son.
Divine retribution would be swift and severe in cases of transgression. Daughters who dared to marry out of the faith were formally pronounced dead. Some, though not all, Jewish communities followed this injunction quite strictly. In Britain, for example, the small Jewish community that had re-established itself in the late seventeenth century saw very few marriages out before the 1830s, when the apostasy of Nathan Rothschild’s daughter and her marriage to Henry Fitzroy caused intense family distress and communal dismay. Indeed, the rate of intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles remained very low in Britain before 1901, despite the relatively small size of the Jewish community. It is not too much to say that in Victorian times opposition to mixed marriages was probably stronger among Jews than among non-Jews. Yet this did not prevent anxieties about the sexual appetites of Jews from surfacing in British literature. An early example is Farquhar’s play of 1702
The Twin Rivals
, in which the licentious Mr Moabite, a rich Jew of Lombard Street, secretly conveys to his house a young lady about to give birth to his bastard child, whom he wishes to raise as a Jew. Hogarth’s
The Harlot’s Progress
, dramatized by Theophilus Cibber in 1733, further develops the theme of Jewish lasciviousness, and still more Jewish fornicators and lechers can be found in Fielding’s play
Miss Lucy in Town
, or in Smollett’s
Roderick Random
and
Peregrine Pickle
. Where the eighteenth century satirized, the early nineteenth century romanticized. The ‘wandering Jew’ with his beautiful (and perhaps convertible) daughter were familiar figures in novels like Scott’s
Ivanhoe
and John Galt’s
The Wandering Jew
, not to mention George Eliot’s relatively benign
Daniel Deronda
. By the end of the nineteenth century, by contrast, Jews in English literature had become more closely associated with ‘white slavery’, a euphemism for prostitution.
The German experience was different. Because they came so much later to overseas empire, Germans adopted ‘scientific’ racism at a relatively late date. There was no German translation of Gobineau’s
Essay on the Inequality of Human Races
(1853–5) until 1898. And,since so few Germans emigrated to tropical colonies, they were more likely to apply imported theories of Social Darwinism and ‘racial hygiene’ to Jews – the nearest identifiable ‘alien’ race – than to Africans or Asians. The composer Richard Wagner provides a good example of the way the race ‘meme’ spread to Germany. Wagner read Gobineau in the original French in 1880 and immediately adopted the idea of the declining racial purity of the German people, which he somewhat eccentrically dated back to the rape of German women by invading armies during the Thirty Years War of 1618–48. Especially detrimental, in Wagner’s view, was any mingling of German and Jewish blood. As early as 1873 – in other words, even before he had read Gobineau – Wagner had rejected the idea that mixed marriages were a ‘solution to the [Jewish] problem’, arguing that ‘then there would no longer be any Germans, since the blonde German blood is not strong enough to resist this leech. We can see how the Normans and Franks became French, and Jewish blood is much more corrosive than Roman.’ Others followed similar lines of reasoning. In
The Jewish Question as a Question of Races, Customs and Culture
(1881), the Berlin philosopher and economist Eugen Dühring, another follower of Gobineau, lamented the ‘implanting of the character traits of the Jewish race’ and called for a prohibition on mixed marriages to preserve the purity of German blood. Theodor Fritsch’s
Anti-Semitic Catechism
(1887) warned Germans to keep their blood ‘pure’ by avoiding contact of all kinds with Jews. His new version of the Ten Commandments included: ‘Regard it as a crime to contaminate the noble stuff of your people with Jewish matter. Know that
Divine retribution would be swift and severe in cases of transgression. Daughters who dared to marry out of the faith were formally pronounced dead. Some, though not all, Jewish communities followed this injunction quite strictly. In Britain, for example, the small Jewish community that had re-established itself in the late seventeenth century saw very few marriages out before the 1830s, when the apostasy of Nathan Rothschild’s daughter and her marriage to Henry Fitzroy caused intense family distress and communal dismay. Indeed, the rate of intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles remained very low in Britain before 1901, despite the relatively small size of the Jewish community. It is not too much to say that in Victorian times opposition to mixed marriages was probably stronger among Jews than among non-Jews. Yet this did not prevent anxieties about the sexual appetites of Jews from surfacing in British literature. An early example is Farquhar’s play of 1702
The Twin Rivals
, in which the licentious Mr Moabite, a rich Jew of Lombard Street, secretly conveys to his house a young lady about to give birth to his bastard child, whom he wishes to raise as a Jew. Hogarth’s
The Harlot’s Progress
, dramatized by Theophilus Cibber in 1733, further develops the theme of Jewish lasciviousness, and still more Jewish fornicators and lechers can be found in Fielding’s play
Miss Lucy in Town
, or in Smollett’s
Roderick Random
and
Peregrine Pickle
. Where the eighteenth century satirized, the early nineteenth century romanticized. The ‘wandering Jew’ with his beautiful (and perhaps convertible) daughter were familiar figures in novels like Scott’s
Ivanhoe
and John Galt’s
The Wandering Jew
, not to mention George Eliot’s relatively benign
Daniel Deronda
. By the end of the nineteenth century, by contrast, Jews in English literature had become more closely associated with ‘white slavery’, a euphemism for prostitution.
The German experience was different. Because they came so much later to overseas empire, Germans adopted ‘scientific’ racism at a relatively late date. There was no German translation of Gobineau’s
Essay on the Inequality of Human Races
(1853–5) until 1898. And,since so few Germans emigrated to tropical colonies, they were more likely to apply imported theories of Social Darwinism and ‘racial hygiene’ to Jews – the nearest identifiable ‘alien’ race – than to Africans or Asians. The composer Richard Wagner provides a good example of the way the race ‘meme’ spread to Germany. Wagner read Gobineau in the original French in 1880 and immediately adopted the idea of the declining racial purity of the German people, which he somewhat eccentrically dated back to the rape of German women by invading armies during the Thirty Years War of 1618–48. Especially detrimental, in Wagner’s view, was any mingling of German and Jewish blood. As early as 1873 – in other words, even before he had read Gobineau – Wagner had rejected the idea that mixed marriages were a ‘solution to the [Jewish] problem’, arguing that ‘then there would no longer be any Germans, since the blonde German blood is not strong enough to resist this leech. We can see how the Normans and Franks became French, and Jewish blood is much more corrosive than Roman.’ Others followed similar lines of reasoning. In
The Jewish Question as a Question of Races, Customs and Culture
(1881), the Berlin philosopher and economist Eugen Dühring, another follower of Gobineau, lamented the ‘implanting of the character traits of the Jewish race’ and called for a prohibition on mixed marriages to preserve the purity of German blood. Theodor Fritsch’s
Anti-Semitic Catechism
(1887) warned Germans to keep their blood ‘pure’ by avoiding contact of all kinds with Jews. His new version of the Ten Commandments included: ‘Regard it as a crime to contaminate the noble stuff of your people with Jewish matter. Know that
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