Mythic Jewish Figures in Nineteenth-Century Western European Fiction

History has shown that antisemitism reactivates and rises like a latent viral infection at the slightest crisis humanity faces. Could literature provide an explanation for its endurance? To address this question, this book takes us back to the nineteenth century and analyses the attitude towards Jews as reflected through literature.

Thanks to the abolition of ghettos in Europe and the acquisition of citizenship, Jews made their entry into nineteenth-century society. This brought them to the attention of the writers who aimed to depict their society in their novels, this relatively new genre at the time. This book offers the unique idea that those novelists delved into their Christian collective memory to create Jewish characters. It proceeds from the assumption that three actors of the Passion of Christ (Mary Magdalene, Judas Iscariot and the Wandering Jew, a concoction of minor actors in the Gospels) have been elevated to the status of myth as they continued to evolve in art and literature along the centuries. By using the mythocritique which looks for traces of myths in literary texts, this book uncovers strong correlations between these three myths and Jewish characters in nineteenth-century novels or novellas in French, English and German.

Moreover, drawing on pioneering research which discovered that Jewish literature existed before the end of the nineteenth century, this book also exposes how French, English and German Jewish authors countered the portrayal of Jews in their fiction.