Victorian Jews Through British Eyes

The authors have selected nearly 150 illustrations, with commentary, from Victorian illustrated magazines such as ''The Illustrated London News'', ''Punch'', and ''The Graphic'', to show how Jewish subjects were presented to Victorian readers. This material, unique because it was produced mainly from eye-witness accounts, also provides a new source to illustrate the social history of Victorian Jews, especially in Britain. The British image of the Jew is shown to progress during this period from a collection of stereotypes - the financier, the pedlar and old clothes-man, the rather shady ancillary of the machinery of the law - to a more accurate representation of a Victorian bourgeois with distinctive religious practices and traditions; and then again to stereotypes produced by concentration on an ''Aliens Question''. Introductory essays by Roger Cowen and V. D. Lipman respectively, describe the Victorian illustrated magazines as sources of material and the Jewish background in nineteenth-century Britain.