Edgeworth and the Jews: Diaspora and Political Control

Dispelled from their homel and scattered across Europe for over a thousand years, the Jews were the paradigmatic diaspora for Europeans during the Romantic era. Some Britons with millenarian yearnings, identifying a Jewish return to Palestine with the end of days and religious apocalypse, dreamed of the creation of a Jewish state. But unlike French emigres or transported convicts, the Jews had no extant nation to which they might return. Perceptions of Jews’ religious and racial difference were compounded by the highly sedimented nature of Jewish cultural identity. Expelled from England in 1290 by Edward I, Jews were readmitted beginning in the midseventeenth century. By contrast, Jewish communities had existed for centuries in other European nations. These groups possessed different subcultures tinged by the national identities of their hosts.1 As a legacy of living secret lives amid the Inquisition, Sephardic Jews in particular had absorbed many traits of their Christian, Spanish neighbors. Todd Endelman explains, “In matters of dress, speech, manners, and the like, bourgeois Sephardim were indistinguishable from their non-Jewish counterparts” (Jews of Georgian England 120). The differences in culture, as well as religious traditions, between Jews of Spanish or Portuguese origin (Sephardim) and those of Central and Eastern Europe (Ashkenazim) could be vast.