Writing the "Other": Jews in Trollope's Novels
Anthony Trollope's failure to represent Jewish characters without falling into stereotypes illustrates the difficulty of writing across difference.
This post is the second in a series on antisemitism in Victorian novels. (The first post, on Dickens, is here.) Today’s author: Anthony Trollope.
The Legal Backdrop
As discussed in the earlier post, the legal status of Jews in England during Trollope’s career as a novelist was circumscribed by a network of prohibitions and disabilities that limited the role of Jews in public and private life. These legal disabilities resulted in part from the fact that Jews had been expelled from England in the 13th century and had begun to return only in the mid-17th century, with unclear legal status as immigrants.
Because of the association of Jews with foreignness, many of Trollope’s characters whose family origins are unknown are thought to be Jews whether they are or not (e.g., the swindling financier Augustus Melmotte in The Way We Live Now, who is never definitively identified as Jew or gentile; Ferdinand Lopez in The Prime Minister, who is described as “a friendless Portuguese,—a probable Jew,—about whom nobody knew anything”; the Anglican clergyman Mr. Emilius of the Palliser novels, later revealed to be a murderer, who is “supposed” to be “a renegade Jew”). In Trollope’s novels, Jews identified as such are typically minor characters who are in the stereotype-reinforcing profession of moneylending. But Trollope did write some novels that prominently feature Jewish characters. One of these is Nina Balatka (1866); another, The Way We Live Now (1875).
Nina Balatka: Love and Suspicion
[Warning: spoilers about this novel follow]. The opening sentence of Nina Balatka tells us that its heroine “was a maiden of Prague, born of Christian parents, and herself a Christian — but she loved a Jew; and this is her story.” Anton Trendellsohn, Nina’s fiancé, is described in racial stereotypes; he is
a very Jew among Jews. He was certainly a handsome man, … and his face was full of intellect…. No white man could be more dark and swarthy than Anton Trendellsohn. His eyes, however, which were quite black, were very bright. His jet-black hair, as it clustered round his ears, had in it something of a curl…. Anton Trendellsohn was decidedly a handsome man; but his eyes were somewhat too close together in his face, and the bridge of his aquiline nose was not sharply cut, as is mostly the case with such a nose on a Christian face. The olive oval face was without doubt the face of a Jew, and the mouth was greedy, and … the movement of the man's body was the movement of a Jew.1
At the outset, the relationship between Nina and Anton is close and loving. Anton’s family owns the house that Nina and her father live in, but the Trendellsohns are aware of the Balatkas’ poverty and do not ask for rent; the narrator archly describes this as “Christian forbearance.” Anton is willing to relieve Nina and her father in other ways, but Nina will not hear of it. Anton attests to his love for Nina in rebuffing his father’s efforts to dissuade him from marrying her:
[A]s truly as I worship God, I love her better than all the world beside. She is to me my cup of water when I am hot and athirst, my morsel of bread when I am faint with hunger. Her voice is the only music which I love….No. father; she shall not be taken from me. I love her, and I will keep her.2
But Nina’s relatives, virulent antisemites who oppose the marriage, have wrongfully retained in safekeeping certain title deeds that Anton’s family owns. In an effort to separate Nina from Anton, they convince Anton that Nina herself has concealed them. They plant the documents among her papers so that Anton sees them when he comes to her house and believes that she has been untrue to him. As the narrator remarks, “The Jew was by nature suspicious, though he was also generous.”3
Nina is crushed by her realization that Anton suspects her, and by the death of her father, which occurs only hours after Anton’s visit to the house. Bereaved and forsaken, she climbs the parapet of the Stone Bridge over the Moldau (Vltava) river after sending a letter to Anton: “My father is dead, and the house will be empty to-morrow. You may come and take your property without fear that you will be troubled by NINA BALATKA.”4
The story does not end in the river, though. Anton learns that he has been deceived. Nina is rescued from her suicide attempt by “Rebecca Loth the Jewess,” who happens to glimpse Nina in the darkness as she crouches on the parapet. The narrator, exoticizing Rebecca, describes her as
dark, with large dark-blue eyes and jet black tresses, which spoke out loud to the beholder of their own loveliness…. And she stood like a queen, who knew herself to be all a queen, strong on her limbs, wanting no support, somewhat hard withal, with a repellant beauty that seemed to disdain while it courted admiration, and utterly rejected the idea of that caressing assistance which men always love to give, and which women often love to receive.5
After the climactic scene on the bridge, Rebecca takes Nina in, providing shelter, clothing, and food for Nina until she and Anton can be married. And Rebecca does all this despite the fact that she also is in love with Anton and had hoped to marry him. Thus the two major Jewish characters are afflicted with an implausibility in Trollope’s narrative: they are “dark,” “greedy,” “strong,” “repellant,” and “suspicious,” yet also, at times, startlingly generous.
The Way We Live Now: Is there Anyone Honest in 1870s London?
In The Way We Live Now (1875), Trollope’s great satirical broadside against commerce and speculation, he portrays the novel’s principal Jewish character, Mr. Ezekiel Brehgert, as honorable – perhaps the only honest man of business in London. Although Breghert’s character, actions, and language are unfailingly gentlemanly, the narrator describes him as a very unappealing “other”:
He was a fat, greasy man, good-looking in a certain degree, about fifty, with hair dyed black, and beard and moustache dyed a dark purple colour. The charm of his face consisted in a pair of very bright black eyes, which were, however, set too near together in his face for the general delight of Christians. He was stout;—fat all over rather than corpulent,—and had that look of command in his face which has become common to master-butchers, probably by long intercourse with sheep and oxen. But Mr. Brehgert was considered to be a very good man of business ….6
The other major Jewish character is “Samuel Cohenlupe, Esq., Member of Parliament for Staines, a gentleman of the Jewish persuasion.” Cohenlupe is the right-hand man of the swindling financier Augustus Melmotte. The very name “Cohenlupe” is a combination of a Jewish surname (“Cohen”) with a syllable (“lupe”) that suggests the Latin word for wolf (“lupus”). And the bearer of that name lives up to its suggestion. As Melmotte’s speculative schemes begin to fall apart, Cohenlupe meditates “his own escape from the dangerous shores of England” and considers “what happy country still was left in which an order from the British police would have no power to interfere with the comfort of a retired gentleman such as himself.” Near the end of the novel, Mr. Cohenlupe absconds with large sums of money.7
Trollope Turns a Satirical Eye on the Antisemites
Complicating the picture of Trollope as an antisemite is the fact that his narrator sinks the rapier of his irony deep into the flabby, self-satisfied prejudice of the most antisemitic characters. In The Way We Live Now, for example, Georgiana Longstaffe, a not-so-young woman of good family, engages herself to marry Mr. Brehgert, the man the narrator compared to a master-butcher. Georgiana contracts this engagement, which she feels is beneath her, in desperation: she has been “out” in the marriage market for several years without success, and Mr. Brehgert is at least affluent.
Georgiana’s decision to affiance herself to Mr. Brehgert brings some ugly sentiments to the surface. Prominent among those who show their true colors are Georgiana’s “friends,” Sir Damask and Lady Monogram – whose names are in themselves a little barb directed at their self-importance. Although Georgiana is staying with the Monograms, Lady Monogram refuses to allow Brehgert to visit Georgiana at the Monogram house. Lady Monogram explains, “There's the butcher round the corner in Bond Street, or the man who comes to do my hair. I don't at all think of asking them to my house…. Mr. Brehgert at present to me is like the butcher round the corner.”8 Notably, however, Sir Damask Monogram is himself the grandson of a butcher.
But Lady Monogram is nothing compared to Georgiana’s father, who declares, “[Y]ou shall not marry him as my daughter. You shall be turned out of my house, and I will never have your name pronounced in my presence again. It is disgusting,—degrading,—disgraceful!” The narrator also recounts the thoughts of Georgiana’s mother with some amusing irony:
If Georgiana chose to marry a Jew tradesman she could not help it. But such an occurrence in the family would, she felt, be to her as though the end of all things had come. She could never again hold up her head, never go into society, never take pleasure in her powdered footmen.
As she sniffs to Georgiana, “And it's only since those nasty Radicals came up that they [Jews] have been able to sit in Parliament.”9
In Nina Balatka, the antisemites are not so much hypocrites as villains. Nina’s cruel aunt Madame Zamenoy
could still hate a Jew as intensely as Jews ever were hated in those earlier days in which hatred could satisfy itself with persecution. In her time but little power was left to Madame Zamenoy to persecute the Trendellsohns other than that which nature had given to her in the bitterness of her tongue. She could revile them behind their back, or, if opportunity offered, to their faces; and both she had done often ….10
And the book provides examples: the aunt refers to Anton as “a filthy Jew” and the prospective marriage of Anton and Nina as “terrible, horrible, abominable, and damnable.” But the narrator describes the antisemitic Zamenoys as slatternly, with clothing that “should have been in the washing-tub much oftener” and with a house that is “not so clean”; the Zamenoys provide no help to Nina and her father although they are rich and Nina and her father are terribly poor, while the Jews provide help; and the Zamenoys are liars and schemers.11
Antisemitism or Philosemitism: Always Otherness
As with Dickens, Trollope’s Jewish characters sometimes cross the line into otherworldly goodness. Mr. Brehgert’s behavior and language mark him as the most upright, worthy character in The Way We Live Now. Rebecca Loth’s generosity in rescuing, housing, feeding, and clothing Nina verges on the angelic.
Trollope was an outsider throughout his childhood and early adulthood due to the impoverishment of his family and the absence of any guidance or mentorship as he launched himself into a career as a civil servant in London. By the time he wrote these novels, though, he was a successful writer who was accepted in gentlemanly circles. As someone who was happy to be a pillar of society rather than a critic of it, Trollope reflected and to some extent amplified prevailing social prejudices.
Unlike Dickens, Trollope appears not to have encountered criticism for antisemitism. Thus, he seems not to have wrestled with his own prejudices to the extent that Dickens did, although he wound up in a similar place: veering between antisemitism and philosemitism, sometimes even in his treatment of a single character, particularly Rebecca Loth. I’ll end here with what I said when discussing Dickens’s antisemitism: 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. Trollope’s failure to create Jewish characters who are not “other” illustrates the difficulty involved in realistically portraying a person or group not well known to or understood by the writer. It is also a caution to those of us who think we are free of prejudgment and believe that we see others as they truly are.12
Appendix of Novels Discussed Above
I have described much of the plot of Nina Balatka above. Trollope originally published this novel under a pseudonym. Its European setting distinguishes it from most of his novels, which focus closely on English customs and manners. In an English novel by Trollope, Nina would not have engaged herself to Anton without the permission of her father (or a lot of handwringing). It is notable that Trollope does not highlight that Nina’s Christianity is Catholicism; in his English novels, Catholics come across as the “other” in comparison with the Anglicans. Trollope’s treatment of his putative hero, Anton, mars the novel; it is difficult to believe that Anton could be both so loving and so suspicious, and at times his title-deeds seem to matter more to him than the woman whom he describes as “my cup of water when I am hot and athirst, my morsel of bread when I am faint with hunger.“
The Way We Live Now is a thoroughgoing satire of the greed and speculation that Trollope observed in London in the 1870s. It also illuminates the decline of landed interests in the wake of the new commercialism. It has many characters and subplots, including several featuring American characters. Lady Carbury, an English widow who writes to support her family although she is not particularly talented, is sometimes thought to have been inspired by Trollope’s own mother, who supported the Trollope family on the proceeds of her prolific writing.
Anthony Trollope, Nina Balatka (1866), ch. 1.
Id. chs. 1 & 6.
Id. ch. 6.
Id. ch. 14.
Id. ch. 7.
Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (1875), ch. 60.
Id. chs. 9 & 69.
Id. ch. 60.
Id. ch. 78. See See https://yalebooks.yale.edu/2017/07/05/disraeli-de-rothschild-and-the-struggle-to-admit-jews-to-parliament/.
Nina Balatka, ch. 1.
Id. chs. 5 &2.
See Paul Delaney, “Land, Money, and the Jews in the Later Trollope,” in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 32 (1992), pp. 765-787. Delaney’s assessment is, on the whole, slightly more indulgent to Trollope than mine is.