Abstract
The British–Jewish writing current during the Romantic era illustrates how British Jews negotiated the problem of modernity, which was quite differently than the Jews in Continental Europe. As explained by historians Todd Endelman, David Katz, and David Ruderman, British Jews accepted and adapted to modernity while at the same time they retained a Jewish identity.1 Whether British Jews wrote in Hebrew, like Mordecai Schnaber Levison, Abraham Tang, and Jacob Hart, or in English, like David Levi, Isaac D’Israeli, Daniel Mendoza, Emma Lyon, Levy Alexander, and Hyman Hurwitz, or both English and Hebrew (Levison and Tang), they allowed themselves to be influenced by British and European currents of thought. Anglophone writers addressed both Jews and Gentiles, and when they defended the Jewish community, they did so forthrightly. In numerous texts by British Jews one finds a recurrent pattern: Jewish difference makes itself fit into already existing generic conventions in much the same way that British Jews became acculturated. Against Christian conversionist pressures, these texts affirm Jewish identity with varying degrees and strategies of defiance. Although Britain had no conventional Haskalah—modernizing Enlightenment movement of cultural renewal and reform led by an intellectual elite—which the German states did indeed have, Britain had a modernizing Jewry nevertheless, as well as reformist writers who tried to play the role of maskil, someone who was critical of traditional beliefs and practices and who adapted Jewish culture to modernity.
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Notes
Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England 1714–1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979; reprint, with a new preface, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999);
David S. Katz, The Jews in the History of England 1485–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994);
and David B. Ruderman, Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry’s Construction of Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
See Todd M. Endelman, “‘A Hebrew to the end’: The Emergence of Disraeli’s Jewishness,” in The Self-Fashioning of Disraeli, 1818–1851, Charles Richmond and Paul Smith, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 106–30. (On Isaac D’Israeli, see “Not for ‘Antiquaries,’ but for ‘Philosophers’: Isaac D’Israeli’s Talmudic Critique and His Talmudical Way with Literature,” Stuart Peterfreund’s contribution to this volume-ed.)
Daniel Mendoza, Memoirs of the Life of Daniel Mendoza, Paul Magriel, ed. (1816; reprint, London and New York: Batsford, 1951), 16; 23–4; passim.
For the public sphere, see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
Arthur Barnett, “Eliakim ben Abraham (Jacob Hart): An Anglo-Jewish Scholar of the Eighteenth Century,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 14 (1935–9): 207–20.
Cecil Roth, “The Haskalah in England,” in Essays Presented to the Chief Rabbi Israel Brodie on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, H. J. Zimmels, J. Rabinowitz, and I. Finestein, ed., 2 vols. (London: Soncino Press, 1967), 1:372–3.
Michael A. Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany, 1749–1824 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967), 115–18.
For the discussions of Levi’s critiques, see Ruderman, chs. 2 and 4; also, Richard H. Popkin, “David Levi, Anglo-Jewish Theologian,” Jewish Quarterly Review 87 (1996): 79–101.
For Mendelssohn’s statement on Judaism and modernity, see his Jerusalem, Or On Religious Power and Judaism, trans. Allan Arkush (Hanover & London: University of New England Press, 1983). The secondary literature on Mendelssohn is voluminous but I will mention the important biography, Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1973). (For a comparison of Mendelssohn’s and Blake’s Jerusalems, see “ ‘What Are Those Golden Builders Doing?’: Mendelssohn, Blake and the (Un)Building of Jerusalem,” Leslie Tannenbaum’s contribution to this collection-ed.)
Todd M. Endelman, “The Englishness of Jewish Modernity in England,” in Jacob Katz, ed., Toward Modernity: The European Jewish Model (New Brunswick and Oxford: Transaction Books, 1987), 229. See also his Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History, 1656–1945 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1990).
For the self-taught tradition of artisan writers, see Jacques Rancière, “The Myth of the Artisan: Critical Reflections on a Category of Social History,” International Labour and Working Class History 24 (1983): 1–12;
Brian Maidment, ed., The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self Taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Carcanet, 1987);
Michael Scrivener, “Shelley and Radical Artisan Poetry,” Keats-Shelley Journal 42 (1993): 22–36;
John Goodridge, ed., The Independent Spirit: John Clare and the Self-Taught Tradition (Tyne and Wear: Peterson Printers, 1994);
Anne F. Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
For Heine and Börne, see Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 148–88.
Charles Duschinsky, The Rabbinate of the Great Synagogue, London, From 1756 to 1842 (1921; reprint, Westmead: Gregg International, 1971), 98–9.
Alfred Rubens, “Portrait of Anglo-Jewry: 1656–1836,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 19 (1955–59): 36–9.
See Todd M. Endelman, “The Chequered Career of ‘Jew’ King: A Study in Anglo-Jewish Social History,” in From East and West: Jews in a Changing Europe, 1750–1870, Frances Malino and David Sorkin, ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 151–81.
Jon Mee, “Apocalypse and Ambivalence: The Politics of Millenarianism in the 1790s,” South Atlantic Quarterly 95 (1996): 671–97; Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
Sheila A. Spector discusses eighteenth-century Hebraism in “Blake as an Eighteenth-Century Hebraist,” in David V. Erdman, ed., Blake and His Bible, Locust Hill Literary Studies No. 1 (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 1990), 179–229. See also the first chapter of Spector’s “Glorious incomprehensible”: The Development of Blake’s Kabbalistic Language (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001),
and David S. Katz’s “The Hutchinsonians and Hebraic Fundamentalism in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Katz and Jonathan I. Israel, ed., Sceptics, Millenarians and Jews, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, vol. 17 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990), 237–55.
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© 2008 Sheila A. Spector
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Scrivener, M. (2008). British-Jewish Writing of the Romantic Era and the Problem of Modernity: The Example of David Levi. In: Spector, S.A. (eds) British Romanticism and the Jews. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05574-3_10
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