Portrayals of Jews in Literature

[Archie]

For those who are interested in the Jewish question and Jew-Gentile conflict throughout history, literature is an avenue that Jewish academics have explored with their characteristic obsessiveness, but critics have not shown the same level of interest, from what I have seen. I assume this is because these works are fiction and hence are easily dismissed. But I would argue that classic literature does reflect the perceptions of the times, often with more color and dimensionality than do strictly historical works. Not to mention many of these classic books and are very much worth reading in their own right.

In classic European literature, portrayals of Jews, as a rule, seem to be quite negative. The following three works are perhaps the most famous, most discussed examples.

• The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare
• Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
• The Prioress's Tale, Geoffrey Chaucer (from the Canterbury Tales)

Shakespeare is generally considered the GOAT of literature and he is central to "the canon." The Merchant of Venice features an unflattering Jewish moneylender villain, Shylock. The "merchant" in the title actually refers to someone other than Shylock, yet it remains evocative due to the associations with Jews.

The Chaucer story relates to Jewish ritual murder, and it has a legendary, religious flavor to it. The Canterbury Tales are very well known in general, but few people are probably aware of this specific story.

Oliver Twist features a Jewish villain, Fagin, who is referred to as "the Jew" repeatedly in the book. The Wikipedia page for Oliver Twist explains,

Dickens (who had extensive knowledge of London street life and child exploitation) explained that he had made Fagin Jewish because "it unfortunately was true, of the time to which the story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew."[21] It is widely believed that Fagin was based on a specific Jewish criminal of the era, Ikey Solomon.[22]

There are at least two of the Brothers Grimm stories that are relevant, The Good Bargain, and The Jew Among the Thorns.

I found a list on the website Goodreads that has some later novels. It's user created, so not necessarily the best quality control here. Some only have one vote and are not great picks. But it's still a useful starting point.
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/103 ... iterature_

Interestingly, you still see negative portrayals of Jews up through the 1920s. The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald is listed. I read this in school (it is still commonly assigned in America), but I honestly did not recall anything anti-Semitic about it. I had to refresh my memory of the Meyer Wolfsheim character, a shady fellow who is said to have been involved with rigging the 1919 World Series.

By the end of WWII, this had changed dramatically (what a surprise). In 1946, for example, we see Laura Z. Hobson's Gentleman's Agreement (also made into a film), a heavily promoted book intended to explore the problem of anti-Semitism. This book is on the Goodreads list, and it does deal with anti-Semitism; however, it is from the Jewish perspective (Hobson was Jewish).

An additional factor here is the consolidation of the publishing industry. There are only five major publishers: Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan. You might see something like "Farrar, Straus, and Giroux" on the spine, but all this seeming variety is an illusion. Nearly all these publishing brands are now owned by the big companies. Self-publishing is dominated by Amazon and hence is also centralized.

Here's a relevant Wikipedia article with more organization and context. And there should be many academic articles about this stuff on Google Scholar, JSTOR, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotyp ... literature

[Stubble]

When I watched 'The House of Rothschild', a documentary about Mr Red Shield, I was rather surprised with how he was portrayed by his fellow ethnics in Hollywood.

https://odysee.com/@AvaWolfe:d/The-Man- ... k-Pilled:f



https://odysee.com/@yngdeath:2/TheHouseOfRothschild:b

[Stubble]

Oh, I see this is 'literature', not film, my apologies.

The True Story of Hansel and Gretel
A Novel of War and Survival

https://tantor.com/the-true-story-of-ha ... urphy.html

Full Synopsis
In the last months of the Nazi occupation of Poland, two children are left by their father and stepmother to find safety in a dense forest. Because their real names will reveal their Jewishness, they are renamed "Hansel" and "Gretel". They wander in the woods until they are taken in by Magda, an eccentric and stubborn old woman called "witch" by the nearby villagers. Magda is determined to save them, even as a German officer arrives in the village with his own plans for the children.Combining classic themes of fairy tales and war literature, Louise Murphy's haunting novel of journey and survival, of redemption and memory, powerfully depicts how war is experienced by families and especially by children. The True Story of Hansel and Gretel tells a resonant, riveting story.

[Archie]

From George Orwell's 1945 essay "Anti-Semitism in Britain"

There has been a perceptible anti-Semitic strain in English literature from Chaucer onwards, and without even getting up from this table to consult a book I can think of passage which if written now would be stigmatized as anti-Semitism, in the works of Shakespeare, Smollett, Thackeray, Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley and various others. Offhand, the only English writers I can think of who, before the days of Hitler, made a definitive effort to stick of for the Jews are Dickens and Charles Reade. And however little the average intellectual may have agreed with the opinions of Belloc and Chesterton, he did not acutely disapprove of them. Chesterton's endless tirades against the Jews, which he thrust into stories and essays upon the flimsiest pretexts, never got him into trouble--indeed Chesterton was one of the most generally respected figures in English literary life. Anyone who wrote in that strain now would bring down a storm of abuse upon himself, or more probably would find it impossible to get his writings published.

Orwell could have added himself to that first list considering the politically incorrect passages in his first book Down and Out in Paris and London. See this thread from the old forum.
https://archive.codohforum.com/20230609 ... ml?t=14438

It's also interesting that he cites Dickens as his example of a pro-Jewish author when Dickens wrote one of the most notoriously anti-Semitic novels in English literature. The reason he says this is because Dickens, in one of his late works, Our Mutual Friend, attempted to make it up to the Jews with a much more favorable portrayal. Chesterton remarked that Our Mutual Friend was essentially a public apology and like most public apologies it was stiff and unconvincing. It seems Orwell had a similar trajectory.

Orwell acknowledges that WWII marked a major shift to the point where portrayals of Jews prior to that date tended to be negative but by 1945 you could not get anything critical of Jews published.