Quick jottings on a mostly-read serial novel: The Banished Ones Fetched Home
I stumbled across the anonymous history-cum-novel/novel-cum-history The Banished Ones Fetched Home while searching for entirely something else, which I suppose illustrates the power of serendipity. (If only it had been a better novel. Or just better. But I digress.) This serial ran in Moses Margoliouth's journal The Hebrew Christian Witness between 1872 and 1875, but it's not clear if it is by Margoliouth himself (who committed at least one novel under his own name, The Curates of Riverdale). As Michael Darby points out, Margoliouth--a Polish Jew turned Anglican clergyman--maintained what amounted to supersessionist beliefs about Jewish religious practices, although he insisted on the "ethnic independence of Hebrew Christians" and had harsh things to say about how other Christians treated Jewish converts [1]. The Banished Ones certainly tends to be scathing about contemporary Gentile Christian mores, especially when it comes to the clergy, but represents at least some of its characters (all of them converts) maintaining traditional rituals, such as those marking the Sabbath.
In any event, the novel is narrated by a Hebrew Christian clergyman, a friend of the ultra-cultured Hebrew Christian Paltiel family. The Paltiels, who seem to owe something in conception to Disraeli's Sidonia, have untold wealth, incredible artistic tastes, and an immense library, not to mention a scroll that contains several centuries of family history. (Their status as Jewish aristocrats of a sort reflects the nineteenth-century English bias toward Sephardim, who were regarded as the Jewish "elite"--by both Jews and Christians--in comparison to Ashkenazim like Margoliouth.) Most of the narrative consists of the Paltiel patriarch telling the story of Anglo-Jewish history via the perspective of family saga, with occasional side excursions into the case of the mysterious Miss Ignota (who is sure she's really Jewish, even if only in the John Wilson sense) and attacks on the behavior of local Gentile clergymen and aristocracy. There's even a very special guest appearance by Sir Francis Palgrave (himself a convert). In a twist of unintentional comedy, the Paltiels turn out to be related to everybody who is anybody in both Sephardic and Anglo-Jewish history--necessary for the plot, to be sure, but perhaps somewhat overly obvious in execution.
As my previous post observed, with some exasperation, I don't have the whole novel--I'm missing at least four and probably closer to six or eight chapters--so I can't really do a full write-up. However, there are at least some points of interest.
1) Sir Walter Scott. Michael Galchinsky, Nadia Valman, and Michael Ragussis have noted Ivanhoe's powerful influence on nineteenth-century representations of Jews, especially in its version of the Shylock father/daughter dynamic inherited from The Merchant of Venice--an influence that, as both Galchinsky and Valman emphasize, extended to Jews themselves (I discussed an example here) [2]. The Banished Ones continues the trend. Not only does it take over wholesale Isaac's lamentations about how badly (and hypocritically) Jews are treated by would-be debtors, but also it reworks both the failed Ivanhoe/Rebecca romance and the king-in-disguise plots. The Rebecca stand-in is Malcah, daughter of the Paltiel's relative Reuben Joscenus, a.k.a. "Josce" of the York Massacre of 1190 (see "related to everybody," above). The "queen-like" (1873 502) young woman, very much a Rebecca-ish Jewish beauty, has been destined from birth to heal the rift between her father's and mother's families by marrying the cousin she has never met. However, while in London, she is rescued from an anti-Semitic mob by the mysterious knight "Merdaunt." They fall in love, although he never reveals his true identity! He leaves for the Crusades! Malcah's cousin appears! (Things do not go well.) Finally, in what most history-savvy readers will consider a burst of true stupidity, Malcah begs to be taken to the coronation of Richard I so that she can look for Merdaunt. And, of course, Merdaunt turns out to be Richard I himself.
Merdaunt/Richard's chivalric (and fictional) courtship of Malcah, in which he begs the "queen-like" Jew to become his "beauteous queen" (1873 543), abandoning all distinctions of Jew and Gentile, proposes an alternate history of England in which a thoroughly philo-Semitic Richard might symbolically yoke Jew and Christian in the state of holy matrimony. In fact, the modern narrator actually argues that there was no interdict on Jews attending the coronation (1873 547), and the scroll's narrator claims that Richard bewails Malcah's death, crying that she was "'the only woman I have ever loved with pure passion; the only woman I would have had share my throne'" (1873 550). In a sense, the author deconstructs Rebecca's rejection of intermarriage: Malcah, like the rest of her family, is both Jew and Christian, and the combination of her aristocratic Jewish lineage and her Christian faith makes her a suitable symbol for a new union--not between Jewish "unbelievers" (as the narrator repeatedly calls non-converted Jews) and Gentiles, but Jewish and Gentile Christians. Instead, though, Malcah's agonized response to the revelation of Richard's identity inadvertently destroys first the local Jewish community, then the community at York. Ivanhoe's symbolic marriage between Ivanhoe and Rowena here self-destructs entirely, in first an excess of passion and then an excess of anti-Semitic rage; the marriage plot proves wholly inadequate to harnessing medieval prejudices.
2) Centering the marginal. The author repeatedly finds ways of situating Jews at the very core of English intellectual, spiritual, and cultural life, primarily by gathering Hebrew Christians (largely fictional) under the same umbrella as other Jews. More cleverly, even signs of Jewish oppression become just one more proof of Judaism's contributions to the fabric of Englishness; after all, the narrator gleefully notes, Westminster Abbey partly owes its existence to money extorted from Jews (1874 505). The narrative thus seeks to de-Other the Jews by insisting that there has always been a core trace of Jewish influence at every level of English culture. This further plays out in the modern plot, in which the Hebrew Christian Paltiels live a full-blown aristocratic lifestyle (albeit one shaped by good Protestant virtues) and are considered exceptionally desirable company; their home, the "Toledo Villa," melds the family's Sephardic and English antiquity. The ideal modern aristocrat turns out to combine the best of Judaism and Christianity. Even better, the Paltiels' written family history stretches back continuously for two thousand years (!), rendering mere English aristocratic family trees "puny and insignificant" (1872 120). Again, Hebrew Christians manage to trump the Gentiles. However...
3) Hebrew Christians vs. Jews vs. Catholics. The most obvious tension in the text derives from the author's attitude to non-converted Jews, the "unbelievers," whom the author rather dislikes in general; occasionally, s/he holds them responsible for sparking anti-Semitic incidents (e.g., 1874 70). It is worth remembering that according to Hebrew Christian theology, conversion to Christianity actually constitutes a "return"; thus, an article elsewhere in the journal praises "the steadily increasing return of many eminent Jews to the Faith in Christ, spoken of 'at sundry times and in divers manners,' 'in time past, unto the fathers by the prophets'" [3]. That is, insofar as a typological reading of the Torah reveals that Christ is the prophesied Messiah, converting to Christianity paradoxically becomes the ultimate embrace of Judaism, rather than its rejection. While that's all very well, the scroll's narrator finds over and over again that medieval Christians are not particularly interested in these fine distinctions. Moreover, besides emphatically portraying the medieval Church as a site of moral and financial corruption, the various scroll narrators burst into outrage over such things as transubstantiation (1873 311). Not only are the best aristocrats Hebrew Christians, but so are the best Christians (and best Jews, for that matter); the early converts turn out to have the best understanding of "primitive Christianity."
[1] Michael R. Darby, The Emergence of the Hebrew Christian Movement in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2010), 140; Margoliouth's shifting attitudes are outlined from 135-40.
[2] Michael Galchinsky, The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer: Romance and Reform in Victorian England (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1996), 106; Nadia Valman, The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 120.
[3] "Antichristian Judaism Adverse to Toleration," The Hebrew Christian Witness 1 (July 1872): 100.