British and Romantic Victorian Cultures

The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture, by Nadia Valman; pp. xiii + 270. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 48.00 [pounds sterling], $91.00.

Nadia Valman's superb book on the "Jewess" in nineteenth-century literary culture demonstrates the virtues of thinking about the textual representation of marginal groups in ways that are complex and variegated rather than monolithic. Valman uses the complicating variable of gender to discuss the image of the Jew in Romantic and (mainly) Victorian fictions, some authored by non Jews and some by Jews, thereby arriving at a new way of understanding both philo- and anti-Semitic discourse that complements the impressive work in this area by scholars like Bryan Cheyette, Jonathan Freedman, and especially Michael Ragussis. Valman's argument, briefly stated, is that British writers regarded Jews with "desire and pity" as well as "fear and loathing" and that the splitting of Jew into masculine and feminine types enabled them to express ambivalent and even contradictory sentiments, to revile but also redeem the Jew.