ABSTRACT
Aaron The Jew, Benjamin L. Farjeon, 1894, 3 vols, Hutchinson. Usually reckoned to be Farjeon’s best novel incorporating as it does a mature examination of Victorian racial prejudice with a highly theatrical plot. The story begins in Portsmouth in the early 1870s. The philanthropic Doctor Spenlove saves an unwed mother, Mary Turner, from suicide. With the help of a benevolent Jewish pawnbroker the doctor contrives to have the unfortunate woman taken back by her former fiancé. Turner goes to Australia, leaving her bastard daughter to be adopted by a Gosport shopkeeper, Aaron Cohen. Aaron’s wife, Rachel, is struck blind while delivering a stillborn baby daughter of her own. To preserve his wife’s will to live, Aaron deludes her into thinking Mary Turner’s child is theirs. The Cohens subsequently move to the south of France, where Aaron prospers as an engineer and has a son Joseph. He returns to England in 1893, enriched. But he is ruined by a rival, Poynter (in fact Mary Turner’s original seducer), who publicises the true parentage of Ruth ‘Cohen’. Ruth, meanwhile, has made a happy marriage with a young aristocratic gentile, Percy Storndale, having been told the secret of her past. At the end of the novel, Aaron is rescued by Mary, now a respectable woman, who reveals how honestly he has always acted. Despite wild narrative improbabilities, Aaron The Jew has numerous scenes reflective of the mean-minded persecution inflicted on the Victorian Jew.
