5 - Hellenist heroines: commerce, culture and the Jewess

Summary

‘I adore Shakespeare’, enthuses Baroness Sampson, vulgar wife of a crooked Jewish speculator in Emily Eden's social satire The Semi-Detached House (1859), ‘and only wish I had time to read him. Indeed, I once went to see his School for Scandal.’ Gloriously embodying social disorder and cultural ignorance, Eden's Jewish parvenu was to become a ubiquitous figure in literature of the 1860s and 70s. In realist writing no less than conversion fiction, however, representations of Jews were highly polarised. Rooted in Christian theology, the critique of Judaism as materialist and of the Jews as materialistic was renewed in the decades following Jewish emancipation. At the same time, the Jews' potential for transcending this form of carnality was persistently allegorised in the figure of the Jewess. In this chapter I explore how novelists – fascinated, repelled and implicated by the figure of the cosmopolitan Jewish plutocrat – were equally bound to the contrary image of the Jewess who resisted the temptations of money.

In Eden's novel, for example, the Baroness is juxtaposed with her niece, the melancholy, poetry-quoting Rachel Monteneros. Disaffected from her Jewish family, whom she suspects of plotting to embezzle her fortune, Rachel wears a habitual ‘look of anxiety, as, resting her head on her clasped hands, she seemed to give herself up to deep and painful thoughts’ (131). Eden's sad Jewess bears more than a fleeting resemblance to the heroines of conversion fiction.