The Portrayal of Jews in Nineteenth-Century English Literature | George Eliot (essay date 1879)
George Eliot (essay date 1879)
SOURCE: "The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!," in Impressions of Theophrastus Such, edited by Nancy Henry, William Pickering, 1994, pp. 143-65.
[In the following essay, first published in 1879 and reprinted in 1994, Eliot (1) documents the negative stereotypes prevalent in nineteenth-century England,(2) argues that the "revived expression of old antipathies " had been stimulated by the fact that Jews had attained political power, and (3) defends Jews against the defamation that they continued to receive in her lifetime.]
To discern likeness amidst diversity, it is well known, does not require so fine a mental edge as the discerning of diversity amidst general sameness.1 The primary rough classification depends on the prominent resemblances of things: the progress is towards finer and finer discrimination according to minute differences.
Yet even at this stage of European culture one's attention is...
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