Singing in a Foreign Land: Anglo-Jewish Poetry, 1812–1847 by Karen A. Weisman (review)

With this book, Karen Weisman joins an important group of scholars – Michael Ragussis, Nadia Valman, and Cynthia Scheinberg, among them – who have illuminated both the role of the Jewish writer in nineteenth-century British letters and the texture of Anglo-Jewish life in an often inhospitable "foreign land." Focusing mainly on Romantic era poets, Weisman offers as case studies four women and one man: Emma Lyon, Celia and Marion Moss, Grace Aguilar, and Hyman Hurwitz. She begins with an epigraph from the late century poet Amy Levy: "[The Jew]," Levy wrote in an 1886 essay, "hardly has left … a drop of bucolic blood in his veins." The term bucolic joins other words like pastoral, land, home, elegy, and exile as the keywords of Singing in a Foreign Land and allows Weisman to launch her overall argument in this book: that Anglo-Jewish writers had an almost impossible task in trying to place themselves within a culture that valued – and made central to itself, especially in the Romantic era – attachment to the land and nostalgia for a green world slowly being occluded by an evolving industrial age. Without a home in the English past and a claim to ownership of land and deep national ties, how could a Jewish poet fashion herself in England?

Though Levy's quotation gives Weisman the kernel of her thesis, it does not adequately represent the scope of this book's arguments. The challenge for the Anglo-Jewish writer was not simply her want of rustic blood but, rather, her position as outsider and exile from some other, suspect culture. Weisman gives us the outlines of Jewish discrimination and rights in England as well as the views of those, like Charles Lamb and William Cobbett, who found Jews to be unacceptable as English subjects. Expelled from England in 1290, Jews were only allowed to resettle in the country some four hundred years later. In 1830, the Jewish Relief Bill failed, denying Jews the promise of political equality. Jews could finally sit in Parliament by 1858 and, by 1871, attend Oxbridge. Weisman's poets wrote, then, during decades of fraught and sustained struggle for liberty and inclusion by a small Jewish community.

The struggle had both emboldening and subduing effects on these figures. Their writing displayed audacity and diffidence. Their self-consciousness, feelings of homelessness, and authorial anxiety made them, Weisman argues, extreme cases of Romantic self-reflexivity: their poetic voices inhabited a rare space where the Wandering Jew and the Romantic peripatetic met. Emma Lyon, daughter of a Hebrew scholar who taught at Eton, Oxford, and Cambridge, produced self-effacing lyrics but authoritative biblical translations, the latter bolstered by the tradition of Christian hymn-writing women. She dedicated her 1812 volume of poetry to Princess Charlotte and penned an elegy for her daughter. Hyman Hurwitz, first professor of Hebrew at University College, London, followed suit with a Hebrew dirge for the regent's only child, Charlotte Augusta. Chanted in the Great Synagogue to a melody used on the mournful day of Tisha B'Av and later translated in a Christianizing vein by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the elegy displayed Jewish determination to show fealty to the monarchy but to do so in Jewish form.

Celia and Marion Moss came from a secularizing home and were no longer rooted in Hebrew traditions. Nonetheless, their divided loyalties were much in evidence in their poetry. "The Massacre of the Jews at York," which commemorated the 1190 slaughter of some 150 Jews, emphatically inserts the Jews within English history and verse and yet does so through a violent anti-Semitic episode. In the "Emigrant's Song," the Mosses play on the ambiguity of home – Zion or England? – and exile. Grace Aguilar, of Sephardic lineage, shared the Mosses' double identity and took it a step further, even to the point of self-alienation. In "Song of the Spanish Jews," she meditates on expulsion and exile, clinging to an...