I hate when people call books like Oliver Twist anti-semitic

[RJbibliophil]

I don't think Dickens was anti-semitic in his writing. It was a description he used. One might even say it added diversity to the thieves.

[Laura-Taylor]

I have recently been studying Oliver in my GCSE English class and after doing extensive research on the perpetrators of suffering in the novel, I found out that Dickens did not make Fagin a Jew out of racism. I also read that he regretted making Fagin a Jew as some of his readers took it the wrong way. He was NOT trying to make a statement about Jews, it was just a coincidence and he regretted this choice.



Laura x x

[cactus]

If I went about reading classics with this view in mind I would probably discard wonderful books like The Adventures of Tom Saywer already!

[t.s.eliot42]

I just wonder why Dickens needed to make it a point that Fagin was Jewish. Why couldn't Fagin simply have been someone who lived in London who taught young boys how to pick pockets. Why is his ethnicity/religion even relevant. Answer. Because I'm sure Dickens was influenced by his enviroment, which I believe, every author is, and so he believed Jews made up a large portion of the criminal class. He made Fagin's ethnicity/religion relevant, but only because he probably based it on preconceived prejudices and ideas already accepted in Dicken's time. In other words, Dickens would not have mentioned that Fagin was a Jew if Anti-semitism were not as prevalent as it was in 19th century Europe.

[DancPing]

Dickens was definitely influenced by social prejudice, but personally, I don't see a problem with that. It wasn't his intention to persecute Jews, and I don't see how he could have made Fagin's character quite so striking or memorable without tapping into the feelings people had about them. I don't mean to sound insensitive, but can you think of anything else that could have inspired the same feelings in people at the time of the book's writing? Witches and warlocks maybe? That would've ruined his book.

Though I wouldn't have the book written any other way, I can definitely understand why it upsets members of the Jewish community. If I were a Jew, I'd probably have a very hard time appreciating it, too. Still, I think his only crime was being insensitive in his quest to write a great book. He chose a role that brought his character to life in the eyes of his audience, and in my opinion, the book is better for it.

[kev67]

According to the chapter notes of my copy:

9. a very old shrivelled Jew: In 1860, Dickens sold Tavistock House for 2000 guineas (£2100) to James Phineas Davis, a solicitor, whom he first described as 'a Jew Money-Lender' -only to be surprised by how 'satisfactory, considerate and trusting' the 'money-dealings' were. Later Mrs Davis remonstrated with Dickens for having made Fagin a Jew, and he replied that such criminals were almost invariably Jewish (see Introduction, p. xxxix). Peter Fairclough cites a contemporary report: 'A Jew seldom thieves, but is worse than a thief; he encourages others to thieve. In every town there is a Jew, resident or tramping;...if a robbery is effected, the property is hid till a Jew is found, and a bargain is then made.' It was thought until recently, indeed, that Fagin was at least loosely based on a famous Jewish fence, Ikey Solomons. At any rate the severe restrictions on Jewish occupations and property-holding did push a number of Jews into illegal activities. Dickens also says in response to Mrs Davis, 'firstly, that all the wicked dramatis personae are Christians; and secondly, that he is called "The Jew", not because of his religion, but because of his race' (letter of 10 July 1843). He did however respond by putting a sympathetic Jewish character, Mr Riah, into Our Mutual Friend (1665); and in 1867 he changed most references to 'the Jew'.

From Philip Horne's introduction:

There is, however, a sinister side to the initial mythic effect Fagin makes before the complicating, somewhat deflating explanations kick in. We must be uneasy about the anti-Semitic legends of child-killing which Dickens irresponsibly allows to colour or 'naturalize' a phrase like 'the wily old Jew had the boy in his toils' (I,18); Fagin's red hair, miserliness, resemblance to the devil, inhuman air of a 'goblin' or 'hideous phantom' or 'loathsome reptile' (III, 5, 9; I,19), and general malevolence, all have some invidious connection with racial sterotype. Further on in his career Dickens, himself by habit not more than a casual anti-Semite, was to make partial amends when a Jewish lady he knew protested against his encouragement of 'a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew', by creating the virtuous Riah in Our Mutual Friend. Dickens' defence that Fagin was Jewish 'because it unfortunately was true of the time to which the story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew' is inadequate justification of the array of stereotypical stage properties with which he adorns his old crook (the most notorious Jewish fence of the time, Ikey Solomons, was brown-haired and beardless, and wore smart modern dress). The strongest mitigating circumstance may be Dickens' intense relish of and twisted identification with this unforgettable embodiment of self-interest, especially at the end when Fagin faces the gallows.

[Jackson Richardson]

Until Oliver meets Mr Brownlow, Fagin is the only person to show him anything like affection and treat him with respect, allbeit with the intention of corrupting him. (Although his treatment in the workhouse was potentially corrupting - see Noah Claypole). Mr Brownlow is pretty unconvincing as a character.

The Jewishness shows Fagin as outside society. But as society is represented by Mr Bumble, it is not such a bad thing to be outside.

[kev67]

The Jewishness shows Fagin as outside society. But as society is represented by Mr Bumble, it is not such a bad thing to be outside.

An important point.


I regard Fagin rather like King Louie from the Disney Jungle Book. Alright, in the final analysis he is a somewhat racist stereotype, but he is so good I am prepared to let it slide.

The writer of the introduction of my copy of Oliver Twist went on to mention that Lionel Bart, who wrote the musical, and who was Jewish himself, did not exactly tone down the stereotype.

imho, and from a 21st century perspective, I think Dickens was treading on thin ice but that he gets away with it.

Dickens also managed to upset the Inuit people. He accused them of killing some British sailors because he could not bring himself to believe British sailors had cannibalized their crewmates. One of Dickens' descendants apologized to them on his behalf. I would like to think from Dickens' response to Mrs Davis's upbraiding of him about Fagin, that he would have been embarrassed about what he wrote regarding the Inuit, if he were alive today.

I have to say I was slightly ill-at-ease about Borioboola-Gha running gag in Bleak House.

[Jackson Richardson]

No, the Borioboola Gha gag isn't racist. It's mocking Mrs Jellaby's patronising attitude.

[Carousel]

Political Correctness

Our culture has been re-written
Washed squeaky clean, and dried
Do you remember friend
The day when laughter died

[Jackson Richardson]

If political correctness means courtesy, consideration and generosity, rather than self righteousness, there's nothing the matter with it.

On consideration that if someone already thinks all Jews are wicked, then reading about Fagin will reinforce that view.

Equally if someone has a racist and colonalist view that all Africans are only savages, then reading Dickens on Mrs Jellyby critizing her for ignoring her family while planning to help Africans, will confirm their view that Africans should be treated with no respect.

[Carousel]

Fagin was just one of a hundred or so of Dickens characters, how can anyone assume that Fagin represented his own views on Jews? Do all an author’s characters mirror the views of their creator, of course not? By that benchmark Thomas Harris would have a preference for the taste of human flesh.
If Dickens had named child gang master MacDonald would that have meant that he was expressing a racist view of the Scots?
The bad guy in the Merchant of Venice was also a Jew so obviously Shakespeare was a racist too.

Do me a favour.

[Pompey Bum]

With respect--exclusively--to those who expressed an opinion in 2015 (not just because I know you guys, but because the inanity of some of the earlier comments beggers belief), I want to suggest that the real question is not: was Dickens an anti-Semite?; but: is Fagin a dangerous character? And unfortunately the answer is: oh yes, very much so.

I want to make two points before getting into my argument. The first is about Dickens and the second about me. Dickens wrote Oliver Twist as a satire against utilitarianism and the inhuman system of workhouses it produced in England. He wanted to show that workhouses were only a brief stopover for children who were destined for lives of crime and vice. Thus, in addition to being morally repugnant, workhouses were everybody's problem. Exposing the alleged nastiness of Jews was not on his agenda.

Unfortunately he opened himself to that charge by using the satirical stock-in-trade character of the demonic Jew, rather than having the artistic confidence to create a completely original character, as he did later with characters like Mr. Smallweed from Bleak House and Ebenezer Scooge from A Christmas Carol. Both of those hard cases would have fitted the same racist caricature that was used for Fagin, but were presented as Jews. Jonathan is the expert here, but my memory is that although Smallweed wears a skullcap on occasion---as non-Jewish characters like old Mr. Dorrit sometimes do in Dickens)--his religion is never specified. And can you imagine what a catastrophe it would have been if A Christmas Carol had been the tale of a miserly old Jew who converted to Christianity? The story would have lost its appeal and charm (and would have been an ugly and petty work besides).

That was the part about Dickens. Here is the part about me. Despite it's flaws, I like Oliver Twist. Not all of it: like Jonathan, I find Brownlow to be an unconvincing character. And since I am not nearly as good a person as Jonathan, I also find Brownlow irritating and occasionally contemptible (as he is when he chastises Nancy for her morality). In fact, I find those demerits to apply to a greater or lesser extent to all the "respectable" characters in Oliver Twist. In my opinion, apart from Bumble & Co, the only characters worth reading about in the novel are the members of the Fagin gang; and none more so, I'm afraid, than Fagin himself.

I would go further. Despite his ontological flaw, Fagin is Dickens greatest villain, and one of the great characters in western literature. In my opinion, that paradox speaks to Dickens genius as a writer: he was able take the utter muck of a crude stock-in-trade character and breathe an eternal (if eternally nasty) life into his nostrils. That was not necessarily a good thing. For all his Dickensian glamor, Fagin remains a profoundly anti-Semitic character. And while Dickens inherited that evil from his model, it was he, to be fair, who let the vampire into the house.

Fagin is a dangerous character because he sits beside the still glowing embers of an ancient lie: the morally and physically demonic Jew. That lie has its origins, perversely, in a once common interpretation of the New Testament verse, John 8:44. In that passage, Jesus is confronting "Jews" (a strange term, since Jesus himself was a Jew--or does it mean "people from Judea" as opposed to Galileans?). The Jews are said to have formerly believed in Jesus, but to have lapsed. John notoriously has Jesus say to them "You have the devil for your father and you do your father's work." The passage goes on to refer to the devil as "the father of liars."

Interpretation of the verses varied over time and place. One of them, which affected (infected?) art history, and from there moved to popular prejudice, was that Jews are the physical descendants of Satan. It sounds stupid (and it is stupid), but look at the demonic physical features that Christian artists gave Jews in Medieval times, and with which they were caricatured in modern times. (For more on this, see Joshua Trachtenberg's scholarly classic, The Devil and the Jews). And lest you think this is obscure and ancient stuff, the please note that the same caricatures were posted on billboards the more active Christian communities in the Third Reich during the Jewish Holocaust--along with the verses from John 8:44.

Now look at Fagin. Look at how he is described physically. To quote from Kev's quotation: "Fagin's red hair, miserliness, resemblance to the devil, inhuman air of a 'goblin' or 'hideous phantom' or 'loathsome reptile' (III, 5, 9; I,19), and general malevolence, all have some invidious connection with racial stereotype." Note where Dickens places Fagin throughout most of the story: beside a fire. Note what he generally holds in his hands: a long fork with which he roasts things and torments the boys. Fagin is a liar and a perverter of innocence. In short, he fully participates in the calumny of the demonic Jew that had been a staple in Christian art for centuries and had become, by Dickens time, a commonplace of satiric caricature. It is true that it was not a commonplace of 19th century English novels, but very few Jews appear in that literature. Dickens the satirist had to draw on a tradition of graphic representations when he made Fagin. That is why there is such an emphasis on his physiognomy.

Thus Fagin participates in a pernicious anti-Jewish tradition that was centuries old by 1837, and would still be active when millions of Jews were murdered by the Nazis in the 1940s. Of course that does not mean that Dickens caused the Holocaust or would ever have wished for such a thing. Like many liberal Victorian Christians, Dickens would have seen Jews as damned unless they accepted Christianity, but to be welcomed joyfully whenever they did. It has already been pointed out that Dickens made some attempt to tone down his anti-Jewish rhetoric when Jews he respected took him to task for it. It surprises me that no one has mentioned the scene near the novel's end in which Dickens actually distances Fagin from Judaism. As Fagin fearfully awaits his execution, he rejects the consolations of a visiting rabbi. All he considers is his own neck--nothing of Israel. This seems to be how Dickens resolved Fagin in his own mind. Once again, the target of Oliver Twist was what Dickens saw as the perversion of Christian morality by the introduction of a utilitarian principles into England's social programs for the needy, not the wiles of a (supposedly) nasty old Jew. Fagin is really just a bystander, albeit a guilty one.

But Dickens anticipates some of the problems to come for Jews when he says "in response to Mrs Davis...that [Fagin] is called 'The Jew', not because of his religion, but because of his race." (One again, I am quoting Kev's quotation). That supposed distinction--between Jewish belief and racial "Jewishness"--resurfaced later in the 19th century, not in connection with Dickens (who was already dead by then) but with a German journalist named Wilhelm Marr. Marr popularized the term "anti-Semitism" as part of his theory that Jews were categorically a race, an that they were locked in an existential struggle with the "German race." Although Marr later renounced anti-Semetism, other German rationalists found his ideas a convenient way to establish a (supposedly) scientific basis for their anti-Jewish prejudices without falling back on Christian anti-Judaism--which many of them held to be irrational (!). And the ideas of those anti-Semites (among others) would later prove fatally attractive to failed artist Adolph Hitler (among others). Belief in Jewish racial identity was the basis for the Nazi policy that Jews could not opt out of extermination through conversion. Faith didn't matter (much) to the Nazis, but race did. Again, I am not saying that Dickens contributed directly German anti-Semitism. But it is a bit chilling (to me, anyway) to hear him say that "[Fagin] is called 'The Jew', not because of his religion, but because of his race" (including presumably his diabolical physiognomy) forty years before Marr.

In my opinion, understanding these things means that the vapid apologetics in the pre-2015 posts above will not do. The fact that people stereotype Italians as criminals is not relevant to the question of whether the character of Fagin is dangerous to Jews. Neither is the issue of whether Dickens used a Jewish fence as his initial inspiration for Fagin. I agree with Carousel about the way that mindless political correctness depletes us intellectually, culturally, and even (as he points out) in terms of our humor. But I strongly assert that recognizing the potential danger to Jews that the character of Fagan continues to represent--and understanding why--is quite the opposite of political correctness. By contrast, the bizarre and insipid idea (expressed above) that Fagin's Jewishness provides his den of thieves with a healthy degree of "diversity" shows PC at its Looney Tunes best. But it would also be an example of mindless PC (and laziness) to use the excuse that "Dickens is racist" to avoid reading his magisterial works.

It would also be wrong, in my opinion, to simply shrug and say: "The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there." The persistence of anti-Jewish racist ideology into the 21st century requires us to amend that expression to: "The past is a foreign country, and we need to be damn sure that we do things differently here."

Fagin is an anti-Semitic character. In my opinion, those of us who love Oliver Twist need to look that fact squarely in the eye. To understand is not to excuse, but to make excuses is. Understanding Fagin does not mean bowdlerizing him out of the story, or placing Oliver Twist at the back of the bookcase between two dusty volumes of Olive Schreiner. It means teaching Oliver Twist in schools. It means understanding why a moral man like Dickens would have put such a potentially dangerous character in a book that aimed at social reform. In fact, understanding what is wrong Fagin frees us to safely appreciate what is right about him as a character and a villain. And it allows us to more fully appreciate the genius of his puppet master, who took an ugly and despicable racial stereotype, and somehow managed to give us the outrageous and ferocious Fagin of London.

[kiki1982]

Wow, I didn't know the portrayal of Fagin was that bad! Seems pretty amusing from a historical point of view.

And those were interesting points.
Obviously there was an element of 'casual racism' in any work prior to the time that people got regularly acquainted with people of a darker skin colour as being like them. There is no doubt about that.
The point is, should you label a work written in such an era as racist based on your modern (justly politically correct) principles? I don't think you should, because their writers didn't even think about it (unless they were taken to task over it, like you say Dickens was).
But indeed you have to teach why this was the case. Just as you should address other weird points like physiognomy, because they are important to understand such passages.

[Pompey Bum]

The point is, should you label a work written in such an era as racist based on your modern (justly politically correct) principles? I don't think you should, because their writers didn't even think about it (unless they were taken to task over it, like you say Dickens was).

Thank you for your comments, kiki. My view is that accusing Dickens of being a racist is beside the point and counterproductive. And annoyingly, it is often used self-righteously ("Dickens was a racist--not like me!") or even as a way to justify academic laziness ("No, I haven't read Dickens, and I am unapologetic about not reading racists!") On the other hand, I see it as too easy to simply attribute such issues to historical context. In my opinion we need to ask ourselves why good men like Dickens participated in something as wrong as the calumny of the demonic Jew. Perhaps you are right that he didn't understand what he was doing until Jews he knew explained it to him. Personally I suspect that is exactly what happened. But if so, let's acknowledge it--as you and I do--rather than make excuses that Fagin wasn't so bad, or that lots of groups suffer stereotypes, or that everyone acted like that in those days (why did everyone act like that?), or that making Fagin a Jew gave Oliver Twist diversity. To do that, in my opinion, is merely to hide the monster under the bed. And ask any six year old: monsters never stay there.