Review - American Jewish Archives

230 American Jewish Archives
xenophobia and anti-Semitism in his earlier fiction, which an-
ticipated his return to the New World. Now Eli Ben-Joseph has con-
tributed a great deal more to our understanding of the full extent of
James's obsessive preoccupation with Jews. With admirable preci-
sion of thought and clarity of style (if not always eloquence or
depth), Ben-Joseph locates the uniqueness of James's anti-Semitism
while at the same time managing to link the novelist's representa-
tions of Irish, Italians, and Jews to the dominant cultural and scien-
tific discourses of his time.
Ben-Joseph wisely begins his study with an introduction to the
anti-Semitic conventions that seem to have been a part of James's
childhood and early adulthood. The author works deftly to contex-
tualize James in relation to his particular historical moment. One of
the great strengths of this study is Ben-Joseph's attentiveness to
often-neglected works, such as the early novel Roderick Hudson
(1875). which prepare the reader for the distasteful Jewish charac-
ters of later works such as "Professor FargoI1' The Impressions of a Cousin
and the greedy Italian-speaking Jew of The Golden Bowl (which is
really James's depiction of an American Jew). What Ben-Joseph
says of Roderick Hudson seems to be an equally relevant response to
James's later Jewish stereotypes: "Jews are here targeted peripher-
ally, unnecessarily, and even annoyingly for the sensitive reader, as
being perilous, grasping or lewd(@). Ben-Joseph's reading of
James's entire oeuvre suggests that James was faithful to an ethno-
centric hierarchy, an ideal of a coherent cultural order in which An-
glo-Saxons figure as the finest examples of humanity. In such an
aesthetics, Jews serve primarily as antithetic figures and blacks and
Native Americans warrant at best an "acerbic mere mention1'(qg). In
view of James's interest in the new realism, the disparity between
his stereotypes and fully realized human beings now appears par-
ticularly glaring.
In many ways, Ben-Joseph reveals his willingness to give the
novelist a fair hearing. His discussion of James's complex relation
to the Dreyfus case is particularly nuanced- James was a supporter
of Dreyfus and yet remained on friendly terms with anti-Semites
and anti-Dreyfusards like Paul Bourget. He even suggests that
James's infamous observations about the Jewish culture of the East
End in The American Scene actually appear quite mild when com-