Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (59 page)

ways.”
22
Fagin’s threat to Oliver is best understood as a permutation of the leg- ends of Simon of Trent and Hugh of Lincoln, versions of the myth that Jews through the ages have kidnapped Christian children for ritual sacrifi the child’s blood being used for the creation of Passover matzo. Modern versions of the Jewish ritual murder myth began in England, notably, with the story of William of Norwich (1144), and, as Joseph Jacobs argued in the late nineteenth century, it is no coincidence that tales of William’s martyrdom “were published and obtained credence throughout Europe just at the time of the second cru- sade, when men’s religious passions were aroused to fanatical fury, and Jews fell martyrs all along the track of the Crusades.”
23

This “blood libel”—which must be understood as a displacement of Christian anxieties surrounding the eating of the Eucharist and the drinking of Christ’s blood, if not also a displacement of ancient accusations that
Chris- tians
ritually tortured, sacrificed, and ate young children
24
—was most fa- mously depicted in a woodcut from Hartmann Schedel’s
Nuremburg Chroni- cle
or
Buch der Chroniken
, printed by Anton Koberger in 1493, which shows a variety of Jewish types surrounding a full-frontal nude image of Simon of Trent. The woodcut offers up an innocent child’s body for a surreptitious ped- erastic viewing, the literal center of the spectacle being Simon’s penis, or rather a knife in the process of cutting off his penis, Simon’s blood dripping into a waiting mixing bowl. (A similar image of Simon’s martyrdom, which also centers around a Jew’s manipulation of the boy’s penis, was painted by Gandolfini d’Asti in the late fifteenth century.) It would be easy enough to an- alyze such images in light of castration anxiety and Lacanian theories of the seductive, proscribed look; yet this is a particularly
raced
example of castration anxiety, which must be understood within the frame of Christian anti- semitism and Christians’ horrific fascination for the circumcised Jewish penis. Collapsing Jewishness and pederastic murder, circumcision and the castration of innocent Christian manhood, this powerful image of the Jewish blood libel has been so central to the European imagination that it continues to be cir- culated in late twenty-first-century political discourse, and, as Hermann Strack points out, circulation of the blood libel myth tends to coincide with moments of financial and political crisis.
25

That this was also the case in Dickens’s day is clear by a glance at Charles Lamb’s widely read essay of 1821, “Imperfect Sympathies,” where he writes,

I have, in the abstract, no disrespect for Jews. . . . But I should not care to be in habits of familiar intercourse with any of that nation. . . . Old prej- udices cling about me. I cannot shake off the story of Hugh of Lincoln. Centuries of injury, contempt, and hate, on the one side,—of cloaked re-

venge, dissimulation, and hate, on the other, between our and their fa- thers, must and ought to affect the blood of the children. I cannot believe it can run clear and kindly yet; or that a few fine words, such as candour, liberality, the light of a nineteenth century, can close up the breaches of so deadly a disunion. A Hebrew is nowhere congenial to me.
26

Similarly, Maria Edgeworth began her 1817 novel
Harrington
with a maid’s “stories of Jews who had been known to steal poor children for the purpose of killing, crucifying, and sacrificing them at their secret feasts and midnight abominations,” the most memorable of which concerns “a Jew who lived in Paris in a dark alley, and who professed to sell pork pies; but it was found out at last that the pies were not pork—they were made of the flesh of little chil- dren.” Playing on the English ballad of “Sir Hugh” or “The Jew’s Daughter,” the nursemaid tells young Harrington how the Parisian Jew’s wife “used to stand at the door of her den to watch for little children, and . . . would tempt them in with cakes and sweetmeats. There was a trap-door in the cellar, and the children were dragged down; and—Oh! how my blood ran cold when we came to the terrible trap-door. Were there, I asked, such things in London now?” (Ironically, given widespread familiarity with the story of Simon of Trent, the narrator’s childhood fears are centered upon a Jew named Simon.)
27
Some ten years after the initial serialization of
Oliver Twist,
this as- sociation of Jews with the killing and eating of Christian children was still suf- ficiently common among the English to underwrite a political cartoon lam- basting one of the first Jewish members of Parliament, Baron Rothschild, as “Baron Roast-child.”
28

The stakes of Dickens’s representation of Fagin as “the Jew” are immea- surably raised once we take into account
Oliver Twist
’s relationship to the legends of Hugh of Lincoln and Simon of Trent, and more general stereo- types that depict the (male) Jew as a seducer of Christian girls, buggerer of Christian boys, and drinker of blood and semen during sacrificial ritual.
29
In its reinscription of the antisemitic tradition of the child ritual murder story, Dickens’s novel must be understood as a potent connotative intervention within contemporary debates on Jews’ efforts to secure full British citizen- ship. Fagin’s threat to Oliver as the paragon of Anglo-Christian identity en- capsulates an entire nexus of fears—economic, religious, racial, and sexually perverse—projected upon the figure of the Jew by a newly powerful Christ- ian middle class desperate to secure its social position by disavowing, dis- placing, yet unwittingly displaying the contradictions within its own psyche. It is telling, in this regard, that the wealth of Mrs. Bedwin’s son and Oliver’s half-brother Monks (if not also the wealth of their father Edwin Leeford) are

derived from British colonial capitalism in the West Indies; and yet it is Fagin the domestic pickpocket who is portrayed as a vampire sucking the lifeblood of those he exploits for money.
30

Clearly Dickens is constructing a radical opposition between the parasitic capitalist, sexually degenerate, Jewish reptilian dynamics of the self-interested pseudofamily and the angelic, benevolent, and selfless home life of the Chris- tian bourgeois family. The logic of this opposition breaks down rather quick- ly, however, despite Dickens’s clear intention of scapegoating “the Jew” for the attempted ruination of Christ-like Oliver, and this breakdown reveals the contradictions central to middle-class Anglo-Christian identity. Let us look again at the parable of the Good Samaritan and the ideal of Christian benev- olence. The lesson of the Samaritan, like most of Christianity, is of course de- rived from Jewish Scripture. “Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart,” God commands in the book of Leviticus; “Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neigh- bor as thyself ” (Leviticus 19:17–18). In appropriating this Jewish ethic as a specifically Christian ideal, the apostle Luke does two noteworthy things: first, he indicates that one of the men who failed to help the man fallen by the side of the road is a Levite, a member of the tribe for whom “Leviticus” is named. In this way Luke damns as hypocrites the very people who first pub- licized the divine commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself and claims the stolen property of this commandment in the name of Christianity. Sec- ond, he changes the commandment so that benevolence is not particular to the “children of thy people,” as it was stated in Leviticus: this love should ex- tend outside of one’s own “family” or people. What makes the Samaritan so good, from a Christian perspective, is that he appears to have no racial or fa- milial kinship to the fallen man but extends his benevolence nevertheless; the Levite, however, continues on his way.

This shift from a genealogically restrictive conception of social responsi- bility, characteristic of ancient Hebrew Scripture, to a universalizing notion of “brotherly love,” characteristic of radical Christianity, is central to Christian- ity’s self-differentiation from its Jewish roots. Throughout the modern age Christians have demonized Jews as proponents of social isolationism and blood-based racial particularism. Of course Jewish ethics are much more gen- erous than this model would suppose: Jewish particularism, and the concept of
ahavat Yisrael
, love for the Jew, are counterbalanced by universalist precepts regarding
darkei shalom
, the ways of peace, that prompt good Jews to extend assistance and compassion to those outside the tribe.
31
Yet it was common during Dickens’s time (as in our own time) for non-Jews to use claims of ex- aggerated Jewish particularism as a basis for antisemitic social policy. Jews

were routinely considered a threat to English security because of their intense loyalty to one another and their presumed propensity to value the family laws of Judaism over the national laws of England. “The English Jews, we are told, are not Englishmen. They are a separate people, living locally in this island, but living morally and politically in communion with their brethren.”
32
As a Parliamentary reporter, Dickens was probably present during the numerous debates surrounding various bills that would have extended the franchise, and therefore full citizenship, to English Jews. Throughout the early 1830s oppo- nents to such bills followed the lead of Sir Robert Inglis, who repeatedly ex- pressed the sentiment “that a Jew could never be made an Englishman, even though he be born here. So long as he looked forward to another kingdom, his sympathies would be given more to a Jew in Paris and in Warsaw, than to a person residing in the same or in the next country to him.”
33

Even the comparatively sympathetic ethnographer Beatrice Webb would later argue, in her study of the “Jewish Community” in England, that “the su- perior mental equipment of the Jew” has perennially been directed “into low channels of parasitic activity, undermining the morality and well-being of their Christian fellow-subjects.” The eastern European Jews who “swarmed” west- ward during the nineteenth century bore with them “a capacity for the silent evasions of the law, a faculty for secretive and illicit dealing, and mingled feel- ings of contempt and fear for the Christians amongst whom they have dwelt and under whose government they have lived.”
34
Beyond the (familial) law cat- alogued in the Talmud, “the pious Israelite recognizes no obligations; the laws and customs of the Christians are so many regulations to be obeyed, evaded, set at naught, or used according to the possibilities and expediencies of the hour” (580), and if there are many Jews in the East End who abide by English law, Webb argues that it is because “the Jew is quick to perceive that ‘law and order’ and the ‘sanctity of contract’ are the
sine qua non
of a full and free com- petition in the open market. . . . In short, the foreign Jew totally ignores all so- cial obligations other than keeping the law of the land, the maintenance of his own family, and the charitable relief of co-religionists” (589).

But is it not the case that Jewish particularism is analogous to Victorians’ championing of private family values? Both Christianity and bourgeois- capitalist individualism deny the importance of genealogical determination of identity and social cohesion, whereas it is Judaism that champions these val- ues. As Webb herself noted, “The moral precepts of Judaism are centred in the perfection of family life, in obedience towards parents, in self-devotion for children, in the chastity of the girl, in the support and protection of the wife” (587). Family values are
Jewish
social values; yet the Jews were feared and hated for establishing the same type of familial cohesion that was the pride of

Christian family values.
35
Paradoxical though it may sound, the same logic indicates that radical Christianity is inherently contradictory to blood family values. When Jesus was approached by his mother and brothers at a public rally, he said, “‘Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?’ And stretching his hand toward his disciples he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers’” (Matthew 12:48–49). Again: “If any man comes to me without hating his fa- ther, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, yes and his own life too, he can- not be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). Christian family values, as commonly un- derstood, are oxymoronic.

In contrast to Webb’s characterization of Jewish community, we find that Fagin’s gang, a “family” made up of members unconnected by blood kinship, corresponds
not
to a model of racial particularism but to a more
Christian
model of metaphorical kinship alliance. To the contrary, it is the highly pri- vate
Christian
family in
Oliver Twist
that privileges familial ties over English law. In one of the novel’s early scenes, the Artful Dodger and his comrade Charley Bates comment on Bill Sikes’s faithful dog: “Won’t he growl at all, when he heard a fiddle playing!” says the Dodger. “And don’t he hate other dogs as ain’t of his breed!” “He’s an out-and-out Christian,” said Charley.”
36
“This was merely intended as a tribute to the animal’s abilities,” the narrator tells us, “but it was an appropriate remark in another sense . . . for there are a good many ladies and gentlemen, claiming to be out-and-out Christians, be- tween whom, and Mr. Sikes’ dog, there exist strong and singular points of re- semblance” (181–82). Dickens does not intend this resemblance to extend to the novel’s model Christian characters, but this is precisely what happens and what must happen, given the fundamental contradiction between Christian universalism and Victorian family values.

The kindness of Mr. Brownlow and Rose Maylie to Oliver appeared to have been the model of disinterested Christian compassion, yet in a final un- likely plot twist we and they discover that they are not metaphorical but
actu- al
members of the “Twist” family. Mr. Brownlow seems to have suspected something of the sort from his very first meeting with the boy: “‘There is something in that boy’s face,’ said the old gentleman to himself . . . ‘something that touches and interests me. . . . God bless my soul! Where have I seen some- thing like that look before?” (119). And what is this “something”? Brownlow was once engaged to the sister of Edwin Leeford, a friend who gave Brownlow a portrait of his common-law wife. Eventually it is disclosed that Leeford was Oliver’s father, making Brownlow Oliver’s virtual uncle. The novel’s other Good Samaritan, Rose Maylie, it turns out, is the long-lost sister of Oliver’s mother. Upon discovering this, Oliver embraces Rose and cries, “‘I’ll never call her aunt—sister, my own dear sister, that
something
taught my heart to love so