The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (review)

Anglo-American literary culture can't keep its mind off the idea of the Jew as artist-and-intellect, which has at least since Trollope been a primary figure for our love-hate relation with the pursuit of the best that has been known and said and created. Such rhetorical projection is at once anti- and philo-Semitic enough to warm the heart of any cultural studies critic, but the plot thickens in one of history's wondrous acts of fulfillment-cum-comeuppance: the diasporic offspring of the uncultured Eastern European poor making Matthew Arnold's project magnificently their own, and, in so doing, making a place for themselves and their concerns within the intellectual establishment of Anglo descent, the English academy especially. Jonathan Freedman examines this dialectic in The Temple of Culture, enacting via a bidirectional genitive the relay between representation (High Culture's construction of Jewish secularism) and self-determination (the reconstruction of High Culture by secularizing Jews) that is his formidable subject. Freedman traces a complex history with erudite, nuanced rigor worthy both of his key interlocutor, Henry James, and the midcentury scholars—Philip Rahv, Leon Edel, Lionel Trilling—who took possession of James's legacy. Freedman himself is sufficiently a master of Anglo-American letters, I am happy to report, to challenge the emergent paradigm of assimilation-as-racialization (the putative change from Jews as victims of unadulterated anti-Semitism to highly placed perpetrators of encoded whiteness) by testing it against imagined and experienced Jewish particularity, a working-within-the-rules of Whiteness studies to query both ends of this otherwise strong narrative.

Halfway through, Freedman analyzes a crucial and fascinating switch-point: in 1895, George du Maurier's Trilby (1895) caused mass hysteria by conjuring up a prophetic variation on the Jewish archetype, Svengali, whose unveiling as the manipulative genius behind chanteuse Trilby's magic allows du Maurier's audience the contradictory fantasy of reaching out to Jewish specialness (art's allure, art's intelligence) and keeping its more potent manifestations (the fear of perversity, anxiety over modern alienation) at arm's length. Concluding the Trilby chapter, Freedman warns that for Jews on the other side of the Atlantic, the forthcoming battle to wrest authority from "genteel, largely Protestant cultural mediators" will come at the cost of "the unmaking of their own Jewishness"—a crisis of ethno-religious loss that Freedman defines as "assimilation to a cultural and social sphere that has had little space for the kind of maniacal energy and cultural lability so spectacularly epitomized by Svengali" (116). In measured judgment, Freedman steps away from the rigorously postmodern, infinitely regressive unpacking of Jewishness as (mass)-mediated contestation to enter the contest himself, deploying, with inspired dexterity, a fictional figure—Svengali!—who first came into the world by outlandish goyish projection. The challenge of Temple's culture to Culture's temple, indeed.