English Origins, Jewish Discourse, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel: Reflections on a Nested Nation by Heidi Kaufman (review)

The curiously ubiquitous presence of Jews, Judaism, and the Judaic in nineteenth-century British culture continues to fascinate scholars. In her recent contribution to this body of work, Heidi Kaufman eschews the usual suspects—Oliver Twist (1837–38), Daniel Deronda (1876), and The Way We Live Now (1875)—and looks to the corners of Victorian literary culture to uncover “Jewish discourse” buried in obscure tracts like Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s Judah’s Lion (1843) or forgotten moments in canonical novels such as Jane Eyre (1847) or Middlemarch (1871–72). Building on the ground-breaking work of Bryan Cheyette in Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945 (1993) and Michael Ragussis in Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity (1995), Kaufman argues both that “nineteenth-century novels frequently turned to representations of the theological and historical filiation of Jewish and Christian traditions” and that “depictions of this filiation played a profound role in conceptualizing English identity in this period” (1). Thus, discourse about Jews was not simply hostile or denigratory but productive, enabling writers to imagine and sustain ideas about English identity by figuring “their own history and culture as emerging from or intertwined with a Jewish past” (2). “The version of England that appeared in nineteenth-century novels was more than just a political, religious, or geographical construction; it was also ...a racial nation with a Jewish past” (5).

The book ranges widely across the realist novel and various forms of popular genre literature from the early Victorian period to the Fin de Siècle. This historical and generic breadth enables Kaufman to make a persuasive case for the persistence of the links between the Hebrew Bible, Jewish history, and English national identity. In the first two chapters, Kaufman’s strategic pairings of texts around particular historical moments or locations work especially well: she studies Maria Edgeworth’s and Charles Dickens’s use of the Gordon riots together with perceptions of Lord George Gordon’s conversion to Judaism, and she links Benjamin Disraeli and the popular evangelical writer Tonna through their similar stories of the Englishman’s journey to Palestine. Given this eclectic choice of key texts, however, more contextual discussion is sometimes warranted. Kaufman notes that Judah’s Lion was frequently reprinted throughout the 1840s and the rest of the century, for example, but does not mention that Tonna’s millennialist vision of the restoration of the Jews to the Promised Land and the project of Jewish conversion more generally were also widely mocked.

At the heart of this study is the argument that Jews were seen within two different paradigms in the nineteenth century: the first presented them as the Old Testament source for modern Christianity; the second regarded them as a racial other. While Protestant writers aimed to appropriate the former paradigm, they also sought to allay the threat to national identity entailed by the latter. It was this tension, Kaufman argues, that the novel tried to resolve. Novels, she contends, “were uniquely well suited to this task because of their emphasis on sequential history, character development, and the possibilities of imagining the nation”; through these techniques they “sought to rework or submerge inherent contradictions in their constructions of England as a racially homogenous and religiously distinct nation” (18). Kaufman’s claim works for some texts better than others, and it also sometimes produces convoluted or overly schematic readings. Early Victorian evangelicals like Tonna, after all, were remarkably untroubled by thoughts of the Jews’ racial difference: they wholeheartedly accepted Jewish proselytes and often put them at the helm of their conversion operations. In a different vein, it’s difficult to see how a triumphalist romp like H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) was wracked by anxiety about Jewish racial pollution.

At its best, however, Kaufman’s analysis is striking. Her...