LITERATURE AND THE CITY

             Amy Levy’s Reuben Sachs is a satirical depiction of the life of middle and upper-middle class Anglo-Jews in the late Victorian period, in which she examined the alleged Jewish culture of materialism, oppression of women, and racial decline. Reuben Sachs is a story about the relationship between the eponymous character of the novella, Reuben Sachs, and his cousin Judith Quixano. Although the two are deeply in love with each other, Reuben realises that he needs to pursue a distinguished political career in order to advance his position, while Judith is a poor relation who cannot help with his future career. Reuben cannot resist a prestigious parliamentary position, so he chooses a political career over marriage to the woman he loves. In addition, the novella is about the conflicting views on Jewish culture and identity within the Anglo-Jewish community. Levy introduces a couple of complex and unresolved problems faced by the Victorian Anglo-Jews by creating tensions between Reuben and his cousin Leopold Leuniger. As there are critical representations of the affluent Anglo-Jewish community, the novella raised a lot of controversy in the Jewish community and was perceived as an attack on Jewish life. However, I argue that by providing different accounts of how the Anglo-Jews negotiate the Jewish values in the novella, Levy deals with the ambivalence towards Jewishness in the Victorian London.

             When Reuben Sachs was published in 1888, it was initially criticised as being anti-Semitic by Jewish presses and critics. The Jewish World, one of the most widely-read Jewish newspapers at that time, accused Amy Levy of “playing the role of an accuser of her people”:

Levy was conceived as a ‘self-hating Jew’, who encouraged Jewish self-hatred, anti-Semitism and positions of racial degeneration with her novella. However, I would argue that Amy Levy is not a ‘self-hating Jew’, and Reuben Sachs is not an attack on the Anglo-Jewish community. Instead, Levy negotiates her Jewish identity with different points of views from the characters in the novella, among which the extensive intense discussions between Reuben and Leo on Anglo-Jewishness are crucial to showing the confusion over Jewish assimilation and self-identification.

             Levy builds up a binary opposition between Reuben and Leo by contrasting their views towards their own race and culture. The question of racial destiny is discussed in a dispute between the two. Leo does not possess deep tribal feeling for his own race; instead, he is “aware of nothing but revolt against, almost of hatred of, a people who, […] lived without ideals, and was given up body and soul to the pursuit of material advantage” (229). Leo is highly critical of Jewish materialism; in his argument with Reuben, which largely draws upon the romanticised portrayals of Victorian Jews in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, Leo asserts the debasement of contemporary Jews as he remarks “we are materialists to our fingers’ ends. That we have outlived from the nature of things, such ideals as we ever had” (238). He believes that contemporary racial decline stems from “the religion of materialism”, and he shows his hostility to Jewish materialism by referring it as “the hereditary stain” (239). In response to Leo’s attack on the materialistic nature of the race, Reuben defends and explains that Jewish materialism is largely drawn and fostered by external factors in the British society, as “[t]his is a materialistic age, a materialistic country” (238). He resists Leo’s notion of Jewish theology as “the religion of materialism”, since he believes that “our religion remains a vital force among the cultivated and thoughtful Jews of to-day” (Ibid). Reuben reckons that Leo has overlooked the virtues of the Jewish people, so he speaks for the good virtues of the Jewish people:

The rhetorical question suggests how the Jewish people are working through the tensions within the community. Just as Bertie, a non-Jewish character in the novella, remarks about the Jewish character, it is all about “the strongly marked contrasts; the underlying resemblances; the elaborate differentiations from a fundamental type” (236). With this notion, Levy is conscious of different views towards self-identification, and she conveys that sense of ambivalence through the characters Reuben and Leo.

             Levy is also sensitive to how the Jewish people attempt to fit in with the British society and the problems they encounter. With “innumerable trivial class differences” (210) in the Anglo-Jewish community, there are mixed feelings towards the way of adapting to life in London. In the late-Victorian period, some of the Anglo-Jews attained positions of status and became integrated into British society (Beckman 185). As a result, the Anglo-Jews, especially the younger generations, have “a desire to strike out from the tribal duck-pond into the wider and deeper waters of society (Levy 210). However, not everyone holds a bright future. For instance, Reuben’s career as a lawyer is in the ascent, in which his career pursuit is described as “a luxury only to be afforded by the rich” (216). On the contrary, Leo, a musician with passion for art, “had no respect” in spite of his attainments, violin-playing and classical scholarship (Ibid); and his life is just full of unsatisfactoriness (248). Interestingly, as the career prospects of Reuben and Leo are different, their perceptions of the London city are also different. Reuben loves the “din and rush and struggle” and the “democratic atmosphere” (200) of modern London that he regards the streets “with an interest both passionate and affectionate” (245). However, Leo “hated London almost as vehemently as his cousin loved it” (Ibid) as the busy streets in London “filled him with a dreary sensation of disgust and depression” (Ibid). As suggested in the novella, the Jewish people are “eager to crown success in any form” (235). Hence, to Reuben, London is a place of hope because his pursuit of a distinguished political career is successful; but to Leo, the London city is a dreadful place because he cannot survive in the “huge competitive examination” (245).

             There are always contradictions between Reuben and Leo – while Reuben is portrayed as a loving Jew, Leo is depicted as a ‘self-hating’ Jew. The challenges faced by the Victorian Anglo-Jews are complicated, so Levy is aware of bringing different voices into the discussions. Therefore, it is problematic to accuse Levy of using Reuben Sachs to promote Jewish self-hatred by merely focusing on the unflattering depictions of Jewishness in the novella. Some scholars suggest that Levy uses Leo as a fictive self to negotiate the anxieties of Jewish self-identification, in which she “worked […] hard to defeat the ‘Leopold Leuniger’ voice within”, and she was “recovering a positive sense of Jewish identity” and “was able to take advantage of what had once been felt as discord but now felt like healthy cultural hybridity” (Hetherington and Valman 17). It is possible that Levy identifies herself with Leo as she shares common background with Leo – both educated at Cambridge, and engaging in creative productions. However, it is also possible that she is dealing with the ambivalence towards Jewishness herself through the two characters – on one hand, she feels the need for Jewish assimilation into the British society; on the other hand, she wants to identify herself as a Jew. As a result, the tensions between Reuben and Leo can be seen as Levy’s internal struggling with both positive and negative views about her race.

             Although the views of Reuben and Leo are always opposing, they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. On one hand, the Anglo-Jews can be proud of their own race; and on the other hand, they can also have a critical examination of their culture and try to integrate themselves into the British society. As a result, this can be a way to work through the ambivalence. The ending of Reuben Sachs also suggests how the Victorian Anglo-Jews can negotiate the ambivalence towards Jewishness. In the end, Reuben dies and Leo remains, which highlights the significance of Leo’s role as an artist. As a musician, Leo represents creativity in the city; and as Leo remains till the end of the story, Levy might want to encourage the Anglo-Jewish artists to engage more in the discussions of the complicated issues within the Anglo-Jewish community in their works. Like Levy herself, she produces many Anglo-Jewish writings to call people’s attention to the subject matter.

             All in all, Amy Levy and her novella Reuben Sachs do not attempt to promote Jewish self-hatred. Instead, Levy has presented different views of the Anglo-Jews with different characters in the novella, particularly with the tension between Reuben and Leo. In the debates of Jewish materialism and assimilation into the Victorian society, Reuben is portrayed as a loving Jew who is “exceedingly fond of [his] people” (239-40), while Leo is depicted as a ‘self-hating’ Jew who holds a position of “revolt” (229) against his race. The challenges faced by the Anglo-Jews are complicated, so Levy attempts to include different perspectives on the subject matter in order to negotiate the ambivalence.