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• W1487246543 abstract "Reviewed by: Aesthetic Persuasion: Henry James, the Jews, and Race James Mendelsohn Eli Ben-Joseph. Aesthetic Persuasion: Henry James, the Jews, and Race. Lanham: UP of America, 1996. 264 pp. $59.50 (Hardcover); $27.50 (Paperback) Henry James is a writer for whom the concept of race and the figure of the Jew are not foreign subjects although their significance is a matter of dispute.The characters who most interest James in his fiction inhabit a wealthy, “white,” predominantly Christian world of England, the United States, and France, into which a few more exotic characters are occasionally allowed. James’s non-fiction, moreover, from criticism to memoirs, contains substantial evidence of James’s anti-Semitism. But any generalization about James’s texts is difficult because they are often insistently vague and sometimes radically different in their inferences. In his description of the lower East Side of New York within The American Scene, James describes Jews as bottom fish “of overdeveloped proboscis” and compares Jewish capacities to survive assimilation to that of worms who live despite being cut up into segments. But the same text offers a quite different assessment of Jews only a few paragraphs and two revised metaphors later, where the Jew appears to be a model of human agency that resists the pressures of commercialism to deracinate a population—a force that James thinks threatens the United States in 1904. Eli Ben-Joseph’s Aesthetic Persuasion: Henry James, the Jews, and Race is a provocative attempt to provide a comprehensive account of James on the subject of Jews and of race. This study is helpful for the materials it brings together and several acute readings. It begins to meet the need for more work on Jews and anti-Semitism in the late nineteenth century, especially in the United States. But Ben-Joseph’s study needs to be both more attentive to the individual texts and more elaborate in its historical treatment of its subject. The latter, especially, would build a more precise and complete sense of the sign of Jewishness and the language of anti-Semitism as it evolves in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, from which James’s work could be read in relation to both sources and intertext. [End Page 200] Ben-Joseph’s interest is less in race than in the images and treatment of the Jew as he or she is directly and indirectly identified in James’s texts, including fiction, non-fiction, letters and criticism. He moves chronologically, from the earliest stories to the latest novels, with an additional chapter for The American Scene and “The Question of Our Speech.” Included in this examination, moreover, are James’s reviews of Francis Parkman, Artur De Gobineau, and The Merchant of Venice. As Ben-Joseph asserts, this range alone suggests the value of the subject, especially given the importance of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century to ideas of race and of the Jew. James’s writing covers more than thirty-five years, and those years—roughly from 1871 to 1909—saw significant changes in the meaning of race and of the Jew in the United States, England, and France, all of which Ben-Joseph wishes to assess. The aftermath of the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Hayes compromise, the Supreme Court ruling against the 1875 Civil Rights act, the mass immigration of the 1870s and 1880s, the xenophobia of the 1890s, the ramifications of Plessy versus Ferguson, the urbanization of America, the rise of corporate capitalism, the development of unions, and the rise of scientific racism—all of these complicate the idea of race and of Jews in the United States alone. Ben-Joseph has therefore selected a potentially powerful focus for evaluating the status of the Jew, which he recognizes. He considers his book to be both a single-author study—what he calls “an aspect of the biography of Henry James” which is “literary, historical and psychological”—and a study through James of “the development of common anti-Semitic notions in late nineteenth-century America, England and France.” Ben-Joseph’s findings are that Jewish characters are not allowed “human development,” even though James’s work is part of..." @default.
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• W1487246543 title "Book review: Aesthetic Persuasion: Henry James, the Jews, and Race" @default.
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