Romanticism/Judaica

A Convergence of Cultures

Sheila A. Spector

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754668800
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317061298
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

The twelve essays in Romanticism/Judaica explore the four major cultural strands that have converged from the French Revolution to the present. The first section, Nationalism and Diasporeanism, contains essays on the diasporean mentality of the Romantics, Byron's attitude towards nationalism, and Polish immigrant Hyman Hurwitz's attempt to gain acceptance among the British by having Coleridge translate his Hebrew elegy for Princess Charlotte. Essays of the second section, Religion and Anti-Semitism, deal with the complexities of Jewish/Christian relations in the Romantic Period. Specifically, they discuss philosopher Solomon Maimon's lack of response to Kant's anti-Semitism, novelist Maria Polack's use of Christian subject matter to combat anti-Semitism, and short-story writer Grace Aguilar's incorporation of the British Bible-centered Evangelical culture, along with various strands of British Romanticism. In the third section, Individualism and Assimilationism, essays consider different ways the Jews were assimilated into the dominant culture, specifically through the theater, sports and and post-Enlightenment philosophy. Finally, the volume concludes with Criticism and Reflection: a revaluation of earlier scholarship on Anglo-Jewish literature; the establishment of Harold Fisch's covenantal hermeneutics as a model for reading Keats; and an analysis of Lionel Trilling, M. H. Abrams, Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman in terms of their Jewish origins, suggesting the further implications for Romanticism as a field.

1 Nationalism and Diasporeanism

1 Enactments of Exile and Diaspora in English Romantic Literature

Stuart Peterfreund

DOI: 10.4324/9781315607016-2

In a recently aired PBS program. The Jewish People: A Story of Survival, Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel reminisces about being asked to meet with the Dalai Lama a number of years ago:

When Wiesel went to see him, he [the Dalai Lama] asked, "Why did you want to meet me?" And the Dalai Lama said, 'I'il tell you why." He continued, "Your people suffered a lot and you went into exile 2,000 years ago, but you are still here. My people just left our homeland; we are in exile. Teach us how to survive."¹

¹ Elie Wiesel, interview on The Jewish People: A Story of Survival, PBS, 2008, http://www.pbs.org/previews/jewishpeople.

Its plamtiveness duly noted, what is noteworthy in addition about the Dalai Lama's comments is the extent to which it understates the experience of the Diaspora. From the time of the events narrated in the Pentateuch—almost 2,000 years of history that preceded the period identified by the Dalai Lama—exile and Diaspora have been a factor in the history of the people that became the Jews.²

² Even in the first two-fifths of the Book of Genesis, it is plain to see the importance of the motif of exile from a given place that is often beloved and far superior to the place of exile, which often is to the originary place as a Diaspora is to a homeland. The first exile and experience of Diaspora in the historical narrative of the Pentateuch was that of Adam and Eve, expelled from Eden to the east of that place (Gen. 3:24), from which place Cain was expelled to live his life as "a fugitive and a vagabond" (Gen. 4:12) for killing his brother Abel. Noah, his family, and the animals endured something akin to exile when God brought the flood that left them the sole inheritors of the earth (Gen. 6-9). As the result of attempting to build the Tower of Babel, speakers of the "one language, and of one speech" (Gen. 11:1) were exiled by the confounding of the one language into several: "So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city" (Gen. 11:8). Although Lot, his daughters, and his wife heeded the instructions of the two angels to flee the environs of Sodom and Gomorrah, a number of consequences followed from that decision. Lot's wife, failing to heed the injunction not to look back, was turned into a pillar of salt (Gen. 19:26). And Lot's daughters, anxious to see that his line was continued in this new Diaspora "in the mountains," conspired to get him drunk and commit incest with him in order to conceive and bear his cliildren (Gen. 19:30-38).Beyond this point in the Pentateuch occur such events as Esau selling his birthright to Jacob for a mess of pottage, after which Esau "went Ms way," now dispossessed (Gen. 25:29-34); Josephs sale mto Egyptian captivity (Gen. 37:26-8), followed by the famine-induced movement of his family, the originating source of the 12 tribes, from Canaan into Egypt (Gen. 42-5); the enslavement in Egypt (Ex. 1:8-14), followed by the Exodus (Ex, 14:16-30); and the 40 years of wandering in the desert (Deut. 1:3), followed in the Book of Joshua by the (re)entry into Canaan (Josh. 1:2 ff.). All Bible citations and quotations here and below are from the King James Version.

Well before and during the era of the events chronicled in the New Testament and long before the exile from Jerusalem in 73 CE. the Diaspora existed, taking the form of Jewish settlements all around the Mediterranean most usually in major cities and/or seaports. The oldest of these settlements is the one in Babylon created by Nebuchadnezzar as the result of the deportation of Jews from Judea (590-580 BCE). Eventually, there were communities in the Alexandria of the Ptolemies, as well as a number of other commercial and intellectual centers. As Robert M. Seltzer notes.

Diasporas were a common feature of the Hellenistic-Roman world. In the fourth century BCE, colonies of Egyptian. Syrian, and Phoenician merchants were frequently in the seaports of Greece and Italy. After the conquests of Alexander the Great, Greeks and Macedonians constituted an immense Diaspora throughout the Near East. Ethnic resettlement and religious diffusion went hand in hand, as settlers brought with them ancestral cults and won for their gods new worshippers among the local population. Although not unique, the Jewish Diaspora was outstanding in its ability to preserve and perpetuate its identity at considerable distance from the homeland and over large stretches of time.³

³ Robert M. Seltzer, "The Expanding Diaspora," in Jewish People, Jewish Thought: The Jewish Experience in History (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1980); repr., http://www.myjewisMeaniing.com/liistory_conuiiunity/Ancient/TheStoryI/Expanding_Diaspora.htm.

Despite settling throughout Europe, both before and after the diasporic expulsion from Jerusalem in 73 CE, the Jews continued, throughout the Middle Ages and after, to be expelled and exiled by the rulers of Europe. The Jews were expelled from England by Edward I in 1290 (and allowed to resettle in the period from 1655 to 1800). They were expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. They were expelled from the Holy Roman Empire by Leopold I in 1670. (The Edict of Tolerance by Joseph II in 1782 allowed Jews back in but limited their access and right to settle in Vienna and environs.) They were exiled to the Pale of Settlement in the lands that lay between present-day Russia and Poland by three decrees of Catherine the Great in 1783. 1791. and 1794. And this list does not begin to take into account emigrations resulting from the revolutions of 1848, the late nineteenth-century Russian pogroms, and the forced exiles and destruction of the Holocaust.

* * *

Not surprisingly, during the era of English Romanticism, which bore witness to its share of revolutions, rebellions, and widespread social disruption, the persona of the Jew as diasporic victim and witness, not merely as a fiendish other ⁴ had a role in the literature of the period. A case in point isHebrew Melodies (1815).⁵ Byron, writing in 1814-15 at the urging of his friend Douglas Kinnaird. drafted lyrics that were then set to music by Isaac Nathan and John Braham. Byron focuses on the diasporic aspect of Jewish history in a number of those lyrics, and he reprises finely that sense of melancholy belatedness that is never far to seek for those exiled or expelled against their will.⁶

⁴ The stereotypical view of the Wandering Jew as supernatural fiend is found in two novels of the period: in the "Bleeding Nun" episode ofThe Monk (1796) by Matthew Gregory Lewis, and in the character of John Melmoth, the namesake of Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Robert Maturin. ⁵ For another view, see Toby R. Benis's "Byron's Hebrew Melodies and the Musical Nation," the next essay in this volume (ed.). ⁶ According to Tracy Clark, "Belatedness is ... a cultural phenomenon that particularly lends itself to the Jewish Diaspora; in fact, several studies of belatedness specifically mention Jewish writers and spirituality, and/or have been written by Jewish critics" ("Belatedness." in The Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, ed. Victor E. Taylor and Charles E. Winquist [New York: Routledge, 2001], 31-2). Clark cites Harold Bloom's The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), as her case in point. See also Thomas L. Asliton. "Byronic Lyrics for David's Harp: The Hebrew Melodies,"Studies in English Literature,1500-1900 12, 4 (Autumn. 1972): 665-81, especially 667. Ashton notes the influence exerted by TomMoore's Irish Melodies in helping Byron "to create the national melodies style. ... Irish melodies meant tears as well as pride, and Byron learned of this fusion from them. In the Hebrew Melodies he put it to his own use."

In "The Harp the Monarch Minstrel Swept for example, the belated speaker reflects back on the glory of King David's reign, which marked the establishment of Israel as a sovereign nation, and then that speaker contemplates that passing of an irrecoverable glory. At one point.

... David s lyre grew mightier than his throne!

It told the triumphs of our King,

It wafted gloiy to our God;

It made our gladden'd valleys ring,

The cedars bow, the mountains nod;

Its sound aspired to heaven and there abode!

Since then, though heard on earth no more,

Devotion and her daughter Love

Still bid the bursting spirit soar

To sounds that seem as from above.

In dreams that day's broad light can not remove.( Il. 10-20)⁷

⁷ George Gordon, Lord Byron, Hebrew Melodies (London: John Murray, 1815), 5-6. Future quotations from Hebrew Melodies will be from the 1815 edition, and will be cited parenthetically by line number.

The lamentably lost past in "The Harp the Monarch Minstrel Swept gives way to the tragic present of "Oh! Weep for Those." which echoes Psalm 137 closely (as does "On the Rivers of Babylon We Sat Down and Wept") in its announcement of and lamentation over the Babylonian Captivity:

Oh! weep for those that wept by Babel s stream.

Whose shrines are desolate, whose land a dream_

Weep for the harp of Judali s broken shell;

Moum—where their God hath dwelt the godless dwell!

And where shall Israel lave her bleeding feet?

And when shall Zion's songs again seem sweet?

...

The wild-dove hath her nest the fox his cave.

The wild-dove hath her nest the fox his cave.

Mankind their country—Israel but the grave!( ll. 1-12)

In Hebrew Melodies, Byron takes as his subject the diasporic expulsions of both the Old and New Testaments, the latter memorialized in "On the Day of the Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus." which closes with an echo of the Shema (Deut. 6:4). the watchword of the Jewish faith. The speaker looks back at the Temple Mount, observing the Second Temple in flames that illuminate the Western Wall, as he is "render'd to Rome." recalling the times when he waited for the setting of the sun on Sabbath Eve:

And now on that mountain I stood on that day.

But I mark'd not the twilight beam melting away;

Oh! would that the lightning had glared in its stead,

And the thunderbolt burst on the conqueror's head!

But the gods of the Pagan shall never profane

The shrine where Jehovah disdain'd not to reign;

And scattered and scorn d as thy people may be,

Our worship, oh Father! is only for thee.( ll. 13-20)

What makes this last look backward particularly poignant is the fact that although there were synagogues—effectively, community centers—where observant Jews met to pray and perform other communal activities, there was only one temple in which to worship the God of Israel. The uniqueness of Jerusalem as that site made the events of 73 CE uniquely painful for the Jews as they were led by their Roman conquerors into the Diaspora:

From the last hill that looks on thy once holy dome,

I beheld thee, oh Sion! when render'd to Rome:

'Twas thy last sun went down, and the flames of thy fall

Flash'd back on the last glance I gave to thy wall.

I look'd for thy temple, I look'd for my home,

And forgot for a moment my bondage to come;

I beheld but the death-fire that fed on thy fane,

And the fast-fetter'd liands that made vengeance in vain.

Oh many an eve, the high spot whence I gazed

Had reflected the last beam of day as it blazed;

While I stood on the height, and beheld the decline

Of the rays from the mountain that shone on thy shrine.( 11. 1-12)

Hebrew Melodies is, in part, Byron's attempt to make use of the genre of national melodies popularized in the English-speaking world by Thomas Moore's Irish Melodies (1810).⁸ Melodies of both the Irish and the Hebrew cultures have something of the ancient remote, and exotic about them—the exoticism of the inaccessibly remote past in the case of the Irish lyrics, and that exoticism combined with an orientalist exoticism in the case of the Hebraic lyrics. Moore himself takes note of the similarities to be observed in the lots of the Irish and the Jews in the Irish melody entitled "The Parallel":

⁸ Ashton, "Byronic Lyrics for David's Harp," 667-8.

Like thee doth our nation lie conquer'd and broken.

And fall'n from her head is the once royal crown;

In her streets, in her halls. Desolation hath spoken.

And "while it is day yet, her sun hath gone down."

Like thine doth her exile, 'mid dreams of returning.

Die far from the home it were life to behold;

Like thine do her sons, in the day of their mourning

Remember the bright tilings that bless'd them of old.⁹

⁹ Thomas Moore, "The Parallel," ThomasMore Poems, http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/thomas_moore/poems/4825, 11. 5-12.

But once this parallel is drawn—explicitly by Moore, and implicitly by Byron in his ap...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: The Convergence of Romanticism and Judaica
• Part 1 Nationalism and Diasporeanism
• Part 2 Religion and Anti-Semitism
• Part 3 Individualism and Assimilationism
• Part 4 Criticism and Reflection
• Works Cited
• Index