The Temple of Culture and the Market for Letters: The Jew and the Way We Write Now

Abstract IN CHAPTER 1 I argued that Jews were much on the minds of nineteenth-century intellectuals in England and America, and in a completely new way, as they began to think of themselves as intellectuals, using the conceptual equipment bequeathed them by their German and other Continental counterparts. But it needs to be added that some of the most important deployments of the figure of the Jew can be found in the genre that, at precisely this moment, was simultaneously experiencing huge popular success and struggling to affirm its artistic prestige: the novel. In this chapter, I want to parse this particular deployment of the figure of the Jew by asking the most vexing (and unanswerable) question of literary analysis: why? Or, more specifically, why here, why in the sphere of high-cultural literary production? After all, in the category-mad nineteenth century, it is unsurprising to find that race theorists, sexologists, and ethnographers all grappled with the question of Jewish difference. At a time when the mass literary market was booming and evangelical culture predominating, it is also unastonishing to discover solemn, didactic romances of Hebrew history circulating in the low- and middlebrow arenas of popular fiction. General Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur (1880) climbed the first bestseller lists in America; Marie Corelli’s Barabbas (1892) did the same in England. Nor, when we turn from the philo Semitic 1880s to the anti-Semitic, antialien 1900s, is it odd to find Edgar Wallace’s paranoid fantasies of world domination by Jewish aliens, anarchists, and Bolsheviks-books like The Four Just Men (1904) or The Council of Justice (1908)-supplanting their more benign biblical precedents in a march into bestsellerdom. What is startling is that Jews should figure with such prominence in a literary culture that was beginning to think of itself as just that, as a distinct zone of imaginative endeavor possessing a distinct and powerful, even redemptive, social mission. And it is equally startling that the matter of Jewry should have been so prominent in the project of self-validation undertaken by writers entering into that zone.