Abstract/Summary

Cheyette’s article will explore the many ways that popular culture in Britain, after the expansion of print culture in the 1890s, was influenced by the growth of political antisemitism and the resulting campaigns against Jewish citizenship in Western European nation-states. It will focus on four bestselling authors who instigated the paperback revolution—George Du Maurier, Hall Caine, Marie Corelli and Guy Thorne—and enjoyed total sales of several millions. With the demise of the expensive three-volume library edition of the novel, there was a sea-change in the types of novels that were produced from the 1890s onwards. Cheap one-volume novels (‘yellowbacks’) were marketed aggressively and were easily accessible which meant that the British reading public were transformed into book buyers rather than book borrowers. The novels and stories of Du Maurier, Caine, Corelli and Thorne were a print version of mass democracy and a new medium that enabled gratuitously dehumanizing portrayals of Jews, once marginal, to have a widespread appeal in mainstream culture. These authors complicated the received linear narrative of the history of antisemitism—which supposedly moved from religious hostility to racial demarcation—by engaging directly with the religious debates of the time. They popularized the so-called ‘Jewish question’—articulated by Wilhelm Marr’s Antisemiten-Liga (League of Anti-Semites)—by distinguishing between ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ Jewish ‘aliens’. This resulted in the promotion or disavowal of immigration restrictions on East European Jewish refugees and often positioned ‘the Jew’ as a racialized outsider not worthy of citizenship.