Word: shylocks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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There is no scarcity of books about Jews in English literature. Critics feel obliged to attack English literature for having 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...
...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...
...Malta and Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice the composite portraits are given their final expression and the final punisments are meted out. "In Chaucer he was torn by wild horses and hanged also. In Gower a lion tears him to death. Marlowe has him burned in a cauldron. Shylock, the fox at bay, loses both daughter and ducats, as well as his religion...
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...
...final chapters, Rosenberg discusses a minor myth--that of the Wandering Jew. "The story of Cartaphilus, who struck Christ on His way to the Cross and was condemned to tarry until His second coming, has left far less of an impact on literature than the Shylock story; but it is in many respects a more useful legend. It answers the purpose of literary history more readily; it changes; it adapts itself to the demands of diverse generations and diverse beliefs. It provides a more reliable and more 'readable' barometer than Shylock to the kind of civilization, ideology, and regnant literary...