Antisemitism and Philosemitism: Jews in Dickens's Novels

Dickens's unsuccessful struggle to represent Jewish characters without falling into stereotypes illustrates the difficulty authors face when attempting to write across difference.

Twenty-first century readers are shocked at the casual antisemitism that leaps off the pages of Victorian novels. It’s a disturbing reminder that these novels were written in a society in which Jews were regarded as an alien race – and that the authors were not immune from the influence of that society even when they criticized it.

Today I’ll begin a three-post series discussing the portrayal of Jews in Dickens, Trollope, and Eliot, starting with Dickens. (Posts on the other authors will follow, but there will be gaps for other topics before I return to this subject.) My objective is not to accuse, excuse, or praise any of these writers, as some of the critical literature does. Rather, it is to explore the difficulty each of them encounters when attempting to portray Jews in a sympathetic or positive light. Even ostensibly supportive descriptions of Jewish characters unwittingly incorporate some of the antisemitic stereotypes that were ubiquitous in English society in the mid-19^th century.

Marcus Stone, The Bird of Prey (1864), an illustration from Dickens’s novel Our Mutual Friend, discussed below. In this illustration, Lizzie Hexam is rowing for her father, who is on the lookout for items of value he can pull from the river. The Hexams are mudlarks, among the very poorest of the poor. Lizzie has her head averted because she knows that they are towing a corpse. Not related to the Jewish character discussed below, but a wonderful illustration … | All illustrations in this post are taken from the Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery, available here.

Social and Legal Context

The legal status of Jews in England at the time was constituted by a network of prohibitions and disabilities – some of which were eliminated during the 19^th century – that constrained the opportunities for Jews in public and private life. Jews were expelled from England in 1290 and began to return only in the mid-17^th century. In the 19^th century, many of the legal disabilities surrounding the Jews arose because of the unclear legal status of the returnees and their families. Many English politicians advocated for “desirable” Jews to be given full privileges of citizenship, but there were fears about the economic, social, and religious consequences of admitting a larger group. In fact, some of the concerns are echoed in our immigration debates today.

Even aside from the citizenship question, social advancement for Jews was limited, because many important positions required taking Anglican communion or swearing oaths on an Anglican holy sacrament. There isn’t space here for the full story of how and when the restrictions and disabilities ended, but I recommend Lionel Gossman’s history From Expulsion to Emancipation: Jews in England 1290-1858, available here.

Fagin, Dickens’s Great Jewish Villain

Now for Dickens. While references to Jews occur throughout Dickens’s work, the two novels with explicitly Jewish major characters are Oliver Twist (1838) and Our Mutual Friend (1865). Because the latter contains a sympathetic portrayal of the Jewish character, it is my major focus – but to understand the significance of that portrayal, it’s necessary to consider an earlier Jewish character, Fagin, the villain in Oliver Twist, as well as events in Dickens’s personal life.

Oliver Twist is an orphan, raised in a workhouse. (Workhouses were institutions established under the 1834 Poor Law to house poor people and force them to work.) At nine, Oliver runs away. As he walks along the road, he meets the Artful Dodger, one of Fagin’s young associates, who brings him to the lodgings in which Fagin lives with his crew of pickpockets and thieves. Fagin is the spider at the center of a web of London criminality.

Dickens refers to Fagin continually as “the Jew.” Even in a revised edition of Oliver Twist, from which Dickens removed some of these references, there are well over 300 instances of that epithet. In fact, the text contains almost exactly as many instances of “the Jew” as it does of “Fagin,” the actual name of the character. Fagin’s Jewishness is not incidental; it is the core of his identity.

The narrator describes Fagin as “a very old shrivelled Jew, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair.”¹ (Red hair was regarded negatively in Victorian England.) Elsewhere, he is described as bearing “an expression of villainy perfectly demoniacal.”² He is a fence, hoarding stolen goods in a lockbox, and a miser who exults over his ill-gotten hoardings in private. Toward the end of the novel, when his troubles begin to mount, the narrator describes him as looking

less like a man, than like some hideous phantom, moist from the grave, and worried by an evil spirit. … [A]s, absorbed in thought, he bit his long black nails, he disclosed among his toothless gums a few such fangs as should have been a dog’s or rat’s.³

Fagin’s power comes from his knowledge and his consequent ability to extort obedience. He has information sufficient to hang his associates, as he makes clear with an implicit threat to the ruffian Bill Sikes: “[I]f the game was up with us … it would come out rather worse for you than it would for me, my dear.” And he muses to himself, as he looks at objects stolen by other associates, since hanged: “What a fine thing capital punishment is! Dead men never repent; dead men never bring awkward stories to light…. Five of ’em strung up in a row, and none left to play booty, or turn white-livered!” Fagin turns the cowardly sneak Noah Claypole to his service by threatening hanging for what he knows Noah has done; and he threatens Oliver with hanging if he fails to comply with orders.⁴

Dickens worked with his illustrator, George Cruikshank, to ensure that scenes and characters from the novel were represented consistently with his narrative intention. The depiction of Fagin is a catalog of Jewish stereotypes:

Details of two illustrations by George Cruikshank for Oliver Twist (both 1837).

From One Extreme to Another

Now for the personal history aspect of the Dickens story. In 1860, Dickens sold his London house to a banker, James P. Davis, whom he labeled “the Jew Money-Lender” in private correspondence (although he became more respectful once payment was duly made). Some years thereafter, the banker’s wife, Eliza Davis, wrote to Dickens, arguing that the portrayal of Fagin in Oliver Twist amounted to a “great wrong” against the Jews. Dickens responded, pugnaciously, that Jews who considered the portrayal of Fagin a “great wrong” were “a far less sensible, a far less just, and a far less good-tempered people than I have always supposed them to be.” He justified the stereotypical treatment of Fagin on the ground that the stereotypes were true; as he responded to Mrs. Davis, “that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew.”⁵

Nonetheless, Dickens’s next major Jewish character, Mr. Riah in Our Mutual Friend, comes across as an effort to make amends for the slur-ridden portrayal of Fagin. But Dickens overshoots the mark, veering into a philosemitism that exaggerates Riah’s Jewishness but diminishes his humanness; the character is otherworldly.

The reader’s first encounter with Riah occurs when the non-Jewish moneylender Fledgeby comes to see Riah at the establishment that Fledgeby owns, but that Riah runs and fronts for him. In answer to Fledgeby’s knock, “a human nose appeared in the dark doorway.”⁶ The emphasis on Riah’s nose recalls the depiction of Fagin.

But once Riah emerges, he is described as

an old Jewish man in an ancient coat, long of skirt, and wide of pocket. A venerable man, bald and shining at the top of his head, and with long grey hair flowing down at its sides and mingling with his beard. A man who with a graceful Eastern action of homage bent his head, and stretched out his hands with the palms downward, as if to deprecate the wrath of a superior.⁷

He also wears a “rusty large-brimmed low-crowned hat, as long out of date as his coat” and carries a staff. The narrator describes Riah as “like the ghost of a departed Time.”⁸ The original illustrations of Our Mutual Friend depict Riah as a kind of antidote to the depiction of Fagin in the illustrations of Oliver Twist; Jewish, but patriarchal, philosophical, and kind instead of grasping and repulsive:

Marcus Stone, illustration for ch. 8 of Book the Fourth of Our Mutual Friend (1865), detail.

Riah’s patriarchal appearance is matched by his behavior. He respectfully addresses Lizzie Hexam, one of the female protagonists, as “My daughter.” (She is the woman featured in the first picture in this post and is not his actual daughter; he uses that term almost as an honorific.) When she is distressed, he helps her in a scene that calls to mind the parable of the Good Samaritan (creating a mash-up of Old and New Testament references, since Riah is straight out of the Old Testament). Another character refers to him as her “fairy godmother.” Despite being on the receiving end of many vile, antisemitic slurs, Riah is unfailingly courteous and deferential.⁹

Fledgeby’s business benefits from the fact that Riah, his front, looks stereotypically Jewish. Fledgeby reflects that “to relinquish an inch of [Riah’s] baldness, an inch of his grey hair, an inch of his coat-skirt, an inch of his hat-brim, an inch of his walking-staff, would be to relinquish hundreds of pounds.”¹⁰

Riah likewise observes that when he is transacting business on Fledgeby’s behalf, the fact that he is a Jew causes borrowers not to believe him when he says that he must consult his principal before deciding whether to extend a loan. Ultimately, the ready belief in Riah as the merciless Jewish moneylender causes him to renounce his position as Fledgeby’s front. He explains,

“I was doing dishonour to my ancient faith and race. I reflected—clearly reflected for the first time—that in bending my neck to the yoke I was willing to wear, I bent the unwilling necks of the whole Jewish people…. Men find the bad among us easily enough—among what peoples are the bad not easily found?—but they take the worst of us as samples of the best; they take the lowest of us as presentations of the highest; and they say ‘All Jews are alike.’ … [Acting for Fledgeby] as a Jew, I could not choose but compromise the Jews of all conditions and all countries. It is a little hard upon us, but it is the truth.”¹¹

In contrast to Oliver Twist, where Dickens refers to Fagin as often by the epithet “the Jew” as by his name, the word “Jew” appears only about a third as often as Riah’s name in Our Mutual Friend. Even though Dickens does not simply refer to Riah by an epithet, Riah is still a walking, talking symbol of the Good Jew, a symbol that can be understood as an atonement for Fagin. Unlike Fagin, however, Riah has no complexity as a character – no fears, aspirations, dislikes, appetites, or flaws. He is exoticized – note the reference above to the “graceful Eastern action of homage” – to the point where he is scarcely recognizable as a real human being. And his physical appearance is as important to the story as his personality, which is almost angelically deferential, kind, and wise – too good to be true.

Writing Across Difference

However repulsive Fagin is, he is a complex character, funny, fearful, and clever. Riah is far less plausible because his otherworldly Good-Jewishness always seems to outweigh anything else about him. Dickens emphasizes Riah’s otherness by making him lack the flaws that so compellingly characterize most of Dickens’s characters, even minor ones.

This is not intended as a criticism of Dickens – it’s pointless to criticize a great writer who has been dead for more than a century and a half and who lived at a time so different from ours. But it is an illustration of the enormous difficulty involved in writing a sympathetic portrayal of a person or group not well known or understood by the writer.

Appendix of Novels Discussed Above

Oliver Twist is Dickens’s second novel, and it is excellent. Dickens interweaves the story of the orphaned Oliver with a thoroughgoing critique of the Poor Laws that led to the workhouses in which Oliver begins his childhood. I posted a picture of a cartoon criticizing the Poor Laws at the bottom of this post, which also contains a description of Oliver Twist. The cartoon is very worth review, because it’s a catalog of the indignities imposed by the Poor Laws. I’m not reposting it here because then this post will not fit into people’s email boxes.

Our Mutual Friend is Dickens’s last completed novel, also excellent and very dark. It features two of Dickens’s most complex female characters: Lizzie Hexam, discussed briefly above, and Bella Wilfer, a young woman who is far less compliant than a typical Dickens heroine. It involves murder, concealed identity, treasure hunting, and an unforgettable minor character whose profession is taxidermy and the articulation of skeletons, both human and animal. I’ll end (except for footnotes) with this illustration of Lizzie Hexam leaping into a boat to rescue a man who has just been beaten and thrown into the river. Dickens writes, “Another moment, and she had cast off …, and the boat had shot out into the moonlight, and she was rowing down the stream as never other woman rowed on English water.“¹²

Harry Furniss, illustration for Our Mutual Friend, Book the Fourth, ch. 6 (1910).

1. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1838), ch. 8.

2. Id. ch. 19.

3. Id. ch. 47.

4. Id. ch. 13; ch. 9.

5. Facts and quotations in this paragraph are from Harry Stone, “Dickens and the Jews,” in Victorian Studies Vol. 2 (1959), pp. 223-253. This paper contains a comprehensive analysis of Dickens’s writing about Jews, as well as information about his transaction with the Davises and about the various antisemitic articles he published in his various periodicals. Stone argues that by the time Our Mutual Friend was published, Dickens was “urging forward the Victorian advance toward toleration” (p. 253), which strikes me as an overstatement.

6. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1865), Book the Second, ch. 5. Below, I will use Roman numerals to refer to the book (Book the First, Book the Second, etc.) and Arabic numerals to refer to the chapter.

7. Id.

8. Id. Book II, chs. 5 & 15.

9. Id. Book II, ch. 15; Book III, chs. 1 & 2; Book IV, ch. 16.

10. Id. Book II, ch. 5.

11. Id. Book IV, ch. 9.

12. Id. Book IV, ch. 6.