Under Postcolonial Eyes: Figuring the “jew” in Contemporary British Writing by Efraim Sicher and Linda Weinhouse (review)

This volume offers a comprehensive survey of the role of the “jew” as it is manifested in a wide range of contemporary English — British and postcolonial — writing. Referencing and building on the work of Bryan Cheyette, Jean-François Lyotard, Sander Gilman and others, the authors employ the term “jew” as a cultural construct and a multivalent, indeterminate signifier, to demonstrate the way it has served as a “litmus test” (in the words of the summary on the book jacket), conveying less and less attitudes to real life Jews and embodying more and more a host of projections, often contradictory, relating to a wide range of issues including otherness, marginality, homelessness, diaspora and identity, personal and national, among others. At one time or another in British and contemporary history, the “jew” stood for the quintessential alien, marginalized and ostracized. At other times it was viewed a wealthy colonial oppressor. The “jew” can be perceived as a dark and swarthy alien (especially if hailing from Eastern Europe) and, at the same time, as part of the white anti-black establishment.

Central to the book’s concern is the way “the jew” figures in the formation of British society’s idea of itself as a multicultural, globalized postmodern society in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Empire. The looseness and inclusiveness of the terms British and postcolonial in this context allows for a broad sweep of perspectives which is very illuminating. Thus while the publication dates of the texts under discussion cluster around the last two decades of the 20^th century down to the present (with the exception of Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest published in 1952), the events described in the novels range from colonial times and settings, through the Holocaust and India’s transition to Independence to present day postmodern, postcolonial Britain. But the mapping out is not only chronological. Roughly the first half of the book deals with the meaning of the “jew” for non-Jewish writers (such as Doris Lessing, Anita Desai, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, and Caryl Phillips) grappling with identity issues in colonial settings or across the color divide, while the later chapters explore the use of the figure of the “jew” in postmodern British writing (e.g., Julian Barnes and Nigel Williams) and especially in the writings of contemporary Jewish or partly Jewish writers (Jeremy Gavron, Howard Jacobson and others).

The authors begin with a historical survey of the way in which the “jew” has been a “means of self-definition” (2) in English culture, embodying the ultimate Other, which, in most collectives, on a conscious and unconscious level helps define who we are by signifying what we are not. This survey begins with the Medieval period, continues through the early modern period and 19^th century liberal humanism and the formation of the idea of culture, and concludes with present day anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism and the complex and fluid boundaries between the two. What emerges from this detailed account is, on the one hand, the persistent racial stereotyping of the “jew” as the alien, hostile covert “enemy” within, the scapegoat upon which all the unacceptable unconscious traits can be projected, and on the other, the ambivalence inherent in the figure since the advent of liberal humanism — the liberal agenda of inclusiveness and the identification with the Jew as the eternal victim, as opposed to the deeply embedded idea of the Jew denoting Otherness and difference. This ambivalence has given rise to astonishingly diverse uses to which the figure of the “jew” has been put in British and postcolonial writing in the past fifty years, and which this volume attempts to encompass. Only a sampling of that diversity can be referred to here.

One of the central uses of the “jew” explored in the book is as a screen, a substitute for other marginalized or ostracized societal groups, or a means to explore societal and...