The Narrative Work of the Jewish Conspirator in Mid-Nineteenth Century European Literature

Umberto Eco’s latest novel The Prague Cemetery (2011) oozes with stereotypes culled from conspiracy novels that coincided with revolutions erupting in Europe in the 1840s. These derogatory representations became what Sarah Ahmed has termed “sticky” signs that through repetition attributed hateful properties to whole groups of people, in this case to Jews and Jesuits, which hack writers trotted out as the collective villains of their novels. Many bear the narrative hallmark of Eugène Sue whose Le Juif errant (The Wandering Jew, 1844–45) casts Jesuits as obstructionists in the struggle for the implementation of civil society and the individual freedoms and rights of citizens. But in a neo-Catholic backlash against antijesuit conspiracy novels, a group of writers across Europe countered by casting the Jew instead of the Jesuit as the culprit, a nefarious plotter seeking to destabilize governments and foment political unrest. Among them are El ante-Cristo (The Antichrist, 1845) by Spanish novelist Antonio Navarro Villoslada that takes place during the struggle over succession to the Spanish throne in the years leading up to 1845; Jules Tournefort’s El antecristo (The Antichrist, 1848) set on the eve of the February 1848 revolution that established the Second Republic in France, and L’ebreo di Verona (The Jew of Verona, 1850) by Father Antonio Bresciani set during the 1846–49 period of the Risorgimento. In these mediocre but popular serial novels is evidence of the evolution of the legendary figure of the cursed Wandering Jew Ahasuerus of folklore and chronicle into a revolutionary conspirator whose Rothschild-sized wealth bankrolls European revolutions and other forms of mayhem. Taken together with the works that they parody or contest, these novels demonstrate how for the nineteenth century hack writer Jew, Jesuit and freemason are interchangeable figures of perfidy, but mostly how the stereotyping that these novels share with Eco’s vast repertoire of rehashed conspiracies are further evidence that, as he claims, “hatred alone warms the heart” (436).