Review
Reviewed Work(s): Jewish Feeling: Difference and Affect in Nineteenth-Century Jewish
Women's Writing by Richa Dwor
Review by: Linda M. Shires
Source: Victorian Studies, Vol. 59, No. 2 (Winter 2017), pp. 365-366
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/victorianstudies.59.2.27
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Studies
WINTER 2017
365
Jewish Feeling: Difference and Affect in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Women’s Writing, by Richa Dwor; pp. viii + 197. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, £65.00, £28.99 paper, $88.00, $39.95 paper.
Although a new wave of interest in nineteenth-century systems of belief seems to have arisen, few current scholars have directly linked literary texts to theology. By connecting
midrash, the rabbinic mode of interpretation, to the works of Grace Aguilar, George Eliot, and Amy Levy, Richa Dwor provides a superb addition to affect theory and Jewish Studies in Jewish Feeling: Difference and Affect in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Women’s Writing. Midrash, she argues, allows us to assess the deep “Jewish feeling” these three writers embedded in their prose. Drawing upon history, religion, and gender studies, Dwor’s close textual readings use Eliot as an important counterpoint to the two Anglo-Jewish writers who tried to transmit Jewish ways of thinking and feeling into English literature. She augments work on Eliot’s Jewish learning by scholars such as William Baker and builds upon the invaluable scholarship of Linda Hunt Beckman, Brian Cheyette, Michael Galchinskey, Cynthia Scheinberg, and Nadia Valman.
Dwor’s book also reminds us of earlier studies of midrash and literary theory by Jewish Studies scholars David Stern and Daniel Boyarin, while being admirably informed by numerous historical and theoretical contexts. To illustrate “personalized, local engage-ments with affect,” for instance, Dwor primarily contextualizes midrash in terms of affect theory, while she relies on Raymond Williams’s “structures of feeling” to explain that affect is not strictly subjective but social, as well as historically and culturally contingent (11). Taking up the challenge laid down by Eve Sedgwick that there is no single history or unitary politics of affect, Dwor convincingly argues that identifying midrash as an affec-tive process has validity and generates a iner understanding of the texture and effects of Jewish-centered literary works in the nineteenth century.
Although Dwor does not overtly engage with recent interpretive controversies, she enters a debate about surface and depth reading. Midrash, as a form of Biblical exegesis, is not peshat, the literal surface meaning or derash, the deep, symbolic meaning, or sod, the mystical meaning. Rather, midrash establishes a comparative, metaphorical meaning. Thus, Dwor is right to focus on questions such as: What is it that draws us to a particular text? What is the affective nature of our engagement? Midrash is a mode of spirituality, a hermeneutics, and a communal literary tradition of storytelling that asks questions of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), attempting to offer interpretive solutions to gaps in meaning and other kinds of problems posed by the text.
Yet midrashic polysemy and textual indeterminacy are not the same thing. For instance, when in “The Spirit of Night” (1852) Aguilar draws on Genesis 1:16—“And God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night”—she creates a modern midrash when she genders the bodies as masculine sun and feminine moon in order to comment upon power imbalances within the Jewish community. At the same time, she does not alter the Biblical text; it remains intact for others to reinterpret in their own time. Thus, as Dwor shows, Aguilar reclaims the sub-stance of the Bible and imports something of the history and mystery of Jewish identity via communal memory, while she engages different groups of readers in her own histor-ical moment through a speciic reading practice. Dwor’s reading of Levy signiicantly
VICTORIAN STUDIES / VOLUME 59, NO. 2 366
defends the author’s criticism of Jews, explaining that while it is self-critical, it is hardly to be read as a rejection. While defending women’s rights as strongly as Aguilar did, Levy creates a corrective in works such as Reuben Sachs (1888) and yearns for the perpetuation of a strongly Jewish community.
Thus when Dwor convincingly shows that Aguilar and Levy incorporate theology into their work, their emphasis on community, bonding, and ethics is linked to their reinterpreting of scripture. For them, midrashic re-interpretation serves to continue and transform the Jewish community. The task Dwor set herself is admirably dificult but rewarding: to deine a distinctly Jewish form of affect and to show how Eliot could not attain it, despite her emotional and intellectual attraction to Judaism, while Aguilar and Levy enlisted “Jewish feeling” in extremely different ways.
Dwor proves her thesis by illustrating how Eliot, especially in Daniel Deronda (1876), views Jewish religion as exemplary by strengthening family and communal ties that might be transferable to other societies. Whereas Aguilar and Levy resist conversion and would claim that Jews should hold a distinct place in Christian England while maintaining an identity marked by difference, Eliot persuades herself that since Christians owe much to their forerunners, Jews have a rightful claim to Englishness. In Dwor’s view, Eliot thus feels with the Jews but not as a Jew.
If I have any criticism of the book, it would be a wish for more emphasis on Eliot’s remarkable ability to learn from Emmanuel Deutsch and her copious readings in Jewish sources. I would argue that she executed a form of Talmudicmidrash in Daniel Deronda by exploiting a comparative method. Her particular choice of double plot, characters, and mixed time frames in that novel precluded a simple surface reading in favor of a mode stressing constant reevaluation by comparison of sections of the text. This is not to argue that any such choice is midrashic. It is to suggest, though, that Daniel Deronda insists on reinterpretation of ideas and feelings, a discarding of both surface meanings and mystical meanings, in favor of comparison, to endorse a spectrum—of tolerance to fellow-feeling— as the basis of community. Moreover, when Eliot persistently cites the Talmud and Tanakh, and alludes to Pirke Avot or to the Book of Esther, she immerses her reader, as Levy and Aguilar did, in emotional reading responses, even if her ethics stresses likeness more than difference.
Throughout the book, Dwor establishes the theological function of literature and the transmissions of Jewish feeling into canonized and less well-known literary works. Historically and theoretically informed, the book astutely connects the shifting meanings of Jewish identity over ifty years with a speciic mode of reading and writing.
Linda M. Shires
Yeshiva University
doi:10.2979/victorianstudies.59.2.27
Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body, by Peter J. Capuano; pp. xv + 323. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015, $80.00, $39.95 paper.
