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The Image of the Jew in English Literature
Tony D. Battle
A synopsis of this kind risks being unsatisfactory in various ways. At one end of the scale it promises to mutilate beyond recognition the various papers from which it draws its material; while at the other it may well decline into that easy theorizing on the reasons for the Jewish stereotype in literature which is the hallmark of a superficial grasp unchallenged by firsthand acquaintance with the complex of source material. The reader has been warned! The best this article can attempt is a fairly simple chronology of the phenomenon of the Jew in (predominantly English) literature, combined with a sketch of theories given to account for it, in the hope that the reader might come to recognize how much his own image of the Jew has been pre-conditioned by the traditional picture presented in some 600 years of literary material.
The Beginnings
Consciousness of `the Jew' (as being a significant kind of being in a way that, say, a French-man was not) first emerged in ;he Middle Ages. It seems certain that for 10 centuries Christian and Jew had lived in conditions of genuine amity and interdependence, whether economically the church law against usury meant that the Jews were the community's bankers or intel lectually think how much Aquinas was to owe to Moses Maimonides. With the crusades, however, began the first systematic persecution of the Jews, and so the question arises, were they the cause or rather the, catalyst of anti semitism? Was their motivation in fact religious exacting punishment on the charge of, deicide or alternatively punishing a race in active league with the heathen Muslim (particularly in Spain)? Or was the situation of the Jews as a mysterious and alien figure determined more by the socio logical fact that being a non-Christian he could in no way enter on terms of real parity a feudal society whose condition of entry and constituting bond was the sacred oath of mutual fealty? Whatever the causes, it was not long before antisemitism was enshrined in the folk literature of the time, and most obviously in the mystery plays. These were dramatized episodes of the New Testament, originally performed in the church buildings, but now imaginatively re-written and elaborated, acted from mobile `stages' by the various trade guilds before the entire local populace. The Jew and Judas in particular quickly became the villain of the New Testament piece, and a villain such as would make cringe even the brutalized medieval imagination. But even more importantly, the Jew was not seen by the dramatists as some noxious antagonist of Christ from ages long since gone: the moneychangers in the Temple who fell under the dramatists' ridicule were clearly recognizable as the men who were the then society's financiers. And so whatever the root cause of hatred of the Jews, it was articulated in unambiguously religious terms. Religious drama was the first great propaganda vehicle for antisemitism.
Elizabethan Drama
It is obvious that this must concern Marlowe's Jew of Malta and Shylock, both characterized by a gargantuan lust for gain on the one hand, and on the other, a demonic hatred of the guileless Christian: Barabbas (mark you!) is a lecher and murders monks; Shylock will even eschew gold in his vampiric craving for Antonio's blood. It is astonishing when reflecting on the assured virulence with which both Shakespeare and Marlowe portray their anti-heroes, that neither of them could have had first-hand acquaintance with (Jewish) Jews, who had been banished from England in 1290. In fact, the hold exerted over the popular imagination in miracle plays and other folk literature had increased with the passage of time, reinforced by variations on the bogeyman type of rumour, such as that accusing the Jews of having caused the Black Death by poisoning Europe's wells. This in fact is one of the charges laid against Barabbas, who finally expires in a boiling cauldron. It would be silly to labour you with details of characters you know too well, or to try and derive some cut-and-dried social 'message' from the Shylock po trait -- there is something more here than satire on Elizabethan avarice. What this i none of my sources seem ready to determin and so this section will end quizzically -with a description of the stock stage-dress the Jew at the time: he wore a huge cloak, big red putty nose, had claws... and clove hooves.
The Modern Novel
In an effort to avoid making this sectioi into a catalogue, discussion will be severel restricted to the central features of the age. No can we go far before being confronted witl Dickens' arch-demon Fagin, perhaps the arch. type of Jewish villainy. Again, it is a matte: of astonishment to find in Fagin precisely thos( features which had first emerged in religion! drama half a millenium previously. He has the red hair which, in the miracle play, identified the Jew with the Devil; he kidnaps innocent Christian children another bogeyman rumour claiming that the Jew kills them for his Passover meal, and first to be found in Chaucer's Prioress's Tale - and he often threatens to poison his coconspirators. In the absence of the cloven hoof, Dickens first presents him in the lurid glow of of a large fire with a toasting fork in his hand!
We are now in fact in a position to generalize about the image of the Jew in literature. Essentially, he is a demonic combination of the sub- and super-human: sub-human in the baleful malevolence of his diabolical designs, and superhuman in the preternatural resourcefulness on which he can draw to achieve them. Little more and little less than Satan himself. Dickens, replying to charges of antisemitism, maintained that he was only being true to social fact most of that particular criminal class were Jews but this surely explains nothing of the person
imaginatively realized in the book. Others maintain that Fagin was used to epitomize the greed of a profit-mad society bent on exploitation of the children of the poor, but again this fails to answer the question: Why portray a Jew in this way? And if Dickens was only being faithful to social fact, can the same be said of Ferdinand Lopez, Trollope's black Portuguese Jew in The Prime Minister, who is shown successively capturing and ruining the choicest flower of female society; of the German Freytag, whose Jewish anti-hero in Soil and Hahen (a standard school text-book) inveigles his way into the ranks of the bourgeoisie, only to become the downfall of a legion of honest German trades folk, a challenge to the Church, and a threat to the Reich itself; or the American Ignatius Donnelly, who in Caesar's Column depicts an apocalyptic phantasy in which the bloated and wealthy class of Jews are the apostles of malicious intrigue and destruction? There are hundreds of such examples.
It seems that an explanation must be sought which goes far beyond reportage of social fact. Sr. Louis-Gabriel suggests that it is the Jew who has been made the scapegoat for all the manifold ills and social neuroses afflicting Europe over the course of the centuries. Social upheaval of any kind induces a thorough-going disturbance in the individual and collective psyche which, rather than risk revolutionary metanoia, seeks issue for its malaise in the selection of a third party as cause of malcontent and butt for inner conflict and disturbed sense of frustration. Sr. Louis-Gabriel maintains that throughout centuries of change in Europe, the Jew became the dogsbody who got kicked when life no longer went according to plan. Such was the situation in the wake of the crusades in the 12th and 13th centuries, when the previous understanding of the universe as safe, static and comprehensible was exploded. And similarly, the state of European nations after the industrial revolution, and particularly France after the 1879 war; England at the end of the 19th century, and Germany from the Reformation onwards.
The tendency to seek such a scapegoat is exacerbated when the seeker is not merely discomforted at the way things are changing, but positively yearns for a past age of golden rusticity. Belloc and Chesterton (see particularly The Dual ol Dr. Hersch) fall into this latter class, both contending that there is a conspiracy of Jews against England and indeed the whole of Christendom. And lest these be thought eccentric examples of the Catholic novelist, it might be illuminating to look into Evelyn Waugh's satires on the 20's, or examine Graham Greene's novels or the 30's (Stamboul Train, etc.), where the Jew is consistently identified with what is really worst in modern life.
The Jew becomes the enemy of society, religion and all that is Established. But that the mentality which so branded the Jew was not an attitude resonant with Gospel values can readily be seen from an examination of the book which has done more than any other to change the image of the Jew in literature. The book is James Joyce's Ulysses. The Ulysses in question is of course Leopold Bloom, the novel's protagonist, the wanderer, the Jew. But rather than being the sinister agent of destruction which is the role pre-assigned to him in all the works so far examined, Bloom stands alone in the hook as possessing the finer human qualities. Throughout the work, the courage, endurance and generosity of the despised stranger throw into sharp relief the grossness and brutality of the average Dublin Christian of the time.
s no use", says [Bloom], "force, hatred, that's not a life for men and women, insult and hatred, and everybody knows that it is the very opposite of that, that is really life." "What is?", says Alf, one of the citizens. "Love", says Bloom, "I mean the opposite of hatred." And they laugh at him.
Contemporary Literature
Aprθs Ulysses, the deluge. An adequate discussion of the Jew in contemporary literature would occupy several volumes of this bulletin.
This section will therefore continue with lopped-off paragraphs, temerariously haphazard in their selection of material, on the Jew in the eyes of non-Jewish and Jewish authors respectively, and conclude with some mention of Holocaust literature.
James Parkes, in his talk on the New Image of the Jew in contemporary (non-Jewish) literature, picks out three genres of novel: those which simply concern themselves with Jews; those whose subject is the Holocaust; and those which are about Israel. Into the first category fall novels by Lord Snow, The Conscience of the Rich, and Roger Peyrefitte, Les Jul/s. The picture of Judaism presented is inaccurate and indigestible respectively. The second category comprises The Burnt Offering by Pastor Albrecht Goes, and The Wall by John Hersey. Both, in their accurate penetration of the infamies of the Holocaust, are fine illustrations of that monstrous irony whereby the Holocaust stands as the prime event in the scandalous history of Jewish European relations which unites Jew and Gentile in any depth of understanding. The third category is exemplified in Morris West's The Tower of Babel and James Michener's The Source, which both attempt to present sensitive accounts of the human meaning of the present Middle Eastern situation. Michener's work "by any standards one of the truly great books about Jewry and Israel" is particularly sensitive in its presentation of both the inter-racial prejudices which divide the Middle East, and the acute conflicts between old and young, religious and non-religious, which are confronting Judaism itself today.
America is the place to find Jews writing about Jews. The pioneer work in this field was Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), which was the first Jewish work to deal in detail with the Jewish immigrant. The work is important not only because it is the first, but because its hero's passage from rags to riches succeeds only in leaving him in that state of rootless and somewhat disturbed perplexity whichis prom-typical of the Jewish hero in subsequent works by such men as Bellow, Malamud and Philip Roth. We have come a long way from the Satan image. Although Cahan's novel was a break-through, subsequent writers on adjacent themes men like Henry Roth and Meyer Levin found scant public interest in their work. However, within the past two decades the picture has radically altered. Once again, it would appear that the Holocaust, coupled with Israel's struggle for national autonomy, has been largely instrumental in re-instating the Jew and Jewish writer. Leon Uris' Exodus, and the musical comedy "Fiddler on the Roof' are good examples of Jewry's recent climb up the popular charts. As regards works of more lasting value,
need no more than remind the reader of Bellow's Herzog, Malamud's The Fixer, and Philip Roth's Good-Bye Columbus. Though only Malamud consistently and vivaciously re-creates a world of traditional Jewish customs and practice, all three are concerned with the Jew as Jew in a way, say, Arthur Miller and Norman Mailer are not.
For those whose responsible drive to understand man's inhumanity is stronger than terrified abhorrence of events in the Second World War, there remains to discuss Jewish writings on the Holocaust. These writings are unique in that they attempt to speak the unspeakable horror of crimes which must shatter any Western idea of man. We are all survivors of the Holocaust, and these works document what we are all survivors or heirs to. There is The Diary of Anne Frank, with its unwritten ending, the most poignant non-fictional testimony to these times. Fiction, in fact, expires in confrontation with these events: the important works of Elie Wiese! and Miguel de Castillo are re-constructions based on personal experience. More typical are the factual accounts of Leon Wells' The Janowska Road and Chaim Kaplan's Scroll of Agony. The former survived to testify at Nuremberg; the latter died at Treblinka. In all these, the image cf the Jews is that of the true anawim. He is not a martyr, nor a hero, but a victim. A victim led to the slaughter, who turns the other cheek and who does not resist. Not out of degradation in which his captors are embroiled. To finish, here is a poem written by a child of the time.
I'd like to go away alone
Where there are other, nicer people.
Somewhere into the far unknown
There, where no one kills another.
Maybe more of us
A thousand strong
Will reach this goal
Before too long.
The child was gassed. The Devil was laid.
