Jews and Jewishness in British Children's Literature
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Jews and Jewishness in British Children's Literature

Madelyn Travis

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Jews and Jewishness in British Children's Literature

Madelyn Travis

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About This Book

In a period of ongoing debate about faith, identity, migration and culture, this timely study explores the often politicised nature of constructions of one of Britain's longest standing minority communities. Representations in children's literature influenced by the impact of the Enlightenment, the Empire, the Holocaust and 9/11 reveal an ongoing concern with establishing, maintaining or problematising the boundaries between Jews and Gentiles. Chapters on gender, refugees, multiculturalism and historical fiction argue that literature for young people demonstrates that the position of Jews in Britain has been ambivalent, and that this ambivalence has persisted to a surprising degree in view of the dramatic socio-cultural changes that have taken place over two centuries.

Wide-ranging in scope and interdisciplinary in approach, Jews and Jewishness in British Children's Literature discusses over one hundred texts ranging from picture books to young adult fiction and realism to fantasy. Madelyn Travis examines rare eighteenth- and nineteenth-century material plus works by authors including Maria Edgeworth, E. Nesbit, Rudyard Kipling, Richmal Crompton, Lynne Reid Banks, Michael Rosen and others. The study also draws on Travis's previously unpublished interviews with authors including Adele Geras, Eva Ibbotson, Ann Jungman and Judith Kerr.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781136222030
Edition
1

Chapter One

Moneylenders and Misers

The Eighteenth Century to the Second World War

In Western Europe, the discourse about the position of Jews in relation to the dominant culture was framed historically in such terms as the ‘Jewish Question’ or the ‘Jewish Problem’. In England, the underlying issue was often as much about the nature of English national identity as it was about Jews. A campaign for the removal of barriers to Jewish civil and legal equality led to the Jewish Naturalisation Act of 1753, or ‘Jew Bill’, which allowed Jews to be naturalised without taking a Christian oath. At the time the Jew Bill was passed, there were no more than 8,000 Jews in England, and there were still only around 35,000 a century later out of a population of 16.8 million. The bill applied in practice to a very small number of Jewish merchants but inspired heated opposition nevertheless. The idea that Jews—for centuries labelled Christ-killers, and thought in the Middle Ages to murder Christian children and drink their blood as part of religious rites—could be treated in law as almost equal to English Anglicans was seen by some as a threat to the very foundations of a nation whose identity was inextricably bound up with Christianity. The Jew Bill was repealed after a short time following intense opposition from, among others, merchants who feared their livelihood would be threatened by increased commercial opportunities for Jews.
Despite the fact that they were a very small and relatively disempowered group at the time, representations of or references to Jews began to appear in more literature for young people as the century progressed, a development that coincided with the growth of children's publishing as a distinct commercial enterprise. This chapter argues that ‘the Jew’ performed a central, though fluid, role in the range of ideologies that formed the discourses aimed at defining the English sense of self in children's literature. The pivotal function played by the figure of ‘the Jew’ helps to account for their surprising presence in this literature.
As will be seen, many representations of Jews in these works for young people were influenced as much by current events or broad political movements as by moral or educational impulses specific to children's literature. Several of them include tropes which sought to define and contain Jews and Jewishness within religious, ‘racial’ and/or national boundaries that differentiated them from the English. These include Judaism as a misguided or outmoded religion; ‘the Jew’ as pious, but lacking spirituality and/or morality, or as seemingly pious, but ‘in reality’ harsh and authoritarian; ‘the Jew’ as an avaricious and miserly moneylender or a wealthy capitalist who serves his own ends or exploits others; a pedlar whose seemingly respectable profession conceals financially motivated criminal activity, or who appears poor but hoards his wealth; a ‘dark’, exotic, beautiful child or young adult; an ugly, bent, hook-nosed, bearded elderly man dressed in a black gabardine; and those whose accent or lisp marks them as Jewish even if they were English-born. Some tropes were modified over time, but nevertheless remained recognisable across a broad range of genres in literature produced up to the Second World War.

England: Babylon or Jerusalem?

In The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917, Eitan Bar-Yosef points to Sunday school, reading the family Bible and ‘listening to mother read The Pilgrim's Progress’ as significant factors in the relocation in the English imagination of Jerusalem to England (11). Such activities almost inevitably placed tensions between ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Jerusalem and the two ‘Chosen Peoples’ at the centre of constructions of English self-identity. The notion of building a new Jerusalem in England underpinned a variety of ideologies during this period. For some, it was a secular utopian ideal of a tolerant, egalitarian society far removed from the more prosaic reality. Others envisaged a return to spirituality and devotion to God that was thought to be lacking in the li beralising and secularising modern world. Alternatively, the geographical Holy Land could be seen as a ‘natural’ focus for the Imperial mission, the site of the religious conversion of the Jews, or both.
These religious and secular conceptions of England, the English and Jews, explored in some literature through the metaphors of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, found expression in many other texts in more literal terms. Ideas about society and the place of Jews in it at times intersect in unexpected ways, particularly when ‘the Jew’ is used as a means of interrogating or bolstering apparently conflicting constructions of English identity and the nation, which themselves are shown to be unstable.
In the early eighteenth century, children's literature focused on the opposition between Judaism and Christianity and drew on constructions of ‘the Jew’as Christ-killer or devil; rarely did it include representations of actual Jewish people. While some of this literature was purely instructive, other works, such as those by Isaac Watts,1 were also intended for children's enjoyment. In ‘Praise for the Gospel’, from the oft reprinted Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children (1715), Watts gives thanks for being born a Christian and not ‘a heathen or a Jew’ (4), while in ‘A Cradle Hymn’ he is more explicit in his condemnation:
Yet to read the shameful story
How the Jews abus'd their King
How they serv'd the Lord of Glory
Makes me angry while I sing.2 (29–32)
In An Essay on Instructing Children on Various Useful and Uncommon Subjects (1743), John Vowler represents Jews as barbaric unbelievers:
Matthew in Africa doth Christ proclaim
He's by a soldier with a Halbert slain
James minor gospel truths bravely maintains
Till with a club the Jews beat out his brains. (23–26)
Vowler and Watts highlight theological differences between Christians and Jews with the obvious objectives of instilling the tenets and values of Christianity in child readers and of distinguishing Christianity from belief systems that the mainstream culture considered inferior. The behaviour of the unbelieving Jews is contrasted with that of the virtuous Christians, reinforcing messages that young readers would have heard in church, helping them to consolidate their identity as Christians and to distance themselves from religious outsiders.
Watts was a religious nonconformist whose views on education were influenced by John Locke (Rivers 727). A liberal for his time, Watts was ‘imitated and parodied’ (730) in Songs of Innocence (1789) by William Blake. Towards the end of the century, the influence of Romantics such as Blake led to more child-centred literature. Some wrote secular tales, while others took an overtly Christian perspective.
Many works depict events in which children observe people and aspects of life not usually encountered in their everyday lives. In Maria's First Visit to London (1818) by Elizabeth Sandham, for instance, Maria is both enchanted and horrified by the Jews’ singing in synagogue, which she likens to an evening at the opera: ‘Their voices were delightful; but the faces of the singers often appeared ridiculous from the distortion of their features, and there was not even the appearance of devotion in any thing we saw there’ (61). The text contrasts Christian spirituality with the Jews’ earthbound adherence to law and ritual, which are seen as empty gestures rather than the true religious devotion shown by Anglicans.
This perceived lack of Jewish spirituality, combined with admiration of their singing, appears nearly a century earlier in John Wright's ‘A Poetical Exercise on the Author's Journey into Middlesex, and to the Famous City of London’, from Spiritual Songs for Children (1727):
The Jews are veiled whilst they do sweetly sing,
And spread the law with mighty triumphing:
Yet in their Gestures little doth appear,
But Mirth and Vanity. (9)
The texts by Sandham and Wright disapprove of Judaism even while displaying an undeniable interest in the synagogue proceedings. Although literature in which Protestant theology is foregrounded has an openly unhappy relationship with Judaism, Jews themselves are acknowledged as real people living in England.
The contradictions that make up London in Wright's text allow the city to be interpreted as either ‘Jerusalem’ or ‘Babylon’, the city of the Jews’ exile after the destruction of the first Temple, or, perhaps, both. Wright highlights the ‘mirth’ with which the Jews sing, their apparent happiness even in ‘Captivity’ (27) suggesting that, unlike in Babylon, they are able to sing songs of joy because in England they are not in torment nor, even, perhaps, in exile.3 In London, says Wright, there is ‘a world of grace’ (14). ‘Wonders [ . . . ] works of God’ are on show at Gresham College (42, 44). The England of this text may indeed be a ‘new Jerusalem’. However, the verse also describes London as a city of ‘sin’ (10), ‘villainy’ (11) and ‘pride’ (13). The traveller witnesses the suffering of the sick and the hungry poor, and criticises those who ‘of pleasure take their fill’, finally concluding that, like the Jews’ prayer, ‘’tis all but vanity’ (59). Perhaps, then, the Jews’ religious services, lacking true devotion, indicate that they have forgotten the ‘heavenly Jerusalem’, in which case they become a symbol not just of their own spiritual emptiness but of that of the city itself. The Jews may feel comfortable in a tolerant England which allows people of all religions to worship freely and apparently even to thrive, yet from a Christian perspective, what is more important is that the soul is in peril. ‘London! What's London!’ (1), the author asks on two occasions. The answer, it would seem, is that the city is both Jerusalem and Babylon; only spiritual renewal and a return to godliness can make it a true heaven on earth.

Enlightenment Voices

Representations of Jews in literature with an ethos of rational tolerance are more frequently free of the patronising tone often found in moral tales, which aim to teach children from the dominant culture how to behave towards those thought to be religiously and/or culturally inferior. Some Enlightenment-influenced writers accept that Jews could be ‘converted’ culturally to Englishness, while others seek to ‘convert’ from prejudice to tolerance those from the dominant culture.4
One such work is Christian Salzmann's Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children; With an Introductory Address to Parents (1790), translated from the German by Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and a Unitarian. In this text, the Jewish Ephraim answers a Christian boy's charge that many Jews are dishonest:
If our nation cheat, the Christians themselves are the cause of it. They despise us and do not allow us to gain our livelihood in an honest way; so many Jews become cheats because they think they live among enemies; but there are many good Jews who tell the truth and give money to the poor and such men deserve our love, whether they are Jews or Christians. (63)
The exchange takes place after Ephraim cures the boy's toothache. Of particular note in this story is the balance of power between the characters. The child reader is not exhorted to pity the poor, inferior Jew, and the Jew is a character with a voice rather than an abstract concept. Here Jews and Christians interact socially, with the Jew even in a position to help the Christian. There is a surprising degree of equality and friendship in the interaction between neighbours.
This revisionist approach appears not just in fiction but in texts about English history itself. In The Little Historians (1824), the religious nonconformist Jeffreys Taylor, brother of the more famous Ann and Jane, debunks the myth of a tolerant England through a brief digression to address its treatment of the Jews. Two boys, bored by their history books, are instructed by their father to produce their own. Lewis, recounting the history of England's kings and queens, expresses sympathy for the Jews, who ‘were sadly used and persecuted [under King Edward] as they had been when Richard was king’ (52). The boys’ father interjects to explain that the Jews were banished from the kingdom and hated by its people for lending money at interest: ‘This is not thought wrong now, any more than it is thought wrong for a man who lives in another man's house, to be obliged to pay him rent for the use of it’ (52). In The Little Historians, Taylor criticises the un-Christian behaviour of even the king. He presents Jews not as actual villains, but as people perceived to be villainous, and in contrasting the difference between attitudes in the past and present, demonstrates the progress society has made.
Maria Edgeworth was a Rousseauist whose interest in rational and ethical values can be seen in some of her work (Butts 93). Edgeworth critiqued the historical treatment of the Jews in her adult novel Harrington (1817) two years before Sir Walter Scott did so in Ivanhoe (1819), a work considered ground-breaking for its perspective. But Harrington was not the first time Edgeworth had considered the subject: she had done so nearly two decades earlier in a work for children, Practical Education (1798), in which she made an attempt to distinguish between biology and behaviour: ‘There can be nothing inherent in the knavish propensity of Jews; but the prevailing opinion, that avarice, dishonesty and extortion are the characteristics of a Jew has probably induced many of the tribe to justify the antipathy which they could not conquer’ (248).
One might conclude from these examples that there was a clear demarcation between progressive portrayals in literature by Dissenters and followers of Locke and Rousseau as opposed to negative images in other literature, but this was not always the case, for stereotypical images of Jews often appeared in texts by authors with an otherwise rational tolerant sensibility. Indeed, Maria Edgeworth was herself among those to create such constructions, prompting an American-Jewish correspondent, Rachel Mordecai, to castigate her for doing so: ‘How can it be that she, who on all other subjects shows such justice and liberality, should on one alone appear biased by prejudice: should even instill that prejudice into the minds of youth! [ . . . ] Can it be believed that [Jews] are by nature mean, avaricious and unprincipled? Forbid it, mercy’ (qtd. in Manly 298). In Harrington, Edgeworth self-reflexively admits her culpability, using Mordecai's words: ‘I have met with books [ . . . ] written expressly for the rising generation, called if I mistake not, Moral Tales for Young People [1801]; and even in these [ . . . ] [Jews] are invariably represented as beings of a mean, avaricious, unprincipled, treacherous character’ (176).5
In one story in the collection, ‘The Good Aunt’, the Jewish jeweller, Mr Carat, speaks with the crude representation of a ‘Jewish’ accent that was common in theatrical and satirical representations of Jews by the mid-eighteenth century: ‘“Dat king wash very grand fool, beg his majesty's pardon,” said the Jew, with a shrewd smile’ (19). Later, Mr Carat seeks to persuade a boy to proceed with a business transaction, saying, ‘O my dear young gentleman, no day in de Jewish calendar more proper for de purchase’ (20). By specifying the Jewish calendar, Edgeworth deliberately links Judaism with a ‘Jewish’ propensity for shady business dealings.
The author's engagement with Jews and Jewishness is more ambivalent in her other work for young people. In ‘The Prussian Vase,’ also from Moral Tales for Young People, a Jewish art dealer appears in court as a witness in a trial. He is not associated with unscrupulousness for much of the text, but is finally revealed to be the perpetrator of the crime. The text elicits conflicting responses to Solomon: sympathy when he is introduced; betrayal when he is identified as a criminal; renewed sympathy when the reasons for his crime become clear; and finally, disgust that he has behaved dishonourably towards an honest worker. ‘Murad the Unlucky’, in Popular Tales (1804), a book for older children, chronicles the downfall of the eponymous hero after he gets into debt as a result of his addiction to opium. In this context, the function of the Jewish moneylender, Rachub, is to highlight the flawed character of the hapless Murad, who flees in order to avoid repaying the debt. The story's focus is really on the poor judgement of Murad and the consequences that befall those who succumb to temptation. Indeed,...

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