ABSTRACT
The major Romantic poets show in both verse and private correspondence little interest in contemporary Jews, and their rights ‘never became the preoccupation of the Romantics’. This description of a ‘typical’ Romantic attitude seems particularly applicable to Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley’s Oxford bookseller, Henry Slatter, claimed to have lost £1,300 through making him a loan in order to dissuade him from ‘flying to Jews’, which he actually did at some point after 1812. ‘Jews’ often just meant ‘money-lenders’, but Shelley certainly went to the notorious ‘Jew’ King, money-broker to the aristocracy during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. In the translation of Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart that forms Shelley’s Note to Queen Mab, VII, 67, Ahasuerus is an ‘unfeeling wretch’ who turns away the suffering Christ from his door. Thus far, Shelley’s paratext preserves a footstep of the villainous hard-hearted Jew of popular fantasy, in as much as Schubart’s poem does also.
