Review - American Jewish Archives

Book Reviews 229
Ben-Joseph, Eli.
Aesthetic Persuasion: Henry James, the Jews, and Race.
Landam, Md.: University Press of America, 1996.252 pages.
Henry James's reputation for anti-Semitism is generally under-
stood in relation to the famous report about the east European im-
migrant Jews of the Lower East Side that appears in his The
American Scene (1907). James's undisguised shock and dismay at what
he found seems to vacillate between horror over the poverty and
squalor he encounters and revulsion toward the punishment the
new immigrants appear to inflict on the English language. His
meeting with "terrible little Ellis Island" left him badly shaken,
feeling like a marginal outsider in his own homeland (after years
living abroad in self-imposed exile) as he wanders among the op-
pressive sights and sounds of the new ethnic neighborhoods.
Throughout The American Scene he describes a sense of rupture and
displacement but nowhere near as dramatically as in his frequent
references to the "swarming" Jewish masses. James's dread, in the im-
mediate aftermath of his visit to Ellis Island, is expressed in stir-
ringly apocalyptic language, a rhetoric that invites the reader to
identify with the author's enlightened sensibilities:
"I think that the simplest account of the action of Ellis Island
on the spirit of any sensitive citizen who may have happened
to 'look in' is that he comes back from his visit not at all the
same person that he went. He has eaten of the tree of knowl-
edge, and the taste will be forever in his mouth,"'
Presumably no reader will wish to be excluded from the status of
"any sensitive citizen" and will inevitably share James's abhorrence
for the damage that Italians, Jews, and other immigrants do to the
cause of an ideal homogeneous culture.
In view of such ingrained antipathy toward the presence of the
Other in culture, it seems surprising that until recently only a few
critics (notably Louis Harap in The Image of the Jew in American Litera-
ture) have attempted to sketch the wider dimensions of James's