Anti-Semitism, Misogyny, and the Logic of Cultural Difference: Cesare Lombroso and Matilde Serao. - book reviews

Judaism, Spring, 1997 by Richard L. Stein

Reviewed by RICHARD L. STEIN

On the ninth of September, 1837, following her first official visit to the City of London, the newly crowned Queen Victoria prepared a long diary entry about the responses of her subjects. Their warmth was extraordinary, so much so that the young Queen seems genuinely surprised: "I cannot say how gratified, and how touched I am by the very brilliant, affectionate, cordial, enthusiastic and unanimous reception I met with in this the greatest Metropolis in the World; there was not a discontented look, not a sign of displeasure - all loyalty, affection and loud greeting from the immense multitude I passed through; and no disorder whatsoever."

Victoria may have anticipated a cooler reception, even some hostility. Perhaps she assumed that there had to be varied emotions in a crowd of varied urban types. If so, that might help explain why her account lingers over one of the urbanites who helped form the touching unanimity of the occasion. When she mentions that she knighted the Sheriffs of London, she adds that the group included "Mr. Montefiore, a Jew, an excellent man; and I was very glad that I was the first to do what I think quite right, as it should be."

The incident tells us less about the Queen's own fair-mindedness (or philo-Semitism)(1) than it does about a wider cultural logic. We might call it a logic of inclusion, although its very operation reminds us of exclusions that did and might still take place. In identifying Montefiore as "a Jew, an excellent man," Victoria acknowledges the need for sufficient justification "to do what I think quite right." Other Jews might raise other questions, pose other problems. She is pleased, in other words, not simply to bestow the first knighthood on a Jewish Sheriff but to be able to do so, to encounter a situation that is so much "as it should be" that she can behave high-mindedly in response. As does the unanimity of the London crowd, Montefiore's superb credentials make possible an almost storybook resolution of a potential embarrassment. And both elements of the visit are worthy of note because they help clarify a fundamental social category: the people. To understand who "the English" are, even to understand the role of their Queen, it was necessary in 1837 to take account of Jews.

Victoria recorded these remarks in the publication year of Oliver Twist, a novel in which the mysterious, unredeemable figure of Fagin - the archvillain Dickens repeatedly identifies simply as "the Jew" - stands for everything the hero and his proper social milieu are not and must not become. It is no accident that such a character appears in an urban novel, or that Victoria's memory of a more venerable Jew blends with her experience of London crowds. Urbanization made questions of identity more urgent, more vexing, and linked them to questions of what the Victorians (and some post-Victorians in our own culture) called race. For Dickens and Victoria (like many of their contemporaries and some of ours), the Jew becomes an essential figure for answering or even formulating such questions. In a century increasingly preoccupied with problems of human similarity and difference, Jews - real people and creatures of fantasy like Fagin - offer a way to mark the division between outsiders and insiders, the exceptions (or potential exceptions) who make it possible to define everyone else in terms of a nile. "Them" when someone wants to speak of "Us," they are, to alter a phrase introduced thirty years ago by Steven Marcus, The Othered Victorians.

Much of this may seem self evident, but it is worth recalling why such concerns should be so timely now. In his influential book of 1966, Marcus was exploring what one notorious nineteenth-century autobiography called the "secret life" of Victorian England, a Freudian "sexuality" named in the book's subtitle but apparently so self-evident that it never needed to be defined in the text. Ten years later, Foucault's History of Sexuality (first translated into English in 1978) radically challenged this notion of sexuality and the "repressive hypothesis" central to it, questioning the complacency with which "We Other Victorians" (the title of his Preface) distance ourselves from the alleged hypocrisy of the last century. Foucault not only inverted Freud's concept of repression, he restored "sex" as a subject of history and subjectivity as a historical category. Largely because of Foucault's writing, identity has become a matter for social rather than strictly psychological examination, no less a political than a personal category. One result is a new attention to figures previously considered marginal, a new attention to the function of such margins in constituting a center. After Foucault, historians tend to examine the special case to raise larger questions of power, knowledge, and social organization; since deviations articulate norms, the general is sought increasingly in the particular.

It is in the spirit of this new particularism that most of the books under review in this essay turn to what might be called Jewish Cultural Studies, although most do not address Jewish culture in and for itself. Their common subject is the position of Jews in a larger cultural situation, the function of Jewishness in discourse. Their common concerns (visible as one scans the terms in their titles, especially those in quotes) are social "construction" and figuration, "race" as a category of social power, "the logic of cultural difference." Their collective focus is less on real Jews - their collective or personal experience - than Imaginary Jews and a kind of Jewish Imaginary that provide some of the important fictions by which the dominant cultures of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain and America understood and perhaps still understand themselves.