Israel at Vanity Fair: Jews and Judaism in the Writings of W. M. Thackeray (review)

Book Reviews 109 Israel at Vanity Fair: Jews and Judaism in the Writings of W. M. Thackeray, by S. S. Prawer. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992. 439 pp. $123.00. The standard accounts of the Jew in English literature devote little attention to the work ofWilliam Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863). Moreover , the few references to be found in them suggest that Thackeray was hostile to Jews and that stereotypical images of Jewish filth, materialism, and chicanery abound in his writing. To correct that impression, S. S. Prawer, Taylor Professor of German emeritus at Oxford and an eminent Heine scholar, has written a richly documented study of the treatment of Jews, Judaism, and the Hebrew Bible in Thackeray's journalism, fiction, and graphic illustrations. The basic premise of Prawer's approach is that the unpleasant images ofJews that appear in Thackeray's work should not be viewed in isolation from either the totality of what he wrote about Jews or his overall tendency to find rogues and scoundrels everywhere he looked. Prawer does not deny that Thackeray populated his fiction and journalism with unpleasant and frequently disreputable Jewish characters. Most of the Jews in his work occupy marginal social positions, earning their living in legal but low-status trades on the fringes of respectability-as street traders, moneylenders, adventurers, sellers of bric-a-brac and second-hand goods, entertainers, keepers of sponging-houses, dancing halls, billiard rooms, gambling dens, and the like. They are, as Prawer makes clear, neither devils nor angels for the most part, although they break' the law on occasion and generally speak, dress, and gesture in stereotypical ways that instantly mark them as Jews. Although Thackeray was not averse to employing hoary stereotypes in describing Jews, Prawer stresses that he was not a racial or programmatic antisemite. (In fact, he supported Jewish emancipation.) Taken as a group, his Jews possess both good and bad qualities: some act like gentlefolk, others like rogues; some are likeable, others disagreeable. But what is more critical is that his Jews play no role, either positive or negative, in his moral imagination or social outlook. Unlike dyed-in-the-wool Jew-haters, Thackeray does not blame the corruption and ills of his day on Judaism or the Jews; there is no obsessive, neurotic element in his treatment ofJewish themes. In his fiction, Prawer notes, "Jews are marginal men and women in a double sense: most of them appear at the margins of British society ... and they figure only in the margins of all his novels and most of his short stories and essays" (p. 424). Thackeray, Prawer reminds us, created no Jewish characters equivalent in importance to Trollope's Melmotte, lopez, or Emilius, Dickens' Fagin, or Du Maurier's Svengali. 110 SHOFAR Spring 1993 Vol. 11, No.3 Prawer also believes that Thackeray's treatment ofJewish malefactors should be evaluated in the context of his belief that folly and knavery, rogues and dupes, are found among all religious, ethnic, and national groups, including his own. The narrator of the character sketch "Captain Rook and Mr. Pigeon," for example, concludes that "there is no cheat like an English cheat" and that England "produces them in the greatest number as of the greatest excellence" (p. 58). Prawer argues convincingly that in creating dishonest Jews Thackeray never makes them worse than their gentile counterparts. In his world, Jews are not predators corrupting society, but rather it is society itself which is "exhibiting predatory behaviour at every level and forcing such behaviour on anyone who has not inherited wealth and who wants to make his way towards social position and esteem" (p. 413). It is difficult to quarrel with Prawer's contention that Thackeray never intended his unsympathetic Jews to represent the group as a whole. His treatment is exhaustive, his reading attentive to nuance and detail, his analysis balanced and sober. Nonetheless, his desire to defend Thackeray appears to have blinded him to one aspect of this problem: whatever Thackeray's intention, his occasional use of highly charged stereotypes helped to perpetuate anti-Jewish sentiment in Victorian society. These stereotypes, which tend to dehumanize Jews and mark them off as different in essence from other...