Jewish Feeling: Difference and Affect in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Women's Writing 1472589793, 9781472589798

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Affect and Jewish Feeling
What is affect?
What is Midrash?
Midrash and affect
1. ‘The still undercurrent of deep feeling’: History and Nation for Grace Aguilar
‘More than unusually moved’: Representing women’s reading
‘The full gushing tide of rapture’: Theorizing women’s reading
‘The Bible, and that nation whose earliest history it so vividly records’: Jewish histories for England’s Jews
2. ‘Finer and finer discrimination’: George Eliot’s Feeling for the Jews
‘Various combinations of common likeness’: Fellow feeling and the ethics of form
‘ Absorbing enthusiasm’: Education and identity
‘A people with oriental sunlight in their blood’: Jewish nationalism
3. ‘A fragment of the eternal truth’: Futurity and Race for Amy Levy
‘That elaborate misconception’: Debating Deronda with George Eliot and Henry James
‘Startling with excess of truth’: Futurity and poetic unfitness
‘A strange yearning affection’: The racial romance of Amy Levy’s Reuben Sachs
Conclusion: Esther and Judith in London: Jewish Feeling as a New Category of Affect
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Jewish Feeling

NEW DIRECTIONS IN RELIGION AND LITERATURE This series aims to showcase new work at the forefront of religion and literature through short studies written by leading and rising scholars in the field. Books will pursue a variety of theoretical approaches as they engage with writing from different religious and literary traditions. Collectively, the series will offer a timely critical intervention to the interdisciplinary crossover between religion and literature, speaking to wider contemporary interests and mapping out new directions for the field in the early twenty-first century. ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY: Blake. Wordsworth. Religion, Jonathan Roberts Dante and the Sense of Transgression, William Franke Do the Gods Wear Capes? Ben Saunders England’s Secular Scripture, Jo Carruthers Forgiveness in Victorian Literature, Richard Hughes Gibson Glyph and the Gramophone, Luke Ferretter John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics, Peter Jaeger Late Walter Benjamin, John Schad The New Atheist Novel, Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate Rewriting the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon Verse, Samantha Zacher Victorian Parables, Susan E. Colón FORTHCOMING: Faithful Reading, Mark Knight and Emma Mason The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace, Adam Miller Long Story Short, Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg and Peter S. Hawkins Pentecostal Modernism, Stephen Shapiro and Philip Barnard Romantic Enchantment, Gavin Hopps Sufism in Western Literature, Art and Thought, Ziad Elmarsafy The Willing Suspension of Disbelief, Michael Tomko

Jewish Feeling Difference and Affect in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Women’s Writing

Richa Dwor

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2017 © Richa Dwor, 2015 Richa Dwor has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-8979-8 PB: 978-1-350-03037-4 ePDF: 978-1-4725-8981-1 ePub: 978-1-4725-8980-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: New Directions in Religion and Literature Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd, Chennai, India

This book is dedicated to my parents, Gila Golub and Mark Dwor.

Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Affect and Jewish Feeling What is affect? What is Midrash? Midrash and affect 1

2

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‘The still undercurrent of deep feeling’: History and Nation for Grace Aguilar ‘More than unusually moved’: Representing women’s reading ‘The full gushing tide of rapture’: Theorizing women’s reading ‘The Bible, and that nation whose earliest history it so vividly records’: Jewish histories for England’s Jews ‘Finer and finer discrimination’: George Eliot’s Feeling for the Jews ‘Various combinations of common likeness’: Fellow feeling and the ethics of form ‘Absorbing enthusiasm’: Education and identity ‘A people with oriental sunlight in their blood’: Jewish nationalism ‘A fragment of the eternal truth’: Futurity and Race for Amy Levy ‘That elaborate misconception’: Debating Deronda with George Eliot and Henry James

ix 1 5 17 24

37 41 58 68

85 89 101 107

115 119

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Contents

‘Startling with excess of truth’: Futurity and poetic unfitness ‘A strange yearning affection’: The racial romance of Amy Levy’s Reuben Sachs Conclusion: Esther and Judith in London: Jewish Feeling as a New Category of Affect Bibliography Index

128 140

165 181 195

Acknowledgements Parts of this book have appeared elsewhere as articles. A version of Chapter 1 was published as ‘Grace Aguilar’s Defence of Jewish Difference: Representing Women’s Reading’, Literature and Theology 29.1 (March 2015): 86–103. Part of Chapter 3 can be found in ‘The Racial Romance of Amy Levy’s Reuben Sachs’, English Literature in Transition 55.4 (July 2012): 460–78. I thank Oxford University Press and Robert Langham for allowing me to reproduce both here in modified form. Permission to publish an extract from Grace Aguilar’s poem ‘Lines, 11 Aug 1834’ is granted courtesy of the Jewish Museum, London. The research in this book began life as my doctoral thesis and I am happy to have the opportunity to acknowledge with gratitude the Postgraduate Teaching Fellowship that I was awarded by the School of English at the University of Nottingham. I am as fortunate now as I was during those years to have had Professor Josephine Guy as my supervisor. I found my first professional home in the Victorian Studies Centre at the University of Leicester, and I thank my colleagues there, particularly Professor Gail Marshall, for several years of wonderful collaboration, community and encouragement. I formed another kind of family at the Nottingham Liberal Synagogue, where I was warmly welcomed, actively listened to and amply fed. There I met my great friend, Rabbi Tanya Sakhnovitch, whose guidance has been so valuable to this project. Elizabeth Fry and Kimberly O’Donnell selflessly read draft chapters, which has earned each my undying gratitude and baked goods on demand. Daniel Weston has, in every way, made completion of this book possible.

Introduction Affect and Jewish Feeling

Following 150 days of flooding and becalmed for ten further months in an animal-laden ark, Noah finally opens a window to send out a dove ‘to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground’ (Gen. 8:8). He does so on three occasions. Having found nowhere to land, the dove returns weary from her first excursion and is welcomed by Noah in a protective embrace; he ‘put forth his hand, and took her, and pulled her unto him into the ark’ (Gen. 8:9). The next time the dove is sent forth, she returns with an olive leaf in her beak, signifying the nearby presence of dry and fruitful land. After her final release she ‘returned not again unto him any more’ (Gen. 8:12), indicating that the captivity and protection represented by Noah have been superseded by the possibility of true freedom, as well as the promise that Noah and his inmates will soon be released from the confines of the ark. The image of the dove reappears in a number of Jewish and Christian biblical texts and has since attained a status in culture as a symbol of peace. For example, in Song of Songs, having made a range of comparisons to other animals the speaker uses the dove to indicate concealed beauty: O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely. (Song of Songs 2:14)

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In the Midrash Rabbah, the dove in this verse is read as symbolizing the nation of Israel, particularly in its innocence and obedience before God: ‘But with the Holy One, blessed be He, [Israel] are like an innocent dove, and they listen to Him.’1 In Christian iconography, the dove represents the Holy Spirit in its appearance at the moment of Jesus’s baptism in which ‘he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove’ (Mt. 3:16) and ‘the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him’ (Lk. 3:22). With its enduring connotations of freedom, innocence and humility the dove has been used in visual art beyond religious iconography as a symbol of peace in political contexts. Notably, Pablo Picasso’s ‘Dove of Peace’ drawings were reproduced to benefit various peace congresses held throughout Europe during the mid-twentieth century. Rebecca Solomon (1832–86) painted ‘The Wounded Dove’ (seen on the cover of this book), a watercolour, in 1866. It depicts a woman, with downcast eyes, cradling a dove to her chest in both hands. The dove appears to have a broken wing, and its head points upwards although its face does not intercept the woman’s gaze. Her full lips are set in a reposeful smile and her expression is meditative. Her attire and the setting are markers of realistically rendered middle-class Victorian domesticity. She wears a purple silk blouse with elaborately ruched sleeves, embellished by black braid at the neck. Her slim waist is emphasized by a buckled belt, beneath which flows a full black skirt, spread to cover most of the chair on which she sits. Upholstered in red velvet and featuring twisted wooden columns and a carved headrest, the chair is rather broad and throne-like. It is positioned before a fireplace, and on the mantelpiece (itself upholstered after a fashion in a fringed red cloth), there is a symmetrical display of fans, vases and ceramic plates in fashionable chinoiserie patterning. The dove in this

1

H. Freedman and Maurice Simon, eds, The Midrash Rabbah: Volume Four – Lamentations, Ruth, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Song of Songs (London: The Soncino Press, 1977), p. 128.

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painting would have presented an unmistakeable biblical reference to its Victorian viewers, who were schooled in spotting such symbols in images and language. It bears an allegorical resonance as a symbol of peace, and by providing succour to the wounded bird the woman enacts a contemporary parable of the rehabilitation of peace in the home. In upholding the popular valorization of women’s domestic spiritual influence, Solomon furthermore replaces Noah’s patriarchal embrace of the dove with a young woman’s, and she substitutes the ark for a well-appointed parlour. Solomon exhibited at the Royal Academy of Art between 1852 and 1868, as well as at other galleries in London. Her father was a merchant and she was one of eight siblings in a Jewish family that engaged actively in the arts, especially painting. A gradual increase in critical attention to her work, usually alongside other neglected Victorian female painters or in the context of her more famous brothers, indicates a trend for recovering female voices in fields where the focus has traditionally been on male figures.2 Critics have noted that while Solomon’s better-known brother, Simeon Solomon (1840–1905), frequently painted explicitly Jewish topics, his sister typically did not do so, preferring historical scenes and once painting a version of John Everett Millais’s ‘Christ in the House of His Parents’ under the supervision of Millais. Beyond the presence of the dove itself, ‘The Wounded Dove’ includes no obvious markers of religion and certainly none of the strongly coded images of Jewishness frequently transmitted in culture at the time; there is no menorah or open Bible on the mantelpiece and the woman’s reddish-brown hair, strong jaw and distinctly wide-set eyes are closer to pre-Raphaelite conceptions of female beauty than the physical characteristics of the

2

See Jan March and Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999); Roberto G. Ferrari, ‘Rebecca Solomon, Pre-Raphaelite Sister’, The Review of the Pre-Raphaelite Society 12:2 (Summer 2004): 23–36.

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Jewess who is by this point a ‘literary preoccupation’.3 Nevertheless, by staging an affective transmission between a woman and the dove – she offers it compassionate shelter, it offers her the possibility of renewed peace – the painting may be viewed as an engagement with Genesis that considers possibilities for women’s interventions into Jewish interpretive practices as well as the formation of Jewish identity within the new conditions of political emancipation. This book seeks to define a distinctly Jewish form of affect and to use this as a framework for identifying Jewish difference in literary works by Jewish authors, particularly in works by female authors. In addition to defining this form of affect, it charts its circulation during the nineteenth century in England. To achieve this, it looks to a rabbinic interpretive practice called midrash and argues that the epistemological state characteristic of midrash – in which ‘all is determined, and yet all is open’ – constitutes an affective experience, first in the sense of taking place within a coherent, self-conscious and feeling subject.4 Furthermore, by using this as a framework for reading literature produced by a very specific population within a clearly delineated location and period, it engages affect in its second, preindividual and social sense to discuss biblical prime-texts as affective bodies and to explain how a particular (Jewish) mode of thought was manifested and can be detected in the works of the authors Grace Aguilar (1816–47) and Amy Levy (1861–89). In what follows here, I provide a definition of affect that highlights its intersections with theology, before turning to an explanation of midrash as a scholarly and – I argue – affective process. Finally, using these concepts to frame the study of women’s writing, I outline the

3

4

Nadia Valman, The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 2. Betty Roitman, ‘Sacred Language and Open Text’, in Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick, eds, Midrash and Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 159–75 (p. 160).

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relevance of Aguilar and Levy for this project and also explain my uses of George Eliot as a counterpoint figure relevant to this discussion of affect and literary representations of Jewishness during the nineteenth century.

What is affect? Theorists of affect often introduce their subject with an admission of the difficulty attendant upon defining it. Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg open The Affect Theory Reader with a question: ‘How to begin when, after all, there is no pure or somehow ordinary state for affect?’5 Looking to two branches from which taxonomies of affect have descended, Seigworth and Gregg draw upon Benedict de Spinoza and Raymond Williams to stress the corporeality of affect and the emergent nature of these ‘social experiences in solution’.6 In the first of many such definitions, they state that ‘affect is persistent proof of a body’s never less than ongoing immersion in and among the world’s obstinacies and rhythms, its refusals as much as its invitations’.7 The body, however, and its receptive and transmissive capacities for affect, is broadly defined as ‘at once intimate and interpersonal’, a porousness that relates to the limits of the self as a conscious subject.8 Teresa Brennan argues that while we formulate unique responses in relation to affect transmitted between individuals or in the environment, ‘we are not self-contained in terms of our energies’.9 While there is a current fashion for identifying the embodied manifestations of apparently abstract sensations such as consciousness 5

6

7 8 9

Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, eds, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, in The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 1–25 (p. 1). Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986 [1977]), p. 133. Seigworth and Gregg, eds, p. 1. Ibid. Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 6.

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or depression, diagnosing these effects does not in all cases resolve the chicken-and-egg dilemma of precedence: which came first, the psychological state or its physical correlation? Rick Rylance has shown that contemporary medicalization of the affects has its roots in nineteenth-century discourses of psychology, which sought to identify the physiological causes of emotions and behaviours.10 Miranda Burgess looks earlier to argue that ‘the theorizing of affects as conditions originating within particular bodies has its roots in the history of late eighteenth-century philosophies of emotion (especially in Adam Smith and Emmanuel Kant)’.11 Brennan, meanwhile, situates psychoanalysis and contemporary neuroscience in an incisive cultural history that views these discourses as modern iterations of ancient systems for representing affects, including Gnostic models for the seven deadly sins.12 In looking to ‘discover moments of change’ evidenced by new theories of emotion, Barbara H. Rosenwein affirms that neuroscience is, at the present time, ‘rapidly coming to dominate the field of the psychology of the emotions’.13 It is useful here to note Patricia Clough’s distinction between affect as ‘pre-individual bodily forces augmenting or diminishing a body’s capacity to act’ and emotion as ‘subjectively felt states’ that, crucially, affirms the uniqueness and subjectivity of the individual experiencing them.14 Burgess notes that in literary scholarship in particular, the two terms – affect and emotion – often ‘stand for and displace’ one another, particularly in

10

11

12 13

14

Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture: 1850–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Miranda Burgess, ‘On Being Moved: Sympathy, Mobility, and Narrative Form’, Poetics Today 32.2 (Summer 2011): 289–321 (p. 295). Brennan, The Transmission of Affect, pp. 97–101. Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Theories of Change in the History of Emotions’, in A History of Emotions, 1200–1800 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), pp. 7–20 (pp. 7, 10). Patricia T. Clough, ‘The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies’, in Seigworth and Gregg, eds, The Affect Theory Reader, pp. 206–25 (p. 207). See also Clough’s The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

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the sense that greater attention is paid to ‘individuated bodies’ and thus to the subjectivity of emotions.15 At stake in these debates is the old question of how the mind relates to the body, as well as the limits of the self as a feeling and corporeal subject. In upholding or dismantling an opposition between binary states, including mind/body and pre-individual/subjective, these scholars are engaging a Cartesian duality between mind and matter. Dismantling this schema requires a return to a Spinozist reconciliation of ‘thought’ (mind) and ‘extension’ (body), and a careful and historicized distinction among affects, emotions and the experience of feeling. We may look to Spinoza for one of the key Western theorizations of affect, in which affect is situated in a wider philosophical engagement with the nature of human existence. In his philosophical treatise Ethics, published posthumously in 1677, Spinoza proposes to treat ‘the affects’ not as a ‘vice of human nature’, to be mocked, cursed, punished or cured, but as a part of Nature. Nature, for Spinoza, is synonymous with God in the sense that God is not ontologically distinct from the world. This idea of God, which includes the affects along with all other facets of human existence, is explained in Ethics through definitions of the terms ‘Substance’, ‘Attributes’ and ‘Modes’, leading to the further definition of ‘God’. ‘Substance’ is ‘what is in itself and is conceived through itself, that is, that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed’.16 Steven Nadler interprets this as ‘that which is truly ontologically independent, and that is not in or dependent upon something else for its being’.17 Of this Substance there are Attributes (variously understood as perspectives on reality or the real aspects of things as they are in the world) and

15 16

17

Burgess, ‘On Being Moved’, p. 290. Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley (London: Penguin Classics, 1996), p. 1 (D3). Steven Nadler, Spinoza’s Ethics: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 55.

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Modes (the concrete or mental manifestations of a given attribute), but crucially, God is the only Substance, ‘a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes’.18 In this way, both the corporeal and the cerebral are united, in that they are attributes of the same substance, which excludes nothing imaginable. Spinoza defends his analysis of the affects against those who, in also theorizing emotion and behaviour, ‘seem to treat, not of natural things, which follow the common laws of Nature, but of things which are outside Nature’.19 Far from being vices or aberrations against nature, the affects – ‘of hate, anger, envy, and the like’ – are in Spinoza’s schema merely modes characteristic of human attributes, and may be related to the mind or body equally. Spinoza defines affect broadly as a change in the body’s power of acting, rather than the cause or the result of that change: ‘By affect I understand affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections.’20 The ‘affections’ can entail a decline from a better condition to a worse one, or an improvement from worse to better. The body’s powers of acting are divided into actions and passions. Actions are internal to the subject and are caused by the mind acting through its own knowledge or ideas. Passions, by contrast, have their origins outside of the subject. When at the effect of passions we are passive, or acted upon. Whether active or passive, the affects imply an increase or decrease in our power of acting that can bring about change both physically and mentally. Becoming truly autonomous requires regulating the passions, those affects that originate outside of the self and render it passive. Mental autonomy is furthermore characterized by the mind’s consciousness of its own striving for self-preservation. Autonomy and self-conscious striving require regulation of the three primary 18 19 20

Spinoza, Ethics, p. 1 (D6). Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., p. 70 (D3).

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affects: desire (cupiditas), joy (laetitia) and sadness (tristitia). Spinoza proposes that ‘The mind as far as it can, strives to imagine those things that increase or aid the body’s power of acting.’21 Desire is a term for ‘appetite together with consciousness of appetite’, or the striving of both body and mind to persevere in being.22 Joy and sadness – or improvement and degeneration – are the primal affects that can be caused by the passions. Desiring continuance of joy or cessation of sorrow is a means of controlling the passions and privileging the actions, and so relying on our rational faculties of mind. Other names for affects deriving from the passions are given by Spinoza, including envy, hatred, rejoicing, love, praise, blame, pity, cheerfulness and melancholy. In translations of Spinoza’s Ethics into English, the words affectus and affectio are often conflated and rendered variously as ‘affect’ or ‘affections’. These terms are used, however, to describe related yet ultimately distinct concepts. Spinoza’s affectus is, for Gilles Deleuze, ‘any mode of thought which doesn’t represent anything’, and affectio, by contrast, indicates the focalization of that thought onto a thing which is representational or which has an objective reality (for instance, a loved one or an image).23 Deleuze and Felix Guattari build on Spinoza’s concept of affect in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980); in his notes on the translation of this work into English, the political philosopher Brian Massumi provides definitions of the terms ‘affect’ and ‘affection’: AFFECT/AFFECTION: Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment in Deleuze and Guattari). L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a personal intensity 21 22 23

Ibid., p. 77 (P12). Ibid., p. 76 (P9). Gilles Deleuze, ‘Spinoza (24/01/1978)’, trans. Timothy S. Murphy, Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze (accessed 2 July 2014), p. 1.

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corresponding to the passage from one experiential state to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act.24

Affect (affectus for Spinoza, l’affect for Deleuze and Guattari) is internal and is characterized by a capacity to enter into ‘experiential [states]’, rather than the specificity of those states themselves which may more properly be described as feelings or sentiments. Affectus in this abstracted and experiential sense is most closely associated with Spinoza’s affect of desire, which derives from the actions rather than the passions. It is thus associated with a certain degree of agency, as the actions are the individual’s internal means of regulating the influence of externally originating passions. Massumi’s notes on ‘affection’ uphold Spinoza’s distinction between internal and external affects: L’affection (Spinoza’s affectio) is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body (with body taken in its broadest possible sense to include ‘mental’ or ideal bodies).25

Two important distinctions arise from this definition: first, that affect in this latter sense of affectio or l’affection is social and thus also temporal; and second, that an expanded idea of what may constitute an affecting body means that the external stimuli for affect are almost incalculably diffuse and can include, as I shall argue, texts. Furthermore, the encounter between the affected and the affecting body also occurs under historically contingent circumstances. In other words, individual human subjects may be said to feel differently in different times and places. It is in this sense that affect is not strictly personal or idiosyncratic in relating to the moral progress 24

25

Brian Massumi, ‘Forward’, in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, eds, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 [1980]), p. xvi. Ibid.

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of the individual, but may also be detected as social, cultural and historical. Since Raymond Williams articulated the concept of a ‘structure of feeling’ in his 1977 work Marxism and Literature (discussed further below), most critics of affect have viewed it as a fundamentally social formation. For some, this has had the effect of radically eroding the boundaries of the self. Seigworth and Gregg go so far as to say: ‘With affect, a body is as much outside itself as in itself – webbed in its relations – until ultimately such firm distinctions cease to matter.’26 For Williams, the fluidity and subjectivity of affect in its social aspect is necessary for restoring the ‘living presence’ to ‘recognition of human cultural activity’.27 We may recall here, however, that for Spinoza affectus – the personal manifestation of affect – can relate to both body and mind in being a non-representational change in an individual’s power to move towards either improvement or deterioration, both mental and physical. Affect may originate internally or externally, but living a good life for Spinoza involves regulating one’s susceptibility to external affects, or the passions. While the distinction between affectus and affectio may be collapsed by contemporary critics into a single, loaded word, it is a distinction to which I shall return in order to demonstrate personal, localized engagements with affect and also to argue for a historicized ‘structure of feeling’ among female Jewish writers during the nineteenth century in England. The introduction of a religious identity is relevant here, as the secularized discourse of affect has much older roots in religious doctrines relating to an individual’s movement towards good and away from evil. Lenn E. Goodman notes that ‘Spinoza’s scheme of active and passive emotions provides a model for the reappropriation

26 27

Seigworth and Gregg, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, p. 3. Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 128.

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in the language of rational psychology of the ancient notion of selfmastery.’28 A preceding example of the role of emotions, or affect, in achieving Christian self-mastery can be found in Confessions of Augustine of Hippo (354–430 ce). Here, Augustine emphasizes his pre-conversion depravity by describing misdirected emotions: Just as we have sins against others if our emotion (animi motus), in which lies that impetus to act, is vicious and thrusts forward arrogantly and without measure, and damage to self if that affection of the soul (animae affectio) whence carnal desires rises is ungoverned: similarly errors and false opinions contaminate life if the rational soul itself is corrupted.29

Here too, philology is important in detecting the subtlety of this argument and will furthermore demonstrate how Spinoza adapted elements of Augustine’s Neoplatonism to refute what Lee C. Rice refers to as ‘the frantic dualisms that he [Spinoza] perceives as medieval in origin’.30 In Confessions and later in Trinity, Augustine advances one of the abiding models of the self of classical Christian theology: that an individual’s moral progress is characterized by an ongoing struggle between the higher, intellectual man and the lower, sensuous and animal man. The soul resides principally in the higher man and is unique to humans for being the seat of reason. Augustine nevertheless attributes certain aspects of the soul to the lower functions of sense perception and animal appetite; in short, the qualities that keep the body alive. The soul consequently appears both in the spiritual and in the corporeal aspects of the body, but it is vulnerable to corruption by the carnal desires which also comprise the self. The wider self, made up of both 28

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Lenn E. Goodman, ‘What Does Spinoza’s Ethics Contribute to Jewish Philosophy?’, in Heidi M. Ravven and Lenn E. Goodman, eds, Jewish Themes in Spinoza’s Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), pp. 17–89 (p. 49). St Augustine, Confessions, trans. F. J. Sheed in Michael P. Foley, ed., Confessions (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2006), p. 69 (IV.15). Lee C. Rice, ‘Love of God in Spinoza’, in Ravven and Goodman, eds, pp. 93–106 (p. 103).

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spiritual and corporeal man, is thus the theatre in which Manichean conflicts between spirit and matter transpire, or, as Augustine later came to believe through conversion, the site at which the rational soul directs its impetus to act away from evil and towards good.31 The soul’s impetus to act – animi motus – is what is translated above by F. J. Sheed as ‘emotion’. This capacity to be in motion is in itself morally neutral but can be influenced by unregulated, low ideas. Animae affectio, the ‘affection’ or disposition of the soul, is the capacity of the soul for feeling, as opposed to acting. These concepts bear comparison to Spinoza’s affectus and affectio, or the actions and the passions, as facets of an individual’s power of acting. In this broadly similar schema, the extent to which an individual is in proximity to goodness and divine love relies in part on a selfdirected capacity to act as a means of controlling passions which emanate either from the body or from external sources. In Emotional Experience and Religious Understanding (2005), Mark Wynn reframes the role of the emotions in Christian ethics by considering models of ‘emotional feeling’ which precede religious understanding but can ‘give rise to enduring behavioural change’.32 Wynn argues for a relationship of ‘reciprocal influence’ between feeling and understanding in religious experience.33 For him, a certain kind of religious understanding is available only in ‘affective experience’: that of the ‘mysterium’, akin to John Henry Newman’s model of ‘primitive’ responsiveness to God that is ‘grounded in our awareness of ourselves as morally responsible’.34 Importantly, this primitive and affective responsiveness precedes (or exists 31

32

33 34

Foley notes that ‘Augustine eventually refuted Manichean dualism with the help of Platonic philosophy [. . .], and the Manichean critique of the scriptures with the help of St. Ambrose [. . .]. He also came to discover the deficiencies of Manichean astrology from an independent study of astronomy.’ Foley, ed., Confessions, p. 331. Mark R. Wynn, Emotional Experience and Religious Understanding: Integrating Perception, Conception and Feeling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 179. Ibid., p. 133. Ibid., pp. 133, 125.

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beyond) linguistically or conceptually articulated renderings of faith. In foregrounding an individual’s capacity to apprehend a nonrepresentational other, which is experienced as an appetite and is accompanied by a degree of self-awareness and moral responsibility, this idea of religious understanding appears to be an inheritor of Spinoza’s affectus, reformulated to suit a theological model. The diction of affect invoked here – including language for abstracted experiences such as joy and sadness, as well as objectoriented sensations like envy or pride – coheres around a further set of terms which are often viewed as synonymous: along with ‘affect’ often comes ‘emotions’, ‘passions’, ‘affections’, ‘appetites’, ‘sentiments’, ‘moods’ and ‘feelings’. For some, these terms can ‘be used fairly interchangeably’, while for others, including Grossberg, we must do more to ‘[parse] out everything that is getting collapsed into the general notion of affect’.35 Bearing in mind the instability, particularly in translation, of terms such as emotion, affect and feeling, this brief look at the language of affect in a philosophical and Christian context has shown an important distinction between, on the one hand, a capacity to act or feel, and on the other, the sensation of experiencing object-oriented feelings. Furthermore, self-consciousness of one’s ability to be affected is generally viewed as central to the moral progress of an individual. In a more contemporary register of the language of affect, emphasis is often laid on the social, collective implications of the individual’s encounter with externally originating affective bodies. It is for this reason that most current attempts to provide a definition of affect lead very quickly to theorizing its transmission. As noted earlier, I am concerned to consider affect both as a felt experience (or emotion) within a singular subjective individual and also in a way which decentres the subject by noting the transmission

35

Graham Music, Affect and Emotion (Duxford: Icon Books, 2001), p. 5; Grossberg, ‘Affect’s Future’, p. 316.

Introduction

15

of affect between individuals in groups on a large scale. In noting the impact of affect upon groups of individuals in particular places and times, the body must furthermore be viewed as immersed in its world, rather than as a discrete and ahistorical object. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick works within the context of literary theory to resolve the ‘Cartesian mind/body dualism’ that, she argues, underpins the treatment of social affect and personal emotion as sequential rather than synchronic, or simultaneous.36 In a similar vein, Massumi looks to ways in which ‘the “natural” and “cultural” feed forward and back into each other’ as a means of eroding the distinction between cognition and bodily reactions and ultimately privileging the pre-subjective.37 In noting a series of binaries – ‘mind and body, [. . .] volition and cognition’ and so on – Massumi positions affect as the resonant consequence of holding both elements in the binaries to be true simultaneously: Affect is their point of emergence, in their actual specificity, and it is their vanishing point, in singularity, in their virtual coexistence and interconnection – that critical point shadowing every image/ expression-event.38

Both Sedgwick and Massumi insist on the inseparability of affect and emotion, and thus also on the blurred boundaries between the body and the world.39 Widening the site of affect from the individual mind or body to the world in which it exists thus encompasses the role of culture – and theology – in producing or representing affective states; this is what Seigworth and Gregg refer to as ‘ethico-aesthetic spaces’, 36

37

38 39

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 113. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 11. Ibid., p. 33. Burgess notes, however, a nuanced distinction between the two, in that for Sedgwick the experience of affect is a personal one specific to the individual, while for Massumi this cannot be the case due to his destabilization of the coherent subject. Burgess, ‘On Being Moved’, p. 294.

16

Jewish Feeling

what Lawrence Grossberg calls ‘the virtual in the actual’ and a critical paradigm that Williams has inaugurated as ‘structures of feeling’.40 The problem of defining affect is not a new one, although the disciplines in which it is currently debated are for the most part modern innovations. Also recent are certain of the key terms in which this debate is expressed. Thomas Dixon has shown that ‘the category of emotions, conceived as a set of morally disengaged, bodily, non-cognitive and involuntary feelings, is a recent invention’.41 Prior to eighteenth-century empiricist approaches to framing the passions and human will, and nineteenth-century discourses of the scientific study of the mind, it was in religious thought that problems of higher and lower affects were debated, contested and set out as programmes for the improvement of body, mind and soul. Indeed, Spinoza’s radical reconciliation of body and mind, and his break with religious orthodoxy (particularly the Sephardic Jewish community in his native Amsterdam, from which he was excommunicated) by conceiving of God as an infinite being within which humans exist as finite modes, represents an engagement with and re-evaluation of both Christian and Jewish ideas of affect. Broadly speaking, a historicized view of affect demonstrates that what once were classed as theological mysteries became gradually reinterpreted as social and scientific modes of understanding. As Dixon reminds us, however, the theological and philosophical have not been ‘entirely erased or superseded’ in this apparent transition during the nineteenth century to scientific epistemologies of the mind and human behaviour.42 Consequently, we must note that a discussion of affect and its uses in 40

41

42

Seigworth and Gregg, eds, p. 8; Lawrence Grossberg, ‘Affect’s Future: Rediscovering the Virtual in the Actual’, in Seigworth and Gregg, eds, The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 309–8 (p. 320); Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 128. Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 3. Ibid., p. 21.

Introduction

17

nineteenth-century literature requires a methodology attentive to the discourses in which it was considered during the period, rather than overlaying this analysis with its theorization now. In short, here I aim to historicize affect, and Jewish affect in particular. In this preamble, I have sought to provide a historical overview of ideas leading to contemporary concepts of affect. This is in order to introduce a further and as yet untheorized intersection among affect, religion and literature. In what follows, I argue that engaging in the Jewish interpretive strategies characterized by midrash constitutes a form of affect as it has been outlined above.

What is Midrash? Irving Jacobs states that ‘[in] simple terms, Midrash is the oldest form of Bible interpretation. For more than twenty centuries, the Bible has challenged the imagination and ingenuity of its interpreters. Midrash represents the response of the earliest generation of Jewish scholars to this challenge’.43 The term midrash is used in Hebrew to designate both a rabbinic method of exegesis and also to describe the genre of literature which employs this method. Midrash can, in other words, refer to a way of thinking as well as the body of texts produced by the publication of this thought. In its original meaning, midrash refers to the biblical interpretation practised by rabbis during the first five centuries of the Common Era. The root of the Hebrew word midrash is deresh, which means ‘to search out’ or ‘to enquire’. Deresh also forms the root of the word for ‘study’: lidrosh. For rabbis from the Tannaitic period (70–220 ce) to the present, this searching out and studying is conducted in order to unfold the manifold meanings which reside

43

Irving Jacobs, The Midrashic Process: Tradition and Interpretation in Rabbinic Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 3.

18

Jewish Feeling

in the language of Torah.44 As with all forms of Jewish study which seek to derive meaning from Torah, midrash is a mode of analysis which views a particular set of texts as the locus of the divine and the interpretation of those texts as a form of worship. It is, however, one approach among many. Nevertheless, David Stern asserts the endurance of midrash as an intellectual and cultural mode: [if] there has been a dominant mode of Jewish reading of the Bible, it has been midrash – if not classical midrash itself – with its imperative to connect to the biblical text, its irrepressible playfulness, and its delight in multiple, polyvalent traditions of interpretation.45

The playfulness and polyvalence characteristic of this mode has led in recent years to studies of the literariness of midrash and the presence of midrashic modes of thought in literary texts. In their 1986 edited volume Midrash and Literature, Geoffrey Hartman and Sanford Budick describe a ‘pressing need’ for contemporary literary studies to look closely at midrash and its implications.46 For them, several characteristics of midrash appear to underpin emergent concepts within literary criticism, such as reader response theory, poststructuralism and Narratology: these are the openness of midrash to multiple, simultaneous interpretations; the status of the reader-interpreter in generating these meanings; philological attention to language; and complex and ongoing intertextual allusions. Indeed, Hartman and Budick look to nineteenth-century intellectual currents for the modern re-emergence of midrash as a critical framework for literature, particularly in the work of Leopold 44

45

46

In its most basic definition, Torah, also called Pentateuch, is the sacred text made up of the five books of Moses and is referred to in a Christian context as the Old Testament. David Stern, ‘Midrash and Jewish Interpretation’, in The Jewish Study Bible, ed. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 1874. Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick, eds, ‘Introduction’ in Midrash and Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. ix.

Introduction

19

Zunz and Matthew Arnold to theorize the influence of Judaism, or ‘Hebraism’, in contemporary culture. In arguing that midrash constitutes a form of affect, I consider how it may feel to occupy a space of both total assurance in the perfection of the text and also radical openness to its implied meanings. My aim is to articulate a mode of affect arising from Jewish interpretive strategies and to note the presence of this mode, ultimately, in the writing and reading of literary, not just biblical, texts. Despite its centrality to the Jewish rabbinical tradition, attempts to define midrash often function, as James L. Kugel notes, by clarifying what it is not.47 David Instone Brewer adopts this method by listing non-midrashic modes of exegesis: peshat, which seeks to emphasize the ‘plain’ or literal meaning of the text in contrast to its ‘hidden’ or allegorical meanings; the nomological reading, which approaches the prime-text as a legal document and seeks to derive precedents and laws even from narrative or non-legal portions; and the ultraliteral reading, which interprets isolated words or phrases according to their literal meaning in a way that disregards the usage of these excerpts in a wider context.48 The tension among these approaches is in either denying or seeking out secondary meanings residing in the text. Midrash is emphatically of the latter school; it aims to show how the text may mean something other than what it appears to mean, and to engage in an ongoing process of discerning meanings that will have contemporary relevance for Jews in every generation. Alongside this apparent rejection of surface meaning, midrash is utterly rooted in textuality and in the words, verses and chapters that are the basic units of Torah. Crucially, for the midrashic scholar these units can, as Emmanuel Levinas describes, ‘set themselves 47

48

James L. Kugel, ‘Two Introductions to Midrash’, in Midrash and Literature, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 91. David Instone Brewer, Techniques and Assumptions in Jewish Exegesis Before 70 CE (Tubingen: JCB Mohr, 1992), pp. 14–16.

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Jewish Feeling

in motion’.49 Barry D. Walfish states this notion in similar terms: ‘Rabbinic midrash treated the entire Bible as an organic whole, whose parts were infinitely significant and ripe for interpretation.’50 Stern, meanwhile accounts for the idea of the wholeness or ultimate coherence of the text by noting a series of core beliefs: first, that the Bible is a cryptic document and that discovery of its true meaning requires special skill; second, that the Bible is a perfect document, without contradiction; third, that the Bible is always relevant, and always has meaning for the present moment; and finally, that the Bible is of divine origin, having been authored and bestowed by a distinct God – the God of the Jews.51 The outcome of belief in the perfection, divinity and openness to interpretation of the Bible is a freedom to atomize the text, to read words and verses out of context and to make connections between verses from various biblical books. It leads to the singular literariness of the composition of rabbinic midrash which, for Stern, ‘exists precisely in the grey area between commentary and original creative composition’.52 Also important is the role of orality in this tradition. Rabbis during the Mishnaic-Talmudic period (100–500 ce), during which the various branches of Jewish scholarship were in large part formulated and made distinct from one another, upheld the conviction that God had given the Israelites an Oral Torah alongside the written one at Mount Sinai. For the Rabbis, this Oral Torah comprised everything about Judaism that was not explicitly stated in the written text, including historically specific laws, folk wisdom and lore. It was their task to comment on the hidden truths of the Written Torah in order to find evidence for what they already believed to be in the Oral Torah, and also to show that the roots of the spoken version 49

50 51 52

Emmanuel Levinas, ‘On the Jewish Reading of Scriptures’, in Jo Carruthers, Mark Knight, and Andrew Tate, eds, Literature and the Bible: A Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), pp. 62–74 (p. 64). Barry D. Walfish, ‘Medieval Jewish Interpretation’, in Berlin and Brettler, eds, p. 1876. Stern, p. 1866. Ibid., p. 1873.

Introduction

21

were firmly embedded in the textual one. Midrash relies on this deep interplay between the prime-text and the needs of the present moment. Access to the Written Torah during the Tannaitic period was severely limited, both because the scrolls themselves were scarce and also because the study of Torah was forbidden under Roman rule after 70 ce. Stern states that as most scholars would have learned Torah by hearing it read aloud in a synagogue or a secret place of study, midrash is consequently ‘very much an exegesis of heard text’.53 Much of midrashic interpretation thus responds to the phonetic or aural elements of the text, and relies on sound-play and puns to aid in memorization. The form of midrash that emerges from this emphasis on memory and public recitation is aggadah, which is inextricably bound up with the idea of speech; Joseph Heinemann points out that the equivalent term haggada is ‘the noun-form of the verb le-haggid, which means “to say” or “to tell”’.54 Aggadah deals with legend and lore, or ‘the vast terrain of non-legal and homiletical material which effectively includes everything in rabbinic tradition from narrative to theology’.55 This breadth of content extends the relevance and appeal of midrash aggadah beyond the learned male world of the yeshiva, or study house, and into public and domestic spaces. Heinemann distinguishes between Written Torah, which was read aloud in the synagogue from a scroll, and aggadah, ‘which was transmitted chiefly by word of mouth, that is by being related orally in the public sermon’.56 The openness of this form – its nature as ‘creative exegesis’ coupled with an expanded non-scholarly audience – is a way of ensuring that the Torah remains ‘dynamic and open to varying interpretation in order to meet the challenges of drastically varying circumstances’.57

53 54

55 56 57

Ibid., p. 1870. Emphasis in original. Joseph Heinemann, ‘The Nature of Aggadah’, in Midrash and Literature, Hartman and Budick, eds, p. 41. Stern, p. 1869. Heinemann, p. 42. Ibid., p. 43.

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Jewish Feeling

In addition to being playful and far-reaching (aggadot may be drawn from biblical narratives, historical events or hypothetical instances of ethical problems),58 these verses generally work to draw a lesson from a question posed of the prime-text. Nevertheless, no single ‘lesson’ or ‘message’ expounded by a given Rabbi is considered ultimately authoritative, and the way that these analyses are published in anthologies of midrashic thought demonstrates that this is an exegetical tradition which endorses multiple readings and re-readings. Indeed, further interpretations of the prime-text are desirable, and printed midrashim are not viewed as discrete or immutable texts.59 Martin S. Jaffee states, with regard to these artefacts: Rabbinic anthologies must be distinguished from those composed in cultures – such as that of early modern Western Europe and its inheritors – ascribing sovereign integrity to authored literary works. Similarly, they should not be viewed – like the scriptural cannons of early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – as relatively immutable literary treasures. In distinction to both of these models, rabbinic compilations are anthologies whose compilers had no hesitations in altering the form and content of the anthologized materials.60

The Midrash Rabbah (rabbah in Hebrew means ‘great’) are aggadic midrashim on the books of the Tanakh (the expended cannon of the Hebrew Bible).61 Notable editions were compiled during the sixteenth century in Venice and Constantinople. These editions are compilations rather than coherent or progressive commentaries on the prime-text. 58 59 60

61

Aggadot is the Hebrew plural of aggadah. Midrashim is the Hebrew plural of midrash. Martin S. Jaffee, ‘Rabbinic Authorship as a Collective Enterprise’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Martin S. Jaffee, eds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 33. The word Tanakh is in fact an acronym of the first Hebrew letter of its three principal components: Torah (the five Books of Moses), Nevi’im (Prophets) and Ketuvim (Writings, which includes eleven Books among which are the Song of Songs, the Book of Ruth and the Book of Esther).

Introduction

23

In collecting and interweaving centuries’ worth of material, the editors ‘[arranged] in sequence the exegetical interpretations of the Biblical text as taught in schools’, in such a way that ‘the existing midrashim betray in passages the character of the sources from which they were taken’.62 In the Midrash Rabbah, commentaries consists largely of a compilation of points made by various sages, along with the intertextual references they posit in relation to the biblical verse under discussion. The chief motivation behind midrash is to provide solutions to the ‘problems’ posed by the text. These so-called problems can include word choice (why has an arcane word been used? What is the relevance of the other meanings deriving from the word’s root?), aural play and repetition (does a repeated word amplify its meaning or imply passage of time, possibly containing a special message to future generations?) and details apparently missing from the narrative or which do not seem internally consistent. Indeed a ‘problem’ may not appear explicitly as such, as any element of ‘Divine Language’, by virtue of being given by God, ‘[transcends] the ordinary medium of human communication’ and must be decoded to reveal the text’s inner meanings.63 Approaches to addressing this potentiality of meaning generally centre on deriving messages of both specific (or, plain) and eternal (or, open) relevance. Midrash, then, is a form of narrative exegesis which is designed to draw contemporary relevance and often moral instruction from biblical texts. Its typical formal characteristics rely on atomization of words and phrases and a free hand in juxtaposing excerpts from across a wide body of text, with apparent disregard for continuity or the literary coherence of earlier meanings. In addition, there is a strong emphasis – especially in aggadah – on narrative retelling of 62

63

‘Midrash Haggadah’, The Jewish Encyclopedia (accessed 17 December 2014). Jacobs, The Midrashic Process, p. 4.

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Jewish Feeling

legend and lore in order to adapt the content of the prime-text to contemporary concerns, and to extract a moral message. The way that this exegesis is presented in anthologies emphasizes a multiplicity of voices arranged without evident hierarchy. Despite this apparent openness, however, midrash maintains an idea of the wholeness and perfection of Torah.

Midrash and affect Following on from these introductory comments on the nature of affect and midrash, it is this book’s project to argue that midrash can be understood through the lens of affect and to show that this affective mode is at play in certain literary works. This is the case in both of Spinoza’s senses of the word – affectus and affectio – and in both instances, the overlap between midrash and literature can be demonstrated. The affective aspect of midrash resides in both its personal and social functions. Midrashic commentary, in its primary sense as a textual practice which emerged roughly two thousand years ago, is itself a response on the part of the rabbis of that time to the affective power of Torah. This response was undertaken in a communal setting, it deployed (as noted) wide-ranging intertextual and dialogic quotation and imagined audiences both ‘over the next hill’ and ‘through all eternity’.64 In contrast to the isolated contemplation of monastic Christianity, midrashic reading of Torah takes place in company and its commentary enacts hypothetical conversations. It has as well a strong oral – and thus, communal – component and looks always to extend, interrupt, question or challenge existing interpretations, but never to provide a singular or

64

Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000B CE–1492 CE (London: The Bodley Head, 2013), p. 45.

Introduction

25

conclusive meaning. In Simon Schama’s pithy formulation, ‘Jewish reading refuses to close the book on anything’.65 Furthermore, what Levinas refers to as ‘the characteristic pluralism of rabbinical thought’ is akin to Spinoza’s affectus in displaying an essentially neutral capacity to act or be ‘in motion’.66 In both the rabbinic and the philosophical models, this provisionality serves a moral purpose: for Levinas, the rabbis’ pluralism ‘paradoxically aspires to be compatible with the unity of the Revelation’, so that while virtually limitless interpretations of the prime-text can be made, all these and more are understood to be contained within the divinely given source; by contrast, affectus works to ensure the integrity of the individual (rather than a given text or a concept of revelation) by regulating externally originating passions.67 Both concepts can nevertheless be pared down to an essentially similar proposition: that affect is generated by the intersection of a pluralistic mode of thought and an external body that engages this way of thinking. For the authors of midrash, the affecting body with which the individual comes into contact is the sacred text itself. The text – the biblical text – is affecting in two ways: first, because of its divine status, it appears to pose questions whose answers can be detected in further interpretation; and second, because the questions which it appears to pose are historically contingent, the approaches to formulating and responding to these questions can tell us something about the culture in which they emerge. As Erich Auerbach points out in the influential essay ‘Odysseus’ Scar’, the Hebrew Bible does little to supply the detail which will account for the inner lives of its protagonists, and ‘thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and fragmentary

65 66 67

Ibid., p. 35. Levinas, ‘On the Jewish Reading of Scriptures’, p. 62. Ibid.

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Jewish Feeling

speeches’.68 We do not know, for example, how Isaac felt or what he thought as his father bound him for sacrifice.69 Was the stranger with whom Jacob wrestled an angel or a man?70 There is, in other words, a gap between the literal meaning of the text and questions that arise from it. The origin of these questions – how did Isaac feel, with what did Joseph wrestle – is significant: are they indeed implied by the text, or do they reflect the preoccupations of those posing them? James L. Kugel argues that this distinction fundamentally sets midrash apart from other exegetical approaches. According to Kugel, midrash is not allegorical, nor apocalyptic, nor eschatological, nor messianic, nor even primarily halakhic. Each of these modes imagines either a continuity or an overlap between Biblical time and our time in the present, in which the Biblical past may, for example, reappear to overwhelm the present, or it may be looked towards to inform present practices.71 Midrash, by contrast, ‘generally views Scripture as a world unto itself, without direct connection to our own times’.72 Expanding on the apparent gaps in the text, either by spinning further narratives or establishing connections to other texts entirely, is thus the action of metonymy, rather than metaphor. For Mieke Bal, however, the issue of which questions the biblical text appears to pose remains unresolved. Without disputing Kugel’s formulation of biblical time in midrash, Bal considers the role of the reader in posing questions, particularly those which hinge on ‘why?’: ‘The question “Why?” [. . .] is neither “in” the text nor outside of it, 68

69

70

71

72

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. William R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 11. See Genesis 22:9: ‘And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood.’ See Genesis 33:24: ‘And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.’ James L. Kugel, ‘Two Introductions to Midrash’, in Hartman and Budick, eds, Midrash and Literature, pp. 77–103 (p. 90). Ibid.

Introduction

27

but “into” it, toward it; it is the reader’s relationship to the text.’73 Bal’s concern is for the affective role of what she calls ‘cultural memory’ in creating ‘culturally framed, embedded ways of thinking’ which play a part in establishing the meanings of relatively stable texts.74 In this view, while midrash may remain metonymic (in the sense of acting to expand on meanings contained within the text, rather than creating metaphoric bridges between text and lived experience) it is also unavoidably historically contingent, and therefore the questions which it poses are revealing of a dynamic moment in time. Importantly, this attention to contemporary biblical reading practices usefully expands midrash beyond its initial rabbinic practitioners and into modern Western history, in which midrash has persisted as an interpretive tool and a written form in arenas other than theology. Hartman and Budick have summarized the cultural presence of midrash as ‘the provisional which understands that it is provisional’.75 Responses in culture to the kind of textual dynamism represented by midrash may be understood using Raymond Williams’s concept of the ‘structure of feeling’, articulated most fully in Marxism and Literature (1977). This refers to a tension between lived experiences and methods for recording these experiences as histories, in which the ‘specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships’ are mediated or elided in the process of cultural articulation using received historiographical forms.76 These affective elements may appear personal or idiosyncratic, but Williams argues that they are produced by historical and topographical – or, temporal and spatial – conditions and are therefore a collective cultural experience. 73

74 75 76

Mieke Bal, ‘First Memories and Second Thoughts’ in Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, eds, Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall and the Present (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), extracted in Carruthers, Knight, and Tate, eds, Literature and the Bible, pp. 306–12 (p. 309). Ibid. Hartman and Budick, ‘Introduction’, p. xiii. Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 132.

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Jewish Feeling

In ‘The Welsh Industrial Novel’ (1979), he gives the example of a ‘pervasive sense of defeat’ felt in Welsh mining communities following the General Strike of 1926. Other critics have used this concept to identify a specific set of emotions experienced by, for example, women living through second-wave feminism who felt a sense of ‘static time’ and ‘foreclosed futurity’.77 Williams argues that the regular ‘conversion’ of such experiences into ‘finished products’ such as authorized histories or even novels prevents our recognition of actual, living presence.78 He describes a distinction between the social and the personal, but argues for a further category that can be encompassed by neither: ‘It is a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate and defined exchange.’79 It is, in other words, the lived present with all of its merging of ideology and practical experience and, importantly, the latency of multiple, as yet unrealized, outcomes. Williams uses the term ‘feeling’ to indicate the immediacy of an experience which is ‘still in process’, and ‘structure’ to show that such experiences are ‘a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension’.80 Both the relational and the emergent nature of Williams’s ‘structure of feeling’ can help to frame what this book now terms ‘Jewish feeling’ in relation to interpretation and history. First, I have shown that midrash is a form which facilitates attention to emergent and provisional meanings, and is thus productive of affect. Second, I work here to, as Lawrence Grossberg puts it, ‘[rediscover] the contingent, the virtual in the actual’ by recreating a structure of feeling experienced by Jewish 77

78 79 80

Mitchum Hueghls, ‘Structures of Feeling: Or, How to Do Things (or Not) with Books’, Contemporary Literature, 51.2 (Summer 2010): 419–28 (p. 425). Hueghls is discussing Jane Elliott’s Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory: Representing National Time (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 128. Ibid., p. 131. Ibid. Emphasis in original.

Introduction

29

women engaged in literary writing in England during parts of the nineteenth century.81 As it happens, the specificity of these writers’ shared experience is in part their use of midrashic thought, so that they both engage and experience historic and immediate forms of Jewish feeling. As a preliminary example of how Jewish feeling operates across time and genre, I turn to two interpretations of the Book of Ruth: the midrashic commentary in the Midrash Rabbah, and Grace Aguilar’s narrative retelling in The Women of Israel, subtitled Characters and Sketches from the Holy Scriptures and Jewish History, Illustrative of the Past History, Present Duties, and Future Destiny of the Hebrew Females, As Based on the Word of God. This is a collective biography of female figures from the Bible and antiquity published in 1845. Ruth is an important book in both Jewish and Christian traditions. For Christian readers, the narrative is significant because Ruth is the progenitor of the Davidic line and thus prefigures, in a typological reading, the earthly lineage of Christ. L. Rabinowitz points out that in addition to the complex interpretation of the text itself in the Midrash Rabbah, in rabbinic literature Ruth is frequently placed in a range of intertextual relationships, and has ‘perhaps more parallel passages in the other midrashim than have the other books’.82 The Book of Ruth itself consists of five chapters, each between eighteen and twentythree verses in length. The midrashic commentary interprets the whole of this text verse by verse, with the exception of 5:16–17, but not in order. In eight chapters of unequal length, only the first and last chapters of midrash cover the first and last verses of the prime-text; the middle sections are dealt with out of order.83

81 82 83

Lawrence Grossberg, ‘Affect’s Future’, p. 320. Ibid., p. viii. L. Rabinowitz, ‘Introduction’ to Ruth, trans. L. Rabinowitz in The Midrash Rabbah: Volume Four – Lamentations, Ruth, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Song of Songs, ed. H. Freedman and Maurice Simon (London: The Soncino Press, 1977), p. vii.

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Jewish Feeling

Ruth is not herself an Israelite, but a native of neighbouring Moab. After the death of her husband, who was an Israelite, she insists that she will remain with her mother-in-law Naomi and return with her to Israel. Ruth’s entreaty to Naomi is often read as a model of filial love and as an archetypal conversion narrative: And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for wither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. (Ruth 1:16)

The sages of the Midrash Rabbah perceive some gaps in this instance of direct speech. They use fabricated dialogue between Ruth and Naomi and further explanations in their own voices to fill in the blanks, while also addressing issues of contemporary relevance: AND RUTH SAID: ENTREAT ME NOT TO LEAVE THEE, AND TO RETURN FROM FOLLOWING AFTER THEE (I, 16). What is the meaning of ENTREAT ME NOT? She said to her, ‘Do not sin against me; do not turn your misfortunes away from me.’ TO LEAVE THEE AND RETURN FROM FOLLOWING AFTER THEE. I am fully resolved to become converted under any circumstances, but it is better that it should be at your hands than at those of another. When Naomi heard this, she began to unfold to her the laws of conversion, saying: ‘My daughter, it is not the custom of the daughters of Israel to frequent Gentile theatres and circuses’, to which she replied, ‘WHITHER THOU GOES, I WILL GO’ (ib.). She continued: ‘My daughter, it is not the custom of daughters of Israel to dwell in a house which has no mezuzah’, to which she responded, ‘AND WHERE THOU LODGEST, I WILL LODGE’ (ib.). THY PEOPLE SHALL BE MY PEOPLE (ib.) refers to the penalties and admonitions [of the Torah], AND THY GOD MY GOD (ib.) to the other commandments of the Bible.84 84

‘Ruth’, trans. L. Rabinowitz in The Midrash Rabbah, pp. 39–40 (II, 22).

Introduction

31

Formally, this commentary is anchored to the prime-text (as indicated by frequent and repeated quotation translated into capital letters), but it shuttles freely between other interpretive modes, registers and topics. The warning against ‘theatres and circuses’ represents, for Rabinowitz, a contemporary anxiety of the sages who wrote this.85 Indeed, we may note that in posing an initial question – ‘What is the meaning of ENTREAT ME NOT?’ – the authors then expand upon the dramatic impact of the scene by inventing further instances of direct speech, thus giving new resonance to the quoted lines of primetext when they are recalled into this new context. The result is that, while Naomi and Ruth are still conversing as in the original, through their voices the rabbis are also addressing one another on such points of law as conversion and correct behaviour for women. This is a conversation joined, some centuries later, by Aguilar. Aguilar’s comments on the Book of Ruth, as I discuss below, represent an act of participation in a tradition of biblical interpretation. In addition to her theological works, she had, by time of writing The Women of Israel, published poetry and written novels. As a woman living in England during the mid-nineteenth century, with little access to classical Jewish texts and operating in an environment in which ‘Jewish interests were fragmented and contested’, she does not conform to a conventional model of Jewish scholarship.86 Furthermore, in placing Aguilar’s assertions of Jewish difference into the context of contemporaneous Evangelicalism, scholars have argued that many of her formal and ideological strategies are either borrowed from Evangelical discourses, or are designed to elide difference by promoting a ‘Protestant reimagining of Judaism’.87 Here I wish to show,

85 86

87

Rabinowitz, ‘Introduction’, p. viii. David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840–1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 71. Valman, The Jewess, p. 99. D. W. Bebbington defines Evangelicalism as emerging from a ‘quadrilateral of priorities’: ‘conversionism, the belief that lives need to be changed;

32

Jewish Feeling

however, that Aguilar is engaging Jewish feeling as it has been defined above, and that this can be detected regardless of the gap between her experience and traditional rabbinic interpretive modes, which is widened by her gender and exclusion from Talmudic training. We can see this in her treatment of the Book of Ruth. In The Women of Israel, Aguilar’s commentary on the Book of Ruth is renamed ‘Naomi’ as ‘Ruth does not properly belong, by birth or by ancestry, to the women of Israel’.88 Like the sages of the Midrash Rabbah, Aguilar is alert to gaps and absences in the terse prime-text; where she perceives them is determined by her own cultural concerns as it was for the sages, but she too explains her licence in filling in these gaps: During the lifetime of her husband and sons, we hear nothing of Naomi; but it is by her conduct and sentiments in adversity, and the strong affection borne towards her by her daughters-in-law, that we may judge of her previous character.89

Aguilar is writing in a midrashic mode to produce, through theology, something of a conduct manual for a contemporary Jewish female readership. Consequently, she is concerned to focus not only on the plain meaning of the prime-text, but more importantly in its eternal meaning and its relevance for readers in the 1840s, for whom explicit links are drawn to a tradition of notable matriarchs: ‘Orpah was a woman in her weakness; Ruth, woman in her strength; and both are as beautifully true to woman’s nature now as then.’90 In

88

89 90

activism, the expression of the gospel in effort; Biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible; and what may be called crucicentrism, a stress on the sacrifice of Christ on the cross’. D. W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 3. Emphasis in original. Grace Aguilar, The Women of Israel; or, Characters and Sketches from the Holy Scriptures and Jewish History Illustrative of The Past History, Present Duties, and Future Destiny of the Hebrew Females, as Based on the Word of God (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1890(?) [1845]), p. 228. Ibid., p. 229. Ibid., p. 231. Emphasis in original.

Introduction

33

response to the long-standing accusation that women are mistreated within Judaism, Aguilar finds in Ruth’s marriage to Boaz that ‘there could have been, neither practically nor theoretically, any one single statute to the disparagement of woman’.91 And in posing, finally, the same question put by Midrash Rabbah – why does Ruth follow Naomi – Aguilar draws a connection between emotional states and moral behaviour: Ruth’s determination to quit her own land, her parents, and their gods, was indeed one of beautiful self-devotion; but it was evidently LOVE, not duty, which impelled it, and that love must have been called forth from the tenderness she had originally received.92

As an apologue, it is one which draws on the creativity and intellectual range of midrash to assert the ongoing moral and social significance of feeling; indeed, the chapter concludes with an appeal for ‘Love [. . .] alike in word and deed.’93 In short, Aguilar draws on a midrashic notion of the biblical prime-text’s simultaneous perfection and provisionality in order to pose what, for her, are the questions that it leaves unanswered. Although a close cousin to Victorian didactic fiction, The Women of Israel is underpinned by a different – and distinctly Jewish – formal and affective framework. Chapter 1 of this book demonstrates Aguilar’s formulation of the transmissive capacities of affect by outlining her theorization of women’s reading. There is a particular model of reading with feeling represented in her fiction and discussed in her theological commentaries that is, for Aguilar, the seat of a sustaining Jewish identity that can withstand the pressures of conversionism. By

91 92 93

Ibid., p. 242. Ibid., p. 243. Ibid., p. 245. Emphasis in original.

34

Jewish Feeling

looking also at texts in which she effects a complex linking of a biblical past to a politicized British present, this chapter shows that Aguilar brings the midrashic concept of metonymy to her view that history may be a means of envisioning a model of Jewish integration into the contemporary British polity. The themes of education and national identity are taken up in Chapter 2, which looks to George Eliot to introduce the contemporary theory of Organicism as an epistemological model cognate to Jewish feeling. Eliot is drawn on here both to revisit her representations of the Jews in the context of Jewish feeling, and also as an important sounding board against which to read Aguilar and Levy. While this book contributes to the recuperation of the latter two authors, it also aims to position Eliot in a nexus of Jewish concerns, and thus to highlight a new aspect of cultural exchanges with Jewish thought and literature in the period.94 Amy Levy is the subject of Chapter 3, and it is precisely her differences from Aguilar (and the extent of her engagement with Eliot) that are of interest. As a writer of the 1880s, Levy is operating after what Michael Galchinsky has termed ‘the racial turn’, in which questions of Jewish difference are inflected by the increasingly influential narratives of post-Darwinian sciences of race, such as anthropology, Spencerian sociology and eugenics.95 Here her critical essays, particularly writing on Eliot and Henry James, are read to show that Levy articulates a version of Eliot’s Organicism in order to express disdain for what

94

95

In this approach I build on the methodology established by Cynthia Scheinberg in Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Scheinberg positions two now canonical poets – Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti – alongside Aguilar and Levy to, as she states, ‘ask some new questions’ about how to read the former pair while considering the Jewish women poets’ ‘engagement, albeit from a very different perspective, with issues of religion and poetry.’ Scheinberg, p. 235. I diverge from Scheinberg in attending mainly to prose forms rather than poetry. Michael Galchinsky, ‘“Permanently Blacked”: Julia Frankau’s Jewish Race’, Victorian Literature and Culture 27.1 (1999): 172.

Introduction

35

she views as James’s ‘literature of decay’.96 This ethics of futurity is examined in the context of Levy’s engagements with poetic and racial unfitness to argue that, while she pushes these terminal forms to their very limits, her works ultimately privilege eternality, and they may thus be said to exhibit Jewish feeling in a way which links her to Grace Aguilar.

96

Amy Levy, ‘The New School of American Fiction’, Temple Bar 70 (1884): 383–9, reproduced in Melvyn New, ed., The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy, 1861–1889 (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1993), pp. 510–17 (p. 517).

1

‘The still undercurrent of deep feeling’: History and Nation for Grace Aguilar

At every word of the Highest, creation sprung. Darkness, borne back by the mighty torrent of effulgent light, would have passed annihilated from the face of the newborn world, but, shielded by angelic ministers, it lingered, in its new-appointed sphere, to do its destined bidding. A firmament of sapphire, stretched between the waters and the waters, veiling the glory of the spiritual heavens from the grosser earth. Land rose from the liquid deep. The rolling waters rushed impetuously to their destined boundaries, held there by the Omnific will. And over the land the creating Word went forth; and, at once, the mountains raised their stupendous forms, crowned with imperishable verdure; the valleys, and woods, and glens rose and sunk in their appointed rests; and flowers, and trees, and streams, and thousand other charms of sight, and sound, and sense, burst forth into perfected being. Myriads of angels hovered round, visible then in their beauty; but now heard only in the sweet breath of the gentle flowers in the varied sounds of the forest trees as the wind floats by; in the summer breeze, or the wintry storm; in the musical gush of the silvery rill; aye, and in the deep hush and calm of the evening hour, when nature herself, as conscious of their ministering presence, sinks into deep and spiritual repose.1 1

Grace Aguilar, ‘The Spirit of Night, Founded on a Hebrew Apologue’, in Home Scenes and Heart Studies (London: Groombridge and Sons, 1883), p. 369. Emphasis in original.

38

Jewish Feeling

This passage, from ‘The Spirit of Night, Founded on a Hebrew Apologue’ by Grace Aguilar is an example of modern midrash.2 In ‘The Spirit of Night’, Aguilar draws on Genesis 1:16 – ‘And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night’ – to develop a narrative which genders these heavenly bodies as a masculine sun and a feminine moon, and seeks to explain their imbalance of power. Her interest in male and female social status, particularly within Jewish community, is an example of what Mieke Bal refers to as reading questions ‘into’ the prime-text, in that Aguilar’s concerns with gender reflect ‘the varying, historically shifting meanings’ such texts can generate.3 In its retelling of the familiar creation narrative (Gen. 1:1–31), ‘The Spirit of Night’ displays a verbose interplay among traditional midrash, the diction of the King James Bible and a Romantic exuberance at witnessing nature. Like the Midrash Rabbah, this passage indicates a reverence for the divinity of language – the ‘creating Word’. In among its flights of imagination and interpretive play, it returns via quotation or paraphrase to the primetext: ‘between the waters and the waters’ echoes Genesis 1:6 (‘And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters’). It transitions, without much in the way of signal or rationale, from a descriptive narrative account to a rhetorical response to the unspoken question of how we can see the evidence of creation in our present world. This passage asks, in other words, how we can make sense of a biblical and historical 2

3

‘The Spirit of Night’ was written and first published in 1846, in the periodical Heath’s Book of Beauty, and re-issued posthumously in Home Scenes and Heart Studies, a compilation of short works arranged by the author’s mother after her death (London: Groombridge and Sons, 1852). This volume includes reissued material that had been well-received during Aguilar’s lifetime, such as the short story ‘The Perez Family’ (first published in 1843 in Charlotte Montefiore’s Cheap Jewish Library) and historical tales from Records of Israel (London: J. Mortimer, 1844). Mieke Bal, ‘First Memories and Second Thoughts’ in Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer, eds, Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall and the Present (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), extracted in Carruthers, Knight, and Tate, eds, Literature and the Bible, pp. 306–12 (p. 309).

History and Nation for Grace Aguilar

39

past while seeking spiritual guidance in the present, or indeed, in what ways divine origins can be felt in quotidian modern affairs. The answers to these questions reside in ways of reading and of feeling. Where once angels were visible, ‘now’ their presence can only be detected via sensory feeling: smell, sound and touch, but not sight. Consoling knowledge of their presence, and thus of a manifestation of the ‘creating Word’, can be found in feelings of ‘deep [. . .] calm’ and ‘spiritual repose’. In ‘The Spirit of Night’, language precedes the material world, but nature bears witness to its generative power. It is ‘nature herself ’ which is conscious of ‘spiritual repose’, but we may observe and feel with the natural world the ‘Omnific’ which remains immanent within it through the spectral presence of angels and the ongoing creative force of the divine utterance. The diction of Evangelical Christianity is present in Aguilar’s prose style. References to ‘glory’, for example, recall publications of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, founded in 1809.4 The hybridity of her phrasing is partly due to her curtailed access to Jewish texts in Hebrew or English, so that she is by necessity drawing upon a broad range of non-Jewish biblical and secular sources. In arguing in ‘The Spirit of Night’ (and elsewhere) that the divine can be experienced through sensory and emotional feeling in nature, however, Aguilar furthermore valorizes the individual’s capacity for textual interpretation and also religious experiences beyond text. Despite her adoption of the classical rabbinic exegetical form of midrash, she explicitly derides the influence of Talmud in a Protestant-impressing move towards rejecting spiritual intermediaries.5 The grandiose tone and evangelical echoes in this 4

5

See William Thomas Gidney, The History of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, from 1809 to 1908 (London: The Operative Jewish Converts’ Institution, 1908). ‘Talmud’ comes from the Hebrew word lamed, meaning study or learning. The Talmud refers to a compilation of oral laws believed to supplement the Written Torah given at Mount Sinai, and also to further books of explication on those laws. Recall that midrash refers both to a mode of biblical interpretation prominent in Talmudic texts and

40

Jewish Feeling

passage can be explained in part by the sources to which the author had access, but may further be understood as a rather deliberate interpolation of a dual audience: the Jews themselves, particularly those excluded from rabbinic interpretive practices, and a Protestant readership which increasingly deployed philosemitic tolerance as a cover for attempts to convert the Jews. Michael Galchinsky has included ‘The Spirit of Night’ in a 2003 Broadview edition of Aguilar’s selected writings, and he locates the story within a carefully mapped lineage of Jewish literature; in a footnote, Galchinsky identifies the story, as I have done, as Midrash, and glosses this genre as a ‘fable’.6 In addition to identifying the biblical proof-text upon which the work is based, he also points to an 1835 midrash in response to which Aguilar has apparently written ‘The Spirit of Night’, and includes this earlier text as an appendix.7 Elsewhere, Galchinsky shows how, in writing midrash, Aguilar intervenes in what he identifies as a masculine literary genre in order to theorize an alternative narrative of gender relations.8 In distinguishing between masculine and feminine genres, and Jewish and non-Jewish ones, Galchinsky posits a binary approach to form, in which certain modes of thought are applied, for the most part, within generic boundaries. He states: Ironically, by continuing to reject the novel form for the midrash, men left the field of the novel open to women, who embraced it. [. . .] Men were still emerging from a traditional system of education with a focus on classical Jewish literary genres, while

6

7

8

also a separate body of commentaries on Scripture, including the Midrash Rabbah, written using this interpretive mode. Michael Galchinsky, ed., Grace Aguilar: Selected Writings (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Literary Texts, 2003), p. 180, fn. 1. See Morris Raphall, ‘The Sun and the Moon’, The Hebrew Review and Magazine of Rabbinical Literature 2 (1835): 41–2, reproduced in Galchinsky, ed., pp. 383–4. Michael Galchinsky, The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer: Romance and Reform in Victorian England (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), p. 187.

History and Nation for Grace Aguilar

41

women, having received little or no formal education, had little connection to traditional forms or resistance to modern forms.9

While certainly not disputing Galchinsky’s summary of these historical conditions, I propose that with an expanded definition of midrash and a wider sense of how Jewish epistemology may be manifested in literary form, we may track the influence of Jewish thought even in works which do not appear to fit into a classical Jewish literary genre. In other words, while Aguilar does write midrash in the sense that Galchinsky uses the word (i.e. as imaginative exegesis via parable or allegory), she also employs this exegetal method in a far broader sense and, far from being steered away from this form towards other literary modes, midrashic traditions of thought and form underpin all of her literary productions. Indeed, Jewish authors’ double usage of Jewish and English formal traditions, and the implications of their doing so, forms the subject of this book. This chapter introduces several key works by Aguilar to examine her engagement with the themes encapsulated in ‘The Spirit of Night’, namely: how to read with feeling, the value of history and ways in which both feeling and history are implicated in the status of women within Jewish community (and thus of the Jews in England).

‘More than unusually moved’: Representing women’s reading In the years after her early death at the age of thirty-one, several of the works for which Aguilar remains known today were published by her mother, Sarah Aguilar. Included among these posthumous publications is the collection of short prose fiction Home Scenes and 9

Ibid., p. 95.

42

Jewish Feeling

Heart Studies (1852).10 One of these pieces, ‘The Authoress’, has been anthologized as recently as 1996, when it was included in Victorian Love Stories: An Oxford Anthology, edited by Kate Flint, alongside short works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, Christina Rossetti, Mary Braddon, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and Oscar Wilde.11 This is an almost unique instance of reading Aguilar’s work in a context that is not explicitly concerned with gender, Judaism or AngloJewish history. Its appearance in this anthology raises the question of whether the literary value of this story is altered when the religious identity of its author and of the complex audiences by which it was initially received are no longer the principal reasons for interest. Flint notes in her introduction that the theme of love in nineteenthcentury fiction was appropriated for a number of ends, including social or feminist critique, as it enabled a ‘focus on the period of a woman’s life when she appears to be most in charge of her fate’.12 ‘The Authoress’ is effectively a non-doctrinal version of the prescriptions that Aguilar elsewhere addresses specifically to Jewish women, whose fate, she implies, rests on more than the selection of an appropriate husband. In this story, however, religion is not openly mentioned, so that idealized feminine traits of modesty, deep feeling and above all domestic nurturing may be viewed as desirable in all English women, regardless of faith. As a professional author, Aguilar wrote for the periodical press (in publications as varied as Keepsake, Howitt’s Journal, La Belle Assemblée, The Occident and Chambers’ Miscellany) and was motivated in part by the need to support herself and her ailing parents. ‘The Authoress’ poses a familiar conflict between women’s 10

11

12

References here are to Grace Aguilar, Home Scenes and Heart Studies (London: Groombridge and Sons, 1883). Grace Aguilar, ‘The Authoress’, in Victorian Love Stories: An Oxford Anthology, ed. Kate Flint (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 1–17. References here to ‘The Authoress’ are to its appearance in the edition of Home Scenes and Heart Studies cited above, pp. 227–44. Kate Flint, ‘Introduction’ to Victorian Love Stories, p. vii.

History and Nation for Grace Aguilar

43

literary ambitions and their obligations towards emotional influence in the home, but does it, for example, display evidence of distinctly Jewish structures of thought and feeling? Reading ‘The Authoress’ alongside another story from Home Scenes and Heart Studies, ‘The Perez Family’ – which does openly aim to represent Anglo-Jewish life – allows us to consider whether Aguilar’s emphasis on domestic female spirituality works to assert a new model of Jewish community, even as it appears to replicate Christian culture and so to advance assimilation. It is finally by positioning these two stories in the context of Aguilar’s book-length theological meditation The Spirit of Judaism (1842) that the aims which underpin her literary works, both Jewish and ‘neutral’, become apparent: for Aguilar, maternal guidance in what to read and how to read it facilities the expression of women’s intellectual ambitions while establishing the foundations of a resilient, modern Jewish identity. Aguilar’s ready adoption of the dominant Victorian ideology of femininity, alongside her explicit addresses elsewhere to a Christian audience and engagements in print with the Evangelical mission to the Jews, led to critiques from her co-religionists during her lifetime regarding her commitment to Jewish life in Britain. Although cherished as ‘the public advocate of the faith of Israel’, Aguilar was also derided for ‘a too apt disposition to generalize from few facts’, and her apparent engagement with a non-Jewish readership was labelled ‘a form of Jewish Protestantism’.13 This uncertainty in how to regard Aguilar’s contribution and her legacy arises in part due to her complex status as an outsider: she was a London-born Jew of Sephardic origin who was raised partly in Devon (not then a site of widespread Jewish

13

‘To Grace Aguilar. The Heartfelt Address of a Few “Women of Israel”’, Jewish Chronicle, 9 July 1847, p. 178; Jacob Franklin, Review of The Spirit of Judaism, from The Voice of Jacob, quoted in Galchinsky, ed., Grace Aguilar: Selected Writings, pp. 365–6 (p. 366); Rachel Beth-Zion Lask Abrahams, ‘Grace Aguilar: A Centenary Tribute’, Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 16 (1945–51): 137–48 (p. 142).

44

Jewish Feeling

habitation); a professional author working alongside wealthy female philanthropists; a reform-minded Jew deeply concerned about the possibility of apostasy; and a serious thinker in theology prevented by gender from accessing the central texts of her religion.14 Taught Jewish history and some Hebrew by her parents during childhood periods of convalescence, Aguilar was aware from youth of her debarment from Jewish textual materials, both due to their scarcity in Devon and due to the total absence of communal religious education for girls outside of informal family instruction. Nadia Valman points out that many of the works published in Home Scenes and Heart Studies were written over a decade before their publication, during the 1830s when ‘the social influence and literary productivity of the Evangelical movement was at its height’.15 Valman has argued that Jews and women were equated and given special status in Evangelical ideology, as both were viewed as susceptible to conversion and as possessing strong religious feeling, and were thus ‘crucial agents of millennial transformation’.16 In Aguilar’s stories, especially historical narratives set during the Spanish Inquisition, she draws on Sephardic distrust of Catholicism in a way which brings her ever closer to an Evangelical audience. As Emma Mason and Mark Knight point out, ‘Evangelical identity was constructed partly in terms of what they were not, and opposition to Catholicism was integral to their growing self-consciousness.’17 Aguilar’s ready engagement with a Protestant audience, as well as her detailed 14

15

16

17

For a biographical sketch, see Sarah Aguilar, ‘Memoir of Grace Aguilar’, preface to Home Influence: A Tale for Mothers and Daughters (London: R. Groombridge, 1852), p. 7. Nadia Valman, ‘Women Writers and the Campaign for Jewish Civil Rights’, in Women in British Politics, 1760–1860: The Power of the Petticoat, ed. Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000), p. 100. Ibid., p. 95. See also Nadia Valman, ‘Jewish Persuasions: Gender and the Culture of Conversion’, in The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 51–84. Mark Knight and Emma Mason, Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 126.

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45

representation of the capacity for Jewish life to replicate conventional British social behaviour, attracted to her work the epithet mentioned above of ‘Jewish Protestantism’.18 Aguilar herself states in the introduction to the novel Home Influence, in press at the time of her death, that her ‘sole aim, with regard to Religion, has been to incite a train of serious and loving thoughts towards God and man, especially towards those with whom He has linked us in the precious ties of parent and child, brother and sister, master and pupil’.19 The distinctions made between people here are familial rather than religious, pedagogical rather than doctrinal. Nevertheless, we may detect the limits of Aguilar’s accommodation of Evangelical modes, and point firmly to what, for her, is the foundation of Jewish difference. Although doing so means reading against the grain of this and similar prefatory comments by Aguilar, I argue that noting the importance placed on women’s reading and textual interpretation in her works indicates the emergence of a new Anglo-Jewish identity which is equipped to resist overtures of conversion, rather than to submit to them. For Aguilar, Jewish women’s religious education was tied to their ability to withstand conversion.20 Her works draw often on Romantic poetic models to express freedom from the conventions of scholarly learning as well as complex emotional states – including the diasporic transcendence and isolation of ‘A Vision of Jerusalem, While Listening

18 19

20

Abrahams, ‘Grace Aguilar: A Centenary Tribute’, 142. Grace Aguilar, Home Influence: A Tale for Mothers and Daughters (London: James Nisbet and Co., [1859]), p. vii. The London Society for the Promotion of Christianity Amongst the Jews was founded in 1809, and was typical of widespread Evangelical campaigns to convert the Jews to Christianity. This was undertaken both to benevolently achieve the salvation of Jewish souls, and also to prepare the way for the Second Coming of Christ, a pre-requisite for which was Jewish conversion to Christianity. The LSPCJ funded soup kitchens, schools and churches which resembled synagogues in some respects. For a primary source see ‫[ הרובד ירבד‬Address by Deborah] or, An address to females on behalf of the London Society for the Promotion of Christianity amongst the Jews. By an Englishwoman (London: [1810]). For an historical overview of this movement, see Eitan Bar-Yoseph, ‘Christian Zionism and Victorian Culture’, Israel Studies 8.2 (2003): 18–44.

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Jewish Feeling

to a Beautiful Organ in One of the Gentile Shrines’21 – but these uses of popular forms and Protestant contexts are always what Cynthia Scheinberg terms ‘“defensive” engagements’.22 While the Protestant notion of private spirituality may fall fortuitously into sync with the necessity, for Aguilar, for Jewish women to engage in unmediated readings of whichever religious materials they might happen to access, here the similarity ends. As Scheinberg notes, Ellen Umansky’s formulation of the Jewish feminist theologian is relevant in defending Aguilar against the accusation of ‘Jewish Protestantism’. Umansky suggests a ‘responsive’ feminist understanding of theology that need not be committed to the norms of that tradition but to its sources and ‘fundamental categories’ of God, Torah, and Israel. Jewish feminist theology then, is a theology that emerges in response to Jewish sources and Jewish beliefs. These responses are shaped by the experiences of the theologian as woman and as Jew.23

This is a useful concept for understanding Aguilar’s complex refashioning of Jewish community which, on the one hand, is not 21

22 23

Grace Aguilar, ‘A Vision of Jerusalem, While Listening to a Beautiful Organ in One of the Gentile Shrines’, in Galchinksy, ed., pp. 196–8. See also Scheinberg’s discussion of this poem in Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England, pp. 183–8. In a similar unpublished poem, Aguilar records her distress upon witnessing a Christian friend entering a church, and realising that she may not follow and pray by her friend’s side: Oh! t’would have been such extasty [sic] to kneel I tell thee now that o’er my heart did steal Alas it might not be. I stood alone E’en in that crowd for my faith was unknown I would have given worlds to enter there And with thee kneel and join in silent prayer To God who is my God as well as thine Tho wildly different is my faith to thine. (ll. 11–18) See Aguilar, ‘Lines, 11 Aug 1834’ in ‘Poems Book 3’ (UCL Special Collections, Grace Aguilar Collection, MS ADD 387, Box A, 1834). Scheinberg, Women’s Poetry and Religion, p. 154. Ellen Umansky, ‘Creating a Jewish Feminist Theology’, in Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality, ed. Judith Plaskow and Carol Christ (New York: Harper Collins, 1989), pp. 187–98 (p. 195); quoted in Scheinberg, Women’s Poetry and Religion, p. 154. Emphasis in original.

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47

dependent on access to sacred texts but which, on the other, is mediated through the pervasive textuality of contemporary literary forms. What emerges is the importance of how to read, rather than what to read. Just as Umansky proposes a Jewish feminist theology in which responses to Jewish sources and beliefs are ‘shaped’ by personal experience, Aguilar both dramatizes and theorizes a model of reading with feeling that can be constitutive of Jewish identity, especially for women. While Aguilar works to formulate a new religious identity for women, she is nevertheless not a feminist in our modern senses of the word. Her advocacy of Jewish women’s education is a central but instrumental component of a wider defence of Jewish difference, and this defence relies on the adoption of gendered spheres in which women’s province is the private spirituality of the home. Galchinsky notes that ‘[b]ecause the home hides Jews’ practice of their formal differences, it enables them to broadcast the elements of their essential sameness to Christians’.24 Aguilar’s display of Jewish domesticity in fiction and in theological works enforces the idea that private, feminine spirituality enables Jews’ successful social integration outside of the home. This is a display that is deliberately instructive to both Jewish and non-Jewish readers; as she states in her epistolary treatise The Jewish Faith, Aguilar works both to ‘enlighten our neighbours to the true spirit of the hope that is in us’ and also to ‘perceive the true spirit of Hebrew patriotism awakening in our people’.25 It may be said, then, that her aims across a diverse body of publications were to represent Jewish practices as sharing essentialist ties with Protestant belief (based, in part, on shared antipathy towards Catholicism), to interpolate a form of Jewish women’s

24 25

Galchinsky, Origin, p. 150. Grace Aguilar, The Jewish Faith: Its Spiritual Consolation, Moral Guidance, and Immortal Hope, ed. Isaac Leeser (Philadelphia: 1227 Walnut Street, 1864 [1846]), p. 264.

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Jewish Feeling

religious and national identity that would enable the performance of tolerance without the risk of conversion and to stage a protest against the existing limits of women’s education by drawing attention to the limitations of her own knowledge while also exceeding these limits considerably in her thought, innovation and social reach. It is in view of these aims that I return to ‘The Authoress’, to consider the extent to which Aguilar’s Jewishness is important to a reading of this story. The authoress of the title is Clara Stanley, who is rejected by her lover Sir Granville Dudley when he mistakenly believes that Clara will not make a good wife because she is a literary woman. Dudley’s prejudice is naïve, though not unfounded; his own mother had literary pretensions that caused her to neglect her family. A friend warns him: ‘A literary woman is the very antipodes of domestic happiness. [. . .] One who is ever pining for and receiving fame can never be content with the praise of one; and one who is always creating imaginary feelings can have none for realities.’26 This does not describe Clara who, in contrast to the ‘irregularities of temper’ and ‘indecision of purpose’ of Dudley’s mother, possesses [m]ore than common intellect, and its constant companions, keen sensitivity and thoughtfulness; a vivid imagination, an intuitive perception of the beautiful, the holy, and the good; an extraordinary memory, and rapid comprehension of every variety of literature, alike prose and poetry.27

Importantly, Clara’s superlative abilities are intuitive rather than artificial, and she writes to effect the moral improvement of her readers rather than to seek personal fame. Orphaned early, she is compelled to earn money by her pen, but gradually proves so successful that she

26 27

Aguilar, ‘The Authoress’, p. 228. Ibid., p. 230.

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is able to stop writing for a profit and to do so only ‘to accomplish good’.28 She is encouraged by the popularity of her works but generally conceals her intelligence in company. Consequently, many love her nature but few know the extent of her mental powers. Despite her intelligence and modesty, Clara is prevented by a scheming cousin from meeting with Dudley to explain herself. Dudley moves to France where he marries a fashionable but ill-suited woman. Clara is bereft at this rejection, and reflects that mental resources are insufficient for happiness – that one must also love. As the years pass, Clara finds a solution to this problem: she continues to write, but anonymously, thus deflecting fame while also enjoying the love of her readership, which now includes the widowed Dudley. Dudley’s daughter has been boarding at a school where Clara is a teacher, and the former lovers meet after eight years’ separation when he is called urgently to the girl’s sickbed. Learning that Clara has been responsible for both his daughter’s education and also the tender nursing that has returned her to health, he asks: Will you tell me, Miss Stanley, how you can possibly contrive to unite so perfectly the literary and domestic characters? I have watched, but cannot find you fail in either – how is this?29

Clara’s explanation is that, insofar as she is writing about domestic life, she has to feel it in order to create a link directly from her heart to the hearts of her readers. Thought and duty are here united, and one supports the other. If Clara has an excess of thought, it is because she has an equally expansive sense of duty. Dudley realizes his earlier error and proposes marriage. After extracting a promise that she may be allowed to continue to write – ‘I cannot draw back from my literary path, for I feel it accomplishes good’ – Clara accepts him and the two, 28 29

Ibid., p. 231. Ibid., p. 242.

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along with the promisingly intelligent daughter, know great joy and happiness.30 With this plot, the site of conflict is deflected from Clara’s intelligence to her ambition. Ultimately, Clara is not made to sacrifice love and marriage, but rather any desire for acknowledgement of her intellectual (rather than emotional) gifts. Where she might have faced spinsterhood and a lonely death, she avoids this fate by choosing to administer sympathy rather than to pursue literary ambition. She also circumvents the unsympathetic taint of the marketplace by imagining a direct link from her writing desk to the hearth of her readers. Thus, her productivity becomes a kind of surrogate domestic discourse. It is her capacity for feeling that becomes central to Clara’s success in both commercial and domestic life, and it is significant that there is no mention of a greater spiritual power beyond Clara’s sense of writing towards a generalized notion of ‘the good’. Both Galchinsky and Scheinberg note the extent to which this story deals with Aguilar’s personal concerns about women’s literary accomplishment and reputation.31 In contrast to ‘The Authoress’, ‘The Perez Family’ does not seek to conceal debates about Jewishness. Rather, it dramatizes the tensions of Jewish interactions with wider British society, and it does so for a dual audience; the story seeks to translate Jewish difference into recognizable Protestant virtues, while also speaking directly to a complex Jewish readership understood to be concerned with apostasy and conversion. The initial publication context of ‘The Perez Family’ heightens the complexity of this dual address. It initially appeared

30 31

Ibid., p. 243. See Galchinsky, The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer, pp. 156–60; Scheinberg, Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England, p. 149. As Galchinsky has shown, posthumous attempts to cast Aguilar in the feminised role of a martyred ‘Moral Governess’ had the effect of downplaying her intelligence and the seriousness of her theological commentaries. Galchinsky, p. 185.

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in Charlotte Montefiore’s Cheap Jewish Library. Dedicated to the Working Classes in 1843, the same year in which Aguilar also began publishing poetry in The Occident, a Philadelphia-based Jewish periodical edited by Rabbi Isaac Leeser. Both publications were addressed to an exclusively Jewish audience. Montefiore, the niece of the prominent Jewish philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore, funded the Cheap Jewish Library anonymously and sold it to working-class Jews for pennies. Print runs were between 250 and 500 copies, and these were distributed by hand to Jewish readers. It was in the Cheap Jewish Library that Montefiore serialized her novel Caleb Asher in 1843, a satire on Evangelical programmes for conversion that were directed at impoverished Jews. Although the Cheap Jewish Library lost money, it fulfilled Montefiore’s charitable aims in using fiction to address religious reform and conversionism. It also provided a context in which female authors corresponded and encouraged one another in publication, and thus may be viewed as contributing to the beginnings of a Jewish women’s movement in England.32 After its initial appearance in the Cheap Jewish Library, ‘The Perez Family’ was later included in the posthumous Home Scenes and Heart Studies, where it sits alongside ‘The Authoress’ and a range of other stories which enforce a strong British nationalism and a piety based on prayer, Bible reading and women’s domestic spiritual guidance. ‘The Perez Family’ opens with a description of a domestic setting in which moral goodness is conveyed through outward cleanliness. Any Jewish incongruity is helpfully explained as if for an interested but ill-informed audience: Leading out of one of those close, melancholy alleys in the environs of Liverpool was a small cottage, possessing little of comfort or beauty in outward appearance, but much in the interior in favour 32

See Richa Dwor, ‘Montefiore, Charlotte Simcha (1818–1854)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, May 2015 (accessed 3 June 2015).

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of its inhabitants’ cleanliness and neatness were clearly visible, greatly in contradistinction to the neighbouring dwellings. [. . .] The cottage stood apart from the others, with a good piece of ground for a garden [. . .]. The garden was carefully and prettily laid out, and planted with the sweetest flowers; the small parlour and kitchen of the cottage opened into it, and so, greatly to the disappointment and vexation of the gossips of the alley, nothing could be gleaned of the sayings and doings of its inmates. Within the cottage the same refinement was visible; the furniture, though old and poor, was always clean and neatly arranged. The Mezzuzot (Deut. vi. 9, 20) were carefully secured to every doorpost and altogether there was an indescribable something pervading the dwelling, that in the very midst of present poverty seemed to tell of former and more prosperous days.33

This cottage is inhabited by the eponymous Perez family at the start of their saga which will include loss of fortune, a fire, death of the father, blindness of a child, enmity between brothers, apostasy, episodes of prejudice and deprivation, a dramatic courtroom scene and another death. Their narrative also emphasizes filial piety, the consolation of offering a good example, women’s prayer and theological debate, Jews in the workforce, a cure for blindness and the happy reunion of family in the home. In relying on these sentimental tropes, this story is not unlike other contemporaneous narratives of feeling and sympathy.34 In arguing that women’s spiritual influence over their husbands and children in the home is the source of their power over national morality, Aguilar replicates ideas made popular by Sarah Stickney Ellis, several of whose most widely read books were published during Aguilar’s lifetime.35 33

34

35

Grace Aguilar, ‘The Perez Family’, in Home Scenes and Heart Studies (London: Groombridge and Sons, 1883), pp. 1–94 (p. 1). See James Chandler, An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). These include The Women of England (1839), The Daughters of England (1842) and The Wives of England (1843).

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The introductory passage above is characterized, however, by some elasticity between convention and foreignness. The house is set physically apart from its neighbours, and this distance prevents the surveillance of local gossips. Visible evidence nevertheless indicates that its inhabitants are outperforming their Christian neighbours in virtues of cleanliness and thrift. The inmates of the house are sufficiently well-rooted to have planted a thriving and pleasant garden, but ‘an indescribable something’ invokes former prosperity and the general sense that this family is not of this place. Note too that although frustrated neighbours are denied viewing access to the cottage interior, the narrative is focalized to bring readers into this space, where our attention is soon directed to the mezzuzot on every doorpost.36 The distinctiveness of this site is finally rooted in the mezuzah as an unambiguous sign of its Jewishness, but it is a sign which is then briefly interpreted by way of a Biblical citation, as though to furnish its implied audience with an explanation. The separation between the outside of the house, which may be viewed and judged by its neighbours, and the inside, which may only be seen through the narrator’s privileged mobility, quickly becomes gendered. In preparing the house for their residence, ‘Sarah and Leah [. . .] worked in the interior, and Perez and Simeon improved the exterior of the house.’37 By drawing on the popular notion of gendered spheres to place only men in the public gaze, Aguilar relocates not only women, but also the visible signs and practices of Judaism to the inscrutable privacy of the home. The Perez family is intensely matriarchal. In addition to acting as the family’s emotional centre amidst its manifold difficulties, 36

37

Mezzuzot are small rectangular boxes hung on the doorposts of a Jewish house. They contain a scroll of parchment on which must be printed Deuteronomy 6:4–9 and 11:13–21. They serve as a visual reminder of one’s commitment to Judaism and are traditionally ascribed an apotropaic function in warding off evil. Aguilar draws our attention to verses 6:9 and 6:20. Aguilar, ‘The Perez Family’, p. 10.

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the widowed Rachel Perez also leads her children in religious observance and in reasoned discussion of sacred texts. While the narrator observes that attendance at synagogue services may have an ambivalent spiritual effect, it is the dialogic, domestic discussion of principles led by Rachel that are most sustaining of Jewish identity (we are told, for example, that the villainous Isaac Levison ‘went to the synagogue regularly; that he did, but it did not seem to benefit him much. How could it, when his actions denied his prayers?’).38 It is what Aguilar terms the ‘spirit’ of religion rather than its ‘forms’ which is ultimately sustaining, and which may be accessed without erudition or education.39 This emphasis on untrained spirituality creates the possibility for women’s religious practice to take place outside of the typical structures of education and study which were restricted to men. Aguilar is concerned both to gain women’s access to places of study and worship – the yeshiva and the synagogue – but also to compensate for their exclusion from those places. Thus, although Rachel leads her children in close analysis of the language and contexts of a psalm, we are assured that ‘she was no great scholar’: Let it not be imaged amongst those who read this little tale, that she was unusually gifted. She was indeed so far from gifted that she had a trusting spirit and a most humble and childlike mind, and of worldly ways was most entirely ignorant; and it was these feelings which kept her so persevering in the path of duty, and, leading her to the footstool of her God, gave her the strength and wisdom that she needed: and to every mother in Israel these powers are given.40 38 39

40

Ibid., p. 51. The distinction between spirit and form is emphasized in The Spirit of Judaism and elsewhere in her works: ‘[so] it is evident, the religion of no Hebrew is perfect, unless the form be hallowed by the spirit, the SPIRIT quickened by the FORM.’ Grace Aguilar, The Spirit of Judaism (1842) in Galchinsky, ed. Grace Aguilar: Selected Writings, p. 245. Aguilar, ‘The Perez Family’, p. 29. Emphasis in original.

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Rachel’s ‘feelings’ of trust and humility compensate for a formal religious education, and equip her with piety and consolation, as well as the capacity to anchor her family in Jewish identity. In possessing innate qualities which require no training, such that all ‘[mothers] in Israel’ may share in, Rachel’s important role is made unexceptional and common to all Jewish women. While the valorizing of women’s spiritual influence in the home has the apparent effect of removing religious expression to the strictly private realm of the family at table, the religious feeling exhibited and discussed by Rachel on the eve of the Sabbath creates an inter-domestic, supra-national Jewishness. In addition to the trappings of Judaism exhibited in this scene, Rachel’s intervention into the contested status of the Oral Law in Jewish practice makes this a Jewish, rather than generically ‘spiritual’ event. As Robert Goldenberg notes, ancient Rabbis taught that the law given by God to Moses at Mt Sinai took two forms: ‘a smaller revelation in writing and the larger one kept oral’.41 This oral knowledge, passed on through generations of successors, took form as rabbinic literature in the second century. The Mishnah, understood as recitation or recapitulation of the Oral Torah, forms the ‘core document’ of the Talmud, which itself requires magisterial knowledge of the whole Torah – both written and oral – to participate in its study or production, or to derive the social authority that comes with this kind of knowledge.42 Talmudic study, undertaken in the male, scholarly environment of the Yeshiva, has characterized a privileged and idealized sphere of Jewish life from antiquity to modern times. Along with the emergence of modernity in Europe came the development of Reform Judaism, first promulgated in Berlin and Hamburg around 1814. This new way of thinking about Jewish identity sought to alter the liturgy and certain religious 41

42

Robert Goldenberg, ‘Talmud’, in Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts, ed. Barry W. Holtz (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), pp. 129–75 (p. 130). Ibid.

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practices in order to accommodate Jews’ heretofore unprecedented levels of social participation as well as their growing tolerance of secular learning. For Lloyd P. Gartner, these reforms asserted that ‘Judaism had a spiritual, eternal core which came from revelation’, and not solely from formal observance and the study of rabbinic commentaries.43 With the reassessment of long-standing rituals, the centrality of the Talmud was called into question by Jewish reformers, a move which caused deep controversy in London Jewish life. Charlotte Montefiore refers derisively, for example, to ‘the rigid observers of outward forms and sanctities, whose piety is measured by the length of their prayers and by their scrupulous fidelity to the traditions of their rabbis’.44 For Aguilar, the tension between spirit and form can be resolved in part by investing ritual with feeling. In The Spirit of Judaism she states with reference to halakha, or Jewish law: We cannot but feel an earnest desire to obey its very dictate, to adhere to it, as strictly, as closely as ever our scattered and fallen state will permit; and not strictly and closely alone, but freely, unconditionally, lovingly, giving the heart, not the servile of obedient slaves.45

Here, a heartfelt and loving observance of the law is set against the image of slaves who are merely servile. Thus, an affective (if not 43

44

45

Lloyd P. Gartner, History of the Jews in Modern Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 140. See also Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York and Oxford, 1988). Charlotte Montefiore, A Few Words to the Jews. By One of Themselves (London: John Chapman, 1853), p. 17. Charlotte’s uncle, meanwhile, the prominent banker and philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore, vehemently opposed the introduction of any reforms to Jewish practise in Britain, and even broke relations with his brother Horatio over the issue. Horatio, who later married Charlotte (his niece), withdrew from Bevis Marks Synagogue to join the new Reform synagogue in 1842. See Abigail Green, Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 166. Grace Aguilar, The Spirit of Judaism, ed. Galchinsky, p. 239.

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juridical) adherence to halakha can invigorate the denationalized – ‘scattered’ – Jews. Obedience to the ‘complex web of religious obligations that give pattern and meaning to every aspect of life’ is achieved through affective outpourings which are ‘intuitive’ like Clara’s, or in ‘feelings’ like Rachel’s.46 The ‘worldly ways’ of which Rachel are ignorant may be read as the Oral Law, rabbinic scholarship of the Talmud. She succeeds without this knowledge in experiencing true faith and in inculcating, despite their many vicissitudes, Jewish knowledge and identity in her children. Her influence through guided reading and a display of affect equips her children, both male and female, to retain an immutable sense of their own difference when they re-enter the world to face its complex temptations and challenges. ‘The Authoress’ and ‘The Perez Family’ have in common the sentimental trope of women’s spiritual influence in the home. In the latter, Jewishness is moved into the domestic interior along with femininity. Rachel’s innate, or God-given, wisdom is a compensation for women’s traditional exclusion from Jewish study, but it is also an indication that Jewish women’s religious practices can occur under new circumstances. Borrowing from Evangelical models of femininity, Aguilar uses these conventions to generate a new model of Jewishness rooted in a maternal intervention into how to read and interpret texts. In ‘The Perez Family’, the selflessness and humility which are sources of goodness are universalized not among all people, but among all Jews. In this sense, the Englishness of Aguilar’s engagement with Evangelicism is transcended, but this occurs, importantly, so that Jews can reside securely in England. This aim is made possible by elevating Jewish women to the status of cultural guardians, rather than viewing them as vanguards of assimilation. 46

Ibid.

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‘The full gushing tide of rapture’: Theorizing women’s reading When, in 1842, Aguilar outlined a model of education in her booklength theological meditation The Spirit of Judaism, she and her mother had founded and were operating a school in Hackney for boys, where they taught ‘religion, English, Hebrew, writing, arithmetic, geography, and history’.47 Notwithstanding Aguilar’s deep concern with education, it is likely that the school was founded principally to earn money following the death of her father, and that she was as much burdened with the task of teaching as she was stimulated by it. Rachel Beth-Zion Lask Abrahams speculates that as Sarah Aguilar was by this point an invalid, ‘we may assume that the main burden of the establishment fell on Grace’.48 The Aguilars’ school was in competition with the Jews’ Free School (JFS), another prominent avenue to Jewish learning founded in 1788 and based, from 1821, in Bell Lane, Spitalfields.49 Aguilar’s intervention into contemporary debates on education, through representing scenes of education in fiction and in operating a school of her own, is to modify the idea of the kind of citizen that is produced by a moral education, and to designate new sites of learning. Her model responds to the particularly Jewish concerns (or the concerns felt by minority religious groups) of maintaining religious difference while making accommodations to national life. Her dual projects of advocating domestic, maternalled education while also operating a profit-generating school are indicative of this tension. 47

48 49

Rachel Beth-Zion Lask Abrahams, ‘Grace Aguilar: A Centenary Tribute’, Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 16 (1945–51): 141. Ibid. Gerry Black, JFS: The History of the Jews’ Free School Since 1732 (London: Tymsder Publishing, 1998), p. 38. The JFS, which still exists, and its most influential nineteenthcentury headmaster Moses Angel have been treated extensively in fiction, notably in Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto (1892) and, more recently, in The Singing Fire (2004) by Canadian author Lilian Nattel.

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The Spirit of Judaism is, for Galchinsky, ‘one of the first major statements by an English Jew of the theological position that later came to be called Reform or Liberal Judaism’.50 It is a series of essays in theology amounting to an extended interpretation of the Shema, the Jewish avowal of belief in one God that is central to Jewish liturgy. Aguilar’s readings of biblical prime-texts in this book are rooted in what she views as contemporary challenges faced by the Jews in England (although the book was first published in the United States). In the chapter ‘Hints on the Instruction of Hebrew Youth’, she argues that it is the specificity of a mother’s feelings, or ‘the full gushing tide of rapture ever attendant on maternal love’ that qualify her as an educator.51 Here, she theorizes the maternal relationships that are dramatized in ‘The Authoress’ and ‘The Perez Family’ in a way which accounts for the eventual outcome of those happy domestic vignettes. The implied dénouement for both is that for the mother who combines love for her child with gratitude to God, her infant will learn the love of God alongside the love of mother, and will in adult life be ‘more likely to prostrate himself before the God that mother worshipped, and pray again even as in childhood’.52 The Jewish mother’s duty to ensure that her child knows God arises more pressingly due to contemporary pressures from conversionists. Aguilar notes that Jews are ‘mingling intimately’ under the same civic and sovereign jurisdiction as other monotheists, and warns of the consequences of assimilation and laxity in religious practice: ‘unless the adherence to the laws of Moses be even more exact, it is more than likely our nationality would be entirely lost, as well as all pride, all glory in the Hebrew faith’.53 Spiritual training of the Jewish child by

50

51

52 53

Michael Galchinsky, Notes on ‘Non-Fiction Prose’, Galchinsky ed., Grace Aguilar: Selected Writings, p. 211. Grace Aguilar, The Spirit of Judaism, ed. Isaac Leeser (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 5602 [1842]), p. 151. Ibid., p. 155. Emphasis in original. Ibid., pp. 155, 160.

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its mother thus becomes implicated in the wider project of protecting the future of Jewish life in England and it highlights the necessity that mothers possess knowledge of how to live according to Jewish law, as well as the ability to withstand pressure to assimilate. Importantly, the mother’s act of textual selection and analysis on behalf of ‘her little charge’ can act as a more effective means of transmitting religious ideas than traditional methods of education such as memorization and recitation which are, in any case, open only to boys: Our prayers are long and not applicable to childish wants and feelings; but a mother may find a sweet employment in throwing together some well-selected passages, either from our ritual or the Book of Life, to form short but impressive prayers for both morning and evening.54

It is the problem of a woman’s ‘throwing together some well-selected passages’ that Aguilar is concerned with, for female access to this material is precisely at issue: access in the sense of physical ingress to the places where texts are stored and used; the presence of suitable material written in English; and the related issue of education in Hebrew language (extremely rare for women at this time). She complains of the ‘scarcity of theological texts among us’, and directs mothers to ‘their English Bibles’ – that is, to the King James Version.55 Jewish translations of the Hebrew Bible into English were not yet available to Aguilar or her readers. She is distinctive in suggesting that it is women who ought to determine the real meaning of words in a text that is understood to be symbolic, or is too dense to be easily understood. In this she looks forward to Elizabeth Fay’s recent model of ‘decryption’.56 Fay states that ‘decryption gives authority and power 54 55 56

Ibid., p. 154. Ibid., p. 102. Elizabeth Fay, ‘Grace Aguilar: Rewriting Scott Rewriting History’, in British Romanticism and the Jews: History, Culture, Literature, ed. Sheila A. Spector (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 218.

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to the interpreter, [and] signals his insider status as it is derived from a prior belonging and knowing outside the text’.57 In positioning mothers as interpreters, Aguilar is petitioning for the same insider’s status and also investigating the barriers that exclude women from asserting valued interpretation. Part of the mother’s task in reading the Bible with her child is to develop the child’s mechanisms of feeling so that it may learn the spirit, as well as the forms, of religion. The necessity of using Christian materials to do so means that Jewish children must additionally be instructed to look to the Law of Moses, as the mainspring, not only of the religion in which he believes, but of every other which acknowledges a God of salvation and mercy [. . .]; as the foundation of life and light [. . .] which springs that universal spirit of religion which, utterly distinct from creed, or form, or service, dwells in every pious heart.58

Here Aguilar inscribes the potentially profane experience of reading Christian scripture with a kind of reverse universalism; contrary to showing that Protestant and Jewish spirituality exist on an equal footing, she draws on a telos of Jewish history to establish both chronological and also divine precedence for Judaism (the same device underpins, as we shall see, her later collective biography The Women of Israel). Any parity between Jews and non-Jews, then, must be founded on the notion that the same God which underlies Judaism and Christianity is first and most powerfully the God of the Jews – the God of Mosaic Law. Once this belief is in place, study of Christian texts (here referred to as ‘aids to the spirit of religion’) may proceed.59 For childish minds fortified by an existing sense of

57 58 59

Fay, ‘Grace Aguilar’, p. 218. Aguilar, The Spirit of Judaism, ed. Leeser, p. 103. Ibid.

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Jewish identity, studying Christian thought may act as a useful and improving exercise; at this stage, ‘there can be no danger in selecting and appropriating portions of those Christian writers earnest in their cause’.60 It is the mother who must recognize which writers are in earnest and undertake the process of selection. The dual concerns of stimulating both knowledge and emotion through the process of reading meet in Aguilar’s discussion of the merits of secular fiction, and the ways in which this medium may serve a spiritual function. She asks: can it be considered impious and profane to render even recreative reading subservient to the cause of piety? to the immortal interests of the soul? will it not rather lead the youthful student to look yet more diligently within his own heart, and prepare his mind to recognise in a measure the ever acting Providence which guides and governs the actions alike of individuals, and those of the whole universe around him?61

More than entertainment – more, even, than edification – secular fiction is important insofar as it leads to the exploration and release of feeling. A mother should include ‘simple, domestic, highly moral tales’ in the household curriculum as an antidote to mental exhaustion.62 She must ensure that while she is vigilant with respect to children’s intellect, she is no less so where their ‘moral training and the guidance of feeling’ are concerned.63 The mimetic action of the fiction that Aguilar describes is to inventively and entertainingly ‘lift up the veil of the world’ in order to reveal what is essentially a morally ordered universe.64 In other words, one’s daily existence may give rise to cultural confusion and moral uncertainty, but exercising one’s 60 61 62 63 64

Ibid. Ibid., p. 197. Ibid., p. 193. Ibid., p. 194. Emphasis in original. Ibid., p. 193.

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emotions in the enjoyment of improving stories can transport young readers to greater certainty. Attention to this emotional life is what facilitates the transmission of knowledge through feeling that Jewish mothers are instructed to perform. The risks associated with reading secular literature, especially novels, are not unremarked on. The tendency to seek ‘whisperings of romance and high-flown sentiment’ in novels is the disastrous outcome of an emotional life which has been ‘kept constrained and concealed’.65 Those who have been ‘taught to drown all feeling, to conceal every emotion’ are those most likely to become perversely seduced by sentimental and romantic fiction from the path of good behaviour.66 Plot devices which to the wrongly educated may appear sinfully sensational will to the pious indicate only that our knowledge of God’s plan is partial, and that there may thus be some ‘seeming incongruity and mystery in human affairs’.67 The capacity of literature to generate spiritual meaning thus resides in the individual’s act of emotionally literate reading, rather than being inherent to the text itself, an argument which reaches beyond the education of children. While contemporary authors of fiction invoked by Aguilar are all Christian, she has already established that Jews may derive moral guidance and consolation from Christian texts, provided that child readers have already developed a strong sense of the specificity of the relationship between themselves and God.68 Aguilar furthermore calls for the creation of a Jewish literary tradition in English, which she sought to inaugurate by writing historical romances, including 65 66 67 68

Ibid., p. 196. Ibid. Ibid. ‘While England may boast the names of [Mariah] Edgeworth, [Felicia] Hemans, [Anna Maria] Hall, [Mary Russell] Mitford, [Sarah Stickney] Ellis, Sinclair, [Susan] Ferrier, [Amelia] Opie, and [Mary] Howitt, amongst her female literati, and [Walter] Scott, and [George Payne Rainsford] James, and [Theodore] Fay, to swell the brilliant list, the young can never be in want of recreation at once as improving to the heart, as delightful to the fancy.’ Ibid., p. 194. See also Galchinksy, ed., Grace Aguilar, p. 233, fn. 1.

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The Vale of Cedars; or, The Martyr (written in 1834; published posthumously in 1852) and ‘The Escape: A Tale of 1492’, first published in Records of Israel (1844). Both furnish Jewish readers with literary texts within which to develop emotional readings, and also contribute to a historicized and nationalistic narrative of Jewish identity. The radical theological implications of Aguilar’s argument divest meaning from the text, even where that text is rabbinically authored, and relocate it to the emotional faculties of the individual reader. For Aguilar, ‘meaning’ in this context relates to knowledge of God’s presence and ways of being in the world that follow from apprehending what she argues is God’s privileged love for the Jews. Rather, however, than implying a wholesale rejection of the forms of religion which, as noted, must be subordinate to the spirit – ‘to assist the worship of the heart, but not to take its place’ – this displacement of meaning from text to an expanded circle of interpreters is in fact a strengthening of Jewish communal identity.69 Indeed, Aguilar issues this stark warning: ‘we live in the midst of others with whom we are still more likely to become assimilated if we relax, in the very smallest degree, from our adherence to the law of Moses’.70 Adherence to the Law, then, is crucial but must be preceded by the same emotional understanding that allows edification to flow from secular fiction. Outward forms of religion, namely the placing of a mezuzah on external doorframes, observing dietary restrictions, keeping the Sabbath on Saturday and men’s wearing of phylacteries while praying serve as reminders of Jewish difference amidst the increasing freedoms of social intercourse. These rituals serve a contemporary function and thus may be viewed as evincing ‘reason, not superstition’.71 Framing ritual as relevant and rational is an answer to the Evangelical critics of Judaism. Doing so furthermore 69 70 71

Aguilar in Galchinsky, Grace Aguilar, p. 239. Ibid., p. 240. Ibid.

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ties long-standing or ancient practices to the pressing concern that Aguilar felt regarding Jewish nationalism in England. ‘Mere forms’, for Aguilar, are historically contingent and are as likely to betray the spirit of religion as to inculcate it. Privileging the emotions (‘every sorrow, every joy, our cares, our hopes, our wishes’) in reading and religious practice thus ensures greater communion with an ‘eversympathizing Friend’ as well as the self-identification that will ensure the continuity of Jewish communal life.72 In thinking about how her literary works fit into a canon of nineteenth-century English literature, we may consider first whether her writing is innovative and aesthetically significant or if, rather, her value lies in enriching contextual knowledge of the period; and second, the impact on her reputation of being categorized according to gender and religion. In recent years – certainly since the publication of Galchinsky’s The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer: Romance and Reform in Victorian England (1996) – criticism of Aguilar and other Anglo-Jewish female authors has tended to resist the binaries of influence and difference to show how, in the words of Valman, ‘the categories of Jewish and Christian in Victorian culture often overlapped to the point of collapse’.73 In The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (2008), Valman argues that certain markers of difference are dissolved through the broad cultural influence of shared narrative strategies, which may be employed by a range of writers regardless of religion or gender. For example, we may view this collapse in the appropriation by female Jewish writers of Evangelical rhetoric and literary forms, particularly those forms traditionally considered feminine, including domestic fiction and religious poetry. For Valman, the outcome of this borrowing is that, to a large extent, Jewish self-representation in the nineteenth century 72 73

Ibid., p. 235. Nadia Valman, The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 10.

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is influenced by Protestant values and aesthetics, and in the case of Aguilar, consciously so. Valman argues that ‘what makes the work of Grace Aguilar distinctive is not her assertion of Jewish culture and religious difference but her attempt to articulate a Jewish identity in the language of Evangelical Christianity’.74 Scheinberg, meanwhile, views Aguilar’s use of form as subversive of gendered categories, and while she similarly recognizes that Aguilar ‘turned to the literary forms of hegemonic Christian culture’, here this is explained as enabling the formation of a unique religious and literary identity in which Aguilar ‘[offers] her own specific set of theological ideas while escaping the criticism of Rabbinic authority’.75 Galchinsky had earlier commented on the pragmatic motivations behind the popularity of historical romance among Jewish female authors, including the knowing use of this form in order to interpolate a wider audience and to achieve ‘politically and religiously progressive aims’.76 Michael Ragussis notes that Aguilar’s occasional first-person interjections within these narratives (in which she identifies herself as a female Jew) serve to assert her authority on the subject of Jewish femininity and also act as a testament to the continued presence and development of Jews in nineteenth-century England.77 Taken together, the effect of this recent criticism is to assert a number of not dissimilar conclusions about Aguilar’s use of conventional literary tropes: that although powerful cultural influences may provide a vocabulary for the expression of ideas about religion, difference may still be asserted via a subversive engagement with popular forms.

74 75 76 77

Valman, The Jewess, p. 100. Scheinberg, Women’s Poetry and Religion, p. 148. Galchinsky, Origin, p. 44. Michael Ragussis, ‘The Birth of a Nation in Victorian Culture: The Spanish Inquisition, the Converted Daughter, and the “Secret Race”’, Critical Inquiry 20.3 (Spring, 1994): 477–508. See also Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).

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Aguilar’s subversion of these forms rests on having the confidence to claim that one may read numerous categories of secular literature and gain spiritual insight. This model does not emphasize one text (for instance, the Bible); rather, meaning can be mediated through various texts by any person with the capacity for interpretation, founded on the spirituality that is learned in childhood. While Aguilar’s views regarding the Oral Law are characteristic of Jewish progressive thought at the time,78 her suggestions that Jewish children read Christian scripture in English alongside a study of Hebrew language are radical, in that they imply that the locus of spirituality is in the reader’s capacity for interpretation – informed by their early moral education – rather than within the text. This produces a model of civic interaction that in the first instance is important in preventing apostasy, and secondarily posits an alternative political status for Jews by showing that they may participate in national, Protestant culture without surrendering religious difference. Aguilar’s call for change relating to women’s roles and the way that text is valued is repeatedly projected onto the figures of the Jewish mother and child. So too is her vision of tolerant relations between Jews and Christians. Here, it is children who are envisioned as passive agents of reform, as what they are taught – alongside knowledge of Jewish scripture – is a way of thinking that will enable defence of religious difference, and so their cultural security in adult life. It is mothers, importantly, who are active in instilling and directing the Jewish feeling that will make this possible. By proposing an alternative method of learning, Aguilar is not undermining how the Bible is being conceptualized and interpreted, nor is she questioning its centrality as the organizing force of Jewish life. However, by outlining a mode of interpretation in which individuals feel the significance of sacred and secular texts for

78

Steven Singer, ‘Jewish Religious Thought in Early Victorian London’, AJS Review 10.2 (Autumn 1985): 191.

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themselves, she overcomes in her work the moral authority of those who would determine the meaning of these texts on behalf of others, as well as rigid gender stereotypes with respect to modes of knowing. In this way, both ‘The Authoress’, in resolving women’s intellectual and domestic roles, and ‘The Perez Family’, in representing the matriarchal educative function, contribute to women’s improved status within Jewish community, and also to the defence of Jewish difference amidst the cultural pressures of assimilation and modernity.

‘The Bible, and that nation whose earliest history it so vividly records’: Jewish histories for England’s Jews Elsewhere in The Spirit of Judaism, Aguilar decries the moral state of the Jewish poor in England who are ‘well versed in traditional lore, but wholly ignorant of the spirit of the Bible’.79 For her, ‘traditional lore’ includes the uncomprehending performance of Jewish ritual and the observance of laws motivated by a sense of duty which is nevertheless ‘utterly unconscious of the nature of Him they thus address’.80 Aguilar views these religious performances as uncomprehending because those reciting the prayers and blessings do not read or understand Hebrew well enough to engage with the words they speak, and also because, for her, religious experience must be ‘simple [and] heartfelt’.81 In advocating personal acts of textual interpretation which lead to affective experiences of divinity, Aguilar appears to engage with popular Evangelical modes as well as strains of the recently imported Jewish Haskalah, or enlightenment, in the form of Reform Judaism.82 She is also, however, drawing 79 80 81 82

Aguilar, The Spirit of Judaism, ed. Leeser, p. 101. Ibid. Ibid. Steven Singer, ‘Jewish Religious Thought in Early Victorian London’, AJS Review 10.2 (Autumn 1985): 188.

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attention to the causes of limited access to sacred texts for England’s Jews; these causes are, as noted, the absence of translations into English and, for women especially, virtually no education in Hebrew. The consequences of this limited access are, importantly, political as well as spiritual. Furthermore, in her metonymic approach to narrating history and posing questions of biblical prime-texts, Aguilar is perpetuating the far older tradition of Midrash. Here we may extend Aguilar’s model of affective reading developed in the forgoing section to consider how, in reading the Bible with feeling, the apocryphal past is interpreted in a politicized present. As Galchinsky and others have argued, Aguilar is concerned with preventing Jewish apostasy by formulating a coherent and affective Jewish identity that can withstand the overtures of Evangelical conversionism.83 When she insists that a heartfelt religion ‘can only be obtained by teaching [the Jewish poor] their English Bibles’, she suggests that Jewish identity can be fostered through the King James Bible, but only if readers are trained, in the manner outlined above, to recognize that the God which appears in this text is first and most powerfully the Mosaic God of the Jews.84 When Aguilar was writing in the 1840s, Jewish translations of the Hebrew Bible into English were not yet available to her or her readers. In America, Isaac Leeser published a translation of the Pentateuch (the five books of Moses which form the Torah and are referred to in a Christian context as the Old Testament) in Hebrew and English in 1845, and a complete translation of the Masoretic texts in 1853. In England, Abraham Benisch translated the Pentateuch and published it alongside the Hebrew text in 1851, four years after Aguilar’s untimely death.85 Writing just before the arrival 83 84 85

Galchinsky, Modern Jewish Woman Writer, p. 136. Aguilar, The Spirit of Judaism, ed. Leeser, p. 102. See Isaac Leeser, The Law of God, Edited, and With Former Translations Diligently Compared and Revised (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America 5605 [1845]); Isaac Leeser, The Twenty-Four Books of the Holy Scriptures: Carefully Translated According to the Massoretic Text, on the Basis of the English Version, after

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of these longed-for resources, Aguilar devises a number of techniques for accessing and thinking about biblical texts. As these necessarily rely on Protestant materials – what Aguilar refers to as ‘English bibles’ – her efforts reside in interpretive strategies for deriving Jewish meaning from these sources. Her ready engagement with a Protestant audience, as well as her detailed representation of the capacity for Jewish life to replicate conventional British social behaviour, attracted to her work the epithet, as noted, of ‘Jewish Protestantism’.86 The Women of Israel (1845) is a collective biography of female figures from six periods of history divided between ‘Wives of the Patriarchs’, ‘The Exodus and the Law’, ‘Between the Delivery of the Law and the Monarchy’, ‘The Monarchy’, ‘Babylonian Captivity’ and ‘Continuance of the Second Temple’. A final seventh chapter treats of ‘Women of Israel in the Present, as Influenced by the Past’.87 Here Bible and Jewish history are retold as parables for a contemporary readership. It is in this work that Aguilar most fully explores the uses of a trans-historical and supra-national narrative of Jewish descent founded in biblical sources. Two years later, in 1847, she adapted this interplay among theology, historiography and the urgent concerns of the present to more overtly political uses in her extended essay ‘History of the Jews in England’. Published in Chambers Miscellany in the year of her death, it is the first such history written in England by a Jewish author. Her use of the genre of collective biography to frame and transmit a series of midrashim is an example of the formal hybridity noted earlier in relation to ‘The Spirit of Night’. Here it is extended to a book-length project of re-engaging with sacred texts

86 87

the Best Jewish Authorities; and Supplied with Short Explanatory Notes (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 5613 [1853]); Abraham Benisch, Jewish School and Family Bible (London: James Darling, 1851). Abrahams, ‘Grace Aguilar: A Centenary Tribute’, p. 142. Grace Aguilar, The Women of Israel; or, Characters and Sketches from the Holy Scriptures and Jewish History Illustrative of The Past History, Present Duties, and Future Destiny of the Hebrew Females, as Based on the Word of God (London: George Routledge and Sons, [1890(?)]), pp. v–vii.

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to answer the questions which emerge from contemporary concerns. In circumventing traditional barriers to women’s religious study by devising her own Jewish parables based on Protestant biblical sources, Aguilar undertakes a complex linking of a biblical past to a politicized British present, and it is this that underpins her plea for Jewish emancipation in ‘History of the Jews in England’. The Women of Israel interpolates its audience as Jewish women who are tasked with correcting misapprehensions about the Jews. The introduction exhorts that [to] realize this blessed conviction, the Bible must become indeed the book of life to the female descendants of that nation whose earliest history it so vividly records; and be regarded, not as a merely political or religious history, but as the voice of God speaking to each individual, giving strength to the weak, justice to the wronged, and consolation unspeakable as unmeasurable to the afflicted and the mourner.88

Although she sets aside the primacy of the Bible as a religious or political record, her readers are nevertheless thought of as actual descendants of a nation whose history is recorded in biblical texts. Thus for Aguilar the Bible does provide a factual account which links contemporary readers to their ancient forbears, as well as an emotional resource from which to derive strength, justice and consolation. This emphasis on its readers’ weakness is partly a feminizing of their emotional state, and also an acknowledgement of the historical condition of the Jews as a persecuted population. In debating the significance of the Bible, though, what remains problematic, especially for a female readership, is which Bible to read and how to interpret it. As noted, Jewish translations into English were not yet available, and most Jewish women would have had insufficient training in Hebrew 88

Aguilar, The Women of Israel, p. 15.

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to study other biblical and rabbinic sources. Aguilar’s approach is to combine two existing narrative forms: the collective biography, made popular by English female writers like Felicia Hemans and Anna Jameson, and the rabbinic device of midrash. In deploying the former, she appeals to a considerable market for didactic accounts of the lives of noted fictional or historical figures. Alison Booth notes that ‘[s]erving as more than self-help or eulogy, canons of women’s lives appear to have been indispensable aids in the formation of nationhood as well as of social difference.’89 In The Women of Israel, Aguilar is the individual composer of original lives, selected and arranged to draw didactic and ideological points from diverse source material. As such, her approach to life writing bears comparison to midrash, a term which she translates elsewhere as ‘Hebrew Apologue’.90 As noted, midrash is a mode of interpretation that derives both points of law and also parables from sacred texts. In devising her own midrashim on biblical sources dealing with female figures, Aguilar engages in narrative exegesis in a way that circumvents male scrutiny and engages a female audience. Her sources for this are primarily the King James Bible and The History of the Jews (1830) by the historian and Dean of St Paul’s, Henry Hart Milman (1791–1868). Milman’s controversial study is a non-literal reading of the Old Testament which depicts the Jews as an Oriental people in largely anthropological terms, and with reference to other historical sources of the ancient Near East. An illustrative example is Aguilar’s lengthy entry on Esther, the Jewish wife of a Persian king who persuades her husband not to allow a mass execution of the Jews in his empire, an event which is celebrated in the festival of Purim. The Book of Esther

89

90

Alison Booth, How to Make it as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 3. Grace Aguilar, ‘The Spirit of Night, Founded on a Hebrew Apologue’ [1852] in Michael Galchinsky, ed., Grace Aguilar: Selected Writings (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Literary Texts, 2003), pp. 180–5.

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is included in the three-part Tanakh, the cannon of the Hebrew Bible, fixed by the second century ce, which includes Torah (the five books of Moses), Nevi’im (Prophets) and Ketuvim (Writings) of which Esther is one. Aguilar retells this story as both a narrative of Jewish historical identity and also as a source of moral guidance for contemporary women. She demonstrates the scope of her research and the seriousness of her scholarly method by including a preamble on the historical record concerning the Babylonian exile, supported by direct quotation from the King James Bible, as well as footnotes detailing her sources and providing brief discourses on such topics as chronology in the Bible. Within this framework of historicity, Aguilar uses the figure of Esther as an exemplary model for her readers. To this end, she interprets Esther as a figure who is submissive, sympathetic, spiritual and who succeeds in becoming integrated into an imperial government while retaining religious difference and belonging to a minority community – clearly an instructive position for Jews residing in Britain. Something else sets Esther apart: ‘But it is the exquisitely feminine character of Esther that is to me her peculiar and touching charm; – it is the still undercurrent of deep feeling, which betrays itself throughout her history.’91 This ‘still undercurrent’ is something of a paradox, as the nature of a current must be that it flows rather than is still. It also typically moves laterally, but here it is ‘deep’, and so it also follows a vertical model; one must go down, rather than across, to locate it. Esther’s feeling exists on multiple conflicting spatial and temporal planes, in the impossible stasis of a current that flows through all times and places, and in the downward probing that must be done to locate it. In addition to offering her readers a didactic model of femininity and citizenship, Aguilar intervenes explicitly in theological debates 91

Aguilar, Women of Israel, p. 349.

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surrounding the prime-text. For instance, the persona of Esther as servile is threatened by the recounting in the prime text of Esther’s gruesome insistence that the ten sons of Haman, her political rival and the would-be scourge of the Jews, be hanged after they had already been executed by some other means. Indeed, the king Ahaseurus (or Artaxerxes) presents her with a rare moment of agency in seeking her preferred course of action: And the king said unto Esther the queen, The Jews have slain and destroyed five hundred men in Shushan the palace, and the ten sons of Haman; what have they done in the rest of the king’s provinces? now what is thy petition? and it shall be granted thee: or what is thy request further? and it shall be done. (Est. 9:12)

Esther’s response is clear: ‘let Haman’s ten sons be hanged upon the gallows’ (Est. 9:13). This passage has for centuries been reviled as an instance of Jewish triumphalism or held up as an episode in the ongoing battle between the Jews and their historic enemy, Amalek. Meanwhile Rashi, the eleventh-century rabbinic commentator, contends that the ten already dead sons come in for this symbolic public desecration because they were responsible for disseminating false accusations about the Jews.92 Milman also offers some commentary on Esther’s request. His agenda in analysing Esther’s behaviour is, needless to say, quite different from Aguilar’s (or, indeed, Rashi’s). Viewing Esther not as a trans-historical ideal of Jewish femininity, Milman places her in a contemporaneous context of other violent female rulers: Though Esther, at first, appears in an amiable light, by the account of her own countrymen, yet the barbarous execution of the ten sons of Haman diminishes the improbability, that, through jealousy, and the corrupting influence of her station in the court of Xerxes, 92

‘The Book of Esther’ (9:12–13), The Complete Jewish Bible, With Rashi Commentary, http:// www.chabad.org/library/bible_cdo/aid/16482/jewish/Chapter-9.htm#showrashi=true

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she might in later life become as revengeful and sanguinary as the Amestris of Herodotus.93

The challenge all this poses to Aguilar’s model of Esther is excruciating; she says: ‘We, ourselves, once shrunk from the verse, and wished it had not had existence.’94 To reconcile her character with the one in the biblical text, Aguilar rises to Milman’s accusation of barbarity: That Esther should have made her request that her people should do on the morrow as they had done the preceding day, and that Haman’s ten sons should be hanged upon the gallows, preceded from no unfeminine or vindictive feeling, but simply from the wish that the future safety of the Hebrews should be fully secured. As an individual, and judging by her previous truly feminine character, Esther would, without doubt, have shrunk from the awful retribution which the plot against the Jews had wrought.95

In short, she works to provide justification, and to maintain Esther’s difference from comparable figures, by highlighting both the vulnerability of the Jews as an alien population in a hostile land and also their restraint. ‘The wars of the Jews’, she insists, ‘were never, from the first of their selection as the Eternal’s chosen, actuated by either ambition or revenge’.96 Aguilar is concerned both to interpret the biblical prime text in a way which demonstrates a contemporary relevance by conforming to Victorian gender roles, and also to refute other interpretations which threaten to undermine her own. In this way, she addresses multiple audiences (including Jewish women and Christian clergy such as Milman) and engages in contestations regarding biblical exegesis. 93 94 95 96

Henry Hart Milman, The History of the Jews (London: John Murray, 1829), p. 188. Aguilar, The Women of Israel, p. 357. Ibid., p. 358. Ibid., p. 359.

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Milman appears at pains to display a critical disinterestedness in order to uphold his liberal credentials. Aguilar, meanwhile, has reasons to maintain the submissive femininity of her heroine, and engages in speculation that to a certain extent reads against, or at least between the lines of, the evidence. Like Rashi, she supplies a rationale for Esther’s actions, suggesting that eight centuries later these still sit uncomfortably with ideas of Jewish women’s behaviour. Time and location work in two ways here: distance and difference are emphasized in a way that appears to enable the story to function, in part, as an allegory. In explicitly clarifying the meaning of the allegory, however, Aguilar presents the past and the East as being concurrent with and relevant to contemporary life in England. The concepts of metaphor and metonymy can help to frame Aguilar’s interpretive approach. Metaphor, analogy or allegory are modes of interpretation that rely on what David Lodge calls a ‘system of equivalencies’ to link events in the text with meanings which reside outside of it (in this case, finding some equivalency between problems faced by Jewish women in London in 1845 and the events of the book of Esther).97 By contrast, understanding the text metonymically means ‘[restoring] the deleted detail, to put the text back into the total context from which it derives’, or to expand upon it so as to state meanings that are implicitly present and contained within it.98 Interpreting The Women of Israel in this latter sense lends Aguilar’s guidance to her readers a further prophetic authority. The distinction between metaphor and metonymy is significant, as metaphor is the formal conception that underlies typology, an exegetal approach popular during Aguilar’s lifetime, particularly among Evangelicals, which is the study of religious texts for the 97

98

David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 93. Ibid.

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purpose of identifying episodes in them that appear to prophesy later events.99 To practitioners of typology, the Old Testament contains allegories which foreshadow events or characters from the New Testament. For example, Jonah’s three nights in the belly of the whale are read as symbolic of, and anticipating, Christ’s three nights in his tomb. Here, Jonah is the type and Christ the antitype. (It is worth noting that there is a typological tradition in some rabbinic literature, particularly in Kabbalah, although naturally this is not Christological.) Metonymy, meanwhile, is the primary concept underpinning midrash; the biblical text, in other words, contains all possible meanings and relevancies, and the act of interpretation (no matter how disconnected or counterintuitive) merely unfolds embedded meanings. As Timothy Larsen points out, Aguilar disputes typological thinking in a series of essays on specific biblical passages, collected and published after her death, which ‘have as their explicit aim refuting Christian readings of these texts’.100 In response to a Christian telos which detects Christological readings in the Hebrew Bible she states: ‘I am more convinced in my own belief, because all that the Christian preaches, of portions of the Old Testament being typical of the sufferings of Christ, is to me clearly illustrative of my own loved nation.’101 Her refusal to think metaphorically about the Hebrew Bible indicates a preference for metonymic thinking, in which the ancient text contains the history of a still-living nation. In this way, Esther may be relevant to a Victorian reader and the present-day civil liberties of the Jews can be framed in the context of knowing how to read the Bible with feeling.

99

100

101

George P. Landow, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art, and Thought (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980). Timothy Larsen, A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 288. Grace Aguilar, Essays and Miscellanies (Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1853), p. 21, quoted in Larsen, p. 288.

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These approaches to dealing with a biblical and historical past are present in her long essay ‘History of the Jews in England’, which was commissioned by the Scottish publisher Robert Chambers for the radical journal Chambers Miscellany and should, according to Galchinsky, ‘be viewed as the founding text of Anglo-Jewish historiography’.102 Its title notably refers to ‘Jews in England’ rather than ‘Jews of England’, and this sense of residing rather than belonging in the nation underpins Aguilar’s complex politics in writing the piece. Making as it does an explicit and interrogative plea for full political emancipation (for Jewish men) – ‘Is it not discreditable to the common sense of the age that such anomalies should exist in reference to this well-disposed and, in every respect, naturalised portion of the community?’ – this article seeks to respond to longstanding counterfactual prejudices against the Jews with a largely dispassionate account of their persecution and their contributions in Britain and its empire.103 It joins Aguilar’s earlier project The Women of Israel in providing an extended history of the Jews, there framed for a female Jewish audience, here directed towards a Protestant readership, to demonstrate the fitness of Jews for full social and political participation without assimilation. The Women of Israel claims a lineage from biblical time and biblical texts for present-day Jews in Victorian England to suggest that the Jews possess a longer and more divinely favoured history than that of England itself. It also, however, demonstrates patriotism by tapping into the Protestant view of England as a new and better Israel. The historian Linda Colley has written about an early nineteenth-century Protestant sense of ‘chosenness’, of being watched over by God, as evidenced by national

102

103

Michael Galchinsky, ‘Note on Non-Fiction Prose’, in Grace Aguilar: Selected Writings, p. 213. Grace Aguilar, ‘History of the Jews in England’, Galchinsky, ed., pp. 313–53 (p. 332). Originally published in Chambers’ Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Tracts 18 (1847): 1–37. Full emancipation of the Jews was achieved in 1858, when Lionel de Rothschild became the first professing Jew to sit in the House of Commons.

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escapes from crises allegedly perpetrated by Catholics, such as the great fire of London, the execution of Charles I and the Gunpowder Plot. Colley argues that ‘being a patriot was a way of claiming the right to participate in British political life, and ultimately a means of demanding a much broader access to citizenship’.104 Aguilar is, in a sense, staking a claim to patriotism as a rationale for Jewish civil liberties. Daniel A. Harris positions this appeal for tolerance in the wider context of Jewish displacements – including the Babylonian exile, the dispersal from Judea after 70 ce and the Inquisitions in Spain and Portugal beginning in the fifteenth century – to which, he argues, Aguilar is especially sensitive due to her Sephardic background: ‘Her consciousness of displacement is crystallized in her Marrano heritage.’105 These exilic events figure as traumatic expulsions from countries once thought safe and create a profound anxiety about the stability of Jews’ position in any ‘adoptive’ country. The antiCatholicism that is implicit in ‘History of the Jews in England’ and dramatized openly in Aguilar’s historical fiction set during the Spanish Inquisition furthermore draws upon lingering tensions

104

105

Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London: Pimlico: 1994 [1992]), p. 5. Daniel A. Harris, ‘Hagar in Christian Britain: Grace Aguilar’s “The Wanderers”’, Victorian Literature and Culture 27.1 (1999): 143–69 (p. 143). The Inquisition was begun in 1478 in Castile and 1497 in Portugal, and was designed to maintain Catholic orthodoxy throughout the Spanish and Portuguese empires, largely by penalizing non-Catholics using techniques of torture or expulsion. Marranos, also called conversos, are crypto-Jews: Spanish and Portuguese Jews who converted to Catholicism to escape execution during the Inquisition, but who continued to practice Judaism in secret. The public spaces of Jewish life were eradicated and replaced by secret rituals conducted in the home. Secret knowledge was transmitted from generation to generation via a matrilineal oral tradition. In ‘The Escape’, however, Aguilar characterizes the oral tradition as a masculine process: ‘From father to son, the secret of their faith and race descended, so early and mysteriously taught, that little children imbibed it – not alone the faith, but so effectually to conceal it, as to avert and mystify all inquisitorial questioning, long before they knew the meaning or necessity of what they learned.’ Grace Aguilar, ‘The Escape’, in Home Scenes and Heart Studies, p. 166.

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following the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829.106 For example, in the short story ‘The Edict’ and the historical novel The Vale of Cedars; or, the Martyr, Aguilar describes the experiences of both the cryptoJewish Marranos and those Jews who fled the Iberian Peninsula, choosing exile over conversion and concealment. Aguilar’s paternal ancestors had fled Spain, while her mother’s predecessors came from Portugal.107 Both families immigrated to Jamaica where they owned sugar plantations, before coming to England in the generation before Aguilar’s birth.108 For Harris, Aguilar’s aim in ‘History of the Jews in Britain’, and across all her works, is consequently to gain a safe harbour for the Jews in Christian Britain, a concern she expresses from the subject position of the historic exile.109 Others have noted the relevance of the inherited trope of concealment to her writing and thus suggest that she perpetuates Sephardic traditions of female cultural transmission. Galchinsky argues that Aguilar’s emphasis on the spirit of religion over its formal requirements shows the influence of crypto-Judaism in her family history, and Daniel R. Langton asserts that ‘Aguilar believed that her own family history offered a precedent for the woman story-teller who took responsibility for the general transmission of Jewish identity.’110 Thus, despite operating in a zone of apparent tolerance, a condition which implies new social 106

107 108

109 110

The bill for the emancipation of the Roman Catholics from their civil disabilities was passed on 13 April 1829. It was carried not only because it was popular, but also because the government wished to avert a possible civil war in Ireland should it refuse to concede the Roman Catholic claims. See Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church: Part I (London: A & C Black, 1970), p. 7. Abrahams, ‘Grace Aguilar’, p. 138. Details of the dates of these journeys are unavailable, but it is possible that documents which would clarify the activities of the Aguilar and Dias families in Jamaica and the locations of Aguilar’s parents’ births are in the possession of Michael Dugdale, who is a descendent of Aguilar’s brother Emanuel. There is scope here for further research to be conducted in the Jewish cemeteries and record offices in Jamaica. Harris, ‘Hagar in Christian Britain’, p. 143. Galchinsky, Origin, p. 137; Daniel R. Langton, ‘The Gracious Ambiguity of Grace Aguilar (1816–47): Anglo-Jewish Theologian, Novelist, Poet, and Pioneer of Interfaith Relations’, Melilah: Manchester Journal of Jewish Studies 8 (2011): 1–29 (5).

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possibilities for Jewish life, Aguilar is not free from the legacy of expulsion, concealment and anxiety. Harris furthermore points to what he calls an ‘explosive outrage’ beneath the surface of her gestures towards accommodation.111 In examining the history and current conditions of Jews in England, Aguilar’s optimism is freighted with knowledge of the worst kinds of persecution, as well as the experience of concealment. Alongside the credentials of ‘History of the Jews in England’ as an original and significant work of historiography, I argue that in this deliberately factual piece Aguilar deploys the polyvalent approach to historicity developed in The Women of Israel in a manner that is similarly underpinned by her strategies for interpreting the Bible. It does so by demonstrating how, and providing an arena in which, to read with feeling, and by using a narrative of past times to indicate futurity and thus affective openness. From its opening line, this history begins with an appeal to deep time and mythic narratives: The Hebrew nation, as is well known, has been for ages scattered over the face of the earth, and now exists in different portions in every civilized country; retaining, however, in all situations, the religion, manners, and recollections of its ancestry – almost everywhere less or more oppressed, yet everywhere possessing the same unconquerable buoyancy of spirit and the indomitable industry.112

This sentence deftly moves from imprecise ‘ages’ to the instantaneous ‘now’ in a way which establishes the scope of the article as well as a continuous relationship between the immeasurable past and the immediate present. It makes a claim to generalized knowledge – ‘as is well known’ – regarding ‘the Hebrew Nation’, which is configured as a unified body, persisting over time and ‘over the face of the earth’. 111 112

Harris, ‘Hagar in Christian Britain’, p. 167, fn. 27. Aguilar, ‘History of the Jews in England’, p. 313.

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The qualities which persist across these expanses are identified as resilience in the face of oppression, dedication to retaining ancestral rites and stories and an industriousness that may begin to prefigure a Protestant work ethic. Indeed, the essential similarities between supranational Jewish nationhood and a contemporary idea of Englishness, particularly in the wake of the recent and controversial Catholic emancipation, is a persistent theme. In recounting the violent siege of York in 1188, in which the city’s population of over 500 Jews committed mass suicide in the face of an angry, Crusading mob, the otherwise brisk pace of an essay covering Roman Britain to the 1840s is slowed considerably to provide a sensory account using novelistic language. The brutality of the English is vividly recounted in scenes that include characters, crowds, suspense and the ‘passions of the surging multitude’: The frantic fury of the shouting rabble rushed to the attack, the horrid nature of the scenes which he knew must inevitably ensue, caused [the governor], even at that moment, to revoke the order; but it was too late.113

This temporal flexibility, in which the action merges from a backwards-looking telos to a vivid present tense, may owe something to Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution: A History (1837), and it achieves a similar effect. The causal sequence of events leading to the known present, so confidently asserted in most historical writing of the time, is suspended. Instead we experience the double subjectivity of an individual caught up in a historical moment, along with our own familiar sense of how the episode will conclude – or at least the sense that the episode is part of a greater narrative which will conclude with relevance to present realities. This deployment of the devices of literary prose means that readers both know and do not 113

Ibid., pp. 315, 316.

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know the meaning of the moment, and can assimilate its significance through scholarly explanations and also through sensory, affective engagement. Jewish figures also come in for critique, however, and those who choose baptism over the suicide pact during the siege are labelled ‘miserable objects’.114 Aguilar is not, it seems, mounting an unreflective apologue for the Jews. This at times even-handed critique upholds her central premise that the English and the Jews share an essentially consistent character that has been adversely affected by various circumstances throughout history (she disputes the association of Jews with financial misdeeds, but concludes by asking: ‘And yet, had all the accusations against them been true, one could hardly have wondered, considering their treatment.’).115 A biographical sketch of Menasseh Ben Israel (1604–54), a Portuguese Rabbi and the first Jew readmitted under Cromwell, demonstrates that while Jews may forever be ‘debased by oppression’ in places such as Spain or Holland, ‘from that time the Jewish nation have found a secure and peaceful home, not in England alone, but in all the British possessions’.116 The mutual respect attested to by Ben Israel and Cromwell is, for Aguilar, not merely a gateway to political sanctuary in all places under British control, but also represents the coming into alignment of two essential natures – the Protestant English and the Jews. In this formulation, the incidents of history that might have placed these groups at odds are regrettable interruptions to their essential character. Here Aguilar returns to the metonymic approach she takes to establishing temporal and emotional continuity between biblical women and her Jewish female readers. Instead of messianism, however, what she seeks in the mutual recognition between Englishman and

114 115 116

Ibid., p. 318. Ibid., p. 312. Ibid., pp. 322, 329.

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Jew is full political integration. This can occur when past prejudices have been laid to rest and collegiate integration is viewed as not only possible in practical terms, but is also imbued with a kind of uniqueness and inevitability. The form of Jewish difference which can be sustained in these conditions is affective: metonymic rather than metaphoric thinking, and a model of reading which is generative of feeling and so of an unassailable Jewish identity. In this way, Aguilar deploys the interpretive strategies she developed to read the Bible in the absence of training or materials in the cause of upholding Jewish difference and defending against the possibility of assimilation, even while she works to demonstrate that ‘they are, in fact, Jews only in their religion – Englishmen in everything else’.117

117

Ibid.

2

‘Finer and finer discrimination’: George Eliot’s Feeling for the Jews

This chapter looks to George Eliot to form both a bridge between and a significant contrast to Grace Aguilar and Amy Levy, the subjects of Chapters 1 and 3. Born three years after Aguilar, Eliot outlived her by over three decades. Eliot’s early years in Coventry, during which she was engaged in translating from German two key works of higher criticism, coincide with the height of Aguilar’s popularity among a wide, international readership before Aguilar’s early death in 1847.1 Aguilar had worked to establish a version of Jewish difference that could be accommodated within Protestant nationalism, and Eliot debates related issues or culture and identity, often with specific reference to the Jews. Like Aguilar, Eliot pursues the tension between ‘immense sympathy’ and a refined capacity to detect gradations of difference.2 Her theorization of the ethics of realism and literary 1

2

Higher criticism is an interpretive practice that reads biblical texts using techniques from literary analysis. It furthermore works to reconstruct the historical context in which those texts were produced, and thus views them as artifacts of the ancient past rather than as divinely authored. These ideas were developed on the Continent, particularly in Holland and Germany, from the seventeenth century and were introduced to the Englishspeaking world in large part via Eliot’s translations of Strauss and Feuerbach (discussed in this chapter). The publication in 1860 of Essays and Reviews, a volume of seven essays by liberal Anglican theologians, marked an immensely controversial attempt to reconcile higher criticism with Christian doctrine. See Victor Shea and William Witla, eds, Essays and Reviews: The 1860 Text and Its Readings (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000). George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Gregory Maertz (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Editions, 2004), p. 613.

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form is, crucially, quite different from Aguilar’s but also, as we shall see, immensely influential to Levy (even while Levy pillories Eliot’s depiction of contemporary Jewish life). Eliot’s life also overlapped with Levy’s; Levy was born in 1861, by which point Eliot had already achieved approbation and popularity as the author of Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Silas Marner (1861). By the time of Levy’s precocious first forays into publication, Eliot was considered one of England’s greatest living authors and had completed her final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876). Levy died in 1889, but in the nine years following Eliot’s death in 1880 she meditated repeatedly on Eliot’s legacy which, for her, resided both in an ethics of representation and in her treatment of the ‘Jewish Question’. Eliot and the ‘Jewish Question’ is the subject of much important scholarship, cohering largely around Daniel Deronda and the chapter ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ from her final published work, The Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879). Rather than contributing directly to current debates on, for example, the status of Eliot’s Zionism as, on the one hand, visionary and philosemitic and, on the other, colonialist and racist, or even on whether Daniel Deronda was circumcised, here I shall look to her treatment of affect and sympathy, education and culture, and finally to an ethics of form, to discuss intersections between her work and those of the authors who, I argue, display ‘Jewish feeling’.3 While Eliot 3

Most scholarship on Eliot’s Zionism and the post-colonial reading of Daniel Deronda responds, at least implicitly, to Edward W. Said, ‘Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims’, in The Question of Palestine (London: Vintage, [1979] 1992), pp. 56–114. See for example Katherine Bailey Linehan, ‘Mixed Politics: The Critique of Imperialism in Daniel Deronda’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 34 (1992): 323–46; Susan Meyer, ‘“Safely to Their Own Borders”: Proto-Zionism, Feminism, and Nationalism in Daniel Deronda’, ELH 60 (1993): 733–58; Carolyn Lesjak, ‘Labours of a Modern Storyteller: George Eliot and the Cultural Project of “Nationhood” in Daniel Deronda’, in Victorian Identities: Social and Cultural Formations in Nineteenth-Century Literature, ed. Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 25–42; Marc E. Wohlfarth, ‘Daniel Deronda and the Politics of Nationalism’, Nineteenth Century Literature 53 (1998): 188–210; Nancy Henry, George Eliot and British Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). For the debate on Daniel’s circumcision, see Cynthia Chase, ‘The Decomposition of the Elephants: Double Reading Daniel Deronda’, PMLA 93 (1978): 222–3; John

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may be said to feel for the Jews, a comparison of this kind will help to show whether she too exhibits Jewish feeling. An illustration of Eliot’s non-doctrinal engagement with affect occurs in an instance from Middlemarch. When Rosamund confirms that it is Dorothea whom Will loves, Dorothea’s response is intense: The revulsion of feeling in Dorothea was too strong to be called joy. It was a tumult in which the terrible strain of the night and morning made a resistant pain: – she could only perceive that this would be joy when she had recovered her power of feeling it. Her immediate consciousness was one of immense sympathy without check.4

The previous night’s ‘waves of suffering’, occasioned by a deep mistrust of Will’s motives and the realization that she had indeed loved him, leave Dorothea vulnerable to this new information and without her habitual reserves of moralizing reflection.5 She experiences instead Spinoza’s affectus in its purest form: a capacity for feeling, without object.6 Her immediate experience is of ‘revulsion’ or upheaval, with only a detached sense of the particular affectio – in this case, joy – to which this internal activity will in time be directed. Similarly, Dorothea’s ‘immense sympathy

4 5 6

Sutherland, ‘Is Daniel Deronda Circumcised?’ in Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? More Puzzles in Classic Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 169–76; K. M. Newton, ‘Circumcision, Realism, and Irony’, in Modernizing George Eliot (Gordonsville, VA: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011), pp. 114–24. For a recent monograph on Eliot and the Jews (particularly on the genesis and reception of Daniel Deronda) see Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot (New York: Encounter Books, 2009). On the translation of Daniel Deronda into Hebrew and its reception, see Mikhal Dekel, ‘“Who Taught this Foreign Woman about the Ways and Lives of the Jews?”: George Eliot and the Hebrew Renaissance’, ELH 74.4 (Winter, 2007): 783–98. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 613. Ibid. Eliot translated in English both Tractatus Theologico-Politico and Ethics by Spinoza, although neither translation was published during her lifetime. The first was undertaken during 1849 at the request of Charles Bray. Eliot worked on translation of Ethics from 1854, during her time in Germany with G. H. Lewes. Although complete by 1856 it was not published due to Lewes’s disputes with publishers, first Bohn then A & C Black. See Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 199.

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without check’ describes a state of radical openness unbounded by the systems upon which she had once relied for meaning and guidance. When this occurs, Dorothea is freed from the ‘dead hand’ of Casaubon’s legacy and her family’s expectations in order to act independently by rejecting inherited wealth and marrying Will. This signals Dorothea’s progress from one who, with reference to Casaubon’s feelings, thinks: ‘what a lake compared with my little pool!’, to a fully independent figure, emboldened to sidestep conventions of class, inheritance and local opinion. Her progress in this respect is mediated to a large extent through the development of her ‘immense sympathy’.7 It is not the objects of her sympathy which enable this transformation – her good works in designing cottages and championing of Lydgate, for example – but rather the stripping away of externally originating affective bodies and the ascendancy of her capacity to feel. In temporarily losing her hold on the specificity of the moment, Dorothea finds the self-mastery necessary to direct affectus towards improvement (true joy) and away from deterioration (renunciation and grief). In this reading, Dorothea’s ‘revulsion of feeling’ can be expressed using Spinoza’s model of affect. Affect is an aspect of one’s capacity to create conditions for his or her own improvement, and is thus related to individualist moral development. Dorothea’s highly developed affectus furthermore comes to impact upon others in a way that is ‘incalculably diffusive’; her capacity to direct feeling towards the good becomes universal rather than particular and has an improving effect on a wide body of people, without reference to herself as an exceptional figure.8 Dorothea’s ‘unhistoric’ legacy does not at first accord with her initial comparison to Saint Theresa.9 If the passage quoted above depicts the moment of her ecstasy in all its conflicting pain and pleasure, where then are her great reforms and eventual 7 8 9

Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 48. Ibid., p. 640 Ibid.

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canonization? Is Dorothea one for whom ‘spiritual grandeur [is] ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity’?10 For Gregory Maertz, Dorothea’s conclusion represents a failure of personal development and meaningful reform: ‘Instead of affording her opportunities for self-realization in altruistic schemes, Middlemarch has clipped her wings.’11 This is to take a materialist view of reform, which indeed is in keeping with the realist aspirations of this novel. Nevertheless, Dorothea’s transformation and submergence into the unremarkedon masses furthermore dramatizes an alternative legacy of affect as community forming, in its indiscriminant transmission from an individual to a group. Importantly, this is a community interpolated by Dorothea’s positive affectus, and not by the more apparent and intractable markers of class, race, religion and nationalism. Dorothea, in other words, originates a structure of feeling.

‘Various combinations of common likeness’: Fellow feeling and the ethics of form In 1856, Eliot wrote a review of two recent works by the German author W. H. Riehl called ‘The Natural History of German Life’.12 In it, she calls for artists to represent the real characteristics of their subjects and to dedicate due attention to the humbler sort of person in particular: It is not so very serious that we should have false ideas about evanescent fashions – about the manners and conversation of beaux and duchesses; but it is serious that our sympathy with the 10 11 12

Ibid., p. 31. Gregory Maertz, ‘Introduction’, in Middlemarch, ed. Maertz, p. 18. George Eliot, ‘The Natural History of German Life’, Westminster Review LXVI (July 1856): 51–6, 71–9. Here I shall quote from its publication in A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren, eds, George Eliot: Selected Essays, Poems, and Other Writings (London: Penguin Classics, 1990), pp. 107–39. The two works under review by Eliot are Die Bürgerliche Gesellschaft (1855) and Land und Lutte (1856).

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perennial joys and struggles, the toil, the tragedy, and the humour in the life of our more heavily-laden fellow-men, should be perverted, and turned towards a false object instead of a true one.13

Representation in art thus plays a role in developing the sympathies of its consumers. In this way, those who create art bear responsibility for directing that sympathy towards those most in need of it, here imagined as the downtrodden rather than the fashionable, the voiceless poor rather than the noisome rich. Unreality of representation is ‘a grave evil’ for failing to generate true sympathy among real readers of fictional characters.14 Art and novels in particular have a weighty moral role in upholding this kind of sympathetic exchange, in which even ‘trivial’ and ‘selfish’ readers can be made to pay attention to ‘what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment’.15 Twenty years after the publication of this article, Eliot’s eponymous hero Daniel Deronda exhibits ‘that keenly perceptive sympathetic emotiveness which [runs] along with his speculative tendency’.16 Deronda is both a sympathetic exemplar and also a conduit through which readers may develop their own sympathetic capacities. As Ruth HaCohen suggests, ‘given the equal moral standing of the fictive and the real in her worldview, Eliot could expect that the reader would undergo, and therefore fully follow, the processes and struggles in Daniel’s soul’.17 Achieving truthful representation within the aesthetic demands of narrative, however, requires selection. The author must know what to represent in order to engage a reader’s sympathies, while also aiming

13 14 15 16

17

Eliot, ‘Natural History’, p. 110–11. Ibid., p. 110. Ibid. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, ed. Graham Handley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014 [1876]), p. 419. Ruth HaCohen, The Music Libel Against the Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 258.

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to create something beautiful for, as Eliot states in an 1855 article, ‘no one can maintain that all fact is a fit subject for art’.18 In this view of authorship, it is the author’s act of composition that produces the text’s moral qualities. If the sphere of art ‘extends wherever there is beauty either in form, or thought, or feeling’, it falls to the artist to limit or shape that beauty into something that is as edifying as a ‘beam of good nature’.19 Indeed, Eliot accuses Balzac of ‘moral nausea’ for failing to be selective in representing scenes of vice, though she exonerates Goethe for depicting similarly venal scenes as ‘vitiating irregularities’.20 Here, Eliot’s stress is on the important and authoritative role of the writer in producing a text in which selection operates so that realist representation may be generative of sympathy. Eliot also considers the issue of selection in texts which may be the product of divine revelation. In her 1856 review of Peter von Bohlen’s Introduction to the Book of Genesis for the Leader, Eliot offers a concise account of the range of orthodox to heterodox responses to the problem of Biblical authority.21 She describes the incompatibility of higher criticism with extreme orthodoxy (the orthodox critic, she notes, must be ‘not an inquirer, but an advocate’).22 Nevertheless, she also points out the absence of moral consolation in the view which ‘finds in the Hebrew writings nothing which cannot be accounted for on grounds purely human, [and] finds them of a character which it would be monstrous to attribute to any other than a human 18

19 20 21

22

George Eliot, ‘The Morality of Wilhelm Meister’, Leader VI (21 July 1855): 703. Here I shall quote from its publication in A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren, eds, George Eliot: Selected Essays, Poems, and Other Writings (London: Penguin Classics, 1990), pp. 307–10 (p. 309). Emphasis in original. Ibid. Ibid. George Eliot, ‘Peter von Bohlen’s Introduction to the Book of Genesis’, Leader VII (12 January 1856): 41–2. Here I shall quote from its publication in Byatt and Warren, eds, George Eliot: Selected Essays, pp. 358–62. Ibid., p. 358. As the translator of Strauss and Feuerbach, Eliot personally facilitated the transmission of German higher criticism into contemporary Anglican thought.

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origin’.23 In other words, when reading ancient texts with sacred status, scholarly disinterestedness ought not to obscure meaningful consolation, although one must also never allow one’s critical gaze to abate. Biblical criticism aside, however, for Eliot the moral status of form is the purview of the writer. Eliot’s suggestion of a sympathetic exchange between text and reader can be understood partly in the context of Organicism. The metaphor of a body that is composed of many collaborative parts, or organs, was a popular trope from the 1860s onwards. It is founded on a conceptual model in which various areas of knowledge, including natural sciences, philosophy and social theory, act as organs that must operate in harmony in order to support the body – the sum total of human awareness – of which they are parts. In an 1876 article published in the Fortnightly Review, man of letters G. H. Lewes (who had by then been Eliot’s romantic partner for over twenty years) attempts to reconcile the theologian’s ‘terrified repugnance’ towards matter with the scientist’s ‘contemptuous rejection’ of spirit by proposing a third way: Organicism.24 ‘In a word’, he explains, Organicism is distinguishable by its consistent carrying out of the hypothesis that the organic phenomena grouped under the terms Life and Mind are activities not of any single element, in or out of the organism, but activities of the whole organism in correspondence with a physical and social medium.25

In this way, Lewes proposes that life and mind, spirit and matter, may be viewed as manifestations of ‘the same group of phenomena [that are] objectively expressible in terms of Matter and Motion, 23 24

25

Ibid. G. H. Lewes, ‘Spiritualism and Materialism I’, Fortnightly Review 29.19 (1876): 479–93 (p. 479). G. H. Lewes, ‘Spiritualism and Materialism II’, Fortnightly Review 29.20 (1876): 707–19 (p. 715).

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and subjectively in terms of Feeling’.26 Here Lewes echoes Spinoza’s distinction between thought and extension (or, the mental and the material) as the two principal attributes of the Substance, called God or Nature, of which all things are comprised. Similarly, Lewes’s model of feeling as a subjective episteme re-frames Spinoza’s affectus which, as discussed earlier, is the capacity to feel rather than the object or sensation of those feelings. Indeed, Lewes states, it is ‘feeling [. . .] with which we must perceive and understand’; consequently, experiencing an affective response to matter is in this view necessary to recognizing the organic nature of life.27 As Sally Shuttleworth notes of the latecentury conception of Organicism, the organism was no longer viewed simply as an association of organs. No element was autonomous; rather, each owed its form to its role and position within the development of the whole.28

Thus, the meaning of each part is achieved through its interconnectedness. Rick Rylance further points out that Lewes’s idea of Organicism ‘stresses process through time, a dynamic interaction of parts, and a functional equality of parts through the system’.29 With this in mind, viewing feeling as a mode of understanding is a form of progress that moves the corporate organism forward in its evolutionary development. Perhaps due to her collaborations with Lewes, this concept was also central to Eliot’s epistemology and morality. In ‘Notes on Form in Art’ (1868), she affirms the moral necessity of attending

26 27 28

29

Lewes, ‘Spiritualism and Materialism I’, p. 480. Ibid., p. 488. Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 3. Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture: 1850–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 274. Emphasis in original.

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to fine gradations of difference, even while witnessing the holistic functioning of the social organism: And as knowledge continues to grow by its alternating processes of distinction & combination, seeing smaller & smaller unlikenesses & grouping or associating these under a common likeness, it arrives at the conception of wholes composed of parts more & more multiplied & highly differenced, yet more & more absolutely bound together by various combinations of common likeness of mutual dependence. And the fullest example of such a whole is the highest example of Form: in other words, the relation of multiplex interdependent parts to a whole which is itself in the most varied & therefore the fullest relation to other wholes.30

Form, for Eliot, exists in the relationship between parts which relate to one another to become a larger whole. Literary form, as we have seen, is not distinct from the thing it describes nor from its readers’ moral universe; the effective functioning of literary form resides in its simultaneous internal wholeness and the interrelatedness between representation and reader. Representation should, for Eliot, function to show individuals and the relations between them as they really are, in all their chaos and possibility, while also presenting an aesthetically and thematically coherent narrative. The image in Middlemarch of a candle illuminating scratches on the reflective surface of a pier glass illustrates this: ‘the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. [. . .] These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent’.31 A novel must thus display the arbitrariness of the egotist, even while it selects for itself a focal point from which to elaborate relationships between its characters. 30

31

George Eliot, ‘Notes on Form in Art’ (1868), in Byatt and Warren, eds, George Eliot: Selected Essays, pp. 231–6 (p. 232). George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Gregory Maertz (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Editions, 2004 [1871]), p. 232.

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Importantly, for Eliot it is advances in ‘knowledge’ which allow the relations between ‘multiplex interdependent parts’ to become known. Acuity of perception is thus in some sense the product of human ingenuity (and its ‘alternating processes of distinction & [sic] combination’), rather than the revelation of existing, immutable truths. This is in distinction to what K. M. Newton observes regarding ‘the orthodox view of science’ in the nineteenth century: ‘[science] describes the true structure of the reality that exists independently of the human mind; it finds an order in the world which is prior to perception and language’.32 Lewes, for one, rejected this consoling view: ‘Science is no transcript of Reality, but an ideal construction framed out of the analysis of the complex phenomena given synthetically in Feeling, and expressed in abstractions.’33 For Lewes, ‘Feeling’ underpins the progress of science, and the apparent ‘truths’ that emerge through the scientific method are effectively ‘abstractions’, or arbitrary structures, that are as much ideas as facts. Newton detects the influence of Lewes’s view of science in Eliot’s preface to Daniel Deronda, quoted below: Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even Science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars’ unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been understood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appears that her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science, too, reckons backwards as well as forwards, divides his unit into billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought really sets off in medias res.34 32

33

34

K. M. Newton, George Eliot: Romantic Humanist: A Study of the Philosophical Structure of her Novels (London: Macmillan, 1981), p. 7. G. H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind II (London: Kegan Paul, 1875), quoted in Newton, George Eliot: Romantic Humanist, p. 7. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 3.

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In comparing science to poetry, Eliot argues that science itself can be founded on invention, while artifice may embody evidential truths of equal merit. In other words, the forms of organization implicit in such acts as telling time, or in applying empirical order to the natural world, are essentially arbitrary and are founded in feeling, in its sense as a capacity to subjectively detect and authorize knowledge. These forms of ordering are furthermore a necessary aspect of narrative, and thus of the development of an understanding of characters and plot. Elsewhere in ‘Notes on Form in Art’, Eliot suggests a method for reassessing familiar knowledge: it is often good to consider an old subject as if nothing had yet been said about it; to suspend one’s attention even to reverend authorities & simply ask what in the present state of our knowledge are the facts which can with any congruity be tied together & labelled by a given abstraction.35

Here Eliot advises thinking beyond the structures already in place when seeking to confirm what is ‘true’, and independently asserting new and subjective ‘abstractions’ to account for the relations between people and things. Importantly, it is an individual’s desire to witness these relationships, rather than the structures which validate them, which Eliot values. This desire is another name for feeling. In this context, feeling itself is not, however, inherently moral. ‘For Lewes and Eliot’, Newton argues, ‘feelings become moral only if they are directed or can be tested against something which can exert authoritative control over them’.36 Whereas religion had previously provided this absolute authority against which feeling could be validated, by the 1850s Eliot could no longer take recourse to Christianity, or to any metaphysical system, to fulfil this role. For 35 36

Eliot, ‘Notes on Form in Art’, p. 432. Newton, George Eliot: Romantic Humanist, p. 64.

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Eliot, religion was a product of mind, and the possibility that there might be some objective ‘truth’ in it was irrelevant to her. Rather, it was the capacity of religion to provoke feelings and ideals that was significant. Newton states that she ‘had no interest in undermining religion from a rationalist standpoint’.37 Religion could be significant as a mode that enabled people to direct feeling towards one another, but for Eliot it was the act of forming a connection to another person that was significant, rather than the religious ideas that motivated it. In locating the value of religious feeling in the connection between individuals, Eliot responds to Ludwig Feuerbach, the German philosopher whose Das Wesen des Christenthums (1841) she translated in 1854 as The Essence of Christianity. Eliot’s biographer Gordon Haight argues that the book’s ‘powerful appeal’ for Eliot was not solely its humanism – a principle to which she had long been devoted – but rather Feuerbach’s ‘daring conception of love’.38 Feuerbach, in Eliot’s translation, calls religion ‘the dream of the human mind’, and argues that faith is at odds with love: The essence of religion, its latent nature, is the identity of the divine being with the human; but the form of religion, or its apparent conscious nature, is the distinction between them. [. . .] That which reveals the basis, the hidden essence of religion, is Love; that which constitutes its conscious form is Faith. Love identifies man with God and God with man; faith separates God from man, consequently it separates man from man, for God is nothing else than a mystical form, – the separation of God from man is therefore the separation of man from man, the unloosening of the social bond.39 37 38 39

Ibid., p. 4. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography, p. 137. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989), pp. xix, 247. Emphasis in original.

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Here, the experience of having religious faith, directed away from man and towards God, weakens the connection between individuals, thus loosening the social bond. Conceiving of divinity as an essence external to humanity, for Feuerbach, is destructive of human relationships. In contrast, feelings of love in recognition of the divine within humans (the imago dei) creates spiritual intimacy between them. Faith shuts people off from one another by creating ‘inward’ and ‘outward disunion’, while love opens them to a greater union and cohesiveness.40 Faith is furthermore a conscious form, while love is a felt experience revelatory of the ‘hidden essence of religion’. Feeling for others is thus both the foundation of sociability and also an affective route to apprehending divinity. Feuerbach further states that it is ‘the consciousness of love by which man reconciles himself with God, or rather with his own nature as represented in the moral law.’41 Here, sociability takes precedence over individual spiritual progress in isolation, and love for another is the means by which to know God. While Eliot’s wholesale adoption of this model cannot be assumed (particularly in the light of her incisive criticism of this and other arguments regarding ‘the moral law’), she does appear to share Feuerbach’s concern for social bonds which, for her, elevate sympathy to a moral framework while also deflecting the site of ultimate meaning from religious structures to social ones, including culture and tradition. There is an important correlation to be made here between Organicism and the notion of the social bond as a site of divinity through love. The idea of an organic society – one which operates as an organism composed of distinct but mutually implicated parts – was an extension of organic theory, which furthermore entailed a sense of unified social consciousness rooted in collective 40 41

Ibid. Ibid., p. 50

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memory of a shared past. Several figures close to Eliot expressed scepticism about this model. In his essay ‘The Social Organism’, published in 1860 in The Westminster Review (of which Eliot had previously been editor), the prominent social philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) argued against the idea of a corporate social consciousness: It is well that the lives of all parts of an animal should be merged in the life of the whole, because the whole has a corporate consciousness distinct from those of its components. But it is not so with a society; since its living units do not and cannot lose individual consciousness, and since the community as a whole has no corporate consciousness capable of happiness and misery.42

Spencer compares the literal organs of an animal to individual humans as components of a society, to argue that whilst stomach, heart, and lungs can operate in sync for the survival of the cow, men and women cannot subsume their subjectivity for the sake of a corporate consciousness which, in any case, lacks a true capacity for feeling. Lewes too was cautious about the transference of Organicism to forms of social organization, particularly nationalism. In ‘Spiritualism and Materialism’, he follows in Spencer’s footsteps: ‘There is no national consciousness equivalent to the individual consciousness, because there is no national unity equivalent to the individual unity.’43 Eliot’s approach to the possibility of a corporate social identity is to consider whether its members are capable of perceiving the fine distinctions and similarities which constitute the all-important bonds that exist between them, even amidst the chaos of the arbitrary and egoistic nature of social structures. An example of this approach 42 43

Herbert Spencer, ‘The Social Organism’, The Westminster Review XVII (1860): 98. Lewes, ‘Spiritualism and Materialism I’, p. 492.

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is voiced by the cantankerous essayist Theophrastus Such in ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’: To discern likeness amid diversity, it is well known, does not require so fine a mental edge as the discerning of diversity amidst general sameness. The primary rough classification depends on the prominent resemblance of things: the progress is towards finer and finer discrimination according to minute differences.44

While the capacity to perceive subtle gradations of sameness and difference may be an intellectual one, recall that for Eliot it is sympathy and love which bind individuals in moral responsibility towards one another. Indeed, in the extract from ‘Notes on Form in Art’ quoted above, Eliot states that the ability to perceive and organize minute ‘unlikenesses’ results in a ‘conception of wholes composed of parts more & more multiplied & highly differenced, yet more & more absolutely bound together by various combinations of common likeness of mutual dependence’.45 Understanding difference, then, is a step towards apprehending a greater ‘mutual dependence’. The failure of organic thinking – of not accurately witnessing ‘diversity amidst general sameness’ – results in social fragmentation and personal alienation. Since, in Eliot’s view, the links between individuals which are formed by shared traditions and historical memory act as the moral framework that gives meaning to feeling, this kind of fragmentation is more catastrophic than a merely political problem; it represents the end of goodness and moral validation. For Eliot, the damaging effect of this ‘grosser mental sloth’ is particularly evident when it is applied to the Jews, as this is what leads to the various forms of discrimination itemized and parodied by Theophrastus Such.46 It is in this regard that

44

45 46

Eliot, ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep’, in Impressions of Theophrastus Such (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1880), p. 259. Eliot, ‘Notes on Form in Art’, p. 433. Ibid.

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Eliot seeks to show how the application of organic thought to the formation of national identity will benefit the Jews in particular.

‘Absorbing enthusiasm’: Education and identity Daniel Deronda is a novel which considers the varieties of and possibilities for Jewish life in England. It concludes by sending its primary Jewish reproductive unit, Deronda and Mirah, away from England and towards ‘the East’ with the aim of, in Deronda’s words, ‘restoring a political existence to my people, making them a nation again, giving them a national centre, such as the English have, though they too are scattered over the face of the globe’.47 The futurity of Jewish life is thus removed from English soil, both racially via the implied children that will issue from the marriage, and mystically, given Deronda’s spiritual inheritance from Mordecai, who implores of Deronda: ‘Have I not breathed my soul into you?’48 Deronda compares the diasporic dispersal of Jews to the ‘scattered’ English, although the latter scattering is the result of colonialism enabled by the reality of an imperial centre. Jewish rootlessness, by contrast, represents for Deronda the necessity of political unification. Importantly, these two states – British imperialism and Jewish nationalism – are not coterminous. While Deronda’s parentage, it might be noted, is Italian, the Lapidoth siblings were born in England. None among them bear much allegiance to a modern state, however. All three ultimately view their supranational Jewish identity as prior to Italianness or Englishness, and also as potentially formative of a new nationalism entirely. For Amanda Anderson, the novel ‘ruminates powerfully on

47

48

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, ed. Graham Handley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014 [1876]), p. 677. Ibid., p. 683.

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the relation between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, promoting an ideal of Jewish nationalism informed by cosmopolitan aspiration’.49 Amidst the instability of collective identities there continues the local and individual network of affinities comprised of family, friendship and labour. In Daniel Deronda, navigating between the local and the international, as well as the spiritual and the political, is facilitated by feeling Jewish, or by participating in affective exchanges through language and music that are ultimately constitutive of Jewish identity in the novel. As stated above, Eliot forms a point of comparison to her predecessor Aguilar, in that both use the novel, among other forms, to engage issues of national, religious and gendered identities in the context of Judaism. Aguilar, as we have seen, emphasizes a matrilineal pedagogy as a means of fostering an outward-looking Jewish identity that can withstand assimilation and apostasy. It is worth noting, then, the ways in which Eliot stages scenes of education in Daniel Deronda in order to assess the important differences between her approaches to the formation of religious identity and Aguilar’s. After all, in looking to Eliot’s uses of feeling, the aim of this chapter is to consider whether, in feeling for the Jews, she exhibits Jewish feeling as defined in the introduction. The only scene of education in Daniel Deronda which is explicitly represented as such depicts the kind of religious education that Aguilar critiques. The instance in which the narrator observes Mordecai giving lessons to the young Jacob Cohen is set entirely among males who enact a pastiche of unsuccessful pedagogy, including inscrutable incantations and a child’s bodily attempt to escape: In the absorbing enthusiasm with which Mordecai had intoned rather than spoken his last invocation, he was unconscious that 49

Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 119.

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Jacob had ceased to follow him and had started away from his knees.50

While this serves to underscore Mordecai’s isolation from the modern, mercantile Jews of the East End, it also stages an uncomprehending exchange of words which, for the young student, are ‘unintelligible’.51 Mordecai imagines circumventing Jacob’s particular limitations and idiosyncrasies by instead printing the inscrutable verses directly onto some other aspect of his young soul: ‘“The boy will get them engraved within him,” thought Mordecai; “it is a way of printing”’.52 The idea of text can, for Mordecai, supersede the individual Jew while also indelibly connecting his recalcitrant pupil to all Jews. This notion is borne out by the programme of reading he establishes for Deronda, to say nothing of their first encounter taking place in a bookshop and the fact of Daniel’s principal inheritance from his grandfather constituting a trunk of documents in various languages. Mirah’s attachment to Judaism, by contrast, comes from remembered scenes of being sung to by her mother. This is an education which is emphatically not text-based, and in the later scenes of her residence with Mordecai in Brompton, she leaves the room when he and Deronda turn to examining their chest of papers. For Mirah, indeed, it is the absence of knowledge and the dominance of feeling which is consoling: ‘They were always Hebrew hymns she sang,’ Mirah tells the Meyricks, ‘and because I never knew the meaning of the words they seemed full of nothing but our love and happiness’.53 Similarly, Mirah’s experience of religious worship is centred on feeling and song, rather than on study and prayer: ‘[My] mother

50 51 52 53

Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 404. Ibid., p. 402. Ibid. Ibid., p. 175.

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used to take me to the synagogue, and I remembered sitting on her knee and looking through the railing and hearing the chanting and singing.’54 Mirah retains this childlike apprehension of Judaism partly because she is kidnapped by her unscrupulous father, and presumably also because, as a girl, she was ineligible for a Jewish education. It is significant that Mirah does not view her musical ability as an art form or herself as an artist, in the way that Daniel’s mother, as the diva Alcharisi, does. Delia da Sousa Correa argues that by excluding all other ties for the sake of art, Daniel’s mother ‘contravenes not merely orthodox ideals of femininity, but the ideals about the inseparability of human and artistic value championed by Klesmer’.55 As signalled by her modesty and abhorrence for the marketplace (in contrast to, for example, Gwendolyn’s musical aspirations), Mirah’s recourse to music as affective education allows her to project positive feelings onto faint memories, and to use her own voice as a means of reviving and extending these associations. Valman observes that Mirah’s education ‘offers an alternate experience of Judaism, casting it not as a system of law, but in the feminised language of affect’.56 On the surface, the novel appears to adopt the general opposition in nineteenth-century intellectual culture between male modes of rational, logical, legalistic and rule-bound knowledge – what John Stewart Mill termed ‘ratiocination’ – and female qualities of emotion, sensitivity, feeling and spirituality.57 Nevertheless, the correlation between men and printed text sits alongside the feminized forms of music that are also repositories of culture and memory. Both text and music are finally shown to give way to – or to enable – feeling for what has already been learned, either through proximity in childhood or 54 55

56 57

Ibid., p. 182. Delia da Sousa Correa, George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 159. Valman, Jewess, p. 152. See John Stewart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence, and Methods of Scientific Investigation (London: J.W. Parker, 1843).

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some other form of cultural inheritance, rather than to initiate new experiences of learning. However, while Mordecai is associated with language and Mirah with music, both siblings experience moments of feeling and knowledge which exceed this gendered pedagogy. Mordecai attests to the breadth of his knowledge, but also to its limitations: I know the philosophies of this time and of other times: if I chose I could answer a summons before their tribunals. I could silence the beliefs which are the mother-tongue of my soul and speak with the rote-learned language of a system [. . .]. I could silence them: may not a man silence his awe or his love and take to finding reasons, which others demand? But if his love lies deeper than any reasons to be found?58

Here Mordecai describes a form of knowledge which exceeds language, philosophy and history. It is ‘love’ which causes him to insist to Deronda that ‘the life of Israel is in your veins’, long before the substance of Deronda’s veins is made known.59 The aspect of Judaism most important to Mordecai – to find a ‘rooting place’ for a unified conception of Jewish idealism – is expressed as an affective rather than pedagogical exchange.60 Indeed, at an early meeting the two men share ‘as intense a consciousness as if they had been two undeclared lovers’, and Deronda promises that dying stranger ‘I feel with you – I feel strongly with you.’61 In addition to deliberating with Mordecai over ancient languages and a textual inheritance, he feels with Mirah when listening to music; on hearing the liturgy chanted at the synagogue in Frankfort, Deronda ‘wondered at the strength of his own feeling’.62

58 59 60 61 62

Eliot, Daniel Deronda (2014), p. 425. Ibid., p. 483. Ibid., p. 421. Ibid, pp. 418, 422. Ibid., p. 308.

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Deronda, in other words, embodies a will to affectus and a consciousness of difference, and is thus the ideal ethical exponent of Organicism. This position is articulated in the course of his reported musings on his own rootlessness, before his true origins are known: He wanted some way of keeping emotion and its progeny of sentiments – which make the savours of life – substantial and strong in the face of a reflectiveness that threatened to nullify all differences. To pound objects of sentiment into small dust, yet keep sentiment alive and active, was something like the famous recipe for making cannon – to first take a round hole and then enclose it with iron; whatever you do keeping fast hold of your round hole. Yet how distinguish what our will may wisely save in its completeness, from the heaping of cat-mummies and the expensive cult of enshrined putrefactions?63

Here, reflectiveness stands in for affectus, or that internal capacity for improvement or deterioration. The ‘emotion and its progeny of sentiments’ are affectio, externally originating affects that act upon affectus. Deronda expresses a desire to remain perceptive to difference by maintaining openness to affectio. An affectus which is excessively guarded against affectio fails, consequently, to ‘discern likeness amid diversity’.64 The logical puzzle which follows illustrates this by representing one’s faculty for feeling as neutral, in the same way that the ‘round hole’ of a cannon is an immaterial absence. Both the cannon and the feeling self are made ‘material’; the former through the shaping of iron, and the latter through the influx of raw material for feeling. This coming-into-being, the narrator points out, cannot take place by repressing or reducing (‘pounding into small dust’) those ‘objects’ which might generate feeling. This model is qualified in the final lines, which show the extreme consequences 63 64

Ibid., p. 306. Eliot, ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’, p. 259.

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of valorizing the material objects of feeling (‘cat-mummies’ and other ‘enshrined putrefactions’) by pointing out that these may decay or lose their significance once the feeling self has passed on. Thus, Deronda’s education in feeling Jewish occurs via the openness of his capacity to feel, which in turn allows him to detect difference via an affective response to the objects of Jewishness represented by Mirah and Mordecai: music and language.

‘A people with oriental sunlight in their blood’: Jewish nationalism Deronda’s status as one who may feel as a Jew underpins and intersects with his political ambitions on behalf of the Jews. Anderson argues that Deronda displays a ‘universalist civic mode of nationality [. . .] built in the principles of critical reason and democratic debate’.65 Deronda’s openness to dialogue is a function of the affective openness which characterizes his Jewish feeling. It is this characteristic which enables him to steer a middle course between the dominant associations of Judaism with extremes of traditionalist isolation and unsettling cosmopolitanism. In this way, his version of Jewish feeling is formulated within the context of non-Jewish attitudes towards the presence of Jews in the modern state; it is, in other words, an outsider’s perspective. This perspective is personified and used to ironic effect in ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep’ from Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879). Theophrastus calls to task those ‘philosophic thinkers and discriminating critics, professedly accepting Christianity from a rational point of view’, who ‘[urge] that differences of creed were made dangerous only by the denial of citizenship – that you must 65

Anderson, The Powers of Distance, p. 122.

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make a man a citizen before he could feel like one’.66 These progressive individuals, upon being confronted with the spectre of socially prominent Jews, find themselves wishing that some restrictions had been put in place to prevent this highly visible incursion into public life. Eliot condemns the inconsistency of their ‘minds so panting for advancement’ that nevertheless revert to medieval anxieties about admitting Jews into society and that do nothing to interrogate the causes of their misconceptions.67 Judith Butler describes this tendency towards distinguishing between collective and personal identities with reference to the Jews: ‘progressive Enlightenment opposition to anti-Semitism consistently cast the ordinary Jew as noxious at the same moment as it championed the rights of the Jews in general’.68 In Daniel Deronda, Deronda’s vague, romanticized notion of Judaism as an ancient and noble tradition results in some dismay when he meets Ezra Cohen, an actual Jewish person: Deronda, not in a cheerful mood, was rashly pronouncing this Ezra Cohen to be the most unpoetic Jew he had ever met with in books or life: his phraseology was as little as possible like the that of the Old Testament; and no shadow of a Suffering Race distinguished his vulgarity of soul from that of a prosperous pink-and-white huckster of the purest English lineage.69

Deronda here confronts the problem of navigating between the general and the specific which, as discussed earlier, is a crucial stage of his moral development. The approaches to Jewish nationalism offered in Daniel Deronda and ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ reflect (and parody) dominant anxieties regarding the integration of Jews into English 66 67 68

69

Eliot, ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep’, p. 277. Ibid., p. 278. Judith Butler, ‘“I Merely Belong to Them”: Review of Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings’, London Review of Books 29.10 (10 May 2007): 26–8 (p. 26). Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 331.

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society and can thus be read as a kind of counterpart to Aguilar’s ‘History of the Jews in England’ which had, three decades earlier, worked to establish the basis for Jewish integration. Where Aguilar delineates a unique fitness between the English and the Jews, Theophrastus gives voice to contemporary anxieties regarding Jewish rootlessness: A people with oriental sunlight in their blood, yet capable of being everywhere acclimatized, they have a force and toughness which enables them to carry off the best prizes; and their wealth is likely to put half the seats in Parliament at their disposal.70

In this view the ‘universal alienism’ and fundamental statelessness of the Jews is a liability, even where they have been given full civic rights.71 The implication is that Jews in England are not themselves truly English, and without national loyalties Jews would gladly become involved in supranational organizations and institutions that would supersede allegiance to their host nation. Nevertheless, Jewish difference is suggested as a bulwark against this dangerous adaptability: If they drop that separateness which is made their reproach, they may be in danger of lapsing into a cosmopolitan indifference equivalent to cynicism, and of missing that inward identification with the nationality immediately around them which might make some amends for their inherited privation.72

Here, maintaining separateness – though it may be the target for reproach – actually facilities identification with nationality. As troubling as the threat of ‘cosmopolitan indifference’, though, is the image of the Jew as trenchantly resistant to change of any kind, and 70 71 72

Eliot, ‘Hep! Hep! Hep!’, p. 282. Ibid., p. 282. Ibid., p. 278.

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therefore ‘unequal to the tasks of modernity’.73 Theophrastus concedes that ‘an expatriated, denationalized race, used for ages to live among antipathetic populations, must [. . .] inevitably lack some conditions of nobleness’, and he is at pains to demonstrate the process by which Christian persecution and exclusion are responsible for having created the flaws for which Jews are most harshly judged.74 Consequently, the solution to the suffering and demonization of the Jews can be found in an improved means of ordering society in which the nobility of its inhabitants is assured by a will to witness their nobility. While Theophrastus does attest to an anxiety about degeneration (‘Let it be admitted that it is a calamity to the English [. . .] that its distinctive national characteristics should be in danger of obliteration by the predominating quality of foreign settlers’), this feared degeneration is linguistic rather than physiological. The threat to ‘our beloved English’ is posed by ‘foreign accent, foreign intonation, and those foreign tinctures of verbal meaning which tend to confuse all writing and discourse’.75 The failure to defend against this defilement is partly also a critique of cosmopolitanism; recall that Theophrastus condemns the English for being ‘agape after what is foreign, though it may be only a vile imitation of what is native’.76 The Jews, he asserts, are a component of what is native, in that Christianity – a foundational aspect of English culture and belief – derives from Jewish texts and traditions. Indeed, it is the Jews ‘whose literature has furnished all our devotional language’, and the Jews ‘whose way of thinking and whose verbal forms are on our lips in every prayer which we end with Amen’.77 Robert Macfarlane notes in this argument ‘the dialectic between nationalism and literature – a great civilization brings forth literature, and literature is the greatest 73

74 75 76 77

Amanda Anderson, ‘George Eliot and the Jewish Question’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 10.1 (1997): 39–58 (p. 41). Eliot, ‘Hep! Hep! Hep!’, p. 278. Ibid., p. 283. Ibid., p. 284. Ibid., pp. 288, 290.

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articulation of that civilization’.78 Theophrastus rescues the Jews from accusations of cosmopolitanism by asserting that, as Judaism is a forerunner of Christianity (as manifested in certain forms of language and liturgy), and England is a Christian country, the Jews have a claim to Englishness, and indeed that they continue to support the cultural stronghold of what it means to be English. Aguilar, as discussed in the previous chapter, uses language and literary forms in a way which evinces Jewish difference. This troubles the assumption made by Theophrastus that Jewish language is merely the foundation for Christian devotion. Furthermore, in ‘History of the Jews in England’, Aguilar argues that Jews have a place in England, not on the basis of having ‘originated’ Christianity, but on terms which acknowledge and accept their difference. Indeed, Aguilar’s nuanced model of detecting and accommodating difference seems to anticipate Eliot’s version of the same. Despite immense sympathetic engagement with the nature of Jewish life in England, however, it does not appear that Eliot’s ‘progress [. . .] towards finer and finer discrimination’ is applied to successfully recognizing Jewish difference.79

Contrasting Eliot’s feeling for the Jews to Aguilar’s feeling as a Jew demonstrates the distinctiveness of ‘Jewish feeling’ as an affective stance displayed by certain Anglo-Jewish authors. Both engage with these issues against a changing backdrop of ways of thinking about the Jews. The effect of increased Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, coupled with the emergence of ‘scientific’ discourses of race led to a new emphasis on figuring Judaism as a racial category, although this shift did little to dislodge existing anxieties about the place of Jews in a Protestant Christian democracy. Three years after Aguilar’s death, the Scottish 78 79

Robert Macfarlane, Original Copy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 114. Eliot, ‘Hep! Hep! Hep!’, p. 259.

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surgeon and anatomist Robert Knox (later made infamous by his association with the murderers Burke and Hare) asserted in Races of Men: A Fragment (1850) that ‘human character, individual and national, is traceable solely to the nature of that race to which the individual or nation belongs’.80 For Knox, ‘race is everything: literature, science, art – in a word, civilization depends on it’.81 Like Aguilar, Knox locates the future of Jewish life in the actions of Jewish women, although for him this is a function of breeding and blood, rather than the transmission of cultural knowledge outlined by Aguilar in The Spirit of Judaism. Two decades later, in chapter of Culture and Anarchy (1869) called ‘Hebraism and Hellenism’, Matthew Arnold proposes instead of Knox’s hierarchy of races a hierarchy of ‘affinities’ in which special affinities between groups from different ‘stock’ mark ‘the essential unity of man’.82 The most strongly marked of these affinities, due to the ‘prominence of [its] moral fibre’, is the one between the English and ‘the Hebrew people’.83 For Arnold, in order to benefit from this affinity, ‘Hebrews’ must, as outsiders, be civilized by the superior culture offered by English society. Furthermore, the cultural differences which distinguish ‘Hebraism’ from ‘Hellenism’ correspond to racial differences which can be empirically verified: Science has now made visible to everybody the great and pregnant elements of difference which lie in race, and in how signal a manner they make the genius and history of an Indo-European people vary from those of a Semitic people.84

80 81 82

83 84

Robert Knox, The Races of Men: A Fragment (London: Henry Renshaw, 1850), p. i. Ibid. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 136. Ibid. Ibid., p. 135.

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While for Knox, Judaism remains unchanging and unchangeable, Arnold relies on a universalist sense that ‘men are all members of one great whole’ to look forward to what Anderson calls the ‘inevitable absorption or suppression’ of Jewish culture in England.85 This possibility was complicated by a sharp increase in numbers, a demographic shift which presented even the Jewish community with new challenges for self-representation and community organization. Of the 12,000–15,000 East European Jews who settled in Britain between 1881 and 1914, Todd M. Endelman writes: They guaranteed the demographic survival of British Jewry into at least the twenty-first century. For without this infusion of new blood, the small, increasingly secularized, native-born community, left to itself, would have dwindled into insignificance, as drift, defection, and indifference took their toll.86

Sander Gilman argues that language itself underwent a process of ‘biologization’ during the nineteenth century, by becoming viewed as a product or reflex of human biology.87 Thus the language spoken by the marginalized group becomes ‘a sign of the innate, biological difference inherent in the very concept of race’.88 By using the language that labels them as different or undesirable, members of such groups may implicitly endorse the idea of their own exclusion, as both the logic behind it and the means of its expression purport to demonstrate that biologically, it must be justified. Chapter 3 of this book thus looks to an Anglo-Jewish writer of the 1880s, Amy Levy, to consider her approaches to feeling and the uses of fiction amidst this rapidly shifting context of Jewish life in Britain. 85 86

87

88

Ibid., p. 62; Anderson, ‘George Eliot and the Jewish Question’, p. 42. Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000 (Berkley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 127. Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 213. Ibid.

3

‘A fragment of the eternal truth’: Futurity and Race for Amy Levy

At the age of twenty-three and already the author of two wellregarded collections of poetry – Xantippe and Other Verse (1881) and A Minor Poet and Other Verse (1884) – as well as some short fiction and a number of literary essays, the young Anglo-Jewish poet and essayist Amy Levy wrote a piece for Temple Bar magazine called ‘The New School of American Fiction’. In it, she points to the novels of George Eliot as models of how literature ought to be.1 The article is a polemical response to William Dean Howells’ announcement of a new style of literature originating in America, best represented by Henry James (who had by this point been residing in England for a number of years). Levy takes issue with several aspects of James’s writing, although she maintains that he is ‘the best writer fitted to interpret’ the fine problems posed by a complex world.2 She doubts, however, whether his uses of the novel form are ‘of such stuff that a great literature is made’.3 What Levy objects to in James and those of his so-called American School is self-consciousness of form. Howells, for example, ‘takes us too much into his workshop secrets; allows 1

2 3

Amy Levy, ‘The New School of American Fiction’, Temple Bar 70 (1884): 383–9, reproduced in Melvyn New, ed., The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy, 1861–1889 (Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1993), pp. 510–17 (p. 515). All further references are to the publication of this article in New, The Complete Novels. Ibid., p. 513. Ibid., p. 513.

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the smell of the lamp to pervade the whole production’.4 She argues that in drawing attention to the constructedness of their work – what she elsewhere calls a ‘selfish record’ – these authors neglect the more important task of ensuring readers’ immersion through emotion.5 Levy concludes that James’s style of writing, though it is assuredly an art form, favours intellect over affect and thus does not make its readers feel. Feeling, then, becomes central to a debate regarding the uses of fiction and the nature of its readership. For Levy, it is through feeling that readers may come to experience the ‘eternal truth’ that is present in great works of fiction, and it is for the purpose of seeking or contributing to this truth that novels ought to be written and read.6 The function of the novel on these terms is thus to contribute to our understanding of human experience, and the best way to achieve this understanding is through emotional engagement. Significantly, it is Eliot who, for Levy, represents the pinnacle of achievement in writing ‘great works’ of literature that can facilitate a reading suffused with feeling. The works that she criticizes are self-conscious, artificial and finite; they display ‘aggressive contemplation [. . .] that is too clever by half ’ and demand dispassionate analysis while obscuring more valued forms of engagement: ‘for a time, certainly, the intellect is stimulated, the interest awakened; but the emotions are rarely stirred’.7 In distinguishing between intellect and emotion, Levy ascribes a moral function to the latter; formal inwardness is, she states, bereft of the ‘spark of ideality’ which imbues great novels with a ‘moral greatness’ that transcends form.8 In contrast to her critique of what she views as laboured symbolism and hyper-sensitive analysis, 4 5 6 7 8

Ibid., p. 515. Ibid. Ibid., p. 512. Ibid., pp. 511, 512. Ibid., p. 517.

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Levy states a preference for works in which ‘we are presented with a deep though less obvious truth, so interwoven with the story as to be identical with it’.9 The form of the text, in other words, evinces an aspect of its ‘truth’ which runs like an undercurrent beneath the surface and can be detected via feeling rather than knowing. The subtle ‘truth’ which is at odds with cleverness is revealed by realism. In offering a riposte to John Ruskin’s claim that the characters in The Mill on the Floss (1860) are akin to ‘the sweepingsout of a Pentonville omnibus’, Levy suggests that in Eliot’s hands realism can be reconciled with emotional truthfulness.10 She asks: ‘What would [Ruskin] have said of a literature which, if the expression be allowed us, occupies itself so largely with the Pentonville omnibus of the soul?’11 Levy suggests that literary texts can represent component of a wider species of truth, a truth which can unfold only gradually and partially, alongside other forms of pleasure in the text: We devour, breathless, whole pages of that ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘intolerable’ writer – William Makepeace Thackeray – without pausing to trouble our minds about ethics or aesthetics. It is not till later perhaps that shape and meaning grow upon our senses; that truth flashes up at us from the wonderful pages. We must stand back from the large and crowded canvas ere we can fully realize the splendour of the composition, the skilful massing of light and shade; perhaps we never realize it at all, and are only vaguely 9 10

11

Ibid., p. 511. John Ruskin, ‘Fiction – Fair and Foul’, The Nineteenth Century 10 (October 1881): 516–31, reproduced in part in Susan David Bernstein, ed., The Romance of a Shop (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Editions, 2006), pp. 237–41 (p. 240). Critics have noted the resonance of Ruskin’s phrasing for an ongoing debate about the relationship between aesthetics and realism. Ruskin, as Susan David Bernstein points out, ‘deplores the popularity of modern urban life in recent fiction’, and this ultimately strikes a note with Oscar Wilde who, in ‘The Decay of Lying’, prefers imaginative ‘lying’ in art to the quotidian ‘truth’ of realism (Bernstein, ed., Romance, pp. 36–7). Levy, ‘The New School’, p. 511.

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conscious that it is a great work of art, a fragment of the eternal truth that we are contemplating.12

The process of apprehending ‘the eternal truth’ in the works of Thackeray and Eliot is left largely to the reader. As this chapter shows, it is wide-ranging social and emotional engagement that Levy advocates, even as she herself moves towards increasingly innovative forms in poetry and prose. The extent to which her formal strategies point towards this kind of affective engagement, and the status of this approach as an instance of Jewish feeling as defined in the introduction, will form the focus of this chapter. Importantly, while Levy is explicit in her admiration of works which demonstrate ‘truthfulness’, her engagement with ‘unfitness’ is ambivalent. She condemns manifestations of such finitude in others, but persists in examining it thematically, as well as formally, in her own work. This emphasis is in some tension with the stated importance of understanding fiction through emotion and feeling. Indeed, if it is an excess of feeling in poets which, as we shall see, makes them unable to participate in communal life, then it may be that affect has serious drawbacks. It is important to stress, as I explain more fully below, that for Levy the process of literary creation as well as the process of reading depends on feeling and on personal emotional engagement. In this respect, the tension between truthfulness and unfitness may more usefully be viewed as being between growth and decay. Artistic works which contain within themselves the ‘germ of decay’ are related to mortality and death. Works which embody a ‘spark of ideality’ are a means of resisting death.13 Reading fiction using one’s emotions – ‘good’ fiction, which is written to facilitate such a reading – carries with it the redemptive promise of eternality. The difference between good 12 13

Ibid., p. 512. Ibid., p. 517.

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and bad fiction is the difference between figurative life and death, and Levy’s act of writing is an ongoing engagement with redemption and mortality; she aims for futurity, but is drawn to its barriers. In this way, her attitude towards literary form represents Levy’s most significant engagement with the problem of redemption. It is also in literary form, and not exclusively in representation, that Levy’s dialogue with Judaism can be detected. In locating textuality as the site of spiritual contemplation, Levy’s approach is not unlike Aguilar’s. Though both were born and lived in the same city during the same century, their attitudes towards social and religious values are in many ways utterly dissimilar. Nevertheless, in their shared concern for women’s roles and the capacity of literature to serve a moral function, it may be that their commonalities are more significant than the differences which initially make them appear so unalike.

‘That elaborate misconception’: Debating Deronda with George Eliot and Henry James In 1886, two years before the publication of her highly controversial novel of contemporary Jewish life Reuben Sachs, Levy published five articles in the London newspaper The Jewish Chronicle. Scholars including Luke Devine have looked to this series as the point at which Levy ‘chose to seriously reengage with her Jewish spiritual and communal identity’.14 For Melvyn New, they represent Levy’s ‘awakening to her Jewish heritage’.15 Linda Hunt Beckman similarly views these pieces as ‘a major turning point in Levy’s relationship to her cultural and religious background’, although she also argues 14

15

Luke Devine, ‘“The Ghetto at Florence”: Reading Jewish Identity in Amy Levy’s Early Poetry, 1880–1886’, Prooftexts 31.1–2 (Winter–Spring 2011): 1–30 (p. 2). Melvyn New, ed., The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy, 1861—1889 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1993), p. 3.

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that Levy is at times ‘straining to be affirmative’.16 The second of these articles is titled ‘The Jew in Fiction’, and in it Levy calls for the initiation of a new literary tradition in English that will ‘do justice to the Jewish question in its social and psychological aspects’.17 In framing this demand, Levy is both critiquing existing modes of representing Jews in fiction and also announcing her intention to produce works which will ‘[show] real insight into Jewish character, not mere observation of outward peculiarities’.18 She is unguarded in stating her opinions, as with her admiration for Eliot and her antipathy towards James. These opinions are not, however, uncomplicated. In ‘The Jew in Fiction’, Levy reads Daniel Deronda as sympathetic but unrealistic, and also issues statements about the function of the novel that are strikingly similar to James’s own views, a surprising overlap given the criticism that she later directs towards him in ‘The New School of American Fiction’.19 As both Levy and James respond directly to Daniel Deronda, their comments on this novel provide an arena for triangulating the attitudes of all three (including Eliot) towards what may be termed affect in literature. In calling for both a ‘serious attempt at serious treatment of the subject’ as well as a view of modern Jews which reflects their

16

17

18 19

Linda Hunt Beckman, ‘Leaving the “Tribal Duckpond”: Amy Levy, Jewish Self-Hatred, and Jewish Identity’, Victorian Literature and Culture (1999): 185–201 (p. 194). Amy Levy, ‘The Jew in Fiction’, The Jewish Chronicle (4 June 1886): 13, reproduced in Reuben Sachs, Susan David Bernstein, ed. (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Editions, 2006), pp. 175–8. The other four articles published in The Jewish Chronicle in 1886 are as follows: ‘The Ghetto at Florence’ (26 March 1886): 9; ‘Jewish Humour’ (20 August 1886): 9–10; ‘Middle-Class Jewish Women of To-Day’ (17 September 1886): 7; and ‘Jewish Children’ (5 November 1886): 8. See also Richa Dwor, ‘“Poor old PalacePrison!”: Jewish Urban Memory in Amy Levy’s “The Ghetto at Florence”’, Partial Answers 13.1 (January 2015): 155–69. Levy, ‘The Jew in Fiction’, p. 177. Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, in The Art of Fiction and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), pp. 3–23. This essay was first printed in Longman’s Magazine in September 1884, and reprinted in Partial Portraits, Macmillan and Co., 1888.

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prominent role in British society, Levy’s article has social as well as literary implications.20 This sloughing off of existing stereotypes in the representation of Jews works both to develop a new literary realism and also to represent a model of assimilated Jewish participation in national life. The complications in her sense of what is ‘real’ or ‘true’, however, are present in her comments on Daniel Deronda, a novel which she initially describes as a ‘true, sincere and respectful attempt [. . .] to portray the features of modern Judaism’.21 For Levy, Daniel Deronda is animated by a ‘noble spirit’, but it is nevertheless not a satisfactory account of modern Jewish life: As a novel treating of modern Jews, Daniel Deronda cannot be regarded as a success; although every Jew must be touched by, and feel grateful for the spirit which breathes throughout the book; perhaps, even be spurred by its influence to nobler effort, and taught a lesson, sadly needed, to hold himself and his people in greater respect.22

The novel’s weakness is that its ideology and its politics are inaccurate; the ‘noble spirit’ which imagines the Jewish characters’ ‘yearnings after the Holy Land and dreams of a separate nation’ is, for Levy, misguided.23 A brief exchange in Reuben Sachs dramatizes Levy’s criticism of Eliot’s ‘Jewish plot’, as well as her regard for Eliot’s attempt: ‘I wonder,’ cried Rose, [. . .] ‘what Mr. Lee-Harrison thought of it all.’ ‘I think,’ said Leo, ‘that he was shocked at finding us so little like the people in Daniel Deronda.’ ‘Did he expect,’ cried Esther, ‘to see our boxes in the hall, ready packed and labelled Palestine?’ 20 21 22 23

Levy, ‘The Jew in Fiction’, p. 177. Ibid., p. 176. Ibid. Ibid.

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‘I have always been touched,’ said Leo, ‘at the immense good faith with which George Eliot carried out that elaborate misconception of hers.’24

Here, Rose, Esther and Leo give voice to the incongruity between the romantic expectations of the well-intentioned outsider (in this case, Bertie Lee-Harrison) and the reality of their middle-class, AngloJewish home. Daniel Deronda’s proto-Zionist conclusion is met with no recognition or approval from Levy’s characters. Despite the insularity that Levy critiques in her contemporary Jewish community, her stated interest is in negotiating this community’s position within British life, rather than envisioning a Jewish nationalism that would require decamping to the Near East. Levy, like Aguilar decades earlier, is careful to set herself apart from the kind of philoSemitism that encourages Jews to view themselves as unalterably separate. Despite its ‘inaccuracies’ in this regard, Daniel Deronda is nevertheless touching, gratifying and even potentially improving for Jewish readers. There is something about the novel which, for Levy, does ring true, and this truthfulness resides in its emotional earnestness and its optimism. James anticipates Levy’s mixed response to George Eliot’s final novel. Daniel Deronda was published by William Blackwood and Sons in eight parts, from February to September 1876. James reviewed several of these parts as they were published, and in December 1876, his review of the book as a whole, written as an imagined three-way dialogue, was published in the Atlantic Monthly (and re-printed in Partial Portraits in 1888, one year before Levy’s death). In ‘Daniel Deronda: A Conversation’, one of the three conversants is sceptical of a ‘Jewish revival’: I rather suspect it is not a possibility; that the Jews in general take themselves much less seriously than that. They have other fish 24

Levy, Reuben Sachs, p. 115.

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to fry. George Eliot takes them as a person outside of Judaism – aesthetically. I don’t believe that is the way they take themselves.25

James notes a failure of accuracy in much the same way that Levy goes on to do, although his critique is not rooted in a deeper sense of the reality of Jewish life in Britain. Indeed, as his novels featuring Jewish characters will show – The Tragic Muse (1890) and The Golden Bowl (1904), for example – James displays significant anxiety about the limits of cosmopolitanism and the presence of Jews as a racial and social disruption.26 Rather, he senses in Eliot’s Jewish characters an unreality that fails to persuade due to the manner of its expression, rather than the truthfulness of its content. For James, Daniel Deronda possesses too much form and too little feeling, and it allows its artistry to become precluded by a philosophy that is too excessively apparent. Pulcheria, the antagonist in this dialogue, declares that the characters in the novel ‘produce no illusion. They are described and analysed to death, but we don’t see them nor hear them nor touch them. [. . .] They have no existence outside of the author’s study’.27 This language is notably similar to Levy’s critique of Roderick Hudson, the novel which had made James’s reputation in 1876: [James] never leaves us alone for an instant; he is forever labelling, explaining, writing; in vulgar phrase, he is too clever by half. And 25

26

27

Henry James, ‘Daniel Deronda: A Conversation’, Nation (25 April 1878), reproduced in Henry James: Literary Criticism, ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson (New York: The Library of America, 1984), pp. 974–94 (p. 981). For a discussion of James’s views on race, cosmopolitanism and the Jews, see Sara Blair, ‘Henry James, Jack the Ripper, and the Cosmopolitan Jew: Staging Authorship in The Tragic Muse’, ELH 63.2 (1996): 489–512. James, ‘Daniel Deronda : A Conversation’, p. 978. In arguing thus, James has revised the views he expressed in February 1876, after reading the first number: ‘The “sense of the universal” is constant, omnipresent. It strikes us sometimes perhaps as rather conscious and over-cultivated; but it gives us the feeling that the threads of the narrative, as we gather them into our hands, are not of the usual commercial measurements, but long electric wires capable of transmitting messages from mysterious regions.’ Henry James, ‘Daniel Deronda by George Eliot’, Nation (24 February 1876), reproduced in Edel and Wilson, eds, pp. 973–4 (p. 974).

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this perpetual cleverness defeats its own ends; it is wearisome and confusing for all its brilliancy.28

Both views critique a self-consciousness of form that may reduce the impact, or ‘impression’, of a novel, only James sends up this quality in Daniel Deronda, while Levy notes it in Roderick Hudson. This pattern, in which James critiques Daniel Deronda and Levy uses similar language against James himself, is repeated elsewhere. Later in ‘Daniel Deronda: A Conversation’, another speaker, Constantius, remarks: [Eliot] has chosen to go into criticism, and to the critics she addresses her work; I mean the critics of the universe. Instead of feeling life itself, it is ‘views’ upon life that she tries to feel.29

While Constantius deplores critical detachment that obscures deeper feeling, Levy in turn complains of ‘that intense self-consciousness, the offensive attitude of critic and observer, above all that aggressive contemplation [. . .] which pervades [James’s] work’.30 Here both critics accuse ‘criticism’ of detracting from the representation of ‘life’. How is it, then, that James and Levy can appear to agree in their response to Daniel Deronda, but that Levy goes on to characterize James’s contemporaneous novel in the same unfavourable terms that he uses to criticize Eliot’s? And where, importantly, does Levy position herself amid these repeated calls for the expression of feeling and the avoidance of self-consciousness in form? One way to account for this circular, unresolved criticism – that is, Levy’s criticism of James for his demonstration of the same qualities that he has earlier parodied in Daniel Deronda, in his critique of that novel which is then effectively repeated by Levy – is to note that while 28 29 30

Levy, ‘The New School’, p. 512. James, ‘Daniel Deronda: A Conversation’, p. 986. Levy, ‘The New School’, p. 512.

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they agree on issues of feeling and form, they disagree with respect to the uses of these modes. In ‘The Art of Fiction’ – an article published in 1884, the same year as Levy’s ‘The New School of American Fiction’ – James characterizes representation as the primary aim of art: [the] only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life. When it relinquishes this attempt, the same attempt that we see on the canvas of the painter, it will have arrived at a very strange pass.31

For James, novelistic representation of life is not, however, pictorial. Its value is not in its visible or material details, but in the intense feeling and observation that animate it. In this, the novelist is also made distinct from the historian; while both ‘must speak with assurance’, the novelist must ‘reproduce life’, in a way that fascinates as well as informs.32 Where other forms of writing may be stirring, informative or inventive, the sole ‘obligation’ of the novel is that it ‘be interesting’.33 Just as the novel is not ultimately pictorial, its interest does not derive from its subject matter but from the impressions it records and creates: A novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life: that, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression.34

That a better novel will contain greater intensity of impression suggests that the intensity must be felt – and not merely described – in order to be evaluated. The novel is here envisioned as a uniquely affecting body, one which can impact upon an individual’s capacity for feeling to a greater or lesser extent. Like Levy, James wishes for the 31 32 33 34

James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, p. 5. Ibid., pp. 5, 8. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid.

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novel to take itself seriously as a literary form, on the grounds that it can depict reality in a way that is distinct from pictorial or historical forms of representation. Levy and James agree, then, on these points: good novels display with interest the verisimilitude of the ‘real’ world, and tell the ‘truth’ of feeling. Given this overlap in their sympathies, it is unsurprising that both authors were attracted to French naturalism (and indeed, that Eliot was not, or at least that she looked unfavourably on the undiscriminating realism from which naturalism emerged), and wished for the introduction of a similar style into English literature.35 For Levy, the example of Alphonse Daudet (1840–97) is inspiring. In her view, Daudet’s Lettres de Mon Moulin (1869), a novel of rural French life, accounts for its protagonists’ manner of living and relates this to their wider community, thus positioning them within the cultural life of the nation. It is ‘what M. Daudet has done for the inhabitants of Southern France’ that Levy wishes to replicate for England’s Jews. 36 For James, it is Emile Zola (1840–1902) ‘to whose solid and serious work no explorer of the capacity of the novel can allude without respect’.37

35

36

37

The word ‘naturalism’, as used by modern critics to describe a late-nineteenth-century literary movement, does not carry precisely the same implications as its use by Eliot, Levy and James. For example, Levy does not actually refer to Daudet as a naturalist, although modern critics would likely label him this way. Raymond Williams accounts for usage of this word as follows: ‘The school of naturalisme was especially affected, as in Zola, by the idea of the application of scientific method in literature: specifically the study of heredity in the story of a family, but also, more generally, in the sense of describing the hypothesis of some controlling or directing force outside of human nature.’ Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana Press, 1988), p. 217. Eliot’s criticism of the French school is related to selection. As I described more fully in Chapter 2, while Eliot attests that ‘the novelist may place before us every aspect of human life’, this breadth of scope is towards showing ‘where there is some trait of love, or endurance, or helplessness to call forth our best sympathies’. Indeed, it is possible, as in the case of Balzac, to ‘[overstep] this limit’. Eliot, ‘Wilhelm Meister’, p. 309. Levy, ‘The Jew in Fiction’, p. 178. Lettres de Mon Moulin was published in English as Letters from my Mill (London: George G. Harrap Company Ltd, 1880). James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, p. 22.

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This respect is due to Zola’s unwillingness to ‘reconcile himself to this absoluteness of taste’ and his emphasis instead on unfashionable and uncomfortable subjects.38 Both Levy and James are drawn to authors who boldly use the novel to represent the unfamiliar. Recall, however, that for Levy novels can be viewed as ‘a fragment of the eternal truth that we are contemplating’.39 For James, this shared reality does not necessarily exist, or if it does, it is incidental to what may make a novel good, which is that it be interesting and internally consistent. In an open letter to prospective novelists, James warns: ‘Remember that your first duty is to be as complete as possible – to make as perfect a work.’40 For Levy, by contrast, it is not the workings of a single author’s mind, or a discrete, closed world that a good novel will reveal, but an aspect of the reality that is common to text and reader, and between readers across time. In this context, participating in the impression generated by a novel is thus to connect via affect to a communityforming truth that is furthermore imbued with a commitment to futurity. Both authors share a sense that individuals and society operate as composite parts of a greater organism, or that the individual and the social order may be understood as collaborative and interconnected. Levy admires writing that ‘is for all time and all humanity’, and is drawn to Eliot’s promise of eternality, in opposition to James’s ‘literature of decay’.41 If Eliot’s plots contain, as Gillian Beer states, ‘the idea of personal immortality or the hypothetical, multiple predictions of daily life’, James’s versions of the same are, in Levy’s view, ‘so terribly finite’.42 Alongside her equation of eternality with literary value,

38 39 40 41 42

Ibid., p. 16. Levy, ‘The New School’, p. 512. James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, p. 23. Levy, ‘James Thomson’, p. 505; ‘The New School’, p. 517. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 183; Levy, ‘The New School’, p. 516.

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Levy deals in her fiction with ‘unfitness’ for futurity, manifested in the recurring theme of suicide or self-annihilation. This impulse is shown to be provoked by the sense of an incapacity for participating in community and an inability to continue existing into an unknown future life. It is a sentiment that is felt in Levy’s works most strongly by poets and by Jews. Across several publications, Levy’s preference for what she uses Eliot to represent is clear, while her criticism of a writer like James points to a tension which nevertheless remains unresolved in her own work.

‘Startling with excess of truth’: Futurity and poetic unfitness Eliot and James are, in a sense, the poles between which Levy positions her attitude towards the moral or redemptive function of fiction. This chapter has argued that for Levy, texts which encourage an affective exchange between author and reader may be viewed as embodying eternality. In contrast, fiction exhibiting ‘cosmopolitanism’, ‘fragmentary endings’ and ‘analysis [which] exceeds narration’ is finite, manipulative and doomed.43 Levy engages with this state of finality by exploring the unfitness of figures whose selfhood is at odds with their environment. The two primary markers of unfitness in her work are a ‘poetic temperament’ and Jewishness.44 The problematic status of these identities marks a fraught intersection between aesthetics, the body and theology. This nexus is similarly vexed for Levy’s near contemporary, the Scottish poet James Thomson (1834–82), about whom she wrote 43 44

Ibid., p. 516. Amy Levy, ‘A Minor Poet’, in A Minor Poet and Other Verse (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1884), reproduced in New, ed., pp. 370–7, l. 51. Subsequent line references are given parenthetically in-text.

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an essay and a long poem. Thomson was known during his life as an obsessive devotee of Shelley. His pen name, B. V. for Bysshe Vanolis, is partly based on the middle name of his Romantic hero. His most acclaimed poem, ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ (1874), is a deeply pessimistic narrative of a journey through a nightmarish and barren city, devoid of love and hope.45 Thomson’s early death due to an internal haemorrhage was brought on by years of alcoholism and insomnia. Deborah L. Parsons notes that despite all Thomson’s poetic protagonists being male, Levy ‘identifies herself firmly with the Thomson wanderer’.46 Levy explores this association first in the essay ‘James Thomson: A Minor Poet’ (1883) and one year later in the 208line dramatic monologue ‘A Minor Poet’ (1884).47 In ‘James Thomson: A Minor Poet’, published in two parts in the Cambridge Review, Levy expresses a sense of intense personal loss at Thomson’s death, although the two are not known to have met. Levy’s spirited defence of Thomson deplores the literary establishment that failed to afford him recognition and critiques other writers who do not match his high levels of ‘very earnestness’ and ‘absolute truthfulness’.48 Thomson did, however, receive some important encouragement during his lifetime and Levy records an anecdotal response to this: ‘Only once,’ says one of his friends, ‘did I see Thomson smile with purely personal pleasure. It was when he received a letter beginning “dear fellow-poet,” and signed “George Eliot”’.49 45

46

47

48 49

James Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night, and Other Poems (London: Reeves & Turner, 1880). Deborah L. Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 90. ‘James Thomson: A Minor Poet’ is in New, ed., pp. 501–9. It originally appeared in two parts in The Cambridge Review, 21 February 1883, pp. 240–1 and 28 February 1883, pp. 257–8. The poem ‘A Minor Poet’ is in New, ed., pp. 370–7. It originally appeared in Levy’s second collection of poetry, A Minor Poet and Other Verse (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1884). Levy, ‘James Thomson’, p. 509. Ibid., p. 506.

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In fact, the letter was addressed ‘Dear Poet’, and was signed ‘M. E. Lewes’.50 In it, Eliot acknowledges receipt of a copy of ‘The City of Dreadful Night’. She thanks Thomson for sending it and compliments his ‘distinct vision and grand utterance’.51 Eliot appears to read the melancholy poem redemptively and, perhaps flatteringly, suggests that its pessimism can motivate a sense of greater social cohesion. She imagines Thomson as a Tieresias figure, who ‘[thrills]’ his audience ‘with the sublimity of the social order and the courage of resistance to all that would dissolve it’.52 This reading relies on her assumption that Thomson ‘[accepts] life’, and wishes ‘to take a very large share in the quantum of human good’.53 K. M. Newton notes her ‘Carlylean tone’ in this letter, particularly in her implication that contemporary poets ought to urge a renewal of the ‘spiritual homogeneity’ that existed before the fragmentation wrought by industrialization and a decline in religious belief.54 In any event, Thomson is quick to disabuse Eliot of the possibility of his being optimistic. He replies with a letter of such dire negativity, that in a mere few lines he moves from invoking ‘the primeval curse of our existence’ to comparing Eliot’s writing to ‘the grand and awful Melancholy of Albrecht Durer’ – the latter meant as a compliment.55 Two days later he writes again to qualify both the poem and his letter as being the products of ‘much sleepless hypochondria’.56 The effect is of a man struggling to position himself between utter despair and the desire for professional recognition, not unlike Levy’s imaginative representation of Thomson in the poem ‘A Minor Poet’. 50

51 52 53 54

55 56

‘GE to James Thomson, London, 30 May 1874’, in The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, vol. VI: 1874–7 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), p. 53. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. K. M. Newton, George Eliot: Romantic Humanist: A Study of the Philosophical Structure of Her Novels (London: Macmillan, 1981), p. 82. ‘James Thomson to GE, London, 18 June 1874’, in Haight, ed., p. 60. Ibid., p. 61.

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For Levy, this intersection of Thomson and Eliot is important. She echoes Eliot in complimenting Thomson’s ‘intellect informed by passionate energy’ and detects in his work a ‘passionate hungry cry for life’.57 Importantly, and despite his own objections, both women read Thomson in the same way. Both envisage a connection between intensity of expression in ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ and the possibility of an improved future life, despite the nihilistic despair which is the poem’s theme, for example: I find no hint throughout the Universe Of good or ill, of blessing or of curse; I find alone Necessity Supreme; With infinite Mystery, abysmal, dark, Unlighted ever by the faintest spark For us the flitting shadows of a dream. (XIV, ll. 73–78)

Neither Eliot nor Levy appear to read here a decadent sense of the inevitable decay of ‘religion, sexuality, art, even language itself ’.58 By contrast, Levy’s sense of Thomson as a poet of passionate futurity makes him better in her estimation than other so-called minor poets, and it is in part Eliot’s regard that confirms her belief. In addition, she looks to Thomson’s poetic technique as a medium for truthfulness: And the truthfulness is none the less that it has been expressed to a great extent by means of symbols; the nature of the subject is such that it is only by resorting to such means that it can be adequately represented. Mood, seen through the medium of such draughtsmanship and painter’s skill, is no longer a dream, a shadow which the sunbeams shall disperse, but one side of a truth.59

57 58

59

‘GE to James Thomson’, p. 53; Levy, ‘James Thomson’, p. 506. Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 2. Ibid., p. 505.

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By reading against the poem, Levy transforms Thomson’s ‘flitting shadows of a dream’ from insubstantial remnants of a once-consoling moral system into the raw materials of ‘one side of truth’. In this view, it is the artifice of the ‘painter’s skill’ that can transform the ineffable affect of mood into the clear light of truth. Levy’s association of symbolism with truthfulness is noteworthy given her critique of James’s use of symbolism as ‘aggressive contemplation’ of a kind that obscures the greater truth evinced by Eliot’s realism.60 The association in ‘James Thomson: A Minor Poet’ of symbolism with truthfulness is underpinned by analogy, in which an image (e.g. a dove) can stand in for an idea (peace). Lothar Honnighausen attributes the rise of analogical thinking during the nineteenth century to the rediscovery of renaissance typology which, he states, appealed to ‘the Victorian urge to discover a symbolic meaning behind everything’.61 For Honnighausen, the typological impulse is inherently Christian, in that theological typology seeks Christological symbols in the Hebrew Bible. A different model is decadent style, which Ellis Hanson characterizes as ‘a tendency to vague and mystical language, a longing to wring from words an enigmatic symbolism or a perverse irony’.62 Between these two uses of symbolism, Levy treads a line which avoids both camps. The ‘truth’ referred to above is ‘but one side’ of a more complex formation and is thus open to a multiplicity of meanings rather than the singular meaning vouchsafed by typology. The poem ‘A Minor Poet’ is narrated by a male figure who is about to make his third attempt at suicide. The first attempt was thwarted by his friend Tom Leigh, who re-appears to narrate the epilogue, 60 61

62

Levy, ‘The New School’, p. 511. Lothar Honnighausen, The Symbolist Tradition in English Literature: A Study of PreRaphaelitism and Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 9. Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism, p. 2.

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having arrived to find the Poet already dead. The Poet, before his death, refers to Leigh’s earlier attempt to dissuade him from taking his own life: [Tom] lectured me a lecture, all compact Of neatest, newest phrases, freshly culled From works of newest culture: ‘common good’; ‘The world’s great harmonies’; ‘must be content With knowing God works all things for the best, And Nature never stumbles.’ Then again, ‘The common good,’ and still, ‘the common, good’; And what a small thing was our joy or grief When weigh’d with that of thousands. (ll. 10–18)

The substance of Leigh’s admonition is to stress communality and faith. For the Poet, these experiences are impossible. The emphasis on the ‘newness’ of Leigh’s ideas gives them an ironic faddishness which is at odds with his recommendation to passively await ‘natural’ ends. Leigh clearly intends consolation in pointing out the smallness of an individual life in relation to all of humanity, but this is the antithesis of what the Poet desires from life. He resists ‘the common good’ as a notion which must require the elision of separateness and thus halt his process of self-definition. Karen Weisman refers to the doctrine of sympathy invoked here as ‘a self-cancelling absorption into the critical mass’, and the Poet responds to Leigh in terms which convey his frustration that he should ignore difference between individuals in favour of social inclusivity: ‘I am myself as each man is himself–/ Feels his own pain, joys his own joy, and loves/ With his own love, no other’s’ (ll. 21–23).63

63

Karen Weisman, ‘Playing with Figures: Amy Levy and the Forms of Cancellation’, Criticism 43.1 (2001): 59–79 (p. 64).

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More than simply a defence of difference, however, the Poet’s dismay is grounded in his sense of unfitness for the conditions of life. Conformity would not be possible even if he wished it, due to the way he has been constituted by ‘the Fates’ (l. 37): A creature maimed and marr’d From very birth. A blot, a blur, a note All out of tune in this world’s instrument. A base thing, yet not knowing to fulfil Base functions. A high thing, yet all unmet For work that’s high. A dweller on the earth, Yet not content to dig with other men Because of certain sights and sounds (Bars of broken music; furtive, fleeting glimpse Of angel faces ’thwart the grating seen) Perceived in Heaven. (ll. 49–59)

For the Poet, a passive, constitutional difference sets him apart and makes inevitable his failure as a participant in the world. The nature of his difference is also related to the burden of imagination. The Poet has seen and heard heavenly things, and his fixation on these sensations makes him unfit for earthly concerns. This complaint is repeated in the short story ‘Sokratics in the Strand’, published in 1884 – the same year as ‘A Minor Poet’. Horace, a frustrated poet, is visited in his attic room by Vincent, who is an outgoing and successful barrister. Horace describes his malady to Vincent: ‘There is something wrong with the machine – a flaw somewhere – it won’t work.’64 This flaw ‘prevents successful normal action’, and so the poet is prevented from enjoying material and spiritual comfort. 65 Vincent’s advice is much like Leigh’s in ‘A Minor Poet’, but is expressed with

64

65

Amy Levy, ‘Sokratics in the Strand’ is in New, ed., pp. 424–30 (p. 427). It originally appeared in The Cambridge Review (6 February 1884): 163–4. Ibid., p. 429.

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greater cynicism. He suggests that Horace’s delicate constitution is merely the fault of weak digestion, and recommends a posture of ironic disengagement: Of course life is a disillusion, a disappointment for most of us. The only way to treat it is as a game which it is just worthwhile to play as long as one doesn’t cheat. I’m playing the game of barristering, or success in life, and trying to think I care immensely about the result.66

According to the sleek and satisfied Vincent, Horace’s unhappiness is due to his failure to accept disillusionment and his insistence on striving after meaning where there is none. The constant refrain of these poets in Levy’s work, however, is that they are fundamentally incompatible with the social organism that everywhere urges their inclusion. The theme of poetic isolation is also typified by, for example, the fin-de-siècle poet Lionel Johnson (1867–1902). Johnson too expressed a feeling of unfitness that was in tension with a desire for union, and like Levy, he was an erudite reader who was trained in the Classics. Unlike Levy, however, Johnson was a convert to what Honnighausen calls – with some derision – his ‘fashionable sombre Catholicism’.67 Hanson, by contrast, presents a more fluid model of conversions such as Johnson’s: Decadent writing is often a literature of Christian conversion, but a conversion that never ends, a continual flux of religious sensations and insights alternating with pangs of profanity and doubt. All the great works of decadent literature are conversion narratives.68

Johnson’s writing is decadent in that it aestheticizes a sense of a world felt to be falling to pieces, and deals subversively with themes of 66 67 68

Ibid. Honnighausen, The Symbolist Tradition, p. 99. Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism, p. 10.

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religious faith and homosexuality. His moral and sexual turmoil is more openly conceptualized using Christian themes and images, but like Levy he also dramatizes the conflict between the inassimilable poet and his better-constituted friend. In ‘Mystic and Cavalier’ (1889) the speaker warns: ‘Go from me: I am one of those who fall’ (l. 1).69 His melancholy difference from his implied listener is emphasized repeatedly, even at times ‘When gracious music stirs and all is bright/ And beauty triumphs through a courtly night’ (ll. 13–14). Unlike his friend, the speaker is unable either to take pleasure in beauty, or to enjoy the peacefulness of rest. He calls out for a monastic retreat from this world of untouchable temptation: O rich and sounding voices of the air Interpreters and prophets of despair: Priests of a fearful sacrament! I come, To make with you mine home. (ll. 32–36)

While both Levy’s Poet and Johnson’s speaker imagine themselves to be unalterably unsuited to future life, Johnson’s view of this exclusion takes the form of a ‘fearful sacrament’ administered by ‘Priests’ who are also ‘prophets of despair’, all references which draw upon a Catholic liturgical tradition. The decadent theme of the artist’s isolation is reconsidered in the context of Jewish identity in Levy’s short story ‘Cohen of Trinity’ (1889). The story opens with an encounter that replays a version of the one between Horace and Vincent in ‘Sokratics in the Strand’ and between the speaker and addressee in ‘Mystic and Cavalier’. After a gap of some years, the gentile narrator comes upon his erstwhile Cambridge classmate Alfred Lazarus Cohen – a Jew – who has since become a celebrated author on the London scene. Critical acclaim has brought Cohen merely ‘inundation by the second-rate’ and with

69

Lionel Johnson, Poems (London: Elkin Mathews, 1895).

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it a terrible recognition that the validation of his unique selfhood provides no consolation: ‘Nothing,’ he said presently, ‘can alter the relations of things – their permanent, essential relations . . . “They shall know, they shall understand, they shall feel what I am.” That is what I used to say to myself in the old days. I suppose, now, “they” do know, more or less, and what of that?’70

While he appears to describe the successful reception of his ‘half poem, half essay, wholly unclassifiable’ work, the use of qualifying phrases like ‘I suppose’ and ‘more or less’ indicates that for him, the opposite might also hold true.71 The narrator cannot reconcile this ambivalence, or what he calls ‘Cohen the poseur, always at the elbow of, and not always to be distinguished from, Cohen stark-nakedly revealed.’72 He ascribes Cohen’s erratic behaviour to vanity and a ‘vulgar desire for recognition’, which in turn is linked to his being Jewish: ‘[a] desire to stand well in one another’s eyes, to make a brave show before one another, is, I have observed, a marked characteristic of the Jewish people’.73 Ten days after this meeting, Cohen commits suicide. For Beckman, the gentile narrator is a member of the ‘dominant social order’ and is thus unable to solve ‘the enigma of the Jew’.74 This makes him unreliable, while also dramatizing the inconsistencies and prejudices in contemporary modes of conceiving of Jews. For Valman, meanwhile, this narrator is a device for looking inward at the fault lines in Anglo-Jewish self representation: ‘Levy’s text, 70

71 72 73 74

Amy Levy, ‘Cohen of Trinity’ is in New, ed., pp. 478–85 (pp. 484, 485). It originally appeared in The Gentleman’s Magazine 266 (1889): 417–24. Emphasis in original. Ibid., p. 483. Ibid., p. 484. Ibid., p. 481, 485. Beckman, Amy Levy, p. 189.

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rather than replicating the ambivalence of Semitic discourse, exposes its tortuous logic.’75 Rather than vanity or avarice, Cohen’s highs and lows may be viewed as the outcome of his extravagant attempts at asserting selfhood under conditions – Cambridge, then literary London – which are hostile to his racial identity and his poet’s desire for individuality. Cohen attempts to assert a Jewish, creative identity in a climate that favours inductive generalization over unique observation, so that if some Jews are believed to have acted in a certain way, the same must be true for all Jews. That Cohen attains a readership but remains unfulfilled indicates that, for him, acceptance by a community entails merely an alternate form of what Wiseman has termed ‘self-annihilation’, that of sympathetic symbiosis between the self and its audience.76 Crucial to Cohen’s irresolvable straining is a desire for recognition, rather than assimilation, of his difference. The ‘audiences’ in these works, however, are rarely able to acknowledge a uniquely constituted self. Their gestures towards the ‘common good’ and admonitions against ‘wanting too much’ stress instead conservatism and conformity. When creative figures in Levy’s works – the Poet in ‘A Minor Poet’, Horace in ‘Sokratics in the Strand’ and Cohen in ‘Cohen of Trinity’ – express feelings of unfitness, they invoke a complicated state in which they have unwittingly been created with a certain sensibility which makes conformity impossible. The separateness of each one exists in a troubled balance with his simultaneous need for an audience – implicit in the act of writing – and so each is cautioned by a well-meaning observer against ‘wanting too much’. For Cohen, this state of alienation is further complicated by racial difference. Suicide is the known or likely result for each character, a motif in Levy’s work which Wiseman frames as ‘the self-annihilation of solipsism, which in turn yields only the privacy of death’.77 Levy’s 75 76 77

Valman, The Jewess, p. 180. Weisman, ‘Playing with Figures’, p. 65. Ibid.

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engagement with suicide as a thematic device can be distinguished from similar expressions of self-annihilation in the works of poets like Johnson, for whom the impulse appears to derive from a willed, and often explicitly eroticized, embrace of death. The issue of suicide, while it must inevitably be cast over her oeuvre by her own untimely death, ought not, however, to be read as the inevitable outcome of the pervasive sense of alienation experienced by creative figures in Levy’s work.78 Suicide is treated by Levy with as much irony at times as gravity. The young heroine of ‘A Slip of the Pen’ (1889) ‘[turns] her thoughts towards Waterloo Bridge’ when she is embarrassed before the man she loves.79 The narrator of ‘Sokratics in the Strand’ glibly notes that ‘the click of the self-slaughterer’s pistol [. . .] is oftener to be heard in Mincing Lane and Capel Court than in the regions of Grub Street and Parnassus Hill.’80

78

79

80

On 10 September 1889, Levy ‘committed suicide by asphyxiation’ in her family home at 7 Endsleigh Gardens’ [Linda Hunt Beckman, ‘Levy, Amy Judith (1861–1889)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) (accessed 24 March 2015)]. Susan David Bernstein shows how initial reactions to Levy’s suicide ‘[made] evident that gender, Jewish inheritance, and social transformation were construed as biological liabilities’, but concludes that ‘it is too simple to read her death as an effect of her own perceived condition of an inherited malady or even what we might today term depression. No one can ultimately know what prompted a young and accomplished woman to take her life, although how her contemporaries viewed her death gives us purchase on the beliefs shaping her culture.’ Bernstein, ed., ‘Introduction’, p. 19. Amy Levy, ‘A Slip of the Pen’ is in New, ed., pp. 471–5 (p. 476). It originally appeared in Temple Bar 86 (1889): 371–7. Waterloo Bridge in London gained a reputation in the 1840s as a site for suicide, particularly by so-called fallen women. Thomas Hood’s poem ‘The Bridge of Sighs’ (1844) describes the death by drowning of a prostitute who jumps from Waterloo Bridge. Levy, ‘Sokratics’, p. 430. Mincing Lane in the City of London was, until the 1830s, the centre of the opium trade and, after the East India Company was disbanded in 1834, the site of tea auctions. Capel Court stands immediately in front of the Bank of England and was a space to which only members of the Stock Exchange were admitted. Grub Street, located in London’s Moorfield district (and renamed Milton Street in 1830) was known for its concentration of impoverished hack writers of all kinds. Mount Parnassus in Greece is sacred to Dionysus and home to the Muses. Robert Burns imagines it as a site of poetic inspiration in ‘O, Were I on Parnassus Hill’ (1788). Levy’s implication is that bankers and those who consume opium are as likely to commit suicide as desperate writers and poets.

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Nevertheless, the persistent notion of unfitness in Levy’s work invokes a sense of finitude, or of endings, rather than of generation or futurity. This is also the case where death is not the final outcome, but where the conclusion implies stasis, as in the final lines of ‘Felo De Se’, published in Levy’s 1881 volume of poetry, Xantippe and Other Verse: 81 I am I – just a Pulse of Pain – I am I, that is all I know. For Life, and the sickness of Life, and Death and desire to die; – They have passed away like the smoke, here is nothing but Pain and I. (ll. 26–28)

Here, the emphatic selfhood strained after by Horace or Cohen is achieved, but it does not bring about death. Indeed, the ‘desire to die’ is quelled, and what remains is consciousness and pain. In Levy’s later work, such as Reuben Sachs (1888), there is also a preoccupation with failed attempts at self-realization, and there is also death – notably that of the eponymous hero – and considerable pain for those who survive. Yet, and as I argue below, this novel also holds out the possibility of redemption and futurity, and in so doing offers a ‘truth’ quite different from that vouchsafed by decadent poets like Thomson and Johnson. Reading against the terminal foreclosure suggested by the trope of suicide can point to the possibility of open and even multiple futures for those residing uneasily on the margins of admissibility to fulfilment and recognition.

‘A strange yearning affection’: The racial romance of Amy Levy’s Reuben Sachs On its publication in 1888, Levy’s novel Reuben Sachs was initially reviewed as being anti-Semitic in both the Jewish and the mainstream 81

Amy Levy, ‘Felo De Se’, is in New, ed., 366–7. It originally appeared in A London PlaneTree, and Other Verse (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1889).

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presses. Many reviews were scathingly critical, and some singled out the author for special abuse: [Levy] is not ashamed of playing the role of an accuser of her people. The unpleasant reproach, derived from ornithological observations, which persons in her position incur, has no terrors for her. She apparently delights in the task of persuading the general public that her own kith and kin are the most hideous types of vulgarity; she revels in misrepresentations of their customs and modes of thought and she is proud of being able to offer her testimony in support of the anti-Semitic theories of the clannishness of her people and the tribalism of her religion.82

Recent critics have noted, however, that rather than endorsing an anti-Semitic stance, Reuben Sachs takes ‘self hatred [as] one of its themes’.83 Bryan Cheyette has posited that the waves of controversy in response to Reuben Sachs inspired a new trend in Jewish selfrepresentation in the 1890s, in which so-called novels of revolt interrogated the limits of Jewish emancipation in Britain. This is in contrast to previous generations of Jewish writers, including Grace Aguilar, who had written in an apologetic tradition by seeking to demonstrate the compatibility between Jewish life and Protestant English nationalism.84 Levy’s novel fits Cheyette’s first category, but in a complex way which retains strong thematic links to the second. Reuben Sachs rehearses and critiques popular tropes for representing Jews, including materialism, repression of women, clannishness and, importantly, racial degeneration. Anxieties about Jewish insularity and 82

83

84

Anon, ‘The Deterioration of the Jewess’, Jewish World (22 February 1889): 5, in Amy Levy, Reuben Sachs, Sarah David Bernstein, ed. (Peterborough ON: Broadview Editions, 2006), p. 165. Linda Hunt Beckman, ‘Leaving “The Tribal Duckpond”: Amy Levy, Jewish Self-Hatred, and Jewish Identity’, Victorian Literature and Culture 27.1 (1999): 185–202 (p. 186). Bryan Cheyette, ‘From Apology to Revolt: Benjamin Farjeon, Amy Levy and the PostEmancipation Anglo-Jewish Novel, 1880–1900’, Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 29 (1985): 253–65 (p. 260).

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inassimilability are expressed in the language of contemporary race science, as when the Sachs family are described in the anthropological terms that so exercised the anonymous reviewer from the Jewish World: Born and bred in the very heart of nineteenth century [sic] London, belonging to an age and a city which has seen the throwing down of so many barriers, the levelling of so many distinctions of class, of caste, of race, of opinion, they had managed to retain the tribal characteristics, to live within the tribal pale to an extent which spoke worlds for the national conservatism. [. . .] Their friends, with few exceptions, were of their own race, the making of acquaintance outside the tribal barrier being sternly discouraged by the authorities.85

Here, Jewish insularity is presented as voluntary and self-policing, while community behaviours are tied to racial characteristics. The conservatism that is parodied in Reuben Sachs has attracted to Levy the epithet of ‘self-hating Jew’, recalling Sander Gilman’s definition of Jewish self-hatred, or the subject’s internalization of dominant stereotypes about his or her marginalized group.86 Since the mid-1990s, scholarly interest in Levy’s oeuvre has led to nuanced interpretations of her engagements with Judaism, both by attending to her narrative technique in poetry and prose, and by historicizing her approaches to Jewishness and the Jewish body. Beckman, for example, reads Reuben Sachs as undermining through free indirect discourse the narrative voice that deploys anti-Semitic rhetoric, and Valman argues that Levy was ‘driven by the intellectual agenda of contemporary liberal feminism’.87 In addition, Emma Francis has negotiated the 85

86

87

Amy Levy, Reuben Sachs (London: Macmillan and. Co, 1888), p. 95. All further references to Reuben Sachs are to this edition. Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 2. See Linda Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), p. 164 and Nadia Valman, The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 190.

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seemingly oppositional categories of Levy’s progressive feminism and her exaggerated representation of Jewish conservatism, as well as the effect of Darwinism on her views on race and sexuality.88 This attention to race, gender and form can be built upon to consider the stance endorsed by Reuben Sachs regarding the continuity of Jewish life in England. Given that the novel’s representation of Jewishness as a racial inheritance was problematic for its earliest readers, and that recent critics have concluded that Levy ‘unthinkingly replicates’ contemporary race-thinking, it may appear as though she is ultimately pessimistic regarding the place of Jewish physiology and culture within the conditions of modernity.89 Indeed, the questions are begged: does she wish to see Judaism ‘bred out’ of the body and out of London? Is she concerned to protect Jewish cultural difference, or merely to witness its demise, and does she view Jewish racial decline as coterminous with liberal progress? Does resisting patriarchy and advancing the rights of women necessarily demand the end of Jewish community? It is true that the effect of Jewishness upon the body, the place of women within Judaism, and the integration of Jews into modern life are all mutually implicated in Reuben Sachs. As a novel of courtship and marriage, Reuben Sachs dramatizes an act of sexual selection that is partially focalized through its female protagonist, Judith Quixano. The role of female choice in breeding is in tension, however, with the capitalist concerns of the novel, in which Reuben’s family wish for him to seek financial and political power above all else. ‘He will never starve’, Reuben’s mother muses, ‘and he must marry money. But Reuben can be trusted to 88

89

See Emma Francis, ‘Amy Levy: Contradictions? – Feminism and Semitic Discourse’, in Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Genre and Gender, 1830–1900, ed. Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1999), pp. 183–204 and Francis, ‘Socialist Feminism and Sexual Instinct: Eleanor Marx and Amy Levy’, in Eleanor Marx (1855–1898): Life, Work, Contacts, ed. John Stokes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 113–28. Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman, ‘Introduction’, in Hetherington and Valman, eds, Amy Levy: Critical Essays (Athens: Ohio State University Press, 2010), pp. 1–27 (p. 8).

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do nothing rash’.90 This materialism ultimately prevents a marriage between Judith and Reuben, and leads to the extramarriage of one and the death of the other. While this unhappy ending is certainly not celebrated within the narrative, it may certainly, at a first reading, act as a model for the dissolution of Jewish identity. By contrast, however, an alternate trajectory can be located which works against the rhetoric of decline and which disputes recent arguments about Levy’s engagements with race. Paying closer attention to form will elucidate two key contexts for reading Reuben Sachs: firstly, Levy’s complex and selective use of diction associated with race, especially as this relates to women and patriarchy; and secondly, her engagement with a tradition of Anglo-Jewish writing which responds to Evangelical attempts to convert the Jews. Levy’s use of embedded tropes in Jewish literary writing, inflected by contemporary race discourse, is a move towards recognizing the continuity and futurity of Jewishness rather than prefiguring its demise. Ultimately, rather than subscribing to the pessimistic hypothesis of contemporary race science, Levy examines the capacity of Jewishness to embody its alternative by holding out the possibility of a future for Jewish life in England which is nevertheless still figured in racial terms. Apart from a shopping excursion and the events of a fateful ball, the action of Reuben Sachs takes place largely in drawing rooms, hallways and bedrooms. One such domestic family gathering is used as a site to revive the central trope of conversionist fiction, a literary genre that emerged during the early decades of the nineteenth century as an aspect of the wide-reaching and well-funded Evangelical campaign to convert Jews to Christianity.91 Conversion of the Jews was undertaken largely for the millenarian purpose of hastening the arrival of the second coming of Christ. In order to convert, Jews would need to 90 91

Levy, Reuben Sachs, p. 2. Eitan Bar-Yoseph, ‘Christian Zionism and Victorian Culture’, Israel Studies 8.2 (2003): 18–44 (p. 20).

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undergo a process of assimilation which would, in addition to ensuring their eternal salvation, also ensure erasure of the boundaries to participation in English national life.92 Evangelical attempts to convert the Jews in England tended towards displays of tolerance and charity. A key device in this coercive pressure was the publication of fiction, in particular historical romances and female Bildungsromanen, as a favoured mode for the proliferation of conversionist propaganda. These fictions were targeted at Jewish women as it was thought that they embodied greater religiosity than their male counterparts. It was also believed that Jewish women were poorly treated and badly educated and thus might easily be persuaded to seek spiritual and social fulfilment outside of Judaism. Consequently, these fictions typically depict a Jewish woman rejecting her parents and community in order to marry a charismatic Christian suitor. As Galchinsky has shown, in novels of the 1830s and 1840s interest in representing Jews in fiction shifted from depicting the patriarchal and avaricious Shylock figure to dramatizing the emotional and spiritual life of his daughter, thus placing the spiritual and social conversion of a Jewish woman at the centre of the plot.93 Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) is an example of the ‘materialistic-Jewish-father/ spiritualJewish-daughter/ chivalric-Christian-suitor’ triangle.94 Valman points out that in these narratives, the father is made to stand in for the ‘ritualistic, legalistic, materialistic, archaic, and, crucially, masculine’ aspects of the Christian view of Judaism.95 Despite this unfavourable characterization of Jewish masculinity, according to Valman philosemitism remained deeply embedded in Evangelical theology, 92

93 94 95

This view predates what Michael Galchinsky has termed ‘the racial turn’ [‘“Permanently Blacked”: Julia Frankau’s Jewish Race’, Victorian Literature and Culture 27.1 (1999): 171–83 (172)]; in the discourses of race science prevalent during Levy’s lifetime, racial difference poses an insurmountable barrier which is much less easily overcome than spiritual reticence. Galchinsky, Modern Jewish Woman Writer, p. 52. Ibid., p. 53. Valman, The Jewess, p. 83.

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and so the idealized potential of Judaism to become Christianity is figured in these narratives as feminine and susceptible to spiritual seduction. Thus, the Christian dichotomy between spiritualism and materialism is played out between the Jewish father and daughter. A crisis is provoked by the intervention of the Christian suitor. The conversion narrative can, as Galchinsky points out, be understood in the wider context of British imperialism: the narrative of the dominant masculine figure persuading the minority, figured as a powerless woman, to undergo a ‘radical assimilation,’ is a standard narrative of orientalist discourse.96

Fiction of this kind enacted the religious and political aims of Evangelical conversionism. It also gave rise to a new genre of writing authored by Jewish women, who used similar forms and set the same love triangle in motion, but with a far different outcome. In these works, protagonists find satisfaction and sanctity within Jewish faith and community. Grace Aguilar’s ‘The Perez Family’, discussed in Chapter 1, is one such example, particularly in the subplots concerning Reuben and Sarah. In Reuben Sachs, Levy continues a long tradition of writing back to conversionist narratives by depicting a young Jewish woman forced to choose between symbolically diverse suitors, but she rewrites this trope to alter its sexual, political and racial dynamics. Conversionist fiction is, in fact, explicitly invoked and rebuked in the novel: ‘Generally speaking, the race instincts of Rebecca of York are strong, and she is less apt to give her heart to Ivanhoe, the Saxon knight, than might be imagined.’97 The Yom Kippur dinner scene, 96 97

Galchinsky, Romance and Reform, p. 54. Levy, Reuben Sachs, p. 103. Rebecca is the Jewish heroine of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe: A Romance (1820). In her duty to her father, Isaac of York, and devotion to the Saxon noble Ivanhoe, Rebecca presented a potent type to those influenced by this immensely popular novel. Valman states that ‘the symbolic economy of gender established by this formative text was to shape narratives of Jews throughout the nineteenth century’. Valman, The Jewess, p. 33.

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for example, illustrates this trope at work. The familiar love triangle is translated into a new, Darwinian vocabulary of competition and procreation, and the scene’s complex discourses of religion and race are complicated by multiple gazes in operation and by densely symbolic language. At a meal presided over by patriarch Samuel Sachs, there is a brief exchange of glances shared between four characters: Judith, her father, Reuben, and Bertie Lee-Harrison who is a non-Jewish guest of Reuben’s. This exchange is comprised of five short paragraphs. Initially, Judith’s attention is directed by solicitude for Reuben: There was a sudden stifled explosion of laughter from Leo’s quarter of the table; and Judith glanced rather anxiously at Reuben, on whose polite, impassive face she at once detected a look of annoyance.98

Reuben and Judith have not to this point been interacting with one another, and are in fact seated at opposite ends of the long table. Nevertheless, Judith is uniquely able to interpret Reuben’s features despite his ‘passive face’. In addition to advancing the novel’s love plot, this allegiance indicates Judith’s sexual maturity. She has, acting independently, developed a preference for a potential mate. Understood in the Darwinian terms that Levy references elsewhere, Judith’s attraction to Reuben appears to represent an act of sexual selection. The next paragraph shifts from accounting for Judith’s gaze to directing an evaluative eye on her appearance: She was sitting next to her father in the close-fitting white gown which displayed to advantage the charming lines of her arms and shoulders.99 98 99

Levy, Reuben Sachs, p. 106. Ibid.

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Judith is eroticized by the narrator, who is explicit in expressing admiration for her body, in the same sentence that points out her proximity to her father – effectively, in the same breath. This invokes the erotic tension of the conversionist love triangle, in which the Jewish heroine’s allegiance to her antiquated, religious father is undermined by the influence of the charismatic suitor. In the conversionist narrative, the daughter’s most important decision is the choice between the father and the lover. Judith’s choice has already been expressed in the preceding paragraph, but reference to her ‘charming lines’ is nevertheless associated with her father. This confusion may point to what these two male figures have thus far been made to represent: in this Jewish romance, Judith’s choice is between a traditional model of Judaism and a contemporary one. She may ally herself with either her father, who has ‘reverted to the ancestral pursuits’, or with Reuben, who confesses to being ‘modified, by the influence of western thought and western morality’.100 The possibility of conversion, then, is to a new mode of Judaism. Thus far, the three characters accounted for within this scene are Jewish. Judith’s contested position between Reuben and her father does not imply the possibility of apostasy. Now, however, she intercepts Bertie’s gaze: Now and then she caught the glance of Mr. Lee-Harrison, who was far too well-bred to obtrude his admiration by staring, fixed momentarily on her face.101

Bertie’s glance is characterized by its gentility which, in this milieu, is a further sign of his being a gentile. It is clear, however, that this presentation of Bertie is not uncomplicated. Part of Judith’s fascination for him is her physical presence, and his interest in her during this 100 101

Ibid., pp. 79, 117. Ibid., p. 107.

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scene is sexual. His earliest encounter with Judith is characterized by this attraction: Bertie, struck by the effect of that sudden, rapidly checked wave of mirth passing over the beautiful, serious face, remarked to Reuben [. . .] that the Jewish ladies were certainly very lovely.102

Bertie’s so-called good breeding here conceals his desire, which is an aspect of his voyeuristic interest in participating in Jewish ritual. Judith is aware that Bertie is watching her, but not aware of her own sexual appeal. Mention of her appearance has not been focalized through her perspective, while both her glance at Reuben and Bertie’s glance at her are. Bertie’s glance marks the intrusion of the Christian suitor, and disrupts Judith’s romance of maturation, in which she is in the process of progressing from her father to her lover, by introducing a radical alternative which throws into relief the Jewishness of her environment. By embodying a racial, religious and social alternative, Bertie’s admiration forces the possibility that Judaism might not be carried forward into future generations at all. At this stage, though, he hardly seems a credible threat. Indeed, his smallness and effeminacy are emphasised repeatedly – he is ‘nothing more than a polite little figure’.103 Nor is Bertie strong in his faith. His ‘taste for religion’ is sent up as faddish and extravagant, and his adoption of Judaism is romantic rather than realistic: ‘Needless to state, he was completely out of touch with these people whose faith his search for the true religion had lead him, for the time being, to embrace.’104 Nevertheless, his admiration of Judith does significantly complicate the sexual and racial tensions of this scene.

102 103 104

Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., p. 220. Ibid., pp. 24, 110.

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Judith’s unconsciousness of this shift is emphasized by a return to the unnamed observing narrator: The hunger and weariness natural, under the circumstances, to her youth and health had in no way marred the perfect freshness of her appearance; and there was a gentle kindliness in her manner to her father which added a charm, not always present, to her beauty.105

This commentator, who is so intent on Judith’s beauty, evinces some prior knowledge of her in the act of comparing her present appearance to how she has looked in the past. Here again, her beauty is related to her interaction with her father, and not to a sexual response to either the Jewish or the Christian suitor. Her appeal, then, in the mind of this informed observer, lies in her traditionalism, or in her sympathy for its fragility. This is a significant narrative bias in a novel which records the effects of late-century assimilation. In the final stage of this silent exchange, the narrator considers Judith’s interiority and uses this as a bridge to return to the ironyinflected outsider’s voice that operates elsewhere in this scene: Perhaps she felt instinctively, what Quixano himself was far too much in the clouds to notice, that no one made much account of him, that it behoved her to take him under her protection. He was one of the world’s failures; and the Jewish people, so eager to crown success in any form, so determined in laying claim to the successful among their number, have scant love for those unfortunates who have dropped behind in the race.106

Here the narrator speculates on the content of Judith’s thoughts (‘perhaps she felt’), but the observation ‘He was one of the world’s failures’ marks a shift away from free indirect discourse and towards 105 106

Ibid., p. 107. Ibid.,

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a resumption of a critical voice that draws on a model of race-ascompetition, or the Jewish race as a race for survival. Also, in a strange reversal, Judith has become protective of her father. Judith’s power here is rooted in her superior cultural position; unlike her father, she is able to interact widely with the various branches of the Sachs family. This adaptiveness, for Levy, is an aspect of Judith’s femininity. In an 1886 article for The Jewish Chronicle, Levy argues that ‘women [. . .] are more readily adaptable, more eager to absorb the atmosphere around them; and by reason of their extra leisure, here in many cases outstrip their brothers in culture.’107 The failure, however, of Jewish society to recognize and respond to this adaptiveness is, for Levy, what puts Jewish women at risk of wrong marriage and apostasy. Indeed, wrong marriage – or, marrying a non-Jew – is a theme in Reuben Sachs, and Judith is the first to condemn it. Upon learning of her cousin Leo’s love for an aristocratic (and Christian) woman, she proclaims: ‘“He will have to get over that!”’108 In taking this view, she is replicating the sentiments of her community: ‘Mrs. Samuel Sachs indeed has been heard more than once to observe pleasantly that she would sooner see her daughters lying dead before her than married to Christians.’109 Marriage between cousins, however, is accepted as normal, and is represented here in various stages of courtship and realization. The ‘fiction of cousinship’ between Judith and Reuben ‘had made possible what is rare all the world over, but rarer than ever in the Jewish community – an intimacy between young people of opposite sexes’.110 This emphasis on insularity, combined with materialism, is perversely what ultimately effects the transition from Judith’s

107

108 109 110

Amy Levy, ‘Middle-Class Jewish Women of To-Day’, is in Bernstein, ed. Reuben Sachs, pp. 178–81 (p. 179). It originally appeared in The Jewish Chronicle (17 September 1886): 7. Levy, Reuben Sachs, p. 63. Emphasis in original. Ibid., p. 103. Ibid., p. 21.

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identification with the history and futurity of Judaism (exemplified by her glances towards her father and Reuben in the scene at the dinner table), to the calamitous outcome at the book’s conclusion, in which Judith marries Bertie and Reuben dies. The necessity for selecting a partner calls into question the degree of agency with which Judith is actually attributed. Levy’s use of the word ‘adaptable’ is significant, as is her notion of what adaptiveness entails for women. Adaption, a term itself recognizably Darwinian to Levy and her readers, is central to Darwin’s theory of evolution, which is phrased in a famously succinct formula: As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.111

For Darwin, adaptation occurs through random variation over many generations of a given species. Many forms of adaptation will be irrelevant, but those that contribute to survival will be perpetuated, leading to evolution. Survival is defined in terms of the successful production of offspring and, as scholars in the field of medical humanities have noted, this notion underpins many marriage plots in novels during the latter decades of the nineteenth century.112 It is

111

112

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, ed. Joseph Carroll (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Texts, 2003), p. 97. Emphasis in original. The seminal texts in this field are Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patters of Thought in Victorian Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), and Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

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at play, too, in the challenge that Reuben Sachs poses to a capitalist notion of success as the accrual of material gain. Adaptive change does not occur within a single life cycle nor, importantly, is it the result of a willed change in behaviour, but rather of the passive interaction between a species and its environment. Eight years before the publication of On the Origin of Species, the scientist and political theorist Herbert Spencer had set out a very different model of adaptation in Social Statics; Or, the Conditions Essential to Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed (1851). Spencer states that ‘[a]ll evil results from the non-adaptation of constitution to conditions’.113 He proposes that perfection of the human species can be achieved by two deliberate methods: the elimination of unsuccessful traits or persons, and the Lamarckian transmission of acquired improvements to the next generation by breeding the offspring of successful members of the population. In this view, the evolutionary process exceeds being a mechanism for the transmutation of species, and becomes rather a means of achieving perfection by realizing an ideal which is latent within humanity. Thus, for Spencer, adaptiveness is linked to civilization and progress, and a capacity to adapt is indicative of individual success and, importantly, of one’s agency: Concerning the present position of the human race, we must [. . .] say, that man [. . .] has been, is, and will long continue to be, in process of adaptation. By the term civilization we signify the adaptation that has already taken place. [. . .] Progress therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity.114

These two models of adaptation – Darwin’s and Spencer’s – among many which were in circulation during Levy’s lifetime, are highlighted here to demonstrate the range of uses associated with this word, and 113

114

Herbert Spencer, Social Statics; Or, the Conditions Essential to Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed (London: John Chapman, 1851), p. 59. Ibid. Emphasis in original.

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the implications especially for notions of agency and procreation. As these are central to Levy’s engagements with race theory, it becomes crucial to think more closely about which traditions Levy draws on when she employs such diction. British sociologist Anthony Giddens defines agency as involving ‘a stream of actual or contemplated causal interventions of corporeal beings in the ongoing process of events-in-the-world’.115 It is a necessary feature of agency that ‘at any point in time, the agent “could have acted otherwise”: either positively in terms of attempted intervention in the process of “events in the world,” or negatively in terms of forbearance’.116 If self-control and self-regulation are aspects of agency, then passive reactions to external stimuli do not in this scheme constitute assertive behaviour. Recall that Levy refers to women as ‘more readily adaptable’. ‘Women’, she states in the same article, ‘are beginning to be conscious of the yoke’.117 This consciousness, or awareness, infers a capacity for self-regulation and decision-making, and it is here manifested as an eagerness ‘to absorb the atmosphere around them’.118 Women’s absorption, then, linked to their emerging consciousness, gestures towards agency. In this scenario, women may choose to be modified by their environment. This model of adaptiveness seems to follow Spencer’s, in that the reaction of the organism to its environment is consciously modified to achieve ideal results. Judith demonstrates adaptiveness by doing what is required of her: she conforms to expectation, and she ensures her material survival by marrying Bertie. These actions, however, are hardly the result of her personal agency or preference. It may be, then, that Levy is contrasting adaptiveness to assertiveness to show that while

115

116 117 118

Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis (London: Macmillan Press, Ltd, 1979), p. 55. Ibid., p. 56. Levy, ‘Middle-Class Jewish Women of To-Day’, p. 179. Ibid.

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Jewish women are responsive to culture, this is essentially a passive response to the conditions of their existence. These conditions are the result of their leisure, itself a product of a wider failure to engage their energies. Women’s ‘extra leisure’ is due to their being ‘carefully excluded [. . .] from every-day intercourse with men and youths’, and taught that marriage is to be their sole personal aim.119 Levy describes the products of this model: a crowd of half-educated, idealess, pampered creatures, absorbed in material enjoyments; passing into aimless spinsterhood, or entering on unideal marriages; whose highest desire in life is the possession (after a husband) of a sable cloak and at least one pair of diamond earrings.120

In contrast, Jewish women who ‘beat themselves in vain against the solid masonry of our ancient fortifications’ may sometimes succeed in ‘scaling the walls and departing, never to return’.121 Adaptiveness, then, in the form of becoming modified by culture, does not imply agency. Middle-class Jewish women’s ‘[outstripping] their brothers in culture’, in Levy’s estimation, is a passive response to their environment. A more active response must involve ‘beating against fortifications’ and, eventually, flight.122 Judith, it is clear, does not choose flight. Indeed, she barely makes a choice at all; on first recognizing that it might come to pass that she will marry Bertie, ‘all her courage deserted her, all her daring of thought and feeling, in the face of a world where thought and feeling were kept apart from word and deed’.123 Nevertheless, Judith experiences greater social ease and interaction than, say, her father. 119 120 121 122 123

Ibid., p. 178. Ibid., p. 181. Ibid. Ibid., p. 179. Levy, Reuben Sachs, p. 139.

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Her integration into places like the glove counter at Whiteley’s and the drawing room at Portland Place shows a capacity to be reactive to current modes of conventional behaviour. This adaptiveness does not, however, extend to critiquing or modifying the environment in which she functions. Levy’s representation of adaptiveness among women in her Jewish community thus also seems partially to follow a Darwinian model, in that circumstances over which these women have no control (as with natural selection) make them more adaptable. Thus for Levy, what appears as a conscious (Spencerian) process of adapting oneself to one’s environment derives paradoxically from what is in practice more like a kind of Darwinian adaptation – that is, an instinctive (and so, passive) capacity to conform. Women must be capable of adaptation in order to survive on the terms dictated by their environment and community, but this version of adaptiveness is more akin to pragmatic resignation than to assertiveness. Recognizing women’s acculturation may appear as if it is remarking on their agency, but in fact it is an indictment of passivity using other words. In drawing simultaneously on the language of Spencer and Darwin, Levy uses this diction in a way that shows a nuanced engagement with dominant approaches to representing Jews in racial terms. As with Levy’s informed and specific use of ‘adaptiveness’, there is in Reuben Sachs a further set of words whose multiple meanings bear close attention. In a work which is so concisely narrated, repetition is significant. Diction and narration associated with Judith work to bridge the gap between a deep history of Jewish identity, the rhetoric of sexual selection already discussed here, and her emerging self-awareness and consequent dissatisfaction with her position as an unmonied woman with little capitol in a marriage market. In the exchange of glances discussed above, use of the word ‘charm’ (‘there was a gentle kindliness in her manner which added a charm, not always present, to her beauty’), recalls the description of Judith’s ‘charming lines’ in

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the preceding paragraph.124 This aspect of her beauty is both physical and temperamental; it may be associated with the shape of her body and also with the tenor of her behaviour. Charm, furthermore, bears associations of magic power or occult influence. While charm may be benign and endearing, it may also imply a persuasive or bewitching effect. Evocations of Judith’s mood are split between images of stony coldness and moments of warmth and light. Whereas she ‘[listens], cold as a stone’ to the Sachses’ political gossip, her mother is earlier able to perceive ‘the tinge of sunburn on her fresh young cheek’.125 With this tension in mind, it becomes important that Judith is perpetually dressed in a ‘close-fitting white gown’, at once indicative of bridal virginity as well as of the sexual allure of ‘the charming lines of her arms and shoulders’.126 References to Judith’s ‘tight-fitting fashionable white evening dress’ do more than merely provide illustrative detail of her sartorial choices. At the Leunigers’ dance, the dress becomes a ‘short, diaphanous white ball gown, with [a] low-cut, tight-fitting satin bodice’.127 She is married in a ‘white silk dress’, and by the time of her residence at the Albert Hall Mansions, ‘the thick, rich folds of her white silk dress [trail] heavily behind her’.128 These different versions of the same white dress chart Judith’s progressive maturation, while also setting her simplicity of style apart from the frivolous and materialistic appearance of her female relatives. While Judith’s beauty is constantly attested to, it is variously hinted at as cold and severe, or as warm and open. A transition between these two states occurs as Judith anticipates Reuben’s arrival at the Leunigers’ dance: [T]o-night some indefinable change had come over the character of her beauty, heightening it, intensifying it, giving it new life and 124 125 126 127 128

Ibid., p. 106. Ibid., pp. 192, 73. Ibid., p. 106. Ibid., p. 150. Ibid., pp. 248, 254.

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colour. The calm, unawakened look which many people had found so baffling, had left her face; the eyes, always curiously mournful, shone out with a new soft fire.129

Importantly, Judith’s awakening is signalled by light shining out from her eyes, an image which is part of Levy’s wider strategy for mapping different gazes onto sources of light. Judith’s internal light signifies awareness and feeling, or the kind of truth that is superior to the other ‘truths’ presented in the novel, such as the ‘truth’ of racial science, or of the importance of material advancement. There is, then, a web of diction associated with Judith’s internal state – her froideur or her fire – that also serves to comment on her appearance and the way that others perceive her. The special phrasing of Judith’s hot and cold phases indicates the fluidity here between internal and external narrative perspectives, as well as the faint possibility for agency derived from self-awareness. In contrast to her chilly unresponsiveness at other times, Judith is warmed to ‘gentle kindliness’ through contact with her father.130 Where elsewhere she is ‘stony’ and utterly withdrawn, her beauty and warmth appear to be drawn out by this filial interaction.131 That this ‘gentle kindliness’ adds ‘a charm, not usually present, to her beauty’ is to complicate what is meant by ‘charm’ and ‘kindness’, both words which have appeared previously. Charm, as noted, has mixed implications of both adorable and sexual appeal, and Judith’s kindliness here recalls her earlier feeling for Reuben: ‘Shall it be blamed her that she had a kindness for everything [Reuben] said and everything he did; that he was the king and could do no wrong?’132 These rhetorical questions are an important narrative device for drawing attention to Judith’s extremely limited capacity to exercise interiority in critiquing her 129 130 131 132

Ibid., p. 150. Ibid., p. 107. Ibid., p. 260. Ibid., p. 56.

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own environment. Importantly, though, it is ‘kindness’ or ‘kindliness’ that Judith exhibits in relation to Reuben and her father. The word ‘kind’ might also imply ‘type’, and it retains the verbal echo of ‘kin’. Judith therefore experiences warmth at being of the same ‘kind’ – that is, the same family or species – as these two men. ‘Kindness’ here also implies sympathy and compassion, indicating that this attraction is emotional as well as physiological. In combination with charm, Judith’s kindness produces this most rare and appealing phase of her beauty. Furthermore, as this phase of beauty is comprised of racefeeling and unconscious sexual appeal, it embodies the novel’s most emphatically depicted potential for Jewish futurity through sexual reproduction and cultural regeneration. This futurity, however, is faced with a series of barriers, including the materialism that causes Reuben’s abandonment of Judith, the presence of a mercenary Christian suitor, and Judith’s inability to act upon her intellectual, emotional or biological potential. These themes are replayed and complicated in the scene of Judith’s final encounter with Reuben. Before he arrives, she is ‘in such a state of tension as scarcely to be conscious of her pain’133 – her unconsciousness has effectively expanded to stifle even her awareness of the milieu into which she seeks inclusion through her engagement to Bertie. Bertie’s nattering is insufferable but Judith succeeds in tolerating it, until Reuben makes an unexpected appearance and she is transformed into ‘a flushed, bright-eyed lady’.134 Once again, Judith has been warmed to beauty by Reuben. Her ‘bright [eyes]’ confirm the momentary exchange of ‘true’ understanding between the two that is non-verbal and imperceptible to those without knowledge of this truth-feeling. Despite being located beneath the critical gaze of her conservative relatives, Judith’s warmth is briefly transformed into

133 134

Ibid., p. 244. Ibid., p. 246.

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interiority, and she gives voice to thoughts which are independent of the coercive expectations focused upon her. As with the earlier scene at the dinner table, she alone is able to read the nervous exhaustion on Reuben’s face and so she dwells upon her pity and love for him: ‘Oh my poor Reuben, my poor, poor Reuben!’135 The development of this interiority, and the impediments which it briefly overcomes, are figured in terms of the complex significance of Judith’s beauty and metaphors associated with eyes and light. These symbols have become dense and interlinked, and they contribute to a multi-faceted depth of meaning in a scene that is notably brief, or which displays the ‘absence of any single superfluous word’ noted by Oscar Wilde in his 1890 obituary of Levy.136 This extreme tension – the acceptance of a value system that is intensely repressive – results for Judith in a kind of psychic disruption, manifested by her repeated experience of a dream-like state, and the development of a facial ‘mask’ which is relaxed when in solitude. Even in times of pleasure and ease, Judith ‘[smiles] rather dreamily’, and by the time of her engagement to Bertie, we are told that [f]or the last four days she had been living in a dream; a dream peopled by phantoms, who went and came, spoke and smiled, but had about as much reality as the figures of a magic lantern. 137

Her disassociation from reality is unrelieved either by satisfaction at ‘marrying well’, or by the agency to actively seek a different outcome. Believing as she does that she must in any event appear content, Judith performs this behaviour in public but occasionally lapses from this performance and is ‘caught’, as when ‘[t]he mask fell off from Judith’s face’ when she is left alone by her cousin Rose for a moment after

135 136 137

Ibid., p. 247. Oscar Wilde, ‘Amy Levy’, The Women’s World, 3 (1890): 52. Levy, Reuben Sachs, pp. 69, 236.

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the dance at which she is abandoned by Reuben.138 Rose’s unexpected return prompts an embarrassed shutting of the door. Later, once she has accepted Bertie’s proposal, Judith is surprised in a corridor by Mrs. Sachs. Thinking herself alone, ‘the muscles of her face relaxed, [and] she stood a moment at the foot of the stairs like a figure of stone’.139 Upon detecting Reuben’s mother approaching her, ‘Judith roused herself at once, and held out her hand with the comedy-smile which she had learned to wear these last few days.’140 Judith’s stony coldness when unobserved indicates her profound incompatibility with the values of her ‘tribal duckpond’.141 Her dreaminess, meanwhile, shows that, while she experiences the tensions between women’s agency and patriarchy, any possibility of expressing this conflict is dissolved into an indistinct avoidance of difficulty. As Judith is unaware of the nature of her own predicament and unable to articulate the causes of her dismay, the narrative itself supplies a voice that will ask these questions for her. Almost immediately, a distinct narrative voice emerges that is attached to Judith. It is typified by the listing of rhetorical questions which are imploring, protective, and sympathetic, and which move towards a justification for Judith’s actions and an explanation of her limitations: As for Judith, shall it be blamed her if she saw no fault? [. . .] Shall it be blamed her, I say, that she saw no fault, she who, where others were concerned, had sense of humour and critical faculty enough?142

In addition, this interrogative voice emerges when Judith is overcome by emotion. In these instances, it acts as a replacement 138 139 140 141 142

Ibid., p. 180. Ibid., p. 241. Ibid. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., p. 56.

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for Judith’s own consciousness by asking the questions that she seems not to be asking of herself: Ah, what had come to Judith, standing in a corner of the hall watching the little scene? Ah, what did it mean, what was it, this beating and throbbing of all her pulses, this strange, choked feeling in her throat, this mist that swam before her eyesight?143

In asking these concerned, sympathetic questions, and in being more perceptive than Judith can herself be, the narrative voice is diagnostic: it thematizes the absences and shortcomings of Judith’s existence, and ultimately comes to prescribe self-awareness and racial affinity as antidotes to the repressiveness of contemporary Jewish society. It is in the Epilogue that Judith’s emergent agency is shown to temper her previous strategies of masked concealment and dream-like avoidance. Significantly, this occurs after the turmoil and resolution of the love plot. She is situated in her marital home when she first evinces a capacity for deeper understanding: Yes, she knew now more clearly what before she had only dimly and instinctively felt: the nature and extent of the wrong which had been perpetrated.144

Rather than a dénouement which confirms the heroine’s satisfaction in her choices, this epilogue condemns both Judith’s marriage out of Judaism, and also the values of the Jewish community which are responsible for condoning this marriage. The interrogative voice returns briefly at the opening of the final section to pose the question of Judith’s future existence, but rather than interceding on her behalf, this voice now serves to underscore Judith’s new capacity to think 143 144

Ibid., p. 123. Ibid., p. 255.

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these thoughts for herself. It remains that the narrator is aware of a development about which Judith ‘as yet [. . .] knows [. . .] not’, which is that she is pregnant.145 This is a return to the Darwinian emphasis on sexual selection; while Reuben may have been marked out as her correct mate, Judith’s offspring with Bertie is nevertheless made to represent the unknowable multiplicity of future life, and thus to act as a harbinger of possible improvement. This pregnancy also marks the replacement of adaptiveness with assertiveness, while further indicating a resurgence of Judith’s Jewish identity in being aware of a painful ‘drift’ away from ‘her own people’.146 It may be that this child, alongside Judith’s developing capacity for introspection, will bring forth ‘that quickening of purpose which is perhaps as much as any of us should expect or demand from Fate’.147 The message, then, of the novel’s final line, is that self-awareness ought to be one’s highest aspiration, above money, status and even above happiness. In Reuben Sachs, Levy critiques her Jewish community’s valuation of money and status over intelligence and tradition, and employs the diction of scientific racial discourse to paint Jews as competitive and degenerate. The plot, furthermore, does not rest on heroic or capable protagonists; Reuben makes the wrong choices, and Judith essentially fails to make any choice at all. Rather, Reuben Sachs charts the effect of this society upon a heroine who possesses the capacity for intelligence and happiness, but lacks the perceptiveness to move beyond its limitations. It is for this reason that the novel voices the anger that Judith cannot. Understood in this way, it may be seen that while the novel is vehemently critical, it is not self-loathing, nor is it a rejection of Judaism. In acting as a cautionary tale in which the heroine’s unvoiced dismay is sublimated into the narrative voice, 145 146 147

Ibid., p. 266. Ibid., p. 258. Ibid., p. 267.

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Reuben Sachs is an attempted corrective, rather than a renunciation. For there is optimism here, as well as a strong desire for continuity of Jewish life. Love of race is what characterizes the attraction between Reuben and Judith, as well as the tenderness between Judith and her father; both of these relationships are endorsed by the text as ideal but are threatened by materialism. While Judith is made to suffer the extreme isolation of a successful conversion plot, there is a strong indication that she will nonetheless be equipped to impart self-knowledge and Jewish feeling to the next generation, which is gestured towards in the form of her unborn child. As a way of envisioning a mode of maintaining religious difference while participating in national life, Levy’s model calls for increased openness to ideas outside of Judaism. This openness, however, is in the service of strengthening the agency and thoughtfulness of both sexes, which in turn, it is implied, will lead to the re-emergence of racial romance and thus the perpetuation of Jewish life in England.

Conclusion Esther and Judith in London: Jewish Feeling as a New Category of Affect

This book has worked to demonstrate the diverse ways in which two nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish female authors have engaged a distinctly Jewish model of affect – here called Jewish feeling – in their literary works. It has argued that this is a site of Jewish difference that can be detected across genre and also in the notably different historical contexts inhabited by Grace Aguilar and Amy Levy. Looking to their overlapping engagements with biblical prime-texts in the form of re-tellings of the Books of Esther and Judith affords a final example of the continuities between their works. Both Aguilar and Levy explicitly invoke the figures of Esther and Judith, either via outright commentary on the biblical sources or by giving these names to important characters who represent a play on the histories of their namesakes. I have discussed in Chapter 1 Aguilar’s narrative account of Esther in The Women of Israel, and here I shall bring this to bear on Levy’s controversial novel of middle-class Jewish materialism Reuben Sachs (1888), discussed in Chapter 3, which charts the development of self-awareness in its female protagonist Judith Quixano, who is herself observed by a relative named Esther. Both Aguilar and Levy participate in reassessments of these figures. Briefly returning here to a discussion of affect and midrash here can release new readings of how they do so. Spinoza’s notion

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of affect as a change in the body’s power of acting which can lead either to decline or improvement is furthermore divided between actions (affectus) and passions (affectio). The former are internal to the subject, while the latter originate in the world beyond. In this book, I have built on contemporary affect theory which explores a radically expanded definition of externally originating affectio, to argue that text – especially biblical or religious text – constitutes just such an affective body. Midrash, the rabbinical interpretive mode that draws stories and points of law from the prime-text, is particularly generative of affect in foregrounding a perpetual and provisional engagement with the Bible. Creators of midrash occupy a space of both total assurance in the perfection of the prime-text and also radical openness to its implied meanings. In its narrative approach to ‘filling in the gaps’ left in the Bible, midrash lies at a borderline between theology and literature. Many literary texts are underpinned by the kind of affective openness characteristic of midrash, and this openness has parallels to recent developments in literary theory. Here I focus on Anglo-Jewish literature and culture in England during the nineteenth century to ask how female authors in particular are accessing, internalizing and reinterpreting biblical source material. Importantly, this is a historiography that recognizes affect as a formative stage in a collective identity. Reconstructing emergent structures of feeling can trace conditions that subsequently come to be fully fleshed out – here, women’s struggle for inclusion in political, intellectual and religious spheres – while still nascent. These authors perpetuate Jewish feeling as a textual practice, in which the text – expanded from the sacred to the secular – is an affective body and its readers may ‘[abide] in the intermediary space [. . .] of allusive textuality’.1

1

Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick, eds, ‘Introduction’, Midrash and Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. xi.

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The Books of Esther and Judith were both composed during the Babylonian exile and both appear in the Old Testament Apocrypha, or those texts whose sacred status merits marginal inclusion alongside the canonical five Books of Moses. Like the Book of Ruth and even the Song of Songs, the Books of Esther and Judith use sexual politics as a vehicle for religious themes and have as their protagonists female heroines with an ambiguous hold over their own power. The archetypal figures of Esther – the prayerful persuader – and Judith – the seducing avenger – have presented irresolvably provocative motifs in rabbinic thought as well as in Western art and literature. In addition to their appearance in Christian and secular artworks, both figures have a parallel and vivid existence in Jewish folklore and classical rabbinic interpretation. For Jews, especially Jewish women writing during the nineteenth century, Esther and Judith carry these narratives of female power but also resonate as models of Jewish diasporic identity. Writing about Esther and Judith using popular literary forms such as collective biography or the novel furthermore presented a means of engaging in – and publishing – biblical commentary which was otherwise closed to women. The prevalence of imagery and narratives of both Esther and Judith in the wider culture meant that female writers without access to Jewish sacred texts written in Hebrew could draw on popular sources and the King James Bible to engage these Old Testament heroines and thus revise histories of the Jews and their status in a contemporary Protestant polity. Esther, the Israelite wife of the Babylonian king Ahaseurus (or Artaxerxes), comes to the aid of her people by praying for ‘eloquent speech’ (Add. Est. 14:13) which she uses to influence her husband, thus preventing a massacre of the Jews. She risks her life in undertaking this mission, and the result is the legal protection from violence and rights to property of the Jews as a minority population throughout the Persian empire. Adam Kirsch calls this sequence of events ‘coincidences that never quite rise to the status of miracles’, and the book is notable in

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being the only one that does not at any point mention God.2 As a story of diaspora told in human terms, it is one which envisions remaining safely in the stranger’s land, rather than dreaming of ‘return, revenge, or take-over’.3 Because of the Jewish holiday Purim, which celebrates this particular salvation of the Jews and on which the Book of Esther is read in full, this narrative is especially familiar. In Western art, the moment of Esther’s approach to the king has been rendered by artists such as Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Gentileschi and Filippino Lippi.4 John Everett Millais’ Esther (1865) shows its protagonist, adorned in a lavishly embroidered yellow silk robe and standing before a blue curtain, poised to enter the king’s chamber and make her plea on behalf of her people. As Jo Carruthers notes, ‘it is from the Victorian period onwards that Esther figures in novels flourish.’5 Here we can think of Aunt Esther in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), Esther Summerson in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–3), Esther Lyons in George Eliot’s Felix Holt (1866), the title character in George Moore’s Esther Waters (1894), and Esther Ansell in Children of the Ghetto by Israel Zangwill (1893). In Christina Rossetti’s sonnet sequence ‘Monna Innominata’ (1880), the speaker fantasizes about becoming the Jewish Queen Esther. While Esther’s success is in enabling Jews to live openly in a foreign land, Judith’s is in preventing incursion and take-over. Her home city of Bethulia, under siege by the Assyrian army, protects a hill passage that would lead its enemies to Jerusalem. When the town elders 2

3

4

5

Adam Kirsch, ‘Is the Book of Esther – a Story Told in Human Terms, Not Miracles – a Holy Book?’, Tablet Magazine, 22 July 2014 (accessed 31 December 2014). Elihu Katz and Menahem Blondheim, ‘Home Away from Home’, Tablet Magazine, 6 March 2012 (accessed 29 September 2014). Paintings by Tintoretto and Gentileschi depict Esther in a swoon before the throne of the King emphasizing, as Aguilar does, the overwhelming emotional effect of speaking publicly. See Tintoretto, Esther Before Ahasuerus (1548) and Artemisia Gentileschi, Esther Before Ahasuerus (1630). Jo Carruthers, Esther Through the Centuries (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), p. 17.

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demur about offering a robust defence, Judith upbraids them and acts independently to save the city. She ‘[decks] herself bravely, to allure the eyes of all men that should see her’ (Jdt. 10:4), walks to the Assyrian camp, and declares that she will tell their general Holofernes how to overtake the hill country and will escort him personally to Jerusalem. On her fourth day in the Assyrian camp there is a feast. Waiting until she is alone with the drunken Holofernes, Judith prays to God, seizes a sword and decapitates the supine general with two great thrusts. The sight of his head back in Bethulia galvanizes resistance among the Hebrews throughout Judea, who defeat utterly the emasculated Assyrian army. As Margarita Stocker points out, this biblical femme fatale has had a powerful and multivalent cultural presence up to the present day.6 As a visual subject, the moment of decapitation has allowed painters to associate a range of visual expressions and postures with Judith, while lavishing attention on the gore of Holofernes’ headless body and the decaying head itself. Andrea Mantegna’s Judith (1475) has her calmly leaving the tent of Holofernes, his head in her hand (and the foot of his headless body visible within), but Caravaggio’s Judith and Holofernes (1598) depicts with horror the very moment of the act, in all its resolution, repugnance and gushing blood. Johan Liss repositions the bodies, in Judith with the Head of Holofornes (1622), so that Judith looks out to meet the viewer’s gaze as she grips the severed head. In August Riedel Judith (1840), a painting contemporaneous with Aguilar’s early career, the head itself is nearly concealed while Judith’s dark hair, Oriental features and rich textiles are emphasized. As Valman notes, the ‘Jewess herself was ubiquitously conflated with the Oriental woman, and recognised by her stylised sensual beauty: her large dark eyes, abundant hair and languid expression’.7 Reidel’s 6

7

Margarita Stocker, Judith: Sexual Warrior, Woman and Power in Western Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998). Valman, The Jewess, p. 4.

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painting brings together the spiritual and sexual attractiveness of the contemporary figure of the Jewess with the violent reversal of power suggested by the biblical Judith. Resonances of Judith also persisted during the nineteenth century in the form of a fascination with women’s crimes, fed by tales from the Newgate Calendar and elaborated in sensation fiction. Lucy Snowe, of Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, identifies with the biblical murderess as a part of her complex repression. Lady Audley may be seen as a covert Victorian Judith, in her double life as murderess and angel. As Stocker further notes, stories of marricide (the murder of a husband by his wife) proliferate towards the end of the century, keeping pace with the rise of the New Woman.8 Importantly, however, when figured as Judith, the transgressive woman retains some of the dignity and authority highlighted in Renaissance paintings. She is, after all, acting under divine order to protect the holy city, and here the holy city is, in a sense, her authentic self at odds with social formations of femininity. On the surface, Esther and Judith present opposing archetypes of female power; domestic influence on the one hand and castrating seduction on the other. Neither biblical narrative, however, can fully contain these meanings. For example, while Esther credits God with her ability to move the king, she also insists that the sons of her enemy be hanged, an act of brutality that generations of commentators have worked to account for. Judith, meanwhile, is a resolutely chaste widow: ‘And many desired her, but none knew her all the day of her life, after that Manasses her husband was dead’ (Jdt. 16:22). Her chastity subordinates Judith to God’s patriarchy, but she nevertheless exploits her sexuality in order

8

Stocker, Judith, see Ch. 9, ‘Reader, I Murdered Him: Criminality and the Uncanny’, pp. 150–72.

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to overmaster and kill Holofernes. While both have been made to represent idealized forms of female power, in some readings it is their status as ‘mere’ women that serves to underscore the ultimate power of God: with no more than such feeble agents, in other words, the God of the Jews defeats mighty armies. It serves as a taunt when the book of Judith concludes: ‘the Lord hath smitten him by the hand of a woman’ (Jdt. 13:15). In brief, then, both Esther and Judith were represented widely in sacred and secular text and image during the nineteenth century. They thus presented complex narratives of ancient Israelite women with whom one might engage, whether or not one had access to biblical texts in Hebrew or, indeed, English. Aguilar’s characterization of Esther in The Women of Israel emphasizes dutiful submissiveness to patriarchal structures of nation and family: Esther’s quiescence and obedience to her destiny were a necessity. Chosen as the bride of a heathen monarch, desired by Mordecai not to show her people or her kindred, debarred from all her friends, [. . .] it was her duty to submit patiently and calmly.9

This Esther’s characteristics are prayer and deep feeling, and her particular challenge is being prevented from living openly as a Jew. Her subjectivity is highlighted in a way which lends something like gothic sensation and immediacy to the familiar tale: [Esther] did not draw back, though the stoppage of every pulse, from pure terror, evinces the struggle with natural feeling, – which it was.10

9 10

Aguilar, Women of Israel, p. 364. Ibid., pp. 365, 366.

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It is finally her prayer, beauty and God’s special protection that allow her to ensure the safety of the Jewish diaspora in the Persian Empire while also revealing her true identity. As a story of diaspora, it is one in which the happy ending is legal protection in exile, rather than return. The embattled Jews of the Persian capitol Shushan are made analogous to those reading this work in London, in 1845. Aguilar’s return to the biblical prime-text includes a display of feeling vividly recounted, and it is underpinned by the metonymic sense that the political exigencies of the present are contained in and continuous with the book of Esther. Esther was a popular subject for collective biographies of notable women. Based on the titles of these works, we can note the various ways in which the Esther narrative was framed and thus how Aguilar’s version sits within a crowded field. In 1817, the year after Aguilar’s birth, Francis Augustus Cox published the unambiguously titled Female Scripture Biography: Including an Essay on What Christianity Has Done for Women.11 Similar works published during the 1840s and 1850s highlight the ‘sacred’, ‘heroic’, ‘notable’ and even ‘representative’ characteristics of Esther and other figures from the Old and New Testaments.12 While these works share with Aguilar an emphasis on highlighting exemplary figures, they engage in typology by reinterpreting named characters from the Hebrew Bible for a Christian audience. In The Women of Israel, Aguilar restores Esther and her counterparts to a midrashic tradition, using 11

12

All references to collective biographies are from Alison Booth, Collective Biographies of Women: An Annotated Bibliography, (accessed 2 October 2014). Francis Augustus Cox, Female Scripture Biography: Including an Essay on What Christianity Has Done for Women, 2 vols (New York: James Eastburn, 1817). Eliza R. Steele, Heroines of Sacred History (New York: Taylor, 1841), includes chapter on ‘Heroism of Queen Esther’; American Sunday-School Union, Notable Women of Olden Times (Philadelphia: American Sunday-School Union, 1852); George Colfax Baldwin, Representative Women: From Eve, the Wife of the First, to Mary, the Mother of the Second Adam (Philadelphia and New York: American Baptist Publication Society, 1855).

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this as an interpretive framework for locating their contemporary significance. In collective biographies at the turn of the twentieth century, meanwhile, Esther’s sacredness falls away in favour of her domestic character, which is highlighted in works like Eve and Her Daughters; or, Heroines of Home (1900) and Women Helpers of their Nation (1916).13 Interestingly, sacredness and domesticity are both supplanted by quite other preoccupations in later decades; consider Women in the Old Testament: Twenty Psychological Portraits (1949), Ten Girls of the Bible Who Became Famous (1960), and Ten Queens: Portraits of Women of Power (1998), all of which have chapters on Esther.14 Many scholars have pointed out Aguilar’s Jewish apologia for a Christian audience, and some have wrestled with the complex claim of her ‘Jewish Protestantism’. Not widely noted, however, is the status of these biographical entries as midrash: on one level, they operate as spiritual and social conduct manuals for women, but they are nevertheless narrative exegeses on biblical texts that seek to answer questions either contained by or directed towards these sacred sources. Aguilar draws on an erudite range of rabbinic and historical sources, resulting in a dialogic presentation reminiscent of Talmud, even as she also invokes contemporaries like Eliza Steele and Anna Jameson, authors of collective biographies of women. By highlighting a character who is above all deeply feeling and ‘like us’, Aguilar prescribes feeling as the mode in which to navigate questions of religious and national identity. Furthermore, in her interpretive and narrative practice she engages the affective 13

14

Thomas Maxwell McConnell, Eve and Her Daughters; or, Heroines of Home (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1900); Frances Vernon Harvey, Women Helpers of their Nation (London: Skeffington, 1916). Norah Lofts, Women in the Old Testament: Twenty Psychological Portraits (New York: Macmillan, 1949); Basil Miller, Ten Girls of the Bible Who Became Famous (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1960); Milton Meltzer, Ten Queens: Portraits of Women of Power (New York: Dutton Children’s Books, 1998).

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textuality characteristic of midrash. In this way, her version of Esther exhibits Jewish feeling. While Aguilar looks to Esther for an exemplary figure, Levy instead subverts aspects of the Judith narrative, just as she satirizes Jewish conservatism and materialism in Reuben Sachs. Recall that the biblical Judith is aware of her sexual attractiveness and ruthlessly certain of how best to act. Levy’s protagonist, by contrast, is just the opposite. Judith’s beauty and sexual maturity are commented on repeatedly. She is a tall, regal-looking creature, with an exquisite dark head, features like those of a face cut on a gem or cameo, and wonderful, lustrous mournful eyes.15

Her community, although she does not know it, is under threat of being broached and overwhelmed in the way that Bethulia was. Rather than acting assertively, Judith’s will is suspended in a state of dreamlike uncertainty. In the absence of divine inspiration and slow to develop her own self-awareness, she is entrapped: She had been caught, snared in a fine, strong net of woven hair, this young, strong creature. Her strength mocked her in the clinging, subtle toils.16

She is so little the femme fatale that she actually marries – rather than decapitates – the stranger and so must watch from exile while her rightful mate, with whom she might have perpetuated the racial and intellectual inheritance of Judaism, dies. The irony is that while Judith flails blindly despite her strength, she is observed by an acerbic and clear-sighted Esther: her cousin, the ‘uncomfortable, eccentric, undignified’ Esther Kohnthal.17 Unlike 15 16 17

Levy, Reuben Sachs, p. 21. Ibid., p. 181. Ibid., p. 41.

Conclusion

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Queen Esther, Esther Kohnthal is not beautiful, and she does make a display of her wealth. She first appears as a small, dark, gnome-like creature, apparently entirely overpowered by the rich, untidy garments she was wearing. She was a girl, or woman, whose age it would be difficult to determine, with small, glittering eyes that outshone the diamonds in her ears. [. . .] This was Esther Kohnthal, the only child of poor Kohnthal; and, according to her own account, the biggest heiress and the ugliest woman in all Bayswater.18

That her wealth and ugliness are both taken on the strength of ‘her own account’ indicate this character’s sense of irony alongside selfknowledge. The ‘glittering eyes’ that can outshine diamonds confirm the special perceptiveness that allows her to see beyond the gleam of this materialism. Despite ‘[falling] in love half-a-dozen times a season, loudly bewailing herself throughout’, this Esther is able to recognize the strictures imposed by the marriage market, and to see directly to the truth of character.19 She pins Bertie as ‘a howling swell [. . .] with a double-barrelled name’ even before his arrival on the scene, and ‘classified him at once as an intelligent fool’ upon meeting him.20 She also possesses ‘a clearer view of Judith’s mind than anyone else’, although this does not enable her to assuage Judith’s unhappiness.21 This is because no one listens to Esther. Reuben cautions: ‘Esther was Esther, and if you began to mind what she said, you would never know where to stop.’22 Unlike Aguilar’s Queen Esther, whose interiority is supplanted by a divine message, Esther Kohnthal’s knowledge originates within herself. Where her royal predecessor is able to influence a king, 18 19 20 21 22

Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., pp. 24, 84. Ibid., p. 239. Ibid., p. 23.

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however, Esther Kohnthal’s message of warning is directed inward, and is only partially articulated. She is her own sole audience, and the only outcome of her aphoristic observations is her private wry amusement. Her surname Kohnthal derives from Cohen or Kohen, which refers, in the Torah, to priests descended from Aaron who have sacred duties in the temple. The name indicates patrilineal descent from this priestly class, which still has special status in some branches of Orthodox and Conservative Judaism. Here, it has been Germanicized, and in showing Esther to be a kind of impotent priestess, Levy may be calling further attention to her configuration of Ashkenazi culture as degenerate and Sephardic culture as racially and culturally superior. It becomes significant, then, that Esther does not attend synagogue on Yom Kippur (‘She had had a sharp wrangle with her mother the night before, which had ended in her staying in bed with Goodbye Sweetheart! for company’) as her priestly antecedents would have been central to administering in the service.23 When Judith is compared flatteringly to the biblical Queen Esther, her cousin Esther, aware that Judith lacks currency on the marriage market, offers this pithy commentary on her namesake: ‘Ah,’ cried Esther Kohnthal, ‘I have always had a theory about her [Queen Esther]. When she was kneeling at the feet of that detestable Ahasuerus, she was thinking all the time of some young Jew whom she mashed, and who mashed her, and whom she renounced for the sake of her people!’24

Here in fashionable London, very far indeed from ancient Persia or Judea, Judith feels deeply but lacks knowledge or will, and Esther sees clearly but cannot be heard. In contrasting obedience and

23 24

Ibid., p. 93. Ibid., p. 114.

Conclusion

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renunciation to self-awareness and sexual choice, Levy offers a very different model of Jewish femininity than Aguilar’s, but one which nevertheless looks to biblical source material as a foundation from which to analyse the social concerns of the present moment. In their uses of the Esther trope, both authors play on an inherited legacy to discuss women’s spirituality and the place of Jews in England. While each one draws on themes of women’s voice, status, and power, it is notable that in 1888, Levy essentially inverts Aguilar’s 1845 model of the same character. What is reversed in Levy’s narrative is the source of power and insight, as well as the role of Jewish women in negotiating civic identities. Whereas for Aguilar, feminine power resides in giving voice to deep feeling, Levy’s Esther chafes at this sincerity, and is defined by the limits of her voice as well as intensity of her self-awareness. Aguilar’s version is designed to be exemplary, while Levy’s has exaggerated and unattractive qualities, and is ultimately impotent. While both authors are linked by their emphasis on feeling and their criticism of perfection of form for its own sake, these approaches are realized differently in the work of each one due to the considerable changes that occurred between their lifetimes. Where Aguilar looks to Romanticism for a contemporary model of the expressive self, Levy has before her examples of decadence and incipient modernism. In overstating their differences, however, we can miss some crucial similarities in their approach to the value and purpose of literary form, and thus to their engagement with Jewish feeling. Scheinberg has noted some generic patters which form alternatives to the intrinsic Christian value placed in narratives of redemption, conversion and closure. These alternatives are formal approaches which might posit multiplicity of perspectives and a community of voices, as in the tradition of Talmud and midrash, over unitary or monologic

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identity, might emphasize narratives of persistence rather than conversion or transformation, and might replace narratives of redemptive closure with narratives of perpetual hope.25

Both Aguilar and Levy explore the ways in which secular forms can participate in religious discourse. For Aguilar, it is important that a coherent philosophy of text is in place – via education – before the study or authorship of text. Once the correct understanding of text has been taught by Jewish mothers to their children, readers may turn to any text and find there a consoling moral message. Similarly, Levy’s appeal for ‘feeling’ and ‘truth’ in literature, as well as the nature of the formal complexity of Reuben Sachs, mean that for her – as for Aguilar – meaning resides in the process of interpretation alongside a midrashic sense of textuality. Levy’s overt criticism of Jewish life does not imply the author’s anti-Semitism. While recent criticism of Levy has shifted away from emphasis on her Jewish identity and towards considering her work in the context of its contemporary literary movements and modern-day identity politics, it is nevertheless crucial to note that Levy’s formal strategies are not strictly akin to those of her contemporaries. This difference can be highlighted via comparison to George Eliot, whose immense thoughtfulness regarding Judaism does not imply the adoption of Jewish structures of thought. Certain Jewish reading practices consist of an affective exchange between reader and text. These acts of reading have historically been undertaken mainly by men. Pointing out that Aguilar and Levy exhibit a distinct category of affect is not, then, to repeat the Victorian formulation of women as emotional rather than rational. By contrast, I argue that when excluded from particular texts and sites of communal study, these authors translate affective reading practices into secular and literary forms, using as their sources a diverse range of popular and Christian biblical materials. 25

Scheinberg, p. 236.

Conclusion

179

Both authors show characters who are experiencing feeling, and this contributes to an epistemology of affect – feeling as a way of knowing – that reaches beyond the text to inform reading practices of contemporary audiences. Readers are led to perpetuate an engagement with what they read, rather than to provide a solution to its ambiguities. While the literary texts of Aguilar and Levy contain instances of theological exegesis, these very texts themselves constitute a site for ongoing affective readings and thus perpetuate interpretive traditions in a context which resonates beyond an orthodox Jewish community. In so doing, they deploy approaches to feeling and textuality which are distinctly Jewish but also highly engaged with an emergent identity in culture, and so represent a new category of affect in the nineteenth century.

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Index Abrahams, Rachel Beth Zion Lask 58 affect 4–17, 56–7, 68–9, 81–4, 86–9, 104–7, 128, 132, 165–6, 178–9 and midrash 19, 24–9, 33 and the novel 116–18, 120, 125, 127 and theology 12–14, 98–9 see also Augustine of Hippo, Saint; Spinoza, Benedict de (Baruch) Aguilar, Grace 4, 31–5, 65–8, 85–6, 102, 119, 122, 165, 173, 177–9 as author of midrash 31–5, 38–41, 69–70, 72–3, 173–4 see also midrash and ‘Jewish Protestantism’ 43, 44–5, 46, 70, 173 and women’s reading and education 45–8 see also The Spirit of Judaism Works: ‘The Authoress’ 42–3, 48–50, 57, 59 ‘The Edict’ 80 ‘History of the Jews in England’ 71, 78, 80, 81–4, 109, 111 Home Influence 45 Home Scenes and Heart Studies 41–3, 44 The Jewish Faith 47 ‘Lines, 11 Aug 1834’ 46n. 21 ‘The Perez Family’ 43, 50–5, 57, 59 The Spirit of Judaism 43, 56–7, 58–65, 68, 112 ‘The Spirit of Night, Founded on a Hebrew Apologue’ 37–41, 70 The Vale of Cedars; or, the Martyr 64, 80 ‘A Vision of Jerusalem, While Listening to a Beautiful Organ in One of the Gentile Shrines’ 46n. 21

The Women of Israel 29, 32–3, 70, 71–6, 78 see also Biblical references: Book of Esther; Book of Judith; Book of Ruth Anderson, Amanda 101, 107, 110, 113 Arnold, Matthew 19, 112–13 Auerbach, Erich 25 Augustine of Hippo, Saint 12–13 Bal, Mieke 26–7, 38 Beckman, Linda Hunt 119, 137, 139n. 78, 142 Bible Jewish translations into English 69 King James Version 38, 60, 69, 72, 73, 167 Torah 18–21, 22n. 61, 24–5, 39n. 5, 46, 69, 73, 176 Oral Torah 20, 55 Written Torah 20–1 Biblical references Deuteronomy 52, 53n. 36 Book of Esther 22n. 61, 72–6, 165, 167–8, 170–7 Genesis 4, 26n. 69–70, 38, 91 Book of Jonah 77 Book of Judith 165, 167, 168–71, 174–7 Luke 2 Matthew 2 Book of Ruth 29, 31–3 Song of Songs 1, 22n. 61, 167 Carlyle, Thomas 82, 130 Catholicism 44, 47, 79 and decadence 131, 132, 135–6, 150, 170–1, 177

196

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Roman Catholic Relief Act 80, 82 Spanish Inquisition 79n. 105 and symbolism 136; see also typology Cheyette, Brian 141 collective biography see Aguilar: The Women of Israel conversion 12–13, 28, 30, 135 apostasy 44, 50, 52, 67, 69, 102, 148, 151 conversionism 33, 39–40, 44–5, 48, 50–1, 59–60, 69, 144–9, 164, 177–8 conversos 79–81 Darwin, Charles 34, 143, 147, 152–3, 156, 163 Dixon, Thomas 16 Eliot, George 5, 34, 85–6, 90–1, 115–18, 120–32, 168, 178 and higher criticism 85, 91n. 22; see also Feuerbach, Ludwig and Organicism 34, 92–6, 98–101, 106–7 and Spinoza 87–8, 106 Works: Daniel Deronda 86, 90, 95, 101–7, 108, 120–5 Impressions of Theophrastus Such, esp. ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ 86, 100, 107–11 Middlemarch 85, 87–9, 94 ‘The Morality of Wilhelm Meister’ 91n. 18, 126n. 35 ‘The Natural History of German Life’ 89–90 ‘Notes on Form in Art’ 93–4, 96, 100 The Origin of Christianity see Feuerbach, Ludwig ‘Peter von Bohlen’s Introduction to the Book of Genesis’ 91 Ellis, Sarah Stickney 52, 63n. 68

Evangelical Christianity 31, 39, 43, 44–5, 51, 57, 64–6, 76 see also conversion: conversionism Feuerbach, Ludwig 91n. 22, 97–8 Galchinsky, Michael 34, 40–1, 47, 50, 59, 65–6, 69, 78, 80, 145–6 Gilman, Sander 113, 142 Hartman, Geoffrey and Sanford Budick, Midrash and Literature 18, 27 James, Henry 34–5, 42, 115–16, 132 on Daniel Deronda 120–8 Jews’ Free School 58 Johnson, Lionel 135–6, 139–40 Judaism Halakha 26, 56–7 and national belonging 34, 51–65, 67, 70–2, 78–84, 101–2, 107–13, 121–3, 141–5, 164, 173 and non-Jews 61, 110–12 see also conversionism and race 101, 111–13, 123; see also Amy Levy: and race Reform 44, 51, 55, 59, 68 Sephardic 16, 43–4, 80, 176; see also conversion: conversos status of women 33, 43, 53, 145–52, 155 Knox, Robert 112–13 Leeser, Rabbi Isaac 47n. 25, 51, 59n. 51, 69 Levinas, Emmanuel 19, 25 Levy, Amy and futurity 35, 127–8, 131–2, 140, 144, 152, 159, 163–4 and George Eliot 34, 115–19, 121–2, 127–8, 131–2

Index and Henry James 34–5, 115–16, 120, 122–7, 132 and race 34–5, 132, 138, 141–64, 174, 176 and suicide 128, 132–40 Works: ‘Cohen of Trinity’ 136–8 ‘The Ghetto at Florence’ 120n. 17 ‘James Thomson: A Minor Poet’ 129, 130–4 ‘The Jew in Fiction’ 120–1, 126 ‘Jewish Children’ 120n. 17 ‘Jewish Humour’ 120n. 17 ‘Middle-Class Jewish Women of To-Day’ 120n. 17, 151, 154–6 A Minor Poet and Other Verse 115 ‘The New School of American Fiction’ 115–19, 120, 124–5, 127, 132 Reuben Sachs 119, 121–2, 140–65, 174–6, 178 ‘Sokratics in the Strand’ 134–6, 138–9 Xanitppe and Other Verse 115, 140 Lewes, G. H. 87n. 6, 92–6, 99 The London Society for the Promotion of Christianity Amongst the Jews 39, 45n. 20; see also conversion: conversionism midrash 4, 17–24, 33–4, 165–6, 177–8 and affect 24–35 and metonymy 26, 34, 177 midrash Aggadah 21, 23 midrash Rabbah 2, 22–3, 29–33, 38 see also Aguilar: as author of midrash

197

Mill, John Stewart 104 Milman, Henry Hart 72, 74–6 Montefiore, Charlotte 56 Cheap Jewish Library 38n. 2, 51 Montefiore, Sir Moses 51 naturalism 126–7 Newman, John Henry 13 Newton, K. M. 95–8, 130 Organicism see Eliot, George: and Organicism Ruskin, John 117 Scheinberg, Cynthia 34n. 94, 46, 50, 66, 177 Solomon, Rebecca 2–4 Solomon, Simeon 3 Spencer, Herbert 34, 99, 153–4, 156 Spinoza, Benedict de (Baruch) 7 affectus and affectio 9–11, 13–14, 24–5, 87–9, 93, 106, 166 see also Eliot, George: and Spinoza Thomson, James 128–9, 132 and George Eliot 130–1 Torah, see Bible: Torah typology 29, 76–7, 132, 172 metaphor vs. metonymy 26–7, 76–7, 84; see also midrash: and metonymy symbolism 132; see also Catholicism: symbolism Umansky, Ellen 46–7 Valman, Nadia 45, 65–6, 104, 137–8, 142, 145–6, 169 Williams, Raymond 5, 11, 16, 27–8, 126n. 35