The Young Jewess and Her Christian School-Fellows

It's been a while since I've written about Jewish conversion literature.  The Young Jewess and Her Christian School-Fellows (1847), ascribed to Clara Moore, is intended for children instead of adults, but it shares the key tropes of novels targeted for an older demographic.   Zillah Isaac, the young Jewess of the title, attends a school run by a woman with a depressingly obvious name, Mrs. Worthing.  The worthy (sigh) Mrs. Worthing is, of course, a model of Christian virtue; her students are models of Christian virtue; and the whole point of the plot, such as it is, is to show Zillah "the beauty and the happiness of practical Christianity" (15).  However, Mrs. Worthing has otherwise promised not to proselytize.  One day, however, Zillah overhears Mrs. Worthing reading the story of Joseph to her students; expecting to hear more about Joseph the next day, Zillah hides outside the schoolroom door, only to find Mrs. Worthing reading one of the Gospels instead.  Zillah responds emotionally to the narrative: she is "shocked" by Judas, feels "sorrow" about Gethsemane, alternately "grieve[s]" and "rejoice[s]" about Paul, and, ultimately, is reduced to tears by the Crucifixion (25-26).  Even more, she tells Mrs. Worthing that "'I am so very sorry that the Jews were so wicked as to crucify Jesus of Nazareth!'" (26)  Oops? Not to worry. It turns out that the deceased Mr. Isaac was a closet Christian, and soon-to-be-deceased Mama Isaac is also a closet Christian, so everyone is hunky-dory with Zillah herself becoming Christian.  As she promptly does--thanks to the power of an exceptionally oversimplified notion of sola scriptura--and lives happily ever after with Mrs. Worthing after Mrs. Isaac dies. 

Speaking with my literary historian's hat on, I see at least two noteworthy things about this novel.  First, the introduction explicitly dissuades children from acting like the evangelical boy in Charlotte Elizabeth's Judah's Lion, who explicates Scriptural passages in order to convert Alick Cohen ("Mr. Jew" [!]).  "Children," Moore tells the reader, "ought not to be preachers, in the literal sense of the word" (iii); instead, they should evangelize by modeling the Christian virtues.  (Moore seems not to have paid attention to her own text, since such evangelization-by-example isn't what converts Zillah.  Be that as it may...)    Second, the novel gestures at one of the core tropes of Jewish conversion fiction, only to make it visible by its absence: the abusive family/community trope.  Conversion fiction normally represents both Jewish families and Jewish communities as simultaneously close-knit and given to explosions of brutal violence (verbal or physical); the latter emerges only when a character, especially a female character, converts to Christianity.    In other words, Jewish families seem ideal but are actually deeply disordered.¹  The Young Jewess and Her Christian School-Fellows invokes the trope when it reveals that, first, Mr. Isaac had secretly converted, and then that Mrs. Isaac is secretly on the brink of conversion: the nature of the Jewish family and community demands that the N.T. be read in secret, lest the convert be ostracized or assaulted.  Moreover, Mr. Isaac does not confide in his wife until he is on his deathbed--a conventional moment of deathbed wisdom, to be sure, but also indicating a certain lack of trust.  Indeed, by the end of the novel, Zillah's "true" mother appears to be Mrs. Worthing, the woman responsible for first exposing her to Christianity.  

¹ At the risk of citing myself, the long version of this argument is in “Protestants against the Jewish and Catholic Family, c. 1829-1860,” Victorian Literature and Culture 31 (2003): 333-57.