Word: rosenberg
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...produced Shylock and Fagin or to defend it for the tolerant portrayal of Daniel Deronda. There are encylopedic 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. Yet, until the appearance of Edgar Rosenberg's study, From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction, no one had bothered to ask the important questions: why the picture of the villanious Jew has remained constant from the medieval ballads about the murder of Hugh or Lincoln to the novels of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh...
...purely historical explanation, not even the excellent work by Montagu Modder, The Jew in the Literature of England, can answer these questions. The historical evidence must be combined with a detailed examination of the texts, literary insight and an exploration of myth. Mr. Rosenberg succeeds admirably, and From Shylock to Svengali is the most important and valuable study on the subject...
...Rosenberg does not attempt a catalogue of all the appearances that Jews make in English literature. He concentrates on a few novelists--Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, George Eliot, and George DuMaurier--with extended glances at a few playwrights--Marlowe, Shakespeare and Cumberland. He supplements his close, detailed examination of a sensibly limited number of texts with some attention to medieval plays and ballads, many minor writers, and extra-literary phenomena such as social and political changes...
...Rosenberg 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 ('and when you have found him, bring me word, that I may also come and worship him'); 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...
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-mache...