The protagonist of Children of the Ghetto, an immensely popular novel by the fin-de-siècle Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill, is Esther Ansell, a poor Jewish girl from an immigrant neighborhood who grows up to write an acclaimed novel of her own. An unsentimental depiction of the Jewish nouveaux riches, Ansell’s fictional novel is lambasted by her fellow Jews, who see it as lending credence to anti-Semitic stereotypes. While Zangwill would attract similar criticism for Children of the Ghetto, the inspiration for Ansell was an English author and poetess by the name of Amy Levy (1862-1889). Emma Garman writes:
During her short career, [Levy] published three volumes of poetry and three novels, and contributed journalism and short stories to periodicals including the Gentleman’s Magazine and Oscar Wilde’s Women’s World. Once hailed as a genius by Wilde, today Levy is little-known outside academic and poetic circles. . . .
In 1886, the British newspaper the Jewish Chronicle had published Levy’s essay “The Jew in Fiction,” wherein the twenty-four-year-old argued that no novelist had made a serious attempt “at grappling in its entirety with the complex problems of Jewish life and Jewish character. The Jew, as we know him today . . . has been found worthy of none but the most superficial observation.” Guilty of superficial portrayals, she charged, were Sir Walter Scott, [Charles] Dickens, and [William Makepeace] Thackeray. As for George Eliot, though Daniel Deronda was celebrated as the first Zionist novel in English literature, Levy dismissed its Jewish characters as unrealistic and overly noble. . . .
[Zangwill’s] Esther Ansell pays tribute to [Levy’s novel] Reuben Sachs, [which] focuses on an extended Jewish family who, living in bourgeois London splendor, overvalue success and prosperity while neglecting their spiritual and intellectual heritage. As such, they are a deliberate counterpoint to Eliot’s virtuous and idealized Jews. . . .
Reuben Sachs caused a dreadful scandal, with Levy accused in various quarters of vitriol and hatred of her own community. “She apparently delights in the task of persuading the general public,” wrote the reviewer for Jewish World, “that her own kith and kin are the most hideous types of vulgarity.”
Read more on Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/212859/female-victorian-jewish-novelist