Portrayals of Jews in Literature
Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2025 3:47 am
For those who are interested in the Jewish question and Jew-Gentile conflict throughout history, literature is an avenue that Jewish academics have explored with their characteristic obsessiveness, but critics have not shown the same level of interest, from what I have seen. I assume this is because these works are fiction and hence are easily dismissed. But I would argue that classic literature does reflect the perceptions of the times, often with more color and dimensionality than do strictly historical works. Not to mention many of these classic books and are very much worth reading in their own right.
In classic European literature, portrayals of Jews, as a rule, seem to be quite negative. The following three works are perhaps the most famous, most discussed examples.
The Chaucer story relates to Jewish ritual murder, and it has a legendary, religious flavor to it. The Canterbury Tales are very well known in general, but few people are probably aware of this specific story.
Oliver Twist features a Jewish villain, Fagin, who is referred to as "the Jew" repeatedly in the book. The Wikipedia page for Oliver Twist explains,
I found a list on the website Goodreads that has some later novels. It's user created, so not necessarily the best quality control here. Some only have one vote and are not great picks. But it's still a useful starting point.
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/103 ... iterature_
Interestingly, you still see negative portrayals of Jews up through the 1920s. The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald is listed. I read this in school (it is still commonly assigned in America), but I honestly did not recall anything anti-Semitic about it. I had to refresh my memory of the Meyer Wolfsheim character, a shady fellow who is said to have been involved with rigging the 1919 World Series.
By the end of WWII, this had changed dramatically (what a surprise). In 1946, for example, we see Laura Z. Hobson's Gentleman's Agreement (also made into a film), a heavily promoted book intended to explore the problem of anti-Semitism. This book is on the Goodreads list, and it does deal with anti-Semitism; however, it is from the Jewish perspective (Hobson was Jewish).
An additional factor here is the consolidation of the publishing industry. There are only five major publishers: Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan. You might see something like "Farrar, Straus, and Giroux" on the spine, but all this seeming variety is an illusion. Nearly all these publishing brands are now owned by the big companies. Self-publishing is dominated by Amazon and hence is also centralized.
Here's a relevant Wikipedia article with more organization and context. And there should be many academic articles about this stuff on Google Scholar, JSTOR, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotyp ... literature
In classic European literature, portrayals of Jews, as a rule, seem to be quite negative. The following three works are perhaps the most famous, most discussed examples.
- The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare
- Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
- The Prioress's Tale, Geoffrey Chaucer (from the Canterbury Tales)
The Chaucer story relates to Jewish ritual murder, and it has a legendary, religious flavor to it. The Canterbury Tales are very well known in general, but few people are probably aware of this specific story.
Oliver Twist features a Jewish villain, Fagin, who is referred to as "the Jew" repeatedly in the book. The Wikipedia page for Oliver Twist explains,
There are at least two of the Brothers Grimm stories that are relevant, The Good Bargain, and The Jew Among the Thorns.Dickens (who had extensive knowledge of London street life and child exploitation) explained that he had made Fagin Jewish because "it unfortunately was true, of the time to which the story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew."[21] It is widely believed that Fagin was based on a specific Jewish criminal of the era, Ikey Solomon.[22]
I found a list on the website Goodreads that has some later novels. It's user created, so not necessarily the best quality control here. Some only have one vote and are not great picks. But it's still a useful starting point.
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/103 ... iterature_
Interestingly, you still see negative portrayals of Jews up through the 1920s. The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald is listed. I read this in school (it is still commonly assigned in America), but I honestly did not recall anything anti-Semitic about it. I had to refresh my memory of the Meyer Wolfsheim character, a shady fellow who is said to have been involved with rigging the 1919 World Series.
By the end of WWII, this had changed dramatically (what a surprise). In 1946, for example, we see Laura Z. Hobson's Gentleman's Agreement (also made into a film), a heavily promoted book intended to explore the problem of anti-Semitism. This book is on the Goodreads list, and it does deal with anti-Semitism; however, it is from the Jewish perspective (Hobson was Jewish).
An additional factor here is the consolidation of the publishing industry. There are only five major publishers: Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan. You might see something like "Farrar, Straus, and Giroux" on the spine, but all this seeming variety is an illusion. Nearly all these publishing brands are now owned by the big companies. Self-publishing is dominated by Amazon and hence is also centralized.
Here's a relevant Wikipedia article with more organization and context. And there should be many academic articles about this stuff on Google Scholar, JSTOR, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotyp ... literature
