Review - American Jewish Archives

232 American Jewish Archives
his eagerness to unsettle James's reputation, he concludes that
James's critique of Prince Edward as "exceedingly vulgar" was
based solely on the fact that Victoria's successor had some Jewish
supporters. But Ben-Joseph's scholarship is generally competent. A
more serious problem is that it sometimes seems to lack the voice of
a critic ingenious enough to transcend what amounts to conven-
tional and even banal approaches to the problem of the image of the
Jew in literature. To claim that Henry James "looked askance at
Jews in an attempt to take the spotlight off his own background"(2)
seems disingenuous; an uncomplicated way to sum up the most
complicated writer of his age, Ben-Joseph's study cleaves hard to
this thesis.
Perhaps it is to his credit that Ben-Joseph refrains from determin-
ing whether James falls back on prejudice and caricature merely to
fill in the murkier margins of his literary canvas, or was guilty of a
more serious moral turpitude. James's readers may prefer to decide
these matters for themselves. Ben-Joseph is happy to let the facts
speak for themselves and does not speculate on why James was so
frequently drawn to the figure of the Jew when clearly that pres-
ence suggests a profoundly anxious estimation of their power and
culture, as if Judaism and Jews may have been rivals to him. He
demonstrates the wide-ranging presence of the Jew in James's nov-
els and cultural criticism without getting closer to the secret of what
is clearly an irresistible fascination. But the reader may feel the need
for Ben-Joseph's exhaustive survey to make at least this much clear:
scapegoating of Jews seems most likely to appear where the novel-
ist's narrative need for moral definitions struggles against his own
ambivalence and fear of collapsed distinctions. In other words,
James's attacks on Jews appear at textual moments of aesthetic cri-
sis, where the novelist fails to clarify cultural values and satisfac-
tory boundaries.
In spite of these quibbles, Aesthetic Persuasion: Henry James, the
Jews, and Race must still be appreciated for what it is, namely a thor-
ough documentation of James's antipathy toward a variety of ethnic
and racial groups that exceeds in its scope all previous treatments of
the subject and that will surely stimulate a rich and controversial
debate, perhaps not any less significant than the rekindled argu-