LP in the British Library, Day #1
Admittedly, I'm somewhat bleary-eyed after reading 740 pages, but here we go.
1. Note-taking on an iPad. Note-taking on an iPad is quite convenient if you're just taking one-line notes on things. If you're doing a lot of transcription, however, it gets slightly frustrating. I have a good keyboard (a Targus), but it's still just small enough to cramp my hands (and, as you may have gathered from this here blog's very title, I'm not exactly a large woman). I'll probably finish up the book I started on the iPad, as I don't anticipate doing lengthy transcriptions from it, and then move to the full-size laptop for the last day.
2. Where'd it go? If you happen to know where The Jewess and Her Daughter went, please drop me a line. (It was just "Not on shelf," as opposed to destroyed.)
3. Alfred Edersheim, Miriam Rosenbaum: A Story of Jewish Life. Miriam Rosenbaum was a rare foray into fiction for Edersheim (1825-89), himself a convert. This conversion novel spends much of its time on Jewish psychology--specifically, why do Jews regard converts with "rancorous hatred" (pref.)? Not surprisingly, it fails to answer that question, although there is perhaps some autobiographical frustration involved in the narrator's admission that "while cut off from his own people, he will receive from others mostly a stranger's welcome" (71). Jewish converts may be all set for the next world, but apparently they have difficulties in this one. As is common in such narratives, antisemitism is mentioned in passing, but without making it a justification for anti-Gentile sentiment; in the end, the fault lies with Jews' lack of authentic charity. Edersheim deploys a number of common tropes, most notably gendering conversion (women convert first, while men react violently); the magic conversion via secret Bible reading; the formalism of Jewish belief (often paralleled to Catholic formalism, albeit not here); and the dying child witnessing to Christ (here with bonus eavesdropping). The most interesting character is a law clerk who converted to Christianity in order to save his skin, then deconverted, yet now feels neither one nor the other. Everything ends happily, with all the characters converted and in excellent financial health (except, of course, for the dead people, who are presumably in heaven).
2. M. E. Bewsher, Mischief-Makers or the Story of Zipporah. A Tale of the Times of Herod the Great. This is a later edition of the novel (the library's first edition was destroyed during the Blitz), and the playful (and utterly inappropriate) Mischief-Makers is not the original title. Much of the narrative consists of a kind of Jewish picaresque, in which Zipporah, our beautiful, Rebecca-ish heroine (well, without the squeamishness about battle) and her father Eleazar travel with a friend, Zechariah, to Rome on a mission from Antigonus to Marc Antony. Eleazar's prophetic rantings against everything he sees, which repeatedly gets him into trouble, jailed, and/or in danger of immediate death, may be intended partly as comic relief--Zechariah's Sancho Panza-ish requests that he KNOCK IT OFF, ALREADY certainly are--but they also add to the general air of doom overhanging the novel, which concludes with the fall of Jerusalem. Antigonus and Marc Antony come off especially badly, as both are degenerates given to "effeminate" behavior (e.g., lying around, drinking, and having a good time); the latter is the former's Gentile alter ego. It's no wonder, the narrative insinuates, that everything goes kaflooey; it doesn't help that most of the novel's women (Cleopatra included) have also fallen away from the paths of virtue. To add to the prophetic state of things, there's a mysterious guy wandering around uttering cries of doom that have a bad habit of coming true. Zipporah is in more overt sexual danger than usual for a children's novel of this period: her stepmother effectively conspires to have her abducted and raped, and Marc Antony spends much of his time trying to seduce, kidnap, and/or rape her. Despite the fact that the Roman Catholic Church doesn't yet exist, the novel manages to sneak in some pointed parallels between Pharisaism and Catholicism (once again, formalism rears its ugly head). Arguably, the relationship betweens Jews and Pagans in this novel is meant to function as an analogy for the post-Reformation relationship between Protestants and Catholics.
3. Henriette Stieff, The Jewess, the Christian, and the Heathen, trans. Mrs. Trees. This is a translation from the German of three novellas, originally published in 1851. (Apparently, nobody has ever cared to penetrate beyond The Jewess, because all of the other pages were uncut.) Another conversion narrative, set in the second century, featuring a special guest appearance by St. Aristides of Athens. The novel's main conflict derives from the Jewish community's decision to throw itself on the side of Simon bar Kokhba (here called Barkochba), as opposed to following the hated "Nazarene"; the narrative unfurls as one long comparison betweeb Barkochba (not nice) and Christ (nice). Our heroine this time is Salome, who also undergoes a magic conversion via Bible-reading (or scripture roll reading); not only does she suffer from Jewish Conversion Novel Patriarch Disease, but also she winds up exiled, kidnapped, sold into slavery, nearly raped, and brutalized before the necessary happy ending (cue mass conversions, everyone lives happily ever after, etc.). Her father Malachi undergoes similar trauma, losing all of his wealth and being reduced to beggary before he is finally rediscovered; once again, we see shades of the familiar Shylock/Jessica dyad.