Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott - Michael Ragussis (essay date 1993)
Michael Ragussis (essay date 1993)
SOURCE: "Writing Nationalist History: England, the Conversion of the Jews, and Ivanhoe," in ELH, Vol. 60, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 181-215.
[In the following essay, Ragussis argues that Scott's depiction of the conflict between Jewish and Anglo-Saxon traditions suggests that history proceeds through the synthesis of cultures rather than the preservation of homogeneous racial identity.]
I: "The Crisis of All Nations"
While Scott was writing his first medieval novel in the summer and fall of 1819, the revival of medievalism in the German states was taking a particularly noxious form. The rise of German nationalism, crystallized by the expulsion of the French after the defeat of Napoleon, climaxed in the famous anti-Semitic persecutions known as the "Hep! Hep!" riots. The idea of Christian medievalism became realized in these persecutions when the rioters reiterated the cry of the Crusaders...
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