Jews, Modernity, and the Fiction of Ben-Levi
This article presents the work of Ben-Lévi [pseud. Godchaux Weil, 1806-1878], who published a series of short stories in the Archives Israélites de France, the leading French Jewish newspaper, during the 1840s. One of the first Jews to write fiction in French, Ben-Lévi offers a portrait of a community caught between tradition and progress. Combining the "realist" literary codes of Balzac with the "idealist" codes of Sand, his stories hold up a critical mirror to the assimilating Jewish bourgeoisie of the era and show how a reformed Judaism could help resolve the dilemmas of modernity. Ben-Lévi's forgotten fictions reveal the agency and creativity of nineteenth-century French Jews in the face of momentous social change while also demonstrating the versatility of French literary models. (MS)
The image of the Jew in European liberal culture, 1789-1914
This collection of essays explores the complex articulations and contexts of anti-Semitism in the literature of four cultures — Britain, Germany, France and Italy — in the long nineteenth century. The essays examine the presence both of explicitly anti-Semitic writing and apparently anti-Jewish stereotypes in the work of writers who were not consciously hostile to Jews. The book scrutinizes assumptions about the relative absence of anti-Semitism in Britain, the image of Germany as resistant to Jewish assimilation, and of Italy as particularly hospitable to Jews. The essays are placed in a comparative framework in order to examine the representation of Jews both within particular national cultures and in the context of Western European modernity. The volume considers the ways in which anti-Semitism functioned within liberal culture in the nineteenth century as part of the broader history of oppression with which Western modernity has been complicit.
Dickensian Disciple: Anglo-Jewish Identity in the Christmas Tales of Benjamin Farjeon
"Benjamin Leopold Farjeon [1838-1903] was of English birth but of the Jewish race."(1) Perhaps this is the casually anti-Semitic remark of one of Farjeon's Victorian contemporaries? It is not. The comment was penned by a biographer of his daughter, children's writer Eleanor Farjeon (1881-1965). In an age familiar with hyphenated identities, it is just the anachronistic quality of Eileen Colwell's statement that calls it to attention. Farjeon was not English "and" Jewish, he was English "but" Jewish. How are we to understand the use of this conjunction? British subject Benjamin Farjeon would have been English except that he was Jewish, a non-sequitur? Farjeon was English/Jewish simultaneously, an oxymoron? Jewish ethnicity and homeland in conflict constituted a dilemma by no means unique to Farjeon. What distinguished him was the fact that he left such a peculiar written record of it. He was a prolific author in the sentimental realist tradition who published over sixty novels between 1866 and 1904.(2) The incongruity of his writing enterprise, embracing the Christmas book genre in one narrative while defending Orthodox Judaism in another, represents an attempt to collapse "English birth" and "Jewish race" into the common ground of a secular national economy epitomized by the Dickensian Christmas. It would be too facile a gesture merely .to dismiss Farjeon's interest in Christmas as an attempt to assimilate Judaism out of existence. The holiday, in both Farjeon's life and novels, was purged of conventional religious import in as much as it functioned as a metonymy for Dickens himself. A Christmas Carol (1843) equated the celebration of the nuclear family, the ideological backbone of the Victorian age, with Christmas. For Farjeon, Dickens and the bourgeois values he narrativized replaced the Christ child to become that which was exalted. Eleanor Farjeon wrote of her father's desire to author "a Christmas story 'after' Dickens, his supreme god. . . . He would dedicate his first book to his idol."(3) The very impetus of Farjeon's Christmas project is essentially blasphemous. It is, after all, a profane literary "god" who reigns "supreme." And to honor this god Farjeon bears a gift, a "story 'after' Dickens," written in 'imitation of the deified figure. The Christmas book is identified as a graven image for a false "idol." Yet contemporary reviews laud Farjeon as an advocate for a kind of worldly national faith. British newspapers describe him as "a preacher of the brotherhood of rich and poor, more powerful, graphic, and tender than any since Dickens"; his "writing - especially his Christmas Tales - are to our thinking the most perfect stories in our language."(4) So, it is the Jew Farjeon, through his fictions, that ministers to the Empire. He is a "preacher" of the Word, "our language," "perfect[ed]" in the Dickensian genre of the "Christmas Tales." Hyperbolic praise by Farjeon and his reviewers for the Dickensian Christmas book would seem to bolster Christianity's exclusive claim to English culture and by implication to national identity. However, the use of a religious vocabulary actually mitigates against such ends. After all, even the metaphoric deification of Dickens is inherently sacrilegious. But more importantly, a theocratic center for "Englishness" is replaced by figures and texts - the "preacher[s]" - of mass popular culture. God as the Word (the Bible), acting as graphemic 1ogos for an Anglo-British nation, gives way to Christmas tales as "the most perfect stories in our language." The very redundancy of the term "most perfect" is reminiscent of the incongruous label, "New" Testament, as if a second edition of the Bible had corrected the first which itself was unassailable. Now the Christmas tale supersedes its own flawless precursor in Christ. Matthew 19:21 (AV) instructs, "go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me." Filtered through the Christmas story genre, Christ's words are truncated into "the brotherhood of rich and poor. …