Author: Kathy Lavezzo
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2016-10-21
Total Pages: 393
ISBN-13: 1501706705
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →England during the Middle Ages was at the forefront of European antisemitism. It was in medieval Norwich that the notorious "blood libel" was first introduced when a resident accused the city's Jewish leaders of abducting and ritually murdering a local boy. England also enforced legislation demanding that Jews wear a badge of infamy, and in 1290, it became the first European nation to expel forcibly all of its Jewish residents. In The Accommodated Jew, Kathy Lavezzo rethinks the complex and contradictory relation between England’s rejection of "the Jew" and the centrality of Jews to classic English literature. Drawing on literary, historical, and cartographic texts, she charts an entangled Jewish imaginative presence in English culture. In a sweeping view that extends from the Anglo-Saxon period to the late seventeenth century, Lavezzo tracks how English writers from Bede to Milton imagine Jews via buildings—tombs, latrines and especially houses—that support fantasies of exile. Epitomizing this trope is the blood libel and its implication that Jews cannot be accommodated in England because of the anti-Christian violence they allegedly perform in their homes. In the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the Jewish house not only serves as a lethal trap but also as the site of an emerging bourgeoisie incompatible with Christian pieties. Lavezzo reveals the central place of "the Jew" in the slow process by which a Christian "nation of shopkeepers" negotiated their relationship to the urban capitalist sensibility they came to embrace and embody. In the book’s epilogue, she advances her inquiry into Victorian England and the relationship between Charles Dickens (whose Fagin is the second most infamous Jew in English literature after Shylock) and the Jewish couple that purchased his London home, Tavistock House, showing how far relations between gentiles and Jews in England had (and had not) evolved.
Author: Bryan Cheyette
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1995-10-26
Total Pages: 322
ISBN-13: 9780521558778
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Combining cultural theory, discourse analysis and new historicism with readings of the works of major contemporary authors, this study concludes that "the Jew" is characterized unstereotypically as the embodiment of uncertainty within English literature and society.
Author: Anthony Bale
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 169
ISBN-13: 0521863546
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Bale examines the ways in which English writers, artists and readers used and abused the Jewish image in the period following the Jews' expulsion from England in 1290. He examines how anti-semitic images developed and came to endure far beyond the Middle Ages.
Author: Edward Nathaniel Calisch
Publisher:
Published: 1909
Total Pages: 290
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Derek Cohen
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Published: 1990
Total Pages: 166
ISBN-13: 9780773507814
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In a collection of insightful critical essays, Derek Cohen, Deborah Heller, and the contributing authors explore the different ways in which writers of English literature have amplified, varied, or denied this archetypical perception.
Author: Abba Rubin
Publisher: Praeger
Published: 1984-11-07
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 0313237794
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Ch. 1 (pp. 3-46) surveys the history of the return of the Jews to England, from the Marranos in the 16th century to the debate on the readmission of the Jews in Cromwell's time, and the debate on the "Jew Bill" in 1753 which rekindled latent antisemitism. The rest of the book examines numerous novels and plays which reflected the current attitude towards Jews. The negative stereotype predominated at first - e.g. in works by Dryden, Defoe, Smollett (in particular), Richardson, and in the revival of Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice" in the mid-18th century - but a change occurred in 1793 when Richard Cumberland depicted the Jew as a positive character in his play "The Jew". Thereafter, more favorable portrayals appeared in English literature, based on knowledge and on experience of the Jewish reality rather than on ignorance and prejudice, until by 1830 the numbers of negative and positive portrayals were equal.
Author: Edward Nathaniel Calisch
Publisher: Port Washington, N.Y : Kennikat Press
Published: 1969
Total Pages: 288
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →States that the survey of a millennium of English literature will disclose two general facts: the first is that a broad line of demarcation is drawn between the Jews in biblical times (before the advent of Jesus of Nazareth) and those since that event, and the second is that the treatment accorded the Jews of the latter period has been, up to very recent years, uniformly antagonistic. The book is organized chronologically, relating historical events from the 11th century through the 19th, works about the Jews written by non-Jews during that period, both positive and negative, and Jewish writings from the 18th century on.