Word: svengalis
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...loves very much," Sophia tells the endless strangers who ask for The Real Truth, "talks little about it." People say that Ponti serves as an image of the father she never had, but she treats him as if he were her own little boy. They say he is her Svengali, but at most he is only a part-time Svengali, being chiefly concerned with minding their considerable enterprises...
...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, why the conscious attempts to reject...
...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 excavates two late eighteenth century novels, Lewis' The Monk and Godwin's St. Leon, which portray the isolated Jew as black magician, and traces their lineage from Cartaphilus to DuMaurier's Svengali. In Trilby "the myths of Judas and of Cartaphilus met in the figure of a Victorian bogey-hypnotist...
From Shylock to Svengali is a complete, sensitive, well written and valuable work. The only question which Rosenberg does not take up is why the Shylock myth has managed to persist. What repressed fears is society acting out in its persistent creation of the knife bearing villain? Rosenberg says, "I am aware . . . that literary conventions can tell us only so much about a subject which is, as bottom, impenetrable...