ABSTRACT
Edmund Burke's characterization of Jews, though a minor feature of the Reflections, invited further commentary on the relationship between Jews and the English nation. The investigations of Jewishness in Isaac D'Israeli's, William Godwin's, and George Walker's novels respond to Burke's comments and draw on a wider array of literary representations of Jews. The myth of the Wandering Jew began as a thirteenth-century tale in which an Archbishop delivers an oral account of the Wandering Jew while visiting a monastery. The relationship between the Wandering Jew and the Benevolent Jew is considered most clearly by Charles Maturin in Melmoth the Wanderer. Melmoth is himself the subject of his descendant's researches, and each of the narratives reveals a little more about the mysterious Wanderer. The short poem names the Wandering Jew only in its title, presumably in order to signal a metaphorical restlessness unattached to Jewish subjectivity.
