Full Description
Oscar Wilde wrote of this novel, "Its directness, its uncompromising truths, its depth of feeling, and above all, its absence of any single superfluous word, make Reuben Sachs, in some sort, a classic." Reuben Sachs, the story of an extended Anglo-Jewish family in London, focuses on the relationship between two cousins, Reuben Sachs and Judith Quixano, and the tensions between their Jewish identities and English society. The novel's complex and sometimes satirical portrait of Anglo-Jewish life, which was in part a reaction to George Eliot's romanticized view of Victorian Jews in Daniel Deronda, caused controversy on its first publication.
This Broadview edition prints for the first time since its initial publication in The Jewish Chronicle Levy's essay "The Jew in Fiction." Other appendices include George Eliot's essay on anti-Jewish sentiment in Victorian England and a chapter from Israel Zangwill's novel The Children of the Ghetto. Also included is a map of Levy's London with landmarks from her biography and from the "Jewish geography" of Reuben Sachs.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Amy Levy: A Brief Chronology
Anglo-Jewish History: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text
Reuben Sachs: A Sketch
Appendix A: Contemporary Reviews of Reuben Sachs
"Critical Jews," The Jewish Chronicle (25 January 1889)
"Reuben Sachs," The Spectator (16 February 1889)
John Barrow Allen, "New Novels," The Academy (16 February 1889)
"The Deterioration of the Jewess," Jewish World (22 February 1889)
"Literary: Amy Levy's Reuben Sachs," The American Hebrew (5 April 1889)
Oscar Wilde, "Amy Levy," The Woman's World (1890)
Appendix B: Other Writing by Levy
"Jewish Women and 'Women's Rights,'" The Jewish Chronicle (7 February 1879, 28 February 1879)
"The Jew in Fiction," The Jewish Chronicle (4 June 1886)
"Middle-Class Jewish Women of To-Day," The Jewish Chronicle (17 September 1886)
"Cohen of Trinity," The Gentleman's Magazine (May 1889)
Poetry
Appendix C: Literary Contexts
From George Eliot, "The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!," The Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1878)
From Mathilde Blind, "Daniel Deronda," George Eliot (1883)
From Israel Zangwill, Children of the Ghetto (1892)
From Vernon Lee, "A Dialogue on Novels," The Contemporary Review (September 1885)
From Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying: A Dialogue," The Nineteenth Century (January 1889)
Appendix D: The Jewish Question in Victorian Culture
The Jewish Type: The New Race Sciences
From Robert Knox, "Of the Coptic, Jewish, and Phoenician Races," The Races of Men (1862)
Joseph Jacobs, "The Jewish Type, and Galton's Composite Photographs," The Photographic News (24 April 1885)
Political and Social Contexts
From Goldwin Smith, "Can Jews Be Patriots?" The Nineteenth Century (May 1878)
From Hermann Adler, "Recent Phases of Judaeophobia," The Nineteenth Century (December 1881)
From Laurence Oliphant, "The Jew and the Eastern Question," The Nineteenth Century (August 1882)
Appendix E: The New Woman Question
From Clementina Black, "On Marriage: A Criticism," Fortnightly Review (April 1890)
From Grant Allen, "The Girl of the Future," The Universal Review (1890)
Appendix F: Map of Levy's London from Bacon's New Map of London (1885)
Select Bibliography
