Here the Jew, Ferdinand
de Levis, is the victim of a robbery at a country-house party.
The other guests band together to defend the thief because he
is one of them, whereas the Jew is an alien. Galsworthy has
carefully purged his imagination of the kind of emotional attitudes
that determined the reaction of Shakespeare and his
audience to the basically similar situation in The Merchant of
Venice, and the result is an objective study in social psychology.
A similarly unemotional approach is to be found in James
Joyce’s Ulysses, where the central character, Leopold Bloom, is
neither exactly hero nor anti-hero but something in between.
Less flamboyant Jewish characters appear in novels by E.M.
Forster, The Longest Journey (1907); and C.P. Snow. The latter’s
The Conscience of the Rich (1958) is devoted to the affairs of a
Jewish family who differ from the English upper class around
them only in an extra touch of gregariousness and more tenacious
adherence to tradition.
Palestine and Israel in English Literature
Ever since medieval times English writers have recorded impressions
of their visits to the Holy Land or written imaginative
works based on Jewish historical themes. One of the
earliest books of this kind was the Voiage (1357–71) of the 14thcentury
Anglo-French traveler Sir John Mandeville. Outstanding
works over the centuries were Henry Maundrell’s A Journey
from Aleppo to Jerusalem at Easter 1697 (1703); The Fall
of Jerusalem (1820), a play by Henry Hart Milman, dean of
St. Paul’s, who also wrote a History of the Jews (1829); Eothen
(1844), travel impressions by Alexander William Kinglake; The
Brook Kerith (1916), a novel by the Irish writer George Moore;
and Oriental Encounters. Palestine and Syria 1894–1896 (1918)
by Marmaduke William Pickthall. Britain’s Mandate in Palestine,
which led to a political confrontation with the yishuv,
and the State of Israel found wide reflection in English fiction,
generally of inferior merit. G.K. Chesterton, an antisemite
436 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6