Philosemitism, eighteenth-century French style

At his death, the short-lived fablist and dramatist Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian left behind an unpublished novella, purporting to be a translation from an old Hebrew poem, entitled Eliezer et Nephtali.  It appears to have been first published sometime around 1802, then was translated into English at least three times  over the course of the next couple of decades; there are, in addition, multiple Hebrew translations.  Although the tale is set in the decades following Joshua's victories, its frame narrative features an unnamed speaker (standing in for the author) who encounters a young Jewish couple while he's out for a walk; the frame turns out to justify and authorize the pastoral plot.

Our first glimpse of the Jewish couple invokes some very conventional tropes, but winds up deploying them in favor of toleration.  The wife "était grande, belle, et sa beauté devenait plus frappante par son caractère étranger"; a dark-eyed exotic, she is very much the stereotype of the Oriental Jewess.  Moreover, we catch the couple in a deeply sentimental moment of reading, as they sob sweetly over a text that turns out to be in Hebrew.   The figure of the weeping Jew, contrasting the horrors of modern exile with the lost heroic age, has been rather tough to shake, but here the speaker mistakenly analogizes this moment to Petrarch and Laura (225).  In fact, the speaker's lengthy contemplation of this picturesque moment, eavesdropping on a conversation he can't understand and climaxing with the incorrect (and rather inappropriate) compliment to the young woman, turns out to dramatize bad Christian readings of Jews more generally.   Consistently trying to locate Jewish suffering in a Christian providential context, the speaker soon gets swamped by the Jewish couple's resolute insistence on sticking to their own plot.  Indeed, the wife, appropriately named Esther, turns out to be not the passive recipient and auditor of a courtly love text, but a masterful speaker in her own right; although the speaker finds himself charmed by "[s]a beauté, son émotion" (228), he also winds up being crushed by her attack, weakly admitting that he doesn't actually get to demonstrate "qu'en tout temps nous avons été les plus justes et les meilleures gens du monde"  (230).  Quite literally, the Christian doesn't get to have the last word.  Notably, the speaker has learned to keep his mouth shut by the time Jonathas and Esther invite him home for dinner: he's contemptuous of the strange dinner preparations, but fears to speak up (231). By the end, the speaker winds up transmitting the poem Jonathas and Esther were reading--supposedly in Jonathas' translation from the Hebrew--to a wider French audience, thereby deferring to the Jew's traditional narrative of the past.

The pastoral novella that follows is slight, but its polemical bent lies in its explicit lack of violence.  According to the Christian speaker, Jewish history welters in its own blood ("sang") (226); by contrast, the novella focuses consistently on how its main characters avoid causing pain to others.  (Although the names are Biblical--there's a Sadoc [Zadok] the priest, Eliezer, Naphtali, and so on--they aren't identical to the actual Biblical figures.  This is Torah alternate history, as it were.)  In some ways, the narrative offers a loose, revisionist retelling of Jacob and Esau.  Brothers Eliezer and Naphtali, whose personalities roughly correspond to Jacob's and Esau's,  exist in a perfect union of personality, so close that heterosexual romance seems not just out of the question, but positively unnecessary.  But this closed circuit is abruptly ruptured when Naphtali rescues Rachel, a young woman on the verge of death by dehydration, at the risk of his own life; the two fall in love immediately.  Unfortunately, when Rachel comes to sacrifice at the Temple for Naphtali's life, Eliezer sees her and promptly falls in love himself.   The narrative thus establishes what could be a pretext for domestic tragedy: the two brothers, suddenly initiated into heterosexual desire (which the text clearly signals is the first phase of their true maturity), could fall out, could kill each other out of jealousy, could send their village into a downward spiral, &c.  But they don't.  Instead, Naphtali sacrifices his desire so that his brother can have Rachel; Rachel and Naphtali agree that their duty to Eliezer transcends their mutual love, and so Naphtali chooses to disappear forever; and, finally, Eliezer realizes the true state of affairs after the marriage, then stages his "death" so that Rachel and Naphtali will need to marry according to Jewish law.   The narrative pointedly lops off each potentially tragic node, then funnels the tale into an afterlife of reclusive pastoral virtue, with the little family retiring from society to memorialize the lost brother.  Once the secret has been revealed, Rachel, Naphtali, and little Eliezer enjoy a brief moment of communion with the dying Eliezer, who grants them his benediction: "soyez heureux sans m'oublier" (266).   Their sentimental tears both echo and produce those of Esther and Jonathas in the frame narrative;  as the ancient family remembers the lost Eliezer while looking to the future, so too do Esther and Jonathas project the possibility of future Jewish happiness while contemplating their historical losses.   The frame narrative's account of gory Jewish history thus finds its opposite number in an account of perfect fraternal love and self-sacrifice.