A Provocative Blind Spot: Orientalism and Charlotte Tonna's Judah's Lion

With the publication of Orientalism (1978) Edward W. Said initiated a profound shift in the relations between critical approaches to literary culture and the study of European imperialism. Central to Said's argument and his subsequent analysis is his identification of a clear, precise division between East and West or Orient and Occident. I question the extent to which this geographical paradigm works for the study of representations of Jewish people and history in Charlotte Tonna's Judah's Lion (1843). Drawing from both Zionist and imperial narratives, Tonna's Evangelical novel depicts the journey of an English Jew, Alick Cohen, to the Holy Land where he is so thoroughly moved by the powerful presence of British imperial interests there that he converts to Christianity. In order to understand this novel's depictions of Jewish history and culture imagined in relation to the British imperial arena, I suggest that we must think within and beyond Said's East/West divide, reading the relations between Semitic and Orientalist discourses as another grid through which European identity emerges. Unlike Said's argument in Orientalism, I maintain that Judah's Lion functions as a Western Christian discourse that draws from rather than against an Orientalized Jewish narrative of the return to a land that was wrongly taken. It is a discourse that is relevant to Orientalism, but not wholly explained by it.