Dear Readers,


I now consider this blog to be my Juvenelia. Have fun perusing the archives, and find me at my new haunt, here.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Anthony Trollope... Wit and Jew-hater


From page 29 of his great work, "The Way We Live Now."

"She was fat and fair,--unlike in colour to our traditional Jewesses; but she had the Jewish nose and the Jewish contraction of the eyes. There was certainly very little in Madame Melmotte to recommend her, unless it was a readiness to spe nd money on any object that might be suggested to her by her new acquaintances."

I'm so excited to be introduced to a new anti-semitic caricature in a highly-regarded work of literature! It's not enough that T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Mel Gibson want us dead. There's good old pickpocket Fagin (although Dickens atoned by putting nice jews in later novels), Meyer Wolfsheim in the Great Gatsby, Robert Cohn in This Side of Paradise, and those assholes at the Harvard Crimson. Oh, and Borat.


But not Jane Austen; no, she was not anti-semitic chiefly, I guess, because she didn't know any of us.

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