AbstractsLanguage, Literature & Linguistics

The Jew in early American literature

by Joseph George Weiner




Institution: Boston University
Department:
Year: 1950
Record ID: 1514577
Full text PDF: http://hdl.handle.net/2144/5399


Abstract

In the essay interest in the Jew had been scholarly rather than humanitarian. In fiction and on the stage the Jew was a blackguard as often as not. But it was in the field of poetry that the Jew received his most sympathetic treatment at the hands of early American writers. The Jew of the poem was thoroughly heroic. If there were a touch of Shylock in his make-up, the poets, at least, did not see it.