Kafka: Foran Loven - hypertekstualiseret af Elias Ole Tetens Lund
Gentlemen og jøder
Anthony Julius skildrer mentaliteten i England for at lodde dybden i den engelske antisemitisme: " It was in mid- to late-nineteenth-century fiction that the question of whether a Jew could be a gentleman was most thoroughly explored. In Anthony Trollope's novels, which represent the most sustained literary exploration of what he termed 'this difficult word',206 the Jew is usually the antitype to the gentleman. The villain of The Prime Minister, Ferdinand Lopez, for example, 'knows how to look and talk like a gentleman' and claims to be one, but is soon revealed to be nothing but a Jew-adventurer— a stranger, apparently foreign, without discernible parentage, elever and adept at modern languages, who says awkward and impertinent things but is also a schemer, a cajoling bully, a speculator, a swindler, a liar, and a cheat. Though 'he had lived nearly all his life in England', Lopez 'had not quite acquired that knowledge of the ways in which things åre done which is so general among men of a certain class'. He is 'selfish', 'void' of'principle', 'utterly unmanly', 'a lie from head to foot'.207 Nevertheless, according to Shirley Robin Letwin, Trollope concludes that the most perfect instance of an English gentleman is the foreign Jewish woman, Mme Max Goesler. Though this has an air of deliberate paradox, it was an established trope in the mid- to late Victorian era that one might find 'gentlemen' in the unlikeliest of piaces. When Sir David Salomons became Lord Mayor, The Times reported this exchange between a Church dignitary and the Prince Consort: 'Thank goodness, Your Royal Highness, we've got a gentleman in the civic chair at last.' 'Yes my lord, but you had to go beyond the pale of Christendom to find him."
(Trials of the Diaspora. A History of Anti-Semitism in England p. 384)