In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviews Frank Felsenstein. Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm ofOtherness in English Popular Culture, 1660-1830. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. xvii + 350pp. US$39.95. ISBN 0-8018-4903-9. This workmanlike study gathers together an impressive mass of documentary evidence illustrating the domestic twists and turns of European anti-Semitism in England from the Restoration to 1830. It will satisfy scholars interested in the continuities of certain facets of anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages through the period in question (the blood libel, the "wandering Jew"); and also those interested in the actual language of this discourse: Felsenstein combs the archives and brings to light many illustrative examples, verbal and visual, ranging from the rantings of pathological haters, with chap-book vocabularies, to the carefully phrased arguments of parliamentary debate. The chapter on the development of Shylock in the hands of Charles Macklin is especially interesting for literary scholars, a potent exemplum for our own time of the power of popular entertainment to shape social attitudes. Almost as persuasive is the chapter on the "Jew Bill" controversies of 1753, where Felsenstein argues cogently against the view that anti-Semitism was a minor part of the debate. The study is well documented and the writing a model of clarity. Indeed, except for its primary reliance on documents of popular rather than privileged culture, it is a quite oldfashioned work of historical scholarship, with all the virtues of accuracy and objectivity, precision and transparency, associated with such efforts. Why then does this book not satisfy? The short answer is the bane of all reviewing: "it's not the book I would have liked to read." A longer answer involves comparison with three other very recent works, each illuminating a significant faultline in Felsenstein's construction of his subject. The first is Bryan Cheyette's Construction of "The Jew" in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875-1945 (1993). What marks this study as richer than Felsenstein's, in addition to its thorough analyses of major literary works (the most interesting Jew in eighteenth-century fiction, Smollett's Manasseh, is mentioned by EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 8, Number 2, January 1996 294 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:2 Felsenstein only in a footnote), is a larger awareness of the political stakes. For example, Cheyette directly addresses the issue of why "Jewish" studies have been scorned by postcolonial literary scholars, who have been, nonetheless, rabidly interested in every other conceivable marginalized group. Except for a brief paragraph on blacks versus Jews, Felsenstein seems unaware of the background of colonialism against which his story unfolds, the role played by the waxing of nationalism and xenophobia during this period. He appears equally unaware that the supposed waning of xenophobia in the last twentyfive years of post-colonial enlightenment has paradoxically produced a new wave of anti-Semitism in "intellectual" circles. There is an unexplored period of forty-five years between the two works (i.e., 1830-75), but in reality a much larger gap: Felsenstein's work offers almost no clues towards explaining the increasingly virulent anti-Semitism that marks the century after 1830; Cheyette, on the other hand, helps us understand present resurgences of anti-Semitism fifty years after the Shoah. Surely, if history is to be of value, it needs consistently to expose to light the spores of the past that become the poisonous mushrooms of the present. The second work I would compare to Felsenstein's is Sander Gilman's Inscribing the Other (1991), one of die few books by Gilman that Felsenstein does not cite. More than any other work, however, it might have clarified Felsenstein's foggy notion of the Jew as "Other," the only theoretical framework he offers. As a synonym for "foreigner," "alien," "enemy," and nothing more, "Other" is a usage emptied of philosophical and psychological meaning; as a patina of "theory" it is especially annoying because it so obviously attempts to provide a modernist aura to a traditional exegesis. No theory holds together the distinct divisions of Felsenstein's study, and his oft-repeated assertion that the anti-Semitism of the Middle Ages was alive and well in eighteenth-century England is, finally, merely a chronological observation...

pdf

Share