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 8 “A Jewish Robert Elsmere”? amy levy, israel zangwill, and the postemancipation jewish novel O Naomi Hetherington I n 1888, the Jewish Publication Society of America was on the lookout to commission a Jewish Robert Elsmere.1 The society was newly formed for the promotion of a modern Jewish literature and culture, and the chair, Judge Mayer Sulzberger, wrote to the journalist Lucien Wolf in London asking whether Amy Levy might “be induced to write a Jewish story for us?”2 The impetus for this request was the American edition of Levy’s novel Reuben Sachs (1888), which criticizes Jewish materialism in a world where religion no longer has a strong hold.3 Levy’s suicide in September 1889 led Wolf to recommend the journalist and Wction writer Israel Zangwill, resulting in the society’s commissioning of Children of the Ghetto (1892), which became, with its British edition, the Wrst Anglo-Jewish best seller.4 Zangwill’s novel is a Jewish response to the You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher.  levy, israel zangwill, and the postemancipation jewish novel religious ferment in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. It contrasts traditional Jewish piety in London’s East End with the spiritual malaise of a younger generation of assimilated Jews. InXuenced by late-Victorian attitudes toward Christianity and Judaism, Zangwill appropriated the language and forms of a Christian majority.5 In particular, Children of the Ghetto plays with key elements of the conversion plot in which Jewish survival hinges on a woman’s fate.6 Its central “allegory of Judaism” is the story of Esther Ansell, a brilliant girl graduate from the East End, who, skeptical of the faith of her childhood, publishes a novel critical of contemporary middle-class Jewish life (CG, 491). Zangwill’s readers have long recognized Levy’s inXuence on the character of Esther, leading to a number of myths that Levy herself came from a poor background and supported her writing through factory work (as Emma Francis ’s chapter in this volume discusses). This chapter explores the literary relationship between Reuben Sachs and Children of the Ghetto to reconsider Levy’s role within the development of the postemancipation Jewish novel. I read her in relation to contemporary anxieties about the disintegration of Jewish religious and cultural life by using Children of the Ghetto as a reception study of her novel. By appropriating Reuben Sachs for his narrative of Jewish revival, Zangwill ensured Levy’s guiding position within the new direction he signposted for AngloJewish Wction. Recounting the commissioning of Children of the Ghetto on Zangwill’s death in 1926, Wolf recalled the “spiritual unrest” of the late 1880s, of which the popularity of Robert Elsmere (1888) was a “symptom.”7 The story of an Anglican clergyman beset by intellectual doubt, it became one of the best-selling novels of the nineteenth century.8 Published the same year, Reuben Sachs illustrated, for Wolf, the “intensity”and “dangers”of this atmosphere of “revolt”for AngloJewry .9 Wolf’s term revolt has been adopted by Bryan Cheyette in his history of the postemancipation Jewish novel to explain Levy’s rejection of an earlier apologetic tradition of Anglo-Jewish Wction.10 A product of the debates about Jewish emancipation in the mid-nineteenth century, the Wrst Jewish novels portrayed the Jewish community as devout, cohesive, patriotic, and deserving of full civil rights.11 Protesting against this oYcial version of morality, the “novel of revolt” was characterized by a critique of the rising Jewish middle classes.12 Reuben Sachs plots Jewish civic and social ambition through Reuben’s choice of a political career over marriage to Judith Quixano, the poor ward of his aunt and uncle the Leunigers. Cheyette argues that Levy transformed the AngloJewish novel through the character of the Jewish idealist.13 This is Leopold You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher.  Naomi Hetherington Leuniger, a musician and reader of poetry, in love with the daughter of an English aristocrat. He welcomes the “absorption” of English Jews into the “people of the country” on account of their “sickening, hideous greed” and “striving for power” (RS, 101). Leo stands for...

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