Description:
IF THERE IS to be a challenge to the increasingly prevalent impulse to recover Anglo-Jewish texts from the silences of the archives, the challenge will undoubtedly arise in relation to the novels of Julia Frankau.1 Frankau’s late Victorian novels on Jewish subjects, Dr. Phillips: A Maida Vale Idyll (1887) and Pigs in Clover (1903), explore and authorize a particular set of attitudes known as “Jewish self-hatred,” and, I will argue, legitimate these attitudes by recourse to an idiosyncratic form of scientific racism. Moreover, as I will demonstrate, these texts have served as spurs to the production of racial anti-Semitism. In such a case, what does it mean to recover the text? For what purposes does one revive interest in a self-hating work that has a history of generating dangerous consequences?