BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

adaptability, both as a danger and an asset, Cohen argues, speaks to the rapid assimilation of
Jews into British society and their eventual acceptance through a prevailing liberal gradualism. 73
Antisemitic stereotypes certainly peppered the popular press, however, ridiculing the hypocritical
pretensions and poor fashion-sense of the “Gentleman Jew,” for example, as demonstrated in
Thackeray’s 1846 satire for Punch entitled “Snobs of England.” One cartoon depicts a
diminutive, gaudily dressed Jewish dandy with huge nose, bulging eyes and swarthy, hairy
complexion in the process of ordering up a serving of pork, “crackling, sage and onions and all”
from a tall, blond, impeccably dressed and faintly amused servitor. 74 Multiple hats (“Mosaic
ornaments”) and Old Clothes became long-standing symbols of Jewish deceit and huckstering.
Carlyle applied the latter trope to Benjamin Disraeli, an Anglican politician of Jewish ancestry
who eventually served as British Prime Minister from 1874 to 1880. 75 Thackeray’s Codlingsby
(1847), a lampoon of Disraeli’s political/autobiographical novel Conigsby (1844), accentuated
the stereotyped pretense of the Gentleman Jew by placing most of the action in the ghetto and
reversing conventional ideas of beauty and taste. Thackeray’s satire ostensibly relieved anxieties
surrounding Jewish emancipation by reasserting British racial preeminence in reaction to
Disraeli’s “bold foregrounding of racial issues” in Conigsby, where he placed Jews and Arabs on
a level with Saxons and Greeks as Caucasions at the top of a four-tier race hierarchy. 76 But even
73 Ibid., 480-81, 483.
74 Claire Nicolay, “The Anxiety of "Mosaic" Influence: Thackeray, Disraeli, and Anglo-
Jewish Assimilation in the 1840s,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 25, no. 2 (2003): 133.
75 Ibid., 127, 129.
76 Ibid., 126, 134-35, 142.
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