On rereading Reuben Sachs

I'm teaching Amy Levy's Reuben Sachs in my graduate seminar this semester, primarily focusing on its relationship to Daniel Deronda.  This was the first time in some years that I'd reread it--the last time I sat down with it was at least a decade ago, I think--and it has been interesting to encounter it during a semester in which I was also teaching a number of assimilation/anti-assimilation narratives in my comp course. Reuben Sachs is one of those novels that makes readers uncomfortable: its full-frontal assault on the late-Victorian Anglo-Jewish middle and upper classes did not and does not endear it to Jewish readers, in part because it is so difficult to articulate the novel's purpose.  A sally against Judaism, or a particular modern manifestation thereof? Harsh critique of Jews seeking to simultaneously evade and maintain their cultural and religious affiliations? Attack on materialism? Feminist denunciation of Jewish patriarchy? Self-aware criticism or internalized antisemitism? The novel's narrative self-enclosure further heightens the ambiguity.  Even though Reuben Sachs is set in a bustling London, its plot unfolds almost entirely within the geographical, cultural, and religious bounds of the better-off segments of the Jewish community; many of its characters seek to assimilate, but what they're assimilating to remains strangely hazy.  Unlike, say, Mary Antin's Promised Land, Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory, or Kevin Johnson's How Did You Get to be A Mexican?, there's almost no sense of cross-cultural encounter and conflict, aside from moments like Reuben's run-in with a disdainful lord; except for Leo Leuniger, the resentful Cambridge student and potential future musician, and Esther, the sharp-tongued heiress, the characters spend little time in self-reflexive meditation on the relationship between their world and that of the Gentiles.   And the Gentiles themselves, quick walk-ons aside, are almost wholly invisible--unless, of course, one counts Bertie Lee-Harrison, the convert to Judaism.  It's that lack of "outsideness" in the narrative, I think, that ultimately makes the satire so discomforting.  (Surely, the reader begins to think after a bit, there must be materialistic and ugly Gentiles somewhere about.)