Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature 0192871730, 9780192871732

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Figures
Introduction: Money Laundering and the Sensational Jew
1. Region, Capitalism, and the Jew in the Post-Tom Plantation Novel
2. La Belle Juive, or “Jew”?: From Rachel Félix to The Marble Faun
3. Desire by Proxy: The Cosmopolitan Jew in Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme
4. Fagin in America
Conclusion: Race, Money, and the Jew
Coda: Charlottesville, “Molineux,” and the Phantom Jew
Endnotes
References
Index

Citation preview

Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature

OX FORD STUDIES IN AMERIC AN LITER ARY HISTORY Gordon Hutner, Series Editor

Schools of Fiction Literature and the Making of the American Educational System Morgan Day Frank Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies An Aesthetics in All Things Cody Marrs Climate and the Picturesque in the American Tropics Michael Boyden

Jewish American Writing and World Literature Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody Saul Noam Zaritt Patriotism by Proxy The Civil War Draft and the Cultural Formation of Citizen-Soldiers, 1863–1865 Colleen Glenney Boggs Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth-Century US Literary History Maria A. Windell

Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature Kelly Ross

Speculative Fictions Explaining the Economy in the Early United States Elizabeth Hewitt

Telling America's Story to the World Literature, Internationalism, Cultural Diplomacy Harilaos Stecopoulos

Modern Sentimentalism Affect, Irony, and Female Authorship in Interwar America Lisa Mendelman

Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States Thomas Constantinesco

Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States Travis M. Foster

Literary Neurophysiology Memory, Race, Sex, and Representation in U.S. Writing, 1860–1914 Randall Knoper

Anxieties of Experience Jeffrey Lawrence

Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835–1874 John Evelev

Transoceanic America Michelle Burnham

Time and Antiquity in American Empire Roma Redux Mark Storey The Latino Continuum and the Nineteenth-Century Americas Literature, Translation, and Historiography Carmen Lamas Violentologies Violence, Identity, and Ideology in Latina/o Literature B.V. Olguin Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction Thomas J. Ferraro The Archive of Fear White Crisis and Black Freedom in Douglass, Stowe, and Du Bois Christina Zwarg

Forms of Dictatorship Jennifer Harford Vargas

Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age Nathan Wolff History, Abolition, and the Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing Jeffrey Insko The Center of the World June Howard Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866–1900 Elizabeth Renker The Civil War Dead and American Modernity Ian Finseth The Puritan Cosmopolis Nan Goodman White Writers, Race Matters Gregory S. Jay

Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature D AV I D A N T H O N Y

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © David Anthony 2023 The moral rights of the author have been asserted All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2023935118 ISBN 978–0–19–287173–2 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192871732.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Acknowledgments This book has benefited immeasurably from the support of various individuals and organizations. Initial research funding was provided by a long-term NEH Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA. The remarkable staff at the AAS was incredibly supportive and helpful. Jonathan Freedman provided early encouragement, and his scholarship on the figure of the Jew has served as inspiration for my own. Gordon Hutner had initial faith in this project, remarkable patience during the composition process, and sage editorial advice throughout. Kirsten Dillender was a tireless and amazing copyeditor. This book has been a long time in the making, and I’m grateful to my family for their support and patience. My mother, Judy Anthony, passed away before this could be completed, but her love and faith in my work helped me see this through. My in-laws, Bob and Shirley Desmond, have been similarly supportive. My son Aidan has been a source of wonder and pride, and a true friend, throughout the book-writing process. Most of all, I want to acknowledge and thank my wife, Erin Anthony. She has been an insightful and demanding reader of various drafts of this book. She has also been a loving partner. This book is dedicated to her. Early portions of Chapters 1 and 2 were published in American Literature and ALH, respectively.

Contents List of Figures

Introduction: Money Laundering and the Sensational Jew

viii

1

1. Region, Capitalism, and the Jew in the Post-Tom Plantation Novel

21

2. La Belle Juive, or “Jew”?: From Rachel F´elix to The Marble Faun

51

3. Desire by Proxy: The Cosmopolitan Jew in Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme

78

4. Fagin in America

101

Conclusion: Race, Money, and the Jew

129

Coda: Charlottesville, “Molineux,” and the Phantom Jew

148

Endnotes References Index

156 187 197

List of Figures I.1. T. W. Whitley, The People Putting Responsibility to the Test, or the Downfall of the Kitchen Cabinet and Collar Presses (1834) Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

2

I.2. John C. White, Shylock’s Year, or 1840 with no Bankrupt Law (1840) Courtesy, Library of Congress.

9

I.3. H. R. Robinson, The Downfall of Mother Bank (1833) Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

15

1.1. “The Great Labor Question from a Southern Point of View,” Harper’s Magazine (July 29, 1865) Courtesy, Library of Congress.

49

2.1. Rachel Félix in the Broadway Belle (September 10, 1855) Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

53

2.2. The Dying Jewess (1833) Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

57

2.3. Gleason’s Pictorial: The Jewess (1853) Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

58

2.4. “The Jewess of Constantina,” The Union Magazine of Literature and Art (January 1848) Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

64

2.5. Syria the Jewess, Street and Smith’s (1864–65) Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

71

3.1. The Crown Jewels, The New York Ledger (November 28, 1857) Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

82

4.1. Playbill for 1852 Production of Oliver Twist at National Theater in Boston Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

102

4.2. Cover of The Life, Confession and Execution of the Jew and Jewess (1856) Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

104

C.1. John Bull and the American Loan, in The New York Illustrated News (1861) Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

133

C.2. The Height of Madness, in Frank Leslie’s Budget of Fun (1864) From the John and Selma Appel Collection of Ethnic Images, Michigan State University Museum.

134

Coda 1. Edward Clay, How to Make the Mare/Mayor Go (1838) Courtesy, Library of Congress.

152

Introduction Money Laundering and the Sensational Jew

One of the more enduring images in American culture is of the Jew either gloating over or lusting after a cache of riches. From the moment in George Lippard’s The Quaker City (1845) when the “Jewish dwarf ” Gabriel Von Gelt stands above a chest of stolen gold doubloons and whispers “Bi-Gott! . . . I smellsh te gooldt already!” all the way up to the current popularity of the “Happy Merchant” meme on alt-right websites, the avaricious, scheming Jew stages a particular American primal scene.1 In it we glimpse in displaced form a disturbing but also riveting version of our own origins as desiring consumer-citizens under capitalism. But why this origin story? Why the Jew? In the final chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno examine the notion of the Jew as “thief.” “That is why people shout: ‘Stop thief !’—and point at the Jew,” they write. “The Jews were the trauma of the knights of industry, who have to masquerade as productive creators. In the Jewish jargon they detect what they secretly despise in themselves: their anti-Semitism is self-hate, the bad conscience of the parasite.”2 The image Horkheimer and Adorno offer of the Jew as “thief ” speaks to their sense that the Jew of the postEnlightenment era embodies a specific “trauma,” one related to the emerging market selfhood I’m describing. This stereotype of the thief, they argue, is a projected figure for a felt sense of loss—a separation from the spontaneous “ebb and flow” of nature and the creative impulses of mimesis.3 But their thinking applies to the representational space in which the Jew first appears with real frequency and purpose in the US. This space is antebellum sensationalism— the schlocky, lowbrow genre made up of dime novels like The Quaker City, penny newspapers, lithographs, and other cheap published ephemera. Here we can see in elaborate form the self-hatred and bad conscience Horkheimer and Adorno describe. We can also see glimpses of the longing that accompanies the trauma of modernity. This book is an effort to understand what this material can tell us about this dynamic of longing and loss, and with it the cultural work of antisemitism. Emerging at the moment when the modern, panic-prone credit economy was first taking hold in American culture, sensationalism is, I argue, a crucial but often overlooked archive for understanding

Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature. David Anthony, Oxford University Press. © David Anthony (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192871732.003.0001

2

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

our background as citizens of capitalism and for analyzing the role of the Jew in shaping that new form of subjectivity. A good place to begin is an 1834 political cartoon by T. W. Whitley entitled The People Putting Responsibility to the Test, or the Downfall of the Kitchen Cabinet and Collar Presses. See (Figure I.1). Here we encounter a scene which captures several of the aesthetic and social dynamics I want to discuss over the course of this study.4 Depicting the chaotic response to President Andrew Jackson’s controversial decision in late 1833 to withdraw federal funds from the Bank of the United States and redistribute them to “pet” state banks, Whitley shows us a crowd of White farmers, laborers, and tradesmen rioting and shouting about the collapsing economy.5 At the same time, Jackson is fleeing, stage right, on the back of his fictional sidekick, Major Jack Downing. Meanwhile, in the background, the statue of justice is being pulled down despite the complaints of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall (“[T]he day of retribution is at hand,” Marshall says). But it’s the foreground of the image

Figure I.1. T. W. Whitley, The People Putting Responsibility to the Test, or the Downfall of the Kitchen Cabinet and Collar Presses (1834) Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

INTRODUCTION: MONEY L AUNDERING AND THE SENSATIONAL JEW

3

that captures our attention. This is where we see a Jewish “Stock & Exchange Broker” named Levi clutching a sack of bullion and engaging in a financial transaction with a sailor. “I say Moses give us some ballast for this here bit of rag,” the sailor says. Levi responds as follows: “Mine Got that ish one of the Pet Bankhs I’ll give you one Dollar for the Ten.” Deploying the stereotype of the Jew as greedy and opportunistic (unlike the sailor, he knows that currency from Jackson’s pet banks is a good investment), the cartoon implies it is the Jew who has stolen the nation’s missing gold bullion. It’s a wonder no one is yelling “Stop thief !” at Levi—but not just because he’s stealing the nation’s fiscal security. In addition, the Jew is in possession, somehow, of that part of the nation’s selfhood and identity that has been lost in the transition to a capitalist economy. He is what capitalist personhood despises in itself. And this is why, relatedly, the Jew embodies the chaos we see behind him. He is the very figure of panic and instability, not just the financial panic, but the social panic, writ large, of a society that has become both modern and worryingly unstable.6 Whitley’s cartoon thus anticipates the genre of literary sensationalism that will emerge in full force over the next decade: the cheap, hyperbolic material that emphasizes suspense, crime, sexual titillation, adventure, and heightened emotion. As critics have shown, sensationalism emerged directly on the heels of various new forms of publication and entertainment in the mid- to late 1830s and early 1840s: penny press newspapers such as James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald, trial reports, crime pamphlets, story papers, blackface minstrelsy and other forms of popular theater, and political cartoons like Whitley’s.7 And as these critics have made clear, sensationalism specializes in precisely the sort of exaggerated rendering of social tensions—political, economic, racial, classbased—that Whitley utilizes in his critique of Jackson’s fiscal policies. Yet if this is the case, we need to ponder the deployment of the Jew as a figure of Otherness, both in this image, and in what Shelley Streeby refers to as the more general “culture of sensation” in the antebellum period.8 Often borrowed from European models such as Shylock, Fagin, Jessica, and Rebecca, stereotyped and cartoonish Jewish characters are mainstays of the fiction of popular writers like Lippard, Ned Buntline (aka E. Z. C. Judson), A. J. H. Duganne, and many others.9 Indeed, this list also includes canonical writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman.10 And what we see is that this material works relentlessly to stage the Jew in the manner of Whitley’s image. The moment I cite above from The Quaker City is one of dozens of such scenes in antebellum sensationalism. The description in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860) of Miriam Schaefer’s father is simply the more refined variant on the same theme. “It was said, for example, that

4

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

Miriam was the daughter and heiress of a great Jewish banker (an idea perhaps suggested by a certain rich Oriental character in her face,) and had fled from her paternal home to escape a union with a cousin, the heir of another of that golden brotherhood; the object being, to retain their vast accumulation of wealth within the family.”11 Not just palpably foreign in accent and appearance, but also pathologically greedy and guardedly, even perversely, insular, the Jew of these and other sensational texts—or the figure I’ll refer to as the “sensational Jew”—acts as the anxious-making dark double to the rapid and confused capitalist growth in the mid nineteenth-century US. To reference Mary Shelley’s introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, the Jew is in many ways the “hideous progeny” of the culture of sensation.12 Grotesque, shameful, potentially dangerous, and frighteningly mutable, the sensational Jew is a stitched-together amalgam of various forms of social anxiety. As such, this figure mirrors sensationalism even as it crystalizes it. Zygmunt Bauman addresses this effort to project anxieties about economic and social disorder onto the Jew with particular nuance. “The great fear of modern life is that of under-determination, unclarity, uncertainty—in other words, of ambivalence,” he writes. “And so the temptation is to ‘deambivalentize’ the ambivalence, by condensing it or focusing it onto one obvious and tangible object—and then burn ambivalence down in this effigy.”13 For Bauman—building, I believe, on Horkheimer and Adorno’s discussion about the post-Enlightenment obsession with rational progress, utility, and order—this scapegoated figure is the same as in Whitley’s image: the Jew. “In the mobile world the Jews were the most mobile of all,” Bauman says. [I]n the world of boundary-breaking, they broke most boundaries; in the world of melting solids, they made everything, including themselves, into a formless plasma in which any form could be born only to dissolve again. . . . [T]hey were walking alarms alerting one to the arrival of the strange new world of the free-for-all.14

The modern free-for-all Bauman describes is the context for the tumult and chaos of Whitley’s cartoon, and for American sensationalism. And again, the figure who best embodies this free-for-all world is the Jew. He is the symbol for what Bauman terms “proteophobia”—a fear not of Otherness per se, but rather a fear of disorder and ambivalence.15 The sensational Jew of the antebellum period thus anticipates Matthew Arnold’s claim in Culture and Anarchy (1869) that the crass commercialism and philistinism of the English bourgeoisie in the Victorian era was “Hebraic”

INTRODUCTION: MONEY L AUNDERING AND THE SENSATIONAL JEW

5

in nature.16 Arnold holds out the possibility for cultural conversion to a transcendent, “Hellenic” liberal culture. But as Bryan Cheyette and Michael Ragussis both argue, his universalizing ideal is centered on basic assumptions about an essential racial difference between Hellenic “Indo-European people” and Hebraic “Semitic people.”17 “[O]nce racial difference is constructed in this fashion,” Cheyette writes, “then the uncontained ‘semitic growth’ of Hebraism can always be represented as a potentially disruptive or ‘anarchic’ force.”18 Cheyette’s reading of Arnold helps us begin to understand the presence of the sensational Jew in antebellum America. On the one hand, much in the way Bauman suggests, this figure is constructed as an effigy, the burning of which helps symbolically purify the modern capitalist world. At the same time, it is this character’s specific form of Otherness that allows him (and her) to do such complex cultural work. Imagined as avaricious, disconnected from the national or local polity, jealous and vengeful, sexually lascivious, and, ostensibly, different at the level of biology and race, the sensational Jew is in many ways the inverted and thus unrecognized mirror image of modern Gentile culture at mid-century. Accordingly, like Arnold’s Jew, he can never be fully converted or assimilated. But, also as with Arnold’s figure of Hebraic Otherness, this is the point. For, in ways that I’ll discuss, the sensational Jew’s role as a discomfiting, ultimately uncanny version of Gentile selfhood is central to the project of sensationalism itself.19 Which leads us to the question of what, exactly, we mean by antebellum sensationalism. This material was immensely popular, even more so than the competing arena of sentimental middlebrow novels like The Lamplighter (1854), and far more so than elite highbrow books like The Scarlet Letter (1850). David Reynolds describes a “hunger for sensationalism” during this period, one that for the first time “could be fed easily on a mass scale” due to improvements in print technology and book distribution.20 Hence commentary like the following from Godey’s Lady’s Book in an 1849 piece on Lippard: “This author . . . is unquestionably the most popular writer of the day, and his books are sold, edition after edition, thousand after thousand, while those of others accumulate like useless lumber on the shelves of publishers.”21 But why did sensationalism have such appeal? Certainly, as Michael Denning and others emphasize, by staging class tension in the manner of the above Whitley cartoon, novels like The Quaker City voice the concerns of working-class readers.22 Similarly, as Streeby, Alexander Saxton, and others suggest, the work of writers like Buntline and Lippard appealed to the nativist, imperialist, and often explicitly racist leanings of many readers, working class and otherwise.23 Streeby terms this the “‘mechanic accents’ of empire.”24 In

6

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

like manner, these and other scholars have argued that sensationalism reflects, usually in problematic ways, the nation’s deeply felt anxieties about gender and sexuality.25 But what if we shift our focus somewhat and think more broadly about the affective dynamics of this material—the “sensational” aspects of sensationalism? For surely the most striking aspect of this genre is its staging of overwrought emotion. Eyes bulging, hair standing on end, arms lifted in dismay—this affective excess is the hallmark of sensational writers like Lippard, George Thompson, and their precursor, Poe. Consider the pitched scene in The Quaker City when the wealthy libertine Byrnewood Arlington realizes that his bet with another member of his privileged set, Gus Lorrimer, about the “seduction” of a young woman in Monk Hall actually involves his sister, Mary. The following description of Arlington bound and gagged while his sister is raped in the next room is both telling and representative. “Over his entire countenance flashed a mingled expression of surprise, horror, and woe, that convulsed every feature with a spasmodic movement, and forced his large black eyes from their sockets. . . . He pressed both hands nervously against his forehead, as though his brain was tortured by internal flame.”26 The quotation contains echoes of Whitley’s tumultuous The People Putting Responsibility to the Test, as well as of Poe. “[O]h, pity me, miserable wretch that I am!” Roderick Usher famously tells the narrator about the live burial of his sister Madeline in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” “We have put her living in the tomb!”27 The narrators and the characters of these and other sensational texts don’t speak or communicate so much as they deliver lines, many of which end with exclamation points. It’s a heightened, performative discourse, one that seems almost to be aimed past the fourth wall of the text to the broader realm of readers’ emotion and morality. Accordingly, we need to ask: What does this consistently excessive emotional register, this particularly American frisson, mean, exactly? What does it tell us? By way of answer, I suggest we read the work of Lippard, Buntline, Thompson, and other sensational writers through the lens of another, related genre. That genre is melodrama, which resembles an intimate first cousin to American sensationalism. Consider Peter Brooks’s influential description of “the melodramatic imagination.” “The connotations of the word [melodrama] are probably similar for us all,” he writes. “They include: the indulgence of strong emotionalism; moral polarization and schematization; extreme states of being, situations, actions; overt villainy, persecution of the good, and final reward of virtue; inflated and extravagant expression; dark plottings, suspense, breathtaking peripety.”28 Brooks could well be describing The Quaker City.29 The

INTRODUCTION: MONEY L AUNDERING AND THE SENSATIONAL JEW

7

moment that Arlington learns that the woman Lorrimer plans to assault is actually his sister, we see the melodramatic moment when a villain comes face to face with his own transgressions and crimes. For in fact, Arlington has himself assaulted many women in like manner. In him, then, we’re confronted with the guilty conscience of the modern capitalist male. Yet this is Lippard’s point. No longer in communion with a larger sense of meaning or belief, men like Arlington are left only with plaintive self-castigation.30 As such, Arlington’s response makes clear the moral stakes of the novel, and of antebellum sensation fiction more generally. His anguish reflects the desire for an ethical world located behind the cruel excesses of capitalist greed and lechery, both of which are represented by Arlington and Lorrimer, but also, in their imaginations, by the Jew Von Gelt. Hence the gothic claptrap of Lippard’s novel, especially as we see it in the notorious Monk Hall, a dilapidated mansion on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Hidden passages, trapdoors, live burial in basements—we’re aware that this is all overdone. But if we take these gothic-sensational tropes seriously, they might also be read as a signal that the Enlightenment embrace of reason and rationality has fallen short in mid-century America. Instead, there is only the confusion and the ambivalence that capitalism wreaks. This, indeed, may be the lesson of antebellum sensationalism, the city mystery, or urban gothic subgenre in particular. The characters are searching for a broader meaning that simply can’t be discovered, or that doesn’t exist, save in the most personal of terms: heroism and villainy. And that villainy is often embodied in the figure of the sensational Jew. We see this, for example, in the opening chapter of Emerson Bennett’s The Artist’s Bride; or, The Pawnbroker’s Heir (1856).31 Entitled “Beauty and the Jew,” the chapter begins with a destitute young woman named Villeta Linden approaching the pawn shop of Isaac Jacobs. Despite her aversion (“she felt a repugnance at entering a place whose threshold was seldom crossed by those who stood well in the world’s estimation”32 ), she puts her pride aside and attempts to sell her last remaining heirloom—a gold chain and locket that belonged to her deceased mother—in order to raise money to help her brother, who is dying of consumption. What follows is a merger of the sensational and the melodramatic. On the one hand, we see in Villeta and Jacobs the contest between good and evil. Hers is “a face of sweetness, sadness, simplicity, and beauty.”33 Jacobs, meanwhile, is described thus: [W]ith a long, cadaverous, and wrinkled face—with an aquiline nose and prominent chin, that seemed disposed to meet over dry, bloodless lips—with great, green, cold, goggle eyes, that seemed to see dollars in everything, and

8

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE nothing but dollars in anything—with white eyebrows, and a few white hairs, the only thing white about him—with a parchment skin, a retreating forehead, and a bald head, Isaac Jacobs looked like the personification of Avarice about to foreclose a mortgage on Death.34

This is more than a random clash of opposites, insofar as it turns out that Jacobs, in an unlikely twist of fate, has actually caused Villeta’s plight. It is he who hatched the plan five years earlier to rob the bank where Villeta’s father worked as a clerk, and it is he who then managed to pin the crime on Linden and murder the innocent man to cover the deed. More dramatically still, it turns out that Villeta is Jacobs’s own distant relative through the marriage of Jacobs’s sister Hagar to a Christian. As a result, Jacobs plans to kill Villeta, just as he has been working systematically to kill all family members linked to his sister’s apostasy. “She married a Christian,” he says of his sister in a later pawnshop soliloquy, “and God’s curse be on her for it! . . . and on all the descendants of the guilty pair!”35 Antebellum sensationalism produces this melodramatic moment. And as per the genre’s formulaic conventions, Jacobs will ultimately fail in his effort to kill Villeta. Instead, the Jew dies, and Villeta ends up inheriting his money. But again, we need to remind ourselves that such plots are themselves the compensatory response to a chaotic world, one where the old narratives of order and hierarchy no longer hold sway. In Bennett’s novel, there’s no gothic claptrap. But the bewildering urban setting in which Villeta finds herself in the opening pages does similar narrative work. “Before this gloomy old building . . . with its darkened windows of stained glass, and its iron trident with gilded balls . . . the fair unknown came to [a] halt, and . . . looked hurriedly around, but this time with a kind of shrinking timidity.”36 Raised by a white-collar father to understand herself as a member of the middle classes, she’s now an orphan teetering on the frightening and bewildering edge of urban homelessness. That her antagonist is the sensational Jew is thus appropriate, as he is the sensational embodiment of the unstable, topsy-turvy world of capitalism she faces.37 But, as Horkheimer and Adorno argue, he is also the projected and reviled figure of loss. The antipathy Jacobs shows toward Villeta and the rest of his family is only the inside-out image of Villeta’s sense of lost community and connection in modern America, one brought on by her father’s job as bank clerk and exacerbated by their isolation in the seemingly anonymous and uncaring world of the antebellum city. By extension, the “repugnance” Villeta feels for Jacobs acts as the measure of her own buried feeling of self-loathing for membership in such a disconnected social world.

INTRODUCTION: MONEY L AUNDERING AND THE SENSATIONAL JEW

9

Reading Jacobs in this way might help us interpret another political cartoon from the period, John C. White’s Shylock’s Year, or 1840 with no Bankrupt Law (1840) (see Figure I.2). Published in New York City, the image is a critique of Congress’s failure to pass a national bankruptcy law in 1840 and implies

Figure I.2. John C. White, Shylock’s Year, or 1840 with no Bankrupt Law (1840) Courtesy, Library of Congress.

10

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

that in the absence of such legislation, Americans will be vulnerable to the Jewish moneylender’s persecutions. “Pay me that thou owest,” the noticeably well-dressed Jew says to the Gentile debtor. The Gentile’s response, “Have patience with me,” goes unheeded. The American Shylock of this cartoon is thus rendered as the very cause of American debt and fiscal insecurity; as with the stereotypical Jew Horkheimer and Adorno reference, he has stolen America’s riches. In addition, he serves as a gothic doppelga¨nger. Much like Von Gelt and Isaac Jacobs, the Shylock of this cartoon is the projected image of American passion and avarice, returned in uncanny form to haunt Americans not just with debt, but with the knowledge, familiar but unrecognized, that the very system of capitalism is unstable. And in this respect, Shylock is, like Jacobs, the inverted and reviled figure of separation and longing. In choking the Gentile debtor, Shylock is in effect enacting a suffocating Gentile self-hatred, one based on the repressed knowledge that a more meaningful, enriching life doesn’t seem to be available in antebellum America. While “Stop, thief !” is the line the Gentile might utter by way of projecting his frustrations onto the Jew, the more powerful line might be something along the lines of “I deserve this.” Rather than a generic figure of Otherness, the sensational Jew is thus the representative of market capitalism, uniquely positioned in the American, and global, imagination. Historians have demonstrated that economic antisemitism has its roots in early Christian injunctions against mercantilism and usury. With New Testament narratives as background (Christ casting out the moneychangers from the temple, Judas accepting thirty pieces of silver to betray Jesus, and so on), Christian authorities labeled such economic activity as debased and immoral. At the Second Lateran Council in 1139, Christian usurers were denied communion and Christian burial. During the Reformation, Martin Luther preached for decades against the expanding credit economy and frequently directed his ire against Jews and the practice of usury. “[O]ur princes and rulers sit there and snore with mouths hanging open and permit the Jew to take, and steal, and rob from their open money-bags and treasure whenever they want,” he writes in “On the Jews and Their Lies” (1543). “That is, they let the Jews, by means of their usury, skin and fleece them and their subjects and make them beggars with their own money.”38 Although the church sought to prevent Christian usury, moneylending was, by the eleventh century and with the development of markets for agricultural surpluses, more necessary than ever to the expanding European economy. Hence the role of the Jew. As Jerry Z. Muller explains,

INTRODUCTION: MONEY L AUNDERING AND THE SENSATIONAL JEW

11

A mortal sin of theology became a mortal necessity of commercial life. . . . One method by which the church resolved this dilemma, beginning in the twelfth century, was to prevent the evil of Christian usury by allowing Jews to engage in that forbidden economic activity. For Jews were not subject to the prohibitions of canon law, and were condemned in any case to perpetual damnation because of their repudiation of Christ.39

The following from Pope Nicholas V (1447–55) articulates the broader logic: “[Jews] should perpetrate usury than that Christians should engage in it with one another.”40 Historians like Muller, Derek Penslar, and Jonathan Zatlin make it clear that church injunctions against usury were often contradictory and filled with exceptions and rationalizations for Christian practices of the same.41 But Penslar also explains that most economic antisemitism was rooted in anxiety about market competition. “Christian merchants, convinced of the honor and utility of their livelihood, heaped calumny on Jews not because the latter were merchants but because they were competitors,” he states.42 The result was economic antisemitism on two fronts, one secular and one religious, both based on stereotypes and myth. “Associations between the Jews and usury may have originated in the concrete reality of the High Middle Ages but thereafter broke their moorings and entered the realm of fantasy,” Penslar writes. “Jewish usury became the cynosure of a constellation of antisemitic mentalities: a manifest act pointing to esoteric, malignant practices, an allegory for the bellum iudaeorum contra omnes.”43 The economically motivated war Penslar references was waged throughout the Enlightenment period and into the nineteenth century. In the 1780s and 1790s, this often took the shape of reform-oriented essays that anticipated Arnold’s later discussion about the danger of Jewish assimilation.44 In the nineteenth century, however, with the dramatic expansion of commercial and industrial capitalism in Europe, Homo economicus judaicus was greeted by a discourse Penslar characterizes as having a more “ominous undercurrent.”45 A writer like Austrian aristocrat Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch (infamous author of Venus in Furs [1870]) could gush as follows about the seemingly pervasive business acumen of the Jewish merchant: “[H]e sells all that there is to sell. . . . It is difficult to say what he is, for there is nothing that he is not.”46 But it was increasingly evident that a mix of envy and derision informed this praise. We hear that derision in Karl Marx’s infamous 1843 essay “On the Jewish Question.” “The Jew has emancipated himself in a

12

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

Jewish manner,” he writes, “not only by acquiring the power of money, but also because money has become, through him and also apart from him, a world power. . . . The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as Christians have become Jews.”47 Marx isn’t arguing here that Jews have caused capitalism so much as that they embody it. Marx then cites the US as the nation where this obsession for material accumulation has actually shaped the very nature of its citizens. In a partial paraphrase of Thomas Hamilton’s Men and Manners in America (1833), he states that “[t]he devout and politically free inhabitant of New England is a sort of Laocoo¨n who makes not the least effort to escape from the snakes that enlace him. In their eyes the world is nothing but a stock exchange and they are convinced that here on earth their only vocation is to become richer than other men.”48 For Marx, the US is where capitalist and national identities have most fully merged. It is also where the Jew embodies this new national subject. Penslar sums up as follows: [E]ven in the optimistic third quarter of the nineteenth century, when continental European liberalism was at its zenith and there was great confidence in the growth of capitalism and the benefits it would bring to humanity, in public discourse the Jew remained separate, somewhat suspicious, abnormal rather than merely distinct. The consistent and persistent association between Jews and one particular set of economic characteristics testifies to the ongoing hold of venerable stereotypes on the link between Jews and money.49

The Homo economicus judaicus Penslar describes—separate, suspicious, abnormal—appears in the US in the form of the sensational Jew. It’s as if writers and cartoonists such as Lippard and Whitley had been reading Marx’s 1843 essay. Moreover, regardless of its inaccuracies and contradictions—or precisely because of them—the narrative about Jewish mercantilism and usury is central to the antebellum imagination. Threatening Gentile America with economic peril and social instability, the sensational Jew is a kind of screen onto which to project and thus disavow the growing awareness that capitalism itself was an unstable foundation for building the modern US. Echoing Horkheimer and Adorno, Slavoj Žizˇek addresses this psychological dynamic, in which the absent Other represents the pleasure and enjoyment that must be resisted for the formation of a stable subject, in the following way: “[I]s the anti-Semitic capitalist’s hatred of the Jew not the hatred of the excess that pertains to capitalism itself, that is, of the excess produced by its inherent antagonistic nature? Is capitalism’s hatred of the Jew not the hatred of its own innermost, essential feature?”50

INTRODUCTION: MONEY L AUNDERING AND THE SENSATIONAL JEW

13

The antebellum discourse of economic antisemitism isn’t limited to the fictional portrayals of Jews. Even though the Jewish population of the antebellum US was small, it was growing with each decade, increasing from about 15,000 in 1840, to 50,000 in 1850, to 150,000–200,000 in 1860.51 And as the population of Jews in the US grew, “actual” Jewish people were increasingly subject to forms of scapegoating similar to the fictional characters I mention here. We see this first of all in reports and comments about ordinary Jews, whether in crowded urban places like New York City, or less populated midwestern locations. For example, in an 1841 issue of the Sunday Flash, one of various racy “sporting weeklies” that emerged in the 1840s in New York City, a wellconnected Jewish broker named Myer Levy was featured in the front-page “Gallery of Rascalities and Notorieties,” replete with a woodcut image of him in hat and coat, carrying a cane. “Levy is a lineal descendant of him who sold his lord for thirty pieces of silver,” we’re told. “This is evinced alike by his gambling stock transactions in Wall Street, and by his invariable practice of bilking female sojourners by the way-side, cheating them with counterfeit bills, possessing himself of their trinkets &c &c &c.” In what follows, we’re told that Levy is a “practical amalgamationist” who “prefer[s] negresses to white women.”52 George Templeton Strong, a wealthy attorney living in New York City, views Jews similarly in an 1845 journal entry about a musical performance he attended: “As usual, three-quarters of the assembly were children of Israel. . . . Had anyone suddenly ejaculated last night . . . ‘Farmer’s Loan and Trust Company has just executed an insolvent assignment!’ the announcement would have had an appalling effect on the hooked-nose and black-whiskered congregation.” Ten years later, Strong repeats these sentiments after a visit to the Greene Street Synagogue in New York City. “Israel does not make a joyful noise. The monotone solo ululation of the reader, or rabbi, are [sic] sufficiently dismal but the people vociferate their responses in discord unspeakable, like eager bidders at the sale of stocks.”53 Like the editors of the Sunday Flash, Strong seems unable to separate the sensational tropes about Jewish greed from the Jews he sees out in the world. The same stereotyping is displayed in the mid-century reports of the credit rating agency Dun and Bradstreet, which was founded by Lewis Tappan, an evangelical Christian businessman in New York (Tappan is also well known for his abolitionist work). The agency’s investigators use language similar to what we see in the period’s sensationalism: “grasping,” “close fisted,” and so on. “Responsible now, but is a Jew; there is no telling how long he will remain so,” one report states.54 Another report attributes the success of a company owned by a Jewish man to the “money making and money saving characteristics of his race.”55 As yet another describes an

14

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

Ohio Jew named Samuel Loeb, “Jewish in his disposition, trust him with some condition.”56 These reports are consistent with the many disparaging news items and the images of those Jews rising to social prominence in America during this period, including Mordecai Noah, Rachel Félix, and Judah Benjamin, among a handful of others. I’ll discuss several of these individuals over the course of this study but will briefly mention Noah here. Noah was a well-known but also much-maligned diplomat, newspaper editor, playwright, and utopian Zionist (he sought a homeland for Jews in Grand Island, New York).57 James Gordon Bennett took particular pleasure in lampooning the Whig-leaning Noah in the pages of the New York Herald, accusing him of everything from a “Jewish conspiracy against the principals, mysteries, or morals of the Christian dispensation” to blood libel.58 But it’s the political cartoon below that best captures how Noah was typically depicted. Entitled The Downfall of Mother Bank (1833), the image is a Democratic counter to the above pro-Bank cartoon by Whitley. Here Jackson is again urged on by Jack Downing, forcing Bank advocates like Bank of the United States President Nicholas Biddle (pictured with the head and hooves of a demon), as well as Whig newspaper editors like Noah and James Watson Webb of the Courier and Enquirer (in top hats, beneath a toppling column), to flee his wrath (see Figure I.3). Noah isn’t empty-handed, however. Like Levi in The People Putting Responsibility to the Test, he’s clutching a bag of gold bullion. And what this suggests is that both Whig and Democrat cartoonists saw the Jew as a scapegoat for the failures of US capitalism. Often, as I’ll show, these were fictional characters, though as the image of Noah indicates, sometimes these were actual Jews who were sensationalized like a character out of The Quaker City. The Mordecai Noah of this image is also, like the various Jewish men I list above, a figure for the passions of capitalist culture. And the place where we see these passions most fully on display is in the period’s literary production. Jonathan Freedman, writing about nineteenth-century authors like Anthony Trollope, George du Maurier, and Henry James, suggests, “[T]he Jew is a veritable embodiment of sentiment, albeit of the wrong sort: of the predominance of passion, greed, avarice, lasciviousness, desire for pleasure.”59 For Freedman, the greedy passions of a character like Ferdinand Lopez in Trollope’s The Prime Minister (1876)—and thus characters like Gabriel Von Gelt and Isaac Jacobs—stand in for the irrational perversities that are the driving force behind a capitalist system which only poses as rational and self-correcting. Michael Ragussis offers a related perspective in his suggestion that all representations of Jews in English literature stem from Shylock in The Merchant of

INTRODUCTION: MONEY L AUNDERING AND THE SENSATIONAL JEW

15

Figure I.3. H. R. Robinson, The Downfall of Mother Bank (1833) Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

Venice (1600)—which is to say that financial stereotypes about avariciousness inform all such depictions. “Shakespeare’s text invades the novel from Harrington to Ulysses as a sign of the play’s indisputable authority,” according to Ragussis. “[N]o portrait of a Jew can exist in English without reference to it, and the English imagination seems unable to free itself of Shakespeare’s text.” The result, he says, is representations of Jews in which “Jewish identity itself disappears, or is mysteriously relocated, as if it exists only behind a mask, only in a performance, only through a Christian mediation that confounds and absorbs it.”60 Much the same is true of the depiction of the Jew in antebellum sensationalism. From the above image of Mordecai Noah, to the lowbrow productions of Lippard and Buntline, to the more complex and artful work of Hawthorne, the characters I’ll discuss over the course of this book are all wearing the mask Ragussis describes. In each case, what we see is a performance intended to help antebellum Christian culture disavow—perhaps launder is a more appropriate term—the more troubling aspects of speculative capitalism and project them onto the Jew. The following from John Brougham’s comedic play, Much Ado About a Merchant of Venice (1868), in which we see an American version of

16

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

Shylock lamenting the actions of his daughter Jessica, provides an especially telling example of this process. Tubal: They tell me that she spends the money faster Than A. T. Stewart or John Jacob Astor. Shy: The earnings of a life; I little dreamed That all those pledges lost or unredeemed; The profits and the plunderings of years, That cost their owners cataracts of tears. And consequently full of joy to me, Should be expended on a jew disprit.61

Playfully dressed up in a nineteenth-century American context, with reference to John Jacob Astor and A. T. Stewart, the scene revises the famous description of Shylock’s grief over his daughter Jessica having eloped with the Christian Lorenzo and stolen his hoarded money. Whereas in Shakespeare, Shylock’s anguish is split between the financial and the familial (“My daughter, O my ducats, O my daughter!” he says62 ), in Brougham’s text, Shylock is noticeably more villainous and much less sympathetic. Hence, his glee over having brought his debtors to tears. Later, Bassanio expresses what everyone, characters and audience alike, is asking themselves about this version of Shylock: “What is to be done with this unfeeling Jew?”63 One answer is that he can be used in the broader American effort to negotiate financial anxiety. As I argue elsewhere, the story of Jessica’s theft of her father’s money and conversion to Christianity was oft told in antebellum sensationalism, especially in short stories and novels, and for the specific purpose of imagining an analogous conversion of Shylock’s “Jewish” money to “Christian” capital.64 The fantasy logic is as follows: no longer tainted by his excessive greed and desire, Shylock’s now-cleansed money can be assimilated into the mainstream of the Christian economy. Yet for this to take place, Shylock has to wear the mask Ragussis describes. Even Shylock has to be a cartoon version of Shylock. This vision of a somehow pure, perhaps even prelapsarian, marketplace— we might call it capitalism without capitalism—was of course brought most thoroughly into being by the Nazis. As historians such as Christoph Kreutzmu¨ller, Jonathan Wiesen, and Zatlin have shown, the process of “Aryanization” and dispossession during the Holocaust was organized around an ideology that understood the theft of Jewish wealth to be an ethical imperative.65 Wiesen puts it thus:

INTRODUCTION: MONEY L AUNDERING AND THE SENSATIONAL JEW

17

[T]he removal of Jewish behaviors (both literal and metaphorical) was fundamental to the National Socialist regime’s twelve-year effort to imbue commercial activity—producing, selling, buying, and consuming—with virtue. The liquidation of most Jewish-owned businesses, the stripping of dental fillings at death camps, and other forms of sanctioned and spontaneous expropriation were, to the Nazis, exercises in righteousness. They were a rejection of “Jewish capitalism” and a consummation of the disinfected marketplace. . . . The agents of the Nazi kleptocracy were part of a milieu that sanctioned thievery as a moral obligation.66

The antebellum US is a century’s remove from the Third Reich, but the notion of “Jewish capitalism” and indeed of “Jewish money,” both imagined as somehow distinct from and inferior to Christian forms of the same, was altogether operative in the US during this period. Over and over, sensationalism stages the Manichean narratives I describe above, with the Jew positioned as the scheming villain threatening either to taint or to steal the fiscal reserves of the novel’s protagonists—and thus, symbolically, of a city, region, or the nation. Crucially, the sensational Jew of this material also embodies the porousness of the melodramatic binary between good and evil upon which these texts rely. And what this embodiment suggests is that “contamination” and “theft” cannot be fully prevented. The “disinfected” marketplace is just as much a fantasy in antebellum America as in Nazi Germany. Toward the end of both The Quaker City and The Artist’s Bride, the Jewish villains are killed off. This, we will see, is the usual fate for the male Shylock figure in American texts (the Jewess, meanwhile, is usually a figure of conversion). But as I’ll also discuss, such conclusions are a form of narrative wish fulfillment, since a purified version of capitalism isn’t otherwise possible. The more accurate depiction of the threat embodied in the Jew can be found in a political cartoon like Shylock’s Year. There’s no narrative resolution here. Instead, Jew and Gentile are imagined in a freeze-frame of perpetual conflict. It’s as if we’re forever stuck on the page where Villeta Linden encounters the evil Jew Isaac Jacobs in his pawnshop, or where Gabriel Von Gelt gazes at his stolen chest of gold doubloons. And precisely because he’s depicted in a static picture, this American Shylock is a powerfully unsettling reminder that the sensational Jew isn’t Other to Gentile America at all. Quite the contrary, he is the uncanny figure both of social ambivalence at mid-century, and of the trauma of loss and self-hatred.

18

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

Each chapter of this book examines how the period’s sensationalism stages a specific cultural narrative relating to these feelings of ambivalence and loss. The sensational Jew plays a significant but not a starring role in most of these stories. This semi-liminal position is consistent with the Jew’s role in the period’s literature. Though populating and influencing various genres— sentimental city mysteries, plantation novels, etc.—the sensational Jew of this period isn’t sufficiently prominent to warrant a text or a genre unto him or herself. In fact, with few exceptions, the Jew is a side player. But this is the point. The sensational Jew operates from the margins of these texts, inducing but also absorbing the various anxieties of the other non-Jewish characters and shaping the very narratives of the texts themselves. Chapter 1, “Region, Capitalism, and the Jew in the Post-Tom Plantation Novel,” examines the role of the Jewish creditor in a cluster of plantation novels appearing in the wake of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). In some respects, the Jew’s appearance in these novels, whether “anti-Tom” or abolitionist in orientation, is surprising. But the ill-fitting presence of the Jew in these works is to the point. Usually staged as Northern creditors, these characters represent overtly the forms of Northern capitalism said to threaten the agrarian feudalism of the plantation economy. Yet as I demonstrate, these novels also reveal the South’s profound ambivalence about capitalism and the Jew. These novels reflect what the recent work of historians such as Sven Beckert and Walter Johnson has proved: that despite claims to the contrary, the South, and with it the slave economy, was itself capitalist to its very foundations.67 Moreover, this capitalist activity is projected onto the sensational Jew. What we see is that, in many ways, the Jew is the South’s uncomfortable dark double—a doppelga¨nger who is a figure less of heterotopia (here Northern capitalism) than proteophobia (the unstable hybrid of Northern and Southern economies).68 Chapter 2, “La Belle Juive, or ‘Jew’? From Rachel Félix to The Marble Faun,” examines the popular figure of the Jewess in antebellum culture. As received from European models like Rebecca in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819), the cultural role of the Jewess was to mark a clear distinction between herself and her Old World and avaricious father.69 Whether this is achieved through conversion, self-exile, death, or mistaken identity (wherein she has been a Christian all along), la belle juive is in this tradition a character who assuages cultural confusion and ambivalence. To this way of thinking, the “Jewess” is quite different from the “Jew.” Here I focus mainly on two well-known instances in which the Jewess blurs the distinction between Jew and Jewess: French actress Rachel Félix, who toured America to much acclaim and

INTRODUCTION: MONEY L AUNDERING AND THE SENSATIONAL JEW

19

controversy in 1855, and Miriam Schaefer, the Jewish heroine of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun. What we see is that the Jewess troubles two crucial cultural boundaries: that between norms of proper and improper forms of femininity, and that between high culture and the more debased, commercialized world of mass-culture sensationalism. Chapter 3, “Desire by Proxy: The Cosmopolitan Jew in Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme,” shifts to yet another stereotype about the antebellum Jew—the rootless, cosmopolitan internationalist whose only allegiance is to money and global capital, rather than nation. This character appeared in the US with increasing frequency in the late 1850s and 1860s in story paper narratives, plays, and novels, including Walt Whitman’s Life and Adventures of Jack Engle (1852). But the cosmopolitan Jew appears with particular force and complexity in Theodore Winthrop’s 1861 novel Cecil Dreeme, where we see that a worldly, erudite Jew named Densdeth is a threatening, malevolent force in the life of the narrator, even as Byng is powerfully drawn to this same character. I suggest that Cecil Dreeme takes the form of what Eve Sedgwick terms the “paranoid gothic,” a literary form in which a male protagonist is pursued by a male for whom he has a repressed desire. I further argue that Densdeth is alluring to Byng precisely because of his status as exotic cosmopolitan Jew.70 It turns out that the cosmopolitan Jew is not simply the negative embodiment of capitalist rootlessness Marx describes. Rather, he is also a figure for a freeing and even empowering form of boundarylessness. Chapter 4, “Fagin in America,” focuses on various novels from the 1850s that borrow from and revise the Jew Fagin, the urban Jew in Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838). Having become a familiar figure in the US following various theatrical runs of Oliver Twist in the early 1850s, the Fagin character began to appear in a number of urban narratives, from pamphlet novels to city mysteries by popular authors such as A. J. H. Duganne and Emerson Bennett. And what we see is that, as per the Dickens formula, the scheming, criminal Fagin is a figure for the instabilities of class at mid-century, which was informed both by increasing economic insecurity, and by changes in inheritance laws. As I demonstrate, the result is a particular form of sentimentality, one linked to the pathos of class decline and, more abstractly, to the proteophobia induced by the urban Jew. Recruited to this country to help depict and combat the uncertainties and ambivalences of class, the American Fagin thus had the unintended effect of highlighting the increasingly unstable nature of class at mid-century. My conclusion, “Race, Money, and the Jew,” recapitulates the issue of race that arises at various points over the course of this study. Borrowing from Michael O’Malley’s provocative argument about the intersecting fantasies of

20

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

racial and fiscal purity in the antebellum period (“specie and species”), I return to the notion of a racially laundered, or “Jew-free,” economy. My main focus is popular writer and editor John Beauchamp Jones. In both his fiction and in his more famous Civil War diary, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital (1866), Jones echoes the increasing cultural obsession with the economic activity and the racial makeup of Jews.71 For Jones as for others, Jews became darker and more racially Other in direct relation to the increasingly vexed and unstable nature of the capitalist economy. But while Jones nervously stages Whiteness as compensation for fiscal instability, Jewishness remains elusive as a fixed or even knowable racial category. Jones’s work is nevertheless predictive. Following the Civil War, writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald would increasingly depict characters such as Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby (1925) as both unsettlingly modern, and as a problem that modernity could address via the pseudoscience of race. This, of course, is the general logic that would lead to the Holocaust. I argue that we should therefore view antebellum sensationalism as an early and important archive for understanding the nature and evolution of our thinking about the Jew as a figure of Otherness in US culture. I end with a coda entitled “Charlottesville, ‘Molineux,’ and the Phantom Jew.” Here I ask the question that was in the back of my mind as I wrote this book: Why study the antebellum Jew now? One answer, I suggest, can be found in the White supremacist march in Charlottesville in August 2017, which was punctuated by chants of “Jews will not replace us.” In order to outline a continuum between the antebellum period and our world today, I provide a comparative reading of the Charlottesville march and a text famous for its depiction of violent political upheaval: Hawthorne’s short story “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (1832). Here I argue that both at the march and in the story, social ambivalence is projected onto the “phantom Jew” of the US imagination. In Charlottesville, the marchers’ chants make this quite evident. In “Molineux,” we’re dealing with a more subtle, but therefore more insidious, version of this same figure. I thus contend that, then as now, the sensational Jew acts as a figure onto whom US Gentile culture projects many of its deepest fears and regrets.

1 Region, Capitalism, and the Jew in the Post-Tom Plantation Novel Scratch just a bit below the surface of the post-Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) plantation novel, and you’re likely to find a somewhat unexpected figure of regional and cultural difference: the conniving, avaricious Jew. Indeed, whether abolitionist or “anti-Tom” in orientation, the plantation novel of the 1850s is surprisingly reliant on this stereotyped but also uniquely fungible character. Maria McIntosh’s The Lofty and the Lowly (1853), Harriet Hamline Bigelow’s The Curse Entailed (1857), Van Buren Denslow’s Owned and Disowned (1857), Eliza Ann Dupuy’s The Planter’s Daughter (1857): these and various other mid-century novels about slavery and plantation life in the South offer lengthy and frequently labyrinthine storylines in which the Jew is a key player.1 One might say, in fact, that the post-Tom iteration of the genre requires the Jew in order to stage the complex tensions between slave South and industrial North. Not that the Jew’s specific function in these texts is immediately clear. In fact, it’s easy to assume he’s simply a stock character, one authors summon forth in an effort to round out the social landscape of their narratives. Usually a ruthless if not outright criminal creditor of Northern or European origin, often a lecherous threat to the sexual purity of Southern women, and almost always the figure who threatens to “unman” the Southern gentry, the Jew lurks in the background of these stories, sometimes disappearing for hundreds of pages, only to reappear at a moment of intense, and usually economic, drama. “I ish no rogue,” says the character Jew David when sneaking into the sickroom of an indebted planter midway through The Curse Entailed. “I only wants my monish.”2 Yet even offstage and out of sight, the Jew, cartoonish in both accent and appearance, schemes against the Southern world he inhabits so uneasily. It’s as if part of his quarrel is his very presence in the South—or in such a narrative. One sometimes wonders, indeed, if the Jew of these texts has stumbled out of the plot of an entirely different literary genre—an urban sensation novel set on Wall Street, say, or a story paper narrative that takes place in the Middle East—and is only biding his time in the unfamiliar context of plantation social life, slaves, and tropical scenery. Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature. David Anthony, Oxford University Press. © David Anthony (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192871732.003.0002

22

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

In fact, the Jew’s appearance in these novels, as well as his palpable difference from the other characters in them, is entirely to the point. For what we see is that the Jew does specific ideological work in these texts. And, as is always the case in the depiction of the Jew in early American literature, this begins with money—or rather, with anxieties about money. As even a brief perusal of these texts will attest, these novels are at their core documents about the unstable nature of the slave economy. Usually this is dramatized in a central moment when, in a direct echo of the famous crisis faced by Mr. Shelby in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a profligate plantation owner is confronted with the possible loss of his estate. “[H]e felt that the old home must go,” we’re told in a typical scene about Mr. Harrington, owner of the heavily mortgaged Wavertree plantation in The Planter’s Daughter, after his risky entrance into the speculative market. “[T]he spot which was as dear to his heart as the very life-blood that flowed in it, must become the property of strangers.”3 But what we find is that economic crisis is directly linked to a Shylock-like Jewish creditor. Here this is “a Jewish broker in the city” named Bondy (he has a “shrewd Jewish physiognomy”) who works with the novel’s speculator villain to undermine the hapless Harrington.4 “Do you wish to ruin this man utterly?” Bondy asks the villain at a key moment.5 The question contains its inevitable answer (“yes”), but it also provides a glimpse of the Jew’s various roles in these texts. To start, the Jew as depicted in the plantation novel embodies Southern anxieties about the Northern economy, which by the 1850s many in the South had come to view as an overwhelmingly powerful force. Consider the following from an 1852 speech by James DeBow at the Southern Commercial Convention, one he reprinted in his journal, DeBow’s Review: What has become of southern commercial competition, now that New-York and New-England conduct nine-tenths of the imports of the country and one-half of its exports, though nearly all of these exports . . . are of southern material [cotton], and more than an equal proportion of the imports are for southern consumption? . . . [I]t is calculated that the South lends from year to year a trading capital to the North amounting to nearly ONE HUNDRED MILLIONS of dollars.6

DeBow’s main complaint, one repeatedly echoed by other writers in trade publications, revolves around the fact that, in the absence of diversified farming or a viable manufacturing sector, the South was forced to purchase the majority of its goods either from the North or from Europe—the latter at prices kept artificially high by federal tariffs on imported goods. The result was that Southern

REGION, CAPITALISM, AND JEW IN POST-TOM PL ANTATION NOVEL

23

dollars continually flowed into the coffers of Northern banks and businesses, allowing the North to grow more and more powerful economically, while the Southern economy grew weaker and weaker. The Jew was also linked to a related if less tangible concern. This was the fear that the Northern mindset about money and profit was threatening to change the very fabric of a Southern culture supposedly organized around chivalry, honor, and a disdain for new wealth.7 As recent work by historians such as Edward Baptist, Sven Beckert, Seth Rockman, and Walter Johnson has shown, the long-held notion of a feudal or precapitalist slave South is simply incorrect.8 Instead, the plantation South—its economy as well as its culture of White supremacy—was capitalist to its core. Indeed, the Southern economy, built up on often elaborate credit systems based on slave-backed mortgages that were themselves securitized through public bonds, was in many ways the engine for the unprecedented growth not only of the US economy in the first half of the nineteenth century, but of global capitalism. As Baptist puts it, “[e]ven to those who did not own slaves, the unlimited use of enslaved African Americans as chattel property was associated with freedom, modernity, and liberal economic life.”9 This was, to reference the title of Beckert and Rockman’s recent collection of essays, “slavery’s capitalism”—a system and a way of life utterly dependent on the labor of Black slaves and the value inhering in them as property. Still, while the spirit of slavery-based capitalism thrived in the South, it was often disavowed. One key indication of this is the fact that the emerging merchant classes in the South, so crucial to the dramatic growth of slavery and the cotton economy, were often viewed with suspicion, if not downright hostility.10 For example, an 1846 editorial in a Shreveport, Louisiana newspaper complains that Southern merchants “have not national attachments or patriotism—their ledger is their bible and money their God.”11 In The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (1857), Hinton Rowan Helper adopts a related style of pro-nationalist language to characterize the South’s homegrown merchants. Describing them as “avaricious assassinators of [our] country,” he goes on to complain that they are “the channels through which more than one hundred and twenty millions of dollars—$120,000,000—are annually drained from the South and conveyed to the North.”12 But such sentiments are perhaps best captured in Daniel Robinson Hundley’s Social Relations in Our Southern States (1860), a text he proclaims is intended to counter “the exaggerated romances of the Uncle Tom school.”13 As Hundley puts it, “[d]uring the grand old Colonial days . . . Southerners did not dream of devoting their whole lives—all their time and talents—to the base

24

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

pursuit of riches—the mere acquisition of dollars and dimes.”14 Now, though, he says, the grasping, acquisitive logic of capitalism has made its way down from the North, producing the strange new hybrid he dubs the “Southern Yankee.” “[T]hough often a farmer or planter, the Southern Yankee is much more frequently a trader or speculator,” he says. The slow but sure gains of agricultural pursuits are not swift enough to satisfy his inordinate craving for money; hence he speculates, either in merchandise, or stocks, or tobacco, or cotton, or sugar, or rice, or grain, or lands, or horses, or men. In all which he is but a type of the Wall Street prototype.15

Hundley’s language echoes the more well-known critique of laissez-faire capitalism by George Fitzhugh in his 1857 Cannibals All!, and certainly it brings to mind hapless fictional characters such as Mr. Shelby from Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Mr. Harrington from The Planter’s Daughter. But it also reflects the political condition Trish Loughran describes as “sectional panic.”16 As she explains, the growth of a national print culture promoting abolition, combined with the mid-century passage of federal legislation such as the Compromise of 1850 (and with it the Fugitive Slave Act), worked to produce the sense that distinct regional identities were in crisis. Such “national compression,” she says, was a new and anxious-making problem for what had previously been distinct and culturally autonomous regions. Loughran suggests that the result of such sectionalism was a fear about “inter-mixing regions” that went hand in hand with the rise of the racist discourse about “mixed races” or amalgamation.17 The Southern Yankee Hundley describes gives form to precisely this concern: as the monstrous offspring of the combined—one might say amalgamated— Northern and Southern economies, the Southern Yankee reflects the sense that cultural identity in the South was giving way before an encroaching capitalist economy that was international in scope. Indeed, in a version of the “master plot” outlined by Jared Gardner, Hundley’s Southern gentry is, it seems, “White” only to the extent that it is resistant as a class to the contaminating influence of both Black slaves and Northern or European capitalists.18 Note, though, that as with authors such as Dupuy, Hundley’s economic anxiety is expressed via reference to the Jew. Repeatedly referring to the Southern Yankee as a “Southern Shylock,” he seems to suggest that Southerners who intermix with Northern capitalists will become tainted by Jewishness itself. In this, Hundley was drawing on fairly standard forms of antisemitism in the South: the claim that the Rothschilds should be denied repayment of state debts in Mississippi because they were of “the blood of Judas and Shylock”;19

REGION, CAPITALISM, AND JEW IN POST-TOM PL ANTATION NOVEL

25

editorials such as the one in an Athens, Georgia newspaper stating that business in Savannah “is in the hands, and conducted principally, by cadaverous looking, cushion-footed Jews”;20 and of course the more well-known charges during the Civil War that Jews like Confederate Secretary of War Judah Benjamin were undermining the Southern economy. “Foreign Jews,” charged Congressman Henry S. Foote of Tennessee in 1862, were “scattered all over the country, under official protection [from Benjamin], engaged in trade to the exclusion of our own citizens, undermining our currency.”21 But Hundley’s “Southern Shylock,” like the version of Judah Benjamin that Foote provides, also reflects the complex psychology at the heart of such antisemitism—and at the heart of slavery’s capitalism. For while certainly representing an external economic threat, the Jew of Hundley’s imagination is also a figure of Southern ambivalence about the region’s slave economy. Hundley’s reference to the Southern Shylock who speculates in men is suggestive in this regard. “[T]he most utterly detestable of all Southern Yankees is the Negro Trader—Speculator he delights to call himself of late years,” he writes. [P]reeminent in villainy and a greedy love of filthy lucre . . . [he] is in every respect as unconscionable a dog of a Southern Shylock as ever . . . used New-England cowskins to lacerate the back of a slave. . . . He is not troubled evidently with a conscience, for, although he habitually separates parent from child, brother from sister, and husband from wife, he . . . never evinces the least sign of remorse.22

Clearly, Hundley’s slave trader is offered as the antithesis of the supposedly benevolent practices of plantation slavery. He is the character through whom the White plantation elite might disavow the centrality of racialized slavery to its own wealth, comfort, and security. Again, though, we should note that Hundley accomplishes this by reference to the Jew—the figure repeatedly offered in the post-Tom plantation novel as the stand-in for the cold-blooded esurience of Northern capitalism. Indeed, as we’ll see, several novels show Jew and slave trader working in tandem; they are, it seems, flip sides of the same capitalist coin. But what’s especially telling is that the appetitive capitalist passions of Hundley’s Southern Shylock (or of Foote’s versions of the Southern Jew) are in fact the very qualities being touted by many prominent commentators in the South. According to this line of reasoning, it was imperative that the South imitate the North’s advances in commerce and manufacturing in order to compete on the national and world stage. Take for example the following from an 1850 essay by William Gregg in DeBow’s Review:

26

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE It would indeed be well for us, if . . . the talent . . . now engaged in embittering our indolent people against their industrious neighbors to the North, had been with the same zeal engaged in promoting domestic industry and the encouragement of the mechanical arts. . . . [T]he true secret of our difficulties, lies in the want of energy on the part of our capitalists, and ignorance and laziness on the part of those who ought to labor.23

Gregg’s comments about Southern indolence were echoed throughout the 1850s. Speaking to the Southern Commercial Convention at New Orleans in 1855, Albert Pike stated as follows: It may be chimerical to attempt to carry on any great work in the south; but, if so, it is the fault of the southern States and the southern people. It is time that we should look about us, and see in what relation we stand to the north. . . . It is high time that our planters should be taught to know that no country can produce alone, and manufacture nothing, and still prosper.24

Editorials such as these, which emphasize the South’s need to modernize its industries and economy, suggest that the Jew of the antebellum plantation novel was no mere scapegoat. Rather, he was in many ways a projected form of Southern envy and self-division. Hence the presence of the Jew in the post-Tom plantation novel. Like a figure in a recurring dream, the Jew of these novels, so nakedly avaricious, is the projected image of the capitalist greed underwriting slavery itself. The fact that he’s often both Northern and European in origin (hence the stereotypically foreign, usually German, accent he often wields) only underscores his role as the embodiment of slavery’s capitalism. For, as Baptist, Beckert, and others have made clear, the credit-based capitalism that fueled the spectacular success of the cotton trade linked remote plantations in places like Louisiana with the urban Northeast, Europe, and India in a tight, interconnected web of interdependence; there was simply no large-scale plantation economy without the involvement of New York and London banking, the textile factories in Manchester and Liverpool, and the villages of weavers in the Indian countryside. We might thus understand characters like Jew David in The Curse Entailed (a German immigrant) as both external and internal to the South; it is this very duality that makes him and others such charged figures in this literature. Consider in this context the description of Old Faggot the Jew in an anonymous novel entitled The Night Watch; or, Social Life in the South (1856). “I always think of shame, crime and misery when I see him, carrying his head

REGION, CAPITALISM, AND JEW IN POST-TOM PL ANTATION NOVEL

27

almost hid between his shoulders, as he does when walking the street. He is a strange creature: repulsive, and at the same time attractive, if I may be allowed to use such a paradox.”25 Rather than simply a stock figure of cultural menace, the Jew of this and other texts is instead a projected if incoherent jumble of ambivalence about the South and its own role in the modern system of capitalism—a system which was both national and global in scope, and utterly unrestrained in ambition and cruelty. Repugnant and, as we see in The Night Watch, strangely “attractive,” the Jew is the very symbol of this ambivalence. Zygmunt Bauman addresses precisely this issue, suggesting that “the Jews had entered modern times already cast in the role of ambivalence incarnate. . . . [They] were to bear the brunt of the notorious HaBliebe, the mixture of attraction and repulsion, of admiration and fear . . . with which people tend to react to phenomena that sit astride the barricade or cross closely guarded frontiers.26 Here, the “phenomena” is capitalism, and the “barricade” is the geographic and ideological divide between South and North. But, and as Bauman also suggests, it was the Jew who embodied, as “formless plasma,” the breakdown of such divisions.27 Bauman’s thesis about the Jew’s seemingly magical abilities to make the solid world melt into air is especially useful in understanding the otherwise odd presence of this character in the post-Tom plantation novel. For it was in the Jew that Southern uncertainty about the seemingly boundaryless capitalist world was made manifest. This is why, to return to Hundley, the notion of a “Southern Shylock” is so revealing. Ostensibly a term meant to signal the distinctions between the South and the North, it in fact offers an apt illustration of the collapse of regional differences for Southerners such as Hundley. Far from being a figure of absolute Otherness, the Jew, it seems, had been internal to the South all along. Indeed, if as Beckert so aptly puts it, “the empire of cotton ushered in the modern world,” it was the Jew who, by virtue of his insistent presence in the post-Tom plantation novel, signaled to readers that the South was inextricably a part of that new world.28

The South’s Dark Double The novel in which Southern ambivalence about money is most overtly staged might be The Planter’s Daughter. Here, as I describe above, we see the standard plot of financial dissolution, with the Louisiana-based Wavertree plantation on the brink of insolvency after the reckless expenditures of the fiscally naïve Mr. Harrington. He has, we’re told early on, “commenced a style of princely

28

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

hospitality, such as has ruined nearly all the old families in his native State.” His real shortcoming, though, is his desire to make back his money on getrich-quick speculative schemes. “From year to year [his] deficiencies increased, while the sanguine spirit of the ease-loving owner induced him to hope that a rise in sugar, or some other lucky chance, would enable him to clear himself of the debt which had thus gradually accumulated.”29 Fairly clearly, the message is that Harrington, much like the Southerners described by William Gregg in DeBow’s Review, is ill-suited for the forms of capitalism emerging at mid-century. Relying on “lucky chance” rather than patient, rational investment, he, like so many other plantation owners during this period, is destined to fall behind in the race to the future. This is highlighted when Harrington is duped by a speculator named Malcolm into mortgaging his plantation for $50,000 in order to invest in a risky real estate venture. “There is absolutely no risk of failure, and I shall raise what I need by mortgaging my crops for a few years to come,” Harrington explains to his concerned daughter.30 And note that Harrington is no rogue outlier. Rather, his entrance into a kind of cotton futures market was common across the South, made possible by credit from London-based banks such as Baring Brothers and the Rothschilds, or US houses such as the Consolidated Association of the Planters of Louisiana (CAPL)—each of which lent money leveraged by slave-backed mortgages and securitized by public bonds.31 But in The Planter’s Daughter, Harrington’s plan goes awry almost immediately when one of Malcolm’s business associates, a man named Withers, decides to steal the $50,000. In an extended scene midway through the narrative, we see Withers carting ten bags of gold coins onto a ship bound for Europe. His plan, we’re told, is to move with his young daughter to France, and in so doing “enjoy all the pleasures” of a life funded by the proceeds of the South’s now fading plantation aristocracy.32 One of the lessons here is of course that capitalist speculators like Malcolm and Withers—Southern Yankees—are robbing the South of its economic livelihood. Indeed, the implicit moral seems to be that, had Harrington’s bags of gold stayed in the South and funded cotton, all would have been well. But the more subtle storyline has to do with the status of Southern money. Described at one point as “bags of treasure,” this money is earmarked as existing outside the hectic, ceaseless flow of actual capital.33 One might say that, at least figuratively, it is imagined as preceding a new economy based on the constant fluctuation of the capitalist marketplace. The fact that this treasure travels, midstory, to Europe only underscores this point. It’s as if, from a Southern perspective, the money derived from Harrington’s plantation is simply

REGION, CAPITALISM, AND JEW IN POST-TOM PL ANTATION NOVEL

29

incompatible with the taint of the increasingly modern, and here Northernstyle, American economy. To better understand this belief in the difference between Northern and Southern money, consider the following from Hinton Helper in The Impending Crisis of the South. In a diatribe against Southern merchants who conduct trade in the North, he seems to point to a qualitative difference between the currencies on either side of the Mason–Dixon line. “Let them scrutinize the workings of Southern money after it passes north of Mason and Dixon’s line,” he says. It is . . . a matter of impossibility, on these small pages, to notice or enumerate all the methods in which the money we deposit in the North is made to operate against us; suffice it to say that it is circulated and expended there . . . to the injury and impoverishment of almost every individual in the South.34

For Helper as, it seems, for Dupuy’s fictional characters, cotton money is contaminated once it leaves the South. But we need to understand that, if Southern money is tainted in the postTom plantation novel, this is the work of none other than the capitalist Jew. Here this is the Jew Bondy, whom I quote above, and who, it turns out, is the right-hand man of the speculator Malcolm. The following lines, in which we’re first introduced to Bondy, speak to this relationship directly: When Malcolm reached New Orleans, his first object was to see a Jewish dealer in securities with whom he had sometimes transacted business. . . . He intended to place in this man’s possession the note which Mr. Harrington had given him for the sum secured by a mortgage on the Wavertree plantation. Bondy had already served him faithfully in several instances where he did not wish his own name to be brought forward, in transactions that might sully the fair reputation he was so anxious to maintain among men of liberal feeling and unblemished integrity.35

Quite literally, it is the Jew who is the face of the novel’s speculative capitalism, this while Southern Gentiles like Malcolm lurk in the shadows and pledge what is clearly a false allegiance to the ideology of paternal feudalism. Another way to put this is to say that the Jew is the double for a Southern Yankee like Malcolm, who is apparently difficult to imagine without the co-presence of this stereotyped form of fiscal Otherness. This mirroring is further highlighted in an exchange between the two about the thief Withers, when Malcolm seeks to mock Bondy for his excessive “self-interest.” “[T]hat is the creed of your race,

30

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

I believe,” Malcolm says. Bondy’s response is instructive. “Not more than of yours, I think, sir,” he says. “It would be hard to find a keener hand at selfinterest than the man we have just spoken of [Withers], and he was no Jew.”36 At least according to Bondy, Jew and Gentile are capitalist twins, both in the North and in the South. And as I suggest above, this link extends beyond Southern speculators like Malcolm and Withers and includes the planter Harrington. His eagerness to invest in their scheme—“By heaven, I will do it!” he cries out after pondering Malcolm’s investment scheme, “[t]he temptation is too much to resist”—suggests he is no different than the Jew Bondy; the two are simply different stages on the same spectrum of capitalist desire.37 Yet this, I would argue, is also what the novel seeks to disavow—something we see if we continue to trace the career of the ten bags of gold Harrington has stolen. The first thing to note is that the money actually travels to Europe without Withers. This is because, in a dramatic moment, Bondy kills Withers while trying unsuccessfully to get him to reveal where he has hidden the money.38 The result is that the cash remains with Withers’ young daughter, who is on board the ship waiting for her father and who is unaware of the money’s origin. This works out well enough for the daughter—with help from a woman aboard the ship who adopts her, she ends up living a comfortable life in England. But it’s disastrous for Bondy, who spends the rest of the novel searching for the missing treasure. He even goes so far as to move into the home where he murdered Withers so that, like a character in an Edgar Allan Poe story, he can tear it apart board by board as he searches for the gold. “Several hours every night were consumed in this fruitless employment, until it became a species of mania with him,” we’re told.39 On the one hand, this is simply a stereotypical depiction of the greedy Jew, one that appears across antebellum sensationalism. But understood in the broader context of the Jew’s role as foil for Southern economic anxiety, this “mania” is more significant still. For what it suggests is an attempt to distinguish the Jew’s economic desire from that of Southerners like Malcolm and Harrington. Harrington may suffer from “temptation” and Malcolm may be a crook, but it’s Bondy who becomes obsessed with money to the point of madness. Nor is such affective displacement unusual. As Jonathan Freedman notes, a range of nineteenth-century writers, both American and British, adopted similar versions of economic antisemitism. “The passions ascribed to the Jew in the culture of capitalism,” he says, “may serve as a powerful way of distancing the affects unleashed by this system from the normative life of Christian culture and gentile commerce. . . . [T]he Jew’s affect . . . bears the burden of conflicting Christian affect vis-à-vis money, wealth, economy.”40 Bondy’s “mania” is in this regard the necessary

REGION, CAPITALISM, AND JEW IN POST-TOM PL ANTATION NOVEL

31

counterpoint to capitalist emotions in the South, whether those of the planter class, or even those of the Southern Yankee; indeed, this is in many ways Bondy’s primary purpose in the novel. But perhaps the clearest evidence of the Jew’s potency in these texts is that so much narrative work goes into neutralizing him and eventually jettisoning him altogether. We might think of his removal as an important ritual, one that does symbolic work for the Southern gentry. In The Planter’s Daughter, this process begins in the novel’s final section, when two key narrative threads intersect. The first has to do with Harrington’s $50,000 debt to Bondy and Malcolm. Here we see that Harrington is able to avoid forfeiture of his plantation when he receives an advance from his broker on an unusually large cotton harvest, a transaction that allows him to “settle with the Jew.”41 Fairly clearly, Dupuy wishes her protagonist to emerge intact from his encounter with Northernstyle capitalism—even if the advance he receives is itself part of the same credit-based capitalism found in the North and in Europe. (This seeming push to free Harrington—and thus the South—from entanglement with the Jew is also suggested when Bondy is later found dead in Withers’ old house, having killed himself in despair over his inability to find the missing $50,000 that Withers has stolen.42 ) The second narrative thread has to do with the money— we might more accurately call it the Southern money—originally stolen from Harrington. This subplot revolves around the daughter of the speculator-thief Withers, who, now grown, returns to America intent upon returning Harrington’s $50,000 to its rightful owner. “I have discovered that the fortune . . . amounted to the exact sum supposed to have been taken on that terrible night,” she says.43 The two storylines work together quite seamlessly. Apparently, the Jew Bondy has to be removed from the South in order for Harrington’s plantation money to finally come home. Freed now, at least symbolically, from the taint of the Jew, this old money represents a nostalgic return to a South which the novel asks us to imagine is now uncorrupted by capitalist desire—either from without or within. And as if to emphasize the shift that has taken place, Dupuy concludes the novel with a dramatic storm, one in which a tornado breaks a nearby levee, and the Wavertree plantation is washed away. Shortly thereafter, Harrington himself dies, and the remaining family moves to a smaller plot of land called the Grange. “The plantation of Wavertree was a desolate waste,” we’re told. “The negroes were sold to a neighboring proprietor, to whom they chose to go; and a most trying scene it was. . . . Cries, sobs, and benedictions were heard on every side.”44 It might thus seem that Dupuy imagines a South necessarily reduced by the forward march of modernity. Indeed, much like the Shelby or St. Clare

32

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

slaves in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Harrington slaves are clearly victims of the South’s unstable economy. But in fact, we should understand the reduced circumstances of the surviving Harringtons (fifty acres and six slaves) as signaling a return to a simpler version of the South, one free from the temptations and fluctuations of the capitalist marketplace. It is as if the storm has cleansed the family, and the South more generally, of the speculative contamination embodied in the Jew Bondy. Indeed, this is perhaps why Dupuy concludes the novel with the unexpected marriage of the Southern Yankee Malcolm and Harrington’s oldest daughter, Pauline. Having fled to Europe after the death of Harrington, Malcolm returns a changed man, not only wiser and humbler, but sickly. “Let me die calling you by the holy name of wife,” he says to Pauline. “I have bitterly repented of the evil that flowed from my selfish madness.”45 Tellingly, Malcolm survives his melodramatic illness, which allows his reformation to dovetail with the new version of the Harrington family that emerges after the death of their patriarch. Separated now from both his Jewish doppelga¨nger and his capitalist desires (his “selfish madness”), Malcolm is no longer a Southern Yankee. Instead, he is able now to join Harrington’s daughter to produce the next generation of the Southern gentry—which, in Dupuy’s fantasy version of the future, looks very much like the South of old.

Plantation Romance and the Jew A similar ambivalence about Southern money informs Maria McIntosh’s confusing 1853 novel The Lofty and the Lowly. I say confusing because, as critics have pointed out, while the novel is clearly a defense of slavery in the “antiTom” tradition, it is critical of both its Northern and Southern characters.46 McIntosh puts it thus: At the time of which we write the people of different parts of the United States were but little known to each other. To the inhabitant of the Southern States, not only the New Englander, but everyone who dwelt north of the Potomac was a Yankee—a name which was with him a synonyme of meanness, avarice and low cunning—while the native of the Northern States regarded his southern fellow-citizens as an indolent and prodigal race.47

Kerry Larson sums up McIntosh’s posture here by saying that “rather than favoring Southern magnanimity over Northern thrift, McIntosh is worried that the options have become too polarized.”48 Striking a similar note, Sarah

REGION, CAPITALISM, AND JEW IN POST-TOM PL ANTATION NOVEL

33

Mesle suggests that McIntosh is “engaged in the work of national union,” a project “that has become more important if also more challenging as a result of the ‘wounds’ rent by Stowe.”49 My own sense is that we should investigate what McIntosh has to say about the economic context for regional polarization and national union at mid-century. For, as with Dupuy, McIntosh depicts financial issues as central to the version of the Southern gentry emerging at mid-century. Indeed, McIntosh is careful to set much of her novel just before and after the Panic of 1837, when the cotton market went from flush times to bust.50 And again, the key character here is the Jew. As we’ll see, in a novel in which the tensions between South and North are exceptionally fraught, it is the Jew who both highlights regional differences, and collapses them. The result, much as in The Planter’s Daughter, is a thoroughgoing ambivalence about the North and its economy. Regarded on the one hand as an external threat to Southern values, Northern modes of finance and industry are, by novel’s end, acknowledged as necessary and indeed desirable. The Southern representative of the novel’s regional polarization is Donald Montrose, the scion of plantation owner Colonel John Montrose. The following quote usefully captures his planter perspective: Donald was not prudent. . . . he had been taught in his Southern home, that the first characteristic of a gentleman was, to prove himself untainted with a narrow, money-loving, or as they termed it, Yankee spirit; and that this was to be done . . . by thoughtless profusion and disregard of money.51

Much like Mr. Harrington in The Planter’s Daughter, Donald is woefully underprepared to deal with modern capitalism. This is made quickly evident when, during a family trip to the North, the young speculator George Browne manipulates Donald into a debt of $65,000—a sum that is especially overwhelming when Donald’s father dies unexpectedly. Suddenly, Donald’s financial excesses represent a threat to the family estate. “Then, Montrose passes into the hands of strangers!” his mother says when she learns of Donald’s wayward finances.52 In response to this crisis, the family lawyer puts Donald in touch with a creditor who, he says, has large sums of cash available on short notice. But it’s not just any creditor. Rather, it’s a Jew named Uriah Goldwire. “I think he is backed by some company at the North” the lawyer tells Donald. “He certainly has great command of ready money . . . though he came among us, some twenty years ago, poor enough. . . . Southern improvidence yields a good crop to Northern capital and thrift.”53

34

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

Again, then, we see the Jew mediating between Northern and Southern economies. A Northerner who has settled in Georgia, Goldwire makes a living taking advantage of the South’s genteel profligacy. And nowhere is this more evident than the dramatic moment when, pinched by the Panic of 1837, Goldwire comes to the Montrose plantation with a slave trader in order to foreclose on his loan. Here is the description of the scene, which is viewed by many of the neighboring planters: Such proceedings as those threatened by Uriah Goldwire had never been known amongst them. They were lenient creditors to each other—no gentleman, it was their creed, could be otherwise. The punctualities of business and rigid construction of contracts necessary amongst mercantile men . . . wore to them an aspect of severity. The immediate foreclosure of the mortgage, therefore, by Mr. Goldwire . . . seemed to them unpardonable; but when to this was added the threatened abuse of his power—above all, his daring to bring among them a slave-trader—a character never seen in these districts of country where negroes are born, grow old, and die, and are succeeded by their children and their children’s children on the same plantation, their indignation was thoroughly aroused, and Southern impetuosity overbore Southern indolence.54

The lines speak to the Jew’s role in this novel and in the plantation narrative more generally. Though clearly cast as a villain, Goldwire is in his economic “severity” the embodiment of Southern anxieties about immersion in the national and indeed global credit economy. Having used his slaves as collateral for the mortgage he has received from Goldwire, Donald finds himself caught up in a system that links him to banks in the US North (Goldwire is an agent for the “Loan and Trust Organization” in Hartford, Connecticut) as well as, indirectly, the many financial institutions in London that have invested in the Southern cotton industry.55 For in fact, Northeastern and European bankers saw plantation owners like Montrose as ideal borrowers. As Baptist explains, Lending to the South’s cotton economy was an investment not just in the world’s most widely traded commodity, but also in a set of producers who had shown a consistent ability to increase their productivity and revenue. In other words, enslavers had the cash flow to pay back their debts. . . . In fact, they owned the biggest pool of collateral in the United States: 2 million slaves worth over $1 billion. Not only was that almost 20 percent of all the wealth owned by all US citizens, but it was the most liquid part of that wealth.56

REGION, CAPITALISM, AND JEW IN POST-TOM PL ANTATION NOVEL

35

This is the context in which we should understand Goldwire’s arrival to the Montrose plantation with a slave trader. Like a return of the repressed, he is a reminder that the South is inextricably linked to the broader global economy and that its wealth has been generated via the credit backed by the “liquid” bodies of its slaves. It’s worth reminding ourselves that Daniel Robinson Hundley’s “Southern Shylock” offers the same triangulation of planter, slave trader, and Jew we see in The Lofty and the Lowly. Indeed, this character is simply a compressed version of the combined threat posed by Goldwire and the slave trader he brings to the Montrose plantation. In each case, the Jew acts as a psychologically flexible scapegoat for the South’s own complicity in slavery’s capitalism. Certainly, McIntosh seems to disavow this connection—hence the above lines about the “indignation” of the Southerners who gather around the widowed Mrs. Montrose. But what we see is that, just as Dupuy’s text points to subtle and perhaps even unconscious links between the landed Harrington and the Jew Bondy, so too does McIntosh align the Montrose men with Goldwire. “[Y ]ou could not be expected to know the feelings of . . . a Southern gentleman toward his people,” Donald says when discussing his slaves with a Northern creditor. But the man’s response gives the lie to Donald’s self-deception. “And may I ask, sir, do Southern gentlemen never sell their negroes?”57 Donald stumbles through a response, but the moment is telling, precisely in that it reveals McIntosh’s seeming awareness that the difference between the planter class and merchant slave traders is paper thin, if not altogether illusory. Yet this is what the novel is unable to fully admit, just as it seems unwilling to acknowledge that Goldwire’s other method of collecting on his debt—a forced marriage to Donald Montrose’s sister Isabelle—is itself the mirror image of the sexual decadence that lurks at the edges of the Montrose plantation. “I’ll tell you what; you’ve got a right handsome daughter,” Goldwire says to Mrs. Montrose when she informs him she can’t make her biannual interest payment. She rebuffs him, but he presses the issue, telling her that if she doesn’t agree to a marriage between him and Isabelle, he’ll sell the plantation, slaves and all.58 The moment is scandalous, but in fact it’s hard not to read Goldwire’s perversion of the marriage contract in relation to another such violation: Donald’s desire to marry his cousin Alice, with whom he’s been raised in a sibling-like relationship. The question put to Alice by Donald’s father is one of several moments when the reader is prompted to view Donald’s feelings for his cousin as inappropriate and bordering on incestuous. “Alice, does Donald love you with more than a brother’s love?” he asks. Our answer has already come a short time earlier when Donald tells Alice of his desire to marry her. “Oh Donald!

36

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

Donald! do not say such terrible words!” Alice says. Donald’s response is that “[c]ousins marry every day,” but Alice’s retort is suggestive: “[N]ot brothers and sisters, Donald—my brother Donald—my darling brother.”59 Larson observes that Donald’s desire for Alice is linked to his problematic economic expenditures. “Too long dependent on slave labor,” he says, “Donald can no more discipline his desires than his finances.”60 I would add that McIntosh is tapping into the conventions of the Southern gothic—a genre that often centers on the excessive and often outré desires of the Southern gentry. The central text here is of course Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), which famously critiques a crumbling, inward-turning plantation family by staging a gothic form of sibling incest between Madeline and Roderick Usher. We see echoes of the Usher twins in Alice and Donald. This is evident in the above-cited exchanges about Robert’s inappropriate “brother’s love,” but it’s especially apparent in a nightmare that Alice has midway through the novel, after yet another conversation (this one with her mother) about a possible marriage to Donald. Dreaming that she is walking with Donald through a graveyard, Alice, we’re told, “thought that she had fallen into an open grave, and that [Donald] was shovelling the earth upon her; it was on her chest, a mountain-weight, oppressive, stifling—she strove, as only those can strive who strive for life, to throw it off, and in vain.”61 Much as in Poe’s story, in which Roderick attempts to bury Madeline in a belowground vault, the gothic trope of live burial seems here to indicate that Alice is trapped by the history and culture of the plantation South—both of which are of course referenced in the graveyard setting of the dream. More to the point, her graveyard suffocation, which itself seems to hint at a terrifying sexual encounter, seems to speak to Alice’s anxieties about the incestuous nature of a possible marriage with Donald. As for what’s at stake, we should return to Loughran’s point about Southern fears over “intermixing regions.” In Poe’s text, the narrator refers to the “Usher race,” explaining that “the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain.”62 Donald’s hoped-for marriage to Alice implies a similar desire for a “direct line of descent.” It’s unclear what a “Montrose race” would consist of, but we should assume that, among other qualities, it would rely on a firewall between Northern and Southern modes of economic desire.63 Recall that in The Planter’s Daughter, the Jew Bondy refutes the notion forwarded by the Southern Yankee Malcolm that economic desire is the “creed” of his “race.” Instead, he says, such desire has spread to the world of Southern Gentiles. Donald’s desired union with Alice looks very much like an effort to safeguard

REGION, CAPITALISM, AND JEW IN POST-TOM PL ANTATION NOVEL

37

against such contamination and to return, somehow, to an originary Southern selfhood, one that precedes the arrival of capitalism to the South. The problem, of course, is that slavery is itself part and parcel of capitalism. Hence the importance of the Jew Goldwire in The Lofty and the Lowly. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe actually collapses decadent Southerner and Jew. Indeed, we’re told that Roderick Usher has “a nose of a delicate Hebrew model,”64 a fact that suggests he is both Southern gentry and Jew. He is, in properly gothic fashion, Other to himself. The Lofty and the Lowly is less radical, with McIntosh seemingly intent upon deploying the Jew Goldwire as an externalized double for Donald. As we’ve seen, this is true economically, in that Goldwire’s intention to sell the Montrose slaves is the projected image of Donald’s own traffic in human flesh (we’re told at one point that there are fifty small slave houses on the Montrose plantation, which implies that there are hundreds of slaves).65 But as I suggest above, this is also true romantically, in that Goldwire’s desire for Donald’s sister Isabelle acts as the narrative counterbalance to Donald’s desire for Alice. A panicked Mrs. Montrose tells Goldwire that “[N]o poverty could ever degrade [Isabelle] to your level,” yet it’s Goldwire’s letter to the president of the bank he works for in Connecticut that is perhaps more revealing. “Should things turn out as I guess,” he writes, “I shall marry, shut up shop, and come North to live.”66 Goldwire’s intent is to take the Southern belle as payment for the Montrose debt and then transplant her North to start a new family line. This is a Southern nightmare of intermixing regions; it is the regional breakdown, or amalgamation, decried by Daniel Robinson Hundley. But this crisis is also what the novel requires: an external threat that allows Donald and his gentry brethren to misrecognize the uncanny relationship between themselves and the capitalist Jew, and to thus evade what is essentially their own selfhatred. Indeed, what we see here is in many ways the antecedent to Quentin Compson’s near-hysterical response to the question posed to him by his college roommate Shreve in Absalom, Absalom! (1936): “Why do you hate the South?” “I dont hate it!” Quentin says over and over. “I dont hate it!”67 I would suggest that Quentin’s denial is related to what we see in anti-Tom novels like The Lofty and the Lowly. I would suggest further that Quentin’s response is related to the antisemitism we see from his brother Jason in The Sound and the Fury (1929)—his complaints about “dam eastern jews,” and so on.68 Both, I think, are responses to the knowledge that Southern slavery is capitalist in the very way that the Jew Goldwire is accused of being capitalist. They are one and the same.

38

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

The intense doubling between Donald Montrose and the Jew Goldwire is perhaps why the sexual and financial excesses of the South are counterbalanced by yet another character in this novel. This is Robert Grahame, the son of a Northern industrialist whose innovations in cotton manufacturing some years earlier are described as groundbreaking. Robert has from a young age run his deceased father’s cotton factory in Connecticut and worked to pay off the debts his father accrued when the textile market was flooded with British goods after the War of 1812 and the business failed. The “lowly” Robert is thus the polar opposite of the “lofty” Donald Montrose. Indeed, in keeping with his above-cited “disregard of money,” Donald refers to manufacturing as “ignoble labor” and describes Robert’s decision to follow his father into industrial work as “a choice no Southerner would have made.” Clearly, Donald’s comments run counter to the exhortations of Southerners such as William Gregg about the need for increased manufacturing in the South. But they also run up against the plot of the novel, for soon enough Robert becomes immensely wealthy after patenting an invention for the improvement of the cloth produced in cotton mills worldwide.69 The Northerner Robert Grahame is thus able to do two things that have proven impossible for Donald Montrose, scion of the Southern plantation. First, he pays off the Montrose debt to the Jew Goldwire by loaning Donald money. “I really am serving myself, in this affair,” he writes in a letter, “for the money is at present lying idle, and I cannot ask better interest than the eight per cent. you are paying, or better security than you have given your present creditor.”70 This, contra the concerns from Hinton Helper which I cite above, is a seemingly benevolent form of Northern money. The fact that the cash is “idle” and apparently out of circulation is especially noteworthy; perhaps active capital is too much of a threat to Southern security. Second, Robert travels South and marries Alice Montrose, thus ensuring that she won’t marry her indolent cousin Donald. The two accomplishments go hand in hand. For it seems that, much as in The Planter’s Daughter, the Jew has to first be neutralized, after which the South can be restored to an imagined state of economic and social health. Here, however, the resolution is more complicated than in The Planter’s Daughter. Instead of a fantasy return to Southern wholeness, we have what looks like regional reconciliation. Mesle argues that McIntosh’s goal is “emphatically not to shore up a specifically Southern identity.” Rather, she says, the novel seeks to “demonstrate that a strengthened moral and national vision will be necessary as the U.S. seeks to retain its preeminence in an era of rapidly shifting political geographies.”71 I would suggest something related: that the marriage of Alice and Robert reflects a way to resolve Southern

REGION, CAPITALISM, AND JEW IN POST-TOM PL ANTATION NOVEL

39

ambivalence about capitalism. For in rewriting the gothic romance of Alice and Donald Montrose, McIntosh provides an outlet for the South’s repressed economic desires. Channeled now into a national romance wherein South and North are symbolically married, with cotton production (Alice, daughter of the Southern plantation) symbolically coupled with its US manufacture (Robert, owner of “Grahame Cotton Mills”), these desires are given the sort of sanction they otherwise lack.72 We might describe this as another form of regional mixing or amalgamation, but clearly we’re asked to view this as preferable to a union between Alice and her Southern cousin Donald Montrose—or worse, Alice and the Jew Goldwire.

Abolition and the Gothic Jew The Lofty and the Lowly isn’t the only post-Tom plantation novel to play with an “Usher”-style Southern gothic, one that features Jewishness at its center. Consider for example an anonymous pamphlet novel entitled Startling Disclosures! Mysteries Solved! or, The History of Esther Livingstone, and the Dark Career of Henry Baldwin (1853).73 Here the narrator, after purchasing a “magnificent” Charleston plantation with 100 slaves from a rich Jewish merchant, encounters an exceedingly beautiful and hypersensual “Jewess” named Naomi, who is one of the slaves on the estate. “My father was a wealthy Hebrew, my mother a Quadroon and a slave,” she explains to him. Almost immediately, the narrator falls in love with and impregnates Naomi. He is, he says, “[i]ntoxicated by the magnetism of her surpassing loveliness” and “entangled by the visions of a delirious dream.”74 Like so many Gentiles before him in the pages of Western literature, the narrator is no match for the alluring Jewess. Soon enough, though, the narrator is called away from the plantation on business, at which point his jealous wife walls Naomi up in a tomb and leaves her and her newborn child to die.75 As we’ve seen, the tropes of live burial and familial inwardness are standard fare for the Southern gothic. But we should note that the excesses of the plantation system are once again displaced onto the convenient category of Jewishness. This is most noticeable in that it’s the “wealthy Hebrew” who rapes his quadroon slave and thus fathers the alluring Naomi; here as elsewhere, the Jew becomes the negative face of slavery. But this is also evident in the figure of Naomi and her seduction of the narrator. In her first meeting with the narrator, Naomi mocks him, saying simply that his wife has kept them separated because “[s]he knew I would love you, and that you would love me.”76 We might compare the Jewess of this story to Hundley’s

40

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

Southern Yankee: another monstrous offspring birthed in the South, she has to be sealed away lest the South come face to face with its own wayward desires and its own guilty conscience. Yet another plantation narrative that deploys a gothic version of the Jew is Harriet Hamline Bigelow’s The Curse Entailed, which I quote at the outset of this chapter when referencing the character Jew David. Here, though, unlike what we see in The Planter’s Daughter or The Lofty and the Lowly, we’re dealing with an abolitionist novel. Accordingly, we need to adjust our focus somewhat. Rather than the unacknowledged symptom of Southern anxiety and ambivalence we see in Dupuy and McIntosh, the Jew depicted in this novel is a fairly overt figure of critique, one Bigelow packages in a version of the Southern gothic in order to underscore her denunciation of the region’s reliance on the slave economy. The plot of The Curse Entailed is even more convoluted than what we see in The Lofty and the Lowly, with various familial narratives paralleling one another and only occasionally intersecting. But at its core, the story revolves around a New Orleans native named Edward Le Rux. Le Rux, we’re told some way into the text, has raised a family under the assumed name Le Clare. The reason for this subterfuge is that his wife and the mother of his two children, a woman named Judy, was a slave owned by his father. In a melodramatic flashback, we learn that Edward fell in love with Judy when his father brought her to the family plantation in Louisiana and eventually fled with her to start a new life in France under the name Le Clare. “[A]s soon as prudence will permit, you must flee your native land,” Edward is told by a family friend who aids their escape. The friend is more helpful still, for in a dramatic act of generosity, he gives Judy a chest of gold coins that, he explains, he found on the beach years earlier, after witnessing a ship inbound from Europe wreck onshore. “It contains gold of the French coinage,” he explains. “I have never spent any of it; but have ever intended to bestow it on some worthy object. . . . I now feel that you are the one on whom I should bestow this gift.”77 Much as in The Planter’s Daughter, a store of treasure thus plays a key role in the story. Here, though, the money isn’t Southern, much less American, in origin. Rather, having traveled from Europe to America, the “French coinage” seems to represent money as yet untainted by the American slave economy. The fact that Edward receives it just as he embarks on his flight from the South with his father’s slave only underscores this point: the money is a fantasy version of prosperity outside the plantation economy of the American South. And the key is that this isn’t “new” Northern money marked by capitalist greed. Rather, like the “bags of treasure” in The Planter’s Daughter, the gold harks

REGION, CAPITALISM, AND JEW IN POST-TOM PL ANTATION NOVEL

41

back to an earlier historical moment, one that seems to predate the rise of modern capitalism. But again, this money is even more ideal in that it also precedes and is clear of the mid-nineteenth-century struggles between the North and South; indeed, as French currency, it also avoids association with the English cotton trade. Instead, it is both literally and figuratively old money, which is to say that it’s very much like the ideal of Southern money, but cleansed of its association with slavery. The problem is that soon after moving to France, Edward becomes dissipated and begins to spend the money recklessly in an effort to mix into French high society. He is, it seems, a Southerner at heart, at least when it comes to handling his finances. Edward seeks to remedy this situation by taking his family—he now has two children—back to America and establishing residence in the North. But after a series of dramatic plot shifts, Edward finally finds himself broke and living with his brother in New Orleans. And this, perhaps predictably, is the moment when the Jew enters Bigelow’s text. For what we see is that Edward and his brother fall into debt to the criminal moneylender Jew David. Somewhat mysteriously, Jew David knows the secret history of Edward’s family and acts to take advantage of this information; it’s as if he has been waiting all along for Edward’s return to the American South. More specifically, he seems to have been waiting for Edward’s daughter Emily, who is legally a slave in the US South. This crisis is highlighted when one of the family slaves reports that a mysterious man has been lurking around the slave quarters. “’Im ask all ’bout good Miss Em’ly,” the slave explains. “An den ’im say som’thin’ to ’imself ’bout ’im money, an’ call ’im monish; an’ den im’ goes off ’gin.”78 In what follows, we see that, true to his plantation heritage, Edward’s brother William sells Emily to Jew David. Bigelow describes the dramatic moment thus: A shudder passed over Emily, as [Jew David] pronounced the word slave. She proceeded to an examination of the papers. . . . From one, she learned that there had been money borrowed of Jew David, to the amount of six thousand dollars. . . . The other paper was a regular bill of sale of Emily Le Rux . . . to Jew David, signed by her uncle, William Le Rux.79

It’s at this point that the novel turns more overtly into a sensationalized version of the Southern gothic. Jennifer Greeson argues that, in order to better elicit sympathetic responses from Northern readers, abolitionist narratives emphasizing sexual abuse in the slave South often borrowed from the tropes of female seduction and coerced prostitution deployed by urban gothic writers

42

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

such as Lippard and George Thompson.80 Bigelow takes this a step further, adding the capitalist Jew as the figure who most overtly enacts the threat to the abducted female. Acting in the manner of urban gothic villains such as Jew Mike in Thompson’s Venus in Boston (1849), Jew David whisks Emily away to a secret prison where he and his brother Moloch store women whom they have abducted.81 “I am claimed as a slave and am now the legal property of Jew David,” Emily says in a soliloquy. The fates of the women vary: some are sold directly into slavery, some are forced into prostitution, and some are impregnated in order to sell their children. As another prisoner puts it to Emily, David and the other Jews “have become pimps to the lusts of Southern gentlemen, who pay . . . well for the vile service.”82 It would be hard to find a more direct description of the imagined relationship between the capitalist Jew and “Southern gentlemen” within the period’s plantation fiction. We might describe this as the smoking gun which proslavery novels such as The Planter’s Daughter and The Lofty and the Lowly are reluctant to make fully visible. Jew David and Moloch are cast as depraved reprobates, but clearly their operation (it’s sometimes called “the robbing and kidnapping company”) is in business only so long as they can market their goods to a steady stream of Southern consumers—that is, as long as the sexual excesses of the plantation aristocracy are given free reign.83 Much in the way that Greeson argues, the Jew of the urban gothic imagination is deployed in a Southern context in order to lay bare the South’s hidden sexual underbelly. “[W]e had a sort of plantation there,” Jew David says late in the novel, after he is finally arrested and placed on trial. [T]welve men came to me—they were rich men, and more than half of them were members of churches. . . . They told me they wanted me to kidnap women and children; and I did so. Some of the gang would come and take those away who were kidnapped, and sell them. They would then meet at my house . . . and we would divide the money.84

The term plantation is noteworthy. No cotton is harvested, but Jew David’s house is indeed the site were a valuable commodity—sex and sexual reproduction—is cultivated. He is thus the (quasi-urban) gothic double of the South’s planter class. We should note as well that Bigelow alters the historical record to achieve this effect. For it turns out that the “robbing and kidnapping company” cited here is based on the real-life activities of a gang of kidnappers that, led by a man named John Murrell, operated in the Mississippi Valley in

REGION, CAPITALISM, AND JEW IN POST-TOM PL ANTATION NOVEL

43

the 1830s. According to a popular pamphlet by Virgil Stewart entitled A History of the Detection, Conviction, Life and Designs of John A. Murrell, the Great Western Land Pirate (1835), Murrell and a group of coconspirators roamed the region abducting slaves, selling them, and then rekidnapping them for repeat sale.85 But although Bigelow actually describes Murrell as an associate of Jew David’s in The Curse Entailed (“I soon found out that the men with whom I was associated were connected with the Murrell gang,” Jew David says in his confession at novel’s end), there’s no suggestion in Stewart’s narrative or anywhere else that Jews were part of the conspiracy.86 Rather, Jew David and his brethren are sensational additions to Bigelow’s critique of the slave South. And more; for at novel’s end, after Emily is saved from Jew David’s prison, we learn that he is the one who originally sold Judy, Edward’s first wife and Emily’s mother, to Edward’s father. Moreover, we learn that she was abducted by Jew David from a White family traveling to the US from France. As he explains at his trial, “I do hereby confess that I took from a ship, which was sinking near this shore, in the year 18–, a white child . . . and that said child afterwards became the property of Mr. William Le Rux, Senior, and was held by him as a slave, under the name of Judy.” This melodramatic revelation puts considerable pressure on the narrative. On the one hand, we see that, via the magical alchemy of the Jew, even White people are vulnerable to slavery. As Emily puts it while lamenting her fate in Jew David’s prison, “I have seen many blacks free, yet I, purely white, am a slave. . . . [S]lavery has no respect to color, blood, or nation.”87 This, it would seem, makes the Jew even more pernicious than the plantation slaveholders with whom he conducts business. On Jew David’s “plantation,” everyone is commodified, whether White or Black. But on the other hand, we should realize that Jew David simply represents the logic of capitalism taken to its furthest extreme. Jew David—and with him the Jew of the post-Tom plantation novel—embodies a modern world in which all social categories seem given way before the insistent pressures of global capitalism. There is, however, a final twist to Bigelow’s narrative, one which returns us to the issue of the South’s economic anxieties. This is the fact that the chest of “French coinage” given to Edward when he married Judy and fled to France was in fact stolen by Jew David and Moloch at the same time that they abducted Judy. Indeed, the money belonged to Judy’s father, who was also aboard the ship at the time that Jew David and Moloch hatched their scheme. (Their plan was to bury the chest on shore and come back for it after imprisoning Judy, but it was instead found and later given to Edward Le Rux.) Once again, then, it is the Jew who acts as the conduit for money as it moves between the South and other regions, whether the US North or, as in this novel, Europe. This

44

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

begins when Jew David intercepts European money en route to the US. But since the money makes its way into the hands of the fleeing Southerner Le Rux, we should think of Jew David as having been responsible for this as well. The Jew is, that is to say, the figure who ensures that this found treasure is never spent within the South itself. This might sound like a reason to interpret the Jew as the South’s antagonist—as more Northern than Southern, for example. But in fact, his actions are consistent with his role as the South’s dark double. Who better to show that the South was its own worst enemy than this figure of internal difference?

Money Laundering in the South The Jew’s role as an agent of abolitionist rhetoric is especially evident in the final text I want to examine here. This is Van Buren Denslow’s Owned and Disowned. Sometimes categorized as a “tragic mulatta” tale, this novel revolves around the plight of Julia Preston, who midway through the narrative learns she is both the daughter and the slave of her father.88 “I knew your mother well,” a priest tells her. “She was beautiful and accomplished, virtuous and pious, but a quadroon, and the property of Mr. Preston.” In what follows, we see that this revelation comes about because Mr. Preston, owner of the Lindenhall plantation in Mississippi, has fallen into debt and is thus preparing to sell Julia to the infamous pirate Conrad Defoe in order to meet his creditors’ demands. “[T]hough I thought of passing her off as my child and as white,” he writes in a letter, “my duty to myself and my creditors in my present embarrassments, makes such benevolence too expensive a luxury.”89 The problem for Preston is that Julia is informed about the impending sale and flees. As a result, Preston is forced to ask for a reprieve from his creditor— who, it turns out, is a Jew named Moses Iasaacks. “Good God, do not ruin me!” Preston begs when meeting with Iasaack’s attorney, Mr. Snacks (also a Jew).90 “Mr. Snacks, I appeal to you as a man, as a Christian, I beg your pardon, sir, as a Jew, what time, if it be only a few weeks, will you give me to raise this sum?” The difference between Christian and Jew is apparently significant here, as Snacks only gives Preston one day to raise the necessary funds before foreclosing on his plantation. Soon enough, Lindenhall passes into the hands of the Jew Iasaacks. “[D]e hall, an’ de niggers, an’ eberyting is all gone to de new owner,” a slave named Miss Tanzey says. “Dey call him Iasaacks, I b’leeb.” Needless to say, Iasaacks immediately makes plans to liquidate the plantation—a decision that becomes especially dramatic once Julia is captured and thrown into jail pending sale. “Julia looked at the unsightly wretch before

REGION, CAPITALISM, AND JEW IN POST-TOM PL ANTATION NOVEL

45

her with loathing and astonishment,” we’re told of her first encounter with a slave trader. “She had not dreamed of the existence of such creatures.”91 Much as we saw with the character Goldwire in The Lofty and the Lowly, it is the Jew who introduces the slave trader and the hard realities of the slave economy into the plantation narrative. But as with the previous novels I’ve cited, it’s also the Jew who facilitates the movement and transformation of Southern money within this novel. This is especially evident if we trace the progress of Preston’s money once he cedes ownership of Lindenhall to Iasaacks. Initially, the funds are held by the creditor Iasaacks. But this is only temporary. Eventually, and in keeping with the novel’s abolitionist agenda, this money actually makes its way to Julia, Preston’s quadroon daughter and slave. The staging is elaborate. In an extended parallel narrative, we learn that Iasaacks has a daughter, Annette, who, in a nod to Jessica in The Merchant of Venice (1600), has renounced her father and married a Gentile lover—the pirate Defoe, who it turns out is First Lieutenant under the famous French pirate Jean Lafitte. “My father was an old Jew,” Annette explains. “I heartily despised him. He was rich and lent much, and the only text of Scripture which he ever knew was ‘the borrower shall be servant to the lender.’ The chink of money would have drawn his attention away from the sound of heavenly harps.” Here however the Jew’s daughter doesn’t steal her father’s money. Instead, Iasaacks dies during the siege of New Orleans. As a result, Annette, Iasaacks’ sole family member, is next in line to inherit her father’s vast wealth. “The amount . . . is almost incalculable,” Snacks explains.92 The wrinkle is that both Annette and Conrad also die during the same battle—Conrad while helping Lafitte and Andrew Jackson in their defense of New Orleans, and Annette when she commits suicide in her grief over Conrad’s death. The deaths of Iasaacks, his daughter, and his son-in-law means that Preston’s Southern money must find a new owner. That person is Conrad Defoe’s brother, a man named Walter Defoe—who, it turns out, has become lovers with none other than Julia Preston. Kimberly Manganelli argues that the figure of the Jewess “cannot be understood unless . . . examined alongside representations of America’s mixed-race slaves.”93 In doing so, she focuses on the transatlantic connections between these two stock characters (with emphasis on the European Jewess). But Owned and Disowned is a useful test case for this thesis on American soil. And what we see is that the Jewess becomes the abolitionist vehicle for rescuing the Tragic Mulatta. The Otherness of the Jessica figure, it seems, is the necessary conduit for laundering Southern money and imagining a new South—one embodied in the union of the mixed-race Julia and the Northerner-in-theSouth Walter Defoe.

46

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

This couple’s sentimental backstory is even more complicated than Annette and Conrad’s. Walter, we learn, has struggled through a difficult childhood in New Haven, Connecticut, working in a “hot, steaming factory” to support his sick mother while his reckless older brother opts for a life of crime at sea.94 But things change for him when, at the height of his mother’s illness, a beautiful and apparently wealthy girl appears at their doorstep and helps nurse the ailing woman. This is of course Julia Preston, who is being educated at a nearby convent. Walter’s mother eventually dies, after which Julia departs for home; Walter, meanwhile, manages to eke out a living at the factory and eventually earn his way into Yale. But Walter never forgets Julia, which is why at the outset of the novel we see him traveling through Mississippi and Louisiana, searching for his long-lost love. When he does finally find her, it’s just as Preston is preparing to sell her, and so Walter becomes active in trying to save her once she’s taken away by the local slave trader. Yet we need to keep in mind that it’s only the unexpected inheritance of Iasaacks’ money and property that allows for a climactic moment in which Walter saves Julia from a slave auction. “Dear, dear Walter, I felt that you were coming to save me,” she says when Walter arrives to take possession of Lindenhall.95 For indeed, Walter is now the new owner of the plantation once owned by Preston, and then by Iasaacks. “There was joy, too, among the lowly,” we’re told of the slaves as they gather for Walter and Julia’s wedding, which takes place on the plantation. “Not only the whole force of the Preston plantation, but also several scores of negroes—the former property of the demented Jew—had assembled down at the quarters, some of them gaily dressed.”96 Having traveled from Preston (Southern gentry) to Iasaacks (“demented Jew”) to Defoe (Northern factory worker), this Southern money seems to have found a suitable owner, at least as per the demands of the abolitionist imagination. But what sort of master is the Northerner-in-the-South Walter Defoe? One answer can be found in Principles of Economic Philosophy of Society, Government, and Industry (1888), a book which Denslow published several decades after Owned and Disowned appeared.97 Here, as part of a wide-ranging discussion about political economy in the US, he suggests that the fiscal tensions between the North and South were the true case of the Civil War: The considerations underlying the entire struggle were economic. The armies that met on the Rapidan, and at Vicksburg, represented opposing economic theories. . . . The lack of the gold revenue, which would have come from a protective tariff if the South had had competing manufacturers, rendered the bonds and notes of the Confederate States worthless. The lack of the

REGION, CAPITALISM, AND JEW IN POST-TOM PL ANTATION NOVEL

47

manufactured goods greatly impaired their military strength. The conviction became far more general in the South after the war, that no nation can afford to depend on the production, by another nation, of any of the forms of wealth essential to a nation’s defense in war. The feeling of dependence on cotton, expressed by the saying “Cotton is king,” gave way to the feeling that money is king. The Northern States, by their greater diversification of industries, actually grew richer in the midst of the expenditures which so impoverished the South. Of this diversity of industries money is the symbol and agent.98

It’s perhaps risky to apply Denslow’s ideas here to his much earlier novel. Still, it does seem as if his retrospective gloss on the causes of the Civil War matches up with what we see in Owned and Disowned (as well as with the various critiques of the Southern economy by DeBow and others). We see this first in the fate of Mr. Preston, the plantation patriarch, who commits suicide on the day of Walter and Julia’s marriage.99 Fairly clearly, his death is intended to signal the passing of the South’s “cotton is king” economy. But we also see this in the actions of Defoe. For, in an echo of what we see with Donald Montrose in The Lofty and the Lowly, Defoe begins almost immediately to convert Lindenhall into something more closely resembling a capitalist enterprise. This begins with his decision to urge his slaves to purchase their own freedom. “[T]o those who had nearly accomplished the work of purchasing their liberty,” we’re told, “he had remitted the balance, and freed not only themselves, but their aged parents and wives and children.” For the others, Defoe imposes “easy terms as the price of their freedom, which would at the same time fit them better for the competition with the always free and skilled laborer of the North, upon which they would enter.”100 This, however, is only a first step for Defoe. After several years at Lindenhall, he decides to return to the North with Julia, where he becomes “a merchant prince.” Apparently, his childhood work in Northern factories, combined with his education at Yale, has prepared him for success in a Northern economy based on manufacturing. Indeed, the very fact that he succeeds suggests he benefits from the “diversity of industries” Denslow describes in his praise of the Northern economy. And yet Defoe doesn’t abandon the South altogether. Eventually, he retires “from the excitement of his counting-house in the metropolis, to [a] beautiful villa upon the banks of the Hudson.” But what’s telling is that this home is quite overtly modeled on the Preston home where Julia was raised. Styled and even named after Lindenhall (with “fac-similes of the green lawn, the groves of cypress, the branching willow” of Lindenhall), Defoe’s Northern villa is quite

48

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

literally the fantasized reincarnation of the plantation South, purged now of slavery. We might understand it as a South in the North—a sort of utopian solution to the economic and social sectional tensions of the 1850s.101 Yet we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the seed money for this new home comes from the inheritance Walter Defoe receives from the Jew Iasaacks—a portion of which was of course Lindenhall itself. For what this suggests is that, as with other writers of plantation fiction, Denslow saw in the Jew a character who could perform a special kind of fantasy work. Acting as the figure through whom Southern money must pass en route to becoming legitimate and Northern (capitalist) in orientation, he is, we might say, a key figure of transition or mediation. At least in this abolitionist novel, the Jew is the South’s negative doppelga¨nger, but he’s also the one who converts—one might say launders— its dirty money. He is once again a “moneychanger.” And given Denslow’s later critique of the South, this makes sense. Perhaps, indeed, it’s only through the magical alchemy of the Jew that such a transformation could ever be imagined at all.

The Jew’s Absent Presence I want to conclude this chapter by looking at one last example of the ideological work of the Jew in the South. This is an engraving on the cover of the July 29, 1865 issue of Harper’s Weekly (see Figure 1.1).102 Entitled “The Great Labor Question from a Southern Point of View,” the picture shows a White plantation owner sitting on the porch of his “big house” with wife and daughter, addressing a Black laborer who, we can assume, has just transitioned from field slave to free laborer. This shift from slavery to freedom is suggested both by the postwar publication date of the magazine’s issue (Robert E. Lee surrendered April 9, and the war officially ended in May) and by the plantation owner’s comments. “My boy we’ve toiled and taken care of you long enough,” he says in a cartoonish speech bubble. “Now you’ve got to work!” Offered as they are in a Northern magazine such as Harper’s, the lines are no doubt meant to be read ironically: clearly the man has been working all along. But for the plantation owner (who clearly has more in common with Southern characters like Dupuy’s Mr. Harrington than with Northerners like McIntosh’s Robert Grahame), the transition from a world governed by slave labor to one dominated by free labor is uncomfortable. For him, it is a shift from owner and supposedly benevolent caregiver to capitalist overseer of a market-driven work force—this is the “labor question” the image heading references.

REGION, CAPITALISM, AND JEW IN POST-TOM PL ANTATION NOVEL

49

Figure 1.1. “The Great Labor Question from a Southern Point of View,” Harper’s Magazine (July 29, 1865) Courtesy, Library of Congress.

50

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

But what makes this picture especially telling is the quote at the bottom of the page from Portia in The Merchant of Venice: “Which is the Merchant here, and which the Jew?”103 Uttered while Portia, disguised as the lawyer Balthazar, is preparing to adjudicate the case between the speculator Antonio and the moneylender Shylock (Antonio has agreed to be the guarantor for a loan Shylock has made to Antonio’s close friend Bassanio), the line ironically suggests that she is unable to distinguish between Gentile and Jew—that, as capitalists, they’re one and the same. Applied here to a Southern context, the line is even more complicated. For what it highlights are Southern fears that defeat in the Civil War signaled entry into a form of mercantilism that would, of necessity, blur and perhaps even eliminate the distinction between Southern plantation owners and capitalist Jews. This is of course a Northern image, and so we should place it in a category with a novel such as The Curse Entailed. Still, the anxieties here are consistent with those expressed by the Southerner Daniel Robinson Hundley in his description of the “Southern Shylock,” as well as in novels such as The Planter’s Daughter and The Lofty and the Lowly. The plantation owner of this image doesn’t match up with the sorts of stereotypical depictions of the Jew I’ve outlined here, and I doubt we’re being asked to read him as such. But this makes the image that much more suggestive. He may not be a Jew, but he might be confused with one, precisely to the extent that he has now entered a capitalist system from which he once thought himself insulated. Here, we might say, the Jew haunts the Southern gentry as its uncanny dark double even when he’s not actually there.

2 La Belle Juive, or “Jew”? From Rachel Félix to The Marble Faun

George Anthon, who is not susceptible to histrionic impressions, is made captive by the Israelitish woman Rachel. She tasks his vocabulary to the utmost. Cram goes every night to hear and see her, and is in a worse spasm of enthusiasm than any since the Kossuth hallucinations. Mrs. Eleanor also goes every night and experiences fevers and nervous flustrations, with ebullient and explosive hysterical tendencies. The moral repute of this Jewish sorceress is certainly low, for though she’s so prodigious a lion, she has been asked, I believe, to meet with the ladies but once, viz., at Trobriand’s. People whisper very black things of her.1

The above entry from the 1855 diary of George Templeton Strong is one of many descriptions of audience responses to the Jewish tragedienne Rachel Félix during her highly publicized American tour that same year. It’s also typical. Focusing with some puzzlement on the excessive affective states Félix induces (“nervous flustrations” and “hysterical tendencies,” etc.), Strong offers Félix as a kind of magical, exotic being, one whom people find simultaneously titillating and nervous-making. An essay in Ballou’s magazine provides a similar perspective. “Rachel was on the stage, and I trembled,” one attendee is quoted as saying after seeing her performance in Adrienne (1849). “The mere glance of her eye had a fiendish fascination—it made me shiver from head to foot. She spoke, and her voice was like nothing I ever heard, ever imagined; but it was the glance of her terrible eye, the mobility of her features, their passion, wildness, pallor, which thrilled me.”2 Writer and soldier Adam Badeau echoes these sentiments in his book The Vagabond (1859). “She struck you with awe or horror, but she felt none herself,” he writes. “[S]he moved you, but it was in spite of yourself. . . . Her influence was akin to that of a sorceress. . . . You were as completely in her power, as if you had fallen in unawares. . . . [Y ]ou were only the puppet to be worked upon.”3

Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature. David Anthony, Oxford University Press. © David Anthony (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192871732.003.0003

52

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

As fiendish but thrilling cultural “sorceress,” Félix was, it seems, able to render viewers spellbound with her passionate performances. And for some, perhaps many, this was unsettling. Thus the following from the Republican Quarterly Review in comparing Félix to popular Swedish singer Jenny Lind, who was brought to America by P. T. Barnum in 1850: “Jenny Lind came to us invested with the charm of certain qualities of heart and character, which the American people universally ascribed to her, and of which Rachel is as universally believed to be destitute.”4 Thus too, writing from a more cynical perspective, the Broadway Belle (a more lowbrow sporting weekly edited by George Thompson) offers a front-page cartoon and short sketch mocking the “cod-fish aristocrats” and “oyster-house critics” who packed the Metropolitan Theater for her opening-night performance and who shamelessly displayed the “profuse liberality of Americans towards foreigners of every grade” (see Figure 2.1).5 “In our engraving,” the editors (perhaps Thompson himself ) state, “the private box on the right of the stage is occupied by a celebrated theatrical cricket, who understands French about as well as he does the Hottentot language; in his enthusiasm, he is showering upon the actress the pennies which he honestly owes his washerwoman.” The cartoon parodies the audience of the Metropolitan Theater. But it also reflects its own anxiety. With wild hair, wielding a dagger, and surrounded by bags of money, Félix is represented by the paper as more than a little threatening. As Badeau suggests above, stage role and persona merge. The result is a complicated mix of “awe [and] horror.” In Félix, then, we see many of the period’s deepest uncertainties about both cultural production and cultural enthusiasm. As the artist who was personally greeted by King Louis Philippe I after her role as Emilie in Pierre Corneille’s Cinna (1641), she was received by American audiences as one of Europe’s main purveyors of high culture.6 To be swept up in one of her performances was, for many, to gain access to a rarified, perhaps sublime, aesthetic experience. But the numerous descriptions of her powerfully affective stage presence speak to a different and more troubling form of cultural production. The pleasures she invoked were both excessive and overwhelming, outré and mesmerizing. And in this she offered something quite different than the exclusive pleasures of the elite high culture suggested by the roles she performed. Instead, Félix was in many ways the embodiment of high culture’s embarrassing twin: mass culture. Indeed, it’s worth noting that descriptions such as those in the Ballou’s piece and Badeau’s book were all but indistinguishable from the period’s critiques of mass culture and sensationalism. Consider the following from an 1859 editorial in Life Illustrated:

Figure 2.1 Rachel Félix in the Broadway Belle (September 10, 1855) Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

54

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE We observe frequently, in the stages and rail-cars, and on the ferry-boats, boys and girls, from a dozen years of age upward, so absorbed in the perusal of some one of our numerous “story papers,” as scarcely to notice anything around them . . . Intellectual and moral culture are thus neglected, while the mind acquires a precocious, a prurient, an inordinate, an insatiate craving for that which perverts the imagination, deludes the fancy, corrupts the passions, and demoralizes the whole being.7

We see similar commentary from the anonymous author of Confessions and Experience of a Novel Reader (1855), who compares the writer of sensation fiction with a spider ensnaring its prey: The novelist’s threads are made up of the amazing, the wonderful, the dumbfounding, and the mysterious. . . . They are finally hatched for the occasion, spun out, and are radiated in all directions, whithersoever the public taste directs, or the deluded multitudes invite, baited with the appellation of “The thrilling romance,” “The new novel,” “The last tale.” Now the pulse of public curiosity beats high, the gaping victims are fairly caught and immolated . . . and poor morality is sacrificed upon the shrine of human gullibility.8

Here as in the Life Illustrated piece, sensationalism captures its victims in much the same way that Félix, as “sorceress,” was said to turn audiences into helpless puppets “completely in her power.” In both cases, the agent is a new and titillating form of cultural production that “perverts” and “corrupts” the public.9 The key, though, is Félix’s cultural role as Jewess—or as “Jew,” to reference the telling alternative term that, as I’ll discuss, was often used to describe her. Simply put, the varied but always intense responses to Félix almost inevitably addressed this issue. For again, it is the Jew (or Jewess) who embodies ambivalence in antebellum American culture. This is something Jonathan Freedman discusses in examining the similar cultural role of the Jewish musician Svengali in George du Maurier’s 1895 novel Trilby: Within the very character of Svengali . . . ambivalence about “culture” becomes structural, definitional; he is at once, and by the very same logic, a representative of the cultural ideal and the cultural abject, the purest of the pure, the filthiest of the filthy. And it is no coincidence that Svengali is so spectacularly a Jew. Indeed, in some sense he could not have been anything else; to put the matter differently, the ambivalence of cultural affiliation that

L A BELLE JUIVE, OR “JEW ”? FROM RACHEL FÉLIX TO THE MARBLE FAUN

55

the novel both enacts and constructs could only find its full expression in the culturally dual figure of the eastern European Jewish artistic genius.10

For Freedman, the cultural work of the Jew Svengali is far more complex than the scapegoating often cited by critics. We see something similar with Félix’s American tour. When Svengali walks onto the stage in Trilby, or when Rachel Félix transfixes American audiences with her performances, what we see is the frailty and indeed the breakdown of the categories of social order and structure—here categories of culture. The cartoon and accompanying sketch from the Broadway Belle is representative. Mocking the “cod-fish aristocrats” and “oyster-house critics” whom they depict as literally throwing money at Félix, the journal reflects a decided anxiety about a world gone topsy-turvy— one in which a Jewess of the lower order has ascended to the seeming heights of both wealth (again, note the bags of money by which Félix is surrounded) and cultural status. And to be sure, it would be hard to overstate how frequently the American public was reminded during Félix’s tour that she was an up-from-the-streets arriviste, one whose success was both remarkable and unlikely. “She was all the rage, and every one stood astonished to see how completely the poor little street girl transformed herself into a grand lady and a queen in society,” readers are told by Graham’s magazine.11 The Western Literary Messenger has a similar narrative. “Dr. Veron dwells with astonishment on the natural endowments of Mademoiselle Rachel, which have enabled her (who sprung from so low a source) to command success in the most brilliant and aristocratic saloons of Europe.”12 And then there’s Harriet Beecher Stowe, who went to see Félix perform in Boston and provides the following commentary: “It is said that Rachel was wont to chant the Marseillaise in a manner that made her seem, for the time, the very spirit and impersonation of the gaunt, wild, hungry, avenging mob which rose against aristocratic oppression.”13 Stowe’s description is telling. For all the “flustrations” about Félix’s sexuality and greed, it seems she also struck a note with viewers because she embodied the unstable, fluid, and indeed ambivalent nature of class in America during this period. This, I think, explains the often excessive efforts to cast Félix as a “Jew” rather than as la belle juive. For what this reflects is a desire to counter the intense ambivalence elicited by her American tour. Thus in a letter to Henry James, William Wetmore Story writes that Rachel “was wretchedly supported by a set of dirty Jews, and they too were taken into the general admiration. She was jewier than ever and tried to skin a flint in Boston.”14 The Republican Quarterly Review is more pointed still. “Now it must be borne in mind

56

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

that the veriest Shylock of her race is not more keenly alive to the value of money than is Rachel,” we’re told. “‘She is not a Jewess—she’s a perfect Jew,’ said some one [sic] who wished to give epigrammatic intensity to the expression of the general sentiment.”15 Such comments are part of the more general anxiety about the intense ambivalence housed in the concept of Jewishness in American culture during this period. To describe Félix as “a perfect Jew” was to underscore the way in which she was seen to embody precisely the forms of cultural abjection Freedman describes. But such descriptions were also part of an effort, both unconscious and conscious, to emphasize the various ways in which Félix had failed to live up to the ideals of the Jewess during this period, both in America and Europe. As critics such as Kimberly Snyder Manganelli, Nadia Valman, and Heather S. Nathans suggest, the Jewess as a cultural type was most often depicted as quite distinct from her avaricious, Old World father.16 In fact, from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century in Europe, the potentially threatening Jewishness of la belle juive was usually emptied out, whether through conversion (Jessica in The Merchant of Venice [1600]), self-exile (Rebecca in Ivanhoe [1819]), death at the hands of her father (Abigail in The Jew of Malta [1589–90]; Leila in Edward BulwerLytton’s play of the same name [1838]), or an eleventh-hour revelation about mistaken identity—the discovery that the Jewess has in fact been a Christian all along (Berenice in Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington [1817]). As Valman puts it, “[i]n diametric contrast to her narrow, patriarchal and unfeeling Jewish family, the Jewess personified the capability of Jews for enlightenment and selftransformation. . . . If the Jew . . . came to stand for the excesses of capitalism or a degenerative atavism, the Jewess equally held the potential for cultural or racial regeneration.”17 The same set of narrative conventions circulates in antebellum sensationalism. Indeed, Rachel Félix arrived in America at a moment when the cultural market was saturated with texts starring the Beautiful Jewess. Novels, periodical stories, plays, children’s stories, poems, religious tracts: these and other cultural forms had featured this character since the turn of the century, and the number of such narratives had been increasing with each passing decade. This storyline is neatly captured in a religious tract entitled The Dying Jewess (1833), where we see the deathbed conversion of the Beautiful Jewess (see Figure 2.2).18 “I know but little about this Jesus, for I was never taught,” the Jewess says to her father in the accompanying narrative. “But I know that he is a Saviour, for he has manifested himself to me since I have been sick, even for the salvation of my soul.”19 In what follows, the father converts as well, and the tract thus provides a form of sentimental closure. Death and loss are healed by Christian faith, and Jewish Otherness is buried along with the Jewess. A plate

L A BELLE JUIVE, OR “JEW ”? FROM RACHEL FÉLIX TO THE MARBLE FAUN

57

Figure 2.2 The Dying Jewess (1833) Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

from Gleason’s Pictorial (see Figure 2.3) captures a freeze-frame of another way to negotiate the Jewish Otherness of the Beautiful Jewess. Here we see the final scene of William Thomas Moncrieff ’s play The Jewess; or The Council of

58

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

Figure 2.3 Gleason’s Pictorial: The Jewess (1853) Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

Constance (1835), which played to sold-out houses along the East Coast in 1853.20 Centered on a Rebecca-like Jewess who refuses to convert, even on pain of death, the scene suggests that one form of cultural work performed by

L A BELLE JUIVE, OR “JEW ”? FROM RACHEL FÉLIX TO THE MARBLE FAUN

59

la belle juive of the antebellum period was to ensure that her foreign exoticism was not assimilated into Gentile culture. To this way of thinking, the Jewess, though intensely desirable, must be left behind in the forward march into an ordered, rational modernity. We’re offered a similar set of narratives in the period’s magazine fiction, where the Jewess was a remarkably consistent presence.21 The best example may be Henry Ruffner’s “Judith Bensaddi,” which appeared in the July 1839 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger and was then reprinted as a booklength text along with a sequel.22 Here the narrator Garame is at first horrified when he realizes he has fallen in love with a Jewess. “I groaned with horror at these reflections. . . . Faugh! The squalid occupants of suburbs and streets, where a decent passenger is nauseated by their filth! . . . The malignant Shylocks of the money market!”23 Indeed, the story ends without a marriage between Jew and Gentile, a conclusion that suggests Garame’s anxiety about Judith’s fearful Jewishness simply can’t be overcome. But in a sequel published in October of the same year, entitled Seclusaval, Ruffner shifts gears and imagines a marriage between Jewess and Gentile. Note, though, that the union takes place only after two key changes in Judith’s life. The first is her conversion to Christianity. “I was almost persuaded when I parted with you,” she says in a letter to Garame. “Now my faith in Jesus of Nazareth is my chief consolation.” The second change is that her father has suffered “a sudden and total bankruptcy” when he is defrauded by “old Levi, a Jew, whom he had imprudently trusted too far as an agent.”24 Soon after his loss of fortune, Judith’s father falls ill and dies, leaving Judith reduced to near poverty. She is also, however, newly eligible, at least in terms of the fantasy union Ruffner offers in his tale. It’s as if Ruffner had to cleanse Judith of her two Old World qualities—her racial and economic difference—before he could imagine allowing her to enter into Gentile society. We might go so far as to say that these two elements have been shifted at story’s conclusion onto a different Jew, the embezzler Levi, in order to free up Judith for successful conversion. Again, though, Rachel Félix refuses the role of Beautiful Jewess. “I am making myself commercial,” she wrote to her friend Louise de Saigneville during her American tour. “I take and I pile up the dollars.”25 Or, as she put it with regards to her various male lovers, “I will have renters, but not owners.”26 Félix, that is to say, rejected the selfless emptying out of her anxious-making difference and the broader cultural ambivalence it reflected. Instead, she embraced the market-based identity so often associated with the Shylock-inflected Jew. This is doubtless the reason the US public was provided with so many descriptions of Félix as sexually and economically scandalous. As Littell’s

60

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

Living Age put it following Félix’s premature death at the age of 37, following an extended battle with tuberculosis, [t]he majority of readers . . . will forget the various parts which Rachel played in the tragic repertory; but they will vividly remember that she was a Jewess to the backbone—that she grasped at money with a horrible keenness—that she cheated her lovers, her patrons, and her comrades—and that she passed through a series of liaisons . . . [that were] numerous, short, and lucrative.”27

Or consider the remembered description of a younger Rachel, still in France, that Harper’s published after her American tour. “On the day of the performance the money was brought to her in a chest,” we’re told. “At sight of this box, full of five-franc pieces, this quantity of money all hers, her eyes dilated, and fastened upon it with an intensity that was almost painful to behold. . . . She ordered the box to be placed before her by her bedside, and, plunging her hands into it, kept stirring the silver about.”28 Needless to say, the account is likely either exaggerated or simply fabricated. Still, it’s noteworthy for the way it portrays an erotic relationship between Rachel and the money she fondles while in bed. For what it suggests is that, for many, Rachel’s reported licentiousness and avarice are one and the same thing.29 There are many other such descriptions of Félix, all of which seem intended to cast Félix less as Beautiful Jewess than as avaricious Jew. But this strategy is especially overt in the following passage from Harper’s, which returned to a discussion of Félix after her 1858 passing: Out of the circle of her own family Rachel was accused of having no consideration for any interest but her own. Some one [sic] asking Mademoiselle Judith [the well-known French actress] why she was so severe in her remarks on one who, after all, was a co-religionist of hers [was given this reply:] “True [. . .] but with a difference: I am a Jewess, but Rachel—Rachel is a Jew!”30

Unwilling to convert either in fact (from Jewess to Gentile) or metaphorically (from selfish, licentious “Jew” to sacrificial la belle juive), Félix presented American audiences with an uncanny image of their own unresolved proteophobia. Watching Félix on stage, as well as watching their fellow audience members who gazed at her, they saw the carefully constructed boundaries of culture melting away before their eyes. Their hysterical reactions suggest they found this simultaneously titillating and terrifying.

L A BELLE JUIVE, OR “JEW ”? FROM RACHEL FÉLIX TO THE MARBLE FAUN

61

Sensationalism and the Jew(ess) in The Marble Faun The contradictory set of impulses produced by the public figure of the Jewess didn’t vanish with Félix’s death in 1858. Rachel Brownstein suggests that Félix’s illness “seemed to signify both ‘consumption’ by sexual desire and punishment for desiring.”31 It’s indeed likely that her death was a sort of object lesson for skeptics and critics. But the literary production in the decade or so following Félix’s death suggests she was simply a symptom of a much broader cultural ambivalence, one that continued to manifest itself across a range of texts and in the figures of both the Jew and Jewess. It’s therefore not surprising that, as I’ll outline in the remainder of this chapter, the Jewess stars both in some of the period’s most lowbrow forms of literary production, and in what is arguably its most highbrow or elite manifestation—Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1860 novel The Marble Faun. Nor is it surprising that all of this work reflects a decidedly metacritical quality. For what we see is a post-Rachel culture negotiating its own unstable cultural boundary lines and using the Jewess to do so. Indeed, the very presence of the Jewess within an antebellum text is often the signal that we’re located within a fairly self-conscious conversation about cultural ambivalence. A figure both for elite refinement and artistry and for a quasipornographic form of sensationalism, the Jewess was both contradictory and popular. Or rather, it may be that she was popular in direct proportion to the degree to which she was contradictory. The following from popular sensation writer Ned Buntline’s Rose Seymour; or, The Ballet Girl’s Revenge (1865) is both telling and representative in this regard.32 Here, in a sequence typical for Buntline and the sensationalism in which he specializes, we see a Jewess named Miriam who has never been allowed to leave her father’s home and who is flogged every night by a “hideous old hag” named Mrs. Starke, apparently for resisting the woman’s efforts to turn her into a prostitute. “They would force a hateful life upon me, and I resisted,” Miriam tells the titular Rose Seymour, after which she bares her shoulder and shows Rose “long, red cuts in every direction, evidently produced by a heavy whip.” Rose tells Miriam that she should escape, but the cloistered Miriam has no knowledge of the outside world. “[E]scape?” she asks in confusion.33 Miriam is thus an American and decidedly sensationalized Jessica figure. The difference, of course, is that her Shylock father has prevented her from running off with her Gentile lover and converting, and is planning to sell her sexual virtue for money. In fact, this is one of several novels in which Buntline stages a Miriam character who is in conflict with her Shylock-styled father.

62

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

In Buntline’s Miriam; or, The Jew’s Daughter (186–?), we’re told that “[h]er father had guarded her with miser-like care from all contact with the world. She had never been abroad except in his company and very few visitors, and those only of his own selection, ever visited the house. Never was veiled and cloistered nun guarded more closely than she.” This description is underscored by the high walls topped with “sharp iron spikes” that surround his home.34 Similarly, in Morgan; or, The Knight of the Black Flag (1861), Buntline has Miriam’s Jewish father Solomon put it thus when he hears that the king has expressed romantic interest in her: “The king shall never find her—never! I will slay her, and bury her fair body unpolluted ere his unholy eye shall ever rest on her again!”35 In Rose Seymour, though, the situation is more dramatic and more scandalous—especially when Rose witnesses Miriam’s nightly torture. It’s also more telling. Here is the key quote, which I cite at length: Unable to bear the suspense any longer, Rose pushed open the door and looked into the room. A horrible sight met her eyes. She sickened with terror. Naked to the waist, the lovely young Jewess was fastened up against the wall. A hideous old hag was flogging her with savage ferocity. [. . . .] Twisting and shrinking, she endeavored to escape from the horrible, cruel blows. She struggled in vain. Again and again the blows descended. The poor girl panted for breath. The color forsook her cheeks. Her eyes glazed. Her bosom rose and fell convulsively. Then she was still as death. The nerves in her body seemed suddenly to relax.36

Certainly the scene performs common stereotypes about the putatively perverse excesses of the Jew’s insular world. Indeed, in many ways this is simply the logical extreme of the Jew’s Shylock-like insistence on keeping his daughter locked away from the outside world. The image that accompanies “The Jewess of Constantina,” an 1848 story in which a jealous father threatens to kill

L A BELLE JUIVE, OR “JEW ”? FROM RACHEL FÉLIX TO THE MARBLE FAUN

63

his daughter for planning to convert to Christianity and marry a French soldier, speaks to the strictly guarded nature of the Jewess and her sexuality (see Figure 2.4). But Buntline takes the Jew’s perverse difference to another level. For the scene is also sexually charged. Beautiful, half-naked, panting and convulsing toward what looks like orgasmic climax, the Miriam of this scene is pornographic—and doubly so because of Rose’s presence as spying audience. Indeed, Rose is in many ways a stand-in for the voyeuristic gaze of Buntline’s readers. Buntline’s language is again telling: [Rose] could not . . . have torn herself away from the spot had her life depended upon it. Something stronger than her will seemed to hold her there. She was fascinated with horror. Spell-bound, transfixed. With greedy eyes Rose watched the movements of the old hag.37

We might think of Miriam as an extreme version of the scandalously sensual Rachel Félix, on stage for similarly “spell-bound” American audiences in 1855. But she’s also of a piece with various other Jewish women from the period’s sensationalism. One thinks for example of Thompson’s Venus in Boston (1849), in which after Fanny Aubrey is abducted by the villainous Jew Mike, she’s brought to a brothel where she’s tended by a Jewess named Rachel. Rachel is, we’re told, “a beautiful brunette of sixteen” whose “wild, lascivious passions had been the cause of her being brought to the ‘Chambers,’ rather than the arts of the man who was at the time enjoying her delectable favors.”38 Such sexual excess is echoed in shocker novels such as The Beautiful Jewess, Rachel Mendoza (1853) and The Life, Confession, and Execution of the Jew and Jewess (1856), the latter of which I discuss further in Chapter 4.39 In each, Gentile men are seduced by Jewish women into aiding in murder schemes. “How could I refuse?” asks the narrator of Rachel Mendoza when the Jewess offers him sexual slavery in exchange for his help burying her victim. “[W]e both forgot the dead man, who lay in his rude grave, in the cellar of the house, in which was also our bridal bed.”40 But the excessive sexuality of the sensational Jewess notwithstanding, the most telling aspect of the tableau Rose witnesses is that it may never have taken place. Although Rose believes she has seen Miriam untied and buried beneath

Figure 2.4 “The Jewess of Constantina,” The Union Magazine of Literature and Art (January 1848) Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

L A BELLE JUIVE, OR “JEW ”? FROM RACHEL FÉLIX TO THE MARBLE FAUN

65

the floorboards of the house, Miriam is alive and well the next morning. Moreover, she seems to know nothing of the events Rose claims to have witnessed. “The eyes of the two girls met in long, earnest gaze,” we’re told, “but Rose, in silent astonishment, saw that Miriam showed not the faintest sign of recognition.” Rose’s confusion is thus shared by the reader. “Could it be possible that this was the same Miriam whom she had seen so cruelly ill-treated—whom she had seen buried beneath the boards of the attic where the brutal outrage was perpetrated?”41 The question applies to both Rose’s confusion and the readers of Buntline’s novel. And the answer is suggestive. For the narrative seems to imply that the horrors Rose believes she has seen are the product of American culture’s own excessive fantasies about Jews—and the Jewess in particular. Rose’s voyeuristic fantasies about Miriam thus parody Gentile America’s tendency to displace its passion and anxieties onto the body of the unconverted Jewess. Buntline, it seems, understood his culture’s attraction to this exotic figure—especially as she is rendered here, in her unconverted state of sexual excess. Yet for however scandalous Buntline might have been in his depiction of the Jewess, it was Hawthorne who provided the most nuanced depiction of this cultural type. This is offered in his 1860 novel The Marble Faun. Accordingly, I will spend the remainder of this chapter locating Hawthorne’s rendering of the portrait painter Miriam Schaefer within the broader context of American narratives that revolve around the Jewess. And what we’ll see is that, for Hawthorne, the Jewess poses a representational dilemma. Like Buntline, Thompson, and the various writers I’ve cited here, Hawthorne seems eager to take advantage of the provocative erotic energy housed in the Jewess. Simply put, The Marble Faun is invested in and indebted to the sensationalism the Jewess excites. Unlike these writers, however, Hawthorne appears to have been quite ambivalent about his Jewish heroine and the sensational aesthetics in which he packages her. Indeed, Miriam is in many ways the period’s primary example of the cultural confusion Bryan Cheyette points to in describing what he terms “semitic discourse”—the form of literary representation in which we see “the protean instability of the Jew as a signifier.” As he puts it, “This indeterminate, fluid reading of ‘the Jew,’ exploited to the full in literary texts, results in semitic representations being utilized in a bewildering variety of contexts.” Miriam is just such a figure.42 The mixture of anxiety and fascination she produces (both in the novel’s other characters and in readers) has less to do with a specific cultural extreme (lowbrow sensation or highbrow elitism) than it does cultural ambivalence—an ambivalence that is, of course, projected onto the figure of the Jewess. She is, in other words, a walking embodiment of

66

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

proteophobia, that modern hatred of the Jew that is a hatred of, and fear of, ambivalence itself. “It was said,” Hawthorne’s narrator tells us in a line I quote in the introduction, “that Miriam was the daughter and heiress of a great Jewish banker (an idea perhaps suggested by a certain rich Oriental character in her face,) and had fled from her paternal home to escape a union with a cousin, the heir of another of that golden brotherhood; the object being, to retain their vast accumulation of wealth within the family.”43 This sort of rumor remains persistent throughout the novel, with Miriam repeatedly described in terms of standard tropes about the Jewess. “She . . . had what was usually thought to be a Jewish aspect; a complexion in which there was no roseate bloom, yet neither was it pale,” we’re told. “She had black, abundant hair. . . . [I]f she were really of Jewish blood, then this was Jewish hair.” Late in the novel, the narrator tells us how Miriam “described herself [to Kenyon] as springing from English parentage, on her mother’s side, but with a vein, likewise, of Jewish blood.”44 This “mixed race” designation is as close as we come to an actual statement about Miriam’s background, but it’s clear that, as Evan Carton puts it, she is “conceived as a Jew.”45 This perspective is echoed by Elissa Greenwald, who suggests that “[i]f Hawthorne surrounds Miriam’s identity with ambiguity, he nonetheless insists upon her Jewish identity.”46 Indeed, Carton and other critics have suggested that Miriam is modeled on Emma Abigail Salomons, the sister-in-law of David Salomons, the first Jewish Lord Mayor of London. Hawthorne met her at the home of David Salomons in 1856 and recorded the encounter in his notebook shortly thereafter.47 Hawthorne’s journal entry about this meeting in his English Notebooks (1853–58) is worth quoting at length: [M]y eyes were mostly drawn to a young lady who sat nearly opposite me, across the table. She was, I suppose, dark, and yet not dark, but rather seemed to be of pure white marble, yet not white; but the purest and finest complexion, (without a shade of color in it, yet anything but sallow or sickly) that I ever beheld. Her hair was a wonderful deep, raven black, black as night, black as death; not raven black, for that has a shiny gloss, and her’s [sic] had not; but it was hair never to be painted, nor described—wonderful hair, Jewish hair. Her nose had a beautiful outline, though I could see that it was Jewish too; and that, and all her features, were so fine that sculpture seemed a despicable art beside her; and certainly my pen is good for nothing. . . . [L]ooking at her, I saw what were the wives of the old patriarchs, in their maiden or early married days—what Rachel was, when Jacob wooed her seven years, and seven

L A BELLE JUIVE, OR “JEW ”? FROM RACHEL FÉLIX TO THE MARBLE FAUN

67

more—what Judith was; for, womanly as she looked, I doubt not she could have slain a man, in a good cause. . . . I never should have thought of touching her, nor desired to touch her; for, whether owing to distinctness of race, my sense that she was a Jewess, or whatever else, I felt a sort of repugnance, simultaneously with my perception that she was an admirable creature.48

Much like the voyeuristic Rose Seymour, or Rachel Félix’s US audiences, Hawthorne cannot avert his gaze from this alluring but unsettling figure. And the reason for his fascination, it seems, is the ambivalence she evokes. “[D]ark, and yet not dark,” “white . . . yet not white,” intensely desirable, yet threatening and repugnant, Salomons is both la belle juive and “Jew.” Indeed, sitting at the intersection of an ancient and fearsome Old Testament womanhood and a more modern form of “true womanhood,” she is yet another example of the indeterminacy surrounding the Jew during this period. The fact that Hawthorne would later borrow from this passage in writing a sketch for Our Old Home (1863) is also telling. On the one hand, and as Louis Harap points out, all reference to the Salomons’ Jewishness is expunged in this published text.49 It is apparent that Hawthorne wanted to avoiding coming across as overtly antisemitic. But in addition, what we see is an effort to understand Emma Salomons in the context of cultural production—mass culture in particular. “I hardly thought that there existed such a woman outside of a picture-frame, or the covers of a romance,” Hawthorne writes after borrowing heavily from the language in the above passage from The English Notebooks. “[N]ot that I had ever met with her resemblance even there.”50 It seems that, for Hawthorne, Emma Salomons has stepped out of the pages of the period’s mass culture—though not, apparently, from a text he himself has ever encountered. Much the same can be said of Emma Salomons’ husband, Philip, the Lord Mayor’s brother. He becomes in Hawthorne’s private rendering an indirect commentary on his discomfiting attraction to Emma. “[A]t the right hand of this miraculous Jewess, there sat the very Jew of Jews, the distilled essence of all the Jews that have that have [sic] been born since Jacob’s time,” Hawthorne writes. [H]e was Judas Iscariot; he was the Wandering Jew; he was the worst, and at the same time, the truest type of his race, and contained within himself, I have no doubt, every old prophet and every old clothesman, that ever the tribes produced; and he must have been circumcised as much as ten times over. I never beheld anything so ugly and disagreeable, and preposterous, and laughable, as the outline of his profile; it was so hideously Jewish, and so cruel, and so keen.51

68

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

Musing sarcastically to himself about how “hideously” Jewish the man is, as well as about the status and appearance of his penis, Hawthorne sounds every bit the jealous observer. As Elissa Greenwald suggests in her discussion of this passage, “Hawthorne’s anti-Semitism is expressed as much by the mysterious attraction he feels to the woman as by his repulsion to the man; indeed, the two emotions are linked, expressing Hawthorne’s anxiety at his attraction to a Jewish woman as forbidden ‘Other.’ ”52 But he also sounds like someone who has been reading the pulpy and frequently antisemitic work of George Lippard, Buntline, and the many other writers for whom such stereotypes were shorthand for cultural anxiety in antebellum America. Here, as I suggest above, it’s hard not to read Hawthorne’s depiction of the Salomons through the lens of the Jewess Miriam in Buntline’s Rose Seymour. Emma Salomons isn’t the prisoner of a Shylock father. But as Greenwald suggests, the sheer Otherness of the couple, combined with Hawthorne’s excessive—one might say sensational—reaction to them, puts Hawthorne in a position much like that of the voyeuristically scandalized Rose Seymour. In each case, the sexual excesses projected onto Jewishness make the Jewess into a figure of overdetermined desire and mystery, one who acts as the projected site of Hawthorne’s own anxiety and ambivalence about sex and gender. The Marble Faun looks at Miriam Schaefer in a manner similar to Hawthorne’s across-the-table antisemitic gaze at Emma Salomons and her husband. Tellingly, this has much to do with the uncertainty surrounding Miriam’s background. Hence the fact that Miriam, as with so many other Jewess characters, is connected to an incest narrative. “If I could but clasp Beatrice Cenci’s ghost, and draw it to myself !” Miriam says to Hilda. “I would give my life to know whether she thought herself innocent, or the one great criminal since time began!”53 As critics have made clear, nineteenth-century readers of The Marble Faun would have been aware of the Cenci story—Francesco Cenci’s probable sexual abuse of his daughter Beatrice, his murder by Beatrice and her brother, and their eventual execution, along with their stepmother, for the crime.54 Moreover, they would have understood the links between Beatrice and Miriam, especially once Miriam and Donatello kill the mysterious model who pursues Miriam throughout the first half of the novel. An ageless wanderer who emerges both from the catacombs and, we might say, from Miriam’s unconscious, the model is a link to her apparently shameful family history. He may be the brother figure with whom she colluded in killing her Cenci-like father; he may be the jilted fiancé chosen by her father. Whatever his exact identity, it’s clear he embodies the oppressive and possibly incestuous Old World Jewish paternity we see in Buntline and elsewhere.55 According to

L A BELLE JUIVE, OR “JEW ”? FROM RACHEL FÉLIX TO THE MARBLE FAUN

69

Carton, “Miriam . . . has violently resisted or revolted against a powerful figure of male authority, probably a rapacious father.”56 That the model is also a figure for the Wandering Jew only adds to the sense that he represents to Miriam the burden of her Jewish history. (Recall that in the above-cited journal entry, Hawthorne refers disparagingly to Philip Salomons as “the Wandering Jew.” ) The sexual perversity of the Jew and Jewess is thus the erotic background to this novel. And, again, it places both the story’s other characters and the reader in the spellbound position of voyeur. For the inwardly turning sexual mystery attached to Miriam is, it seems, an inverted image of American sexual desire more generally. Frederick Crews is perhaps the most exacting on this point: “Miriam’s fate in the plot of the romance is to be the scapegoat for a sexual nausea that Hawthorne, along with his other characters, prefers to vent upon the foreign temptress and her sensual race.”57 Crews might have added both that this is a narrative rehearsed by Rachel Félix’s American critics (“People whisper very black things of her”), and that it is in American sensationalism— itself often embodied in the Jewess—that this sexual nausea is given its most explicit expression. This unsettling eros is why it’s so telling that, like Rachel Félix, Miriam is herself a producer of culture. Indeed, her paintings and sketches are often as scandalous and sensational as Félix herself. As Donatello learns early in the novel when visiting her studio, many of her subjects are rebellious Jewish women: Salome with the head of John the Baptist, Judith with the head of Holofernes, Jael driving a nail through the head of Sisera. And each is rendered as excessively passionate and violent. It is, the narrator says, as if [Miriam] herself were Jael, and felt irresistibly impelled to make her bloody confession, in this guise. Her first conception of the stern Jewess had evidently been that of perfect womanhood, a lovely form, and a high, heroic face of lofty beauty; but, dissatisfied either with her own work or the terrible story itself, Miriam had added a wayward quick of her pencil, which at once converted the heroine into a vulgar murderess.58

The wording here is significant: shifting from classical art to “vulgar,” Miriam seems to shift from high culture to mass culture. This shift extends to a selfportrait Miriam has drawn. Here is the narrator’s description of the painting: She was very youthful, and had what was usually thought to be a Jewish aspect; a complexion in which there was no roseate bloom, yet neither was it pale; dark eyes, into which you might look as deeply as your glance would

70

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE go, and still be conscious of a depth that you had not sounded, though it lay open to the day. She had black, abundant hair, with none of the vulgar glossiness of other women’s sable locks; if she were really of Jewish blood, then this was Jewish hair, and a dark glory such as crowns no Christian maiden’s head. Gazing at this portrait, you saw what . . . Judith was, when she vanquished Holofernes with her beauty, and slew him for too much adoring it.59

The passage provides yet another echo of Hawthorne’s journal description of Emma Salomons. But it also turns reminds us that Miriam, like Salomons, is the very embodiment of ambivalence for Hawthorne.60 “There was an ambiguity about this young lady,” we’re told by Hawthorne’s narrator, “which, though it did not necessarily imply anything wrong, would have operated unfavourably as regarded her reception in society, anywhere but Rome.”61 As for what Donatello and the novel’s other characters make of Miriam’s paintings, Hawthorne’s early description of the still naïve Donatello’s response to Miriam’s paintings is revealing. “He gave a shudder,” we’re told. “[H]is face assumed a look of trouble, fear, and disgust. He snatched up one sketch after another, as if about to tear it in pieces. Finally, shoving away the pile of drawings, he shrank back from the table and clasped his hands over his eyes.”62 Gordon Hutner suggests that such scenes provide an analogy for Hawthorne’s vision of a proper American reading audience, one necessarily put off by such intensity of expression. As he puts it, “[t]he reader must sympathize, but it is the writer’s task to win that response by being subtle, not excessive.”63 Donatello, we might say, is unlikely to be an avid reader of pulpy sensation novels such as Rose Seymour. Instead, he would likely prefer the sort of Beautiful Jewess conversion narrative we see in a serialized novel like Syria the Jewess, which appeared in Street and Smith’s from 1864–65.64 In a typical scene, the beautiful Syria plays her harp in a manner far less threatening than what we see in Miriam’s paintings. “Syria . . . played and sang a wild, sweet song, written by some Hebrew bard, whose thoughts had been only the sufferings of his people, and their eventual triumph.” Syria’s music reflects her reverence for an Old World Jewishness, as does her dutiful allegiance to her father, the wealthy Ben Israel. But for all of Syria’s faithfulness, she is in love with a Gentile, Juan Montez, and plans to convert. “Juan’s God should be my God,” she says. “His people my people!”65 Hence the untainted purity that informs the image of her as she begs the narrative’s villain—the evil Spaniard, Count Garcia—to forbear in his threatened sexual assault (see Figure 2.5). Characters like Syria are a model for a de-ambivalentized Jewishness, one that a character like Donatello would likely find appealing.66

L A BELLE JUIVE, OR “JEW ”? FROM RACHEL FÉLIX TO THE MARBLE FAUN

71

Figure 2.5 Syria the Jewess, Street and Smith’s (1864–65) Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

The artistic tensions between Miriam and Donatello are even more pronounced in the relationship between Miriam and Hilda. A young American who has relocated to Rome to study painting, Hilda has a reverence for artists such as Guido and Raphael that has gained her a reputation as the finest copyist in Rome. “The spirits of the Old Masters were hovering over Hilda, and guiding her delicate white hand,” we’re told. Indeed, Hawthorne’s narrator explains that Hilda has chosen to forgo a potentially successful career as a painter of original works in order to commit herself to elite high art. “Hilda had ceased to consider herself an original artist,” we’re told. And her motivation, it seems, is to avoid any form of cultural production that requires her to consider the tastes and sensibilities of contemporary audiences. Though she “might have set up for herself, and won no ignoble name,” we’re told, “this could only be done by lowering the standard of art to the comprehension of the spectator.”67 Richard Brodhead suggests that Hilda’s “militant high-cultural spirit” might be understood in relation to Hawthorne’s unease over the fact that, in the eightyear interval between The Blithedale Romance (1852) and The Marble Faun,

72

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

the American culture industry had “split writing into separate categories of literary and popular, hierarchically related as high and low.”68 We should extend this perspective to Hilda’s relationship with Miriam. For what we see is that Miriam-as-Jewess acts as a potentially threatening figure for Hilda—not just in relation to Hilda’s late-narrative disappearance into the Palazzo Cenci and imprisonment in the Convent of the Sacré-Cœur, but also, and more importantly, in terms of Hilda’s aesthetic sensibility. Indeed, the narrative makes it clear that Miriam threatens Hilda’s very sense of herself as a purveyor and keeper of high culture. We see glimpses of this early on, when Miriam visits Hilda, known locally as “the fair-haired Saxon girl,” in her “turret-home” apartment at the top of the Torre della Scimmia in Rome. Here, Hilda shows Miriam a copy she has painted of Guido’s Portrait of Beatrice Cenci. In the ensuing discussion, Miriam questions Hilda’s assumption that Beatrice’s participation in the murder of her father and stepmother brings with it a “terrible guilt,” one Guido captures in Beatrice’s famously sorrowful expression.69 “Beatrice’s sin may not have been so great,” Miriam says. “[P]erhaps it was no sin at all, but the best virtue possible in the circumstances.” Miriam goes on, in lines I quote above, to lament her inability to truly know Beatrice’s innermost feelings about the crime. And it’s at this point that Hilda becomes aware—or begins to believe—that Miriam’s expression has transformed into a kind of copy of Guido’s (and thus Hilda’s) Beatrice. It was, we’re told, “as if [Miriam’s] passionate wish and struggle to penetrate poor Beatrice’s mystery had been successful.” The momentary merger of the two women is significant. Certainly, it reinforces the reader’s sense that Miriam has suffered abuse similar to Beatrice’s. Similarly, it suggests that Miriam is capable of the violence we see in her various portraits of Jewish women. But Hilda’s momentary conflation of the two women also shows us how susceptible she is to Miriam’s influence. Or rather, it reflects how Hilda’s artistic vision and sensibility can be influenced by the figure of the Jewess. “What an actress you are!” Hilda says to Miriam after her statement about sympathetic connection with Beatrice. It’s as if Miriam has become for Hilda a sort of Rachel Félix–style changeling, one who confuses the relationship between the high culture of Guido and the other artists Hilda so reverently copies and the more mercurial/passion-oriented mass culture that Miriam-as-Jewess embodies. To return to the above quote from Hawthorne’s narrator, Miriam at this moment represents “lowering the standard of art to the comprehension of the spectator.” No wonder Hilda is taken aback. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Miriam, do not look so!” she exclaims. Hence too her reaction when Miriam does change her expression. “Ah, now you are yourself again,”

L A BELLE JUIVE, OR “JEW ”? FROM RACHEL FÉLIX TO THE MARBLE FAUN

73

she says. We can all but hear her relief at seeing that the Jewess has, at least momentarily, become less protean.70 Again, this encounter is suggestive of the ambivalence Miriam represents. Yet what truly challenges, and alters, Hilda’s worldview is the moment when she witnesses Donatello murder the model by pushing him off the edge of the Tarpeian Rock—an action that Miriam assents to with an approving look. “I did what your eyes bade me to do, when I asked them with mine, as I held the wretch over the precipice!” Donatello says in dismay. Hilda echoes this charge in a tense encounter with Miriam. “I saw Donatello spring upon him! I would have shrieked; but my throat was dry! I would have rushed forward, but my limbs seemed rooted to the earth! It was all like a flash of lightning! A look flashed from your eyes to Donatello’s. . . . It revealed all your heart, Miriam!”71 From this moment on, Hilda is a changed person. But note too that, from this moment forward, the novel itself is changed and becomes more ambivalent. It is as if the Jewess and her actions have altered the very form of Hawthorne’s Romance. With regards to Hilda, Hawthorne’s narrator makes it clear that her change has to do with her exposure to sin, and thus to the messy moral status of humans after the Fall. “To this innocent girl, holding the knowledge of Miriam’s crime within her tender and delicate soul, the effect was almost the same as if she herself had participated in the guilt.”72 But we need to note that the trigger for Hilda’s loss of innocence, and her confrontation with moral ambiguity, is the Jewess. And what we see is that, once again, the Jewess is at the center of tensions over cultural production—experienced here as Hilda’s sudden loss of passion for the elite art to which she has devoted herself. Here is the key quote: [I]n her self-surrender, and the depth and tenderness of her sympathy, had lain Hilda’s remarkable power as a copyist of the Old Masters. And now that her capacity of emotion was choked up with a horrible experience, it inevitably followed that she should seek in vain, among those Friends so venerated and beloved, for the marvels which they had heretofore shown her.73

Hilda, it seems, is in a position not unlike that of Buntline’s Rose Seymour. Having spied the dramatic—one might say sensational—secret life of the Jewess, she is left both emotionally and culturally off-kilter. But there’s more; for, read from this perspective, the murder of the mysterious model suddenly takes on the feel of an event pulled from the pages of

74

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

an urban gothic city mystery à la Lippard, replete with suspense, murder, and exclamation points. The above lines from Hilda (“I would have shrieked; but my throat was dry! . . . It was all like a flash of lightning!”) speak to this shift. Or consider the moment when Miriam and Donatello discover that the dead monk in the Church of the Capuchins is the model they have so recently murdered. “No wonder that their blood curdled; no wonder that their hearts leapt, and paused! The dead face of the monk, gazing at them beneath its half-closed eyelids, was the same visage that had glared upon their naked souls, the past midnight, as Donatello flung him over the precipice.”74 The inattentive reader might believe she has mistakenly picked up a copy of Lippard’s The Quaker City (1845) and not Hawthorne’s ostensibly more staid highbrow novel The Marble Faun. The paintings produced by Miriam and Hilda (as well as Kenyon’s sculptures) aren’t therefore the only place where Hawthorne is staging a discussion about the status of art. Quite the contrary, he’s also pursuing this at the level of plot and style—of genre. Accordingly, what we see is a felt internal tension between the high-culture Romance for which Hawthorne is so famous and urban sensationalism. In The House of the Seven Gables (1851), we see this tension play out in the stark differences between the sensational short story Holgrave writes and the rest of the novel-as-Romance. In The Marble Faun, the fault lines are less obvious, a fact which suggests that the novel itself is staging a kind of generic uncertainty. And what this implies is that Miriam’s very identity as Jewess has almost necessarily turned the narrative into a complicated, perhaps even messy, site of textual ambivalence. Cheyette suggests that Henry James’s belief in the “organic wholeness of the novel” is paralleled by his “reparative desire for a whole national consciousness”—a desire undermined by the presence of the “alien” Jew.75 Miriam-as-Jewess does similar work at the level of form. Here, the “organic wholeness” of Hawthorne’s Romance is itself undermined by Miriam’s “alien” presence.76 This generic ambivalence becomes increasingly evident as the narrative nears conclusion. Indeed, once Hilda confesses what she has witnessed to a priest in St. Peters and is detained by papal authorities in the Convent of the Sacré-Cœur, it seems that she is herself in danger of being transformed into a sensational character.77 We might think about victimized young women in The Quaker City such as Mary Arlington, who is abducted by the libertine Gus Lorrimer and raped in the notorious Monk Hall. But consider also the heroines of pulpy anti-Catholic novels such as Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk; or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed (1836) or Thomas Ford Caldicott’s Hannah Corcoran: An Authentic Narrative (1853).78

L A BELLE JUIVE, OR “JEW ”? FROM RACHEL FÉLIX TO THE MARBLE FAUN

75

The influence of such texts is especially palpable as we follow Kenyon through the streets of Rome in his frantic efforts to locate Hilda. Here is an extended quote that speaks to these tensions: It seemed to Kenyon, looking through the darkly-colored medium of his fears, that all modes of crime were crowded into the close intricacy of Roman streets, and that there was no redeeming element, such as exists in other dissolute and wicked cities. For here was a priesthood, pampered, sensual, with red and bloated cheeks, and carnal eyes. With apparently a grosser development of animal life than most men, they were placed in an unnatural relation with woman, and thereby lost the healthy, human conscience that pertains to other human beings, who own the sweet household ties connecting them to wife and daughter. . . . In those vast palaces, there were a hundred remote nooks where Innocence might shriek in vain. Beneath meaner houses, there were unsuspected dungeons that had once been princely chambers, and open to the daylight; but on account of some wickedness there perpetrated, each passing age had thrown its handful of dust upon the spot, and buried it from sight. Only ruffians knew of its existence, and kept it for murder, and worse crime. . . . It was terrible to imagine what hideous outrage might have thrust [Hilda] into that abyss!79

Again, we seem suddenly to be in the pages of an urban sensation novel, with Hilda as the innocent maiden whose virtue is being threatened by depraved priests or other criminals threatening not just “murder,” but “worse crime”— by which Hawthorne clearly means rape. This fear is significant, as sexual violation implies the scandalous possibility that Hilda will be made into a character very much like Miriam Schaefer, or perhaps even the Miriam of Buntline novels such as Rose Seymour. Indeed, the intersection of Jewishness and sensationalism might help explain Hawthorne’s emphasis on the fact that, just before her abduction, Hilda has strayed near to Rome’s Jewish Ghetto. Hilda’s present expedition led her into what was—physically, at least—the foulest and ugliest part of Rome. In that vicinity lies the Ghetto, where thousands of Jews are crowded within a narrow compass, and lead a close, unclean, and multitudinous life, resembling that of maggots when they overpopulate a decaying cheese.80

76

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

This is the moment when Hawthorne’s novel picks up the cadences of his journal entry about Philip Salomons and spills over into naked antisemitism. Likened to “maggots,” Jews here are the projected, externalized figures of all that is different from or in opposition to the White Christian female purity Hilda represents. The narrator goes on to tell us that “Hilda passed on the borders of this region, but had no occasion to step within it.”81 But the very presence of this binary division—Jews on one side, Gentile Christians on the other—is to the point. For as we already know, Miriam has by her very presence in the lives of Hilda, Donatello, and Kenyon transgressed and blurred this boundary line. Hilda doesn’t need to go to the Jewish Ghetto, because the Jewish Ghetto has come to her. And the result is that Miriam has upset the ordered, rational world that Hilda depends on for her very sense of herself as a modern subject. No wonder the narrative itself begins to show fissures at the level of genre. The generic tensions between sensationalism and the Romance are also on display in an odd scene toward the novel’s end, in which Kenyon wanders into the crowd at the height of Carnival and encounters “a gigantic female figure, seven feet high, at least, and taking up a third of the street’s breadth.” The “Titaness” gestures toward Kenyon for affection, and when he rebuffs her, she makes “a gesture of despair and rage” and shoots Kenyon with a gigantic mock pistol.82 Carton suggests that the Titaness seems to be an image both of the patricidal Beatrice Cenci, and of “the guilty Miriam run riot.”83 But the encounter also pits a rebellious popular culture against the elite art embodied in Kenyon. It’s almost as if Miriam’s paintings have come to life. Indeed, Kenyon is the object of the gaze here, with the gigantic woman offering what Nancy Bentley describes as a “grotesque mimicry of love.”84 Reversing the dynamic we see in the various instances of sensational gazing at the Jewess I’ve been discussing—spellbound Americans watching Rachel Félix perform, Rose Seymour spying on Miriam in Buntline’s narrative, and Hilda’s witnessing of the model’s murder—here mass culture and the Jewess look back. Devotees of the Hawthornian Romance will be relieved to know, however, that the seeming challenge posed by sensationalism and the Jewess in The Marble Faun is temporary. For Hilda is eventually released from her papal confinement. The key, however, is that this freedom is achieved only via a dramatic exchange in which Donatello is offered in exchange for Hilda. Miriam’s final gesture to Hilda and Kenyon—she holds out her hands “as if . . . on the other side of a fathomless abyss, and warn[s] them from its verge” (461)— is thus an allegory for a US readership.85 And the message is that, though alluring, the sensational Jewess as per Hawthorne, Buntline, and others must

L A BELLE JUIVE, OR “JEW ”? FROM RACHEL FÉLIX TO THE MARBLE FAUN

77

be jettisoned in order for the more proper forms of sexuality that Hilda and Kenyon embody to progress. Bentley offers a similar reading. Suggesting that, as faun and racial Other, Donatello and Miriam are associated with a libidinal, primitive form of selfhood, she further contends that the novel “finally aims to reign in potentially disruptive energies” of this sort so that Hilda and Kenyon can move forward as representatives of a modern and more rational American future.86 From the perspective I’ve been offering here, Hawthorne invokes the sensational Jewess to contain, and to defuse, the very ambivalence she embodies. We might return once more to Rachel Félix. In an 1855 piece on Félix, Harper’s cites gossip that includes claims about her “haughtiness,” “profligacy,” and “debauchery.” But interestingly, the essay suggests that these are all exaggerated rumors. “No one fully believed any of these tales,” the writer explains, “but these half-beliefs entered largely into the popular idea of Rachel.”87 The writer might well have been describing antebellum America’s sensational Jewess. Clearly, she was a figure of excess and fantasy. But the consistency with which she appeared in the period’s sensationalism suggests that she entered the popular imagination as an almost necessary presence, one who helped an anxious antebellum America imagine a scapegoat for the increasingly ambivalent world it was confronting. Invoking and then rejecting the Jewess—whether la belle juive or the Jewess as Rachel-like “Jew”—was an effort to reorder, and de-ambivalentize, a world in which the boundaries separating categories of high and low culture, or pure and impure forms of womanhood, were dissolving almost as quickly as they could be repaired. The Rachel-invoked “nervous flustrations” George Templeton Strong attributes to his friend Mrs. Eleanor in the journal entry with which I begin this chapter are those experienced in the US more generally—not just because of Rachel Félix, but because their world simply wouldn’t hold still for them any longer.

3 Desire by Proxy The Cosmopolitan Jew in Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme

This chapter begins where the previous one leaves off—the moment at the end of The Marble Faun (1860) when Hilda and Kenyon depart together for America. Certainly, as I discuss, this reflects a flight from Miriam Schaefer and the cultural ambivalence she embodies in her role as sensational Jewess. But there’s another issue at play for the two Americans, one that also involves Miriam. This is their fatigued relationship to the cosmopolitanism of Rome, especially as that form of selfhood is manifested in the circle of artists with whom they interact. We see this expressed repeatedly following Hilda’s witnessing of the model’s murder, such as when we’re told that Hilda feels “the exile’s pain,” and her “pictorial imagination” shifts to American rather than European scenes.1 But the couple’s shared longing for American soil is depicted most directly and most poignantly in the narrator’s summary declaration of their decision to finally return home and marry. So, Kenyon won the gentle Hilda’s shy affection, and her consent to be his bride. . . . And, now that life had so much human promise in it, they resolved to go back to their own land; because the years, after all, have a kind of emptiness, when we spend too many of them on a foreign shore. We defer the reality of life, in such cases, until a future moment, when we shall again breath our native air; but, by-and-by, there are no future moments; or, if we do return, we find that the native air has lost its invigorating quality, and that life has shifted its reality to the spot where we have deemed ourselves only temporary residents. Thus, between two countries, we have none at all, or only that little space of either, in which we finally lay down our discontented bones. It is wise, therefore, to come back betimes—or never.2

Shunning the status of “temporary residents” abroad on a “foreign shore,” as well as the attendant ambivalence of a split identification “between two countries”—a split that threatens to leave them with no sense of national Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature. David Anthony, Oxford University Press. © David Anthony (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192871732.003.0004

THE COSMOPOLITAN JEW IN THEODORE WINTHROP’S CECIL DREEME

79

identification “at all”—Kenyon and Hilda retreat, finally, from the sense of detachment and rootlessness so often associated with the cosmopolitan. This, indeed, is how Bruce Robbins puts it characterizing the frequent critique of cosmopolitanism: “The cosmopolitan is held to be incapable of participating in the making of history, doomed to the mere aesthetic spectatorship that he or she is also held secretly to prefer.”3 In returning to America, we can assume, Hilda and Kenyon wish to resume some sort of engagement with what they perceive to be the more real life of their nation. Moreover, it seems, their very sense of selfhood, both as individual citizens and as citizen-artists, requires it. It’s as if Kenyon and Hilda have been reading Herman Melville’s now famous 1850 review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse (1846).4 Published in Evert Duyckinck’s The Literary World, the essay calls quite stridently for an American appreciation of the genius of American writers, and of the American creative imagination more generally. “You must believe in Shakespeare’s unapproachability, or quit the country,” Melville complains. [W]hat sort of a belief is this for an American, a man who is bound to carry republican progressiveness into Literature, as well as into Life? Believe me, my friends, that Shakespeares are this day being born on the banks of the Ohio. . . . [N]o American writer should write like an Englishman, or a Frenchman; let him write like a man, and then he will be sure to write like an American.5

According to Melville’s logic, Hilda and Kenyon need to return to America in order to realize their true potential as artists. Tellingly, Melville urges his American readers to “boldly contemn all imitation,” a statement that is especially pertinent for Hilda.6 Having abandoned a potentially promising career as “an original artist” and having gained the reputation as “the best copyist in Rome,” she is in many respects the exact antithesis of the sort of Americanness Melville calls for.7 But as Melville’s reference to bringing “republican progressiveness into Literature” also suggests, there are broader implications. For his essay is in many ways an overt appeal to the “Young America” movement championed by Duyckinck and his colleague John L. O’Sullivan, the editor of the Democratic Review. Calling for a divorce of American culture—both political and aesthetic—from European tradition, the movement promoted an aggressive cultural nationalism, one that was by definition antithetical to the sort of cosmopolitan lifestyle Hilda and Kenyon practice in Rome. “Is there any lack of

80

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

home themes that our authors should lack home thoughts?” asks the anonymous author of “Nationality in Literature,” an essay that appeared in the Democratic Review in 1847. We would set no limits [to] the subjects on which our authors should write. . . . But we would have them true to their country. . . . What we complain of is, the unnational spirit of our writers; that they slavishly adhere to old and foreign models; that alike in their subjects, and in their method of handling them, they are British, or German, or something other than American.8

One way to read the return of Hilda and Kenyon to America is as a response to this call to refuse an “unnational spirit.” In returning to America, they’re being “true to their country” and rejecting an overly cosmopolitan form of selfhood. If, however, cosmopolitanism represents an at least perceived threat to the core Americanness of Kenyon and Hilda, we should again remind ourselves that it is a quality best represented in the novel by Miriam. The daughter of an English mother with “Jewish blood” and a seemingly corrupt Italian father, she is thoroughly international in background. And the key is the way this background, and indeed her “blood,” seem to inform her sensibility. “There was something in Miriam’s blood,” the narrator explains, “in her mixed race, in her recollections of her mother—some characteristic, finally, in her own nature—which had given her freedom of thought.”9 This “freedom of thought” gives Miriam the ability to resist an arranged marriage her father attempts to force upon her after her mother’s early death. Yet it also seems to prevent her from close connection with the people in her life. Though she has “great apparent freedom of intercourse,” she also “k[eeps] people at a distance, without so much as letting them know that they were excluded from her inner circle.” And this is something which those around her come to understand. According to the narrator, “society began to recognize the impossibility of getting nearer to Miriam, and gruffly acquiesced.”10 In a word, Miriam is detached—and detached in a way that signals both cosmopolitanism, and Jewishness. Indeed, as the early rumors that Miriam might be “the daughter and heiress of a great Jewish banker” suggest, her cosmopolitan detachment and her Jewishness are one and the same thing.11 Hawthorne, that is to say, is tapping into the trope of the cosmopolitan Jew. Prevalent in both Europe and America during this period, the cosmopolitan Jew embodied the rootlessness and detachment of capitalist modernity. A figure for what Amanda Anderson, in a discussion of the depiction of Jews in Daniel Deronda (1876), terms “radical disidentification,” the cosmopolitan

THE COSMOPOLITAN JEW IN THEODORE WINTHROP’S CECIL DREEME

81

Jew was perceived as not only uninterested in but also incapable of national connection. “Lacking the grounding provided by national allegiance, yet often fully participating in the practices associated with cosmopolitanism,” she says, “the Jews become culturally untethered, dangerously modern. As such, they may easily self-servingly ally themselves with transnational forces (capitalism, particularly).”12 Hence—once again—the Jew’s frequent role as a foil for Gentile characters, especially as they’re embroiled in plots surrounding financial intrigue. We see versions of this in the “anti-Tom” plantation narratives I discuss in Chapter 1, where Jewish creditors act as scapegoats for Southern anxieties about Northern capitalism. But here it is the Jew’s very cosmopolitanism—his detachment and internationalism—that is at issue. For what we see is that this transnational sensibility is itself the projected site of the wayward desires, capitalist and otherwise, of Gentile characters. A useful example of what I’m suggesting is offered in The Crown Jewels which ran in Robert Bonner’s popular story paper, the New York Ledger, from late 1857 to early 1858.13 The tale revolves around the efforts of two heavily indebted English nobles to steal the crown jewels from the Tower of London. Their plan is to make off with the jewels and then fence them with a wealthy Jewish moneylender. In this story there are two such figures to choose from: Salathiel and Josaphat, who combined seem to be propping up a large percentage of the English economy (we’re told that Salathiel “held a lien upon one out of every five of the handsomest estates in England”).14 But in addition to possessing enormous wealth, the two Jews are overtly international in orientation. Josaphat lives in “a Moorish palace . . . in the heart of London” and switches easily between various languages. Salathiel’s mansion is similarly exotic. A “scarlet-turbaned African” greets visitors, and the vast halls are filled with “singing birds,” “the fragrance of strangely brilliant flowers,” and “gorgeous rugs from the costly looms of Ispahan.”15 The below image of Salathiel, wearing a turban and robe and instructing his son Elias in Hebrew while his daughter Ketura looks on, might be read as a sort of snapshot of the cosmopolitan Jew in the American imagination (see Figure 3.1). It might also be thought of as a prequel to the story of Miriam Schaefer in The Marble Faun—at least as imagined by Hawthorne’s readers. For what we see in the Ledger image is both an exotic Jewishness, and the cultural detachment of the international Jew. Indeed, the narrator of The Crown Jewels is insistent on this point. Jews like Salathiel and his children, we’re told, represent a “[n]ation without a country!” and a “people without a land!” As a result, they “mingle not with the peoples among whom they dwell, and . . . dwell among them as if they expected to depart on the morrow to return to their beloved Palestine.” Or as Salathiel puts

82

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

Figure 3.1 The Crown Jewels, The New York Ledger (November 28, 1857) Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

it to one of the thieving nobles, Lord Neagle, “I have no friends, my lort, but among my own people. When you needed money and brought securitiesh, I loaned it. It is my business. I have none friendships with Gentiles.”16 This is why, when Josaphat agrees to purchase the stolen crown jewels from Lord Neagle, his decision is depicted as the inevitable result of his capitalist instincts. “The cupidity of the Jew was stronger than the suspicions of the man,” we’re told.17 The fact that he doesn’t know that the jewels are in fact stolen is beside the point. His function in this story, and in American fiction more generally, is to act as mirror for the capitalist excesses of the profligate Gentile. This, indeed, is the image of the Jew which Karl Marx infamously offers in “On the Jewish Question,” where, as I outline in the Introduction, he argues that it is Jews who have turned capitalism into a global phenomenon. As a result, he says, “Christian nations” have taken on the detachment and rootlessness— what Anderson terms the “radical disidentification”—of Jews. As Cathy Gelbin and Sander Gilman put it, this is “the cosmopolitanism of capitalism.”18 And it’s the Jew who is its agent—its cause and effect. Tellingly, part of Marx’s focus here is on what he perceives to be an emergent American sensibility, one that has become infected by the Jew’s

THE COSMOPOLITAN JEW IN THEODORE WINTHROP’S CECIL DREEME

83

purely capitalist form of cosmopolitanism. “Indeed,” he says, “the practical dominance of Judaism over the Christian world has reached its unambiguous, normal expression in North America. Here even the announcing of the gospel, the Christian pulpit, has become an article of trade, and the bankrupt gospel merchant becomes like the evangelist who has become rich in business.”19 This conflation of “North American” and “Jew” is neatly captured in John Brougham’s popular play The Lottery of Life (1868).20 Here we see that the Jewish fence and forger Mordie Solomons has a double life as the Gentile businessman Mr. Allcraft. As an ex-criminal turned amateur detective puts it upon discovering the ploy, “Mr. Allcraft, and Mr. Solomons, too! Here’s a discovery; upon my life and soul, this is lovely,—I thought I was a tolerable specimen of rascality, but such a magnificent combination is absolute genius—I could almost worship it.”21 In what follows, we learn that Solomons has several other false identities and that he has engineered a complicated plot to disinherit the son of an ex-business partner. Solomons, it seems, has neither stable identity nor national affiliation. This is perhaps why the stage instructions call for Allcraft to be played in “[d]ark suit with white neck-tie”; the instructions for Solomons, meanwhile, state that he should be depicted in a “long beard, and false Jewish nose with glasses” and that he speak “with a strong Jewish accent.”22 Apparently, and in keeping with Michael Ragussis’s observation about the Jewish Shylock mask, Brougham expects his American audiences to understand the sort of cosmopolitan Jewishness we see in Solomons as inherently performative and lacking in substance—as if, beneath the absurd “nose with glasses” and cartoon accent, the Jew simply doesn’t possess a core form of selfhood, American or otherwise.

Whitman’s Jew The cosmopolitan Jew strikes a similar note in another narrative from this period. This is Walt Whitman’s 1852 urban sensation novel Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: An Auto-Biography. As Zachary Turpin has shown, the novel was anonymously authored and serialized by Whitman in the pages of the Sunday Dispatch.23 Here, though, the storyline is more complex than what we see in a text like The Lottery of Life. As such, it raises the question of whether in fact it’s sufficient to read this character only through the lens of the overt stereotyping we see in Brougham, Marx, and so many others. Instead, it may be that this tale reflects what we see elsewhere, if less frequently, in antebellum culture: namely, the fact that the Jew, ever fungible in the American

84

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

imagination, is also the character in and through whom to imagine an alternative to strict norms of national affiliation and conduct. Freed by his/her very movement and detachment, as well as by his/her cultural marginality, this figure might in fact offer a somewhat different perspective, one in which cosmopolitanism opens up ways of thinking and being otherwise foreclosed in mid-century America. Indeed, it may be something like the “freedom of thought” ascribed to Miriam Schaefer in The Marble Faun—a sensibility that allows for the crossing of borders and boundaries that are less easily negotiated by the “Young Americans” championed by O’Sullivan, Duyckinck, and others. Perhaps more than anything else, Jack Engle is the story of modern selffashioning. For what we see is that Jack, the novel’s eponymous narrator, is something of a blank slate. Though adopted at a young age by a kindly shopkeeper after the sudden death of his parents, he actually knows very little about his past and has no real emotional connection to his own history. Thus, when he learns the story of his father’s murder, he admits to feeling as if he’s hearing the story of a “stranger.” “I thought of them more as the listener to the story, than as one having any special point of interest that came home pointedly toward me,” he says of the events surrounding the murder.24 Accordingly, the question put to him by a friend and colleague midway through the book— “How do you know your name ought to be Jack Engle?”—is central to his dilemma.25 For what we find is that he is almost literally the author of his own life, and that the novel itself is in many ways his attempt to fill in the empty space of Jack Engle. By novel’s end, Jack obtains the story of his origins, this in the form of a manuscript written by his father’s murderer. As a result, he’s able finally to say, “I at last knew of myself.”26 But this doesn’t mean his story is a seamless narrative of selfhood discovered. Quite the contrary, it shows the fissures of his self-construction as a first-person modern subject. On the one hand, Jack’s story is one of Enlightenment progress. “For the first time in our lives, we had been treated with rational benevolence,” Jack says of a remembered kindness he and a friend receive from a neighbor. “[T]he glimpse that came upon me, of a happy, peaceful, honest, well-ordered life: my belief is, I say, that all this acted with the influence of a good genius upon me, afterward.”27 Such memories are why we aren’t surprised to learn that in the present of his narration, Jack is a young, 20-year-old apprentice in the office of a lawyer named Covert. His, it seems, is the life that so many other young white-collar men aspired to in the 1840s and 1850s in America. As Thomas Augst explains in The Clerk’s Tale (2003), these young men were often intensely focused on a deliberate form of self-improvement. As he puts it, “[f ]or middle class men, free time was not merely a privilege but a moral test.”28 Augst suggests that

THE COSMOPOLITAN JEW IN THEODORE WINTHROP’S CECIL DREEME

85

the clerk’s life was measured, obsessively and anxiously, against the presence of what he terms his “moral Other”—a kind of idealized self, one reflective of a rational market culture that sought “an accounting for moral character,” “proper investment of time,” the “profit of pleasure,” and so on.29 It turns out, however, that Jack is ambivalent about the Bartleby-like existence he discovers in the rational world of the law. “Could I stand it?” he asks. “Could such an eternal procession of chapter ones, title twos, and section threes, have any other result than to make my brain revolve like this earth, on its own axis? . . . I found I was neither fitted for the study of the law, nor the study of the law for me.”30 But Jack’s desire for a “well-ordered life” persists despite his professional confusion. As he explains, he feels indebted to his adoptive guardian, a man named Ephraim Foster. “Could I so thoroughly displease this man, in almost the only serious point where he had demanded from me a compliance with his will? . . . [O]ught I not to submit, even for his sake, if for no other?” Moreover, Jack wonders if his reluctance to embrace the regulated life of the law is simply a temporary form of immaturity. “And would not time change my aversion, and perhaps make me ashamed of my childish prejudices and weakness?” he asks.31 This uncertainty is why it’s so telling when, as in so many other urban narratives from the period, he is thrown off when he encounters the titillating figure of the Jewess. We see this first when Jack meets two Jewish women who are clients of Covert’s. These ladies . . . were the wealthy Madame Seligny and her daughter. Madam was fat enough, and red enough; had a hooked nose and keen black eyes. Her person glistened and rustled with jewelry and silks, diffusing a strong scent of musk every movement. She had a yellow silk bonnet, set back on her head; and her fat hands gloved in white kid, applied a perfumed handkerchief of costly lace, to the beforementioned nose. She waddled, rather than walked, and sank down panting in the great chair which Mr. Covert had placed for her. Rebecca, the daughter, offered mettle more attractive. She was a pretty good specimen of Israelitish beauty, tall and slender, and in the full maturity of womanhood. She dressed with some taste, although richly, and with a little of her national fondness for jewelry.32

Jack’s description of the two women echoes the ambivalent tensions we’ve seen in so many descriptions of the Jewess. Here, Whitman seems to have split this character into two separate characters, with Rebecca figuring as desirable belle

86

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

juive, and Madame Seligny standing in for the threateningly repugnant female “Jew.” Later in the novel, we’re told that Madame Seligny may in fact be “an old Jew tradeswoman” who is passing herself off as “an emigrant member of the French nobility” in order to increase the interest in the “fashionable gambling house” she runs.33 This counter-rumor is never confirmed, but it adds to the image we receive of her as not just foreign, but suspect and vaguely sordid—as if she represents the boundary between acceptable and transgressive behavior. Ivy Wilson states that Whitman’s famous maxim about containing multitudes has often been understood as a metaphor for the democratizing impulses of the nation, but the presence of African Americans . . . within the poetic space of his verse and other writings complicates any understanding of how the US cultural and literary imagination seeks to contain or otherwise demarcate its subject-citizens.34

This observation also applies to Whitman’s depiction of Jews in Jack Engle. Indeed, as with the sensational Jew in so many antebellum texts, Whitman’s Jew comes to us always already fraught, precisely because this figure carries the weight of his culture’s often intense ambivalence about what it means to be a person and a citizen in capitalist America. It’s thus not surprising that the two women reflect contradictory passions in Jack and various other Gentile men throughout the novel. This is especially evident midway through the narrative, when we learn that Jack’s good friend Tom Peterson (“the cleverest, finest, manliest fellow I ever knew”) has begun a romantic and possibly sexual relationship with Rebecca.35 Tellingly, Jack receives this information from Tom’s “horrified” father, rather than from Tom himself, who has kept the affair a secret. “I felt really sorry for [Tom’s father],” Jack says. “I comforted the grieved man, by reminding him how unlikely the story seemed. Tom was no saint, we all knew; but he had been equally free from anything like dissipation, or coarse tastes.”36 The distinction here between Tom as a man who is “no saint” and one who has “coarse tastes” is revealing. Earlier in his narrative, Jack expresses envy over Tom’s refusal to conform to the sort of professional life he himself has entered into. “Tom was by trade a machinist,” Jack says. “Was it not that this manly trade had something to do in forming my friend’s character? I had a notion that way, and a vague feeling of the story it was that had caused a good deal of my repugnance to the law.”37 But Tom’s apparent relationship with Rebecca is a bridge too far for Jack—even when Tom assures Jack that his feelings for Rebecca aren’t as serious as Jack suspects.

THE COSMOPOLITAN JEW IN THEODORE WINTHROP’S CECIL DREEME

87

“As to Rebecca,” Tom says at the end of a long conversation between the two young men, “while I cannot feel indifferent to her, still you need not think I am in love. At least not yet.—The woman I love must be—; but never mind what.”38 The blank space in Tom’s description of what he requires to love a woman is significant. He might mean a rich woman—something that doesn’t apply to Rebecca. He might also mean something about race or ethnicity—that his future wife has to be White, for example. But here we might note that Jack has actually begun a relationship with a Latina woman named Inez, and that this is utterly unremarked upon by any of the characters in the text. We simply don’t seem to be dealing here with a character like the Black slave Margaret in Whitman’s other known novel, the 1842 Franklin Evans. “The loveliness and grace of Margaret had fascinated me,” Evans says in that earlier text. “[B]ut she was one, not of my own race, and her very liberty was owned by another. What had I to do with such as she?”39 The other possibility is that Tom might have meant to say he could only marry a Christian. In this scenario, Rebecca would have to convert, Jessica-like, a move that would provide a fantasyshedding of her threatening and repulsive “Jew” qualities—qualities which are hidden beneath her youth and beauty, but which are embodied in the figure of her older counterpart, Madame Seligny. In Jack Engle, however, there is no magical conversion narrative that allows for a marriage between Tom and Rebecca. Instead, in keeping with her literary namesake—Rebecca from Ivanhoe (1819)—Rebecca actually exits the story at novel’s end unattached to Tom or to any of the other Christian men in it. (We should note, though, that the corrupt lawyer Covert tries to seduce Rebecca, only to be rebuffed by her; apparently, his criminality and “carnal” nature allows him to cross a boundary line that Jack and Tom refuse to transgress.40 ) The novel’s penultimate paragraph provides the explanation for Rebecca’s departure: “Madame Seligny went abroad; she said for the purpose of taking possession of an inheritance. What truth there was in that part of the story I know not. But Rebecca accompanied her, and that forever broke up the pleasant intimacy between Tom Peterson and the pretty Jewess.”41 There is a decided tone of relief in Jack’s description of the departure of “the wealthy Madame Seligny and her daughter” for Europe. Seeking to narrate himself into existence—to become the person who can say “I at last knew of myself ”—Jack attempts to fit himself into the sort of monotonous and predictable world of Enlightenment professionalism available to him in Covert’s law office. But as we’ve seen, this is a struggle for him, and the Jewess as deployed by Whitman embodies his confusion and ambivalence. Sexually

88

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

desirable but not the stuff of Gentile love or marriage; financially canny but also shady and legally liminal; seemingly cosmopolitan but also indeterminate in terms of actual identity and background, Whitman’s Jew is here located at the boundary line that Jack is himself negotiating as he decides whether or not to live the rational, ordered life of the emerging white-collar bourgeoisie. And so, again, we’re dealing with something different here than what we see with the depiction of Margaret in Franklin Evans. As Amina Gautier suggests, Margaret “stands in as the foil for Evans’s baser desires but is eventually made to embody them and is consequently punished for them.”42 The Jewess in Jack Engle is more contradictory and ambivalent. Less a figure of absolute Otherness than one who blurs self and Other, Whitman’s Jew, like the Jew of antebellum sensationalism, helps reveal for us the ambivalent underbelly of the “clerk’s tale” in antebellum America. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, to see that Madame Seligny and Rebecca are the ones who first reveal to Jack that his boss Covert is in fact a scheming crook. “Rebecca bluntly expressed her opinion,” Jack says, “that he was one of the greatest scoundrels in Wall street, or its neighborhood.” Rebecca also tells Jack and Tom that Covert is a known lech. “What would you say . . . if you knew that not one hour ago this worthy gentleman was in the very room where we are now . . . making love to me!—making love, I tell you.”43 At least in this story, it’s the Jew—or rather, the cosmopolitan Jew—who peels back the layers of professional respectability and shows how criminality and lechery are seemingly inherent within the world of Wall Street. And the interesting thing here is that both Rebecca and her mother find the latter detail about Covert’s sexual advances amusing. To them, he’s an object of ridicule; from their perspective as relative outsiders to the local community, Covert simply isn’t to be taken seriously. “To confess the truth,” Rebecca explains with a “comico-serious air,” “I did not answer at all by word of mouth. I gave him a look, kicked over a footstool, and sailed out of the room with a magnificent bang of the door behind me.”44 All of which is to say that the Jewess of this novel, so foreign and also so mobile, may well act as a kind of catalyst for Jack’s decision to forego a career as an attorney. We see this break from the clerk’s life at book’s end, when we learn that Covert has been running a complicated scheme to rob Jack of an inheritance that was left for him by the man who murdered his father. Covert, revealed as a “cunning villain,” sends for Jack only to find that his clerk is no longer an employee.45 “Far from being at the office, I had, when I put my hat on my head the evening before, taken an oath never voluntarily to enter its doors again,” Jack says. “My days of studying law, I felt, might as well come to

THE COSMOPOLITAN JEW IN THEODORE WINTHROP’S CECIL DREEME

89

an end.” It’s as if Bartleby had decided to quit and leave the attorney-narrator’s office in Melville’s ironic clerk’s tale, rather than remain and haunt the building after he’s fired. To Jack’s relief, his guardian and father figure, Ephraim Foster, gives assent to this decision. “After all, Jack,” Foster says. “I don’t know that I was too fast in pushing you to this sort of life.”46 Foster’s phrasing underscores what is at stake here: the romantic and professional choices available to the young white-collar male in 1850s America. What “sort of life” was required of this population? The Jew—especially the Jew as a cosmopolitan figure of detachment and mobility—is a reminder of, and gives fantasy expression to, other options and other possibilities. This perspective, whereby the cosmopolitan Jew embodies both an unsettling form of rootless detachment and, simultaneously, a challenge to the constraints and normative standards of American social life, is similar to that offered by Sharon Oster in her reading of the Jew as depicted in The Golden Bowl (1904) and various other works by Henry James. “Whether cosmopolitan or disaporic,” she says, “each of these figures is objective for being displaced, as well as central to modes of exchange that transcend local boundaries. Standing just beyond the constraints of American social life and its institutional formations, these marginal figures challenge tradition and institution by virtue of their dislocated positions.”47 The Jews of Whitman’s urban novel do similar work. Precisely because of their status as inassimilable characters hovering on the edges of the world Jack inhabits, they provide the sort of alternative to white-collar professional orthodoxy he seeks. Needless to say, Jack doesn’t depart with these women when they exit the narrative. But this isn’t the point. Their very presence in his life are reminders that the mobile world and the ambivalence it induced was both anxious-making and potentially liberating.

“Everywhere and Nowhere”: The Jew and the Paranoid Gothic The text which perhaps best captures the complicated and thoroughly ambivalent nature of the cosmopolitan Jew in the late antebellum imagination is Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme (1861). Tellingly, the novel opens with the first-person narrator, Robert Byng, declaring the word “Home!”48 It’s a sort of pronouncement, one meant to mark his return to the US after having lived abroad in Europe for ten years studying chemistry and traveling. “[H]ere he is, fellow-citizens,” says his friend Harry Stillfleet the morning after Byng’s arrival in New York City on the SS Arago. “He has seen the

90

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

world and had his fling in Paris, where he picked up a little chemistry and this half-cynical manner and half-skeptical method.” Stillfleet is being ironic, but the comment is telling. Both men are aware that the move to America is significant for the 26-year-old Byng and requires a shift of attitude and perhaps sensibility. “The judge in the name of the American people demands, ‘Why . . . haven’t you been five years at the bar, or ten years at the desk?’” Stillfleet also says, to which Byng replies, “Bah, Harry! Don’t bore me with your Young Americanism!”49 Byng, it seems, has been reading the Democratic Review while in Europe—or perhaps The Literary World. And if this comment to Harry is any indication, he’s not impressed with the basic posture of nationalist pride and ambition O’Sullivan and Duyckinck were advocating. Instead, though obviously pleased to be “Home!,” he seems to have one foot still in the more cosmopolitan mindset of Europe. And indeed, Stillfleet presses him on this point. “Don’t put on airs, stranger,” Stillfleet says when showing Byng his apartment in a building owned by the fictional Chrysalis College, which he has offered to loan to Byng while away on extended travel for work. “You have lived too long in Florence. Brunelleschi and Giotto have spoilt you.” A later comment by Stillfleet, offered when introducing Byng to a man named Locksley, is even more pointed. “[H]ere’s my friend Byng, Robert Byng Esquire, of Everywhere and Nowhere. . . . He’s been a half-century in Europe and knows no more of America than the babe unborn.”50 This is unlike, say, Hawthorne’s description of himself after he loses his job as surveyor in “The Custom House Preface” to The Scarlet Letter (1850): “I am a citizen of somewhere else,” he says. Hawthorne is lamenting his lost form of national connection and goes so far as to describe himself as being “in a decapitated state, like Irving’s Headless Horseman.”51 As a citizen of “Everywhere and Nowhere,” Byng is conversely—at least to Stillfleet—a rootless cosmopolitan. On the other hand, we soon see that Stillfleet, whom Byng describes as having a “rattling, Frenchy way,” isn’t without his own cosmopolitan tendencies. This is particularly evident in the way Stillfleet has decorated his apartment. “[W]hat a wealth of art, virtu, and rococo you have here!,” Byng says to Stillfleet in admiration. “When I shut my eyes, I was in a seedy building in a busy modern town; I open them, and here I am in the Palazzo Sforza of an old Italian city.” Stillfleet’s response—“I have sampled all the ages of the world. . . . One does not prowl about Europe ten years without making a fair bag of plunder”— suggests that he and Byng actually share a worldly, cosmopolitan sensibility (the fact that both lived in Europe for ten years only underscores their shared situations).52 The difference is that Stillfleet seems to have adjusted to life in the US. The reason he’s able to lend Byng his apartment is that he’s leaving

THE COSMOPOLITAN JEW IN THEODORE WINTHROP’S CECIL DREEME

91

for Washington, D.C. to help with the designs for the new US Capitol building. (This project actually did begin in late 1856 and was completed in 1863.) “I go, as an architect, to expunge a little of the Goth and Vandal out of their sham-classic plans,” he explains to Byng.53 Apparently, Stillfleet has learned to apply his worldly, European sensibility to an enterprise that is wholly American in orientation. For Byng, though, a self-described “returned absentee,” assimilation into the national narrative seems fraught. And this may well have to do with his globally-oriented sensibility. “It seems to me that my allotted method of forming myself is by passing out of myself into others,” Byng tells his new neighbor Churm. “I adopt the natures of my companions, and act as if I were they.”54 The self-description echoes Stillfleet’s “Everywhere and Nowhere” label. Simply put, Byng doesn’t quite know who or what he is, especially now that he’s back in America. Just as importantly, he tends toward an excess of sympathetic identification; the boundary between himself and others is permeable. This is especially significant in that, en route to America, Byng has formed a close relationship with Densdeth, the “Hebrewish” man who will become the novel’s villain. “[W]e became intimate at once,” Byng says to Stillfleet.55 And indeed, Byng is filled with admiration for his traveling companion. In addition to being impressed with Densdeth’s financial successes (he refers to him as “a very Midas with the gold touch” and “a potent millionaire”), Byng praises Densdeth for his worldly sophistication and urbanity. Describing him as “brilliant” and “accomplished,” he states that Densdeth “has been everywhere . . . has seen everything . . . [and] knows the world de profundis.”56 Densdeth, that is to say, is a fellow cosmopolitan. In Cheerful Yesterdays (1898), Thomas Wentworth Higginson suggests that Densdeth is modeled on William Henry Hurlbert, who wrote for the New York Times from 1857 to 1860 and then for the New York World, starting in 1862.57 A brilliant linguist whom Higginson says was able to pass easily “as a Frenchman in France, an Italian in Italy, [and] a Spaniard in Spanish countries,” Hurlbert was also, Higginson states, known for his great beauty, as well as for his witty and often irreverent perspective on international politics (one reviewer noted in 1869 that Hurlbert was the “prince of persifleurs” and viewed abolition as “moral twaddle”).58 Hurlbert would thus have been an apt referent for Densdeth, who disdains the notion that America offers an exceptional experience to young men such as Byng. “Possibly you may have fancied that men are to be trusted on a new continent,” he says mockingly. “Possibly you may believe in the success of a society and polity based on the assumption that mankind is not an ass when he is not a villain, and vice versa.”59 Densdeth, it seems, has his doubts about the sort of

92

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

Young America narrative championed by O’Sullivan. To him, there is no reason to trust in the sort of rational citizen-subject (a “well-ordered life”) we see a character like Jack Engle try to emulate in Whitman’s novel. To Densdeth, villain and law-abiding character are one and the same thing. But Byng also admits that he’s ambivalent about Densdeth. “[H]e attracts me strangely” he says to Stillfleet, the implication being that he’s both puzzled by and uneasy about his own felt interest in Densdeth. This is a sentiment he echoes at various points. “What does it mean . . . this man’s strange fascination?” he asks when he sees Densdeth at the Chuzzlewit, a local men’s club. “When his eyes are upon me, I feel something stir in my heart, saying ‘Be Densdeth’s! He knows the mysteries of life.’ I begin to dread him. . . . What is this potency of his? How has he got this lodgment in my spirit?”60 This combined discomfort and confusion builds throughout the novel, as Densdeth is consistently present on the edges of Byng’s life. Thus Byng offers the following later in the narrative in relating a conversation he has had with Densdeth and several other men at a restaurant called the Minedurt: “I did not state to my own mind, then, why he captivated me,—why he sometimes terrified me,—why I had a hateful love for his society.”61 Christopher Looby suggests that the “hateful love” Byng feels for Densdeth reflects a version of what Eve Sedgwick famously terms “homosexual panic”—that form of repressed male–male desire which emerges as a felt sense of persecution.62 I want to explore this more fully below in examining the erotic triangle that develops around the relationships between Byng, Densdeth, and the eponymous Cecil Dreeme—who, unbeknownst to Byng for most of the novel, is in fact his old friend Clara Denman, in disguise in order to hide from an arranged marriage to Densdeth. But before launching into this complex dynamic of sex and gender, I want to argue that Byng’s conflicted feelings about Densdeth have to do with a single key quality: Densdeth’s Jewishness. And it’s a dazzling Jewishness. Here is Byng’s response to Stillfleet’s early query about Densdeth: “Densdeth, handsome as Alcibiades, or perhaps I should say Absalom, as he is Hebrewish?” Stillfleet confirms that this is the person he has in mind, and from this point forward Byng is consistent in depicting Densdeth as marked by a distinct form of difference. “His nose was a delicate aquiline,” we’re told, “and his other fine-cut features corresponded. His eyes were yellow, feline, and restless.” In another scene, Byng tells us that Densdeth “spoke with a delicate lisp, or rather Spanish softness,” after which he describes him as having “a marked Orientalism of face.”63 Hurlbert was described in similarly Orientalist terms by Higginson (he was “a picturesque Oriental” and a “dark beauty” Higginson writes admiringly).64 But if Hurlbert was in fact a

THE COSMOPOLITAN JEW IN THEODORE WINTHROP’S CECIL DREEME

93

model for Densdeth, Winthrop seems to have decided that the way to extend and intensify Densdeth’s fascinating exoticism was to render him as a Jew. As if to underscore the above descriptors, Densdeth is also described as a “Shylock” and “a Wandering Jew.”65 And the idea, it seems, is to make Densdeth into a kind of literary cousin of the various Jewish villains in American and British culture. Part Shylock (“Such talents for finance!” one character says of him) and part precursor to Svengali (“Densdeth has magnetized you,” Churm says to Byng), Densdeth-as-Jew personifies both Wall Street capitalism and the erotically seductive powers of the foreign cosmopolitan.66 Densdeth thus embodies the ambivalence Byng feels about his return to America and the more ordered, regulated lifestyle it seems to require. Hence, for example, the fact that Byng continues to hear in his head the voices of various European companions who mocked his decision to return home. “Going back to America!” they say in a sort of remembered collective voice. “Why Byng! life without shade, life all bald, garish steady sunshine, may do to swell wheat and puff cabbage-heads; but man needs something other than monotony of comfort, something keener than the stolid pleasures of deaconish respectability.”67 This is a kind of self-warning about the overly ordered life world of Enlightenment rationality. We might think again of Jack Engle’s felt frustrations about the prospects of a white-collar existence in Whitman’s novel. In that novel, it is the Jewess who represents a challenge to the orderly life Jack resists. Here it is the Jew Densdeth who gives shape to Byng’s ambivalence about his decision to trade the cosmopolitanism of Europe for American order and security. We might go so far as to say that Densdeth couldn’t be imagined as anything other than a Jew. Here as elsewhere, the Jew is the projected figure of loss and self-deception.68 Again, though, as per Byng’s comments about a feeling of “hateful love,” Densdeth isn’t depicted as a purely negative figure. Instead, Densdeth also gives powerful expression to Byng’s ambivalence about his own sexuality— as well as a more general ambivalence about sexuality in the US during this period. For what we see is that Byng is negotiating a fraught borderland between different modes of sexual desire. As Looby points out, the novel was published on the brink of the historical moment Michel Foucault identifies, when the notion of the “homosexual” was invented as a “species,” that is, as a type of person that could be readily identified and categorized—this so as to help solidify an understanding of heterosexuality as itself normative and acceptable.69 And what we see is that the new friendship Byng strikes up upon arrival in New York with a young man named Cecil Dreeme—who, again, is actually his childhood friend, a woman named Clara Denman—represents for

94

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

Byng an idealized form of male intimacy, one free from the categorical strictures or stigma of “homosexuality.” The two take long walks together at night (to avoid a chance encounter with Densdeth, Dreeme refuses to go out by day), and soon Byng regards him as “a friend of friends” and “part of my heart.” Indeed, Byng states outright that he feels for Dreeme “a love passing the love of women.”70 This is, in short, a queer romance—or so Byng believes it to be as long as he is ignorant of Dreeme’s true identity as a woman. In fact, throughout his increasingly intense and passionate relationship with Dreeme, Byng gives what can only be called halfhearted lip service to heterosexual desire for Clara’s sister, Emma Denman. “Emma Denman was the woman I deemed myself on the verge of loving,” he says. “It was she whom I felt that I did not love, and yet ought to love.”71 As this line suggests, Byng seems aware of a social expectation for heterosexual romance. At the same time, this awareness doesn’t stop him from openly embracing his relationship with Cecil Dreeme. We should note, though, that Byng provides an immediate follow-up to his statement that his love for Dreeme is one “passing the love of women.” It is as follows: “If I should lose [Dreeme], if he should abandon me, I might be ready to take the world as Densdeth wishes.” This suggests that, in Densdeth, Byng seems to find the negative, perhaps threatening, side of same-sex desire. Byng states early on that, “Our intimacy on board [the Arago] will not continue on shore.”72 But it’s clear that Densdeth continues to represent a powerfully erotic pull for Byng. In some respects this is overt. For example, during the above-referenced first scene in the Chuzzlewit, Byng states the following: Densdeth was studying me, with a covert expression,—so I felt or fancied. I interpreted his look,—“Young man, I saw on the steamer that you were worth buying, worth perverting. I have spent more civility than usual on you already. How much more have I to pay? Are you a cheap commodity? Or must I give time and pains to make you mine?”73

Byng’s inference that Densdeth seeks to “pervert” him is significant. We might read this as a reference to sex between men—perhaps as practiced aboard the Arago before docking on American shores. But it’s worth noting the ambiguity of Byng’s language here. “[S]o I felt or fancied.” “I interpreted his look.” Densdeth is indeed menacing at various points in the novel, most especially when, late in the narrative, he actually kidnaps Cecil Dreeme/Clara Denman. But it’s also the case that Byng is here inferring a great deal about what he perceives to be Densdeth’s intentions. He is, in other words, projecting his worst fears onto Densdeth. Indeed, this is the place to point out that, although Winthrop’s novel

THE COSMOPOLITAN JEW IN THEODORE WINTHROP’S CECIL DREEME

95

strongly implies that Densdeth is a Jew, this isn’t stated outright. Rather, this is a perspective we pick up from Byng’s first-person narration and from his conversations with characters such as Stillfleet. Densdeth is “Hebrewish,” Byng says. He’s a “Shylock.” He has “a marked Orientalism of face.” Byng assumes Densdeth is a Jew—or a sensational Jew. But it may be that Winthrop, as author, is very subtly leaving Densdeth’s specific identity—his specific form of Otherness—open to question. And what this would suggest is that this is a narrative in which the Jew is both an actual figure of projection and an imagined one. My own sense is that the actual and imagined converge in the character of Densdeth so completely that there really is no way to disentangle the two. Either way, Byng is projecting his anxious fears about sexuality (as well as gender and money) onto the figure most uniquely positioned for such displacement: the sensational Jew. And as we’ve seen in looking at examples such as Rachel Félix (“People whisper very black things of her”), this isn’t an unusual move in American culture.74 As Jonathan Freedman argues in a discussion of the closeted Jewish character Roy Cohn in Tony Kushner’s much later Angels in America (1991), the “cultural queering of the Jew” is a long-standing tradition, one in which “the Jew [is] at once monstrous, empowered, and perverse.”75 Freedman lists nineteenth-century literary characters such as Fagin and Svengali as precursors to Cohn, but we might also think of the disgust Hawthorne expresses for Philip and Emma Salomons in The English Notebooks (1853–58). Recall his claim that Philip Salomons “must have been circumcised as much as ten times over.” Remember as well his related statement about Emma Salomons: “I never should have thought of touching her, nor desired to touch her; for, whether owing to distinctness of race, my sense that she was a Jewess, or whatever else, I felt a sort of repugnance.”76 It’s difficult not to read the somewhat bizarre image of a multiply circumcised David Salomons as a form of wishful castration— a castration that, via projection, speaks to Hawthorne’s own attempt to deny his uneasy feelings of sexual desire for la belle juive, Emma Salomons. In like manner, Byng’s fearful assumption that Densdeth wishes to pervert and master him reflects the fact that, in the Jew of Winthrop’s novel, Byng confronts his decided ambivalence about his own desires. In a later conversation with Dreeme, Byng says the following about Densdeth: “Name and man are repulsive; but attractive also. Attractive by repulsion.”77 Here Byng is quite conscious of his ambivalence. But what he seems unable to fully acknowledge is that this ambivalence is itself linked to fears about his own sexual desires. This, indeed, is why the novel takes on the trappings of what Sedgwick terms the “paranoid gothic.” As she explains, this is the subgenre in which

96

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

“homophobia found its most apt and ramified embodiment.”78 And certainly Byng’s ambivalence reflects a variant of homophobia. For even though he loves Dreeme quite freely, he detests and is terrified by the side of himself that is drawn to Densdeth. Hence Densdeth’s role as both persecutor and Mr. Hydelike doppelga¨nger. Acting as a kind of ever-present dark double (Byng calls him “a malignant shadow” at one point), Densdeth consistently appears before him in clubs and restaurants, in the theater, and even on the streets of New York. “I turned with a slight start, for I had not observed the new-comer as an acquaintance until he was at my side,” Byng says in a particularly dramatic scene, when Byng and Dreeme are out on one of their intimate midnight walks. “It was Densdeth.” Byng says that the meeting reflects the moment when “Destiny overtakes our unconscious steps.”79 The implication is that Byng has unconsciously sought this encounter between Densdeth and Dreeme, and thus between his two competing attitudes toward same-sex desire. In what follows, we see Densdeth actually pursue the couple along the city streets. “He is following us!” Dreeme shouts, prompting the two to hurry away.80 Densdeth, we realize, has recognized Dreeme for who he really is—Clara Denman. But we also understand that Byng can’t yet see this. Looby’s reading of the overlapping yet distinct nature of Byng’s relationships with the two men is here useful. “As readers we must take Cecil Dreeme stereoscopically, as it were: the two queer romances (one beautiful, one sinister) are each other’s slightly mismatched counterparts, which, if taken together, produce a historical reality effect.”81 Even as Byng flees with Dreeme, his same-sex lover, he is in flight from another man to whom he is intensely attracted—and whom he fears for precisely this reason. The fact that the latter is a Jew (or is imagined as one) is no coincidence. Rather, it speaks to the ways in which the sensational Jew, endlessly fungible, was so often deployed in the antebellum American imagination as proxy for ambivalence and its twin, proteophobia.82 And this is perhaps why Winthrop stages the apartment Byng borrows from Stillfleet such that it’s adjacent to a small room Densdeth rents for storage. Indeed, Byng discovers that the room opens directly into Byng’s new home, via a padlocked door. “A dark room! that is Otrantoish!” Byng exclaims.83 Densdeth’s gothic space acts as symbolic closet for Byng’s repressed desires for Densdeth as Jew. But the implication is that it’s a space that might open into Byng’s more active, conscious life at any time. Part of the reason for Byng’s anxiety is that Densdeth is part of a continuum of Jewish men who were deemed as somehow inappropriately masculine in the antebellum US. In the case of Densdeth, of course, the threat is that he’s sexually deviant, and thus threatening. But as Heather Nathans has shown,

THE COSMOPOLITAN JEW IN THEODORE WINTHROP’S CECIL DREEME

97

Jewish men were often understood as insufficiently masculine throughout the antebellum period. Thus, for example, Mordecai Noah, the editor, diplomat, and playwright I mention in the Introduction, was publicly ridiculed in 1828 for running from a fight against his ex-business partner, Elijah Roberts, and then filing suit against Roberts. As Nathans puts it, “Noah’s Jewish identity seems to have ‘ghosted’ the trial, whether in accusations of his dishonesty; his cowardice; [or] his ignorance of the way ‘gentlemen’ conducted themselves in affairs of honor.” In an inverse scenario in 1832, Dr. Philip Minis of Savannah, Georgia, shot and killed a Gentile named James Jones Stark after Stark called Minis “a damned Jew” that “ought to be pissed on.” In one respect Minis was acting according to the Southern code of honor. The problem was that Stark was unarmed. According to Nathans, Minis thus “played into the same stereotypes that Stark had invoked in the slurs that sparked the original confrontation.”84 Patricia Cline-Cohen, Timothy Gilfoyle, and Helen Horowitz point out that Myer Levy, who I also mention in the Introduction, was similarly perceived as insufficiently masculine—mainly because, like Noah, he resorted to the legal system rather than more manly street fights.85 “He may be a Jew in other matters, but when it comes to fighting, he is a Quaker meeker than Moses,” the editors of the Sunday Flash stated.86 One could list numerous other such confrontations, including one in 1859, in which a Jewish peddler named Edward Rosewater was accosted by a man in Tennessee demanding a refund. “Says if I was a White man he’d whip me,” Rosewater writes in his journal. The commentary here from Nathans is useful: because of his Jewishness, she states, “Rosewater is somehow unworthy of masculine combat.”87 The villain Densdeth thus embodies an alternative form of antebellum manhood to Byng, one that, because of its link to Jewishness, is culturally understood as inadequate to the more normative standards of antebellum manhood. Yet it may be that the threat posed by Densdeth—that is, the possibility that Byng’s repressed desires for Densdeth might assert themselves more forcefully, or even win out eventually—suggests that we consider reading Byng’s anxiety and panic from a slightly different perspective. What if, in other words, we interpret Densdeth and his cosmopolitan Jewishness as a figure of queer difference that, though fearsome, also signals something that looks like liberation, sexual and otherwise? What if Densdeth actually represents, albeit in inverted form, a way out of the regime of “Young American” Puritanism Byng worries will prove overly constricting? One place to begin is with Densdeth’s consistent admonitions to Byng to resist a too easy belief in the exceptional nature of the American project. “Possibly you may not have quite outlived your illusions,” Densdeth tells him in

98

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

another moment from the above-cited conversation at the Minedurt. “You shall see. I shall give you entrée into the other worlds,—the business world, the literary world, the religious world.”88 The passage is another example of Densdeth’s basic cynicism and overall misanthropy. But it also reflects his attitude that America isn’t in fact uniquely virtuous, and that one could—and perhaps ought to—rely instead on less concrete or tangible “other worlds.” To the likes of Marx, Duyckinck, or O’Sullivan, this attitude is a threat—it is implicitly “unnational.” But viewed in the context of Byng’s ambivalence about repatriation, Densdeth’s offer of “entrée into the other worlds” is significant. For what it suggests is that the “strange fascination” Densdeth presents to Byng is linked to Densdeth’s cosmopolitanism. Byng desires Densdeth, but part of this desire may well be linked to Byng’s longing for the European world he has recently departed. For, as we can infer from his remembered conversations with European friends and his reflections on his various sexual relationships with Europeans, Byng’s life was much less constrained in Europe than in America. Byng might be seeking something like what James Clifford describes as “discrepant cosmopolitanisms,” by which he means cosmopolitanism viewed more variably—or perhaps from the perspective of ambivalence. Challenging the notion “that certain classes of people are cosmopolitan (travelers) while the rest are local (natives),” Clifford outlines a comparative, nonbinary approach that complicates binaries like home and travel, cosmopolitan and Young American, or nation and Jew.89 And it’s Densdeth and his specific form of cosmopolitanism, I would suggest, that informs the novel’s dramatic ending. In the final few chapters, Densdeth kidnaps Dreeme—who, again, he has discovered is Clara Denman. Soon thereafter, acting on a lucky tip, Byng and several friends pursue Densdeth to an isolated asylum located outside the city. Upon arrival, one of the men, Towner (long a victim of Densdeth’s persecutions), stabs and kills Densdeth.90 Moments later, Byng finds Dreeme “bound and helpless” in a locked room.91 This is when Byng learns Dreeme’s true identity—and discovers that the romance he believed himself to be having with a man has in fact been a love affair with a woman. The events amount to a form of cultural horsetrading. For what we see is that the required payment for Densdeth’s death is the like killing off of Cecil Dreeme. And what this suggests is that the death of the novel’s Jewish villain allows for—makes way for—the death of the novel’s same-sex narrative. The resulting logic is as follows: in order for the emerging strictures of heterosexuality to assert themselves with real force, the cosmopolitan Jew-asdoppelga¨nger must first be removed from the narrative. This is certainly one

THE COSMOPOLITAN JEW IN THEODORE WINTHROP’S CECIL DREEME

99

way of interpreting Byng’s situation at novel’s end. Contemplating his relationship with a new lover (Clara Denman) and an alternate form of sexual desire (heterosexual romance), he seems both confused and dismayed. Early in the narrative, Byng suggests that he is indeed hoping to find a female partner in America. As he puts it, “Living so many years in Italy and France, among women deflowered by the confessional, and among the homely damsels of Germany, I was eager for the society of fresh, frank, graceful, girlish girls at home.”92 But as we’ve seen in his halfhearted relationship with Emma Denman, the “girlish” American womanhood he has idealized turns out to be less attractive to him than he anticipated or hoped. Either way, the result is a dilemma for Byng at novel’s end. Looby puts it thus: “Can [Byng’s] cherished same-sex love be transmuted, somehow, into heterosexual attachment?”93 Byng’s comments to Clara (whom, notably, he continues to refer to repeatedly as “Cecil Dreeme”) suggest that the answer is “no.” “Never unsexed, Cecil!” he says in the moments after the rescue and resulting revelation of Clara’s identity. “I talked to you and thought of you, although I was not conscious of it, as a man does to woman only.”94 This is the statement of someone suddenly caught out and seeking to adjust to a new set of rules. Byng is simply unable here to address Clara-as-Clara. Instead, he’s talking still to Cecil Dreeme. In keeping with the novel’s gothic trappings, one might say Byng is speaking to the dead—and mourning the loss of his true love. Tellingly, Byng’s final comment about Densdeth strikes a similar note of longing. “There was the man whom I should have loved if I had not hated, dead at last,” he says.95 The statement, which echoes his earlier remark about a “hateful love” for Densdeth, reflects Byng’s continued ambivalence—both about sexuality and about what it means to be a “Young American” in 1860. Again, that ambivalence passes through the figure of the cosmopolitan Jew. But there’s also a note of regret here. And I would suggest that this reflects the way in which the Jew’s cosmopolitanism marks what lies just beyond the novel’s American horizon of possibility. It may be that we’re looking at something like the Gentile “self-hatred” described by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. For in losing Cecil Dreeme and Densdeth, Byng is ensuring his final transition to the more bourgeois “Young Americanism” he mocked upon arrival to the US. From this perspective, the internationally fluid Jew, while housing Byng’s worst fears, is also the person in and through whom to imagine an alternative way of living, one freed from the constraints of national norms and limitations. He represents the possibility, at once thrilling and terrifying, of real and permanent boundary-crossing. Like so many other Jews in the antebellum imagination,

100

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

Densdeth is the sign that the boundaries of the modern world were porous all along. No wonder Byng both loves Densdeth and hates him. These aren’t just conflicting emotions. Rather, they’re one and the same thing—which is why they require America’s sensational Jew to negotiate them.

4 Fagin in America Leslie Fiedler stated some time ago that there is no Fagin character in American Literature. Clearly, though, he overlooked the urban sensationalism of the late antebellum period.1 Indeed, though it took about a decade after Oliver Twist first appeared in America in 1838, by mid-century the figure of Fagin—the criminal urban Jew—had begun to permeate this material.2 Sensation novels, plays, “flash” newspapers, true crime pamphlets, even children’s fiction—all of these media began featuring a scheming Jew who haunts the nation’s cities and threatens its respectable middle-class inhabitants. But, in keeping with Oliver Twist, the menace of the urban Jew is consistently imagined in stories about Jews abducting children. Here, for example, are the dramatic lines in George Thompson’s Venus in Boston (1849), when the villain Jew Mike snatches a young street girl named Fanny Aubrey from the home of the upstanding Mr. Goldworthy: “[T]he Hideous Object crouched beneath the bed; she heard its deep breathing—its heavy sighs; then it reared its awful form above her. . . . What was the astonishment and dismay of the startled group, on discovering that Fanny Aubrey was nowhere to be found.”3 This moment is echoed in A. J. H. Duganne’s The Tenant-House; or, Embers from Poverty’s Hearthstone (1857), when a woman named Monna Maria warns a young girl named Ninetta about her possible abduction. “Is it true[?],” Ninetta asks. “Ay, child!,” Monna Maria says. “[T]he vile heretic would steal thee for the Jews, who desire to turn thee from our Holy Church, and make thee like themselves— the devil’s children!”4 Or consider the anonymously authored Old Haun, the Pawnbroker; or, The Orphan’s Legacy (1857).5 In this more overt replay of Charles Dickens, the eponymous villain plots to abduct a poor orphan named Anna Hervey, who has been adopted by a middle-class doctor. “He may try and coax, and say a great deal that isn’t true—tell you of so many nice things that he’ll give you,” the doctor warns Anna about the Jew Haun. “[B]ut don’t you believe a word he says.”6 Needless perhaps to say, such precautions prove insufficient, and Anna is eventually snatched by the villain Haun. It is a plot device whose consistency and popularity allow us to call the Fagin narrative a mini subgenre of its own, one that paralleled the popularity of Oliver Twist in America, especially once it became a hit theatrical production in the

Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature. David Anthony, Oxford University Press. © David Anthony (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192871732.003.0005

102

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

1850s (see Figure 4.1). Which raises the question: What was the deep psychology of American narratives that staged the urban Jew as a threat to Christian children?

Figure 4.1 Playbill for 1852 Production of Oliver Twist at National Theater in Boston Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

FAGIN IN AMERICA

103

One place to begin addressing this question is to point out that, as with the original Dickens narrative, these American versions of Oliver Twist tend to be organized around inheritance plots. In Dickens’s novel, Oliver is unaware that he is heir to half of a large fortune left to him and his paternal half-brother, Edward Leeford. He is similarly ignorant of the fact that this half-brother is in fact the mysterious character Monks, who is working with Fagin to ensure Oliver doesn’t receive his share of the family fortune (indeed, part of Fagin’s task is to trick Oliver into committing a crime, an act which would, according to the terms of the will, disqualify him for inheritance). By novel’s end, Fagin and Monks are of course foiled in their efforts to appropriate this money, and the young Oliver is somewhat magically lifted into the precincts of upper-class respectability. This basic storyline surfaces repeatedly in 1850s America. In the abovecited Old Haun, it turns out that the abduction of the girl Anna is motivated by the fact that, unbeknownst to her, she is heiress to $100,000 left by a rich uncle. Similarly, in Emerson Bennett’s The Artist’s Bride (1856), which I discuss briefly in the introduction, the Jew Isaac Jacobs plots to deny the poor young Villeta Linden her $300,000 inheritance. “[I]f you vash broves dem no childs of der faders and der moders,” Jacobs says in his cartoon accent, “den you shee dey vills not pe der heirs mit der court” (107). A short pamphlet novel entitled The Life, Confession and Execution of the Jew and Jewess (1856) does similar work (see Figure 4.2).7 Here, a Jewish pawnbroker named Gustavus Linderhoff Talzingler is asked by a dying cousin to be the guardian of his three young children. At first Talzingler is unwilling to accept such a charge, in particular because his cousin has converted to Christianity. But when Talzingler learns that the children are heir to $20,000, he quickly changes his mind. “Let the apostate die,” he mutters to himself.8 Shortly thereafter, Talzingler becomes the children’s guardian, a duty he shares with his new young wife, a seductive and spendthrift Jewess named Fanny. Soon enough, the two begin plotting to steal the children’s inheritance. Eventually, in a nightmarish mix of Oliver Twist and Hansel and Gretel, Fanny convinces Talzingler to take the children into the woods and murder them. “[L]et us do the deed,” she says. “It will be over in a moment, and the prize will be ours.”9 (47). There is then something like a “Fagin Effect” in the popular culture of antebellum America. Moreover, it dovetails with American ambivalence over the very notion of inheritance. On the one hand, laws of partible inheritance were embraced by the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Daniel Webster as central to

104

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

Figure 4.2 Cover of The Life, Confession and Execution of the Jew and Jewess (1856) Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

FAGIN IN AMERICA

105

democracy and economic equality. According to Jefferson, “The repeal of the laws of entail would prevent the accumulation and perpetuation of wealth in select families.”10 On the other hand, commentators expressed misgivings about the effects of laws limiting inheritance, in particular because of the threat they seemed to pose to the status of the family. Here, for example, is Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America (1835), lamenting the rapid effect in New York following changes in inheritance laws: [N]ot only does the law of partible inheritance render it difficult for families to preserve their ancestral domains entire, but it . . . compels them in some measure to co-operate with the law in their own extinction. . . . [N]ow . . . the aspect of society is totally altered; the families of the great landed proprietors are almost all comingled with the general mass. . . . [T]he law of partition has reduced all to one level.11

Tocqueville’s comments are echoed by none other than Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose The House of the Seven Gables (1851) is of course an extended meditation on this issue. Here, the plot revolves around the centuries-old feud between the Pyncheon and Maule families. The conflict, readers will recall, begins in the mid-seventeenth century, when the landed Colonel Pyncheon accuses a local farmer named Matthew Maule of witchcraft in order to appropriate Maule’s house. At his execution Maule curses Pyncheon, who subsequently dies. More important for succeeding generations, the deed to Pyncheon’s claim to a vast stretch of land in Maine disappears, thus depriving his family of a large inheritance. Over the course of the novel, we watch various Pyncheon relatives fantasize about how this inheritance would restore the Pyncheons to prominence, while the surviving Maule, a young man who goes by the name Holgrave, offers an incisive critique of this attitude. The exchange between him and the young Phoebe Pyncheon is perhaps the best example of the contending attitudes between the two families. “To plant a family!” Maule says. “This idea is at the bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do. The truth is, that, once in every half-century, at longest, a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its ancestors.”12 For Holgrave, in other words, inheritance is at the root of many of America’s social problems. Phoebe, though, is overwhelmed by this new perspective. “How you hate everything old!” she says. “It makes me dizzy to think of such a shifting world!”13 The social anxieties reflected in Phoebe’s “shifting world” and Tocqueville’s “general mass” are akin to those we see in American revisions of Oliver Twist.

106

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

To be sure, these narratives tend to be structured around the sort of dramatic cross-class movement we see in Dickens’s tale. As with Oliver when he is taken in by the kindly Mr. Brownlow, characters like the above-cited Anna Hervey are transferred, against all odds, from the squalid world of the streets and into the secure confines of middle-class homes (the children in The Life, Confession and Execution are less fortunate). But also as with Oliver, their abduction by the Jew returns them to this world—at least until, in keeping with the Dickens script, they can be rescued from the urban vice the Jew usually signifies. We might go so far as to say that this sort of frantic back-and-forth across class lines is in some ways the raison d’être of the Fagin narrative. For what we see is a border crisis, one reflecting a middle class that has yet to become fully consolidated. Hence the vulnerability of this class to the sort of intrusion staged by the Fagin character, who acts as a kind of register of the porous, and evolving, nature of the middle classes at mid-century. Holgrave, who elicits in Phoebe Pyncheon an intense sense of dismay over the “shifting world,” might be thought of as producing a version of this proteophobia-like anxiety. But the American Fagin embodies this anxiety even more powerfully. As we’ve seen, this can mean trespass by the criminal classes—Jew Mike from Venus in Boston and the other Fagin characters within urban sensationalism. But the more threatening, if abstract, intrusion is that of the market itself into the lives of the middle class. Repeatedly in these novels, we encounter middle-class characters who have fallen upon hard times. In Bennett’s The Artist’s Bride, the young Villeta is vulnerable because of her father’s sudden disappearance from his job as “Cashier of the —- Bank.”14 Many suspect him of having robbed the bank and run off, but readers learn that Linden has actually been murdered in a plot hatched by the Jew Jacobs. Either way, the family quickly becomes destitute, winding up in the New York City slum that is the setting for most of the novel’s action. The same sort of downward mobility marks Old Haun, the Pawnbroker. “Five years ago we came to this city; my husband hoping to obtain some situation which would yield a better compensation for his services,” Mrs. Hervey explains. “But he was often sick, and then all our earnings went rapidly, and finally he lost his situation, and for some time could obtain no employment suited to his physical condition. In this manner we were gradually reduced to poverty.”15 Fagin thus arrived on American shores at a moment of uncertainty and economic vulnerability for the middle classes. But these examples suggest that there is another, related, way to describe the middle classes in these novels. And that is to say that, as per the Oliver Twist formula, they’ve become defined by sentimentality. Indeed, economic vulnerability and sentimentality go hand in

FAGIN IN AMERICA

107

hand. The scenes in Old Haun where Anna Hervey quietly weeps for her father are representative. “The tears stole out of her eyes when she remembered her father’s sufferings,” we’re told at one point. “[B]ut no sigh or sob escaped her heaving breast, for she was conscious that her mother was still awake, and her affectionate heart forbade her adding one drop to that mother’s bitter cup.”16 We see a similar moment in The Artist’s Bride, when Villeta and her sickly brother Lionel meet an old family friend, Mrs. Leslie, who offers to rescue them from their poverty. Here is the exchange: “It is such a rare sight to us to behold the face of a friend!” [Lionel] added, with tearful eyes, as his thin, transparent hand closed nervously upon hers. “Ah! poor orphans! would to God I had found you sooner!” said Mrs. Leslie, in a choking voice. “Lionel! dear Lionel! dear brother! beware of this excitement!” exclaimed Villeta, in alarm, as she turned and anxiously gazed upon his thin, hollow, ghastly features, now quivering with a newly awakened emotion.17

Much like Anna’s silent tears for the remembered sufferings of her father, Lionel’s “tearful eyes” and “transparent hand” are markers not just of sentimentalism writ large, but rather of a particular kind of economically based sentimentality, one specific to the plots of mid-century urban narratives such as The Artist’s Bride and Old Haun. It is the affect of class decline—or rather, of class instability and fluidity, wherein social categories become porous, and emotion follows suit.18 The process I’m describing, whereby class sensibility emerges and becomes recognizable via economic stress, is very much in keeping with the dynamic Joseph Fichtelberg outlines in Critical Fictions (2003).19 As he explains in examining the popular urban fiction of the 1850s, At midcentury, the market had come to seem much more volatile than even its most ardent players could have imagined. Their response to insecurity was to intensify the sentimental attributes of class. . . . Market fictions came to insist that feeling was the preserve of an embattled middle class whose insecurity was both a distinction and a threat.20

Fichtelberg’s reading is particularly useful for understanding America’s Fagin narratives. For what we see is that the Jew is the trigger for affective display— which is to say that sentimentality is itself a marker of the anxiety and proteophobia I’ve been discussing. This is something Zygmunt Bauman alludes to

108

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

in describing the role of sentiment in the order-seeking modern world. “Sentiment/emotion/feeling/passion is the name of [the] unpredictability which opens where the arm of Reason, however long, cannot reach,” he says. “In the garden of Reason, sentiments are weeds—plants that seed themselves in unexpected and inconvenient spots. The spots are inconvenient because they have not been allocated in advance—they are random from the point of view of the master plan.”21 At least in the Fagin narrative, the sentimental hallmarks of sighing and weeping are a reminder that our characters have strayed from the path of middle-class regulation, progress, and success. Instead, they’re in the realm both of class ambivalence and, inter alia, the Jew. This implies that middle-class affect is sometimes shaped and imagined via the Jew. We might put it in terms of the following formula: middle-class anxiety: sentimentality // sentimentality: Jew.

In this reading, middle-class anxiety about downward mobility and the presence and actions of the Jew go hand in hand. Or rather, the Jew is a mirror of the period’s confusion and ambivalence about class and money. Indeed, my argument in this chapter is that the American Fagin narrative is a space within which these sorts of anxieties and ambivalences were given voice. Borrowing from Oliver Twist, these stories stage the faceoff between Jew and dispossessed child in order to rehearse the themes of inheritance, class, and sentiment—and in so doing, map out the contours of the emergent middle classes. But as I hope to show, the very presence of the Fagin character—the Jew—in these narratives belies any attempt at coherence or any notion of secure boundaries. The American Fagin, recruited to this country to help depict and combat this ambivalence, had the unintended effect of highlighting the difficulty of this effort at mid-century. Indeed, even though, as per the Oliver Twist plotline, the Jews of the stories I examine are all neutralized (they’re killed off, arrested, or otherwise jettisoned from the storylines they inhabit), the fact is that this removal is cosmetic. Even in his absence, the leftover waste of the ambivalence he represents remains. Where the Jew is involved, even (or especially) when packaged in the familiar form of Fagin, closure is always partial, or indeterminate.

Lockets, Tears, and the Jew The Twist-ian tropes of Jew and Gentile urban child are particularly evident in the above-mentioned novel Old Haun, The Pawnbroker; or, The Orphan’s Legacy. Indeed, as if sensing the need to establish this connection as quickly

FAGIN IN AMERICA

109

as possible, the anonymous author of this tale opens with a scene in which the desperately impoverished Anna Hervey travels to the Chatham Street pawnshop run by the eponymous Jew Haun. The goal is to sell her family’s one remaining heirloom. “We have the locket left yet, and that will bring bread for to-day at least,” Anna’s mother says to her sickly and unemployed husband.22 The problem is that, as ownership of the locket suggests, Anna isn’t a native of the streets. Instead, we soon learn that she and her middle-class family moved to the city a few years previously so that her father could “as stated above, seek more renumerative white-collar employment.” Unfortunately, Mr. Hervey’s ill health causes him to miss too much work, and he loses his job. Soon enough, the family becomes destitute, and Anna finds herself navigating what is repeatedly described as her “filthy” urban environment with the help of a clever Irish boy named Mich. Notably, though, even Mich—a kind of well-intentioned Artful Dodger—isn’t savvy enough to protect Anna when, predictably, she is swindled by Haun, who gives her a $5 bill from a defunct bank.23 Also predictably, Haun soon learns what Anna doesn’t know—that she is in fact the heiress to a sizable fortune. This information comes from one of Haun’s customers, a man named James Cornell, who will act as the novel’s Monks character. Much like Monks when he sees the locket stolen from Oliver’s mother and realizes that Oliver is his half-brother, Cornell recognizes the miniature stored in the locket Anna has sold to Haun and understands his familial connection to Anna.24 As Cornell explains to the pawnbroker, he has been hired by Anna’s wealthy uncle, a retired sea captain named William Leonard, to travel from New Orleans to New York City and attempt to locate his estranged sister and her family—the Herveys. But Cornell is also related to Leonard—he is Leonard’s cousin, and his only living blood relative besides Mrs. Hervey and Anna. And what we see is that, like Monks before him, his plan is to prevent his relatives from ever receiving an inheritance. “[O]ne thing is certain,” Cornell says in a soliloquy, “if these relations turn up they become his heirs—if they don’t turn up then I’m the trump.”25 What ensues is a charged game of cat and mouse, with Cornell and Haun— this novel’s Monks and Fagin—joining forces to find Anna and eliminate the Hervey family. This, however, proves difficult, especially once Mr. and Mrs. Hervey both die of consumption, and the kindly doctor who treats them, Dr. Foster, adopts Anna. A US stand-in for Mr. Brownlow in Oliver Twist, Dr. Foster acts as Anna’s guide up from the world of the streets and into the middle classes. Or rather, he is the figure who can see in her an inherent sense of

110

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

class distinction. As the narrator explains following Foster’s first visit to Anna’s tenement apartment, He knew from their conversation and manners, that the persons whom he had that night met in that miserable abode, were not of the mass—that they had moved in a different sphere, and although forced by misfortune to live among the rough and degraded inhabitants of the neighborhood; still he saw that they were—although among them—not of them.26

Foster’s job, we might say, is to prepare Anna to receive her inheritance from her uncle Leonard. But as the language of the above quote suggests, this money seems to be understood in relation to the sorts of concerns expressed by Tocqueville in his comments about the threat that partible inheritance poses to “the families of the great landed proprietors”—that of becoming “comingled with the general mass.” This is why, before her death, Mrs. Hervey sought to “prevent Anna’s associating with the vile children that thronged the neighborhood to which their poverty had condemned them.”27 This is also why, a short time after Anna makes the move into Foster’s home, she becomes almost literally invisible to her street urchin friend Mich. Though he hears her voice among the throng on Broadway on Christmas Eve, he cannot pick her out of the crowd. “[H]e started, and turned to gaze after the speaker, but all were strange; he saw no familiar face, yet he was sure he knew the voice—it was that of Anna. Yet none but well-dressed people were near him.” At least in this drama of class fashioning, to rise up from the streets is to become invisible to those who have yet to access the protected spheres of middle-class selfhood.28 But the real key to Anna’s class fashioning is her relationship with the Jew Haun. At one point, when he’s still confused as to the motives of Leonard and Haun, Dr. Foster poses the following question about Haun: “Why should [Leonard] employ an agent, and above all, such an agent?”29 The answer is both straightforward and abstract. Certainly, it’s the Jew who best and most effectively stands in contrast to Anna’s Oliver-like reclamation of her class status. Indeed, Haun’s role here is in keeping with that outlined by Fichtelberg in his discussion of the depiction of the lower orders in turn-of-the-century sensationalism: As frailty became a badge of economic resilience . . . writers increasingly sought to preserve this imperative from the working class and the poor. Those who resisted the transparent sympathies of benevolent merchants or who lacked the capacity for sentimental responsiveness seemed to be opposed

FAGIN IN AMERICA

111

to the common interests of society. In times of panic, they did not react with the disarming candor of middling heroes and heroines. Instead, they rejected sympathy, became as opaque and menacing as the unpredictable market itself.30

This reading helps us decipher the largely two-dimensional nature of the Fagin character, both in this novel and in the antebellum period more generally. For with the exception of narratives in which the Jew-as-Shylock bemoans the loss of his Jessica-figure daughter (a plotline that, as I’ll discuss below, intersects with at least one American Fagin narrative), the sensational Jew of early American literature is emotionally stunted. Recall, for example, the lines I quote in the introduction from John Brougham’s Much Ado About a Merchant of Venice (1868) regarding Shylock: “What is to be done with this unfeeling Jew?”31 The reason for emotional stuntedness, of course, is that he embodies the “opaque and menacing” economic market. Consider the description of the aged Jewish usurer Mordecai in James Maitland’s novel The Lawyer’s Story; or, The Orphan’s Wrongs (1853).32 Daily does he . . . creep up stairs, and there, in the old dusky office, at the old table, in the accustomed corner, may be found the once shrewd and energetic—the still keen, money-loving usurer. He has sense enough to know, old and childish as he is, that his gold is the only friend he has left; many friends he never did have, gold was always the friend he most loved and reverenced, and he has found his reward in its adhering to him when all others have failed.33

Hence too the narrator’s insistence in Old Haun that the pawnbroker’s “purest enjoyment” comes from his criminality. “He was happy,” we’re told, “both in having defrauded others, and in having added to his own gains.”34 Rather than rely on human interaction and affective exchange, characters such as Mordecai and Haun find connection only in the money form itself. It is as if they have evolved into the living embodiment of Karl Marx’s famous dictum in Capital, Vol. I (1867): “As we proceed to develop our investigation, we shall find, in general, that the characters who appear on the economic stage are mere personifications of economic relations; it is as the bearers of these economic relations that they come into contact with each other.”35 Indeed, these characters seem to have taken Marx’s notion a step further. For them, people aren’t interesting or desirable simply because they are the embodiment of money. Rather, money—“always the friend [the sensational Jew] most

112

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

loved”—is actually preferable to people. And what this reflects is a sort of pathological anti-sentimentalism, one that, in an echo of Dickens’s Fagin, runs exactly counter to the form of middle-class affect around which sentimentality is defined. The affective flatness of the American Fagin might be further underscored by looking briefly at another Twist-related novel. This is John Treat Irving’s Harry Harson: or, The Benevolent Bachelor (1853).36 Set in the poorest slums of New York City, where the area’s “savage” and “reckless” inhabitants are “next of kin to beasts,” the story zooms in at its outset to the underground lair of two criminals—the Dickensian Mrs. Blossom and Mr. Snorkel.37 These two, we soon see, make their living by training a small army of street children to beg and pick pockets on the streets. “Children, kenneled there like beasts, gathered about Mrs. Blossom,” we’re told in the opening pages. “[W]an, miserable little wretches, with blear eyes, thin, pale faces, crippled, deformed, blighted.” But amidst this swarm of destitute children, we see two youths who, as per the Oliver Twist formula, have been kidnapped from an upper-class home. “Strange tenants they were of such a place,” we’re told, “for they were singularly beautiful; exotics which could never have been the growth of such a soil.”38 Soon enough, these two children escape the clutches of their kidnappers and wind up in the home of the “benevolent bachelor” of the story’s title; he is another Mr. Brownlow in America. In what follows, we learn both that the children are heir to a considerable fortune, and that their abduction was motivated by the desire to steal their inheritance. We are, it seems, squarely within the realm of Oliver Twist. Yet this is Oliver Twist with a difference. For although the villain who masterminds the children’s abduction, a man who goes by the pseudonym Michael Rust, is described as a “dark” and “sinister” moneylender with “black brows, and shaggy, gipsy-like hair,” he isn’t a Jew—at least not overtly.39 Certainly, this suggests a desire to revise the Fagin storyline; perhaps Irving was even uncomfortable with the antisemitism of Dickens’s novel. But the key here is that, unlike the Jews of other American Fagin narratives, the villain Rust is both emotionally vulnerable and sympathetic. Indeed, a pivotal moment is when we learn that Rust has kidnapped the two children from his rich brother, and that he has done so not simply out of greed, but in the hopes of eventually having enough money to support his own daughter. Here is a distraught Rust, when he learns that his daughter has fallen prey to a life of poverty and has become a prostitute. “I would have added the destruction of those children to the catalogue of my crimes, that I might have grasped their inheritance, to have showered all that I had gathered by toil and crime upon her. She was my hope, my pride, my own dear darling child; but she is

FAGIN IN AMERICA

113

shipwrecked now; she has withered my heart.”40 Rust’s “withered” heart signals that, despite his structural and perhaps even physical similarity to Fagin, he is no Jew. For again, at least in this genre of Oliver Twist rewrites, the Jew is by definition emotionally opaque and beyond the reach of sympathetic connection. Another way to put this is to say that, especially when it comes to the question of inheritance, class, and sentiment in 1850s America, there’s no villain quite like a Jew.41 All of which is to suggest that, in Old Haun, and in the Fagin narrative more generally, sympathy is the coin of the realm. The following passage, in which we see an exchange between Mrs. Hervey and Dr. Foster after the death of Mr. Hervey, is representative of the sympathetic economy that characterizes their status as members of the middle and upper-middle classes. “God bless you for your kindness,” Mrs. Hervey answered, with much emotion. “There—there—be quiet. You must be quiet. You must not excite yourself so, if you ever expect to get strength,” the Doctor interrupted, impatiently. “I endeavor to restrain myself, but can not [sic] at all times—my nerves seem to be unstrung.” “Very likely—very likely, Ma’am.” After a moment’s hesitation, as if to gather strength for the painful recital, in a low and trembling voice, Mrs. Hervey continued. She was often obliged to stop, from fatigue, and oftener to choke back the tears, which the memory of earlier and happier days sent welling up to her sunken eyes. None knew the burning anguish of those unshed tears. They saw the quivering lip and the pale face, but heard not the cry for strength that rose on the wings of the tremulous sigh that escaped from her heart.42

Mrs. Hervey’s tears are signs of her frailness and vulnerability. But as Fichtelberg suggests, this weakness—highlighted by her “unstrung” nerves—is itself a key marker of her status as a member of the middle class. This is also the explanation for Anna’s visceral response to Haun when they first meet in his pawnshop at the outset of the novel. “Anna shuddered with disgust at the contact with Haun’s hand, and involuntarily stepped back,” we’re told.43 Apparently, Anna’s very biology signals that she is superior both to the Jew, and to the broader economic realm he signifies. Just as important, such moments actually make her and characters like her aware of themselves as middle class. Here as elsewhere, the Jew is a key figure through whom the American middle class imagines itself into being.

114

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

And yet Haun is more than simply a static agent of class difference. Quite the contrary, he is in many ways the figure who signals and enacts this novel’s actual ambivalence about class and inheritance. For again, where the American Jew is involved, what we’re likely to see is the porous nature of the social categories he traverses and embodies. He is the sign, that is to say, of class anxiety. This is especially true in the Fagin narrative and its commentary on class in 1850s America. Here, of course, Haun-as-Jew is the novel’s villain: just as the reader is prompted to sympathize with Anna, we’re instructed to feel antipathy toward Haun—especially when he contemplates killing Anna in order to ensure she doesn’t receive her inheritance. “But what’ll I do with the little ____ after I get her?” he asks in an aside. “[P]erhaps have to throttle her to put her out of the way, finally.”44 We should note, though, that Haun performs somewhat contradictory work in this novel. In particular, he seems to be positioned in opposition to laws of entail and to be working for something closer to partible inheritance. Or least this is one way to read his efforts to prevent Anna from inheriting Leonard’s money. The following exchange between Cornell and Haun, in which Cornell expresses his hopes of inheriting money from Leonard despite the fact that Anna’s mother is a more direct relation, speaks to this fairly directly: “He’s always told me that I should be his heir, and now he’s got a crotchet in his head that he must find this sister and her child. I know well enough how it will go if he does find her. She’ll get all and I none.” “Perhaps he would divide it between you,” said Haun. “So I thought once, and would have been very willing to divide, but I got a letter to-day that settled that.”45

In what follows, Cornell promises to pay Haun $10,000 to track down Anna and her parents and ensure that Leonard believes they are all dead—either that, or murder them. “Willing to divide” Leonard’s family money but also willing to eliminate Leonard’s direct descendants altogether, Cornell poses a clear opposition to more traditional—and more conservative—models of inheritance. Dr. Foster underscores this perspective when he later learns that, following Leonard’s death in New Orleans, Cornell has inherited Leonard’s money. “It is not natural that one should forget his own blood, and give all he has to strangers,” he says of Leonard—this despite the fact that Cornell is an actual “blood” relative of Leonard’s. “I intend the child shall have all that rightfully belongs to her.”46

FAGIN IN AMERICA

115

But again, Cornell’s efforts to keep Anna from her inheritance are only possible with the aid of the Jew Haun. Much as with Fagin in Oliver Twist, it is Haun who knows how to navigate the streets of New York in search of Anna, and it is he who eventually locates and kidnaps her. “He met us in the strate,” Anna’s Irish nurse explains, “and knocked me down and sazed her.”47 Haun, it seems, has been reading his Jefferson—and the result is Leonard’s “not natural” decision to will his money to Cornell. Which isn’t to say that this novel’s Jew should be read simply as a figure of progressive politics. Casting Haun as a Fagin-like antagonist to American laws of entail, the novel projects the more general breakdown of the nation’s rigid system of class hierarchy onto the figure of the Jew. It’s as if Holgrave had been working in league with a Jew in his efforts to topple the Pyncheons in The House of the Seven Gables. This, I would suggest, is the reason Anna is soon rescued and Haun is killed off. Old Haun simply isn’t a novel that can sustain the ambivalence contained in this Fagin character. Following an argument about Cornell’s overdue payment to him, Haun murders Cornell. Conveniently, though, Cornell doesn’t die until he confesses to the police his scheme to deprive Anna of her inheritance. This leads the police to Haun’s pawnshop, which is soon leveled by an angry mob. A short time later “the old Shylock” is arrested, and then dies trying to escape from prison.48 But it’s worth noting that this happens some two-thirds of the way through the narrative. Apparently, this American novel is either unwilling or unable to follow the model of Oliver Twist and wait until its final pages to eliminate its Fagin character. What’s interesting, though, is that the novel doesn’t seem able to let go of the anti-gentry politics Haun embodies. We get a glimpse of this the morning after Anna’s rescue. “How glad I am to be here again,” she says to Dr. Foster. “[B]ut I dreamt all night about that old man. What do you suppose he wanted of me?” Foster suggests that she simply needs to repress the entire event. “I don’t know, never mind him,” he says. “I wouldn’t think of him any more [sic].”49 It seems, though, that Anna—and the plot that surrounds her—continues to have the Jew in mind. For while Anna becomes a rich heiress, she ends up rejecting various upper-class suitors, the main one of which is revealed as a fortune hunter. Instead, she ends up marrying Mich, the hardscrabble Irish boy who befriended her when she was still living with her parents and selling matches on the streets. Moreover, Mich—who has made his way, Horatio Alger–like, up to an early-stage career as an attorney—refuses to have anything to do with Anna’s inheritance. “Anna, do you suppose I would touch one farthing of your fortune?” he asks. “I wish, for my own part, that you had nothing. . . . Then by my devotion I could prove to the world that my love has been disinterested.”50

116

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

This statement is less surprising than it might seem. For it highlights the novel’s true agenda, which is to imagine a space that is middle-class both in sensibility (as witnessed by the many tears shed by the Hervey family) and finances (neither poor masses nor landed/entailed wealthy). Indeed, this is why Anna’s inheritance ends up being eliminated altogether in the novel’s final pages. Here is the central quote: But there is truth in the words, that riches take to themselves wings and flee away. A few years after the marriage of Anna, the bulk of her fortune was entirely lost by a destructive fire which occurred in New Orleans, the insurance, by the neglect of her agent, having been allowed to expire.51

Depriving Anna of Leonard’s legacy, the fire completes the work which Haun and Cornell—the American substitutes for Fagin and Monks—attempted several hundred pages earlier. The crucial difference here is that by book’s end, Anna is firmly located within a middle-class family of her own. Apparently, in order to be successfully middle-class in this novel, the best bet is to follow the sentimental ideal set forth by Anna’s new husband, the Alger-esque Mich: to have both “love” and “nothing.”

“[H]eirs mit der court”: Illegitimacy and Class Affect The American Fagin is just as threatening—and just as complex—in Emerson Bennett’s The Artist’s Bride. The narrative opens with a sentimental flourish in 1836 Philadelphia, in the pawnshop of the Jew Isaac Jacobs just as he is about to do business with the young Villeta Linden. Villeta, we learn, is desperate for cash because her older brother Lionel—her only surviving family member—is dying of consumption. As a result, she hopes to pawn a gold chain and locket that once belonged to her mother. “Oh, sir!” she exclaims. “I am greatly in need, or I would not part with them for any consideration. They belonged to my poor dear mother, who is now in a better world.” Not surprisingly, the 95-year-old Isaac drives a hard bargain and will only advance a fraction of the jewelry’s actual worth. “Dree dollarsh,” he says. “I vash not puys dem—I vash only lends monish on dem.”52 But when Villeta provides her name for the pawn receipt, Isaac realizes that he and the girl are actually related. Indeed, it turns out that Villeta is the great-granddaughter of Isaac’s sister Hagar. The problem is that, at least in Isaac’s eyes, this makes Villeta his enemy. For what we learn is that Isaac has a lifelong hatred of Hagar

FAGIN IN AMERICA

117

for marrying a Gentile named John Ackland. We’re also told that Isaac has systematically been killing off Hagar’s descendants, one by one, in an effort to exact revenge for his sister’s apostacy. His plan for Villeta is no different: “I can put a deadly poison in the locket, that will kill her if she wears it,” he says to himself.53 Again, then, we’re on the terrain of Oliver Twist—something confirmed when we’re told that Villeta’s locket contains the certificate of marriage for Villeta’s parents. This document is just as useful to Isaac as the information Monks gleans from the locket in Dickens’s novel. For though Isaac’s ultimate goal is to wipe out his sister’s family line, he’s also involved in a plot to obtain the large inheritance—$300,000—due to the descendants of his Christian brother-inlaw, John Ackland. His task here is thus similar to Fagin’s, but with a difference. He wants to make it seem that Villeta is actually an illegitimate child—a fact which will discredit any claim she might make to the family fortune. The marriage certificate from the locket is thus the linchpin for events as they unfold over the course of the novel. Isaac’s above-quoted statement about preventing Villeta and her brother (who is soon to pass away) from being “heirs mit der court” speaks to his plan, as does the follow-up comment from his accomplice, a man named Leon Dupree. “Ah! I think I understand you!” Dupree says. “[Y ]ou mean if these children . . . can be proved to be illegitimate, they cannot inherit according to the law.” “Shust so! shust so!” Isaac replies. “[Y ]ou vash gets vat I vash means ash von lawyer!”54 Standing in for Fagin and Monks, Isaac and Dupree are referring here to the fact that, as late as the 1830s in America—the time period in which Bennett’s novel is set—many rulings on illegitimacy and bastardy rights continued to follow common law in England and hold against the inheritance rights of children of unwedded parents. As William Blackstone put it, recognizing bastard rights “is plainly a great discouragement to the matrimonial state; to which one main inducement is usually not only the desire of having children, but also of procreating lawful heirs.”55 Indeed, although the trend from the colonial period into the mid-nineteenth century was to find ways to legitimate baseborn children, such advances were uneven, with numerous courts continuing to separate legal from “spurious issue” and thus deem illegitimate children “filius nullius”—the child and heir of no one. Thus in 1835, in a Tennessee ruling, Judge Jacob Peck expressed concern about rulings that granted legitimacy to bastard children. By granting such children “inheritable quality,” he wrote, the court “takes away a portion of the rights of the heirs proper [of the father] by dividing the estate with the illegitimate child.”56 Similarly, in 1858, or just after the publication of The Artist’s Bride, a number of

118

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

decisions were handed down which seemed designed to counter a more liberal ruling in Wisconsin. As Michael Grossberg puts it, “Justices were extremely cautious in allowing bastardy reform to upset an existing scheme of family inheritance.”57 Isaac’s desire to label Villeta as illegitimate and deny her an inheritance thus seems to align him with Jacob Peck and others wishing to protect families from the claims of bastard children. But in fact, as the marriage certificate makes clear, Villeta actually is the legitimate daughter of her parents, Eldridge Linden and Ellen Courtney—and Isaac knows this. Accordingly, we should view Isaac as somewhat contradictory. Though he seeks to disinherit Villeta, he isn’t an agent of bastardy reform. Far from it. Instead, he is simply a rogue player in the period’s evolving debate over inheritance laws. And this, I would suggest, is a role best performed in mid-nineteenth-century America by the Jew—the figure of ambivalence and proteophobia par excellence. This description is especially apropos for Jacobs, whose goal, it seems, is to break down the orderly world of mid-century inheritance laws, but not in a way that fits in with a particular or consistent political position. Rather, he is in his pathological greed simply self-serving—which is to say he is a sort of avatar for the free-for-all logic of capitalism itself. The novel makes this increasingly evident as it progresses. Following his pawnshop encounter with Villeta, Isaac works with Dupree to deny Villeta her inheritance. One of the key issues here is that Leon Dupree is also a descendant of John Ackland; he and Villeta are second cousins via Dupree’s mother. The plan is thus to make Dupree the sole heir to Ackland’s riches, at which point he will pay Isaac for his help in obtaining the entire inheritance. “I shwears you vash say you vill gifs me fifty dousand dollarsh for der certificates,” Isaac says to Dupree.58 Perhaps not surprisingly, the catch is that Isaac plans to murder Dupree after getting his share of the money, and thus make good on his vow to eliminate all of his sister’s descendants. The other key issue is that Isaac is actually responsible for the death of Villeta’s father, and thus for her sentimental status as orphan in the novel’s present. For what we learn late in the novel is that, working with Leon Dupree’s father, Basil Dupree, Isaac actually engineered a plan whereby Villeta’s father was framed for the robbery of the bank where he was employed. This was accomplished when Basil, who was also a bank teller, killed Villeta’s father on his way from work, then used this man’s vault keys to rob the bank of over $400,000 in specie. As the narrator explains, “The fact of the bank having been robbed by some one [sic] who had opened the doors and vault by proper keys, and locked the same after removing the money, united with the fact of the

FAGIN IN AMERICA

119

mysterious disappearance of the cashier on the same night, all tended to fix suspicion on the murdered officer.”59 Isaac is thus responsible for the central affective energy of the novel—the pathos that ensues from and is linked to the plight of Villeta and her brother in the narrative’s early stages. He is, we might say, its emotional engine. Accordingly, when Villeta and Lionel weep over their shared misery, it signals two key issues. Indeed, as Fichtelberg suggests, their tears tell us that despite their straitened circumstances, Villeta and Lionel are in fact suited to be members of the American middle classes. The following passage, part of an encounter between Villeta and the villain Leon Dupree before she realizes his true intentions, captures the emotional capacity so important to our understanding of her as a subject marked by inherent qualities of class and sensibility. “You ask if we have friends,” pursued Villeta, in a quick, excited tone. “We had friends . . . in times past—or at least we thought so—but an unfortunate circumstance . . . caused us to withdraw from society, and bury ourselves in seclusion; and in a very short time—for so goes the world—we found ourselves alone in our sorrow.” Villeta paused, turned aside her sweet face, and for more than a minute her emotions seemed to choke her utterance.60

Villeta goes on to describe her father’s death and her suspicion of foul play (which of course involves Dupree’s father), at which point she truly breaks down. “As she said this, she fell to weeping and sobbing, as if her heart would break.”61 We are here squarely within the sentimentalized world of antebellum urban sensationalism—which is to say that we’re dealing with a genre seeking to induce readerly sympathy in precisely the class-related way Fichtelberg describes. Villeta’s tears are the markers of a highly attuned middle-class sensibility. Moreover, it’s a sensibility that has been wounded by the unpredictable forces of the economic market. This is why, in the moments leading up to this scene, we see Leon offer to buy a short story that Villeta has written. “Almost every one of your sex can use the needle,” he says in reference to the occasional money she earns as a seamstress. “[B]ut very few, permit me to say, possess genius of so high an order as yourself.”62 Certainly, and as we see, Dupree’s praise is part of an effort to seduce Villeta. But it’s also part of the novel’s broader effort to assure readers that she is not inextricably linked to the urban squalor, or the laboring classes, by which she’s surrounded. Rather, she has the heightened sensibility of the artist-producer; she is a member of

120

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

the creative classes. We see a related moment when Lionel explains how he originally became ill. “I took cold, while working one day in the rain . . . but I could not afford to be idle—for we had become much reduced . . . and I could not bear the thought that my dear sister should become a slave of the needle.”63 Like Anna Hervey in Old Haun, or the two abducted children in Harry Harson (“exotics which could never have been the growth of such a soil”), Villeta is sentimentalized to the extent that she is middle class. Simultaneously, she’s middle class in exact proportion to her ability to display the sensibility of sentimentalism. Again, the key figure here is the Jew. Here the central player is Isaac. But as a descendant of Isaac’s apostate sister Hagar, Leon Dupree is himself partly Jewish. Hence the description of him as having “a certain cunning twinkle of the eye, which would lead the wary physiognomist to be cautious how he trusted this man beyond the restraining motives of self-interest.” Hence, too, the fact that he’s “crafty, insincere, and treacherous—incapable of friendship beyond a certain degree—and even more to be dreaded as a friend than an enemy.”64 Apparently, his quotient of Jewish blood makes him both selfish and incapable of sympathetic connection. Instead, devoid of real affect, his role in the narrative is to threaten Villeta both financially (he seeks to steal her inheritance) and sexually (late in the novel he attempts to rape her). With regards to the latter, we might note the following exchange: “Oh, God help me!” exclaimed Villeta, looking wildly around, and trembling like an aspen. “Oh, God help me!” she repeated, sinking down upon a sofa, and burying her face in her hands. “What! in tears, my darling!” said Leon . . . advancing to her side. “Nay, dearest, you must not weep!”65

In what follows, Villeta is saved by her friend and eventual lover Julian St. Cloud. But the key is that her virtue and sensibility—signaled of course by her tears—are threatened by Leon, whose very Jewishness seems to insist that he sexually assault the innocent Villeta and that he mock her sentimental reaction to her own assault. Readers have been prepared for this since early in the novel, when we’re told that Leon is the primary financial backer of a brothel that houses young women who have been seduced or abducted into a life of sexual servitude. “[H]is money had paid for all; and they themselves were little better than his slaves,” we’re told in a line reminiscent of the description of the villain Jew David in Harriet Hamline Bigelow’s The Curse Entailed (1857),

FAGIN IN AMERICA

121

whom I discuss in Chapter 1.66 Nevertheless, his assault upon Villeta is shocking in direct relation to her middle-class sensibility. Her potential violation is allegorical—it is the threatened violation of the vulnerable middle class she embodies by the sensational Jew, and thus by the capitalist market he, in turn, represents. But there’s more. For Leon’s comment to Villeta as he advances upon her in this late scene—“if you can prove yourself legitimate, I think you will suit me”—also reminds us that both middle-class sensibility and Jewishness are linked to the issue of inheritance. Here, interestingly, Leon suggests he would welcome proof that Villeta is in fact “an heiress of considerable wealth.”67 Like Isaac, Leon is ideologically flexible. He’s willing to side with the general posture of traditional inheritance laws, but only provided it benefits him. Indeed, it’s worth noting that Leon’s father Basil (whose “complexion generally was a shade darker than that of the Anglo Saxon”) initially explains his newfound wealth after robbing the “—- Bank” by claiming he has inherited money from a “wealthy relative in France, who had left him as heir.”68 For these Jews, both less rabidly dogmatic than the murderous Isaac, inheritance is a desirable marker of rank and class. These men, it seems, have read their Tocqueville and found his concerns about “the families of the great landed proprietors” compelling—but only to the extent that they benefit from it. Still, we need to follow the trail of the money to understand fully the Jew’s role in this sort of sensational fiction. For what we see is that Villeta is fortuitously rescued from Leon’s brothel hideout before he is able to assault her, after which Isaac is arrested by the police. Isaac’s prayers as the police are breaking into his house are telling. “[I]f they get in and put me out of the way, great Lord,” he says, “all my property—my hard-earned property—all my money— will go to the hated Christians—all! all! all!”69 Isaac’s complaint echoes his vendetta against the descendants of his apostate sister, but it also reveals his complicated role in this novel. The police break into his apartment, Isaac dies of a heart attack. The result is that Villeta actually ends up as the heiress both of the Ackland fortune, and of Isaac’s money. The narrator puts it thus:

By the sudden death of the pawnbroker, Villeta Linden recovered the marriage certificate of her parents, which was found among his papers, and which proved of vast importance to her, in settling her claim to the Ackland property. . . . And as the old Jew died intestate, it was discovered . . . that Villeta was the only legal heir . . . to his property, and in due course of law she was put in possession of all he had gained through a long life of sin and crime.70

122

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

Several issues are in play here. First, of course, the novel eliminates the threat to the upper classes posed by the Jew Isaac. At least symbolically, the death of the Fagin character makes the novel’s economic landscape much more secure. Second—and related—we see that, much like Oliver Twist, Villeta is restored to her rightful place as the heir to the Ackland fortune. Once again, it is as if the Jew had to be killed off in order for family money to find its way home. But the third issue is perhaps the most interesting. This is the fact that Villeta actually inherits Isaac’s criminally tainted money—a large portion of which comprises his share of the money from the bank robbery he and his accomplices pinned on Villeta’s father. On the one hand, this suggests simply that Isaac’s ill-gotten gains are now in the proper hands. But, and as the reference to the money as “procured through guilt and blood” suggests, this isn’t actually Villeta’s money. Instead, it belongs to the bank’s original depositors. In this sense, the inheritance Villeta receives from Isaac has the potential to look like a sleight of hand, one where the rich get richer while the average person continues to do without. Or at least this is how it would seem had Villeta chosen to keep this money. In fact, though, she decides to do otherwise, something we’re told in the second half of the above quote: But she received it [her inheritance] only to bestow it in a manner consonant with her own pure and upright character. She would rather, she said, endure, as she had done, the trials of honest poverty, than live in affluence upon money procured through guilt and blood; and so, with what she lawfully inherited from the Jew, she secretly founded a well known charitable institution, and many have lived since to bless the hand that gave.71

The fact that Villeta rejects Isaac’s money and donates it to the poor suggests we need to complicate our understanding of this novel. For the novel continues to privilege middle-class sensibility over actual wealth. Indeed, the fact that Villeta has inherited money but gives it to the poor is a kind of bookend to the sentimental pathos that marked her early moments in the narrative. She launders the Jew’s ill-gotten money and marks herself as a middle-class subject capable of deep sympathy for the plight of those less fortunate than herself. But lest we forget, she still has the Ackland fortune to fall back on—something confirmed in the trove of documents Isaac has hoarded. This, though, is simply confirmation of her status as a class subject. In the magical alchemy of the American Fagin narrative, Villeta gets to be selflessly sentimental and monied heiress at the same time.

FAGIN IN AMERICA

123

Sensationalism Run Amuck; or, the Sympathetic Jew The exception that proves the rule about the antebellum Fagin narrative is A. J. H. Duganne’s The Tenant-House; or, Embers from Poverty’s Hearthstone (1857).72 Right from the outset, in the novel’s prologue, we see that the novel will revolve around the Oliver Twist formula of the abduction of a special child set to inherit a large fortune. Born “amid luxury and refinement,” this “blueeyed, angelic-looking infant” is snatched from its nurse by a street woman named Old Pris, the Rag-Picker. Instantly, the child is transformed, and we see her “not clothed as before in garments of fine linen and velvet, but wrapped in a muddy and dingy blanket-rag, which already soils its pure skin and draggles its golden locks with the filth of the pavement.”73 Moreover, we learn later on that Old Pris is in fact a Jewess known as “Rachel the traitress,” and that she has abducted the child in order to exact revenge on the child’s father.74 Ten years pass as the young girl is raised in one of the various low-rent tenement houses that are the stage for the novel’s action. It’s a Dickensian and highly sentimentalized milieu of poverty, illness, and desperation. With children huddling together for warmth while sleeping in the streets (“[o]ne lying upon another, in layers of two and three”), and benevolent members of the upper class occasionally stepping in to aid these needy children ([“[L]et him abide with us,” says one kindly gentleman about a homeless boy), the effect of Oliver Twist is everywhere in this novel.75 The catch is that the stolen child is the daughter of a wealthy Jew named Mordecai Kolephat. Kolephat, we’re told, owns the eponymous tenant house, which goes by the name Foley’s Barracks. But in fact, this is a very small portion of his vast fortune. As the narrator puts it, He could look back to partnerships in ocean adventures—to vessels manned and victualled by his money, bearing unholy freights of kidnapped Africans, to glut the markets of the Indies, and coin, from human agony, more gold to swell his hoards. He could recall investments in the far-off western wilds, when his drugged liquor had maddened Indian tribes, and his gunpowder, trafficked for costly peltries, had armed the savages against his countrymen, the frontier whites. He could recollect the prayers of debtors, left to rot in mouldy prisons, when law stood by to aid the crimes of Mammon.76

Kolephat, that is to say, represents the very form of capitalism that has oppressed most of the novel’s characters—Pris and his abducted daughter included. At one point we’re told that, as far as the tenants of his building

124

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

are concerned, “the rich old man might have been a myth, or that impalpable motive-power—a corporation.”77 The reader is thus in a somewhat complicated position with regards to the Fagin narrative. Certainly, the Jew still represents a threat to the Gentile world he inhabits; he is the lurking figure of Otherness that brings the novel’s other, non-Jewish characters into relief—especially the poor who inhabit the tenement buildings he owns. But as per the Oliver Twist formula, his job—his structural role—is to steal a young child and plot to steal his or her inheritance. Here, however, it is the Jew who has lost a child, one who is due a large inheritance. The Jew is thus both villain and victim. Moreover, the Jew is in fact emotionally vulnerable. The dramatic moment late in the novel when Kolephat sees his daughter for the first time in ten years is the height of sentimental pathos. Watching her as she performs on stage in a rundown local theater, he realizes instantly that she is his missing child. “A clash of applause shook the slight walls of the building,” we’re told. [B]ut Mordecai Kolephat heard it not. His hands were lifted nervously, and outstretched, as though he would rush forward to the child. . . . Mordecai half arose, uttered a sharp cry, and then, overcome by his emotion, sank back feebly. . . . “My child—my long-lost child!” he cried, piteously.78

What are we to do with this sympathetic Jew, and what does it mean that Duganne stages him in this way? On the one hand, it may be that this is simply sensationalism run amok. Indeed, it’s worth noting that Kolephat is as much Shylock as Fagin. This is evident in his sheer wealth, as well as in his relationship with his niece, Rebecca. “[C]onsidered by everybody as his adopted daughter, to whom would, undoubtedly, descend his property,” Rebecca is a stand-in for Shylock’s daughter Jessica in The Merchant of Venice (1605). This is especially true in the sense that, unbeknownst to Kolephat, Rebecca is having an affair with a Christian named Charles Richmond. “How foolish—how wicked I am to love you,” Rebecca says to Richmond, words that reference the taboo nature of the relationship between Jessica and the Christian Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice.79 Note too that, in a sensationalized upgrade of Jessica’s decision to steal Shylock’s ducats and jewels and elope with Lorenzo, the two lovers plot to kill Kolephat and thus inherit his money before he discovers that his actual daughter is still alive. “Should he die at once,” the scheming Richmond says to Rebecca, “this—dancing girl—will never be brought to the house. He will never see her, and you will be his heiress. Is it not so, dearest?”80 One might

FAGIN IN AMERICA

125

say that Duganne had the recipes for the antisemitism in both Dickens and Shakespeare and ended up mixing the two together. But we should also consider how the hybrid nature of this amalgam of Fagin and Shylock presents us with yet another version of the sensational Jew. For in Kolephat, we again see a Jew who upends the simple notion of Jew-asOther: heterophobia. Instead, as both capitalist oppressor and sympathetic victim, he is inherently contradictory. And nowhere is this more evident than in Kolephat’s sentimentality. “Tears fell from Mordecai Kolephat’s eyes—the first tears that had watered his heart during years of lonely misery,” we’re told of his long-awaited meeting with his daughter. Her response—“Are you my father?”—highlights the way in which this Jew experiences emotion unavailable to the period’s other, more static Fagin characters.81 Here, indeed, we might as well be reading about the downwardly mobile but deeply feeling and middle-class Gentile parents of Anna Hervey or Villeta Linden.82 Earlier in this chapter, I suggested a formula for thinking about the way the American Fagin is positioned in relation to class and sentiment in the antebellum period: middle-class anxiety: sentimentality // sentimentality: Jew

My point was to suggest how the Jew acts in various narratives as the motor for a form of sentiment that authenticates a character’s membership within the middle classes. Thus, when Villeta Linden or her brother weep, we see economic decline (triggered by the actions of the sensational Jew), but also inherent markers of middle-class sensibility. When Kolephat weeps, though, we see something different. Rather than simply mirroring the cold and fearsome rationality of the marketplace, Kolephat provides an uncanny reflection of the affective depths of the anxious middle classes. I thus suggest that, at least with respect to this novel, we revise our formula in the following way: Jew: sentimentality // sentimentality: class mobility.

The difference is significant. In The Tenant-House, the Jew isn’t merely the causal force behind middle-class decline and recovery. Rather, somewhat unexpectedly, he is the figure for a similarly sentimentalized process of class mobility—of all kinds. For if the Jew can have sentimental affect of the sort we see in Kolephat, then what we see is the very sort of categorical breakdown Bauman emphasizes in his discussion of the Jew and ambivalence. Where the Jew is involved, in other words, all bets are truly off. Or rather, this is what

126

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

the Jew’s very presence in a text is meant to suggest and highlight—that the orderly, rational world of modern capitalism was socially unstable and roiling with conflicting forms of affect.83 This, indeed, might help explain the fact that it isn’t only the dispossessed members of the middle classes—the blue-blooded Olivers and Villetas—who have affective depth in Duganne’s novel. Rather, more often than not it is the poor who are given the aura of sentimentality. Fichtelberg suggests that “[b]y the late 1850s . . . urban writers began to imagine a new scenario in which the pestilent poor were impervious to sentimental appeals.” In fact, he argues that The Tenant-House represents the sort of novel in which writers were beginning to “turn[] on the dependent poor.”84 My sense, though, is that Duganne’s novel actually explores forms of affect by which the poor might be identified as having the potential for class advance. And what this suggests is that, contra Dickens and the majority of American Fagin narratives, Duganne’s poor have inherent qualities of sensibility and affect that mark them as prospective members of the middle classes. Consider, for example, the character Robert Morrison, known on the streets as Bob the Weasel. Early on we’re introduced to him as a homeless newsboy who has befriended a poor young girl named Fanny, whose mother has become deathly ill, probably due to a cholera epidemic sweeping the tenement where she lives. “Oh, dear, oh! My mother is dying,” Fanny says, “wildly sobbing, and hiding her face with her thin hands.” Bob accompanies Fanny to her tenement apartment, but when they arrive, Fanny’s mother has already passed away. In what follows, we see Bob fend off the efforts of one of Kolephat’s agents—Peleg Ferret—to collect the rent from Fanny’s mother. “Yer ought ter be ashamed, yer mean old thief !” Bob says to Ferret. “Yer want ter take a poor orphan child’s last shillin’, yer do.” The narrator tells us that Bob’s complaint “seemed to reach some chord of feeling, either of shame or sympathy, in the agent’s bosom,” and indeed Ferret departs without his money. “You’re too much for me—that’s so,” he says.85 Here as elsewhere in this novel, the poor are sentimentalized in their dealings with the invisible hand of the Jew’s economic influence. What’s telling, though, is that Bob doesn’t remain in his impoverished state. Rather, he is soon rescued from his plight by this novel’s Brownlow character, a man named Mr. Granby. “Do you tell me you have no home, my child?” a naïve Granby asks him while buying a newspaper from him on the street. “Where, then, do you live?—where do you sleep?” Bob’s response produces “a big tear” on Granby’s “ruddy cheek,” and soon enough Granby and his servant transport Bob back to Granby’s home.86 And what we see is that, much as with

FAGIN IN AMERICA

127

Anna Hervey in Old Haun after she is adopted by Dr. Foster, Bob is almost completely transformed by virtue of his time in the middle-class home of Mr. Granby—so much so that he seems to suffer a moment of misrecognition even in relation to himself. Fanny would hardly have recognized her newsboy friend, had not his voice assured her of his identity; for the kindness of Mr. Granby . . . had produced a complete metamorphosis in his appearance, even since the day before. A suit of brown, the first new clothes the boy had ever known, a pair of stout boots, and cloth cap, and, more than all, a white shirt-collar . . . were sufficient, indeed, to disguise from ordinary gaze the weird and ragged urchin who had slept so lately, with his fellow-dwarfs, half-buried by the falling snow. In truth, the lad seemed strange even to himself.87

This sort of class transformation is of course familiar to the Fagin narrative. What’s different here is that Bob isn’t the unknowing heir to an upper-class inheritance; he doesn’t have the secretly middle- or upper-class blood of an Oliver Twist or an Anna Hervey. Instead, his is one of various narratives Duganne develops alongside the central storyline of Kolephat’s abducted daughter, the goal of which seems to be to show us that even the city’s poor have inherent qualities of sensibility that make them ready candidates for membership in the middle classes.88 And again, the key here is that Bob isn’t heir to a family fortune—no mysterious lockets or hidden documents link him to reserves of money that will confirm membership within the upper classes. Instead, the novel seems to be offering a way to grant him class status without resorting to family money. The retort of another character to one of Kolephat’s many collection agents is to the point. “We were very rich,” a young girl named Emily says when asked if she has access to family wealth. “[N]ot in money, Mr. Jobson—but in contentment!”89 We’re thus in the sensational terrain Fichtelberg describes, with a difference. In The Tenant-House, a sentimentalized form of vulnerability isn’t a register of inherent middle-class sensibility so much as it is a sign of the potential for this mode of class and affect. These aren’t fallen members of the middle classes who are destined to cycle back into the proper social sphere. Instead, they’re aspirational—these characters are in training for membership in the middle classes. And more. For Kolephat’s sentimental discovery of his daughter leads to his like discovery of the poverty over which he has been presiding. At first, he’s put off by the sordid milieu in which he finds her. “[W]as she not worse, far worse,

128

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

even, than a child of the streets?,” he wonders to himself the night he goes to watch her perform in the theater, an apparent reference to the possibility that even at her young age she might have fallen prey to prostitution.90 But when the two are finally reunited, this after a dramatic fire in which Kolephat’s tenant house burns down, the suturing of Kolephat’s emotional wounds brings about a change of heart in his attitude toward his money. Suddenly, Kolephat becomes a philanthropist. Intent upon “provid[ing] for Poverty’s wants, and . . . consider[ing] Poverty’s sorrows,” he begins rebuilding his tenant house. The goal, we’re told at novel’s end, is that “upon its ashes shall arise a house that will be fit for humans to enter,” one in which “owners will behold their tenants, face-to-face, and landlord and tenant shall be happier in mutual confidence and respect.”91 This somewhat forced ending might lead us to suspect that proteophobia doesn’t apply to the Jew of Duganne’s novel. Perhaps, Duganne seems to be saying, if the American Fagin is cross-bred with an American Shylock, our anxieties about the instabilities of class and capitalism will be alleviated. But in fact, as I’ve tried to suggest, Kolephat simply embodies proteophobia in a somewhat altered form: his sentimentality is the uncanny return of the ambivalence and anxiety housed in those other more foreboding characters. The fact that Kolephat is as sentimental as the characters he has so long victimized is, it seems to me, simply a form of narrative misdirection. Indeed, his newfound generosity notwithstanding, Kolephat remains the embodiment of America’s ambivalence about the instability of class and inheritance in the middle of the nineteenth century. Another way to put this is to say that Kolephat can’t cleanse his relation to capitalism via a late turn to sentimentalism and philanthropy, because in fact his sentimentality is itself a marker of the presence and influence of that very capitalism. And lest we overlook this fact, we should note that his recovered daughter will inherit his fortune. Accordingly, we’re reminded once again that, when the American Fagin appears in antebellum sensationalism, it is a sign that capitalism and sentiment are working hand in hand to negotiate and indeed efface anxieties about class in America. On the other hand, these texts are, in their ambivalence, reflections of that very anxiety. As such, they provide a glimpse into the affective life of capitalism during this period. To this, a character like Isaac from The Artist’s Bride, so ruthlessly unsentimental, might say “Shust so! shust so!” But the American Fagin narrative, itself dependent on the sentimentality Isaac rejects, will likely ignore this claim and offer its tears of sorrow instead.

Conclusion Race, Money, and the Jew

Over the course of this book, I have shown the range of anxieties that motivated the deployment of the Jew in antebellum sensationalism. From concerns about the Southern and Northern economies to discomfort with cosmopolitanism, to uncertainties about instabilities of class, gender roles, and aesthetics, the Jew was a consistent, and consistently fungible, figure of Otherness and projection in mid-nineteenth-century America. The late antebellum period, however, saw yet another iteration of the sensational Jew. This was the rise and consolidation of the sensational Jew as a racialized category, one with nascent and troubling rhetoric leading to more modern forms of antisemitism. In some ways, of course, race hovers at the edges of almost all sensational versions of the Jew during this period. Bondy in Eliza Ann Dupuy’s The Planter’s Daughter (1857) has a “shrewd Jewish physiognomy.” Miriam in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860) is believed to be “the daughter and heiress of a great Jewish banker” partly because of “a certain rich Oriental character in her face,” and because of her own claim about having “Jewish blood.” In Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme (1861), Densdeth has “a marked Orientalism of face” and “olive skin” that serves as a “mask.” The hooked-nose Jews in political cartoons like Edward Clay’s How to Make the Mare/Mayor Go (1838) border on grotesque. And so on. Moreover, these physiological traits bleed into these characters’ usually stereotyped language and actions. Recall the scheming pawnbroker Isaac Jacobs as he haggles with Villeta Linden in his pseudo-Yiddish about her mother’s gold chain and locket in The Artist’s Bride (1856): “I vash not puys dem—I vash only lends monish on dem.”1 Such moments support Sander Gilman’s contention that, with the rise of the pseudoscience of ethnology in both Europe and the US during the early 1850s, internal qualities, especially voice and morality, came increasingly to be understood in terms of race and racial difference.2 Characters like Jacobs, along with Bondy, Miriam, Densdeth, and the Jew of Clay’s cartoon, suggest that the question Gilman poses in The Jew’s Body (1991)—“[A]re Jews white?”—was taking shape in late-antebellum sensationalism.3 But the answer to this question was ambivalent. Matthew Frye Jacobson writes that “Jews in the United States are neither wholly divisible from

Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature. David Anthony, Oxford University Press. © David Anthony (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192871732.003.0006

130

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

nor wholly dependent upon the history of whiteness and its vicissitudes in American political culture.”4 Although Jacobson is primarily interested in the post–Civil War era, his perspective is also useful for thinking about the later antebellum period. For as I’ll detail below, the sensational Jew was both White and Black, and, simultaneously, neither Black nor White, an ambivalence that was the logical outcome of the career of the antebellum period’s sensational Jew. As the representative of capitalism, the sensational Jew embodied the blurring and the breakdown of a host of social and cultural categories—class, gender, and so on. By the end of the antebellum period, however, and with increasing intensity in the Civil War era, this character also came to represent the leaky nature of the boundaries between racial categories. This is the moment when the Jew as depicted in American sensationalism moves out of previous stereotypes and begins to become fully “modern,” in all of the contradictory complexity of that term. In Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), Zygmunt Bauman argues that the Nazi’s “Final Solution” was inherently paradoxical.5 On the one hand, the project of mass extermination was a rejection of the modernity Jews had come to represent. “In their appeals to the deep-seated horror of the social upheaval that modernity augured,” Bauman says, ideologues of National Socialism “identified modernity as the rule of economic and monetary values, and charged Jewish racial characteristics with responsibility for such a relentless assault on the volkisch mode of life and standards of worth.”6 Simultaneously, the effort to eliminate the entire population of Jews from Europe was a profoundly modern response to age-old fears. “It is difficult . . . to arrive at the idea of extermination of a whole people without race imagery,” Bauman writes. It is particularly difficult, and well-nigh impossible, to conceive of such an idea separately from the engineering approach to society . . . and the practice of scientific management of human setting and interaction. For these reasons, the exterminatory version of anti-Semitism ought to be seen as a thoroughly modern phenomenon; that is, something which could occur only in an advanced state of modernity.7

The paradox Bauman outlines is at work in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), which famously features the Jewish gangster Meyer Wolfsheim.8 Gatsby’s criminal “gonnection,” we’re led to understand, threatens American tradition (Wolfsheim is the gambler who “fixed the World’s Series back in 1919”), and he’s a walking embodiment of the racially inferior type

CONCLUSION: RACE, MONEY, AND THE JEW

131

Tom Buchanan derogates in his screed about “‘The Rise of the Coloured Empires.’ ” He is, in other words, the behind-the-scenes puppet master of Gentile conspiracy fears, even as he’s the very figure for racial hierarchy. “[I]f we don’t look out, the white race will be—will be utterly submerged,” Tom says. “It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”9 Fitzgerald is referencing Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), which, like earlier pseudoscientific works of ethnology (several of which I’ll discuss below), targets Jews as an inferior and degenerate race.10 Fitzgerald thus exposes how early twentieth-century US culture had begun to understand the Jew as threateningly modern and as a problem that modernity could potentially solve via racial pseudoscience. The Jew of the late 1850s and 1860s is messier and less easily mapped out. Yet this contradictory logic—the Jew as too modern and in need of modern solutions—emerges during this earlier period. Indeed, this new duality starts to become a key form of cultural work that the sensational Jew performs. Eric Goldstein argues in The Price of Whiteness (2006) that “until white Americans could define the Jew and the forces of modernization he represented, they could not clearly define themselves.”11 The sensational Jew represents the modern forces Goldstein describes. But in the 1850s and 60s, he was inherently protean, and thus an unstable reference for those seeking to map out a reliable form of modern White selfhood. My study began by discussing the Jew Levi in T. W. Whitley’s political cartoon, The People Putting Responsibility to the Test (1834). In this early image, the sensational Jew seeks to profit from the social chaos he also embodies. He is a figure of the modern economic world that threatens more traditional modes of community and selfhood. The sensational Jew of the Civil War era also embodies and absorbs modern social chaos. But for this version of the Jew, depicting him as greedy and generically Other isn’t adequate to the challenge he poses. In this later era, the racializing of the sensational Jew proceeds in direct proportion to a felt sense of chaos and ambivalence at the national level, especially in the economic sphere. One key economic touchstone is the Panic of 1857, which ended a period of prosperity and speculation that followed the Mexican–American war and the discovery of gold in California in 1849. The other crucial financial event was the economic devastation brought on by the Civil War, since governments on both sides needed to borrow on an unprecedented scale to meet their financial obligations. In the North, debt increased from $65 million to $2.7 billion from 1861 to 1865. Lost consumption is estimated at $1.15 billion; the per capita loss was approximately $150, or roughly a year’s wages. In the newly formed Confederacy, the debt leapt to roughly $2.5 billion. Lost consumption was $6.2 billion, and the per

132

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

capita expense was a staggering $376, or the loss of over two years’ wages. Yet unlike in the North, where tax hikes and the sale of bonds helped cushion the financial blow, the Southern economy could not overcome these challenges. Instead, various factors—an overly low tax rate, the excessive printing of new Confederate money, lack of industry, and a massive debt load in London and Amsterdam—brought economic catastrophe. By mid-1864, interest payments on Confederate bonds accounted for fully 50 percent of government expenditures. Inflation was so high, Confederate money was essentially valueless.12 This is the broader context in which the racializing of the sensational Jew unfolds in the US. Consider an 1861 cartoon from The New York Illustrated News entitled John Bull and the American Loan (see Figure C.1).13 The image shows us an early-in-the-war and confident President Abraham Lincoln on the streets of London, wrapped in an American flag and confronting a Jewish financier named Shylock. “No Shylock,” Lincoln says, “we did not come about the loan—we have money enough, and to spare, at home. But we thought, since our English brethren had come to be ruled by such as you, and your hirelings, yonder, that we had better keep an eye on you.” The cartoon suggests that Lincoln is intent upon keeping Northern finances free of foreign influence, and thus avoiding the fate of his “English brethren,” who have become financially entangled with the Confederacy. That this potential threat is embodied in Shylock is notable. According to this cartoon, all debt is tainted by the corrupt capitalist influence of the Jew. But the image also implies that this taint is racial in nature. Indeed, it would be difficult to miss Shylock’s representation here as remarkably dark-skinned. He is, for all intents and purposes, “Black.” And what this suggests is that race and money are here linked in the figure of the sensational Jew. The Lincoln we see here wasn’t alone in his suspicion that Jews might undermine the war effort.14 As Bertram Korn thoroughly documents, in both the South and the North, Jews acted as convenient scapegoats for anxieties about resources during the war. Hence, General Ulysses S. Grant’s description of Jewish traders in a letter to C. P. Wolcott in December 1862, on the day of his notorious General Order No. 11. “[T]he specie regulations of the Treasury Department have been violated, and that mostly by Jews,” he writes. So well satisfied have I been of this that I instructed the commanding officer at Columbus to refuse all permits to Jews to come South, and I have frequently had them expelled from the department, but they come in with their carpet-sacks in spite of all that can be done to prevent it. The Jews seem to be a privileged class that can travel anywhere.15

CONCLUSION: RACE, MONEY, AND THE JEW

133

Figure C.1 John Bull and the American Loan, in The New York Illustrated News (1861) Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

Thus also Tennessee Congressman Henry S. Foote’s claim in 1863 that “if the present state of things were to continue, the end of the war would probably find nearly all the property of the Confederacy in the hands of Jewish Shylocks.”16 A later cartoon, from the front page of the June 1864 issue of Frank Leslie’s Budget of Fun, does similar work (see Figure C.2).17 Entitled The Height of Madness, the image offers a stereotypically caricatured Jew in the act of stabbing an eagle with a long knife, an act labeled “Bogus Speculation.” “Mr. Shoddy wants to kill the bird that lays all the golden eggs,” the caption states. As Gary L. Bunker and John Appel explain, Shoddy was a popular cartoon character who embodied the belief that Jews were responsible for producing substandard (“shoddy”) clothing, weapons, and other military supplies for

134

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

Figure C.2 The Height of Madness, in Frank Leslie’s Budget of Fun (1864) From the John and Selma Appel Collection of Ethnic Images, Michigan State University Museum.

CONCLUSION: RACE, MONEY, AND THE JEW

135

Union soldiers.18 Shoddy is directly attacking US liberty, presumably by speculating in Southern cotton purchased with gold specie, money that will, in turn, be used by the Confederate army against the US. But again, if the Jew of the Civil War is imagined as an internal threat to the regional economies of both North and South, one that, as a frustrated Grant observes, “can travel anywhere,” the Jew is also, necessarily, a figure of increasing racial difference. In 1846, John C. Calhoun stated that Jews were “notoriously a race of brokers, bankers, and merchants.”19 Leonard Rogoff suggests that such a comment in the mid-1840s reflects a view whereby Jews were “looked upon as a class.”20 But this would change within a decade. As Jacobson argues of the era immediately following the Civil War, Now it was not only that Jews could be known in their greed (or their Jacobinism or their infidelism or their treachery) by their physiognomy, but that their physiognomy itself was significant—denoting, as it did, their essential unassimilability to the republic. Only now did the “Israelitish nose” stand for something in and of itself—not greed, or usury, or . . . well-poisoning, but simple “difference.” Only now was the dark Jew equated with “mongrelization,” that catch-all term for “unfitness” in American political culture.21

This is why the Shylock of John Bull and the American Loan is represented as Black. It is also why, in The Height of Madness, Shoddy is rendered as so physiologically extreme, with excessively protruding nose, large ears, dark facial features, and notably small feet. He too is racially marked. If not explicitly Black, he’s certainly not White. Indeed, it is Shoddy’s racial difference that fuels his avarice and his concomitant willingness to stab and kill American liberty. We might say as well that the excesses and outré passions of capitalist greed are juxtaposed in these images with implied symbols of Anglo-Saxon Whiteness— the American flag (encircling Lincoln’s White skin) and the American eagle Shoddy brutally murders. Michael O’Malley refers to the relationship between political economy and racial economy as that existing between “specie and species.”22 According to O’Malley, if many seemingly solid things melted into air, other more nebulous ideas grew more certain as capitalism advanced. . . . The shared language of race and money suggests that the freer market society became, the farther its promises extended, the more it demanded racial categories that resisted exchange or negotiation.23

136

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

In other words, the putative racial purity of Whiteness is presented as a kind of compensatory gold standard in antebellum America, such that narratives about racial identity acted as a kind of fantasy bribe, whereby anxieties about the period’s unstable economy could be displaced onto similar concerns about racial instability. Those issues were often represented as far more manageable than the ones associated with the period’s unstable economy. O’Malley’s reading helps us also to understand how the sensational Jew—invariably the figure of fiscal anxiety and economic scapegoating—was often apprehended in terms of race and racial difference. Consider, for example, Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme, when the narrator Byng portrays the villainous Jewish financier Densdeth as racially linked to his nameless Black servant: He was an Afreet creature, this servant, black, ugly, and brutal as the real Mumbo Jumbo. Yet sometimes, as he stood by his master, I could not avoid perceiving a resemblance, and fancying him a misbegotten repetition of the other. And at the moments when I mistrusted Densdeth, I felt that the Afreet’s repulsive appearance more fitly interpreted his master’s soul than the body by which it acted.24

For Byng, Jewishness merges with Blackness at the moments when Densdethas-Jew is at his most psychologically and emotionally threatening—and when he’s most alluring. What this suggests is that for Byng (and perhaps for Winthrop), the fiscal and racial corruption of the Jew are one and the same. We see this double source of prejudice again in Dion Boucicault’s popular melodrama After Dark (1868), when the scheming Jewish gambling house proprietor Dicey Morris is cast in symbolic relation to the two Black minstrel performers he employs at his seedy underworld establishment. “Hab yer got accomerdation for two gen’lemens as is down on their luck to-night?” Jem asks as he first enters the stage with his sidekick Josey.25 Jem and Josey are described in the “Costumes” section of the play as “Negro minstrels” with “striped pants,” “fancy vests,” etc., and later they dance a “negro breakdown” while Morris watches from a front table 7, 33).26 But while they’re in blackface, it isn’t clear if they’re Black performers or White. And to be sure, this might change with each staging of the play. As such, they offer a confused racial performance, one that parallels the similarly unclear racial status of Dicey Morris. As Nicholas Daly puts it, the play, marks Morris’s putative racial difference, albeit indirectly. In effect, Morris’s “blackness” is partly twinned with and partly carried by the . . . “negro min-

CONCLUSION: RACE, MONEY, AND THE JEW

137

strels,” Jem and Josey, who play in his music hall/gambling den. Jem and Josey are more than local color: they metonymically announce Morris’s racial separateness.27

The racial storyline informing such texts—that the Jew hovers ambivalently on the border between racial categories of White and Black—is consistent with the mid-century discourse of the emerging field of ethnography, both in the US and Europe. This is the work that informs such later studies as Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. And here, as in this later material, Jews were increasingly seen as the racially inferior bearers of mixed blood. For example, writing in a chapter of The Races of Men (1850) entitled “Jewish Race,” the ethnologist Robert Knox argued that Jewish blood was degraded because of its mixture with black Africans’ during the exile of Jews in Alexandria. So even as Jews are “never to be mistaken for a moment— never to be confounded with any other race,” they can also be seen as being “of other races intermingled”: “[L]ips very full, mouth projecting, chin small, and the whole physiognomy, when swarthy, as it often is, has an African look,” he states. Later in his categorization, Knox puts it thus: “a large, massive, clubshaped, hooked nose, three or four times larger than suits the face—these are features which stamp the African character of the Jew.”28 On the other hand, and contradictorily, Jews were often described as inhabiting a branch of the so-called White races. While the leading American ethnologist Josiah Clark Nott concurred that Jews were indeed a race distinct, he insisted they were not Black. Rather, Nott contended in 1850 that Jews were members of what he termed “the Great Caucasian family.”29 In support of this thesis, Nott insisted in Types of Mankind (1854) that nineteenth-century Jews had descended virtually unaltered from the ancient Israelites. “It will illustrate the indelibility of the Abrahamic type to present here a mummied Shemitish head,” he writes in describing a mummified skull from the collection of Samuel Morton. “[H]ow perfectly the Hebrew type is preserved!”30 Indeed, in his 1850 essay “The Physical History of the Jewish Race,” Nott refutes claims made by James Prichard in Researches into the Physical History of Mankind (1813) about so-called Black Jews, asserting that dark-skinned Jews such as those in India were actually converted Jews who had intermarried into the local Hindu population.31 “[T]he white Jews had been living at least fifteen hundred years in Malabar, and were still white Jews, without even an approximation, in type, to the Hindoos,” he writes. “[T]he black Jews,” he says, citing the earlier work of Rev. Claudius Buchanan, “were an ‘inferior race’—‘not of pure caste’—or, in other words, adultered by dark Hindoos—Jews in doctrine, but not in stock.”32

138

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

Knox and Nott are the two most prominent voices in an increasingly contentious field at mid-century. And what their basic disagreement reflects is, again, the ambivalent status of the Jew during this period. Gilman provides the summary comment that “within the racial science of the nineteenth century . . . Jews were quite literally seen as black,” but the actual situation in the antebellum US was more complex.33 Historians writing after Gilman, including Goldstein, Jacobson, Karen Brodkin, and Lewis Gordon, all suggest that, by and large, Jews—especially Ashkenazi Jews from Central Europe— were often understood as “White” in and around the mid-nineteenth century, even as they were seen as racially distinct from Aryan or Teutonic branches of Whiteness.34 Yet they all emphasize that Whiteness was usually a negotiated category, one that provided a potential path to assimilation in the US, albeit one that was tenuous and elusive.35 Indeed, Jacobson points out that the theory of Jewish “indelibility” forwarded by Nott laid the foundation for the perspective that Jews could never be fully assimilated. “[F]rom the outset,” he says, “scientific writings on Jews . . . tended to focus on questions of assimilation, most often emphasizing the race’s stubborn immutability—which is to say, its unassimilability.”36 Gordon, meanwhile, argues that in adopting Whiteness, Jews of European descent were taking advantage of the colonial bargain whereby they were deemed White largely in relation to Black slaves and Native Americans. As he puts it in a powerful passage, Jews were, after all, not historically white. It was the need to create distance from the colonized populations in the Euromodern world that raised the demand for growing populations of whites in the colonies. The result was that many groups who were not white in Europe were offered a ticket to become white in its outposts. . . . If Jewishness could be made exclusively religious, then the bearer of the religion could be racially otherwise. Thus, those light-skinned enough to be accepted as white received membership into whiteness by appealing to their religious identity as separate. This was not a good development for Jews who could not “pass” as white, however, and its impact on Jewish history is palatable as a once majority population of color quickly disappeared in proverbial plain sight.37

For Gordon, then, Jewishness was divided into two racial categories quite similar to those that Nott identified: “White” Jews (primarily Central European Ashkenazi Jews) who were deemed “authentically” Jewish, and “Black” Jews (mostly Sephardic, Mizrahi, etc.) who were regarded as racially inferior and whose relationship to “authentic” Jewishness was understood as

CONCLUSION: RACE, MONEY, AND THE JEW

139

either attenuated or illusory. Indeed, Gordon might argue that the Shylock of John Bull and the American Loan isn’t an Ashkenazi Jew from Central Europe. Rather, he might contend that this Shylock is, like Shakespeare’s original, Sephardic or Mizrahi, a Black Jew.38 But given the emphasis on a US–European context, I propose that the image intends to Blacken the Whiter, Ashkenazi, Jew, who is the default version of the Jew in the American imagination. Indeed, because the “White” Jew is the norm for a US readership, the Blackness of this Shylock speaks directly to, and embodies, the financial difficulties Lincoln addresses in his trip to London. Depicted in the early stages of the Civil War, the Lincoln of this image assumes the posture of financial confidence, but the image also implicitly acknowledges that everyone, even (or most especially) the president, is subject to the whims of capital. Lincoln claims the US doesn’t need the Jew’s money. Yet his stated plan to “keep an eye on you” bespeaks an implicit uncertainty and concern about the war and its financing. This is the reason the Shylock of this cartoon is depicted as Black; he is the racially marked embodiment of fiscal anxiety. The antebellum writer who best reflects the cultural urgency to represent the ambivalent racial status of the sensational Jew may well be John Beauchamp Jones. Jones was a popular novelist and literary editor from the early 1840s to the late 1850s. His fifteen novels include titles like The City Merchant; or, The Mysterious Failure (1851), Life and Adventures of a Country Merchant (1854), and Wild Southern Scenes. A Tale of Disunion! And Border War! (1859). He edited a pro-John Tyler newspaper entitled The Daily Madisonian from 1841 to 1845, and then later the proslavery Philadelphia paper Southern Monitor, which ran from 1857 to 1860. But Jones is best known for the journal he kept during the Civil War. From 1861 to 1865, he served as a high-ranking clerk in the Confederate States War Department in Richmond, in what was to become the Passport Office. While performing this work, he kept a daily journal that was published posthumously in 1866 with the title A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital. And from the novels to the journal, what much of this material reflects is a consistent obsession with the figure of the Jew in American economic life. Over and over in his fiction, Jews with names such as Moses Tubal, Abraham Ulmar, and Moses Rhino antagonize Christian merchants who are attempting to maintain their businesses, such as dry goods stores and counting houses, or who are simply seeking to keep the economy from imploding. Such depictions are even more common in Jones’s Civil War diary, where Jones treats Jews as if they’re scheming characters in one of his novels. As Korn puts it in characterizing the diary, Jones “appears to have been driven by psychopathic Judeophobia.”39

140

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

Thus, in Wild Southern Scenes, a semi-apocalyptic novel that stages the chaos and violence of a predicted but still fictional Civil War between North and South, economic markets collapse amidst factional mob violence and looting. As the tumult ensues, Jews act as scapegoats for the breakdown of civil society. “With a doleful countenance an auctioneer was selling stocks and real estate, and Jews, mostly, were the purchasers,” we’re told at one point. “They seemed like greedy vultures, snatching, scrambling for the scattered fragments of ruined fortunes.”40 This broad brushstroke of economic antisemitism is consolidated in the character Solomon Mouser. As battles rage in the streets, a corrupt soldier named Sergeant Bim finds Mouser huddled over a cache of stolen money. “I know your instincts,” Bim says. “You nosed out my treasure just as naturally as a buzzard finds carrion. Not to eat, like the sensible buzzard, but to watch and starve over it.”41 Here as elsewhere, the Jew is inherently—which is to say biologically and thus racially—avaricious and prone to hoarding. In addition, this racial stereotyping is offered in direct proportion to a felt sense of chaos and ambivalence at the national level, especially in the economic sphere. Fairly clearly, Jones is deploying race in response to economic anxiety. Economic antisemitism is also on display in Jones’s diary account of the actual Civil War between North and South in the US. In an entry from the early months of the war, Jones writes: The Jews are at work. Having no nationality, all wars are harvests for them. It has been so from the day of their dispersion. Now they are scouring the country in all directions, buying all the goods they can find in the distant cities, and even from the country stores. These they will keep, until the process of consumption shall raise a greedy demand for all descriptions of merchandise.42

Echoing the passage from Wild Southern Scenes about Jews buying up the stocks and real estate of financially ruined Philadelphians (one wonders if Jones was aware of the parallel between his fiction and his diary), the description paints a picture of Jews as rootless, opportunistic mercenaries. Neither Northern nor Southern, they are for him parasitic inhabitants of a nation to which they don’t belong. Jones provides many such descriptions, even as he works under Jewish Confederate Secretary of War Judah Benjamin (“Benjamin, the Jew,” Jones writes at one point).43 An entry from December 1862, in which Jones claims that Jews are smuggling cotton and other goods to the North despite the Northern blockade against trade, expresses similar feelings about Jews undermining the Confederate economy.

CONCLUSION: RACE, MONEY, AND THE JEW

141

The illicit trade with the United States [that is, the North] has depleted the country of gold, and placed us at the feet of the Jew extortioners. It still goes on. Mr. Seddon has granted passports to two agents of a Mr. Baumgartien— and how many others I know not. These Jews. . . . have injured the cause more than the armies of Lincoln. Well, if we gain our independence, instead of being the vassals of the Yankees, we shall find all our wealth in the hands of the Jews.44

In some respects, Jones’s language resembles the portrayals of Jews we see in the anti-Tom plantation novels in chapter one. Like Uriah Goldwire in The Lofty and the Lowly (1853), the Jews whom Jones describes are internal enemies without allegiance to the South but must be tolerated because of their control over the money supply. The difference is that, for Jones, Jews are racially distinct from White Southerners and from White Northerners too. He suggests this racialized perspective in a diary entry about the Confederate victory at Leesburg, where Southern troops were dramatically outnumbered. “The Yankees are a calculating people,” Jones writes in late October 1861. [A]nd if 1500 Mississippians and Virginians at Leesburg were too many for 8000 Yankees, what could 200,000 Yankees do against 70,000 Southern soldiers? It made them pause, and give up the idea of taking Richmond this year. But the enemy will fight better every successive year; and this should not be lost sight of. They, too, are Anglo-Saxons.45

The final line is telling insofar as Jones sees Southerners and Northerners as racially linked enemy combatants—both are “Anglo-Saxons.” Jews, meanwhile, are excluded from this category. And what that suggests is that the concerns Jones expresses about Jews controlling the Southern money supply are themselves influenced by notions of race and racial difference. For Jones, a better economy would be one free of the interference of Jews—but not simply because they represent Northern capitalism. Rather, it’s because, for him, Jews represent capitalism in its most negative, racialized aspects. One way to interpret Jones’s perspective here is to think about the racial discourse of economic scarcity. This is something Jonathan Zatlin discusses in his examination of the East German response to the influx of Polish tourists across a usually regulated border starting in 1972.46 This migration was part of an agreement to foster “social internationalism,” which German officials assumed would produce a positive response from both Poles who were willing to spend money, and Germans who saw increased retail sales. But the

142

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

experiment “failed miserably,” since the Polish visitors were seen as economic interlopers plundering East German goods already in short supply. “Angry that millions of Poles were engaging in a kind of consumer tourism,” Zatlin asserts, [s]ome East Germans depicted Polish purchasing patterns as a form of looting, accusing the Poles of being a nation of thieves and comparing them to “hordes of locusts” who were stripping the GDR of everything of value. Other East Germans likened the Polacks to animals—”dogs,” “swine,” and “scum” who were “fouling up the place.” Still others physically assaulted their Polish guests.47

The situation Zatlin outlines is similar to the one Jones describes in his journal. For Jones, as for East Germans in the 1970s, money and racial or ethnic identity are intertwined. In Jones’s case, Jews aren’t just capitalists bent on overwhelming the Confederate economy and undermining the Confederate dollar. They are practicing a debased form of capitalism. This is why, in another diary entry, Jones expresses concern about the fact that there isn’t a clear policy about whether Southern merchants ought to pay their debts to Northern businesses. “To-day I recognize Northern merchants and Jews in the streets, busy in collecting the debts due them,” he says. “I hear on every hand that Southern merchants, in the absence of legal obligations, recognize the demands of honor, and are sending money North, even if it be used against us. This will not last long.”48 According to Jones, Southerners—by which he means White Christian men from the South—engage in an economically pure form of trade and market capitalism, one driven by Southern honor. His perspective is that Jews are either unconcerned with or are incapable of honorable business practices. And again, this is because Jews aren’t “Anglo-Saxon.” The economic and racial antisemitism of texts like Wild Southern Scenes and A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary is even more pronounced, and more complex, in his 1851 novel, The City Merchant. Set in Philadelphia, the narrative is a prime example of the popular subgenre Mary Templin terms “panic fiction.”49 With titles such as The Victim of Chancery; or, A Debtor’s Experience (1841) and The Lawyer’s Story; or, the Orphan’s Wrongs (1853), these narratives revolve primarily around the troubles of white-collar workers—clerks, merchants, attorneys, bankers—and foreground issues of fiscal anxiety and crisis. Indeed, it is a largely forgotten context for Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853)—subtitled “A Story of Wall-Street”—insofar as Melville’s tale

CONCLUSION: RACE, MONEY, AND THE JEW

143

partakes of this subgenre and provides ironic commentary on it. The City Merchant also expands the boundaries of this material. Much in the way O’Malley discusses, the story of financial panic provides Jones the means by which to invoke the parallel issue of racial panic. Samuel Otter describes The City Merchant as “a racist novel” that “confirms the bonds of Saxon and Celt and the failures of African American liberty.”50 However, Otter doesn’t account for the way Jones’s tale triangulates Black–White tensions via the sensational Jew, a move that enables Jones to construct a narrative in which racial purity (Whiteness) and fiscal purity (a credit-free, gold-backed form of political economy) are imagined as one and the same. The racial Otherness of Blackness and Jewishness, meanwhile, is conjoined with fiscal recklessness, debt, and insolvency. The City Merchant opens in the months preceding the 1837 Panic and focuses on the financial and racial dramas of the suggestively named Edgar Saxon. With regard to the former, we learn that Saxon has made the surprising announcement that his supply house will cease doing business on credit. His clerks call in his debts and pay all outstanding bills in specie. The result is immediate. Rumor circulates that his firm has failed, which prompts one of his more aggressive creditors to begin short selling Saxon’s notes. Not surprisingly, this creditor is the “cunning Jew” Abraham Ulmar. Ulmar, we’re told, lives and works in a section of Philadelphia “where the Jews were as thick as blackberries, and almost as dark.”51 An importer of European goods, Ulmar runs his own firm, but he also works with a group of Jewish associates, including the notorious Moses Wolf, to control the value of the city’s currency. With Saxon, however, this attempt fails. For Saxon’s business isn’t a failure at all. Quite the contrary, his specie-only policy allows him to ride out the coming financial panic, while many of his peers go bankrupt. Thus, when Ulmar finds out that Saxon has in fact received a letter of praise from the President of the Second Bank of the United States, Nicholas Biddle, Ulmar realizes that Saxon is, in reality, financially solvent, and that he has been had. Worse, Ulmar finds that, because Saxon is debt-free and conducting business on a cash-only basis, he has no leverage against the savvier businessman. “Curse tem all!” Ulmar says, a comment echoed by Ulmar’s Jewish peers, all of whom join him “in bitter denunciations . . . of Mr. Saxon, and all Christians in general.”52 The moment is symbolic. In bettering the Jew, Saxon wins out against the figure who embodies the more general financial panic engulfing the nation in 1837. Saxon’s victory expresses the dream, woven into the fabric of The City Merchant, of a form of capitalism free of the rapacity Ulmar and Wolf represent.

144

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

Saxon can thus fend off fairly easily the fiscal challenge that the sensational Jew poses. But Saxon is more vulnerable to another threat, one overtly racial in nature. This menace appears about halfway through the novel, when Saxon’s two young nieces, Alice and Eda Sandys (aged 15 and 13, respectively), are approached by a pair of men whom Jones terms “fashionable. . . . mulatto exquisites, [who] had the effrontery to step forward and offer their arms” to the women. The incident, we learn, is the result of recent abolitionist rhetoric then circulating in the city, something highlighted by the sight of “Lucretia Mott walking by the side of Frederick Douglas [sic].”53 As the narrator explains, The negroes themselves, both the free and the fugitive, credulous by nature, and utterly incapable of restraint when their passions are roused, believed a day was coming, nay, that it was at hand, when they would be on an equality in every respect with the white people of the north. And for several days great strapping negro fellows were seen promenading the streets in social attitudes and familiar converse with white women; while white men walked the pavements with sooty-faced African women hanging on their arms!54

The lack of Black male restraint the narrator describes is fully expressed late in the text, when Saxon’s nieces are kidnapped by the same two “mulatto exquisites” who accosted them in the street. They are then whisked off to a predominantly Black section of the city where, presumably, they will be raped. “That part of the city at that time was inhabited chiefly by the colored people,” we’re told, “who, in moments of excitement and passion, could be roused with great unanimity to the commission of terrible deeds.” The narrative suspense is intense but short-lived. The girls are soon rescued by a young and White Virginian named Edmund Scarboro, who locks them and himself in an upstairs apartment on Queen Street in the city’s Black neighborhood. In a violent confrontation that eventually turns into a race riot, police and various groups of White vigilantes save Scarboro and the girls. The “sooty rabble” is eventually routed and (racial) order is restored to Philadelphia after a lengthy battle that lasts long into the night.55 Coupled with Ulmar’s actions, the kidnapping and riot offer a complex allegory of race and money. In the first instance, we see that Saxon’s fiscal integrity is threatened by the irrational passions of the credit economy, passions embodied by the “avaricious” Jew Ulmar. In the second instance, we see that the similarly irrational passions of the rapacious Black male pose a danger to the sexual and racial integrity of Saxon’s family. But these aren’t simply parallel narratives. Quite the contrary, “specie and species” intersect at the point where

CONCLUSION: RACE, MONEY, AND THE JEW

145

Jewishness and Blackness are themselves linked. From this perspective, the “mulatto exquisites” who abduct Saxon’s nieces are proxies for Ulmar. They do symbolic work very much like Densdeth’s Black servant in Cecil Dreeme (described as “a misbegotten repetition” of Densdeth) or the “negro minstrels” Jem and Josey, who act as racial doubles for Dicey Morris in After Dark.56 Indeed, we see a related situation in Jones’s Wild Southern Scenes. As previously mentioned, the Civil War Jones imagines in this novel results in economic collapse amid general social and racial chaos. Jews swoop in like “greedy vultures, snatching, scrambling for the scattered fragments of ruined fortunes,” as the hierarchical racial order is overturned. Not long after the fighting begins, we see 50,000 abolitionists rioting in the streets of Philadelphia and carrying prisoners with them in cages. One cage holds the editor of a proslavery newspaper, the “— —.” This is likely a sly reference to Jones’s position as editor of the proslavery paper the Southern Monitor, which he was still running upon publication of Wild Southern Scenes. Textual self-reference or no, the observation prompts the reader to experience shock at the spectacle of its editor being auctioned for sale by a “negro boy.” “Now, gemmen,” the character says. “I offers a likely sound fellow, ob de Caucus tribe, to the highest bidder. . . . He is a great worker, and can see without specks.”57 Much as we see in The City Merchant, Jones imagines in this later text a topsy-turvy racial world where “Caucus tribe” members (presumably White people, especially Southerner sympathizers) can be sold by Black people to the highest bidder.58 This overturning of the White–Black racial order intersects with and is informed by financial upheaval, the chaotic circumstances that the “greedy” Jewish traders represent, and the actions of such unscrupulous Jews as Solomon Mouser, whose “instinct[]” for hoarding money points to his racial difference. The formula of novels like The City Merchant and Wild Southern Scenes thus reads baldly as follows: Jew: Black // financial panic: racial panic.

In like manner, a pure, unadulterated Whiteness (something Edgar Saxon’s very name evokes) is linked to fiscal soundness (whether imagined as a gold standard, credit regulation, or some other “rational” economic policy). For Jones, Whiteness is a fantasy hedge against the nation’s inexorable movement into an inherently unstable capitalist economy. Indeed, this is why, in Wild Southern Scenes, all attempts to steal the federal reserves from banks in Philadelphia are unsuccessful. “The President did not suffer the public funds to accumulate in places where riots prevailed,” we’re told. “[A]nd every day considerable amounts of the precious metals, guarded by trusty agents, arrived at

146

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

Washington.”59 As in The City Merchant, Jones is committed to imagining the nation’s fiscal reserves as the symbolic bulwark against racial mixing. The above logic helps explain Jones’s insistence on tidy plot resolution in The City Merchant, evident in the marriage of Saxon’s niece Alice to the heroic Edmund Scarboro. Here, as Alice and Edmund relocate to a life in the Virginian Confederacy, middle-class romance safeguards against racial and financial ambivalence. That protective function is also evident in the plotline involving a boy named Billy Grittz. We first see Billy working as Saxon’s errand boy. Yet we soon learn that he is the son of another broker, William Grittz, and that his mother is a mixed-race (White and Black) woman named Olivia Wann. “Then I am a negro, I suppose?” Billy asks his mother at the moment of this revelation. “You have African blood in your veins,” she replies. “Many years ago I was a slave, in Norfolk, Virginia. I was white, as you see me now . . . [and] I was tempted to run away with your father, who brought me thither.”60 Tellingly, this melodramatic moment is balanced out by the equally dramatic information we receive at novel’s close about Billy’s father. For it turns out that William Grittz is “really a Jew, although he affected to be a Christian.” Moreover, and not surprisingly, he has been in league all along with the likes of Ulmar and Wolf in the effort to undermine Saxon’s business. The fact of Grittz’s Jewishness thus seems to explain his willingness to run off from the South with the mixed-race Olivia, even as it provides a convenient allegory in the person of his son Billy, who we see has become romantically involved with Ulmar’s daughter Rachel. “Billy Grittz did his utmost to learn enough Hebrew to worship understandingly in the synagogue,” we’re told, just as “Mr. Grittz acknowledged his Hebrew origin, to secure a good match for his son, and Rachel threw no obstacles in the way. So they were married.”61 We thus see another romantic enclosure, one paralleling the protective barrier constructed around Saxon’s White family. Here, the chaotic passions of Jewishness and Blackness are simultaneously merged and contained. Jones’s fiction and war diary are therefore of a piece. It’s as if, in the diary, Jones is imagining the likes of Abraham Ulmar and Moses Wolf wreaking havoc on the national border between North and South in order to undermine the economies of both sides of the war effort. Jones, like many others, views the porous Civil War border between North and South as unstable— a fully modern landscape. The sensational Jew is, for Jones, its denizen and scapegoat. And this, finally, is the racial logic of the sensational Jew. As Bauman argues, this figure is conjured up in effigy in order to be burned down and expelled. Yet the very fact that this process is so often repeated, and with such intensity,

CONCLUSION: RACE, MONEY, AND THE JEW

147

bespeaks the anxiety, as well as the sadness and longing, by which it is driven. In closing, we might look once more at the cartoon John Bull and the American Loan. Lincoln’s confrontation with the sensational Jew in this image is, at its core, an encounter with himself and his nation’s economic origins. It is another in a long line of economic primal scenes, moments in which we see the origins of our capitulation to a system based on capitalist exchange. Here Shylock is rendered as Black because this is the representational strategy for expressing utter contempt for him. But the real reason for this disdain is White Christian trauma, a form of self-hatred Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno describe in relation to the discourse of race. “Race is not, as the nationalists claim, an immediate, natural peculiarity,” they write in response to Nazi propaganda about the racial inferiority of Jews. Rather, they argue as follows: “[R]ace today is the self-assertion of the bourgeois individual.”62 This perspective also applies to the 1850s and 1860s period. Separated out from an organic community, the bourgeois individual of the antebellum US—think Bartleby, or Jack Engle in Walt Whitman’s Life and Adventures (1852)—understands him or herself in relation to the rationalized, bureaucratic, and hierarchical thinking of capitalism and the Enlightenment. One key component of this social order is race of the sort described by pseudoscientists like Knox and Nott, and represented in the work of writers like Jones and in cartoons like John Bull and the American Loan. Despite his claims about economic self-sufficiency (“we have money enough, and to spare, at home”), Lincoln, wrapped in his American flag, sees in a Black Shylock the inverted image of his distance and separation from the whole version of himself he has forsaken in his adoption of capitalist selfhood. We should thus keep in mind Goldstein’s suggestion that White Americans can’t define themselves without defining the Jew and the modernity he represents. Indeed, as I’ll discuss in the coda, this effort at self-definition via the Jew continues up into our own present moment. That this Jew is often a negative form of reference—a scorned and even reviled bugaboo located at the axis of race and money—is simply reflective of the fact that White Gentile America requires a scapegoat for its own felt sense of loss and anxiety.

Coda Charlottesville, “Molineux,” and the Phantom Jew

As I’ve tried to show, the sensational Jew was a key figure in the antebellum imagination. But why study this character now? One answer to my question was offered in the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017, when approximately 600 marchers descended on this university town for a “Unite the Right” rally. It began, ostensibly, as a demonstration against the proposed removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee from what was then called Lee Park (the name had been changed to Emancipation Park and has since been changed again to Market Street Park). But the event ultimately became an opportunity for a range of groups—White nationalist, neo-Confederate, neoNazi, alt-right, Ku Klux Klan, and more—to advocate for White supremacy. In keeping with their desire to champion Lee and the Confederacy, the marchers advocating anti-Black racism also full-throatedly expressed antisemitism. This particular round of hate speech actually began to take shape three months before, on May 13, 2017, when White supremacist Richard Spencer led a nighttime rally to protest the city’s plan to remove Lee’s statue. The event drew over a hundred protesters, many of whom took up the chants “Blood and soil!” and “You will not replace us!” Similar tactics were employed at the larger August rally, where demonstrators on the University of Virginia grounds marched with tiki torches, displayed swastikas on banners, brandished semiautomatic rifles outside a local synagogue, and aired slogans like “Jews are Satan’s children!” and “Jews will not replace us!” To many, this eruption of antisemitism was surprising, even strange. As Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, described his consternation: “This is an agenda about celebrating the enslavement of Africans and their descendants, and celebrating those that then fought to preserve that terrible machine of white supremacy and human enslavement. And yet, somehow, they’re all wearing shirts that talk about Adolf Hitler.”1 Greenblatt’s comments are to the point. Why target Jews at a rally that seems focused on the Confederacy? The answer is that there is a fundamental connection between nostalgia for the Confederacy as embodied in Robert E. Lee and the antisemitism reflected in the chant of “Jews will not replace us!” For

Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature. David Anthony, Oxford University Press. © David Anthony (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192871732.003.0007

CODA: CHARLOTTESVILLE, “MOLINEUX,” AND THE PHANTOM JEW

149

the various hate groups converging in Charlottesville saw in the Jew something quite similar to that imagined in novels like The Quaker City (1845) and images like Shylock’s Year (1840). The Jew presented an imagined effigy for their collective fear about an ambivalent, topsy-turvy modern world, where the unraveling of the illusion of stable hierarchies of class and race and gender might leave White Christian men in a nervous state of social and economic uncertainty. The chant of “Jews will not replace us!” speaks directly to this anxiety. As Kathleen Belew and Ramón A. Gutiérrez explain, the phrase quite purposely invokes White Replacement Theory, or the Great Replacement Theory.2 This is the belief that non-White people, or foreigners, will overtake the US via immigration, reproduction, and the seizure of political power via access to the ballot box. Once on the fringes of White supremacist dogma, this notion has become a major talking point on Fox News and any number of online forums.3 Moreover, this notion is not infrequently accompanied by the claim, one echoing those made in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that “replacement” is being orchestrated by a secret cabal of rich and powerful Jews such as George Soros, to whom putatively obedient voters from the Third World are in thrall.4,5 Jonathan Sarna, Jason Stanley, Talia Lavin, and others have pointed out that Replacement Theory and an accompanying antisemitism were also part of the motive for the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.6 Sarna, for example, points to the preponderance of Confederate flags and White supremacist symbols outside the Capitol on January 6, such as swastikas, the insignia “SMWE” (Six Million Wasn’t Enough), and a T-shirt donned by one man reading “Camp Auschwitz: Work Brings Freedom”—the latter phrase an English translation of the Auschwitz motto “Arbeit macht frei.” As Sarna explains, this overt antisemitism likely reflects the fact that many of the rioters were responding to claims by QAnon and other sources that Jews are attempting to undermine orderly life in America. These claims include the notion that Jews were the architects of the Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of 2020, the COVID pandemic, Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, and even the abduction of children in order to harvest the chemical compound adrenochrome. This last storyline is an obvious retelling of the centuries-old claims about Jews and “blood libel.” But it’s important in that it speaks quite directly to the persistence of age-old conspiracy theories about Jews. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno argue that such charges reflect an unconscious longing for the creativity and connection of communal rite, a sense of yearning consistently projected onto Jews. “The Jews as a whole are charged with

150

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

practicing forbidden magic and bloody rituals,” they write. “Disguised as an accusation, the subliminal craving of the indigenous population to revert to mimetic sacrificial practices is joyously readmitted to their consciousness.”7 To this way of thinking, the phantom Jews invoked by QAnon or by the Charlottesville marchers are projected figures of the communal practices that White nationalists can’t access in their individualistic, atomized daily lives. Indeed, the otherwise absurdly elaborate and fascist nature of the Charlottesville ceremony—the marching and chanting, the white-collared shirts, the tiki torches—might be understood as an inverted stand-in for exactly that form of missing magic and ritual. My sense, then, is that there are many links between Jews as imagined in recent outbreaks of political violence (Charlottesville, January 6, and so on) and the antebellum figure I’ve termed the “sensational Jew.” In both periods, the Jew is perceived as the behind-the-scenes and often racially Other figure of social, financial, and political instability, even as he acts as the projected image of longing and loss. To emphasize and unpack this parallel, I want to pause over an antebellum text famous for its depiction of political upheaval and elaborate ritual: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s well-known short story about early eighteenthcentury colonial rebellion, “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (1832). What we’ll see is an uncanny resemblance between Hawthorne’s tale and events like the Charlottesville march. As Hawthorne’s narrator explains at the outset, the narrative revolves around tensions between the British colonial government in Boston and the local inhabitants. After the kings of Great Britain had assumed the right of appointing the colonial governors, the measures of the latter seldom met with the ready and general approbation which had been paid to those of their predecessors, under the original charters. The people looked with most jealous scrutiny to the exercise of power which did not emanate from themselves.8

In what ensues, we see the naïve protagonist Robin arrive to the city via ferry and seek out his “kinsman,” the eponymous Major Molineux. Robin’s plan is to receive preferment from Molineux and thus, because his older brother is “destined to succeed to the farm,” establish himself in a career away from home.9 But despite his best efforts, Robin is unable to locate his relative until story’s end. Instead, he wanders the mysterious and quasi-gothic streets of the city, consistently rebuffed whenever he inquires as to the whereabouts of Molineux. This, we finally learn, is because Major Molineux has been deposed

CODA: CHARLOTTESVILLE, “MOLINEUX,” AND THE PHANTOM JEW

151

from his position in a violent uprising. In a late and melodramatic scene, Robin finally sees what everyone else in town seems to have known all along: that his kinsman has been tarred and feathered. “Right before Robin’s eyes was an uncovered cart,” we’re told. “There the torches blazed the brightest . . . and there, in tar-and-feathery dignity, sat his kinsman, Major Molineux!”10 The setting is eerily similar to the nighttime march in Charlottesville. This similarity is due in part to the chaotic context. “[T]he unexpected appearance of the crowd, the torches, the confused din and the hush that followed, the specter of his kinsman reviled by that great multitude—all this . . . affected him with a sort of mental inebriety,” we’re told about Robin’s confusion. However, the parallel also has to do with the mysterious man Robin encounters at several key points in the story, first holding “whispered conversation” in a local inn, and then “muffled in a cloak” on the street when he tells Robin to keep watch for the imminent arrival of his kinsman. He is, we learn, the leader of the political uprising Robin is soon to witness. Described as having an “unprecedented physiognomy,” the man has a “broad hooked nose,” “shaggy eyebrows,” “fiery eyes,” and a “twofold” facial complexion. “One side of the face blazed an intense red, while the other was black as midnight,” the narrator says.11 It may be that the man symbolizes a split between self-governance and British rule. He’s also, though, a figure of Otherness that looks very much like the stereotypical Jew of this period. As critics such as Sander Gilman and Matthew Frye Jacobson note, a “broad hooked nose” of the sort described in this passage is a signature for a threatening form of Jewish alterity.12 As Gilman puts it in discussing George Jabet’s Notes on Noses (1848), “[T]he nose came to be the sign of the pathological Jewish character for Western Jews.”13 This may well be why Hawthorne’s story obsesses over this feature, as it does over physiology in general. “[T]he nose came boldly forth in an irregular curve,” we’re told in the earlier passage, “and its bridge was of more than a finger’s breadth.” Later on, Robin asks a townsperson about the man, describing him as having “a hook nose” and “fiery eyes.”14 Certainly, other antebellum writers rely on this physiological trope when demarcating Jewish identity. Indeed, we’ve seen this language repeatedly over the course of this study: in George Templeton Strong’s diary entry about “the hooked-nose and black-whiskered congregation” at a New York City music performance; in Edmund Bennett’s The Artist’s Bride (1856), when the scheming Jew Jacobs is described as having an “aquiline nose” (we’re also told he has a “hawk-bill nose”); in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” when we’re told that Roderick Usher has “a nose of a delicate Hebrew model”; in Walt Whitman’s Life and Adventures of Jack Engle (1852), when we learn

152

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

that Madame Seligny has a “hooked nose”; and in Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme (1861), when the Jewish villain Densdeth is characterized by a nose that is a “delicate aquiline.”15 Note too that in the 1856 entry from The English Notebooks I cite above, Hawthorne describes Emma Salomons thus: “Her nose had a beautiful outline, though I could see that it was Jewish too.”16 Or we might look at one more political cartoon from the antebellum period, Edward Clay’s 1838 How to Make the Mare/Mayor Go (see Figure Coda 1).17 The image satirizes incumbent Aaron Clark for his suspected corruption in the New York City mayoral race of that year by invoking a stereotyped image of a Jew, replete with an excessively large, hooked nose and broken English. “Shtop my friendsch I vill shave you shome troublesh,” he says to Clark. “It ish moneysh vat maksh de Mare/Mayor go.!!” According to Clay, political collusion and Jewishness go hand in hand. The broader implication is that the Jew is the figure responsible for political corruption and chaos—which is to say that it is he who is to blame for the ambivalent messiness and dishonesty of American politics. In Hawthorne’s story, unlike in Bennett, Whitman, Clay, et al., Jewishness remains implied, or perhaps even unconscious. The man looks and acts like the stereotype of the sensational Jew, but he isn’t labeled as one by Hawthorne. We might go so far as to call the Jewishness we see here a phantom presence, one not unlike the Jewish non-presence in Charlottesville. As the above quote

Figure Coda 1 Edward Clay, How to Make the Mare/Mayor Go (1838) Courtesy, Library of Congress.

CODA: CHARLOTTESVILLE, “MOLINEUX,” AND THE PHANTOM JEW

153

from The English Notebooks reminds us, Hawthorne was capable of unchecked antisemitism. In this earlier 1832 story, we’re presented with a related, but different, form of antisemitism. Like the Charlottesville marchers, Robin discovers an unspoken, implied Jewishness, one that embodies his felt anxiety about social upheaval.18 This is why it’s significant that the mysterious man is revealed to be the leader of the uprising. We sense this first when Robin sees him in “whispered conversation” with a “group of ill-dressed associates.” We also see this in the “sneering glance” the man levels at Robin.19 Like Isaac Jacobs in The Artist’s Bride, he is clearly an untrustworthy schemer. But the man’s role as dangerous revolutionary is most fully visible when Robin sees that the man, “clad in military dress, and bearing a long sword,” is riding a horse at the head of the tar-and-feather procession. Suddenly we realize, with Robin, that the Jew’s “twofold” face is the very image of the ambivalent world spilling over into the streets and into Robin’s rapidly changing life. “May not a man have several voices, as well as two complexions?” another man, referred to as a “gentleman,” asks Robin.20 The question is both mocking and appropriate: this is the state of the new world Robin has entered, one where the clearly delineated hierarchies of Old World England have given way to the disorder and ambivalence of a market-driven liberal democracy in the colonies and in the modern world. Robin’s unspoken answer is that he’d prefer it were otherwise. But Robin is learning that the stable sense of kinship relations he relied upon as a youth back on the family farm isn’t applicable in the more urban environs of Boston. Here, “the confession of an empty pocket” (that is, a lack of sufficient funds) actually “outweigh[s] the name of [his] kinsman, Major Molineux,” just as it gives the lie to Robin’s foolish assumption that the citizens of Boston must perceive in him “a family likeness” connecting him to Molineux. Relatedly, the unfamiliar urban world Robin encounters is unsettlingly cosmopolitan. The inn where he first sees the mysterious man is described as “a Turkish caravansary” and is run by a Frenchman “who seemed to have inherited the courtesy of his parent nation.” As he wanders the streets in search of Molineux, Robin twice encounters groups of men who don’t speak English. Instead, they “utter a few words in some language of which Robin knew nothing.”21 Certainly, it’s the encounter with Molineux that is the chief horror of the night for Robin. But the foundation for Robin’s hysterical reaction to his kinsman’s humiliation—his laughter—is prepared by his efforts to understand a newly modern setting. Peter Brooks describes the gothic as the genre “that stands most clearly in reaction to desacralization and the pretensions of rationalism.”22 That world is represented by the mysterious man who, it seems to me, is a Jew—or rather, a

154

SENSATIONALISM AND THE JEW IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE

“sensational Jew”—in all but name. Building on the work of other critics seeking to move past the liberal consensus perspective of Hawthorne’s historical fiction offered by Sacvan Bercovitch,23 Nancy Armstrong suggests that we see in Robin an individual who has “severed his ties to his former self and therefore to home,” and who thus “settles into the role of an exile in a world of exiles, a person without a place.” Armstrong’s point is that Robin thus becomes linked to a world in which individual agency is both singular and closely tied to the success of the community. As she puts it, “the self-governing individual and democratic mob are inextricably mixed.”24 I would further argue that this reading helps explain the role of the mysterious Jew in this story. Both exterior to and located within the body politic, Robin is in many ways mirrored by, and is the double of, the sensational Jew as I have described this figure over the course of this study. Like the mysterious man and like the Jew of the US imagination, Robin is himself a figure of ambivalence. And here it’s important to emphasize that while Robin ends up realizing that the man leading the procession is seeking to depose a figure of British rule, this person isn’t revealed as a revolutionary hero. This is because, as critics have suggested, democracy is itself viewed with ambivalence in this story. As Paul Downes puts it, “Hawthorne’s story seems to suggest that this city of the dead, this city of mob violence and night terrors, is also our America, our democracy, our modernity.”25 What we see then is a gothic narrative, one that responds to desacralization and the pretensions of rationalism by staging forces that cannot be accounted for by the daylight self. Hence Robin’s confusion as he wanders the mysterious nightmare world of Boston’s streets. “He now roamed desperately,” we’re told, “and at random, through the town, almost ready to believe that a spell was on him.”26 The city streets are similar to the labyrinthine interior of Monk Hall in The Quaker City, or the confusing urban world of The Artist’s Bride. The difference is that, in Hawthorne’s story, no clear distinction between good and evil emerges. Yes, Robin has a melodramatic final encounter with his kinsman, Major Molineux. But though the story strains toward something like resolution, we’re left with the uncomfortable sense that revolutionary fervor may in fact be the chief evil of the story. Hence the fact that Robin is infected by the “contagion” of hysterical laughter that affects the crowd surrounding the hapless Molineux. “Robin’s shout was the loudest there,” we’re told. This is the sensational frisson of the story—he simply isn’t able to access a meaningful distinction between good and evil. In this “evening of ambiguity,” the melodramatic encounter of uncle and nephew results only in hysteria.27 The question, then, is why the menacing leader of the mob that tars and feathers Molineux is figured as a Jew. The answer is that this revolutionary

CODA: CHARLOTTESVILLE, “MOLINEUX,” AND THE PHANTOM JEW

155

character could only be a Jew, just as the hate groups in Charlottesville could only have chosen the Jew as the ghostly image of their fears and frustrations. Then as now, it is the Jew who best performs the cultural work of ambivalence in America. He is the lurking, frightening figure of the moment when social categories of national affiliation, class, race, gender, sexuality, and more change shape and then keep on changing into an uncertain future. This is why then President Donald Trump essentially embraced the Charlottesville marchers with his comment on August 15 that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the confrontations and the murder that took place that day.28 This is also why Trump said of the members of QAnon, “I heard that these are people that love our country.”29 His whole platform of “Make America Great Again” was a nostalgic appeal to those who were and are fearful of the changing world. As the Charlottesville marchers and the January 6 rioters showed, this fear was and still is embodied for many Americans in the figure of the sensational Jew.30 Lavin’s meditation on QAnon conspiracy theories is useful here. “Wouldn’t it be easier to believe in the tunnels?” she asks, referring to the viral rumor, again informed by the specter of blood libel, that some 35,000 children were being held in underground tunnels in Central Park. “You could then rest assured that nothing is complex except the cover-ups of evil, that evil is simple, that it can be defeated. . . . There were enemies, so many enemies, blooddrinkers from the dawn of time, but they would be defeated soon and executed for treason.”31 Lavin acknowledges that the Manichean world she envisions is the stuff of sensational melodrama. But she also acknowledges the seductive nature of such narratives. My book is an attempt to understand how the Jew was integral both to the early American formation of these sensational stories, and their popularity. The Jew doesn’t appear in every sensational text of the period. But antebellum sensationalism deploys this figure with notable frequency and with a consistent form of narrative and affective impact. I argue that if we can begin to understand the sensational Jew of antebellum America, we can begin to understand our own psychological strategies for dealing with social, economic, and political anxieties today.

Endnotes Introduction 1. George Lippard, The Quaker City, or, The Monks of Monk Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery, and Crime [1845], ed. David Reynolds (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 238. The “Happy Merchant” image, also known as “Jew-bwa-ha-ha.gif,” originated with drawings in the 1980s and 1990s by an artist named Nick Bougas, who uses the pseudonym “A. Wyatt Mann.” See Joseph Bernstein, “The Surprisingly Mainstream History of the Internet’s Favorite Anti-Semitic Image,” BuzzFeed News, February 5, 2015, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ josephbernstein/the-surprisingly-mainstream-history-of-the-internets-favorit. 2. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments [1947], trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 142. The text focuses on antisemitism in Chapter 5, “Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment,” 137–72. For useful discussions of this section of the book, see Martin Jay, “The Jews and the Frankfurt School: Critical Theory’s Analysis of Anti-Semitism,” New German Critique 19, no. 1 (Winter 1980): 137–49; and Oshrat Silberbusch, Adorno’s Philosophy of the Nonidentical: Thinking as Resistance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 3. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, 148. 4. T. W. Whitley, The People Putting Responsibility to the Test, or the Downfall of the Kitchen Cabinet and Collar Presses (New York: Anthony Imbert, 1834). 5. For a history of the “bank war” between the Democrat Jackson and president of the US Bank Nicholas Biddle, see Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 6. Note that in addition to the crowd of White laborers, we see two Black men to the left of the image (one of whom offers the non sequitur, “Hurrah! for Massa Garison, den he shall be King!”), and that along with the collapse of the justice system, we see the confirmation of political cynicism and corruption, with Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John Calhoun looking on with bemused contempt at Jackson’s plight. 7. See Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (London: Verso Press, 1987); Isabelle Lehuu, Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Verso Press, 1990); Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture

ENDNOTES

8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

157

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and Ronald Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Streeby, American Sensations, 27–37. I’m drawing here on the extensive archival work in two key studies: Louis Harap, The Image of the Jew in American Literature: From Early Republic to Mass Immigration (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974) and Frederic Cople Jaher, A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of Anti-Semitism in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). But I’m also taking advantage of databases that weren’t digitized when Harap and Jaher were conducting their research. And what I’ve found is that the Jew was even more consistently present in this period, and more central to it, than these scholars have suggested. Indeed, while these impressive works cover fairly broad historical periods, the antebellum period requires a study unto itself in order to do justice to the range and complexity of texts in which the Jew is depicted. For Hawthorne, Poe, and Whitman, I’m referring to the following: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun: or, The Romance of Monte Beni [1860] (New York: Penguin Books, 1990); Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” [1839], in The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings, ed. David Galloway (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 90–109; and Walt Whitman, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: An Auto-Biography; A Story of New York at the Present Time in which the Reader Will Find Some Familiar Characters [1852], ed. Zachary Turpin (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017). Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 2. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831), xxii. Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 215. Bauman, Life, 215. Bauman, Life, 208. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism [1869], ed. William S. Knickerbocker (New York: MacMillan), 1925. Arnold, Culture, 173. See Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). For a discussion of Arnold’s deployment of the Jew and Jewishness, see also Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 43–54. The fuller passage from Arnold is as follows: “Science has now made visible to everybody the great and pregnant elements which lie in race, and in how signal a manner they make the genius and history of an IndoEuropean people vary from those of a Semitic people. Hellenism is of Indo-European growth, Hebraism is of Semitic growth; and we English, a nation of Indo-European stock, seem to belong naturally to the movement of Hellenism.” See Culture, 140–1.

158

ENDNOTES

18. Cheyette, Constructions, 19. Ragussis reads this passage as reflective of Arnold’s desire to absorb the Jew into English national culture “like the absorption of Judaism into Christianity, or Hebrew Scripture in the Christian Bible.” Arnold, he argues, “authoriz[es] himself to limit and even to eradicate the elements of difference by which Hebraism undermines his . . . racially pure definition of the English nation.” See Figures, 224. 19. Cheyette, again in reference to Arnold, puts it thus: “‘The Jew,’ like all ‘doubles,’ is inherently ambivalent and can represent both the ‘best’ and the ‘worst’ of selves. Unlike marginalized ‘colonial subjects,’ who were, for the most part, confined racially to the ‘colonies’ in the late nineteenth century, Jews were at the centre of European metropolitan society and, at the same time, banished from its privileged sphere by a semitic discourse. It is the proximity of Jews . . . that made them both a powerful ‘self ’ and a powerless ‘other.’ ” See Constructions, 12. 20. Reynolds, Beneath, 169. 21. “Editor’s Book Table,” Godey’s Lady’s Book (January 1849), 67. Also cited in Denning, Mechanic, 87. 22. For more on the dynamics of class in US sensationalism, see Denning, Mechanic; Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Saxton, Rise and Fall; David Stewart, Reading and Disorder in Antebellum America (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011); and Streeby, American Sensations. 23. See Streeby, American Sensations; Saxton, Rise and Fall; Denning, Mechanic; Jason Ahlenius, “Sensation’s Imperial Narratives: Affect in the United States’ Democracy of Print, 1846–1848,” Western American Literature 50, no. 4 (Winter 2016): 258–315; Christine Bold, “Malaeska’s Revenge; or, The Dime Novel Tradition in Popular Fiction,” in Wanted Dead or Alive: The American West in Popular Culture, ed. Richard Aquila (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 21–42. 24. Streeby, American Sensations, 19. 25. See David Anthony, Paper Money Men: Commerce, Manhood, and the Sensational Public Sphere in Antebellum America (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009); David Anthony, “Fantasies of Conversion: The Sensational Jewess in Poe and Hawthorne’s America,” American Literary History 26, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 431–61; Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler, eds., Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Paul Gilmore, The Genuine Article: Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Dawn Keetley, “Victim and Victimizer: Female Fiends and Unease over Marriage in Antebellum Sensational Fiction,” American Quarterly 51, no. 2 (June 1999): 344–84; Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); Dana Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); Mary Templin, Panic Fiction: Women and Antebellum Economic Crisis (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014). 26. Lippard, Quaker City, 74. 27. Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” 156; emphasis original.

ENDNOTES

159

28. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess [1976] (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 11–12. 29. Michael D’A lessandro makes much the same point in arguing that Lippard deploys the language of melodrama in his fiction as a means of signaling allegiance to workingclass readers in Philadelphia, many of whom were quite familiar with the “mechanic accents” of stage melodramas performed at the Walnut Street Theatre in the 1840s. In fact, as D’A lessandro reminds us, Lippard actually agreed to adapt The Quaker City for the stage in late 1844, only to have the performance canceled by the mayor following threats of violence by upper-class audience members who were themselves the subjects of Lippard’s charged class critique. The plan was for the performance to be produced by Francis Courtney Wemyss for the more genteel Chesnutt Street Theatre. Apparently, Wemyss was hoping to expand his clientele to the working classes. The problem was that the novel, some of which revolved around the real-life case of Singleton Mercer, a Philadelphia clerk who was acquitted of murdering his sister’s seducer (hence the Arlington–Lorrimer tension), had touched a raw nerve. After seeing the playbill posted around the city, an infuriated Mercer purchased 200 tickets for the play and gave them to supporters who threatened to burn down the theater. In response, Philadelphia’s newly elected mayor, Peter McCall, canceled the opening night performance. See Michael D’A lessandro, “George Lippard’s ‘Theatre of Hell’: Apocalyptic Melodrama and Working-Class Spectatorship in the Quaker City,” J19 5, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 205–37. For a first-person account of the affair, see Francis Courtney Wemyss, Twenty-Six Years of the Life of an Actor and Manager (New York: Burgess, Stringer, & Co., 1846). See also Sari Altschuler and Aaron M. Tobiason, “Playbill for George Lippard’s The Quaker City,” PMLA 129, no. 2 (March 2014): 267–73; and Julia Curtis, “Philadelphia in an Uproar: The Monks of Monk Hall, 1844,” Theatre History Studies 5 (January 1985): 41–7. 30. The proceeding action makes this even more apparent. When Arlington manages to escape Monk Hall, he stumbles haphazardly into the home of a poor young woman named Annie Davis. In what follows, we learn that Annie has died of illness and starvation, and that in his grief, her father has committed suicide. But there’s more. For Arlington learns that Annie has died just three weeks after giving birth to a child—and that he, Arlington, is the father. “He lifted the sheet and looked upon the face of the dead. One look was enough. With a wild howl he fell backward, and for a moment lay like a dead man upon the floor. A low groan came from his lips. Then with a sudden bound he sprang to his feet—his dark eyes were riveted to the face of the dead. Again that wild cry burst from his chest; his hands were pressed madly against his forehead.” See Lippard, Quaker City, 410. Aided by the unlikeliest—one might say the silliest—of plot machinations, capitalist villainy and working-class virtue are set in stark contrast. 31. Emerson Bennett, The Artist’s Bride, Or, the Pawnbroker’s Heir (New York: Garrett, Dick, & Fitzgerald, 1856). 32. Bennett, The Artist’s Bride, 11. 33. Bennett, The Artist’s Bride, 9. 34. Bennett, The Artist’s Bride, 13. 35. Bennett, The Artist’s Bride, 40. 36. Bennett, The Artist’s Bride, 11.

160

ENDNOTES

37. Nicholas Daly points out the triangulated relationship linking sensationalism, melodrama, and the Jew in his reading of Dion Boucicault’s stage melodrama, After Dark (1868), which was a hit in both the US and England in the late 1860s. See Nicholas Daly, “Blood on the Tracks: Sensation Drama, the Railway, and the Dark Face of Modernity,” Victorian Studies 42, no. 1 (Fall 1998): 47–76. As Daly points out, the play offers many of the plot devices in the melodramatic arsenal, from separated family members and fortunes lost and won, to disguised identities and breathtaking moments of near-death (the play is famous for its “railway rescue,” a feature lifted from Augustin Daly’s play, Under the Gaslight [1867]). He also demonstrates how, in establishing the requisite good–evil tension, the play features as its main villain a criminal Jew named Dicey Morris, who runs a gambling club and music hall in the heart of London’s seedy underworld. Morris is the classically comic parvenu. The “Costumes” section of the 1868 play describes him thus: “Jew; side-whiskers; blue velvet figured vest; showy watch-chain, with charms; . . . fancy scarf, fancy pocket-handkerchief.” He also has “the salient peculiarities of the low-lived London Jews [sic] speech and mannerism” (7). See Dion Boucicault, After Dark: A Drama of London Life in 1868 [1868] (New York: De Witt Publishing House, n.d.), 7. Daly’s reading is thus especially useful. “Melodrama,” he says, “marked ‘the Jew’ not only by accent and appearance but also by occupation. Morris’s gambling dens and his bill-discounting effectively associate him with ‘dirty’ money. . . . In effect, all that middle-class Victorians disliked about the urban, commercial culture that sustained . . . prosperity is condensed in . . . Morris.” See Daly, “Blood,” 63. This emphasis on the contradictory nature of the Jew’s role in the Gentile imagination—Morris is both laughable fiscal villain and the embodiment of Christian economic desire and practice—is to the point. Here as elsewhere, the Jew is both a perceived external threat, and the unrecognized image of modern capitalist Gentile selfhood. Moreover, that capitalist selfhood is unsettlingly protean and unconstrained by the old forms of order and hierarchy that once helped organize Western society. Instead, characters like the counter-jumping Morris represent the ambivalence and proteophobia Bauman describes. He is the walking reminder of the topsy-turvy nature of mid-nineteenth-century America. 38. Martin Luther, “On the Jews and Their Lies” [1543], in Luther’s Works, vol. 47, eds. Franklin Sherman and Helmut Lehmann, 137–306 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), 217. 39. Jerry Z. Muller, Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 23. As Jaher explains, this attitude was standard throughout the early Middle Ages. “Since the eighth century the church had forbidden Catholics to lend money at interest,” he writes. “By 1100 money was deemed an instrument of worldly corruption, and at the Second Lateran Council (1139), Christian usurers were denied communion and Christian burial. Jews were not subject to the ban on usury, and since Christianity did not prohibit borrowing at interest, they found a niche in the Christian economy in practicing this despised but indispensable profession.” See Jaher, Scapegoat, 51. 40. Quoted in Muller, Capitalism, 23. 41. Muller, Capitalism; Derek Penslar, Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Jonathan Zatlin,

ENDNOTES

42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

161

“The Usurious Jew: Wilhelm Roscher and the Developmental Role of the Homo Economicus Judaicus,” in National Economies: Volks-Wirtschaft, Racism and Economy in Europe Between the Wars (1918–1939/45), eds. Christoph Kreutzmu¨ller, Michael Wildt, and Moshe Zimmermann, 18–32 (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing: 2015). Muller puts it thus: “To be sure, the lending of money at interest was practiced by Christians nevertheless, often furtively, sometimes with the aid of scholastic legal rationalizations that defined the practice as nonusurious.” See Muller, Capitalism, 27. Zatlin also argues that the narrative about Jewish usury needs to be more nuanced. He contends that the notion of “Homo economicus judaicus” is a convenient stereotype, one that has fueled the notion that Jews are responsible for the creation and spread of capitalism. “Never mind that the prohibition on moneylending enshrined at Lateran Council of 1215 applied to Jews as well as Christians,” he says. “Never mind that the bogeyman of nineteenth-century development economics—‘the Jews’—in no way possessed a monopoly over usury, even once the practice became common despite the prohibition. The Catholic Church and its agents, from the Jesuits to the Cahorsins and Lombards, managed most European capital markets, such as they were. Never mind that Christians lent money, at interest, to Jews.” See Zatlin, “The Usurious Jew,” 25. Penslar, Shylock’s Children, 16. Penslar, Shylock’s Children, 18–19. Thus, Christian Wilhelm von Dohm claims in Concerning the Amelioration of the Civil Status of the Jews (1781) that Jews have become corrupt due to their occupational concentration in commerce. Similarly, the Abbe Grégoire argues in Essays on the Physical, Moral, and Political Improvement of the Jews (1791) that Jewish “régénération” can be achieved by limiting Jews to cash-only economic transactions and routing them toward what he saw as more productive work in craft shops and on farms. See Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, Concerning the Amelioration of the Civil Status of the Jews (Berlin: 1781); Abbe Grégoire, Essays on the Physical, Moral, and Political Improvement of the Jews (London: J. Stock, 1791), cited in Penslar, Shylock’s Children, 27. Penslar, Shylock’s Children, 140. Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch, Die Hoffinanz und der moderne Staat, 6 vols. (Berlin, 1953–67), cited in Penslar, Shylock’s Children, 140. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question” [1843], in The Marx–Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 39–62 (New York: Norton, 1978), 49. See also Marx’s description of commodities in Capital, Vol. 1 (1867): “The capitalist knows that all commodities— however tattered they may look or however bad they may smell—are in faith and truth money, are by nature circumcised Jews, and, what is more, a wonderful means for making still more money out of money.” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy [1867], trans. Ben Fowkes, ed. Ernest Mandel (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 256. Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 49. Penslar, Shylock’s Children, 141. Slavoj Žizˇek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 206. Jaher, Scapegoat, 186. See “Gallery of Rascalities and Peculiarities–No. 6,” The Sunday Flash, October 17, 1941, 1. In response, Levy brought charges of criminal and obscene libel against the

162

53. 54.

55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

68.

ENDNOTES paper’s editors, William Joseph Snelling, George Wilkes, and George B. Wooldridge. For a full discussion of this case, see Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 77–108. George Templeton Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, vol. 1, eds. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 256; vol. 2, 231. Jaher, Scapegoat, 204. Cited in David A. Gerber, “Cutting Out Shylock: Elite AntiSemitism and the Quest for Moral Order in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Market Place,” The Journal of American History 69, no. 3 (December 1982): 615–37, 632. The reports he cites are between 1845 and 1865. Jaher, Scapegoat, 204. Cited in Stephen G. Mostov, “Dun and Bradstreet Reports as a Source of Jewish Economic History: Cincinnati,1840–1875,” American Jewish History 72, no. 3 (March 1983): 333–53, 348–49. This report is from 1851. Jaher, Scapegoat, 205. Cited in Mostov, “Dun and Bradstreet,” 348–9. This report is from 1856. The most complete source on Noah is Jonathan Sarna, Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981). Jaher, Scapegoat, 155. See also “Roy’s Hebrew Lexicon—Secret Conspiracy Against Religion Developed,” New York Herald, November 18, 1837, 2. Freedman, Temple of Culture, 68. Ragussis, Figures, 58, 59–60. At the opening of Shylock’s Children, Penslar offers a similar observation about the extraliterary influence of Shylock: “The moneylender Shylock, Shakespeare’s most notorious creation, represents the totality of Jewish otherness in Christian Europe. His livelihood is a synecdoche, representing the inseparability of Jewish religious, social, and economic distinctiveness.” See Pensar, Shylock’s Children, 1. John Brougham, Much Ado About a Merchant of Venice (New York: Samuel French and Son, 1868). Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice (1600), II.viii.15. Brougham, Much Ado, 19. David Anthony, “Shylock on Wall Street: The Jessica Complex in Antebellum Sensationalism,” in Paper Money Men, 70–101. Christoph Kreutzmu¨ller and Jonathan Zatlin, “Introduction: Possession and Dispossession,” in Dispossession: Plundering Germany Jewry, 1933–1953, eds. Kreutzmu¨ller and Zatlin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020), 1–32; Jonathan Wiesen, “A Jew-Free Marketplace: The Ideologies and Economics of Thievery,” in Kreutzmu¨ller and Zatlin, Dispossession, 33–50. Wiesen, “A Jew-Free Marketplace,” 33–4. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage Books, 2014); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). Sharon B. Oster provides a related analysis of the double fantasy work of the Jew in examining the depiction of Jews in turn-of-the-century American texts such as Henry James’s The Golden Bowl (1904) and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905). As she explains, characters like the Bloomsbury shopkeeper in James’s novel and the

ENDNOTES

163

financier Simon Rosedale in Wharton’s text reflect the way in which the Jew was often contradictorily linked with both an idealized, precapitalist past (via a popular form of philosemitism), and a ruthlessly market-driven future (via a more straightforward antisemitism). In James, the shopkeeper becomes “a nostalgic holdover of the preindustrial capitalist past,” and thus “a noble Hebrew of the Hebraic myth.” In Wharton, meanwhile, the Jew is the disconcerting figure of capitalist modernity. “Rosedale mediates tensions between leisure time and business time, between friendship and business, trust and risk, capitalist exchange and precapitalist gift,” Oster says. More to the point, Rosedale as Jew marks the inexorable transition to “a commercially driven future marked as Jewish.” Sharon B. Oster, No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018), 138, 111, 165, 168. 69. See Kimberly Snyder Manganelli, Transatlantic Spectacles of Race: The Tragic Mulatta and the Tragic Muse (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012); Nadia Valman, The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 70. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). See especially Chapter 5, “Toward the Gothic: Terrorism and Homosexual Panic,” 83–96. 71. John Beauchamp Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1866).

Chapter 1 1. Harriet Hamline Bigelow, The Curse Entailed (Boston: Wentworth and Company, 1857); Van Buren Denslow, Owned and Disowned; or, The Chattel Child (New York: H. Dayton, 1857); Eliza Ann Dupuy, The Planter’s Daughter: A Tale of Louisiana (New York: W. P. Fetridge & Company, 1857); Maria McIntosh, The Lofty and the Lowly (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1853). Further references to these editions will be cited as CE, OD, PD, and LL, respectively. 2. Bigelow, CE, 360. 3. Dupuy, PD, 277. 4. Dupuy, PD, 275, 93. 5. Dupuy, PD, 269. 6. James DeBow, “Importance of an Industrial Revolution in the South,” DeBow’s Review 12, no. 5 (May 1852): 554–62, 555. 7. On the ideology of the Old South, see Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); and William Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York: George Braziller, 1961). 8. Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage Books, 2014); Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia:

164

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

ENDNOTES University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); and Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). The historian most influential in depicting a precapitalist South, and the one to whom these scholars are indirectly responding, is Eugene D. Genovese. See in particular The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965). Baptist, Half, 373. On the merchant classes in the South, see Frank J. Byrne, Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820–1865 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006); and Tom Downey, Planting a Capitalist South: Masters, Merchants, and Manufacturers in the Southern Interior, 1790–1860 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2006). For a broader discussion of the role of cotton merchants in the growth and indeed creation of modern capitalism, see Beckert, Empire, 199–241. Cited in Byrne, Becoming Bourgeois, 58; emphasis original. Originally published in Caddo Gazette and De-Soto Intelligencer (February 11, 1846). Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (New York: Burdick Brothers, 1857), 334. Daniel Robinson Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States (New York: Henry B. Pierce, 1860), 8. Hundley, Social, 130. Hundley, Social, 135. Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 [2007] (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 353. Loughran, Republic, 366, 352. Jared Gardner, Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787– 1845 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). Alexander McNutt, cited in Reginald C. McGrane, Foreign Bondholders and American State Debts (New York: Macmillan Company, 1935), 201. Originally published in Mississippian (January 18, 1841). W. A. Lewis, Letter to the Editor, Southern Watchman (April 30, 1862). The quote from Foote is cited in Bertram W. Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War [1951] (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 2001), 212. I will discuss paranoia about Jews during the Civil War at further length in the conclusion. Hundley, Social, 139–40. William Gregg, “Domestic Industry: Manufactures at the South,” DeBow’s Review 8, no. 2 (February 1850): 134–45, 134–5. Cited in “Southern Commercial Convention at New Orleans—No. 2,” DeBow’s Review 18, no. 4 (April 1855): 520–8, 524. Anonymous, The Night Watch; or, Social Life in the South (Cincinnati: Moore, Wilstach, Keys, & Co., 1856), 100. Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 215–16. Bauman, Life, 215. Beckert, Empire, xii. Dupuy, PD, 19.

ENDNOTES

165

30. Dupuy, PD, 14. 31. On slave-backed mortgages and cotton futures, see Baptist, Half, 215–59; Beckert, Empire, 199–241; and Bonnie Martin, “Neighbor-to-Neighbor Capitalism: Local Credit Networks and the Mortgaging of Slaves,” in Slavery’s Capitalism, eds. Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 107–21. 32. Dupuy, PD, 91. 33. Dupuy, PD, 92. 34. Helper, Impending, 334–5. 35. Dupuy, PD, 265. 36. Dupuy, PD, 268. 37. Dupuy, PD, 58. 38. Dupuy, PD, 109. 39. Dupuy, PD, 272–3. 40. Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 69. 41. Dupuy, PD, 289. 42. Dupuy, PD, 415. 43. Dupuy, PD, 403. 44. Dupuy, PD, 375. 45. Dupuy, PD, 411. 46. Perhaps because of this complexity, The Lofty and the Lowly has emerged as the postTom plantation novel to receive the most critical attention in the past ten years or so. See Kerry Larson, Imagining Equality in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Sarah Mesle, “Sentimentalism’s Nation: Maria J. McIntosh and the Antebellum Contexts of ‘Southern’ Fiction,” Studies in American Fiction 40, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 203–30; and Mary Templin, Panic Fiction: Women and Antebellum Economic Crisis (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014). 47. McIntosh, LL I, 15–16. 48. Larson, Imagining, 63. 49. Mesle, “Sentimentalism’s Nation,” 220. 50. For an extended discussion of the impact of the 1837 Panic on the cotton market, see Joshua Rothman, “The Contours of Cotton Capitalism: Speculation, Slavery, and Economic Panic in Mississippi, 1832–1841,” in Slavery’s Capitalism, eds. Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 122–45. Templin places McIntosh’s novel squarely in the context of the panic. 51. McIntosh, LL I, 130. 52. McIntosh, LL I, 290. 53. McIntosh, LL II, 29. 54. McIntosh, LL II, 119. 55. McIntosh, LL II, 38. 56. Baptist, Half, 245. 57. McIntosh, LL II, 36. 58. McIntosh, LL II, 115–17.

166 59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81.

82. 83. 84.

ENDNOTES McIntosh, LL I, 143, 87. Larson, Imagining, 63. McIntosh, LL I, 175. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” [1839], in The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings, ed. David Galloway (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 90–109, 92. We see language about region and race at various points in The Lofty and the Lowly. One character, Mary Grahame, refers to Northerners as “the Yankee race,” see LL I, 152; Donald calls them a “mean race,” see LL I, 252; and the narrator, meanwhile, explains that Northerners often regard Southerners as an “indolent and prodigal race,” see LL I, 16. My sense is that this is less a reference to race as biology, or the five races of man, than to a discursive construction of race, one that is regional in orientation, and one that includes (among other factors) the notion of economic desire. Sander Gilman notes the seeming Jewishness of the Ushers, and its relation to the depiction of the family as incestuous, mentally unhinged, and so on. Gilman, “Sibling Incest, Madness, and the ‘Jews,’ ” Jewish Social Studies 4, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 157–79. McIntosh, LL I, 200. McIntosh, LL II, 116, 38. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! [1936] (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 303. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury [1929] (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1987), 116. McIntosh, LL I, 153, 265. McIntosh, LL II, 109. Mesle, “Sentimentalism’s Nation,” 220. McIntosh, LL I, 108. Anonymous, Startling Disclosures! Mysteries Solved! or, The History of Esther Livingstone, and the Dark Career of Henry Baldwin (Philadelphia: E. E. Barclay, 1853). Anonymous, Startling Disclosures, 27, 28, 29. Anonymous, Startling Disclosures, 34. Anonymous, Startling Disclosures, 29. Bigelow, CE, 320. Bigelow, CE, 269. Bigelow, CE, 366. Jennifer Rae Greeson, “The ‘Mysteries and Miseries’ of North Carolina: New York City, Urban Gothic Fiction, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” American Literature 73, no. 2 (June 2001): 277–309. See also her expanded version of this discussion in Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). George Thompson, Venus in Boston; A Romance of City Life [1849], in Venus in Boston and Other Tales of Nineteenth-Century City Life, ed. David Reynolds (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002). Bigelow, CE, 370, 414. Bigelow, CE, 381. Bigelow, CE, 525.

ENDNOTES

167

85. Virgil Stewart, A History of the Detection, Conviction, Life and Designs of John A. Murrell, the Great Western Land Pirate (Cincinnati: Augustus Q. Walton, 1835). For an extended discussion of both Murrell and Stewart’s pamphlet narrative, see Johnson, River, 57–61; 64–9; 70–1. 86. Bigelow, CE, 525. 87. Bigelow, CE, 434, 372. 88. See for example Kimberly Manganelli, Transatlantic Spectacles of Race (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 77–8. 89. Denslow, OD, 59, 64. 90. The name of this attorney is spelled both as “Snacks” and “Snaacks” over the course of the novel. I’ve chosen “Snacks” because the passage I quote has this spelling and because the name only shifts to “Snaacks” midway through the text. 91. Denslow, OD, 193, 255, 230. 92. Denslow, OD, 118, 281. 93. Manganelli, Transatlantic, 8. 94. Denslow, OD, 33. 95. Denslow, OD, 288–9. 96. Denslow, OD, 292. 97. Van Buren Denslow, Principles of Economic Philosophy of Society, Government, and Industry (New York: Cassell & Co., 1888). 98. Denslow, Principles, 688. 99. Denslow, OD, 295–6. 100. Denslow, OD, 293. 101. Denslow, OD, 300. 102. “The Great Labor Question from a Southern Point of View,” Harper’s Weekly IX, no. 448 (July 29, 1865): 465. 103. Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice [1600] (New York: Viking Press, 1969), IV.i.169.

Chapter 2 1. George Templeton Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, vol. 3, eds. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 235–6. 2. Mary Janvrin, “The Story of Rachel Félix,” Ballou’s Dollar Monthly Magazine 8, no. 2 (August 1858): 173–6, 175. 3. Adam Badeau, The Vagabond (New York: Rudd & Carleton, 1859), 267–8. 4. “Rachel,” Republican Quarterly Review 1, no. 2 (October 1855): 156–60, 156. 5. “Rachel’s First Appearance in America,” The Broadway Belle (September 1, 1855). 6. For a description of this encounter, see Rachel M. Brownstein, Tragic Muse: Rachel of the Comédie-Française (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 127–8. 7. “Sensation Literature,” Life Illustrated (July 1859): 100. See also, for example, “Cheap Literature,” Northwestern Review and Commercial and Real Estate Reporter (September 1857): 33–4; “Popular Literature—The Periodical Press,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (January 1859): 96–112; “Editor’s Table,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine

168

8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

ENDNOTES (November 1859): 838–40; and “Cheap Reading,” National Democratic Review (May 1856): 418–20. Anonymous, Confessions and Experience of a Novel Reader (Chicago: W. M. Stacey, 1855): 19–20. We find a related scenario in a much more canonical moment. This is the scene in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) when the artisan-writer Holgrave reads a short story he has written to the young Phoebe Pyncheon. As he explains just prior to this private performance, he is an established member of the period’s emerging class of writers of sensation fiction. “[M]y name has figured, I can assure you, on the covers of Graham and Godey” he says to her. “In the humorous line, I am thought to have a very pretty way with me; and as for pathos, I am as provocative of tears as an onion.” But Holgrave’s fiction does more than produce tears; it also entrances those who give over to its seductive qualities. Or at least this is what happens with Phoebe. Here is how Hawthorne describes the moments immediately following the reading: “Holgrave gazed at her, as he rolled up his manuscript. . . . A veil was beginning to be muffled about her, in which she could behold only him, and live only in his thoughts and emotions.” What better description of the putatively spellbinding effects of mass culture at mid-century? “I consider myself as having been very attentive,” Phoebe says, but in fact she has been hypnotized by the enthralling sorcery of mass-culture sensationalism. Phoebe, we might say, is very much like the audiences at Rachel Félix’s performances. See Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables [1851] (New York: Penguin Classics, 1986), 186, 211, 212. Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 106. “Editor’s Table,” Graham’s American Monthly Magazine of Literature 47, no. 4 (October 1855): 360–8, 362. “Mdlle Rachel—Particulars of her Life,” Western Literary Messenger 23, no. 5 (January 1855): 219–20, 219. See also the following from Ballou’s Dollar Monthly Magazine: “Who, then, of the throng who bestowed their coin upon this pale, thin, meagre, ill-clad, little wanderer, saw trace of her, who, years afterward, on the boards of the Theatre Royale, moved all the Parisian world?” Janvrin, “The Story of Rachel Félix,” 174. “Rachel,” New York Times (September 7, 1855). Cited in Kimberly Manganelli, Transatlantic Spectacles of Race: The Tragic Mulatta and the Tragic Muse (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 115. Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, & Co., 1903), 303. “Rachel,” Republican Quarterly Review, 157. This passage also appears in an essay in entitled “Rachel” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 11 (June 1855): 681–7, 682. Manganelli, Transatlantic Spectacles of Race; Nadia Valman, The Jewess in NineteenthCentury British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Heather S. Nathans, Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans: Performing Jewish Identity on the Antebellum American Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017). Valman, The Jewess, 7.

ENDNOTES

169

18. The Dying Jewess (New York: Mahlon Day & Co., prob. 1839–45). 19. The Dying Jewess, 7. 20. “Closing Scene of ‘The Jewess,’ ” Gleason’s Pictorial 4, no. 15 (April 1953): 225. See also William Thomas Moncrieff, The Jewess; or, The Council of Constance (London: Duncombe, 1835). Moncrieff ’s play was adapted from Eugène Scribe’s French libretto La Juive (1835). 21. See for example the following: S. B. Beckett, “The Jewess of Cairo,” Ladies’ Companion 14–15 (November 1840–April 1841): 270–81; “The Jewess of Constantina,” trans. Mary Thompson, The Union Magazine of Literature and Art 2, no. 1 (January 1848): 35–9; Mary E. Lee, “Aaron’s Rod; or, The Young Jewess,” Southern and Western Literary Messenger and Review 12 (September 1846): 554–60; “Minna Lowe: The Pretty Jewess,” Brother Jonathan 3, no. 10 (November 5, 1842): 277–80; Caroline C—, “Myrrah of Tangiers,” Graham’s American Monthly Magazine 36, no. 2 (February 1850): 125–32; Nasus, “The Wheel of Life,” The Southern Literary Messenger 11 (1845): 129–37, 213–18, 288–94. 22. Henry Ruffner, “Judith Bensaddi: A Tale,” Southern Literary Messenger 5 (1839): 469– 505. The book-length text, from which I quote here, is Judith Bensaddi: A Tale, Second Edition, revised and enlarged by the author (1839), in Judith Bensaddi; A Tale, and Seclusaval, or, The Sequel to the Tale of Judith Bensaddi, ed. Michael Pemberton (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1984): 149–222. 23. Ruffner, Judith Bensaddi, 124, 126. 24. Ruffner, Judith Bensaddi, 505, 646. 25. October 8, 1855. Brownstein, Tragic Muse, cited in Manganelli, Transatlantic Spectacles of Race, 209. Brownstein’s translation. 26. “Rachel,” New York Times (September 7, 1855). Cited in Brownstein, Tragic Muse, 151. 27. “Memoirs of Rachel,” Littell’s Living Age 3, no. 2 (1858): 689–91, 689. 28. “Gossip About Rachel,” Harper’s Weekly 2, no. 86 (August 21, 1858): 542. 29. See also the following description in the above-cited Republican Quarterly Review article: “[T]he woman who counts her liaisons by dozens, and who, without ever having been a wife, is the mother of a quarter of a score of children, who are obliged to acknowledge among them more than one father, is not, in any country of Europe, so far as we know, and certainly not here, entitled to that appellation.” “Rachel,” 158. 30. “Gossip About Rachel,” Harper’s Weekly 2, no. 86 (August 1858): 542. 31. Rachel Brownstein, Tragic Muse: Rachel of the Comédie-Française (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 16. 32. Ned Buntline, Rose Seymour; or, The Ballet Girl’s Revenge: A Tale of the New York Drama (New York: Hilton & Co., 1865). 33. Buntline, Rose Seymour, 46, 44. 34. Ned Buntline, Miriam; or, The Jew’s Daughter: A Tale of City Life (New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, prob. early 186–?), 61, 62. 35. Ned Buntline, Morgan; or, The Knight of the Black Flag: A Strange Story of By-Gone Times (New York: Robert M. De Witt, 1861), 52. 36. Buntline, Rose Seymour, 46. 37. Buntline, Rose Seymour, 46.

170

ENDNOTES

38. George Thompson, Venus in Boston; A Romance of City Life [1849], in Venus in Boston and Other Tales of Nineteenth-Century City Life, ed. David Reynolds (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 100. 39. B. T., The Beautiful Jewess, Rachel Mendoza (Philadelphia: E. E. Barclay, 1853); The Life, Confession, and Execution of the Jew and Jewess (Baltimore: A. R. Orton, 1856). 40. B. T., Rachel Mendoza, 18. 41. Buntline, Rose Seymour, 49. 42. Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 8. 43. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun [1860] (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 2. 44. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 48, 429. 45. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 430; Evan Carton, The Marble Faun: Hawthorne’s Transformations (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992), 42. 46. Elissa Greenwald, “Hawthorne and Judaism: Otherness and Identity in The Marble Faun,” Studies in the Novel 23, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 128–38, 132. 47. On this meeting see also Lewis Harap, The Image of the Jew in American Literature (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974), 108–10; and David Greven, “Hawthorne and the Gender of Jewishness: Anti-Semitism, Aesthetics, and Sexual Politics in The Marble Faun,” Journal of American Culture 35, no. 2 (May 2012): 135–52. 48. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The English Notebooks [1853–58] (New York: Russell & Russell, 1941), 321. 49. Harap, Image, 110. 50. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Our Old Home (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863), 388. 51. Hawthorne, Notebooks, 321. 52. Greenwald, “Hawthorne and Judaism,” 130. 53. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 67. 54. See for example Carton, The Marble Faun, 42; and Spencer Hall, “Beatrice Cenci: Symbol and Vision in The Marble Faun,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25, no. 1 (June 1970): 85–95. 55. Speaking of Shelly and Hawthorne’s shared interest in the Cenci narrative, Frederick Crews puts it thus: “[T]he paternal figure is evidently guilty of sexual misconduct toward the daughter figure.” See Crews, The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 227. 56. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 91. 57. Crews, Sins, 222. 58. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 43. 59. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 48. 60. Nor is Miriam shy about the link between herself and her subject. “And do you recognize the likeness?” she asks Donatello, to which he responds in the affirmative. “Signorina,” he says, “the resemblance is as little to be mistaken as if you had bent over the smooth surface of a fountain, and possessed the witchcraft to call forth the image that you made there! It is yourself !” Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 48. 61. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 20. 62. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 44.

ENDNOTES

171

63. Gordon Hutner, Secrets and Sympathy: Forms of Disclosure in Hawthorne’s Novels (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 173. 64. See Syria the Jewess, Street and Smith’s New York Weekly 20, no. 5–20 (December 1864– April 1865). 65. Syria the Jewess 20, no. 5 (December 22, 1864); no. 11 (February 2, 1865). 66. See also Augustin Daly’s Leah, the Forsaken, a play that toured the Northeast in 1862 to great acclaim. Here, against the backdrop of nineteenth-century Germany, we see the wronged Jewess Leah planning vengeance against the Gentile lover, Rudolph, who has forsaken her despite the fact that she has converted to Christianity for his sake. “Forgive me, heaven, that I forget my nation to love this Christian!” she says. Leah eventually renounces the Old Testament–style curse she has put upon Rudolph’s marriage to another Gentile woman and forgives him for his weakness. Moreover, she resists killing the apostate Jew who has deceived Rudolph into abandoning her. “As Judith to Holofernes, so I told you,” she says as she draws a knife at play’s end, and for a moment the audience is led to believe she will stab her antagonist. Instead, she drops the knife and departs, stage left, for “the promised land!”—understood here to be America. The implication is that Leah’s conversion has purged her of an overly passionate, Old World Jewishness and made her ready for the modern world of Gentile America (Rudolph’s early complaint that Leah is an “enchantress” whose “dark eyes are ever gazing in my soul” is typical of the way Leah is depicted throughout the play). That Leah and Rudolph do not marry is therefore not rendered as tragic—especially once we see that Rudolph and his wife have named their first child after Leah. It is as if the new Leah is the immaculate version of a Jewess truly cleansed of the taint of Jewishness. See Augustin Daly, Leah, the Forsaken (New York: Samuel French, 1862), 13, 44, 13. 67. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 58, 56, 60. 68. Richard Brodhead, The School of Hawthorne (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 73, 70. 69. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 56, 62, 66. 70. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 67. 71. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 172, 210. 72. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 329. 73. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 335–36. 74. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 188. 75. Cheyette, Constructions, 6. 76. One could also argue, of course, that this is where the novel finally becomes engaging, and where readerly boredom—about which Hawthorne frets quite explicitly in the novel’s preface—is somewhat relieved. 77. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 466. 78. Maria Monk, Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk; or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed (Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 1836); Thomas Ford Caldicott, Hannah Corcoran: An Authentic Narrative of Her Conversion from Romanism, Her Abduction from Charlestown, and the Treatment She Received During her Absence (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1853). 79. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 411–13.

172

ENDNOTES

80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 387–88. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 388. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 445–46, 446. Carton, The Marble Faun, 95. Nancy Bentley, “Slaves and Fauns: Hawthorne and the Uses of Primitivism,” ELH 57, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 901–37, 934. 85. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 461. 86. Bentley, “Slaves and Fauns,” 931. 87. “Rachel,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 687.

Chapter 3 1. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun [1860] (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 342. Similarly, when visiting Donatello’s estate, Kenyon finds himself dissatisfied with the undeniable beauty of Italian sunsets. “The sky was soft and bright,” we’re told, “but not so gorgeous as Kenyon had seen it a thousand times, in America; for there the western sky is wont to be set aflame with breadths and depths of color with which poets seek in vain to dye their verses, and which painters never dare to copy.” See Marble Faun, 266. 2. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 461. 3. Bruce Robbins, “Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, eds. Pheng Cheah and Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 4. 4. Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses” [1850], in The Writings of Herman Melville: The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, ed. Harrison Mayford (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1987), 239–53. 5. Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 245–8. 6. Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 248. 7. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 56. 8. Anonymous, “Nationality in Literature,” The United States Magazine and Democratic Review 20 (March 1847): 264–72, 271. 9. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 429, 430. 10. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 21. 11. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 2. 12. Amanda Anderson, “The Cultivation of Partiality: George Eliot and the Jewish Question,” in The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment, ed. Anderson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 127. In a discussion of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), Catherine Gallagher puts it thus: “In ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!,’ the last of the Theophrastus Such essays, Eliot sums up . . . the word ‘alienism.’ Alienism is a spiritual disease that, she tells us, is sometimes euphemistically called ‘cosmopolitanism.’ Jews are particularly prone to it because, having no homeland of their own, they are often forced to live in the medium of abstract universalism created by international finance.” Catherine Gallagher, “George

ENDNOTES

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

173

Eliot and Daniel Deronda: The Prostitute and the Jewish Question,” in Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 56. Horatio Nelson, “The Crown Jewels. A Tale of London and Paris,” New York Ledger 13, no. 36–45 (November 1857–January 1858). Nelson, The Crown Jewels, November 28, 1857. Nelson, The Crown Jewels, December 26, 1857. Nelson, The Crown Jewels, November 28, 1857. Nelson, The Crown Jewels, December 26, 1857. Cathy Gelbin and Sander Gilman, Cosmopolitanism and the Jews (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 60. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question” [1843], in The Marx–Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 59. John Brougham, The Lottery of Life [1868] (London: French’s Acting Edition, 1875). Brougham, Lottery, 62. Brougham, Lottery, 2, 7. This is also why, when he’s foiled at play’s end, Solomons’ response reflects the Jew’s stereotypically singular focus on gain and accumulation. “All—all that I have schemed and plotted—wasted life, and devoted energy to make secure, vanishing from my grasp like the grapes of Tantalus.” See Brougham, Lottery, 59. Zachary Turpin, “Introduction,” in Walt Whitman, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: An Auto-Biography [1852], ed. Turpin (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017), vii–xxii. Walt Whitman, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: An Auto-Biography; A Story of New York at the Present Time in which the Reader Will Find Some Familiar Characters [1852], ed. Zachary Turpin (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017), 93. Whitman, Jack Engle, 55. Whitman, Jack Engle, 90. Whitman, Jack Engle, 17, 18. Thomas Augst, The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 62. Whitman, Jack Engle, 194, 79. Whitman, Jack Engle, 24. Whitman, Jack Engle, 26. Whitman, Jack Engle, 22. Whitman, Jack Engle, 74, 73. Ivy Wilson, “Looking with a Queer Smile: Walt Whitman’s Gaze and Black America,” in Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet, ed. Wilson, vii–xix (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), ix. Whitman, Jack Engle, 68. Whitman, Jack Engle, 70. Whitman, Jack Engle, 82. Whitman, Jack Engle, 75. Walt Whitman, Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate [1842], eds. Christopher Castiglia and Glenn Hendler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 82.

174

ENDNOTES

40. Whitman, Jack Engle, 83. 41. Whitman, Jack Engle, 156. 42. Amina Gautier, “The ‘Creole’ Episode: Slavery and Temperance in Franklin Evans,” in Whitman Noir, ed. Ivy Wilson, 32–53 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 41. 43. Whitman, Jack Engle, 72, 72–3. 44. Whitman, Jack Engle, 73. 45. Whitman, Jack Engle, 93. 46. Whitman, Jack Engle, 144. 47. Sharon Oster, “The Shop of Curiosities: Henry James, ‘The Jew,’ and the Production of Value,” ELH 75, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 963–92, 983. For a similar discussion, one that also focuses on James, see Sara Blair, “Henry James, Jack the Ripper, and the Cosmopolitan Jew: Staging Authorship in The Tragic Muse,” ELH 63, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 489–512. 48. Theodore Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme [1861], ed. Christopher Looby (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 13. 49. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 17. 50. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 22, 29. 51. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter [1850] (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 43. 52. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 29, 25, 23, 25–6. 53. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 19. 54. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 29, 51. 55. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 14, 15. 56. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 14. 57. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1898), 107. “But all these companionships were wholly secondary to one which was for me most memorable, and brought joy for a few years and sorrow for many. . . . This was William Hurlbert (originally Hurlbut), afterward the hero of successive novels—Kingsley’s ‘Two Years Ago,’ Winthrop’s ‘Cecil Dreeme,’ and my own ‘Malbone.’ ” Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays, 107. 58. Eugene Benson, “New York Journalists: W. H. Hurlbert,” Galaxy 7 (January 1869): 31, 33. Cited in Axel Nissen, Manly Love: Romantic Friendship in American Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 204. Hurlbert’s opposition to abolition may be explained at least in part by the fact that his family was from Virginia and owned slaves even after they moved North. 59. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 108. 60. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 39. 61. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 109. 62. Christopher Looby, “Introduction: Cecil Dreeme and the Misfortune of Sexuality,” in Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme [1861], ed. Looby, vii–xxii (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), xviii. 63. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 43, 44, 45. 64. Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays, 107. 65. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 89, 50. 66. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 61, 100.

ENDNOTES

175

67. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 119–20. 68. Here a comment from Zygmunt Bauman about the role of the Jew as a key figure of projection is also useful: “One may say that the Jews served as the waste-yard onto which all the ambivalence squeezed out of the universe could be dumped, so that the self-identity of the Christian world could be of one block and at peace with itself.” Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 213. 69. Looby, “Introduction,” xi. 70. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 136, 190, 163. 71. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 134. Nissen puts it thus: “Byng is working hard at falling in love with Emma Denman, but the desired result is not forthcoming.” See Manly Love, 81. 72. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 163, 14. 73. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 39. 74. George Templeton Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, vol. 3, eds. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 236. 75. Jonathan Freedman, “Angels, Monsters, and Jews: Intersections of Queer and Jewish Identity in Kushner’s Angels in America,” PMLA 113, no. 1 (January 1998): 90–102, 95. 76. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The English Notebooks [1853–58] (New York: Russell & Russell, 1941), 321. 77. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 106. 78. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 186. 79. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 68, 146. 80. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 147. 81. Looby, “Introduction,” xx–xxi. 82. As Marilyn Reizbaum puts it in a discussion of James Joyce’s deployment of the Jew as a stand-in for Irishness in Ulysses (1920): “The surprise of the Jew is that s/he is always the proxy relation.” Reizbaum, “Urban Legends,” Éire-Ireland 45, no. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 242–65, 249. 83. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 25. 84. Heather Nathans, Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans: Performing Jewish Identity on the Antebellum American Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 56, 57, 59. 85. Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Horowitz, The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 79. 86. “Gallery of Rascalities and Peculiarities–No. 6,” The Sunday Flash, October 17, 1941, 1. 87. Nathans, Hideous Characters, 223. 88. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 108. 89. James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, 96– 116 (New York: Routledge, 1992), 108. 90. Towner’s description of his relationship with Densdeth suggests both that he has given over to Densdeth in ways that Byng has resisted, and that the result is another version

176

91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

ENDNOTES of homosexual panic. “The first time he saw me,” he says, “he laid his finger on the bad spot in my nature, and it itched to spread. I’ve been his slave, soul and body, from that moment.” Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 179. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 197. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 67. Looby, “Introduction,” xii. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 199. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 195.

Chapter 4 1. As Fiedler puts it, “[E]xcept as the threatening guardians of sloe-eyed ambiguous beauties, male Jewish characters seldom make more than peripheral appearances in early American fiction. There are neither Riahs nor Fagins.” Leslie Fiedler, The Jew in the American Novel (New York: Herzl Institute Pamphlet, 1959), 7. 2. Oliver Twist first appeared in America as a serial in the Museum of Foreign Literature and in the American edition of Bentley’s Miscellany. The book appeared in America in 1839. 3. George Thompson, Venus in Boston; A Romance of City Life [1849], in Venus in Boston and Other Tales of Nineteenth-Century Life, ed. David Reynolds (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 81. 4. A. J. H. (Augustine Joseph Hickey) Duganne, The Tenant-House; or, Embers from Poverty’s Hearthstone (New York: R. M. Dewitt, 1857), 392. 5. Old Haun, the Pawnbroker; or, The Orphan’s Legacy. A Tale of New York, Founded on Facts (New York: Livermore and Rudd, 1857). 6. Old Haun, 203. 7. The Life, Confession and Execution of the Jew and Jewess (Baltimore: A. R. Orton, 1856). 8. Life, Confession and Execution, 30. 9. Life, Confession and Execution, 47. 10. Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: G. P. Putman’s Sons, 1892), 69. 11. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America [1835], vol. 1, eds. Francis Bowen and Phillips Bradley (New York: Vintage Classics, 1990), 50–1. 12. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables [1851] (New York: Penguin Classics, 1986), 185. Note that in the short story he writes and which he reads to Phoebe, Holgrave has Matthew Maule voice similar sentiments. “And keep you the House of the Seven Gables. It is too dear bought an inheritance,” he says to Gervayse Pyncheon. Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, 207. 13. Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, 184. 14. Emerson Bennett, The Artist’s Bride; or, The Pawnbroker’s Heir (New York: Garrett, Dick, & Fitzgerald, 1856), 88. 15. Old Haun, 120. 16. Old Haun, 123–4. 17. Bennett, The Artist’s Bride, 190.

ENDNOTES

177

18. Thus, too, in The Life, Confession and Execution of the Jew and Jewess, the dying father laments his wife’s death and his subsequent struggles to care for his children. “Everywhere I went, the spirit of Alice seemed to follow. For five years, I have not enjoyed an hour’s rest. At length, poor and almost starving, I reached the city of New York,” 25. 19. Joseph Fichtelberg, Critical Fictions: Sentiment and the American Market, 1780–1870 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003). 20. Fichtelberg, Critical Fictions, 202–3. 21. Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 54. 22. Old Haun, 14. 23. Old Haun, 20, 60, 87. “[T]he bank is closed, and the money is not current, that’s what’s ailin’ wid the money,” a grocer says when Anna attempts to spend the bill. Old Haun, 31. 24. Old Haun, 39. In Oliver Twist, the plotline involving a locket which belonged to Oliver’s mother begins midway through the novel. This is when the character Old Sally lies dying in the workhouse where Oliver once resided and tells Mrs. Corney about the time she took a locket from Oliver’s mother, Agnes Fleming. “She charged me to keep it safe,” Sally says guiltily, “and trusted me as the only woman about her.” Shortly thereafter, Mrs. Corney (now the married Mrs. Beedle) tells Oliver’s half-brother, Monks, that she found a pawnbroker’s receipt clutched in Sally’s dead hand, and that upon turning it in, she found the locket, inside of which were two locks of hair along with a wedding band. “It has the word ‘Agnes’ engraved on the inside,” she tells Monks about the ring. “There is a blank left for the surname, and then follows the date, which is within a year before the child was born.” This is valuable information for Monks, whose real name is Edward Leeford and whose goal is to hide proof that Oliver is actually the illegitimate son of Agnes and his wealthy father, Edwin Leeford, and thus his half-brother. With this information concealed, Monks will be Edwin Leeford’s sole heir. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist [1838] (New York: Penguin Classics, 2002), 196, 313. 25. Or as he puts it to Haun later on, “If Leonard believed them all to be dead he’d give it up and be quiet; and then I, being his cousin, and the only living relative that he would have, he’d just make me his heir, and then I’d come in for the whole when he dies—which will be before a great while, for he cannot last long.” Old Haun, 109. 26. Old Haun, 63. 27. Old Haun, 16. 28. Old Haun, 103. In her study of the depiction of childhood in nineteenth-century America, Karen Sánchez-Eppler notes that by the 1850s, urbanization and industrialization had begun to erode older notions of community. Instead, they created settings in which “class difference was more visible and yet also more chaotic and insecure.” Anna seems to embody this insecurity, and the uncertainty and anxiety expressed by Mich and Mrs. Hervey about Anna’s class status reflects the unstable nature of this new world. Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 157. 29. Old Haun, 201, my emphasis. 30. Fichtelberg, Critical Fictions, 225.

178

ENDNOTES

31. John Brougham, Much Ado About a Merchant of Venice (New York: Samuel French and Son, 1868), 19. 32. James Maitland, The Lawyer’s Story; or, The Orphan’s Wrongs (New York: H. Long, 1853). 33. Maitland, The Lawyer’s Story, 160. 34. Old Haun, 34. 35. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 [1867], trans. Ben Fowkes, ed. Ernest Mandel (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 179. 36. John Treat Irving, Harry Harson; or, The Benevolent Bachelor (New York: Samuel Hueston, 1853). 37. Irving, Harry Harson, 7–8. 38. Irving, Harry Harson, 9. 39. Irving, Harry Harson, 55. 40. Irving, Harry Harson, 263. 41. A related dynamic is on display in an 1858 pamphlet novel entitled The Fireman’s Bride, or Beautiful Myria, the Mad Actress. Here the Jew Caleb Seigle steals a large sum of money from a man named Orson Blakey who has entrusted him to watch over it— indeed, Seigle attempts to murder Blakey, and abducts his children in the bargain. It turns out, though, that Seigle has a change of heart many years later. Indeed, he returns Blakey’s children and his money—he even makes Blakey his sole heir. But the scene is especially instructive for what it says about the Jew’s capacity for emotion. “[Seigle] had not laughed for years before, so serious had he grown in the accumulation of money,” we’re told. “All looked at once towards him,—he had fallen back in his chair ghastly pale. . . . He was dead. . . . In the excess of his repentant joy, he had burst a blood vessel.” Apparently, Seigle has broken the period’s rules about the emotional life of the American Fagin character, and the result is his immediate removal from the narrative. The Great Original and Entrancing Romance, The Fireman’s Bride, or Beautiful Myria, the Mad Actress (Philadelphia: M. A. Milliette, 1858), 52. 42. Old Haun, 118. 43. Old Haun, 24. 44. Old Haun, 205. 45. Old Haun, 110. 46. Old Haun, 285. 47. Old Haun, 231. 48. Old Haun, 268. 49. Old Haun, 262, 263. 50. Old Haun, 452–3. 51. Old Haun, 458–9. 52. Bennett, The Artist’s Bride, 14, 15. 53. Bennett, The Artist’s Bride, 46. 54. Bennett, The Artist’s Bride, 107. 55. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. (London, 1765– 69), vol. 1, 454–60, cited in Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 198.

ENDNOTES

179

56. Cited in Grossberg, Governing, 206. See McCormick and Wife vs. Cantrell, et al. Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Tennessee During the Years 1834–5, vol. 7, ed. George S. Yerger (Nashville: S. NYE & Co. State Printers, 1836), 623, 624. 57. Grossberg, Governing, 205. 58. Bennett, The Artist’s Bride, 272. 59. Bennett, The Artist’s Bride, 401. 60. Bennett, The Artist’s Bride, 88. 61. Bennett, The Artist’s Bride, 89. 62. Bennett, The Artist’s Bride, 78. 63. Bennett, The Artist’s Bride, 197. 64. Bennett, The Artist’s Bride, 31. 65. Bennett, The Artist’s Bride, 378. 66. Harriet Hamline Bigelow, The Curse Entailed (Boston: Wentworth and Company, 1857), 129. 67. Bennett, The Artist’s Bride, 373. 68. Bennett, The Artist’s Bride, 96, 401. 69. Bennett, The Artist’s Bride, 403. 70. Bennett, The Artist’s Bride, 407. 71. Bennett, The Artist’s Bride, 407. 72. A. J. H. Duganne, The Tenant-House; or, Embers from Poverty’s Hearthstone (New York: Robert M. De Witt, 1857). 73. Duganne, The Tenant-House, 14, 13. 74. Duganne, The Tenant-House, 180. 75. Duganne, The Tenant-House, 24, 133. 76. Duganne, The Tenant-House, 161. 77. Duganne, The Tenant-House, 171. 78. Duganne, The Tenant-House, 408. 79. Duganne, The Tenant-House, 160, 166. 80. Duganne, The Tenant-House, 402. 81. Duganne, The Tenant-House, 484. 82. Note too that Kolephat’s niece Rebecca ends up abandoning her plans to kill her uncle and steal his daughter’s inheritance. Instead, she embraces her role as caretaker to Kolephat’s newfound heiress. “Her passionate nature has been subdued,” we’re told. “[S]he kisses . . . the Hebrew’s daughter, when the child is sleeping, dropping tears upon her fair brow.” Duganne, Tenant-House, 488. 83. This confusion, or blurring, is also on display in Madeline Leslie’s 1867 Lost But Found; or, The Jewish Home (Leslie wrote under the pen name Aunt Hattie). Here, we move from the streets to the more protected and noticeably sentimental precincts of middleclass respectability—which is to say that, by the latter half of the 1860s, the figure of Fagin was beginning to move more easily between the genres of sensationalism and sentimentalism. Indeed, the America Fagin is protean enough that we see him divided into two characters. On the one hand, we have Jesse Seixas, who moves with his family into a small town in western New York. According to local gossip, Seixas has

180

84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

89. 90. 91.

ENDNOTES obtained the land next to his home “by unlawful means”—it had “belonged to children under age,” and “he had bribed their guardian into the bargain.” But this rumor about a Fagin/Monks-style appropriation of children’s inheritance is overshadowed by the more concrete information we receive about Seixas’s twin brother, Justin, who acts as the other half of the Fagin equation. As Mrs. Seixas explains to Isaac’s mother, Mrs. Duncan, some ways into the text, “Years ago, Jesse’s brother—they are twins,— committed a dreadful sin. It was not exactly stealing, and yet—it was worse. They were traveling together, he and [a] sick gentleman; the invalid died suddenly in the night, leaving all his concerns in the hands of Justin. The temptation was too much for him; he was not rich, nor good like his brother; and he determined to forge a will and keep all the dead man’s money.” (83–4). Here, then, we’re presented with “good/sentimental” and “bad/anti-sentimental” versions of the Fagin character. Aunt Hattie (Madeline Leslie), Lost But Found; or, The Jewish Home (Boston: Graves and Young, 1867), 21, 83–4. Fichtelberg, Critical Fictions, 230. Duganne, The Tenant-House, 23, 39, 41. Duganne, The Tenant-House, 51, 52. Duganne, The Tenant-House, 223. The early description we receive of the Widow Marvin and her daughter Emily provides a related example. The Widow is poor, but she’s known throughout the tenement houses for her cleanliness and industry, and for the way she has passed these qualities on to her daughter. “Such habits produced their natural result, in imparting neatness and taste to her child,” we’re told. “[A]nd, therefore, much to the wonder of improvident and reckless neighbors, Emily Marvin . . . grew up totally unlike the squalid children on every floor of the Barracks.” Here there are intimations of previous class status—rumors that the Widow has “seen better days,” and that she “had been known to ‘play tunes’ on the piano-forte, in some remote period, albeit her fingers were now stiff with hard toil.” But these rumors are never verified. Instead, the Widow becomes consumptive and dies a sentimental death, with Emily “weeping, at her mother’s bedside.” In what ensues, Emily and the above-described Fanny are taken in by a generous seamstress named Margaret, who acts as a female version of the kindly Mr. Granby. Duganne, Tenant-House, 60, 62. Duganne, The Tenant-House, 68. Duganne, The Tenant-House, 411. Duganne, The Tenant-House, 489.

Conclusion 1. Eliza Ann Dupuy, The Planter’s Daughter (New York: W. P. Fetridge and Company, 1857), 93; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun [1860] (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 48; Theodore Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme [1861] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 45, 63; Edward Clay, How to Make the Mare/Mayor Go (New York, 1838); Emerson Bennett, The Artist’s Bride (New York: Garrett, Dick, & Fitzgerald, 1856), 15.

ENDNOTES

181

2. As he puts it, “For the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientist the ‘blackness’ of the Jew was not only a mark of racial inferiority, but also an indicator of the diseased nature of the Jew.” Gilman also suggests we can hear a key early stage of the demonization of the Jews’ voice in the erasure of Christ’s Jewish voice in the New Testament. Describing the difference between the translations provided in the early Gospels of Matthew and Mark (“My God, My God, why has thou forsaken me?” [27:46; 15:34]) and those in Luke and John (“Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” [23:46] and “It is finished” [19:30], he argues as follows: “As Christian readers who read through the Gospels in their canonical order, we thus abandon the image of Christ as one who sounds Jewish and replace him with the image of one who sounds like ourselves (whether we speak Greek, Latin, German, or English). He becomes a Christian. Thus the existence of a ‘hidden’ language which would mark Christ as a ‘real’ Jew, i.e., as a non-Greek-speaking Jew and therefore of lower status, was impossible.” See Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New Jersey: Routledge University Press, 1991), 172, 16. 3. Gilman, The Jew’s Body, 171. 4. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 238–9. 5. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) 61–82. 6. Bauman, Modernity, 61. 7. Bauman, Modernity, 73, emphasis original. 8. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribner, 1925). 9. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 88, 16. 10. Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Son, 1920). 11. Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 41. 12. These figures come from Claudia Goldin and Frank D. Lewis, “The Economic Cost of the American Civil War: Estimates and Implications,” Journal of Economic History 35, no. 2 (1975): 299–326. 13. John Bull and the American Loan. The New-York Illustrated News. August 26, 1861, 256. 14. Bertram Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War [1951] (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 2001). 15. War of the Rebellion . . . Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies [1880] (Pasadena: Historical Times, 1985), I XVII, Pt. II, pp. 421–2. Cited in Korn, American Jewry, 169. 16. Henry S. Foote, Southern Historical Society Papers [1861–65] (New York: Kraus Reprint Company, 1977), IX, p. 122. Cited in Korn, American Jewry, 211. Similarly, “Parson” William Gannaway Brownlow, the infamous editor, publisher, politician, and general propagandist from Tennessee, sided with Grant’s General Order by claiming in a newspaper editorial that “[i]t is useless to disguise the fact that nineteen out of every twenty cases brought to light, of all this smuggling, turns out to be the work of certain circumcised Hebrews.” Cincinnati Daily Times (January 21, 1863), 2. Cited in Korn, American Jewry, 199. In 1864, the Chicago Tribune, building on the

182

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

ENDNOTES false supposition that the Rothschilds were proslavery and thus backing the Confederacy, posed the following question: “Will we have a dishonorable peace in order to enrich . . . the Rothschilds, and the whole tribe of Jews?” (September 10, 1864). Cited in Korn, American Jewry, 191. The Height of Madness, Budget of Fun, June 1864, 1. Gary L. Bunker and John Appel, “‘Shoddy,’ Anti-Semitism, and the Civil War,” American Jewish History 82, no. 1 (1994): 43–71. John C. Calhoun, The Papers of John C. Calhoun (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1983), 22: 9. Leonard Rogoff, “Is the Jew White? The Racial Place of the Southern Jew,” American Jewish History 85, no. 3 (September 1997): 195–230, 201. Matthew Frye Jacobson, “Looking Jewish, Seeing Jews,” in Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, 2000, eds. Les Back and John Solomos, 238–52 (London: Routledge University Press, 2009), 242. Michael O’Malley, “Specie and Species: Race and the Money Question in NineteenthCentury America,” American Historical Review 99, no. 2 (April 1994): 369–95. O’Malley, “Specie and Species,” 373. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 38–9. Dion Boucicault, After Dark [1868] (New York: De Witt Publishing House, n.d.), 20. Boucicault, After Dark, 7, 33. Nicholas Daly, “Blood on the Tracks: Sensation Drama, the Railway, and the Dark Face of Modernity,” Victorian Studies 42, no. 1 (Fall 1998): 47–76, 65–6. Robert Knox, The Races of Men: A Fragment (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1850), 131, 133, 134. Josiah Clark Nott, The Physical History of the Jewish Race (Charleston: Steam-Power Press of Walker & James, 1850), 23. Josiah Clark Nott and Samuel George Morton, Types of Mankind (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, & Co., 1854), 116. Nott offered a similar parallel in examining the carving of a stone head from what is now Northern Iraq. “And still, after 2500 years, so indelible is the type, every resident of Mobile will recognize, in this Chaldean effigy, the facsimile portrait of one of their city’s most prominent citizens, who is honored alike by the affection of his co-religionists, and the confidence of the community which has just elevated him to a seat in the National Councils.” Nott and Morton, Types of Mankind, 116–17. James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind (London: J. and A. Arch, 1813). Nott and Morton, Types of Mankind, 116–17. Nott is referencing Rev. Claudius Buchanan, Memoir of the Expediency of an Ecclesiastical Establishment for British India (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1805). See especially 117–18. Nott’s text suggests direction direct quotations from Buchanan’s memoir, but this is not the case. Gilman, The Jew’s Body, 174. Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 11–22; Jacobson, Whiteness, 39–68; Lewis R. Gordon, “An Afro-Jewish Critique of Jews Against Liberation,” Contending Modernities (March

ENDNOTES

35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57.

183

26, 2021), web: https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/theorizing-modernities/afrojewish-critique-liberation/. Goldstein suggests that a particularly Jewish form of Whiteness provided Jews the opportunity to both belong to mainstream American culture, yet also retain their “emotional connection to Jewish peoplehood.” Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 3. Hence, he says, claims such as the following in 1859 by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, perhaps the most influential rabbi in antebellum America: “We are Jews in the synagogue and Americans everywhere.” Cited in Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 12. Jacobson, “Looking Jewish,” 243. Gordon, “Afro-Jewish.” Relatedly, Gordon also argues as follows: “‘Antisemitism’ is thus, for many white Jews, an attractive formulation of hatred of Jews since it disassociates Jews from the dreaded designation of being a race, because, as nearly anyone who has experienced racism would admit—like ‘gender’ with regard to ‘feminine’—‘race’ is a term that for the most part signifies being of color.” Gordon, “Afro-Jewish.” Korn, American Jewry, 219. John Beauchamp Jones, Wild Southern Scenes (New York: Rudd & Carleton, 1859), 74. Jones, Wild Southern Scenes, 159. John Beauchamp Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1866), 78. Jones, Diary, 166 (October 9, 1862). This is one of numerous passages in which Jones is careful to identify people as either Jewish or possibly Jewish. See, for example, Jones’s entry in mid-May 1863: “Hon. Mr. Garnett asked and obtained permission for a Mr. Hurst (Jew?) to pass our lines, and bring Northern merchandise to Richmond for sale.” Jones, Diary, 304 (May 1, 1863). Jones, Diary, 221 (December 22, 1862). Jones, Diary, 88 (October 24, 1861). Jonathan Zatlin, “Scarcity and Resentment: Economic Sources of Xenophobia in the GDR, 1971–1989,” Central European History 40, no. 4 (2007): 683–720. Zatlin, “Scarcity and Resentment,” 684, 686. Jones, Diary, 28 (April 26, 1861). Mary Templin, Panic Fiction: Women and Antebellum Economic Crisis (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014). Samuel Otter, Philadelphia Stories: America’s Literature of Race and Freedom (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2010), 194. John Beauchamp Jones, The City Merchant; or, The Mysterious Failure (Philadelphia: Lippincott and Grambo, 1851), 66, 91. Jones, The City Merchant, 97–8. Jones, The City Merchant, 131. This is an anachronism, as Otter points out: see Philadelphia Stories, 196. The novel is set in 1836–37. Douglass didn’t escape from slavery in Maryland until 1838 and didn’t become a public figure until 1841. Jones, The City Merchant, 130. Jones, The City Merchant, 188, 189. Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme, 64. Jones, Wild Southern Scenes, 60, 60–1.

184

ENDNOTES

58. At a parallel moment, we also see prisoners caged by the Southern army. This time we see an abolitionist forced to read Walt Whitman’s poetry to Douglass, “an unmixed African!” Jones, Wild Southern Scenes, 85. 59. Jones, Wild Southern Scenes, 54. 60. Jones, The City Merchant, 161. 61. Jones, The City Merchant, 235. 62. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments [1947] (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 138.

Coda 1. Jonathan Greenblatt, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, quoted in Emma Green, “Why the Charlottesville Marchers Were Obsessed With Jews,” The Atlantic (August 15, 2017), web: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/ 08/nazis-racism-charlottesville/536928/. 2. Kathleen Belew and Ramón A. Gutiérrez, eds., A Field Guide to White Supremacy (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021). 3. Here, for example, is Fox News personality Tucker Carlson venting on this subject in 2021: Now, I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term replacement, if you suggest the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World. But they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening, actually. Let’s just say it. That’s true.

Tucker Carlson, Tucker Carlson Tonight, Fox News (April 12, 2021). See also the cartoons of Ben Garrison. 4. The Protocols emerged from Russia around 1903 and purported to be a factual set of protocols for an international Jewish conspiracy for world domination. In twentyfour chapters, or protocols, allegedly minutes from meetings of Jewish leaders, the text claims to depict the secret plans of Jews to rule the world by manipulating the economy, controlling the media, and causing religious conflict. 5. Carlson is especially adamant about Soros’s ill intent. See, for example, his recent claims while promoting a new documentary entitled Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization (2022). “Western civilization is his target,” Carlson says of Soros, this as part of a celebration of Hungary’s ethno-nationalist and openly antisemitic prime minister, Viktor Orbán. “[Soros’s] program for the past 15 years at least has been to make the societies he focuses on more dangerous, dirtier, less democratic, more disorganized, more at war with themselves, less cohesive—in other words, it’s a program of destruction aimed at the West.” Tucker Carlson, The Five, Fox News (January 25, 2022). It should be noted, however, that Carlson stops short of explicit mention of Jews or any other direct form of antisemitism. It’s therefore an open question as to whether or not Carlson is using Soros as a dog whistle for antisemites in his viewing audience. 6. Jonathan Sarna, “The Symbols of Antisemitism in the Capital Riot,” BrandeisNow (January 11, 2021), web: https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2021/january/anti-semitism-

ENDNOTES

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

185

capitol-riot-sarna.html; Jason Stanley, “Movie at the Ellipse: A Study in Fascist Propaganda,” Just Security (February 4, 2021), web: https://www.justsecurity.org/74504/ movie-at-the-ellipse-a-study-in-fascist-propaganda/; Talia Lavin, “QAnon, Blood Libel, and the Satanic Panic,” The New Republic (September 29, 2020), web: https:// newrepublic.com/article/159529/qanon-blood-libel-satanic-panic. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments [1947] (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 153. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” [1832], in Young Goodman Brown and Other Tales (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 37. Hawthorne, “Molineux,” 51. Hawthorne, “Molineux,” 54. Hawthorne, “Molineux,” 55, 41, 46, 47. See in particular Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New Jersey: Routledge University Press, 1991), Chapter 7, “The Jewish Nose: Are Jews White? Or, The History of the Nose Job,” 169–93; Matthew Frye Jacobson, “Looking Jewish, Seeing Jews,” in Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader [2000], eds. Les Back and John Solomos (London: Routledge University Press, 2009), 238–52. Jacobson puts it thus: “[V ]isible Jewishness in American culture between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries represented a complex process of social value become perception: social and political meanings attached to Jewishness generate a kind of physiognomical surveillance that renders Jewishness itself discernable as a particular pattern of physical traits (skin color, nose shape, hair color and texture, and the like),” 239. Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New Jersey: Routledge University Press, 1991), 181. Hawthorne, “Molineux,” 41, 51. George Templeton Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, vol. 1, eds. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 256; Emerson Bennett, The Artist’s Bride; or, The Pawnbroker’s Heir (New York: Garrett, Dick, & Fitzgerald, 1856), 52; Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” [1839], in The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings, ed. David Galloway (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 94; Walt Whitman, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: An AutoBiography; A Story of New York at the Present Time in which the Reader Will Find Some Familiar Characters [1852], ed. Zachary Turpin (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017), 22; Theodore Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme [1861] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 43. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The English Notebooks [1853–58] (New York: Russell & Russell, 1941), 321. Edward Clay, How to Make the Mare/Mayor Go (New York, 1838). The mysterious Jew of Hawthorne’s story is different than the “secret Jew” that emerged in Benjamin Disraeli’s fiction and then in the later fiction of Anthony Trollope and George Eliot. As Michael Ragussis explains, the secret Jew “subverts and eventually destroys the dominant culture in which he lives.” See Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 236. The Jew of Hawthorne’s story is instead the embodiment of political chaos. Hawthorne, “Molineux,” 53, 41, 42. Hawthorne, “Molineux,” 53, 52.

186

ENDNOTES

21. Hawthorne, “Molineux,” 42, 41, 46. 22. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess [1976] (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 17. 23. See especially Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978) and The Office of the Scarlet Letter (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). Analysis of Hawthorne’s historical fiction has evolved in the wake of Bercovitch’s influential study. Whereas in Bercovitch’s analysis, political discord and dissent come from within an already established liberal order, and thus reflect continuity and fulfillment, critics from the 1990s onward complicate this interpretation and read Hawthorne, and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” in particular, as challenging any uncomplicated notion of revolution. See for example Peter Bellis, who suggests that “Molineux” offers “initiation and transition,” but also “a nightmare image of the Revolution as parricidal disorder,” one that suggests “a Parisian mob bringing a victim to a guillotine.” Peter Bellis, “Representing Dissent: Hawthorne and the Drama of Revolt,” ESQ 41, no. 2 (1995): 97–119, 107. See also Paul Downes, “Democratic Terror in ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux’ and ‘The Man of the Crowd,’ ” Poe Studies 37 (2004): 31–5; and Joseph Alkana, “Disorderly History in ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux,’ ” ESQ 53, no. 1 (2007): 1–30. 24. Nancy Armstrong, “Hawthorne on the Paradox of Popular Sovereignty,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 47, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 24–42, 35, 36. 25. Downes, “Democratic Terror,” 31. 26. Hawthorne, “Molineux,” 46. 27. Hawthorne, “Molineux,” 254, 248. 28. Quoted in Glen Thrush and Maggie Haberman, “Trump Gives White Supremacists an Unequivocal Boost,” New York Times (August 15, 2017), web: https:// www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/us/politics/trump-charlottesville-white-nationalists. html. David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, tweeted the following shortly after Trump spoke the same day: “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth.” @DrDavidDuke, Twitter (August 15, 2017). 29. See “Trump Says QAnon Conspiracists ‘Love Our Country,’ ” PBS NewsHour (August 19, 2020), web: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-trumpholds-white-house-news-conference-4. 30. Consider, for example, the various tweets cited by Jeffrey Goldberg in a 2016 essay in The Atlantic (he provides images of his face photoshopped onto a picture of a prisoner in a concentration camp, etc.). Jeffrey Goldberg, “A Brief Introduction to ProHolocaust Twitter,” The Atlantic (June 8, 2016). Or there is the November 22, 2019, broadcast by Florida pastor and radio host Rick Wiles on the (since banned) TruNews channel on YouTube, in which he stated during the Trump impeachment hearings that “this impeach Trump movement is a Jew coup. The American people better wake up to it really fast.” One could cite dozens of similar examples. 31. Talia Lavin, “QAnon, Blood Libel, and the Satanic Panic,” The New Republic (September 29, 2020), web: https://newrepublic.com/article/159529/qanon-bloodlibel-satanic-panic.

References Ahlenius, Jason. “Sensation’s Imperial Narratives: Affect in the United States’ Democracy of Print, 1846–1848.” Western American Literature 50, no. 4 (Winter 2016): 258–315, doi: 10.1353/wal.2016.0012. Alkana, Joseph. “Disorderly History in ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux.’ ” ESQ 53, no. 1 (2007): 1–30, doi: 10.1353/esq.2007.0000. Altschuler, Sari and Aaron M. Tobiason. “Playbill for George Lippard’s The Quaker City.” PMLA 129, no. 2 (March 2014): 267–73, doi: 10.1632/pmla.2014.129.2.267. Anderson, Amanda, “The Cultivation of Partiality: George Eliot and the Jewish Question.” In The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation, edited by Anderson, 119–46. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Anonymous. Confessions and Experience of a Novel Reader. Chicago: WM Stacey, 1855. Anonymous. “Nationality in Literature.” The United States Magaize Magazine and Democratic Review 20 (March 1847): 264–72. Anonymous. The Night Watch; or, Social Life in the South. Cincinnati: Moore, Wilstach, Keys, & Co., 1856. Anonymous. Startling Disclosures! Mysteries Solved! or, The History of Esther Livingstone, and the Dark Career of Henry Baldwin. Philadelphia: E. E. Barclay, 1853. Anthony, David. “Fantasies of Conversion: The Sensational Jewess in Poe and Hawthorne’s America.” American Literary History 26, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 431–61, doi: 10.1093/alh/aju038. Anthony, David. Paper Money Men: Commerce, Manhood, and the Sensational Public Sphere in Antebellum America. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009. Armstrong, Nancy. “Hawthorne on the Paradox of Popular Sovereignty.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 47, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 24–42. Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism. 1869. Edited by William S. Knickerbocker. New York: MacMillan, 1925. Augst, Thomas. The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. B. T. The Beautiful Jewess, Rachel Mendoza. Philadelphia: E. E. Barclay, 1853. Badeau, Adam. The Vagabond. New York: Rudd & Carleton, 1859. Baptist, Edward. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2014. Baron, Salo. “The Economic Views of Maimonides.” In Essays on Maimonides, edited by Salo Baron, 170–7. New York: Columbia University Press, 1941. Bauman, Zygmunt. Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995. Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Vintage Books, 2014. Beckert, Sven and Seth Rockman, editors. Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Beckett, S. B. “The Jewess of Cairo.” Ladies’ Companion 14–15 (November 1840–April 1841): 270–81. Belew, Kathleen and Ramón A. Gutiérrez, editors. A Field Guide to White Supremacy. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021.

188

REFERENCES

Bellis, Peter. “Representing Dissent: Hawthorne and the Drama of Revolt.” ESQ 41, no. 2 (1995): 97–119. Bennett, Emerson. The Artist’s Bride; or, The Pawnbroker’s Heir. New York: Garrett, Dick, & Fitzgerald, 1856. Benson, Eugene. “New York Journalists: W. H. Hulbert.” Galaxy 7 (January 1869): 31, 33. Bentley, Nancy. “Slaves and Fauns: Hawthorne and the Uses of Primitivism.” ELH 57, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 901–37, doi: 10.2307/2873090. Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Office of the Scarlet Letter. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Bernstein, Joseph. “The Surprisingly Mainstream History of the Internet’s Favorite Anti-Semitic Image.” BuzzFeed News, February 5, 2015. Bigelow, Harriet Hamline. The Curse Entailed. Boston: Wentworth and Company, 1857. Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England. 4 vols. London, 1765–69. Blair, Sara. “Henry James, Jack the Ripper, and the Cosmopolitan Jew: Staging Authorship in The Tragic Muse.” ELH 63, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 489–512. Bold, Christine. “Malaeska’s Revenge; or, The Dime Novel Tradition in Popular Fiction.” In Wanted Dead or Alive: The American West in Popular Culture, edited by Richard Aquila, 21–42. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Boucicault, Dion. After Dark: A Drama of London Life in 1868. 1868. New York: De Witt Publishing House, n.d. Brodhead, Richard. The School of Hawthorne. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Brodkin, Karen. How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. 1976. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Brougham, John. The Lottery of Life. 1868. London: French’s Acting Edition, 1875. Brougham, John. Much Ado About a Merchant of Venice. New York: Samuel French and Son, 1868. Brownlow, William Gannaway. “Editorial.” Cincinnati Daily Times, January 21, 1863, 2. Brownstein, Rachel M. Tragic Muse: Rachel of the Comédie-Française. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Buchanan, Claudius. Memoir of the Expediency of an Ecclesiastical Establishment for British India. London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1805. Bunker, Gary L. and John Appel. “‘Shoddy,’ Anti-Semitism, and the Civil War.” American Jewish History 82, no. 1 (1994): 43–71. Buntline, Ned. Miriam; or, the Jew’s Daughter. A Tale of City Life. New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, n.d. [early 1860s?]. Buntline, Ned. Morgan; or, The Knight of the Black Flag: A Strange Story of By-Gone Times. New York: Robert M. De Witt, 1861. Buntline, Ned. Rose Seymour; or, The Ballet Girl’s Revenge: A Tale of the New York Drama. New York: Hilton & Co., 1865. Byrne, Frank J. Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820–1865. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006. C—, Caroline. “Myrrah of Tangiers.” Graham’s American Monthly Magazine of Literature, Art, and Fashion 36, no. 2 (February 1850): 125–32. Caddo Gazette and De-Soto Intelligencer, February 11, 1846. Caldicott, Thomas Ford. Hannah Corcoran: An Authentic Narrative of Her Conversion from Romanism, Her Abduction from Charlestown, and the Treatment She Received During her Absence. Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1853.

REFERENCES

189

Calhoun, John C. The Papers of John C. Calhoun. 1959. Edited by Robert Lee Meriwether, William Edwin Hemphill, and Clyde Norman Wilson. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1983. Carlson, Tucker. The Five. Fox News, January 25, 2022. Carlson, Tucker. Tucker Carlson Tonight. Fox News, April 12, 2021. Carton, Evan. The Marble Faun: Hawthorne’s Transformations. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992. Chapman, Mary and Glenn Hendler, editors. Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. “Cheap Literature.” Northwestern Review and Commercial and Real Estate Reporter (September 1857): 33–34. “Cheap Reading.” National Democratic Review (May 1856): 418–20. Cheyette, Bryan. Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Clay, Edward. How to Make the Mare/Mayor Go. New York, 1838. Clifford, James. “Traveling Cultures.” In Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, 96–116. New York: Routledge, 1992. “Closing Scene of ‘The Jewess.’ ” Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion 4, no. 15 (April 9, 1853): 225. Cohen, Patricia Cline, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Crews, Frederick. The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. Curtis, Julia. “Philadelphia in an Uproar: The Monks of Monk Hall, 1844.” Theatre History Studies 5 (January 1985): 41–47. D’A lessandro, Michael. “George Lippard’s ‘Theatre of Hell’: Apocalyptic Melodrama and Working-Class Spectatorship in the Quaker City.” J19 5, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 205–37, doi: 10.1353/jnc.2017.0013. Daly, Augustin. Leah, the Forsaken. New York: Samuel French, 1862. Daly, Nicholas. “Blood on the Tracks: Sensation Drama, the Railway, and the Dark Face of Modernity.” Victorian Studies 42, no. 1 (Fall 1998): 47–76. DeBow, James. “Importance of an Industrial Revolution in the South.” DeBow’s Review 12, no. 5 (May 1852): 554–62. Denning, Michael. Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America. London: Verso Press, 1987. Denslow, Van Buren. Owned and Disowned; or, The Chattel Child: A Tale of Southern Life. 1857. New York: H. Dayton, 1860. Denslow, Van Buren. Principles of Economic Philosophy of Society, Government, and Industry. New York: Cassell & Co., 1888. Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. 1838. New York: Penguin Classics, 2002. Dohm, Christian Wilhelm von. Concerning the Amelioration of the Civil Status of the Jews. Berlin: 1781. Downey, Tom. Planting a Capitalist South: Masters, Merchants, and Manufacturers in the Southern Interior, 1790–1860. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2006. Downes, Paul. “Democratic Terror in ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux’ and ‘The Man of the Crowd.’ ” Poe Studies 37 (2004): 31–5, doi: 10.1111/j.1754-6095.2004.tb00161.x. @DrDavidDuke. “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth.” Twitter (August 15, 2017). Duganne, A. J. H. (Augustine Joseph Hickey). The Tenant-House; or, Embers from Poverty’s Hearthstone. New York: R. M. DeWitt, 1857.

190

REFERENCES

Dupuy, Eliza Ann The Planter’s Daughter: A Tale of Louisiana. New York: W. P. Fetridge & Company, 1857. The Dying Jewess. New York: Mahlon Day & Co., prob. 1839–45. “Editor’s Book Table.” Godey’s Lady’s Book, January 1849. “Editor’s Table.” Graham’s American Monthly Magazine of Literature 47, no. 4 (October 1855): 360–8. “Editor’s Table.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (November 1859): 838–40. Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! 1936. New York: Vintage International, 1990. Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. 1929. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1987. Fichtelberg, Joseph. Critical Fictions: Sentiment and the American Market, 1780–1870. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. Fiedler, Leslie. The Jew in the American Novel. New York: Herzl Institute Pamphlet, 1959. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Charles Scribner, 1925. Foote, Henry. Southern Historical Society Papers, Vol. 11. 1861–65. Edited by R. A. Brock. New York: Kraus Reprint Company, 1977. Freedman, Jonathan. “Angels, Monsters, and Jews: Intersections of Queer and Jewish Identity in Kushner’s Angels in America.” PMLA 113, no. 1 (January 1998): 90–102, doi: 10.2307/ 463411. Freedman, Jonathan. The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary AngloAmerica. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Gallagher, Catherine. “George Eliot and Daniel Deronda: The Prostitute and the Jewish Question.” In Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, edited by Ruth Bernard Yeazell, 39–62. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. “Gallery of Rascalities and Notorieties—No. 6.” The Sunday Flash, October 17, 1841. Gardner, Jared. Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787–1845. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Gelbin, Cathy and Sander Gilman. Cosmopolitanism and the Jews. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Genovese, Eugene D. The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South. New York: Pantheon Book, 1965. Gerber, David A. “Cutting Out Shylock: Elite Anti-Semitism and the Quest for Moral Order in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Market Place.” The Journal of American History 69, no. 3 (December 1982): 615–37, doi: 10.2307/1903140. Gilman, Sander. The Jew’s Body. New Jersey: Routledge University Press, 1991. Gilman, Sander. “Sibling Incest, Madness, and the ‘Jews.’ ” Jewish Social Studies 4, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 157–79. Gilmore, Paul. The Genuine Article: Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Goldberg, Jeffrey. “A Brief Introduction to Pro-Holocaust Twitter.” The Atlantic (June 8, 2016). Goldin, Claudia and Frank D. Lewis. “The Economic Cost of the American Civil War: Estimates and Implications.” Journal of Economic History 35, no. 2 (June 1975): 299–326. Goldstein, Eric L. The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Gordon, Lewis R. “An Afro-Jewish Critique of Jews against Liberation.” Contending Modernities (March 26, 2021), web: https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/theorizing-modernities/afrojewish-critique-liberation/. “Gossip about Rachel.” Harper’s Weekly 2, no. 86 (August 21, 1858): 542. “The Great Labor Question from a Southern Point of View.” Harper’s Weekly, July 29, 1865. The Great Original and Entrancing Romance, The Fireman’s Bride, or Beautiful Myria, the Mad Actress. Philadelphia: M. A. Milliette, 1858.

REFERENCES

191

Green, Emma. “Why the Charlottesville Marchers Were Obsessed with Jews.” The Atlantic (August 15, 2017), web: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/nazis-racismcharlottesville/536928/. Greenwald, Elissa. “Hawthorne and Judaism: Otherness and Identity in The Marble Faun.” Studies in the Novel 23, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 128–38. Greeson, Jennifer Rae. Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. Greeson, Jennifer Rae. “The ‘Mysteries and Miseries’ of North Carolina: New York City, Urban Gothic Fiction, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” American Literature 73, no. 2 (June 2001): 277–309. Gregg, William. “Domestic Industry: Manufactures at the South.” DeBow’s Review 8, no. 2 (February 1850): 134–45. Grégorie, the Abbe. Essays on the Physical, Moral, and Political Improvement of the Jews. London: J. Stock, 1791. Greven, David. “Hawthorne and the Gender of Jewishness: Anti-Semitism, Aesthetics, and Sexual Politics in The Marble Faun.” Journal of American Culture 35, no. 2 (May 2012): 135–52, doi: 10.1111/j.1542-734X.2012.00803.x. Grossberg, Michael. Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. Hall, Spencer. “Beatrice Cenci: Symbol and Vision in The Marble Faun.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25, no. 1 (June 1970): 85–95, doi: 10.2307/2933137. Harap, Louis. The Image of the Jew in American Literature: From Early Republic to Mass Immigration. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.” 1832. In Young Goodman Brown and Other Tales, edited by Brian Harding, 37–55. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The English Notebooks. 1853–58. Edited by Randall Stewart. New York: Russell and Russell, 1941. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of the Seven Gables. 1851. New York: Penguin Classics, 1986. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Marble Faun: or, The Romance of Monte Beni. 1860. New York: Penguin Books, 1990. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Our Old Home. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. 1850. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003. The Height of Madness. Budget of Fun (June 1864), 1. Helper, Hinton Rowan. The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It. New York: Burdick Brothers, 1857. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. Cheerful Yesterdays. Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1898. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. 1947. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Hundley, Daniel Robinson. Social Relations in Our Southern States. New York: Henry B. Pierce, 1860. Hutner, Gordon. Secrets and Sympathy: Forms of Disclosure in Hawthorne’s Novels. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988. Irving, John Treat. Harry Harson; or, The Benevolent Bachelor. New York: Samuel Hueston, 1853. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. “Looking Jewish, Seeing Jews.” In Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader. 2000. Edited by Les Back and John Solomos, 238–52. London: Routledge University Press, 2009. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.

192

REFERENCES

Jaher, Frederic Cople. A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness: The Origins of Anti-Semitism in America. 1994. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. James, Henry. William Wetmore Story and His Friends. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, & Co., 1903. Janvrin, Mary. “The Story of Rachel Félix.” Ballou’s Dollar Monthly Magazine 8, no. 2 (August 1858): 173–6. Jay, Martin. “The Jews and the Frankfurt School: Critical Theory’s Analysis of Anti-Semitism.” New German Critique 19, no. 1 (Winter 1980): 137–49, doi: 10.2307/487976. Jefferson, Thomas. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Vol. 1. Edited by Paul Leicester Ford. New York: G. P. Putman’s Sons, 1892. “The Jewess of Constantina.” Translated by Mary Thompson. The Union Magazine of Literature and Art 2, no. 1 (January 1848): 35–9. John Bull and the American Loan. The New York Illustrated News (August 26, 1861), 256. Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. Jones, John Beauchamp. A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital. Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1866. Jones, John Beauchamp. The City Merchant; or, The Mysterious Failure. Philadelphia: Lippincott and Grambo, 1851. Jones, John Beauchamp. The Western Merchant: A Narrative. Containing Useful Instruction for the Western Man of Business. Philadelphia: Grigg, Elliot, and Co., 1849. Jones, John Beauchamp. Wild Southern Scenes. A Tale of Disunion! And Border War! New York: Rudd & Carleton, 1859. Keetley, Dawn. “Victim and Victimizer: Female Fiends and Unease over Marriage in Antebellum Sensational Fiction.” American Quarterly 51, no. 2 (June 1999): 344–84. doi: 10.1353/aq.1999.0026. Knox, Robert. The Races of Men: A Fragment. Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1850. Korn, Bertram W. American Jewry and the Civil War. 1951. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 2001. Kreutzmu¨ller, Christoph and Jonathan Zatlin. “Introduction: Possession and Dispossession.” In Dispossession: Plundering Germany Jewry, 1933–1953, edited by Kreutzmu¨ller and Zatlin, 1– 32. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. Larson, Kerry. Imagining Equality in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Lavin, Talia. “QAnon, Blood Libel, and the Satanic Panic.” The New Republic, September 29, 2020, web: https://newrepublic.com/article/159529/qanon-blood-libel-satanic-panic. Lee, Mary E. “Aaron’s Rod; or, The Young Jewess.” Southern and Western Literary Messenger and Review 12 (September 1846): 554–60. Lehuu, Isabelle. Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Leslie, Madeline (Aunt Hattie). Lost But Found; or, The Jewish Home. Boston: Graves and Young, 1867. Lewis, W. A. “Letter to the Editor.” Southern Watchman (April 30, 1862). The Life, Confession, and Execution of the Jew and Jewess. Baltimore: A. R. Orton, 1856. Lippard, George. The Quaker City, or, The Monks of Monk Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery, and Crime. 1845. Edited by David Reynolds. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Looby, Christopher. “Introduction: Cecil Dreeme and the Misfortune of Sexuality.” In Theodore Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme. 1861. Edited by Looby, vii–xxii. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

REFERENCES

193

Loughran, Trish. The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770– 1870. 2007. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Luther, Martin. “On the Jews and Their Lies.” 1543. In Luther’s Works, Vol. 47. Edited by Franklin Sherman and Helmut Lehmann, 137–306. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971. Maitland, James. The Lawyer’s Story; or, The Orphan’s Wrongs. New York: H. Long, 1853. Manganelli, Kimberly Snyder. Transatlantic Spectacles of Race: The Tragic Mulatta and the Tragic Muse. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012. Martin, Bonnie. “Neighbor-to-Neighbor Capitalism: Local Credit Networks and the Mortgaging of Slaves.” In Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development, edited by Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, 107–21. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. 1867. Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes, edited by Ernest Mandel. New York: Penguin Books, 1990. Marx, Karl. “On the Jewish Question.” 1844. In The Marx–Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 39–62. New York: Norton, 1978. McCormick and Wife vs. Cantrell, et al. Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Tennessee During the Years 1834–5. Vol. 7. Edited by George S. Yerger. Nashville: S. NYE & Co. State Printers, 1836. McGrane, Reginald C. Foreign Bondholders and American State Debts. New York: Macmillan Company, 1935. McIntosh, Maria. The Lofty and the Lowly; or, Good in All and None All-good. 2 vols. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1853. “Mdlle Rachel—Particulars of her Life.” Western Literary Messenger 23, no. 5 (January 1855): 219–20. Melville, Herman. “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” 1850. In The Writings of Herman Melville: The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, edited by Harrison Mayford, 239–53. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1987. “Memoirs of Rachel.” Littell’s Living Age 3, no. 2 (1858): 689–91. Merish, Lori. Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Mesle, Sarah. “Sentimentalism’s Nation: Maria J. McIntosh and the Antebellum Contexts of ‘Southern’ Fiction.” Studies in American Fiction 40, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 203–30, doi: 10.1353/saf.2013.0010. “Minna Lowe: The Pretty Jewess.” Brother Jonathan 3, no. 10 (November 5, 1842): 277–80. Monk, Maria. Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk; or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 1836. Mostov, Stephen G. “Dun and Bradstreet Reports as a Source of Jewish Economic History: Cincinnati,1840–1875.” American Jewish History 72, no. 3 (March 1983): 333–53. Muller, Jerry Z. Capitalism and the Jews. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010. Nasus. “The Wheel of Life.” The Southern Literary Messenger 11 (1845): 129–37, 213–18, 288–94. Nathans, Heather S. Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans: Performing Jewish Identity on the Antebellum American Stage. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Nelson, Dana. National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Nelson, Horatio. “The Crown Jewels. A Tale of London and Paris.” New York Ledger 13, no. 36–45 (November 1857–January 1858). Nissen, Axel. Manly Love: Romantic Friendship in American Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Nott, Josiah Clark. The Physical History of the Jewish Race. Charleston: Steam-Power Press of Walker & James, 1850.

194

REFERENCES

Nott, Josiah Clark and Samuel George Morton. Types of Mankind. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, & Co., 1854. Old Haun, the Pawnbroker; or, The Orphan’s Legacy. A Tale of New York, Founded on Facts. New York: Livermore and Rudd, 1857. Oliver Twist. Playbill. National Theater, Boston, 1852. O’Malley, Michael. “Specie and Species: Race and the Money Question in Nineteenth-Century America.” American Historical Review 99, no. 2 (April 1994): 369–95, doi:10.2307/2167278. Oster, Sharon. No Place in Time: Hebraic Myth in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018. Oster, Sharon. “The Shop of Curiosities: Henry James, ‘The Jew,’ and the Production of Value.” ELH 75, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 963–92, doi: 10.1353/elh.0.0026. Otter, Samuel. Philadelphia Stories: America’s Literature of Race and Freedom. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2010. Penslar, Derek. Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” 1839. In The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings, edited by David Galloway, 90–109. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. “Popular Literature—The Periodical Press.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (January 1859): 96–112. Prichard, James Cowles. Researches into the Physical History of Mankind. London: J. and A. Arch, 1813. “Rachel.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 11, (June 1855): 681–7. “Rachel.” The New York Times, September 7, 1855. “Rachel.” Republican Quarterly Review 1, no. 2 (October 1855): 156–60. “Rachel’s First Appearance in America.” The Broadway Belle, September 1, 1855. Ragussis, Michael. Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Reizbaum, Marilyn. “Urban Legends.” Éire-Ireland 45, no. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 242–65, doi: 10.1353/eir.2010.0008. Reynolds, David. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. Robbins, Bruce. “Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism.” In Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, edited by Pheng Cheah and Robbins, 1–19, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Robinson, H. R. The Downfall of Mother Bank. New York, 1833. Rogoff, Leonard. “Is the Jew White? The Racial Place of the Southern Jew.” American Jewish History 85, no. 3 (September 1997): 195–230, doi: 10.1353/ajh.1997.0025. Rothman, Joshua. “The Contours of Cotton Capitalism: Speculation, Slavery, and Economic Panic in Mississippi, 1832–1841.” In Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development, edited by Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, 122–45. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. “Roy’s Hebrew Lexicon—Secret Conspiracy against Religion Developed.” New York Herald, November 18, 1837. Ruffner, Henry. “Judith Bensaddi: A Tale.” The Southern Literary Messenger 5 (1839): 469–505. Ruffner, Henry. Judith Bensaddi; A Tale, and Seclusaval, or, The Sequel to the Tale of Judith Bensaddi, edited by Michael Pemberton, 149–222. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984. Sacher-Masoch, Leopold Ritter von. Die Hoffinanz und der moderne Staat. 6 vols. Berlin: 1953–67. Sánchez-Eppler, Karen. Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

REFERENCES

195

Sarna, Jonathan. Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981. Sarna, Jonathan. “The Symbols of Antisemitism in the Capital Riot.” BrandeisNow, January 11, 2021, web: https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2021/january/anti-semitism-capitol-riotsarna.html. Saxton, Alexander. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. London: Verso Press, 1990. Scott, Sir Walter. Ivanhoe. 1819. New York: Signet Classics, 2009. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Sellers, Charles. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. 1600. In William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, edited by Alfred Harbage, 215–42. New York: Viking Press, 1969. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831. Silberbusch, Oshrat. Adorno’s Philosophy of the Nonidentical: Thinking as Resistance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. “Southern Commercial Convention at New Orleans—No. 2.” DeBow’s Review 18, no. 4 (April 1855). Stanley, Jason. “Movie at the Ellipse: A Study in Fascist Propaganda.” Just Security, February 4, 2021, web: https://www.justsecurity.org/74504/movie-at-the-ellipse-a-study-in-fascistpropaganda/. Stewart, David. Reading and Disorder in Antebellum America. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011. Stewart, Virgil. A History of the Detection, Conviction, Life and Designs of John A. Murrell, the Great Western Land Pirate. Cincinnati: Augustus Q. Walton, 1835. Stoddard, Lothrop. The Rising Tide of Color: Against White World-Supremacy. New York: Charles Scribner’s Son, 1920. Streeby, Shelley. American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Strong, George Templeton. The Diary of George Templeton Strong, edited by Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas. 4 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1952. Syria the Jewess. Street and Smith’s New York Weekly 20, no. 5–20 (December 1864–April 1865). Taylor, William. Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character. New York: George Braziller, 1961. Templin, Mary. Panic Fiction: Women and Antebellum Economic Crisis. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014. Thompson, George. Venus in Boston; A Romance of City Life. 1849. In Venus in Boston and Other Tales of Nineteenth-Century City Life, edited by David Reynolds, 1–378. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. Thrush, Glen and Maggie Haberman. “Trump Gives White Supremacists an Unequivocal Boost.” New York Times (August 15, 2017), web: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/us/politics/ trump-charlottesville-white-nationalists.html. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. 1835. Vol. 1. Edited by Francis Bowen and Phillips Bradley. New York: Vintage Classics, 1990. “Trump Says QAnon Conspiracists ‘Love Our Country.’ ” PBS NewsHour (August 19, 2020), web: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-trump-holds-white-housenews-conference-4.

196

REFERENCES

Turpin, Zachary. “Introduction.” In Walt Whitman, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: An AutoBiography. 1852. Edited by Turpin, vii–xxii. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017. Valman, Nadia. The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. 1880. Edited by Robert N. Scott. Pasadena: Historical Times, 1985. Wemyss, Francis Courtney. Twenty-Six Years of the Life of an Actor and Manager. New York: Burgess, Stringer, & Co., 1846. White, John C. Shylock’s Year, or 1840 with no Bankrupt Law. New York, 1840. Whitley, T. W. The People Putting Responsibility to the Test, or the downfall of the Kitchen Cabinet and Collar Presses. New York: Anthony Imbert, 1834. Whitman, Walt. Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate. 1842. Edited by Christopher Castiglia and Glenn Hendler. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Whitman, Walt. Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: An Auto-Biography; A Story of New York at the Present Time in which the Reader Will Find Some Familiar Characters. 1852. Edited by Zachary Turpin. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017. Wiesen, Jonathan. “A Jew-Free Marketplace: The Ideologies and Economics of Thievery.” In Dispossession: Plundering German Jewry, 1933–1953, edited by Christoph Kreutzmu¨ller and Jonathan Zatlin, 33–51. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. Wilson, Ivy. “Looking with a Queer Smile: Walt Whitman’s Gaze and Black America.” In Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet, edited by Wilson, vii–xix. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014. Winthrop, Theodore. Cecil Dreeme. 1861. Edited by Christopher Looby. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Zatlin, Jonathan. “The Usurious Jew: Wilhelm Roscher and the Developmental Role of the Homo Economicus Judaicus.” In National Economies: Volks-Wirtschaft, Racism and Economy in Europe Between the Wars (1918–1939/45), edited by Christoph Kreutzmu¨ller, Michael Wildt, and Moshe Zimmermann, 18–32. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing: 2015. Zatlin, Jonathan. “Scarcity and Resentment: Economic Sources of Xenophobia in the GDR, 1971–1989.” Central European History 40, no. 4 (2007): 683–720, doi: 10.1017/S0008938907001082. Zboray, Ronald. A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Žizˇek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

Index Anderson, Amanda 80 anti-Tom novels 18, 21, 32, 37, 81, 141 Appel, John 133–5 Armstrong, Nancy 154 Arnold, Matthew 4–5, 11, 157n.17, 158n.18 Augst, Thomas 84–5 Badeau, Adam 51, 52 Ballou’s Dollar Monthly Magazine 51, 52, 168n.12 Baptist, Edward 23, 26, 34 Barnum, P.T. 52 Bauman, Zygmunt Life in Fragments 4–5, 27, 107–8, 125–6, 146, 160n.37, 175n.68 Modernity and the Holocaust 130 Beautiful Jewess, Rachel Mendoza, The 63 Beckert, Sven 18, 23, 26, 27 Belew, Kathleen and Gutierrez, Ramón 149 belle juive, la 18, 51–77, 86, 95 Bellis, Peter 186n.23 Benjamin, Judah 14, 25, 140 Bennett, Emerson The Artist’s Bride 7–8, 17, 103, 106, 107, 116–22, 125, 128, 129, 151, 153, 154 Bennett, James Gordon 3, 14 Bercovitch, Sacvan 154, 186n.23 Bigelow, Harriet Hamline The Curse Entailed 21, 26, 40–4, 50, 120 blood libel 14, 149, 155 Boucicault, Dion After Dark 136, 145, 160n.37 Brodhead, Richard 71–2 Brodkin, Karen 138 Brooks, Peter 6–7, 153 Brougham, John The Lottery of Life 83 Much Ado About a Merchant of Venice 15–6, 83, 111, 173n.22 Brownlow, “Parson” William Gannaway 181n.16 Brownstein, Rachel 61

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 56 Bunker, Gary L. 133–5 Buntline, Ned (aka E. Z. C. Judson) 3, 5, 6, 15, 65, 68, 76 Miriam; or, the Jew’s Daughter 62 Morgan; or, The Knight of the Black Flag 62 Rose Seymour 61–5, 68, 73, 75, 76 Caldicott, Thomas Ford 74 Calhoun, John 135, 156n.6 Carlson, Tucker 184n.3, 184n.5 Carton, Evan 66, 68–9, 76 Cenci, Beatrice 68, 72, 170n.55 Charlottesville, Unite the Right March 20, 148–50, 151, 153, 155 Cheyette, Bryan 5, 65, 74, 158n.19 Clay, Edward How to Make the Mare/Mayor Go 129, 152 Cline-Cohen, Patricia 97 Confessions and Experience of a Novel Reader 54 Crews, Frederick 69, 170n.55 D’A lessandro, Michael 159n.29 Daly, Augustine Leah, the Forsaken 171n.66 Daly, Nicholas 136–7, 160n.37 DeBow’s Review 22, 25, 28 Democratic Review 79, 80, 90 Denning, Michael 5 Denslow, Van Buren Owned and Disowned 21, 44–8 Principles of Economic Philosophy 46 Dickens, Charles Oliver Twist 19, 101–03, 105–06, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113, 115, 117, 122–4, 126, 127, 177n.25 See also Fagin Douglass, Frederick 144, 184n.58 Downes, Paul 154

198

INDE X

Duganne, A. J. H. The Tenant-House 3, 19, 101, 123–8, 179n.83, 180n.89 du Maurier, George 14 Trilby 54, 55 Dupuy, Eliza Ann The Planter’s Daughter 21, 22, 24, 27–32, 33, 35, 40, 48, 129 Duyckinck, Evert 79, 84, 90, 98 Dying Jewess, The 56–7 Edgeworth, Maria 56 Eliot, George Daniel Deronda 80, 172n.12, 185n.18 Fagin 3, 19, 95, 101–28, 176n.1, 177n.25, 178n.42, 179–80n.84 Faulkner, William Absalom, Absalom! 37 The Sound and the Fury 37 Felix, Rachel 14, 18, 51–60, 61, 63, 67, 69, 72, 76, 77, 95, 168n.9, 168n.12, 169n.29 Fichtelberg, Joseph 107, 110, 113, 119, 126, 127 Fiedler, Leslie 101, 176n.1 Fireman’s Bride, The 178n.42 Fitzgerald, F. Scott The Great Gatsby 20, 130–1 Fitzhugh, George 24 Foote, Henry S. 133 Freedman, Jonathan 14, 30, 54–5, 56, 95, 157n.17 Gallagher, Catherine 172n.12 Gautier, Amina 88 Genovese, Eugene 163–64n.8 Gilfoyle, Timothy 97 Gilman, Sander 82, 129, 138, 151, 166n.64, 181n.2 Gleason’s Pictorial 57–8 Goldstein, Eric 131, 138, 147, 183n.35 Gordon, Lewis 138–9, 183n.38 Graham’s American Monthly Magazine 55 Grant, Ulysses S. 132, 135 General Order No. 11 132, 181n.16 “Great Labor Question from a Southern Point of View, The” 48–50 Great Replacement Theory 149 Greenblatt, Jonathan 148

Greenwald, Elissa 66, 68 Gregg, William 25–26, 28, 38 Grossberg, Michael 118 Happy Merchant, The 1, 156n.1 Harap, Louis 157n.9 Hawthorne, Nathaniel The Blithedale Romance 71–2 The English Notebooks 66–8, 70, 95, 152, 153 The House of the Seven Gables 74, 105, 106, 115, 168n.9, 176n.12 The Marble Faun 3–4, 19, 61, 65–77, 78–80, 81, 84, 129, 170n.60, 172n.1 Mosses from an Old Manse 79 “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” 20, 150–5, 186n.23 Our Old Home 67 The Scarlet Letter 5, 90 Height of Madness, The 133–5 Helper, Hinton Rowan 23, 29, 38 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth 91, 92, 174n.57 History of the Detection, Conviction, Life, and Designs of John A. Murrell, A 42–3 Horkheimer, Max, and Adorno, Theodor Dialectic of Enlightenment 1, 4, 8, 10, 12, 99, 147, 149 Horowitz, Helen 97 Hundley, Daniel Robinson 23–5, 27, 35, 37, 39–40, 50 Hurlbert, William Henry 91, 92, 174n.57 Hutner, Gordon 70 Irving, John Treat 112–3, 120 Irving, Washington 90 Jabet, George 151 Jackson, Andrew 2, 3, 14, 45, 156n.6 Jacobson, Matthew Frye 129–30, 135, 138, 151, 185n.12 Jaher, Frederic Cople 157n.9, 160n.39 January 6 insurrection 149, 150, 155 Jefferson, Thomas 103, 105, 115 Jessica 3, 16, 45, 56, 61, 87, 111, 124 Jew of Malta, The 56

INDE X Jewess 17, 18–9, 39, 45, 51–77, 78, 85, 87, 88, 93, 95, 103–4, 123, 169n.21, 171n.66 “Jewess of Constantina” 62–3, 64 Jews antisemitism 1, 10, 11, 13, 24, 25, 30, 37, 76, 112, 125, 129, 140, 142, 148–9, 153, 156n.2, 162–3n.69, 183n.38, 184n.5, 185n.6 cosmopolitan Jew 19, 78–100, 101 doppelga¨nger, Jew as 10, 18, 32, 48, 96, 98–9 Homo economicus judaicus 11–12, 160–1n.41 racial discourse about 129–47 sensational Jew 1–17, 63, 76, 77, 78, 86, 95, 96, 100, 111, 121, 125, 130, 131, 132, 136, 139, 143, 146, 148, 150, 152, 154, 155 southern Jew 21–50 urban Jew 19, 101–2 See also la belle juive, Fagin, Jessica, Jewess, Rebecca, Shylock, Svengali John Bull and the American Loan 132–3, 135, 139, 146–7 Johnson, Walter 18, 23 Jones, John-Beauchamp The City Merchant 139, 142–6 Life and Adventures of a Country Merchant 139 A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary 20, 139, 140–2 Wild Southern Scenes 139, 140–2, 145 Knox, Robert 137–8, 147 Korn, Bertram 132, 139 Kreutzmu¨ller, Christoph 16 Kushner, Tony 95 Larson, Kerry 32, 36 Lavin, Talia 149, 155 Leslie, Madeline Lost But Found 179–80 n.84 Levy, Myer 13, 97, 161–2n.52 Life, Confession, and Execution of the Jew and Jewess 63, 103, 104, 106, 177n.18 Lincoln, Abraham 132, 135, 139, 141, 146–7 Lind, Jenny 52 Lippard, George 1, 3, 5, 6, 12, 15, 42, 68, 74

199

The Quaker City 1, 3, 6–7, 17, 74, 149, 159n.29, 159n.30 Littell’s Living Age 59–60 Looby, Christopher 92, 93, 96, 99 Lott, Eric 158n.22 Luther, Martin 10 Maitland, James 111 Manganelli, Kimberly Snyder 45, 56 Marx, Karl 19, 83, 98 Capital Vol. I 111–12, 161n.47 “On the Jewish Question” 11–12, 82–3 McIntosh, Maria The Lofty and the Lowly 21, 32–9, 40, 42, 45, 47, 50, 48, 141, 165n.46, 166n.63 Melville, Herman “Bartleby, the Scrivener” 89, 142 “Hawthorne and His Mosses” 79 Mesle, Sarah 32–3, 38 Minis, Dr. Philip 97 Moncrieff, William Thomas 57–9 Monk, Maria 74–5 Mott, Lucretia 144 Muller, Jerry Z. 10–11, 160–1n.41 Nathans, Heather 56, 96–7 Nelson, Horatio “The Crown Jewels” 81–2 Night Watch; or, Social Life in the South, The 26–7 Noah, Mordecai 14, 15, 97 Nott, Josiah Clark 137–8, 147, 182n.30 Old Haun, the Pawnbroker 101, 103, 106–16, 120, 126–7, 177n.26 O’Malley, Michael 19–20, 135–6, 143 Oster, Sharon 89, 162–3n.69 O’Sullivan, John L. 79, 84, 90, 92, 98 Penslar, Derek 11, 12, 162n.60 Pike, Albert 26 Poe, Edgar Allan 3, 6, 30 “The Fall of the House of Usher” 6, 36–7, 39, 151 Prichard, James 137 Protocols of the Elders of Zion 149, 184n.4

200

INDE X

QAnon 149, 150, 155 Ragussis, Michael 5, 14–5, 16, 83, 158n.18, 185n.18 Rebecca 3, 18, 56, 58, 87, 124 Reynolds, David 5 Robinson, H.R. 15 The Downfall of Mother Bank 14–5 Rockman, Seth 23 Rogoff, Leonard 135 Rothschilds 24, 28, 181–2n.16 Ruffner, Henry “Judith Bensaddi” 59 Seclusaval 59 Sacher-Masoch, L. von 11 Salomons, David 66, 67, 69 Salomons, Emma 66–8, 70, 95, 152 Salomons, Philip 67, 68, 76, 95 Sarna, Jonathan 149 Saxton, Alexander 5 Sedgwick, Eve 19, 92, 95–6 Sensationalism 1–20, 30, 51–77, 116–22 Sentimentalism 108–28 Shakespeare, William The Merchant of Venice 14–5, 45, 50, 56, 124 See also Shylock Shelley, Mary Frankenstein 4 Shoddy 133–5 Shylock 3, 9, 10, 14, 15–16, 17, 22, 24, 50, 56, 59, 61, 62, 68, 83, 93, 95, 111, 115, 124, 125, 128, 132, 133, 135, 139, 147, 149, 162n.60 and race 139, 146–7 Southern Shylock 24–5, 27, 35, 50 See also The Merchant of Venice Soros, George 149, 184n.5 Stanley, Jason 149 Startling Disclosures! 39–40 Stoddard, Lothrop 131, 137 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 33, 55 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 32 See also anti-Tom novels

Streeby, Shelley 3, 5 Strong, George Templeton 13, 51, 77, 151 Sunday Dispatch 83 Sunday Flash 13, 97, 161–2n.52 Svengali 54–5, 93, 95 Syria the Jewess 70–1 Templin, Mary 142 Thompson, George 6, 42, 65 Broadway Belle 52–3 Venus in Boston 6, 42, 52, 63, 101, 106 Tocqueville, Alexis de 105, 110, 121 Trollope, Anthony 14, 185n.18 Turpin, Zachary 83 Valman, Nadia 56 Victim of Chancery, The 142 Webb, James Watson 14 Webster, Daniel 103–4 Western Literary Messenger 55 White, John C. Shylock’s Year, or 1840 with no Bankrupt Law 9–10, 17, 149 White supremacy 23, 148 Charlottesville march 20, 148–50, 151, 153, 155 Whitley, T.W. The People Putting Responsibility to the Test 2–3, 4, 5, 6, 12, 14, 131 Whitman, Walt Franklin Evans 87, 88 Life and Adventures of Jack Engle 3, 19, 83–9, 92, 93, 147, 151–2 Wiesen, Jonathan 16–17 Wilson, Ivy 86 Winthrop, Theodore Cecil Dreeme 19, 89–100, 129, 136, 145, 152, 174n.57 Young America Movement 79–80, 84, 90, 92, 97, 98, 99 Zatlin, Jonathan 11, 16, 141–2, 160–1n.41 Žizˇek, Slavoj 12