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“PERMANENTLY BLACKED”: JULIA FRANKAU’S JEWISH RACE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 1999

Michael Galchinsky
Affiliation:
Georgia State University

Abstract

IF THERE IS to be a challenge to the increasingly prevalent impulse to recover Anglo-Jewish texts from the silences of the archives, the challenge will undoubtedly arise in relation to the novels of Julia Frankau.1 Frankau’s late Victorian novels on Jewish subjects, Dr. Phillips: A Maida Vale Idyll (1887) and Pigs in Clover (1903), explore and authorize a particular set of attitudes known as “Jewish self-hatred,” and, I will argue, legitimate these attitudes by recourse to an idiosyncratic form of scientific racism. Moreover, as I will demonstrate, these texts have served as spurs to the production of racial anti-Semitism. In such a case, what does it mean to recover the text? For what purposes does one revive interest in a self-hating work that has a history of generating dangerous consequences?

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 1999 Cambridge University Press

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