3 thoughts on “Was Novelist Charles Dickens an Antisemite?”

  1. Donald H. Harrison

    Goldie Morgentaler of the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, is a professor of English literature. The work of Charles Dickens is a specialty. Here is her comment on Jerry Klinger’s article above:

    “I have a few minor bones to pick (Oliver Twist is by no means Dickens’s masterpiece). But I don’t disagree with the general tenor of the argument. Dickens subscribed to the genteel antisemitism of his time and there is no getting around that, not even for admirers like me. He did try to write a more sympathetic Jewish character in answer to Mrs Davis’s complaint in Our Mutual Friend, but that portrayal is also antisemitic in the opposite way, namely, in its depiction of a saintly Jewish character without a blemish who dresses like some biblical character and has zero personality. In his letters, Dickens was full of prejudice against Jews, although I don’t think he knew very many personally. I’ve actually published several articles about the Jews in Dickens including one called “When Dickens Spoke Yiddish,” about the translations of Dickens’s novels into Yiddish, of which there were many. You may be surprised to learn that Oliver Twist was the most popular of Dickens’s novels for Jewish readers in Eastern Europe. That article appeared in Dickens Quarterly and can only be accessed through a university library, but it is quoted extensively here in an article from the Forward: https://forward.com/culture/448358/why-jews-loved-charles-dickens-and-even-fagin/. As the title says, Dickens was the favourite non-Jewish writer of east European Jews, so that too needs to be taken into account in any assessment of Jewish reactions to his work. My major disagreement with the author of the piece in SDJW is his final assessment that Dickens was a flawed man of the 21st century but a decent man of the 19th. Dickens was more than a flawed and decent man. He was a great writer, one of the greatest novelists ever to my mind. That is why we care about him and that is why we Jews are dismayed by his antisemitism. “

  2. Jerry… Having read many of your commentaries, literary offerings and musings over the years, and having found them informative and thought provoklng (as well as amusing on occasion), I found your commentary on Dickens and his character Fagin very, very interesting. I have always recognized the uncomfortable depiction of Fagin as scurilous and intentional. But your essay clarified (for me) the context of Dickens’ characters with the time of publication and the genuine nature of the person the author seems to have been.

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