From The London Quarterly Review. JEWS IN ENGLISH FICTION. 1

Of late years it has been a commonplace of conversation with Englishmen to speak with extremest reprobation of German "Judenhetze" and Russian Anti-Semite ferocity, and to denounce the irritating insults, the oppressions, the plunderings, the wholesale deportations of an industrious unhappy people, in which the fanatic dislike to an alien and obstinate race has expressed itself; while the speakers have rarely failed to dwell complacently on British exemption from these offences against justice anu mercy. Yet there was a time when anti-Jewish prejudices, bitter as those of Russ or German, harbored in English breasts, and expressed themselves in insults as unfeeling, and deeds as cruel. Very slowly were those prejudices modified, while the English nation, coming itself into fuller light of liberty, was won first to endure the presence of the Hebrew alien, and then to admit him, though with much hesitation, to share in the rights of citizenship.

After this it could hardly be denied, by men of liberal culture, that he was responsive to kindlier usage, and showed himself a human creature, and no enemy of mankind, one of a race distinguished by its own excellences as well as by marked defects. Yet, even thus, the extraordinary mingling in him of the base and the noble has earned for him more than his full share of disfavor in the land of his adoption, and his persistent separation has worked to render it hard for either friend or enemy to appraise him quite justly; one outsider has despised him, another has praised him highly; the estimate of both, it may be, has been erroneous. Perhaps it is only to-day, when some children of Israel have themselves taken the pen and written true words of their people, that the English Jew is begin

11. The Prioresse's Tale. By Chaucer. 2. The Merchant of Venice. By Shakespeare. 3. Ivanhoe. By Sir Walter Scott.

4. Daniel Deronda. By George Eliot.

5. Sebastian Strome. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. 6. Reuben Sachs. By Amy Levy.

7. Children of the Ghetto. By I. Zangwill.

ning to be rightly understood by his neighbor, the English Gentile. Is it not worth our while to note under what varying aspects, and with what near or remote approach to truth, English imaginative writers have portrayed him, in this age, and in others more remote? A few typical examples may suffice us to judge what has been our advance in intelligent toleration, and what may be hoped for Israel from the freer contact with the outer world.

Our earliest great poet and earliest great master of fiction, Geoffrey Chaucer, shall lead us first into his pleasant world of Fantasy-a broad, gay, rich landscape in the promise of springtime, bathed in the warm light of unclouded sunrise; not even the earthly, gross, grotesque figures that mingle in it with more gracious shapes can do away with its special charm of "Maytime and the cheerful dawn." Yet if we look more closely into the rejoicing scene, we shall find on its sunny verdure one blot of sooty blackness; it is where, in "The Prioresse's Tale," the figure of the "cursed Jew" is brought forward as a mark, not of sportive mockery, but of hatred too deadly to be blent with derision. The story of the little child who roused murderous hate in the inmates of "a Jewerie" by carolling loud and clear his new-learnt hymn, "O alma Redemptoris mater!" as day by day he passed their doors on his way to school, stands grim and dark among the "Canterbury Tales," a witness to the banned existence of the Jew in mediæval England, as elsewhere in Europe, and to the fierce suspicion with which he was regarded.

To the Prioresse and her poet-creator, the Jew, enclosed in his Ghetto, is no better than some specially loathly spider encamped in its web; he is for them only the envenomed enemy of Christianity, a creature made up of cursing and bitterness. What more natural for him than to resent as an intolerable insult the child's loud chanting of the praise of the Virgin Mother? -what so likely as his avenging that insult in the blood of the innocent offender? The legend of the crime and of

its miraculous detection is told with entire faith, and with a significant reference to the fate of "young Hew of Lincoln, slain by cursed Jew”—one of the too famiar tales of child sacrifice that have haunted the painful path of Israel all down the Christian centuries; a story which, sung in ballad form by wandering minstrels, did its part in embittering English feeling against the outcast nation, actually banished from England when Chaucer told his tale.

From that dawn-time of English literature we pass to the great days of the drama. Two famous playwrights turn to profit the general abhorrence of the Jewish usurer, and make his imagined plottings against the lives of Christian men their theme; Marlowe's savage caricature in "The Jew of Malta" is followed by Shakespeare's immortal picture in "The Merchant of Venice." In drawing Barabbas, his hideous Jew, "the mere monster who kills in sport, poisons whole nunneries, and invents infernal machines," Marlowe was simply embodying common English opinion concerning the Jews, driven forth of England so early as the reign of Edward I. Ignorant hate inspired that tradition, and the playwright gave vivid and violent, but scarcely exaggerated, expression to it. But it is far otherwise with Shakespeare's masterpiece the only really adequate appreciation of Jewish character, in its unlovelier aspect, produced before the present century, by any imaginative writer. The author of "The Merchant of Venice" might have been able to study from the life the Judaic traits he reproduces-the hard, but real, patriotism, the secret scorn for the injurious inconsistent Christian, the stiff tribal prejudice, the singular mixture of craft and boldness employed in the pursuit of revenge for wrongs long unwillingly borne with inward fierce resentment-these, one might suppose, must have been seen in action to be so well understood; and, indeed, some students of the play are inclined to credit its author with personal knowledge of Venice and of its Jews, whom he has drawn with unflattering and unloving skill. A far more intelligent,

but a not less real, dislike than that inspired by Marlowe's coarse misrepresentation would be produced in those who first watched with delight the unfolding of Shylock's character, and the unravelling of his murderous schemes, and exulted in the completeness of his overthrow; the kindliest feeling that an Elizabethan audience would carry away from that spectacle could only be a sort of humorous scorn for the defeated, humiliated, ruined usurer, caught in his own snare; for the cheated, plundered father, whom his only child deserts for a Christian lover. Yet is it very much that Shakespeare should have seen in the Jew a man of like passions with other men, heir to the long injuries of his people, justly claiming to have suffered in his own person from maddening contempt and insult, while he has little reason to render thanks for that boasted Christian gentleness and mercy, which compels him to apostasy, and, while leaving him life, take from him the means by which he lives? Pitilessly hard, incapable of discerning that he sins in standing on mere legal right when he does so with intent to murder, this Jew still owes much of his deformity of soul to Christian ill-usage; Shakespeare has discerned this, and made it evident-an astonishing achievement for this son of the sixteenth century, and a sufficient proof of his intellectual sovereignty, were there no other.

It was long before any Jewish portrait, even remotely comparable to the unsympathetic but living delineation of Shylock, was drawn by an English hand. The Hebrew, permitted at last to return to England after the Restoration, dwelt among us many years an unloved alien, and his self-seeking greed, his usurious practices, too often furnished a theme for the mockery of witty dramatists like Sheridan, and of other writers less famous; till another great artist in fiction awoke to the more serious, picturesque possibilities of the despised Oriental money-lender, and Scott gave us in "Ivanhoe" that sordid, yet pathetic, figure of Isaac of York; that noble and heroic form of his