There are two notable diamond jubilees this year: the obvious one and Jewish Book Week (JWB). The festival opened last weekend and will run at Kings Place in London until Sunday evening, when David Aaronovitch and Umberto Eco will end proceedings with a discussion about the latter’s novel, The Prague Cemetery.
JBW is a celebration of literature; but, as one might expect, Jewish identity is central to most events. Yesterday afternoon saw Dennis Marks and Michael Hofmann debating the life and work of Joseph Roth — one of that band of writers (Kafka, Mann and Zweig) who described southern and eastern Europe during and after the collapse of the Hapsburg empire.
Like Kafka and Zweig, Roth was Jewish — although he described that heritage as an ‘accidental quality’. Roth has been branded a ‘self-hating Jew’, a charge inspired by his pronounced opposition to Zionism on the grounds that all nationalism is corrosive. Marks rejected the accusation, quoting Roth’s famous witticism ‘I am Jewish, not a Jew’, a sentiment that Jonathan Miller would echo some 30-odd years later.
As I listened to the audience debate the subject, I couldn’t ignore the truism that Judaism is both a community and a creed. The interest in this long-dead writer’s faith, or lack of it, was an expression of solidarity. It revealed more about the participants than it did of Roth. The overwhelming sense was of pride, and perhaps comfort, in a shared identity.
Not that everything was clear. I felt that there might be a subtle cultural difference between those who used the German pronunciation of Roth (“Rote”) and those who used the Anglicised “Roth”. The distinction was not determined by nationality: some evidently foreign Jews used the English version, although perhaps they did so out of deference. As an ignorant gentile, I did not know if this perceived significance was merely imagined.
A historical gentile view of Jewish identity was examined later in the afternoon, during the debate ‘Fagin the Jew’. Professor Leon Litvack of Queen’s University Belfast described late-Georgian England’s anti-Semitism. He showed sketches and cartoons that depicted Jews as big-nosed rag-and-bone men, often of a criminal bent. He referred to two infamous Jewish criminals (Ikey Solomons and Henry Worms) of the 1820s and 1830s. Apparently, Worms was a model for Fagin: he was convicted of hoarding stolen goods, which were pinched by his children on his instruction. He was deported to Tasmania.
Litvack’s aim was to give a balanced account of contemporary prejudices to illustrate that ‘Fagin was not a conscious attack on Jews.’ The historical context is important. Jews were not allowed to own shops or purchase material for resale at that time. The result was that most lived in grinding poverty and resorted to crime. Fagin’s undoubted venality was a symptom of wider Jewish victimhood. Dickens hinted at this in a letter to Eliza Davis (the wife of the Jewish financier who bought his house) in 1864, defending himself from charges of anti-Semitism. But he then excised references to Fagin’s Judaism in later editions of the novel, unable to convince himself of the whole character he had created.
The film historian Michael Eaton then demonstrated how screen representations of Fagin changed over the course of the 20th century, beginning with a 1909 silent film and ending with Carol Reid’s Oliver! (1968). Most of these adaptations have Fagin as a 19th century stereotype of ‘the Jew’: preposterous nose, sharp teeth and filthy as a matter of habit.
Alec Guinness’ portrayal in David Lean’s 1948 film is notorious. But while Guinness emphasised Fagin’s villainy, Ron Moody, who played Fagin in Lionel Bart’s beloved musical, is a benign victim of Bill Sikes’s savagery. Both interpretations are grounded in the text, but show only one half of the character. There is something deeply pathetic about a man who relies on children, as well as something deeply sinister. Ben Kingsley’s version in Roman Polanski’s 2005 film (above) captures both sides of this complicated Dickensian character, an emblem of the unhappy Jewish experience of 1830s Britain.
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