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"A fresh-made garment of citizenship" - representing Jewish identities in Victorian Britain
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Jews and gender in British literature 1815-1865.
No full textPhDThis thesis examines the variety of relationships between Jews and gender in early
to mid-nineteenth century British literature, focussing particularly on representations
of and by Jewish women. It reconstructs the social, political and literary context in
which writers produced images and narratives about Jews, and considers to what
extent stereotypes were reproduced, appropriated, or challenged. In particular it
examines the ways in which questions of gender were linked to ideas about religious
or racial difference in the Victorian period.
The study situates literary representations of Jews within the context of
contemporary debates about the participation of the Jews in the life of the modern
state. It also investigates the ways in which these political debates were gendered,
looking in particular at the relationship between the cultural construction of
femininity and English national identity.
It first considers Victorian culture's obsession with Rebecca, the Jewess created in
Walter Scott's influential novel Ivanhoe (1819). It examines Rebecca's refusal to
convert to Christianity in the context of Scott's discussion of racial separatism and
modern national unity.
Evangelical writers like Annie Webb, Amelia Bristow and Mrs Brendlah were
prolific literary producers, and preoccupied with converting Jewish women.
Particularly during the 18'40s and 1850s, evangelical writing provided an important
forum for the construction and consolidation of women's national identity.
Grace Aguilar's writing was an attempt to understand Jewish identity within the
terms of Victorian domestic ideology. In contrast, Celia and Marion Moss, in their
historical romances, offered narratives of female heroism and national liberation,
drawing on the contemporary debate about slavery.
Benjamin Disraeli's construction of a "tough version of Jewish identity was a
response both to the contemporary stereotype of the feminised Jew and to the debate
about Jewish emancipation. It also drew on the virile ideology of the Young England
movement of the 1840s
Worldly Exile: Mina Loy's 'Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose'
No full textThis is an essay about Mina Loy's writing of Jewish identity and exile in her poem, 'Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose
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Playing with history: negotiating subjectivity in contemporary lens based work
No full textContemporary artists exploring Jewish identity in the UK are caught between two exclusions, broadly speaking: an art community that that sees itself as ‘post –identity’ and a ‘black’ art scene that revolves around the organizations that emerged out of the Identity debates of the 1980s and 1990s, namely Iniva, Third Text, Autograph. These organizations and those debates, don’t usually include Jewish identity within their remit as Jewish artists are considered to be well represented in the British art scene and, in any case, white. Out of these assumptions, questions arise in relation to the position of Jews in Britain and what is at stake for an artist in exploring Jewish Identity in their work. There is considerable scholarship, relatively speaking on art and Jewish Identity in the US (such as Lisa Bloom; Norman Kleeblatt; Catherine Sousslouf), which inform the debates on visual culture and Jews. In this chapter, I will be drawing out some of the distinctions between the US and the UK debates within my analysis, building on my own writing over the last ten years as well as the work of Juliet Steyn, Jon Stratton and Griselda Pollock.
In short, this chapter aims to explore the problematic of what Jewish Identity can offer the viewer as art; what place such art inhabits within a wider artistic context and how, if at all, it is received. There is a predominance of lens based work that explores Identity arising out of the provenance of feminist practices and the politics of documentary that will be important in the framing of the work. I do not aim to consider what constitutes a Jewish artist, that has been done elsewhere and is an inadequate and somewhat spurious conversation . I will also not be focusing on artists whose intention is to celebrate an unproblematised Jewishness (however that is constituted in any given work). Recent artworks and scholarship has in any case rendered the trumpeting of attachment to any singular identity anachronistic at best. I will focus on artists working in the UK who incorporate questions of Jewishness into a larger visual enquiry that build on Judith Butler’s notion of identity as process or performative as well as the more recent debates and artwork that consider the intersectionality of identifications that co-constitute provisional identities (Jones, Modood, Sara Ahmed, Braidotti/Nikki S Lee, Glenn Ligon). The case studies to think through these questions of identity, will be artworks by Susan Hiller, Doug Fishbone and Suzanne Triester. In thinking through works by these artists, I will also serve to contextualise them, situating them briefly within the history of the landmark exhibition in the UK, Rubies and Rebels and the work of Ruth Novaczek, Lily Markewitz, Oreet Ashery and myself
Philosemitism, antisemitism and ‘the Jews’: perspectives from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century
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Preface; Introduction: The wide field of relations?, Tony Kushner with Nadia Valman. Part I Theorising Tolerance and Intolerance: Intolerance and tolerance: only one 'one and only' god or more', Gavin I. Langmuir; The power of tolerance, David Theo Goldberg; Reading intolerant texts in a tolerant society, Norman Solomon; The limits of tolerance: nation-building and what it means for minority groups, Mark Levene. Part II Philosemitism, Antisemitism and Intolerance: Jonah the Jew: the evolution of a biblical character, Yvonne Sherwood; The Jews and the cross in the middle ages: towards a reappraisal, Elliott Horowitz; Albert the Great on the Talmud and the Jews, Irven M. Resnick; 'Inward' and 'outward' Jews: Margaret Fell, circumcision and women's preaching, Claire Jowitt; Enlightenment and exclusion: Judaism and toleration in Spinoza, Locke and Bayle, Adam Sutcliffe; The limits of toleration in enlightenment Germany: Lessing, Goethe and the Jews, Ritchie Robertson; The slave, the noble and the Jews: reflections on section 7 of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals, David M. Seymour; Antisemitism in Canada: the legal dimension in context, Thomas S. Kuttner; Offending the memory? The Holocaust and pressure group politics, Tony Kushner. Bibliography; Index
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