ABSTRACT
Neither complete cultural insiders within England's national boundaries nor colonial others, depictions of English Jews do not fit neatly into the study of the novel's role in imagining national identity. Harrington can be regarded as the culmination of an era in Jewish portrayal that sought to investigate Jewish stereotypes and revise Jewish tropes to suit a multi-ethnic British public. Ivanhoe chronicles the role of Jews in the shaping of the English nation and considers at least how Jews ought to be more included in the nation that they helped found. The love plot that typically joins warring factions in Scott's novels fails, since Ivanhoe and Rebecca do not marry. Middlemass's apparently divided loyalties largely derive from his fragmented identity, but his Jewishness can potentially be regarded as influencing his selfish characterization, particularly as the modern Jews' history in Europe, including their transnational community, was sometimes pointed at to imply the uncertainty of Jewish loyalty to host nations.
