ABSTRACT
Formerly the Israelite in novels was as accurate a representative of his race, as was the frog-eating French dancing master or the howling wild Irishman of ancient farces. He was a coiner, a buyer of stolen goods, a trainer of young thieves, a pettifogging attorney, a sheriff's officer, a money-lender, a swindling financier. In the eighteenth century, Shylock was frequently drawn upon as the most reliable idea of what Jews are really like and why they should be excluded from the social body. This tactic relies on the slippery relationship between fiction and reality because readers seemed ready to accept fiction as a fair indication of what Jews are. By the 1790s, British writers began to think more carefully about these figures and how they relate to living Jews. Such re-evaluation began with the deployment of Jews to embody larger sociocultural issues.
