Jewish Presences in English Literature

Jewish Presences in English Literature

Author: Derek Cohen

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 9780773507814

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In a collection of insightful critical essays, Derek Cohen, Deborah Heller, and the contributing authors explore the different ways in which writers of English literature have amplified, varied, or denied this archetypical perception.


Jewish Presences in English Literature

Jewish Presences in English Literature

Author: Derek Cohen

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 1990-09-01

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 0773562621

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"The image of the Jew in English literature, as in the Western imagination, has at its base the figure of the Christ-killer. All representations of the Jew in Christian culture are constructed in the light of this irreducible definition." -- from the introduction In a collection of insightful critical essays, Derek Cohen, Deborah Heller, and the contributing authors explore the different ways in which writers of English literature have amplified, varied, or denied this archetypical perception. While the authors approach this subject from diverse perspectives, the essays are unified by an awareness of the common tradition out of which representations of Jews have developed and illustrate the tradition's continuity and modifications. Studying the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, Joyce, and a selection of texts from the ninth to the sixteenth century, the essays show how constructs of Jewishness fit into a writer's pre-existing concerns and patterns of representation and how even later, more favourable depictions are over-simplified reactions to this attitude. Some of the authors directly address the question of what constitutes anti-semitism in a literary work. All take into account the social and historical contexts in which the individual works took shape. Their main concern, however, is not to produce a social history but to illustrate how even the greatest writers draw on stereotypes embedded in the popular imagination and to focus on the internal dynamics of individual works, thereby recuperating classical portrayals within a contemporary critical perspective.


The Accommodated Jew

The Accommodated Jew

Author: Kathy Lavezzo

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2016-10-21

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 1501706705

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England during the Middle Ages was at the forefront of European antisemitism. It was in medieval Norwich that the notorious "blood libel" was first introduced when a resident accused the city's Jewish leaders of abducting and ritually murdering a local boy. England also enforced legislation demanding that Jews wear a badge of infamy, and in 1290, it became the first European nation to expel forcibly all of its Jewish residents. In The Accommodated Jew, Kathy Lavezzo rethinks the complex and contradictory relation between England’s rejection of "the Jew" and the centrality of Jews to classic English literature. Drawing on literary, historical, and cartographic texts, she charts an entangled Jewish imaginative presence in English culture. In a sweeping view that extends from the Anglo-Saxon period to the late seventeenth century, Lavezzo tracks how English writers from Bede to Milton imagine Jews via buildings—tombs, latrines and especially houses—that support fantasies of exile. Epitomizing this trope is the blood libel and its implication that Jews cannot be accommodated in England because of the anti-Christian violence they allegedly perform in their homes. In the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the Jewish house not only serves as a lethal trap but also as the site of an emerging bourgeoisie incompatible with Christian pieties. Lavezzo reveals the central place of "the Jew" in the slow process by which a Christian "nation of shopkeepers" negotiated their relationship to the urban capitalist sensibility they came to embrace and embody. In the book’s epilogue, she advances her inquiry into Victorian England and the relationship between Charles Dickens (whose Fagin is the second most infamous Jew in English literature after Shylock) and the Jewish couple that purchased his London home, Tavistock House, showing how far relations between gentiles and Jews in England had (and had not) evolved.


I. L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture

I. L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture

Author: Ruth R. Wisse

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2015-07-01

Total Pages: 147

ISBN-13: 0295805676

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I. L. Peretz (1852–1915), the father of modern Yiddish literature, was a master storyteller and social critic who advocated a radical shift from religious observance to secular Jewish culture. Wisse explores Peretz’s writings in relation to his ideology, which sought to create a strong Jewish identity separate from the trappings of religion.


Constructions of 'the Jew' in English Literature and Society

Constructions of 'the Jew' in English Literature and Society

Author: Bryan Cheyette

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1995-10-26

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 9780521558778

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Combining cultural theory, discourse analysis and new historicism with readings of the works of major contemporary authors, this study concludes that "the Jew" is characterized unstereotypically as the embodiment of uncertainty within English literature and society.


Jews in Medieval England

Jews in Medieval England

Author: Miriamne Ara Krummel

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-01-08

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 3319637487

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This volume examines the teaching of Jewishness within the context of medieval England. It covers a wide array of academic disciplines and addresses a multitude of primary sources, including medieval English manuscripts, law codes, philosophy, art, and literature, in explicating how the Jew-as-Other was formed. Chapters are devoted to the teaching of the complexities of medieval Jewish experiences in the modern classroom. Jews in Medieval England: Teaching Representations of the Other also grounds medieval conceptions of the Other within the contemporary world where we continue to confront the problematic attitudes directed toward alleged social outcasts.


Shakespeare's Religious Language

Shakespeare's Religious Language

Author: R. Chris Hassel Jr.

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-03-26

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 1472577299

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Religious issues and discourse are key to an understanding of Shakespeare's plays and poems. This dictionary discusses over 1000 words and names in Shakespeare's works that have a religious connotation. Its unique word-by-word approach allows equal consideration of the full nuance of each of these words, from 'abbess' to 'zeal'. It also gradually reveals the persistence, the variety, and the sophistication of Shakespeare's religious usage. Frequent attention is given to the prominence of Reformation controversy in these words, and to Shakespeare's often ingenious and playful metaphoric usage of them. Theological commonplaces assume a major place in the dictionary, as do overt references to biblical figures, biblical stories and biblical place-names; biblical allusions; church figures and saints.


'Essenced to Language'

'Essenced to Language'

Author: Nayef Al-Joulan

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9783039107285

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Rosenberg was more than just a war poet. A general failure to take this into consideration has contributed to the belated recognition of the distinctions of his work. A working-class London Jew, he schooled himself, long before the Great War, to respond to issues of class, culture, art and poetry; a combination of dependency and self-sufficiency which sustains his mature work, and which gave him a sense of himself as an Anglo-Jewish poet. To illuminate Rosenberg, Nayef Al-Joulan considers the conditions of the Jewish community in the East End of London at the turn of the century and examines the writer's attitudes to the Zionism in vogue. He also investigates striking echoes of Freudian psychology in Rosenberg's work. Tracing Rosenberg's working-class literary heritage, Al-Joulan underlines a modern Jewish insight that has parallels with Marx and Freud and therefore uncovers the role class and race played in the critical marginalising of Rosenberg. The book concludes by examining Rosenberg's cognitive ekphrasis, his idea of language as a vehicle for mental essence, a perception rooted into the painter's mind.


A Brilliant Commodity

A Brilliant Commodity

Author: Saskia Coenen Snyder

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-11-18

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0197610471

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Following diamonds from African mines to the necklines of high society women, this international history shows why Jews were central to the transatlantic gem trade and its growth into a global industry. During the late nineteenth century, tens of thousands of diggers, prospectors, merchants, and dealers extracted and shipped over 50 million carats of diamonds from South Africa to London. The primary supplier to the world, South Africa's diamond fields became one of the formative sites of modern capitalist production. At each stage of the diamond's route through the British empire and beyond-from Cape Town to London, from Amsterdam to New York City-carbon gems were primarily mined, processed, appraised, and sold by Jews. In A Brilliant Commodity, historian Saskia Coenen Snyder traces how once-peripheral Jewish populations became the central architects of a new, global exchange of diamonds that connected African sites of supply, European manufacturing centers, American retailers, and western consumers. Centuries of restrictions had limited Jews to trade and finance, businesses that often heavily relied on internal networks. Jews were well-positioned to become key players in the earliest stage of the diamond trade and its growth into a global industry, a development fueled by technological advancements, a dramatic rise in the demand of luxury goods, and an abundance of rough stones. Relying on mercantile and familial ties across continents, Jews created a highly successful commodity chain that included buyers, brokers, cutters, factory owners, financiers, and retailers. Working within a diasporic ethnic community that bridged city and countryside, metropole and colony, Jews helped build a flourishing diamond industry, notably Hatton Garden in London and the Diamond District of New York City, and a place for themselves in the modern world.


Genius & Anxiety

Genius & Anxiety

Author: Norman Lebrecht

Publisher: Scribner

Published: 2020-12-08

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 1982134267

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This lively chronicle of the years 1847­–1947—the century when the Jewish people changed how we see the world—is “[a] thrilling and tragic history…especially good on the ironies and chain-reaction intimacies that make a people and a past” (The Wall Street Journal). In a hundred-year period, a handful of men and women changed the world. Many of them are well known—Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Kafka. Others have vanished from collective memory despite their enduring importance in our daily lives. Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusions or major surgery. Without Paul Ehrlich, no chemotherapy. Without Siegfried Marcus, no motor car. Without Rosalind Franklin, genetic science would look very different. Without Fritz Haber, there would not be enough food to sustain life on earth. What do these visionaries have in common? They all had Jewish origins. They all had a gift for thinking in wholly original, even earth-shattering ways. In 1847, the Jewish people made up less than 0.25% of the world’s population, and yet they saw what others could not. How? Why? Norman Lebrecht has devoted half of his life to pondering and researching the mindset of the Jewish intellectuals, writers, scientists, and thinkers who turned the tides of history and shaped the world today as we know it. In Genius & Anxiety, Lebrecht begins with the Communist Manifesto in 1847 and ends in 1947, when Israel was founded. This robust, magnificent, beautifully designed volume is “an urgent and moving history” (The Spectator, UK) and a celebration of Jewish genius and contribution.