News Versus Novel: Speaking on Behalf of Minority Communities in Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto

Abstract

This paper argues that Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto problematizes the newspaper’s role in developing nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish identity. Acknowledging the centrality of newspapers to the Jewish community, Zangwill dramatizes the limitations of newspaper form and function to the cultivation of a broader affective attachment. The newspaper’s regularity dulls its editor’s sense of the passage of time, so that its routinized labor makes it seem as if he is not fully conscious. In contrast, novelistic realism enables Zangwill to convey the complex feelings that the Jewish ghetto elicits in his main character, Esther Ansell, both when she resides there and later returns. The newspaper looks like a form conducive to affective connections only when it is repurposed by readers and made to work more like a novel. Whereas George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda concludes with Daniel’s yearning towards Palestine and an independent nation for his people, Children of the Ghetto valorizes the Jewish ghetto as a place of nostalgic attachment, a setting that fosters affective attachment based not in anonymous nationalist imaginings but in lived and material communal proximity. Late-nineteenth century Jewish newspapers amplify the problems of representing a coherent Anglo-Jewish population and integrating it into a larger national public. Where Daniel Deronda mostly evacuates the importance of the newspaper to the Anglo-Jewish community, Israel Zangwill re-locates it to the core of the Jewish question in Children of the Ghetto. This will also argue that Children of the Ghetto responds to patterns of community developed in Middlemarch, foregrounding a subplot in Eliot’s novel: Will Ladislaw’s work as a newspaper editor. Ladislaw’s editing of The Pioneer is reworked in Raphael Leon’s work for The Flag of Judah, as both characters seek to allow for communal reforms but run into obstacles posed by the structural limitations of the newspaper.