English Origins, Jewish Discourse, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel: Reflections On A Nested Nation (review)

Heidi Kaufman's English Origins, Jewish Discourse, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel takes as its starting point the ways race and religion became increasingly important markers in the construct of English identity in the nineteenth century. As the British worked to redefine themselves along such delicate lines, they were inevitably forced to confront the paradox of constructing themselves as racially distinct from Jews, the very people with whom they shared a "filial past" (10). Kaufman posits that many nineteenth-century novelists attempted to "[rework] this filial connection" (10) by inventing a racially homogonous nation through the use of Jewish discourse, "a system of representations or appropriations of Jewish history, culture, and people" (2). Kaufman's book thus explores the ways writers sought to envision an English identity whose origins were rooted in Jewish history, but whose current state was defined along the lines of supremacy, purity, and "chosen-ness" (5).

Because English Origins takes as its subject a relationship fraught with ambivalence, contradiction, and paradox, Kaufman uses the introductory chapter to explore the concerns that confronted nineteenth-century writers. For instance, Kaufman asks, what are the defining boundaries of Jewishness and Englishness? How can English identity be divorced from its Jewish affiliations if it defines itself through a Jewish discourse? Who is defined as "other" and who is a "legitimate insider" (20)? Following this first chapter is a close reading of seven Romantic and Victorian novels that reveals the ways novelists engaged in what Kaufman calls nesting, the "act of absorbing, enshrining, and embedding ... Jewish traditions and histories ... in the nineteenth-century novel's construction of English national and racial identity" (10). While scholarly interest in the relationship between novels, race, and nation has been prevalent, to say the least, Kaufman notes that much of this work has "left little room for examining varieties within any single grouping [of race/identity], nor have they created opportunities for addressing points of overlap among these categories or groups" (4). English Origins addresses this oversight by pointing directly to the sundry versions of nested identities that were produced in novels at this time. Kaufman's book, then, broadens the way Jewish and Anglican relations can be configured and understood, and the heuristic of nesting enables her to question, if not undermine, the common readings of the novels that she treats in this work, such as the familiar assertion that the vague ending between a Christian and his Jewish lover in Disraeli's Tancred is a marker of Victorian anxiety over miscegenation. Less concerned with how Judaism explicitly figures into literature at this time, Kaufman explores the more interesting and nuanced ways in which British authors manipulated Jewish discourse to create "a racial nation with a Jewish past" (5). In this regard it makes sense that Kaufman examines Middlemarch (a novel with no Jewish characters) and not Daniel Deronda (a novel appealing to Zionist and Jewish sympathies), and allows Barnaby Rudge (an historical novel based on the Gordon Riots) to occupy a more prominent space in her study than its predecessor, Oliver Twist—the novel that introduced readers to Dickens' most famous Jewish character, Fagin.

The chronological structure of Kaufman's study strengthens the evidence that the manipulation of Jewish discourse in novel writing was not exclusive to a particular author or timeframe, but rather a common and durable device that easily adapted to what was most relevant and current at the time. Beginning her analysis with Maria Edgeworth's 1817 novel Harrington, she spans the century with the mid to late nineteenth-century novels, Barnaby Rudge (1841), Judah's Lion (1843), Tancred (1847), Jane Eyre (1847), and Middlemarch (1871-72), and concludes with H. Rider Haggard's 1885 novel King Solomon's Mines. Though Kaufman explains that she chose "novels that best elucidate the power of Jewish discourse to help produce English identity" (25), it is noteworthy that she offers a fair balance of male...