Imperial Englishness in Julia Frankau's "Book of the Jew"

This article investigates the controversial novel Pigs in Clover, published in 1903 by Anglo-Jewish writer Julia Frankau, and what it exposes about the nature of fin de siècle Englishness and Jewishness. I begin by situating Frankau's fiction within the context of both Jewish and postcolonial studies, particularly the relationships—ones only beginning to receive scholarly attention—between Anglo-Jews and empire. Drawing on this context, I examine how Frankau adapts the plot and rhetoric of conversion from earlier Victorian literature to address two kinds of conversions: the novel's protagonist, Karl Althaus, contemplates a literal conversion from Judaism to Christianity and a figurative conversion to Englishness. By 1900, the once-popular conversion genre, which traced Jewish characters' paths to Protestantism, had given way to plots more attuned to cultural conversion and the development of national identity. Pigs in Clover is the rare book that directly depicts both kinds of conversions, allowing us to compare their methods, ideology, and efficacy. In doing so, the novel illustrates the staying power of conversion as nationalizing strategy and narrative structure. But it also indicates how conversion could link Jews to imperialism in revealing ways. I argue that the novel, after rejecting both religious and cultural conversion, advocates the possibility of converting to a new, secular religion of nationalism, what I call an imperial Englishness. To be English is, in Frankau's fiction, to have faith not in Christianity but in England's culture of empire. Pigs in Clover reminds us that the fear of colonizers' Englishness dissipating when abroad had a counterpoint: the view that Englishness might, paradoxically and problematically, be acquired more effectively when out of England itself.