There can be no straightforward account of attitudes toward Jewishness in the work of Virginia Woolf. This is a woman who lived happily married to a Jew and whose private references to Leonard as “my Jew” are marital jokes (Diary [The Diary of Virginia Woolf] 1: 11), yet whose diaries regularly efface the individual Jew and reduce him or her to an identity that is generalized and conceptual rather than unique. She reads a French novel, Et Cie, “by a Jew,” not by Jean-Richard Bloch (1: 134); Roger Fry's daughter Pamela marries “her Roumanian Jew,” not Micu Diamand (2: 188); it is only a “young Jewess [who] was attacked in bed at 4 last Sunday morning by a mad husband with a razor,” not Mrs. Sybil Starr (3: 268). Such labeling comes easily to Woolf, and even when names are ascribed, the Jewish tag is quickly tied on: Bruno Walter was a man whose name certainly could not easily be forgotten, but in her diary record of their meeting Woolf remembers him as “a swarthy, fattish, man. … Not at all the ‘great conductor’ … a little Slav, a little semitic” (4: 153). Other names not quite so eminent as Walter's are prone to slip her mind: whether “Hinder?” or “Hinckel?” Woolf can't remember (Dr. Rita Hinden had just left Monk's House after having tea), but in any case her guest was a “cheap hard Jewess” (5: 264-65).¹

Without seeking excuses for Virginia Woolf, I want to study the complexities of her anti-Semitism first by considering the cultural and historical meanings of “the Jew” through a psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity, then by reading her short story “The Duchess and The Jeweller” in these terms, and finally by discussing an earlier short story, “Three Jews,” by her husband Leonard.² I am indebted in my analysis to Zygmunt Bauman's work on the “conceptual Jew” in Modernity and the Holocaust (especially chap. 2), which draws on Sartre's sense of the “viscosity” of “the Jew” in Being and Nothingness; to Mary Douglas's anthropological work on the cultural associations of “the Jew” with “sliminess” in Purity and Danger; and to Julia Kristeva's work on “abjection,” most notably in Powers of Horror. What all these writers address is the formation of boundaries: What is clean and what is unclean? What is pure and what is dangerous? What is order and what is chaos? More significantly, all of them point to the “in-between” as that which most tellingly reveals how such social and cultural boundaries are constructed and maintained. Through the sheer overdetermination of meanings ascribed to him, “the Jew” becomes a kind of in-between that defies location, a “semantically overloaded entity,” as Bauman puts it, “comprising and blending meanings which ought to be kept apart, and for this reason a natural adversary of any force concerned with drawing borderlines and keeping them watertight” (39). Bauman goes on to put his case more forcefully still: “I propose that the conceptual Jew has been historically construed as the universal ‘viscosity’ of the Western world” (40).

Such a statement corrects the familiar interpretation of “the Jew” as Other, as for example in Sander Gilman's explanation:

Anti-Semitism is central to Western culture because the rhetoric of European culture is Christianized, even in its most secular form. This made the negative image of difference of the Jew found in the Gospel into the central referent for all definitions of difference in the West.

(18-19)

Gilman's understanding of “the Jew” as Other operates by a strict bipolar model that disallows any sense of “viscosity” and any method that would foreground the disruption of categorization rather than the categories themselves. Such a method—operating in terms of the in-between—is practiced, for example, by Hannah Arendt in her analysis of how modern anti-Semitism responds to the fact that Jews were “a non-national element in a world of growing or existing nations” (22).³ Social and national identities do not stick to “the Jew,” for which reason Arendt argues that Jews are “non-national” or “inter-national”: they are the in-between. If we take the liberty of substituting Jew for woman in Woolf's ringing declaration in Three Guineas, then the threat of the in-between is yet clearer: “As a Jew, I have no country. As a Jew I want no country. As a Jew my country is the whole world” (313). Arendt's nonnational Jew and Woolf's woman outsider in Three Guineas are, by this argument, culturally threatening in the same way: both cut across the “clean” demarcations of self/other that regulate the various boundaries of identity, be they social, national, religious, or gendered. The threat is not that of the foreigner or the outsider as the discrete Other but rather that the foreigner and the outsider are already within, implicated in the foundations of identity. Arendt's Jew and Woolf's outsider are viscous, slimy, even polymorphous. One attracts anti-Semitism, the other misogyny.

Gilman's distancing of “the Jew” from Christianity as its “negative image,” therefore, fails to recognize the truly protean threat of the in-between, which Woolf taps into with her feminist polemic, Arendt perceives in her study of totalitarianism, and Zygmunt Bauman realizes as well:

The Jews were not just unlike any other nation; they were also unlike any other foreigners. In short, they undermined the very difference between hosts and guests, the native and the foreign. And as nationhood became the paramount basis of group self-constitution, they came to undermine the most basic of differences: the difference between “us” and “them.”

(52, Bauman's italics)

Gilman's analysis of “the Jew” as merely the “negative image” of Christianity misreads the complex interdependency of Christianity's relationship with Judaism. Jews, as Bauman observes, were simultaneously the “venerable fathers of Christendom and its hateful, execrable detractors”; they were, “so to speak, co-extensive and co-terminal with Christianity” (37). As such, Jews were implicated in the very construction of Christian identity. They are already and always within, not the negative of the Christian positive, but an aspect of that positive image itself.

An explanation that seeks to account for the operations of Western discourse in terms of a Jewish Other, as Gilman's does, also overlooks the fact that it is not necessarily the case that all the languages of the West are Christianized. Insofar as Christianity, like Judaism, is a socialized, symbolic discourse, a virtual “Law of the Father”—as, it should be remembered, is Judaism itself—it supersedes an earlier experience that psychoanalysis has addressed variously as the pre-Oedipal, the imaginary, or the semiotic. The defenses that maintain the separation of this “pre-Christian” or “pre-Jewish” self from the “Christian” or “Jewish” self are weak and keep breaking down, continually revealing the constructedness of the self to the self and reminding it of its frailty. If it is assumed, then, that the sense of individuality is formed as the infant becomes socialized and integrated into cultural organization and value systems, then the moment this process begins to develop is when the child realizes that aspects of its own being are “wrong.” As the child accepts that bodily products such as excrement and vomit are tabooed as repugnant and dirty, simultaneously it begins to form concepts of cleanliness and propriety that work toward defining the emergent sense of selfhood. Physical disgust is thus implicated in the very construction of identity, which is built upon the perilous foundations of the rejected self. Out of these spasms of revulsion Kristeva develops her theory of the abject, delineating the boundaries of selfhood in the interval between pleasure and disgust, presence and absence:

These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere, cadaver.

(3)

It is precisely out of this sense of abjection that those impulses are generated which culturally drive anti-Semitism. Drawing on such analysis, I propose to read Virginia Woolf's own complex relation to Jewishness, taking into account not only her social attitudes of class and race but also matters of corporeality and psyche such as her anxieties over eating and sex.

To begin, let us set two diary entries side by side, one that records a visit from Virginia's Jewish mother-in-law, Marie Woolf, the other a visit to her intimate aristocratic friend, Vita Sackville-West. Leonard's mother figures in Virginia's diary with frequent regularity. This is a typical example, from September 1930:

Here of course, I begin to see very plainly how ugly, how nosey, how irreparably middle class they all are. Indeed, my aesthetic sense is the one that protests most obstinately—how they cheapen the house & garden—How they bring in an atmosphere of Earls Court & hotels, how impossibly out of place, & stuffy & towny & dressy & dowdy they look on the terrace, among apple trees & vegetables & flowers! But there I am pinned down, as firmly as Prometheus on his rock, to have my day, Friday 26th of September 1930, picked to pieces, & made cheap & ugly & commonplace; for the sting of it is that there is no possible escape—no escape that wont make old Mrs Woolf begin to dab her eyes & feel that she is not being welcomed—she who is so “painfully sensitive”—so found of cakes, so incapable of amusing herself, so entirely without any interest in my feelings or friends; so vampire like & vast in her demand for my entire attention & sympathy, while she sits over the fire, in her dreary furs & ugly bonnet & large boots, with her pendulous cheeks & red nose & cheap earrings, talking about Worthing every year, & will expect to come to tea with us. Lord Lord! how many daughters have been murdered by women like this! What a net of falsity they spread over life. How it rots beneath their sweetness—goes brown & soft like a bad pear!

(2: 320-21)⁴

Virginia's prejudices are made manifest in this account and become yet more pronounced if we compare it to her account of another visit a short while earlier, at the beginning of the month, this time to the home of Vita Sackville-West:

[Vita] was very much as usual [?]; striding, silk stockings, shirt & skirt; opulent; easy; absent; talking spaciously & serenely to the Eton tutor, an admirable young man, with straight nose & white teeth who went to bed, or to his room, early, leaving us alone. I remarked the boys calling him Sir & bending with salaams over his hand & then kissing Vita—how English—how summery & how upper class—how pleasant—how without accent. This has been going on a thousand years I felt; at least, I can remember summers like this—white flannels & tennis, mothers, & tutors & English houses & dinner with moths getting in the candles & talk of tennis tournaments & ladies asking one to tea all my life—so pleasant, so without accent … like a stream flowing deep & correct & unruffled through narrow banks. This kind of thing we now do to perfection. It is not interesting, but from its admirable completeness & sameness makes one tender towards it.

(3: 252-53)

Family rituals which in the first example are presented as suffocating and false here become “lifestyle statements” about ease and beauty; as often as Virginia remarks on the “cheapness” of the Woolfs, she admires the “Englishness” of the Nicolsons (and the straight nose of their Eton tutor). Her very insistence upon the Nicolsons' aristocratic Englishness marks off Leonard's relatives as common and foreign, just as their repeated (and supposed) “accentlessness” implies the heavily accented Jewish voice (“I do not like the Jewish voice; I do not like the Jewish laugh,” Virginia had written in her diary 15 years earlier, of Leonard's sister Flora [1: 6]). All this is sufficiently clear, and Woolf's innate snobbishness has been noticed often enough. Indeed, the diary entry immediately following this account of the Nicolsons' gracious home life, for 16 September 1929, specifically sets Vita Sackville-West against Marie Woolf as the polar opposites of Virginia's social world: “I am more shattered & dissipated by an hour with Leonard's mother than by 6 hours—no, 6 days, of Vita. … The tremendous gear changing that has to take place grind's one's machinery to bits” (3: 253).

It is the demarcating line between these two attitudes, however, that is interesting, if what Vita represents is a kind of ego ideal beneath which lies the constant threat of the abject self, a threat that is made suddenly visible in the image of perishable fruit that associates Marie Woolf with the “brown & soft” pear. In this piece of rotting fruit is condensed Woolf's horror of corporeality itself—that is, nothing less than a horror of death. Thus, her nausea at the rotting pear is more the expression of her own inescapable corporeality than it is a reaction to the secondary physical characteristics of Leonard's Jewish family. Dirt and waste do not threaten from outside but rather present Woolf with her own vulnerable sense of self: a threat not of the foreign but of the foreign as already part of the self. The decomposing fruit is in this sense not so much an external object as it is that which determines identity from within, continually reminding her of what must be ejected or at best controlled in order to maintain the idea of self.

From her prolific private writing it quickly becomes apparent that Woolf's class and race opinions are almost always couched in such terms of physical revulsion. In her many diary and letter appearances, Marie Woolf becomes the conceptual Jew for Virginia, “spry as an old tramp” at age 80, representative of all Jewry who “cant die—they exist on a handful of rice and a thimble of water—their flesh dries on their bones but still they pullulate, copulate, and amass … millions of money” (Letters [The Letters of Virginia Woolf] 4: 195-96). Virginia Woolf's immediate association of sex and death with money is again revealing. Jews “cant die”; they “pullulate” and “copulate” and make money while their flesh dries corpse-like on their bones. What Woolf's associative thought process from sex to death to money reveals is the danger of that which is capable of trespassing the border: the viscous. Like sex with its emissions, penetrations, and confusions of inside and out, and like the corpse, which is both somebody and nobody, money too exists only as a function of exchange, insinuating itself indiscriminately into high and low, infiltrating the furthest reaches of legitimate and criminal transaction, infecting every social process and institution: filthy lucre. Kristeva, following Douglas, has argued that dirt and decay acquire their negative connotations only in so far as they relate to the cultural idea of a boundary whereby clean is delineated against unclean: “Excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse, etc.) stand for the danger to identity that comes from without: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its outside, life by death” (71). Substances that cross this boundary are physically threatening, socially embarrassing, and culturally taboo, confusing the distinction between inside and outside that constitutes difference and structures the bounds of identity.

“The human body is always treated as an image of society and … there can be no natural way of considering the body that does not involve at the same time a social dimension,” writes Douglas in Natural Symbols. “If there is no concern to preserve social boundaries, I would not expect to find concern with bodily boundaries” (70). In this sense, the relation of body to identity becomes a kind of prototype for larger cultural experience and meanings. Therefore, whether the threat of the in-between is seen variously as a challenge from without or a transgression from within, an internal contradiction or a margin that is vulnerable, it leads from symbolic significance back to the primal boundaries between body and self. It is in this regard that “the Jew” is problematic in Woolf's work, revealing in socially specific terms how the plural and communal self that is recognizable throughout her fiction is always also subject to the experience of abjection. Thus, in a grim logic, it is the figure of the conceptual Jew in Virginia Woolf's work who embodies the abjection of the “clean and proper” self. These anxieties about abjection, which can be read through her unguarded comments on Marie Woolf, inform the very circumstances of writing “The Duchess and the Jeweller,” in which Virginia effectively found herself charged with anti-Semitism.

“THE DUCHESS AND THE JEWELLER”

Virginia Woolf worked on “The Duchess and the Jeweller” intermittently throughout the 1930s and published it in Harper's Bazaar, both American and British editions, in 1938. Unusually for Woolf at this late stage of her writing career, she had trouble getting her story accepted. The New York literary agent Jacques Chambrun reported a nameless editor's objections to her overt Jewish typecasting of the story's protagonist, the jeweler:

This certainly is not for us. And what is more I am sure Mrs Woolf cannot make this a story for us. It is a psychological study of a Jew and as they have distinctive characteristics I dont think she could make it a psychological study of a Scotsman or an Irishman.

(qtd. in Lee 679)

The criticism was sharply conscious of the increasingly problematic political situation of the late thirties, and Woolf bowed to it, revising the story accordingly. The name of the world-famous jeweler of the story went through the emphatically foreign stages of Theorodoric, then Isadore, before she chose the safe anglophone anonymity of Oliver as first name and signaled his gentile status with the patronym Bacon. Other overt references to his Jewishness were erased: the detail of his pronunciation of the word bet as pet was removed; the recollection of his childhood as “a little Jew boy” was revised to “little boy”; and the “crowds of Jewesses, beautiful women, with their false pearls, with their false hair” was changed simply to “crowds” (Dick). Nevertheless, Oliver's profession casts him as a probable Jew, and the stereotype is confirmed in retained references to a London East End boyhood, Hatton Garden apprenticeship, and an unmistakable “nose, which was long and flexible, like an elephant's trunk” with a “curious quiver at the nostrils” (243). As Hermione Lee puts it, “the ‘jew’ in ‘jeweller’ was still pronounced” (679-80), but Woolf herself let as much slip in a letter to her sister: she suspects that the literary agent may yet “shuffle out of the Jew and the duchess” (Letters 6: 173). In the inverted title, the Jewish reality breaks through again. Much as the narrative tries to write out the Jew, it can't avoid foregrounding the terms of Jewishness.

In finding herself confronted with the commercial business of commission, contract, and payment, Woolf was forced to enter her narrative's own world of financial negotiation. Her sister Vanessa egged her on to drive a hard bargain and advised her to withhold the story unless “money is paid beforehand” (Letters 6: 157, 159, 191). Even the magazine in which “The Duchess and the Jeweller” appeared, Harper's Bazaar, marked a departure from the intellectual exclusiveness of her own Hogarth Press into the middle-brow commercial world of fashion and popular fiction. Leonard Woolf had himself been similarly confronted in the early twenties with propositions to write for the American market. The story that caught the attention of American literary agents in his case was “Pearls and Swine,” whose aphoristic title curiously anticipates the situation of Bacon the pearl dealer in “The Duchess and the Jeweller.” Leonard's story, recognizably similar to Conrad's Heart of Darkness in its narrative form and thematic intent, is a contemptuously critical tale of British imperial power. Set against the backdrop of pearl fishing in Ceylon as regulated and administered by the British, the story's handling of the colonial subject was deemed too brutal for the tastes of the American reader. In Downhill All the Way Leonard explicitly recalls the repeated and urgent advice that to “sugar-coat” his subject would carry great financial reward (88-90). He refused to be tempted by this opportunity, having no interest in tailoring his writing for profit, and “Pearls and Swine” remained unaltered and unpublished in the United States.⁵

Although this is not to suggest that Leonard's refusal is in any way morally superior to his wife's compliance (the personal and historical variables between the early twenties and late thirties are numerous and complex), nevertheless, with “The Duchess and the Jeweller” Virginia did not hold out for the high aesthetic standards of her usual self-directed publishing practice, and in terms of plot and style it does not bear the hallmark of a typical Woolfian short story. It makes one wonder what exactly she was responding to in her diary with the rhapsodic exclamation that “This morning I had a moment of the old rapture—think of it!—over copying ‘The Duchess & the Jeweller.’ … there was the old excitement, even in that little extravagant flash” (5: 107). The remark seems more fitting of literary experiments like “The Mark on the Wall” or “Kew Gardens” than of what has usually been recognized as one of her most “conventional” short stories (Hafley; Baldwin 61-62). Its sudden conclusion, which throws the tale into high dramatic and psychological relief, is a melodramatic device that Woolf disparaged when she thought she detected it in a story like Katherine Mansfield's “Bliss”: “she is content with superficial smartness; & the whole conception is poor, cheap, not the vision, however imperfect, of an interesting mind” (Diary 1: 179; Woolf is referring to the story's ending at the moment when Bertha realizes that her husband is having an affair). Certainly, it is generally true that Woolf's narratives do not turn on plot: here, however, the story pivots resoundingly on the transaction between the jeweler and his client, the Duchess of Lambourne, “daughter of a hundred Earls,” who, it appears, has been visiting him regularly to sell the family jewels in order to pay off her gambling debts (245). She is down to her last ten pearls, which the jeweler suspects to be false even as he hands over a check for £20,000 on the promise of an invitation to the Duchess's weekend house party; his weakness is that he is in love with her daughter Diana. The story ends with his suspicions confirmed. The pearls are indeed “Rotten at the centre—rotten at the core!” (247).

As untypical of Woolf as the story is, compared with her formally far more radical work, significantly it is this text that carries the most potential to surprise and offend. “You can still surprise people by telling them to read ‘The Duchess and the Jeweller,’” James Hafley wrote in 1956; “the fact that Virginia Woolf, of all people, wrote something with a ‘plot’ comes rather as a shock” (13). This almost 50-year-old observation still holds true today. Woolf continues to be read in terms of an ideological agenda that privileges “serious” against “popular” fiction, “highbrow” against “middlebrow,” intellectual creativity against commercial hackwork, aristocrat against tradesman: dichotomies that are neatly summed up by the choreographed positions she herself sets out in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” Once again we are operating within the same polarity we observed in Gilman's positive/negative reading of Jewishness and Christianity. In order to move beyond this binary, we cannot simply read “The Duchess and the Jeweller” as a story that is not of the first water (like the pearls themselves). It is not so readily categorized. Something of the unease of its conditions of writing and publishing continues to unsettle it narratively as well. The story writes against sensationalism and sentimentality (showing their falsity and shallowness) even as the plot operates in these selfsame terms. If Woolf found the (melo)dramatic dénouement of Katherine Mansfield's “Bliss” “cheap,” then the conclusion of her own story both confirms and denies a similar response.

The readings of “The Duchess and the Jeweller” that I have offered thus far have all followed the same pattern of movement from the certainties of polarity and unity into the ambiguous and chiastic no-man's-land of the in-between. This pattern is repeated even in terms of its plot, which is established on the abject disturbance of “identity, system, order” (Kristeva 4), for not only has the Jewish, East End Oliver Bacon disrupted the polarities of London's commercial geography by penetrating the exclusive West End shopping district centered around Bond Street, but he also threatens to penetrate into the most intimate social demarcations in his pursuit of the aristocratic Diana. The Duchess's sale of the pearls secures his invitation to her country house, tempting him with access to political power (the prime minister will be his fellow guest) but even more desirably, with sexual access to her daughter. For all its denial of Oliver's Jewishness, therefore, the plot nevertheless enacts a miscegenation that is commercial, political, and sexual. Indeed, what is miscegenation but a facet of abjection itself? The fear of mixing—of class, of race, of belief—that is signified by miscegenation is thus at the heart of this Jewish/non-Jewish plot: a fear of the union of that which is culturally unassimilable, forever degenerating into ambiguity. In this sense, any reading of “The Duchess and the Jeweller” must remain ambiguous, viscous. The jeweler's simultaneous affirmation and repudiation of Jewishness collapses the binary into the same. The Jewish Other, with its connotations of trade and cheating, is in fact already miscegenated with the story's “clean” and “proper” self. In the end, the story enacts the seepage of one class into the other through money dealing, creating anxieties that carry through into the very conditions of the text's own production for the popular market. In its viscosity, money is itself an agent of miscegenation, keeping the world of the aristocrat and that of the Jew implicated one in the other, literally in exchange. If the jeweler as a boy partook of the common East End practice of reselling stolen dogs to their owners (“selling stolen dogs to fashionable women in Whitechapel” [242]; see also the abduction of dogs in Flush), so now it is the Duchess who sells already-sold pearls to him (“The Appleby cincture—hadn't she sold it already?” [246]). Even as he agrees to the deal, the jeweler is half-aware that he has seen these supposedly real pearls before (indeed he has), these pearls that come rolling out of her bag as if from a “slit” in a “ferret's belly” (246). The abject connotations of “filthy lucre” have already been considered in the first section of this essay. Take away a consonant, and pearl becomes pear: like the “brown & soft […] bad pear,” the pearls that pass between the Jew and the Duchess are rotten. Indeed, Woolf's choice of adjective, with its inappropriate vegetative connotations (pears can be rotten, but pearls can only be bad) gives the game away, mixing the rank world of ripening and decomposition with the symbolic world of commodity and finance.

Leonard Woolf's “Pearls and Swine” works in very similar ways. Though it concerns an ostensibly different subject, colonial power, this story also muddies the clean demarcations between self and Other, East and West. I am not suggesting a direct line of influence between Leonard's story and Virginia's, but Leonard's also casts the self/Other relationship in the suspect terms of money dealing and profiteering. Under the colonial supervision of the Ceylonese pearl fishing industry, oysters are divided up two thirds to the government, one third to the diver, and then left to rot in order to reveal whatever pearls may be in them. The riches of empire arise out of a putrid swarm of flies and maggots:

They [oysters] rot very well in that sun, and the flies come out and lay eggs in them, and maggots come out of the eggs and more flies come out of the maggots; and between them all, the maggots and the sun, the oyster's bodies disappear, leaving the pearls and a little sand at the bottom of the canoe. … But whatever it is, and whatever the reason, the result involves flies, millions of them and a smell, a stench—Lord! I can smell it now.

(421)

Against this sickening backdrop, the nature of colonial power is exposed through the abject impulses of nausea: the administrators can only fight back their retching as they try to carry out their duties in the stench of decomposition. Whatever produces nausea does so primarily because of the self's reflex horror at its own condition.⁶ The colonials in “Pearls and Swine” may assume superiority over the mass of “Tamils, Telegus, fat Chetties, Parsees, Bombay merchants, Sinhalese from Ceylon, the Arabs and their Negroes, Somalis probably, who used to be their slaves” (420), but their helpless vomiting collapses all such distinctions at the visceral level of physical disgust. All attempts to preserve the borders that maintain the superstructures of racial and national difference are rendered powerless by the body's spontaneous revolt at the invasion of the clean by the unclean. “Pearls and Swine” manages a subtle but devastating critique of what its narrator calls “the problem of East and West” (416); the point is that the problem lies with the West, not the East, and it is through abjection that the narrative manages its projection of discomfort onto the Western self. Leonard's story is more obviously politically inflected than Virginia's, but in their different ways both reveal how that which is repulsive to the socialized symbolic self is already a fundamental component of its identity. And wherever bodily boundaries are thus breached, we find that the social and the political are miscegenated as well.

It is important, therefore, that “The Duchess and the Jeweller” should be written so as to keep our sympathies with Oliver Bacon. In spite of playing on the swine metaphor of his name and describing him snuffling for jewels like some “hog in a pasture rich with truffles” (243), the narrative adheres strictly to the jeweler's point of view. The Duchess is the story's real criminal, bargaining with pearls she knows to be doubly false: not simply fakes, but goods which have in reality been sold already. Indeed, the shadowy Jew lurks in her background too, for the objectionable beautiful Jewesses with their “false pearls” that had to be excised from the preliminary drafts have in final copy become the Duchess herself. Moreover, we cannot help but feel sorry for the emotionally lonely jeweler who lacks a wife and is deserted even by his housemaid. Even more than our pity, however, it is abjection that qualifies the story's evident melodrama by inviting our compassion. The conclusion leaves the jeweler contemplating an uncertain future, his status and fortune in jeopardy, rubbing his hands together like a caricature Jew. Or then again, perhaps he is praying, penitent as he is in front of the picture of his mother, poignantly returning to his East End origins: “And again he was a little boy in the alley where they sold dogs on Sunday” (247). In the pause that concludes the story, it is his mother rather than Diana, the pitiless huntress, who maintains a presence in the jeweler's life, whose voice speaks directly through his memory of stealing dogs (“Oh, Oliver! When will you have sense, my son?” [242]) and whose image presides over his affairs: “‘Forgive me, oh my mother!’ he sighed, raising his hands as if he asked pardon of the old woman in the picture” (247).⁷ The maternal presence is infinitely stronger in the vigilant Jewish mother than in the aristocratic Duchess who dangles the prize of her daughter, reminding us that if Woolf is seeking for the tradition that “thinks back through its mothers,” as she famously proposes in A Room of One's Own, then it is emphatically affirmed by Judaism, which maintains itself through the maternal line.

Virginia's relationship with her mother has long been the starting point for much Woolf scholarship, from biographical to feminist studies. But in many ways, Woolf's real and continuing relationship with the mother was with her Jewish mother-in-law, who died at almost age 90 in 1939, less than two years before Virginia's own death. It is Marie Woolf who so often provoked Virginia's intellectual, class, and race prejudices, frequently at the most basic level of squeamish snobbery. Virginia could never quite extricate herself from the viscosity of Marie Woolf's clinging possessiveness, but the very fact that she regarded their relationship in these terms involved struggles of selfhood and identity at a far more visceral level than ever was possible with the idealized lost mother.

I do not wish to situate Julia Stephen and Marie Woolf as opposing maternal poles. On the contrary, the early absence of Julia ensured that the process of her expulsion could never be fully worked out by her daughter, and therefore the difficulties with Marie were very much a continuation of the relationship with the mother. Kristeva argues that the realm of the symbolic is never sufficiently absolute to maintain its own autonomy; such autonomy as it is able to claim is directly dependent on the abjection of the mother:

The abject confronts us … and this time within our personal archeology, with our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity even before ex-isting outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of language. It is a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling.

(13)

Julia and Marie are thus versions of the same, made all the more powerful without being defined by the “awkward” fact of her mother-in-law's Jewishness, which for Virginia came to represent, in the very construction of her prejudices, the terms of a necessary and never completed abjection of the mother. It is this struggle that is felt in the narrative and textual complexities of “The Duchess and the Jeweller.” The conceptualization of Marie Woolf as pesky Jewish mother-in-law, or Oliver Bacon as archetypal Jewish jeweler, exposes the operations of anti-Semitism, but at the same time they are both creations of an abject impulse which reveals that when Virginia Woolf writes about “the Jew,” she is always also writing about her own self.

“THREE JEWS”

Being Jewish was an issue in Woolf family history. Leonard's paternal grandfather had stipulated in his will that his children must marry within the Jewish faith in order to inherit. By the time Leonard married Virginia in 1912 both his grandfather and father were dead and the patriarchal edict had long since ceased to resonate through the generations. But neither was Leonard able to renounce his Jewishness altogether, for by his own account it formed his genetic code:

I have always felt in my bones and brain and heart English, and more narrowly a Londoner. … Yet my genes and chromosomes are neither Anglo-Saxon nor Ionian … my Semitic ancestors, with the days of their national greatness, such as it was, already behind them, were in Persia or Palestine. And they were already prisoners of war, displaced persons, refugees, having begun that unending pilgrimage as the world's official fugitives and scapegoats which has brought one of their descendants to live, probably die, Parish Clerk of Rodmell in the County of Sussex.

(Sowing 13)

Rather than dissociating himself from his “Semitic ancestors” through distanced and impersonal narrative, Leonard inscribes his Jewishness in fiction. Just as in his autobiography he declares his genes and chromosomes to be Semitic, so does his Jewish protagonist in The Wise Virgins (1914) assert his non-European origins in markedly physical terms: Harry Davis was “born that way twenty thousand years ago in Asia,” and is proud that “one can't be born again; once and for all one has one's father and mother in one, in every cell of one's body” (157). It is in this novel and the previous The Village in the Jungle (1913) that Roger Poole sees Leonard obsessively working out the problems of miscegenation in his own marriage to Virginia. Poole's reading is persuasive, given the contemporaneous circumstances of the Woolfs' recent marriage. The earlier novel concerns the desire of two Ceylonese lovers to marry across the caste system, while The Wise Virgins recasts the romance plot in England with a Jew and the daughter of an upper-class intellectual family: “In both novels, the plot hinges on an attempt made by a pair of lovers to cross, to dare, to brave, the doubly-reinforced taboos of caste and race: and in both novels the attempt fails” (Poole 76). Effectively, what both novels are really about is the cultural threat of miscegenation as the in-between.

Certainly, Leonard was acutely conscious of the differences between his Jewish background (which followed the popular stereotype of tailors with one grandfather and jewelers with the other) and that of the intellectually aristocratic Stephens: “I was an outsider to this class, because, although I and my father before me belonged to the professional middle class, we had only recently struggled up into it from the stratum of Jewish shopkeepers. We had no roots in it” (Beginning Again 74). More famously, Leonard's Jewishness was an issue for Virginia as well, who confessed to it in her momentous premarital letter to Leonard (“your being a Jew comes in also at this point. You seem so foreign” Letters 1: 496), and still vividly remembered her early difficulties with his perceived foreignness decades later: “How I hated marrying a Jew—how I hated their nasal voices, and their oriental jewellery, and their noses and their wattles” (Letters 4: 195).⁸

Five years into his marriage with Virginia, Leonard again addressed the problem of miscegenation in a narrative whose title immediately declared its Jewish subject, eliciting the facetious anti-Semitic remark of a family friend: “Three Jews—is not that rather too much of a good thing?” (Fredegond Shove, qtd. in Lee 313). The story reveals that the echo of his grandfather's pronouncement against gentile wives was still ringing in Leonard's memory, but here the Woolf patriarch's ban has been transferred to the mother. Significantly, the struggle is with the mother rather than the father. Just as in Virginia's narrative Oliver Bacon remembers his mother's words (“When will you have sense, my son?”), so is the voice of the third Jew's mother heard here, with similar nuances of expression:

I know my poor mother, God rest her soul, used to say: ‘My son,’ she said, ‘if you come to me and say you want to marry a good Jewish girl, I don't care whether she hasn't a chemise to her back, I'll welcome her—but if you marry a Christian, if she's as rich as Solomon, I've done with you—don't you ever dare to come into my house again.’

(11)

The third Jew perpetuates the maternal injunction, but for him it is now an issue of class rather than faith, and his anger is provoked by precisely the opposite case as that warned against by his mother: “I might have received his wife, even though she was a Goy. But a servant girl who washed my dishes! I couldn't do it. One must have some dignity” (11). Does establishing the Jew as socially superior to the Christian here really absolve Leonard of being read as making veiled references to Virginia's privileged Stephen background? After all, his relationship with Virginia informs the story throughout, from the level of plot to the very conditions of its production and publication.

“Three Jews,” together with Virginia's “The Mark on the Wall,” marked the launch of the Hogarth Press as a publishing house. On the title page husband and wife signaled their partnership as both publishers and writers in an undertaking that is shared and generic rather than specific to each:

TWO STORIES
WRITTEN AND PRINTED
BY
VIRGINIA WOOLF
AND
L. S. WOOLF(9)

The publishing circumstances of Leonard's story thus couldn't have been more different from those of “The Duchess and the Jeweller.” Where Virginia's “Jewish” story appeared in a mass-market magazine, Leonard's was a “little press” pamphlet that was typeset, printed, bound, and distributed entirely by the Woolfs themselves. Where Virginia was required to meet the standards of an editor, Leonard had free rein to write what he pleased. However, in the historical moments of their publication—one toward the end of the First World War and the other on the brink of the Second—the two stories have in common a crucial denominator: both appeared at a time when the idea of the foreigner as enemy merged with the idea of the German, and in this ideology the figure of “the Jew” occupies a special place.

Leonard Woolf's “Three Jews” was written and published in England during World War I. Hostility to German aliens in Britain grew with each newspaper report of submarine attacks, use of poison gas, and ill treatment of prisoners. Its highest point came in May 1915 after the sinking of the Lusitania, which instigated a wave of riots and attacks on shops and businesses with German or German-sounding names. There was violence in Liverpool, Manchester, Yorkshire, Scotland, and London (primarily the East End, with its large immigrant population). Premises were ransacked and looted: in London alone almost 2,000 properties were damaged at a cost of nearly £2 million (Panayi 129). In the popular consciousness the distinction between foreignness and Germanness was clided; indeed, given the six-fold increase in Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe to England in the pre-1914 decades (from 14,468 in 1880 to 82,844 in 1905), the speaking of Yiddish marked the Jew with a pronounced Germanic foreignness (Feldman 139). As John Stevenson observes,

the circle of targets widened to include Jews, Russians, Swiss and Chinese in riots which became as much anti-foreigner as anti-German. … The extension of the rioting to attacks on the shops of Jews and other non-German shopkeepers or workers illustrated a latent xenophobia which was to surface periodically after 1915.

(56-57)

For example, after conscription was introduced in 1916 (Leonard Woolf himself was exempted from service on medical grounds), Jews who opposed the war and were not conscripted were attacked in Leeds. This anti-Semitism was to continue throughout the interwar decades and after. By the late 1930s the distinction between German and Jew was amply clear, yet even after the Second World War, Holocaust survivors were unwelcome in Britain and were legislated against in the government's distinctly racial immigration policy.¹⁰ In the light of this history, we need to remind ourselves of Hannah Arendt's correlation of rising anti-Semitism with the growth of a politics that derived less from nationalism than from economic and ideological interests that exceeded the boundaries of the traditional nation-state. If she is right, then it is no surprise that by the time Virginia Woolf wrote “The Duchess and the Jeweller” in the late 1930s, the figure of “the Jew” was culturally no more secure than it had been during the First World War.

Leonard Woolf's “Three Jews” is remarkable in the context of this history. The story opens conventionally enough by establishing itself in time and place through a first-person narrator: it is the first day of spring in the present day (1917) in London. Yet there is something uncomfortable in the very cliché of this springtime, for the speaker seems peculiarly misplaced in the setting. From the start there is a marked restlessness in his voice and spirit, an even physical yearning to break free of London with its constricted and sooty streets, emphasized by the twice-repeated phrase “the first stirring of the blood” (4). The narrator is somehow more vigorously alive, more full-bloodedly vital, than the wan and modest London spring. He appreciates the bold primary colors of budding tulips and hyacinths “that even London could not rob” and utters an impatient “damn it” at the “delicate” sunshine and “pale blue sky” seen from his window: not for him the frail, pallid pastels of a London spring. Thus the decision to visit Kew Gardens is already by implication a compromise:

I wanted to see and smell the earth; above all I wanted the horizon. I felt that something was waiting for me beyond the houses and the chimneypots: I should find it where earth and sky meet. I didn't of course but I took the train to Kew.

(4)

By the third paragraph the narrative restricts itself to a narrow radius, circulating the same tedious words and phrases over and over again: “It was spring there, English spring with its fresh warm breath, and its pale blue sky” (we've read this before); “the quiet orderly English spring that embraced and sobered even the florid luxuriance of great flowers bursting in white cascades over strange tropical trees”; the gardens are visited by “quiet orderly English people” who are “happy in their quiet orderly English way”; the trees in the garden are similarly “quiet” as the visitors walk “slowly, quietly, taking care to keep off the edges of the grass because the notices told them to do so”; even at refreshment these people drink tea “quietly, soberly, under the gentle apple-blossom” (4-5; my emphasis). Nowhere in this extended description does the narrator explicitly signal his difference, and yet there is a perceptible tug between his vibrant longings and the placid, complacent Englishness (quiet, orderly, sober) that insistently keeps repeating itself in the visitors, the gardens, and even the weather. The narrator, therefore, writes against Englishness even as he invokes its setting, but his full foreignness is not registered until the arrival of a stranger, whom he describes in appreciative and markedly corporeal terms that are unmistakably Jewish and which immediately suggest the vibrancy and energy found wanting in Englishness:

There was a bustle and roll and energy in his walk. I noticed the thickness of his legs above the knee, the arms that hung so loosely and limply by his sides as they do with people who wear loose hanging clothes without sleeves, his dark fat face and the sensual mouth, the great curve of the upper lip and the hanging lower one. A clever face, dark and inscrutable, with its large mysterious eyes and the heavy lids which went into deep folds at the corners.

(5)

Speaking to the narrator, the man reveals a telling “slight thickness of the voice, the over-emphasis, and the little note of assertiveness in it,” and with that most phatic of opening lines on the weather, implicitly identifies the narrator as a fellow Jew: “Nothing to beat a fine English day.” What would normally constitute an innocuous remark here becomes yet another observation on Englishness, the very repetition of which puts the stranger in league with the narrator who, essentially, has been doing nothing but commenting on Englishness since the story began. The ease with which the two men take up the dialogue—as if in medias res—excludes the reader (we don't as yet know what they are talking about) and in fact constructs the reader as English. Against us, the narrator and the newcomer identify their common Jewish heritage: we are definitely the outsiders here. Henceforward, the two speak together as “we” and appeal to each other's Jewishness: “you knew me at once and I knew you. We show up, don't we, under the apple-blossom and this sky. It doesn't belong to us, do you wish it did?” With the recent emphasis on Englishness still resonating, the narrative now revolves familiarly and easily around the concerns of the Jewish community: Palestine, synagogue, Yom Kippur. At a time when foreignness, and particularly Germanness, were openly suspect, “Three Jews” signals its Jewishness with offhand references to “Schul,” by drawing attention to the Yiddish pronunciation of w as v, and by alluding to the contemporary real-life case of Mrs. Rosalie Straus, wife of the owner of Macy's department store in New York City, who had chosen to die with her husband Isidor (one of the preliminary names for Oliver Bacon) on the Titanic rather than be saved in a lifeboat. These Jewish/German inflections are all the more pronounced for the fact that in the same month that saw the publication of “Three Jews”—July 1917—the British royal family changed its surname from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor in order to avoid being stigmatized as German.

The story's foreignness picks up speed as its narrative voices succeed one another. The second Jew proceeds to introduce the third, specifying (even reveling in) precisely those same features of clothing and appearance that marked the second Jew out to the first:

You couldn't mistake him for anything but a Jew. His arms hung down from his shoulders in that curious, loose, limp way—you know it?—it makes the clothes look as if they didn't belong to the man who was wearing them. Clever cunning grey eyes, gold pince-nez, and a nose, by Jove, Sir, one of the best, one of those noses, white and shiny, which, when you look at it full face, seems almost flat on the face, but immensely broad, curving down, like a broad high-road from between the bushy eye-brows down over the lips. And side face, it was colossal; it stood out like an elephant's trunk with its florid curves and scrolls.

(7)

The repetitive characterizations layer the story's speakers into a communal Jewish identity. It is thus difficult to keep the various narrators distinct, particularly in the way that the narrative voices, all of them male, inexorably lead to the female. For all of them, the wife is the central issue. Jew Number Two has one dead wife and one living; Jew Number Three tells of the death of his wife; a fourth Jew, son of the third, marries a wrong wife, a “Goy”; even the real-life Mrs. Straus of the Titanic disaster continues the story's preoccupation with wives, whether good or bad, Jewish or Christian, living or dead. Against the obsessive repetition of the story's construction, these multiple wives show up the one noticeable absence: the only character not to specify a wife is the primary narrator, who also refrains from acknowledging his Jewishness. Indeed, only retrospectively and by inference can the first narrator be identified as being Jewish at all. Given the existence of the third Jew's errant son, it is even unclear exactly which three males the story's title embraces, as there are four Jews to choose from.

It is thus on the primary narrator's silence about his Jewishness and his wife, if any, that the story's construction of cultural and sexual identity founders. Whereas “The Duchess and the Jeweller” writes out the Jew, in “Three Jews” it is the wife that is written out. To some extent, all wives in the story are denied through absence, death, or disowning. The only “real” wife in the story is the second narrator's second one, but she too lives a curious half-life as faithful companion on his regular visits to his first wife's grave. Indeed, even in the Carrington woodcut that prefaced the first edition of the story, the absent wife is emphasized: it shows two heavy male figures (one a mourner, the other a grave digger) standing amidst Hebrew-inscribed headstones, solemnly staring into the abyss of an open grave.¹¹ The person of the wife is consigned to the void, whether to the graves of the dead wives of the narrative's secondary Jews or to the aporia that represents the wife of its primary narrator. Interestingly, a female is present in Carrington's concluding woodcut: clearly a dishwashing servant girl like the Christian wife, this lithe and pert-breasted, apron-clad figure stands in front of a seated spectating man, turning her long neck provocatively under his evidently appreciative gaze. According to the story, the male spectator in this illustration should be the third Jew's son, but with his full beard and luxuriant head of hair he looks far more like a Jewish patriarch than a rebel. Thus we are left to wonder who exactly is spectating here.

The Jew in Carrington's first illustration, who stares so abjectly into the open grave, oddly evokes Leonard's memory of his own wedding. The brief description in his autobiography primarily recalls the fact that the “St. Pancras Register Office … looked down into a cemetery” (Beginning Again 69). Leonard's most vivid impression of his marriage is the view of the tombstones, which for him stood in place of the vows omitted in the civil ceremony:

In the ceremony before a Registrar one makes no promise “to love and to cherish, till death us do part, according to God's holy ordinance”, but in the St. Pancras Office, facing the window and looking through it at the tombstones, behind the Registrar's head, one was, I suppose appropriately, reminded of the words “Till death us do part.”

(69-70)

In the same way that Leonard's memory metonymically turns omitted marriage vows into tombstones, so in his story does the grave stand in for the figure of the wife. These operations of metonym may be buried in personal memory, but they become suddenly visible when Carrington translates the narrative text of “Three Jews” into visual terms.

For the contemporary readership, these issues would also have resonated in the story's reference to Rosalie Straus, who willingly went to her death on the Titanic because she was a wife. She is written into the narrative only in the terms of being Jewish, a wife, and a mother:

Now look at the Titanic disaster: who was it refused to get into the boats, unless her husband went too? Who met death hand in hand with him? Eh? A Jewess! There you are. Her children rise up and call her blessed: her husband also and he praiseth her!

(6-7)

The narrative cannot mean this ironically. The quotation from Proverbs is but one of many citations of Old Testament scripture in the course of the story, none of which are offered critically, and as a tribute to Mrs. Straus's virtue it is supported by her own reported answer to her husband when offered a place in a lifeboat, echoing Naomi in Ruth: “Where you go, I go.” But again, this textual detail is curiously embedded in the history of Leonard's own courtship of Virginia, with whom he attended the public inquest on the sinking of the Titanic. The inquest occurred during the intense month of persuading Virginia to marry him, ten days after Leonard learned that he could not extend his absence from duties in Ceylon any longer and was thus faced with leaving the Colonial Service without certain knowledge that Virginia would accept his offer (his only reason for resignation). Moreover, the inquest took place a mere two days after Virginia's long and frank letter of 1 May 1912, in which she confessed the problem of his Jewishness and admitted her lack of sexual responsiveness (Letters 1: 496-97). It is by no means a firm acceptance of marriage, but it gave Leonard sufficient hope to risk his career. He put in his formal resignation the following day, 2 May. And on 3 May he went with Virginia to hear about the Titanic, perhaps a curious choice of outing under the circumstances, given their own emotional and sexual tensions of the moment. (It also seems curious because neither Leonard nor Virginia was particularly “voyeuristic” or so interested in public sensation that they would actively seek it out.) From that inquest Leonard carried with him the figure of the good Jewish wife who proves her loyalty with her voluntary death by drowning; Virginia, too, remembers a dead wife, but, typically, she gets it wrong.¹²

These tensions continued to trouble him five years later when he came to write “Three Jews.” This in itself is not surprising, but it provides a context for reading a story that, in spite of its transparent Jewishness, never openly declares its primary narrator to be a Jew; that affirms its masculinity thrice over in its narrative voice, yet cannot dispel the abject threat of the figure of the wife; and that repeatedly concerns itself with the issue of the wife, yet assigns no wife to its primary speaker. The story proclaims its terms of reference only to have those terms slide into ambiguity. Indeed, even in its setting it is not entirely on home ground, for it trespasses on Virginia Woolf's “Kew Gardens.” On the evidence of Katherine Mansfield, who read a draft of Virginia's story just one month after “Three Jews” was published, “Kew Gardens” was certainly already written in the summer of 1917 (Alpers 250-51). Leonard turns Virginia's diverse parade of Kew Gardens visitors into a promenade of Jews, but it remains her literary territory, not his; the gardens are more famously owned by Virginia, for whom “Kew Gardens” is one of the key short stories that remain the recognized prototypes of her ground-breaking modernist practice.¹³

Like “The Duchess and the Jeweller,” therefore, “Three Jews” is a stylistically and thematically “uncomfortable” story, whereby that which must be expelled or denied (the Jew in “Duchess,” the wife here) is still intimately part of how it produces meaning. In this sense the two stories are texts both of abjection and miscegenation, if these terms are taken together to signify the process of contamination through mixing. Abjection and miscegenation are thus social and cultural explanations of the treacherous in-between that collapses the poles that maintain the purity of identity and form. This essay has read “Three Jews” alongside “The Duchess and the Jeweller” in order to explore a complex politics of identity and selfhood that neither story can entirely resolve, either through race or gender. Each story addresses the anxieties of cultural purity in ways that are privately and publicly significant for Leonard and Virginia Woolf, singly as writers and together as husband and wife.

I declared at the beginning that I would seek no excuses for the anti-Semitism of Virginia Woolf. But I want to offer one last speculation, again based on an entry in Virginia's diary, from March 1936, when the writing of “The Duchess and the Jeweller” was already under way. In a long and detailed entry she records how a destitute young woman had fainted from hunger on the area steps of her home at 52 Tavistock Square:

I thought it was a little dressmakers apprentice come with my dress. But it was oh dear—a girl, fainting. Can I have a drop of water? She was hardly able to walk. Sat on the area steps while I got one. Then I took her in: got L.: hotted soup. But it was a horrible thing. Shed been walking all day to get work, had neuritis—cdnt sew, had had a cup of tea for breakfast, lived in one room alone in Bethnal Green. At first she cd hardly speak—“I'm hungry” she said. Gradually livened. Half dazed. Said You look like brother & sister, both have long noses. I'm a Jewess—a curious stress on the word as if a confession. So's he I said. Then she perked up a little. But my God—no one to help her, she said. Friends? Oh they only think of enjoying themselves. May I take this home? taking a bun. We gave her tongue, 2 eggs, & 5/-. Did you make this yourself—of the soup. Can you afford it—of the money. And a mere wisp—22—suffering. Never saw unhappiness, poverty so tangible. And felt its our fault. And she apologised. And what could we do. I shall stay in bed if I'm feeling bad & then go to the Labour Exchange. But I cant get any work. Think of our “class”: & this is what we exact.

Now it is raining, & I suppose … well, what's the use of thinking? As usual what was so vivid I saw it all the evening becomes stylised when I write. Some horror become visible: but in human form. And she may live 20 years … what a system.

(5: 19)

The tag of “Jew” is no longer glibly affixed: the particulars of the girl's condition are described until she herself, in the first person, is allowed to admit “I'm a Jewess.” Woolf not only records the fact of Jewishness in the girl's own voice, but also implicates her own self into this identity, firstly by acknowledging the girl's remark on the similarity between herself and Leonard, and secondly by identifying Leonard to the girl as her fellow Jew (at which she “perks up”). In thus admitting to her own resemblance to her husband (primarily through the stereotypical feature of the Jewish nose), which the girl assumes marks them as brother and sister, Virginia transforms the marriage bond into a blood tie that suggests her shared Jewishness with Leonard (and the entry does not record her contradicting this assumption, either). None of the self-distancing that is so evident in the diary descriptions of the Jewish Woolfs is present here. If anything, the entry is a personal working-out of how to write about the Jew in the first place. Virginia is fully aware of her tendency toward stereotyping (“what was so vivid … becomes stylised when I write”), and what so easily could have turned into a conceptualized description of the “wandering Jew” remains scrupulously personal to the girl by specifying her problems and conducting a conversation with her that ranges impartially from direct to indirect and free indirect speech between her own voice and that of the girl. Virginia's sensitivity to the grim reality of 1930s unemployment bears none of her typical abhorrence of the body; indeed, the fact that the girl's appalling physical condition is so succinctly and effectively conveyed is entirely due to the fact that Woolf feels it at her own corporeal level and confronts bodily needs with a frank itemization of eggs, tongue, soup, and buns that refuses the usual metaphorical extravagances of her “food writing” (of which the college dinners in A Room of One's Own are the best example). Here is Woolf writing of urban hunger and destitution as sympathetically and straightforwardly as Orwell did in such contemporaneous works as Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and A Clergyman's Daughter (1935). She does so with horror, but this is no longer the irrational, speechless horror of abjection. There is miscegenation here indeed (not only has Christian been mistaken for Jew and wife for sister, but more generally the East End has encroached upon Bloomsbury and the poverty-stricken lower class upon the educated upper-middle class), but the “horror made visible” is not embodied in the figure of the destitute Jewish girl but rather in the system that perpetrates such misery, a system of which Woolf knows herself to be a part. Tellingly, she did not register surprise when she first saw a figure on the steps, but merely assumed that it was the dressmaker's apprentice delivering her new dress. In the “hungry thirties,” however, the life of this apprentice would not have been substantially different from that of the unemployed Jewish girl. What Woolf perhaps would not have noticed, had she been visited by the dressmaker's apprentice, is suddenly called to consciousness and jolts her into the realization that for all the power that horror wields at the most primal level of the self, such horror can, and must, always be confronted at a level that is also social and political.

Notes

1. Since this essay was written, Woolf's recently discovered notebook (1909) has been published as Carlyle's House and Other Sketches. One sketch of the seven is particularly unpleasant: “Jews,” an account of a dinner given by a Mrs. Loeb, to which the editor David Bradshaw assigns the “doubtful distinction of being Woolf's first significant anti-Semitic smear” (40). Indeed, “Jews” is a substantial addition to the anti-Semitic remarks in Woolf's diaries and letters, and in future will have to be included in any analysis that seeks to address her anti-Semitism. For my own argument it is an early example of Woolf's typically indiscriminate practice of reducing an individual to a generic Jewish identity with stereotypical features of appearance and voice. Her hostess Mrs. Loeb may be rich, but she seems to belong more appropriately “behind a counter” (14); her drawing room may be grand, but it is “florid.” Mrs. Loeb is “a fat Jewess, coarsely skinned, with drooping eyes, and tumbled hair,” who “flattered us and wheedled us, in a voice that rubbed away at the edges of all her words and had a falling cadence.” Food also becomes implicated in Woolf's cultural aversion: Mrs. Loeb forced it upon her guests, and “of course” (a telling remark), it “swam in oil and was nasty.” David Bradshaw's careful research into the identity of Mrs. Loeb and her son Sydney gives an entirely different impression of the Loeb household as a remarkably cultured establishment. Three years after this party, Sydney was to marry the youngest daughter of the conductor Hans Richter, and went on to be “one of the most consummate Wagnerians of his generation” (41) as well as an expert on Elgar and an amateur photographer whose albums of contemporary classical musicians and singers is now an invaluable archive of the period (41-44). Such information throws Woolf's prejudice into high relief.

2. “The Duchess and the Jeweller” was first published in Harper's Bazaar (London in Apr. 1938 and New York in May 1938); the first drafts were probably started in 1932. “Three Jews” was first issued together with Virginia Woolf's “The Mark on the Wall” as Two Stories, the inaugural publication of the Hogarth Press in 1917.

3. Arendt's book, first published in 1951, does not take its bearings from the establishment of modern Israel, nor does the second, enlarged edition published in 1958. Indeed, there is only one passing reference to Israel in the entire book. Rather, Arendt is concerned with the history and rise of twentieth-century totalitarian movements such as fascism and communism, as test cases of her more general thesis that anti-Semitism waxes in proportion to the waning of the traditional nation-state. Whenever the political map increasingly comes to be organized in terms of ideological configurations other than Virginia Woolf's and Leonard Woolf's “Jewish” Stories traditional nationalism, she argues, the “homeless” Jew becomes a particularly threatening figure.

4. Although this lengthy description makes no explicit reference to Marie Woolf's Jewishness, familiarity with the mode in which Virginia habitually refers to her Woolf relatives throughout her diaries enables the recognition of features that she commonly associates with their Jewishness: their bourgeois tastes and “cheapness,” physical characteristics, clothes, jewelry, and perhaps most of all, the stranglehold (as she perceives it) of the Jewish matriarch over her large family. Oddly, Virginia never reads the equally (and famously) difficult relationship between Vita Sackville-West and her mother in such disdainful terms.

5. “Pearls and Swine,” written in 1912, was published in Leonard Woolf's Stories of the East (London: Hogarth, 1921).

6. The self-reflexive impulse is more apparent, for example, in such expressions for nausea and vomiting as the French mal au coeur (sickness of the heart), or Estonian süda on paha (my heart is bad).

7. Interestingly, Leonard's mother Marie Woolf was the daughter of an Amsterdam diamond merchant, and her first married name (Sidney Woolf was her second husband) was Goldstucker, unmistakably Jewish and invoking the image of gold. Hermione Lee gives this information in Virginia Woolf (299), but Leonard Woolf is markedly silent on this point in his otherwise detailed and loquacious autobiography. Was the name too Jewish, compared to, for example, her much more aristocratic-sounding maiden name, de Jongh?

8. This echoes the “pendulous cheeks & red nose & cheap earrings” that irritate Virginia so much in the previously discussed “bad pear” passage of her diary.

9. The title page is reproduced in Leonard's Beginning Again 235.

10. After 1945 Jewishness was still generally associated with suspect foreignness: the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, told the home secretary in 1945 that he was “anxious to avoid the concentration of large numbers of refugees from Europe, especially Jewish refugees, in the towns” (qtd. in Kushner 420-21). Government agreed with Bevin's opinion that Jews were of “inferior stock” and would not easily assimilate into English culture and identity, an attitude that, essentially, was anticipated by and inscribed into state policies already with the Aliens Act of 1905.

11. The two Carrington woodcuts discussed here are reproduced in Spater and Parsons 98.

12. The wife whom Virginia erroneously remembers drowning is Mrs. Stead, whose corpse she describes in her trademark imagery of underwater suspension: “ships don't sink at that depth, but remain poised half way down, and become perfectly flat, so that Mrs. Stead is now like a pancake, and her eyes like copper coins” (Letters 1: 495). Unlike Mrs. Straus, Mrs. Stead did not go down with the ship and so survived her husband.

13. As Virginia Woolf was herself aware:

    conceive mark on the wall, K[ew]. G[ardens]. & unwritten novel taking hands & dancing in unity. What the unity shall be I have yet to discover: the theme is a blank to me; but I see immense possibilities in the form I hit upon more or less by chance 2 weeks ago.

    (Diary 1: 14)

Works Cited

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Dick, Susan. Notes on “The Duchess and the Jeweller.” The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. London: Hogarth, 1985. 301-02.

Douglas, Mary. Natural Symbols. New York: Pantheon, 1970.

———. Purity and Danger. London: Ark, 1996.

Feldman, David. “Nationality and Ethnicity.” Twentieth Century Britain: Economic, Social, and Cultural Change. Ed. Paul Johnson. London: Longman, 1994. 127-148.

Gilman, Sander. The Jew's Body. London: Routledge, 1991.

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Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.

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