Blessing and Curse: Imaginary Jews and Romantic Texts

Abstract

Recent work on Jewish identity and representation in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Britain has emphasized the dominant culture’s ambivalence, repeatedly manifested in terms of contradictory images, representations, and sayings about Jews and Judaism. As Bryan Cheyette and others have argued, part of the difficulty of Jewish representation involves the fact that Jews are border figures, the Other within British culture: they are hard to place and categorize.¹ In the culture as a whole, for instance, anti-Semitic caricatures and philo-Semitic conversionist discourse flourish in an atmosphere of growing religious toleration. On a more specific level, even writers who consciously set out to present Jews in a positive light often reveal their own prejudice and ambivalence about Jews, or the idea of “the Jew.” The ambivalence, so characteristic of Romantic representations of Jews and Jewishness, exposes the limitations of the theoretical construct of the sympathetic imagination, which guides much of the aesthetic and ethical discourse of Romanticism. In this chapter (and when considering Wordsworth and Edgeworth separately in later chapters) I examine this ambivalence in specific texts as manifestations of the contradictory ways in which the culture imagines Jews.