The Racial Romance of Amy Levy's Reuben Sachs

On its publication in 1888, Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy (1861-1889) was initially received as being anti-Semitic in both the Jewish and the mainstream presses. Many reviews were scathingly critical, and some singled out the author for special abuse:

[Levy] is not ashamed of playing the role of an accuser of her people. The unpleasant reproach, derived from ornithological observations, which persons in her position incur, has no terrors for her. She apparently delights in the task of persuading the general public that her own kith and kin are the most hideous types of vulgarity; she revels in misrepresentations of their customs and modes of thought and she is proud of being able to offer her testimony in support of the anti-Semitic theories of the clannishness of her people and the tribalism of her religion.¹

Recent critics have noted, however, that rather than endorsing an anti-Semitic stance, Reuben Sachs takes "self hatred [as] one of its themes."² Bryan Cheyette has posited that the waves of controversy in response to Reuben Sachs inspired a new trend in Jewish self-representation in the 1890s, in which so-called "novels of revolt" interrogated the limits of Jewish emancipation in Britain, whereas previous generations of Jewish writers had written in an apologetic tradition by seeking to demonstrate the compatibility between Jewish life and Protestant English nationalism.³ Levy's novel fits Cheyette's first category, but in a complex way which retains strong thematic links to the second. It rehearses and critiques popular tropes for representing Jews, including materialism, repression of women, clannishness and, importantly, racial degeneration. In Reuben Sachs, anxieties about Jewish insularity and inassimilability are expressed in the language of contemporary race science, as when the Sachs family are described in the anthropological terms that so exercised the anonymous reviewer from the Jewish World:

Born and bred in the very heart of nineteenth century [sic] London, belonging to an age and a city which has seen the throwing down of so many barriers, the levelling of so many distinctions of class, of caste, of race, of opinion, they had managed to retain the tribal characteristics, to live within the tribal pale to an extent which spoke worlds for the national conservatism.... Their friends, with few exceptions, were of their own race, the making of acquaintance outside the tribal barrier being sternly discouraged by the authorities.⁴

One consequence of the insularity that is here associated with immutable racial characteristics is imperfect participation in non-Jewish national life. The frustrated desire for integration that is expressed in Reuben Sachs has attracted to Levy the epithet of "self-hating Jew," recalling Sander Gilman's definition of Jewish self-hatred, or the subject's internalisation of dominant stereotypes about his or her marginalised group.⁵ Considerable scholarly interest in Levy's oeuvre has led to more nuanced interpretations of her engagements with Judaism, including Linda Hunt Beckman's reading of Reuben Sachs as undermining through free indirect discourse the narrative voice that propounds anti-Semitic rhetoric, and Nadia Valman's argument that Levy was "driven by the intellectual agenda of contemporary liberal feminism."⁶ In addition, Emma Francis has negotiated the seemingly oppositional categories of Levy's progressive feminism and her exaggerated representation of Jewish conservatism, as well as the effect of Darwinism on her views on race and sexuality.⁷

We may build upon this attention to race, gender and form to consider the stance endorsed by Reuben Sachs regarding the continuity of Jewish life in England. Given that the novel's representation of Jewishness as a racial inheritance was problematic for its earliest readers, and that two recent critics have concluded that Levy "unthinkingly replicates"⁸ contemporary race-thinking, it may appear as though she is ultimately pessimistic regarding the place of Jewish physiology and culture within the conditions of modernity. Indeed, we may ask: does she wish to see Judaism "bred out" of the body and out of London? Is she concerned to protect Jewish cultural difference or merely to witness its demise? Does she view Jewish racial decline as coterminous with...