6 - The shadow of the harem: fin-de-siècle racial romance

Summary

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, public discussion of the Jews reached a new intensity. In the press and political rhetoric, the mass migration of eastern European Jews during the 1880s and 90s was represented as a threat to the labour market, housing conditions and public health of the ailing imperial metropolis. While Jewish immigrants came under increasing scrutiny for their alien cultural practices and ‘tribal loyalties’, the question of the assimilability of ‘the Jew’ returned to haunt their middle-class, Anglicised co-religionists too. This question was addressed in the languages of anthropology, racial science, and eugenics; in the field of the novel, it surfaced via the marriage plot.

For many novelists of the period, this chapter will show, the Jews' distinctiveness was manifested in their ‘oriental’ attitude towards women. It was to this theme, for example, that Evangelical missionaries returned when reviving the old conversion narratives from earlier in the century. Disowned, or the Outlawed Jewess (1889) claimed that although contemporary Jews were severely persecuted, Christians were rightly opposed to their ‘social character’, in particular their enslavement of women, who were ‘bargained’ for on the marriage market. Celia Franks, the heroine of Violet Guttenberg's conversionist novel Neither Jew Nor Greek: A Story of Jewish Social Life (1902), is shocked at the acceptance among even middle-class Jewry of the uncivilised practice of arranged marriage; she cannot understand ‘how any self-respecting girl can allow herself to be disposed of in that cut-and-dried manner’.