Nadia Valman. The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ISBN-13:9780521863063. Price: US$90.00/£50.00

Nadia Valman’s monograph makes an invaluable contribution to recently launched conversations within and across the fields of Victorian and Anglo-Jewish studies. Intertwining and recombining the perspectives and frameworks of gender theory, new historicism, cultural studies and narrative theory, Valman produces an original approach to a historically informed reading of the figure of the Jewess in nineteenth-century cultural discourse. The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture builds on Bryan Cheyette’s seminal work on semitic discourse and Michael Ragussis’s study of the trope of conversion in British literature and historiography. Adding to their understanding of the interplay of religion and race in British representations of Jews and national identity, Valman’s dazzling new argument elucidates the ambivalent response to the so-called Jewish Question along the axis of gender. Valman examines how a variety of contemporary critiques of Judaism were translated into the literary form of “an ideological, aesthetic and temperamental battle” (7) between the patriarchal and materialistic male Jew and the sympathetic, spiritual Jewess. Valman’s study thus investigates the complex relation between Jewish and women’s identity: in particular, the ways in which Enlightenment and Christian traditions tended to oppose Judaism’s overall archaism to Jewish women’s potential for improvement and redemption. In the early nineteenth century, in the context of debates over political rights for minority denominations, Evangelical millennialists saw the Jewess as the ideal convert and spiritual redeemer of her errant tribe and, by extension, the instrument of broader salvation for the Christian nation. In the 1830s and 1840s, liberal-minded arguments for tolerance and inclusion figured the socially responsible Jewess as a model citizen. In the 1860s and 1870s, with the full socio-economic integration of the Anglo-Jewish bourgeoisie, the specter of cosmopolitan capitalism was projected onto the Jewish man of commerce, while the Jewess became the vessel of eclectic culture or patriotic awakening. Finally, in late-Victorian and Edwardian fiction, feminist liberalism invoked racial science to account for the degeneration of the patriarchal Jewish man while positing the emancipated Jewess as biological and cultural regenerative force. Such gendered ambivalence toward Jews and Judaism was, Valman points out, built into British theological, philosophical, political, and scientific discourses in the nineteenth century. Yet, the rhetorical appeal of the Jewess in fictional texts hinged on readers’ existing identifications with the Evangelical conversion novel. Tormented suffering owing to a conflict of allegiances purified the Jewess into “an ideal version of the Christian, the patriot or the artist” (211). Thus, the passionate Jewess undergirded religious narratives and their secular variants: confirming the triumph of Christianity in conversionist prose, or embodying the spirit of Jewish collectivity in Anglo-Jewish revisionist texts, modeling affective national bonding, or resisting religious bigotry and economic instrumentality through aesthetic sensitivity. Whereas virtuous suffering valorized the feminine Jewess, her masculine counterpart was castigated for his religious oppression and economic exploitation. The first chapter examines unresolved contradictions in the Enlightenment narrative of religious tolerance in which reason and the secular state should join forces to fight superstition and prejudice. In illuminating readings of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) and Anthony Trollope’s Nina Balatka (1867), Valman exposes how the political failure of national inclusion was mirrored in historical romances in which the Jewess’ “repellent beauty” constitutes the limit case for liberal tolerance. Rather than entering into the allegorical marriage union as an emblem of political reconciliation, the Jewess is sacrificed into the romance of women’s friendship, thus neutralizing her disruptive sexual, racial, and religious features. The second chapter turns to the genre influence of Evangelical women’s conversionist narratives. Written between the 1820s and 1840s, these writings figure the Jewish woman’s conversion experience as a traumatic rebirth from oppression in …