The Jew: Assumptions of Identity (review)

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Winter 2004) 241–242 JULIET STEYN. The Jew: Assumptions of Identity. London and New York: Cassell, 1999. Pp. ix Ⳮ 214. Twenty years ago the study of Anglo-Jewry was the purview of institutional historians interested in local Jewish communities. The work was detailed but rarely seemed to extend past the limits of local color. Some more meaningful work then appeared in the United States on British Jewry during the Enlightenment, but even that was limited by the assumption of an encapsulated social history that saw the Sonderweg of England in the odd post-Cromwellian trajectory of the Jewish communities. In the past decade, however, there has been an explosion of interest in the cultural history of British Jewry, with a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Works on British writing by and about Jews, on a new Jewish identity in the United Kingdom, and on Anglo-Jewish history as a history of Diasporas, have all made this rather parochial arena of study come alive. That things British are exciting should be no little surprise to American scholars of English, as that field has always been defined in the United States as the study of British literature. That there is also a Jewish component in this field, from the anti-Semitism of Shakespeare or T. S. Eliot to the Jewish writing of Amy Levy or Harold Pinter, is not a great surprise. It is evidence that the British case is of value for the study of the Jewish Diaspora beyond England and the United Kingdom. Juliet Steyn has now expanded the reach of the cultural study of Jews and Jewishness to visual sources with her contribution to the history of the Jew in Britain. She focuses on both non-Jewish and Jewish perceptions , using evidence from art, such as photography (Galton and his Jewish contemporaries), caricature (Dickens’ Fagin and the work of George Cruikshank), and the high art of R. B. Kitaj. To date, there has been no better study of the idea of the Jew in art, especially Jewish art in Britain. Clearly presented, using social historical sources, such as the evidence presented to the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as art historical insight, this book presents a wealth of material and of analysis. Steyn’s bias is toward a psychological reading of how Jewish artists from Mark Gertler to Lily Markiewicz in the United Kingdom imagined their own identity and how they expressed it in art. The deep, complex reading of Jewishness that overlies these traditions of representation is the material that Steyn presents to the 242 JQR 94:1 (2004) reader to support her analysis. That Kitaj, like Eliot, is an American who adopts Britain and English culture is important in showing the special relationship among Diasporas in London. Steyn’s work is unusual because she self-consciously moves from the banal to the complex, from the schematic to the analytic. She makes a strong case that if the United Kingdom is a Sonderweg, then it is one that had much in common with other nationalities in the nineteenth century. University of Illinois/Chicago SANDER L. GILMAN ...