Analysis of Charles Dickens’ anti-Semitism

A case study of Fagin

Contents

1 Introduction....................................3

1.1 Charles Dickens and his works................3

1.2 The general reviews of Dickens’ novels.......3

1.3 Jews in English literature...................3

2 Fagin...........................................3

2.1 Fagin and his influence......................3

2.2 Creation of Fagin............................3

3 On the Jewish Question..........................3

3.1 Karl Marx....................................3

3.2 Charles Dickens’ Jewishness..................3

4 Later characters................................3

5 Conclusion......................................3

References:.......................................3

1 Introduction

For the convenience of study, this thesis adopts Liu

Bingshan’s classification of Dickens’ literary career,

that is, three periods. According to Liu Bingshan, the

first period extends from 1836, the publication of Boz, to

1841. The second period of his literary career is from

1842 and ended in 1850. The third period refers to the

period from 1851 to 1870.

The first period is marked for youthful optimism.

Dickens published five novels in all except Sketches by Boz

in just five years, among which the Pickwick Papers brought

him first great popularity. Oliver Twist is considered to be

“a story in the tradition of Bunyan, the morality play”

because of its thick moral instruction. Dickens

believed that all the evils of the capitalist world would

be remedied if only men treated each other with kindness,

justice, and sympathetic understanding. He thought that

the whole social question would be solved only every

employer reformed himself according to the model set by

the benevolent gentlemen in his novels and of only the

rich used their power and wealth sympathetically to

assist the poor to escape from poverty. This naïve

optimism is the characteristic of the petty-bourgeois

humanitarian of his time. In this period, Dickens wrote

his famous works as The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist.

The second period began from 1842 and ended in 1850.

It was a period of excitement and irritation. In this

period, Dickens made a trip to America. Before the visit,

he thought of the United States as a world in which there

were no class division and human relations were

humanitarian. But what impressed his most during his

visit there was the rule of the dollar and the enormously

corruptive influence of wealth and power. Vulgar

selfishness, which prevailed everywhere, concealed the

fine qualities of the people. Dickens’s naïve optimism

toward the capitalist society was profoundly shaken. In

this period, Dickens wrote his famous works as American

Notes, David Copperfield.

The third period of his literary career refers to the

period from 1851 to 1870. Dickens’s works in this period

show intensifying pessimism. Dickens, consciously and

subconsciously, shows himself more and more at odds with

bourgeois society and more and more aware of the absence

of any readily available alternative. In this period,

Dickens wrote his famous works as Hard Times, Little Dorrit.

In recent years a good many important studies of

Dickens have appeared. These studies have approached

Dickens from the most diverse points of view, though

there has been generally an implicit agreement with

Edmund Wilson’s belief that “we may find in Dickens’ work

today a complexity and a depth to which even Gissing and

Shaw have hardly…done justice — an intellectual and

artistic interest which makes Dickens loom very large in

the whole perspective of the literature of the west.”

While recognizing the measure of justice in the

traditional charges against Dickens’ novels (that they

are melodramatic, falsely pathetic, didactic, repetitive,

and so on), various critics and scholars have attempted

to assess what is authentic in his fiction. One can

distinguish several different modes of approach in these

recent studies, though there is of course a good deal of

overlapping. There are biographical studies, culminating

in John Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens and Frederic G.

Kitton’s Charles Dickens: His Life, Writings, and Personality. These

biographies have put our knowledge of the facts of

Dickens’ life and their relation to his work on solid

ground. Other scholars have explored the relation of

Dickens’ works to the political, moral, and social

realities of the Victorian age, like in Una Pope-

Hennessy’s Charles Dickens, while still others have examined

Dickens’ overt opinions about politics or morality, and

have shown us how Dickens was a much more deliberate and

calculating writer than we had thought, like in Daniel

Born’s The Birth of Liberal Guilt in The English Novel: Charles Dickens To

H .G. Wells. The latter scholars have most often found their

evidence in Dickens’ letters and speeches, like in Selected

Letters of Charles Dickens edited by Paroissien David and The

Speeches of Charles Dickens edited by K. J. Fielding. Similar

studies have shown the relation of Dickens’ opinions and

practice as a novelist to Victorian theories and practice

generally, or have studied the history of the criticism

of Dickens’ novels, like in George H. Ford’s Dickens and His

Readers: Aspects of Novel-Criticism Since 1836. Some concentrate on

the art of Dickens’ works, like in Dickens at Work by John

Butt and Kathleen Tillotson, Reality and Comic Confidence in

Charles Dickens by P. J. M. Scott, and The Imagined World of

Charles Dickens by Mildred Newcomb.

After Shakespeare, Dickens is the most written about

author in English literature. Dickens’ 14 major novels

and numerous shorter works teem with a fantastic array of

entertaining characters and convey vividly and memorably

a sense of the author’s time: its hopes and sorrows,

follies and pleasures, houses and streets, factories and

schools, manners and people. In one way or another they

all show Dickens’ intense concern with the injustices of

his society. Dickens’ vivid description creates many

lifelike characters, which impress the readers deeply in

their memory after reading. Among them the characters of

children play the most important role in Dickens’ art

gallery. In the history of world literature, perhaps

Dickens is the first one who threw tremendous energy into

his creations of children. “Reflecting life through

children’s point of view is a main characteristic of

Dickens’ art of fiction.” In his novels he created nearly

100 children characters and more than 50 ones were named.

There is no scarcity of books about Jews in English

literature. Critics feel obliged to attack English

literature for having produced Shylock and Fagin or to

defend it for the tolerant portrayal of Daniel Deronda.

There are encyclopedic lists of all the Jews who have

appeared on the printed page and detailed, psychoanalytic

polemics about whether or not Dickens was really anti-

Semitic.

Edger Rosenberg’s From Shylock to Svengali(1960) traces the

myth of the Jew to its Biblical origins. "It dates back

at least to Herod, the slayer of children and aspiring

Christ killer in disguise; to Judas, the original

businessman with the contract in the pocket; and to the

anonymous vulgar Jewish farceur who, in answer to

Christ's 'Eli', eh' forced a reed filled with vinegar

between His lips." The twin masks of the Jew-mutilator

and usurer thus had Biblical sanction "at a time when

literature flourished under clerical auspices and when

nine tenths of the corpus poeticism derived from Biblical

paraphrases and metrologies. . ." In ballads and morality

plays the two roles were already being joined, and the

mere physical presence of the Jews in England between the

Norman Conquest and their expulsion under Edward I did

nothing to change the myth. In Chaucer's The Prioress's Tale

the twin roles are set. In Marlow's Jew of Malta and

Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice the composite portraits are

given their final expression and the final punishments

are meted out. "In Chaucer he was torn by wild horses and

hanged also. In Gower a lion tears him to death. Marlowe

has him burned in a cauldron. Shylock, the fox at bay,

loses daughter and ducats, as well as his religion."

Before examining the nineteenth century stereotypes of

the Jew, Rosenberg investigates the rise of the counter-

myth of the Jew as Saint. He accounts for the flimsiness

of the sainted Jews by searching out the motives of their

creators. In Cumberland's The Jew Sheva is the antipode

to Shylock. He is modest, kindly, generous, and long

suffering. Rosenberg quotes extensively from Cumberland's

Memoirs and his articles in The Observer to prove

Cumberland's didactic motives. Rosenberg concludes, "In

view of Cumberland's instructive biases as a playwright

generally, we need not, then, be surprised by the papier-

mâché figure that Sheva is made to cut. He is plainly

little more than a pawn--not in the plot, but of the

message behind the plot. 'I take credit myself,'

Cumberland writes . . ., 'for the character of Abraham

Abrahams. I wrote it upon principle, thinking it high

time that something should be done for a persecuted race.

I seconded my appeal to the charity of mankind by the

character of Sheva, which I copied from this of

Abrahams.' The phrase upon principle goes a long way

toward explaining not only Sheva's general dramatic

insufficiencies, but the collapse of subsequent attempts

to redeem the Jew for literature."

The process of vilifying the Jews and then guiltily

meting them out a kind of justice is exemplified in the

novels of Maria Edgeworth. "Having impressed her readers

with her ability to manipulate the stereotype of the Jew

villain and having informed them some six times over that

Jews were frauds, usurers, poisoners, perjurers,

traitors, parasites on the national economy, threats to

the body politic, and violators of young boys, Edgeworth

decided to take it all back and Harrington." (Prominent

Jewish matrons seem to have taken an active hand in

helping the process along. Miss Edgeworth received a

complaint about her illiberality from an American Jewess

which may have occasioned the writing of Harrington, just

as Dickens' creation of Riah was helped along by the

famous letter from Mrs. Davis.) The "pallor" of Miss

Edgeworth's good Jews, like that of the other apologies

in English literature--Dickens' Riah, DuMaurier's Leah,

and Trollope's Trendelssohn--is explained by Rosenberg:

"The chief reason . . . is that [the good Jew] has been

almost consistently a product of far too obvious and

explicit ulterior motives. He bore from the first the

pale cast of after-thought. Given the convention, the

authors who kept the Jew-villain in circulation created

their man with a good deal of spontaneity. The Jew-

villain might not be a realistic figure; but within the

canons of comedy and melodrama he could give the illusory

appearance of being a creature of flesh and blood. The

purveyors of the immaculate Jew, on the other hand,

produced not so much a character as a formula. Riah and

his type will not bleed if you prick them."

Comparing Fagin to all the other Jew-villains in

English literature, Rosenberg notes the vital difference:

"Marlowe's and Shakespeare's Jews assert themselves

actively against their persecution and regard it as a

source of terror. The point is that none of them can be

sensibly appreciated without an awareness of the

restrictions which prevent them from participating fully

in the social world. There comes a point at which

Barabas, the professional poisoner, ceases to be a

satanic figure and can lecture Ferneze on the conditions

of injustice without immediately sounding ludicrously

hypocritical. Dickens works differently. Fagin enjoys

only the barest status as homo Europaenus. . . . Even his

Judaism is defective. . . . Fagin, we know, falls

completely outside of any religious

framework. . . .Dickens, in short, has 'de-historicized'

his man and came up with some prehistoric fiend, an aging

Lucifer whose depravity explains him wholly. . . .

Characters like Fagin who are without grace, who terrify

the very young and murder the innocent, exist in two

worlds and operate on two levels of reality. They can

dance about on the Victorian stage, making the theatrical

noises of their forefathers who danced around the cross;

or they can be interpreted as distorted dream-figures,

the grotesquely magnified bogeys out of a fairy tale. . .

. In a piece written for All the Year Around, Dickens

asked: 'Are not the sane and insane equal at night as the

sane lie a dreaming?'" Rosenberg analyses the grotesque,

distorted humor of Oliver Twist and relates it to

Dickens' later work.

2 Fagin

2.1 Fagin and his influence

It is important to point out Dickens’ attitude towards

Jew is always a controversial topic. While Dickens was

known as a great social reformer, his 1838-39 newspaper

serial publication of Oliver Twist demonstrated the deep

societal anti-Semitism of Dickens' time. Fagin, a major

character in the story, is an underworld criminal who

trains small children to be pickpockets. He is a very

unseemly character and, more often than not, he is

referred to derisively as “the Jew.”

In 1863, Dickens received a letter from Eliza Davis, a

Jewish woman whose husband had purchased Dickens’ home in

1860. Davis wrote to Dickens that his negative portrayal

of Jews "encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised

Hebrew." Dickens immediate reaction was defensive, but

the letter had an obvious effect on him. The episodes of

Oliver Twist were in the process of being printed in book

form. Dickens halted the publication to make changes.

Unfortunately, 38 chapters had already been printed and

in these the references to “the Jew” remain. In the final

15 chapters, however, Dickens altered approximately 180

such negative references. That is why Fagin is called

"the Jew" 257 times in the first 38 chapters, but barely

at all in the next 179 references to him.

As so many have observed, Fagin is a compelling and

memorable figure and has had an enduring life outside of

literature as an archetypal Jew, second only, perhaps, to

that of Shylock. He also serves as an epitome of economic

self-interest, one of the main concerns of Oliver Twist. It

goes almost without saying that, throughout the period in

which Dickens’s novels appeared, the Jew was understood

as the typical homo economicus. Even Thomas Macaulay, an

early defender of giving Jews full legal and political

rights in Britain, grossly exaggerated their economic

power, declaring that “The Jew may govern the money

market, and the money market may govern the world”

(Feldman 75).Whether associated with crimes like theft

and the fencing of stolen goods in the early decades of

the century or merchant banking and stock brokerage in

the last, Jews remained the steady objects of economic

anti-Semitism.

How did Dickens resolve the matter of economic anti-

Semitism that lies at the heart of even the casual

prejudice Dickens expressed in his private remarks about

doing business with the Davises? Dickens criticized

against the “Jew Money-Lender” to whom he wished to sell

his house more than two decades after writing Oliver Twist,

In this regard, he shared the tendencies of Karl Marx,

Max Weber, and, to a lesser extent, Matthew Arnold to see

the Jew as incapable of achieving spiritual or moral

transcendence while retaining his fundamental Jewishness.

2.2 Creation of Fagin

Dickens borrowed from both the greedy and the

contaminating urban Jew in his creation of Fagin. The old

man’s greed and interest in profit by any means go

without saying. Willing to corrupt boys to steal for him

and to swallow coins in order to keep them from his

thieving colleagues, he hoards treasure and habitually

takes out the gold watches and jewels in his possession

to gaze upon them fondly, as he would a favored child. He

combines the miser’s love of lucre with a characteristic

indifference to the most vulnerable of human beings, a

pattern that can be reversed, as we know from George

Eliot’s Silas Marner, by loving a child and relinquishing a

devotion to wealth. But Fagin also resides squarely

within the miasma and filth of the urban underworld. The

first description of him and his lair in the novel

features a room “perfectly black with age and dirt,” a

frying pan filled with cooking sausages, and a

“shriveled” old Jew with matted red hair and a “repulsive

face,” dressed in a “greasy flannel gown” (105).

Repugnant olfactory and tactile elements complete the

visual evocation of the old man and heighten the reader’s

feelings of revulsion. The dank, filthy, grimy interior

has its outdoor counterpart in the London night that

envelops Fagin when he ventures forth:

The mud lay thick upon the stones, and a black mist hung overthe streets; the rain fell sluggishly down, and everything feltcold and clammy to the touch. It seemed just the night when itbefitted such a being as the Jew to be abroad. As he glidedstealthily along, creeping beneath the shelter of the walls anddoorways, the hideous old man seemed like some loathsome reptile,engendered in the slime and darkness through which he moved:crawling forth, by night, in search of some rich offal for ameal. (186)

Here we have the Jew as a repellant, reptilian,

primitive creature, barely emerged from the mud and ooze

of creation, setting out in search of the inner organs to

feed his depraved appetites. Readers have associated his

preying on children with blood libel, sexual abuse, and

murderous intent. Deborah Heller refers to Fagin’s

“ominous role as an abductor of children and violator of

childhood innocence,” and Jonathan Freedman reminds us of

the modern image of the Jew as pander, “almost invariably

with overtones of sexual perversity, frequently aimed at

children or young women” (Heller 43; Freedman 67). When

Oliver, waking from sleep, witnesses Fagin looking at his

treasures, the old man waves a kitchen knife at him, a

gesture that Steven Marcus, in a striking reading of the

passage as primal scene, likens to the threat of

castration (376). Fagin keeps company with the prostitute

Nancy and her pimp, the more convincingly homicidal

Bill Sikes, who add to the urban contaminants that circle

around Dickens’s Jew. Perverse, degraded, predatory,

filthy, primitive, and avaricious, Fagin epitomizes the

semi-visible but always feared underside, the

subterranean and intestinal of metropolitan life.

3 On the Jewish Question

If this were all Dickens had intended in placing Fagin

in the midst of his novel of London crime, it would have

been sufficient to establish the character as both deeply

memorable and deeply disturbing. But Dickens was up to

something more here. As Susan Meyer has suggested, Fagin

is essential to the very purpose of this novel: he is, in

her words, a “corrective figure for the instruction and

improvement of English Christians, guiding them, by a

skillful employment of the rhetoric of anti-Semitism,

toward the practice of what [Dickens] represents as true

Christianity, characterized by mercy and benevolence

toward the poor” (241). To drive home the purity and

irreducibility of this kind of evil, Meyer continues,

Dickens offers Fagin, condemned to die at the novel’s

end, no redemption, no chance of true repentance or

transformation, no conversion, either moral or spiritual.

The anti-Christian forces in the novel must be fully

eliminated.

3.1 Karl Marx

Dickens, however, does more than use Fagin as the

Jewish antithesis of the true Christian spirit: he also

makes the Jewish criminal the very epitome of the

Christian spirit gone wrong and, consequently, the

representative of precisely what passed for ethical

philosophy in what Dickens perceived to be the twisted

thinking of some of his contemporaries. In this reading,

Fagin signifies not merely Jewish avarice and callousness

but the very essence of the perverse economic and moral

ethos of the age. To understand as fully as possible and

with the widest possible implications what Dickens was

after here, we take a look into Karl Marx’s “On the

Jewish Question,” published in 1844, just five years

after Dickens had completed the serialization of Oliver

Twist. An essay that has often been avoided because of its

militant and, for some, embarrassing anti-Semitism, “On

the Jewish Question” is a fascinating statement that, at

its most useful, elucidates the meaning of one of the

dominant strains of anti-Semitic thought in the mid-

nineteenth century.6 It begins as a critique of the Young

Hegelian Bruno Bauer’s “The Jewish Question” and ends as

a series of epigrammatic, almost oracular, statements

about the nature and condition of modern Jewishness in

its relation to Christian society.

At its most commonplace, the essay repeats familiar

accusations: that the “secular cult of the Jew” is

“haggling,” his “secular God,” money (52). At its most

far-reaching, it claims that Jewishness has found its

“highest development” in “Christian society itself” (54).

Jews can only become emancipated if they allow for or

achieve “the emancipation of humanity from Jewishness” but,

as yet, “Jews have emancipated themselves [only] in so

far as Christians have become Jews” (52, 53). Judaism is

inherently practical, not theoretical, and its secular

bases are not just haggling and materialism but self-

interest and egotism: “What is the secular basis of

Jewry?” Marx asks, “Practical need, self-interest” (52). These

are the very characteristics that have been unleashed, to

insidious effect, in the contemporary world and have come

to dominate Christian society at its worst.

In Marx’s rhetoric, then, Jewishness – or Judaism, for

he believes in the religious as well as the secular

foundation of the modern Jewish character – is abstracted

into the very mentality from which modern capitalist

society suffers. After developing out of Judaism,

Christianity has devolved back into it. As Stephen

Greenblatt writes in discussing Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta in

relation to Marx’s “On the Jewish Question,” “The Jew is

charged not with racial deviance or religious impiety but

with economic and social crime, crime that is committed

not only against Christian society but, in a less ‘pure’

form, by that society” (292). Barabas is, like Fagin and

like Marx’s Jew, the “alienated essence of Christian

society,” his Judaism a “universal antisocial element of

the present time” (306, 297). Paradoxically, Jewishness

is the dominant and lamentable spirit of the age –

perhaps any age. There is no real difference at present,

Marx asserts, between Christian and Jew, and the

salvation of (Christian) society lies in the

disappearance of the Jew and Jewishness. Marx ends his

essay this way:

As soon as society succeeds in abolishing the empirical essenceof Judaism, i.e. haggling and its presuppositions, the Jew willbecome impossible, because his consciousness will no longer have anobject, because the subjective basis of Judaism, practical need,will be humanized. . . .

The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of societyfrom Judaism. (56)

Marx envisions, or proposes, that Jewishness will

become impossibility and that once this happens – once

the Jew is liberated from his religion and culture –

society will be purged of its Jewishness and of all those

characteristics that Christianity had relatively lately

borrowed from it. Marx imagines a kind of conversion and

salvation story, demanding that the Jew divest himself of

his religion and its cultural accretions so that

bourgeois, Christian society might in turn shed its own

Jewishness and be redeemed.

3.2 Charles Dickens’ Jewishness

Fagin, to return to Dickens, is to the Christian

society of Oliver Twist what Marx’s Jewish to modern society

and in almost exactly the same way. Fagin is not only the

typical Jew but the epitome of rampant individualism.

Dickens uses him not just as a sign of avariciousness and

urban contagion but as a mouthpiece and symbol for the

misguided, soul-destroying political and economic

philosophies of his day. Fagin is an analogue, at the

lowest possible level of society, for the theorists of

political economy and Poor Law reform responsible for

managing society at the very highest levels and against

whom Dickens aimed this novel. Not just a narrative of

London low-life and criminal capers, not just the story

of a foundling who turns out to be wellborn though

illegitimate, Oliver Twist is also, of course, a highly

topical text. The workhouses of the early chapters –

where Oliver is born, picks oakum, asks for “more,” and

is starved so that he will fit nicely down a chimney when

apprenticed as a sweep – are consequences of the New Poor

Law of 1834, meant to punish paupers by abolishing

outdoor relief. Dickens wants to pillory these

institutions and this particular “reform,” but he makes

it clear that a perverse philosophy linked to political

economy, Malthusian principles, and the laissez-faire

doctrine of self-interest, lies behind them. The

hypocrisy of such philosophy is exposed in the figure of

Mr. Bumble, the parish beadle, at the beginning of the

novel but also finds an unexpected practitioner and

defender much later on in Fagin himself.

In chapter 43 Fagin counsels Noah Claypole, a

prospective collaborator in crime, in the philosophy of

“Number One”: “Every man’s his own friend, my dear. . . . He

hasn’t as good a one as himself anywhere. . . . Some

conjurors say that number three is the magic number, and

some say number seven. It’s neither, my friend, neither.

It’s number one”(387). And he goes on, complicating the

matter a bit by tacitly acknowledging that, if everyone

is “number one,” he might have trouble enforcing Noah’s

fealty to him and his own primacy in business matters.

“In a little community like ours, my dear,” Fagin

elaborates, “we have a general number one; that is, you

can’t consider yourself as number one, without

considering me too as the same. . . . It’s your object to

take care of number one – meaning yourself. Well! You

can’t take care of yourself, number one, without taking

care of me, number one. . . . I’m of the same importance to

you, as you are to yourself.” Appropriately confused and

a bit suspicious, Claypole resists the idea that he and

Fagin can both be number one and, even more, the

inevitable conclusion that Fagin’s number one must

somehow come first. Perhaps, interrupts Noah at one

point, Fagin is really Noah’s number two. But Fagin

reassures him:

You depend on me. To keep my business all snug, I depend onyou. The first is your number one, the second my number one. Themore you value your number one, the more careful you must be ofmine; so we come at last to what I told you at first – that aregard for number one holds us all together, and must do so,unless we would all go to pieces in company. (388)

Dickens uses the Jewish criminal to explain the

doctrine of self-interest and to underscore its

inadequacies as a guide for an ethical or even a logical

life. He does so not necessarily to assault the Jews but

to show up the actual philosophers, especially political

economists, who preach self-interest for all individuals

but actually believe their own interests should take

precedence over all others’. Indeed, Dickens uses Fagin

to expose the ultimate impossibility of constructing a

society in which each man is for himself first and

foremost. These philosophers and the social engineers and

law-makers who depend upon them have, in Marx’s terms,

become Jews.

4 Later characters

Later in his novel, Our Mutual Friend, he created the

character of Riah (meaning "friend" in Hebrew), whose

goodness, Vallely writes, is almost as complete as

Fagin's evil. Riah says in the novel: "Men say, 'This is

a bad Greek, but there are good Greeks. This is a bad

Turk, but there are good Turks.' Not so with the Jews ...

they take the worst of us as samples of the best ..." As

the late-nineteenth century Anglo-Jewish poet and

novelist Amy Levy put it, Dickens “tried to compensate

for his having affixed the label ‘Jew’ to one of his bad

fairies by creating the good fairy Riah” (Levy 176).Davis

sent Dickens a copy of the Hebrew bible in gratitude.

Dickens not only toned down Fagin's Jewishness in revised

editions of Oliver Twist, but removed Jewish elements

from his depiction of Fagin in his public readings from

the novel, omitting nasal voice mannerisms and body

language he had included in earlier readings.

During the almost thirty years between the time of the

publication of Oliver Twist and that of Our Mutual Friend both

the status and the stereotyping of Jews in Britain had

undergone substantial change. In 1858, after fourteen

failed attempts to pass legislation removing parliamentary

disabilities for Jews, efforts at Jewish emancipation

succeeded and Lionel de Rothschild became the first

professing Jew in the House of Commons (Feldman 31). In

the years that followed, Jews were able to enter the

professions, hold civic office, and administer justice

without taking a Christian oath. They were finally

treated, though perhaps not welcomed, as Englishmen. Some

Jews also met with extraordinary financial success in the

third quarter of the century (78). Historians calculate

that, whereas at least half of all London Jews were

impoverished or barely making a living at mid-century, by

1879 Jews accounted for fully 14% of all non-landowning

millionaires in Britain (Endelman 81; Feldman 80). And, in

1868, Benjamin Disraeli, born a Jew though a convert to

Anglicanism, became Prime Minister for the first time. The

increased public visibility and economic success of a

number of Jews helped to shift dominant stereotypes from

greedy street sellers, shop-owners, and criminals to

ruthless self-made men and parasitic speculators. It is

during this period that Dickens sold his home to the

Davises and characterized Mr. Davis as the generic “Jew

Money-Lender.” Trollope’s novels of the 1870s contain a

number of these types, though many, like Augustus Melmotte

in The Way We Live Now (1875), are not explicitly identified

as Jews. Indeed, it is their status as ambiguous Jews, or

Jews who “pass,” that attracts the novelist and partly

accounts for the dramatic interest of these characters.9

Riah is persuaded by – or converted to – the position

that each Jew, unlike each Greek or Turk or Christian or

Englishman, is a representative one. Unlike Fagin, who is

for himself alone and makes a virtue of it, Riah carries

with him “the whole Jewish people.” He might have decided

to quit Fledgeby’s employ simply to extricate himself

from a bad business or claimed his debt to Fledgeby

senior’s kindness as an excuse for his fealty to the son,

but he offers quite another reason for quitting and takes

the blame for his misguided employment on himself. He

quits because he, as well as any other individual Jew, is

responsible for the society’s impression of all Jews. In

this speech he accepts the idea that the English take the

worst Jew for the best and find all Jews to be alike. To

them, all Jews are “Mr. Aaron,” each one interchangeable

with any other. Riah’s way of thinking, familiar to Jews

and members of other minority groups even today, sits

somewhere between allegiance to his people and acceptance

of a form of anti-Semitic thinking as the rule by which

he must govern his life.15

5 Conclusion

Dickens atones for Fagin, then, by making Riah a

decent man and a good Christian, by discrediting certain

forms of ant-Semitism in the narrative, by creating a Jew

who does not represent the self-interested and greedy

spirit of the day, and, most importantly, by having Riah

declare that no Jew but a paragon is a tenable Jew and

then shadowing him with conversion. The best Jew is a

Christian, Dickens seems to imply, offering a less

offensive version of Marx’s idea that all the worst

Christians have become Jews. Marx claims that society

will be liberated when the Jew becomes impossibility.

Dickens doesn’t go that far, but he does imagine a Jewish

emancipation based on the transformation, the tacit

conversion, of Jew into virtuous gentile and on the Jews’

compensation for gentile prejudice. For the ease, that

is, with which the non-Jewish world makes the Jew into

the symbol of that which is worst in itself. Finally,

Dickens shares with Marx the idea that the Jews’ fate is

inextricably tied to their relationship to forms of

money-making. Riah must, above all, be converted away

from allowing himself to be regarded as a man who makes

money like a Jew – through exploitation, greed, and

hoarding – toward the renunciation of even the taint of

usury; and then he must enter fully into the economy of

redemption, rebirth, and artistic transmutation. He must

abandon the Jewish realm of pariah capitalism and inhabit

the Christian world of rational and redemptive labor.

References:

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Relations and Political Culture, 1840–1914. New Haven:

Yale UP, 1994.

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Dickens' "Oliver Twist" and Freytag's "Soil und

Haben". Comparative Literature Studies, 1979. 16(1):

p. 1-11.

[3]. Gordon, N.R., Dickens versus Thackeray: The Garrick

Club Affair. PMLA, 1954. 69(4): p. 815-832.

[4]. Jr. Lane, L., Dickens' Archetypal Jew. PMLA, 1958.

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[5]. MACDONALD, T., 'red-headed animal': Race, Sexuality

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[9]. Nord, D.E., DICKENS'S "JEWISH QUESTION": PARIAH

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[9]. Squires, P.C., Charles Dickens as Criminologist.

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[10]. Stone, H., Dickens and the Jews. Victorian Studies,

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[11]. 乔乔乔, 乔乔乔乔乔乔乔乔乔乔乔乔乔乔乔乔乔《》. 乔乔乔乔乔乔, 2004(2).

[12]. 乔乔, 乔乔乔乔乔乔: 乔乔乔乔乔乔乔乔乔乔乔乔乔《》. 乔 乔乔乔乔乔乔西 (乔乔乔乔乔乔乔), 2010(01).