Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Charity, Community and Religion, 1830–1880 by Alysa Levene (review)

Abstract

dialecticism is fittingly employed in the chapter on the Arcades Project, where Freedman confronts Benjamin’s soft-pedalling of French economic antisemitism, which identified Jews with usury and capitalism. He argues that Benjamin’s Marxism, together with his affection for Paris and for French culture, impelled him to romanticize the Arcades at the expense of the semiotically Jewish, putatively decadent department stores that displaced them, and to soft-pedal the antisemitism of Charles Baudelaire and the socialist Charles Fourier. In a brilliant tour de force, Freedman stages a conflict within Benjamin in which the Jewish thinker ultimately gains the upper hand over the Francophile. The brilliance involves Freedman’s uncovering a kabalistic subtext in the letter of Benjamin’s text and locating in it a “Judeocentric” theory of writing and a messianic hope (205). This Derridean move is especially resonant because it echoes the deconstructive reversals by which Freedman reads Sigmund Freud’s engagement with Arthur Schopenhauer in the previous chapter, but this time making hope, rather than pessimism, the dominant note. At times it may seem as though the connections to decadence in these layered analyses are tenuous. But I am willing to accept the premise of a long fin de siècle that precedes the Yellow Nineties of England, because decadence emerges earlier in Paris and later writers continued to engage with it. Occasionally, Freedman identifies Jews who aren’t Jews. I don’t mean figures like Proust or the novelist Reginald Turner, but Wilde’s Salomé and her royal parents, who are not represented in the play as the Jews that they were in fact; or (I smile as I write) Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop in his 1932 cartoon Minnie the Moocher, Freedman’s final example of the modern Jewish slender female body popularized by “Salomania.” Suffice it to say that the hasenpfeffer her parents are forcing upon her, being made from rabbit, is not kosher; moreover, to interpret the bald pate of Boop père as a yarmulke is surely wishful. But I am almost sorry to disown Betty as the last in a line of decadence-influenced Jewish female icons whom Freedman has joyfully identified. Beth Newman Southern Methodist University