Tales of a Jewess
In every scholar's life, there comes a time when he or she finishes reading a book, looks off into the distance (or, at least, into the computer screen), and, in a state of advanced perplexity, asks one unanswerable question:
"Who could have possibly thought that this was a good idea?"
The otherwise-unknown Madame Brendlah's Tales of a Jewess (1838) is that kind of novel. In fact, given that it was never finished--only the first volume exists--the Victorian reading public may also have been asking itself that question. Montagu Frank Modder comments, with some irony, that the novel is "[n]o doubt a well-intentioned volume," but concludes that "[t]he execution is both weak and egotistical."1 In theory, Tales of a Jewess is about the conversion of a young Jewish woman to Christianity, partly due to the carelessness of her family: they schlepped her off to a Christian boarding school. Our heroine, Judith, yearns "to see my beloved mother and brothers put from them the bigotry of Jews, and become in spirit, tolerant Christians" (106). Tales of a Jewess does, in fact, demonstrate some "tolerance" : the novel's most devoutly Christian character is the family's African servant, Joseph--Judith herself scorns a potential suitor who is a "slave dealer" (6)--and we also encounter a virtuous, wronged woman of partly Indian descent. Nevertheless, in a case of truly spectacular self-deconstruction, this brief for "tolerant Christians" comes in the middle of what is quite possibly the most anti-Semitic novel I've read since Gwendolen--except that, unlike Gwendolen, this is supposed to be an evangelical conversion novel. Tales of a Jewess drops a passing allusion to the blood libel in the preface, repeating it again towards the novel's conclusion ("She has often heard her brothers exclaim, that they would sooner have stabbed her to the heart, and drunk her blood, than that she should have married a Goyer" [vii]). Judith's idea of a practical joke runs to tricking a rabbi into eating meat basted in pork juices, a story she's sure that her ideal Christian beloved Hartford will "enjoy" (56). Other examples of "fun" (ahem) include "accidentally" helping another rabbi to fish cooked in butter, thereby making it impossible for him to eat the meat served for the main course, and exploiting the prohibition against travel on the Sabbath by trapping several Jews on an island without any food. Characters tell stories celebrating Jewish skills in such matters as theft and blackmail; Judith's own father, a Catholic convert to Judaism, gleefully describes the time he attempted an assignation with a nun, despite being married at the time. The principal rabbi is a villain out to destroy Judith by any means possible. Judith's Jewish bosom buddy, Ellen, turns out to be a viper in disguise. Only Judith's mother appears to have much in the way of redeeming virtues, and even she condemns Judith for converting to Christianity. Beyond the...charms...of the various Jewish characters, the novel also introduces a number of familiar anti-Semitic topoi, including the child persecuted for owning a New Testament, the rote and insincere nature of Jewish religious practices, and the underlying abusiveness of the Jewish family (a "disordering of authority and gender"2).
Even considered purely as a novel, Tales of a Jewess is remarkably inept. Brendlah structures the plot as a series of inset narratives: after the plot inches ahead for a few moments, a character stops and tells a story. Rinse, repeat. For some reason, a number of these stories are about Napoleon, with whom Judith's father served; it's never clear why, although I'm guessing that Mme. Brendlah was trying to kill two potential literary markets with one stone. One of the first inset narratives, by Judith's mother, is never actually finished, despite her promise to do so (perhaps Mme. Brendlah just forgot, or perhaps she meant it for one of the following volumes). Judith's father speaks with a pronounced accent, except when he inexplicably drops it for an entire chapter. And, in an unintentionally hilarious moment, Judith and the young lady from India share a spontaneous, sentimental moment of "mutual confidence," in which Judith "told her all her history" (168)--a fine example of TMI, to be sure, after what appears to be about five minutes' acquaintance.
Nevertheless, there are some points of interest here. Unlike the cheap fiction of the late 1840s and later, Tales of a Jewess evinces an almost raucous interest in errant sexuality that sometimes characterizes other religious novels of this period. (We also get an open discussion of circumcision, to which Judith objects.) When the novel isn't thwacking us over the head with its anti-Semitism, it's dwelling intensely on the threat of uncontrolled eroticism. Judith's mother hints strongly that her marriage to a supposed convert to Judaism has not been happy (and certainly the husband's tales hint at a certain lack of fidelity), while Judith's brother Emanuel trifles with the feelings of a Christian girl. More seriously, a young woman is betrayed by her fiance and her twin sister, bears an illegitimate child, and goes insane, ultimately leading to her impending death, an attempted infanticide, and the suicides of both fiance and sister; Judith's brother Adolphus engages in an illicit interfaith relationship with Judith's friend Bertha that results in a "still-born son" (21) and Bertha's own death; another one of Judith's friends, Isabel, gets herself entangled in a love affair with a soldier that, combined with some other personal traumas, provokes her into committing suicide (the reader will, by now, have noted a certain trend); Judith encounters a young man, Thomas, who accidentally kills his pregnant sister and then murders her lover; and a madman turns out to have murdered his own wife, the better to wed another woman. Even Judith's young visitor from India is a woman betrayed by an Englishman who turns out to be a bigamist. (There's enough death by sex here to make one wonder if this is actually a modern slasher film in Victorian disguise.) In all of these instances, lust--or even love--unregulated by Christian faith results in suffering at best, death and damnation at worst. The after-effects of desire wreck both individuals and their families, spiraling out from supposedly private romances. The universe of Tales of a Jewess is, in fact, an intensely sexual one, in which the chaotic force of the erotic (leading, as it keeps doing, to death and despair) affects even the most apparently virtuous of beings, like Bertha. This world, suggests Nadia Valman, is "chaotic and uninterpretable," largely because man's fallen desires render it so.3 After all, Bertha's and Isabel's Christianity fails to halt their inexorable collapse. But woman's Christian faith alone is useless; without any reform of the novel's many lustful males, womanly devotion proves a weak shield. In that sense, the novel rejects the theories of female "influence" that were growing increasingly popular at about this time: far from redeeming the corruptions of male public and private life, here female virtue simply implodes under the weight of mutual desire.
Judith's decision to elope with William Hartford, then, albeit with Joseph's approval, was probably meant to set up some kind of disaster in the second volume. Notably, the narrator condemns the decision, arguing that "rashness of action" (199) was one of the less positive aspects of Judith's character. This sinful decision, says the narrator, will irrevocably separate Judith from her mother: "Merciful Father! forgive the transgression of the child, in disobeying so good a parent" (199). Judith turns out to be a terrible reader of all the inset narratives the novel has inflicted upon us so far. Although her romance plot with William Hartford inverts her mother's--instead of the man converting to Judaism, the woman has converted to Christianity--she nevertheless indulges in the same rejection of authority that characterizes just about every one of the novel's tragic mini-romances. Judith chooses pleasure over the suffering of self-denial, and therefore may have put herself on the road to doom. After all, remarks the narrator, "Should the reader ask, had she no other happiness? The reply is, Yes! But, after being caressed, beloved, and universally admired, to be scorned, despised, and forbidden ever again to enter the presence of her family, was a trial, which nothing but a firm reliance in her new religion could enable her to sustain" (204-5). Judith's decision to elope suggests that this "firm reliance" has, instead, given way, insofar as she has chosen earthly "happiness" over the "other happiness" (i.e., faith in salvation through Christ) promised by her newfound beliefs. Her true faith, that is, lies in the salvific power of romance with her one true beloved--even though the novel keeps insisting that all romance plots run into a dead end (quite literally). At this phase of the novel's development, in other words, it's not altogether clear that her much vaunted conversion has actually worked.
1 Montagu Frank Modder, The Jew in the Literature of England to the End of the Nineteenth Century (1939; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1944), 413.
2 Nadia Valman, The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 66. I discuss such attempts to render Jewish and Catholic families pathological in “Protestants against the Jewish and Catholic Family, c. 1829-1860,” Victorian Literature and Culture 31 (2003): 333-57.
3 Valman, 68.