THE JEW IN FICTION.* Tars is a useful and an
interesting little book, and it is written throughout in the best possible spirit. The author's thesis is that the popular misconception about the Jews has been largely caused by the misrepresentation of them in. works of fiction. In days gone by the Jew was commonly regarded under two aspects,—a man under a divine curse, and a grinding, sordid, inhuman usurer. The former idea cul- minated in the fiction of The Wandering Tew, and it seems to have made the late Lord Beaconsfield more indignant than even the brutal treatment of his race. And let us say at once that, whatever we may think of Lord Beaconsfield as a politician and party man, his defence of the Jews was a very noble trait in his character. The natural propensity of the convert is to disparage the religion or party which he has abandoned ; and the temptation of one converted from an oppressed and a despised race is to hide his connection with it. The Jews have been no excep- tion. Abraham becomes " Braham," Levison " Lewson," to conceal the Jewish origin. Impelled by similar motives, the oppressed Irish have, in multitudes of instances, Saxonised and Normanised names purely Celtic. It was much to the credit of Lord Beaconsfield that he rose superior to this temptation. His grandfather chose the name D'Israeli to
• The Jew in English Fiction. By Babb! David Philipaoa, D.D. Oinahinati: Hobert Clark and Co. 1£03.
identify himself for ever, openly and publicly, with the race of Israel ; and Lord Beaconsfield tells the fact with honourable pride. There can be little doubt that he would have furthered his political ambition by a less ostentatious championship of the Jews. For, not content with defending them, he exalted them immeasurably above the races that oppressed them, and especially above the proud aristocracy of England, by whose aid alone he could reach the goal of his ambition.
It is impossible not to admire the indomitable courage of the political parvenu who, while aspiring to lead the Tory Party and become Prime Minister of England, could characterise
the proudest aristocracy in the world as, in comparison with his own race, a " mongrel breed," lying under the ban of "that irresistible law of Nature which is fatal to curs." In Sybil he tells the working classes that they are a nation of oppressed " serfs," " ground down by an aristocracy com- posed of those who plundered the Church in the reign of Henry VIII., who plundered India in the•reign of George and " who plundered the nation in the reign of George IV.," " fat graziers and second-rate squires." No doubt Lord Beaconsfield carried his defence of the Jews to extravagant lengths, as in that disagreeable passage in Tancred where his Jewish heroine, evidently expressing his own sentiments, addresses the hero of the book (a Christian) in the following language :—" We have some conclusions in common. We agree that half Christendom worships a Jewess, and the other half a Jew. Now let me ask you one more question. Which do you think should be the superior race, the worshipped or the worshippers P" This is, of course, an absurd, and to a Christian mind a somewhat shocking argument. But it was the natural reaction from a gross injustice; and we cannot help admiring the pluck of the man who could thus risk, almost court, the indignation and resentment of the very class which he was aspiring to lead, and through whom alone he could compass his ends. And it is unquestionable that his vigorous and defiant championship did help to create in England a more favourable opinion of the Jews.
Our author corrects Lord Beaconsfield on two points. The first is, Lord Beaconsfield's dictum that from Asia alone great movements can go forth, since there alone the Divine in- fluence rests, and there alone God spoke with man. In a conversation with Sidonia, Tancred said :—" I have for a time suspected that inspiration is not only a Divine, but a local quality." Lord Beaconsfield (in the person of Sidonia) answers :—" I believe that God spoke to Moses on Mount Horeb, and you believe that He was crucified in the person of Jesus on Mount Calvary. Both were children of Israel and spoke Hebrew to the Hebrews. The Prophets were only Hebrews. The Apostles were only Hebrews. It is a part of the Divine scheme that its influence shall only be local." Our author, himself a Rabbi, speaks of "the narrowness and fallacy of this conception," and he is right. Yet we suspect that at bottom Lord Beaconsfield meant only what Browning has expressed so forcibly in Luna :— " My own East ! How nearer God we were ! He glows above With scarce an intervention, presses close And palpitatingly, His soul o'er ours : We feel Him, nor by painful reason know ! The everlasting minute of Creation Is felt there; now it is, as it was then ; All changes at His instantaneous will, Not by the operation of a law
Whose Maker is elsewhere at other work."
The other misconception which Rabbi Philipson corrects is Lord Beaconsfield's contention that " the Jews are essentially Tories." " The native tendency of the Jewish race, who are justly proud of their blood, is against the doctrine of the equality of man." Our author admits this tendency on the part of the Jews in England, but justly observes that in Germany, France, Italy, and Russia, the Jews " are among the levellers, or at least the Liberals." Of course, our author and Lord Beaconsfield are right in denying that the Jewish race is now under a divine malediction for the orucifixion on Calvary. At the same time, there is often in the lives of nations, as of individuals, a crisis, a day of visitation, which, if neglected, may seal the fate of the nation or individual.
Our author takes as examples of the Jew in fiction, Mar- lowe's Jew of Malta, Shakespeare's Shylock, Cumberland's The Jew, Scott's Ivanhoe, the Jews in Dickens's Oliver Twist and Our Mutual Friend, the representation of the Jews in Disraeli's Calvingslry and Tancred, and in George Eliot's Daniel Deranda. The author complains with great justice that in Marlowe's play, in Shylock, and in other fictions of the kind, bad characters among the Jews are taken as types of the race and religion. Jews who suddenly become rich are apt to become " shoddy,"—vulgar, purse-
proud, and ostentatious. But these characteristics are as true of other races and religions. The proverb about setting a " beggar on horseback " had not its origin in Jewish examples.
It is hard, moreover, to vilify the Jews for being to a large extent the money-lenders of the world, considering that the
legislation of Christendom for a long time shut them out from almost every other means of livelihood. Our author also gives evidence to show that even in medifeval times, when the prejudice against the Jews was fiercest, the usury of Christian money-lenders was sometimes more cruel and intolerable than that of the Jews. In Marlowe's Jew of Malta, we find one of the vilest examples of humanity re- presented, and this was acted before admiring audiences as a fair type of the Jews in general, and thus helped to propagate an entirely false and cruel libel on a persecuted race. The author argues, with much plausibility, that in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare intended to vindicate the Jewish race from this injurious aspersion. And certainly Shylock had good reason to hate his Christian antagonists. Shake- speare puts language of noble, and sometimes pathetic if somewhat vindictive, dignity into his mouth. And the poet contrives to let us see that the Jew, after all, is defeated by a quibble,—that, in short, the prejudice against him was such that a Court of Law could not be expected to do justice to a Jewish complainant against a Christian. We believe that Irving interprets Shakespeare truly in enlisting sympathy on behalf of Shylock. In The Jew of Cumberland, the author admits that the favourable picture of the Jew, though true in substance of many Jews, is overdrawn as a type. And he argues that the Jew in Our Mutual Friend is intended to undo the injustice done to the Jews in Oliver Twist. His criticisms on the representations of the Jews in Ivanhoe and Daniel Deronda are excellent, and on the whole accurate and just. We observe, how- ever, that the author, like many other cultivated Jews of our day, abandons all idea of a separate Jewish nationality in the future, or any desire for the restoration of a Jewish Com- monwealth. It might be asked,—Why, then, the apparently Providential preservation of the Jews as a separate race, mingling with the ocean of humanity like the Gulf Stream, yet retaining their individuality through all vicissitudes P If ever there was a national type which seems indestructible, it is the Jewish. When one of that race marries a Gentile the type, mentally and physically, has a tendency to persist and reproduce itself through several generations. The author's answer is that " on the day that Israel was scattered among the nations, its Messianic mission began,"—the mission, namely, of upholding and propagating the doctrine of monotheism. Christians cannot, of course, accept that conclusion, for they affirm that Christianity is a monotheistic religion. They must, therefore, find some other solution of the problem of the existence of the Jews as a separate, highly endowed, and apparently indestructible race, mingling with the nations of the world, but not amalgamating. That, however, is a subject too large for the fag-end of an article. Rabbi Philipson has done good service to his race by this little volume, and he has certainly written nothing to ruffle the sensibilities of those who may differ from him.
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