Analysis of Charles Dickens’ anti-Semitism

A case study of Fagin

Contents
1 Introduction ................................................................................................... 2
1.1 Charles Dickens and his works ............ Error! Bookmark not defined.
1.2 The general reviews of Dickens’ novelsError! Bookmark not
defined.
1.3 Jews in English literature ..................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
2 Fagin ............................................................................................................. 6
2.1 Fagin and his influence........................................................................... 6
 2.2 Creation of Fagin .................................................................................... 7
3 On the Jewish Question ................................................................................ 8
3.1 Karl Marx ............................................................................................... 8
3.2 Charles Dickens’ Jewishness .................................................................. 9
4 Later characters ........................................................................................... 11
5 Conclusion .................................................................................................. 12
References: ..................................................................................................... 13

1 Introduction

For the convenience of study, this thesis adopts Liu Bingshan’s classification of
Dickens’ literary career, that is, three periods. According to Liu Bingshan, the first
period extends from 1836, the publication of Boz, to 1841. The second period of his
literary career is from 1842 and ended in 1850. The third period refers to the period
from 1851 to 1870.

The first period is marked for youthful optimism. Dickens published five novels
in all except Sketches by Boz in just five years, among which the Pickwick Papers
brought him first great popularity. Oliver Twist is considered to be “a story in the
tradition of Bunyan, the morality play” because of its thick moral instruction.
Dickens believed that all the evils of the capitalist world would be remedied if only
men treated each other with kindness, justice, and sympathetic understanding. He
thought that the whole social question would be solved only every employer reformed
himself according to the model set by the benevolent gentlemen in his novels and of
only the rich used their power and wealth sympathetically to assist the poor to escape
from poverty. This naïve optimism is the characteristic of the petty-bourgeois
humanitarian of his time.In this period, Dickens wrote his famous works as The
Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist.

The second period began from 1842 and ended in 1850. It was a period of
excitement and irritation. In this period, Dickens made a trip to America. Before the
visit, he thought of the United States as a world in which there were no class division
and human relations were humanitarian. But what impressed his most during his visit
there was the rule of the dollar and the enormously corruptive influence of wealth and
power. Vulgar selfishness, which prevailed everywhere, concealed the fine qualities of
the people. Dickens’s naïve optimism toward the capitalist society was profoundly
shaken.In this period, Dickens wrote his famous works as American Notes, David
Copperfield.

The third period of his literary career refers to the period from 1851 to 1870.
Dickens’s works in this period show intensifying pessimism. Dickens, consciously
and subconsciously, shows himself more and more at odds with bourgeois society and
more and more aware of the absence of any readily available alternative. In this
period, Dickens wrote his famous works as Hard Times, Little Dorrit.

In recent years a good many important studies of Dickens have appeared. These
studies have approached Dickens from the most diverse points of view, though there
has been generally an implicit agreement with Edmund Wilson’s belief that “we may
find in Dickens’ work today a complexity and a depth to which even Gissing and
Shaw have hardly…done justice — an intellectual and artistic interest which makes
Dickens loom very large in the whole perspective of the literature of the west.” While
recognizing the measure of justice in the traditional charges against Dickens’ novels
(that they are melodramatic, falsely pathetic, didactic, repetitive, and so on), various
critics and scholars have attempted to assess what is authentic in his fiction. One can
distinguish several different modes of approach in these recent studies, though there is
of course a good deal of overlapping. There are biographical studies, culminating in
John Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens and Frederic G. Kitton’s Charles Dickens:
His Life, Writings, and Personality. These biographies have put our knowledge of the
facts of Dickens’ life and their relation to his work on solid ground. Other scholars
have explored the relation of Dickens’ works to the political, moral, and social
realities of the Victorian age, like in Una Pope-Hennessy’s Charles Dickens, while
still others have examined Dickens’ overt opinions about politics or morality,and have
shown us how Dickens was a much more deliberate and calculating writer than we
had thought, like in Daniel Born’s The Birth of Liberal Guilt in The English Novel:
Charles Dickens To H .G. Wells. The latter scholars have most often found their
evidence in Dickens’ letters and speeches, like in Selected Letters of Charles Dickens
edited by Paroissien David and The Speeches of Charles Dickens edited by K. J.
Fielding. Similar studies have shown the relation of Dickens’ opinions and practice as
a novelist to Victorian theories and practice generally, or have studied the history of
the criticism of Dickens’ novels, like in George H. Ford’s Dickens and His Readers:
Aspects of Novel-Criticism Since 1836. Some concentrate on the art of Dickens’
works, like in Dickens at Work by John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson, Reality and
Comic Confidence in Charles Dickens by P. J. M. Scott, and The Imagined World of
Charles Dickens by Mildred Newcomb.

After Shakespeare, Dickens is the most written about author in English literature.
Dickens’ 14 major novels and numerous shorter works teem with a fantastic array of
entertaining characters and convey vividly and memorably a sense of the author’s
time: its hopes and sorrows, follies and pleasures, houses and streets, factories and
schools, manners and people. In one way or another they all show Dickens’ intense
concern with the injustices of his society. Dickens’ vivid description creates many
lifelike characters, which impress the readers deeply in their memory after reading.
Among them the characters of children play the most important role in Dickens’ art
gallery. In the history of world literature, perhaps Dickens is the first one who threw
tremendous energy into his creations of children. “Reflecting life through children’s
point of view is a main characteristic of Dickens’ art of fiction.” In his novels he
created nearly 100 children characters and more than 50 ones were named.

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 encyclopedic 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.

Edger Rosenberg’s From Shylock to Svengali(1960) traces the myth of the Jew to
its Biblical origins. "It dates back at least to Herod, the slayer of children and aspiring
Christ killer in disguise; to Judas, the original businessman with the contract in the
pocket; and to the anonymous vulgar Jewish farceur who, in answer to Christ's 'Eli',
eh' forced a reed filled with vinegar between His lips." The twin masks of the
Jew-mutilator and usurer thus had Biblical sanction "at a time when literature
flourished under clerical auspices and when nine tenths of the corpus poeticism
derived from Biblical paraphrases and metrologies. . ." In ballads and morality plays
the two roles were already being joined, and the mere physical presence of the Jews in
England between the Norman Conquest and their expulsion under Edward I did
nothing to change the myth. In Chaucer's The Prioress's Tale the twin roles are set. In
Marlow's Jew of Malta and Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice the composite portraits
are given their final expression and the final punishments 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 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-mâché figure that Sheva is
made to cut. He is plainly little more than a pawn--not in the plot, but of the message
behind the plot. 'I take credit myself,' Cumberland writes . . ., 'for the character of
Abraham Abrahams. I wrote it upon principle, thinking it high time that something
should be done for a persecuted race. I seconded my appeal to the charity of mankind
by the character of Sheva, which I copied from this of Abrahams.' The phrase upon
principle goes a long way toward explaining not only Sheva's general dramatic
insufficiencies, but the collapse of subsequent attempts to redeem the Jew for
literature."

The process of vilifying the Jews and then guiltily meting them out a kind of
justice is exemplified in the novels of Maria Edgeworth. "Having impressed her
readers with her ability to manipulate the stereotype of the Jew villain and having
informed them some six times over that Jews were frauds, usurers, poisoners,
perjurers, traitors, parasites on the national economy, threats to the body politic, and
violators of young boys, Edgeworth decided to take it all back and Harrington."
(Prominent Jewish matrons seem to have taken an active hand in helping the process
along. Miss Edgeworth received a complaint about her illiberality from an American
Jewess which may have occasioned the writing of Harrington, just as Dickens'
creation of Riah was helped along by the famous letter from Mrs. Davis.) The "pallor"
of Miss Edgeworth's good Jews, like that of the other apologies in English
literature--Dickens' Riah, DuMaurier's Leah, and Trollope's Trendelssohn--is
explained by Rosenberg: "The chief reason . . . is that [the good Jew] has been almost
consistently a product of far too obvious and explicit ulterior motives. He bore from
the first the pale cast of after-thought. Given the convention, the authors who kept the
Jew-villain in circulation created their man with a good deal of spontaneity. The
Jew-villain might not be a realistic figure; but within the canons of comedy and
melodrama he could give the illusory appearance of being a creature of flesh and
blood. The purveyors of the immaculate Jew, on the other hand, produced not so much
a character as a formula. Riah and his type will not bleed if you prick them."

Comparing Fagin to all the other Jew-villains in English literature, Rosenberg

notes the vital difference: "Marlowe's and Shakespeare's Jews assert themselves
actively against their persecution and regard it as a source of terror. The point is that
none of them can be sensibly appreciated without an awareness of the restrictions
which prevent them from participating fully in the social world. There comes a point
at which Barabas, the professional poisoner, ceases to be a satanic figure and can
lecture Ferneze on the conditions of injustice without immediately sounding
ludicrously hypocritical. Dickens works differently. Fagin enjoys only the barest
status as homo Europaenus. . . . Even his Judaism is defective. . . . Fagin, we know,
falls completely outside of any religious framework. . . .Dickens, in short, has
'de-historicized' his man and came up with some prehistoric fiend, an aging Lucifer
whose depravity explains him wholly. . . . Characters like Fagin who are without
grace, who terrify the very young and murder the innocent, exist in two worlds and
operate on two levels of reality. They can dance about on the Victorian stage, making
the theatrical noises of their forefathers who danced around the cross; or they can be
interpreted as distorted dream-figures, the grotesquely magnified bogeys out of a fairy
tale. . . . In a piece written for All the Year Around, Dickens asked: 'Are not the sane
and insane equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming?'" Rosenberg analyses the
grotesque, distorted humor of Oliver Twist and relates it to Dickens' later work.

2 Fagin

2.1 Fagin and his influence

It is important to point out Dickens’ attitude towards Jew is always a

controversial topic. While Dickens was known as a great social reformer, his 1838-39
newspaper serial publication of Oliver Twist demonstrated the deep societal
anti-Semitism of Dickens' time. Fagin, a major character in the story, is an underworld
criminal who trains small children to be pickpockets. He is a very unseemly character
and, more often than not, he is referred to derisively as “the Jew.”

In 1863, Dickens received a letter from Eliza Davis, a Jewish woman whose
husband had purchased Dickens’ home in 1860. Davis wrote to Dickens that his
negative portrayal of Jews "encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew."
Dickens immediate reaction was defensive, but the letter had an obvious effect on him.
The episodes of Oliver Twist were in the process of being printed in book form.
Dickens halted the publication to make changes. Unfortunately, 38 chapters had
already been printed and in these the references to “the Jew” remain. In the final 15
chapters, however, Dickens altered approximately 180 such negative references. That
is why Fagin is called "the Jew" 257 times in the first 38 chapters, but barely at all in
the next 179 references to him.

As so many have observed, Fagin is a compelling and memorable figure and has
had an enduring life outside of literature as an archetypal Jew, second only, perhaps,
to that of Shylock. He also serves as an epitome of economic self-interest, one of the
main concerns of OliverTwist. It goes almost without saying that, throughout the
period in which Dickens’s novels appeared, the Jew was understood as the typical
homo economicus. Even Thomas Macaulay, an early defender of giving Jews full
legal and political rights in Britain, grossly exaggerated their economic power,
declaring that “The Jew may govern the money market, and the money market may
govern the world” (Feldman 75).Whether associated with crimes like theft and the
fencing of stolen goods in the early decades of the century or merchant banking and
stock brokerage in the last, Jews remained the steady objects of economic
anti-Semitism.

How did Dickens resolve the matter of economic anti-Semitism that lies at the
heart of even the casual prejudice Dickens expressed in his private remarks about
doing business with the Davises? Dickens criticized against the “Jew Money-Lender”
to whom he wished to sell his house more than two decades after writing Oliver Twist,
In this regard, he shared the tendencies of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and, to a lesser
extent, Matthew Arnold to see the Jew as incapable of achieving spiritual or moral
transcendence while retaining his fundamental Jewishness.

2.2 Creation of Fagin

Dickens borrowed from boththe greedy and the contaminating urban Jew in his
creation of Fagin. The old man’s greed and interest in profit by any means go without
saying. Willing to corrupt boys to steal for him and to swallow coins in order to keep
them from his thieving colleagues, he hoards treasure and habitually takes out the
gold watches and jewels in his possession to gaze upon them fondly, as he would a
favored child. He combines the miser’s love of lucre with a characteristic indifference
to the most vulnerable of human beings, a pattern that can be reversed, as we know
from George Eliot’s Silas Marner, by loving a child and relinquishing a devotion to
wealth. But Fagin also resides squarely within the miasma and filth of the urban
underworld. The first description of him and his lair in the novel features a room
“perfectly black with age and dirt,” a frying pan filled with cooking sausages, and a
“shriveled” old Jew with matted red hair and a “repulsive face,” dressed in a “greasy
flannel gown” (105).Repugnant olfactory and tactile elements complete the visual
evocation of the old man and heighten the reader’s feelings of revulsion. The dank,
filthy, grimy interior has its outdoor counterpart in the London night that envelops
Fagin when he ventures forth:

The mud lay thick upon the stones, and a black mist hung over the streets; the rain fell
sluggishly down, and everything felt cold and clammy to the touch. It seemed just the night when
it befitted such a being as the Jew to be abroad. As he glided stealthily along, creeping beneath the
shelter of the walls and doorways, the hideous old man seemed like some loathsome reptile,
engendered in the slime and darkness through which he moved: crawling forth, by night, in search
of some rich offal for a meal. (186)

Here we have the Jew as a repellant, reptilian, primitive creature, barely emerged
from the mud and ooze of creation, setting out in search of the inner organs to feed his
depraved appetites. Readers have associated his preying on children with blood libel,
sexual abuse, and murderous intent. Deborah Heller refers to Fagin’s “ominous role as
an abductor of children and violator of childhood innocence,” and Jonathan Freedman
reminds us of the modern image of the Jew as pander, “almost invariably with
overtones of sexual perversity, frequently aimed at children or young women” (Heller
43; Freedman 67). When Oliver, waking from sleep, witnesses Fagin looking at his
treasures, the old man waves a kitchen knife at him, a gesture that Steven Marcus, in a
striking reading of the passage as primal scene, likens to the threat of castration (376).
Fagin keeps company with the prostitute

Nancy and her pimp, the more convincingly homicidal Bill Sikes, who add to the
urban contaminants that circle around Dickens’s Jew. Perverse, degraded, predatory,
filthy, primitive, and avaricious, Fagin epitomizes the semi-visible but always feared
underside, the subterranean andintestinal of metropolitan life.

3 On the Jewish Question

If this were all Dickens had intended in placing Fagin in the midst of his novel of
London crime, it would have been sufficient to establish the character as both deeply
memorable and deeply disturbing. But Dickens was up to something more here. As
Susan Meyer has suggested, Fagin is essential to the very purpose of this novel: he is,
in her words, a “corrective figure for the instruction and improvement of English
Christians, guiding them, by a skillful employment of the rhetoric of anti-Semitism,
toward the practice of what [Dickens] represents as true Christianity, characterized by
mercy and benevolence toward the poor” (241). To drive home the purity and
irreducibility of this kind of evil, Meyer continues, Dickens offers Fagin, condemned
to die at the novel’s end, no redemption, no chance of true repentance or
transformation, no conversion, either moral or spiritual. The anti-Christian forces in
the novel must be fully eliminated.

3.1 Karl Marx

Dickens, however, does more than use Fagin as the Jewish antithesis of the true
Christian spirit: he also makes the Jewish criminal the very epitome of the Christian
spirit gone wrong and, consequently, the representative of precisely what passed for
ethical philosophy in what Dickens perceived to be the twisted thinking of some of his
contemporaries. In this reading, Fagin signifies not merely Jewish avarice and
callousness but the very essence of the perverse economic and moral ethos of the age.
To understand as fully as possible and with the widest possible implications what
Dickens was after here, we take a look into Karl Marx’s “On the Jewish Question,”
published in 1844, just five years after Dickens had completed the serialization of
Oliver Twist. An essay that has often been avoided because of its militant and, for
some, embarrassing anti-Semitism, “On the Jewish Question” is a fascinating
statement that, at its most useful, elucidates the meaning of one of the dominant
strains of anti-Semitic thought in the mid-nineteenth century.6 It begins as a critique
of the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer’s “The Jewish Question” and ends as a series of
epigrammatic, almost oracular, statements about the nature and condition of modern
Jewishness in its relation to Christian society.

At its most commonplace, the essay repeats familiar accusations: that the
“secular cult of the Jew” is “haggling,” his “secular God,” money (52). At its most
far-reaching, it claims that Jewishness has found its “highest development” in
“Christian society itself” (54). Jews can only become emancipated if they allow for or
achieve “the emancipation of humanity from Jewishness” but, as yet, “Jews have
emancipated themselves [only] in so far as Christians have become Jews” (52, 53).
Judaism is inherently practical, not theoretical, and its secular bases are not just
haggling and materialism but self-interest and egotism: “What is the secular basis of
Jewry?” Marx asks, “Practical need, self-interest” (52). These are the very
characteristics that have been unleashed, to insidious effect, in the contemporary
world and have come to dominate Christian society at its worst.

In Marx’s rhetoric, then, Jewishness – or Judaism, for he believes in the religious

aswell as the secular foundation of the modern Jewish character – is abstracted into
the very mentality from which modern capitalist society suffers. After developing out
of Judaism, Christianity has devolved back into it. As Stephen Greenblatt writes in
discussing Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta in relation to Marx’s “On the Jewish
Question,” “The Jew is charged not with racial deviance or religious impiety but with
economic and social crime, crime that is committed not only against Christian society
but, in a less ‘pure’ form, by that society” (292). Barabas is, like Fagin and likeMarx’s
Jew, the “alienated essence of Christian society,” his Judaism a “universal antisocial
element of the present time” (306, 297). Paradoxically, Jewishness is the dominant
and lamentable spirit of the age – perhaps any age. There is no real difference at
present, Marx asserts, between Christian and Jew, and the salvation of (Christian)
society lies in the disappearance of the Jew and Jewishness. Marx ends his essay this
way:

As soon as society succeeds in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism, i.e. haggling and
its presuppositions, the Jew will become impossible, because his consciousness will no longer
have an object, because the subjective basis of Judaism, practical need, will be humanized. . . .

The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism. (56)

Marx envisions, or proposes, that Jewishness will become impossibility and that
once this happens – once the Jew is liberated from his religion and culture – society
will be purged of its Jewishness and of all those characteristics that Christianity had
relatively lately borrowed from it. Marx imagines a kind of conversion and salvation
story, demanding that the Jew divest himself of his religion and its cultural accretions
so that bourgeois, Christian society might in turn shed its own Jewishness and be
redeemed.
3.2 Charles Dickens’ Jewishness

Fagin, to return to Dickens, is to the Christian society of Oliver Twist what

Marx’s Jewish to modern society and in almost exactly the same way. Fagin is not
only the typical Jew but the epitome of rampant individualism. Dickens uses him not
just as a sign of avariciousness and urban contagion but as a mouthpiece and symbol
for the misguided, soul-destroying political and economic philosophies of his day.
Fagin is an analogue, at the lowest possible level of society, for the theorists of
political economy and Poor Law reform responsible for managing society at the very
highest levels and against whom Dickens aimed this novel. Not just a narrative of
London low-life and criminal capers, not just the story of a foundling who turns out to
be wellborn though illegitimate, Oliver Twist is also, of course, a highly topical text.
The workhouses of the early chapters – where Oliver is born, picks oakum, asks for
“more,” and is starved so that he will fit nicely down a chimney when apprenticed as
a sweep – are consequences of the New Poor Law of 1834, meant to punish paupers
by abolishing outdoor relief. Dickens wants to pillory these institutions and this
particular “reform,” but he makes it clear that a perverse philosophy linked to political
economy, Malthusian principles, and the laissez-faire doctrine of self-interest, lies
behind them. The hypocrisy of such philosophy is exposed in the figure of Mr.
Bumble, the parish beadle, at the beginning of the novel but also finds an unexpected
practitioner and defender much later on in Fagin himself.

In chapter 43 Fagin counsels Noah Claypole, a prospective collaborator in crime,

in the philosophy of “Number One”: “Every man’s his own friend, my dear. . . . He
hasn’t as good a one as himself anywhere. . . . Some conjurors say that number three
is the magic number, and some say number seven. It’s neither, my friend, neither. It’s
number one”(387). And he goes on, complicating the matter a bit by tacitly
acknowledging that, if everyone is“number one,” he might have trouble enforcing
Noah’s fealty to him and his own primacy in business matters. “In a little community
like ours, my dear,” Fagin elaborates, “we have a general number one; that is, you
can’t consider yourself as number one, without considering me too as the same. . . .
It’s your object to take care of number one – meaning yourself.Well! You can’t take
care of yourself, number one, without taking care of me, number one. . . . I’m of the
same importance to you, as you are to yourself.” Appropriately confused and a bit
suspicious, Claypole resists the idea that he and Fagin can both be number one and,
even more, the inevitable conclusion that Fagin’s number one must somehow come
first. Perhaps, interrupts Noah at one point, Fagin is really Noah’s number two. But
Fagin reassures him:

You depend on me. To keep my business all snug, I depend on you. The first is your number
one, the second my number one. The more you value your number one, the more careful you must
be of mine; so we come at last to what I told you at first – that a regard for number one holds us all
together, and must do so, unless we would all go to pieces in company. (388)
 Dickens uses the Jewish criminal to explain the doctrine of self-interest and to
underscore its inadequacies as a guide for an ethical or even a logical life. He does so
not necessarily to assault the Jews but to show up the actual philosophers, especially
political economists, who preach self-interest for all individuals but actually believe
their own interests should take precedence over all others’. Indeed, Dickens uses
Fagin to expose the ultimate impossibility of constructing a society in which each
man is for himself first and foremost. These philosophers and the social engineers and
law-makers who depend upon them have, in Marx’s terms, become Jews.

4 Later characters

Later in his novel, Our Mutual Friend, he created the character of Riah (meaning
"friend" in Hebrew), whose goodness, Vallely writes, is almost as complete as Fagin's
evil. Riah says in the novel: "Men say, 'This is a bad Greek, but there are good Greeks.
This is a bad Turk, but there are good Turks.' Not so with the Jews ... they take the
worst of us as samples of the best ..." As the late-nineteenth century Anglo-Jewish
poet and novelist Amy Levy put it, Dickens “tried to compensate for his having
affixed the label ‘Jew’ to one of his bad fairies by creating the good fairy Riah” (Levy
176).Davis sent Dickens a copy of the Hebrew bible in gratitude. Dickens not only
toned down Fagin's Jewishness in revised editions of Oliver Twist, but removed
Jewish elements from his depiction of Fagin in his public readings from the novel,
omitting nasal voice mannerisms and body language he had included in earlier
readings.

During the almost thirty years between the time of the publication of Oliver
Twist and that of Our Mutual Friend both the status and the stereotyping of Jews in
Britain hadundergone substantial change. In 1858, after fourteen failed attempts to
pass legislationremoving parliamentary disabilities for Jews, efforts at Jewish
emancipation succeeded andLionel de Rothschild became the first professing Jew in
the House of Commons (Feldman31). In the years that followed, Jews were able to
enter the professions, hold civic office, andadminister justice without taking a
Christian oath. They were finally treated, though perhapsnot welcomed, as
Englishmen. Some Jews also metwith extraordinary financial success in thethird
quarter of the century (78). Historians calculate that, whereas at least half of all
LondonJews were impoverished or barely making a living at mid-century, by 1879
Jews accountedfor fully 14% of all non-landowning millionaires in Britain (Endelman
81; Feldman 80).And, in 1868, Benjamin Disraeli, born a Jew though a convert to
Anglicanism, becamePrime Minister for the first time. The increased public visibility
and economic success of anumber of Jews helped to shift dominant stereotypes from
greedy street sellers, shop-owners,and criminals to ruthless self-made men and
parasitic speculators. It is during this periodthat Dickens sold his home to the Davises
and characterized Mr. Davis as the generic “JewMoney-Lender.” Trollope’s novels of
the 1870s contain a number of these types, thoughmany, like Augustus Melmotte in
The Way We Live Now (1875), are not explicitly identifiedas Jews. Indeed, it is their
status as ambiguous Jews, or Jews who “pass,” that attracts thenovelist and partly
accounts for the dramatic interest of these characters.9

Riah is persuaded by – or converted to – the position that each Jew, unlike each
Greek or Turk or Christian or Englishman, is a representative one. Unlike Fagin, who
is for himself alone and makes a virtue of it, Riah carries with him “the whole Jewish
people.” He might have decided to quit Fledgeby’s employ simply to extricate himself
from a bad business or claimed his debt to Fledgeby senior’s kindness as an excuse
for his fealty to the son, but he offers quite another reason for quitting and takes the
blame for his misguided employment on himself. He quits because he, as well as any
other individual Jew, is responsible for the society’s impression of all Jews. In this
speech he accepts the idea that the English take the worst Jew for the best and find all
Jews to be alike. To them, all Jews are “Mr. Aaron,” each one interchangeable with
any other. Riah’s way of thinking, familiar to Jews and members of other minority
groups even today, sits somewhere between allegiance to his people and acceptance
of a form of anti-Semitic thinking as the rule by which he must govern his life.15

5 Conclusion

Dickens atones for Fagin, then, by making Riah a decent man and a good
Christian, by discrediting certain forms of ant-Semitism in the narrative, by creating a
Jew who does not represent the self-interested and greedy spirit of the day, and, most
importantly, by having Riah declare that no Jew but a paragon is a tenable Jew and
then shadowing him with conversion. The best Jew is a Christian, Dickens seems to
imply, offering a less offensive version of Marx’s idea that all the worst Christians
have become Jews. Marx claims that society will be liberated when the Jew becomes
impossibility. Dickens doesn’t go that far, but he does imagine a Jewish emancipation
based on the transformation, the tacit conversion, of Jew into virtuous gentile and on
the Jews’ compensation for gentile prejudice.For the ease, that is, with which the
non-Jewish world makes the Jew into the symbol of that which is worst in itself.
Finally, Dickens shares with Marx the idea that the Jews’ fate is inextricably tied to
their relationship to forms of money-making. Riah must, above all, be converted away
from allowing himself to be regarded as a man who makes money like a Jew –
through exploitation, greed, and hoarding – toward the renunciation of even the taint
of usury; and then he must enter fully into the economy of redemption, rebirth, and
artistic transmutation. He must abandon the Jewish realm of pariah capitalism and
inhabit the Christian world of rational and redemptive labor.
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