Israel Zangwill, or ‘The Jewish Dickens’: Representing Minority Communities in Novel and Newspaper

This chapter examines how the newspaper participates in novelistic depictions of late nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewishness, with a focus on Israel Zangwill’s 1892 novel, Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People (1892) and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876). The dominant nineteenth-century Jewish newspaper, The Jewish Chronicle, sought to accommodate its readers and to represent a unified Jewish community to the larger national public; however, Jewish print culture more broadly was politically, culturally, and linguistically diverse. Acknowledging the centrality of newspapers to the Jewish community Zangwill dramatises the limitations of newspaper form and function to the cultivation of a broader affective attachment. In Children of the Ghetto, Zangwill contrasts the representative potential of novelistic realism with the English-language Orthodox newspaper, The Flag of Judah, which only imperfectly fosters an Anglo-Jewish community. The newspaper’s regularity and routinised labor dull its editor’s sense of time and weakens his affective attachment to other members of his community. In contrast, novelistic realism enables Zangwill to convey the complex feelings that the Jewish ghetto elicits in the protagonist and novelist Esther Ansell. The newspaper looks like a form conducive to affective connections only when it is repurposed by readers and made to work more like a novel. This chapter also argues that Israel Zangwill reworks Eliot’s novelistic approaches to community in Children of the Ghetto. Whereas Daniel Deronda concludes with Deronda’s yearning towards Palestine and a nation for his people, Children of the Ghetto valorises the idea of the Jewish ghetto as a place of nostalgia, a setting that fosters affective attachment based not in anonymous communal imaginings but in lived and material proximity. Zangwill’s novel dramatises the difficulties in creating a minor community within a larger national community, and the extent to which form matters in how that community is envisioned.