ABSTRACT
Cecil Roth has identified "an unbroken sequence of Jewish writers" beginning in the late eighteenth century; David Ruderman's recent work on Anglo-Jewish writers and intellectuals locates the start of this trajectory even earlier, in the seventeenth century. In "The Evolution of Anglo-Jewish Literature", Cecil Roth identifies several Anglo-Jewish writers whose contributions to literary culture created what he describes as "an unbroken sequence of English authors and scholars" which began at the close of the eighteenth century. Clearly, becoming modern is a challenge, not just for the Jews in Fiction Without Romance, but also for the English. Fiction Without Romance addresses interrelated concerns about enlightenment values, the importance of female education, and religious pluralism. "Enlightenment" and Haskalah are slippery words, and the author do not want to imply that Polack's circle of writers and educational reformers would have necessarily identified themselves as maskilim.
