ABSTRACT
From the 1790s to the 1810s, depictions of Jews capitalized on latent rhetorical potential, enlarging the scope of Jewish characterization and developing careful thought about Jewish subjectivity. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, cruel treatment of Jews was no longer considered comedy, but tragedy. Even when she turns to experiments with the benevolent Jew in Harrington, Edgeworth continually distorts the supposedly clear distinctions between Jew and Gentile, much as Brockden Brown exposes the religio-ethnic fluidity of Jews in his essay. Although Harrington steps away from simplistic Jewish tropes, it has been deemed highly disappointing to contemporary and modern readers alike, though for different reasons. By setting her Jewish novel in the eighteenth century, Edgeworth locates the first significant English-Jewish encounter in the recent past. Her Jewish characters are foreigners with tenuous roots in England; only Berenice is truly English, and only because she embraces her mother's heritage.
