THE JEWISH QUESTION IN VICTORIAN HISTORICAL ROMANCES
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31436/shajarah.v22i1.590Keywords:
racial stereotypes, Orientalism, Muslim and Jewish communities, Victorian Literature, historical romance, “home”, “abroad”Abstract
The essay examines the use of racial stereotyping as a means of
tracing the development in the portrayal of Muslim and Jewish
communities in Victorian historical romances at “home” in England
and “abroad” in the Middle East, through the analysis of three
historical romances from the Victorian era: Benjamin Disraeli’s The
Wondrous Tale of Alroy (1833), Edward B. Lytton’s Leila or The
Siege of Granada (1838) and Hall Caine’s The Scapegoat (1890). As these novels were highly inspiredby Sir Walter Scott’s contribution to
the genre of historical romances in The Talisman and Ivanhoe, they
confirmed and challenged Scott’s racial and cultural stereotypes of
Muslim and Jewish communities, and in doing so, prepared for a new
version of Orientalism which progressively revised the perception of
Jewish communities within Muslim communities “abroad” and
within Christian communities at “home” in England and under
Christian rule in Spain. Thus these texts not only emphasized the role
of the Victorian novel in shaping and reinforcing certain existing
racial stereotypes of the Muslim East, Islam and Muslims worldwide
that persist until today, but also contributed to the rise in the
depiction of an increasingly sympathetic view of Jews in Victorian
fiction well pronounced in political novels such as Disraeli’s Tancred
(1840) and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876).