Walter Scott’s Jewish Characters and the Nineteenth Century Imagination
Matthew Skwiat, Morehouse College
The works and characters of Walter Scott loomed large in the nineteenth century, impacting not only the thoughts and minds of his readers, but the ways history, gender, and religious identity were shaped and understood. Nowhere is Scott’s influence more keenly felt then in the construction of his Jewish characters. While Scott created only a handful of Jewish characters like Zilla de Moncada and Richard Middlemas in “The Surgeon’s Daughter” (1827), it was the introduction of father and daughter Isaac and Rebecca of York in the historical novel Ivanhoe (1819) which resonated most throughout the century. Rebecca in particular became one of Scott’s most beloved characters, with an early review in Blackwood’s calling her “by far the most romantic creation of female character the author has ever formed,” and that no female character “is to be found in the whole annals either of poetry or of romance” (84). Rebecca’s steadfast devotion to her faith and steely reserve in the face of prejudice made her a template of romanticized notions of femininity, Jewish identity and a symbol of female empowerment. Rebecca and Isaac were molded from sources both real and literary but were able to transcend their origins, thwart easy typification, and live on through a number of popular entertainments from operas and stage productions to early films. A closer reading of the two characters, an understanding of their origins both historical and contemporary, and a focus on the ways these characters and their situations were reworked and reconceptualized in other popular media will help elucidate the impact of Scott and the important role he had in shaping attitudes and understandings of Jews in the nineteenth century.
Ivanhoe’s Origins and Inspirations
Walter Scott’s decision to write a novel around Jewish characters dates back to at least 1817. His biographer J.G. Lockhart relates a story told to him by one of Scott’s friends, the artist and Scottish lawyer James Skene, about a conversation Skene had with Scott about the author’s fond memories interacting with Jews while a young man in Germany (Lockhart 177–8). This kernel of an idea grew into what would become Isaac and Rebecca in Ivanhoe. Scott told Skene after publication that “you will find this book owes not a little to your German reminiscences” (178). Scott’s turn towards Germany and the Jewish people may also have been inspired by real life calamities taking place there. In August of 1819 the so- called Hep-Hep Riots broke out in many states of the German Confederation. The antisemitic attacks on Jewish people and businesses were a result of the backlash from the ongoing efforts towards Jewish emancipation following the Napoleonic Wars.1 The degrading treatment of Isaac and Rebecca at the hands of the Knights Templar and Normans, coupled with the examination of nationhood and assimilation throughout Ivanhoe, resonated with readers who were confronting similar questions and situations across Europe.
Scott responded to real-world issues plaguing post-war Europe in Ivanhoe but also found sources of inspiration in his friends and acquaintances. From as early as the 1820s, readers and scholars have attempted to connect the people in Scott’s novels to their real-life counterparts. Given the popularity of Rebecca, rumors began to spread that Rebecca Gratz of Philadelphia was the original prototype. Gratz was a prominent Jewish American philanthropist and community organizer who funded a number of important initiatives throughout Philadelphia including the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society, the Jewish Foster Home, and the Hebrew Sunday School. Gratz, like Rebecca, was unmarried and was committed to her faith, remaining steadfast even when she was proposed to by a Christian man. She was also friends with the American writer Washington Irving, and some sources claim that Irving had told Scott of Gratz when he visited Abbotsford in 1817. A note, now lost, had accompanied an edition of Ivanhoe sent to Irving by Scott alluding to the similarities between the two Rebeccas.2 While the accuracy of Gratz’s inspiration behind Rebecca of York remains inconclusive, her life offers an interesting parallel to Scott’s novel and the ways his popular characters were written and imagined.
Rebecca, Isaac, and Literary History
Scott’s characters owe their creation as much to fiction as they do to fact. Rebecca and Isaac descend from a robust literary tradition dating back to Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. Many critics have seen in the relationship between Isaac and Rebecca echoes of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and the characters Shylock and Jessica. Numerous references throughout Ivanhoe make these connections clear from the direct quotations Scott includes at the beginning of his chapter headings to the resemblances between the two, as both feature stereotypes regarding Jewish characters and wealth, and each have the daughter tested by love for a Christian man.
Isaac has been understood as more emblematic of Shylock. Edgar Rosenberg in From Shylock to Svengali (1960) argues that in creating Isaac as a much maligned and persecuted Jew, Scott borrowed heavily from stereotype. As the “comic butt” (95) of the story Rosenberg argues, Isaac, is one dimensional, a “milder Shylock” and a “Shylock without his fangs” (102). While Rosenberg and others have brought up convincing critiques of Isaac’s character, he remains a deceptively intricate character, caught between a cruel and ignorant world which does not value him and a powerful will to survive and protect his daughter. Instances of Isaac’s complexity is found in the description Scott paints of him. He describes a physiognomy that “would be considered handsome” but which “during those dark ages, was alike detested by the credulous and prejudiced vulgar, and persecuted by the greedy and rapacious nobility, and who, perhaps, owing to that very hatred and persecution, had adopted a national character, in which there was much, to say the least, mean and unamiable” (64). Scott’s description paints a portrait of Isaac and a “vulgar” society which has unfairly and ignorantly determined his character. Laced within this description is also Scott’s ambivalent assessment of Isaac as he imparts to him a “mean and unamiable” countenance. Ultimately, Isaac’s overriding impulse is survival, not just for himself but for Rebecca. The actions he takes to protect Rebecca cut through his comic portrayal and offer glimpses of revolt. When the Norman Front-de-Boeuf seeks a ransom for Rebecca, Isaac refuses, telling him “I will pay thee nothing,” and when faced with torture responds, “do thy worst. My daughter is my flesh and blood, dearer to me a thousand times than those limbs which thy cruelty threatens” (238). Isaac’s courage and defiance work at disrupting the stereotypical contours of Shylock while at the same time making him into a sympathetic character who thwarts easy identification.
The same kind of complexity and strength found in Isaac is further embellished in his daughter Rebecca. She, like Isaac, bears passing resemblance to literary ancestor Jessica in Merchant of Venice, and has also been linked to Marlowe’s Abigail in The Jew of Malta (1590).3 Other connections have also been made to Clarissa Harlowe, the titular heroine from Samuel Richardson’s eighteenth-century novel.4 Because of these many literary allusions, Rebecca is not free of stereotype, and in both look and appearance is exoticized because of her beauty and foreignness. Scott’s first descriptions of her reveal her orientalist qualities: “Her form was exquisitely symmetrical, and was shown to advantage by a sort of Eastern dress, which she wore according to the fashion of the females of her nation. Her turban of yellow silk suited well with the darkness of her complexion” (93–4). The beauty and otherness of Rebecca add to her allure in the novel, a point many have commented on both positively and negatively since the novel’s release. The exotic and erotic appeal of the female Jewess was a trope that reverberated throughout the nineteenth century in the works of George Eliot, Benjamin Disraeli, and Anthony Trollope. Many see this trope as harmful to Jewish representation, with Rachel Schulkins arguing that “the character of the sexy Jewess was conceived to reinforce the notion that Jews are a corrupt race, enslaved to their desires and thus morally inferior to the host nation” (112). While the legacy of the exoticized Jewess created problematic stereotypes, it is important to note that Rebecca is herself more than just her beauty. It is in fact in her action and deeds which reveal her power and command in the novel.
The Strength and Sympathy of Rebecca
What makes Rebecca of York such a fascinating character is the careful balancing between the strength she shows and the sympathy she garners from the reader and other characters. Like her father Isaac, the cruel situations and adversity she goes through is meant to create empathy for her, while at the same time chastising the ignorant world and society she lives in. Faced with the threat of violence by the evil Bois-Guilbert, Scott describes how “her looks, air, and manner” gave her “a dignity that seemed more than mortal” (265). Not only does she possess courage, but also elicits empathy, even from her persecutors. When she is tried for witchcraft by the Knights Templars, she stands proudly and had “impressed on the audience a sentiment of pity and sympathy” (410). Even when forced to convert or face death, she tells the Templars that “life has been miserable- miserable, at least of late, but I will not cast away the gift of God, while he affords me the means of defending it. I deny this charge-I maintain my innocence, and I declare the falsehood of this accusation” (414). It is Rebecca’s refusal to disavow her faith and stand up for both her religion and personhood that imbues her with such force of will.
Unlike Jessica and other literary Jewesses of the past, Rebecca importantly refuses to give up her faith and with it delivers one final rebuke of the violent and treacherous world of England. During Ivanhoe’s finale, Rowena implores Rebecca to stay in England now that King Richard has returned. Rebecca instead decides to self-exile, telling Rowena that “the people of England are a fierce race, quarrelling ever with their neighbors, or among themselves, and ready to plunge a sword into the bowels of each other. Such is no safe abode for the children of my people” (499). Importantly, it is Rebecca who chooses to leave England, a decision she delivers with the same strength of character and rebelliousness that has defined her throughout the novel.
The Afterlives of Rebecca and Isaac: Stage, Page, and Screen
The popularity and cultural reach of Ivanhoe was immense and reverberated across the media landscape from popular plays and operas to sequels and revisions. Rebecca and Isaac lived long in the nineteenth century imagination as a number of adaptations of Ivanhoe happened almost immediately. One month after the novel was released Thomas Dibdin presented Ivanhoe; or the Jew’s Daughter (1820) at the Surrey Theatre. This was quickly followed Samuel Beazley’s Ivanhoe: or the Knight Templar (1820) and George Sloane’s The Hebrew (1820) at Covent Garden. The mania for all things Rebecca and Isaac related reverberated throughout Britain with each production capitalizing on the success of Scott’s name and novel while also augmenting the original. Sloane’s The Hebrew, for instance rewrote the novel with Isaac as main character, rehabilitating him from a weak comic stereotype into a more fleshed out and nuanced human being.5 The Hebrew is particularly noteworthy as it sought to expand the proto-Jewish elements in the novel and deepened the connection between Isaac and Rebecca.
Sloane’s rewriting of Ivanhoe showcases the ways in which Scott’s story was reimagined across the nineteenth century. This was particularly true of many artists and authors within the Jewish community who responded directly to Scott’s novel. One of the leading Jewish writers of the Romantic and early Victorian period was Grace Aguilar who, like Scott, began her career as a poet before moving into novel writing. Her posthumously published novel Vale of Cedars; or the Martyr (1850) takes the Orientalized figure of the Jewess epitomized in Rebecca and reworks it in the figure of Marie as a source of rebellious strength who rejects conversion and, like Aguilar herself, becomes a symbol of Anglo- Jewish resilience and power. Aguilar’s novel is instructive in understanding the ways Scott’s novel and Rebecca herself were influential to later Anglo and Jewish authors.
For many readers and writers it was Rebecca’s supposed lack of a happy ending that generated the most commentary. Scott alludes to this in his introduction, writing, “the character of the fair Jewess found so much favor in the eyes of some fair readers, that the writer was censured, because, he had not assigned the hand of Wilfred to Rebecca” (12). Many of the stage and film adaptations rewrote the ending altogether with Dibdin’s finale featuring Ivanhoe rescuing Rebecca. Later novelists like Thackeray would revisit Ivanhoe’s conclusion and hope to correct a perceived wrong. In Thackeray’s comic sequel Rebecca and Rowena (1850), Rebecca marries Ivanhoe, renouncing her faith in the process, proclaiming, “I love and bless him always. Yes, always. My prayers are his; my faith is his. Yes, my faith is your faith, Wilfrid, Wilfrid! I have no kindred more, I am a Christian” (96). Attempts like Thackeray’s uncover uneasy responses to religious conversion and Jewish integration across Europe. These questions surrounding Jewish self-determination, culture and assimilation would continue to be explored across the Victorian period. A later novel inspired by Ivanhoe would further wrestle with the cultural, religious, and social parameters of Judaism in the nineteenth century. George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) reworks the romance between Ivanhoe and Rebecca through Gwendolyn and Deronda and mixes up the genders in the process. Eliot, like Scott, relies on a combination of sympathy and strength in the creation of her characters while focusing on the significance of faith and its importance to identity. Eliot’s novel helped inspire a number of Christian and Jewish Zionist movements, and was one of the most important successors of Ivanhoe.6
The influence of Isaac and Rebecca altered the ways Victorians understood Jewish character, nationalism, and even gender. Later feminists like Francis Julia Wedgwood would be inspired by Scott’s characters and Rebecca in particular became an exemplar of feminine strength and perseverance. Wedgwood wrote that Rebecca was Scott’s “finest creation” and gave a “voice to a race downtrodden” (518). Other iterations like Elizabeth Taylor’s Rebecca in Ivanhoe (1952) would further strike a balance between romance and reality, strength and sympathy. What gave Scott’s Jewish characters’ their significance was, as Virginia Woolf wrote, “the seed of life in them” (158). It was their complex humanity and depth and ability to be so many things for so many people. Rebecca and Isaac managed to break out of their literary molds and helped inspire and define Jewish character across the nineteenth century.
1 Under Revolutionary and later Napoleonic France, Jews were emancipated. Under Napoleonic rule, some German states had begun the process of emancipating their Jewish citizens, and Jewish representatives at the Congress of Vienna demanded emancipation for all Jews in Germany.
2 The note read: “how do you like your Rebecca? Does the Rebecca I have pictured compare well with the pattern given?” (qtd. in Lewin). For more information on the similarities between the two see Judith Lewin’s article “Legends of Rebecca: Ivanhoe, Dynamic Identification, and the Portraits of Rebecca Gratz” (2006).
3 See Edgar Rosenberg, From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction (1960).
4 Nassau Senior in his review of Ivanhoe mentions that this scene imitates Samuel Richardson, writing that “we have little doubt that the mode in which Rebecca repels the Templar, is borrowed from the celebrated scene in which Clarissa (vol. iv, letter 13, awes Lovelace by a similar menace of suicide” (Critical Heritage 238).
5 Ivanhoe was one of Scott’s most widely adapted novels for the stage. For a robust list of these productions see H. Philip Bolton, Scott Dramatized (1992).
6 Much has been written on Eliot and Jewish culture and identity. See for example Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot (2012); Susan Meyer “Safely to their Own Borders”: Proto-Zionism, Feminism, and Nationalism in Daniel Deronda” (1993); and Bernadette Waterman Ward’s “Zion’s Mimetic Angel: George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda” (2004).
Works Consulted
Bolton, H. Philip. Scott Dramatized. Mansell, 1992.
Hayden, John O. Scott: The Critical Heritage. Routledge & K. Paul, 1970.
Himmelfarb, Gertrude. The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot. Encounter Books, 2012.
Lewin, Judith. “Legends of Rebecca: Ivanhoe, Dynamic Identification, and the Portraits of Rebecca Gratz.” Nashim, vol. 10, 2006, pp. 178–212.
Lockhart, J. G. Narrative of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. J.M. Dent, 1915.
Meyer, Susan. “‘Safely to Their Own Borders’: Proto-Zionism, Feminism, and Nationalism in Daniel Deronda.” ELH, vol. 60, no. 3, 1993, pp. 733–58.
Rosenberg, Edgar. From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes In English Fiction. Stanford University Press, 1960.
Schulkins, Rachel. “Immodest Otherness: Nationalism and the Exotic Jewess in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe.” Nineteenth Century Gender Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, 2016, pp. 111–31.
Scott, Walter. Ivanhoe. Oxford University Press, 2010.
Thackeray, William Makepeace. Rebecca and Rowena. Bradbury and Evans, 1850.
Ward, Bernadette Waterman. “Zion’s Mimetic Angel: George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.” Shofar, vol. 22, no. 2, 2004, pp. 105–15.
Woolf, Virginia. The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf. Harcourt, 1967.
Bibliography
Aguilar, The Vale of Cedars; or The Martyr. New York, 1851.
Beazley, Samuel. Ivanhoe or the Knight’s Templar. London: W. Smith, 1820.
Dibdin, Thomas. Ivanhoe or the Jew’s Daughter. London: Thomas Hailes Lacy, 1820.
Scott, Walter. Ivanhoe. Archibald Constable and Co., 1820.
–. “The Surgeon’s Daughter” in Chronicles of Canongate. Cadell and Co., 1827.
Sloane, George. The Hebrew. Thomas Hailes Lacy, 1820.