British Romanticism and the Jews: History, Culture, Literature

British Romanticism and the Jews explores the mutual influences exerted by the British-Christian and British-Jewish communities on each other during the period between Enlightenment and Victorianism. The essays in this volume demonstrate how the texts produced by the Jewish Enlightenment provided a significant resource for romantic intellectual revisionism, in much the same way that romanticism provided the cultural basis through which the British-Jewish community was able to negotiate between the competing obligations of ethnicity and nationalism. With separate sections for cultural contexts, British romantics, and Haskalah, and Jewish writers and British romanticism, the collection contains essays dealing with the Jewish naturalization controversy of 1753, Jews in the popular press, and Halakhah and the Haskalah. Among the British romantics, the essays focus on Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Sir Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth, and Charles Dickens. Finally Jewish writers include David Levi, Isaac D’Israeli, Hyman Hurwitz, Grace Aguilar, Benjamin Disraeli, and Harold Bloom.