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DICKENS'S "JEWISH QUESTION": PARIAH CAPITALISM AND THE WAY OUT Author(s): Deborah Epstein Nord Source: Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 39, No. 1 (2011), pp. 27-45 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41307849 Accessed: 10-12-2018 14:41 UTC

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Victorian Literature and Culture (201 1), 39, 21-^5. © Cambridge University Press 2010. 1060-1503/10 $15.00 doi: 1 0. 1 0 1 7/S 1 060 1 503 1 0000252

DICKENS'S "JEWISH QUESTION": PARIAH CAPITALISM AND THE WAY OUT

By Deborah Epstein Nord

The story - we might almost say legend - of how Dickens came to make the character of Riah in Our Mutual Friend a benign figure and a deliberate revision of Fagin, underworld denizen of Oliver Twist , is well known. In 1 860, an Anglo-Jewish couple, J. P. and Eliza Davis, bought Charles Dickens's London home, Tavistock House. Dickens remarked to his personal secretary, William Wills, that he could not recall any "money-making dealings . . . that have been so satisfactory, considerate, and trusting" (Johnson 487). This expression of relief and slight surprise that the sale of his property to a Jewish family was without complication followed on Dickens's suspicion, crudely expressed earlier in the negotiations, that the "Jew Money-Lender" (as he referred to J. P. Davis) would not come through on the deal (Stone 243). But, though the Davises proved surprisingly cooperative in this phase of the transaction as far as Dickens was concerned, Mrs. Davis did ultimately have a complaint to register with the great writer and delivered it politely in a letter three years later. It was not about the house or the terms of purchase but rather about the character of Fagin, created by Dickens in 1837, some twenty-six years earlier. English Jews, she told him, had taken offense at this portrayal of one of their people and believed Dickens had done them a "great wrong" by offering the greedy, thieving, child-corrupting, sausage-eating criminal as representative of their " scattered nation " (Lane 98). Still, she added, while the author lived he might conceivably "justify himself or atone" for this deed. Apparently contrite and unaware of feeling any of the prejudices his portrait of the London fence might convey, Dickens declared in a letter back to Mrs. Davis that he had only "friendly feelings" for the Jews. His contrition did not end there. For the novel he was then beginning to write, Dickens would create a beneficent Jewish character, Riah, friend to the river dredger's daughter, Lizzie Hexam, and her misshapen companion, the dolls' dressmaker, Jenny Wren. As the late-nineteenth century Anglo-Jewish poet and novelist Amy Levy put it, Dickens "trie[d] to compensate for his having affixed the label 'Jew' to one of his bad fairies by creating the good fairy Riah" (Levy 176).

Although we can indeed see the character of Riah as a form of atonement for Fagin or as an attempt on Dickens's part to rehabilitate the image of the Jew in line with Mrs. Davis's request, it is also the case that both of these characters are integral to the larger philosophical and topical concerns of the texts in which they appear. This may be

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28 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

more obvious for Fagin than for Riah, in large part because Dickens's Jewish fence looms large in Oliver Twist and has an organic connection to its criminal plot and urban setting. As so many have observed, Fagin is a compelling and memorable figure and has had an enduring life outside of literature as an archetypal Jew, second only, perhaps, to that of Shylock. He also serves as an embodiment of economic self-interest, one of the keynote concerns of Oliver Twist. But Riah, too, though a paler and smaller creation than Fagin, grows naturally out of Dickens's preoccupations in Our Mutual Friend , especially his fascination with forms of urban labor and his interest in the possibilities of personal and social transformation, and so cannot be explained only by the character's usefulness in negating or exposing anti-Semitic thinking.

Both of these figures mark Dickens's working out of the connection between "the Jew" and forms of economic life and exchange. He used Fagin and Riah to think generally about different forms of capitalism and the principles of human existence and behavior that underpinned them. It goes almost without saying that, throughout the period in which Dickens's novels appeared, the Jew was understood as the quintessential homo economicus. Even Thomas Macaulay, an early defender of giving Jews full legal and political rights in Britain, grossly exaggerated their economic power, declaring that "The Jew may govern the money market, and the money market may govern the world" (qtd. in Feldman 75). Whether associated with crimes like theft and the fencing of stolen goods in the early decades of the century or merchant banking and stock brokerage in the last, Jews remained the steady objects of economic anti-Semitism.1

How, then, did Dickens manage to get from Fagin to Riah and to purge his urban Jew of the taint of corrupt moneymaking? How did he resolve the matter of economic anti-Semitism that lies at the heart of even the casual prejudice Dickens expressed in his private remarks about doing business with the Davises? Dickens inveighed against the "Jew Money-Lender" to whom he wished to sell his house more than two decades after writing Oliver Twist , just as he was on the verge of composing Our Mutual Friend , a novel in which he tried to separate money-lending and Jewishness and thereby undermine the image of the rapacious Jew. He did so by making Riah only an apparent usurer, the front man for an English one; however, as we shall see, he did so in such a way as to suggest that the two phenomena - Jewishness and economic ruthlessness - could not ultimately be disentangled. Dickens did find his way to the solution of Riah's "Jewish problem," though in the end he proved unable to remove the Jew from an economic matrix or to imagine a virtuous modern Jew outside of Christian paradigms. In this regard, he shared the tendencies of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and, to a lesser extent, Matthew Arnold to see the Jew as incapable of achieving spiritual or moral transcendence while retaining his fundamental Jewishness.

Dickens's secondary - and related - difficulty in making the transition from malevolent to benign Jew lay in the deep cultural and historical associations between Jews and the corruptions and taints of urban life. Whereas Gypsies, those other others, were almost always depicted as rural figures, Jews both rich and poor were understood as emphatically of the city, and of London and its East End in particular (Nord 6-7). And there were good reasons for this. Of the 35,000 Jews living in England and Wales in 1851, 20,000 of them lived in London, and about two thirds of these remained in the eastern part of the City and in districts east of that (Feldman 167). 2 A variety of nineteenth-century writers who produced comprehensive works on London devoted entire chapters or sections to the Jews of the metropolis. When the Frenchwoman Flora Tristan published her Promenades dans Londres

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"Dicken's 'Jewish Questions'" 29

in 1840, she included a chapter on the Jewish quarter (she singled out no other religious or ethnic group in this way). Charles Booth's mammoth, seventeen-volume study, Life and Labour of the People in London , which began publication in 1889, started with a volume on East London. It contained chapters on "The Jewish Community" and "The Tailoring Trade" (a discussion of the sweating system, largely associated with East End Jewish workshops) by Beatrice Potter.

Most notably, Henry Mayhew devoted a chapter of the second volume of his four- volume work London Labour and the London Poor (1861-62) to "The Street-Jews." Here, Mayhew catalogues Jewish occupations - fruit sellers; traders in foreign commodities such as watches, jewels, and sponges; pen and pencil sellers; and, above all, old clothes dealers - and neigh- borhoods - Houndsditch, Aldgate, Whitechapel, the Minories, Bevis-Marks, Clerkenwell (all in the East End). With his anthropological eye for the customs and rituals of different London folk, Mayhew explains kashrut (Jewish dietary laws), the differences between Jewish and Irish boys, Jewish habits of marriage, clothes-sellers' street cries, and the change over fifty years in Jewish garb. Indeed, his account of the labor and social habits of Jewish East Londoners is apparently sufficiently reliable for recent historians of Jews in nineteenth- century Britain to employ it freely and regularly as a source.3 But again and again, in the course of offering acute, convincing, and largely dispassionate observations of Jewish East End life, he comes back to the one trait that defines and provides the common denominator for all Jews: a love of money that surpasses that of any other people in England (198).

Jews make good husbands, fathers, and sons, Mayhew concedes, but their "principal characteristic is their extreme love of money" (201). They possess the "spirit of gambling" and seek trades in which, "as they describe it, 'there's a chance.'" That is, he explains, "they prefer a trade in such commodity as is not subjected to a fixed price, so that there may be abundant scope for speculation , and something like a gambler's chance for profit or loss" (193; emphasis added). Not just greed but a tolerance, even an appetite, for risk is inherent in the Jewish character, whether of the street sellers in the East End or of the stock-brokers,

including a few "wealthy Jew millionaires," living in Regent's Park. Mayhew focuses neither on crime nor on a criminal underworld in his discussion of street-Jews and grants Jews in general a kind of respect for their financial successes and their loyalty to tradition and ritual observance, but he makes clear that their success is due to a taste for moneymaking in its most speculative forms.

The urban Jew was not only associated with speculative investments and hawking his wares, however. He also figured in a nexus of images and types connected with Victorian anxieties about filth and contamination. In densely and newly crowded city streets, middle- class people rubbed shoulders with unknown and unsavory fellow citizens. Epidemic diseases like cholera and typhus spread invisibly and without apparent explanation. Polluted air, streets filled with refuse and all manner of waste, and smells that emanated from gas lamps, rotting food, and excrement all combined to create an unhealthful and, in some areas, repugnant atmosphere. (Dickens was, of course, a master at evoking this atmosphere, as anyone who has read the first two pages of Bleak House will know, yet he sanitizes it as well). Certain occupations and types were deeply connected in middle-class fears and imaginations with the filth, stench, and contagion of the city: ragpickers; workers in refuse dumps; dredgers, or those who searched the river for bodies or bits of metal and lost property to sell; sailors, who could smell of drink, tobacco, garlic, sweat, and tar; prostitutes, who spread venereal disease; the unclean poor generally; and Jews. "Jews," writes Alain Corbin in The Foul

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30 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

and the Fragrant , "also were regarded as filthy individuals. They owed their unpleasant odor, it was said, to their characteristic dirtiness. 'Everywhere these Hebrews gather,' [one commentator] asserted, 'and where they are left to administer their precincts themselves, the stench is singularly perceptible'" (145). Flora Tristan mentions the "powerful stench" emanating from piles of old clothes in London's Jewish quarter (171). Juliet Steyn points out that the association between Jews and a particular smell - the foetor Judaicus - goes all the way back to medieval anti-Semitic rhetoric (48-49). Individually and collectively - and often by process of conflation - these urban figures and tropes represented the dangers of city streets: the prostitute, the sewer, the river, and the Jew often appeared together or interchangeably as emblems of contagion. The overlapping phenomena of rapaciousness, degradation, and urban existence haunted the representation of Jews in literature and culture. In the case of Riah, as we shall see, Dickens struggled to cleanse his own creation of the stain of these intractable associations.

/.

Dickens borrowed from both of these stereotypes - the avaricious and the contaminating urban Jew - in his creation of Fagin. The old man's greed and interest in profit by any means go without saying. Willing to corrupt boys to steal for him and to swallow coins in order to keep them from his thieving colleagues, he hoards treasure and habitually takes out the gold watches and jewels in his possession to gaze upon them fondly, as he would a favored child. He combines the miser's love of lucre with a characteristic indifference to the most

vulnerable of human beings, a pattern that can be reversed, as we know from George Eliot's Silas Marner, by loving a child and relinquishing a devotion to wealth. But Fagin also resides squarely within the miasma and filth of the urban underworld. The first description of him and his lair in the novel features a room "perfectly black with age and dirt," a frying pan filled with cooking sausages, and a "shriveled" old Jew with matted red hair and a "repulsive face," dressed in a "greasy flannel gown" (105).4 Repugnant olfactory and tactile elements complete the visual evocation of the old man and heighten the reader's feelings of revulsion.

The dank, filthy, grimy interior has its outdoor counterpart in the London night that envelops Fagin when he ventures forth:

The mud lay thick upon the stones, and a black mist hung over the streets; the rain fell sluggishly down, and everything felt cold and clammy to the touch. It seemed just the night when it befitted such a being as the Jew to be abroad. As he glided stealthily along, creeping beneath the shelter of the walls and doorways, the hideous old man seemed like some loathsome reptile, engendered in the slime and darkness through which he moved: crawling forth, by night, in search of some rich offal for a meal. (186; ch. 19)

Here we have the Jew as a repellant, reptilian, primordial creature, barely emerged from the mud and ooze of creation (like the megalosaurus at the beginning of Bleak House , only far more hideous), setting out in search of the inner organs of what? - animals? small boys? - to feed his depraved appetites. Readers have associated his preying on children with blood libel, sexual abuse, and murderous intent. Deborah Heller refers to Fagin's "ominous role as an abductor of children and violator of childhood innocence," and Jonathan Freedman reminds us of the modern image of the Jew as pander, "almost invariably with overtones of

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"Dicken's 'Jewish Questions'" 31

sexual perversity, frequently aimed at children or young women" (Heller 43; Freedman 67). When Oliver, waking from sleep, witnesses Fagin looking at his treasures, the old man waves a kitchen knife at him, a gesture that Steven Marcus, in a striking reading of the passage as primal scene, likens to the threat of castration (376). Fagin keeps company with the prostitute Nancy and her pimp, the more convincingly homicidal Bill Sikes, who add to the plethora of urban contaminants that circle around Dickens's Jew. Perverse, degraded, predatory, filthy, primitive, and avaricious, Fagin epitomizes the semi-visible but always feared underside - subterranean, cloacal, intestinal - of metropolitan life.5

If this were all Dickens had intended in placing Fagin in the midst of his novel of London crime, it would have been sufficient to establish the character as both deeply memorable and deeply disturbing. But Dickens was up to something more here. As Susan Meyer has suggested, Fagin is essential to the very purpose of this novel: he is, in her words, a "corrective figure for the instruction and improvement of English Christians, guiding them, by a skillful employment of the rhetoric of anti-Semitism, toward the practice of what [Dickens] represents as true Christianity, characterized by mercy and benevolence toward the poor" (241). To drive home the purity and irreducibility of this kind of evil, Meyer continues, Dickens offers Fagin, condemned to die at the novel's end, no redemption, no chance of true repentance or transformation, no conversion, either moral or spiritual. The anti-Christian forces in the novel must be fully purged.

Dickens, however, does more than use Fagin as the Jewish antithesis of the true Christian

spirit: he also makes the Jewish criminal the very embodiment of the Christian spirit gone wrong and, consequently, the representative of precisely what passed for ethical philosophy in what Dickens perceived to be the twisted thinking of some of his contemporaries. In this reading, Fagin signifies not merely Jewish avarice and callousness but the very essence of the perverse economic and moral ethos of the age. To understand as fully as possible and with the widest possible implications what Dickens was after here, we take a detour into Karl Marx's "On the Jewish Question," published in 1844, just five years after Dickens had completed the serialization of Oliver Twist. An essay that has often been avoided because of its militant and, for some, embarrassing anti-Semitism, "On the Jewish Question" is a fascinating statement that, at its most useful, elucidates the meaning of one of the dominant strains of anti-Semitic thought in the mid-nineteenth century.6 It begins as a critique of the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer's "The Jewish Question" and ends as a series of epigrammatic, almost oracular, statements about the nature and condition of modern Jewishness in its relation to Christian society.

At its most banal, the essay repeats familiar accusations: that the "secular cult of the Jew" is "haggling," his "secular God," money (52). At its most far-reaching, it claims that Jewishness has found its "highest development" in "Christian society itself' (54). Jews can only become emancipated if they allow for or achieve "the emancipation of humanity from Jewishness" but, as yet, "Jews have emancipated themselves [only] in so far as Christians have become Jews" (52, 53). Judaism is inherently practical, not theoretical, and its secular bases are not just haggling and materialism but self-interest and egotism: "What is the secular basis of Jewry?" Marx asks, " Practical need, self-interest " (52). These are the very characteristics that have been unleashed, to insidious effect, in the contemporary world and have come to dominate Christian society at its worst.

In Marx's rhetoric, then, Jewishness - or Judaism, for he believes in the religious as well as the secular foundation of the modern Jewish character - is abstracted into the very

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32 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

mentality from which modern capitalist society suffers. After developing out of Judaism, Christianity has devolved back into it. As Stephen Greenblatt writes in discussing Marlowe's The Jew of Malta in relation to Marx's "On the Jewish Question," "The Jew is charged not with racial deviance or religious impiety but with economic and social crime, crime that is committed not only against Christian society but, in a less 'pure' form, by that society" (292). Barabas is, like Fagin and like Marx's Jew, the "alienated essence of Christian society," his Judaism a "universal antisocial element of the present time" (306, 297). Paradoxically, Jewishness is the dominant and lamentable spirit of the age - perhaps any age.7

There is no real difference at present, Marx asserts, between Christian and Jew, and the salvation of (Christian) society lies in the disappearance of the Jew and Jewishness. Marx ends his essay this way:

As soon as society succeeds in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism, i.e. haggling and its presuppositions, the Jew will become impossible, because his consciousness will no longer have an object, because the subjective basis of Judaism, practical need, will be humanized. . . .

The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism. (56)

Marx envisions, or proposes, that Jewishness will become an impossibility and that once this happens - once the Jew is liberated from his religion and culture - society will be purged of its Jewishness and of all those characteristics that Christianity had relatively lately borrowed from it. Marx imagines a kind of conversion and salvation story, demanding that the Jew divest himself of his religion and its cultural accretions so that bourgeois, Christian society might in turn shed its own Jewishness - its own materialism, egotism, and ethic of self-interest - and be redeemed.

Fagin, to return to Dickens, is to the Christian society of Oliver Twist what Marx's Jew is to modern society writ large and in almost exactly the same way. Fagin is not only the quintessential Jew but the embodiment of rampant individualism. Dickens uses him not just as an emblem of avariciousness and urban contagion but as a mouthpiece and symbol for the misguided, soul-destroying political and economic philosophies of his day. Fagin is an analogue, at the lowest possible level of society, for the theorists of political economy and Poor Law reform responsible for managing society at the very highest levels and against whom Dickens aimed this novel. Not just a narrative of London low-life and criminal capers,

not just the story of a foundling who turns out to be wellborn though illegitimate, Oliver Twist is also, of course, a highly topical text. The workhouses of the early chapters - where Oliver is born, picks oakum, asks for "more," and is starved so that he will fit nicely down a chimney when apprenticed as a sweep - are consequences of the New Poor Law of 1834, meant to punish paupers by abolishing outdoor relief. Dickens wants to pillory these institutions and this particular "reform," but he makes it clear that a perverse philosophy linked to political economy, Malthusian principles, and the laissez-faire doctrine of self-interest, lies behind them. The hypocrisy of such philosophy is exposed in the figure of Mr. Bumble, the parish beadle, at the beginning of the novel but also finds an unexpected practitioner and defender much later on in Fagin himself.

In chapter 43 Fagin counsels Noah Claypole, a prospective collaborator in crime, in the philosophy of "Number One": "Every man's his own friend, my dear

a one as himself anywhere

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" Dicken's 'Jewish Questions'" 33

and some say number seven. It's neither, my friend, neither. It's number one" (387; ch. 43). And he goes on, complicating the matter a bit by tacitly acknowledging that, if everyone is "number one," he might have trouble enforcing Noah's fealty to him and his own primacy in business matters. "In a little community like ours, my dear," Fagin elaborates, "we have a general number one; that is, you can't consider yourself as number one, without considering me too as the same

You can't take care of yourself, number one, without taking care of me, number one

of the same importance to you, as you are to yourself." Appropriately confused and a bit suspicious, Claypole resists the idea that he and Fagin can both be number one and, even more, the inevitable conclusion that Fagin's number one must somehow come first. Perhaps, interrupts Noah at one point, he - Fagin - is really his - Noah's - number two. But Fagin reassures him:

You depend on me. To keep my business all snug, I depend on you. The first is your number one, the second my number one. The more you value your number one, the more careful you must be of mine;

so we come at last to what I told you at first - that a regard for number one holds us all together, and must do so, unless we would all go to pieces in company. (388; ch. 43)

Dickens uses the Jewish criminal to explain the doctrine of self-interest (according to Marx, the secular faith of Jewry) and to underscore its inadequacies as a guide for an ethical or even a logical life. He does so not necessarily to assault the Jews but to show up the actual philosophers, especially political economists, who preach self-interest for all individuals but actually believe their own interests should take precedence over all others'. Indeed, Dickens uses Fagin to expose the ultimate impossibility of constructing a society in which each man is for himself first and foremost. These philosophers and the social engineers and law-makers who depend upon them have, in Marx's terms, become Jews.8

II.

Marx's essay is interesting for, among other things, the implicit distinctions it makes between Christian and Jewish cultures in relation to the state and material life. Although Matthew Arnold, writing Culture and Anarchy only three years after Dickens began Our Mutual Friend , concentrates primarily on the dialectical relationship between Hebraic and Hellenic cultures, he is also tangentially interested in the relationship of Judaism to Christianity, both the continuities and the differences between them. At moments in the fourth

chapter of Culture and Anarchy Hebraism signifies an amalgam of Jewish and Protestant cultures and traits, while at others Arnold is at pains to separate the two and even uses the rhetoric of ethnology ("Science has now made visible to everybody the great and pregnant elements of difference which lie in race. . .") to differentiate between "Indo-European" and "Semitic" peoples (141). The English, Arnold ventures, get their sense of humor from their Indo-European roots and their "assuredness, . . . tenacity, . . . and intensity" from the Hebrew origins of their Protestantism (142). Further, he asserts, leaving the racial for the textual realm, the Old Testament teaches flight from sin, while the New Testament counsels humankind to "die for it" (135).

For understanding the wider ethical critique of Jewishness in the mid-nineteenth century, especially in relation to economic life, another of Arnold's dicta about Hebraic-Christian

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34 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

differences is the most telling. Hebraism relied on an "old law and network of prescriptions" to aid in the crucial human endeavor of self-regulation, but Christianity substituted for adherence to the law a "boundless devotion to that inspiring and affecting pattern of self- conquest offered by Jesus Christ" (132). Legal prescriptions were inadequate for "patient continuance in well-doing," so Christianity added and emphasized the example of Christ as a means to overcoming the weaknesses and wayward inclinations of the self. Christianity, Arnold asserts, is Hebraism "aiming at self-conquest and rescue from the thrall of vile affections, not by obedience to the law but by conformity to the image of a self-sacrificing example" (136; emphasis added). Judaism, in other words, did not provide sufficient guidance for the conquering of destructive human impulses. It left too much room for selfishness and indulgence and provided inadequate means for self-overcoming.

Though Arnold's view of ostensible Christian-Hebraic differences is far less invidious than Marx's in "On the Jewish Question," it is not difficult to see in these two statements a common strain of Jewish critique. Self-interest and excessive materialism, those characteristics Marx underscores as noxious Jewish traits, can be understood as the result of and certainly as consistent with this incomplete self-overcoming, this too great self- indulgence unchecked by Christian love, self-sacrifice, and possibilities for altruism. In the economic realm, as it is represented in anti-Semitic rhetoric, no restraints on greed or base impulses interfere with Jewish rapaciousness, no model of self-sacrifice or transcendence softens egoistic desires. Max Weber's early twentieth-century formulation of these religious and cultural differences in relation to economic drives in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism helps to elucidate the connection between the Arnoldian and the Marxian view. Old Testament morality, Weber asserts, sounding a lot like Arnold though not acknowledging him directly, leant a powerful impetus to the "spirit of self-righteousness and sober legality" of Protestantism and so can be understood as contributing to the capitalist spirit (165). Modern Judaism, however, brings with it other developments that account for an important distinction between the particular capitalist cultures attached to each religion. "The Jews stood on the side of the politically and speculatively adventurous capitalism," Weber writes, "their ethos was in a word pariah-capitalism. But Puritanism carried the ethos of the rational organization of capital and labour" (165-66; emphasis added). Speculation and usury characterize Jewish modes of capitalism, whereas Protestant forms are marked by rational organization and "systematic work in a worldly calling, as the highest means to asceticism, and [as] ... the surest and most evident proof of rebirth and genuine faith" (172). Protestant modes of capitalism offer the possibility of transcendence through dedicated labor, while Jewish forms lead to parasitism rather than spiritual rebirth.

The association of Christianity with a capitalist ethic that opens the door to redemption and the notion of Jewishness as a faith that promotes "pariah capitalism" inform Dickens's treatment of moneymaking, value, and religion in Our Mutual Friend. Modes of producing wealth in the novel do not, in the end, map precisely onto religious difference, but Dickens uses this conventional distinction as a way of talking about deadly and generative labor, as well as about the relationship between wealth and the spiritual realm. Like Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor , which influenced Our Mutual Friend in a number of important ways, Dickens's last novel features the "waifs and strays" and scavengers of London street life: those who gather the refuse and detritus of others and recycle it to make their livings, and the refuse itself - dust, dung, scraps, bones, bits of metal, even dead bodies. It opens with a river-dredger on the Thames, a man who fishes corpses out of the water, likely

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"Dicken's 'Jewish Questions'" 35

pockets the coins to be found on these bodies, and turns them in for a reward. Those traits, practices, and urban phenomena that, according to Corbin, Mayhew, Marx, and others, were deeply associated with Jewish types in the nineteenth century, appear more prominently in Our Mutual Friend than in any other of Dickens's fictions. And yet, as we know, the Jew of this novel is neither an old clothes nor a scrap dealer but an apparent usurer, the very stereotype of the greedy, rapacious Jew.

During the almost thirty years between the time of the publication of Oliver Twist and that of Our Mutual Friend both the status and the stereotyping of Jews in Britain had undergone substantial change. In 1858, after fourteen failed attempts to pass legislation removing parliamentary disabilities for Jews, efforts at Jewish emancipation succeeded and Lionel de Rothschild became the first professing Jew in the House of Commons (Feldman 31). In the years that followed, Jews were able to enter the professions, hold civic office, and administer justice without taking a Christian oath. They were finally treated, though perhaps not welcomed, as Englishmen. Some Jews also met with extraordinary financial success in the third quarter of the century (78). Historians calculate that, whereas at least half of all London Jews were impoverished or barely making a living at mid-century, by 1879 Jews accounted for fully 14% of all non-landowning millionaires in Britain (Endelman 81; Feldman 80). And, in 1868, Benjamin Disraeli, born a Jew though a convert to Anglicanism, became Prime Minister for the first time. The increased public visibility and economic success of a number of Jews helped to shift dominant stereotypes from greedy street sellers, shop-owners, and criminals to ruthless self-made men and parasitic speculators. It is during this period that Dickens sold his home to the Davises and characterized Mr. Davis as the generic "Jew Money-Lender." Trollope's novels of the 1870s contain a number of these types, though many, like Augustus Melmotte in The Way We Live Now (1875), are not explicitly identified as Jews. Indeed, it is their status as ambiguous Jews, or Jews who "pass," that attracts the novelist and partly accounts for the dramatic interest of these characters.9

It is likely that Trollope based Melmotte on Mr. Merdle, swindler, man from nowhere, speculator, and ultimate cause of extensive financial ruin in Dickens's Little Dorrit ( 1 855-57). Merdle's wife and stepson criticize him for "carrying] the Shop about, on his back . . . like Jew clothesmen with too much business" (449; bk. I, ch. 33). 10 The large bosomed Mrs. Merdle cautions her husband that he should not mingle with the prosperous and genteel classes, "unless you can accommodate yourself to Society

by being more degage , and less preoccupied" (446^7; bk. I, ch. 33). Merdle combines the ostensible vulgarity of the Jew - too interested in his own business, not detached enough in his manner - with the Jew's purported predilection for gambling, chicanery, and, most importantly, speculation, the form of financial enterprise most powerfully associated with Jews in anti-Semitic discourse.

Whether Merdle is meant as a shadow Jew or not, he shares characteristics of both the

street Jew and the crude high capitalist who barely, temporarily, passes as a gentleman. As David Feldman has argued in Englishmen and Jews , discourse surrounding Jewish emancipation and assimilation focused on how "English" Jews might become, on those traits that would allow them to succeed and blend into English society and those that might prevent them from becoming true Englishmen. "What was at issue in most of the debates," Feldman writes, "was . . . the extent to which Jews, at any particular moment, could be contained within the national community, and on what terms" (136). Melmotte and, quite likely, Merdle lack the "decorum and gentility" necessary to survive as Englishmen

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36 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

(Endelman 110). The question in Our Mutual Friend , then, is whether Riah, a Jew whose public identity is already that of a usurer, can overcome this taint and emerge as a morally and socially acceptable citizen.

Ill

As THE NOVEL'S INTEREST IN recycling suggests, Our Mutual Friend is preoccupied with the idea of transformation. Dust is transmuted into gold, bones into the taxidermist's carefully wrought skeletons, driftwood into babies' cradles, discarded scraps of cloth into dolls' clothes, and death into life. There is nothing, no matter how insignificant or even invisible, that cannot be made valuable or useful or used in the service of art. Individuals - most

importantly John Harmon and Eugene Wrayburn - are reborn. They not only come back from the dead but die into a better life; they are redeemed, they find transcendence. Scavenging is the basest manifestation of a process of transformation that, at its most sublime, amounts to resurrection in this most iconographically Christian of all Dickens's novels. Opposed to this kind of artistic and life-creating alteration in the novel is the production of wealth through speculation, deception, and exploitation, the kind of parasitic or pariah-like money making associated with Jews in anti-Semitic discourse. The Veneerings, Fascination Fledgeby, the Lammles, and, at the other end of the social spectrum, Silas Wegg all participate in or aspire to participate in the creation of unproductive wealth. As Catherine Gallagher points out, death is a crucial source of life and value in Our Mutual Friend ("illness unto death brings wealth"), so that an economy that looks unproductive or soul-destroying at first glance turns out to be redemptive (110). But the novel also, of course, features those who negate this principle: high-life speculators, people who traffic in "Shares" and have "never achieved success in anything, never originated anything, never produced anything," people who, like the scavengers, make something out of nothing but, unlike them, make only what is never generative, never sublime. These traffickers in shares might be understood to represent the "highest development" of the Jewishness that Marx located in "Christian society itself."

Where does the Jew, Riah, fit into these patterns of transformation? And how, in a novel that summons all of the degraded signs associated with the Jew as urban contaminant and capitalist pariah, does Dickens manage to rehabilitate and redefine the Jew? He does so, in part, by locating Riah within the context of these two forms of money-making - the Jewish and the Christian, if you will - and then by trying to purge the idea of Jewish labor of the elements of speculation, exploitation, and hoarding. Riah, affiliated initially, whether unfairly or not, with an economy of parasitism and spiritual death, must learn to embrace an economy of transcendence. In the end, he can do so only through becoming an object of transformation: a process that appears to be necessary despite the novel's insistence, virtually from the outset, that Riah is himself innocent, the victim of prejudice and gross misunderstanding.

Dickens uses the figure of Riah and the views of those who encounter and exploit him to anatomize anti-Semitism and to refute the idea that the Jew is necessarily the economic spirit

of the age. The most casual anti-Semite in the novel is Eugene Wrayburn, who gives voice to a nonchalant, upper-class prejudice that is inextricable from his laconic, careless dandyism. Eugene's apparent indifference toward Lizzie Hexam's virtue and reputation is a more aggravated form of his callousness toward Riah. Both bespeak the young man's arrogance and lack of regard even for those, like Lizzie, he claims to love. When he comes across Riah walking with her, Eugene refers to him by the epithet "Mr. Aaron," not once or twice but ten

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"Dicken's 'Jewish Questions'" 37

times in the course of one conversation, and urges him to be off to "any engagement he may have at the Synagogue" (464; bk. II, ch. 15). 11 Eugene realizes that Riah stands steadfastly between him and Lizzie on this occasion and disparages him through the repetition of a name that implies the obliteration of individual identity and the interchangeability of all Jews. It is a mark of Eugene's inability to understand or perhaps care much about this demonstration of his casual prejudice when, later on, he explains to Mortimer Lightwood that he gave the Jew the name of "Mr. Aaron" because it "appeared to [him] expressive, appropriate, and complimentary" (598; bk. Ill, ch. 10). In the final pages of the novel, when Eugene undergoes redemption and rebirth, we are told that he has become the beneficiary of the Jew's efforts to disentangle his badly managed business affairs, a sign of both Eugene's moral renewal and Riah's adoption of life-giving labor.

Fascination Fledgeby, the most obvious figure in the novel's exposure of anti-Semitism, is, in some sense, only a more sinister version of Eugene in his unscrupulousness, purposelessness, and dandified affect. Indeed, Fledgeby's exploitation and defamation of Riah help to lay bare Eugene's casual maltreatment of the Jew. Like Mr. Casby in Little Dorrit , Fledgeby is a gouger who hides behind a front man, in Casby's case the Gypsy Pancks, in Fledgeby's the Jew Riah. Never in Our Mutual Friend does Dickens obscure this, as he does for a while in the case of Pancks and Casby and, in this novel, in the case of the motives for Mr. Boffin's apparent transformation into a despicable miser. Fledgeby makes a living through usury, the crime with which Jews were so often associated, and he makes use of Riah as front man precisely because his clients would expect such practices of a Jew and never question the charade.

If the novel's clear identification of Fledgeby as the real usurer were not sufficient, we have Riah's own direct denial of having any authority in his financial dealings. "I do as I am directed," he declares (and we already know this), "I am not the principal here. I am but the agent of a superior, and I have no choice, no power" (635; bk. Ill, ch. 13). Dickens's use of language - agent, choice, power - make transparent his intention to expose a larger social dynamic between Christian and Jewish worlds. He overturns the idea that Jews might be pulling the strings behind the scenes, manipulating the Christian puppets of high finance. In this case, as in others, it is quite the reverse. Similarly, he inverts for a time the conversion story that Michael Ragussis has identified as a ubiquitous feature of Jewish narratives in British fiction.12

In order to keep Lizzie safe from the male predators - principally Bradley Headstone but also Eugene Wrayburn - who stalk her in the streets of London, Riah sends her to live among Jewish acquaintances in the countryside, on the borders of Oxfordshire. These unnamed Jews also manage the paper mill where Lizzie works and in the shadow of which Betty Higden, in flight from the clutches of the workhouse and pauperization, dies peacefully. Mrs. Milvey, the reverend's wife, frets over whether these clearly kind-hearted Jews will try to convert Lizzie to Judaism. The joke here is that Jews do not ordinarily attempt conversion of others, whereas the Christian mission to convert the Jews (Mrs. Milvey's status as a Protestant clergyman's wife is not irrelevant) was widespread.13 Lizzie's response to Mrs. Milvey when she inquires about the spiritual danger to which the young woman might be subject is telling: "They have never asked me what my religion is. They asked me what my story was, and I told them" (579; bk. Ill, ch. 9). The truly virtuous, whether Christian or Jew - the Rev. Milvey, Betty Higden, Riah, his friends in the country, or Lizzie herself - seek the truth of the individual story and do not coerce or suspect others of coercion. The real threats to Lizzie's wellbeing,

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38 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

as we know, are two Christian men who practice their own form of coercion - sexual, not doctrinal.

Unlike Bradley, Eugene, and Fascination Fledgeby and like his co-religionists on the border of Oxfordshire, Riah seeks to protect both Lizzie and Jenny Wren from danger. The former functions, in a sense, as the good Jewish daughter so often tied in literary narratives to a miserly or exploitative father (Shylock, for example, or Isaac of York), only here the Jewish "father" is beneficent (Sicher 151). Bradley threatens to force Lizzie into an oppressive and soul-destroying marriage, Eugene to ruin her virtue, and Fledgeby to send her out onto the streets to work, perhaps, or to exploit her attractiveness to men like Wrayburn. Fledgeby asks her if she, like Jenny, comes to St. Mary Axe to buy anything, and when she answers "no," he asks knowingly, "Nor sell anything neither, miss?" (333; bk. II, ch. 5). Lizzie Hexam is always on the verge of turning into a London prostitute, for which her abject poverty, her brother Charlie's pandering instincts, and her association with the folk of the city who make their livings on the streets make her a likely candidate. Rather than repeating the association between Jewish criminal and prostitute - Fagin and Nancy, for example - that Alain Corbin emphasizes in The Foul and the Fragrant , Dickens conspicuously revises it, making Lizzie endangered but chaste and Riah her self-appointed guardian. Not, like Fagin, the abductor or perverter of children and women, Riah is their "protector," their good Jewish father.

Jenny refers to Riah as "godmother," turning him into a fairy tale figure, putting him in the

place of her negligent father, feminizing him (not unusual in the creation of Jewish stereotypes but usually done less benignly), and associating him with powers of transformation. Referring to Jenny as "Cinderella," Riah is offered as a specific fairy-tale godmother. As Cinderella's godmother changed the ragged young woman into a beautifully dressed princess, a coach into a pumpkin, mice into footmen, so does Jenny want Riah magically to straighten her back and make her drunkard father into a good boy. If he can transform himself into a godmother, then perhaps he can "change . . . other objects too." Jenny indulges in this fantasy but knows well that Riah's powers are limited. When he tells her he has lost his wife and children but that the "happiness was," she replies, "You had better change Is into Was and Was into Is, and keep them so" (494; bk. Ill, ch. 2). In a novel about transformation for both good and ill, Riah has one, but only one, foot in the camp of those who work beneficent change - or at least aspire to.

As part of his effort to make Riah, on balance, a morally upright man, Dickens takes great pains to portray him as a Jew of an earlier age, a species of anachronism. When Riah is described as "an old Jewish man in an ancient coat, long of skirt, and wide of pocket," with long, grey (note, not red) hair, wearing a large-brimmed hat " as long out of date as his coaf (328; bk. II, ch. 5) - a "very gaberdine" (332; bk. II, ch. 5) - we can be fairly certain that Dickens is reproducing Henry Mayhew's account of the way street-Jews looked fifty years earlier: dressed in the "distinctive garb and aspect of a foreigner [Mayhew tells us] . . . not unfrequently the gabardine, which is never seen now in the streets, but some of the long loose frock coats resemble it" (Mayhew 197). When Eliza Davis objected in her letter to Dickens that Riah's garb was untypical for a contemporary London Jew, she was right, and yet she missed the point (Sicher 146). 14 Mayhew indicates in 1851-52 that Jews already no longer looked this way. Dickens's intention over a decade later is to signal that Riah is a Jew of the past, "venerable" (a word he uses repeatedly in referring to Riah), a patriarch, a man in "ancient dress, like the ghost of a departed Time " (465; bk. II, ch. 15). And further: "Thither

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"Dicken's ' Jewish Questions' " 39

he went at his grave and measured pace, staff in hand, skirt at heel; and more than one head, turning to look back at this venerable figure indistinctly seen, which fancy and the fog had worked into that passing likeness" (480; bk. Ill, ch. 1). In this description, almost certainly a rewriting of the grim evocation of a reptilian Fagin going forth "in search of some rich offal," Riah is a phantom, a relic, a ghost emerging from the "grave." Unlike Fagin, who merges with the misty, muddy, blackened nighttime streets of London, Riah's ancient mien offers a marked contrast with the modern city.

Those who see him walking at night staff in hand, like a Biblical prophet, might believe he is spectral, an illusion, a figment of their imaginations half created by the shape-shifting powers of the fog. In the novel Riah is very nearly disembodied, bodiless, again in contrast to Fagin, whose body is threatening, bestial, and debased. In choosing to make Riah an anachronism, a visitor from a "departed Time," (465; bk. II, ch. 15) Dickens allies him with a moment before the time of high capitalist speculation, before a present ruled by "Shares, oh mighty Shares!" (160; bk. I, ch. 10) or, at the very least, he marks him as a good Jew, separate from the modern, self-interested, speculating variety. Rather than making Riah another Merdle or an ally of the Veneerings, Podsnaps, and Lammles, Dickens places him in the orbit of speculation but distinguishes him from the stereotype of grasping Jewish capitalist. Venerable, biblical, patriarchal, ghostly, grave, and measured, Riah may not be a representative of the economic spirit of the age - this age - but rather haunts it in the person of a benign and self-sacrificing sage of a by-gone era, an era that predates even the time of Fagin or Mayhew's street-sellers.

Dickens's Riah is affiliated not only with an earlier time, making him an ancient rather than a modern Jew, but also with a striking vision of pastoral in the midst of the metropolis. Here Dickens further pries the stereotypical street Jew from his associations with urban degradation and decay. Jenny, Lizzie, and Riah take refuge from the city's noise, grime, and bustle in the garden that Riah, the apparently quintessential urban figure, has created on the roof of Pubsey and Co. In a scene that unites the visionary powers of Jenny Wren with the novel's larger themes of transformation and redemption, Riah mounts the steps to the roof, accompanied by Fledgeby, as if on "some pilgrimage of devotion" (332; bk. II, ch. 5). There they find Lizzie and Jenny taking a holiday, seated on a carpet with a basket of fruit and another containing the tools of Jenny's trade, the "damage and waste" she uses for her dolls' clothes (333; bk. II, ch. 5). Although they claim to have come for the quiet and clean air, they lean against a blackened chimney and breathe in the same smoke that penetrates the atmosphere down below. Jenny's imaginative powers, however, convert this rooftop to an Edenic bower (akin to Boffin's bower), a tranquil sanctuary away from those on the ground who are, in her words, "alive, crying, and working, and calling to one another down in the close dark streets" (334; bk. II, ch. 5). "It's so high," she says, "and you see the clouds rushing on above the narrow streets, not minding them, and you see the golden arrows pointing at the mountains in the sky from which the wind comes, and you feel as if you were dead" (334; bk. II, ch. 5).

For Jenny, Lizzie, and Riah this is a place not only of transformation but of resurrection, of dying into life. Jenny declares that she delights in seeing the stooped Riah coming "out of his grave" (the door to the roof but also an allusion to Riah's ancient provenance), taking a breath and standing suddenly upright, born again to life. To the sinister, undeserving Fledgeby she hisses, "But you are not dead

again to descend to work, she yells, "Come back and be dead, Come back and be dead!"

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40 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

(334; bk. II, ch. 5). This scene in Riah's rooftop garden sets the stage, indeed provides a template, for the rebirths through near death by drowning that both the novel's male protagonists, John Harmon and Eugene Wrayburn, undergo before the end of the narrative. To emerge from the grave into new life, shedding sin, woe, guilt, and the burdens of the past, is to enact the most important kind of transformation Dickens represents in Our Mutual Friend : redemption through equal portions of grace and imagination. Jenny, Lizzie, and Riah make a strange trio of exemplars for the idea of resurrection: a crippled child, a dredger's daughter, and a Jew who is known to the world as a vicious usurer. Each one, however, is associated with moments or processes of transcendence. Jenny is the visionary Eugene sends for when he is dying so that she can "have the fancy" by his bedside (807; bk. IV, ch. 10). Lizzie holds the body of the dying Betty Higden by a tree that reminds the old woman of the "foot of the Cross," kisses her disfigured face, blesses her, and lifts her "as high as heaven" (575, 577; bk. Ill, ch. 8). And Riah, though seen by all the world as an exploiter and gouger, ascends periodically to the roof of Pubsey & Co. to die into life.

For Riah's redemption to be complete, however, for some ultimate transcendence to take place, it is apparently not enough for him to be the good father - or fairy godmother - and protector of the hounded Lizzie and crippled child, Jenny. Nor is it sufficient for Dickens to make him an ancient Jew, far removed from the contemporary, speculating Jews of London. In a novel that posits two economies, generative and soul-destroying, Riah must do more: he must be made to shed the final vestiges of his connection to ways of producing wealth that are associated with Jewish practices and character. He must undergo conversion, both psychically and spiritually. Just as the narrative of Jewish conversion is embedded satirically into the novel in the person of Mrs. Milvey, so does it appear in a subtler and more serious vein. Though Riah is never overtly or literally converted to Christianity, he emerges as one of the best, truest Christians in Our Mutual Friend , in the sense that true Christianity consists here of goodness, selflessness, and the ability to transcend life and die into redemption, but also in the sense that Riah departs definitively the realm of parasitic Jewish money-making and enters into the constructive Christian economy of transformation.

Indeed, even though the narrative is pointedly clear from the very beginning that Riah is innocent of the crimes that Fledgeby hides behind him to commit, he must nonetheless renounce the ruse to which he has tacitly consented: his apparent participation in, if not initiation of, Fledgeby's bill-broking schemes. He has allowed himself to be mistaken for a bad man, so much so that even Jenny doubts his motives for a time. That she does so can be interpreted to mean that she is not free from anti-Semitic impulses. Perhaps, as Jonathan Grossman suggests, the reader is forced in that moment to evaluate Jenny's response to Riah - "You are not the godmother at all! . . . You are the Wolf in the Forest!" - and find her wanting (46). But it seems clear that even if Jenny misinterprets the situation, it is nonetheless incumbent upon Riah to remove any doubt about his innocence and to adopt the view that, as a Jew, he must be, and be perceived to be , above reproach.

In some important sense, then, Jenny has not misread Riah but rather has understood that, by the ethical standards of the novel and of the culture that produced it, he is guilty of allowing himself to be involved in a morally corrosive charade. And, in the end, Riah himself concurs. He acknowledges that he must atone not for profiting from others' debt - which of course he has not done - but for encouraging the world to think ill of all Jews by his apparent misdeeds. He is guilty, in other words, of what Mrs. Davis had accused Dickens of doing when he released the character of Fagin into the Christian world. In the speech that

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"Dicken's 'Jewish Questions'" 41

follows Riah confesses to Jenny, and it is striking to realize that the guilt he claims to feel seems unrelated to whether he has been an actual usurer or not:

I was doing dishonour to my ancient faith and race. I reflected . . . that in bending my neck to the yoke

I was willing to wear, I bent the unwilling necks of the whole Jewish people. For it is not, in Christian

countries, with the Jews as it is with other peoples. Men say, "This is a bad Greek, but there are good Greeks. This is a bad Turk, but there are good Turks." Not so with the Jews. Men find the bad among us easily enough . . . 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." If, doing what I was content to do here [at Pubsey and Co.], because I was grateful for the past [Fledgeby's father had been good to Riah] and have small need of money now, I had been a Christian, I could have done it, compromising no one but my individual self. It is a little hard upon us, but it is the truth. I would that all our people remembered it! (795; bk. IV, ch. 9)

Riah is persuaded by - or converted to - the position that each Jew, unlike each Greek or Turk or Christian or Englishman, is a representative one. Unlike Fagin, who is for himself alone and makes a virtue of it, Riah carries with him "the whole Jewish people." He might have decided to quit Fledgeby's employ simply to extricate himself from a bad business or claimed his debt to Fledgeby senior's kindness as an excuse for his fealty to the son, but he offers quite another reason for quitting and takes the blame for his misguided employment on himself. He quits because he, as well as any other individual Jew, is responsible for the society's impression of all Jews. In this speech he accepts the idea that the English take the worst Jew for the best and find all Jews to be alike. To them, all Jews are "Mr. Aaron," each

one interchangeable with any other. Riah's way of thinking, familiar to Jews and members of other minority groups even today, sits somewhere between allegiance to his people and acceptance of a form of anti-Semitic thinking as the rule by which he must govern his life.15

Thinking back to Mrs. Davis's anxiety that Dickens's readers would take Fagin as a prototype for all Jews, we see that Dickens has not denied this idea but confirmed and perpetuated it and, beyond that, that he has created a "good [Jewish] fairy" who parrots the notion and takes its implicit burdens upon himself. Indeed, Riah comes close to taking the blame for what Fledgeby has done. He continues to Jenny Wren: "I always saw . . . that you believed the story readily, my child, because I was one of the Jews - that the story itself first came into the invention of the originator thereof, because I was one of the Jews" (796; bk. IV, ch. 9). If Fledgeby created a ruse to hide his own treachery and cast it onto Riah, it is because Riah is a Jew. If Jenny believed wrongly in the truth of Fledgeby's "story," it is because Riah is a Jew. The origin of even the "originator's" perfidy is Riah's Jewishness. Riah's goodness and Dickens's desire to make him a gentle and upright man are undeniable, but the Jew's final act of contrition for, in the end, being a Jew, is a form of disquieting self-abasement.

To see Riah as a convert is to see him not as an outlier in the novel or as an isolated

minor character embedded in an arcane Jewish subplot but rather as part of the pattern of moral transformation that is central to the novel as a whole. The alchemy that changes dust to gold, scraps to clothes, and odd bones to intact anatomical structures has its analogue, as we have seen, in the redemption and conversion of Harmon and Wrayburn. We also see Boffin hard at work in the moral reform of Bella Wilfer in what amounts to the novel's

greatest charade - a charade that, unlike Fledgeby and Riah's, is constructed to trick the reader and possibly transform him or her as well. Bella, inserted into the plot of speculation,

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42 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

accuses John Harmon (when he is disguised as John Rokesmith) of "speculating]" in her, just as old man Harmon had done when he willed her to his son (434; bk. II, ch. 13); and Boffin, when he is playing the corrupting miser, accuses John of the same thing (655; bk. Ill, ch. 15). The elder Harmon had identified Bella as selfish and willful when she was still a child and so had chosen her as an appropriate wife for his son (85-86; bk. I, ch. 4). Judged by the Boffins to be a young woman spoiled first by poverty and then by riches, Bella nonetheless demonstrates the admirable qualities of tenderness toward her penniless father and a certain kind of self-knowledge: "I am the most mercenary little wretch that ever lived in the world," she confesses to her father, and must have money by marrying it (374; bk. II, ch. 8).

Mr. Boffin will play the miser for her benefit, in order to transform her into an unselfish, freely loving, and wholly ungrasping young woman and so enable her to marry a man she believes to be poor. Like the Harmon money, whose "rust and tarnish" must be effaced through the Boffins' goodness and charitable deeds, Bella's spoiled veneer must be stripped away and the "truly golden gold" of her heart made to shine through (843; bk. IV, ch. 13). This transformation resembles the necessary conversion of Riah. Each is understood, at least in part, as a victim - Riah of prejudice and Bella of speculation in human flesh. In both cases some fundamental virtue must be made to prevail and an outer layer of corruption sloughed off. In both cases the individual must be moralized, rather like the generic English Jew whose layers of crudeness and excess prevent him from conforming to the national model of citizenship.

Decades ago, in one of the first important treatments of Dickens's engagement with Jews and Jewishness, Harry Stone remarked that Our Mutual Friend is, in that regard, "a measure of Dickens' conversion" (246). It was after the publication of this novel, towards the very end of Dickens's life, that he oversaw a new edition of his works and altered hundreds of pages in the reissued volume of Oliver Twist. The majority of these changes involved references to Fagin and, more specifically, instances in which the novelist had referred to him as "the Jew" and was able to replace this epithet with "Fagin" or, simply, "he."16 Following Stone, it is tempting to include Dickens himself in the list of those transformed by and within Our Mutual Friend. He played the role of Boffin, benign manipulator of those deluded by their greed and self-absorption, and also the role of Eugene Wrayburn, a man capable of casual prejudice and predatory sexual instincts. But he is also Riah, conceding that Mrs. Davis was right to insist that any individual Jew - perhaps especially those who appear to conform to any negative stereotype - stands in the mind of the English public for all Jews.17

Dickens atones for Fagin, then, by making Riah a decent man and a good Christian, by discrediting certain forms of ant-Semitism in the narrative, by creating a Jew who does not represent the self-interested and greedy spirit of the day, and, most importantly, by having Riah declare that no Jew but a paragon is a tenable Jew and then shadowing him with conversion.18 The best Jew is a Christian, Dickens seems to imply, offering us a less offensive version of Marx's idea that all the worst Christians have become Jews. Marx claims

that society will be liberated when the Jew becomes an impossibility. Dickens doesn't go that far, but he does imagine a Jewish emancipation based on the transformation, the tacit conversion, of Jew into virtuous gentile and on the Jews' compensation for gentile bigotry - for the ease, that is, with which the non-Jewish world makes the Jew into the symbol of that which is worst in itself. Finally, Dickens shares with Marx the idea that the Jews' fate is inextricably tied to their relationship to forms of money-making. Riah must, above all, be converted away from allowing himself to be regarded as a man who makes money like

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"Dicken's 'Jewish Questions'" 43

a Jew - through exploitation, greed, and hoarding - toward the renunciation of even the taint of usury; and then he must enter fully into the economy of redemption, rebirth, and artistic transmutation. He must abandon the Jewish realm of pariah capitalism and inhabit the Christian world of rational and redemptive labor.

Princeton University

NOTES

I wish to thank audiences at the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University and in the English

Department at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) for their interest in and helpful responses to an earlier version of this essay. Particular thanks to Susan David Bernstein, Tamara Ketabgian, and Joshua Fogel.

1 . Freedman uses the phrase "economic anti-Semitism very productively in The Temple of Culture to refer to the nexus of prejudices against Jews that center on their relationship to money and to a variety

of economic systems. See Alderman 1 1-12 for Jewish criminality in the early decades of the century.

2. Feldman adds that by 1882, just before the huge wave of Jewish immigrants from the Continent settled in London, this number had swelled to 30,000 (167-68). Of the new immigrants, 60% to 70% of them

gravitated to the East End (Endelman 129). The East End's Jewish associations only increased, then, as the century progressed.

3. See, for example, Feldman 49 and Alderman 10. 4. Jews were frequently caricatured as redheads, perhaps because King David was thought to have red

hair, perhaps because of less salubrious associations between ruddiness and the devil, Esau, or the mark of Cain. Lane speculated decades ago that Uriah Heep, another redhead, with his obsequious hand gestures and posture and Old Testament name that bears a close resemblance to Riah's, was also meant to be a Jew. In the Bible, Uriah, the husband of Bathsheba, is pitted against King David, who

steals his wife, just as Heep and David Copperfield compete for the attentions of Agnes Wickfield (Lane 96). This would also produce the strange effect of setting in opposition one actual redhead and a redhead by association, thereby suggesting the resemblance between Copperfield and his archrival.

5. See Pike's two volumes Subterranean Cities and Metropolis on the Styx on the underground spaces of

the nineteenth-century city and all of their metaphorical implications. Fagin's search for "offal" also recalls the association Marx makes between Jews and innards or bowels in "On the Jewish Question"

when he says that "out of its own entrails civil society continuously brings forth the Jew" (54). Thanks

to Tamara Ketabgian for this connection. 6. Both Cheyette and Dellamora have shown an interest in discussing the connection between Marx s

essay and anti-Semitic thinking in other nineteenth-century (English) writers. 7. Using this phrase, so favored by the Victorian sages, seems especially appropriate in relation to Marx's

essay, because its rhetoric and vatic tone are, in some sense, profoundly Carlylean. 8. See Cheyette 97-98 for the association between political economy and Jewishness implicit in the

sentiments of George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice Webb, who wrote of East End Jews as "the embodiment of [the Jewish political economist] Ricardo's homo economicus " (98).

9. On Trollope, see Freedman chapter 2 and Cheyette chapter 2. The latter writes suggestively of Trollope's interest in Jews who "pass": those able to enjoy worldly success precisely because they can cross certain social and "racial" boundaries. See Constructions of " the Jew " in English Literature and

Society (23-42). In discussing Dickens's evolution from Oliver Twist to Our Mutual Friend , Stone also points to the "steady rise in the status of English Jewry" between 1820 and 1860 (235).

10. Stone (230) and Sicher (147) suggest other Dickens characters that are or may be Jewish. The exercise seems instructive but also, perhaps, endless.

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44 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

11. "Aaron" was used as a generic Jewish name in the period and perhaps conjured the greed and materialism associated with the Biblical Aaron, Moses's younger brother, who built and worshipped the golden calf while Moses ascended Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments. Grossman makes the point that in calling Fagin "the Jew" repeatedly in Oliver Twist , the narrator effectively renames him (39).

12. Ragussis has demonstrated how powerful a cultural and religious imperative the conversion of the Jews remained well into the 19th century. In Figures of Conversion he looks at a variety of texts from the 1790s through the 1870s that feature what Cheyette calls "Semitic discourse" (rather than anti- or philo-semitic) (Cheyette 8). Not only does Ragussis establish the degree to which the Jew acts as a marker of difference in British culture, but he also shows how frequently the idea or fact of conversion

functions as a pivot in narratives involving significant Jewish characters.

13. See Feldman 54-55 and Endelman 86 and 101 on British organizations devoted to the conversion of the Jews. George Eliot's Daniel Deronda exposes the ubiquity and insensitivity of Christian attempts to convert Jews when the generally well-meaning Mrs. Mallinger expresses the hope that Mirah Lapidoth will embrace Christianity and, to that end, invokes the Society for the Conversion of the Jews.

14. "One can believe in the vital Fagin as he darts through London alleys and trudges up rotting stairways," writes Stone, "but who can believe that limp, gentle Riah with his Biblical staff and Biblical talk ever saw a London street?" (248). It is precisely Riah's unbelievability that Dickens counts on in the text to remove the taint of the modern, economic Jew from this character.

15. Or, as Grossman puts it, Riah will now begin to perform his Jewishness forjudging Christian eyes, as if on a stage, revealing the extent to which "Jewish identity is, in part, formed through a response to (Christian) representation" (49). Grossman argues that Dickens is actually attempting "to represent the impossibility of [depicting a Jew]": "the absence of mimetic Jews in Dickens is not a lack," he writes, "to be mourned as a failure of representation

announces Dickens' complex silence on Jewishness, his paradoxical inability to portray a Jew, even as he portrays a Jew" (49, 52). While I think Grossman credits Dickens with more self-awareness in

this matter than he actually had, I can see his argument as another way of saying that Dickens cannot imagine a virtuous Jew who is not a Christian. On the question of conversion, Grossman makes the interesting suggestion that Scrooge's story in A Christmas Carol is actually a Jewish conversion story, from (Jewish) miser and enemy of children's welfare to Christmas-time philanthropist and protector of Tiny Tim (50-5 1 ).

16. See Stone 251-52 for the extent and nature of Dickens's changes to Oliver Twist for the 1867-68 edition. Grossman has a suggestive interpretation of the significance of the one reference to "the Jew" that Dickens left in the chapter newly titled "Fagin's [rather than 'The Jew's'] Last Night Alive" (45).

17. Marcus writes tellingly of Dickens's association of Fagin with his father and of Dickens's own identification with Fagin and thus with his father as well: "at the deeper levels of his being," Marcus writes, "Dickens maintained and had access to a feeling of identity with his father, even with that father who appeared to him as destroyer and betrayer of his son. His father was alive in him, as was Fagin, and in creating Fagin Dickens affirmed that fact as much as he negated it" (376). In Our Mutual Friend , Dickens is transformer and transformed, converter and converted, Jew and anti-Semite.

18. Others have remarked on the attribution of Christian virtues to Riah (see, for example, Sicher 152) but not, I think, on the need to make him into a Christian.

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