The Jew's Daughter: A Cultural History of a Conversion Narrative by Efraim Sicher (review)

This is an excellent study that will remain a milestone in an age of ever- proliferating cultural histories. What makes it so is not only its enthralling topic nor the impressive range of material marshalled by its author but also its rigorous analysis and perceptive interpretation and the compelling narrative spun from it all. The representation of the Jewish other in western cultural production is racialized; it is also gendered and, frequently, sexualized. In his new study, Efraim Sicher explores from a comparative perspective the gendered difference of the Jew as it emerges and evolves in shifting discourses about the body, religion, and race as well as gender, sexuality, and nation from the medieval period to the present day. His focus is on the inherent dichotomy of representations of the Jewish father and his daughter (the mother is usually absent from the conventional constellation) and their correlation to shifting cultural paradigms of masculinity and femininity, of exclusion and inclusion, and of attraction and repulsion.

While it engages in a discerning conversation with invaluable earlier studies such as Florian Krobb's Die schöne Jüdin (1993), Nadia Valman's The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (2007), and Éric Fournier's more recent La belle juive (2012), Sicher's absorbing study is unprecedented in its scope and ventures far beyond their individual range in its scrutiny across time and space. It is, in this respect, akin to George K. Anderson's exhaustive thematic study of The Legend of the Wandering Jew (1965) which, in some ways, it complements. Yet Sicher's approach is anchored in a more recent methodological and theoretical framework; it is informed by a pervasive cultural historical approach that convincingly incorporates gender studies, critical race studies, and postcolonial studies.

The long-recognized centrality to representations of "Jew" and "Jewess" in western cultural production of Shakespeare's Shylock and Jessica and of Scott's Rebecca in Ivanhoe is not challenged in Sicher's book. But both texts and their respective impact are persuasively situated by the author in an extensive web of literary, folkloristic, artistic, and musical manifestations of the Jewish other and more particularly of the Beautiful Jewess across Europe and North America. In this way, tracing its antecedents and metamorphoses, Sicher demonstrates the evolution and far-flung dissemination of the trope, and his erudite and meticulously researched study goes a long way to explaining the mechanism of its propagation and its underlying motivations from the Middle Ages to the present day.

Significantly, Sicher's scrutiny is aimed not only at well-known texts—such as Shakespeare's and Scott's and, for instance, Marlowe's The Jew of Malta—but also at more obscure narratives and narrative traditions. He locates the origins of the figure of the Beautiful Jewess in medieval cultural production with the allegorical figures of Ecclesia and Synagoga prominently displayed in sacred architecture and, more specifically, with the appearance of the Jew's (beautiful) daughter since the twelfth century in literary and folkloristic renderings of the blood libel and in exempla. Within the latter traditions emerged the malevolent and sexually rapacious antitype of the Virgin Mary and, initially in parallel but with a more persistent trajectory, the desirable and virtuous maiden whose eventual conversion facilitates her marriage to a Christian. The beauty of the Jew's daughter, signaling her moral appetence and her convertibility, is programmatically contrasted to the somatic and moral ugliness of her father. Sicher astutely uses the relational pattern of this enduring familial configuration to throw into relief the gendered difference of the Jewish other that was mostly predicated on the respective conversion potential of either figure until the late nineteenth century produced the trope of the juive fatale—the Beautiful Jewess as a femme fatale.

The conversion narrative construed around the figure of the Beautiful Jewess is in fact the common thread that links the various segments of...